Revenge of the Lawn, the Abortion, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (19 page)

"And UC?"

"The same story. I don't know what it is about English teachers and me, but they fall like guillotines when they see me coming."

"Where were you born?"

"Santa Clara. All right, I've answered enough of your questions. Now tell me how you got this job. What's your story, Mr. Librarian?"

"I assumed possession of it."

"I take it then that there was no ad in the paper."

"Nope."

"How did you assume possession of it?"

"The fellow who was here before me couldn't stand children. He thought they were going to steal his shoes. I came in here with a book I had written and while he was writing it down in the Library Contents Ledger, a couple of children came in and he flipped, so I told him that I had better take over the library and he had better do something that didn't involve children. He told me he thought he was cracking up, too, and that's how I got this job."

"What did you do before you started working here?"

"I kicked around a lot: canneries, sawmills, factories. A woman supported me for a couple of years, then she got tired of it and kicked my ass out. I don't know," I said. "It was all pretty complicated before I started working here."

"What are you going to do after you quit here or do you plan on quitting?"

"I don't know," I said. "Something will come up. Maybe I'll get another job or find a woman to support me again or maybe I'll write a novel and sell it to the movies."

That amused her.

We had finished our coffee. It was funny because suddenly we both noticed that we did not have any more coffee to drink and we were sitting together on the bed.

"What are we going to do now?" she said. "We can't drink any more coffee and it's late."

"I don't know," I said.

"I guess it would be too corny for us to go to bed together," she said. "But I can't think of anything else that would be better to do. I don't want to go home and sleep by myself. I like you. I want to stay here with you tonight."

"It's a puzzler," I said.

"Do you want to sleep with me?" she said, not looking at me, but not looking away either. Her eyes were somewhere in between half-looking at me and half-thinking about something else.

"We don't have any place else to go," I said. "I'd feel like a criminal if you left tonight. It's hard to sleep with strangers. I gave it up years ago, but I don't think we are really strangers. Do you?"

She turned her eyes 3/4 toward me.

"No, we're not strangers."

"Do you want to sleep with me?" I asked.

"I don't know what it is about you," she said. "But you make me feel nice."

"It's my clothes. They're relaxing. They've always been this way. I know how to get clothes that make people feel better when they're with me."

"I don't want to sleep with your clothes," she said, smiling.

"Do you want to sleep with me?" I said.

"I've never slept with a librarian before," she said, 99% toward me. The other 1% was waiting to turn. I saw it starting to turn.

"I brought a book in here tonight denouncing my own body as grotesque and elephant-like, but now I want to take this awkward machine and lie down beside you here in this strange library."

W
HAT
an abstract thing it is to take your clothes off in front of a stranger for the very first time. It isn't really what we planned on doing. Your body almost looks away from itself and is a stranger to this world.

We live most of our lives privately under our clothes, except in a case like Vida whose body lived outside of herself like a lost continent, complete with dinosaurs of her own choosing.

"I'll turn the lights out," she said, sitting next to me on the bed.

I was startled to hear her panic. She seemed almost relaxed a few seconds before. My, how fast she could move the furniture about in her mind. I responded to this by firmly saying, "No, please don't."

Her eyes stopped moving for a few seconds. They came to a crashing halt like blue airplanes.

"Yes," she said. "That's a good idea. It will be very
hard, but I have no other choice. I can't go on like this forever."

She gestured toward her body as if it were far away in some lonesome valley and she, on top of a mountain, looking down. Tears came suddenly to her eyes. There was now rain on the blue wings of the airplanes.

Then she stopped crying without a tear having left her eyes. I looked again and all the tears had vanished. "We have to leave the lights on," she said. "I won't promise.

I reached out and, for the first time in two billion years, I touched her. I touched her hand. My fingers went carefully over her fingers. Her hand was almost cold.

"You're cold," I said.

"No," she said. "It's only my hand."

She moved slightly, awkwardly toward me and rested her head on my shoulder. When her head touched me, I could feel my blood leap forward, my nerves and muscles stretch like phantoms toward the future.

My shoulder was drenched in smooth white skin and long bat-flashing hair. I let go of her hand and touched her face. It was tropical.

"See," she said, smiling faintly. "It was only my hand."

It was fantastic trying to work around her body, not wanting to startle her like a deer and have her go running off into the woods.

I poetically shifted my shoulder like the last lines of
a Shakespearean sonnet (Love is a babe; then might I not say so, / To give full growth to that which still doth grow.) and at the same time lowered her back onto the bed.

She lay there looking up at me as I crouched forward, descending slowly, and kissed her upon the mouth as gently as I could. I did not want that first kiss to have attached to it the slightest gesture or flower of the meat market.

I
T'S A
hard decision whether to start at the top or the bottom of a girl. With Vida I just didn't know where to begin. It was really a problem.

After she reached up awkwardly and put my face in a small container which was her hands and kissed me quietly again and again, I had to start somewhere.

She stared up at me all the time, her eyes never leaving me as if I were an airfield.

I changed the container and her face became a flower in my hands. I slowly let my hands drift down her face while I kissed her and then further down her neck to her shoulders.

I could see the future being moved in her mind while I arrived at the boundaries of her bosom. Her breasts were so large, so perfectly formed under her sweater that my stomach was sanding on a stepladder when I touched them for the first time.

Her eyes never left me and I could see in her eyes the act of my touching her breasts. It was like brief blue lightning.

I was almost hesitant in a librarian sort of way.

"I promise," she said, reaching up and awkwardly pressing my hands harder against her breasts. She of course had no idea what that did to me. The stepladder started swirling.

She kissed me again, but this time with her tongue. Her tongue slid past my tongue like a piece of hot glass.

W
ELL
, it had been my decision to start at the top and I was going to have to carry it out and soon we arrived at the time to take off her clothes.

I could tell that she didn't want to have anything to do with it. She wasn't going to help. It was all up to me.

Damn it.

It wasn't exactly what I had planned on doing when I started working at the library. I just wanted to take care of the books because the other librarian couldn't do it any more. He was afraid of children, but of course it was too late now to think about his fears. I had my own problems.

I had gone further than taking this strange awkward beautiful girl's book. I was now faced with taking her body which lay before me and had to have its clothes taken off, so we could join our bodies together like a bridge across the abyss.

"I need your Help," I said.

She didn't say anything. She just continued staring at me. That brief blue lightning flashed again in her eyes, but it was relaxed at the edges.

"What can I do?" she said.

"Sit up, please," I said.

"All right."

She sat up awkwardly.

"Please put your arms up," I said.

"It's that simple, isn't it?" she said.

Whatever was happening I was certainly getting down to it. It would have been much simpler just to have kindly taken her book for the library and sent her on her way but that was history now or like the grammar of a forgotten language.

"How's this?" she said and then smiled. "I feel like a San Francisco bank teller."

"That's right," I said. "Just do what the note says," and I started her sweater gently off. It slid up her stomach and went on over her breasts, getting briefly caught on one of them, so I had to reach down and help it over the breast, and then her neck and face disappeared in the sweater and came out again when the sweater went off her fingers.

It was really fantastic the way she looked. I could have been hung up for a long time there, but I kept moving on, had to. It was my mission in life to take her bra off.

"I feel like a child," she said. She turned sideways
from me, so I could get at the brassiere clasp in the back. I fumbled at the clasp for a few moments. I've never had much luck with brassieres.

"Want me to help?" she said.

"No, I can get it," I said. "It may take me a few days but I'll get it. Don't dishearten. There...
AH!
"

That made Vida laugh.

She did not need a bra at all. Her breasts stayed right up there after the bra left them like an extra roof on a house and joined her sweater. It was a difficult pile of clothes. Each garment was won in a strange war.

Her nipples were small and delicately colored in relationship to the large full expansion of her breasts. Her nipples were very gentle. They were another incongruity fastened like a door to Vida.

Then at the same time we both looked down at her boots, long and black and leather like a cloud of animals gathered about her feet.

"I'll take your boots off," I said.

I had finished with the top of her and now it was time to start on the bottom. There certainly are a lot of parts to girls.

I took off her boots and then I took off her socks. I liked the way my hands ran along her feet like water over a creek. Her toes were the cutest pebbles I have ever seen.

"Stand up, please," I said. We were really moving along now. She got awkwardly to her feet and I unzipped her skirt. I brought it down her hips to the floor and she stepped out of it and I put it on the pile of other battles.

I looked into her face before I took her panties off. Her features were composed and though there still flashed bolts of brief blue lightning in her eyes, her eyes remained gentle at the edges and the edges were growing.

I took her panties off and the deed was done. Vida was without clothes, naked, there.

"See?" she said. "This isn't me. I'm not here." She reached out and put her arms about my neck. "But I'll try to be here for you, Mr. Librarian."

"I
JUST
don't understand why women want bodies like this. The grotesqueness of them and they try so very hard to get these bodies, moving hell and high water with dieting, operations, injections, obscene undergarments to arrive at one of these damn things and then if they try everything and still can't get one, the dumb cunts fake it. Well, here's one they can have for free. Come and get it, you bitches.

"They don't know what they're getting into or maybe they like it. Maybe they're all pigs like the women who use these bodies to turn the tides of money: the movie stars, models, whores.

"Oh, Christ!

"I just can't see the fatal attraction that bodies like this hold for men and women. My sister has my body: tall and skinny. All these layers are beyond me. These aren't my breasts. These aren't my hips. This isn't my
ass. I'm inside of all this junk. Can you see me? Look hard. I'm in here, Mr. Librarian."

 

She reached out and put her arms about my neck and I put my hands upon her hips. We stood there looking at each other.

 

"I think you're wrong," I said. "Whether you like it or not, you're a very beautiful woman and you've got a grand container. It may not be what you want, but this body is in your keeping and you should take good care of it and with pride, too. I know it's hard but don't worry about what other people want and what they get. You've got something that's beautiful and try to live with it.

"Beauty is the hardest damn thing in the world to understand. Don't buy the rest of the world's juvenile sexual thirsts. You're a smart young lady and you'd better start using your head instead of your body because that's what you're doing.

"Don't be a fatalist winner. Life's a little too short to haul that one around. This body is you and you'd better get used to it because this is all she wrote for this world and you can't hide from yourself.

"This is you.

"Let your sister have her own body and start learning how to appreciate and use this one. I think you might enjoy it if you let yourself relax and get your mind out of other people's sewers.

"If you get hung up on everybody else's hang-ups, then the whole world's going to be nothing more than one huge gallows."

 

We kissed.

F
ORTUNATELY,
I was able to get in touch with Foster up at the caves when Vida discovered that she was pregnant. Vida and I talked it over. The decision to have the abortion was arrived at without bitterness and was calmly guided by gentle necessity.

"I'm not ready to have a child yet," Vida said. "And neither are you, working in a kooky place like this. Maybe another time, perhaps for certain another time, but not now. I love children, but this isn't the time. If you can't give them the maximum of yourself, then it's best to wait. There are too many children in the world and not enough love. An abortion is the only answer."