Read Plan B for the Middle Class Online
Authors: Ron Carlson
Plan B for the Middle Class (20 page)
The band kicks into a slow jazz number and Clare starts to lead. She's a good dancer, really, steady and right on the music. I pull back for a moment and say, “You know what I do? I work with pandas.” She gives me a scary appraising look and I add, “Panda bears. I was a writer.”
“That's okay,” she says. “You'll be okay.”
But when we fall together after that interchange, the whole dynamic scatters. Clare adjusts herself, hitching her arm around my neck further, and drawing her body against mine.
“Vonnie told you about Frank and Allen, didn't she.”
“Yes,” I say. Clare grips me at the neck. We won't be talking anymore. I can feel her against me like a drumbeat and I simply dance. Slowly. It is one of the closest embraces I have ever engaged in in public. She is pulled up so that our ears are almost touching and I can feelâwith every stepâthe lean hardness of her body. The keyboard player is leading the combo through “Feelings” now, milking the vacant maudlin song to the limit. I look over and see Yvonne at our table and she gives me a brave nod:
Good for you, keep it up.
Clare and I have tightened things right up and now I can feel her pubic bone bruising against me with every move, intentionally, but I don't give way. She's using it to search my pelvis the way an impatient woman roots her purse for keys, and then she's found it, and hungrily she stays right on the beam. The other dancers seem oblivious to our humping; this is the age of dirty dancing or whatever, so I close my eyes and follow as she tilts frankly into me, pressuring me up to nine o'clock and then quickly to eleven. This would be the right time for Katie to show up, of course, and I could explain how I was comforting the sisters. The other couples have fallen into two-armed embraces, but Clare and I keep our clasped hands out in a classic ballroom pose, perhaps a trifle low, while our hips work like two guys tunneling out of prison.
My father told me a few things about sex. A person remembers these scenes. It was one of those nights when I was going out and I was reading
Time
magazine in the living room waiting for Ryan to honk. My father always wore plaid shirts after work with the sleeves rolled and his pencils in the pocket. He was a practical man who everywhere he went had a pencil, and though I may be more reticent than he is mostly, I am just like him with that pencil. He was an engineer and he took that approach.
“Let's talk about sex for a minute,” he said. I remember he didn't say “What do you know about sex?” or “What do you want to know about sex?” No, we were in this together. We were going to talk about sex for a moment. “I'm sure that you understand the technical principles involved,” he said. “The guiding physical laws of sexual intercourse between a man and a woman are very simple. You know how the man is designed, and a woman is constructed in a complementary fashion in terms of the location of the vagina and its angle. These things are obvious. What isn't as obvious to students of anatomy and sex is another essential principle of engineering.” Here he asked a question: “Do you know what that principle is?”
“No, sir, I don't.”
“That principle is
cooperation.
These things are all designed to facilitate sexual intercourse, but without the element of cooperation, it won't work the way it is intended. The results will be all wrong. Cooperation is the most complex concept about sex. You're going to hear a lot about love and responsibility in the next few years. Just remember they are simply part of this idea of cooperation.” He stood up. “This isn't a great talk, but it's ten times what any of your pals are going to get from their dads. You'll be all right. There's no hurry.”
Ryan McBride had another approach. He was still a virgin too, but when he heard that Cheryl Lockwood was meeting me at the party, he became all wisdom. “You want something to happen, right?” he told me on the way to the party graduation night. I was floating in a new freedom, still seeing myself cross the podium an hour before to pick up my diploma. I marched down the aisle, where my father stepped out and put his arm around me. He was stuffing his paper and pencil into his jacket pocket, for he had designed yet another thingâa more efficient way of distributing the diplomas without losing the sense of ceremony. His arm still around my shoulder, we walked outside the gym, where my mother in a pretty blue silk dress was waiting under the leafy campus sycamores. He and Mom were going out to dinner, and Mom smiled and said, “Welcome to the real world, where tomorrow morning bright and early we're going to weed the garden. So don't stay out too late.” She kissed me on the cheek and added, “Congratulations.”
Then I was in the Oldsmobile with Ryan, both of us jerking around changing clothes as he drove around the west side, picking up the big boxes of hot dogs, the bags of buns, the eight cases of soda, and the three cases of Coors from his uncle's garage, and then striking out on the old highway toward the lake. It was like rocket travel, our ship breaking clear of civilization, and slipping further and further into the wasteland void, carrying enough hot dogs for the rest of our lives. The sun had set and it was June: the earth glowed beneath us. Ryan was hollering theory. “If,” Ryan pounded his right hand into the seat between us, “you want something to happen tonight with Cheryl, then you need to be realistic about how it would happen, and you know,” he was growing gradually louder, beating the seat with each phrase, “that you are not going to do anything. Do you hear me? You know and I know that you are not going to do anything. You are not going to make one move. So. Listen to me. The secret is: let things
get out of control!
” I reached over and righted the steering wheel so we moved back onto the paved roadway. “So listen. Just do this. Horse around.” He saw my face and said, “That's right, just horse around. Dance, bump, push, shove, touch, touch, touch. Horse around until you can let her know ⦠that you're aroused. That's all it takes.” Ryan had stopped pounding now and he had both hands on the wheel, but he was emphasizing his theme by turning to me after every sentence and squinting. “Once a girl feels she has aroused you, she's obligated. Girls are responsible people. They're not like guys. If they feel they've caused something, they take care of it.” I squinted back at him and nodded, but I was full of questions, wondering if what he said was true and wonderingâif push actually came to shove that night with Cherylâwhat I would do.
In the middle of the next dance, Clare and I turn so I can see our table through the other dancers and I see something odd. Yvonne is talking to a pretty dark-haired woman whom I recognize as Katie. My wife is sitting with Yvonne and they are talking like classmates, and then Yvonne points at us and Katie looks, catches my eye, and waves. Clare and I are still slow-dancing, ignoring the rock beat of “Jambalaya,” locked together in a pelvic clinch that has me up under the waistband of my undershorts, pain and pleasure, while she bumps and clings, her pubic bone like a blade cutting a new road in the wilderness as she breathes short and sharp against my neck. Around us the dancers are twisting and hopping, and we must look oddly stationary to my wife. I smile and nod at Katie, lift my hand from Clare's back and waggle a short wave, but as I do I feel Clare grip me as if I was going to drop her out a window and I hear air in her teeth once, twice, and she rises against me softly now and falls, and then the grip is gone and she is floating loosely in my arms. She relaxes and pulls back and when I look in her face she is contorting and rolling her eyes, clearing them the way people do who wear contact lenses, her forehead corrugating. Finally she sees me watching her. “What?” she says, averting her face. “So, what do you do with pandas.”
At the table Yvonne stands and says to Katie, “This is my sister, Clare.” Katie shakes her hand and we all sit down.
“We've been dancing,” I say. “You missed the torch dancers.” The waitress appears and busily clears the table, deftly setting a glass of wine in front of Katie. I see the other women aren't having any more. As I settle in my chair my rash flares.
“We've had a nice talk,” Yvonne says to me.
“How long have you been married?” Clare asks.
“Fourteen years.”
“That's wonderful,” Clare says. She smiles at me. She's being sincere. “That is really wonderful.” When she stands, she seems very tall. She goes on, “Well, Vonnie, I don't know about you, but this farm girl is up too late.”
The sisters depart, each giving me a handshake out of a business manual, Yvonne clasping my hand in both of hers and saying, “You've been so kind.”
For a moment I consider beginning an explanation, but it would start, “Their husbands ⦔ and I let it go. I feel a simple relief at being alive and I just smile at Katie.
We aren't fully out of the lift when I take Katie in my arms and we kiss. “This is great,” she says, as we amble down the carpeted hall in a four-legged embrace, turning, and pressing into each other. “This is hungry kissing, do you know that? Remember?” She's up against me again, her arms cinch. “Hungry kissing?”
We undress before we remember to close the door, I'm not kidding, and then in the bed, she rolls a naked leg onto me and I tell her the story of the day, not telling her about Dr. Morris and his shots. The whole time I'm telling the tale, we're moving with each other and from time to time she reaches down and checks the progress of this erection, the twelfth kind, and when she does that our moving rechecks itself and changes gear. This is what storytelling should be, this is the kind of attention narrative desires.
I bring the day right up to the torch dance and stop. Katie pulls me over onto her now and says, “You know, I've never seen you dance before. I've never seen you dance with another woman.”
Now this next part, the bodies roll, their design made manifest, and there is achieved a radical connection. I'm not talking about souls. Who can tell about this stuff? Not me. You're there, you are both in something, something carnal and vaporish at once. Your mouths cock half a turn and you sense the total lock. You're transferring brains here; your spine glows. You go to heaven and right through, there's no stopping. What do you call it? Fucking? Not quite right here, this original touch, the firmament. My credo: you enter and she takes you in. This is personal. This is cooperation. Who can live to tell about it? You cooperate until you're married cell to cell, until all words flash away in the dark.
We roll apart, seizing onto our pillows as if they were life preservers. After a moment, Katie places the backs of her fingers on my cheek. She says, “I've got to go to sleep.” She smiles and her eyes close. “Don't worry about the column. You don't need it. You're a writer. There are a million things to do.”
Mornings, many early mornings, the boys will climb onto our bedâhow many times have I been bounced awake?âand either sit on my head and talk to Katie or fish from the foot, casting my robe sash into the icy waters beneath us. They have phenomenal luck always, hoisting dozens of large fish, reptiles, and other treasures from the sea and immediately offering them to us to eat. I lie there as Ricky wedges a piece of graham cracker in my mouth, saying, “Have some fish, Dad. Really. These are good.” Katie is sanguine about all this as she sits in the pillows and asks Ricky for a little lemon with her fish and Ricky pantomimes the lemon. Harry keeps a lookout on the prow, his inverted binoculars showing the doorway out there somewhere on the edge of the lost world.
If I don't eat my fish right away, Katie says to me, “Hey, Dad, get with the program. These guys are fishermen. Come on. It's better than being nomadic wanderers.” What can I say? It is one of mankind's oldest struggles: life on a boat. Two guys want to fish in the open air. One guy wants to feel his wife's bare thigh under the warm covers and fish later.
Now in our bed in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, I can feel my wife descending in sleep. I can almost feel her falling away into night. She goes deeper with every breath. But I am full of allergy medicine and mai tais. I swing my legs out of bed and go to the window. Things are quiet all along the shore.
On Black Rock Beach twenty years ago I thought I was going to blunder across one if not all of the sexual frontiers. The scene was set, and I was ready. Night came on like the first night on earth, the sunset blistering the surface of the Great Salt Lake with the same wincing flash that it spread across the west desert sky, a flare that took our eyes and then chilled in a minute, replaced by the charcoal shadow of the planet.
Ryan lit the gas-soaked pile of lumber with a paper rolled in a ribbon which he told everyone was his diploma, and our little fire ripped into the dark. We had four sawhorse tables of food and drinks, and some guys had set up two large speakers in the back of a pickup and the flat sandy wilderness rang with Bobby Vee, the Four Seasons, Del Shannon, the Beatles, Dick and DeeDee, Roy Orbison, the Coasters, Johnny Mathis, the Boxtops, Richie Valens, the Shirelles, Andy Williams, Dion, and occasionally some wise guy would slip in Gene Autry or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Ryan kept the beer in the open trunk of his Olds. I remember how beautiful and illicit it looked in there, a tub of gold cans in silver ice. I thought: This is it, we're going to drink beer. I'd had a few, most of them with my father on the days when we'd poured the patio or leveled the yard, but this was different, this was a tub of gold cans on silver ice at the edge of the known world.
It was a hundred teenagers goofing around and dancing in the perimeter of a small fire by the wide margin of a big lake. And though we had miles of open space, no one wandered far from the fire. A couple might go for a walk, but there was something about knowing that there was
nothing
down that beach, nothing along the five hundred miles of coastline, not a thing, that sent them back quickly to the circle of light.
