It Feels So Good When I Stop (18 page)

“We can do this another time if you don’t feel good. I’m not even hungry.”

“Please.” She took my hand, and I flinched. “It’s important for me to do this.”

“Okay.” My door had no handle. I was Ted Bundy’d in.

 

WE WENT TO the Crow’s Nest. From across the room, the waiter and cook nodded at me when we walked in.

“Come here a lot?” Marie asked.

I didn’t answer.

“Two for dinner, Captain?” the waiter asked with menus in hand.

 

MARIE PICKED THE chunks of meat from her lobster roll and scraped off most of the mayo before eating it. She scrubbed her front teeth with her tongue after each swallow. She looked like she was working a football mouthpiece into proper position. It was a little disgusting to watch. I deducted a few beauty points.

“So, what did you want to talk to me about?”

She took a sip of her cocktail. “Have you ever made a film?”

“No.” I didn’t think she was talking about porn, but I wasn’t sure. Jocelyn and I had snapped a few Polaroids of each other that were bluish in tint. Garden-variety back-of-the-top-drawer stuff. But that was all. We pillow-talked about doing more, and that was arousing enough. Plus it would be a drag if my parents saw it. Or if I had a kid someday—which was never going to happen, but if I did—it would blow having sex movies of me out there.

“I’m a filmmaker.” She swallowed, then pushed the sides of her hair behind her ears. “I thought maybe you’d work for me for a couple weeks.” I pictured a false-walled torture chamber retrofitted to 97 Opal Cove Road. “I can’t pay you a lot.”

“Why me?”

“Honestly? The way you take care of that baby gave me a feeling about you.”

“Really? I almost got him eaten.”

“But you didn’t.” She took a drink. “And you didn’t fuck me when I was wasted.”

“If I was more shitfaced I would have.”

“Thanks a lot. Am I that attractive?”

“No. Yes. I meant if I’d have had more to drink-”

She smiled. “I know what you mean. If, if, if. If I was the queen of England, I’d pee Moët.”

We laughed. I felt the earliest pinch of a crush.

“Seriously,” she said, “why are you trying to make me think you’re repulsive for
not
being repulsive?”

“Is that what I’m doing?”

I WAS WAITING as the bus pulled into Amherst Station. It was near midnight. I’d been staring at a small cluster of fireflies flickering above a patch of unruly garbage grass, trying not to think about the family I’d financially destroy if my health-insuranceless body was taken over by cancer. Thankfully, I spotted Jocelyn seated—like an angel—near the back of the bus. She stayed there well after the initial crush of passengers moved forward. Jockeying for position was not her thing. I moved closer to the door as passengers filed off. They all looked beat.

“People are fucked,” she said before her second foot touched the pavement. She was wearing the white linen pants. That meant a thong could be in my immediate future. We kissed.

“What happened?”

“Oh, boy, you’re going to love this.” She scanned the small crowd. “See dumpy-ass over there? With the Princess Leia haircut?”

The young woman in question was standing in a puddle of urine-colored light. Her billowing Sinbad pants and leotard top were chicken-broth green. She poked the pay phone dial pad like it was the chest of someone who had wronged her.

“Of all the fucking people, who do you think sat down next to me?”

“Nut job?”

“And, oh, my God, does she ever smell.” Jocelyn gagged. A fake, but a nice touch.

“Onion pizza?”

“Worse. Halibut.”

“Oh, man.”

“I’m not kidding. I had to put Blistex on my nostrils. Feel.”

I touched her mustache patch. It was still slippery. I felt a twinge in my dick.

“And that’s not the best part.”

“Lucky you.”

“I make a special trip to the Strand to buy a book for the trip, right?” She drew a copy of Maxine Hong-Kingston’s
Woman Warrior
from her pocketbook. “So as I’m smearing Blistex all over my face so I can read without puking, she sees the book on my lap and asks me if she can take a look at it because she likes the title.”

“And you let her?”

“I didn’t think she was going to read the whole thing.”

“No shit.”

“Can you believe that?”

“Did you tell her you wanted it back?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Why?”

“Because at first I thought she was just reading a few lines, you know? Then when she turned the page, I was thinking, There’s no fucking way. And then, I’m not kidding, I was fascinated. What kind of person does that? I mean, to smell like that’s one thing. Maybe she can’t help it, you know? Some people smell. What can you do? But reading a stranger’s book is just . . .” She shook her head, trying to jar the right word loose.

“Fucked up.”

“Isn’t it? And you know what she said when she gave it back? She said she was disappointed. She expected it to be different.” Jocelyn’s mouth was open wide with reen acted shock. “Can you fucking believe that?”

I took the book from her. “It’s pretty thick. She’s a fast reader.” I spread the book open, raised it to my face, and took deep a whiff.

“I wouldn’t.”

“It smells like sea monkeys.”

Jocelyn was entertained, but she acted like she didn’t want to be. “You’re sick.”

“You’re the one laughing, so what’s that make you?”

“Sicker, probably.”

The driver was pulling the last of the suitcases from the bus’s lower compartment. Jocelyn took the opportunity to distance herself from the oddball sniffing the crotch of
The Woman Warrior
. I watched her walk. A thong it would be. She slipped the driver a couple bucks’ tip.

“Why did you do that?” I said out of the corner of my mouth.

“Because that’s what you do.” Jocelyn’s family was loaded and domestically disinterested enough to have their standing weekly grocery order delivered by a young man her mother described as a “nice colored fellow.”

I took her bag, and we walked arm in arm in a line tangent to the rancid pool of light. “Go slow,” I said. “I want to see if I can smell her.”

“Stop.”

I pulled Jocelyn closer to me. Princess Leia was giving the gears to whoever the poor fuck was that she’d called: “Do not fucking stand there and tell me you didn’t tell me that.”

Jocelyn squeezed my arm. “My God,” she whispered, “look at the receiver.” The cord leading to it was frayed and completely severed from the rest of the telephone.

“Do not humiliate me here,” Leia said to her imaginary friend.

“Humiliate her somewhere else,” I whispered.

Jocelyn nibbled my ear and told me I was a terrible person.

We walked toward my house along Pleasant Street. It was late June. Trustafarians with names like Zephyr, Flake, and Winnebago were reenacting scenes from
Billy Jack
, Burning Man, and Bread and Puppet on Amherst Common. They had established a tiny Hoover ville of high-end pop tents, a small circular trampoline, and some anti-whatever signs. Someone was blowing a spastic tune on a flute. Two dudes were squeezing those long African drums Paul Simon had a total hard-on for around the time of the
Graceland
album. Birds from deep within the majestic, centuries-old elm trees were screaming like their throats were being cut.

“Fucking hippies,” Jocelyn said, tapping into her mean streak. “Free Leonard Peltier, my fucking ass. These are the same assholes with No Blood for Oil bumper stickers.”

“So?” I didn’t particularly like hippies, but I didn’t particularly hate them, either. Mostly they were invisible to me.

“So? So doesn’t the bumper of a fucking Volvo seem like an odd place for that sentiment?”

“It’s not like they’re actually hurting anybody.”

“What do you mean? That’s exactly what they’re doing. It makes me sick.” She was getting heated up. I knew how little it would take for her to turn that heat directly on me.

“Hey,” I said. “Guess who bought new sheets?”

“WHAT KIND OF film are we talking about?” I asked Marie.

“A documentary.”

“Oh.”

She laughed. “You seem disappointed. What did you think I meant, porn?”

“No.”

Marie was loosening up. How loose remained to be seen. The waiter took his time placing two fresh drinks near the hub of the table. He was eavesdropping. I waited until he was gone before I spoke.

“I don’t know if I have the head for any kind of work right now,” I said. “I’m in the middle of some heavy personal stuff.”

“Who isn’t? ”

“I don’t know. Lots of people?”

“I’ve never met any of them.” Marie got to work on the new drink. “I’m not going to try too hard to convince you of what you’re up for. You know better than anyone.”

“What’s the movie about? Cape Cod surf culture and tattoos? Shit like that?”

Marie’s eyes were the color of a drunk-friendly Jack and Coke. Two lovely crow’s-feet appeared at their corners when she smiled. “It’s about my son. He drowned four years ago.”

JOCELYN WAS IN the bathroom, caulking the edges around her diaphragm with spermicidal jelly. We had an understanding that her inserting it in front of me would have had the opposite effect of a good Degas painting of a peasant woman washing herself. Nothing like a lot of real-life bending, reaching, and determined lower-lip biting to empty the sails of all wind.

“What a pain in the fucking balls,” she said, climbing into bed. “I should go back on the pill.”

“Why don’t you? Seems like it would be a lot easier.”

She got annoyed with me, like going back on the pill was my callous and uninformed idea. “Because the pill fucks up your body. That’s why. They don’t even know what it does to you long-term. I might never be able to get pregnant.”

“So?”

She gave me a dirty look.

“Fine,” I said. “Let’s keep doing what we’re doing.”

Jocelyn rolled onto her back in a huff and slapped the comforter with both hands. “Because I don’t want to get pregnant now.”

I went cold. “Did something go wrong in there?”

“No. Not any more than usual. It’s not like I can stick my head up my twat to check the fit.”

“I can go back to wearing a rubber, too, if that makes you feel any better.”

She pooh-poohed that idea like I was, for the umpteenth time, overlooking the obvious. “I can’t feel anything with a condom. I have to be able to feel you. You, not an inner tube—or it doesn’t work for me.”

I could have put on three rubbers after a dip in hot paraffin and still would have been able to bust a quality nut. I moved into the fetal position and faced her side. “I know,” I said. “It’s a drag for me, too, if I can’t feel you.”