Full Frontal Fiction (19 page)

At the Albuquerque airport, they rented a Jeep. At the hotel, they checked in and threw their luggage in the room. It was late, nearly ten, and they hadn't eaten. They had dinner downstairs and crashed into bed, sleeping without touching.

In the morning, they ate bagels and drank grapefruit juice and went out to shop in the plaza. She bought a pair of silver crucible earrings with malachite orbs. At a street kiosk, they ate two burritos. They went back to the hotel and took a shower together, and she lathered his cock with soap. He put it in her, soapy, and it stung. She pulled away. They rinsed and dried off and waltzed to the bed, and he entered her from behind, her mouth over the cool pillowcase.

“Bob? You said you were tested for AIDS. But there's a six-month window. You know?” She suddenly felt as if anything she spoke about was unimportant, out of context and silly. He slumped back on the sheets and groaned.

“Have you ever had sex with a man?”

“What?” he said angrily. “Don't I seem slightly hetero to you?”

“That has nothing to do with whether or not you've had sex with a man. Have you ever used needle drugs?”

“I don't think this conversation has anything to do with me. What's the matter? I mean, this is ridiculous.”

“Why don't you answer me?”

“I'm exhausted. I could strangle you.”

He rolled over and put the pillow on top of his head. She imagined herself a mother dangling a puppet, her child the only audience, clapping at the marionette. Then the image wheeled away and she saw the back of his head and the deception and awkwardness between them. She wanted to talk, wanted to fix it, but she would wait. She lay there for another hour, thinking how he might react to her tomorrow, how he would feel and be, whether he would touch her or not. Maybe she'd be surprised.

In the morning she woke up to little fish kisses up and down her spine. He tried to roll her under him. When she would not dive, he tried to push her head down on him. At first she resisted, but she wanted to go below to take a good look at the place where a surgeon might have opened him up and sealed him. The light was dim. She couldn't reach the nightstand light, and when she tried he asked what she was doing. She took his cock in her mouth and bit it slightly. He moaned in pleasure. She bit harder. He slapped the top of her head. She pulled back and went into the bathroom. “What's wrong?” he called.

She closed the door and drew herself a cool bath and felt something just short of guilt, wished she were here alone, could walk and walk, not sense the changes in his mood and her own neediness. She decided to towel off and go out there and apologize, to ask questions, tell him more about herself, dance with him, spit on the floor—anything but this cool bath and her own volatile fears. She was eager to get out but the blood of eagerness drained, and she slid deeper into the suds.

They drove ninety miles to Angel Fire to look at land. Bob had considered buying a ten-acre parcel and building a log home on it. The land up there was just about to take off, investment-wise. While he rattled on, she could only think of her baby and the way it had fluttered in her womb. One more month and she would have felt the baby as more than butterfly wings.

Bob didn't like the realtor. He didn't like East Coast men, he'd whispered to her while the realtor answered his phone. She liked the realtor just fine. He told them how he'd cleared his own land, how he and his wife owned a nine-acre piece with a view of the ski mountain, about his recent heart attack, his grandchildren. He tried to talk Bob into a steep ten-acre plot in back of the trailer that was his office. They walked up and down the property and when the realtor asked, “How do you like it?” Bob said, “It's a dog. Why don't you show me something decent, okay?” The realtor, twisting his hands, told them, “All right, let's take a ride.”

He took them to a flat piece with a creek running through. They got out and walked up the creek to the edge of the property. Bob stood by the trickle of water (it was winter and the water wouldn't run hard until late spring, the realtor said), asking about trout and paved roads. It was there in the afternoon light that she saw it. He had put a finger up to scratch his cheek and pulled the skin forward, and the sun caught the thin white scar. When the skin came back after his fingers left his cheek, the skin-fold covered the scar. As they walked back to the car, she thought of the ways in which she was vain, and that charm was vanity, giving to get something back. She knew how to be charming, but she'd lost her will. She was real with him. Real in a puttylike way and unable to concentrate.

“What's wrong with you?” he asked quietly.

“This is the third time you've asked today,” she said.

“But what is it?”

“Well,” she said, rolling down her window. Cold afternoon air filled the Jeep and the windows crooned from the wind. Bob turned on the heat. “Well,” she said again, “did you have your teeth fixed?”

“What does that matter?”

“I saw the lines of your real teeth under the laminate, or whatever it is.”

“Is that a crime? My teeth are bad.”

“If I had a baby with you—”

“A baby? What are you—”

“—what color hair do you suppose it would have?”

“You know, we were getting along so well. This is crazy. A baby?”

“I guess it would have brown hair; I don't think it would be blond.”

“I don't think I need to apologize for that. Do I?”

“The scar on your ear. I'm hungry. Could we stop at the next fast food? I could go for a cup of coffee. Did you have a facelift? And did you have the big V?”

“The what?”

“You act pretty stupid for a smart guy. Did you?”

He veered the car to the right, to the west, where a gravel space for a scenic overlook narrowed into a dirt road that seemed to roll all the way to the horizon. The land was wavy with violet sage, the Jemez angling south, the peaks coated in glistening white.

“Have you flipped your lid?”

“Drive on, please,” she said. If she had a knife, she would hold it to his throat. She'd make him drive. She didn't want to be stuck with him here, looking out at such beauty. It would make her cry again.

He pulled onto the highway and drove with one hand, reaching over with the other to touch her hair, her cheek, the oval hollow part of her neck. At least they had sex, she thought, something that people had had since the beginning of time, naked people, people who scavenged for food and whose teeth rotted and who died from abscessed teeth. In the beginning of time when people had nothing, and the making of a fire was something, and charring meat, when the wet red body of a baby slid out of its mother's tunnel and its blanket was tree boughs or moss, there was always sex alone or with someone else, and love, or the attempt to love.

“Did you have a vasectomy?” she asked, small, cold tears running down her chin.

“Enough!” he said, hitting the steering wheel with the heel of his hand. “I think we should fly back tonight. Really.”

“You think, or we should? Did you?”

“You take everything I've ever done to try to make myself more seem like less. You try to humiliate me.”

“A vasectomy makes you more, and you think my asking the question is humiliating you?”

“Whatever I want to do with myself, that is my business. Please shut up. Let's catch an early plane and go back.”

“Everyone fakes it from time to time. You're phonier than most. Maybe that's why you're such a good fuck.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Don't act so shocked.”

They checked out and drove silently back to Albuquerque, where they caught the plane two days before their scheduled departure and flew back to the Twin Cities. He was not speaking to her, not at all, and his neck had broken out in a faint rash. The sky littered her front yard with a translucent coating of snow.

“Why don't you come in?” she said, leaning into his car window.

“Thank you, no.”

“Please. Oh please, Bob. I have something to—”

“What is it—a gun? A bullet?” He half laughed. “Because I'm scared of you. You're one scary woman.”

She opened her mouth a little but did not speak for a few seconds. He was already backing out. When she yelled, Stop, he kept going, and she ran into the street and threw down her fisted hands.

She stormed into the bathroom and took a pregnancy test. Negative, as she'd suspected. In her living room, she slid the baby video into the VCR, watched it once, then rewound and watched again, attentively, the one part: the baby's left thumb upturned, leg extending, at which point she remembered, in the doctor's office, she had felt the boy's foot graze her like a butterfly wing. She held her breath now as she had held it then, as the rounded needle tip, rounded so as not to hurt the baby should he bump against it, popped into his ellipse. She turned on the television and tapped through the channels, hunting for something to record over baby.

Music for Torching

BY A. M. HOMES

[THEIR OWN HOME damaged by a fire, Elaine and her husband, Paul, are staying with their suburban neighbors, Pat and George. It is a weekday morning; the kids are at school, the husbands left for work hours ago.]

Elaine is awake. She is embarrassed to have slept late. She lies in the bed thinking that what she has to do now is get up, get dressed, and go home. She has to fix the house, fix herself, and focus on what comes next. She has to plan for the future. Her plan is to go downstairs, have a quick cup of coffee, and then go home.

Pat is in the kitchen. She is on the phone and also ironing. “Good morning,” she whispers to Elaine.

“Morning,” Elaine says.

The coffeepot is on. Elaine pours herself a cup and leans against the counter. Pat is still in her robe. Her hair is a mess. On the table is a bowl of pineapple slices, left over from the night before—no muffins, no warm morning pastries, no fresh-baked bread. Elaine checks the clock—ten A.M. How odd. Pat in her robe, Pat serving leftovers. If Pat can't keep it together, who can?

Pat is smiling at Elaine, practically grinning. Why?

“What?” Elaine asks.

“You're so lovely,” Pat says, and Elaine isn't sure if Pat is talking to her or the person on the phone.

Elaine sits down with her coffee and begins reading the paper. In the background Pat is ordering lamb. “Page forty-three. Could I have three racks and then one leg?”

Elaine had never heard of anyone having meat mailed to them.

“Over the phone. Door to door. Hardware, underwear, shoes, food, everything,” Pat says as she's hanging up. “It saves me so much time.” Pat sprays starch on the last of the shirts and digs in, wrestling the wrinkles.

“I slept late,” Elaine says sheepishly.

“Every day isn't perfect,” Pat says. “Some days start strangely.”

Is that why she's still in her robe? As Elaine reaches across the table for the sugar, the coffee sloshes, it splashes onto Elaine's clean white shirt. “Shit,” she says, jumping up, running to the sink, blotting it with a kitchen sponge.

“Take it off,” Pat says.

“I'm not dressed,” Elaine says, pulling the stained fabric away from her skin—she's braless.

Pat takes something out from under the sink, squirts it directly onto the shirt, and rubs thoroughly with her bare hand. The spot disappears. “Will you let me iron it?” Pat asks.

Elaine hesitantly unbuttons the shirt and slips it off.

Pat moves to the ironing board to press the blouse dry. Steam rises from under the iron. Goose bumps come up on Elaine's skin. She crosses her arms over her chest.

Pat holds the shirt open for Elaine, like a bullfighter's cape.
Toro.

“Thanks,” Elaine says, sliding her arm in.

There's something delicious about the shirt, crisp, bright white against her skin. The cotton is hot on the spot where the coffee spilled, the place where Pat worked it. Hot against cold, Elaine closes her eyes and lets the warmth soak in. “Thanks,” she says again.

Pat is moving in a slow circle around Elaine, lifting Elaine's hair out from inside the neck of the blouse.

Something brushes against Elaine's neck. What? What was that? A prickly triangle. Elaine turns toward it, turning toward the trouble, wanting to see what's what. It's Pat. Pat kissing her. Pat kisses her again. Pat kisses her on the lips. “Ummmm, ummm,” Pat murmurs.

A whirl, a dizzying spin.

The purple press of Pat's lips is insistent and sure. Pat is kissing her, and Elaine isn't sure why. She pulls back and looks at Pat. Pat's eyes are closed, her face a dissolve coming at Elaine again. Elaine turns slightly to the side, avoiding her. The kiss lands on Elaine's cheek. Pat's eyes blink open—baffled. Something. Guilt. Confusion. Elaine can't think, can't see, can't breathe, but she doesn't want to give Pat the wrong idea, she doesn't want to say no, she doesn't want Pat to be hurt. Elaine kisses Pat.

The kiss, unbearably fragile, a spike of sensation, shoulders the frame. Everything Elaine thinks about who she is, what she is, is irrelevant. There are no words, only sensation, smooth sensation. Tender, like the tickling lick of a kitten. Elaine feels powerless, suddenly stoned. Pat is kissing her. She is kissing Pat. They are standing in the middle of the kitchen, giving and getting every kiss they've ever gotten or given; kissing from memory. Kissing: fast, hard, deep, frantic, long and slow. They are tasting the lips, the mouth, the tongue. Elaine puts her hands to Pat's face, the softness of Pat's skin; the absence of the rough scruff and scratch of a stale shave is so unfamiliar as to seem impossible. Pat rubs her face against Elaine's—sweeping the cheek, the high, light bones, muzzling the ear, the narrow line of the eyebrow, finishing with a butterfly flick of the lashes.

Elaine's mind struggles to make sense, to find familiar coordinates—it spins uselessly.

Pat reaches for Elaine's hand. “Come,” she says.

“Where are you taking me?” Elaine asks in an airless voice.

“Bedroom.”

“No,” Elaine says, fast, firm. Bed, that's breaking a rule—a rule she didn't know she had. It is like being a teenager again. There are things you will and won't do. Bed is too much. Pat and George's bed, their twins' twin beds—no. Bed is out of the question. So far it is a kiss, just a kiss, nothing truly unforgivable. “No,” she says again.

“Am I frightening you?” Pat asks, coming in close, whispering the question right into Elaine's mouth. Kissing. “Am I?” Pat's hand is on Elaine's shirt, on the buttons.

Elaine, not wanting to offend, breathes, “No,” even though she is terrified.

Pat undoes the buttons. It feels amazingly good. Pat is unbuttoning the blouse, brushing her lips against Elaine's neck, her clavicle, going lower.

Elaine fixates on the blouse, holding it against her body, worrying it will get wrinkled.

“Don't worry,” Pat says, pulling the blouse away. “I'll iron it. I promise, I'll iron it again when we're done.”

The shirt falls to the floor.

Elaine bends to pick it up. She stops to drape it over the back of a chair.

It's fine, Elaine tells herself, if it's only a kiss. Fine as long as the clothing is on, fine if only her shirt is off, fine if...She's making rules and instantly breaking them.

Pat is at her breast. A noise escapes Elaine, an embarrassingly deep sigh—like air rushing out of something. Elaine can't believe that she's letting this happen; she's not stopping it, she's not screaming, she's enjoying it. Pat is kissing Elaine's belly, tonguing the cesarean scar that no one ever touches. Elaine reaches for Pat—there's an incredible strangeness when they touch simultaneously. Elaine can't tell who is who, what is what—Marcel Marceau, a mirror game, each miming the other. Phenomenal confusion. Elaine touches Pat's breast, pressing. Her knees buckle, she collapses to the floor. Pat goes with her.

They are in the kitchen, down on the linoleum floor. It is fine, Elaine tells herself, fine as long as Pat is dressed, fine as long as Elaine keeps what's left of her clothes on.

“Is this all right?” Pat asks.

“Nice,” Elaine manages to say.

Luscious. Delicious. Pat is smooth and buttery, not like Paul, not a mass of fur, a jumble of abrasion from beard to prick. Pat is soft, enveloping.

Elaine is thinking that it'll stop in a minute, it won't really happen, it won't go too far. It's just two women exploring. She remembers reading about consciousness-raising groups, women sitting in circles on living-room floors, looking at their cervixes like little boys in circle jerks, women taking possession of their bodies. Only this is far more personal—Pat is taking possession of Elaine.

Pat is pulling Elaine's pants off. Elaine is lifting her hip, her khakis are tossed off under the kitchen table. Pat is still in her robe. Elaine reaches for the belt, half thinking she will use it to pull herself up, she will lift herself up and out of this. The robe opens, exposing Pat.

Pat spreads herself out over Elaine, skin to skin, breast to breast. Pat against her, not ripe, repulsive. She almost screams—it's like a living thing—tongue and teeth.

And Pat is on top, grinding against Elaine, humping her in a strangely prickless pose. Fucking that's all friction.

She reaches her hand under Elaine's ass to get a better grip. Crumbs. There are crumbs stuck to Elaine's ass. Horrified, Pat twists around and begins licking them off, sucking the crumbs from Elaine, from the floor, and swallowing them like a human vacuum cleaner. “I sweep,” she says, wiping dust off her mouth. “I sweep every day. I'm sweeping all the time.”

“It's all right,” Elaine says. “It's fine.”

Fine if it's only on the outside, fine if it's just a hand. Fine if it's fingers and not a tongue, and then fine if it is a tongue. Fine if it's just that, and then it's fine. It's all fine.

They are two full-grown women, mothers, going at each other on the kitchen floor. A thick, musky scent rises, a sexual stew.

Pat reaches up. Pulling a pot holder shaped like a bright red lobster off the counter, tucking it under Elaine's head—from above Elaine looks as if she has claw-shaped devils' horns sticking out of her head. “That's better,” Pat says.

“Thank you,” Elaine says. “I was starting to get a headache.”

“Mmmm,” Pat says, spinning her tongue in circles.

“Mmmm,” Elaine echoes involuntarily.

Pat's fingers curl between Elaine's legs, slipping in.

“Aooww,” Elaine says, combining “Ah” and “Ow,” pain and pleasure. It takes a minute to figure out what hurts. “Your ring,” Elaine pants.

The high diamond mount of Pat's engagement ring is scraping her. Pat pulls off the ring, it skitters across the floor, and she slips her hand back into Elaine, finding the spot. She slips in and out more quickly, more vigorously.

Elaine comes in cacophonous convulsions, great guttural exaltations. She's filled with a flooding sensation, as though a seal has broken; her womb, in seizures, squeezes as though expelling Elaine herself.

And just as she thinks it's over, as she starts to relax, Pat's mouth slides south, and Elaine is flash-frozen at the summit of sensation, her body stun-gunned by the flick of Pat's tongue. She lies splayed out on the linoleum, comparing Pat to Paul: Paul goes down on her because he saw it in a porno movie, because he thinks it's the cool thing to do. Paul goes down on her like he's really eating her, like she's a Big Mac and he's got to get his mouth around the whole burger in one big bite.

Elaine is concentrating, trying to figure out exactly what Pat is doing. Every lick, every flick causes an electric surge, a tiny sharp shock, to flash through her body.

She is seeing flashes of light, fleeting images. It's as though she's losing consciousness, losing her mind, dying. She can't bear any more—it's too much. She pushes Pat away.

“Stop,” she says, closing her legs. “It's enough.”

Pat lies next to her. Pat kisses her. Elaine tastes herself on Pat's lips, a tart tang, surprisingly slick, a lip-gloss lubricant. Their mouths move over each other, hungry.

They begin again.

She owes Pat something.

Elaine's hand moves down, over the rolling hill of Pat's belly, the slow arch of her pelvis. The absence of balls, of the ropy, rock-hard root, is strange, simultaneously familiar and un-. Elaine rubs Pat, working fast and furtively in the swampy heat, doing what needs to be done, not lingering. Pat fills with blood, becoming thick, fibrous, seeming to swell, to tighten on Elaine's hand. Out of character and undignified, Pat writhes athletically, enthusiastically, on the floor. She comes with a long, low moan.

They are finished.

Elaine looks around the kitchen—at the cabinets, the counters, noticing that the coffeemaker is still on and that they kicked the kitchen table, knocking some of the sections of the newspaper to the floor. Her thigh is stuck to the linoleum; she peels it up; it makes a thick sucking sound. She is naked on the kitchen floor with a pot holder tucked under her head as if she's had some strange household accident. Her underwear is across the room, by the refrigerator; her khakis are under the kitchen table; her blouse, draped over the chair. She is doused in the queer perfume of sex, drowsy—as though awakened from a dream before it ended.

“You're a treat,” Pat says. “A delicacy. I never get to kiss. George doesn't like it.”

Elaine is crawling around on all fours, rounding up her clothing, wondering, What do you do now? How do you bring yourself to standing? How do you get up, get dressed and move along?

“How about a bath, a long, hot bath?” Pat asks.

Elaine pulls on her underwear and looks at the kitchen clock. “I can't,” she says. “Look at the time; it's eleven-thirty. Aren't you worried about having gotten off schedule?”

Pat shrugs. She finds her ring on the floor and puts it in her mouth, sucking it to clean it.

Elaine is dressing as fast as she possibly can. She can't believe what she's done: Okay, so Pat kissed her—George doesn't like to kiss, and Pat needed a kiss, but what about the rest—did it really happen? Has Pat done this before? Does Pat think it was all Elaine's fault? And why is Elaine thinking fault? Why is she blaming herself? Pure panic.

“Are you all right?” Pat asks.

“It's fine,” Elaine says, hurrying.

Elaine needs to be in her car going home, she needs to be someplace familiar and safe, she needs a few minutes alone. She is suffering the strange anxiety of having risen so far up and out of herself as to seem entirely untethered. She's scared herself—as though this has never been done before, as though she and Pat invented it right there on the kitchen floor. She wonders if she's suffered some odd injury—did she hurt herself? Did Pat scrape her? Will she get an infection? Will she have to tell someone—explain it? She fumbles frantically with the buttons on her blouse.