Love Me Back (6 page)

Damon had smooth knotty forearms. I’d never been with a black man then. His forearms were pecan colored and his lips were superfat and perfect. I think his hair was thinning but it was kept carefully in scrawny dreads. He was adopted. He was wary and closed and seemed untethered. Not crazy. Just without anyone. When we were together he talked and I listened. He talked about what he was getting next from Best Buy or the J. Crew catalogue. He talked about making his record on CD Baby. He wanted some tropical fish. He was long-term housesitting for some friends in one of the nicer neighborhoods where professors and retirees lived. There was wisteria. The house was spacious and felt uninhabited. There was a housemate I never saw but I was loud at night so I was glad I never ran into him. There was a tree in the middle of the house. A big old magnolia. Damon said they hadn’t wanted to cut it down when they built it so they built the house around it. The house was in the shape of a square with the center cut out. That was where the tree was, and all the interior walls of the house were glass so you could see it.

He grew giant supremely nourished marijuana plants in a closet in his bedroom, but I didn’t know that until I’d been going over there for eight or nine months. The strange part was that I had never even looked in that closet, or asked what was there. I hadn’t noticed it but it was right there in
the wall, a door with a knob. It was odd because I am the kind that will notice everything in a house and will peek under papers.

There were three transformations: He gave me my first orgasm. We stayed up all night listening to Ben Harper on the expensive fantastic stereo in the living room. We lay on the floor wrapped in a blanket. We kissed and then he pulled my pants off and stretched out on his belly. He held me down so firmly I couldn’t scoot away even though in the beginning it was just too much. So much. He had his arms wrapped under my legs and back over and his hands pulling back the lips and he flicked my clit so hard and pointed and precise and sweet. I couldn’t do anything but feel it. I didn’t know how to help then. He did it all. When it came it was a train, it was heavy and I couldn’t do anything but have it. I sang out—I was so loud he covered my mouth even though there was no one in the house. He said I don’t think they’ve been taking care of you have they.

The second was pot. He taught me how to do that. He was beautiful with it. So deliberate. Grinding the buds for the joint, rolling it. The way he sat forward on the couch with his arms balanced on his knees and his handsome fingers handling the paper with such respect and delicacy. So serious. His glasses would slip down his nose a bit while he focused and he would pause and hold the paper trough so still in one hand while he nudged his glasses up with the other. Nothing happened of course the first few times but one afternoon when we were both off we went to the Olive Garden on a date. I was married. I didn’t hide it from my husband. Damon and I smoked out before we left his place
to go to the restaurant. It was in the car that I finally felt it and I tipped forward and put my hands on my knees and felt warm and good. I felt desperate and so content. I felt like I knew everything about life. I knew what it was. I knew it was real and I knew what real meant. My eyes were closed and I said Oh. Damon said Hey Marie are you good? I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about life. He said Hey. I could feel him looking at me. Hey, he said. You got to be able to shake that off. I don’t want to shake it off, I said. Sit up, he said. I leaned back but I didn’t open my eyes. When we got to the restaurant I didn’t want to get out of the car. We sat in the parking lot listening to Dar Williams. The bright rasp of her fingers lifting off the strings connected my ears with my nipples with my cunt. My ears pulsed and my nipples pulsed and my cunt pulsed. I felt the milk and I pushed in on my breasts and thought about my husband and my baby and how much I loved them. Hey, he said. Open your eyes. I looked at him. You ready to go inside? Or what. I’m ready, I said. Okay, he said. You’re cool?

I’m great, I said.

We went inside. We sat across from each other with the breadsticks between us. I don’t know what we talked about. Everything tasted amazing. He said I sure was occupying a lot of space in his head. I don’t think I said much. Olives don’t even grow in a garden, I said.

The last one was that night when we got back to his place. We didn’t turn on any lights but there was a full moon shining down on the tree in the middle of the house and everything inside was gray and blue. I said I wanted to listen to the Powderfinger album so he turned it on and then
he sat down on a barstool with one foot on the floor and one on the bottom rung. I kissed him and pressed my hard breasts against his chest and then I unbuckled his pants and pulled out his cock and I felt such affection for it. Such devotion. It was so big and so fat and so hard and so straight. I kissed the top of it and then I was sucking on him and licking him forever. With so much love. There was nothing but my mouth around him. Nothing else but feeling what he was feeling and giving him what he wanted. I gave myself over to it and I knew what to do. The sounds he made were so genuine and grateful. I was moving with the music. I was performing. Just like that I understood how to be sexy like I’d finally understood what it was to be high and it was as if I had always known even though I hadn’t until that night. When he came he curled forward over me and cradled my head and I was wrapped up in the middle of him and I was swallowing it all and I could feel the vibration of his sounds on the back of my head. I stayed there with him far back in my throat after he’d finished and I had swallowed all of it. I waited until he sat up and then I let him go gently and sat back on my heels and looked up at him and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Damn, he said. Damn. Where’d you learn to do that? he asked, looking at me with admiration and disbelief. Here, I said.

There was a small room in the hall between the bedrooms. I don’t know what it was supposed to be. It didn’t have any windows but it wasn’t a closet. He had set up his own stereo in there and his guitars were lined up on their stands. There were speakers in each corner and a big beanbag in the middle of the room. After I learned how to get
high and suck dick we started going in there at night. He’d light a candle and turn on Jack Johnson or something else mellow. Ani DiFranco. Sometimes Patrice Pike. The Honeytree Lie. One night it was Alanis singing something better than the ironic song and I found her voice and figured out how to give it up to him too. I was lying with my back on the beanbag and my bottom on the carpet and he was inside me and I rode her voice with my pelvis. I let it go. Oh God Marie he said. I let him have all of it and he came and I knocked over the candle with my foot and the flame went out but we didn’t do anything about it because we were both having his climax. He passed out right away. I didn’t move. I was comfortable in the dark on the beanbag with his weight on me and his cock inside me. I liked it in that room. The smallness of it made me feel right. It was like a secret. Like we had found a place outside of life. Or under it. Away. When You Oughta Know came on I was glad the stereo remote was by my hand so I could skip it without disturbing him. I lay there in the dark listening to her and looking at the dark and smelling his neck. I closed my eyes and cried while she sang. You choose you learn she said. You pray you learn. You ask you learn. I was crying without letting my body move. It was only tears. I was keeping my breathing normal and I wasn’t making any sounds but the emotions made the milk come out fast and hot and I couldn’t push on them because he was lying on top of me. I hadn’t nursed her in over eight hours and there was so much milk. He woke up when he felt it on his chest. I’m leaking, I said. Wow, he said. He got up off me and when he did I could feel all the streams streaking away from my body and he said Whoa! because some of it was still
reaching him. I didn’t try to stop it because I needed to let the milk go anyway if I wasn’t going to feed her. He turned on the overhead light and when he saw that the milk was shooting out and dripping off my body onto the floor he said Hey! Shit! and grabbed his shirt off the floor and covered me with it.

I took what I’d learned back to my husband and taught him how to go down on me. I mean I didn’t explain it or anything but I knew what to do with my hips and I knew what to ask for and I discovered that he had a sweet mouth and he loved making me come. He loved me.

The morning I didn’t get up and pulled a package of saltines out of the drawer of the nightstand and took small bites without raising my head up off the pillow he said Is it mine? I don’t know, I said. I could feel him staring at the ceiling. He went with me to Planned Parenthood. If I had known whose it was I would have had it. If it had been Damon’s I would have wanted it. If I had known it was my husband’s I would have wanted it. But I couldn’t want it without knowing.

After that I stopped seeing Damon for a while but my husband seemed older and wise in the saddest way. He didn’t want to eat and his cheekbones sharpened. He went for long walks with the baby. One night we had candlelit sex on the floor in the living room. We would have done it on the couch but the couch was covered in clean laundry. Her toys were all over the floor around us. When he came he kicked the door to her little plastic barn and it made the cow stick its
head out with a loud electronic moo. We laughed. The baby woke up and cried and I went to feed her.

I walked out of Chili’s one Saturday morning when Kevin tried to punish me. I worked all the time. Every night and doubles on the weekends. I would pick up anyone’s shift, anything to get my mind into that gray place. Everyone knew I would work for them if they asked. I had agreed to take this girl’s shift but I didn’t realize it was an opener’s. I was supposed to be there at ten fifteen and I got there at ten forty. I thought I was early because I thought her shift started at eleven. I still had plenty of time to do all the opening work but Kevin was pissed and told me I couldn’t wait tables. He told me to go stand in the dish pit and take plates from the servers. When lunch got going and they started bringing me stacks from their tables each of them asked me what I was doing there. I was embarrassed and angry and I thought it was dumb since I never fucked up and I always came in early and stayed late. I didn’t understand how it was going to teach me anything to stand there in the dish pit. I was so angry I felt my nose blush and my eyes start to water so I took off my apron and left it on a stack of clean glasses on my way out the to-go door.

I went over to Damon’s. I had only been seeing him at work. I would stand close to him while he scooped chips out of the warmer. He would look at me and raise his eyebrows. When he opened the door he said What’s up. I came in and we went back to his bedroom. The door of the weed closet
was open and he was in the middle of tending the plants. What?! I said. You didn’t know? he asked. No idea, I said. I sat on the bed and watched him. There was a bong on the floor so I picked it up and took a hit. I lay back on the pillow still holding the stem and I imagined someone driving the blunt glass tip of the stem into the hollow of my throat. He came and sat down next to me and picked up the bong and I handed him the stem. So what’s happening, he said. I quit, I said. I walked out. I told him why and he took a bubbly hit and while he held the smoke in his mouth he said Kevin’s a prick. He lifted his chin and pushed up his glasses and inhaled twice and then he let out the smoke in rings.