The Last Worthless Evening (21 page)

“You guys are so rich,” she said.

“It doesn't matter.”

“I know. Let's go to the woods.”

“What woods?”

“Upstairs.”

He moved to her front to kiss her, but she stepped around him and pulled him up the stairs. At their top she looked down the dark hall past closed doors. She looked at him and raised a forefinger to her lips and whispered: “They're so quiet.” She looked down the hall. “My mother's not. Probably she thinks she is.”

“What are we doing?”

“Ssshhh. Whisper.”

Holding his hand, she moved down the carpeted hall. The music in the basement room was faint, and she did not know whether she heard its repetitive bass or felt it through the soles of her sneakers. She stopped at the first door and heard nothing but the music and her clandestine breathing, and Bruce's, faster and louder beside her. She went to the next door and flicked ashes again and when she realized it, her foot moved over the carpet. She followed the hall, turning into another wing, past doors closed to silent rooms, and stopped at the master bedroom at the end of the hall. Behind it the mattress was moving, and Bruce whispered: “It's Goldilocks.” She wanted to hear a girl's voice from the bed.

“Your parents' room. They shouldn't do it in there.”

“Why not? No: I guess you're right.”

She caught his wrist as he lifted his arm to knock on the door. She pulled him away, and all down the hall to its corner she listened behind her for a girl's voice. She imagined hissing, in there on the huge bed. She turned into the first wing, hurrying, pulling him; the heat of her cigarette was near her fingers. One of the doors was open now, and she glanced through it at the dark and the bed's silhouette and smelled marijuana smoke. At the top of the stairs she drew him beside her for the descent. She said aloud: “Get me to an ashtray.”

Now he led: into the empty living room with its large windows, and he leaned away from her, then an ashtray was in her hand. Her fingers burned as she put out the cigarette. He took the ashtray and put it on a lamp table beside them. Then he was holding her, kissing her with his open mouth, his tongue, and he was hard against her pelvis. Slowly she was moving backward with the pressure of his weight, and when her calves touched the couch she lay on it and held and kissed him as he moved on top of her and mimed lovemaking between her legs that she spread and then lifted around his waist, her sneakers crossed above him. She had done this before and she would do it now with him, let him come against her in his jeans, listen to the soft cries and groans from his throat and receive his weight as he collapsed on her. But he stopped and shifted and was beside her; with closed eyes she saw herself singing, saw the mirror and the line and the straw from her nostril, and Belinda hugging her, and the smoke of fifty cigarettes pluming from her lips, and Wanda's face so pale just before she pushed herself from the wall and into the crowd between her and the bathroom; Bruce unbuttoned her jeans and carefully, slowly, eased down the zipper; she raised her hips and he slid the jeans down to her ankles, then he was off the couch, squatting, working at the laces of her sneakers and taking them off, one at a time, a hand holding her heel; then he pulled off her jeans and laid them on the floor. She waited for his hands to move up her legs for her pants, waited to twist away from them, and to close her thighs. But he rose and, standing on one leg at a time, pulled off his sneakers; then he unbuckled and unzipped and pushed his jeans down his hips and stepped out of them. His erection was white cotton. He pulled his tee shirt over his head. When his hands touched the waistband of his jockey shorts she turned toward the floor and found her purse on it and lit her last cigarette. She reached to the coffee table for an ashtray and lay on her back again and placed the ashtray on her skin and the front of her bikini pants. She remembered they were pale blue. He lay on his side, at the edge of the couch, the cock pressing her left thigh. She held her cigarette to his lips, then said:

“Can we just lie here?”

“Sure.”

But when they finished smoking he moved the ashtray to the floor and kissed her. For a long time he kissed her in the dark and the distant music and low beat from the basement and once the steps and voices of a couple descending the stairs and in the hall and through the dining room and kitchen, music rising through the basement door as they opened it, then they closed it and her sounds again were those of kissing and fast breath, and his hand was gentle on her breasts, under her loose white Mexican blouse. When he pushed it above her breasts she raised her shoulders and head and arms, and for an instant her face was inside its white, then it was gone and she was naked with him, save for her pants. When his hand went there she closed her legs and he kissed and softly sucked her breasts and she opened her legs to his hand, and lifted her hips; he pulled her pants away from her, then pushed them past her knees, and she drew one leg out of them and with that foot she pushed them down and over the other foot. He was on top of her, kissing, hard against her, and she drew back and twisted away.

“I can't.”

“Please.”

“I can't.”

“Why?”

“I don't have anything.”

“I do.”

“No you don't.”

She held him tightly and kissed him and it was touching her again; she moved with it, felt it slip between her lips, and she jerked back from it.

“In my room,” he said. “I'll go get one.”

“No. I can't. I won't.”

“Please. I can't stop.”

“Here. Move.”

Holding his waist, she tenderly pushed him toward the back of the couch, and she shifted to its edge. When she held the cock, he lay on his back. She kissed him. She had never touched one, and its surface was smooth. She moved her hand up and down and he moaned. Now that she was not afraid, she wanted to give him his pleasure or his release from it; and warmly she kissed him, gently she moved her hand. Then he said: “Molly. Your mouth. Please.”

She did not want to and she wanted to and this made her feel her drunkenness again, and the cocaine, and she moved with them, between his legs, and said What if I don't like it? then knew she had not said it aloud and she did not; she lowered her face, her hair falling down her cheeks and forehead, her jaws widening, and she saw a large bird, a swan, eating from the earth; then, as if she were beside the couch, she saw her mouth moving down and up. He squirmed and gasped and moaned, then it twitched: only a tiny spurt of salty liquid, it was nothing and it was over; but then she felt the rush beneath its skin and it convulsed and warm bitter liquid softly slapped the roof of her mouth, and then again, her mouth filled with it and the bitterness of lemon rind; she swallowed and oh shit oh God she had done it, it was in her, and her soul recoiled from her throat, from her heart, and lay soiled and sticky in her stomach while she swallowed again, then did not move. In her mouth it throbbed. She did not move; she kept her face hidden in her soft hair. Then his hands were on her cheeks, her shoulders, and he pulled her up to him, her face to his, and kissed her: her dirty mouth and fouled breath and her soul lying cold beneath her heart. She felt both abused and unworthy, so she gratefully received his kisses, and wept. He licked her tears. He was murmuring to her. She was beautiful, she was wonderful. His tongue went from her tears to her breasts, and he moved, and licked her belly and moved again and was licking her, she could hear him lapping juice, his tongue inside her, then on it, oh on it where at night in her bed and in the morning in her bed and afternoon in her bed her finger— She moved against and with his tongue and pressed his hair and head with her hands. Then she heard her voice, the girl's voice above her with its deep strange cry like a prayer as she became her climax and her voice grew louder with its chant: “Oh God—”

In the morning, heat woke her. She was naked and she got up and turned on the oscillating fan on her bureau at the foot of her bed, and knew from the angle of sunlight in her room that it was between eight and nine; as she went to the fan and back to bed she did not look at the clock. She opened her eyes only to the sunlight and the fan's switch, and closed them as she walked to the bed and lay on it and saw through her headache and nausea the cock in her mouth. His semen was in her blood. She was nearly asleep again; she had to piss and she tried to will her bladder to sleep too but it was insistent and now she was fully awake to the day she did not want to wake to. She got up and lit a cigarette and went to her bathroom and sat and sighed and shut her eyes and smoked. Then her bowels held her there, the Dos Equis leaving her with more solidity than they had in their bottles, all those bottles she had drunk, and with a stench that repulsed even her. Pain moved laterally through her stomach, and the next release weakened her, and her legs quivered. She sat and waited for her body to set her free so she could sleep, and regain that freedom too, from her knowledge that she deserved this punishment. Then she washed her hands and face, and studied its pallor and her dark eyes for a sign. There was none: only the fatigue in her eyes, and the drained skin and the expression of painless damage on her face. Only a hangover.
Gueule de bois
, the French called it. Mug of wood, Mrs. Conway said. Wooden face.

But she wanted a mark: deserved one, had earned one as Dorian Gray earned his. Late one night she had watched the old movie on television, in black and white until he pulled the cover from his portrait and it was in color; and sitting in the dark living room, she had exclaimed in horror; or her flesh had, her body tightening upright in the chair, and sending from her mouth an articulated gasp:
oh
. She rinsed her toothbrush glass and filled it with water and imagined her photograph on her mother's dresser: that eternal smile when she was fourteen changed by a downward turn of one corner of the mouth. She almost believed it, and felt the picture drawing her to her mother's bedroom, to gaze at the grim set of her lips. Then she saw her mother's mouth going down and up on a cock. From a bottle in the medicine cabinet she took three aspirins and swallowed them and gagged, on the tablets or the water, but she held her breath, then slowly released it, and leaning on the sink she told her body to relax, and she did not vomit.

In bed she smoked, to blend the flavor with the taste of toothpaste, to soothe her nerves and heart in their hung-over acceleration. Melted lemon rind in her mother's mouth, in her mother's breath and blood.
You feel like yourself alone among everyone else
, her mother had said.
With your body and your heart
. Then why did she feel like ashes? And not even five feet and four inches and a hundred and twelve pounds of contained ashes, but ashes scattered and blown among others, everywhere and so nowhere, and all that was left on her bed was her soul steeping in bitter semen. She slid her hand under the sheet she had pulled above her hips because even alone in her room she needed to cover her vagina. She closed her eyes to the sound of Bruce licking, to the image of them on the couch; she watched them from above and from the side and a close-up of his tongue on her like in the movie they had gathered the courage to rent, the four of them together in the store, and they watched it in Belinda's dark basement, Molly and Belinda and Dotty and Wanda:
They've got to be on drugs. That is sick!
and laughing and joking, then after the movie, in the first moments of dark, the four of them suddenly quiet on the couch, disgust and sorrow spreading like gas from their bodies pressed together, and all at once they each lit a cigarette and Belinda said
I guess nobody wants to suck a cock tonight
and the gas was compressed and released in jets of laughter. Now her finger was helpless against her mind, and she focused again on Bruce's tongue and inhaled from her cigarette as she came, the two pleasures drawing from her the moans she controlled from habit, muted to sighs of smoke.

Now she could sleep. But she took the ashtray to the wastebasket beside her dressing table and emptied it so she would not wake to its smell. She watched the ashes floating down to settle on wads of Kleenex and a crumpled shopping bag; yesterday she had bought music, cassettes in that bag. Yesterday: a Wednesday in summer. She looked at the mirror attached to the table. Not a mark. Even her hymen was in place. How could it be a Thursday you did not want to wake for, and how could you want it to be Wednesday again and buying Rickie Lee Jones, and nothing of those wishes showed, not even in your eyes? Her body was faithless. It only showed eating and colds and flu and the sun.
Yourself alone among everyone else. Your body and your heart
. Bullshit, she said to her eyes in the mirror, and turned from her reflected nakedness and went to bed, drew the sheet to her waist, and in the breeze of the fan, she slept.

Noon light was in her room when she woke. It was on the sheet and her breasts, her face in shadow still. She thought she was nauseated again, then knew it was hunger. She imagined the kitchen and her mother standing in it, and she wanted her mother there to smile at her, kiss her. Kiss her? She had given away her mouth. It would never be the same mouth for her mother; never, never.
If I don't get out of this bed I'm going to cry all afternoon
. Then she let it come, lying on her back, a forearm covering her eyes. When it stopped she was very hungry. She would eat on the sundeck and lie all afternoon in the sun. She would read. Choose a book that would make her forget, for those hours in the sun, last night and today and seeing Bruce tonight; would make her forget even her body, and her name. A book by a woman. She liked Edna O'Brien. She did not always understand the stories, but she loved their music. But she would not spend this afternoon with Edna O'Brien; she wanted the people in the book to have clothes on, and to be outdoors in sunlight.

Her stomach's demand was a childish distraction, and she denied it. She made the bed and gathered last night's clothes from the floor and stuffed them into the wicker basket in her bathroom. She would have to shower tonight to see Bruce, but she showered now for her soul, and when she stepped out of the tub her clean wet skin gave her a portion of hope, like a scent on the breeze. Showers were a delightful mystery: water, soap, water, and some transition occurred, something deeper than clean flesh. Her morning was in the past now. She could dress, move about the house, eat and drink; afternoon was here; night would come. Time had started its motion again, and she could enter it, with interest, with anticipation, and soon—she was sure of it now, as she dried before the steamed mirror and thought of what she would eat—she could enjoy again what time held for her: tonight with Bruce the ocean glittering and blue in the last of the sun, then darkening under the first stars in the fading color of the sky. She put on a maroon bikini bathing suit and went barefoot to her mother's room. The door was open. The bed was made, the windows behind it open to the smell of trees. She did not look at her photograph on the dressing table. She crouched at the bookcase and scanned the spines, then went downstairs. The living room was sunlit, warm; she moved slowly past the large bookcase, looking for a woman's name. But in the Hs she stopped at the five Hemingway books. Her mother had asked her to read
The Old Man and the Sea
, and she had liked it and had cried, last winter with snow. When she was a virgin. She was still a virgin. So last winter when she felt like one. Her mother's favorite was
For Whom the Bell Tolls
, but Molly had not wanted to read it because it was long. But this afternoon was long. She took it from the shelf and went to the kitchen.