Chapter 9 #2
I tickle the top of your foot. “Well, he dropped out of school….” I pause for reaction, but you don’t react. “He’s seriously like the smartest guy I know, and he was blogging, and now…now he got a job at a real paper.”
“You’ll have to show me his blog.”
Not possible—it doesn’t exist—and I thank my lucky stars that a computer can’t fit in your pocket.
You wiggle your toes—you want me—and I hold them in my hands—I want you—and you let out a little moan.
I passed the test. I do have a place. My place isn’t this place.
My place isn’t my place. My place just might be with you.
You sip your wine. You feel it too. You touch your hair—you’re teaching me how to touch you—and you gulp.
I like you like this. Nervous. Opening slowly, petal by petal, and then taking a deep breath as you plunge into the deep end, the place you go because I went there first.
“So, my best friend, Anjanette…she also dropped out of school.”
“Cool.”
“And like you said, well, she’s not the smartest person I know….” That’s me. “But she’s the happiest person I know.”
I rub circles on the pads of your little feet. You smile. Do you want me to kiss them?
“Joe, random question, but did you ever see Coyote Ugly?”
Fuck it. I can’t lie anymore. “Nope.”
“First of all, we’re watching it, stat.”
Oh, you want me. You just planned our next date.
“Deal.”
“Second, okay. It’s so good, Joe. It’s about these Jersey girls, right? And they were so us. One is a dreamer, and the other is…practical. The dreamer wants to be a songwriter, so she moves to New York, and by the end of the movie, she makes it.”
“And the best friend?”
You have sadness in you, and that’s why you wear those plaid tights, that awful cape. “Well, she’s just happy to have her little home. And it’s like…it’s enough for her to have this small little life, you know? She’s not like trying to be things. She just is, you know?”
I hold your feet. You know that I know. You trust me.
“So, I fly home a few months back. Anj and I go see Coyote Ugly, and after the movie, we’re like…weird. We can’t decide where to eat and it’s odd. Best friends, but we’re like aliens. We go to Chili’s and it’s…I mean, it’s not like Carrie and the girls, you know?”
No, I don’t know, but at the same time I do. “Weird.”
“Yes. Weird is it. We get our grub, and we talk about the movie, and she’s like, ‘Gundylocks, slow your roll.’ ”
“Huh?”
“Oh, it’s a nickname, only back home.” The way you look down hurts, like this whole other part of you is inaccessible, tucked into your family’s cookie-cutter hearth, steaming in a kettle I can’t touch. “Anyway,” you go on. “She says she’s worried about me living in the city.”
“Why?”
You’re pouring more wine, and I will kill Angus Kaplan—I won’t kill him—but I would if it meant we could live in the sinking living room, if I knew we could talk like this every night.
“Well, Joe, come on. She was right. She said I’m not like the girl in the movie.
I don’t have a dream. A purpose. A passion.
And it hurt, you know? ’Cause Anj…she has her purpose, she’s settled…
and…She didn’t want to hear about my ‘crazy’ life, and I didn’t want to hear about her curtains.
It’s not a tragedy, but…Do you know those books… Amelia Bedelia?”
I know all the books and I remember the first date, the list I made for conversation starters. We are doing it before we do it and show me another guy who could say what I say right now. “Amelia Bedelia does everything wrong.”
You laugh like you could love me—the sinking living room is rising—and I can’t squeeze your little feet hard enough.
I want to put them in my mouth, tights and all.
And then your laughter fades. I let go of your feet.
I love you. I love you! I love that you’re rubbing your eyes and drinking your wine and showing me your sad side.
Your Miss Lonely loneliness. You loved your best friend, and you lost her.
I never had one, Vail. But I get it.
“You know why I love going to the movies, Joe? Because you go into the dark with someone. You leave your lives and you go into this world together, and sometimes, in the dark, you see what you don’t want, and that’s the risk, right?
If we’d seen anything besides Coyote Ugly that day, we might still be friends. It’s like you too….”
I pet your feet. Serendipitous little feet. “Yes, Sitcom.”
You pull at your skirt. “Actually, baby, can we not do that anymore? Sitcom…Cusack…I know I don’t look like Kate Beckinsale—”
“You’re prettier.”
You laugh, and it’s good—I am sick of those stupid nicknames—and your petals are wilting, dropping like sweet flies.
Your lips come together, and you lick them, and I swear I can feel your tight, scared heart starting to pound.
“See,” you say. “When you and I went to the movies…I forgot about how the power can be a good thing. We were so awkward at the start, and by the end of act one, it was like, oh, I like this guy. He’s good. ”
This is the reason lovebirds need a nest. A sofa.
Quiet. You’re relaxed in a way that you can’t be in a coffee shop or a bookstore.
You forgot about how nice it is to just sit around listening to music, and the petals are opening quickly now, one after another, after another.
You bite your lips, but there is something going on inside of you.
Something scary, something sad. I don’t have a dream.
A purpose. A passion. You close your eyes.
I squeeze your feet. You open your eyes.
“It’s like this, Vail. Of course you don’t have a dream. You’re working your ass off. You can’t sleep because you’re on call for this douchebag who doesn’t respect you.”
“I know.”
“Don’t sweat dreams, Vail. Most people are lying when they tell you about their dreams, and the thing is, and seriously…
You dream when you’re in deep sleep. You’re not dreaming right now but…
Since we met I’m, I’m dreaming a little bit more.
And maybe telling you that will, you know… You deserve to dream too.”
No more footsies and no more nicknames. You mount me. Legs and arms. Lace and skin. You do have a passion—your hands clinging to my hair, tugging—and you do have purpose—Miss Tongue wants Mr. Tongue—and you do have a dream.
You purr. “Come to Mama, baby. Come.”
You are Mama, and Portnoy comes alive. Your hands are on the move, all ten thousand of your perfect milk bone fingers. Happy Portnoy. Hungry Portnoy.
“So much hair, baby…so thick.”
Me? Is that good? Bad? Fuck it. On we go.
Miss Tongue broadsides Mr. Tongue in the deep blue sea, and I’m learning the way of you.
Slow and then fast. Fast and then slow. You’re the elder, and it feels good, the way you steer my hands.
Oh, baby. Oh, Joe. You grab my biceps and run a hand down my chest—I need a better sweater—and I could live like this, with you, read you all day, all night.
That first day in the theater. I’m a visual person.
Me too, and my eyes are open. I see you, Vail. I see you.
I pull your shirt over your head, and it’s allowed. I know it because you pull my sweater off and run your hands over my chest, and then you…Wait. Did you just giggle?
The CD doesn’t skip, but it does. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing, baby. I just love how you are. Soft and…soft and snuggly.”
SOFT IS THE OPPOSITE OF HARD.
“Oh.”
“Aw, no. See, it’s a good thing, baby. It means you’re not a narcissist gym rat….”
Soft is for girls, and Portnoy isn’t soft. Is he?
You grab onto my hair. Another giggle. Is there laughing in sex? Is there crying in baseball? “Baby,” you say, “just promise me you won’t get a haircut or go crazy at the gym. You’re so pure, the Frampton on repeat and the ‘let’s just listen to music’…it’s all so seventies.”
I ask if that’s a good thing, and you tell me to learn how to take a compliment. I kiss you—no more talking, no more words—and your hand finds my Portnoy, and he wants out of the pants. I reach for your waistband. You whisper in my ear. “Mmm…You first, baby.”
You put a hand on my zipper. Zipper down. Watership Down. Portnoy up. Hard. You say it again. “Come to Mama.”
Gently, Joseph. I can’t rush this. You’re a romantic.
The anti-Cynthia. Sex matters to you. Love.
We never saw Cusack and Beckinsale do the nasty in Serendipity, and Tom Hanks doesn’t stick it to Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail, not even in the end, in the park, and then you go still. Still as a fucking stop sign.
I’m unzipped. I’m in your hands. I look at you. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I just…I’ve just never seen one like this, I mean, not in person….”
WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY DICK?
“Sorry,” you say. “It’s exciting…. I can’t believe this.”
WHAT IS WRONG WITH MY PORTNOY?
“Oh.”
“It’s just…it’s so rare to see one in the States. I mean…you’re uncut.”
I’m not un-anything. I’m natural. “Yeah.”
“You don’t see that a lot…not that I see a lot. And we did an episode about this.”
Great. You made fun of my dick on national fucking television for girls. “Oh.”
“Was your mom…Is she a hippie or something?”
You study me like a book, like suddenly you read dicks.
I bet Tom Hanks is cut. I bet his mother was all over that shit and I don’t want Alma Goldberg in my head, but she’s there, lurking.
I can’t introduce you. I won’t introduce you.
It’s my dick and the Mister Softee truck is ringing the bell, gunning for my Portnoy.
You think you want my stories, but you wouldn’t want my stories if you knew my stories are all laced with salmonella and I’m losing it. Us. You.
But then my chin is in your hand. “Baby,” you say. “Relax. Tell me what you want.”
Anything. Everything.
And then we’re back. I want what you want.
Portnoy wants to run, yawp, and jump out of his foreskin and slide into your Moleskine.
Down, boy. But now your hands are faster and wait…
Do you want it to end now…like this? I haven’t touched your Beckinsale, and you order me to come, come for Mama, baby.
No. That’s not how it works. Not in the pornos or the poems. There are rules about this.
Mama don’t take my Kodachrome until I give you your greens of summer, and no cookies for me without cookies for you.
I throw you onto your back. You squeal. You like it.
I grab onto the waist of your tights. You wince. “Um, I sort of have my period.”
A crackhead won’t notice a little blood, and neither will I. “I don’t care.”
“That too is very seventies, baby, but…Wait.”
Uh-oh. Is it my dick? Me? You sit up. “Did you, like…Did you invite friends over?”
You pull your shirt over your head, and you reach for a boot, and I hear it now. The elevator. I tell you I’m sorry, and you laugh. “It’s fine, Cusack. All good. Totally!”
But I’m not laughing and I’m not Cusack.
We got past that, I am baby, I am Joe, and you’re regressing and the elevator is rising.
Our love nest is collapsing, the living room isn’t sinking, it’s in free fall like my fucking Portnoy.
Our first date flashes in my mind, the way they say your life does right before you die.
Houston and Mercer. Philip Roth and Mr. Tongue.
And now it’s over. He’s coming, not me, not you. Him. Angus Fucking Kaplan.
I rub my forehead, and you kick me like we’re buddies, like I’m some random guy you hooked up with.
You say it will be nice to meet my friend—HE’S NOT MY FRIEND—and you pull lipstick out of your bag and rub it on your mouth like I might just be the way you meet some other guy, some better guy with HBO and a common American cock.
The elevator groans, and I just fucking say it. “We should have gone to Serendipity.”