by Comeau, Joey
I’m impatient.
Nine-fifteen on a Tuesday night, and I’m blurry-eyed drunk on the sidewalk with a broken boy. We look like assholes. I have an erection.
“Fuck that house,” he says, lifting the bottle to point. “David used to live there,” he says. “I went to school with him. He gave me this.” He lifts his arm, showing me his elbow, but I don’t see anything. “He had a baseball bat.” He pauses and takes a drink. We stand and stare at the house, at the blue television light in the downstairs window. “I’ve never been so scared,” he says, quieter. He takes another drink and then looks at me. “Hey,” he says. “Is your arm still bleeding?”
“No,” I say. “I’m good to go.” I say it slow and careful. I say it obvious. He’s still looking at the house, holding the bottle near his lips. A car rolls up the street and turns into a driveway a few houses down. I can hear a kid’s voice. It’s not even ten o’clock. I feel close to blacking out. The kid is whining. The mother says, “Shut up.” Simple.
I take a drink from the bottle, then hand it back.
“Come on,” he says, pulling me toward the back yard. He reaches over the fence and undoes the latch. I follow him into the grass and the dark. There’s a window back here. I’m overwhelmed by something. Maybe fear. Mostly I’m thinking about fucking and then going home. I’m thinking about waffles for breakfast.
There’s a light on in the kitchen of the house, but all we can see is a toaster, shining and chrome. All we can see is a microwave that blends into the wall. White. Tomorrow I will buy that hat.
This back yard is quiet enough. I take hold of the top button on his jeans and pull them open. He lifts the bottle again and I drop down in front of him.
“No,” he says, but he doesn’t stop me. I run my tongue up him, the very tip of my tongue. I take him inside my mouth. I suck his cock.
He pulls my hair sharply, and tilts my head back to look up at him. He pours the bottle on me, from above. My mouth is still open, but it splashes in my hair and across my cheeks. In my eyes. It splashes on my arm and everything is clear suddenly. The pain is bright.
He twists my hair in his hand and he yanks me back down on him and begins to thrust into my mouth. My eyes sting and my arm stings and when I look up at him he isn’t even looking at me. He’s staring at the house. Fuck it. I slide my hand down the front of my own pants, and run my fingers over the material of my underwear. I press slowly, moving all the way over my erection and then back up.
I am slow and then I am violent, like him.
I come first, and it’s a struggle not to bite him. I bite a little and he comes. He comes in my mouth, thrusting faster and then so slowly that I forget we are moving. Everything is warm. He says quietly, “David.”
edith
You haven’t had time to write back and already I am writing you a second letter. I was taught to have better manners than this and I suppose this letter is evidence of how little I learned. I am not the proper young woman I could have been.
There are things I meant to say in my first letter, but I lost my nerve. First, you must have been confused to receive such an admiring letter about a story you have not yet published. Liz, the editor of the journal, is not to blame. She does not know I wrote to you or that I’m interested in you. She and I have never spoken about you. I found out about your story the old-fashioned way. I overheard.
At dinner, Liz called your story bizarre. She was talking to Sarah, another editor and a friend of hers, who seemed to have difficulty chewing with her mouth closed. Neither of them is ever terribly polite to me, so you’ll have to excuse my unfavourable observations. I was eating my asparagus quietly, smiling whenever either of them made a joke. Once a week, we have family dinner. Liz insists on calling it “family dinner,” though she and I are only roommates. She always invites friends. I never do.
This night, her guest was Sarah, a thin and gawkish brunette with manners best exemplified by her eating habits. Sarah consistently ignores me at dinner, unless there is wine. When drunk, she sneaks glances my way, and tries with very little subtlety to work my homosexuality into casual conversation. She has no romantic interest in me, as far as I know. It is the unfortunate combination of a child’s curiosity and a journalist’s ignorance of personal boundaries.
The two of them were going back and forth about the current issue of their literary journal, laughing over unsuitable submissions. They both thought it was very funny that an eighty year old woman might write pornography. They thought it was “cute.” I was fascinated by the idea of you. I hadn’t read your story. I knew nothing about you. But I spent the rest of that dinner lost in my thoughts, tuning out Liz and Sarah, imagining you.
It isn’t quite accurate to say that I knew nothing about you. I knew you were eighty years old, four times my age, and still interested in sex. In my mind that had implications beyond those few spare facts. Writing pornographic literature is not an appropriate pastime for an eighty year old woman. In most people’s minds, even having sex is inappropriate for an eighty year old woman and so you became inappropriate in my imagination. You spoke out of turn. You shocked people to take their measure, to put them off balance, but mostly for the sheer fun of it.
Also, because nobody is languidly inappropriate, you became very vivid, very animated. You laughed too loudly, and you gestured with your whole body. I imagined that you would have short white hair, and a bright face. Your eyes would be piercing and direct. Your lips would be hard and thin, but wet.
I remember, Sarah asked me a question as they were cleaning away the dinner plates and I looked at her blankly. I hadn’t been listening. Liz rolled her eyes.
“Don’t you have any homework you could be doing?” she asked.
I left them alone.
For the next few days, I thought about you in every spare moment. I thought about you while sitting in the cafeteria, while standing in line to renew my health plan. I decided, in the lobby of the student union building between classes, that perhaps you were not animated. You were reserved. You chose your words carefully. Or maybe your words poured onto the page, a sex-mad stream of consciousness. Your story would tell me more. I had to read it.
When Liz went out for the evening, I let myself into her bedroom. Liz is very conscious of her personal space. She would not have been pleased to come home and find me rooting through her desk. It was a risk, yes, but I had to know more about you. I stole your story and took it back to my bed. I sat down and turned on the small desk lamp. I read your story and I decided to write you a letter. Your address was on the first page of that manuscript. I couldn’t resist.
In that first letter I didn’t have the courage to ask you on a date. I wrote about how much I enjoyed your story and I said nothing else. Sometimes people are moved to voice their appreciation, but I have never understood that particular impulse. I was moved to voice my fascination, yes, but in the hopes that you would meet me. That was my motivation then, and that is my motivation now. Come out to dinner with me.
I have my outfit planned already. I will wear a simple black dress, like your story’s protagonist wears at first. I am twenty-one years old and I program computers. I am studying at the university here in the city. Attached you will find a photograph of me. It is not a very flattering photograph. I look drunk and slightly out of control. But I chose this picture because I have my shirt pulled up. I want you to make no mistake about this. I am asking you to dinner because I would like to sleep with you.
Yours,
Ann.
---
Edith,
I should leave you alone. I wish I could. Another week has gone by with no response. I have read your story every night. I have read your story and enjoyed it the way you must have meant for it to be enjoyed. I masturbated to your story. Is that too graphic an admission? I wish I could shock you into meeting me.
But how could I shock someone who wrote, “I live to feel her fingers move inside of me like this. The bus makes another stop. A fa
t man climbs aboard, hauling himself up the stairs. I would kill him for one more moment with her fingers inside me. I don’t have to. She gives me my moment for free. He lives because of her generosity. We all live because of her generosity.”
I don’t know what to do. I wish you would write back.
Ann.
---
Edith,
If the world were to end now, I might live forever, feeling this way.
This morning, sitting down to write to you, nothing seems quite real to me. For an hour I have been in my bed, beneath my covers, staring at the ceiling of this room, reliving last night. I remember the dress I wore, simple and black, soft against my skin. I tried to choose the perfect underwear. I did not have the courage to go without.
I was prepared for our evening date far too early and so I drank wine, sitting on the couch while Liz studied across from me in silence. When it was time, I slipped into my shoes and I was dizzy with excitement. I held tightly to the bar on the subway, repeating the restaurant’s address in my head.
You were sitting calmly at the table, watching me. You were beautiful, Edith. Your dress was elegant and my first thought was frustration that my seat was so far from yours, on the other side of that table. But it afforded me a view of you, as you spoke.
You stood and offered your hand and I held it too long. I had not noticed the music that played throughout the restaurant until that moment, when your hand took mine.
Beyond that point, I don’t know if I can provide an accurate accounting of my thoughts and feelings. I can certainly try. Everything about you was careful and calculated and strong. You talked so confidently. You were not the headstrong, shocking woman I had imagined before reading your story. Everyone in that restaurant was in awe of you. Your hair was white, the way I imagined. It was smart and sophisticated, like your dress. Your eyes were more blue than possible, perhaps because of the wine.
You asked me about computer programming. I stuttered.
But you smiled that confident smile again and you told me about working with the earliest computers, writing an article for the newspaper you would eventually own. When you described those machines, towering to fill whole rooms, making a noise to wake the devil, I felt like I was there with you. The idea of you in a room with that old machinery, pushing punch cards into the reader, writing notes in your notebook, it seems so perfect and right.
You told me about flying a small plane through the mountains. I sat there with nothing to say. I already knew everything I might say. I have never seen the mountains, unless you count the large rocky hill near where I grew up, or the ski slopes an hour out of town. I have never seen mountains the way you mean mountains, enormous, reaching up into the sky, peaked with snow. You paused and I might have told you that. I might have told you about how my father used to climb mountains and how every year he promised to eventually take us with him. It is a promise he still makes when the family is all together again. But I stayed quiet. I’ve heard my own stories before. Every new story out of your mouth was exciting and unexpected. I would have been a fool to speak.
Our skinny waiter bowed and fawned over you, as though you were someone’s grandmother. He checked on us too often, asking, “Is everything alright, here? Is there anything I can do?” as though you were about to keel over. I wanted to tell him that you could snap him like a twig.
Instead, I put my hand on yours and I gave him the look, the lesbian look, the animal-crouched-over-her-family look, mixed with sex. This is mine. I will tear you apart.
He stepped back, still smiling politely.
I can tell you this, Edith. When you squeezed my hand in return, I knew I had done the right thing, writing to you. The waiter faded into the background, leaving us alone. I wanted you to tell me another story, but you watched me instead.
You asked me questions then, and I gave only short answers, certain you couldn’t be interested. But you persisted. I babbled about the first girl I had ever kissed, Laura. I’m not sure that you were interested in how her room was decorated, or how strange we acted around one another after that kiss. I should have told the story better.
I wish I had asked you about your first kiss, Edith. But instead I babbled about university, about programming computers, about hiding from the lesbians at my school, because I don’t like belonging to clubs.
You told me that a woman should be brave. I don’t recall the context. You said, “A woman should be brave.” Are you someone’s grandmother? When was your first kiss? I should have told you, Edith, about the look on Laura’s face after our kiss, half-shocked, but half-dreamy. I imagine I looked the same way when you kissed me last night. I died. You walked me to my cab and kissed me on the mouth, and I died.
I died and I am living forever.
Ann.
---
Edith,
My roommate Liz told me that I hide in my room. We finished dinner and I put away my dishes. I was on my way back to my bedroom and Liz said, “It’s no wonder you don’t have any friends.”
Her theory, bless her concerned soul, is that I am “antisocial.” She had a whole list of examples prepared. I never talk at the dinner table when she has guests over. She phrased it, “When we have guests over,” though the guests are never mine. I never go dancing on Friday or Saturday nights, despite having been invited on two separate occasions by Liz herself. I wondered, as she listed these proofs of my anti-social tendencies, how long she had been preparing this list. It did not have the feel of a spur-of-the-moment conversation.
I held my tongue. I wanted to tell her about you, Edith, and about how I slipped out of my room last night, long after she had gone to sleep. I walked through the dark streets, and you met me down in the subway station, wearing a long black coat that suited you well. Light fell into that coat. You looked like a revolutionary.
Would Liz have worn that same smug smile on her lips if she had seen me, hand in hand with you, slipping past the security cameras, climbing past the gates? We disappeared down the walkway along the inside of that tunnel, and Liz has never done anything of the sort. You led me down thin metal platforms. We climbed down ladders, into deeper tunnels, down where the air tasted like dirt and oil and machinery.
There were switches there, and controls. You pushed me up against a box covered with grimy buttons, and you told me, “This is where you can have me.” I was overcome. Behind us, a secret door opened and on the other side was the oldest computer I have ever seen. There were flashing tubes and blinking lights. It was like an old science fiction movie. Lightning shot from one part of this old relic to another. I was amazed. Everything was suddenly so overwhelming. The machine clattered. You pressed your lips to mine. Lightning, again.
Then you took my hand in yours and led me into the hidden room. You climbed backwards onto a table and pulled your dress up, exposing your panties. I slipped my finger under the waistband. These memories excite me. I hope you will excuse me if I slip and say something untoward. I am trying my best.
What did Liz do last night? She drank wine with her editor friends. They sat around our kitchen table and laughed about students who wrote predictable plots, embarrassing love scenes. I was underground, anti-social and lit by lightning, deafened by the insane rattle and shrieking of machines that had been antiques long before I was born. Your skin was so soft. I went down on my knees in front of you, resting my hands on the table top, and I kissed the skin on your legs. You lifted your dress higher. Your coat hung down to the floor. I kissed you and your skin was so thin and folded and soft. I said that already, didn’t I? Soft. Soft. Soft.
Punch cards were spilling out onto the floor of the room and a man with an old scientist’s lab coat came bustling in from a secret door. His hair was wiry and frazzled. He went right to the wall of computers, where he began flicking switches. The lights went out and the room was lit only by intermittent flashes of lightning. The lights came back on and you tensed up under my touch when you saw him.
“Don’t mind
me,” he said. “Don’t mind me one bit. I have to collect these calculations. Very important. Very important.” He started scooping all the punch cards into his bag. I kissed you. I trailed my tongue from your knee to cunt. I pushed my tongue into you. Punch cards kept pouring out of the computer. I imagined the machine’s insides, all gears and tubes and lights flashing. Edith, it was a wonderful second date.
Love,
Ann.
---
Edith,
How can I get your attention?
I read your story. I loved it. I want to meet you, but if you are not interested, please write to say so. This is my sixth letter and at this point, any response would do. Of course, a positive response would make me happiest. Come on a date with me. I’m not crazy. I want to sit in a restaurant with you. I won’t hiss or growl at the waiter. I won’t expect you to lead me to any hidden underground computer rooms. I just want to meet you, to hear your voice, to get to know you.