The Mammoth Book of Short Erotic Novels (33 page)

Are you happy? asked the journalist quietly.

Yes, me very happy, ’cause I drink too much! I bring something for you. Here your clothes; I wash them for you; your shirt not yet; I no iron.

The photographer lay on the bed, his eyes closed.

You angry me?

No, not angry, Joy, just tired.

Look! I got toy monkey! You see? From lady! She like me too much! You go America Friday, I go her Saturday for holiday. No make love! No make love! Only go with her. You not angry?

Nope, yawned the photographer.

He looked at the monkey on the bed for a while. Then he flung it to her, or at her; what he was doing was never entirely clear. But surely he was only playing with her.

She froze in just the same way that Thais jogging in the park freeze into rigid attention when the national anthem comes on the loudspeaker. Then she whirled on him.
Why
you do that? You
angry me?

No. Just tired.

You no like me?

I like you fine, Joy.

Why
you angry me?

After that, the photographer’s face hardened. The journalist knew that something bad would happen.

Joy stood by the mirror. She had been about to undress. She fingered the topmost button of her Patpong uniform, undoing it and then doing it up again. Then she began to speak in a rapid
monotone.

You no like me? You no like me OK I go home sleep. You no like me? You no like me?

The photographer said nothing. He didn’t even open his eyes.

OK you no like me I go. I go now. You no like me. OK.

She began to pack very rapidly. The journalist lay watching her in silence, saddened to the bottom of his heart, knowing that there was nothing he could or should do, nothing to do in that long,
long time when she stood by the doorway waiting and then she said: OK. I go. And she waited a little longer. Then she turned out the light, opened the door, and shut it behind her. Now she would be
walking toward the stairs; the photographer could still have leaped up and caught her; now she was downstairs; now she’d be walking very, very quickly in the rain to find a
tuk-tuk
.
Lying in the darkness, he heard the photographer groan.

In the morning he decided to set out for Joy’s to tell her that he was worried about her and possibly to give her flowers or money. He arrived at Joy’s with his
heart in his throat and knocked, seeing light under the door. At least they weren’t sleeping.

Joy? he said.

Yes, she finally said listlessly.

He went in and said: My friend no angry you. I worried you. You drink too much. No problem. OK?

Pukki’s face had lit up when he came in, but now it dimmed. You no come for me?

I have something for you, Pukki, he said, giving her his last twenty dollars.

The girls were not their bar selves. They sat sweating and trying to rub away beer headaches. Two Thai boys (whom they vehemently assured him were not their boyfriends, and he thought:
Why
does it have to be my business? Why can’t they be your boyfriends? We have no claim on you; we’re only sick butterflies
) were lying on the futon. Soon Pukki began to pay the
journalist his due attentions. She sent one of the boys out to get lunch. When he came back she spooned the journalist’s food onto the plate for him, just right. She peeled the skin off his
chicken. She poured his water while the boys ironed his shirt and blue jeans. She had him lie down, and she sat fanning him. You good wife, he teased, and she laughed in delight, snuggling against
him. The boys massaged his legs, calling him Papa-san and bumming ten baht off him (he gave them twenty), and he thought:
Well, I could do worse than marry Pukki; Pukki is really a dear, dear
girl . . .

Before long, the photographer had made up with Joy, and they had gone to buy her some shoes with bells on them. The journalist closed the shutters finally and sat on the unmade
bed. One of the photographer’s used rubbers was on the floor. A fresh one waited on the bureau, like a fresh battery pack ready to be plugged in.

The bathroom door, a little ajar, was gripped by claws of humid darkness. The dirty walls, splattered with the blood of squashed bugs, seemed his own walls, his soul’s skin and prison. How
could he set his butterfly free?

Then he remembered the Benadryl and smiled.

He got up and began to search listlessly through the first-aid kit. He felt neither happy nor sad. For a long time he could not even find the Benadryl, but in the end he saw that he was holding
the jar in his hand.

After a while he unscrewed the top and swallowed a capsule dry. It went down fairly easily, and so did the next, but the third one didn’t, so he took his first swallow of beer. Eventually
the bottle was as empty as his heart. In the next room, someone coughed. He lay down on the bed, feeling a little sick, and stared at the ceiling for a while; then he got up and turned the light
out. It was very dark. He undressed down to his underwear and got under the covers.

Later, when the dark figures bent over him and he didn’t know whether he was in hell or whether he’d simply flubbed it, he strained with all his force to utter the magic words: More
Benadryl, muttered the journalist.

Ahem! Benadryl, you know, is only an antihistamine – not one of those
profound
and
omnipotent
benzodiazepines that can stop a man’s heart even better
than a pretty whore.

No, he didn’t really know his drugs, just as he didn’t know why all the Cambodian whores had taken Russian trick names; but when he walked down Haight Street one foggy afternoon
after he got back, it was all
buds? buds? indica buds? get you anything?
wide-eyed faces wanting to help him get high; he’d never been offered drugs so many times at once his entire
life! and he thought:
Has something about my face changed over there? Since I said yes to so many women, is my face somehow more open or positive or special or weak?

Back at the city clinic again because his balls still ached, he listened to the other victims of sexual viruses and bacteria explicating their woes:
That’s what
happens when you get
bored
. . . Well I tole that bitch I wanna become a personal trend . . . and I said please touch my mouth I’m a competitive body builder and she says I wanna hug
and I says ya want anything more and I
dipped
her like
this!
and then I tole her if a man touch
my
doll like that I’d kill ’im! . . . He gimme five dollahs
an’ then he stick it in me an’ now I be gettin’ these night sweats; well sistah if I was serious I was scared so I can’t be serious . . .

You should really take the AIDS test, the doctor said. How many sexual partners did you say you’ve had in the last month?

Seven, the journalist said. No, eight. No, nine.

Well, now, said the doctor. I think that puts you in our highest-risk group, right in this red area at the top of our AIDS thermometer. Did you know the sexual histories of all your
partners?

Oh, I know their histories all right.

Well, that’s very good, Mr Doe. Because, you see, if you didn’t know their histories you might not be aware if they’d engaged in any
high-risk
behaviors such as
unprotected sex, anal intercourse, IV-drug use, prostitution . . . They wouldn’t have engaged in any of those behaviors, now, would they, Mr Doe?

I don’t
think
they were IV-drug abusers.

Mmm-hmm
. Now, Mr Doe, do you always use condoms?

I couldn’t go so far as to say that, doctor.

Well (the doctor was still struggling to keep a positive attitude), would you say that you use condoms more than half the time, at least?

I did use a rubber with
one
of ’em once, the journalist grinned. But it was kind of an accident.

Mr Doe, said the doctor, you really should take the AIDS test.

I’d rather not know. How about if you just wrote me a prescription for some Benadryl? I’m fresh out.

With all due respect, his wife was saying, maybe even because you’re so smart, I don’t know – but you’ve definitely got problems. (The journalist had
just told her that maybe, just maybe, they should consider a divorce.) You need analysis, his wife said. You’ve got something to work out. You always say my family’s screwed up –
well
! I’m telling you,
your
family’s screwed up. Really screwed up. Actually the rest of them aren’t so bad. It’s you. Everyone thinks you’re a freak.
All the neighbors think you’re a freak, even if they’re too nice to say it directly to me. I’m normal; I’m tired of being married to a freak.

I see that, he said.

All your friends are freaks. Either society’s rejected them or else they’ve rejected society. They’re the lowest of the low. You’ve spent years building up a crew of
freaks.

I wouldn’t necessarily call them freaks, he said.

Tears were snailing their accustomed way down the furrows in her cheeks that all the other tears had made, so many others, and so many from him – why not be conscientious and say that
those creek-bed wrinkles were entirely his fault? They shone now with recognition of his guilt; they overflowed until her whole face, sodden with snot and tears, reminded him of a beach where
something flickers pitifully alive in every wet sand bubble when the waves retreat.

And that photographer you hang out with, she said, it doesn’t do your character any good to be with someone so irreverent.

Hearing that, no matter how sorry for her he was, he could not prevent a happy brutal smile from worming to his lips, twisting his whole face; he could hardly wait to tell the photographer what
she’d said and listen to him laughing . . .

He kept waking up in the middle of the night not knowing who this person beside him was. After she started sleeping in the other bedroom, they got along much better. Sometimes
he’d see her in the backyard, gardening, the puppy frisking between her legs, and she’d seem so adorable there behind window glass that he ached, but as soon as she came in, whether she
stormed at him or tried desperately to please him, he could not feel.
He could not feel!
For years he and his wife had had arguments about the air-conditioner. He’d turn it on and then
she’d turn it off and he’d wake up stifling and turn it on again and then she’d start screaming. Sometimes he couldn’t sleep. Other times he dreamed of struggling in a
blue-green jungle the consistency of moldy velvet; the jungle got hotter and deeper and then he’d find himself in the disco again, no Vanna there any more, only the clay-eyed skulls from the
killing fields, white and brown, a tooth here and there; from the Christmas lights hung twisted double loops of electrical wire (the Khmer Rouge, ever thrifty, had used those to handcuff their
victims); no girls, no beer; they kept bringing him skulls . . .

SPEAKING PARTS

M. Christian

Pell remembered seeing Arc’s eye – like it was the first thing she’d ever seen. Tourmaline and onyx. Silver and gold. A masterpiece watch set in a crystal
sphere, the iris a mandala of glowing gold. Her blinks were a camera shutter’s, as imagined by the archetypal Victorian engineer, but built by surgical perfection not found anywhere in
Pell’s knowledge. The woman’s left eye was jeweled and precise, clicking softly as the woman looked around the gallery – as if the engineers who’d removed her original wet,
gray-lensed ball had orchestrated a kind of music to accompany their marvelous creation: a background tempo of perfect watch movements to accompany whatever she saw through their marvelous, and
finely crafted, sight: Click, click, click.

An eye like that should have been in a museum, not mounted in a socket of simple human skin and bone, Pell had thought. It should have been in some other gallery, some better gallery –
allowed only to look out at, to see other magnificent creations of skilled hands. Jare’s splashes of reds and blues, his shallow paintings were an insult to the real artistry of the
woman’s eye.

That’s what Pell thought,
at first
, seeing Arc – but only seeing Arc’s perfect, mechanical eye.

Pell didn’t like to remember first seeing her that way – through the technology in her face. But it felt, to her, like it had its own kind of ironic perfection to deny it. So Pell
lived with the biting truth that she didn’t, at first, see Arc – for her eye.

But later, right after she got momentarily lost in the beauty of Arc’s implant, the woman looked at Pell with her real eye, the gray penetrating right one – and Pell forgot about the
tourmaline, onyx, silver and gold machine.

She had finally seen Arc, herself – the woman, and not the simple, mechanical part. Next to her, the eye was cheap junk: a collection of metal, old rocks, and wires.

She wasn’t Arc at first. First she was the woman with the perfectly created eye. Then she was the beautiful woman. Then she was the woman where she didn’t belong.
Seeing her eye, then seeing her, Pell lastly saw her as oil, the kind of oil you’d see pooling in the street, that had somehow managed to make its way into a glass of wine. Agreed, it was
cheap red wine – something out of a box and not even a bottle, but, still – she was oil: she didn’t belong and that was obvious, despite the cheapness of the gallery. You could
tell, cataloging her bashed and scuffed boots, noting her threadbare jeans, her torn T-shirt; that, amid clean jeans and washed (and too black) turtlenecks that she was a hum, a discordant tone in
the finely meshed posing in Jare’s tiny South of Market studio.

The woman was aware of her discrepancy. She wandered the tiny gallery with a very large plastic tumbler of
vin
very
ordinaire
, stopping only once in a while to look at one of
Jare’s paintings.

Holding her own wine tight enough to gently fracture the cheap plastic with cloudy stress-lines, Pell watched her, stared at the tall – all legs and angles, broad and strong – woman
with the artificial eye. She tried not to watch her too closely or too intently, sure that if she let slip her fascination she’d scare her off – or, worse, bring down an indifferent
examination of Pell: a sad ballet of a slightly curved lip and a stare that was nothing more than a glance of the eyes. The woman would see Pell but wouldn’t – and that would be an icy
needle in Pell’s heart.