King Dork (29 page)

She grabbed my wrist to look at my watch, and I thought

she was going to go all Dr. Hexstrom on me and say “I’m

sorry but our time is up,” but then she suddenly turned

around and straddled me and after shooting me an unread-

able look leaned in and started to lick my lips. I was, again, taken aback, but I knew what to do. Or I thought I did. This time, the kissing part was going much better, but when I

reached beneath her blouse and located her left breast just under the front of her bra and started to squeeze it Fiona style with my nails against my palm, so it went nails–upper nipple–bra-palm, she squirmed, and not in a good way. And

when I tried it again, she twisted away a bit, and I paused and made a note to self: not all girls like the nipple thing. Check.

She hadn’t been too fazed, though, and she continued the

kissing, which was a lot sloppier and—what? Wild? Yeah, wet and wild. Sloppier, wetter and wilder than it had been with Fiona, anyway. I hadn’t known there were so many variations.

So my right hand had been rebuffed, but I reached up

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with the left and placed it neutrally yet with reverence on the other breast, which felt very nice. See, I figured I’d let the right one cool off for a while. I moved my rebuffed hand

down to her thigh and then started sliding it up toward her butt, while we were both still slobbering on each other’s

faces, her tongue ring clicking occasionally against my teeth.

Then, feeling no resistance, I slid my fingers up even farther.

I don’t even know how to describe what that felt like; there isn’t anything remotely like it to compare it to. Let’s just say it was really, really nice.

She leaned back and laughed just a bit with that open-

mouth thing she did and said, “You really know your way

around a girl.”

Now,
I
had to laugh at that, because it was so, so, so not true. Probably just more politeness. They grow ’em up sweet and well mannered in the Catholic church, I can tell you that right now.

What happened next was: she stopped kissing me, leaned

back, snatched my wrist to look at my watch, and then

looked at me. My return look said “what?” but I was prepared to be shown the door at any moment.

“I wouldn’t mind,” she said finally in a matter-of-fact

tone, “giving you some head.” Well, I guess she could tell I wouldn’t mind it all that much either, because she added,

“Why don’t you get in the bed?” And she leaned over and

pulled back the Holly Hobbie bedcover.

I scrambled back quickly, not knowing exactly how what

was going to come next would end up coming, or even

knowing what that would be with much specificity.

“With your pants on, huh?” she said. “Well, that’s different.”

Too late, I realized I had committed some horrible (devil-

head) faux pas. I quickly got rid of my shoes and slithered out of my jeans and sat there in my U.S. Army shirt and white

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BVDs leaning against Deanna Schumacher’s headboard. It

had a horse on it. I looked pretty stupid, I’m sure, and I’m not surprised that Deanna Schumacher started snickering a little bit. “You’ve got to get some boxers,” she said.

What she did then was kind of weird, or I thought it was

weird. She put her glasses on the pillow next to me, slid under the sheet, and put it over her shoulders like it was

Superman’s cape or something; and then she moved the

sheet so that it was over her head, too; and then she kind of swooped down and the official blow job part of the program began. I wasn’t really in a position to complain, but the sheet was kind of a bummer. I wanted to watch, to see what it

looked like, as I had been fantasizing about this precise scenario since time immemorial and I was pretty interested in how the reality would match up to the pretend images and

the porn. She clearly didn’t like being observed while she worked, however. She also wasn’t very into having a person’s hands on her head during this operation, even though I

couldn’t help putting them there anyway, just a bit. That

wasn’t a deal-breaking faux pas, though. I realized, with a bit of a shock, that even King Dork, the (devil-head) embodiment of the faux pas, hadn’t committed a deal-breaking faux pas the whole time. Maybe, in the end, there weren’t any

deal-breaking faux pas in this situation. I didn’t have a lot of data at my disposal, you understand.

It was great. It really was. But I was also very aware of the ticking pumpkin-meter, and it made me nervous and distracted. Yeah, that was probably it.

At one point she leaned up, the sheet around her face like a—what’s it called? Babushka, I think. But she didn’t say

“matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match.” What she

said, in a hurried whisper, was:

“We only have around ten minutes left, Tom-Tom.”

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“Okay, okay,” I said. It was nice to get the reminder,

though hearing her say it made me even more nervous.

However, I wasn’t going to let this one go. It was my big

chance. I concentrated and replayed my memory of the

episode with the real Fiona in my head, as I had done hun-

dreds of times before, and it relaxed and excited me at the same time as it always did. We were back on the right track.

And it wasn’t long before I was feeling glad all over, be-

lieve me.

Then she emerged from her little sheet fort, leaned up,

and pulled my hair back from my face so it was flat on top of my head, staring at me up close from above for what seemed like quite a while, despite the still-ticking clock. Then she said:

“My boyfriend gets off at ten, and he’s going to be here

any minute, so you’re going to have to get out of here.

Don’t”—she paused—“Don’t, um, please don’t—” I could tell

she wasn’t sure how to ask me not to tell anyone about what had just happened. It was the only time during the whole

episode where she seemed less than perfectly composed and

all-knowing.

My look said “oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not. Your se-

cret is safe with me.” But she was no slan, so I added, out loud, “Don’t worry—I won’t tell anyone. Promise.” She smiled, and then leaned over and kissed me softly and lightly on the mouth. A hefty twenty-four words and a couple of urgent

inarticulate spasms had escaped my lips during the whole affair, but I couldn’t help adding another four words in spite of myself. “You’re very pretty, Deanna.” And I meant it, too. I suddenly realized that she kind of reminded me of the

“Thinking of Suicide?” girl from the pamphlet, which really pushed my buttons. But Deanna Schumacher didn’t seem too

interested in discussing the matter any further at the moment.

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Maybe “you’re very pretty” was laying it on too thick. It’s really hard to know.

She said she was going to have to run upstairs to brush

her teeth. Straightening up the place for the next customer, I guess. “It was very nice seeing you again, Tom-Tom, after all these years,” she said, back in her well-mannered element.

“Say hello to your mother and sister for me. Maybe you

could come by again sometime. . . .”

I was very, very proud of myself.

On the way home, I was singing “Glad All Over,” “My

Baby Loves Lovin’,” and “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy,” at the

top of my lungs as I rode through the near-deserted streets.

When I did “Fox on the Run,” I tried to sing the “I” loud

enough that it would echo, “I . . . I . . . I . . . , ” just like on the record. And it kind of almost did.

TH E F O G OF DEAN NA

Believe it or not, it didn’t hit me till I woke up the next day that Deanna Schumacher was not only a confusing sex kitten I had never made out at a party with, but also the daughter of a man who had known my dad and worked with him in some capacity. In other words, he was a potential source of information about the circumstances surrounding his death. Somehow I

knew it wouldn’t be easy to engage Deanna Schumacher on

that topic—nothing was easy when it came to talking to her. But I resolved to give it a shot sometime, if I ever had the chance.

Here’s how I knew I was starting to fall for Deanna

Schumacher: I began to take time off from trying to psychoanalyze her and from replaying the mental video of our “date”

and from splashing around in a pool of self-pity and instead 223

started writing love songs about her. “I Wanna Ramone You,”

for example:

I wanna ramone you

hier
and
ici.

I wanna ramone you

là
and
aujourd’hui.

If your boyfriend’s been postponed

and if we won’t be chaperoned

and if you wanna get ramoned,

comment?
come on, come on . . .

There’s more where that came from, but it should be

enough to demonstrate: I am a Romantic Genius, and a

Dreamer.

I was still scared to call her, though. In fact, it took me a couple of days to get up the nerve even to dial Holden

Caulfield style—that is, with the intention of hanging up. Our secret date had been on Thursday, Veterans’ Day. I stalled on Friday. I took the weekend off. Then I took a deep breath on Monday and picked up the phone with steely determination.

I needn’t have bothered with the s. d., however. Her answering machine was full, and I couldn’t have left a message even if I tried. I hadn’t realized that it was possible for frustration and relief to come in the same box, but it did. Maybe her family had gone out of town for a long weekend. So who had

been leaving all those messages on her machine? That

thought drove me crazy and made me cry, though not quite

literally.

She could have gone away with her boyfriend—Tim, was

it?—instead of with her family. Or perhaps the boyfriend had 224

gone along on the family excursion. Maybe they were

riding in the backseat of the family car surreptitiously groping each other underneath a blanket. Maybe they were ra-

moning right now. I was starting to feel a little jealous of Ted, or Dan, or whoever. In fact, I thought I might be starting to hate him. But I squelched that thought. There was no future in that line of thinking. And I was impressed with my own

maturity for realizing it. The whole thing was very adult and sophisticated.

I had settled into a comfortable pattern of dialing and being informed by a robot voice that the machine was full,

which I did several times a day, causing some turmoil in the household because Amanda thought of the phone as her exclusive property. So I dropped the phone in shock when, on Thursday evening, I heard not the robot voice, but the voice of my imaginary girlfriend saying “Didi’s phone, leave a message.” I picked the phone off the floor without being able to think of anything to say, but it was too late anyway, so I had to dial again, once the dial tone came back on. Then it was busy. In its own way, this unexpectedly retarded attempt to make a phone call was like a little Hitchcock film: all suspense and delayed gratification with plot twists and multiple false endings. I waited ten minutes and dialed again, and

waited another ten minutes and dialed again, thinking that I would not be too surprised if it were answered by a mysterious German-accented voice asking me if I had the formula

and telling me to wear a red carnation and come to the

Oberausterplatz. But no. “Didi’s phone, leave a message.”

I took a deep breath. “This message is for Deanna Skoo—”

Deanna Schumacher picked up the phone, and she didn’t

mention the Oberausterplatz.

“Jerk.”

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I didn’t know what to say. Finally she said, “Hello? Hello?

Are you there?” I cleared my throat and said that I was there, and that I had been trying to call—

“Jerk,” she repeated, breaking in.

We were back where we started.

“I’ve been trying—”

“Whatever,” she broke in. “I don’t mess around with just

anyone.” Now, how I was supposed to know that was a little unclear: it seemed to me, on the evidence, that her criteria in that regard were in fact rather broad. “I’m not used to being ignored,” she said, “and, in case you’re wondering, I don’t have any trouble getting dates.”

I’m sure you don’t, I thought. It’s the phone conversation afterward that you seem to have not quite gotten the hang of.

But I doubted this was the right answer, so what I said was:

“I’ve been trying—”

“Well, I’ve been away.”

“—to call—”

“What?” It struck me that despite all the “this is she” and

“say hello to your mother” stuff, she was a lot less polite on the phone than she was when she was offering to give you an illicit blow job in the fifteen minutes before her boyfriend arrived. Did she ever let anyone finish a sentence?

“I’ve-been-trying-to-call-you-but-your-machine-has-

been-full,” I said as quickly as I could. And I almost got to

“your” before she broke in: “I’ve been away—are you deaf ?

My machine was full.” I was at a loss, and I almost hung up.

But then, her voice softened.

“I’m glad you called, Tom-Tom. I was beginning to think

you had used and forgotten me.” Now there was a teasing

tone. How many personalities did this girl have, anyway? I realized there would be no point trying to puzzle out how being unable to leave a message on someone’s answering ma-

226

chine because they have been away from home for four days

counts as ignoring them. Or why she was going all
Fatal
Attraction
on me when I was the one who was supposed to pretend I didn’t exist for the preservation of her real-life serious nonimaginary relationship. We were in boy-girl world, or we sort of were, where logic is optional. I was learning a lot.

Really, I was just glad to hear her voice, even if I had no earthly idea what the things it was saying were intended to accomplish. Or rather, I liked hearing the nice voice. The mean voice was harder to take. But she also confusingly used the nice voice to tell me that her boyfriend was a very jealous, unstable person who had rage issues and that all she