Rubyfruit Jungle (21 page)

After a ten-minute reflection period, she rolled over and said, “Do you want me to make love to you? I’ve never done it before but I’m sure I can.”

“Yes, I’d like it if you’d make love to me.”

“What fantasy do you have?”

“I don’t think I have any.”

“But how can you make love without a fantasy? Everyone has sexual fantasies. I bet it’s something you think is too awful to tell. You can tell me. It’ll make me all excited again.”

“I’m sorry but I just like to make love. It’s the touching and the kissing and all that gets me turned on. You wouldn’t have to say a word.”

“I don’t believe anyone in this day and age can live without a fantasy.”

“Well, I do have one thing but I’m not sure it’s a fantasy.”

“Tell, tell.” She put her arm around my waist.

“When I make love to women I think of their genitals as a, as a ruby fruit jungle.”

“Ruby fruit jungle?”

“Yeah, women are thick and rich and full of hidden treasures and besides that, they taste good.”

“That’s hardly a fantasy. You have an extremely immature sex life, Molly. No wonder you’re a lesbian.”

“If it’s all the same with you I think I could do without being made love to.”

“Oh, you’re embarrassed because you don’t have a fantasy. Don’t be. I’ll make one up for you. I do want to make love to you. You have a very sexy body—it’s light and smooth and tight. You’re Plato’s perfect androgen. No, that’s not right—
you’re a woman without fail. But you’re so strong. You haven’t got flab anywhere. I—I want to go inside of you. It must be exciting to go inside another woman where she’s wet and open.”

“Okay, okay, you make up the story and I’ll listen while you make love to me.”

Polina made up a story about being students at a boys’ boarding school. In this one we did it in the locker room. It turned her on so much that she made love to me with absolute frenzy. But I could sense Polina and I weren’t going to have much of a relationship. I couldn’t survive the stories, and I couldn’t understand why they were about men.

She didn’t spend the night although I wanted her to. It’s nice to curl up next to a warm body, then wake up in the morning for a hello hug. But she said she had to sleep with her old blue sweater on and a big pillow under her knees. She couldn’t possibly sleep in the same bed with another human being. So she went home and I couldn’t sleep the whole night trying to figure out if I dreamed it or if it was true. It was true. The next morning when a little bit of sunlight fought its way through the pollution to my mattress I found some long strands of black hair and a few gray ones.

My date with Paul turned up and I went, out of a sense of blazing curiosity. What could these two do? Did he tell her these absurd stories? There was only one way to find out.

Paul took me to an Italian restaurant and then fumbled for the next move. He obviously wasn’t used to female attention and was at loose ends.
I suggested we walk in Riverside Park for awhile. I told him I’d walk him home since he lived right on the Park. It took us one half hour to go four blocks. We arrived at his door and he started to hobble in, then turned as if struck by a blinding thought. “Would you like to come upstairs and look at my thesis? It was highly regarded at Harvard.”

“I’d love to see your thesis.”

Paul spent the next hour and one half explaining to me the supreme importance of punctuation in early twentieth-century poetry. He worked himself into a lather over the horrible idea that poetry was ditching punctuation. After this diatribe he took a swig of Squirt and vodka and started a tirade against Edmund Wilson. Without warning he stopped talking, lurched off his side of the sofa and kissed me—with those teeth. Jesus. Before I had time to get myself geared he dove into my crotch like he was right out of
Dawn Patrol
and he slobbered all over me. Paul didn’t believe in warming up.

“Paul, why don’t we go into your bedroom?”

“Oh, right.”

Once in his bedroom I was greeted with fresh horrors. Every inch of him was covered in hair. Right out of the trees he dropped and into my crotch. I must be in love with Polina to endure this orangutan. God. Paul was jabbering and rolling his eyes. I thought either he was going to have a seizure or dive on me again when he suddenly flipped over, held his decently sized prick in his hand, and put his other hand on the back of my neck drawing me to him.

“Where are we?”

I was on. “We’re in the men’s john at Times Square in the subway.”

“No, no,” he shrieked. “We’re in the ladies room at the Four Seasons and you’re admiring my voluptuous breasts.”

“Goodbye, Paul.”

I didn’t break off with Polina right away. I guess I needed her too much—the conversations, the theater, and her stories of Europe where she grew up. I tried to ignore the sex, but Polina was getting more and more into it. It hit rock bottom for me when she wanted to be told she was a golden shower queen. Polina had saved her urine in empty glass Macademia nut jars for me to admire while I told her the story of her mighty pissing powers in yet another fantasy men’s john. No way I could hack that. I asked her if maybe we could be friends and she nearly had a coronary.

“Friends, what do you mean, friends? Here I am on the threshold of powerful sexual discoveries and you want to be friends?”

I tried to tell her to find other women, but she wanted me. She wanted me but she was ashamed of me. She wouldn’t introduce me to her friends or
let me come by for her at work. Afraid I’d flash a lavender neon “L” between my tits, I suppose. More out of loneliness than love I stayed with her. My classes at school were all men and they had it in for me since I was doing better than they were. Of all careers I thought film would be somewhat open, but their pathetic egos had bloated to outrageous proportions behind a small Arriflex and they resented a woman who could compete on “their” territory and worse, win. The bars weren’t a hotbed of intellectual ferment, even though I had found some nice ones uptown where the merest hint of roles would have frozen you out. Roles were for truck drivers to these women. But I could only take so many conversations where big names were dropped like napalm to inflame your brain with admiration. I don’t give a shit who you know, I care about what you do. These highclass dollies weren’t doing much. But I couldn’t go back to the sleazy Colony or Sugar’s where the bulls still put butch hair wax on their crew cuts. So there was Polina for all her fantasies, a seemingly better choice than any of the others.

It was Alice who resolved the problem. The three of us would go out from time to time. I was too dangerous for her friends but I was good enough for her daughter. Polina’s double-think was astounding. She encouraged my bond with Alice. We were closer in age than Polina and I were, which wouldn’t have made a difference if Polina didn’t harp about her age constantly. Alice was only six years younger than I was. I began to feel guilty for being born in 1944. The “old lady,” as she referred to herself, looked down her nose at our music, the films we shared, and the
magazines we read. She was not above patronizing either one of us for our years and our tastes which drew Alice and I closer together, as generational hostility always does. Alice knew her mother and I were lovers and she thought it was great. She also knew about Paul and considered him the original human slug. One yellow, acid drizzle day she confessed, “You know Mom wants to sleep with me?”

“Oh yeah?”

“She won’t admit it but I know she does. I think I’d like to sleep with her. She’s very good looking, you know. Too bad it would freak her out. Incest doesn’t seem like such a trauma to me.”

“Me neither, but then I can’t really say much about that because I didn’t grow up with my real parents. But I never have been able to figure out why parents and children put each other in these desexed categories. It’s antihuman, I think.”

“Yeah, parents get freaked out about everything. Mom must have a heavy case of repression going, because she’ll never deal with the fact that she digs my body.”

“She’s got more going than that.”

“Oh yeah? What’s the old girl cooking up?”

“Nothing. Just don’t sleep with your mother. I’m not against incest if both parties consent and are over fifteen, but your mother’s on her own weird trip.”

“Tell me her trip.”

“No, I don’t kiss and tell.”

“Oh Molly, why do you have to have morals?”

“Because I don’t have money.”

“How are your morals when it comes to sleeping with me? I’m jail bait, ya know.”

“Alice, your spirit of romance is so delicate. Moves me to tears.”

“Please sleep with me. I feel like I can trust you. You won’t get into a big, heavy thing about it, you know?”

“I know, but what about your mother?”

“What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.” Alice giggled and slipped me a sly look. “I’ll give you one perfect, yellow rose for your sunshine soul and then will you sleep with me?”

“For one perfect yellow rose—yes.”

Alice jogged down Broadway looking for a florist’s shop, ran inside a tiny one, and emerged, rose in hand. Off we went to 17th Street, to the cockroaches and the steam heat that never steamed. But Alice steamed and shook and sighed, and she hadn’t one sexual quirk in her mind. She loved being touched and she loved touching back. Kissing was an art form to her. She was there, all there with no hang-ups, no stories to tell, just herself. And I was just me.

Alice’s survival instincts were sound. She knew we’d have to sneak around to see each other more often. Polina’s warped Victorian mentality would get watersoaked if she read our beads. When the three of us were out together, it was a unique form of torture. Once in the balcony watching
Rozencrantz and Gildenstern Are Dead
, Polina held my left hand while Alice played with my right thigh. The play made no impression on me at all, but I clapped wildly at the end to let off all that trapped energy.

Polina threw us together, hoping it would happen, yet terrified of it at the same time. Somehow
I was the sexual go-between for both of them. I was a kind of telestar for them to bounce messages off to each other. There were times when I felt lonelier with them than without them.

One Saturday afternoon looking out over Harlem and hearing the steady drums from the park, mother and daughter entered a time-honored fight. Polina accused Alice of behaving like a child over some trivial item and Alice replied that Polina was suffering from hardening of the arteries, specifically in her head. This kind of cheerful banter went on until Alice in a fit of untried ego hit her oldest competitor: “I’m not a baby anymore. For Christ’s sake, Mother, I’m old enough to be making it with your lover, so dig it and get off my back.”

“My what?”

“Molly and I are lovers.”

Polina recoiled. She fumed in Italian and rattled so fast all I could catch was “Basta! Basta!” and a slap across the face. When her streak of bilingualism petered out she ordered me out of her life and Alice’s life forever in unmistakable English. Alice protested, but Polina curbed that strike with the threat that she wouldn’t send Alice to college if Alice persisted in this relationship. Alice was a shrewd sort and she had no intention of working her way through college, especially after contact with my life. She bowed to her mother’s superior material force. And I gracefully exited to 17th Street where the hounds of hell gnawed at my ankles and the waterbugs organized a safari through my kitchen.

I dreamed of sewer lagoons underneath the skyscrapers, where I could navigate a Con Edison
raft to take me out of this crazy city with its crazy people. Give me one sharp pole to fight off the blind alligators thrown into the drainpipes by people who bought them as babies on trips to Miami Beach. Miami Beach, so close to Carrie with her crotons, ixora, and blind pride. Miami Beach where the geriatric generation buys sequined colostemy bags to match their shoes. Even if I made it through the drainpipes to the Inter-coastal I couldn’t land there. There is no place to go. Here I am in the Hanging Gardens of Neon, hustling my ass for a degree and living in shit. Shit worse than Shiloh and damn, is there one person in Manhattan who isn’t a radiated disaster area? Maybe it’s me. Maybe I’m the disaster area, or am I still full of Dunkard ways and simple dreams? Maybe I belong in the foothills of Pennsylvania with the Mennonites and the Amish and how the hell can I make movies out there? You can’t even have electric light bulbs out there. In Logic 101 this is called being on the horns of a dilemma. Either way you get gored. But if I had money maybe I could slip out of that dilemma. I mean, if I had money I wouldn’t be at the mercy of chance, peanut intellects, and amputated emotions so much. With money you can protect yourself. But getting it is another story. One more year and I’ll be out of school. An instant fortune. Oh sure, I can slip into the cracks of the pavement, because no one will hire me. Shit. Well, I’m not giving up. But I’d like to rest every now and then. I’d like to see the hills of Shiloh again and lay my body down in the meadow behind Ep’s place, out where they buried Jenna. Maybe the smell of the
clover will get me through one more winter in this branch of hell. Maybe I can keep myself together with a day in the country. There’s still no price on the sun.