Rabid (14 page)

Conroy set down his drink and stared at her, somewhere between terrified and pissed. “You aren’t pregnant.”

“Christ, Conroy. I’m not preggers. Get a hold of yourself.” She sipped her scotch, which emphasized the point. “It’s all just to contribute genes to the next generation.”

Conroy looked back to the television. “Reductionist, like your genetics. I thought you didn’t like reductionism. Glorious big picture, and all that.”

~~~~~

Leila said, “You’re trying to pass on your genes before you die and are burned up or decay and your atoms reenter the carbon cycle. Even my dad passed on his genes. But let me tell you something.” Her voice fell, and somewhere her mind thought,
don’t tell him this, he doesn’t even understand Middlemarch
. “I’m opting out, like George Eliot.”

“No you aren’t.” He didn’t even look at her.

“I’m not having kids, any kids, ever.”

He sipped his drink and didn’t turn his stare away from the television. “You’ll want kids when you’re older. All women want to have kids.” The asshole was dismissive, condescending.

Condescending.

Con can mean opposite. Con-descending, the opposite of falling, so
falling up
.

Conroy, Con-roy,
roy
means
king
, so
Con-roy
means
the opposite of a king
.

“No,
men
want kids,” she said. He was treating her like a drunk teenager. She wasn’t a teenager.

“It’s selfish to not want kids.” He watched some golfer do something to grass.

She said, “It’s selfish to have kids, to believe that your DNA is so valuable that you should produce lots of kids to suck up resources and turn food into crap and keep passing on your DNA. It’s selfish to make babies so that your own death is less terrifying.”

“Baloney.”

“Come on, Conroy. A woman who doesn’t want children scares you. It’s
unnatural
.”

“It is unnatural. Everyone wants kids. Women want to be mothers.”

“No, Conroy. Women want
sex
. Women risk getting pregnant and giving birth that, except for the last couple of decades here but still in most of the world, is horribly painful and lethal a good percentage of the time, because they want
sex
. That’s how much women want to
fuck
.”

“Bullshit,” he scoffed.

He
scoffed
at her, the idiot. “It’s why
men
were against birth control in the early nineteen hundreds and why the pro-lifer leaders now are all guys.
Two, four, six, ten. Why are all your leaders men?
Men want children. Men want to get married so they can lock up the woman so they know the kids are theirs.”

Conroy laughed. “There’s an old saying, ‘Men give marriage to get sex. Women give sex to get marriage.’ That’s the way it works.”

Leila was betraying secrets to the enemy. He had put sodium pentathol in her scotch and he
wasn’t even listening
to her spill these secrets, the secrets that women even kept hidden from themselves so they couldn’t betray them. “Listen to yourself.
Men
run the Catholic Church. The Church is against birth control and abortion and sex outside marriage and abortion.”

Conroy shook his head. “I wonder which neurotransmitter you have too much of.”

“Surely you don’t believe there’s a God that dictates that crap.”

“Leila, you’ve had enough to drink.”

She couldn’t stop talking. This topic haunted her. “Consider gay men. Homosexual men are promiscuous and have anonymous sex in the back rooms of bars.”

Conroy nodded. “Because they’re
men
. Heterosexual men would have that much sex if women let them.”

“You’ve got it backwards.” She was almost yelling across her apartment at him, but she couldn’t stop. He was an idiot and he thought
she
was wrong when she wasn’t wrong, but she was too drunk to stop herself. “Gay men have a
woman’s
sexual appetite. They like men, and they like
lots
of men as often as possible. They also like good shoes and pretty clothes and antiques.”

“Leila, please stop drinking.” He stood.

“But lesbians,” she swirled the dilute scotch in her glass and thumped it on the kitchen counter, “who wear sensible shoes, have extended groups of lesbian friends, cut their hair short, and participate in team sports,
they
pair-bond for life and stop having sex within a few months. That’s
men
.”

“Lesbians stop having sex?” Conroy took her glass away. “You’re going to be drunk before you even go out.”

He still didn’t get it. “That’s why hetero men fear gay men. Homos aren’t the manliest of men, inhabiting an all-male society, unfettered by women. The gay underground is a matriarchy. Gay men admit it and call each other by female names,
girlfriend, Mary, bitch
.”

He set her glass down on the bar, out of her reach.

She said, “It’s why hetero men like lesbians and why women become fag hags. They can relate.”

“Leila, let’s sit down. You’ve had a lot to drink on an empty stomach.”

“I’m fine.” She couldn’t make him understand because it scared him. He was terrified and mocking her and she should shut up. Leila’s head swam. The digital clock on the stove said six forty-five. Jody would be there soon. “You’ve got to leave.”

“I can’t leave you like this.” He sighed. “You’re distraught.”

“Just another word men use to make women seem weak.” The room swayed so she held onto the kitchen counter.

“Okay, then you’re drunk.”

“Am not.” She reached for her drink, and Conroy moved it farther down the bar. Asshole, just because he was taller, he could win at keep-away. “Jody is usually early. You should leave.”

“Will you stop drinking?”

“Fuck, no.”

“I’m worried you’ll choke to death on your own vomit.”

“Oh, attractive, Conroy.”

“Okay, here,” he said and he handed her back her glass, but it was filled with water. She drank it anyway. His vacant, recessive blue eyes crinkled at the corners with laughter. “Besides,” he said, “you’re forgetting something in your drunken, feminist theory.”

“What,” she said.

“Keep drinking the water. Men put little energy into making gametes and make millions of them. It’s in our reproductive interest to spread our genes far and wide, hope a few take root.”

At least he was listening, even if it was only to get his way, to keep her from drinking. “But—” she said.

“Not done,” he said. “Women put so much energy into making one egg a month and then nine months gestation, and then eighteen years of child rearing, that it’s in their best interest to marry a guy who’ll help raise their offspring. That’s male competition and female choice, sexual selection. Darwin.”

“Old theory,” Leila said. “Victorian era theory. Most men don’t have the opportunity to spread their sperm far and wide, so they find one egg and guard it and the offspring that they
think
is theirs. Most men don’t have sex with thousands of women.”

“Rock stars do.”

The alcohol buzzing softened as her liver chewed the ethanol in her blood.

“Salmon exception,” she said.

The doorbell bonged.

“Crap. Jody’s here.” Leila tried to figure out what to do.

“Salmon, like omega-three fatty acids?” Conroy asked.

“Salmon, the fish that spawn.” Leila went over to her door and looked out the peephole. Yep, Jody was dressed in spangles and sparkling scales that confused the peephole’s fisheye lens. She yelled, “Just a minute!”

Jody called through the door, “If you’re not dressed, that’s fine with me.”

“Getting my purse!” Leila went back to the kitchen and Conroy. “Nope. Missed the point again, Con-roy.” She handed him his vodka pine-screwdriver, took his rough hand, and led him through her kitchen.

Enough ethanol laced her blood that Leila was too sharp, too clear, and she knew all the ways he was wrong.

So many ways, starting with fish evolution and ending with fucking Leila.

She led him to her hallway and said, “Male salmon come in two types: normal and rock star. When resources are scarce, they all turn into little male salmon that swim like hell upstream and have the energy to get there, and they find one female salmon, and they spawn exactly once and die.” She tugged his hand and pulled him toward her closet. “When there are a lot of little male salmon around and competition for the females gets hairy, a few males grow bigger, shinier, redder, with big hooked jaws and canine teeth and can barely make it back upstream. Testosterone poisoning. They’re too big, too heavy, and the bears can see them. It’s risky. They’re rock stars, and if they make it, they get all the chicks.”

“That doesn’t happen.”

“Look it up.” Leila shoved him into the dark closet between her hanging clothes.

He held the closet door open. His blue eyes bugged out. “Even if salmon do that, we’re not fish.”

Her head rocked forward and her eyebrows cocked. “Of course we are, Conroy. We’re nothing but bald monkeys, and we’re nothing but hairy fish.”

He held her clothes apart and glared at her. “But you’re not going to have kids. So you have no purpose, under your own theory.”

“On the contrary, I can do whatever the hell I want to.” She slid shut the closet door, and she mumbled against the wood, “I’m free. Not even evolution can trap me.”

~~~~~

Conroy waited in the dark of Leila’s closet. Light slid through the cracks between the closet door and the jamb, just enough so he could faintly see her clothes hanging around him. Her clothes smelled like floral laundry detergent.

One pair of blue jeans was hanging by his left side, and he traced the crotch of her jeans with his finger, slowly, then rubbed the bulky seam, imagining Leila’s soft clit inside.

Outside the door, Leila whispered, “Lock up when you leave, but give us a five minute head start.” Her footsteps clinked away. There were greetings of two female voices, some very European moist lip sounds, and the front door closed.

The apartment was quiet, and Conroy found a slippery black blouse of hers hanging beside him. He ran his hands inside the material, where her small breasts would be, pinched the fabric that would rub her nipples.

He could hardly wait until she wore that black, silky blouse.

~~~~~

Saturday afternoon, Dante opened his office door to let Conroy Sloan enter. Bev waited outside.

Mr. Sloan crossed to his chair and lowered himself into it. Traces of sober consideration or light fatigue softened his usual twitchiness. Perhaps he was ready to truly confess.

Cordially, Dante asked Sloan, “You have informed the woman?”

Sloan sighed and reached behind him. He tugged a bloated wallet from his hip pocket, sorted through its contents, and handed Dante a folded piece of paper.