Random Acts of Love (Random #5) (12 page)

God help me, I was getting hard.

“Hold on. Back up. Let me understand this,” I said, needing a break from the relentless onslaught of her layered story. “He actually put his limp penis into the straps of a high heel shoe and fucked it?” 

“Yes.” Someone at the table next to us shifted meaningfully. I was not about to turn around and make eye contact.

“And he stripped completely naked to do this?”

“Sure. Because that’s what you do when you have soul-crushing sex with the person—or persons—you love most, right?”

The person behind me began whispering to someone else.

“He objectified a woman’s high heel shoe—” 

“Nuh uh. He
loved
that shoe. That shoe became this object of lust and desire, just like a human being. To him, in that moment, the shoe became his wife. The sole of the shoe was her vagina. The shoe was transformed into a sexual partner.”

The scrape of chairs behind me told me more people were listening.

“Is this some grad school project?” someone muttered to a friend.

“And that’s why he stripped naked when he humped the shoe?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Couldn’t he just take it home?”

“You ever loved and lusted after someone so much you couldn’t bear the thought of being separate from their skin for even one more second? Had to have that person instantaneously with all your sole, with every cell of your body, the impulse control shot because you became a singular pulse of need?”

Oh, I was definitely hard now.

“Yeah,” I choked.
You. Right now.
 

People behind me began to breathe a little quicker.

“That’s how Old Doc felt. He got into that craft closet and squeezed in between the boxes of Christmas decorations. Stripped down to his birthday suit. Pulled out the sleek, black pump with modest heels—this was the pastor’s wife, after all, so we weren’t talking about come-fuck-me pumps, though they sure were for old Oglethorpe,” she snorted. “He starts by licking the shoe—” 

“Excuse me?”

She smirked. “That’s right. Shoes don’t have lips. Gotta first lick them.”

“Why?”

“You start having sex with a kiss and a lick, right?”

I shut up.

“And then he gets into the preliminaries, settling his limp self right in, and starts up. Gets nice and hard, the shoe all sweet and a little lubed up by his pre-cum.”

Someone behind me stifled a groan.

“And then BAM! The closet door flies open, and there’s the pastor’s wife, the sexton, and the pastor, all wearing yard clothes and come to look for the spring festival signs to put out on the church lawn.”

A collective gasp arose from behind me. I gasped, too, heart pounding, cock throbbing in my pants.

“Oglethorpe froze. The sexton turned away and started laughing, practically sprinting out the door. The pastor’s wife and the pastor stood there, all agog, because that’s what you do when you find the doctor who delivered your babies, tended to your strep throat, gave you a vasectomy and gives you annual pap smears, right? You stand there with your bottom jaw on the floor and your eyes widening as you take in the sight.” 

“Mrs. Johns—that’s the pastor’s wife—screams, ‘That’s my nice shoe!’ and snatches it out of Oglethorpe’s hands. Except the problem was those little straps.”

“Straps?”

“She’d gotten a little fancy and bought those Mary Janes high heels. The ones with the strap across the top of the foot.”

I cringed. “Ouch.”

“Yeah. Old Doc’s cock had swollen up so much it was really in that shoe, and when Mrs. Johns tried to take it away his penis was trapped. So she pulled on the shoe, which yanked his root, which made him come tumbling out attached, and his nakedness stumbled and fell on her, pinning her to the ground.”

“Oh, shit!” I shouted. Several heads turned. 

“Right. Pastor Johns started pulling on Old Doc’s naked body and screaming, ‘You can’t defile my wife,’ and meanwhile, Old Doc is mortified, naked, and has his manroot caught in a shoe strap, attached to a shoe the pastor’s wife is yanking on.”

She paused and took a long, dramatic drink of her coffee. And smirked.

“What happened?” I asked, exasperated she’d stop there.

She looked pointedly behind me. I heard people move with the swiftness of someone caught staring.

“So,” she said, lowering her voice, “the pastor grabbed the first thing he could find in that closet and started beating Old Doc with it.”

Her eyes widened but she went silent.

“What was it?”

“The baby Jesus.”

Someone behind me started choking.

“The baby
what
?”

“The baby Jesus. Remember how this was the closet with lotsa stuff and Christmas decorations in it? Old Doc had picked him a place where the nativity scene was stored. Pastor Johns starts whapping old naked Doc Oglethorpe all over with the Lord to get him to stop being lewd with his poor, trapped wife. Who, at that point, was screaming, ‘I got these on sale at Halle’s and you ruined them.’”

Darla shrugged and tipped her cup up.

“That’s it?” I asked. “That’s the story?”

“No. There’s more.”

“Then why’d you stop again?”

She held up her empty coffee cup and shook it slightly. I rolled my eyes, grabbed it, and got to the coffee counter to order two more.

“Are you a writer?” I heard someone say, then turned to look. The people behind me consisted of three guys and a woman a little younger than us. One guy was wearing a skirt. The other two wore jeans and had long, lumberjack beards that were just scraggly enough to be their first time growing a beard. 

“No,” Darla said. “I’m just from Ohio.”

One of them nodded sagely, as if that explained anything.

“Do you think that Old Doc’s unconventional sexuality has a core theme of transcendence?” the woman asked. She had long, greasy hair, eye glasses like someone from the 1950s, and her nose was pierced with a hoop down the septum.

“Transcendence?”

“Was his objectification of the shoe a symbol for something beyond the vagina? More of a pansexualization of a kind of one-world, all-connection that ties into Buddhist themes? Like finding the divine in every animate and even inanimate creature?” she pressed, shoving her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

“I think Old Doc needed to fuck shoes,” Darla replied just as I came back with our coffees.

“Tell the rest,” I urged, holding back a nasty glare at the four of them. 

“You guys can listen in if you want,” she said to them.

They gave us a dubious look, and then one of the bearded dudes asked, “Are you MFA students in literature?”

“No. We’re musicians. Well, he is. I just manage the band,” Darla replied.

That perplexed them.

“Is this story part of a song? Are you brainstorming?”

“No.” My answer was intended to be terse.

“So....”

“Just telling the story of how I was conceived,” Darla chirped.

All four of their faces went slack with shock.

“Let’s get outta here,” Darla said, standing. She grasped her coffee cup, looped her arm through mine, and we left them hanging.

“Genre fiction,” one of them muttered under his breath. “Bet they’re genre fiction writers.” That made the other three shake their heads in disgust.

The wave of cold night air smacked some reality into me. “Finish,” I ordered.

“There happened to be a yoga class taking place in the church at that very moment—” 

“This has gone too far!” I exclaimed.

“What?”

“I find it hard to believe the town doctor liked to fuck shoes in secret. Harder to believe he started stealing shoes. Even harder to believe the whole shoe-fucking-in-a-church-closet part. But you got me at yoga in Peters, Ohio. I refuse to believe it. No way your town was that enlightened.”

“Fuck off. We have yoga and Reiki and Feldenkrais and all that shit. Where do you think people who practice that stuff can afford to live? We can’t all have $5,000 a month practice studios like in Cambridge.”

“Still....”

“You wanna hear the rest, or not?” Her eyes tilted up over the rim of her coffee cup, glittering with mirth.

“Yes,” I confessed. “I do.” God help me. 

“The yoga instructor, Sheena, barged in with her yoga people behind her, coming upon the pastor beating Old Doc with the baby Jesus, and she started screaming. The women pulled the naked man off Mrs. Johns, who stubbornly held on to the shoe.” Darla stopped and looked at me. “You know, this is the part I never understood about the story. His cock stayed hard through the whole time. Wouldn’t he get a limp dick?”

“No. Not necessarily.”

“Really? Don’t you need the blood for your brain and arms and legs when you get attacked?” Darla was taking Biology 101 at the Harvard Extension School this semester. I smiled.

“You can get fear boners.”

“‘FEARBONERS?” she shouted, like it was one word.

“Yes,” I hissed.

“Huh. Learn something new.” She shook her head quickly, then said, “They got poor Mrs. Johns untrapped. Her hand was holding the shoe, which was attached to the cock, which—” 

“You’re starting to tell the story in verse. Like that old kid’s story, There Was an Old Lady Who Swallowed the Fly.”

She frowned. “There was an old lady who...jizzed in a shoe,” she said in a sing-songy voice, her eyes lighting up. “I could probably put together a pretty good set of song lyrics about this.”

“Let’s not and say we did. Besides, the old lady wouldn’t jizz in a...oh, never mind.”

“And then,” she pressed on, ignoring me, “Sheena reached over and unbuckled the buckle, setting poor Old Doc free. He just stood there, naked and aroused, his clothes and reputation in a little puddle behind him, the pastor holding baby Jesus like a baseball bat.” 

She took a sip. “And then he whacked Old Doc unconscious with one final, big blow and cracked the baby Jesus in half.”

“I think my leg is getting pulled.” 

“It’s true! Ask Josie.”

“I am not asking your aunt whether this story is true.”

“Suit yourself.”

“And that’s it? The end of the story?”

“No. Pastor Johns called Old Doc’s wife. They took old Doc to the hospital and told the story. His colleagues treated him, and his wife went home and found the stash of stolen shoes. Twenty-nine pairs in all.”

“Twenty-nine!”

“That was over the course of a decade or so.”

“Hmm.”

“And when he woke up, he was so humiliated he started talking about killing himself via autoerotic asphyxiation.”

“You are totally pulling my leg.”

“I’m not!
Ask Josie
.”

“What the hell similarity is there between
me
not wanting to sign the damn band tour contract and this old pervert?”

She stopped dead in her tracks and pointed to me. “That. Right there.”

“What?”

“Pervert.”

“I’m not a pervert.”

“Yes. You are.”

She was so serious that my stomach dropped. My skin began to hum and go cold all at the same time. A soulful look filled her irises, as if some entity poured it right in.

“No,” I said slowly. “We’re not perverts. We’re not.” I still didn’t understand how this connected to my need for more time to decide whether to leave law school for a year and go on tour. 

“Was Old Doc a pervert? Or was he just trying to do his best to get what he needed in a world that wouldn’t give him a safe place to live and be himself without judgment or shunning?” 

Oh, shit.

My skin began to crawl. This wasn’t about the contract at all. This was about my parents inviting her over to dinner, wasn’t it?

And so much more.

“Don’t be a naked shoe fucker hiding in the church craft closet, Trevor,” she said quietly. She stopped and started up at me. “Old Doc lived.”

“What?”

She shrugged. “He lived. The whole town knew his secret now. His wife, the doctors and nurses at the hospital where he treated patients, all his patients, his wife, the twenty-nine women whose shoes had been stolen...everyone. And you know what?”

“Hmph.”

“He lived.” She blinked a few times. “It wasn’t easy, and he was humiliated as fuck, but he made it through. His practice dropped for a while, but people eventually came back. His wife went home to her family in Minnesota for a few weeks with their kids, but she came back. And the weird part is that although not one of those twenty-nine women wanted their stolen shoes back—” she shuddered “—women started quietly giving him their old shoes. Their discards. Just leaving them next to his car in the parking lot.”

“WHAT?”

She snorted. “Don’t ask me why. Hell if I know. I think some people get it. They understand. It’s just who a person is. No rhyme or reason. It’s not like Old Doc said to himself when he was a little kid that he wanted to fuck shoes. Any more than you, me and Joe said we wanted to find ourself fulfilled in a threesome.”

The coffee suddenly tasted like sand.

“I’ll go to your parents’ house for dinner. And I’ll pretend. But one day you’re gonna be caught naked with your cock in a shoe and I would really prefer you not have to do that. We don’t need more broken baby Jesuses.” 

And with that, Darla walked away from me, slow and steady but firmly toward the T subway entrance. She didn’t look back. 

I didn’t follow.

C
HAPTER 4

Darla

Josie lent me her car so I could drive out into the suburbs to go to Trevor’s parents’ house. He couldn’t drive me because he had an appointment that day at the dentist in his hometown, so it was easier to meet there. I’d long gotten used to the strangeness of New England towns surrounding Boston. So different from Ohio. A home in Ohio was “old” if it was a hundred years. Out here, people sniffed as if that were cute. “Old” was a three-hundred year old house, and it was really special if it was from the 1600s and involved Salem Witch Trial refugees.

The roads were different. No curbs in most places. And while Peters wasn’t exactly suburbia, what I found different in the fancier suburbs of Boston was that people kept pine orchards in their front yards. The edges of yards were bordered by woods in a way they weren’t back home. Subdivisions here could involve an acre or two of land per home. Near Peters, a subdivision involved a quarter acre per house at best, and the lawns were well-edged and green. Almost a radioactive green.