Full Frontal Fiction (4 page)

It's like looking up from under water, seeing the lights flicker above the surface, reaching up with your hand, and not grasping. I have lived my life this way: wanting to desire, holding back. I am weary of dodging experience. It's like as a wind too brisk to be borne; I close myself and turn away. Perhaps for some passion is a thing both viewable and viewed; for my part, I would rather not dream than dream and be denied. When Alice touches me I flutter. A window opens and, in a blink, closes. She feels me retreat. And like a huntress she pursues. She pursues, not to find me, simply not to be eluded. And ever the acceleration, as if the trigger of my great abandon were simply around the corner, dependent on some key code of positions or perversions. She pulls off of me, turns me over, sticks something in, pours something over, binds or bites or burns me until my wellconfected moans convince her she's hit it, that she's touched that part of me she thinks my fear would have me hide. She thinks she can work me like she works every other man, but I see their faces, bent over her, frozen in vulgar masks of pleasure and I feel very far away. Over and over I see it; I see her with all the others, the ones who don't understand her, never cared for her, would take and take and take from her and never bother to find out who they were taking from. Maybe I'm wrong; I've never fucked a man. But then I've also never met one who wasn't selfish. They don't realize that Alice is like a butterfly: if you touch her, you'll rub the dust off her wings and she'll never fly again.

He doesn't even seem to care. I stroll in at any hour strung out of my fucking head and take his coffee and wait for the burning words, the hard hand that never comes. He just looks at me with that pathetic, understanding, impassive face, as if to say, “Don't worry, honey, it's okay, I know you've had a long night,” and I can barely fucking stand it. I want to scream out, to smack him in the face, to wipe off that smirk, to humiliate him, to knock him off his angel's peg and make him feel what it's like to feel ashamed. He thinks he's doing me a favor by always being there and “taking things in stride” and doesn't even see that he only sits at home 'cause he's too scared and lost to go out and all his so-called devotion to me is just his need to have someone else call the shots and treat him like a dog and give him the chance to show how noble he is 'cause he keeps coming back for more. Oh, my big hero, how I need you. I need you I need you I need you. And I keep repeating it over and over under my breath as I kneel down and unzip his pants. And he comes, thinking that he loves me.

I wonder whether love is anything other than giving. To lose yourself in commitment, to bend beyond your needs for the other, to be perfect and beautiful and true. Everything else is shit: shit to fuel our ego, our vanity, our greed. With Alice I have learned that events of beauty are hand-rungs in the succession of time; we climb toward the bright window and hope to find stillness.

Bed of Leaves

BY DANI SHAPIRO

LATER, SHE WILL REMEMBER THE LEAVES. The way they scratch and crumble against her back. The way her panties are smudged with dirt and she will have to ball them up and stuff them into her knapsack where her mother won't find them. Years later, as a woman, there will be a moment at the end of each summer when the scent of fresh-mowed grass will fill her lungs through an open car window, and she will close her eyes and her tongue will go soft, her inner thighs moist like the pale insides of a half-baked cake.

Eddie Fish is unbuttoning her shirt. There have been boys before this moment, boys who have stuck their fingers between her blouse and jeans, tugging the fabric loose, pushing their hands up around her bra and cupping her breasts. There have been boys—two, to be exact—who have unzipped her pants in the school basement, pushing their hardness against her cotton panties, eyes squeezed shut. But Eddie Fish is not a boy. Eddie is a man—twenty-eight years old— and Jennie knows these woods are about to become a part of her history. She is writing the story of her life, the story of her body on these damp suburban grounds with the man she has chosen precisely because he is a man. The blond hairs on his wrists glisten as he reaches around her and unhooks her bra. She is impressed by his skill at bra-unhooking, the ease with which he pulls the straps off her arms and hangs it on a nearby branch, a white cotton 32B flag of surrender. She is impressed by his warm dry palms which brush against her nipples, and by his eyes, dark blue in the noon of this clear Indian Summer day, staring straight at her. “Lisa Wallach,” he says, murmuring the name of his last girlfriend as he stares at Jennie's breasts.

She looks at him, flushed.

“Sorry,” he laughs, “I can't explain it. Your hair, your tits—you look just like her now...”

She doesn't know enough to be horrified. To slap Eddie Fish across his pale stubbled cheek, grab her bra off the branch and streak through the woods, away from him. Instead, she is flattered by the comparison to Lisa Wallach, who is a woman, after all—at least twenty-six—and who is very beautiful in that frosted-blond urban way. Lisa is a lawyer. She has an apartment in the city, and wears leather boots with stacked heels, long velvet skirts almost brushing the floor.

“What am I doing here with you?” he murmurs as he undoes the top button of her tennis shorts, bends down and unlaces each sneaker, pulls off her Fred Perry socks with their small green wreaths. He unzips her shorts and shimmies them down around her ankles, along with her panties. Parts of her have never felt the breeze before. Her ass, her crotch, each nipple seems to braid together into a rope twisting deep into her stomach, twining around itself, a noose which will remain forever inside her.

“Jailbait,” he says, kissing her belly-button.

Years from now, Eddie Fish will be a gynecologist in Scarsdale. He will drive a Volvo, own an espresso maker, be the father of two daughters of his own—two daughters he would kill if he ever found them in the woods with a man resembling his younger self. But today, as he lights a joint and places it in Jennie's mouth, he is not focused on his future, the bright golden-boy future which unfurls before him like an heirloom rug. He has no doubts, no fears. His medical school degree is at the framer's, his internship in the city will begin in just a few weeks, and Lisa Wallach is finally a thing of the past. And here is Jennie, the beautiful neighborhood kid with the crush on him, Jennie, twelve years younger than he—sixteen, for chrissake—three years ago he had attended her Bat Mitzvah! His eyes travel over her shoulders, down her breasts, lower to the blond depths of her. A virgin? He doubted it. She had written him letters all through medical school, letters so steamy he and Lisa had read them to each other late at night. He stubs out the joint on a tree trunk, next to a carved heart with no names, no initials inside it.

Gently, he lays her down on a bed of leaves, her head resting against the root of a tree. She crosses her legs, her arms, trying to cover herself. She has no idea how sexy she is. He quickly pulls his polo shirt over his head, undoes his own shorts and steps out of them. Then, in his sneakers and tight white briefs, he lowers himself on top of her, careful to prop himself on his elbows.

Later, after it is all over, a friend will ask him why, after all, he did it.

“She was so beautiful,” Eddie will say. “So fucking beautiful.”

Eddie's head is between her legs. His mouth is moist, chin dripping, and he looks up at her as he twirls his tongue around and around. With his fingers, he spreads her apart. “Are you using anything?” he asks.

“Yes,” she says. She wants him to think she's a woman of the world. A woman whose motto, like a Boy Scout's, is “Be prepared.” Her heart pounds as he slides a finger into her. Can he tell that she's lying?

He kisses her on the lips and she tastes herself. She is anticipating something awful, vomitous, some reason why her mother lines up bottles of sweet-smelling potions on the bathroom sill. She is surprised. The taste is not unpleasant: oceanic, vaguely like seaweed. Something dredged from the depths.

She wonders what he tastes like, if she will ever know.

Eddie wriggles out of his underwear and moves up her body so that his thing, this thing that she has been waiting for, is swinging above her mouth like a heavy, hypnotic pendulum. The last one she saw was Steven McCarthy's, back in third grade, when she accidentally-on-purpose opened the bathroom door while he was standing over the toilet.

Tentatively, she opens her mouth, darts out her tongue, runs her lips over the shaft. She is expecting something rough, something that feels like stubble. She is surprised by his smoothness, and she dips her head down and covers him. He moans a high-pitched sound she has never heard before, blending into the chirps and rustles all around them. Suddenly, Eddie pushes himself farther into her mouth with a small grunt and she tastes something faintly metallic at the back of her throat.

“Whew,” he says, pulling away from her. “You sweet thing. Where'd you learn that?”

She feels heat rise from her breasts to her cheeks. Without even looking, she knows that a blotchy, red rash has spread across her chest and neck, a map to her inner world. She always turns blotchy when she feels anything complicated. She fights back the urge to gag at the drop of thick slippery fluid trickling down her throat.

“I almost came,” he said with a grin. “Naughty girl.”

He slides down her body, his stomach pressed against her own, and thrusts into her. Jennie braces herself and grits her teeth, waiting for the pain. Will there be blood between her legs? Will he find out she's a virgin and recoil? Jennie knows this: Eddie Fish does not want her to be a virgin. For the rest of her life, boyfriends and husbands will ask about her first time, and the name Eddie Fish—that unfortunate moniker—will forever be whispered in a progression of beds.

Who was your first?

Eddie Fish.

And how was it, my darling?

It was—it was what it was.

He has pushed all the way inside her and she feels nothing. No pain, no magic. Her insides have widened to accommodate him as if a door has always been open, as if a room inside her has been drafty, just waiting to be entered.

Her breath seems loud to her ears, and her heart pounds erratically as Eddie moves to the rhythm of music only he can hear. She tries to time her heart, her breath, to his. Ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum. A tribal forest beat. The hairs on his thighs tickle her and she fights an urge to break into hysterical giggles. Her stomach is hot beneath him, an interior soup. She twists her head to the left and sees Eddie's hand flat against the dirt, his wrist encircled by a thin strand of leather that she remembers Lisa Wallach brought him from Brazil. The leather strand had magical powers, Lisa told him, and he would have very bad luck if he unknotted it himself. Jennie wonders if Eddie Fish will wear that strand of leather until it disintegrates.

Eddie speeds up. A vein in his throat pops out and he is looking down, down to the place where their bodies are joined. With a gasp and a grunt, he collapses on top of her. Jennie can feel his heart through her chest. Eddie Fish's heart! She will remember this moment, she promises herself: the faded blue summer sky, the worm inching along the edge of a pale yellow leaf, the soft smell of dirt. She will color it with a patina of great beauty. She thinks about Eddie's question—Are you using anything?—and her fingers grow icy. She wonders if it can happen the first time, if the grassy mess oozing between their legs can grow into something more complicated—a punishment, a life sentence. She closes her eyes and prays: just this once, never again, please not now.

“What?” asks Eddie, looking down at her.

“Sorry?”

“Your lips were moving.”

“Oh, it's nothing.”

“You're not getting weird on me, Jen, are you?”

She doesn't answer. Getting weird. Eddie's words echo and bounce through her skull. She twists her neck once again, her cheek resting on the cool earth, and stares at the empty heart carved into the base of the tree. She imagines her own initials there, and then, like a stack of cards flipping through the wind, a hallucination, she sees the initials of every man who will ever become her lover. There are so many—perhaps dozens! More than she can possibly imagine. She is filled with the knowledge of what she does not know.

Eddie kisses her throat, his lips dry and papery, then jumps up and rummages for his briefs beneath a pile of fallen leaves. He looks down at Jennie and she squints at him, blinded by the sunlight behind his shoulder. From where she lies, he seems like a giant.

“I—I didn't use anything, Eddie,” she falters.

He stumbles on one leg, awkward as he pulls on his underpants.

“What did you say?” he asks, stopping.

“I'm sorry—I didn't use anything,” she says, this time with greater conviction.

“Jesus, Jennie!” He punches the air. “How could you—”

“I didn't know.”

“But I thought you were—”

Tears stream down her face. The light, the woods are refracted, kaleidoscopic.

Eddie Fish's face becomes a blur.

“You bitch!” she hears, as if from a great distance. He is walking away from her, heels crunching against the leaves. “If anything happens, it's not my problem, do you hear me?”

Slowly, she gathers her things. She pulls her bra from the branch, stuffs her panties into her knapsack, buttons her blouse and yanks on her shorts. She sits back down against the tree and searches the ground for a sharp twig. When she finds it, she begins scratching her initials into the empty heart, digging deep into the bark. She works carefully, with the precision of an artist. She fills the whole perimeter, so there will be no room for anyone else.

For God's Sake, Forgive Your Mother

BY DARCEY STEINKE

IN THE TAXI, on the way in from the airport, objects moving at her through the windshield had the ability to harm. The green shamrocks painted on the diner window, the Angelina billboard. She could handle artifice, third-rate holidays, giant stylized breasts. It was the everyday objects that hurt, the pay phones, the mailboxes, the 7-Eleven in the strip mall. Fuck them. Fuck the purple bougainvillea twining around the metal fence. She would put each blossom inside her mouth and chew. Fuck flowers. Fuck the moon, the stars. She hated the blue awning on a place called Communication Station. She hated anything that reminded her of that lovely internal configuration created by sex.

In the hotel room, absolutely everything a dull pink, she got out the tiny bottles of bourbon from the mini bar. Closing the curtains partway, she lay out over the bed. Planes, no bigger than floaters in the corners of her eye, moved across the column of sky between the drapes. She thought of the people on the planes reduced to dust motes, the middle-aged lady in the woolen suit. The new mother, her baby's head tucked inside her shirt; the two of them smelling like sugary milk left over after cereal. Without an armature, her desire moved around the woods flinging a nightgown onto bushes, saplings, brambles. Spread over the arching branches of a thicket, the white material looked best. She thought of the last letter she sent him, each word like a day when it rained and she made soup and put on an extra sweater to warm herself.

Then she thought about the last time. How his room was slightly arrogant, with the fireplace, the leather reading chair, the strange print of a dock scene done in neon colors. It was a room from her parallel childhood, one her brother would have inhabited if she'd been a banker's daughter instead of a minister's. She walked over to look at the picture and he had come up behind her exactly as he had in the dream the night before. Turning her around, he kissed her first on the lips and then below the ear. She moved her hand up under his shirt, her palm resting on the slope of his back. Then came the whole economic system of skin against skin. Lips first, the nerves sending subtle charges down her chest out into her limbs. A sort of possession began, desire manifesting first in the touch of his fingertips and then in the proximity of big swatches of warm skin. Her favorite landmark: the moment before all hell broke loose, when he took off his glasses and set them carefully on the nightstand beside the bed.

All this was still pleasant to recount. The figurative confabulations were what pained her, the forms they had created in space. His body hanging over her, cock in her mouth, her finger up inside him. Her tongue ringing around that clenched circle of skin. Somewhere inside of him, there was an ancient Chinese city governed by a boy who was constantly fighting back death. Paper lanterns hung in the courtyard, brightest at twilight. There was a city inside of her too, but more like Baltimore than Peking. Vacant storefronts and a fat lady living over a convenience shop. She was anxious to fuck. And the fucking was very nice, especially the part when they were standing against the wall, she up on her tiptoes, him behind her, and then that moment he leaned over and kissed along the raised vertebrae of her spine.

The hole opened up. For a while she sated it with Caesar salads but then it demanded books of poetry in blank verse. She understood after a time that it would only be satisfied with sex soup. One wet pussy. One hard cock. And a bottle of black nail polish. But that recipe just made the longing worse, elemental to her now as the fallen light at the window, as the feel of her own palm against the bones in her hip.

Had she mentioned that the bed was king size? That its scale in proportion to her body was making her sick? And you should always think twice before slipping out of your skin. You hope it will be this great event, that congress will fill with democrats, that glamour will be unmasked as the fraud she really is. But in the end it's so hard working with people, you want them all to like you and be happy but you get caught up in their frailties, and sometimes you can't help becoming a conspirator in their gloomy conception of original sin.