‘You’re hungry, yes?’ Gio asked. ‘Tell me you’re hungry.’
I was mute. Hungry.
‘You want to put it in your mouth?’
Yes. Up and down, up and down like a fool!
‘Why do you like putting things in your mouth?’
I don’t know. Just give it to me!
As my mouth opened, Gio’s zipper came down. He let out his cock. I couldn’t look at his face. His cock was the only thing I could look at: the thickening root, the slit like an eye. His cock was the part that already loved me.
Put it in my mouth, gimme, gimme, gimme, please …
‘If you don’t speak, we’ll do it like this then.’
Holding the back of my head, Gio shifted toward my face. He placed his hard flesh on the groove of my tongue. I was stunned. I got hot. I dropped into his cradling. I was sucking his body in gulps down my throat. I wanted to swallow to see how we fit. A suctioning clasp. Forever. No key.
With my mouth on his cock and his cock in my mouth, I didn’t remember any other man I’d ever been with. No other man had ever been inside me. I was a bud, sprouting fresh from the mud.
Ezrah, maybe you think that’s dumb female essentialism, but it’s not.
It was daytime when I went back to the park. I walked to the top of the hill, up a set of wooden stairs. I hadn’t realized that there was a clear way up – that what looked like a forest at night was just a bunch of crooked trees. I could see the club down at the end of the street: the silver door where the men came in and the brick part at the back where all of us lived. The buildings of the city were packed together in the distance. The sky hung above them like a heavy white sheet.
Lani and Coco sat together on the grass. They were passing a bottle back and forth, waving me over.
‘Come, Mira!’ Coco shouted, almost standing.
For a second I thought she might start being nicer to me. Lani shoved her cigarette butt into the grass. The patch they were sitting in was yellowish, flat. When I got up close, I saw they’d both been crying.
Coco passed me the bottle. I sat down and took a swig.
‘What is this?’ I coughed. It was fizzy and off.
Lani started laughing. ‘It’s to clean out your mouth!’
That one mouthful made me feel sick. It prickled in my throat like an acid or something. I put my head on the ground. An old cigarette touched my cheek.
‘Adi’s not coming back,’ Coco said.
‘What are you talking about?’ I said into the grass.
There was a push in my gut then my throat, as if I were really going to vomit. ‘She’s dead,’ Coco said. Lani started to laugh, her sharp birdy laugh.
I closed my eyes, totally repulsed. Deep in my head I heard something snapping, one tiny wishbone broke in each ear.
I sat up, dizzy. Coco lit up. Lani was as blank as the clouds.
‘You guys, she’s not dead. She called me two days ago. Maybe three, I don’t remember.’
‘Oh my god, what’d she say?’ Coco passed me the joint. Lani perked up.
I sucked in harder than I’d ever sucked a joint. That toxic drink still crawled on my tongue.
‘She said she was, uh, sorry that she left, but she was trying to make a go of it somewhere else. I don’t know. I didn’t hear where. I wanted to know but I didn’t catch where she was. She said I shouldn’t tell anyone.’
‘That’s it?’
Coco took back the joint. Lani poked the dry ground.
‘Uh, she asked about Gio. She asked if I’d seen him.’
Lani and Coco stared at me. They knew he’d been to my room. My heart started beating too fast.
‘You should not have fucked him, Mira. That was fucking, fucking wrong!’
I rolled my eyes. I fucked her old lover. So what? She stole from me.
Coco helped Lani up from the grass, clutching her fat arm. They left linked together, whispering. I realized right then as I watched them go back to the club that Adi was more like them than like me. I saw right then the biggest difference between us. Adi wasn’t ever going to go home and neither would Lani or Coco. They wouldn’t leave here like I would one day. This was their life, their stuck, money-making lives. I knew that some girls could do things like fucking for cash and they could always go home, they could always feel new, but some girls do things and never escape – they fuck up their bodies, take drugs, sit in shit.
This was the line between me and Adi: the revolting line of inequality.
I put my forehead on the dead grass. Shame explored my shit-flung face.
It was early in the morning the next time Gio came.
‘Morning has broken,’ he said, at the bottom of my bed. He had a strange look. His eyelids were flickering.
God, why did I want to be with him so badly? Why did I wish that he would just climb into bed and get naked with me?
It sounded like Gio was humming for a second, like he was some old man letting it come out through his nose.
‘I’ll see you then, Mira … ’
‘You’re leaving?’
Gio walked to the door. ‘I will if you’re not downstairs in five.’
I didn’t have time to dress in anything good. I didn’t put on makeup and I didn’t brush my hair.
When I ran out back, Gio was standing beside a smallish white car. He opened the passenger door for me. I didn’t want to link up his car with that car.
The seats were covered with burlap and it smelled like gas inside. It had a bit of trouble starting, but once we got out onto the highway, everything seemed all right. We were driving east, away from the city. Both of us were quiet for a long time. I kept trying to think of something to say, but nothing seemed right. Maybe I felt Adi’s body sitting in my seat.
‘Where is your family, Mira?’
A low scraping noise suddenly started running with the engine. I looked behind us. Gio accelerated.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Don’t you speak with them?’
‘Who?’
‘Your mother, your father.’
‘Not really,’ I said.
I wasn’t going to talk about my family with him. I didn’t even want to think about my family with him. My family meant nothing inside this car. Even my Ezrah shit disappeared.
‘What does your father do?’
‘Why are you asking me?’
‘Why don’t you answer?’
‘He’s a doctor.’
‘A rich doctor?’
‘No. He has enough.’
Why the fuck was he asking me this? I was betting his next question would be: Why are you doing this?
Well, sir, Mr. Mogilevich, since you asked, I am prostituting myself so that I can go to Japan, so that I can travel and see the whole world, in fact, so that I can make money quickly and not be in debt to my family, the government or amorphous men. I don’t care about having some predictable good job at twenty-two so my mummy and daddy will pat me on the head.
‘What about your brothers?’
‘Brothers?’
‘Yes, what about the brothers.’
‘I don’t have any brothers.’
‘No brothers? Poor father!’
I snorted.
‘And Mother?’
‘My mother?’
‘Who is your mother?’
‘She’s a teacher. What do you mean?’
‘She teaches what?’
‘Religion.’
‘Religion?’ Gio started coughing. ‘What kind of religion?’
‘I don’t know, my god. All kinds.’
‘Your mother teaches “all kinds” of religion? You think there’s “all kinds”?’
I was glad he was hacking. What did he really want to know about my family? How much money we made? How I was sheltered from life? Did he want to know how my mother taught kids the Hebrew alphabet? Gio knew I was Jewish! Adi told me that he kn
ew.
‘We have a long way to go,’ Gio said abruptly. ‘Why don’t you sleep now.’
Sleep? For fuck’s sake. I was too anxious to sleep.
‘Adi told me you were from Russia too.’
‘I said go to sleep!’
Who did he think he was talking to me like that? Like I was dumb? In a way, I felt more Jewish than I’d ever felt in my life. I felt fucking persecuted!
I stared out the window. The clouds were all withered. I felt myself getting tired, even though I didn’t want to. My grandfather who’d died when I was ten used to sing me this song in Yiddish when I sat on his lap. I was trying to remember it, something about names and rhyming names, when my chin dropped onto my chest. Then my eyes popped open. I mean, I felt like I was dreaming but my eyes were wide open. I saw me and Gio still driving on the highway, but in the distance I saw all these people running toward the car. There were fifty of them or hundreds of them, coming closer, throwing rocks at us, plates at us, garbage, rats … The highway got narrower and the people smashed their faces on the glass.
They were flat-lipped, screaming, Let us in!
I was trying to scream too, Keep driving! Keep driving! But nothing came out. We must’ve run over something. There was a dragging sound. I turned and I saw there was blood on the road printed behind the tires. Air bubbles started popping in my chest. I knew there was someone dying underneath us. God, get away! I was trying to wake up. Get away! Get away!
‘Shhh!’ Gio was gripping my shoulder.
‘Where are we going?’
‘Calm down. You’re okay.’
Gio took his hand off me and slowly rubbed his face and chin. I was trying to focus on his face, the hairy outline of a man. He reminded me of John, of Ezrah, of Michael, my dad – the way all men’s cheeks are rough and black.
‘I sent the children out a few months ago,’ Gio said. ‘I knew it was going to get worse in the city.’
‘What?’
Gio glanced over at me. ‘I have a woman at the house who takes care of them when I’m not there.’
I realized that Gio had draped a coat around me while I was sleeping. The coat had slipped down to my waist. Gio kept turning his head to look at my tits. I stared straight ahead and slit my eyes. I felt my nipples through my shirt. I wanted to make myself feel them even more. His staring was making heat flash through my tits.
‘I had to take my children from the city. Their mother left them alone in this wasteland.’
I just wanted him to keep staring at me, I wanted these feelings in my breasts to continue. I wanted liquid to spurt out of them. I was with a man who had come to my bed twice. A man I didn’t make pay. The man who fucked Adi up. Who brought her here. Who sold her here. God, what exactly was I trying to find out about a man? I felt like a man myself, a compartment – amoral.
The trees beside the road were getting thicker, all the trunks stacked in the same darkened lines.
‘She was a little like you, their mother.’
I didn’t know why I thought I was in love with this fuck!
‘Relax, Mira,’ Gio said softly.
I closed my eyes. My stomach was made of soft shit. We drove on in silence, the trucks, the trains and us.
I started thinking about Ezrah. It was his birthday soon, the tenth of October. I thought I might call him. I just wanted him to know that I remembered. But I was too embarrassed to call or too mad to call, maybe too gone, too amoral to call. I didn’t even know which thing I was more.
Why couldn’t Ezrah like me no matter what I did? What if I cleaned trash from the streets for a living? What if I was legless, leprous, contagious? Why couldn’t he love me just because I worked at the club? Just because I had sex with strange men, is that a reason he shouldn’t love me? I could say it over and over, every which way: Why don’t you love me with come on my hands? Why don’t you love me legs spread for the crowd?
I don’t love you, Ezrah would say to me, because this isn’t you.
Yeah? Who am I? You tell me who I am.
The Mira I knew when I was a kid, the Mira I want when I’m feeling alone.
So what’s the problem?
There’s shit on your knees, it’s all over your knees.
Fuck you, Ezrah. There’s no shit on my knees.
Only I can see it. You can’t see that genre of shit.
I knew he would say something like this.
Or: Jism is not invisible, Mira.
Oh, go fuck yourself, Ezrah. And fuck your jism-flecked birthday!
‘Who do you pray to, Mira?’
Gio’s voice woke me.
‘Nobody,’ I said.
‘That’s not true.’
‘It is. I hate God.’
‘Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that.’
My eardrums beat blood.
‘While you were asleep, you were crying for God.’
‘I was not.’
‘Yes you were. You were crying, “God, God!”’ Gio imitated my voice. He seemed to be getting more comfortable with me or something.
I stared at the road. The road never changed. ‘Look, I’m not religious,’ I said.
Gio laughed. ‘Do you know how the Christians pray?’
I remembered Nadia Russian Orthodox in her taffeta skirt. They dress up for God to respect him, she’d said.
‘Yes or no?’
‘No.’
Gio rolled down the window to let in some air. It started whistling over our heads.
‘The Christians pray,’ he said slowly, ‘to believe in the flesh of Jesus Christ: the real man, with real blood.’
I felt weird that he’d just said Jesus Christ. The heat in my body had all gone away.
Gio shifted around on his seat. It was like he was trying to scratch inside his back. ‘When a Christian girl kneels before the priest,’ he said, ‘the body of Jesus is put in her mouth. She says: Hoc est enim corpus meum. You know what that means? Come, say it with me.’
I thought he was joking. Nadia would’ve told me about that! A girl on her knees before the priest who puts Jesus’ body inside her mouth?
‘Hoc est enim corpus meum. Come, say: Hoc est enim corpus meum.’
‘No.’
‘Mira.’
Gio was so stern that I laughed.
‘Okay, okay. Hoc est enim corpus meum.’
‘Good. “This is my body.” Say it.’
‘This is my body.’
I looked down at my chest. My nipples were big again.
‘And when the priest holds up the goblet of wine, he says, Hic est enim calix sanguinis mei. Say it.’
‘Hic est enim calix sanguinis … ?’
‘Mei.’
‘Mei.’
‘“This is my blood.” Say it.’
‘This is my blood.’ My gut rumbled.
‘“Except you who eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” John 6:53.’
Gio looked at me and nodded, as if I knew what he was saying. But I’d never heard this kind of thing before. I didn’t know anything about Jesus Christ.
‘The Christians pray,’ Gio continued, ‘because Jesus was a real man. He had a real body and real blood. The Christians pray because Jesus showed them his body, his unclothed body pierced with nails, so that they could look at his wounds and remember their own.’
Gio stretched his huge fingers over the steering wheel. Yeah, Jesus was crucified, that much I knew.
‘The very first time I met the mother of my children,’ Gio said, looking over at me briefly, ‘she wanted to kiss me, she wanted to “do it.” But I knew that I would be an animal with her. I didn’t want to be an animal with her. I was going to grip her neck and sink my teeth in … ’
Something was changing inside the car. There was this electricity between us again. I reached out and touched Gio’s neck. S
oft baby hairs flattened down on the skin.
‘I couldn’t stand that she was doing the same thing to all those other animals.’
We turned off onto a smaller highway. Gio stopped talking. He let me work out the kinks in his neck. I felt him start to relax in my grip. When we were kids – of course I remembered this now – Nadia told me that Jesus was killed by the Jews. Suddenly Gio twitched and something cracked in his neck. My hand flew off and stuck to my lap.
‘You, as a Jewish girl, cannot so easily be a whore, am I correct?’
Oh my god. Why the fuck was he so shocked about me? He was the one who came to my room. He was the one who was a smuggler pimp!
‘It has nothing to do with being Jewish,’ I said.
Gio ignored me. He took out a handkerchief from his pocket. He pressed it to his open mouth. It looked like he licked something off it.
‘Do you know why God told the prophet Hosea to marry a whore?’
‘I think I should get out,’ I said. ‘I just told you I was not a whore.’
Gio accelerated.
‘Why would God tell the prophet Hosea to marry a whore? Would many men want to marry a whore?’
‘I don’t care, okay? I want to get out!’
Gio swallowed, his throat bulged. ‘They’d be disgusted. Why?’
‘Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off,’ I muttered.
‘God forced Hosea to marry a whore,’ Gio said, ‘because being with a woman who’d slept with so many was the only way to show him the real way to love.’
Hate, I thought. Hate.
‘You think this is easy for a man, Mira?’ Gio went on. ‘“For she is not my wife,” said Hosea, “neither am I her husband: let her therefore put her whoredoms out of her sight, and her adulteries from between her breasts, lest I strip her naked, and set her as in the day that she was born, and make her as a wilderness, and set her like a dry land, and slay her with thirst … ”’
‘Fuck off! I don’t care about Hosea. A man is the one who helps a woman be a whore!’ I screamed.
Gio smiled and attacked the road. ‘You’re right. And Hosea was obeying God by taking the whore as his wife. Her name was Gomer. Hosea and Gomer.’
Little Cat Page 17