“Oh, she was just a groupie,” he said. “The point is, I didn’t care how beautiful she was. I wanted you.”
When they got off the phone, Valerie buried her face in the T-shirt, rubbing it across her lips and cheeks, helplessly nipping at it with her teeth.
His return was a festival of romantic lewdness. At four in the morning, as they lay on the rug in the irradiant caress of the television light, she invited him to sleep with her. At six in the morning, Michael slept like a healthy animal while she lay in a grim ball, tormented by overstimulation. The joy of the previous day seemed unreal, and even if it wasn’t, the outsize quality of it was bound to heighten the desolation she would surely feel when the affair was over. Valerie had not had many good experiences with men in her life, and as the sad sacks and malefactors of the past assembled for her mental review, her excitement over this boy began to seem pathetic. But each time she was about to sink into a restful misery, boisterous optimism surged up and kicked her into wakefulness.
When they got up, they had mugs of tea with spoonfuls of honey in them, and then Michael pretended to be a sleazy boss dropping in on an unsuspecting housewife just after her naive husband has left for work. The boss was a terrible malefactor, but in the haven of fantasy, he was safely confined to her script. There was great drama as the poor housewife struggled to resist him, but to no avaiclass="underline" Valerie opened her eyes just in time to be a little startled by the look of almost demented malice on Michael’s young face as he ejaculated across her mouth and nose.
They lay in each other’s arms for a long time. Then Valerie got up and put on a tape of piano jazz and made them a big pancake breakfast. They ate it on a rickety table on her back porch. It was nice, except the sauciness of the jazz suddenly sounded so self-satisfied that she had to go in and turn it off. “I’m sorry,” she said when she came back out. “That music was making me feel like an asshole.” Michael laughed. He sat in his boxer shorts, with his long legs spread, exuding succulent boyness just faintly shaded with dim, inchoate cruelty.
They went for a genteel walk, up and down the hills of the Castro and Noe Valley. They admired the flowers with which residents had planted their yards. Michael told her that he had been fat in junior high and that other kids had made fun of him. Then he had lost weight in a dramatic growth spurt during the summer before high school and had returned to school eagerly anticipating what he assumed would be his new social status, only to have the same mean kids call him “Pig Dick” again.
“It made me think that people would just do that to me all my life, no matter what I did,” he said. “After the end of that day, I went into a deserted classroom and cried. I mean, I really cried.”
Valerie emitted a tender moo and embraced his hips with one arm. “I wish I could’ve come to you as a visitation from the future,” she said. “I would’ve held you and told you you were handsome.”
Michael stopped walking and hugged her against his chest. His heart beat like a proudly flying flag.
They went back to the apartment and had sex while imagining a heartless scene between Michael and the Seattle girl he’d rejected. About halfway through the fantasy, Valerie stopped being a bystander and became the poor girl. She pleaded with him to fuck her, but when he did, she felt a terrible rush of emotional pain that shocked her into tears. Mistaking her shudders for excitement, he became too rough, and she cried out for him to stop. They separated and Valerie turned on her side, just in time to see Michael’s expression of impersonal cruelty devolve into confusion and injury. He clasped her wet face in his hands. “Oh,” he said, “I didn’t mean . . . I didn’t mean it. . .” They started again and she cried more, but she didn’t want to stop.
When they finished, they separated and stared at each other, disoriented and almost shamed. “Well,” said Valerie, “and this is only the third week.”
“Holy shit,” said Michael. “You’re right.”
Again he spent the night. He slept curled around her from behind, his forehead butting against her shoulder blades, one hand on her breast. She lay wide awake, withstanding surges of happiness and fear.
The next day she was too physically sensitive for sex. Half joking, he pawed and cajoled her. His aggression ran in a giddy zigzag that grabbed her up and pulled her along, which was fun except that she didn’t feel like going anywhere. Like the sleazy boss, he mauled and grabbed, and under his clownishness she sensed the vicious look she had glimpsed the day before. Another time, the look might’ve excited her, but now it felt like an unfriendly finger poking a tender spot. “I need to be by myself,” she said. “Like, for several days.”
After he left, it occurred to her that he saw her withdrawal as a squeamish flinch from his carnal might, and that idea so irritated her that she walked around muttering sarcastically for several minutes. She was older than he was! Their fantasy life was her idea! She remembered that she had cried, but the memory seemed to be about someone else; the image of her weeping face was static, as if it were an abstract signifier of something just beyond her vision. She remembered Michael’s expression, as it went from malice to tenderness, with a piercing, secretive poignancy that was like a sore tooth. She felt like squirming.
She sat down to finish a jacket cover illustrated with the leafy branches of trees.
He called her the next day. The band had suddenly gotten an out-of-town gig, which meant he would be leaving town for a few days, starting tomorrow. “I know we’re having a moratorium,” he said. “But I can’t go that long without seeing you, and also we have this big cool car that we rented for the trip. We could go for a fun drive in it.”
She told him she wanted to see him but that she didn’t want to have sex. “I just can’t do it now,” she said. “I feel too sensitive. Can you respect that?”
He paused, as if savoring an elaborate and slightly absurd delicacy. In a soft voice, he said yes.
“Are you sure? Because I don’t want to have some ridiculous scene.”
He swallowed voluptuously. “I’m sure.”
She noticed his condescension, but it felt to her like another version of his expression, caught between malice and unspeakable tenderness. It felt secret and sweet.
When he got to her house, they cuddled on the couch. They told each other about their lives. Valerie talked about leaving home when she was sixteen. She told him about panhandling and selling jewelry on the street. She described her shiftless older boyfriend, whom she had supported by working as a waitress.
“It sounds rough,” ventured Michael.
“Mostly not,” she said. “Mostly it was banal. And sometimes it was fun. I would do stuff like go to Las Vegas for a weekend with some guy I’d just met. Even ordinary stuff was fun. Like when I got a job painting and lettering signs at a circus in Montreal. I thought that was really cool.”
“That is cool,” he said admiringly.
“Some bad stuff happened, though. I was raped by this asshole once.”
Michael sat up and smiled. “Yeah? What happened? What did he make you do?”
Valerie felt startled, then she realized she wasn’t really startled at all. “Are you reacting that way because I had sort of a smiley look on my face when I told you I was raped?”
His smile snagged and lapsed.
“That smile was left over on my face because I’d just told you this other nice stuff. I wasn’t smiling about being raped.”
He looked down. “I don’t know why I did that. I know rape is horrible, but it’s the horribleness that gives it a charge. It’s like the fantasy thing. Like, right now, some guy is making some girl do something really gross. It’s weird.”