"I'm not a lesbian, you know," she said, becoming quite serious.
"Sure," I said sarcastically.
"Well, you let men suck your cock for a year and a half, so I guess that makes you a queer, right?"
She always knew how to shut me up.
"Okay," I said. "Why aren't you a lesbian? Don't forget, I just did it for money, but you do it for fun."
"Well, I may do it for fun, but not because I'm basically a lesbian. If anything, it's autoeroticism with me, and also I think with a lot of other women who like their own kind as well as men."
"What do you mean 'autoeroticism'?"
"Well, I obviously can't make love to myself. But I'd like to be able to do it. So this is a substitute. I love myself, love my own body, love to look at myself in the mirror and see how beautiful I am. And when I see myself, I'd like to make love to myself, but I can't. I can't kiss myself, or suck my own breasts or lick my own cunt. And masturbating isn't really that satisfying for me. So I get other girls, girls with beautiful bodies like my own, and who look as much like me as possible. Then, when I'm making love with them, I guess I pretend that it's me, making love to me. And I find that very exciting… Haven't you ever wanted to suck your own cock?"
"I'm not limber enough," I said.
"But suppose you could find some man who had a cock that looked just like yours. Wouldn't you like to suck it-just to see what it would be like? And pretend that you were sucking your own?"
I had to admit that I had never thought of it, but at the same time I understood what Mora was trying to tell me. I never judged her and, whatever her reasons for liking girls, they remained her own.
But for all the months I had known her, she still remained a mystery to me. Bits and pieces fell together once in a while, but Mora was like a jigsaw puzzle that had been purchased with parts missing. I resolved to do something to try to make the picture complete.
Chapter 7
One afternoon I returned early from school, long before Mora would be home, and carefully examined the contents of the box on the floor of her closet. It was like a scrapbook that had never been put together. There were pictures of her with an older man and a woman, undoubtedly her parents, standing in front of a large, brick house. Other pictures showed her seated in a spacious, antique-filled living room. There was a photo of her at a birthday party when she was about my age, and three or four photos of girls who had been her modeling-school friends. One was inscribed across the face, "To my darling Mora, to whom I pledge my undying love, Dorothy," and another written on the back, "To Skinny. I will always love you and remember our period of great love."
Her high-school yearbook had a class picture. Mora looked even thinner than she now was. The faces of thirty-one boys had been circled, with no mention or explanation of them.
There were two very hot love letters from Dorothy, the girl who evidently had been her roommate, saying how she missed "… those delicate pink petals and soft breasts that I did so love to love," and pledging to love Mora forever. There was a bill from a hospital in Tucson, addressed to her father, and asking eight-hundred dollars for an emergency dilatation and curettage, along with a copy of a letter explaining that, due to "unfortunate circumstances," extensive damage had been done to the endometrial lining of the uterus, and it was doubtful that his daughter would ever again be able to conceive.
There were canceled checks dating back for a year, made out monthly from her father to Mora, in the amount of one thousand dollars each.
There were four photographs of Mora. In one photo she was sucking the cock of a guy whose face wasn't on camera; in another she was getting it doggie-style from a big, fat guy who had his head turned the wrong way; in the third, she had the same fat guy on top of her and had her head turned to the side, where a young, blond boy had his very juvenile-looking prick in her mouth; in the fourth she was lying with her legs spread toward the camera, shoving a small Coke bottle up her cunt. Under the photos were the negatives, and under those a canceled check made out by her to "cash" for five hundred dollars.
There were also a bunch of matchbooks, napkins, and stirring rods from the various places she had been.
At least I had found a few of the ghosts. How many more ghosts were there? I wondered. I replaced the box exactly as I had found it, and never touched it again.
Her drinking continued. It seemed that my screwing her was the only thing that would keep her away from the gin bottle long enough to be compatible. Unfortunately, because she often came home tired and not feeling like sex, I took a good deal of abuse. She accused me of screwing some of the girls from school, even though she knew that I regarded them as children. She began to demand that I come home immediately after school, and she would phone me from wherever she worked to be sure that I was there. If I went to judo, she would phone me at the dojo. If I had a job to play in the evening she would either go with me or make sure that I was home directly afterward; I dared not even go for a beer with the guys. It sure didn't sound like the mutual-trust routine she had given me in the beginning. Then, when we went to bed, she would get very apologetic, saying that she didn't know why she was like that and begging me to forgive her. And even if she was tired and didn't feel like fucking, she would suck me off just to show that she cared even when I told her that she didn't have to.
On Sundays she would begin to drink with the morning paper, and I started leaving earlier each week to spend the day with my parents.
It suddenly came to me that I was living the life of a prisoner and that, in spite of all the sex I was getting, I wasn't at all happy. It was too great a price to pay, but at the tune I lacked the maturity to leave her. I refused to go crawling back to my parents, and I was still afraid of being by myself in the great big world, afraid of living alone in an empty apartment.
I knew our relationship was deteriorating, and didn't know how to save it, didn't know if I even wanted to save it. But I didn't know what else to do, either, so I played Mora's rules until I got to the point where I wanted to kill her when she yelled at me.
One Sunday evening when I got back from my parents' house, the worm finally turned. Mora had been drinking and painting, meaningless, violent dabs of fuchsia to match her temper. It was eight o'clock, and I was usually back no later than seven. Where had I been for the extra hour? Who was it I'd been screwing, ungrateful little bastard that I was?
I tried to explain that the Southern Restaurant, where we had gone for dinner, was crowded, and that we had to wait a long time. She wouldn't even let me finish a sentence. Of all of her tirades, this was the worst.
The bile built up in me, my throat got tight, and I found myself out of breath. For the first time since childhood I lost control. I gave her a hard, open-handed whap across the face, knocking her sprawling against the easel, which came clattering down on top of her, canvas, paints, and all.
"Shut up, you fucking bitch! I screamed. "I've taken all the shit out of you I'm going to take. I'm tired of being a goddamn slave around here, waiting for you to get drunk and blow up at me. So from now on I come and go when and where I please, and I screw who I please, and if it pleases me to screw nobody because of you, then I screw nobody.