Little Cat (17 page)

‘Ilovethe/manwhotakesthebusinhisunderwear/andswears/ thathewillneverhaveawife/ortellalie.’ That was the name of his first play. It was about a man who falls in love with a woman he always sees on the bus. It turns out she’s the head of the big electricity corporation that has just turned off his heat.

John could talk about his writing forever. He always held it to his chest after I read it and asked, ‘You liked it, you really liked it?’

I told him I did. But I would’ve rather read Michael’s stuff. If I ever asked John what Michael wrote about, John wouldn’t tell me. He said that Michael’s plays were genius, though, because Michael was a genius.

‘Have you read them?’ I asked.

John shook his head. ‘He’s waiting for a big audience, you know? He doesn’t want to waste his time on any community theatre shit.’

‘Why doesn’t he ever come back to see me?’

‘I think he’s working on something big. He’ll come back soon, don’t worry, Mira.’

Maybe I stayed with John because he seemed okay in the world. I mean, that he was okay considering everything he’d been through. I’d never been through any of that stuff. I didn’t want to be with him though. I knew that. Especially not the way he wanted to be with me. I remember thinking it was okay if I did it for a little while, but after that time they tried to film me with that guy Joel, I really just wanted to spit it all out. I knew Michael wasn’t coming back. And I hated John’s smoke-and-beer smell. It was always there now, as if it were my smell too.

The night we broke up, I really didn’t want him to go down on me again, and when he started to anyway, I pushed his head away.

‘Let me, babe!’ John begged. ‘Come on, let me eat your pussy. I love it so much, it tastes so good.’

I started coughing uncontrollably. John lifted his head and got up off his knees. He went to the bathroom to get me some water. When I didn’t want the water, he said, ‘What’s the problem here, Mira?’

I was thinking:
How does anything ever really end?

‘What? What’s wrong with you, Mira?’

‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ I said.

John’s eyes sagged down. ‘Hey, I just want to be your dog. How many times have I told you that, babe?’

‘But I don’t want to anymore.’

John got an old joint from the table beside the bed. He started smoking it and didn’t offer me any. He was really angry. The room started to shrink. ‘You don’t want to see me anymore, is that it?’

I was sitting on the edge of the bed with my back to him. I was looking around for my bra.

‘Why? Huh, Mira? You tell me.’

‘I don’t feel anything.’

‘Aw, fuck.’

‘I’m sorr– ’

‘Don’t say that. Just don’t say that. After everything we’ve been through together. Fuck it, I don’t fucking believe you.’

‘I’m sorry, I just – ’

‘I said, don’t say that!’ John was pacing around in front of me. He started pulling at his chin.

‘John … ’

‘No. Shut up. If that’s what you want, Mira, then just go.’

‘Go? Go where?’

‘Goddammit. Just go. Get out!’

‘But it’s too late right now.’

‘So?’

‘How am I going to get home?’

‘I don’t know. A smart girl like you will think of something.’

John grabbed the sheet off the bed from behind me and wound it around himself. He was blinking wildly. ‘What’re you worried about? Get that look off your face. C’mon, they’ll think you’re a whore. All men think a woman alone at night is a whore. For fuck’s sake. You gonna cry now? Don’t be a baby. Fuck. You’re not a baby anymore. You’re the one who wants this.’

‘Does the bus run all night?’

John started laughing. ‘You’ll find a way home! Go back to your mommy and daddy. Go back to your little life.’

John poked my shoulder to get me moving. I heard him exhaling hard. I was looking around on the floor for my bag.

When I finally got all my stuff together and was walking to the door, John stayed close behind me. He was making pissed-off breathing sounds. For a second I was worried he was going to push me down the stairs.

‘She thinks it’s all just going to end when she wants it to?’ John opened the front door so hard that it banged the wall and sprayed plaster. ‘You finally getting the fuck out of here, huh?’

I didn’t want to cry. I didn’t look at John’s face. I ran down the stairs and heard the door slam behind me. I stood outside on the porch for a few seconds, swallowing hard, sweating under my hair. I heard a huge crash upstairs. I thought John must’ve kicked in the
TV
.

Fleeing through the dark streets, I kept hearing his voice: ‘All men think that a woman alone at night is a whore.’

I thought she was brave in the dark in her high heels, standing tall while I was running. She could face the thing that wanted to lodge itself inside her.

Adi was sitting on my bed like a man.

‘You scared me! Where were you?’ I’d been getting myself ready in the bathroom. Red cheeks, red lips, hair in pigtails. ‘You were here the whole time? Aren’t we working? What are you doing? You’re not dressed. It’s late.’

Adi was hunched over. Her foot was sticking out over the straps of her shoe. The top part, the bridge, was swollen like a little anthill.

‘I have to go home.’

‘What? To Volgograd?’

‘No, Jamaica.’ Adi started laughing. Her foot looked infected. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it before.

‘No. Where are you going? Tell me.’

‘Israel. Wanna come screw some Hasids with me? They like the Russian pussy.’ Adi shoved her hands in her lap. ‘Fuck, I always forget you’re not Russian, Mirushka!’

Adi was shaking, she was white, that anthill on her foot.

‘What’s going on, Adi? Come on, can’t you just tell me?’

‘Exodus.’

‘Is he going with you?’

‘I told you to stay away from him!’ Adi shouted. ‘He hates you because he still hates me.’

I got nervous. Adi was grinding her teeth.

‘Gio said to me, Mira, that you are a Jew.’

Adi looked at her feet. The hurt one wouldn’t move.

‘Yeah? So what?’

A car beeped outside. Adi dragged herself to the window.

‘You are a Jew.’ She was grinding her teeth and cracking her jaw. ‘I can’t believe it!’

Then Adi turned from the window without looking at me. She hobbled toward the door past me, shifting her weight from the bad foot to the good. I tried to stop her but she used her elbow in my chest.

‘You stay away from me, Jews,’ she hissed, and limped out my door.

After six weeks of hanging out with her every single fucking night she was dissing me now because I was Jewish? Fucking God.

I went to the window and waited to see her in the lot. After a few seconds, Adi stumbled out the back door. Her arms were rigid by her sides. There was no car. No one was waiting.

God, it made me sad that she was so fucked up. Adi swayed side to side, picking at something on her cheek.

Then a small white car drove past the club. I watched Adi wave her arms and run to it. She ran like a goat, dragging her clod. She leaned down into the driver’s window.

‘Adi!’ I screamed through the screen. ‘Wait! Don’t go!’

But Adi had already skipped around the car to the passenger side. The car flashed its headlights up at my window.

‘Wait!’

I couldn’t see Adi and I couldn’t see who was with her.

I raced out of my room past the heaps of old sheets. I thought maybe Adi and Gio were actually going somewhere together. Even though I didn’t believe she had ever been to Israel. And I didn’t believe she had ever had kids. I knew she wasn’t going home either.

A few cars in the lot of the club were idling, soft: regulars wanting to be the first inside.

Adi and the white car were gone. I stood alone. Someone beeped at me.

There was this slimy low voice in my head that was saying without thinking:
Love will be different for you.

It will be different between a Jew and a Jew.

HALLUCINATION

A
fter my second shift of the night, when I was already undressed and ready for bed, a guy started banging on my door. It was the guy I hadn’t seen since the day me and Adi moved in, that landlord with the brushed-back hair.

‘Famous Mira,’ he said as he entered my room.

My tongue felt thick and full of sleep.

‘No comment?’ The guy laughed. He had the accent of Adi, of Gio, of everyone here. I would’ve kicked him if I’d been wearing something under my nightshirt. ‘Now that your best friend’s gone, you find out how things work around here.’

I crossed my arms over my chest. I looked on the floor for some leggings or a skirt. I had wondered when someone was going to say something to me about living upstairs without Adi. I’d always given her my money for the month and I hadn’t paid yet since she had gone. It had been just a week. I wanted this Russian lord out of my room. I couldn’t find anything to cover myself.

‘Thirty percent goes to the office each time you bring a fuck to your room. I don’t care how much the fuck’s given you either. You get a hundred and you bring down your thirty.’

I thought it was thirty-five. Adi told me it was thirty-five.

‘What about the hundred and fifty for phone and laundry?’ I asked.

The guy started laughing through his nose. ‘Me and that crazy bitch go a long way back but she got you good, all right.’

The guy scratched his scalp and stared at my crotch. ‘What’s a girl like you’s doing here anyway, I’ve got no idea. But they seem to like you. Thirty percent and you stay as long as you like. Keep the one-fifty, princess.’

My breath smelled and I opened my mouth. The guy made sure I smelled his too. The stench of us together was milky.

I barely felt myself running to the bed. Cream thickened down the walls of my throat. Why’d Adi do that? Why’d she steal my fucking cash? I did that sucking. I earned my fucking keep!

Adi, fuck you. Fuck you, Adi.

The door clicked and he left. Finally I was crying.

It was that time of night when light wants to break but dark wants to stay. There were hundreds of bugs flapping in circles on my screen. My hands and feet were still tingling from fucking. That last guy did it so hard my cunt was pulsing like a phantom. I had to go outside and get some air.

I’d never really walked around the club at night. I knew people were hiding all over, screwing in the parking lots and the spaces between the buildings. I knew that they looked for each other in the park at the end of the road, past the lit-up parts, in the darkness that smelled green.

I veered left and walked up a steep little hill. Old sperm was growing like spores in the grass. I passed rustling, a grunt. I walked into the forest. My eyes turned to pins through the rows of thick trees. There was someone behind me. I crouched down and rested in front of a trunk.

I knew it would happen.

‘Working?’ a voice asked.

‘Yeah.’

‘How much?’

‘Sixty.’

‘Suck and fuck?’

‘Yeah.’

The guy stuffed some crumpled-up money in my hand. I knew it wasn’t enough. Sixty? This is what I’m good for? This is how I work?

The guy pulled me up. He took me jogging through trees. Leaves were ripping down all around us. I was trying to breathe, I was skipping to run. The tree trunks were gleaming with dark purple glaze.

‘Here. Stop here.’

I didn’t see his face. He was pushing me forward. I banged into wood. Fuck! I should’ve said more. His hands on my shoulders, his weight from behind. My teeth grazed the bark and my knees sank in mud.

The man was holding his cock at my neck. He was trying to turn me around by the chin. I could see him, I swear, from the back of my head. He was chubby, some father, a bull with a beard.

‘Take it. Come on.’

Oh god, this guy had the funniest dick in the world! A stubby old mushroom with a soft wilted head. He was tapping it downward, trying to paste with it back and forth on my lips.

‘Bareback,’ he grunted. ‘Gimme bareback. Please.’

‘Condom,’ I said, shutting my lips.

My neck stayed arched while the guy searched his pockets. The sky was the colour of bruises, the feeling of him. I promised myself: this was the last time.

But the guy started getting pissed. He couldn’t find a condom. He was swearing and he started pushing his naked cock into my face all over again. This time, he grabbed under my jaw. I whipped my head from side to side, but he kept smashing the mushroom into my lips.

A growl was spreading through my chest.

I was seething. Blowing. My brain disappeared. I scratched my fingers down the guy’s legs. I pulled at his hairs, tried to rip his flesh.

‘You little cat! You scratching me up?’

The guy’s pants lay in a pool at his feet. I was stuffed in the mouth and my fingers were scurrying, digging inside his thick leather slit. I picked the whole wad. Took plastic too. Buried it under the dirt of my knees. His balls were slapping like jelly on my chin. I tensed up to keep him from going so fast. But I couldn’t get tense, something made me loose. I kept feeling this strangeness blow up through my body, up from the mud, up to my throat. It made my saliva start tasting like tin. I was sucking to swallow, to keep myself breathing, his thickness, his cock, his stale white drops.

For a second I thought that someone else was there, or something behind me, around me, a swell of warm air. Something was telling me to take his body, suck out his energy – take him from him.

I heard myself moan. The guy let go of my head. My eyes flew high to the grid of the branches where darkness was being sucked by the whole sky.

‘
Say fuck me, please. Say fuck me, fuck me
… ’

My hands held tight on to the columns of his thighs.

‘
Fuck me
. Say it:
Fuck me, fuck me
… ’

‘Fuck me.’
God! Are you there in the tree?

The man shot into the back of my mouth. He collapsed to his knees. ‘Sorry … Sorry.’

I spit out his grains. I didn’t say a word.

The guy stood up quickly. I watched him from the ground. A body loomed over me, a floating head and bulbous gut. He was pulling up his pants, zipping, trying to say something.

‘It’s okay,’ I shrugged. I didn’t care if men hated me, I didn’t care that Adi was gone.

This time burned its shit knowledge in.

Light was sinking down slowly through the branches. It turned the trees into spotty grey poles. I watched the guy walk away until his back disappeared. When I dug out his fold, I was smiling.

There, from my window in the middle of the day, walking through the parking lot away from the club, there in the middle of the shining concrete – he looked like a man walking out of the desert.

I lifted the screen and stuck my head out. I started waving my arms from side to side in the air.

‘You! Wait!’

I flung myself halfway out the window. He didn’t stop.

‘Gio! Look!’

He turned to face me. I put my hands on my breasts and squeezed them together.

‘Come up here, you fucking asshole!’

Gio used his hand over his eyes to shelter them from the sun. I unbuttoned my shirt and took off my bra. I let my tits hang out in the air. Gio’s head tilted sideways.

‘Come up here! Come! I need to talk to you!’

Gio’s body rocked from side to side. I pinched my nipples between my fingers. I was keeping him there, watching me. For the very first time in my life it felt like what I wanted and what I was doing was exactly the same thing.

Gio raised his free hand in the air. First it was a fist. Then it was a finger, the pointing one.

One second? One minute? What the fuck did that mean?

‘I can’t wait anymore, come on!’ I pressed the brick window ledge to fly out even more.

Gio moved his first finger from side to side. Tsk-tsk, it was saying.
Don’t be a bad girl.

‘Fuck off! I’m not scared of you!’

A sluggish smile spread across his lips. His white shirt billowed behind him like a sail.

‘I need you right now!’ I shrieked into the wind.

But Gio turned away from me. His finger was still pointed up in the air. One minute? One year? One hundred fucks more? I’d be a good girl. I wanted him.

One week from the window scene, from Gio’s one finger held like a match in the air, I’d made almost one thousand dollars. I stretched one finger up from my fist when I took off my clothes and shook it onstage. Code meant:
Fuck me. Fuck me, Man. I will fuck you and you will fuck me.

The smallest dicks were always the meanest. They jutted in too fast and they never slid out, just in, in, in … Big dicks were kinder. Little-dicked men wanted to kill. They made me suck their horns with my hands behind my back. Some men who came to me couldn’t even fuck. They’d just sit there and sob, stroke their soft pack of veins. God, I saw so many cocks. They came to my door in one long line.

I didn’t believe that I’d ever get dry. I thought:
How can a woman ever get dry?
But sometimes my cunt really hurt when I fucked, like a space getting carved from a heap that’s too thin. But then, other times, it felt like a monster! It would get so fat, all the juices ganged up. When Gio came back after one week to see me, god, the first time, I swear, my cunt was like a buggy banging up and down on a rough, potholed road, being dragged by four horses, horses pulling on my lips, horses stretching the skin from my cunt over holes, so that each time I bumped up and down it was – god! – pouring love from my holes, bumping over more holes.

I danced all for him. I was a one-pointed light.

Nighttime, nighttime. Flies on the screen.

My door was unlocked. I met Gio open with my legs already spread. My see-through panties were barely a screen.

Gio stared at me hard. He was wearing a suit. I wanted him to take it off. He stood at the foot of my bed. I writhed on it, stoned.

‘Do you know who I am?’

I nodded. I knew. It was like Adi threw him to me.

‘When did you first know that we were going to do this?’ Gio asked.

‘Right now,’ I lied.

I wanted him to take me any way he wanted.

Gio kneeled down at the end of my bed. He was so tall that I could see his whole chest. I thought he was smirking at the fabric of my panties because my hair came through its tiny holes. His eyes looked metallic. I heard Gio letting out breaths through his nose. I propped myself up and stared at him. My breasts felt heavy. It was like he was going to pray to my pussy.

Gio grabbed my ankles and started stroking lightly. He was murmuring something. I couldn’t hear what it was. Then he licked his lips and slid in like a drone.

I was waiting to be touched. Beating through my panties, I let out a groan. I couldn’t take more. I wanted his mouth.

Gio gripped my thighs and launched himself forward. His lips pushed against the tissue of my panties. He licked once up and down with his whole entire face. God, just that once, pressing on my slit, he got me to the point where I was already gone. He finally moved my panties to one side. My black space opened up and his breath poured inside me. He stared at me there. I was too swollen to care.

Breathing from my cunt, talking from my cunt, I was bulging forth from hairy lips.

I know it’s terrifying if you look it in the eyes.

Gio used his knuckles, dipping into my wetness to stretch me and rub me. He pinched my lips with his rough-tipped thumbs. He stretched me even wider. I wanted his tongue. All I wanted was his face. He was pulling and stretching, he could’ve bit down and I would’ve spurted come. I was going to come, my breathing was fast, I was gonna come out, I was just about to come …

Gio slithered up over my belly. His face dripped with sweat. He took his shirt off and leaned on one hand. His chest was one huge smooth rock of hide. He unzipped his pants. He yanked down my panties. His cock was so big it hung over my breasts.

Adi’s been here
, I thought.
She’s been where I am.

Gio was like the king of the forest, the beast who had the right to lord over his bitch. This is a man, a Russian evil man Jew! I was anxious, too ready, and I grabbed for his cock. But he took my hands and stuck them onto his back. I held on to the curve where his muscles started bucking. I had to suck in my breath. Gio didn’t take time. He kneed my legs open and pushed himself up, plowing through my thickness, my blackness, all wet. I felt my head roll over to the side. I shut my eyes and just let the juice gush. My cunt felt like the shape of a boat where wood gets squeezed into points from each shuddering side. The force of his thrusts carried shocks through my chest. I wanted his come, right at the back of me, right at the end. With Gio on top of me, moving and fucking, I felt myself being forced through the bed. He was fucking so hard that my body hit earth.

‘I always knew,’ I said between his thrusts. ‘I always knew me and you were going to do this.’