Meanwhile, I can just make out Darlene standing a few yards ahead, her white-streaked hair glowing in the streetlight as she motions to passing cars to stop. One man in a car slows down briefly, presumably to check her out, then speeds off.
“Sayonara, shithead!!” she bellows. “That’s French for fuck you.”
Finally, after a few more minutes, a black pickup pulls over on the bike lane. I see her long, sinuous body lean into the cab as she flings her mane at the driver. He doesn’t have a chance.
“Okay,” she shouts a few minutes later. “He says he’ll take the deer.”
“Okay what?” I answer, suddenly feeling protective and then worried that maybe he’s thinking venison!
“He says he’ll take it to a shelter—we just have to help him get it in the flatbed.”
I try to act grateful and calm as the short, muscled-up man in a tight black T-shirt and jeans gets out of his truck, walks over to me, and flashes a wide, sharklike grin. Then he unbuckles his leather belt and pulls it like a whip out of his pants.
I glare at Darlene and my heart starts to pound.
“Relax, Dora. This is Bill. He’s a real doll. Guess what! He thinks I look like Daryl Hannah. Anyways, he says he’s going to tie the buck’s hoofs together so he doesn’t kick the shit out of us and then we’ll all lift him into the truck,” she says cheerfully. Sometimes Darlene has this weird kind of mother energy that is hugely comforting. In the moment.
Then Bill looks at us and says, “One of you has to ride in the back so the buck don’t roll himself out.”
I look at Darlene and we’re both thinking the same thing. I can’t drive on the goddamn freeway, so it’s me and the stranger and the buck going on into the dark without her. I make one last attempt to worm out of this. “You know, the man at the shelter says deer in this area are infested with ticks that carry Lyme disease.”
“Wash your hands when you get there, then,” she shoots back.
So here’s how it went down. The three of us held down the buck, tied his back legs, and heaved him into the truck as the dust flew off the animal in blinding, eye-stinging waves, like thick clouds of tear gas. Then I jumped in, covered us both up with a piece of greasy tarp, and held down the buck’s head as good old Bill raced along the 405 in the emergency lane, his lights flashing, all the way to Torrance.
All the while, the animal struggled to right himself and I could sense he was gradually regaining his equilibrium and strength. He smelled earthy and woodsy like a wet pile of leaves and at one point he let out a windy, guttural sound like nothing I had ever heard. It wasn’t a howl or a growl—more like the muffled, heartrending sob of a small child in distress.
As I lay beside him holding his warm, heavy head, I gazed down at the wild, guarded cast of his eyes. There was something so unnatural about it all—being that close to a creature that needs to get back to whatever wild place he came from as soon as possible. I felt a sense of urgency for him and for me.
The natural balance of the world was upset and both Darlene and I instinctively felt the call to set it right. I suddenly flash on Mole’s rescue of Otter’s young son on the Island of Pan and how he “felt a great Awe fall upon him, an awe that turned his muscles to water, bowed his head and rooted his feet to the ground. It was no panic terror—indeed he felt wonderfully at peace and happy…”*
When we finally reach the shelter, Bill jumps out, disappears inside, and argues with the techs for what seems like ages. Meanwhile, just as the buck has a renewed burst of energy and I am struggling to keep him down, my cell phone goes off. I automatically grab it from my purse with my free hand, thinking it’s Darlene.
“Dora?”
Fred.
“Oh, hi.”
“So, what’s goin’ on?”
“Oh. Nothing.”
“You sound out of breath—are you okay?”
“I’m fine but, ah, Fred, I can’t talk just now.”
“Okay. I’ll call you later.”
I hang up. Great. My mother used to say a watched pot never boils. Somehow or other that also applies to getting calls from men. They wait until you are frantically trying to keep a giant buck from bolting out of the back of a pickup, and then they call.
Catch the Soap
“Tell him I’ve been too fucking busy—or vice versa.”
~ Dorothy Parker (1893–1967) to Harold Ross (The New Yorker)
when asked why she had not delivered her manuscript on time.~
The first thing I think of when I get home is ticks. Ticks on my scalp. Ticks under my nails. Ticks in hidden places where you don’t even notice them until they are so swollen that whatever disease you have has metastasized and you are a goner. I need a drink. I open a brand-new bottle of something expensive that I’d been saving for the right occasion. This is it.
I turn on the water in the tub as hot as I can possibly stand it without searing my skin. I debate whether or not to call my doctor and tell him I’ve lain down with a buck. Maybe after the bath. I sink down into the water, submerging my head. Everything stings. I’ve got scratches all up and down my arm and a big black and blue mark on the side of my face where I accidentally banged my head on the side of the truck. I shampoo my sweaty hair at least five times. What I really need is white vinegar. I remember my mother used to put it in the humidifier to get rid of the bacteria. I jump out of the tub, buck naked, and head for the kitchen. I lean over the sink and douse myself with vinegar. Then the phone rings.
“Hey, it’s Victor here. There’s a gentleman who says you’re expecting him, Fred Mud, can he come up?”
Shit. Fred Mud? Oh. Very funny. Who cares. What the hell. “Tell him to come up.”
I answer the door in an old sleeveless T-shirt and sweats. My hair is dripping wet and I smell like a pickled something. He’s obviously coming up to apologize. I guess we should sit and talk about it. Probably a good idea. I wish I didn’t look like garbage.
Fred is standing in the doorway with a frosted bottle of Belvedere, the fancy one with the etched picture, and he has a puzzled grin. “Jesus, what happened to you?”
“Darlene and I rescued a deer. Come on in,” I say quickly.
“Does it hurt?” He touches my face and I pull away. I’m still annoyed and tired and, when it comes to him, confused. Jesus, he looks great.
“Peace offering,” he says, and gently strokes the back of my arm. I start to weaken as he croons, “Poor baby.” Without a beat, he swoops me up, swings me around, and kisses me, slamming the door shut with his foot. He puts his hands under my shirt and slides them down into my sweats and presses my hips next to his. He whispers a lot of foolishness as he pushes me back into the room.
“God, Dora. You’re beautiful.”
A crazy urge suddenly comes over me. I pull off my T-shirt and sweats and throw myself at him. We are both heady with lust as we stumble and fall on the rug. He grins and hoists himself over me, crushing me with his body. He grabs my wet, vinegary hair, pulls my head back, and pins my arms behind my back. Then he starts doing something with his tongue. My whole body is trembling. The buttons from his shirt are digging into my chest and the stiff fabric of his pants feels good. I try to rip his shirt off and he laughs at my urgent struggle. It’s shocking how much I want him.
“You won’t respect me in the morning,” he says with delight.
“You’re right. You were naughty and you need to be punished. Do you mind if I get my handcuffs?” I say, still panting from the tussle.
He looks at me with strange, new interest. “Do you have handcuffs?”
“Maybe,” I taunt him. “Follow me.”
He’s thrilled. There is something about a guy finding out you’re a bad girl. Just the thought completely turns him on.
I lead Fred, like some Nubian slave, into my bedroom and motion for him to sit on the bed. His tongue isn’t exactly hanging out of his mouth, but you get the picture. I open the drawer by the side of my bed, pull out my gleaming steel handcuffs,
and dangle the keys provocatively in front of his face.
“You didn’t believe me, did you?”
He’s chortling like an adolescent. “Okay. Where did you get these?”
I wasn’t going to tell him that I got them from Darlene as a separation gift…her ex, Mel the cop, had left them behind. I don’t even want to think about what Darlene’s done with them. “Just lay down,” I say. But at that moment he spins around, tackles me, and handcuffs me to my handmade ivy-twined iron bed frame.
We are roaring with laughter as I kick my legs violently at his chest, twist my body back and forth, and wrap my legs around his waist and squeeze him like a vise. I pull him toward me and his body is heavy and strong and I’m gasping for breath. Lusting for him.
He knows. He props himself up on knees and unbuttons his shirt.
“How much do you want me?” he teases.
He puts his fingers in my mouth and then leans in and kisses me softly and slowly and our mouths get wet and warm and tingly and this guy really knows how to kiss. Great kissing can be almost like making love. If it’s done right, it can magically obliterate all the extraneous limbs and sharp corners of your bodies. It’s a rapturous feeling. Oh, my, my, my. This feels good…the sweet, hypnotic power of it all where you are outside yourself, suspended somewhere far away looking down on a scene where, for once, reality is better than fiction.
I remember when I was a teenager, there was a boy named Chris who used to come over after school and sit in my bedroom and kiss me. We would start out slow, laughing and kidding around, but he knew and I knew that this was all leading somewhere we weren’t ready to go. I learned it was all a question of acquiescence, letting your guard down and opening yourself up to a tangle of feelings and driving urges that sweep over you as a series of firewalls are released one by one.
Fred pulls off his pants and starts licking me under my arms, down my stomach, on the soles of my feet and other places that make me crazy.
There’s always a moment when you can feel the yielding in your muscles and your bones and all you can think about is you want more. A selfish, ravenous sensation washes over you and if someone is good, and Fred is definitely good, you never want it to stop.
I had a discussion in college once with Pamela, before William, when she was a hell of a lot looser. The concept was that “doing it” with a guy you had a crush on was sort of like finding out his one BIG secret: Is he good in bed? By that we meant, is he gentle or rough? Does he take his time or get carried away? Is he robust and insistent or does he let you take the lead? Is it a religious experience or just hard-core? We decided that you never really discover a good lover’s secret because they are different every time. It’s all a question of patter—the strong, silent type never really did it for either of us in the sack. A good lover had to know how to talk, cajole, philosophize, wax poetic, gossip, confess, and flatter. And the dark other side, the raunchy, off-color rap that feverishly describes in whispers and murmurs every lurid move.
As we got older, though, we both realized that, alas, technique is never the whole story. How could it be that simple, after all? It’s the ineffable qualities of a person, like temperament, sensibility, integrity, and idiosyncrasies, that truly capture a lover’s imagination and send them to that coveted place of bliss. You can lick your chops over his physique, his bank account, his cool car, suave manners, whatever, but no matter how he acts in bed, that hideous word “connection” has to carry you through, it just does, or you inevitably end up blowing him off for no apparent good reason.
His face is next to mine as I strain my wrists against the cuffs and arch my back, pressing my breasts up against his bare chest. I have unlocked my legs from his waist now and obligingly let him lie down on top of me. He is rock hard and he lets me know it.
“Unlock the cuffs, Fred,” I say with a moan. “I want you to fuck me. Right now.”
“You can’t have everything you want, Dora. That’s no fun,” he chides as he holds the keys up to my face and then flings them across the room.
He’s stroking and moving. I feel as if sensation after sensation is piling up, swirling around me, carrying me off into a lost place.
As he goes down on me, he whispers, “Who would have thought my baby is a slut.”
We doze off enveloped in a languorous embrace and wake up a few hours later, reeking of vinegar, vodka, and sex. I tell him I want a bath and he says, “Me too.”
Aside from the view, the best feature of my apartment is the master bathroom. There is a big, old-fashioned claw-foot tub by the window, vintage white tile floor, and shiny stainless steel hardware with French chaud and froid on the handles.
Fred follows me into the bathroom, looks around at the disarray of books all over. He picks up a paperback version of Welty short stories and says to me, “You’re the real thing, aren’t you?” I am taken aback with the compliment.
“It’s the perfect getaway. I can spend the whole weekend in here.”
I pour loads of bubble bath in the tub, maybe a little too much; my entire body is hidden in giant drifts of white, snowy fluff. That’s when I see the sparkle in Fred’s eye.
He sits on the rim of the tub with a towel wrapped around his waist, picks up a bar of soap, and flips it like a lucky penny into the tub. It disappears below the surface for a moment and slowly floats down, grazing my leg.
“Dora! Catch the soap!” Then he jumps in.
We sit facing each other for one decorous moment, like a pregame salute. Let the wild rumpus begin. I dive for the soap, sliding against his thigh, while he grabs my wrist and lunges forward for the slippery prize. I push back against him in a kind of mat slam, my right hand and foot jamming him in the stomach as I inadvertently slip back and dunk myself. His foot is now wedged between my thighs and he starts moving it seductively higher and higher.
“No fair,” I say as I grab his foot and pull him under. I reach for the soap and see his hand underwater, grasping for it also; we both make contact at the same time and the soap suddenly shoots up in the air and sails across the bathroom tile floor, which is now flooded with water.
We both stare at the soap, which has skidded all the way to the carpet. We are out of breath and panting and covered in a film of slippery suds.
“Come here, baby,” he breathes in my ear. “Let’s do it this time without the cuffs.”
What’s in a Name
“Get stewed: Books are a load of crap.”
~ Philip Larkin, British poet (1922–1985), “A Study of Reading Habits” ~
Have you ever eaten a messy, juicy chili cheese dog smothered with mustard and onions on a soft, steamed bun at two a.m., flush with the excitement of a new lover, slightly hungover and famished from all the sex? I could say that it’s better than sex. It’s not. But it sure caps off a night of sin.
We are sitting on swivel seats at the counter of what is advertised as the most famous hot dog stand in the country. The plaster walls are covered with signed pictures of dead actors and the smell of garlic and chili wafts out the door and down the street. The neighborhood has seen better days, far better. Some say F. Scott ate here during the dismal time he lived in Hollywood and turned out his three thousand pages of mostly worthless screenplays.
There is usually a line down the block waiting to get in, but right now, it’s just me, Fred, and a couple of off-duty bouncers. I lean on the cracked white Formica counter, which glistens with a thin film of grease. Fred and I are surprisingly coherent considering we have downed a half bottle of Belvedere. Coherent and oddly empowered in the way lovers seem to get when they have totally satisfied one another.
“So Dora, my pet. Let’s get personal. Tell me a secret.”
A secret. And just as I was feeling so relaxed. “You tell me a secret.”
“I asked you first.”
Jesus. I could tell him my father left home when I was eight—no, too depressing. My mother was an alcoholic. I accidentally shoplifted a bra at Victoria’s Secret. Si
nce my separation my credit rating has gone into the toilet or, how about I put Botox in my forehead to keep it from furrowing when I read. Well, for sure, I’m not telling him about the freeway thing. I have to find just the right secret. Can’t be gossipy and petty. Also can’t be too deep or dark or messy or, for that matter, secret. This is giving me a headache. “Okay. Did you know I was named after Eudora Welty?”
Uh-oh. Did I detect a slight slur? Am I a little drunk? What the hell.
He smiles indulgently. “Oh, is that so…”
I know that look. He thinks I’m drunk.
“Yes. It is so.”
“I’m not wild about the Southern women writers, a bunch of screwed-up old maids who lived with their parents and tended to their gardens.”
“Nice, Fred.” What a narrow-minded, chauvinistic, creepy thing to say. I attempt to temper my volubility. “You know, Welty was a brilliant writer. Reading her stuff is like watching slapstick—the timing is impeccable.” I give an exaggerated kiss to my fingertips (the international sign for yeah, baby) and end with a flourish of my hand.
Fred is all insouciance. “I don’t like slapstick.”
“Did you read The Ponder Heart or Why I Live at the P.O.?”
“Maybe.”
“No, you didn’t. Otherwise, you couldn’t feel this way. Next to Shakespeare, she has the best high comic dialogue I’ve ever read.”
“Shakespeare? Come on, Dora. Let’s not get too carried away here.”
We’re both quiet for a minute while I search for my next line. A-ha! I’ve got it.
“You know what Mencken said about Shakespeare, don’t you…‘All he did was string together a lot of old well-known quotations.’” I think for a minute.
“So, what’s your secret?” I give him a flirtatious, drunken wink.
Not missing a beat, Fred looks at me and says, “My secret is I really dig you, Eudora.”
Literacy and Longing in L. A. Page 12