Then Gabriel asked me a question.
“Have you ever been to Greece?”
“No. I’ve never been anywhere.”
“How come?”
I sat down again. “My father has heart trouble, so I’ve stayed close to home. After high school I got a job at the public library, and I’ve been there ever since.”
When it came to life, I was a virgin in all but the old cock-in-the-hole sense. Hand me any book, and I could catalog it even in a coma. I could find answers to questions about everything from anthills to transvestitism, but I sometimes woke up in the middle of the night, my heart galloping, and realized that I might die before I ever experienced cunnilingus.
“You should go to Greece, Aggie. You’d see things differently there. Simon knows what I mean.”
“My father’s never been to Greece, either.”
“Even so, he understands me. He knows what I am.”
“Do you think you might fall in love with him?”
Gabriel laughed. “I told you I couldn’t answer questions about the future.”
“If you don’t love him, why are you here?”
“I like the way he stares at me when I’m naked. I like the way he touches me. And because I’m dead broke and he’s letting me stay here for free.”
I should have hated Gabriel for admitting that, but I didn’t. I could see him in Greece, sunbathing naked in the rubble of a ruined temple, recharging his body in the light of an amoral sun. I could see myself there, too, emptied of everything but a desire for life. Free of taking care of Simon. Free of being Agatha.
“I want to go to Greece,” I said.
“Me too. But I can’t get there without any money.”
“I have money.”
“Sure, Aggie.”
“I do! Not a fortune, but enough.”
“Then we’ll go,” Gabriel said.
I believed him.
“You promise?”
“I promise,” Gabriel said. “We’ll go.”
“When?”
“Whenever you’re ready.”
I didn’t decide that night. I did my research, throttled my conscience, and decided we’d leave in September. By the time my father started the new school year, Gabriel and I would be in Athens. From there we’d travel to the islands whose names I murmured in my bed at night like incantations.
It started on a Monday morning. Simon was teaching summer school. Gabriel was mowing the lawn. I stood at the kitchen sink, sipping a glass of iced coffee and inhaling the fragrance of cut grass. I should have known something was up when the lawnmower’s drone stopped.
“Aggie?”
I hadn’t heard Gabriel enter the kitchen. Coffee spilled down my chin. The glass fell from my hand and shattered on the floor.
“Shit!” I grabbed a dishcloth.
Gabriel was on his knees, picking up the shards of glass. I knelt beside him. A ruby bead welled out of the pad of his thumb. I grabbed his hand and stuck his thumb in my mouth.
His thumb tasted of gasoline, grass, and the dangerous tang of blood. I closed my eyes and sucked at the digit as if it were a straw to his soul. I sucked greedily, drinking his experiences, his memories, the mysteries of his past. I didn’t consider what I was doing until I opened my eyes and found him staring at me. His eyes were a clear, steady gold that morning. I could almost believe he was sincere when he said, “I could fall in love with you in Greece.”
“I don’t know if I could fall in love with you,” I said, “but I sure as hell need to fuck you.”
We stampeded upstairs like wild horses, tripping over each other to get to my bedroom, where we undressed in a mute frenzy. Naked, we slowed down for some sensual investigation. His skin was moist from working outdoors; my fingertips clung softly wherever they made contact. He cupped my breasts and suckled my nipples until I thought I’d cry from the keen joy. His hard-on nudged my thigh, but he wasn’t in any rush to enter me. Instead he moved down, spangling my belly with kisses. A prayer took shape in my mind.
Oh, Lord, let him eat my pussy.
Oh, Lord, let this be better than that time in the truck with Hank Maples.
Then Gabriel was turning my cunt inside out like the cuff of a velvet sleeve, and his tongue was wandering through grooves I didn’t know I had, places that hadn’t been touched by anything more exotic than a washcloth. Gabriel’s mouth had more tricks than a whole herd of circus ponies, and that morning he showed me all of them. The flutter. The clit-flicker. The figure eight, the labial lunge, the lick-out-the-slipper, the toad-in-the-hole. He licked me into a state I’ve only heard drug addicts talk about: a mindless, floating ecstasy.
The floating got turbulent when he started to suck on my clit. He slid one finger inside me, then two, then three, then an impossible four. Deeper his hand plunged. My body felt paralyzed from the waist down, except for the red zone between my thighs. I was wetter than I’d ever known a woman could be, until I hit my peak and unleashed a flood. My body arched so high that I could swear I saw Greece. While Gabriel rode me to his own climax, I watched a delirious light dance against a blinding blue sky.
After he fell asleep I explored him, inch by inch. Gabriel’s skin was a map. His tan formed continents of bronze and seas of dusky rose. It was not the kind of tan you get working in an oil field or fishing for crappie. His body bore the imprint of ancient light.
But Gabriel wasn’t interested in ancient light. He was more concerned with drinking beer and scamming free plane tickets and screwing outdoors. Yet in that sense, Simon would have said, he was as ancient as they come: the living, breathing soul of unreasoning desire.
As a teenager I’d read my father’s copy of Plato’s Symposium. Simon worshipped those dialogues; he’d have given his life to go back to ancient Athens and sit in on that dinner party with Socrates and his friends, drinking and laughing and talking about love. I didn’t know what I was looking for in that book. Possibly a balm for the uneasiness I felt about my parents’ marriage, or a map to the places Simon traveled in his mind when his body seemed so restless.
When I read what Diotima told Socrates about love and procreation, my heart turned into a sack of wet cement. Love is creative, she said; it strives for immortality in different forms. A person can create with his body—have children with women, in other words—or reach for a more exalted love and produce children of the soul. It’s the second kind of love that takes you from the physical to the spiritual plane, and finally earns you a ticket to absolute beauty. I figured that second kind of love was what Simon secretly craved, what kept him awake at night, incapable of resting in my mother’s bed.
I once asked my mother how she and Simon fell in love. She told me, for the hundredth time, the story of how they met. He was a graduate student in classics, she was an English major who wrote poetry, both believed secretly in fate. Once they realized that they not only shared a passion for Plato, but had been raised in the same stultifying town, they started to see the handprints of destiny everywhere they looked. That same destiny brought me into being before they were married, and between my mother’s longing for respectability and my insistent need to be fed, they went back to Pawsupsnatch to take reliable jobs at the high school and public library.
But that wasn’t the information I wanted. I wanted a bulletin from the world of adult love, some succinct secret to the mystery of passion.
My mother took a long time to think about this. “In the beginning,” she finally said, “we thought we were two halves of the same whole. Later we realized that we simply loved the same books. And we loved you, of course.”
“You mean that was enough?” I squealed.
My mother looked at me, bemused. “Books and a child turned out to be plenty for me,” she said.
When I was sixteen, my mother died of ovarian cancer. In some dirty nook of his conscience, I think Simon saw her death as the ultimate sign that he’d failed at love. Twelve years later Gabriel came along. My father didn’t seem to care who
he was, or what he wanted; he just clung to Gabriel’s body as if it were the last lifeboat on a desolate sea.
Maybe Simon thought that at some point down the road, he would see absolute beauty through a drifter with hazel eyes and a brass ass.
The last week of August I made dinner for Simon and Gabriel every night. Guilt stripped my appetite, but it made me want to cook like crazy. The china rattled in my hands as I set out the plates.
“Are you all right, Agatha?” Simon asked.
I saw something besides concern in my father’s face—a plea, or a challenge: Don’t take him away from me, or Go ahead and try.
“The catfish is terrific, Aggie.”
Gabriel stuffed a forkful of fish into his mouth. He winked at me. I scowled and fussed with the napkin in my lap. An angry red lovebite marked the inside of my thigh. I had been coming when Gabriel gave me that bite. He had five fingers curved up inside my cunt like a funnel when he bit me in the softest part of my leg, and I went over the edge.
“Nothing like catfish fresh from the lake,” my father said.
We had bought the filets at Shop ’n Save. Every time I lifted my fork I could smell Gabriel’s musk on my hand.
That afternoon Gabriel had stolen a rowboat from the dock of someone’s summer cabin, and we had rowed out to the middle of the water. We had told Simon we were going fishing, but the only pole that came out on that expedition was about eight inches long.
We sprawled in the boat, our legs intertwined, and rubbed suntan lotion into each other’s skin. If anyone had been watching, they might have wondered why we applied lotion mainly to the parts of our bodies that were covered by clothes. The ruddy head of his erection was nosing its way up through the waistband of his shorts, and the seat of my skirt was slippery with my arousal. My cunt must have known, even if my brain didn’t, that life was going to take a peculiar turn in the next week. How else can I explain why I ordered Gabriel to eat me right there in the boat, instead of dragging him over to the sheltering trees along the lake’s shore?
He grinned. “You don’t care if we attract an audience?”
I growled, spread my thighs, and pushed him down.
Leaning back, I closed my eyes against the sun. Under the tent of my skirt, Gabriel’s head bobbed as he tongued me. The boat rocked crazily, shivering with the pounding of my pulse.
“You’ve never been this turned on,” Gabriel said, his voice muffled. “You’re soaking wet.”
“Shut up. That tongue wasn’t made for talking.”
But he was right; I’d never felt such a primitive, unself-conscious lust. The rude midday sun blessed us, the sexy waa-waa of the insect chorus mocked my sense of propriety, and I felt as if the gods of desire were urging us on. I hooked a leg under Gabriel’s thigh and applied a steady friction to his crotch. His cock, still trapped in denim, was a hot, dry bulge against my shin. Suddenly he groaned and pulled back. His spine arched. His body trembled. He bit down hard on my thigh as he thrust against my leg, spilling come onto the floor of the boat. I stared up into the sun as I climaxed, watching the light pulsate with my cunt’s throb, knowing I could be bat-blind when it was over but not caring if I lost my sight.
Needless to say, the boat capsized. We had to slosh around the Shop ’n Save like drowned rats to find our dinner.
If I’d known that would be the last time Gabriel made me come, I would have made him eat me till his jaw locked. I would have made him lick my pussy till his tongue bled.
Two days before we were supposed to go to Greece, I decided to leave work early and go home. I don’t know why. I’d never had a premonition before, and I’d rather not have one again.
I found Gabriel crouched on the floor beside my bed. The mattress had been pushed back. His fingers shuttled rapidly; for a second I thought he was saying the rosary. But it wasn’t beads he was handling; it was my money. I kept a cash hoard under my mattress, in case the bank ever got hit by a tornado.
Gabriel looked up.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting ready for our trip.”
“Bullshit.”
Gabriel clambered to his feet. His backpack dangled from one shoulder.
“Leaving already?”
“Yep.”
“Without me?”
He sighed.
“Have you really been to Greece?”
“Sure,” he said.
But I knew that even if he was telling the truth, Gabriel hadn’t been to the Greece he’d promised me. He’d been to a scorched, sweaty place, crowded with disappointed tourists who couldn’t find the Greece they’d imagined, either.
“Get out of here,” I said. “Take the money and get out.”
It took every ounce of willpower I had to say that. A rabid animal was clawing at my gut, frantic with need. Then there was Simon. I didn’t even want to think about my father’s fragile heart.
Gabriel let his backpack slide off his shoulder. I knew what was coming. He walked up to me, standing so close that his chest grazed my nipples. Wary as an animal tamer, he circled me with his arms, then let his hands settle on my waist. Through the fabric of my skirt his thumbs hooked my panties and slid them down. They slithered to the floor like something small and valueless drifting into murky water.
“One more time, Aggie,” he said. “Let me fuck you one more time.”
I unbuttoned his fly and pulled out his cock. He was already fully erect, as if my pain had turned him on. I didn’t want that sorcerer’s wand anywhere close to my core. I knelt and took him in my mouth. No seduction, no ceremony, just a hard, angry suck, the kind of release he might get from a stranger in a public restroom. I gripped the root of his shaft with one hand and tugged with my lips, letting my teeth scrape his skin. He yelped; I dragged harder. His body tensed.
I usually didn’t swallow, but today I wasn’t about to stop. I gripped his ass and drew him deeper than I’d ever taken him, so deep that I almost choked. For a moment he was absolutely still, then he bucked and yelled. I let him shoot his bitter sap down my throat, knowing it wasn’t safe, but needing to memorize the flavor of his particular evil.
“I’ll never forget the way you taste,” I said when I had caught my breath. “You taste like a lie. Now get out.”
Leaving, Gabriel didn’t make a sound. I felt him depart, though. The daimon. The spirit who comes and goes between worlds.
After Gabriel left, I took a walk. I ended up walking all the way out to the lake where Gabriel and I had made love. I conjured my father’s face in the water and rehearsed what I would say.
Gabriel’s gone.
No, Daddy—
He’s not coming back.
My father would know we were heading for an emotional shitstorm if I called him “Daddy.” He’d been “Simon” to me since my mother’s funeral.
When I got home, the house was dark. Simon must have found out already. He was probably halfway to Texas by now, driving madly through the darkness, searching the highway for Gabriel’s Dodge.
All night I waited. As soon as a respectable wedge of sunrise appeared, I called the high school principal at home.
“Simon’s gone,” I announced, too tired to be frantic anymore. “I’m going to need help finding him.”
“Finding him? What for?”
“You mean you know where he is?”
“Why, Simon got on a plane to Athens yesterday! Took a leave of absence so he could travel in Greece. Big dream of his. I wasn’t thrilled at the short notice, but with his heart, you know…Agatha?” The principal’s voice rose to a dumfounded squeal. “Where the heck have you been?”
Agatha?
Was that me?
Where had I been? So fuck-drunk that the town gossip hadn’t reached me. Once I landed at the bottom of my shock, I looked around and saw sense in the depths. My father and I had a hard time with love, but we were even worse at dealing with pain. Of course Simon hadn’t told me he was leaving. I’d never planned to tell him about my escape, ei
ther. We’d both gotten passports, purchased tickets. The only difference was that Simon got away first.
I could fall in love with you in Greece.
Father or daughter—the object of lust hardly mattered to Gabriel, who could pound everything sacred to a pulp with his magic cock.
This is the way I justified my father’s flight, after I’d talked things over with the Simon who occupies my head. If Simon hadn’t gone to Greece with Gabriel, he would have gone alone. But his destination would have been a Greece of his own making, and you wouldn’t see him in this world again. He’d be having dinner in some Athens of his mind, a world of immortal light. Every once in a while, a nurse would come by with a pleated paper cup and order him to swallow some pills.
Blood is thicker than water, yes. But you don’t crave a glass of blood when you’re dying of thirst.
Hell, I hope Simon earned his ticket to absolute beauty, grabbed Gabriel’s cock, and took that gorgeous bastard with him. I have no idea where Gabriel is, but in my optimistic moments I imagine he’s still with Simon, drinking retsina at some taverna by the sea and listening to my father weave his own theory of love.
BETTY
Ann Dulaney
BETTY’S NOT THE NAME SHE WAS BORN WITH, but it’s served her well enough.
When you think of the name Betty, you think of a flour-dusted housewife wearing Avon cosmetics and bearing French’s green-bean casserole to a block party potluck. You think of a beehived waitress in a diner that serves blue plate meatloaf and mashed potatoes to a clientele willing to plunk down two dollars and forty-nine cents in assorted change for it. You think of a member of a Gals’-Nite-Out bowling team, the kind that wears matching starched turquoise shirts that say Bluebelles in broad cursive across their backs. You think of a kind of dessert, or a cartoon character.
Betty is none of those things, yet in a manner of speaking she is all of those things too.
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