“How do you figure?”
“He made our flesh weaker than the flesh of a woman. So He’s always with us when our flesh leads us to temptation.”
“My flesh didn’t lead me here. You did.”
“That’s right. Because I don’t want you to get to be in your twenties and be so in awe of what women have between their legs that you become the slave of the first one to let you have it. I’d rather you sinned once tonight and got it out of the way than stay pure and become a lifelong neurotic.” He raised the flask to his lips, drank deeply, and coughed so hard that a fine mist of whiskey coated the inside of the windshield. Between the heat of the day and the constant drinking of the evening, his beard had come to resemble something wild and sickly; a gutter animal, rank and matted from exposure. “Though I suppose it’s your decision in the end. No sense losing your cherry if you’re not man enough to handle it yet. Say the word and we’ll drive back into town. I’m sure there’s somewhere around here we can get you a hot fudge sundae, if that’s less frightening for you.”
“No. I’ll go inside.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I just decided. I’ll do it.”
Dad reached over and patted my knee proudly. He said, “That a boy. You’ll see. People make a big deal about it, but there’s nothing more natural for a man to do. We were built for it, same as them.”
I got out of the Charger and staggered up the peastone walkway with Dad several steps behind me. When I got to the front porch, I waited for him to catch up so that he could knock or ring or recite whatever password would establish him as a member of the club. But then the door opened and a middle-aged Asian woman appeared behind the screen to greet us. She was squat and buxom and wearing a plain black dress that reached past her ankles, but with a makeup job that offset the funereal look of her clothes with muted pastels and eyebrows penciled into Egyptian arches. She seemed to look straight past me, smiling at my father with every tooth showing as her manicured hand pushed the screen door open.
She said, “Welcome back, Mr. Temple. We were pleased to hear you would be joining us. The girls get lonesome when you’re away so long.”
“I’ll bet they do.” Dad smiled and winked in her direction. All of a sudden he struck a strange and deceptively casual pose, standing straight with his thumbs hooked through his belt loops, rocking back and forth on the heels of his shoes. He looked like the salesman instead of the customer. “Tonight I’m here to help my son mount his first jenny. Our mutual friend led me to believe everything would be ready when we arrived.”
“And so it is. Livia is waiting in the parlor as we speak.”
“Good. Junior and I’ll be at the bar. Give us a couple minutes and then send her in.”
We stepped through the doorway and into a talcum-scented room with crepe paper lamp shades throwing colored shadows onto the walls. None of the ceiling lights were on, and so the whole interior of the house seemed caught in a state of perpetual twilight that would have been disorienting even if I was sober. Dad stepped in front of me and led us to a bar that consisted of two varnished folding tables fitted together at a ninety degree angle. He must have forgotten his advice about staying with the one that brought me, because he ordered us each of shot of whiskey. A fat Latino nodded and grabbed an unlabelled bottle off one of the shelves nailed into the papered drywall. Dad and I touched our glasses together and tossed the whiskey down our throats. It was the second type of liquor I had ever had, and all it did was make me shudder.
Dad said, “I remember my first time in a place like this.”
But he didn’t go on. He just stood leaning on the bar, looking out at the rest of the room. While a few of the girls were occupying the laps of other customers, most were spread out over several ancient, floral-print sofas positioned at different points along the perimeter of the room. They sat with their bare feet on the cushions or tucked into their skirts. Some were topless and others covered, but they all seemed to share their madam’s affinity for gaudy eye shadow, as though they were franchise workers obliged to wear the same matching uniform. I shook my head and looked at Dad.
I said, “Some of these girls don’t look a day over fifteen.”
“They’re young, but they know what they’re doing. Or else they wouldn’t let them stay.”
“Doesn’t seem right. As young as they are.”
“It’s a different culture here in the valley. Kids start screwing as soon as they sprout their first fuzz.”
Before I could begin to wrap my head around the sexual disparities between San Joaquin and the coast, the old madam returned, accompanied by a heavyset young girl with curls of brown hair running down her naked shoulders and back. She was pudgy in the face and a bit snaggletoothed, but pretty enough all the same. For as much as she stared straight at me, I could hardly bring myself to look her in the eye.
The madam addressed me directly for the first time. She said, “This is Livia, Mr. Temple. Livia, may I introduce Mr. Elliot Temple, Jr. Mr. Temple is just in from the coast. I thought perhaps you could entertain him for a while.”
The child-whore smiled and said, “I’m sure I could find something to do with him.”
Dad laughed in a boisterous, over-the-top sort of way; honestly, I’m surprised he didn’t go so far as to actually slap his knee, he was so caught up in the performance of being jolly. After a childhood in which I could scarcely remember him hugging me, he now came up behind me, gripped my shoulder, and whispered, “Go get her, buddy.” Livia roped her arm around mine and began leading me upstairs.
The more I replay the events of that night in my head, the more improbable it seems that I could black out some small moments and be able to recall others with such clarity and detail. The hike up the stairs, for example, as well as the first stages of my eventual undressing, was wiped completely from memory by the time I awoke in the morning. The next thing I remember after leaving the parlor was sitting on the side of a queen bed in my underwear watching Livia roll her stockings down her legs two inches at a time. Her legs were fine in the conventional sense, but all I could think of were pale sausages being torn raw from their translucent casings. Perhaps I wasn’t really drunk enough to black out. Perhaps it’s possible that, in wanting so desperately to forget my first foray into adult sensuality, my brain had tried suppressing everything that happened to me that night, but, finding itself unable to erase the most important and formative events, it settled for omitting the transitional periods, the in-between moments that connected one trauma to another.
Livia stroked my thigh and asked if this was my first time. Already embarrassed, I closed my eyes and shook my head before she had even finished asking the question.
“Who told you? Dad, Kylee, or one of the others?”
“No one told me anything, baby. I was just curious.”
“Right. Is that how you got into this line of work? Out of curiosity?” I looked at her again and saw that her smile had vanished. With as much sexual experience as she must have had, it was easy to forget that she was at least a couple years younger than me, that in all likelihood she was just barely old enough to enroll in high school. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to be rude. Or if I did, I’m apologizing for it now.”
She laughed abruptly, resuming her hand’s playful busywork around my swimsuit area. “No worries, baby. You’re funny. I like that in a man.”
She stood and walked to the old fashioned vanity table and retrieved a condom from the bottommost drawer. From behind, her nudity was frank and unpretentious; thighs and ass and furrowed labia all united in one seamless, all-encompassing erogenous zone. I tried to put myself in the mood to do what was expected of me. It wasn’t a physical problem; I had been hard since before she took off her skirt. The difficulty was in shrugging off the feeling of general misery that had been plaguing me since before we arrived, in persuading my mind to enjoy the pleasures of the body when all I could think of was Dad waiting downstairs, drunk and boastful, believing he had succeeded in making his son a man. Livia sat back down on the edge of the bed. She scooted closer and touched my arm tenderly.