Little Cat (18 page)

Then Gio pulled out and spurted on the rise of my gut. One short sound fell out of his throat.

He stared at his stuff on my belly, trembling on me there. Then he wiped me off with the sheet. He left the bed and went into the bathroom. I heard the shower run.

I flapped around on the bed still feeling his cock in my cunt. I was like a fish needing water, more salt in her gills!

And I still hadn’t recovered when he came out of the bathroom. He was fully dressed. I was flat on my back. Gio leaned down to kiss me. ‘I’ll be back,’ he said.

I didn’t make him pay.

I swear it was like he’d just given me something. Something I wanted that I couldn’t say out loud. When he was in me, I didn’t want to come. I just wanted him to stick me, over and over, because with each of his thrusts, my pussy got tighter. My pussy got hotter and stronger so it could hold him in there. Each second we were fucking, a voice in my head breathed:
I want you, I see you, I know who you are.

I felt that the very first time that we fucked. Gio was someone I already loved. So what is love but already loving?

God, why do I love him more than he loves me? Why do I love his body so much more than he loves mine? It’s like he is the woman and I am the man. He’s the indifferent one and I’m the one ravishing!

I know the way the flesh feels on his stomach, animal thick. I love the way his back rounds at the top. I know the width of his neck and the mark on his forehead, the mark that I think is from praying on the ground. Why do I imagine Gio religious? Is it because I’m the religious one now?

I think of him praying with me, us praying together, our foreheads down on some scuffed tiled ground surrounded by smoke, weird orthodox smoke.

Hey, Ezrah, would God accept me with my fist in the air? My moral fist in the air and all this sperm in my brain? Would God accept us in the temple together?

I don’t know who God is. I felt Ezrah’s hate, I knew Gio moved money and women around.

It had been just over two weeks since Adi got into that white car and never came back. I thought about calling the cops and filing a report, but almost all of the girls at the club had overstayed their visas and I knew I couldn’t do that to them.

I also had no idea what Gio had to do with Adi being gone.

Mostly I knew that I wanted Gio all to myself. I wanted Gio Mogilevich mine. Because something came out from his heart that was dark and alive, some kind of ray that pierced through my weak protection.

And Gio came back for me seven days later. Fucking bastard, it took seven long days! I made a measly $200 because I was only thinking about him. To get myself to sleep I imagined Gio and me in Japan, drinking like gangsters, praying like slugs.

It was noon when he came and I was just getting up. He was wearing a grey suit jacket, which was strange because it was hot out even though it was September. Gio sat beside me on the edge of the bed and started tickling my ribs with his fingertips. I had to choke back my laughs. Then he did the same thing up near my throat. That made me yell, louder than I meant to. My head was lifting off the bed and slamming back down and Gio began tickling me even harder from throat to waist, throat to waist, until the whole bed was moving and I was spinning. I squeezed my eyes and let myself go …

‘Shhh, Mira! Stop breathing so heavily.’

My eyes opened up. Stop laughing? Stop breathing? Gio’s lips were pressed together. He was staring at my neck. He thought he was looking at my face, but he wasn’t. I knew that look from other guys. The glazed eyes that meant:
I want to be with someone I don’t feel guilty about right now.

‘Hey, why’re you wearing that jacket?’ I asked loudly. ‘Where were you? Where are you coming from?’

Gio wasn’t going to tell me where he had been. He sat there vacantly, like I’d ruined the moment or something.

‘Is something wrong?’ I asked. ‘Did something just happen?’

‘No.’ Gio took off his jacket and arranged himself over my body. His thighs locked like walls at my sides. He scooped his hands under my neck and brought me up to the big lump in his crotch. The smell of sweat charged the creases in his pants. I wanted to rub my face down there, burrow.

‘You’re hungry, yes?’ Gio asked. ‘Tell me you’re hungry.’

I was mute. Hungry.

‘You want to put it in your mouth?’

Yes. Up and down, up and down like a fool!

‘Why do you like putting things in your mouth?’

I don’t know. Just give it to me!

As my mouth opened, Gio’s zipper came down. He let out his cock. I couldn’t look at his face. His cock was the only thing I could look at: the thickening root, the slit like an eye. His cock was the part that already loved me.

Put it in my mouth, gimme, gimme, gimme, please …

‘If you don’t speak, we’ll do it like this then.’

Holding the back of my head, Gio shifted toward my face. He placed his hard flesh on the groove of my tongue. I was stunned. I got hot. I dropped into his cradling. I was sucking his body in gulps down my throat. I wanted to swallow to see how we fit. A suctioning clasp. Forever. No key.

With my mouth on his cock and his cock in my mouth, I didn’t remember any other man I’d ever been with. No other man had ever been inside me. I was a bud, sprouting fresh from the mud.

Ezrah, maybe you think that’s dumb female essentialism, but it’s not.

It was daytime when I went back to the park. I walked to the top of the hill, up a set of wooden stairs. I hadn’t realized that there was a clear way up – that what looked like a forest at night was just a bunch of crooked trees. I could see the club down at the end of the street: the silver door where the men came in and the brick part at the back where all of us lived. The buildings of the city were packed together in the distance. The sky hung above them like a heavy white sheet.

Lani and Coco sat together on the grass. They were passing a bottle back and forth, waving me over.

‘Come, Mira!’ Coco shouted, almost standing.

For a second I thought she might start being nicer to me. Lani shoved her cigarette butt into the grass. The patch they were sitting in was yellowish, flat. When I got up close, I saw they’d both been crying.

Coco passed me the bottle. I sat down and took a swig.

‘What is this?’ I coughed. It was fizzy and off.

Lani started laughing. ‘It’s to clean out your mouth!’

That one mouthful made me feel sick. It prickled in my throat like an acid or something. I put my head on the ground. An old cigarette touched my cheek.

‘Adi’s not coming back,’ Coco said.

‘What are you talking about?’ I said into the grass.

There was a push in my gut then my throat, as if I were really going to vomit. ‘She’s dead,’ Coco said. Lani started to laugh, her sharp birdy laugh.

I closed my eyes, totally repulsed. Deep in my head I heard something snapping, one tiny wishbone broke in each ear.

I sat up, dizzy. Coco lit up. Lani was as blank as the clouds.

‘You guys, she’s not dead. She called me two days ago. Maybe three, I don’t remember.’

‘Oh my god, what’d she say?’ Coco passed me the joint. Lani perked up.

I sucked in harder than I’d ever sucked a joint. That toxic drink still crawled on my tongue.

‘She said she was, uh, sorry that she left, but she was trying to make a go of it somewhere else. I don’t know. I didn’t hear where. I wanted to know but I didn’t catch where she was. She said I shouldn’t tell anyone.’

‘That’s it?’

Coco took back the joint. Lani poked the dry ground.

‘Uh, she asked about Gio. She asked if I’d seen him.’

Lani and Coco stared at me. They knew he’d been to my room. My heart started beating too fast.

‘You should not have fucked him, Mira. That was fucking, fucking wrong!’

I rolled my eyes. I fucked her old lover. So what? She stole from me.

Coco helped Lani up from the grass, clutching her fat arm. They left linked together, whispering. I realized right then as I watched them go back to the club that Adi was more like them than like me. I saw right then the biggest difference between us. Adi wasn’t ever going to go home and neither would Lani or Coco. They wouldn’t leave here like I would one day. This was their life, their stuck, money-making lives. I knew that some girls could do things like fucking for cash and they could always go home, they could always feel new, but some girls do things and never escape – they fuck up their bodies, take drugs, sit in shit.

This was the line between me and Adi: the revolting line of inequality.

I put my forehead on the dead grass. Shame explored my shit-flung face.

It was early in the morning the next time Gio came.

‘Morning has broken,’ he said, at the bottom of my bed. He had a strange look. His eyelids were flickering.

God, why did I want to be with him so badly? Why did I wish that he would just climb into bed and get naked with me?

It sounded like Gio was humming for a second, like he was some old man letting it come out through his nose.

‘I’ll see you then, Mira … ’

‘You’re leaving?’

Gio walked to the door. ‘I will if you’re not downstairs in five.’

I didn’t have time to dress in anything good. I didn’t put on makeup and I didn’t brush my hair.

When I ran out back, Gio was standing beside a smallish white car. He opened the passenger door for me. I didn’t want to link up his car with that car.

The seats were covered with burlap and it smelled like gas inside. It had a bit of trouble starting, but once we got out onto the highway, everything seemed all right. We were driving east, away from the city. Both of us were quiet for a long time. I kept trying to think of something to say, but nothing seemed right. Maybe I felt Adi’s body sitting in my seat.

‘Where is your family, Mira?’

A low scraping noise suddenly started running with the engine. I looked behind us. Gio accelerated.

‘What’s that?’ I asked.

‘Don’t you speak with them?’

‘Who?’

‘Your mother, your father.’

‘Not really,’ I said.

I wasn’t going to talk about my family with him. I didn’t even want to think about my family with him. My family meant nothing inside this car. Even my Ezrah shit disappeared.

‘What does your father do?’

‘Why are you asking me?’

‘Why don’t you answer?’

‘He’s a doctor.’

‘A rich doctor?’

‘No. He has enough.’

Why the fuck was he asking me this? I was betting his next question would be:
Why are you doing this?

Well, sir, Mr. Mogilevich, since you asked, I am prostituting myself so that I can go to Japan, so that I can travel and see the whole world, in fact, so that I can make money quickly and not be in debt to my family, the government or amorphous men. I don’t care about having some predictable good job at twenty-two so my mummy and daddy will pat me on the head.

‘What about your brothers?’

‘Brothers?’

‘Yes, what about the brothers.’

‘I don’t have any brothers.’

‘No brothers? Poor father!’

I snorted.

‘And Mother?’

‘My mother?’

‘Who is your mother?’

‘She’s a teacher. What do you mean?’

‘She teaches
what
?’

‘Religion.’

‘Religion?’ Gio started coughing. ‘What kind of religion?’

‘I don’t know, my god. All kinds.’

‘Your mother teaches “all kinds” of religion? You think there’s “all kinds”?’

I was glad he was hacking. What did he really want to know about my family? How much money we made? How I was sheltered from life? Did he want to know how my mother taught kids the Hebrew alphabet? Gio knew I was Jewish! Adi told me that he knew.

‘We have a long way to go,’ Gio said abruptly. ‘Why don’t you sleep now.’

Sleep? For fuck’s sake. I was too anxious to sleep.

‘Adi told me you were from Russia too.’

‘I
said
go to sleep!’

Who did he think he was talking to me like that? Like I was dumb? In a way, I felt more Jewish than I’d ever felt in my life. I felt fucking persecuted!

I stared out the window. The clouds were all withered. I felt myself getting tired, even though I didn’t want to. My grandfather who’d died when I was ten used to sing me this song in Yiddish when I sat on his lap. I was trying to remember it, something about names and rhyming names, when my chin dropped onto my chest. Then my eyes popped open. I mean, I felt like I was dreaming but my eyes were wide open. I saw me and Gio still driving on the highway, but in the distance I saw all these people running toward the car. There were fifty of them or hundreds of them, coming closer, throwing rocks at us, plates at us, garbage, rats … The highway got narrower and the people smashed their faces on the glass.