Wayne said, “Spoons, Ms. Forktine. Ms. Forktine, spoons.” Pamela Forktine was older than Wayne. She had put up with the advances of every description of loser testosterone hardcase it was conceivable to put up with, until Wayne. Wayne was to her mind so far gone on rancid testosterone he was sweet. That her fifteen or so years on him did not seem to bother him — a direct result, as she saw it, of the hormonal dementia these boys suffered — made her certain he was sweet.
The fifteen or so years she had on him did not bother Wayne, until they went out and Pamela Forktine took the bull by the horns and said, while they were going counter-clockwise in their cowboy boots and she was looking for Wayne’s chest hair between the pearl snaps of his shirt with her finger, “You want to do the bone dance?”
“Do what?” Wayne said, stopping their counterclockwise drift among the stream and creating eddies of resentment on the floor around them. “I mean, sure,” he said, and they got going again.
“It’s what kids say,” Pamela Forktine said. “Bone in, bone out.”
Wayne sort of bent over at the waist, blowing his nose at this. He turned a red far deeper than the yoke on his shirt. He had a piece of ass, it was a lock, but this kind of talk embarrassed him to a dangerous point. If Pamela Forktine wanted to do the bone dance, then Pamela Forktine had best not say anymore about it.
They went to her house. There she scared Wayne by looking in another room and announcing, “It’s okay. He’s out.”
“Who?”
“Rafe.”
“Rafe?”
“Oh. Raphael.”
“Who’s Raphael?”
“My son.”
“How old is he?”
“Nineteen.” Pamela Forktine had led Wayne into the living room and was making them a drink in the kitchen. Wayne pondered getting beat up by a nineteen-year-old kid named Raphael. His original concern had been that Pamela Forktine was married and that he might be shot by a Mr. Forktine. That was, now, preferable to this other. Raphael Forktine was either going to be a homosexual of some sort or some kind of terminator. Rafe Forktine sounded like death row.
When he looked back on it, picturing Pamela Forktine’s death-row-candidate son beating the ever-living shit out of him might have been the high point in the travail of his and Pamela Forktine’s eminent time together. But Rafe Forktine did not burst in and rescue Wayne from what was about to happen. No one did, including God.
Before God and everybody else, Pamela Forktine walked in the room with two drinks and her blouse open, no bra. This required of Wayne a careful, very casual double take. Her breasts were not altogether visible because they seemed to point down and away from each other, like a cartoon hound dog’s eyes. It was the end of subtlety on Pamela Forktine’s part. “Where’s that bone, Wayne?”
Wayne turned red and made a splitting noise.
“In here?” Pamela Forktine made one stroking pass, one unzipping pass, and scared Wayne with an immediate and vigorous program of what he would later term gobbling. It included a gobbling noise. Wayne would have laughed but was too frightened. The gobbling worked, though, and Pamela Forktine got up very cuddly in his neck, her knees facing him on the sofa, and said, “Oh, sweetie. I hope I’m okay.”
“You’re okay, sure you’re okay—”
“No, I mean. Well. I’ve been…”
This scared Wayne again. “You’ve been…what?”
“Dry.”
“What?”
“I’ve been, well, dry.”
There they were in a brightly lit living room waiting for a nineteen-year-old son to avenge his mother, who said things like bone in bone out, gobbled you, was dry. Wayne was about to lose it. Why did pussy have to be this way? Why could it not be like in a magazine? Like in a book? Like at least in a story, something that went smooth and worked.
But Pamela Forktine was not giving up. She gobbled, she got Wayne into the bedroom, she got on Wayne, and Wayne had a passing fancy that her hair felt like hemp rope and her skin like party balloons three days after the party. But this felt good, this harsh rope and loose satin, and made its opposite number, fine hair and young tight flesh, seem like tomatoes and eggplants, and Wayne began if not gobbling back at least nibbling this satiny crinkly Pamela Forktine, and Pamela Forktine, when that didn’t tickle too much, seemed to like it and kept saying “Oh, sweetie” and was not dry. It worked. Wayne gasped up on her like a shipwrecked man on his found island. “Oh, sweetie, sweetie, sweetie,” Pamela Forktine said, patting his head in rhythm.
This was a very sad and silly business, Wayne thought, this woman calling him this for not doing any more than not losing his desire and spooing in her in five minutes, but she was calling him this sweetie nonsense without any joke, she was serious, and that made Wayne feel, despite himself, good. She could by God call him whatever she wanted to. What had she ever done to him? She had fucked him, that’s what, and that was what he’d asked for. He was going to be man enough to take what he got if he was man enough to ask for it.
And he was asking for it, man or not. Man. God, or whoever, put you here, and you have to ask for it. He puts water here and it has to run downhill. You get up there in fucking 120-degree heat and have to stop its running. You fix the fucking leak.
“I sprung a leak in you, Pamela Forktine,” Wayne said.
“You sure did.”
“Was it too soon?”
“No, sweetie. It was just fine.”
Just fine, Wayne knew, meant too soon. So what? Was that his fault? No, it was not. Water runs downhill. It has to.
It was not a new beginning, but it was, Wayne thought, new enough. He was half asleep and inadvertently said, aloud, “New enough,” and Pamela Forktine said, “Hmm? Did you say nude enough?”
“Sounds like a wiener,” Wayne said.
They nestled and snuggled together. Pamela Forktine said, “Do you like cereal? Rafe likes cereal. You can stay. There’s enough.”
“There’s nude enough?”
“Nude enough.”
It was their first joke together. Wayne said, “I had a twin brother no one knows about. Sparky. Sparky died and Wayne lived.”
“I’m sorry, sweetie. How old was he?”
“Sparky was three. Minutes.”
“Mmmm.”
“Nude enough.”
“I’m nude enough, Wayne.”
“What? More?”
“Sounds like a wiener, sweetie.”
Wayne liked women who said what they wanted. Up to a point. This was the point. This was precisely the point. He liked Pamela Forktine.
Wayne took, as he puts it, a dump. This came out of him loose and burning. It made him step more highly than usual for a few minutes afterward and wish for some kind of soothing salve. “Is there any beer?” he asked Pamela Forktine. This was probably a mistake, at nine in the morning with a new woman with a teenage son possibly already in the kitchen eating cereal. Next he would be watching cartoons. Wayne gave this some thought. Maybe this was not the place to be.