She shrugs. “Come in and wait. I’ll leave my door open so we can hear the delivery men.”
He stops by Hugh’s door, puts the beer down and lifts the mat. No key. He reaches to the top of the sill and runs his hand across. Then he tries the handle to see if it is unlocked. Meanwhile, Amy keys her door open and stands there.
“Great. The key isn’t here.”
She says, “Come in. Put the beer down. You can look out every few minutes.”
He hefts the beer up, saying, “Even if they come, I can’t get in.”
In her apartment he sets the case on a small table beside the half wall in the designated kitchen area. It is a one bedroom, one bath apartment, laid out exactly like Hugh’s. It feels weird because Hugh’s decor in the living area consists of a couch and a TV, while this one was clearly decorated by an older, much older, woman. There were two puffed up upholstered wing chairs that looked too big for the room, and a huge plump sofa placed with the back against the half wall of the kitchen, and every flat surface staged knick knacks, or pictures taken long ago. Here and there were weird dolls; weird because all dolls are weird and spooky. His older sisters loved to tease him still, by reminding him that when he was a toddler he’d cry when they brought their dolls out to play. He starts toward the door.
“Okay, then,” he says. “If you see Hugh when he gets home tell him I was here and couldn’t find the key.”
“Relax, big fella. You can wait here.” She takes his hand and leads him to the sofa.
“Sit. Do you want a drink? I’m going to have a beer.”
“No thanks.” He sat in a way to avoid eye contact with the dolls. “You don’t strike me as a beer drinker.”
“Every so often. I took a case because some friends are coming over.”
“Tonight?”
“One night, next week. But, I saw Lawrence, and my mother, this afternoon. Always a joy.”
“You don’t like him?”
She takes an opener from a kitchen drawer, pulls out a bottle, snaps off the cap and stood there holding the bottle.
She says, “I like Lawrence more than her. She’ll apologize for the weather. ‘Oh, honey, I’m so sorry it rained on your birthday.’“
Grayson chuckles, figuring she saw that as a loveable foible of Mom’s.
Amy says, “But if she steps on your foot, she’ll say, ‘Well, what was it doing on the floor?’”
His chuckle is stoppered when he realizes she sees that not as loveable but, it seems, as a hanging offense. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth, indeed.
Here and there were a few framed photos of a plain girl with sad, swampy eyes. In one she was squeezed between two adults, one male and one female, both of whom may have been mistakenly thinking they were showing happy smiles but looked more like they were in mid-shriek.
She gestured to the room at large and says, “I’m only staying here until I’ve finished grad school, so I can’t be bothered redecorating. It’s a convenient location, and I got sick of all the silliness that goes on in the student neighborhoods. So, when Nana died, I packed up my clothes and came here.” She looks around, in a way that seemed wistful. He figures it is a way for her to hold on to her grandmother, too.
“She was a sweetheart,” Amy says. “I miss her terribly. She was my paternal grandmother. My father disappeared before I was born, so she was the only relative from that side.”
Before they were called swamp Yankees, the early settlers from England were called Puritans, and The Old Man descended from a long line of them. If you showed an emotion, you were being “dramatic.” On Grayson’s mother’s side, they were full blooded Irish, all the way down, clannish and volatile. So, he believed it was his nature to be uncomfortable with any emotion, except anger. He noted the apartment looked like The Museum of Lace Doilies. They seemed to be everywhere but the floors and the ceilings.
“Boy,” he says. “Nana sure liked doilies.”
She laughs. “And those little painted ceramic figurines. They’re supposed to be cherubs, I think.” She sweeps her extended arm around the room. “She placed them all over the apartment. I think they’re creepy.”
She reaches down and hands him the beer, he took it, automatically, before he realizes what it is. She turns to go into the kitchen.
“Wait a second, no, I don’t want a beer.” He hops up, follows her out and puts it on the table.
“Oh, that’s right.” She reaches out and picks it up. “Do you want a joint? I’ve got some very nice Colombian.”
He thinks about it: He rarely smokes dope. The few times a year he did smoke, it just made him mellow. He doesn’t have a problem with pot. He quit drinking and smoking pot isn’t drinking. Maybe smoking pot could be a solution to the drinking issue.
“Yeah, that sounds good,” he says.
“Sit. I’ll get it.”
He sits back down on the couch and she came out of the bedroom shaking a small re-sealable plastic bag.
She says, “My papers are on the shelf above you. No sit, I’ll get them.”
She puts a hand on his left shoulder for balance and reaches with the other arm to take a pack of rolling papers off the shelf, pressing her flat belly against the right side of his head. It is done with an intimacy that seems to be comfortable for her but is both thrilling and discomforting for him.
She sits beside him and soon they fire it and smoke up, passing the joint back and forth. One reason he isn’t a keen pot smoker is that he found the rituals, and holding the smoke and the burning lungs, unpleasant. But, worst was the smug self-regard, and the ‘Aren’t we hip,’ bullshit was really tiresome. He is happy that she isn’t doing the whole observing-herself-being-cool like so many pot heads did. Plus, he identifies pot with hippies, and he certainly isn’t a hippie. By this time, the pot has worked and he is numb. Beside him, she seems dreamy.
“Good stuff, huh,” she says.
“Stunning.”
“Watch,” she says. “Look at this.” She gets to her knees on the couch and reaches up to the shelf again, leaning against him. She sits back down and now there is no space between them.
She hands him a ceramic cherub and says, “Look at this. Imagine if you had to paint this? With tiny little brushes? I ask you, isn’t it weird? The little boy in the cloth cap, standing in some kind of basket, his hand shading his eyes.”
“He’s a lookout in a crow’s nest,” he says.
“He’s a lookout in a crow’s nest?” she says. “What’s he looking for? The white whale?”
“Yes. Could be Ishmael,” he says. “And I only escaped---’ ”
“‘Alone to tell the tale,’ ”she says.
That wasn’t exactly right, he knew, but they were close. He hands back the figurine. “I don’t want to break it. It looks fragile.”
She stretches again to put Ishmael back, and this time he finds he’s turned his face to her belly.
“Good dope. Very good dope,” she says. “Nice. I’m going to have a glass of wine. I have a gorgeous red.”
He says, “Oh, are you like a wine…person? What do they call them? A wine something?”
“Are you thinking of an enthusiast, or a snob?” she says. “Or, like, a wine bibber?”
He laughs. Bibber! What a great word.
“What’s funny?” she says.
“Wine bibbers,” he says.
“I told you,” she says. “Excellent dope.”
“Absolutely,” he says.
“That reminds me. Did you ever try absinthe?” she asks.
“Yeth,” he says. “Just kidding. No. It’s not legal, is it?”
“It is, I mean, no, it’s not, but I just happen to have some, again, courtesy of Lawrence,” she says. “My mother calls him ‘Lawrence of Inebria’. You have to try it.”
“I don’t want to drink any booze,” he says.
“I think it’s more like a hallucinogen than booze.”
“Oh, well,” he says. “That should be all right.”
She came back with a bottle and stops to read it. “Yes, I guess it is a kind of booze. It’s 148 proof,” she says.
“I’ve never had it.”
So, how could he quit it? He’d never tried it, for Pete’s sake. But he is definitely off the beer and whiskey.
She says, “I know it really fucks you up.”
“Make mine a double.”
He second and third guesses his decision to sample the absinthe during the tedious and ostentatious preparation, which involves a sugar cube, a peculiar spoon, fire, ice water, and slow stirring. When it is ready to drink, it looks awful, a shade of kid snot green.
He says, “That sugar cube isn’t dosed with acid, is it?”
She says, “No, but I do have some windowpane, if you want that.”
He shakes his head, takes a sip of the drink and tastes licorice. The taste is unexpected and disconcerting. He stops just short of a shudder and childish grimace.
“Is this made out of melted licorice?”
“Anisette seeds, plus fennel and wormwood.”
“Oh yeah, seeds, flannel and wormwood, that sounds delicious,” he says. “None for you?”
“I’m going to get that glass of wine.” She gets to her feet and floats away.
He says, “You’re going to bib some wine,” and cackles, then tosses off the drink, taking it like medicine.
She comes back with her half-filled wine glass. “You drank that right down. You’re supposed to sip it.”
He doesn’t want to tell her he drank it down fast because it’s awful. That didn’t make sense to some people.
She says, “What do you think? Would you like another?”
“Not right now. I’m, uh, phew. That really does taste like licorice.”
“You can’t handle your licorice?” she says.
He closes his eyes and smiles as a glow starts in his belly and radiates out, and he shivers to a sound made by a small gong somewhere in Tibet.
Peace, through unrestrained animal spirits. Time to stop grieving.
“If I don’t live, I will die,” he says.
He must not have said it because she says, “Have you ever tried Tullamore Dew?”
He shakes his head a couple times, stopping when he feels like his brain is going to slide out of his ear.
“It’s a very nice Irish whiskey.”
His grandfather Spike used to say, ‘Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.’ Grayson never got the exact reference, but understood the sentiment to mean, if you’re going to screw up, screw up good. No sense breaking a promise only slightly. He could always stop again tomorrow.
“Sounds good. Should I go see where Hugh is?” He thinks about standing. “In a minute.”
She came back and hands him a water glass with a healthy dose in it.
“Now sip this,” she says. “Don’t gulp it down.”
He sips, frequently. “That is nice.”
She sits beside him, taking a peck at her wine now and again, and then she put the wineglass on the coffee table. She angles toward him, lifts her legs to the couch so her knees touched his thigh, put her hand there, and slid it back and forth slowly.
She says, “I may be a tough Movement woman and all that, but my feelings were hurt the other day. I felt rejected.”
“Oh no,” he says, feeling terrible that he’d made her feel bad. “No, no. It isn’t you. I still have hope Catherine will take me back.”
“That’s fine, I don’t want to marry you. I just want to have some fun. Corinne said you were a great guy.”
“I’m surprised. She doesn’t like me.”
“She told me you were fun. That’s what I need. I’m involved with big things, heavy shit, you know? I can’t fraternize with the guys in my group. Marxists talk all day about equality, but as soon as you fuck one, they expect you to cook for them and wash the dishes, and they will never take you seriously again.”
He takes a sip from his glass. “I’d really like a cigarette, if that’s okay?”
She removes her hand from his leg. “Me, too.”
He puts his empty glass on the coffee table and takes his smokes from his shirt pocket. He shakes a couple out and hands one to her.
“I like to smoke when I drink,” she says. She takes a lighter from the table and lights both cigarettes.
He says, “I should go and check on Hugh’s couch. See if they’re there. The truck drivers.” He holds up the cigarette and looks at it. Smoking, standing up and walking to the door involve too many things all at once, way too many things. “After this.”
She takes his hand and began to rub his thumb with hers. Soon, their thumbs were pressing pad to pad, and writhing around each other. Thumb wrestling is really getting him amped up, way past horny. This is ridiculous, what could be goofier, and yet he increases the tempo. Wow, he’ll have to remember this.
She gets to her knees on the couch again, leans in, takes his bottom lip in her teeth and rubs her tongue on his lip. She puts one hand behind his head and runs her hand through his hair, let go of his thumb and with that hand caresses his thigh. Then she moves her hand higher, and takes a loose hold of what she found.
She stops kissing but doesn’t pull away.
“Oh. You’re not going anywhere. This,” she squeezes and releases it, “is a lie detector.”
Despite his best intentions, he validates her theory by shifting position to allow her better access.
She puts her hand on the side of his face and turns his head toward her and kisses him. Her lips are open and her breath smells of sweet wine, and her tongue is darting, small, warm and slick. She kisses him, and his lie detector expands to the point where he feels like his scalp is stretching. She nips at his earlobes and the hand he was going to use to gently push her away instead goes around and cups a cheek of her ass, her super-duper ass. Her hand fumbles with his belt, she makes a hissing noise, and he shifts so she can get at him, and he can use his other hand, too. He changes position so now they knelt face to face on the couch, and he drops his free hand between her legs for a second, before he is driven to get closer, to get inside; she reads his mind and arches back so he can put his hand inside those fantastic pants to where she’s wet, she gasps, struggles to get his belt undone. She is not as facile as he would like, so he shifts to a seated position with a quickness, uses the toes on each foot to pull his shoes off, stands up so fast he is lucky not to faint, hooks his thumbs on his belt and falls back on the couch as his pants and boxers go down at the same time, and then lends her a hand, sliding off her silky pants, leaving her in some flimsy red panties. He picks her up and fastens her on his lap and as fantastic as she looks in her pants, she looks way, way better without them and she fucks even better than she looks.
CHAPTER EIGHT
He came to on the couch in Amy’s place and she is nowhere to be found. He finds a note on the table.
I have study group. I had a great time and I would love to see you again. And again, and again………
He looks at Nana’s clock and sees it’s almost seven. He crosses the hall and slams his knuckles against his brother’s door several times before it opened.
“Where the hell were you?” Hugh says. “You said three o’clock you’d be here.”
“I was here. There was no key under the mat.”
“What?” Hugh bends and pulls up a corner of the mat to reveal a key. “What do you call that?”
“You just put that there,” Grayson says
“In any event, I was here at four, just as they were pulling in. Luckily, I left work early.”
“Let me in, if you’re going to, but spare me your tale of woe.”
Hugh backs away. Grayson nods, and lurches into the apartment.
Inside the one-bedroom apartment Hugh has a minimum of furniture; the new sofa, a small kitchen table, a clock radio on the counter and a table top black and white TV. All in all, the place has the ambiance of a budget motel room.
He made it to the c
ouch, “Oh, it’s a beauty,” and fell back on it, landing on it like a man defenestrated.
Hugh says, “I told Charlie I’d pick him up after work. I gotta go.”
“You’re going all the way in to Oliver’s?”
“No,” he says. “At the Red Line. Back in 10 minutes.”
Charlie is the day bartender at a bar across the street from Fenway Park. He looks way younger than twenty-two, and anytime a cop comes into the bar and gets a look at Charlie, the cop asks for his ID. His youthful appearance is mainly due to him being the size of an eleven-year old boy.
“There you are,” says Donny. His jumbo-sized cousin comes out of the bathroom cinching up his belt.
“Go back and wash your hands,” Grayson shouts.
“I did already! Mind your own business.”
“You washed your hands? What, with your pants around your ankles, you washed your hands? I doubt it.”
“Hugh go to get Charlie? Hey! Where have you been?” Donny says. “I came over to help you move the couches out and in.”
“They just had to be signed for. No moving out and in.”
“I went looking for you when you weren’t here. Where were you?”
“Nowhere,” Grayson says.
“I looked everywhere,” Donny says.
“Yeah, well, I wasn’t there. I was nowhere and I’m now here.”
“Good. P.S., you look like shit.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere,” Grayson says.
“So, what’s the matter with you?” Donny says.
“Nothing,” Grayson says. “I told you I’m fine.”
“Oh, I get it. You’re still on the wagon. Well, praise the Lord and pass the macaroni salad.” Donny squints at him. “No, you’re not. You have been drinking! What a liar.”
“While you’re arguing with yourself, I’m gonna use the bathroom. Is it safe?”
Donny ignores him.
Grayson washes his face in cold water and rinses his mouth. He’s not hungover, not too bad anyway, so he must not have drunk to excess. Progress.
When Grayson comes back to the living room, Donny starts in again. “I went to your place when I was looking for you. You should keep that door locked. You’re a sap. Someone could come in and steal all your valuables.”
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