by Janet Capron
“What are you doing in there?” Michael yelled.
“Oh, I—I don’t know,” I said, pulling myself back into space-time.
“That’s all right, you’ll mellow out. Drink some more rum,” Michael said.
He continued to look after me, taking responsibility for my state of mind, clocking it every so often to make sure I didn’t go out and not come back.
I flashed on a memory of my handsome father, Rayfield, and I, driving in silence up to his riding stable in the countryside where he boarded his horse. I am about nine or ten. We are absolutely silent the whole time. He is shifting gears in his little Karmann Ghia and simply delighting in the drive. It never occurs to him that maybe his daughter next to him is feeling one long howling pain of rejection. Is feeling that he has so little interest in her that she, like a parcel, like a Sunday burden, is being driven up to the stable and put on a horse because she is an obligation he is now too sober to avoid. Unless—and here is where the fruitful imagination takes over for good—unless this is it. This is, in fact, love. Silence is the ultimate communion, the evidence of complete understanding. Yes, silence, sharing the solitude, that’s what love is.
And now, freshly bathed and wide-awake, I sat silently with Michael on the other side of the pin light. If all women were looking for their father again, then I was set. They resembled each other: dark hair, strong black eyebrows and contrasting light eyes—a distinctly Byronic look. But the quality of Michael’s I was most grateful for on my first night back was that he was such a stick-in-the-mud. Michael was still there, a castled king in his corner. Unlike other men who would probably go somewhere else or take up with someone else in your absence, unlike this father of mine who married again so fast, Michael never moved off his spot, never left the block. He was strangely reliable. True, I might have to share him with another woman from time to time, but it was vastly preferable to being outright excluded. Handsome, winsome Michael was still there where I had left him. That was compelling; it was the crux of his appeal.
I was thinking this as we sat together, naked. The soft, long hair on Michael’s chest was glistening wet under the pin light. His body had matured beyond him, suggesting as it did a warm and nurturing kind of man. I felt like a little girl.
“Guess it was tough trying to make a living out there as a full-time activist. Orthodox feminists. Humph. Doesn’t pay very well, does it?” Michael asked.
“Michael, don’t make fun of me.”
“I’m not, I’m really not. But I could’ve told you that wasn’t for you. You have to find some other way.”
“What do you mean ‘not for me’? Because I like sex too much, is that what you mean?”
“Something like that. Listen, they’re repressive. The way I see it, they want to turn things back, put more distance between the sexes.”
“You aren’t hearing what they’re saying, that’s obvious.”
“Oh? So why did you leave?”
“Well, the truth is you’re right about me. I couldn’t handle it. It was too austere, that life. I’m just a sybarite, that’s all I am. I give up, OK? I missed getting high. And, well, I missed you. OK? I really did. Now I’m here. So let’s drop it.”
Silence. He had to weigh those words, “I missed you.” He had to let them echo for a few seconds above the sound of the whirring fan. And then he resumed his rightful place as the man who would run my life. From an amused distance. Nevertheless, he was willing to run it, which is more than I could say for any other man thus far.
“What are you doing for bread?”
“Nothing.”
“Where are you staying?”
“At my mother’s house right now.”
“We gotta figure out what you’re going to do. You can’t live off your mother forever. Any ideas?” he asked.
“You know me, I always figured the world owed me a living,” I said.
“Maybe it does, but don’t be surprised if it doesn’t pay up. Have to think of something...gotta have a gimmick, that’s what you need, a gimmick,” he said. He was sitting naked with his legs crossed, tapping his knee, smoking a Camel. He was getting that mischievous look, playing with me now.
“I know. You could start a circle jerk, advertise in Screw. You would be the supervisor. ‘Supervised circle jerks...’ No? OK, maybe not. Then let’s see...how about ‘Private Viewing of Blue Movies for an Elite Few’? You’d be amazed who’d pay to see sixteen-millimeter flicks, all those poor schmucks too uptight to go to Forty-Second Street. You could rake it in! What’s wrong with that idea?”
“I don’t even have an apartment, let alone enough chairs to accommodate a movie audience,” I said, pretending to take his silly suggestions seriously. I lit up a Newport. I was pouting. I hated his cheery attitude. And I already knew where this was going.
“You know I got a good friend, Susannah, you remember Susannah?” he asked me.
“Of course.”
Of course I did. The pretty, femme Susannah, with her honest-to-God dark corkscrew curls and her actual flouncy skirts, was the first woman I ever had. She was his southern belle contingent. Came up here just to see him maybe two or three times a year. It was preposterous. We all had to defer to her when she came, as if she were special, which was hardly the case, it was only that she was infrequent. Nevertheless, everybody had to make a big fuss over her. The last time I saw her, the three of us went back to Michael’s house, and Susannah got to be the center of everything as usual, as if Michael and I were extending ourselves as host and hostess. I had not planned it, but I found myself going down on Susannah, after it was instigated by Michael, who lay underneath her. She was acting wild in a demure sort of way, sitting up with her back to him and rotating awkwardly on top like a helpless mewling little thing. While this was happening, Michael kept smiling at me around the back of her head as if we were in cahoots. Then he pulled out and pushed her toward me.
(In spite of the company I had been keeping, I had never seen a vagina that close up before, let alone tasted one. Not what I expected, it was, somehow, much neater. I had assumed it would be a flaccid, fleshy, amorphous hole, but Susannah’s pulsed with muscle hidden inside. When I tentatively circled her clitoris with my tongue, it stood up, and I felt her whole vagina spasm ever so slightly. The clitoris embarrassed me; it seemed like such a vestigial little thing. Poor women, with our tiny imitations. Otherwise, from what I could see, with its swollen labia and its thick inner wall, the vagina was just like an inverted penis. ‘But what a powerful sex organ,’ I remember thinking, a little surprised and almost frightened by the gravitational pull of it.)
“Well, Susannah knows this madam,” Michael went on. “I told you when she’s in New York, she always turns a few tricks and makes enough to pay all her expenses. I could find out the name of the madam, if you’d be interested. Better yet, why not get in touch with Corinne? She’d fix you up. Corinne really likes you; yep, she’d do it in a New York minute.
“You and everybody else, me included, is already giving it away. But you’re lucky. You can get paid for it. Who’s going to object? Nobody around here. Do you care what the straight world thinks? Of course not. In fact, whenever it disapproves, I take it as a sign at least I’m doing something right. I don’t see why you shouldn’t get paid for it.”
This was one of Michael’s longer speeches. I understood he was encouraging me to be defiant. I got it. His motives were very nearly pure. But if I’d been capable then of being honest with myself, I would have had to admit that I was hurt. I wished that he would claim me, possess me, swear he’d never love another. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that Michael did want to possess me in his way by sharing my experience, because I already knew what he had in mind. I knew that Michael’s own peculiar interpretation of pimping would never include taking money—he had such an aversion to money—but he’d insist on hearing all the details. ‘Vicarious’ was his favorite word.
“Do you think I could do it? I mean, I don’t
know whether I’d be any good at it,” I said.
“You good at it? You got to be kidding. Anyway, from what Susannah and Corinne tell me, there’s nothing to it. These johns are all straight businessmen, married guys, looking for a piece of strange. They’re so excited by the idea, they come after a few strokes. Nothing to it,” he said.
“I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it,” I said, still pouting.
We were sitting naked together, I on one bed, he on the other, maybe two feet apart, not speaking. The only lights were the pin light and the glowing tips of our cigarettes. The radio was playing another tune, a preview from Europe the DJ said, something about a horse in a desert. Dumb lyrics I suddenly realized in an unwelcome moment of lucidity. Dumb.
Michael reached for his suede book bag full of vibrators. He pulled out a huge machine, which was flat across the top.
“Look at this, it’s new on the market. Isn’t it a beauty?” he said, a small boy displaying his latest gadget.
“What does it do?”
“The vibrations are so strong, they make the whole inside of your pussy contract. You come in about ten seconds,” he said.
But then he put it away.
“That’s for later,” he said, a papa now, teaching his kid how to postpone gratification.
Also, the truth is he had only brandished the thing to get us on the subject of sex in the here and now. Neither one of us was in the mood for a vibrator. But Michael’s problem was that he was shy. He was really soft-spoken and shy, and he could never get over the fact that women were so willing to sleep with him. Even after years of various girlfriends threatening to commit suicide on his account, he was still stupefied by the pitch of their desire. Not many men are ready to unleash a woman, watch her go, the way Michael was. So it’s understandable he would feel like the sorcerer’s apprentice sometimes.
He grabbed my nipple, which was standing straight up thanks to the tickling breeze from the fan, between his thumb and middle finger. I felt my clitoris jump like a little fish. He took hold of my other nipple. Then I think he actually kissed me. It was more like one mouth bruising another, the way children do it, but it was a kiss. He pulled me close, settling down right on top, skin to skin, heart to heart. The kissing changed. We opened to each other. It all came back to me, how it used to be when we first met, before the drugs took over completely. I remembered. We were back. No wonder I loved him. After a few generic thrusts, he recovered this stroke he had. The way his whole body moved on top of me—the sweetest rub, then the lushest friction, then throbbing velvet torture. God please let me come. I felt completely subordinated, pinned helpless and squirming under his big body. I held on tight. I could hear myself squeaking, grunting, moaning. I hated those noises, but I couldn’t stop. He was watching me. I opened my eyes and there he was. My legs spread wide. After a while, he reached down with one hand and pushed them back closer together. Acute pleasure was forcing me to give myself up. Inside the fierce heat I was thinking, ‘I love you.’ Michael whispered in my ear. I heard him say, “You’re here to stay. You’re doomed.” I wish I knew what it was he did. Not just in and out, he somehow slid up into me over and over until eventually even I would come. Not this time. I couldn’t quite let go, and he couldn’t hold it anymore. He stayed inside shuddering and twitching for a while afterward. I didn’t want him to pull out; I wanted more. My tears on my face.
He let himself out of me slowly and reached for a cigarette. I felt a keen sense of loss. Maybe if I had really come, put my hand down there and really got off, I thought, I wouldn’t feel so bereft now. But no, probably even that wouldn’t have made much of a difference. I would have felt deprived anyway, at least wistful. The better it was, the tougher it was when it ended. I could never get enough when it was that good. I remembered now why I used to think he was indispensable. I sighed out loud. Everything was missing; I was manless once again.
But he kept close. I could be thankful for that at least. I knew there would be more; I could tell and felt relief. Michael would never leave a woman hanging. He was strangely devoid of ego in that area. If I weren’t satisfied, he didn’t make me feel like I was hard to please. Like me, Michael had come to believe it was absolutely crucial that everyone have an orgasm one way or the other. He had read all about Wilhelm Reich’s Orgone Box, and he knew that sexual frustration caused most of the misery between people.
He was lying now to my right, on the outside of one of the single beds. He reached for my pack of Newports and handed me a cigarette, lighting both of ours with his Bic. We lay there in the faint glow of the pin light. Then, without warning, he switched his Camel to his left hand, turned over, and grabbed my face with his right hand. His left arm now dangled off the narrow bed. He lay half on his side with his face up against mine and proceeded to turn my head in both directions, back and forth, while he conned my face as if he were looking for clues.
“I can’t get a handle on what you look like.” He was staring into my eyes now. “What do you look like? I’ve never been able to figure it out. All year, while you were gone, I tried to picture your face, but it always came up different.”
He continued to maneuver my head in the tiny glare of the pin light now as if my eyes didn’t exist, as if my face were a many-sided crystal he was trying to make sparkle. Then he thrust my head away.
“Too many planes in that face or something,” he said.
After which he collapsed on his stomach and lay there for a minute with his own face buried in his hands. Finally, when I was about to throw my arms around him, he jumped up, full of pep, a shining tribute to the regenerative power of speed, and made us both another drink.
Now I was back at the Traveling Medicine Show, waiting for the opportunity to boast to Michael about turning my first trick. I was armed with solid evidence of my intention to stay. Trading sex for money was the only way I could think of to get Michael to take me seriously.
I watched Tommy Shelter, an old friend of Michael’s from their Village days, climb on the tiny stage at the back of the room for a second set. He started thumping chords on his acoustic guitar with so much urgency you thought the strings might break, and singing his signature brand of delta blues with a driving rock ‘n’ roll beat, preaching to the converted. The story went that Tommy had learned how to play guitar on the stage of the Black Box around the same time Bob Dylan was still passing the kitty around. This would explain why Tommy strummed and hammered with such poignant frustration. His voice, majestic and raspy at once, shot through with soulful passion, catapulted him to the top. The fact that Tommy was missing his upper front teeth didn’t hurt either. The way he slid over his f’s and dropped his t’s made him sound like a very old, wise sharecropper. Really, he was only a year or two past thirty, with a Nubian cameo of a face. He was one of a dozen or so luminaries in the music business who still showed up periodically to try out new material.
The bar crowd was so blasé, so hard-boiled, so wired on speed and booze, it did not make a fuss over these musicians, who would otherwise get mobbed by groupies in the more fashionable clubs downtown. As a matter of fact, the regulars at the Traveling Medicine Show made a point of paying attention to the music but turned their backs on the performers themselves once they stepped off the stage. When two of the Beatles and their latest Uriah Heep manager showed up in the late sixties (at the height of their careers), Michael put them at a table in the corner, where they sat pointedly ignored by everyone until, perhaps deflated, they slunk back out into the night.
The real stars were the bartenders. These Irish Americans were big, handsome, and profligate with their drugs. They free-poured the booze and made generous love, drawing young women like me who, released by the Pill, would rather hang around getting smashed until last call in the hope that we might go home with one or the other of them than wait idly backstage at the ready for some stuck-up musician, or, God forbid, sit demurely by the phone, silently praying.
And here was Jimmy the bartender,
still wiping the bar with the same dirty rag. A company man he was, devoted to Michael in this case, but Jimmy would have to have been devoted to someone. He was that kind of guy. Jimmy was a refugee from a big football school in Indiana. The army wouldn’t take him for some reason; he’d tried to enlist. He was a large and, unfortunately for him, open-faced strawberry blond who blushed for no reason at all. Rather than play against type, Jimmy hung on to his midwestern guilelessness, oblivious to the mores of the scene in which he now found himself. Michael adored Jimmy—“4-H Jimmy,” he called him—and took every personal kind of pain to drag him down into the muck with the rest of us. Right away, he had turned his hick buddy onto speed, derailing Jimmy off his career track. (Armed with a degree for it, Jimmy had once longed to go into the hotel business, but all hopes for that were gone now.)
Michael sat with his feet up on a second chair (he’d become more sedentary once he hit thirty) at his big, long table reserved for him to the left of the room against the wall. He had on a pair of giant earphones, which were not attached to anything; it simply meant he did not wish to be disturbed. He was polishing his cracked moccasins with a paper napkin as if they were Guccis, leaning forward to get a good look at them in the overhanging light. He kept pushing a lock of his long black hair off his face as he did so, until exasperated, he pulled his hair back in the fat rubber band he had been wearing around his fuzzy wrist. Michael seemed completely preoccupied with these self-appointed tasks, completely uninterested in his old friend Tommy, who was singing a mournful refrain about freedom on the tiny stage at the far end of the saloon.
And as always, Michael also seemed not to have noticed that I had just walked through the door. But 4-H Jimmy beamed and scooted over to where I was now standing at the bar.