What We Are (15 page)

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Authors: Peter Nathaniel Malae

BOOK: What We Are
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I bought us tickets for the stage. Maybe we weren't getting out enough, maybe the studio was cramping our growth as a couple. A
freak show might change that. On a Thursday night, I drove Sharon to downtown Berkeley to see an X-rated contemporary version of a Sophoclean tale,
Eddie Puss
, that was being performed by the Jugs-Or-Nuts, a traveling troupe of thespian transvestites.

I had a hard time taking the troupe seriously, especially since Eddie Puss was much smaller than his own mother. Yet when I watched for expressions of disgust from Sharon during key moments in the play, she'd either yawn or roll her eyes. Once she said, “How embarrassing for you men,” and then turned her head to sleep. By the end of Act II, she was snoring so loud I had to wake her up with a nudge. I followed Sharon under the neon-lit sign and watched her toss the Eddie Puss ticket stubs into the first garbage can.

From behind I threw out a bone, something Catholic from my childhood: “Do you want to go to confession with me tomorrow?”

“Are you kidding? I'd be in there until next year! No sin booths for me!”

Nothing seemed to get a rise out of Sharon. Her basic attitude was instructive: on the second year of a relationship things plateau, especially sex; that's the way it goes for every couple. Like the dull commitment of lifetime service to the National Guard. Perhaps I had been looking for a fight, a spark between us, even if I'd lose the fight.

The spark that would make me feel alive....

No sparks at the end of the alleyway, and I hung a left into the parking lot. Ivy was everywhere, feeding like a virus on the concrete and steel. Three cars were parked in parallel forty-five degree angles. I kept my eyes to myself. I'd learned my lesson during the first week of the ritual when I witnessed two people fucking in the backseat of a Toyota Camry. They had seen me coming and kept going. The shocks of the undulating car creaked like an old bed. They seemed encouraged by the idea of getting caught. I had picked up my stride and ducked into the back entrance of the bookstore.

I passed the three cars without incident and walked up the four-step staircase into the bookstore. This the worst part of the ritual, nodding at the clerk. He was just what you'd expect in a bookstore like this, truly filthy: pockmarked with the cavernous pores of alcoholism, lips smeared white with an anti-cold-sore cream that didn't prevent him from constantly licking his lips. On that day, he had on an Arco mechanic's shirt with the sewn-on name tag
LOU
and was shelving giant rubber phalli behind the counter—black, white, brown, red, transparent, striped—next to boxes of artificial vaginas molded in cold wax directly from the porn stars themselves. Then he was on his tippy-toes, stretching out for packaged Mardi Gras beads and the bigger version, a row of Ping-Pong balls on a string.

I slid past the counter, and he turned and said, “Hey, buddy. What did the ovary say to the other ovary?”

I didn't look at him, I didn't look at the items for sale behind him, but I stopped, my eyes on the ground. I couldn't believe my ears. In half a year's time, I hadn't exchanged one word with anybody in the bookstore, let alone Lou. It was a bad omen. I considered exiting the joint at once. But the image of Lou following me out the door, wondering if I was an undercover cop or a spy from another bookstore, kept me from leaving. And the thought of having to right-hook Lou on those plague-ridden lips before escaping down the alleyway was a trial I wouldn't put my fist through.

“What?” I managed.

His laugh sounded like the squeaky collusions of mice behind the wall. “Hey, there's Dick!” he said, slug tongue out of his mouth. “Let's egg him!”

The joke depressed me: my mind was fast to self-indict. When were Sharon's ovaries last drowning in my “protein fishies,” as she used to call it during the early days? It was three weeks, maybe longer. Our sex was missionary, her head propped, my face to the side of her head buried in the pillow.

Sharon herself had started it. We'd lain down together, and she had stretched her neck to one side of the pillow. Automatically. When we'd first met, that meant nuzzle the neck, blow on the ear, nibble the lobe. But things had changed. My instinct had been to follow her lead and push my face into the pillow. There wasn't the slightest protestation from Sharon.

We no longer showered together. Sharon was invariably dressed before I woke up in the morning, no matter how early I rose. She'd also be dressed when I came home and dropped into the couch to yell at whatever demagogue I could find on cable news. And she'd been sleeping in a G-string, a knee-length Stanford T-shirt and black silk blinders that looked like doilies over her eyes. Sharon had loved Naked Thursday, a twenty-four-hour affair of mutual nudity where I was not allowed to touch her until midnight struck. That had been painful and rewarding, with a strong element of Catholic deprivation to it that I admired even then. By the time the moment of consummation came, I was desperate for contact. But no more prancing around our studio in the buff. Naked Thursday went out like a lot of Thursdays do, without note.

At the counter, Lou was now bent over a six-foot plastic doll, genially oxygenating it as if he were blowing up a raft for the kids at the lake. I walked past the desk to the gallery of both real and televised moans and all the way to the last unoccupied booth in line closest to the door (which opened into the lot for exit but not entrance), locked the booth, dropped my pants to the knees but no further, inserted a dollar into the pay slot, still standing, turned the volume down on the private screening, and flipped to channel eighteen, which featured Sapphic encounters, women feasting on women, violating each other in every conceivable way. My goal was to finish before I used up the three dollars, which gave me three minutes in all.

But the machine was not cooperating. Bad omen on that day, Aphrodite issuing a warning. It kept flicking back to channel thirteen.
Each time I reached out and hit the flashing red button and returned to the isle of Lesbos, the screen jumped to two men in a steamy sauna with skimpy white bath towels around their waists. Finally the channel just stayed where it was, wouldn't move. And despite my efforts to mute the machine, it remained at full volume. Above their grunts and squeaky palms, everyone in the gallery could hear the conversation on the screen, my screen, and I knew that if I didn't find a fix fast, I'd have someone waiting outside my booth in seconds.

“You look like a big friendly bear, don'tchu?”

“Grrrrrrrr.”

“And I'll be your little bear-er, won't I?”

“Grrrrrrr.”

Then the machine went crazy. Flashing from channel to channel faster than an eyeblink, I saw silicon lips crying the Oh of ecstasy in mass libidinous excretion in the water on the streets in the gutter on rooftops in someone's sometimes many people's mouths, bubbling over like the froth of sewage on the shore of a stream outside an insidious chemical plant, and in the depleted well of romance in my head, I found the recurring picture of Sharon dancing through the bookstore. Prancing and pirouetting past that nest of Herpes at the counter, the only woman clothed, she did not belong in the filth, even the filth of my own imagination.

Maybe less out of sheer decency and more out of sexual survival, of keeping the images to themselves, I shouted,
Ahhhhh!
and opened the door, stiff-armed the besparkled chest of the queen of
qui tacit consentire
standing outside my booth, his bleached Levi's cut so tight and thigh-high that even as he was falling backward, I could see the outline of his boot like a map of Italia, and hustled past another royal queen awaiting escort on the carriage, ran out the door into the lot, the moaning ghosts hot on my tail, freed at last to feed on the virginal world.

I ran through the already dark lot and hit the alleyway practically skidding. A little lamp of light at the end of the lane. The moon, sitting in its own gray wash. Two Korean chefs in butcher aprons were smoking on the back step of their restaurant. They could see and understood immediately from where I came, or didn't come, and smiled, laughing as I neared. One reached into his pocket and pulled a cigarette from it, holding the unlit snipe out as I sprinted by them, right through their smoke.

I heard, “Need break, boss? Very tired?”

I remember thinking that each step over the sliding gravel and jumping rocks was like a cleaning of the conscience, an erasing of the past, a strike of six-o'clock weekday amnesia. As if my sprint would expunge the evidence of ever having been there in the alleyway.

I sped home under a blue-black sky dark as the inside of the booth, thinking on Sharon's goods, my greed. She was sloped like the silver line bisecting a Coke can, skin blown-glass smooth to the touch, men all across the city of San Jo wanted a piece of her delicates. She was beautiful. So many regions of Western Europe were in her face: Swedish down-turned pouty mouth, Irish sea-blue eyes, lightly freckled French button of a nose, prominent German forehead. A beautiful American mutt! Sweet as a teaspoon of sugar, salty as an oyster, everything ripe on her body for seed. And I was blowing it in my greedy head, or in my sticky hand, searching for whatever impetus out there I didn't have.

I decided right there that I'd no longer share myself with the channel-eighteen lesbians. They never existed. I would take it further than that. I would avoid the town of Mountain View for the rest of my life. Never drive through there again. A meaningless map dot removed from my head.

Mountain View is gone, my son, gone!

One purist sweep of the 48,000-population Silicon Valley suburb from my head.

And then all visual stimulation, the “body art” of
Playboy
, must also be erased. Showtime and HBO canceled, cable canceled—perhaps the television removed altogether. Out the door, signed off for donation at the Goodwill. No more Miller Light girls and Howard Stern whores. Walking the streets with Sharon, I would be a horse with blinders. And when Susan came to visit, or Sharon's mother, or any woman, it would be a cordial Hello, how are you, nice to see you. Retreat into the bedroom to read the poetry of Father Hopkins, SJ, keep it clean.

I'd read more selectively. All things promoting the mind to stretch, dulling the instinct to fuck, must go. They were the enemy of potency. Anytime I felt the urge for art, I'd drive down to the Carmelites and admire the architecture of the saints. And if it got really bad, I'd slip into a sin booth and try and confess through the screen. All for the consummation later with Sharon. That sweet whirling violence down below, the old gut flame of virility. I wanted to possess and be possessed. Sharon of Paul, Paul of Sharon. Body, mind, but especially mind.

At the apartment complex, I stopped at the fountain and put my hands out to catch the spray of the water crashing. Like it was holy water, blessed H
2
O. I took a deep breath, prepared for a life of sanctity. Anticipating the baptismal romp with my girl. Just walk right in and claim my territory.

I got to the leaning wooden fence of our porch, unlatched the patio gate, and saw that the light was out, the blinds of the sliding glass door shut. I'd beaten her home, big-time lucky. Now I could prepare for her arrival. Light some candles, burn some incense, prepare the tub. Swoop her up when she walked into the studio, her arms loaded down with groceries, or, even better, dried with the salt of a thorough workout at the gym.

Right then a rhapsodic moan escaped through the cracks of the door.

It was Sharon. I knew the tone of her pleasure. I hadn't heard that voluminous pitch from her in almost a year. It picked up, like a car alarm. Or a booth back at the bookstore.
Jesus, God
. I stared down at the ground, Sharon's moan filling the little vacuum of hearing space on our patio. It was getting louder and I peeked over the fence into the neighbor's patio. All the lights were off. Bob, Jim, John, whatever his name was, probably had the bottom of a glass pressed to his ear, the shared wall between the two studios thin enough to rub one off in the darkness.

But I found a ray of hope in my image of our neighbor. Maybe Sharon was engaged in some self-manipulation of her own. Maybe the whole world was a private booth of self-indulgence. Maybe everyone, when finally alone, has a straying palm or a probing finger, and maybe the darkness was universal. Maybe Sharon had the lights dimmed, a silk sheet drawn to her belly, a glass of champagne in her right hand, the bottle in her left. Maybe Sharon's moans were uttered in the ecstatic vanity of solitude, a thorough celebration of self.

The moan came again, sustained, almost mournful.

So I'd been in the gutter for half a year, but Sharon was in the gutter too, or at least familiar with it, and that made for an even slate between the two of us. Rehab needed on both our parts, not just mine.

Then I heard something else. I looked behind me, held my breath. It was not true. It will vanish, just like the booth back in that nameless town in my deleted past.
It will be gone, gone, gone
.

But the new sound rose from under the door again, stronger. Then the exchange. A choral succession of lust. Pronounced in intervals by a tenor “Yes!” Definitely Sharon. “Yes! Yes! Yes!” A quickening of the pace and then the chaos of simultaneous guttural sounds. Each moan compounded by the other, two seals feeding on the pier.

I put the key softly into the lock and closed my eyes.

On the futon, their heads were deep in each other's midsection. I shut the door and Sharon looked up, still gyrating at the naked hip,
moist lips pursed, the squint of pleasure in her Irish eyes widening to fright.

I sat down on a chair near the sliding glass door, eyes on Sharon. Candles were burning by the phone. Sharon was reading my face, looking for a sign. The whole time Susan, on her stomach on Sharon, neither looked up nor stopped. Mad with lust. She was as shapely as I'd imagined, and her breasts pressed against Sharon's belly were like little half-filled water balloons. She had a ruby-red-lips tattoo on her alabaster-skinned ass, and all along the surface in no discernible pattern were Sharon's handprints in fading blush. I was so close to the futon I could hear the wetness. I gritted my teeth, stood, and looked down on it all.

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