A Note Written by Murmur Lee Harp and Passed to Charlee Mudd in Their Eighth- Grade Homeroom, Written in Valentine Red Ink, Hearts Splattered Across the Page
Bobby Cramer is to DIE FOR!!!!!! He is soooooo CUTE. OH GOD!!!! Did you see him smile at me when we walked in? We have to make sure we get right behind him in the lunch line. Oh God, I LOVE HIM SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!!
A Love Note from Murmur Lee Harp to Lawrence Fairhope Davis, Written Eight Months After Her Divorce and During Her Brief Employment at the Catholic Day School Located in St. Augustine’s Old City ( It Should Be Noted That the Affair Ended Shortly After Murmur Sent This Epistolary Rumination on the Nature of Love)
Dearest Larry,
Consider this a message from on high, a message not necessarily aimed at you—perhaps any male from the Midwest will do—but since you’re the only person from the Midwest I’ve ever been intimate with, well, you know:
TEN THINGS MIDWESTERN BOYS DON’T KNOW
1. Girls are sensitive.
2. Girls innately demand that a handful of very specific situations be honored with a plethora of ancient, indelible protocol—protocol (some might call it “ritual”) that has been handed down from one womb to the next since the rise of Eve. Example: If a boy and a girl have recently spent three hours exploring, licking, sucking, and penetrating each other’s bodies, then the very next time they lay eyes on one another? Well, this encounter is very important to the girl.
3. After lovemaking—especially lovemaking for the first time—the girl is apt to feel mighty happy but also a tad vulnerable. It is proper—essential, even—for the boy to help her feel pretty about herself the next time they see each other. This is especially true if something has prevented them from seeing each other in the days immediately following the lovemaking (say a horrible illness—the flu, the plague, mono—has struck them down).
4. If ardent, erotic notes are sent to and fro in campus mail (dangerous) in the wake of the lovemaking, rather than a missive in which one of them explains that the encounter was one big horrible mistake and mustn’t ever be thought of again—well then, once in each other’s presence, a sweet acknowledgment of their tenderness is quite necessary.
5. Girls who have recently been ravished by someone with whom they are smitten require this: When the girl and boy see each other for the first time after lovemaking (fifteen seconds of running in and out of a house as if all asses are on fire, with barely a nod of a hello, does not count), the girl needs the boy to send some ardent signal, even a subtle one, that she—and their shared passion—is valued.
6. After seeing a boy for the first time after lovemaking, the girl does not want to be made to feel as if she is simply one more haggard colleague passing in the hall. The girl does not want to feel that in order to have a conversation with the boy (Hello. How have you been? What’s new in your life?), she must do something stupid or dramatic, like run her car into a tree. If the girl feels this way, it will inevitably cause her to spend yet even more money with her therapist.
7. When a boy sees a girl for the first time after they have made love, the following actions are considered good form. The boy should tell her hello and that it’s really nice to see her. The boy should give her a hug—even if it’s only an aw-shucks midwestern hug. The boy should tell her she’s pretty, even if she looks like she is in the throes of the flu. When the boy and girl first come back into their shared orbit, the boy should be sure to take five minutes out to sit down with her and have a pleasant chat.
8. All these things are important because they convey to the girl that what they shared in her bedroom while they were all slick and erect and wanting was something the boy does not regret.
9. The boy should not make the girl do all the work.
10. If a boy makes any or all of the aforementioned blunders, he usually has a chance to undo the damage. But it must be done quickly. In fact, it should be rectified no later than the following day. If blunders are allowed to stand longer than that, the girl will decide that the boy deeply regrets having ravished her, that the coupling meant nothing to him, and that she must chalk it up to simply one more mistake. She will also decide that in the future, the boy is to be given nary a nod.
A Letter Murmur Lee Harp Wrote to Her Husband, Erik Nathanson, Two Days After He Walked Out on Her
Erik:
These things I know:
Your daughter, whom you abandoned in the weeks and days leading up to her death, will never welcome you into the gates of heaven. Indeed, she will make sure you never get that far.
Your betrayal of me—with someone half your age, how laughable is that!—is a function of your illness. You are mentally ill. I don’t know the diagnosis (sociopath? psychopath? evil motherfucker?), but the symptom is as follows: You attempt to destroy everyone who loves you.
And finally, I leave you with this: Sex with you was always boring.
Sincerely,
Murmur Lee HARP
(I also changed Blossom’s surname)
An E- Mail from Murmur Lee Harp to Billy Speare
My Dearest William,
I was shocked when you entered me and filled me and stayed deep inside me . . . shocked because of the absolute wonder of it.
Wanting,
ml
Billy Speare
Thanks to the review in the Times, The Sex Life of Me took off like a bottle rocket in Baghdad. Six months earlier, Knopf had put me on the road. Thirty-six cities in thirty days. One hotel room after another—they all looked alike. Cities looked alike; bookstores looked alike. And so did the handful of lonely little old ladies who came to hear me read. Three to five blue-haired biddies at each stop. Washed-out, watery eyes, thin-toothed, thick-ankled. And every one of them in a book club. Hell, I started to think that Knopf had hired them. So I drank my way across America, all on my publisher’s tab. Maker’s Mark, Wild Turkey, Jack Daniel’s. As long as it was whiskey, I was all right. The liquor helped me not care that the asshole interviewers hadn’t read my book, or that the old biddies said they would wait to buy it until it came out in paperback, or that the airlines lost my luggage not once but three times.
Oh yeah, that was all behind me. Thanks to one well-placed brilliant review, I was almost a hairbreadth away from making the List. Best-seller, here I come: That’s what God began to whisper in my ear morning, noon, and night.
And it got even better, because my good fortune with Sex paled (well, almost) in contrast to the extraordinary time I was having with Murmur. After that day on the river, it wasn’t long before we landed in the sack. She was a sexual leviathan, hungry all the time, pushing for more.
Oh yeah, buddy, the first time: candlelight dinner and the works at her place. I can’t recall what we ate. It didn’t matter. I was focused on those firecracker blue eyes, which sparkled with bad-girl playfulness. I watched her shovel something in her mouth and I thought, Oh what she could do with a long, hard prick.
We rumbled over to her bed—a big, high altar of a bed, covered in peacock blue silk—as soon as the dishes were stacked. We kissed gently and we kissed hard and my fingers explored way up there and her hand worked my member. We went on and on like that, but my fucking dick would not get hard. It was the damnedest thing. The thought crossed my mind that maybe she’d put something in my food. I did everything I knew. I sucked her. I boldly watched her. I fantasized that I had three chicks doing me. Nothing.
I was embarrassed, but mainly I was angry. I mean real anger. Like I wanted to shoot out the lights. So I took it out on Murmur. I made her come so many times, she finally begged me to stop.
Next morning, though, it was a different story. I reprised my manhood with a dick as hard as an old oak log. She took it all, with her legs up over my shoulders. Yep, it’s what I thought when I first laid eyes on her: She was all twat.
So after a good long, hard fuck, there we were, wrapped in each other’s arms and a postcoital glow, our first romp in the sack, and she etched my cheekbone with a finger th
at smelled like sex and asked, “So, what do you write?”
I pinched her nipple. “I write,” I said, kissing the tip of her puck nose, then her freckled shoulder, “great”—kiss—“fucking”—kiss—“novels”—kiss. Throat, neck, lips.
She leaned up on one elbow and rested her pointed little chin in the cup of her palm. “I know you write. But what I want to know is, do you write anything I would have heard of?”
Well, that certainly put it on the table. “My most famous book is a collection of short stories called Good People from a Bad Town. But the Sex Life of Me is well on its way to outshining Good People.”
“Wow, that’s amazing. You don’t strike me as a literary type.” She fumbled with my chest hair. “The way you were talking last night, I figured you wrote travelogues or something.”
“Oh yeah?” I rubbed my hand across her breasts. She was staring to piss me off. “What would you know about literary types?”
She flicked her tongue across my lips. “What I know just might surprise you.”
I pulled her close. “Listen, if we’re going to keep up this sort of activity, you need to read my books.”
She pressed her pelvis into my groin, arched her back, fiddled with something beyond her tousled hair. “Nope. Not yet.”
“What? Why not?” What the hell was she talking about? I rolled her off of me and slapped her ass.
“Because I want to know you, the real you, before I start reading all that fiction you evidently churn out. I’m interested in what’s up here, and here, and here,” she said, touching my head, my heart, my dick. “And then we’ll get to the rest.”
I wasn’t sure what to think of that, or even how to respond, so I kissed her deep and long. But we didn’t fuck, because I was tapped out. The limp dick from the night before would certainly not see the light of day. Again, she arched her back and presented to me the slender curve of her neck. I kissed it. She tasted salty. Then, exhibiting an innate feline grace, she sat up, stretched her arms over her head, yawned with a manly timbre, and slid onto the floor. That’s how high the damn bed was—when she sat on the edge, her feet didn’t touch the ground.
“How about some coffee, bacon, eggs?” She stood naked before me, her hips just a slight swell and her breasts small, firm, with dark owl-eyed nipples. I had a sudden urge to cry. This woman was so honest, without pretension. I lay there looking at her, thinking, Why the hell hasn’t a woman this fine been snatched up by somebody by now?
“Why don’t you have a man?” I asked. “You’re gorgeous and funny and smart. Seems like men would be knocking down your door.”
“Ha!” Her face turned sly. She walked away but said over her shoulder, “Who’s to say they aren’t?”
Bitch. I laughed, got out of bed, and followed her to the kitchen. I wrapped my arms around her, cupped her breasts, pressed myself against her back and behind. I whispered into her ear, “You rock my world.”
She reached back and squeezed my dick. “You’re pretty amazing yourself,” she said. She spun around and touched my face. “Why don’t you go take a shower while I fix breakfast?”
“I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we take a shower and then we’ll both fix breakfast?”
“Is that right?” She had two dimples, both of them at the corner of her left lip.
I leaned over and gently kissed her cheek. Then I took her by the hand and led her into the bathroom. I shampooed her hair and slathered lavender suds between her breasts, down her thighs. I rubbed her shoulder blades and the small of her back. I knelt down and washed the spaces between her toes. I massaged the valleys and rises of her bone-thin ankles and lightly traced a grim mouth of a scar on the back of her right calf. Hers was not a perfect body—I mean, she wasn’t fourteen anymore—but that’s not what I was looking for. Murmur’s body reflected her soul—a little wild, a tad bit off center, honest, basic, full of yearning.
We toweled off, slipped into tees and jeans. I can’t remember what we talked about. That’s because our words were unimportant. Imagine that—me saying words were unimportant. But that morning, in that kitchen, what mattered is that we spoke about things of little consequence. Ours was an easy conversation, one that flowed illogically, simply, like a stream sliding over river rock. We ate eggs and drank strong black coffee. We laughed. We found ourselves humming along to an old Beatles’ CD she’d popped into her stereo. She dabbed toast crumbs off the corner of my mouth and I put a slice of bacon between my teeth and leaned into her and she bit clear through it. We told each other stories. I don’t remember those, either. All I can recall is that for the first time since my divorce ten years past, I felt as if I might actually become, under Murmur’s influence, a decent man.
Murmur Lee Harp Sees Her First Date with Billy Speare
Here I am, still dead as rain, floating along, scattered one moment, gathered the next. Sometimes I’m hard and tight and fast-moving. But there are other moments when I feel as if the universe has tossed me like a handful of salt just to see how far I’ll fly.
I’m a little scared. I mean, can this be all there is for all of eternity? Is this what spirits do? Forever? Blow about like pollen in a dimension composed solely of wind, watching from time to time film clips of their lives? Where’s God? Where’s a little band of angels trumpeting golden horns and shaking silver-dollar tambourines? Where are the legions of those who have come before me? Where is Blossom? Where the hell am I?
The wind folds me up, kneads me like dough, and there, at my new center, is Billy Speare. He is knocking on my opened door, a bouquet of store-bought daisies in his fist.
I say, “Welcome!” and float over to the door—radiant in my yellow strapless sundress, which shows off my trim figure. He kisses me on the cheek. “Come in, come in. What can I get you? What beautiful flowers!”
I fuss in the refrigerator, searching out the coldest beer. I fuss at the sink, trying to arrange the daisies quickly but with flair as I stick them in a blue vase. I fuss with my hair. I fuss with the marinara sauce on the stove. I fuss with the silver beads around my neck. I fuss with everything my hands touch. I am a mess.
He walks through my one-room house (that’s a lie—my bathroom is its own space) and says, “Wow! What a view, what a great place!”
“Why, thank you. I built it myself, you know. After my daughter died and my husband left me. I had to do something. Here. Here’s a picture of my little girl.” I grab a framed image of Blossom off the bookcase. She is five and is dressed like a mouse for Halloween.
“She . . . she died,” I say stupidly, trying to figure out if I’m repeating myself.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “That must be really hard.”
“It is.” I put the photo back and curse myself because old grief tears suddenly threaten to spill down my face. I manage in a steady voice to ask, “Do you have children?”
“Yeah, I do. But I don’t want to talk about it.”
I look at him real hard, trying to divine the problem. I get nothing.
Next thing I know, I see us in bed. He pleasures me. He seems unconcerned with his own needs. I am so impressed. I think, Here is a man who might actually love women. Right then, naked, in my bed, doing it with a man who—if you really, really think about it—is a stranger, I decide to give him all of me in every way. It’s time, I say to myself; it’s time. You’ve got to get over being scared to commit. This guy is loving you up. Walk out of the pain of Erik Nathanson. Walk out of the pain of Bloom’s death. Walk out of the sorrow of fucking a man just to know you still can. Walk into life.
His head is between my legs. He is loving me there. Yes, right there. I say, “Stop. Baby, please, stop. I want to talk to you.”
He licks me all the way up to my forehead and then pulls me tight. “What is it, girl? You have such a crazy name. Murmur Lee,” and he begins to laugh, and I interpret this as joy.
“Do you love your mother?” This is a serious question. I run my finger along the outer curve of his ear. I s
tare past his shoulder and into the black, star-torched night. Erik hated his mother, accused her of many crimes, including stupidity, clumsiness, and forgetfulness.
“What kind of question is that?” he asks. “Here we are, making love, and you ask me about my mother?”
I squeeze him tighter. “Yes. Tell me.”
He doesn’t respond right away—there is maybe a five-second pause—and I’m determined not to fill it with anything except for a silent expectation that he will answer. “I suppose you can say I loved my mother. That’s what we do. We love our parents no matter what. It’s obligatory.” He cups my breast. “But it’s not like we had a good relationship. She was a bitch, Miss Murmur Lee. A grade-A jagged thorn of a bitch. I was happy when she died.”
I close my eyes three times, pretending it’s the stars, not me, blinking. Grateful for the darkness, I spin around in his arms, giving him my back. For a few moments, I ponder the possibility that I am a cursed woman. How could I have met and immediately flipped for yet another man who doesn’t love his mother? I fight back tears and panic. I hold on, wrapping my arms around his. But he seems so nice, I tell myself. So very, very nice.
“Murmur Lee, you okay?” he asks.
“Oh, yes, Billy,” I say, knowing it’s a lie but trying to please, fully throwing myself into the familiar comfort of old patterns, “I’m just about the happiest woman you’ve ever seen.”
Oh no. This is bad. I spin round and round, shot full of holes. The truth stings. For all my bravado, all my independence, all my spell casting, all my book reading, all my talk about the Universe and what she wanted, I see now that when it came to men, I never knew how to behave.
The Problem with Murmur Lee Page 15