I say you’re messing with me. I say that didn’t really happen did it?
She says it did! Kathy says to me this is what she said I swear to you! I told her to please just go away please and leave us be we’re trying to play some pool here and this lesbian old drunk says to me I know what you do with your friend here; I know what you do with her in secret behind closed doors! I told her to die and go to hell and she just laughs at me and goes you think it’s all a dream but one day you’re gonna wake up, sweetie. That’s what she said, honest Injun.
I say weird.
She says I’m never going back to that bar again.
I hold out the bottle to her and ask if she wants more.
She says I think I’ve had enough to drink tonight.
I say so well that lez made a move on you – it’s just like that one time -
What time? Oh, at the club?
Yeah.
Kathy says I remember that now. We were dancing. It was late but we’d been doing coke. I was feeling very very good, this I do recall. Cocaine always makes me feel good. You went into the bathroom. This girl came up to me. She was wearing a polka-dotted dress. She comes up to me and says hi my friends and I were wondering and she points to the corner of the club where there’s these two other girls, looking over at us, and they were also wearing dresses with polka dots, and she says to me, she says we were wondering: are you gay or bi? and when I told her I was straight, quite straight, she just laughed like she didn’t believe me or something. Now that was weird too.
I say it is.
She says why do some people think I’m gay? I don’t understand this. I don’t look like a lesbian, do I?
I say I dunno.
She says I’m not.
I sit up from the bed.
She says I know I am not.
I am naked and standing up.
She says I’m not.
I say are you sure?
I should know!
I say have you ever had an experience? with another female?
She says have you ever had that kind of experience?
I walk about her room and I talk, I say to her look, here is your bedroom window; this is your window; you look out your window and you see things; you see outside; you see things outside; the things you see: you can hear them but they cannot hear you; you strain for certain thoughts; these thoughts elude you, these thoughts you thought you thought; your notions ask do you know me? And here is your desk, your small desk, the desk you have had since you were a child. A desk of memories. Who can say what used to be in these desk drawers, other than what is in them now; past things used to inhabit: objects of girlhood. And what do you have here now – old magazines, notes for college classes. Here is your word processor, an old model but still trustworthy. It gets the job done; floppy disks: slow amp;sloppy. A printer that prints dot-matrix. It prints the things you write. And what do you write, little girl, hmmmn? Poems? Stories? Belles lettres? What are you writing now, what is here on the screen, these paragraphs amp;words, these words amp;sentences, what could it be, eh? Not a poem or story, no, that is not you; that is not what you do; it’s – lemme look – it’s a research paper on marine biology. You are on page five. So here, Kathy, here we have a college term paper, one of them anyway. How long have you been working on it? [1] Is it important? [2] Is all the time and effort worth it? [3] How much actual research did you do? [4] Do you have your footnotes straight, [5] your bibliography, [6] do you have an MLA Manual of Style? [7] Look here, this is your chair. How many times have you sat in it? How many times have you plopped your bottom in this chair and thought about things, looked at the things on your desk? How many words were in your thoughts? What did you look at on your desk? Did you look at the computer, at the screen, did you look at this camera sitting on the desk? Do you have film in this camera? You do. How many pictures have you taken? Do you like to take photos? What if I took a photo of you, sitting against the bed, naked and smiling at me? What if I did? What if I put this camera up to my eye and take a photo of you? Here are your clothes, now, your dirty clothes, all piled up in a hamper as well as on the floor, shirts amp;socks amp;panties amp;bras amp;jeans amp;skirts, you need to do your laundry, girl, these clothes smell. And here, here, here is your closet; more clothes; more clothes. Clean clothes. They all look the same. Here is your carpet. A rented carpet, actually. Like this apartment, this rug does not belong to you. Here is your bottle of wine that I drink from (and I do take a drink, a pause in my monologue, and when I am done I continue, she looks at me, sitting naked on the edge of the bed, and I say:) here is your bed, the bed you have slept many nights in; the bed, in fact, that we have made love in, that we have screwed in, balled in, banged in, fucked in. I wonder how many other men you’ve had on this bed? Over the years. No, don’t answer. This is your room; your rented room; this room does not belong to you; and you have to ask yourself well what the hell does belong to me? We own very little. But your body is yours; you own your body; this here is your body; this body that I have fucked twice this evening; this body I used to make love to until you stopped wanting to see me – but now, here we are, here we are again; again, here is your body. But what is in a body, what’s in a face? Nothing at all that death won’t soon erase. For a second there, I almost believed that your body was special, and just for me. [8] But here, here, here we have two bottles, here are two bottles of wine; one empty, one still filled with the divine. We drank all of this other, this poor, sad, stupid bottle. We also drank a lot at that bar: beer beer beer. But I think we need more – we need something else. Need something to keep us going. How I ask do you feel now?
She says a little tired, and a little tense, too.
Still?
She says yes.
I tell her lie down. She does, on her stomach. I sit on her butt, gently, and start to rub her neck and back. She goes ummmn and I ask if she likes and she says she likes and please do go on and I say that we are still-lives, time and everything else has stopped here: this moment we find ourselves in. She says that she has been thinking about her family, her mom amp;dad thinking about how they are all different, yet alike, I say yeah: the ingredients of a family.
She says take my sister for example; she’s a good example; she’s a year younger than I am. We look alike; she tends to be more feminine in nature than me. This is what I think, anyway. No one has actually come out and said this but I think they think – well, maybe I’m just paranoid, maybe I have an inferiority complex or something. My sister goes to a different university, one back east. Here I am going to a university on the west and she’s back there with all those silly-ass New Englanders. Natch, she joined a sorority. She’s probably having a great time. I know she is. She has all the good-looking, shallow-brained guys she could ever want. All she cares about is buying things: clothes amp;jewellery amp;make-up. A new car. She’s always talking about how she needs cars, new cars, all cars, cars cars cars. If a guy has a nice amp;fast car, you bet she’ll go out with him, no matter what he looks like or what kind of personality he has. Is she easy? Dunno. Does she put out for these car guys? Who can say. I’ve never asked; I suspect she does; she does. And she’ll go out and spend forty bucks on a new make-up kit she doesn’t need with the money our parents give to her and all I can think of is that forty bucks could have bought groceries for the week. My sister gets this from my mom. My mom is just the same: always buying things that aren’t necessary; talking about buying things; wishing she had more money so she could buy more things. The desire for the material – but I’m sure this subject is mundane. Mmmmn, you have a good way with your hands, you know. I dunno – I guess I also like material objects, but not in the same way as my sister amp;mother. I like computers, or TVs, VCRs, anything electronic amp;exciting. I have this fascination with technology. My father is the same way. I get it from him. Dad is always taking things apart and putting them back together, just to see how they work; he likes to know how things tick; tick-tock like a clock. That’s how I am. Those are the differences and samenesses in my family. But we are very close.