“I don’t see why you’re complaining!” from Jack the Ripper.
“I’m not,” Lanya said. “But I mean, I spend maybe half my time here. Maybe more than half. And I think I know you guys pretty well—”
And D-t: “No, now you wait a minute! Hey, now you wait—”
Lanya finished in the silence: “I was just curious why, that’s all.”
“Now wait,” D-t repeated. “We got a very strange and funny group of people here. And I guess we don’t talk about it that much because you have to be very careful you know? Very polite.”
“I don’t just mean making jokes about sex,” Lanya said. “But even that, when you come down to it. You’ll get really foul for ten, twenty minutes. Then nothing for a day, two days—”
“You mean thinking and figuring how to get laid?” Raven said. “Yeah, I know what she means.”
Spitt said: “I don’t have to talk about it. I get mine,” and looked at Glass to corroborate him.
Glass, hands behind him on the wall, just leaned back a little more watching (Spitt and Lanya were the only whites in the room), curious, as though the discussion was going on all for him.
“There are just very different kinds of people here,” D-t said. “For me, maybe, what she said is true. I just never been that interested in sex, I guess, compared to some people. I told a friend of mine once I jerked off about maybe two, three times a year. And got laid about the same. He said that was very strange—”
“Yeah, that’s strange!” Jack the Ripper hollered, and people laughed.
“Spider over there, see—he’s what…? Ten years younger than I am? And he’s down at the park, practically every God-damn night it looks to me, getting his pipes swabbed out by the guys sneaking around the bushes—”
“God damn—” Spider said, uncomfortably.
“We just got very different people,” D-t went on, “who like very different things. In very different ways. People like me and Gladis, say. We’re pretty much exclusively interested in the opposite sex, and then, one at a time and rarely.”
“Three times a year, baby,” Gladis said, her inflection swinging down low as it could get; “now I don’t know whether I’m all that much like you,” and up again.
Which tickled the Ripper.
“Shit,” D-t said. “You know I used to think I was normal. But then we got guys like Jack the Ripper who are interested in anything.”
Spider said, sullenly: “I’m interested in anything.”
“Aw, nigger,” D-t said, “you’d be interested in a clam if it smiled at you and promised not to bite!”
Spitt added over the laughter, “…and even then, I don’t know!” which I don’t think anybody really heard.
“Then we got the groupies—” D-t went on.
“Groupies!” from Glass, laughing for the first time. “Is that what you call us?”
“I mean you guys just aren’t interested in anything less than a full scale encounter group-grope—”
“Aw, man,” from Glass, “you just wish you could—” and I didn’t hear the rest because:
Tarzan asked: “What’s going on in there?”
I glanced back. “Nothing.”
But some of the guys inside had seen us through the screen. A couple more turned to look. So I opened the door and went in, Tarzan following. Lanya was still laughing. Edging Thruppence over on the table, I sat next to her.
“With so many different types, see,” D-t said, getting Lanya’s attention back, “you have to be very polite: when we live this close. And that means you don’t talk too much. You just do it when it’s around to be done and the rest of the time you talk about something else.”
Tarzan stayed in the doorway, his back to the screen, as outside now as Glass had been before.
Laughter spilled them into different subjects (food, wouldn’t you know): Thruppence said we had stuff in the cellar that we hadn’t known about till now because nobody had thought to look, till he’d gone down that morning. He took some of us out to show us. There was no real cellar door; just a trap-window, planked over, and a busted Yale lock hanging from the hasp. It let you into a damp, four-and-a-half foot dugout that went under half the house where, besides all the crates of tin cans—some with mildewed labels—was the fuse-box and the hot-water heater, which I re-lit.
Later a couple of people took baths.
I wish they’d continued the sex discussion. It hadn’t felt finished. I wondered if it was the advent of me (the Boss) or Tarzan (the Oddball) that had shifted it; or simply the balance in the cream-to-coffee ratio. Out of conceit, I decided it must have been Tarzan.
Revelation, with his ash-pale hair, his gold chains, his pink, pink skin, polarizes a black bunch when he is the only white among them the same way Lady of Spain, blacker than Spider, high-assed, with little, low tits (from jokes the others make, she’s of West Indian descent), polarizes a white group when she is the sole black: visually.
Tarzan, however, so often the only blue-eyed blond among the apes (now the official name for the sub-group of five out of the fifteen/sixteen blacks in the nest [Raven, Jack the Ripper, Thruppence, Angel, Spider]) polarizes them in a very different way. His fawning fascination, his near-belligerence, and general lack of use for anyone white makes it impossible to see him/them without a whole aura of sexual/political resonances, which they carry like their lights. (Two thoughts—First:) Even so, everyone seems more or less able to absorb the situation with tolerance and hardly a comment. (Second:) With all these whacked-out spades, there doesn’t seem to be one among them, man or woman, in a similar position with a white group (Glass, triumvirate with Spitt and Copperhead, seems a very different thing. Why?) Perhaps the nest (or the House) would be a good place for June after all—after all, I can put up with Eddy. (Or can I?)
Pretty soon it broke up around the cellar window and got back together in the yard…But we never did get back to talking about sex. Oh, welclass="underline" that politeness. I guess Lanya’s right.
Third conversation started in the loft. I was on my back; Lanya was leaning on my chest, looking in my mouth while I talked about something. In the middle of a sentence, she got my mind off what I was saying, saying: “I could come from just the smell of your breath. It puffs out in a small hot cloud with each word.”
“Pretty bad, huh?”
“It’s not bad—please, don’t stop talking.”
But I couldn’t think of how to go on.
She said: “Your mouth is like a flower. Each tooth is like a daisy petal, complete with calyx: You’re getting a sort of green skin over the base of your teeth, up near the gum.”
“Beautiful,” I said. “Pretty soon I’ll be ready for Bunny to come take me away.”
“Hey.” Denny rolled over. “Let me see?” leaning on my shoulder.
I said, “Oof!” and didn’t smile.
“Smile,” Denny said.
“I wonder if it comes off.” Lanya reached up and held her hand like a claw, over my face. “Just a second,” one finger coming down.
“Cut it out—!” I turned my head.
“I was just going to scrape at it with my fingernail.”
Denny looked at his and on my shoulder. “Man, my nails are filthy.”
“They’re rimmed with the exact color of black pearl.” Lanya put her cheek next to his. “And he’ll probably use it in one of his poems.”
“Too fancy,” I said, my hand on his. She covered mine. Then Denny closed his eyes tight and tried to wiggle between us like a basset puppy (which started us laughing) and sometimes she is a lorikeet. And sometimes he is a parrot; and she is an airborne borzoi.