Rust and Bone (20 page)

Nod to the librarian, eyeing her legs, weave my way through periodical racks and paperback carousels and newspapers threaded on wooden dowels to the conference room. The room's decorated in a Thanksgiving motif: shellacked gourds and ears of maize, pie-plate turkeys with tissue paper tails. Table scattered with crayons and children's books left over from the Reading Buddies program:
Digging Dinosaurs, Where the Wild Things Are, Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes
. The usual suspects: Baney Jones and Owen and Bette. Seat myself beside the fourth person, who I'm surprised and more than a little excited to find here.

“Hey,” I say to her. “How's Wayne? He going to be alright?”

“He'll be fine,” the fluff girl answers in a whisper. “Ambulance guy shot him up with morphine so he wasn't feeling much of anything. I'm going to check back on him tomorrow.”

“Great news. Maybe I can come with?”

She shakes her head. “Don't think so. Wayne isn't your biggest fan.”

“Why—what did I ever do?”

She cocks an eyebrow.

“Are you insinuating I
wished
Wayne's dick would break? That I somehow
rigged
his penis to …
explode?
”

“Mr. Chancey.” The addiction counselor is maybe twenty-five, recent college grad with this high breathy voice like he's got a penny-whistle lodged in his throat. “If you could save your conversation for the break. Bette, please go on.”

Bette O'Neal is a large woman: I believe the euphemism is
Rubenesque
. She's a dual addict: an overeating nymphomaniac.

“Well, okay, so I'm at my son's high-school basketball game, alright? He's seventeen, a senior. The ah, the point guard or something. So they're playing and it's a close game, five points, around that and I'm in the stands which're crowded but not too crowded—not a playoff game or like that.” Bette sips from the liter bottle of Pepsi she's brought. “There's this guy on the other team—
boy
I guess I should say, but who knows? What's the legal age nowadays?”

“Eighteen.” The counselor's name is Joey. “The legal age of adulthood is eighteen.”

“Oh. So okay, maybe
legally
he's a boy, but a lot of it depends on maturity and … like, upbringing, doesn't it? Not like I actually
did
anything—I mean, physically speaking. Anyway this guy, boy, whatever, he's tall and lanky and … lithe I guess, which I know'd usually describe a girl or like a cat but this boy, he really was
lithe
. I'm sitting there in the stands totally
consumed
—can't take my eyes off him, the way he's running up and down the court. The gym's got that smell you get when guys or gals or people, just any old people, find themselves in close contact. Like sweat but I don't know,
deeper
than sweat. Know what I'm talking about?” A few people nod and Bette says, “So I'm staring at this boy and touching myself. Brought a coat on account of the chill and lay it across my lap. Strange but I didn't imagine fucking, his hands on my tits, my mouth on his cock, any of that—just watching him run and jump was enough. The biggest turn-on was his youth: he was young and clean and probably disease-free, which, even though I wasn't fucking him I still felt was, y'know, a
plus
. Orgasmed five times real quick, like a string of firecrackers going off.” Sip of Pepsi. “That was my week.”

“Thank you for sharing, Bette.” Joey'd winced every time Bette used the words
fucking, cock,
or
tits
. “While it's commendable you didn't act on your urges, you must admit such behavior is not socially acceptable.”

“Ah, lay offa her,” says Baney Jones, a sixty-three-year-old serial exposer.

“I'm not
on
her, Mr. Jones,” says Joey. “We're trying to create a supportive and honest environment. That means critical appraisal of—”

“Ah, your mother wears army boots!” Baney slaps a liverspotted palm on the table. “You're giving her the gears! Reading her the riot act!”

“It's okay,” Bette says. “I'm a big girl, sweetheart; I can handle it.”

Baney tugs a plaid-pattern porkpie hat tight over his skull, shooting Joey a glare from beneath the brim. Joey elects to move on. “Owen, is there anything you'd like to contribute this evening?”

Early twenties with a mop of sandy-reddish hair, Owen Traylor's a tragic case: working a summer construction crew on break from college, he was struck—
impaled,
is I guess the right word—with a length of rebar: it split the left side of his head behind the eye and the pressure forced a portion of Owen's brain through the wound. Thankfully the hospital's got a crack neurosurgeon on staff who was able to patch Owen's skull in a grueling ten-hour procedure. He's damn lucky but something's still jakey in his noggin, a few mis-crossed wires because Owen's blowing his load
all the time
. We're talking fifteen, twenty times a day. Riding the bus, say, or shopping for deli meats at the supermarket and blammo—Mount Vesuvius. Poor bastard wears adult diapers but the constant convulsions have turned his abs hard as granite. Owen's not an addict so much as a neurological anomaly but attends regular as clockwork, and if it helps him, hey, that's peachy.

“Went on a date the other night,” he says. “Sandy, that girl in my sociology class.”

“You handed round a photo, didn't you?” I ask. “Black hair, right? Green eyes?”

“Ah, yes,” Baney says. “Fine bosoms, as I recall. High and proud.”

“Right,” Owen goes on, “that's her. She's real smart and talented— she painted my portrait, did I tell you?—and, I don't know, just, oh you could say,
great
. She's got a fantastic laugh and I'm not a funny guy, not naturally, but still I'm always trying to say something to crack her up.”

Joey taps his ballpoint pen on a legal pad. “Is Sandy aware of your physical handicap?”

“It never came up.” Owen shifts uncomfortably in his orange cafeteria-style chair. “We been seeing each other for a month or so, on and off. The other night things got, well …
intimate
.”

Everybody leans forward perceptibly. Baney says, “
Now
we're down to brass tacks.”

“Mr. Jones,” Joey warns, “please.”

“So we're at her place watching TV on the couch. One thing led to another and …”

“How did one thing lead to another?” Bette wants to know. “Don't skimp, Owen. Don't give us the ole
dot-dot-dot
to skip past the good bits.”

“This is a sexual recovery group,” says Joey, “not
Penthouse Forum
.”

“Well,” Owen says, “we kissed and then, uh, then some other stuff. But when we were, y'know,
expressing our love,
I found I couldn't … it was impossible to … like,
do
what it is I
do
twenty times a day.”

“Are you saying,” Joey asks, “you had difficulty reaching orgasm?”

“The guy who loses it in elevators and movie theaters and in
church,
for god's sake, this same guy can't deliver when it counts.” Owen shakes his head. “Can you believe the irony?”

“So what?” says Bette. “Did she get off?”

“Think so.”

“So what's the big deal?”

“I thought,” Owen says, confused, “it was important to a woman that she satisfy her man. Like, a confirmation of her skills or something.”

The fluff girl snorts. “Don't care so long as I get mine.”

“Ain't that the truth,” Bette says.

Owen looks relieved. “So you think it's okay?”

“Did you go down on her ungrudgingly?” I ask.

Owen nods, blushing.

“Then she's yours for life, m'man.”

Joey claps his hands and clicks his teeth. “Moving on! We have a new member with us tonight. Please introduce yourself and tell us a little.”

The fluff girl speaks. “Hello, everyone. My name is Beatrice. I'm a sex addict.”

“Welcome, Beatrice,” we say in unison.

“Just moved to town. I grew up out East but lived all over. I've got reflex sympathetic dystrophy syndrome; basically, I'm hypersensitve to touch.” As if to prove this, she traces a finger along the tabletop and down the cool steel leg. “Feel everything at a heightened sensory level. When I get with a man I'm not looking for love or even sex … I'm after friction. Men are just …
vehicles,
is the medical term. Friction delivery systems.”

“I see,” says Joey. “What do you hope to accomplish here?”

“I'm hoping to get laid.”

“I like your moxie!” Baney says.

“Beatrice,” Joey says dourly, “that is not at all the
ob
-jec-
tive
.”

“Wait a minute, now, hear me out.” She holds her hands out in the manner of a policewoman halting traffic. “We're all addicts here, aren't we? And the nature of addiction—all addiction—is to hurt. Hurt yourself, hurt others. Am I lying?” Beatrice's fingertips running over the weave of her jeans. “And our addiction's different, isn't it? Alcoholics don't romance the bottle or apologize after drinking it; drug addicts don't worry about knocking their needles up. Our addiction is intensely personal so we need to be responsible. Find that fine line between our needs and the existence of others.” Beatrice's fingertips moving along the table's gum-pebbled underside. “It's okay for a viper to lie down with another viper—all vipers know their nature, right? Problem's when the viper lies down with the lamb.”

“Is that how you see yourself—a viper?” Joey asks. “And the others here—vipers?”

Beatrice shrugs. “I've been to a lot of these groups. One thing never changes: people don't admit their flaws. Always the rough childhood, the cold wife, stress at the office, the same old piss and moan. Nobody ever stands up and says, Listen: the awful things I do come from a defect in my basic human character, deeply rooted and inseparable from who I am. Never
once
will you hear that. So, yeah, guess I'm a viper. Safe childhood, caring parents, but still. Don't wish to harm anyone but your urges get the better of you sometimes, right? That's why I'm here: searching for someone like me. Only responsible way to go.”

ME AND OWEN
hunker outside the library doors, smoking. Wind whips through the courtyard, litter scuttling along the cement walls. Two empty vodka bottles wrapped in a white plastic bag perch atop an overflowing garbage can. Beatrice steps out in a leather windjammer.

“Could I bum one of those?” she asks me.

“Don't know—do vipers share cigarettes? I mean, in the wild?”

Standing there in the courtyard's thin yellow light I am again struck by just how beautiful this girl is: Helen of Troy, sack-the-city-torchthe-ramparts kind of beauty, the sort that leaves a wake of helpless shattered men, man-
husks
eaten out and hollow and left to contemplate the paths they'd taken to claim that beauty in those foolish moments when they felt themselves capable.

“You're pretty hot, Beatrice.” Hand over my pack. “I'm saying, for a reptile and all.”

“Aw, ain't you a peach.”

“Just got to town, huh? Where from?”

“Couple different places.”

“So, why here?”

“Weary of the same places, the same faces.” She hums the opening bars of a song which, though familiar, I cannot place. “Moving on down the line.”

“You found a job pretty quick.”

“Yeah, well, I worked for a director out West. He made a call.”

“You do good work.”

Beatrice's long pale fingers caress the cigarette. “Nothing much to it, is there? Not talking rocket science. And how long you been in the biz?”

“Few years. Started after my divorce.”

“Like it?”

“What's not to like?” Then: “Anyway, it's safer. Everyone knows the stakes. Everything's laid out in black and white.”

She fixes me with a look, the import of which I cannot fully discern. “You think?”

“Yeah I think. Sure I think.” A shrug. “Or something. Just my dime-store philosophy.”

Baney and Bette return from a coffee shop up the street. We stand in the frosty courtyard, knit shoulder-to-shoulder against the wind. The doors open and shut, mothers and children, college students, old women with satchels of paperback romances passing into and out of the library's welcoming light. I wonder whether any of them pause to consider us huddled here—what might they think? Beatrice's hand moves against Owen's side, a catlike pawing gesture and Owen smiles feebly, looking away. When she laughs the plume of her cinnamoned breath wafts past my face.

Bette shivers. “Got to get out of this cold. Fat chick with thin blood—I'm an enigma.”

Baney says, “I could use an enema myself.”

The others head inside. Beatrice grinds the butt under her boot heel. “You had a wife?”

“For six years. Swell job, big house.”

“Kids?”

“A daughter.”

“Love them?”

“Don't know I ever loved my wife. Thought I did for a while. Love my kid to death. Wish there was more room in my heart.”

“So, you've hurt people.”

“A lot. Haven't you?”

She nods. “Tell them up front who you are and what you're about but still, everyone thinks they're the one's gonna change you. I'm not gonna change. Sure it's miserable sometimes, but it's constant misery trying to be something else. This is …”

“The lesser of two evils.”

“Yeah.” A smile. “Like that.”

Down the street two faceless women scream at one another in an unknown dialect until the rumble of a watertruck drowns their voices and through a gap in the courtyard's security fence, a lengthwise slit between decaying housing projects, the moon shivers on the hammered face of the canal.