Earth Angel (25 page)

“I’m coming to the intersection. Which way do I turn?”

“I told you, it’s just a question.”

“No, I’m not being metaphysical. I have to turn up at the traffic light. Left if we’re going to your motel, right if we’re
going to my house.” He looked over at me. “Or do I have to answer your question first?”

“Left,” I said. “For the sake of your bladder.”

He pulled into the left turning lane, caught the green arrow, and sailed through the intersection. “I don’t know what I’d
do. There’s a tribe in the South Pacific that I visited once, just for a few days back when I was in college. They have an
inordinate number of hermaphrodites among them. No one knows why, whether it’s genetic or environmental or both. In this country
when someone’s born that way, we make a choice and surgically alter them. But there they do nothing. Dozens of these people
have breasts and penises and balls and vaginas. I was about twenty when I first saw them. It confused the hell out of me.
Some decided they were women and walked around with long hair and bare breasts. Sometimes I’d be attracted to one and get
all weirded out.” He sighed. “I mean, she looked just like a woman, had breasts and a vagina like a woman, but also had a
penis dangling between her/his legs. Too complex for me.”

“Like being in a frozen yogurt store with too many flavors?”

“Huh?”

“With a hermaphrodite there’s too many choices. The old existential dilemma.”

He looked over at me. “Now
you’re
starting to weird me out.”

I smiled and reached over and placed my hand over his as it rested on the side of his seat. His thumb reached up and stroked
my skin.

“So,” he said, “when we get to your motel, and after I’ve emptied my bladder, are we going to have sex?”

I laughed. “Aren’t you the romantic one.”

“I wasn’t asking to be forward, just practical. I didn’t leave the house expecting to have sex, so I didn’t bring any birth
control. Should we stop and get something?”

I thought about it. Sex with David. I shrugged to myself. Why not? It did fit in with my grand plan of insinuating myself
more deeply into his life so he would accept my gifts. Perhaps I could use this opportunity to quiz him on water heater capacities
and copper piping. Pillow talk. I also had to admit the idea appealed to me on a personal level; I wanted to have sex with
him and feel myself burn the way I had the other night in Mexico. That night in the van—my knees scraping against the floorboards,
my hip bones slamming into the torn leather seat, my buttocks dripping sweat—I had been without doubt and guilt, if only for
a few seconds. But shouldn’t I ignore that level and keep focused on my goal, my mission. After all, I hadn’t exactly accomplished
anything yet. A few phone calls to water heater companies. Some dollar amounts scribbled on the back of the phone book. I
still hadn’t contacted the Jewish summer camp or shopped for Tim’s car. Maybe I’d been stalling, waiting for this moment.
Was having sex with David part of my plan or just a selfish indulgence?

“Sure,” I said. “We could do that. Have sex.”

“Okay. I’ll stop for something.”

I’d thrown my diaphragm out after Tim’s death, some gesture of loyalty. Apparently an empty gesture. “There’s a grocery store
up there.” I pointed half a block on the left.

He pulled into the parking lot and shut off the engine. “Want me to get it?”

His discretion was touching, but a little paternal. “Get what, exactly?”

“I don’t know. Condoms, sponges, foam. What’s your preference?”

“What did you and Annie use?”

He looked at me a little hurt. “Look, Grace, I’m not trying to nail as many women as I can in one weekend. Is that what you
think?”

“No. I was just curious, from a medical standpoint. If you used nothing, then she’s probably on the pill and neither of you
has any communicable diseases. You’re both too responsible to risk hurting the other, or the children. So, I’m sure I don’t
have to worry about AIDS or gonorrhea or anything like that. And I’m clear of diseases, so you don’t have to worry. We just
have to concentrate on the birth control aspect.”

He shook his head. “Have two people ever been more clinical about having sex?”

“Gee, we’ll always have the van, Rick.”

“Is this the start of a beautiful friendship, Louie?”

I shrugged. “We’ll see.”

We walked into the grocery store, went down the cat food aisle, which made me miss Blue and how she drank the water from my
bedside glass every night, shoving her head into the glass so far I sometimes had to pull it out. We came to a little section
of condoms that was displayed exactly like the pet toys. There was a divider, on the other side of which were the “feminine
needs,” which included sponges and spermicidal foam.

“You have a preference?” he asked.

“Is this a test from some men’s magazine? I pick condoms, then I’m a cold bitch. I pick sponges or foam, then I’m warm and
loving. I offer to just go bareback and they put my face on beer cans. Something like that?”

“Wow, uncanny how well you know us. All our little tricks, our pathetic ploys. I feel so naked now in front of your wisdom.”
He reached over and plucked a box of
sponges from the shelf. “This okay? And, by the way, Annie and I had oral sex. She prefers it. Anything else you need to know?”

When we pulled into the motel, the old guy came out of the manager’s office with a bag of yellow raisins. “Want to feed Gus?”
he asked us.

I couldn’t help myself, I looked up into the tree. It was a huge canopy of dense foliage, completely blocking out the sky.
I thought I saw some leaves rustle, but then I saw some others rustle on the other side of the tree and I realized it was
just an ocean breeze stumbling through the branches. I looked at David, who was also staring up into the tree, shading his
eyes with one hand.

“What’ve you got up there, a blue jay? Looks like maybe a finch?”

The old man laughed. “You don’t know your birds too well, do you?”

“I guess I’m used to the more tropical kind.”

The old man measured out some raisins in David’s hand. “Go ahead, toss ’em on up. Gus’ll get ’em.” He offered some raisins
to me but I held up the plastic grocery bag with my contraceptive sponges in them as if my hands were already too occupied.

David tossed a raisin high into the leaves. It disappeared, never dropped back. But still no bird.

“Something, huh?” the old man said. “Likes to tease me, I’ll say that much about him.”

“He’s something.” David nodded, still looking up.

Inside my motel room I asked David, “Tell me the truth, did you really see that fucking bird?”

He laughed. “No, but something ate those raisins. You think the tree is haunted?” He opened his eyes wide and made a scary
face.

“Spooking me is not the way to get me into bed.”

“What if I tossed raisins at you?” He walked into the
bathroom and closed the door. I heard the toilet lid clunk up.

When he came out he saw the guitar and open music book. “Hey, you play guitar. Cool.” He picked up the guitar, looked at the
chords for “Kodachrome,” strummed through them as he read, then reared back and started playing the song like a professional.
He never looked at the book again, finger picking, strumming, adding little flourishes. He sang two verses, his voice sturdy
but resonant, like James Taylor. It made me want to smash the guitar. I knew then I would never attempt the song again, not
being able to bear my own slow methodical clumsiness.

He finished with a dramatic strum and set the guitar down. “Well, enough foreplay, let’s get to the sex part.”

I didn’t say anything, but I could tell from the sudden seriousness of his expression I must have had one hell of a look on
my face. “Hey, I was just kidding. I thought that’s what we did, kidded back and forth like teenage morons. Are you changing
the rules?”

I started unbuttoning my denim blouse. “No rules.”

David limped over to me, brushed my fingers away from the buttons. He began unbuttoning my blouse, looking at me in the eyes.
I could feel each plastic button thumbed through the button hole, the halves of my blouse falling away from each other like
stage curtains, the cool refrigerated air of the motel room crashing into my skin as the blouse fell open another inch. Never
had unbuttoning taken so long, never had unbuttoning made me this excited.

“Somehow we’ve fallen into this pattern, this rhythm,” he said. His voice was low, almost a whisper, as if we were in a movie
theater. “We talk at each other as if we were auditioning for
David Letterman
. Pow, pow, zing. Usually I like it. It’s fun. But right now I actually feel very… uh…” He shrugged. “Very something. Very
nice. Very
tender toward you. So, I’d like to see if we can pretend we’re just a couple of middle-class yokels who rarely meet somebody
really worth pursuing and when we do we want to be very, very careful not to blow it. Can we try that?”

I thought it over, then said, “Too kinky.”

He smiled and shook his head. “Well, it was worth a try.”

He leaned over and kissed me, his hands slipping into my open blouse and around my sides, up my back, his warm palms flat
against skin. My arms circled his shoulders. Our lips twisted against each other, tongues slow and lazy. I tasted the sweet
pickle from the egg salad sandwiches the psychic had made for us. With potato chips on the side, just like the school cafeteria
where she worked. We’d sat at her kitchen table while she absently shuffled tarot cards and told us how her egg salad recipe
was handed down from her grandmother who’d worked the soup kitchens during the Great Depression. “Many a poor hobo had been
cheered by Nanna’s egg salad,” she’d told us. She’d wanted to make the same recipe for the kids at the elementary school where
she worked, but all recipes had to be cleared through some nutritionist in Sacramento. “That’s a laugh,” she’d said, actually
laughing, “considering the crap we feed those poor kids.” While I was kissing David, tasting her pickle-rich egg salad, I
suddenly pictured her working in the cafeteria, her giant breasts and stomach tarped in a white apron, her permed bleached-blond
hair clamped under a hair net, the steam from giant pots making her sweat, melting her makeup. I couldn’t shake the image.
Perhaps I was psychic, too.

My vision of Mrs. Hudson vanished when I felt David’s hand plunge down the back of my jeans, into my underpants, his fingers
cupping my buttocks, first one side, then the other. His other hand quickly unbuttoned and unzipped the front of my jeans.
They slid over my hips and gathered around my thighs. One quick push and he also
had my underpants cuffing my thighs. I couldn’t move. What if there was a fire?

While we continued kissing, his hands explored my body. One hand felt each breast, brushing against each nipple, which were
so hard they actually hurt. The other hand curved down around my ass and between my legs until it found my vagina. He teased
around the edges, dipping in and out in a way that made my legs wobble. Then he removed his hand, dragging his wet fingers
across my skin, leaving a cool trail.

He eased me back onto the bed, pulled off my running shoes, pants, and underwear. Somehow my blouse had come off while we’d
been kissing, though I hadn’t noticed. I lay naked on the bed, while he stood fully clothed over me, looking at my body.

“Well,” I said, “are you posing for the cover of a romance novel?”

He smiled and started undressing. I quickly scooted up the bed and climbed under the covers. I was kind of embarrassed by
my nakedness. The other night in Mexico had been a different me. Plus, we’d been in a dark van, in a foreign country. Here
enough daylight filtered into the room to expose all my flaws. I was still pretty skinny and my skin had become nearly translucent.
I had an irrational fear that he’d be able to see right through me, observe my organs and skeleton. And my pubic hairs were
still blond, while the hair on my head was black. Even though he knew about that, it still looked funny. It’s not just the
taste of the food, my mother used to say, arranging danish in complex designs in the deli showcase, it’s the presentation.
She’d said the same thing while helping me get dressed for the prom. So, I decided to keep my danish covered.

I watched him undress. His body was toned without being bulky. He was a mesomorph body-type, strong-boned and well built.
In the forties, psychological studies were done linking body types with personality traits. The
mesomorph was considered to be physically strong, athletic, adventurous, and aggressive.

When he got into bed next to me, I reached down and felt his penis. A mesomorph penis, hard and thick, like the banister I’d
cracked my forehead against tumbling down his stairs. I cupped his scrotum and he moaned. This is pretty much the same technique
I’d used with Daryl, but I didn’t really have a lot of different arrows in my quiver. I did about three things well during
sex; testicle fondling was one of them. He started to roll toward me to kiss me, but I sat up and leaned over his penis. I
lowered my head and took it in my mouth. I thought of Annie, who had been doing the same thing to the same banister only a
few hours ago. Had he showered since then or was I tasting Annie’s saliva? Was David thinking of me right now, or her? Did
she do this better than I? Well, even if she did, at least if I wanted I could check his prostate while I was at it, she couldn’t.

I slid my mouth up and down. I started going faster. I looked at his face out of the corner of my eye. His eyes were closed,
his mouth pulled into a cute little grimace.
Blowjob
was a funny phrase, I thought. As if it was assumed to be hard work, a job, not pleasure, for the woman. It turned a woman
into a sort of car mechanic for the man, doing grimy jobs just to keep his engine running: “Can’t stop to chat, gotta clean
those valves.
Handjob
should do it, but it could turn nasty, which would force me into a
blowjob
. Could run into overtime.”

Such thoughts. I tried to force them from my head. Maybe it was those kinds of thoughts that caused me to lose my rhythm sometimes
with Tim. I’d be bobbing along, thinking everything was going great, feel Tim’s body tensing, ready to explode. Then he’d
relax. Nothing. “Lost the rhythm,” he’d say. Sometimes I’d try again, sometimes we’d just do it the conventional way. How
does one get that rhythm? Or are you just born with it.