She stopped in midsentence and looked at him. She seemed to consider the question earnestly. “No,” she said. “Not really. I mean, I can lie, but I usually don’t about important things. Why do you ask?”
“Why did you tell me you were a masochist?”
“What makes you think I’m not?”
“You don’t act like one.”
“Well, I don’t know how you can say that. You hardly know me. We’ve hardly done anything yet.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I can’t just come out and tell you. It would ruin it.”
He picked up his cigarette lighter and flicked it, picked up her shirt and stuck the lighter underneath. She didn’t move fast enough. She screamed and leapt to her feet.
“Don’t do that! That’s awful!”
He rolled over on his stomach. “See. I told you. You’re not a masochist.”
“Shit! That wasn’t erotic in the least. I don’t come when I stub my toe either.”
In the ensuing silence it occurred to her that she was angry, and had been for some time.
“I’m tired,” she said. “I want to go to bed.” She walked out of the room.
He sat up. “Well, we’re making decisions, aren’t we?”
She reentered the room. “Where are we supposed to sleep, anyway?”
He showed her the guest room and the fold-out couch. She immediately began dismantling the couch with stiff, angry movements. Her body seemed full of unnatural energy and purpose. She had, he decided, ruined the weekend, not only for him but for herself. Her willful, masculine, stupid somethingness had obstructed their mutual pleasure and satisfaction. The only course of action left was hostility. He opened his grandmother’s writing desk and took out a piece of paper and a Magic Marker. He wrote the word “stupid” in thick black letters. He held it first near her chest, like a placard, and then above her crotch. She ignored him.
“Where are the sheets?” she asked.
“How’d you get so tough all of a sudden?” He threw the paper on the desk and took a sheet from a dresser drawer.
“We’ll need a blanket too, if we open the window. And I want to open the window.”
He regarded her sarcastically. “You’re just keeping yourself from getting what you want by acting like this.”
“You obviously don’t know what I want.”
They got undressed. He contemptuously took in the mascular, energetic look of her body. She looked more like a boy than a girl, in spite of her pronounced hips and round breasts. Her short, spiky red hair was more than enough to render her masculine. Even the dark bruise he had inflicted on her breast and the slight burn from his lighter failed to lend her a more feminine quality.
She opened the window. They got under the blanket on the fold-out couch and lay there, not touching, as though they really were about to sleep. Of course, neither one of them could.
“Why is this happening?” she asked.
“You tell me.”
“I don’t know. I really don’t know.” Her voice was small and pathetic.
“Part of it is that you don’t talk when you should, and then you talk too much when you shouldn’t be saying anything at all.”
In confusion, she reviewed the various moments they had spent together, trying to classify them in terms of whether or not it had been appropriate to speak, and to rate her performance accordingly. Her confusion increased. Tears floated on her eyes. She curled her body against his.
“You’re hurting my feelings,” she said, “but I don’t think you’re doing it on purpose.”
He was briefly touched. “Accidental pain,” he said musingly. He took her head in both hands and pushed it between his legs. She opened her mouth compliantly. He had hurt her after all, he reflected. She was confused and exhausted, and at this instant, anyway, she was doing what he wanted her to do. Still, it wasn’t enough. He released her and she moved upward to lie on top of him, resting her head on his shoulder. She spoke dreamily. “I would do anything with you.”
“You would not. You would be disgusted.”
“Disgusted by what?”
“You would be disgusted if I even told you.”
She rolled away from him. “It’s probably nothing.”
“Have you ever been pissed on?”
He gloated as he felt her body tighten.
“No.”
“Well, that’s what I want to do to you.”
“On your grandmother’s rug?”
“I want you to drink it. If any got on the rug, you’d clean it up.”
“Oh.”
“I knew you’d be shocked.”
“I’m not. I just never wanted to do it.”
“So? That isn’t any good to me.”
In fact, she was shocked. Then she was humiliated, and not in the way she had planned. Her seductive puffball cloud deflated with a flaccid hiss, leaving two drunken, bad-tempered, incompetent, malodorous people blinking and uncomfortable on its remains. She stared at the ugly roses with their heads collapsed in a dead wilt and slowly saw what a jerk she’d been. Then she got mad.
“Do you like people to piss on you?” she asked.
“Yeah. Last month I met this great girl at Billy’s Topless. She pissed in my face for only twenty bucks.”
His voice was high-pitched and stupidly aggressive, like some weird kid who would walk up to you on the street and offer to take care of your sexual needs. How, she thought miserably, could she have mistaken this hostile moron for the dark, brooding hero who would crush her like an insect and then talk about life and art?
“There’s a lot of other things I’d like to do too,” he said with odd self-righteousness. “But I don’t think you could handle it.”
“It’s not a question of handling it.” She said these last two words very sarcastically. “So far everything you’ve said to me has been incredibly banal. You haven’t presented anything in a way that’s even remotely attractive.” She sounded like a prim, prematurely adult child complaining to her teacher about someone putting a worm down her back.
He felt like an idiot. How had he gotten stuck with this prissy, reedy-voiced thing with a huge forehead who poked and picked over everything that came out of his mouth? He longed for a dim-eyed little slut with a big, bright mouth and black vinyl underwear. What had he had in mind when he brought this girl here, anyway? Her serious, desperate face, panicked and tear-stained. Her ridiculous air of sacrifice and abandonment as he spread-eagled and bound her. White skin that marked easily. Frightened eyes. An exposed personality that could be yanked from her and held out of reach like … oh, he could see it only in scraps; his imagination fumbled and lost its grip. He looked at her hatefully self-possessed, compact little form. He pushed her roughly. “Oh, I’d do anything with you,” he mimicked. “You would not.”
She rolled away on her side, her body curled tightly. He felt her trembling. She sniffed.
“Don’t tell me I’ve broken your heart.”
She continued crying.
“This isn’t bothering me at all,” he said. “In fact, I’m rather enjoying it.”
The trembling stopped. She sniffed once, turned on her back and looked at him with puzzled eyes. She blinked. He suddenly felt tired. I shouldn’t be doing this, he thought. She is actually a nice person. For a moment he had an impulse to embrace her. He had a stronger impulse to beat her. He looked around the room until he saw a light wood stick that his grandmother had for some reason left standing in the corner. He pointed at it.
“Get me that stick. I want to beat you with it.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Get it. I want to humiliate you even more.”
She shook her head, her eyes wide with alarm. She held the blanket up to her chin.
“Come on,” he coaxed. “Let me beat you. I’d be much nicer after I beat you.”
“I don’t think you’re capable of being as nice as you’d have to be to interest me at this point.”