Lifted by the Great Nothing: A Novel (18 page)

He’d thought about his stupid fantasy of Nadine and him as a couple. Seventeen-year-old boys and thirty-year-old women who got together were trashy people, the kind of people who yelled at the camera on early-evening local news stations, drank themselves dumb, smashed plates, and kicked dogs. They didn’t know about Zora Neale Hurston and Oscar Peterson; they didn’t talk about the Absurd or their fear of death or make fusions of French cream sauces with duchess potatoes and African fufu. They were not kind and soft with each other while also being sophisticated, confiding and articulating their deepest thoughts. High school kids and thirty-year-old women who got together were loud and lewd and stained.

She put a cucumbered hand on his cheek to turn his face toward her. He dropped his peeler in the sink. With the other hand she took his and placed it on her hip. She stepped into him, their waists connected. His heart drummed louder.

She said, “Max?” and then pulled his neck down to kiss him. A deep kiss that lasted a long time before their mouths opened and their tongues crossed over. She drew back to check what all this had done to him, and laughed a little out of her nose. She said, “Is this a really bad idea?”

“No,” said Max. He brought his mouth down to hers again, but she pinched his jaw in her hand to stop him. She studied his face for a second before lowering him down, and slowly licked his closed mouth from left to right. She said, “We can enjoy each other like this. No big deal, right?”

He couldn’t believe it. “Right. No big deal.”

She took her shirt off, her breasts swelling out her bra, and told him to touch her, and to put his mouth on her nipples over the bra. To graze his teeth over them. Then to rub her up and down with his hand over her shorts. She ordered him to unzip and pull everything down to her ankles. She asked if he wanted her and how long had he wanted her. Speechless, as he stood back up from the floor, smelling the sweetness between her legs, he nodded yes.

She guided his hands to her ass and squeezed with him. Shook it a little. Laughed. Removing her hands, she told him to do it again, without her help. Her gorgeous ass in his hands. She jumped up on the edge of the sink, let her shorts and underwear drop off her ankles, and parted her legs to both sides of him. She said, “Take it out. I want to see it.”

The heat from her vagina made his penis grow long, downward at first and then filling upward. His quick trembling breaths made it sound as if he were lifting something heavy. The moment his erection rose enough to scrape its head against her
tight, shiny curls, it started losing all power, drooping.
Please, no.
It slunk inward until all that remained was the tip and an obscene rumple of foreskin. He’d dreamed of this moment for years, and now he shrank in terror.

“You okay?” she said. She reached between her legs and cupped his balls as if she were holding a baby chick. With her other hand, she tweezed the head between her fingertips and stretched it out of its hole. She brushed it up and down her pubic hair a couple times, trying to reawaken him.

He wanted to scream that this was not his penis. He had never seen this penis before in his life. His did not behave this way. He wanted to flick and squeeze and yank this dick until it became his again. But he didn’t dare touch it. Masturbating the emasculated rubbery thing in front of her was more than he could handle.

“It feels so good,” he said, his genitals cold and numb.

She looked over her shoulder and said, “The neighbors might see.” She hopped down, and put on her shorts and found her shirt.

He pulled up his pants. “I’m so sorry,” he said.

“I’m the sorry one. Look at me. I’m nearly old enough to be your mother. Have I lost my mind?”

“No.”

She put a palm to her forehead. “I’m feeling a little pathetic here.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Thanks.”

“No, I mean because of me, not because of you. Really.”

She pursed her lips. He felt he was supposed to leave now.

“Don’t feel pathetic,” he said. “Please don’t say you feel pathetic.”

She looked out the window for a long time. “When I love a friend, I want to get as close to him or her as I can. A minute
ago, touching you felt like an innocent way to do that. It seemed light and easy, and now it feels so irresponsible and heavy.” She shook her head. “I cannot believe I did that.” She wouldn’t look at him. “Max, if you stand there much longer, I’m going to get truly embarrassed.”

She walked him to the door, apologized again, and opened it for him. He couldn’t cross that threshold and go outside. If he did, the dream he had gotten so close to would be forever gone. There were a few seconds left before he would miss the opportunity to turn this around. He had never been proactive. Luck had formed his life thus far and would keep forming it if he didn’t do something to change that fact.

“No,” he said, staring out her front door, facing his house. He shut the door and looked at her. He pushed her shoulders against the wall and kissed her.

“Max. Please. I feel bad enough as it is.”

He pulled away. “I want to feel closer too. You were right, it doesn’t have to be some big deal. I was just nervous.” This time she let him kiss her, and as soon as he felt her kiss back, fire flowed through him. He was eager to prove his arousal and pressed himself against her crotch. She pushed him back a little at first, but he broke through her resistance. When he felt her fully concede to his body, he huffed like a bull with excitement. So much blood barreled up into his ears, it sounded like he was on an airplane. They frantically ripped their pants back off in the doorway, and he showed her his glorious erection.

She led him to her bedroom by his penis like a leash. Her ass and hips swayed back and forth as if to say,
Okay, all right, follow me; follow me
.

“Lie down,” said Nadine when they got to the bed. “Take everything off. And your socks.”

She unclipped her bra and he watched them fall. She crawled onto the bed slowly, her breasts swinging a little from side to
side. After taking him into her mouth for a second, she came up and straddled him, hovering over his penis. She had him suck on his fingers and put them inside her. She rocked back and forth on them, telling him what to do. Her wet walls ballooned in and out, and the very top had ripples like the roof of a mouth. Again, stunned by a surge of performance anxiety—
Oh my God, Oh my God, Am I doing this right? Does this feel good? Does she like this? Did she just groan? Shut up, just feel it, be in the moment, just relax and go with it, stop thinking about it
—he felt himself losing strength.
Oh my God.
The more he begged it to stay up, trying to flex it back into action, the limper it got. Feeling he didn’t have much time before he’d lose it completely, he said, “I want to be inside you now.”

She looked at him questioningly, and all he could think was, Please hurry.

She asked, “Are you a virgin, Max?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yes. Yes.”

The moment she lined it up with her vagina, his mouth slackened, the pressure to perform increased, and his dick curled into a shrimp. She managed to push it in anyway, and he could feel it getting even smaller in there. She tried to move on him but he slipped out. He actually wanted to cry. She glided her clitoris back and forth on it for a frustrated moment and then got off and lay next to him. He’d lost his chance for good now. The weight of the failure made him hold his breath.

She sat up, and Max presumed she was looking for her clothes, but she said, “You know, penetration isn’t even the best part. Let’s try this.” She got on all fours and turned around. She said, “Smack my ass.” He did it and laughed nervously. She said, “Again, but harder.” He started getting into it. “Yeah, again. Good. Again. Now lick me, use your hands to open and lick me.”

She wasn’t giving up on him. He smothered his face in her, closing his eyes and breathing her in. She coached him on where to lap and flick his tongue and what to do with his hands, her wetness and his saliva all over his mouth and chin. She started sucking on him too.

By the time she turned back around and began sliding down on him, he had stopped thinking about his penis’s functioning at all. He’d let it do its natural best. This time when he entered her, he felt every distinct and remarkable layer. He pushed through the rasp of her pubic hair, spread her lips, and sank into her hot inside. He moaned with liberating agony. It deepened until their pelvises blocked them from getting any closer, from becoming the other. She ground down on him and waved her hips side to side, back and forth. She looked at the ceiling with her hands on his chest. The perfumes of their sex, the pace that picked up speed, the panting, the thrusts, the clapping of their middles, their suctioning mouths, her gripping and pulling his torso red, was all part of the revolution that made his life mean something new.

The success lifted him so high he had the capacity and will to love all things more fully than ever before. Having been with Nadine even gave him the impetus to reach out to his father. Tell him that it was important they improve their relationship, and that there was no good reason things had soured like they had. He saw him the next morning, but Rasheed was on his way out the door, not leaving enough time to get down to it. Max smiled at him in a way that meant,
My arms are open to you now, Dad. We’ll figure this thing out. We will. I love you.

But his mood crashed as soon as he went over to Nadine’s later that day. Things felt different, and not in the way he’d hoped: She didn’t suddenly treat him like her boyfriend. In fact,
nothing at all seemed to have changed. There was no kiss at the door; she simply let him in and walked back into the kitchen to tend to her stir-fry, singing harmonies to a Daft Punk album she had playing in the background, acting normally. And after the night before, normalcy felt like total rejection. He became fixated on the idea of being physical again, just a long embrace for starters, more for reassurance than anything. He didn’t know what he’d expected exactly, but every second here was saturated with the possibility of It—the touching—happening again, without It happening again, and this made him feel tense and unwanted. She asked if he’d like to stay for dinner, and he accepted with a stilted “Yeah, gre— Awesome, I’d love that a lot, terrifically … um …” She gave him a funny look. Sitting at the table, he tried to think of something to say, but his throat filled with dry ice. This wasn’t the charmed and butterflied awkwardness of shy love. What was wrong with him? He could tell by her body language that she felt it now too. Or was that in his head? He couldn’t decide. Maybe she wasn’t thinking about him at all right now, wasn’t affected by what they’d done. Was there anything special for her about yesterday?

“So,” she said, “I should probably warn you, I have to get out of here around nine.”

“You covering somebody’s nightshift?”

“Nope. Just going out for a bit.”

“Oh.” He swallowed. “Meeting up with a friend?”

“Yep.”

After a minute, he asked, “Lucille?”

“No. Not Lucille.”

A date. His body turned achingly fragile. Before, when Nadine had dates, he didn’t have the illusion that she belonged to him. He was used to her being out of reach in that way, happy to spend any time with her at all. But tonight the vision of her getting intimate with someone else revolted him. And in no time
at all, he was bursting with the brand of jealousy he’d read about in novels. The maddening kind that makes you behave ridiculously. The kind that makes you unwilling to accept anything less than an exclusive, possessive relationship as sworn eternal lovers. He knew he was thinking like an insane person, but he couldn’t stop.

She sucked in her lips and gave him what looked like the face of apology. He felt pitied, and that hurt. “Max, we shouldn’t let what happened change everything. We have a great thing here, you know?”

“No, yeah, I totally agree.”

“You do?” She sighed in relief. “I’m really glad to hear you say that.”

Then touch me, goddammit!
he wanted to cry out.

She continued tending to her stir-fry. “So, what did you think of that Russell Banks book? Have you finished it?” She looked back at him. “Max?”

“Yeah. The book.”

“Well, what did you think? Seemed right up your alley.”

“Actually, Nadine––”

When he said nothing more, she turned. “Yeah?”

Her face was so perfect. “I can’t stand it.”

“What?”

“The book. I could hardly get through the first page.” What was he talking about? “Totally insipid. Dead.”

“Oh. That sucks, sorry.” She shrugged and returned to her food.

“Yeah, no, the
book
kind of sucks.”

She laughed a little and said, “You liked his other one,” then went back to singing along with the music. He didn’t respond, and she gave no sign of noticing. Her indifference was drowning him. Having never felt this crazy before, he worried he’d act like even more of an idiot if he didn’t get out of there. “Yeah, anyway, I’ve got to get going. I’ll see you around.” He stood.

“Wait, you do? I thought we were eating together. I’m cooking for two now.”

“I actually got to go. I got to go, actually.”

“Got to go actually, do you?”

He didn’t laugh. “I’m sorry.” He started walking out.

“Max, where?”

“Hmm?”

“Where do you have to go?”

He stared back blankly. Of course there was nowhere else for him to be, nothing else to do. She knew by now he had no other friends, that his relationship with his father was shit, and that she was the only person he felt close to. He’d told her as much. Her asking where he was going felt a lot like cruelty.

“I’m going to help my dad with some house stuff.”

“Okay. You suddenly remembered?”

“Yeah.”

As he opened the front door to leave, she said, “Hey. If things got weird, we need to talk about it.”

“Weird? Why? Are things weird for you? They’re not weird for me at all. I just forgot I told my dad I’d help him move stuff around.” He didn’t stay long enough to get a sense of whether she believed him or not.