Nicotine (10 page)

“Hey. I can tell you're going through a difficult time, and I feel like I'm giving you support that you really need. I think it's the beginning of something good. Why are you putting sexual expectations on it?”

“Because I—” She hesitates and takes a deep breath. “Okay, maybe it is expectations. I have certain accustomed ways of going about certain things. Habits, maybe. And this is new to me. Because usually when I touch a guy's dick when he's in bed with me, it's not, like,
amorphous
.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Give me a minute. I have to get my head around this.” She ponders the issue for five seconds and says, “I don't believe you. I think you're impotent, and it's a medical problem. Erectile dysfunction or whatever.”

“It wasn't a problem before you groped my crotch!”

“I can stop right now,” Penny says.

“That would be respectful.”

She slides out of bed and stoops to find her clothes. “I'm so in hell,” she says. She can't feel blameless. She wanted to use him to discover a more shallow way of living. Memories of the dead were dragging her underground, and she wanted a life on the surface. The superficiality of skin on skin. So in all their hours of talking, the sum total of information she has shared with Rob about her father: nada. The man about whom she knows way too little knows nothing about her. But she would have fucked him, because she's that kind of shallow bitch—the kind who doesn't mind getting caught being that
kind of shallow bitch. Who just found out she's been begging hugs off a neuter creature who pities her. Whee. And her embarrassment is nothing compared with her anger. She is (tacitly) angry enough to yell at him until he swears never to speak to her again. It feels like a setup designed to teach her a lesson.

“Come back here,” he pleads. “I'll miss you.”

“I thought you were straight. I'm going home.”

“Please stay,” he says, patting the futon. “We don't have to sleep together to sleep together.”

Before she can find the words to say Fuck Off, there is a knock at the door.

She opens it to find Jazz standing in the lean-to, holding a cigarette and a glass of red wine. “I was just leaving,” Penny says. “Sorry I got loud.”

“I overheard your conversation, and I wanted to tell you to stop being so hard on yourself.”

“You are kidding me.”

Jazz's head wobbles tipsily, and she takes a drag off her cigarette with the side of her mouth. She says, “You shouldn't leave. You should never leave. You should stay here with this freak and
learn
. You're crushing hard on the Robster and thinking you want his dick, but it's not his dick you want. It's his
mind
. Get back in there and show the boy some respect, and you'll see—”

“Don't you think it's pretty fucking sexist, telling me to let him set the agenda?” She moves forward, toward the door.

Jazz raises the glass of wine and cigarette in her hand to eye level. She sidesteps to block Penny's escape. “Look at me,” she says through the smoke. “Do I have a dick?”

“Honestly? I
don't know
.”

Jazz flicks open her quilted dressing gown to reveal a deltaic butterfly-like arrangement of Wedgwood-blue silk and ivory lace. It looks pricey. “Check it out,” she says, resting her left hand on
Penny's shoulder as she dandles her cigarette and wine in her right. “No dick. But I want you anyway, because I'm a sexual person
.
Not asexual like a certain vagina tease who leads women on because he likes the attention.”

Confusion sets in. Penny sees a possible hell-hath-no-fury-like-a-woman-scorned angle, but Jazz does not seem to be looking for sympathy.

“You're hot,” Jazz continues. “Like a woodland creature in heat to get fucked, and so smooth and brown no normal person can stand it, and this sexless bastard over here does not care, because he wants to be your friend. But I care. I want to get all up inside you and make you come until your teeth chatter. Go ahead. Grope my crotch.”

Feminine beauty is not something Penny is used to seeing up close. Especially not beauty so reassuringly obscene. She had felt like a sailor on a life raft pelted by hail, and now Jazz is the mermaids, singing of life in caves under the sea. The obscenity is the neon sign flashing over the fairy-tale cave, telling her she's in the right place.

The standoff is brief. Her pride—as a curious person not entirely conservative—bids her extend her hand and tap the underwear. The slight touch turns the silk a darker blue. Jazz is very wet. When Penny's finger grazes her, she struggles to get her next breath.

“See?” she says. “We'll never be friends.”

Penny touches the underwear again a little harder, in the interest of science. She puts her hand on Jazz's birdlike hip bone and looks into her eyes. She feels more or less as though a trapdoor had opened and dropped her into the Matrix. She sneaks a glance at Rob. He has picked up a back issue of
Popular Mechanics
from the floor and seems to be reading.

Later he enters Jazz's room to turn off the light (for privacy, because her rooftop greenhouse has no curtains). He sits in her armchair, watching the two women by the pinkish glow of mercury vapor streetlamps on atmospheric haze. He palpates his crotch once briefly and frowns.

THE NEXT DAY AROUND LUNCHTIME,
over dry toast and tea, Sorry invites Penny to come along to the Friday potluck at Stayfree.

Penny says, “What, did you hear I'm a lesbian or something?”

“The whole neighborhood heard you're a lesbian!”

She imagines herself making loud sounds and can't be sure she didn't. “I was so fucking drunk,” she says, apologetically.

“I was just busting your balls. We didn't hear a thing. When Rob came down this morning, he said you were with Jazz, and I put two and two together. He didn't look real ecstatic.”

Penny frowns. “Well, it's not like he wanted—”

“What? Love, romance? He wants all those things. He's just not ready to pay the price.”

“Well, if he doesn't want sex, he doesn't want sex. It would be really shitty to, like, rape him by humping his leg. And I was truly pretty drunk. And Jazz was so into it.”

She frowns at the memory. The symmetry of sex with Jazz is still vivid. Breasts discovering the softness of breasts. Her clitoris grinding against Jazz's with inept abandon, pleased to find it equally indestructible. The silkiness of their faces. Their sweet little teeth.

Significant emotional asymmetry, however, had been introduced by her increasingly intense desire to involve Rob, who kept sitting there in the armchair. She remembers his staying for at least an hour, sometimes touching himself (he touched himself only once, but the movement caught her eye, and she naturally assumes it was part of a series), and that when she made eye contact, he got up and left. That's what she likes remembering best. Not the sexual ecstasies before and after. Just that Rob got up and left—that maybe, possibly, he was a little bit jealous?

“I take it you're not in love,” Sorry says.

“Not with Jazz.”

Sorry nods and lights a cigarette. “So you want to come to Stayfree?”

“And meet dykes? I don't know.”

“There's no such thing as a feminist dyke. Not anymore. Stayfree is feminist men and women such as you and I.”

“I don't know if I could eat much. But I could definitely stand to meet people. It's not like I know anybody around here.” She tentatively touches the pack of cigarettes. She shakes her head.

“Go upstairs,” Sorry suggests. “You can lie down in my room. I'll call you when it's time to get up.”

Penny accepts the offer. As she relaxes, mounting the stairs, her head begins to throb.

Instead of the bed, she picks a spot on the rug in the sun. She curls up with her head on a pink-and-gold meditation pillow. Through the open window she can hear the clank of Rob's tinkering in the garage. After the minivan revs up and drives away, she sleeps.

AROUND FIVE, HER PHONE RINGS
with the promised wake-up call. She returns to the kitchen, where Sorry assigns her to help with their potluck dish, a lentil salad, by shelling every walnut in a very large bag—fully five pounds of walnuts.

“Where'd you get so many walnuts?” Penny asks, putting down the nutcracker to shake her aching hand.

“I found them in the pantry. Probably from the trash at the co-op. It's a miracle they're not rancid. It would be a sad waste if they were. They did some study that if you eat a handful of nuts every day, it's as healthy as jogging. You can skip the exercise and eat the nuts.”

“So shouldn't we be rationing them, to eat a handful a day?”

“Do I look to you like I believe in studies?” She taps an ash into a saucer next to the sink and returns to her task of grating carrots into a bowl. “Nuts are fat pills. I want them out of the house.”

Laughing makes Penny shudder involuntarily. She works in pained silence. She doesn't have the appetite to try one of the nuts.

When Rob gets back from his outing, he comes into the kitchen.

“Hey, guys,” he says, clapping her on the shoulder. She sits up a bit to lengthen her contact with his hand, and he bends to kiss her neck. He shows them both a circular saw he found on a sidewalk in Hoboken. It lacks only a power cord.

“Great saw,” Penny says.

“I might build a gazebo out back,” he says.

They get him to taste the salad. He says it would be great if the walnuts weren't rancid.

“Maybe we should have tasted them,” Penny says. “But there will be other stuff to eat. Are you coming along?”

“I don't think so. People at Stayfree don't really go for me. They think I'm a macho man.”

“That's what I used to think, too. But haven't they known you longer?”

“They never see me cuddling with a dude. I think that's the problem.”

“They never see you cuddling with a woman who isn't conventionally attractive,” Sorry says. “I've never seen you with a woman taller than you. Or older, or fat, or with short hair.”

Rob puts his arm around her and says, “I'm a tragic slave to my genetic program. I have no choice but to go with it. It's like being born trans. I was born liking plain vanilla T&A.”

“Who you calling plain vanilla?” Penny protests.

“You should be more upset he called you T&A,” Sorry points out.

“I don't see you herding any llamas in a bowler hat,” Rob says. “You're a biz-ad major from Morristown.”

“I was raised in Brazil by animist drug freaks!”

Sorry says, “Ignore him. He's jealous. You think she always tag-teams him like that? No way.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Rob says.

“You shouldn't take it personally. He's never had sex in his life.”

“Hey,” Rob says. “Cool it.”

“Well, have you?” Penny asks.

“Have I what?”

“Had sex.”

“Of course I have. It's hard time pressure. If you say you don't want it, they take it as a challenge. Girls are like, ‘Of course you didn't want my friend, she's a ska-ank!' Then they rape me. I'm hugging some girl and—
bam
—she's on her knees. They think it's going to be easy, like abusing a child.”

Penny is shocked into silence, and Sorry says, “You're not any kind of child, Rob. Maybe you need to work on your communications skills—as in learn to say no—if all these women are taking it too far?”

“Now it's
my
fault,” he says.

“Were you an abused child?” Penny asks softly.

“I just meant it's so weird they think they can physically dominate me. I mean, it's one thing holding down a five-year-old—”

“I get the picture,” Penny says.

“You just don't like it when women make the first move,” Sorry says. “You're a cis-het dude-bro on strike for better conditions.”

“A blow job shouldn't be anybody's first move. I like being friends with women.”

“You like worshipping size-queen starfuckers,” Sorry says. She turns to Penny and adds, “He's in vicarious love with Jazz. He wants her more than anything in the world. Just not for himself.”

“Jesus,” Rob says, turning away.

“Are you a voyeur?” Penny says to him. “You get off living next to her?”

“I don't get off!”

“Maybe women go for your dick because your mouth is full of tobacco?”

“Ask him where Jazz sleeps when it's too hot or too cold or too loud in her greenhouse,” Sorry says.

Rob leaves the kitchen and stomps upstairs.

“We just annoyed the living shit out of him while acquiring no actionable intelligence,” Penny says to Sorry.

“You just don't want to hear it,” Sorry says.

THEY BORROW HIS MINIVAN TO
drive to Stayfree because it's raining. The house is on a dubious-looking block, with several abandoned houses on the same side of the street. The marshy vacant lot opposite is overgrown with high reeds. The facade is black, with the squatter lightning-bolt emblem in lavender.

Penny follows Sorry inside. The dark living room is lined with books and posters. The only white objects are the smartphone and cylindrical loudspeaker playing pop songs from the mantelpiece. Husky men stand around the sofas, eating. Shrill women fuss over the arrangement of food on the buffet. Sorry plunks down the salad. “Is this good?” No reaction. She proceeds to the kitchen to take a serving spoon from a drawer and returns, via the buffet table, to the front porch, where Penny is standing looking out at the street.

“We're the only girls here,” Penny whispers. “I mean, as in—what am I trying to say? Am I being trans-phobic?”

“Hey, I miss women feminists, too. But I'm not willing to move back to Jordan to see them again.”