Watch Your Mouth (10 page)

“Cyn’s here?”

“She is?” Steven’s head followed the arc of the fan around the room, a smile of surprise smeared on his mouth along with egg grease. “She’s not here. What was I—oh. No.
Since
the tip is only one molecule wide, the laser bounces off that one molecule and hits the gold. From the way it hits the gold, we read with this”—he stuttered for a term that a Mather liberal arts student could understand—“special meter thing. We can tell from the way it reflects off the wire’s one molecule, off the gold—we can tell
exactly
what the gold is shaped like. I mean, on a molecular level.”

Cyn’s roommate had been a puckered little chemical girl whose only redeeming quality was her constant lab work, keep- ing her away at all hours so that it wasn’t
too
often that Cyn and I would make love just three feet from her snoring, pimply face, holding our hands over each other’s mouths to absorb our moans into our skin. I knew how to make small talk with sci- ence types. “So this whole new meter thing you’re building is based on ripping up a wire with pliers?”

“Well, that’s how we get the wire to have a one-molecule width.”

“But after you rip it, it could be
any
width.” “Not the very tip.”

“Yes the very tip,” I insisted. “I mean, it could be two mol- ecules, side by side.”

He smirked. “Yes, actually it could. But that’s one of the founding fallacies of physics in the first place. Entropy is in- creasing. You know what that means?”

“Yes.”

He explained it anyway. “It means that systems are breaking down quicker and quicker through the power of chance. Re- actions between disparate parts occur at faster and faster rates, and the way they change their surroundings forces us to aban- don our previous assumptions at an astounding rate.” Meta- phors in operas are always corny,
always.
“We’ve already experienced a problem with using gold, because they’ve just discovered a new type of gold. S-gold.”

“S-gold?”

“Yeah. They put—because—well, I won’t explain it all, but because it’s a different kind, sort of a different molecular—well, let’s say it’s a different
species
of gold. So we’re calling it S-gold for now. It’s—it’s pretty interesting.” His voice trailed off sud- denly and he dropped the subject. I watched his fork prod at a flat little stack of garnish: half an orange slice, a piece of parsley and an inflamed nipple. As his fork pierced the nipple my eyes filled with memory like an allergic reaction. One of my fingers was poised over Cyn’s nipple, the nail sinking into it like a trick we taught our campers, months later, to make their mosquito

bites stop itching momentarily. I could see her sex contracting in expectation while my own stretched toward her like a hung- over arm, under the covers, toward the cursed, necessary bleat- ing of the alarm clock. I poised myself over her—not our usual position—and moved my fingers from her breast to the bed- covers, for balance. With a sharp vocal—like a burst of brass when the forbidden lovers are discovered, later, in Act III Scene One—she grabbed my wrist like I was taking candy without asking, and returned it to her breast while I wobbled unsteadily between her legs. She met my eyes as she took my weight, and with a lurch she grabbed my other hand, and, looking at me from sharp bright slits, wrapped my sweaty fist around myself. She wanted to come this way, without me inside her, while she watched me stroke myself just inches from her poised sex. Tee- tering, wronghanded, frustrated and loud, I did it. This was the beginning of about a month’s hot interest in masturbation. For weeks afterward we would lie next to one another and stare at the blank tiles of the dormitory ceiling while in the periphery we could see the lustful and selfish movements of our own fin- gers between our own legs. “Keep your hands,” Cyn would pant, a horny cop, “where I can see them.” Starting in sensual silence and closing with desperate, heaving gasps, we’d make ourselves come without touching one another except for the trembling
thunk
of our hip bones as they shivered against one another, like silverware in a drawer in a kitchen in a house in an earth- quake. But it was never as good as the first time. For all the unpeeling we did in the weeks that followed, we never com- pletely recollected the raw afternoon where she collapsed under the throb of her swollen nipple while I stroked myself, kept

stroking myself. Even after I came I kept stroking myself, want- ing to give her more and more until my veins ached, strewing more of my ejaculate like pearls upon the forestry of her sex.

“I guess I should stop beating around the bush,” Steven said. The cleaved maraschino cherry of the evocative garnish paused for a minute on his tongue before disappearing down his wind- pipe, past that small triangle of downy hair, very light tan and descending lazily to a point, that I’d seen the first night I’d arrived in this humid and heaving city. It was hard to concentrate in here.

“Go ahead.”

He sighed and dropped his fork to the plate in resignation. What could this be, that he wanted from me? Some sort of pseudo-fatherly advice, some locker room talk? He was past, way past, the age of worrying about hairy palms or going blind. Pittsburgh had an aggressive program that made condoms more available at school than exam answers, so he wasn’t going to slip me a twenty and wait outside the drugstore while I debated whether his teenaged paramour—some geeky science girl at the lab? a high school flame whose parents hadn’t dragged her to Europe or something?—would prefer something Ribbed for Her Pleasure. “It’s about girls,” he said finally.

“What can I help you with?”

“Well,” he said. “When you—how did you—O.K., you and my sister are—”

Bing Bing Bing is the sound my heart makes when I see you babe. Bing Bing Bing don’t you know that we really got it made. When you walked into my life, I felt my heart sing. Everywhere I go I hear Bing Bing Bing.

“Yes?” I said finally.

“How did you approach my sister?” “What do you mean?”

“When you first—well, when you began thinking romanti- cally—do you know what I’m saying?”

“You’re saying how did I make my first move on your Cyn?” “No,” he said quickly. “I don’t know. I mean, how can you tell when someone is interested in you? There’s this person. I

wish I could get inside her—”

“Would this be your first time?” I asked.

“What?” Steven’s head followed the arc of the fan around the room. “What? What was I—oh. No. I wish I could get inside her
mind,
just to know if she’s interested. Because it’s sort of a delicate situation. I mean, if it turns out Cynthia isn’t interested, then—”

“Cyn?”

“What? Well, I didn’t want to tell you who she is, but yes.” “What?” The castaway, adrift in the wild sea of Cyn’s family, approaches an island only to find that it’s the slick back of a

terrible sea serpent.

“Her name is Cynthia.” “Like your sister Cynthia?”

“Well, sure.” He blinked, laser-quick. “I mean, let’s pretend it’s my sister, because it’s as good a situation—a
hypothetical
situation—as any. I mean, it would be a delicate situation if I wanted to approach my sister, because if she wasn’t interested it would be awkward, you know?
That’s
my situation.
That’s
what I’m talking about. Hypothetically, of course.”

“Hypothetically? Hypothetically let’s say you want my advice on how to approach your sister?”

“Well, Cynthia—let’s just talk about this situation for now.”

I struggled to find some facet of this conversation I could face, and talk to. “That would be incest.”

“There’s a better word for it,” Steven said, licking his lips. “My father and I were just talking—what was the word?”

“Never mind,” I said. I couldn’t believe how easily
I know what you’re talking about
could come from my mouth. “Forget the word.”

“It’s on the tip of my tongue,” he said.

“Forget the word. Forget your
tongue,
Steven. Surely you can understand that it’s difficult to discuss this situation. Whoever you have a crush on, it’s not going to be like incest.”

“Well, not if you think of it like that:
Incest
. But all behavior exists within a social and cultural context. I mean, it’s like what I told you about entropy. Systems are breaking down quicker and quicker through the power of chance. Reactions between disparate parts occur at faster and faster rates, and the way they change their surroundings forces us to abandon our previous assumptions at an astounding rate.”

“You said that already.” Though the second time around he sings it differently.

“Yes, I know, but this time I mean it in reference to—I wish I could think of the phrase my father used.”

I sighed, scarcely audible over the growing T.U.D. “Intergen- erational sex.”

He snapped his fingers. “That’s
it!
” he said. “If you think of intergenerational sex within the context of entropy, it doesn’t seem horrible but the natural consequences of scientific pro- gress. I mean, it’s like what happened with the gold. Entropy is increasing, resulting in that S-gold I told you about. Think of an S-family. S-father. S-mother. S-sister. S-dog, even.”

“Interspecies sex?”

“Well, not in my case,” Steven grinned. “But that probably isn’t so far off, entropically speaking. But within the family— why not? It was individual molecules reacting within the ele- ment of gold that produced S-gold—why not a family whose molecules would react with one another, and produce an S-family?”

“That’s about the worst science I ever heard,” I said, attempt- ing to sound lighthearted. The flutes try the same thing.

He frowned, and I could see in the cross wrinkles around his mouth a genetic history. The same frown when the doctor- father—the S-father, maybe—was reminded of the ceramic leg, buried in that poor girl, snapping in two. “So you’re not going to help me with Cynthia?”

“We are speaking hypothetically, right?” Steven blinked. “Sure,” he said.

“I mean, you really have a crush on
somebody else
named Cynthia, who isn’t your family member but in some other dif- ficult situation, some other social and cultural context, right?” “Well, sort of,” he said. “It’s like that book you’re reading there.
When You Can’t Be Friends with Your Mother.
If you can’t

be friends, maybe—”

“Mimi gave me this book,” I said, pulling my hands away from it like it might have rabies. “She was saying something similar about it.”

“My mother Mimi?” “Yes.”

“She lets you call her that?”

“She
asked
me to call her that. What’s wrong with that? Cyn and I are—”

“It’s just strange. She’s always hated her name. She hates to hear it. She’s always regretted being named something even a little unusual. She says it’s easier to go through life with the simplest, most invisible thing that people can call you. She al- ways said she hoped I’d forgive her for naming me something unusual.”

“Steven isn’t unusual,” I said.

“It’s
Stephen,
” he said. “With a P-H.” “Stephen?”

Stephen smiled. “As in phony.”

The horizon shifted, in front of my eyes, like a set being lifted to reveal a bare stage where anything can happen next. I knew nothing. I’d been living in a house for more than half a summer and around me the molecules were shifting to an S-house, an S-half of an S-summer. My assumptions were no longer viable. I was as far from knowing what was going on as the soon-to- be-rejected suitor in one of Mozart’s little marriage operas, lol- lygagging around with gay little vocalizations before the entrance of the fickle woman. I muttered something and left Stephen at the table, stumbled into the bathroom where the last chords of the act reverberate in the tiny, stained tiles. “Your’re stupid,” said a graffito in the last stall, and I didn’t have any idea whether the misspelling was an accident or on purpose, some scientific joke. Maybe everything was a scientific joke. Maybe everything was my dirty mind, stained like old porcelain and held in my panicked, sweaty hands, encased in my thick skull. As in the changing rooms back at Camp Shalom I felt the ghosts of masturbation around me, the sudden erections of high-school boys throwing their lab coats open and their shorts down to beat around the bush, their S-sisters moaning in the

meters of their minds. But I didn’t know if that was
real.
It could be hypothetical. It could be nothing, nothing but my own dirty mind and the erection I found, born of it, when my hands stopped clutching my brain and moved lower.
Your’re stupid,
I thought to myself, panting from panic and imagination, my hands moving to lower my shorts, dipping and sagging over my skin like a slow curtain.

A
B R I E F
I N T E R M I S S I O N

[The audience strolls out of the auditorium and chats about subjects tangentially related to the action.]

The Board of Directors raised eyebrows to the rafters that

spring when they announced that the Pittsburgh Summer Opera Season would consist entirely of anti-semitic operas. The Be- nedrum Center for the Performing Arts, it was said at the press conference held the first day Cyn and I sixty-nined, was the first American opera company to host such a season, perhaps the first opera company in the entire non-fascist world.

This assertion wasn’t strictly true. Just before I embarked upon this terrifying and sexy summer, a senior at Mather Col- lege was pounding out a thesis for his degree in anthropology which studied a small high-minded group of bigots who stopped patronizing the opera, ballet and symphony in Jackson, Mississippi, because they felt the aesthetic morals were getting soft on Communism, Catholicism and interracial marriage. This was back in maybe 1950. Withdrawing all donations, these fine upstanding folk formed the Concerned League of Art and Na- ture and it doesn’t take a Talmudic scholar to figure out that’s

C-L-A-N. Clan like Ku Klux except with a C because these folks thought it was more subtle that way. They also thought it was more subtle to put on one season of original operas, music and theatrical presentations with titles like
Symphony of the Nigger Problem
and
The Interbreeding Daughter
. They put them on in a church with costumes sewn by the wives/sopranos.