by Greg Baxter
Allison, who is in public relations, has long brown hair that she can wear in a hundred different styles, and large eyes – so large and sad they are the first thing you notice – in a face that narrows sharply toward her mouth. She writes short stories on the weekends. They are all about people who can’t talk to each other. When she kisses, she throws her head back in what I would call premature ecstasy, with her eyes open, and moans. She is very funny and quiet until she gets three or four pints inside her, and then she starts marching down the middle of busy streets telling men to fuck off. When she is underneath me she is always squirming away – it is like some National Geographic article in which the female is only subdued if the male can penetrate her. She tells me I am hurting her in a weak and crying voice but if I stop or slow down she looks at me as though I’ve ruined the moment.
Then Evelyn. Evelyn is the type of woman who has read all of Proust, whom I have only read one book of, but who also loves television shows about deformities and surgeries, which she can watch while eating dinner – while I have to look away and make loud noises. I am in love with her, but she has as little interest in hearing it as I have in saying it. Evelyn is afraid of having sex in bright light, and is always covering her naked body. She has a beautifully shaped and scentless cunt. It is perfectly symmetrical and inconspicuous. It is small but gets extremely wet. I crawl between her legs and admire her. I begin to lick her slowly and heavily, then quicken. I have my hands on her ass, lifting her to me like a giant delicious plate of food. When she is breathing quickly and moving around a little, I slip my middle and index fingers inside her. She begins to moan and almost writhe. A few minutes later I move both fingers into her ass. This is one way she comes. I press it past the quivering muscle, there is a sensation of a pop, then empty heat. Then slowly, all the way, I push inside her. And now I am licking her as fast and as lightly as I can, and sucking her clitoris. Her orgasms are like quiet emergencies – she whispers that it’s on the way, repeats herself three or four times, convulses for a few moments, moaning Oh God or something like it, then grabs and holds herself with all her fingers pressed flat and hard on her cunt. And then I climb up her long body and if my dick has gone flat it goes hard the moment it’s in contact with her. She is ten times more beautiful being fucked than doing anything else, because it is only being fucked that you may witness all of her. She is too inscrutable to gauge at any other time. This is a woman who blushes when she is asked to speak in public but likes to watch herself giving head in mirrors. She has conveniently mounted a narrow mirror into the wall beside her bed, and we often fuck sideways so both of us can watch. Sometimes when I am on top of her, her head slips over the edge and she watches herself upside down. She likes to be fucked with great energy, which she absorbs in near silence. When there is no mirror, just us, and I am on top of her, she keeps her eyes half-closed for the most part, staring at nothing. I gaze at her face. Slowly she lifts her eyes and looks at me, and does not look away. After I have come inside her and rolled exhaustedly off, we lie close to each other for a few minutes without speaking, and then she asks how long before we go again.
A few others have come and gone. A very small girl – just barely five foot – who is sweet and emotionally fragile came only when I fucked her from behind and immobilized all her limbs. A receptionist, aged thirty-nine, could not come at all – never once in her life, she said. A few came from intercourse, but only when they were on top and motoring at full speed. One came only when I made her talk about fucking other women – she is bisexual, only twenty-three. One night we met a girlfriend of hers at a bar. We got drunk and walked around the city looking for a taxi.When we found shadows or stretches of emptiness I would kiss one of them, or both of them, and they might kiss each other while I put my hand down the front of one’s jeans. We got a taxi and pretended to be normal for twenty minutes, talking about this and that. We went to my friend’s place – straight to her bedroom, which was filthy and smelled of mildew – and they both knelt down in front of me and took turns sucking my dick. Periodically they licked each other’s mouths. Then I put them on the bed. I fucked one from behind while she kissed the other. Then I fucked the other on her back while the first straddled her face. The first became faint and lay to one side, but kept one leg under the other’s head, so that I could watch the other lick the first’s clit while I worked two fingers in and out of her cunt. We all came together, or pretended to.
This is a very different December from the last, most of which I spent shopping and at dinner parties where the hosts and guests tried to outdo each other with toasts and clean, large houses. I have probably tripled in biological age since then. I get winded walking up one flight of stairs. I’ve sprouted a few grey hairs at my temples. My deterioration gives me a sense of great freedom. My thoughts go unencumbered now. I approach a state of equilibrial disdain, disdain without heat. Wherever I see crowds, I avoid them. If I offend, it is not because I have sought to. If I please, it is an accident.
I spent a whole decade cultivating rage. I laboured to disappoint. I infected the people I knew with bitterness. I pulled them in close and betrayed them. I felt no remorse, just pity. I left the tiny battlefields of my relationships scorched and full of smoking corpses. I walked over the bodies without examination.
I like to call my Vespa midnight blue, but in truth it is dangerously close to purple. Not long ago, on my way to Evelyn’s apartment in Leopardstown, I hit a large pothole in Donnybrook. I saw it too late, driving only a few feet behind a car at high speed, in the rain. I braced and slammed into it; to brake fully in wet weather on a Vespa is suicide. I think I said Oh SHIT. There was a loud crash and the handlebars popped out of my grip for a moment. My feet came off the little platform. I was disconnected from the bike for only half a second, but I was pretty certain I was dead. The hole was only a few inches deep but Vespas aren’t very rugged. Primarily they are to be sat on while smoking cigarettes in Italy, talking to pretty girls. The hit sent a jolt right into my neck. For a few days I couldn’t turn my head sideways, or lift it.
The first time Katie saw my scooter, she laughed. She said, in the most wonderful accent imaginable, Oh dear, and put her hand to her mouth. But your helmet? she said. It’s for a real motorcycle.
Last week, Katie and I went ice-skating at the RDS for her birthday. A Canadian friend of hers, Patricia, came along. Patricia is a short girl with sturdy legs and a voice like shattered glass being rubbed into your eyes; but she has pretty brown hair, light freckles, and a nose so tiny that you feel you must touch it. Katie has phases in which she surrounds herself with as many people as possible, plays six or seven instruments at small sessions with friends, and goes after men with the gargantuan clumsiness of an elephant. But when she is feeling low she withdraws from crowds, assumes she will never be a good musician, and swears off romance forever. When she is happy she is like a large soap bubble, or thousands of them, blowing down a sunny street. When she is sad she is very pretty. That night she was feeling sorry for herself. She had made a point to invite nobody along to the ice-skating party, so Patricia and I had invited ourselves.
I had been ice-skating only once before, at the age of sixteen, so seventeen years later I was just trying to move around the rink without falling and shattering my wrists. The rink was small and almost square, so that as soon as you came out of a corner you were heading into the next. I took long rests every few minutes, stretching the cramps out of the muscles in my shins, and watched the girls race around the ice. Katie was pretty good. She was trying to learn the hop. Patricia skated with the effortless finesse and astronomical speed I had expected from a Canadian. There were a bunch of teenage boys there who were purposely crashing at full speed into the walls. One grabbed my shirt trying to regain his balance and, on purpose, I elbowed him in the face. Patricia, however, slipped gracefully through them. They tried to keep up but could not. She skated backward, taking photographs of Katie and me, faster than the boys could go forward. Now and a
gain I’d mimic her style and almost fall over. My arms would spin and I’d go back and forth like a pendulum. She stayed low and smooth and instinctually aware of her surroundings. By the end of the night I’d learned how to take corners by crossing my legs, but that was it. Katie learned to hop and kept doing that. She was unaware, probably, that her large breasts were bouncing around in her tight black top, and that nearly all the boys and men, including me, were helplessly transfixed by them.
I am always hoping that one night she will give in to curiosity and fuck me. But women don’t seem to fuck men out of curiosity, at least not friends.
Afterwards, we went to Mary Mac’s and had cheeseburgers and cake – a cake that Patricia made at the table in the pub with ingredients she pulled out of a plastic bag. It was Monday, and the place was nearly empty. Mary Mac’s had been a regular spot for me the year before, great for all-evening Friday drinks in summer. The girls ate the cake before the cheeseburgers. They nearly finished it. I had to slice a tiny piece and move it far away from them, and they even tried to eat that. When the food was finished, Patricia took a phone call from her boyfriend and disappeared for an hour. Katie and I sat together drinking. She mentioned, for the hundredth time, that she would leave Ireland soon but that she would never return to Wales. She wanted to live in a small village by the sea and play music. Her job was no good, but she needed the money for travel. She sighed, and then she snapped out of it. Underneath the table, I let my feet touch her feet. She didn’t notice.
5
Glitter Gulch
I had to spend Christmas in Texas. It was out of my hands. My father had demanded, in the way he has of demanding, that I come home: he knew a thing or two about collapsed marriages. I left my house in the hands of Helen, a former student who owned a thousand books without covers (she worked in a bookstore), and who liked to dance on my dining-room table in the middle of the night; sometimes I watched from a chair, drinking whatever was left in the house.
I got home at four in the morning on the 21st, the day I was to fly out, and, having no clean clothes, threw some dirty boxers and socks and a pair of flip-flops into a large suitcase – I would buy clothing in Texas. After a long shower I went up to my little terrace and paced around in the streetlit dark. My taxi wouldn’t be long, and I needed to stay awake. Since my heart probably couldn’t take the strain of coffee, I decided to expose myself to the cold for half an hour. I had survived a month-long binge, and I couldn’t trust myself to open my eyes if I closed them.
That night, I’d been drinking with John, another former student, at the Lord Edward, an uncomfortably lit and foul-smelling box near Christchurch, full of very calm old people. We’d ended up there after drifting from one unsatisfactory spot to the next. It was the Thursday before the city broke up, so everywhere was jammed – the bars, the footpaths, restaurants, shops. The following night would be worse, but I’d be five thousand miles away.
John is a big guy, handsome, at six foot two an inch taller than me, not fat but large-bellied. He always wears T-shirts and big jackets, never combs his hair, and shaves once a month. He was finishing a thesis for a master’s in computer programming – or obsessing over its lack of progress. It had become – this tiny document – the most wretched and debilitating task in his life, and he could not talk about it without slipping into nonsensical rambling. He was the most talented writer I’d come across in a year of teaching, but it hadn’t come together for him, and now, I knew, he was going to quit. His decision to commit murder on his talent was something I remorsefully admired – I had played a decisive role in John’s disillusionment. I had passed on too freely my loathing for the propriety of being a writer, tried to help him find the pure and fearless voice of total disenchantment. During one of our conversations I said that a man who can write ought to commit an act of violence against literature or abandon it entirely. John had written three or four stories in his whole life.
We’d been at the Lord Edward for an hour when Olivia arrived. She had sent me a few texts in response to my invitation, aloofly intimating she might pop along, at some time, if she got bored of what she was doing, and wasn’t too tired to go home, but she’d see. John and I were outside, smoking. We saw her only when she stopped in front of us. She walks so softly, arms always crossed, shoulders never rising or falling, that she seems to stand still. She wore heels – she wears heels to run across the street for bagels on Saturday mornings – and dark blue jeans.
Hey, I said.
Hey, she said, as though I had introduced myself at a nightclub, and she was not interested.
The three of us sat at the bar, and John and Olivia did most of the talking. I was wiped out, drunk, and had nothing clever to say – I just wanted to lie Olivia in front of me on the bar and go down on her, with everybody watching, her legs buckled over my shoulders, her arms knocking down glasses. Once I tried to speak and mispronounced music. They asked me to repeat myself, and I made the same mistake: moosic, moosic. I went for cigarettes to keep from drinking, but smoking just made me worse. Parts of me grew very heavy, such as my tongue, my brain, my eyelids, and my lungs. Olivia asked John if he was a writer, and his answer was to groan and say he’d done my classes. How’s it going, she asked him. Not well to be absolutely fucking honest with you, he said.
Olivia went to the toilet at one point and John said, Fuck me, horse, she’s good-looking.
It was the truth, and I knew she had men falling at her feet. But she didn’t trust men. Once, while lying in bed after sex, I put my arms around her and she said, That’s not necessary.
John left at ten, and Olivia and I decided to go to Wexford Street. The taxi took a long time, in heavy traffic, going up George’s Street. Every laneway seemed to be occupied by a thousand bodies. The street between Hogan’s and the Market Bar was impassable with people smoking. Two girls screamed insults at each other outside the Capital Bar. I was happy to be in this city, but not of it. If it had hit a wall then, it would have smashed entirely to chalk and glass and blood. I tried to hold Olivia’s hand. She asked, What are you doing?
We went to Solas, which was the only place that didn’t have a cover charge and wasn’t impossibly packed. I’d drunk myself a little sober – this always strikes me as uncanny – so I was chatty again. We stood by the bar and I watched her in the mirror. Barbarically I tried to kiss her. I had my hands up the back of her shirt, and she wiggled away now and then. Another couple kissed beside us. Don’t you see how disgusting that is? she asked, but after another vodka my hands were in her back pockets, and she was giving in. I lifted her onto her tiptoes and I kissed her open-mouthed and roughly, and she put her hand on the back of my head. The bar didn’t notice. People ordered drinks beside us. When somebody knocked into her, she dropped out of my arms abruptly. She looked at me as though she might slap me and said: You can come home with me, but no sex.
No sex?
I can’t.
Out of action?
Out of action.
I thought I’d say, I’ll fuck you anyway. It was the truth. I like the bloody aftermath. But I caught myself.
I want to go back with you, I said.
It’s probably pointless.
We went out to the street. It must have been around midnight, and I felt as though I might fall asleep standing up. There were free taxis everywhere, which saddened me a little, since I had hoped to kiss outdoors for a few minutes, and soak up the last bit of atmosphere – there would be none of it in Texas.
In her flat I wanted to make myself something greasy to eat, but her fridge and all her cupboards were empty, as usual. Every week she planned a big food shop, and every week something got in the way. I poured myself a glass of tap water. She sat on her couch, curled up in one corner. I sat on the other side and we listened to music on the radio. I yawned and checked the time on my phone.
What’s wrong with you? she asked.
Huh?
You’re usually on top of me by now.
But you sa
t so far away.
I always do.
I pulled her on top of me and looked at her for a while. She has big eyes and dark eyelashes. When I started trying to undress her, she crawled between my legs and blew me to the background noise of house or trance or industrial – I simply don’t know what these terms mean, I only pretend to – and I pulled her hair back to watch my dick screw in and out of her mouth. I became the whole city, and I turned to chalk and glass and blood. Olivia was getting tired and out of breath. Little droplets of saliva and ejaculate, from many near orgasms, leaked out of her lips. When she stopped to catch her breath, I jerked myself off to come. She watched patiently, breathing. But I couldn’t. I was too tired. I told her to put a towel down and we’d fuck.
Disgusting, she said.
Finally we lay down on the couch and kissed. I closed my eyes and opened them.
You’re awake, she said.
What time is it?
Just past three.
I fell asleep?
While kissing me.
She was in the same spot, lying beside me with her left arm bent helplessly between us. The radio was still playing, but it wasn’t loud anymore; it was something like jazz and very bad.
Sorry, I said.
It was romantic, she said. The snoring.
On the way home, in the taxi, I texted to say that I’d miss her, and would bring her back a souvenir.
You’re a girl, she texted back.
And I felt that I was surely in love with her, or in love with a life in which she existed.
Hartsfield International, Atlanta (I)
I had a five-hour layover in Atlanta. My departure gate hadn’t been assigned, so I walked aimlessly for a while. I found some underground tunnels that linked the terminals at their ends – normally one takes the main shuttle link that runs right down the centre like a spine. I stood on the slow conveyors in these half-mile-long tunnels, all by myself. There was no music.