Squatting down behind the door, I strained to hear what was going on outside. A car door slammed, and I wondered if it was Spoon coming home. The sound of a drunk kicking a garbage can. Spoon often did that, making a terrible mess all over the street. It must be him. Finally I heard the sound of the student next door rummaging in his bag for his key. He would never have guessed that a girl sat behind a door less than a meter away from where he stood, a glass gripped tightly in her nervous little hand.
A miserable feeling began to well up in the pit of my stomach, like Alka-Seltzer bubbles. I had no idea what I would say to him when I saw his face, but I knew that however much I cursed him, it wouldn’t have any effect on the stupid jerk. Dirty words were just everyday language to Spoon.
I was numb with exhaustion. The next thing I heard was the sound of the key in the lock, the sound that used to frighten me so much every day. The door opened just a crack and Spoons shameless black face came peeping through. I didn’t even have the energy to stand up. I just sat there and looked at him. Spoon picked me up in his arms and kissed me, bringing in a rush of cold air from outside.
“Oh my god! Are you okay?”
He pinched my cheeks and my lips with his fingertips, playing with my face like I was a baby. I tried to explain my feelings but I couldn’t find the words.
“What’s wrong? Forgot how to speak English, huh?”
I tried to give him a brash smile like one I’d seen in a Jeanne Moreau movie, but I was too young to pull it off.
“Do you love me?” I asked.
Spoon didn’t answer. The word “love” had no real meaning for either of us, and he usually tried to brush questions like that aside with a quick, “You know I do.”
But now I could sense that the meaning of the word “love” was changing for us. It was no longer something trivial, but something dark and heavy, a word that we no longer dared use so lightly. I looked down, and removing one of my earrings, I dropped it into the glass of gin I was holding in my hand. I held the glass out to Spoon and he stared at it, a puzzled expression on his face. I pushed the glass up to the white ivories that were his teeth. It made a little clinking sound.
“Cheers!”
I forced the glass between his teeth and poured in the clear, strong liquid. The gin and the earring flowed down into his stomach. It must have burned his throat along the way.
“I hope that diamond stays inside your body forever.”
Ever since then, I only wear the other earring in my left ear, all by itself.
“You know, you’re my Linus blanket.”
Spoon didn’t apologize. He must have thought it was special enough that he finally knew how much he needed me, like a blanket, taking it everywhere, sucking on it for comfort, unable to sleep without it. And he must have thought that him needing me made me lucky. I just didn’t have the heart to argue with the dopey bastard. He was probably right anyway.
Spoon was under my skin. We talked. We must have fucked hundreds and hundreds of times, but now for the first time we communicated with each other using words, not just our bodies. I told him how much I wanted him when he wasn’t there. And I explained to him how it got so bad that I would have been happy just to catch a glimpse of one of his turds left floating in the toilet bowl. Once, I even turned the trash can upside down so I could line up his empty Michelob bottles on the table.
“Spoon, I wanted to eat your penis, to scoop it out with your spoon like I was eating a banana.”
I just kept on talking. My senses were alive with sexual excitement.
Spoon looked up, clicking his tongue like he was irritated.
“Shit… I feel like I’m only here for you to play with. It’s like your skin. When I press it with my finger, it gives. And when I take my finger away, it goes right back to the way it was.”
He knew his kisses would have a much more dramatic effect on me than his fists. He had learned how to read my emotions so well that he even knew how to turn a painful bite into a deliciously pleasurable experience.
“Oh, Spoon, right now I feel like butter on hot toast.”
Spoon had wanted a cat more than anything when he was a young boy.
But his whole family hated cats, and no one would listen to him. He used to think about cats all the time, even at school, and he’d tell his mother about how cuddly and soft and cute they were, but she just told him that what he was describing sounded more like a girl than a cat, and hat in four or five years he should try finding himself a girlfriend to look after instead.
Then one day, on his way home from a friend’s house, Spoon found an abandoned cat with a bad leg. He was overjoyed and took the cat home on his bicycle. But his brothers were allergic to cats and were angry with him when they couldn’t stop sneezing. In the end, Spoon decided that he would take care of the cat secretly in his bed. But it always had gunk oozing out of its eyes; it must have had some kind of disease.
Spoon’s family was poor and they couldn’t afford to buy extra food for the cat, so Spoon fed it his own leftovers. No one liked the cat. It was a scrawny, pathetic-looking creature, but Spoon loved it.
One morning when Spoon woke up, he found the cat had thrown up yellow puke and died; it was lying underneath him. Spoon hated the cat for dying on him without warning. He wrapped it in a plastic bag and threw it down a back alley, and as he did, he heard the echo of his mother’s voice telling him, “Cats and girls—there’s very little difference.”
He was only a child, but he was convinced it was true.
My body made juice.
“Dissolve your sugar in me, Spoon.”
If his dick had been an icicle, I would have melted it with the heat from my body.
“Crush me like you did the cat!”
Like that poor cat, I would remain alive in Spoon’s heart and wreak my lifelong revenge. His mother was right about cats and girls.
When we made love, something about the smell would suddenly remind me of oysters, and Spoon’s skin would become like hot tar and envelop my whole body. The room was pitch black. No lights. No music.
Only the aroma remained. My sense of smell made me feel like a police dog, and I was sure I would be able to sniff Spoon out, no matter where he went.
He trapped me with his elbows and slowly opened his eyes to look down at his prey. He ground his teeth together. I felt like if anyone was grinding their teeth it should be me.
“I can’t stand it!”
“Why?”
“You’re on top of me, in control as always, and I’m trapped here underneath you, feeling like this.”
“Feeling like what?”
“Like I’m gonna pass out and die.”
“Open your eyes for me.”
Spoon grabbed my jaw with his hand and pulled my face toward his to stop me from fainting. I wished he’d just let me pass out. That would have been a lot easier.
“I want you to watch me and feel me here on top of you right to the very end.”
I started to cry. I just couldn’t help myself. Now at last I understood that pleasure and pain were one and the same thing. Loving Spoon was such a painful experience. I wondered if maybe I should just wait for it to turn into pleasure. Or if one day I would just get used to it and accept the mixture of pleasure and pain.
“Look at me!”
I looked. There was no escape. I was possessed. Nothing else mattered. Everything I cared about lay between the sheets on that bed.
And maybe Spoon knew. I’m sure we would have dived into bed together, writhing passionately like worms, even if somebody had told us that today were the end of the world.