The Parallel Apartments (19 page)

“I was a little worried you were seeing a quack, but I didn't want to be nosy.”

They scratched and scratched Dartmouth's brisket.

Justine continued: “I'm still a little worried about that.”

“Dammit,” Lou said from the kitchen. Everyone in there laughed, quite unfettered, quite ignoring the yeti of awkwardness that had been wandering around the house ever since Lou and Dot came.

“You can be as nosy as you want,” said Dot, adjusting her pillow. It was smeared with iridescent green eyeshadow.

“What is it that he's…”

trying

“…going to fix, anyway?”

Justine could not look at Dot. She concentrated hard on scratching Dartmouth between each of his ribs, feeling for muscle, for meat, tissue, the pulses of living. While scratching a spot between Dartmouth's fifth and sixth left-hand ribs, about a third of the way down, Dartmouth decided he needed to be in the kitchen, and thus explosively embarked Dot's lap. Justine now had nothing to scratch, nothing to deflect her question, whose intrusiveness grew and grew as the instants that Dot did not answer passed. So Justine yawned.

“It's a disease that's getting more and more common,” said Dot. “AIDS. It's not contagious, except through sex or shared needles…”

“I know,” said Justine. “We learned about it in health class.”

“I
got it from
sex.”

In the kitchen, one, then another bottle cap
chk-tk
ed on the linoleum floor.

From Lou?

“It wasn't from Lou,” said Dot, with timing so precise it was as if she had read Justine's mind. “Most certainly not. We've fucked—pardon me—but that was many years ago, and we gave up trying pretty quick. Our styles did not complement.”

Justine scratched and kneaded her palms.

“Was it a heroin addict?” she said finally, her voice sand-dry. “Or a gay guy?”

“Could've been either. I've had a lot of… lovers.”

“Wow.”

“Dammit,” said Lou from the kitchen.

“Has he told you much about me?” said Dot.

“Lou?”

“Lou.”

“Well, we're pretty much all together at the same times, you know, us three, so nothing you haven't already heard.”

“You knew I was—
am,
for life, I guess, like an Episcopalian—a hooker?”

Justine hadn't known.
Wow.

“So that's how you got it?”

“Yep.”

“So Sherpa's gonna cure you.”

“He might yet.”

“Good,” said Justine, though she wondered why she'd never heard of somebody who had found a cure for the most incurable disease since leprosy.

Dartmouth appeared in the kitchen doorway.

“Come,” said Dot, and Dartmouth cameth.

“How many… lovers do you think you had?”

Justine shivered at the shape of the word in her own mouth.

“Two thousand six hundred and sixty.”

“Whoa. Serious? All different people? You kept track?”

Dot picked up one of her books and gave it an I've-got-a-secret waggle.

“You don't mind me asking you all this?”

“Long as I get to ask you some stuff.”

“Blistering barnacles,” said Archibold. “Crikey, what a bloomer.”

“What did he say?” said Dot, looking in the direction of the kitchen.

“It's from
Tintin
.”

“What's a
Tintin
?”

“Comic book. My boyfriend reads them.”

“Oh,” said Dot, looking at her three books. “I used to enjoy
Wonder Girl.
She was foxy. Who's your boyfriend?”

Justine thanked god for returning Dartmouth, whom she began to scratch and scratch and scratch.

“Troy.”

“Fellah at the drugstore?”

“From school. We've been friends a long time, but going out for only about three weeks.”

“Have you had him over?”

“He's kind of a secret.”

“You like him okay?”

“I guess. He's kinda gay.”

“Bi?”

“I mean, I don't mean he's really gay, he's just a dork.”

“Barbershop quartets were all that was gay when I was a girl. And songbirds and maybe fawns bounding through meadows. So did you let him fuck you?”

Dot had a wee glint in one eye. Justine shivered again, the word
lovers
coming back, crowding her mouth like cocktail cherries.

“No… not yet.”

“Virgin?”

“No,” said Justine, exploding into a hot blush.

“Him?”

“Troy? Yeah. He's dying to not be, though. He pleads and cries and bribes. He's very simple.”

Ask me something else

“And yourself? Who did the popping?”

Justine spent an instant creating a story about a graund and gentle knight who died tragically, but abandoned it.

“Dick.”

“Dick. You say that like he's a dick.”

“He is.”

Dick also had breasts, womanly breasts, that he hated and that Justine had always been careful to be neutral about. They'd had sex a few times, always at night, always in the interior black of his Dad's Bronco, Dick always naked from the waist down only.

One late-fall night, near one in the morning, at the foot of Enchanted Rock, both of them abrim with an hallucinogenic zuppa of shrooms and sun-dried jimson-root (recipe and ingredients sponsored by Mac, Dick's older brother), Dick let Justine take off his shirt and suck his shameful mammaries. The experience was mutually painful, on several levels. Justine had had orthodontia installed for the first time that very morning, reducing her mouth to a kind of achy oral mulch, and Dick's nipples turned out to be highly quick, especially to metallic nibbling. After some shrieking and bloodshed, they gave up. She told him that she loved his breasts; that she loved
him,
and he cried. Instead of going home, where they were expected, they fell asleep. When she woke the next morning, Dick was not in the Bronco. She found him sitting naked on a nearby cedar stump, a filet knife gripped loosely in one hand, wild hatred rimming his big black pupils.

“Fuck off,” he had said when Justine approached him. But Justine did not fuck off. She tried to take his knife away, first with pleas and commands, then with force, but Dick ran away, screaming, “Fuck you!,” hacking twigs off of arid scrub oaks. Justine ran after him, but tripped, and Dick disappeared. Justine left the Bronco unlocked and walked home. She was received there by two furious and worried generations of Durants and remanded to her room. Later that night, she cut herself.

“You're a pro,” Dot said, holding Justine's arms, wrists up, in her hands. “A lefty, huh?”

“Yeah.” Justine was proud of her arms. “Been at it for years.” From shoulders to palms, Justine's arms were crisscrossed with scars of all character. The cuts were noticeably denser and deeper on her right arm.

“What about this?” said Dot, indicating with her thumb one end of a much thicker, newer scar that ran like a Nazca line from the base of her thumb to the calluses of her elbow and which was lined on both sides with small perpendicular scars, like dashes.

“I'd always used single-edge razor blades, the kind you get at the hardware store,” said Justine. “But I was out of those, and so I bought a pack of double-edged blades from 7-Eleven on the walk home, you know the kind that have a weird-shaped cutout like a candlestick in the middle, for old-fashioned shaving razors?”

“Old Lou still uses one of those.”

“They're a
lot
sharper. I cut deeper than I meant to. It slipped right through cables and tubes. My ring finger and middle finger don't work very well. See? It's why I got committed.”

“Two, four six, eight, mm, mm, mm… ah, fifty-four stitches.”

“Fifty-two. This one and that one were already there.”

“That's a better number, anyway. Jokerless deck.”

“Tons of blood. Charlotte had to pull up the carpet and throw out the mattress. Livia told me Charlotte was in a quandary over that—she didn't know how to throw them out without the whole world knowing. She couldn't just leave the blood-soaked stuff on the curb and wait for Big Trash Day. Finally she had her lawnmower man, Duck Baby, come by with his pickup, after dark, and haul it all off. That was the worst part of the episode, upsetting Charlotte like that.”

“You just don't think of that sort of thing when you feel rotten,” said Dot. “Disregard is an insidious effect of the disease of depression.”

“I still feel awful. And just a few days ago she nearly had a heart attack when she found some leftover blood on a fan blade. As a granny, she was upset, but as a housekeeper, appalled.”

“Lucky you didn't die, young lady.”

“I knew how to do a tourniquet. It was in a Webelos book I found in the library a long time ago. But I've been telling anyone who asks that it was a real suicide attempt. People scoff at cries for help. They condescend. And I've been cutting myself for so long, there's no way anyone really believes it when I tell them it was real.”

“It wasn't, though, was it?” said Dot. “Maybe they pick up on that.”

“I don't know. It sure looks bad. And even though I keep it covered, I still like it when people want to see. It looks like the real thing. And that at least gets me a little respect. Or at least it kills off some of the contempt.”

“Like doing time. That gets respect. But you'll get addicted to respect, and really shuffle off one day if you're not careful.”

“I don't know. It doesn't buy me that much, anyway.”

Justine thought of Clarissa Speen.

“So what happened to Dick?”

“He didn't do anything to himself. I saw him a few days ago in the guidance office. We have the same guidance counselor. It was like nothing had ever happened between us. We chatted about stupid stuff. He talked about
how hot our guidance counselor is. I could tell he had his smasher bra on under his shirt.”

“So was he any good?”

“You mean…”

“In the sack.”

Justine had no idea.

“He seemed to like it.”

“Blow him?”

“Yeah. He really wanted me to.”

“I can't believe it.”

“It's true.”

“I know, I'm just playing. What's it like blowing a man with all that metal in your mouth?”

“I never did it before I had braces, so it's all I know.”

“There was this girl I knew, Clancy, in New Orleans, found a dentist to pull out all her front teeth, top and bottom, so she could give a good blow job. You can guess how she paid the dentist, who afterward declared the procedure a great success. Soon she was the costliest suck in town.”

Justine tried to imagine this and could not.

“Wow.”

“Plus, her lisp she'd had all her life? Cleared right up.”

“I don't think I'm very good at it. I can't concentrate. I lose track of what I'm doing. It's like something is missing, you know what I mean?”

“Oh yes,” said Dot. “I do.”

“It felt like something that's always been missing, though. Even when I was little.”

Dot nodded, barely.

“When I was little I used to like to lick mirrors. Or anything reflective I could see myself in. It gave me great feelings—sexy feelings, if you know what I mean, like it made me feel grown-up like Charlotte, who was the coolest and most beautiful thing in the world, and like Livia, who was the sexiest.”

“She's still an erotic presence.”

“Yeah, well, she's a cold bitchrocket now. And all my sexy feelings, the good, warm ones that had nothing at all to do with body parts, disappeared when I was, like, eleven.”

“Period?”

“Period, yep, and period. Now I don't care that much about having… fucking Dick. Except for sucking his boobs,
that
was pretty great. Apart from that, I'm kinda asexual now. Like an echinoderm.”

“What the hell is an echinoderm?” said Dot, placing her hand on her chest. “No, don't tell me. I don't want to know. But look. No one's asexual. Especially somebody with eyes like you have. Those are
bedroom
eyes, young lady. You just haven't found what you like yet.”

Gracie Yin.

“Blow jobs, however,” said Dot, “will grow on you. So to speak. Everyone likes blow jobs.”

“I don't think I really like Troy. I mean, he's great and everything, and he's a pretty good friend, but…”