“Now you’re getting the idea,” Arthur said.
In all my months of sensual adventures, I’d never yet kissed a girl—nor had I thought to. You’d think by this point in my journey I would have stopped being so easily surprised by the twists and vagaries of life—but Celia’s kiss astonished me. Then it kept on astonishing me, as she dug in only deeper.
My first impression was that kissing Celia felt like such a frightful extravagance. There was so much to her. So much softness. So much in the way of lips. So much in the way of heat. Everything about her was pillowy and absorbing. Between Celia’s enormously soft mouth, and the abundance of her breasts, and the familiar flowery smell of her—I felt subsumed by it all. It was nothing like kissing a man—not even like kissing Anthony, who knew how to kiss with rare tenderness. Even the gentlest kiss from a man would be rough compared to this experience with Celia’s lips. This was velvet quicksand. I could not pull myself away from this. Who in their right mind would want to?
For a dreamy thousand years or so, I stood there under that streetlamp, letting her kiss me, and kissing her back. Gazing into each other’s oh-so-beautiful and oh-so-similar eyes, kissing each other’s oh-so-lovely and oh-so-similar lips, Celia Ray and I had finally reached the absolute zenith of our complete and mutual narcissism.
Then Arthur broke the trance.
“All right girls, I hate to interrupt, but it’s time for us to nip on out of here and head to a nice hotel I know,” he said.
He was grinning like a man who’d just won the trifecta, which I suppose he had done.
—
It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, Angela.
I know that this would be a fantasy for many women—to find yourself in a big bed in a fancy hotel room with both a handsome man and a beautiful girl available for your enjoyment. But from a matter of sheer logistics, I quickly discovered that three people engaging in sexual exploits at the same time can be both a problematic and arduous situation. One never quite knows where to put one’s attention, you see. There are so many limbs to organize! There can be a great deal of: Oh, pardon me, I didn’t see you there. And just when you’re getting settled into something nice, somebody new shows up to interrupt you. One also never quite knows when it is over. Just when you think you’re done with your pleasure, you find that somebody out there isn’t yet done with theirs, and back you go, into the fray.
Then again, maybe this triad would have been more satisfying if the man in question hadn’t been Arthur Watson. He was practiced and vigorous in the sport of copulation, to be sure, but he was exactly as off-putting in bed as he was in the world—and for the same reasons. He was always looking at or thinking about himself, which was irritating. My sense was that Arthur had a deep and penetrating appreciation for his own physique, and thus he liked to arrange himself into tableaux that brought maximum attention to his own musculature and handsomeness. Never once did I get the feeling that he had stopped posing for us or admiring himself. (And imagine that ridiculousness, if you would! Imagine being in bed with the likes of Celia Ray and a twenty-year-old version of me—and not paying attention to anything but your own body! What a dumb man!)
As for Celia, I didn’t know what to do with her. She was too much for me to manage—volcanic in her raptures, and labyrinthine in the secrets of her needs. She was forked lightning. I felt like I’d never met her before. Yes, I’d been sleeping and cuddling with Celia in the same bed for almost a year—but this was a very different kind of bed, and a very different kind of Celia. This Celia was a country I’d never visited, a language I could not speak. I could not find my friend hidden anywhere in this dark stranger of a woman, whose eyes never opened, and whose body never stopped moving—driven, it seemed, by some ferocious sexual incubus that was equal parts fever and wrath.
In the midst of all this—in fact, right at the white-hot center of it—I had never felt more lost or lonely.
—
I must say, Angela, that I had almost backed out of this arrangement at the door of the hotel room. Almost. But then I’d remembered the promise I’d made to myself months ago—that I would never again excuse myself from participating in something dangerous that Celia Ray was doing.
If she were engaged in wildness, then I would be, too.
While this promise now seemed stale and even confusing to me (so much had changed in the past few months, so why did it even matter to me anymore, to keep up with my friend’s exploits?), I stuck with my vow anyway. I hung right in there. With no small amount of irony, I can say: consider it an expression of my immature honor.
I probably had other motives, as well.
I could still feel Anthony shoving my hand away from his arm, and saying that I wasn’t in charge of him. Calling me sister, in that contemptuous tone.
I could still hear Celia talking about Edna and Arthur’s marital arrangement—“They’re continental, Vivvie”—and looking at me as if I were the most naïve and pitiable creature she’d ever encountered in all her days.
I could still hear Edna’s voice, calling me an infant.
Who wants to be an infant?
So I proceeded. I rooted about that bed from one corner of the mattress to another—trying to be continental, trying not to be an infant—digging and pawing at Arthur and Celia’s Olympian bodies for proof of something necessary about myself.
But all the while, somewhere in the only remaining corner of my brain that was not drunk or sorrowful or lusty or stupid, I perceived with unblurred clarity that this decision was going to bring me nothing but grief.
And boy, was I right.
NINETEEN
What befell me next is quickly told.
Eventually our activities ended. Arthur and Celia and I immediately fell asleep—or passed out. Awhile later (I had lost track of time) I got up and put on my clothes. I left the two of them sleeping in the hotel room and ran the eleven blocks home, clutching at my shaking, underdressed body, trying and failing to stay warm despite the cruel March wind.
It was well after midnight when I opened the door to the third floor of the Lily Playhouse and rushed in.
Instantly, I could see that something was wrong.
First of all, every light in the place was blazing.
Secondly, people were there—and they were all staring at me.
Olive and Peg and Billy were sitting in the living room, surrounded by a cumulus cloud of dense cigarette and pipe smoke. With them was a man I didn’t recognize.
“There she is!” cried Olive, leaping up. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
“Doesn’t matter,” said Peg. “It’s too late.” (This made no sense to me, but I didn’t pay the comment much mind. I could tell by her voice that Peg was very drunk, so I didn’t expect her to make sense. I was far more concerned about why Olive had been up waiting for me, and who was this strange man?)
“Hello,” I said. (Because what else do you say? Always helpful to start with the preliminaries.)
“We have an emergency, Vivian,” Olive said.
I could tell by how calm Olive was that something truly terrible had happened. She only became hysterical over insignificant matters. Whenever she was this composed, it had to be a real crisis.
I could only assume that somebody had died.
My parents? My brother? Anthony?