The suits were worn at home and at work. I’d started moving furniture a week ago.
I stood and smoothed my clothes the best that I could when an old Cadillac arrived; it had commercial license plates and darkened gypsy cab windows. My hands were shaking.
Out stepped Lorraine. She paid the driver a twenty.
As I led Lorraine to our room I felt the pulse of nature on the stairs. My arms and legs trembled so much I thought they were going to tear.
The room had a double bed and that’s it. Not even a night table. The telephone was on the floor. There was space for a dresser or chiffonier, but those starving animals had been sold off by the farmer. I would have made a joke about the decor, but was too afraid that Lorriane only needed one excuse to leave.
— I’m glad to know that, Lorraine said.
I had that feeling again, of my mind being read.
— Your smile, she clarified. I’m glad to know you can smile.
She was nervous. She was.
If I sound surprised that’s because I was surprised. To me women were like the perfect model of government: paving the roads and protecting the weak. Omnipotent.
Boys without fathers say that kind of thing a lot. About their mothers. About their wives. Comparing ladies to goddesses and gold. But still I think we hate women even more than the average guy.
My hands were on her shoulders. I reminded myself that we weren’t in love. Be fun, I told myself. Don’t get weird. She only wants to play.
A man walked across the second floor landing right outside our room. The curtains were drawn so I only heard his boots on the concrete in drowsy cadence. He stopped by our door.
Lorraine wasn’t listening, but I was.
She touched my neck to tell me that we could kiss, but I wanted to hear the man outside go mosey off. I tried to think of some excuse for checking the door, but didn’t want to look like the cheating husband afraid that he was being followed. Or worse, a nut.
Lorraine made my skin tin again. When she squeezed warm hands around my cheeks they curved and shaped easily. I wanted to enjoy it, but hardly could because the outline of a man was still visible through the window when our curtains shifted.
Don’t think I’m being too spectral here, I wasn’t afraid that the guy was a ghost; it was a push-in robbery that worried me.
— There’s some things I’ve got to take care of anyway, Lorraine said, then dropped her bookbag on the floor.
I was agitated by the guy standing outside then by the fact that my hesitation had curdled our mood. — Why don’t you forget about that? I suggested. What is that?
— My books, she said. I have to write a paper.
Insulted, I went to the bathroom. Who brings homework to a rendezvous?
Of course, geek that I am, outrage gave way to a fantasy of she and I doing naked research on the bed. How erotic it would be to write up the bibliography with her bare thighs pressed against my back. Then when I walked out again Lorraine was packing.
— We have to move, she said.
— What the hell are you talking about?
— There’s no working phone and I need one.
Lorraine had unscrewed the mouthpiece from the handset to find that inside it someone had lumped ten or twelve pieces of gum.
— What do you want the phone for? I can help you.
— Please, she scoffed.
I got angry that she didn’t want my sexy research assistance. — You know these rooms are usually hourly, I said.
— It took you almost an hour just get up those stairs.
I sat on the bed and stifled any cracks about her own fat back because Lorraine seemed an insult away from running home.
— It’s not so hard. You go down and tell them the room’s not how you want it.
I was so annoyed that I forgot about the spook by my door until I was out there with little of Lorraine to protect me. But I did still have the perfect clean smell of the woman, which seemed to be enough because the man out there had gone.
This new room was like the other one except that we had a nightstand which Lorraine used as a desk. While she chatted with class-mates on the working phone I sat on the floor, horseshit insane for pussy.
When another half hour passed I walked over to see that she was writing her essay in bubble letter handwriting, like a junior-high-school girl. Plus the book she used for reference was wrong, mostly because she used only one. Lorraine was writing, in part, about Lee Iacocca’s relationship with Henry Ford II and what caused Iacocca to finally leave Ford. But she used only Iacocca’s autobiography for the facts!
When I get bored my favorite pastime is to catalogue the stupidity of others.
— I thought you were supposed to hang up a jacket so it wouldn’t wrinkle, she said just then.
— Uh, this is wrinkle-proof.
— Nothing natural is wrinkle-proof.
She laughed, but I wondered why she had to be so shitty. Maybe she’d seen me sneering at her two-inch-wide margins. I felt my face warming and didn’t want the ridicule. If we’d been having sex already this wouldn’t come up.
My mother might think a diet was going to save me and Grandma feel the same about hard work, but what I truly needed was to release this hydroelectric dam — sized nut then the lesser problems like debilitating psychiatric disorders could be swiftly fixed.
But my outburst only made Lorraine less horny, imagine that. Instead of shredding off her underthings she asked me some questions that I didn’t understand.
— Do you think Ahmed Abdel deserves another trial? she repeated.
I shrugged, I stalled, I had no idea who this guy was but wanted to sound well informed. Maybe he was a singer who’d killed his wife while on drugs. William Burroughs never went to jail, so why should this guy?
— That’s not what happened at all, she yelled. What do you do with your time?
Lorraine drained a pamphlet from her bookbag. His name was Ahmed Abdel and he’d gone to jail for exploding a police car while two cops sat inside. He swore he hadn’t been involved. That he was a journalist, not a jingoist. This was on the first page of the pamphlet.
— My friends are making time for his campaign. What about you?
I didn’t like her tone; it sounded like a dare. — I’m afraid I’d get lost in the crowd.
— You are the crowd, she said.
I think my hesitation rubbed her rawest parts. She was in college, a time of optimistic fascism when it seems that all the world needs is one more rally.
— I’m not sure we’d ever be good friends, I told her.
— Is that why we’re here?
— Well.
— You keep that. Getting involved can change your entire life. Make you a better person.
She pointed to the pamphlet and wouldn’t relent until I’d put the ten-page document in my jacket pocket. I was on the bed and so was she, but we faced dissimilar walls.
Two hours past midnight Lorraine said, — You’ve been quiet.
— I’ve been looking at you.
She had a faint mustache over her upper lip. It didn’t make her ugly or masculine. Right then it was the most beautifully feminine thing that I could stand.
I crept toward her. Dim light was the best special effect; it made me appear graceful. My knees were in some of her papers; my palms ground down on the books. She put one hand out to push me back, but I was fawning over her and she liked that as much as everyone does.