She was too gregarious. She was too friendly. He became too boring. The truth was, it wasn't really the sex Mayvis was after, it was the attention. And in seeking the attention she had also become addicted to the excitement. All of this had been explained to her in the group her parents had sent her to. She wasn't really having fun at all with all those men, they told her. She was se eking something which she could never find from strangers, and in the process she was exposing herself to great dangers. One didn't have to be a genius to know what those dangers were, but Mayvis was getting a thrill out of her own peril, they had explained. The people at the meetings had been very educational, they had loved explaining things, they knew so much jargon that it was as if they didn't even have to think about what they said, they just kept repeating key phrases, expecting her to agree with them. After a while it had seemed easier to agree than to argue.
Roger, one of the men in the group, spent part of every meeting talking about how his sexual fantasies had ruined his life. He read pornography, he confessed. He sought women other than his wife. He masturbated daily.
Although he announced his failings in the prescribed manner, bewailing his misery and praising his higher power for allowing him to attend the meetings and take charge of his life, he always sounded a little proud to Mayvis.
Roger sounded as if he were determined to make his sexual hyperfunction a bit more hyper than anyone else's. At the last meeting she had attended, Mayvis had called him on it.
"If pounding your pud makes you so unhappy, why don't you just quit it?" she asked.
He had smirked at her with the superiority born of true understanding.
"And why don't you quit balling guys you pick up in convenience stores?" he demanded.
"Because it doesn't make me unhappy," she said. "I like it."
"You are in denial," he said. They always said that to anyone who didn't agree with them.
"Maybe," Mayvis replied. "But I'm not whacking off in gas station toilets."
He managed to look pained and smug at the same time.
After the meeting, when Mayvis apologized for her comments, Roger asked if she wanted to sleep with him to see what she had been missing. She had not been back to the meetings since.
She wasn't certain that she would recognize him-there had been an awful lot of faces to remember-but when she saw him standing outside the restaurant, looking like a tree with muscles, she remembered, all right.
He was standing there holding a piece of paper in his huge hand.
He was wearing a candy-striped uniform jacket that looked as if it had been slept in for weeks. His face and arms were covered with dust and streaked with sweat trails. He looked at Mayvis as if he really had walked the sixty miles from Hazard.
It's come to this, she thought. I'm picking up goons.
I'm sleeping with halfwits. Maybe I should go back to those meetings after all. I could sleep with the jerk-off Roger, who isn't very nice but changes his clothes once a week.
Then Cooper saw her and smiled hugely and she remembered that he really was kind of cute, in a mammoth sort of way, the way a bear can be cute.
Mayvis consoled herself with the thought that if nothing else, she could spot the loonies, the really dangerous ones, from a mile off. Cooper looked menacing because of his size-his great size was also part of his attractionbut she knew from experience that he was as malleable as mud.
She knew how to handle him.
Cooper didn't volunteer why he had left Hazard and walked sixty miles to find the same job again, and Mayvis didn't ask. In all honesty, she didn't care. She wasn't planning to adopt the big guy-she doubted very much that she would ever see him again after today-or that she would want to. She had just been so touched that he had called. Men in Hazard seldom called her; only strangers did. Men who had been given her name or read it scrawled on a wall somewhere, they called. She knew why they were calling, of course. Sometimes, if she felt like it, she went out with them, but she always made them take her somewhere first, out to eat or to a movie, somewhere they would be seen with her. It was the price she made them pay for calling her. If she selected them, that was different-no charge, and the front seat of the car was good enough.
She wasn't about to make Cooper take her out to dinner, however, even assuming he could pay for it in the first place. She didn't particularly want to be seen with him, not even in a town where no one knew her. She wasn't going to do anything with him, either, not even in her car, until he got cleaned up.
"Now pay attention this time," she said, filling out the application.
"Next time you'll be able to do it for yourself."
"You do it," Cooper said.
"I am doing it, but I'm not always going to be around for you."
"I'll call you," Cooper said.
"Listen, sugar, I'm not your traveling secretary. Just watch and learn."
"Let me drive," Cooper said. Mayvis was still behind the wheel, resting the application form on the horn button.
"Just hold on."
"Let me," Cooper said.
He reached across the seat and lifted and dragged her to the passenger side, then slid behind the wheel himself.
The speed and ease with which he accomplished it startled Mayvis. She had never been handled with such strength.
"Hey, now, listen. You go on in that washroom and clean up first."
"No."
"I mean it. You don't clean up, that's it, I'm going home." She returned her attention to the application, deliberately not looking at him. If you acted as if you expected to be obeyed, you usually got your way, she had found. When they were horny, they'd do whatever you said. It was only afterward that they got difficult. She could feel him staring at her but she kept her eyes on the paper.
"Go on now, honey, while I finish this for you. Then you can drive, okay?" She patted his leg for encouragement, still averting her eyes.
Cooper took hold of her wrist. She turned to look at him for the first time. His eyes were flat and expressionless. Big and brown but unreadable, like the eyes in a mask. Mayvis realized suddenly that she was very frightened.
She tried very gently to pull her hand away; she didn't want to make it a contest of strength.
"The sooner you go, the sooner you'll get to drive," she said. He kept looking at her, nothing showing in his face. Mayvis smiled as friendly as she could make it, while her eyes flicked rapidly around her. They were in a fast-food-restaurant parking lot, for God's sake. There were people everywhere. Nothing could happen here, she thought. Relax, relax and talk to him. "You want me to finish your application, don't you, honI can't do that with just one hand."
She waited, looking for some flicker of recognition in his eyes. They looked like two buttons sewn on a doll's face. For the first time she realized how stupid the man was. She had thought he was reticent, like most men she knew, uncommunicative and clearly a little slow, but not really stupid. She had assumed he had a reading disability which accounted for his application problems, not that he was too dumb to understand the words.:'Coop?" she said softly.