By Victor Greto
It was the first time he said “I love you” to anyone. He hesitated, closed his eyes just before he said the three words, and then stumbled over the I.
Her eyes grew dark in the afternoon sun. “You lie,” she said, and laughed. Her teeth, angling toward some middle point in her mouth, were stained tobacco yellow.
It was only two weeks from the day of their very first date, after which they had gone to bed. “Isn’t it wonderful how our bodies can make us feel?” he had said to her that first time. He was nineteen.
Nick met Dorothy while they both delivered flowers for rival wholesale florists. It was she who asked him out for the first time. Never mind that he actually said the words. It was she who came to the dock at the wholesale florist’s and asked to see him. Nick came out drunk. His boss had taken him to lunch, stopping at his place afterward for some beers.
Dorothy sat in her old blue Maverick, her left arm extended on the wheel, jouncing to the rhythm of the engine. He had seen her a half-dozen times at the airport, an occasional stop for the both of them. She had worn a dark, fuzzy sweater that draped nicely over her ass. She walked as if the point of the walk was to showcase that ass of hers. Nick looked. He introduced himself. But that was it.
When she pulled up to where Nick worked, Dorothy had her sister with her. She asked Nick if there might be any job openings for her sister at the florist, which seemed a silly question to ask the guy who just drove the van, whom she hardly knew, and who didn’t know a damn thing about anything outside the routes he took to deliver flowers.
But Nick was feeling just as silly and he shook his head slowly and then stopped. “Maybe,” he said. “I just don’t know.”
Dorothy smiled. When she smiled like that, her cheeks balled up, she beamed and looked cute. He just couldn’t help it. “If there ain’t,” he said, “maybe I can make it up to you by taking you out to dinner.”
She kept grinning, and a burning sensation he suddenly felt in his abdomen told him that’s why she was there in the first place.
Dorothy tilted her head down and looked up through her lashes. It was a perfect pose for a guy’s eye to travel: from her curly, permed hair, to her upturned brown eyes, small nose, curved lips, clustered breasts down to the crease between her legs.
She said, “Okay,” softly, and her cheeks got even redder. He looked. Then, she looked at her sister, and Nick’s eyes went with her, and her sister, he noticed, was ugly. She was slimmer and smaller than Dorothy, but her face was pockmarked. Her sister looked toward the back seat and there he saw a child on her hands and knees and grinning like Dorothy. Her name was Annie; she was four and she was Dorothy’s kid. Whatever: he had a date and he was excited. He felt the way he always felt when he’s had at least two beers and it’s the afternoon. Very cool.
So, Dorothy and Nick had their first date. They went to this place that used to be an old railroad station depot. Nick had heard the pizza there was the worst, but that everything else was cool. They ordered the pizza anyway, and, sure enough, it sucked. They had one or two pieces each. When they ate, she sat next to him instead of opposite him. That was weird. They first sat opposite each other when they looked at the menu and Nick told her about the place’s lousy pizza reputation. But they were both novices at this sort of thing. Pizza was the first thing that came to mind.
She got up as soon as the waitress left them with the menus and sat down next to him and put her hand on her face and tilted her head down and smiled the way she had done in the car. Nick’s eyes inevitably did the line dance toward her crotch. She wiggled her ass in the seat as she was doing all of this. Nick was thrilled, and they kissed there for the first time.
Then, after they couldn’t eat the lousy pizza anymore, they went out to her car and put what was left of the pizza in the back seat. They went to her place. It was a duplex just east of downtown. Annie wasn’t there; she was staying with Dorothy’s parents, so they had sex right away. Afterward, he found out she was twenty-two years old, which seemed pretty old to him, and that made him feel even cooler.
That’s when he said the line about their bodies making them feel good, and she seemed impressed. Nick knew he was. He wasn’t a pro or anything, but Dorothy wasn’t like Sheila, a co-worker who worked in the flower room whom he’d been dating before he asked Dorothy out. Dorothy didn’t say much in bed – unlike Sheila, who kept telling him what a big bad boy he was – but Dorothy did a lot more, and did it smoothly, and she wasn’t as bony as Sheila; she was rounder, had more curves, and Nick liked that much better.
Nick stayed that first night. He awoke with the radio blasting heavy metal music. It was awful because Nick was so comfortable and she was as curvy as the night before. She lay there like she was dead, her face shoved into the pillow. She told Nick later she needed that music blasting for at least fifteen minutes just to get up in the morning. Nick wasn’t that way. He was the guy back home that got up even before mom, pulling up the old yellow shades, jumping into the shower first because he hated sleep to stay on him like some old woman.
A couple of days later Nick told Dorothy about Sheila, and she looked at him right in the eyes: “Get rid of her,” she said. And he did. He took Sheila out to Wendy’s during a lunch break at work, and she was eating her burger, but when he told her he was seeing someone else, she gulped while she was in the middle of eating, and Nick could see the food slowly inch down her soft, thin throat, and her eyes welled, and she just looked at him, and he hated her and couldn’t eat another thing.
It bothered Nick so much that he got depressed the next couple of days to the point of sickness, and he threw up one morning and stayed home from work. He was reading War and Peace at the time, and just lying in his cot at the apartment because he didn’t have a bed, feeling like shit and not wanting to get into all those characters’ lives.
But Nick read anyway. It was part of a bargain he’d made with himself when he first came to Colorado the month after he graduated high school: to read at least one hundred pages of a classic novel each evening, no matter what. He had tried to start when he was back home, and read sporadically through some of the books that lined the shelves in the den. He wanted the books to be his. The first book Nick had bought back home was Look Homeward, Angel, and he read and reread it the two months before he had moved. Then he bought Of Time and the River. He was hooked. It opened up a different world of writing for him. His own writing seemed limp in comparison. When he read Crime and Punishment, he had been conquered. He decided then and there he was going to read everything by each author deemed to have produced great literature. He realized how empty his life at home had been, how there existed no characters worthy of study or portrayal.
So, the week Nick got sick after telling Sheila he started seeing someone else and she had that piece of sandwich slowly going down her soft, thin throat, he was reading War and Peace. He threw up again that night. He couldn’t even stand up from the cot. He crawled to the bathroom and threw right up there in the toilet. Even so, he didn’t want to be with Sheila anymore.
Nick had called in sick to work for the second day that week when Dorothy showed up at the door. She wore an ugly purple-blue fleece coat that looked a hundred years old, but she was just smiling away, her face red from the cold, and told him he really wasn’t sick, was he, and jumped right into the cot with him. Nick wasn’t in the mood, but Dorothy insisted, said it would be good for him. So, for the first time in his life, Nick had sex when he didn’t want to and thought of something else.
Although at first unnerving, it came to be no big deal, this having sex only because Dorothy wanted it. It helped him learn how to snugly tuck this sort of behavior at a point in his brain where it wouldn’t distract him from what was most important.
He had plans for himself, ever since he could remember, and they were all self-discoverable, internal; everything outside those plans was peripheral, artificial, done to please the gods that demanded he interact with other people. He had it all decided before he drove out to Colorado. An artist in the bud, he wanted his greatest creative expression to be his self, a creation he believed had been formed and finished a long time ago, before self-consciousness had taken hold, before he had felt shame. Experience was the last thing he really wanted. His self boiled, longing for written forms of expression that would reveal himself to the world in one great phrase, paragraph or narrative. The only experiences he enjoyed were long walks through town, which allowed random sensations to set off internal associations, reflections and memories he made concrete in his mind through mumbled pieces of poetic phrases.
Coolly watching the progression of Dorothy’s grimaces, Nick realized there was no crucial difference between masturbation and sex. In fact, the latter was much more of an imposition because you had to do it with someone you never knew as well as yourself, someone who always had something else going on in her head, someone never on the same page as you. The only thing of value outside of himself was the lurking possibility that it might tell him something more about him. So far, he had draped fig leaves around everything except reading. When he occasionally thought he had begun to find the stirrings of something in someone else – in a look, a remark, a feeling he had –he turned his full attention that way, and became irretrievably disappointed.
His mind had always compartmentalized his emotions and thoughts. Now, on his own, there was no seepage between compartments. Airtight, his life bounced like a Ping-Pong ball atop a jagged line of moments, events and people that could not change him.
And look: he was pleasing Dorothy; not only was he doing no harm, he could pat himself on the back.
Nick quit his job at the florist just before he moved in with Dorothy. He was going to quit anyway; after nearly a year at the florist, he felt restless. He had a vision of himself as an artist and artists didn’t deliver flowers. They suffered and read and wrote. He had no idea how he was going to survive, but it didn’t seem to matter. The sensation of quitting was sustaining for a while. So was the image of seeing himself reading in the park, or on a stone bench outside the downtown library.
When he told Dorothy what he had done, that he had quit and had nowhere to go, she told him he could live with her. He debated with himself for a little while, but it seemed an easy decision. He could have traveled up to Fort Collins where his brother Marc had moved the month after Nick arrived, but Marc lived with a girl, and Nick just didn’t want to deal with that.
But after a month watching Nick wander the duplex, spending the little money he had on used books and reading, Dorothy insisted he get some kind of work. When Nick did find another job that fall, it was delivering beauty supplies.
He decided it was okay because he didn’t have to think about it very much. He lingered after work cleaning up the back room or the van, so by the time he got home, Dorothy would be home with dinner just about done, and Annie would be in her room playing. It grew to be comforting, undemanding, like some old shirt he slipped into before going to bed.
His real life, as I mentioned earlier, was reading. He wasn’t ready to write yet; soon, yes, but not quite yet. Screw that first piece of shit he wrote when he was sixteen and had convinced himself he was in love. That was the epitome of arrogance. There was so much to know and do before he even began to think about trying again. He had to ingest Tolstoy and Wolfe and Shakespeare and Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky and Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Salinger and Faulkner and Kafka and James and Dickens and Dreiser and Eliot and Lewis and Joyce and Dante and the Bible and Montaigne and Defoe and Voltaire and Hardy and Maugham and Cummings. They had to become a part of him, the material of his daydreams and nightmares, his first and last thoughts before and after he delivered two dozen perms and a box of hair spray to Maureen’s Guys & Dolls on Academy Boulevard.
Nick slipped into Dorothy and Annie’s lives like a hungry student with a load of books in his arms, held tight between his legs, balanced on the tops of his feet. At the end of the day, he couldn’t wait to read. Just read. He ate well, but he never thought about eating. He thought about reading and joyously anticipated what more he would know the next morning. He spent most of his money on books. He repeatedly told himself that he wasn’t ambitious, didn’t care about his outward appearance, that he would die happily digging ditches – or delivering beauty supplies – if he could just be left in peace to read, and then – believing he would just know when he was ready – write. He poured as much sensual energy as he could into understanding literature. Nothing else mattered.
That lasted a little more than a year.
Slowly, like sweat trickling from his neck down his back, he began to long to talk to someone about the stuff he was reading. After all that time with Dorothy and delivering beauty supplies, he wanted to go to school and listen to the company line, figure out if he was anywhere near where the smart people stood and if not, why, and what that might tell him about who he was. Above all, he wanted to talk one-on-one to others about what had been brewing in his mind for years now, whether the sound of his soul’s excavation was truly a solitary one, or whether it could be joined with others in a noisy clang. He realized he was lonely.
Dorothy and Annie were just there, the way his family had been just there, living everyday lives as though that had been the goddamn point.
Nearing his twenty-first birthday, though, he wouldn’t budge. There seemed an inevitability with his developing relationship with Dorothy. At times, he did everything he could to annoy her, make her hate him, tell him to get out. During those times, she suffered his presence the way any charitable person might. Then, as if calling in a payment, she grew passionate, handling him like a boy, touching parts of his body as though she’d discovered them for the first time. She made him touch her the same way, and though his mind often wandered, he did what he was told, touched, kissed and licked her in areas he never thought he would.
But he was not impressed. If anything, he felt underwhelmed, degraded and petty.
He learned about Dorothy during that first year. She had gotten pregnant with Annie when she was sixteen. Six months after he moved in with her, he found out she had been married once to a guy who tried to kill her. Her parents were divorced. Her remarried father lived in Denver. Her mother had married a long-winded, pretentious Italian-hater. They lived nearby. At the beginning of the second year Nick and Dorothy were together, her step-father lost his job. For several months, they lived out of a trailer parked in front of the duplex where Dorothy and Nick lived. After that, her parents moved into a trailer park.
But Nick stayed. He listened silently but contemptuously to Dorothy’s dreams: of a house that would be hers, of a family, of staying home to take care of their children.
There were nights he nearly convinced himself to leave. At one point he had read Jude the Obscure and became convinced it was really about him. Then, in the middle of Of Human Bondage, he decided it was time. Escape scenarios flickered dispassionately in his head: walking downtown streets with the paperback in his hand, leaning against a shop window. He’d read till he was drowsy; he would even sleep out there, head bent over the open book. But it would be okay because he had his book with him, and he would read and read and read until it became a part of him, like everything else he had read before. Or, a beautiful woman would find him passionately reading his book in the park; impressed by his concentration, she would introduce herself, and take him into her home when she discovered he had nowhere to go. This scenario always stopped after they had sex.
One cold spring night Nick doggedly paced the floor of the duplex with his hands in his pockets; Dorothy was humming and cooking stuffed peppers in the kitchen, while Annie was playing with Barbie dolls in her room. He would go he would go he would go, he kept thinking, pacing, looking at the curled, shiny cover of Bondage resting on the end table.
After smelling the food fresh from the oven, after hearing Dorothy say, Are you ready, Nick? and walking into Annie’s room, picking her up, and carrying her into the kitchen, he proceeded to eat so much his stomach hurt. Even Dorothy and Annie were surprised at the way he ate that evening. Little did they know that he had been that close to leaving them, that close to freeing himself from their clutches.
His mood grew as mercurial as Colorado in the spring. It was like the time he lived alone, before Dorothy and Annie, kind of the same but different, when he got to be so lonely he could have screamed. He had hated every goddamn, mother-fucking thing he could think of. Everything was shallow; he seemed to be the only guy afloat in sea of shit. He liked taking long walks down Platte Avenue by the pawn shops because it made him feel even more useless and seedy, think about mimicking Raskolnikov and actually killing the owner or owners. He had nothing to lose and perhaps it would feel so good to do something like that and then, more gloriously yet, spit at those who might capture him if they could, literally spit and scream obscenities at the cops and the judges and the lawyers and whoever else got in the way.
No; he hadn’t changed much. He stayed and read and had sex and ignored Annie as much as he could. But then, after just a few more months, he couldn’t do it anymore. He wouldn’t leave, though. He would go to school. He concluded that it wasn’t Dorothy that was bothering him. It was just his mind; it felt ready to burst. He would go to school, college, something he had never even considered doing in high school because of the money. The community college, though, was cheap, and took anyone.
It took him a while to get the guts to ask her, but one summer morning he convinced Dorothy it was the right thing for him to do. She surprised him by agreeing so quickly; then she shocked him by telling him it would be best for him to quit his job and try it out full-time. They sold his car because they decided it would be cheaper for him to take the bus. He gave Dorothy the money he made from the car and the little money he had saved. When he started in the fall, he was twenty-one.
He took four classes, including western civilization, world literature and humanities. He fell to it like a starving man at a buffet. He couldn’t stop stuffing things into his face, asking naïve questions with his mouth full. He impatiently lingered on ambiguous replies. As before, he convinced himself he was reading his own history and dimensions as he studied Homer, Aeschylus and Dante, the ancient Hebrews, Greeks and Romans. For every time period or author he studied, he went to the library and took out a half dozen books about each of them. One thought, one verse, one idea led to a host of others, which in turn led to another host, until he reeled in both despair and joy. He made poetic and tangential connections between history and literature, between literature and history, until his mind massed itself into a sticky ball of thought into which he dipped his hands to rummage and reshape.
Talking about literature was tantamount to talking about himself, and, make no mistake, Nick loved the attention. Just like his own outward situation, things like plots and literary devices – those palliative concessions made to the reader – were nothing but affectation, subtly shrouding a deeper, truer, more profound reality, which most missed. With fellow students he felt a prism of impatient emotions: embarrassment when they made foolish comments, knowing they hadn’t read the work, or, when they had read it, abjectly mixing metaphor with literal reality; anger at the waste of his time when they read achingly slow; insult and depression at the implicit pride of their ignorance. He capitally punished them by never looking their way again.
Still, hints from teachers and conversations among certain students conspired to open other first-ignored themes or ideas within many of the works he’d read before. It was like looking at himself in the mirror for the ten-thousandth time, and suddenly discovering he had a large and defining mole on his cheek. It made him laugh out loud, and then, watching himself laugh, caused him to make faces at his own solemnity. But even self-conscious mockery turned serious because he relentlessly stared at himself, reading, thinking, and always-always-always he stopped laughing. It was too important, he was too important, greatness was too important.
So, when he looked up from a book and saw Dorothy watching television, saw her talking to her mother on the phone, saw Annie racing through the house, he could not help but make a face, narrowing his eyes toward the book. He passionately longed for a lack of passion, to poke out his own eye as it lingered on Dorothy’s ass when she bent over, on her breasts as they tautly bounced when she removed her shirt. His greatest disappointment was his will power, its thickening absence when he needed it most.
It worked to great effect at school, though. His rabid attention and obsessive focus clung tightly to words and thoughts. A loner because of his obsession, it got to the point that when someone addressed him, he hesitated, stunned really, that someone would say something to him.
When he received a note from a girl, he was shocked, angered and excited. Nick’s world literature class had been writing papers on Dante’s Inferno and, as an exercise, passed them around to other students to critique before rewriting and handing them in to the teacher. The critiques were to be both constructive and anonymous. He began to read his critiqued paper only after he got off the bus and while he walked the two blocks to the house. Scrawled at the end of a positive critique of his paper: I want you so bad I can taste it I just can’t stand the thought of you without my lips on you I’m so crazy about you I want you so bad
The person had scratched a name at the end: Rachel. Nick cudgeled his brain to remember her. He stopped a half block from the duplex and stood by the streetlight and read the note a dozen times. He couldn’t stop himself from reading the note.
“A friend of mine saw you the other day,” Rachel said matter-of-factly the next morning the class met. Tall as he, Rachel had long blond hair, high cheekbones, a straight nose and pale lips. “On the bus. You were funny,” she said. “You never took your eyes off your book; you only moved your hands to move the hair out of your face – but you kept reading.” When she said this, she touched his hair, brushed it back from his left eye. Her eyes were hazel; he could see the spokes ray from her pupils. She smiled.
Nick remained still, his mouth a pencil line. She kept smiling, touched his hair again. “I’m going to class,” he finally croaked.
Nick had no idea what they studied that morning. He felt angry that he couldn’t concentrate on the class. He also felt guilt: the way he had to hide his paper in his back pocket when he had gotten home the night he first read Rachel’s note; the way he had to lie to Dorothy when he told her how uneventful the day had been; how he blew his hundred pages of reading that evening thinking about who Rachel might have been; how, when he retyped his paper, he couldn’t care less if it was any good; how, when he was done retyping the paper and put that away, he took out the paper on which Rachel had written and tore off her note at the bottom, folded it, and put it carefully into his wallet, tearing the rest of the pages to pieces.
He dared not look at her during class, staring instead at the teacher, whose very red, chubby mouth formed words about medieval Italian Guelfs and the second circle of hell. He tried to think of Dante and the meandering cobblestone streets of Florence, walking down those curving alleys, but instead saw Beatrice with long black hair peeking out of every open window. His feet were set at the end of class, to race out the door toward the promise of the Purgatorio and Paradiso.
But Rachel stopped him at the end of the hall. She called out his name softly and inevitably; Nick had listened for it, hoping to hear it as he was about to turn a corner. When he did, he stopped against the corner of the wall and his shoulders sagged.
Rachel stood a foot from his face, smiled. “You got my note?”
Nick leaned against the wall. “Yes.” His voice cracked, and he smiled.
“You can kiss me now,” she said, moving her face toward his.
It was too easy – not Rachel, or even the situation, but his complicity. He couldn’t help but smile while kissing her. She kissed him again.
“Well,” Nick said, straightening himself out on the wall.
“Come on.” She put out her hand and he held it. She tugged at his arm like a mother with a little boy, walking quickly across the school, down the steps, to the outside. It was cold and the sun shined overwhelmingly bright. “Your next class isn’t until two-thirty,” she said.
They walked to the parking lot where she unlocked the door of an old yellow Volkswagen Beetle. He got in quietly. “How do you know when my next class is?” Nick said, staring at the dashboard; a picture of Jim Morrison sans shirt was inexpertly taped there.
“Don’t get all worked up,” Rachel said, backing the car out. “At least not yet. A friend of mine is in your Western Civ class. Okay?”
Nick’s stomach began to sink. “I’m with someone else,” he said to Jim Morrison.
“Right now you’re with me,” she said.
“That’s true,” Nick said, closing his eyes for several seconds. “What’s the idea?” flicking the frayed tape around the Morrison picture.
“Don’t you like the Doors?”
“I like them fine,” Nick said. “Where are we going?”
“I want to show you where I live.”
The drove to the foothills, then up into the mountains. It seemed a long time, and Nick slowly got back that sinking feeling. But it was pretty up in the mountains now that the season was just about to turn to winter. He could see frost and patches of snow like icing at the tops of hills and curves. The car chugged dutifully and soon there was only lightly frosted dirt roads and glittering aspen trees. She drove into a long driveway. The house was wooden, with large windows and a patio.
“You live with your parents?” Nick asked.
“Yes.”
Are they home or something?”
“No.”
She took his hand as they walked up two flights of wooden steps along the side of the house. They entered through the kitchen; it smelled of old food and dirty dishes. A large living room with a lot of big windows looked out into the mountains; furniture plush, off-white, with afghans; back yard with trees, short hills, dirt trails.
“Nice,” Nick said, looking out. His eyes found several bookshelves, and he studied the titles quickly. Signet Classics.
“My mother teaches English,” Rachel said.
“Why did you want me to see your house?”
She came up to him and moved her head to kiss him. “No,” Nick said.
She pulled away and shook her head. Her hair swayed and lightly brushed her ass. When she walked, her long legs seemed to stretch forward as if she was skating. She wore pale-blue jeans. “You want something to eat?” she asked.
She looked older than Nick. He’d noticed in the bright light that her face looked tired, almost manly, tight, and her eyes had small, dark half-moons beneath them. “No, I’m not hungry,” he said.
She came up to him again. “Let me show you the upstairs.”
They went upstairs and she showed him her room. It was very small, but to the west slid glass doors that led out to a patio overlooking the back yard. Her bed was plush with a lot of lacy pillows. Posters on her walls were of men in various states of undress, some famous, others advertisements.
“Cool room,” Nick said, his eyes involuntarily scanning her small bookshelf: college textbooks and anthologies.
He didn’t tell her no when she moved to kiss him again. In fact, he returned the kiss, twining his fingers through her hair, pulling, moving his tongue in her mouth, then locking his fingers with hers, pushing himself against her and on to the bed. She began breathing heavily through her nose; her face became even tighter, lost, and Nick looked curiously at her fluttering eyelids, her trembling body.
They both removed each other’s clothes. He liked taking her sneakers and socks off, pulling at her jeans as she stiffened her legs and pointed her toes, running his tongue up the smooth and muscular calves, pulling her panties down, plunging his tongue inside her and around her thighs and belly. Her body was athletic, defined. He tried to forget himself, forget what he was doing and just do it; but he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, reaching her breasts and face consciously, deliberately, afraid to miss an inch. He stopped at her mouth, and, by silent mutual consent, she worked on his body, and he had to close his eyes to feel her. When he opened them and looked down he saw nothing but a blond mass of hair; he pulled her up and finally, sweetly, they made love.
Unlike Dorothy, even when it was over, when they lay side by side and stared at the ceiling, Rachel was not done, and they had sex again, and it was all Nick could do not to laugh out loud. Afterward, when she turned on her stereo by the side of the bed, he reached over to touch her ass, white and taut, and he could not help but kiss her there.
She enjoyed being naked, and it was fine watching her walk around the room. She wouldn’t stop talking. She told Nick she had been adopted. She’d found out that her biological father had been Spanish; she knew nothing of her biological mother. She had a brother who also had been adopted. Her adoptive father was an electrical engineer, her mother a public school teacher. She had gone to the University of Colorado after high school, but flunked out. She hadn’t been ready for school then, she told Nick, so she moved back in with her parents. She just turned twenty-three. She played piano, liked alternative rock, and listening to Nick in class.
“In that order?” Nick asked inevitably.
“Not necessarily in that order,” she said.
“What do I say?” Nick was sitting up on the bed, watching her pace, enjoying himself.
“You don’t have to say anything. The way you look, breathe, smile, make that serious face when you’re thinking.”
Nick closed his eyes. She lay next to him, her head in his lap, and slept.
He showered twice when he got home, before Dorothy arrived. He pretended to do his usual reading, some homework. After Annie went to bed, Dorothy and he had sex. Funny, but he felt like a million bucks. If anything, he felt stronger, in control, even kind. He pumped patiently until she was done. He could see her smile in the darkness, felt her hands move up and down his stiff arms. When he rolled over to his side of the bed, she asked, “You’re done?” “Not if you’re not,” he said. He pulled her on top of him, and they finished together for the first time in a long time.
Rachel and he began sitting next to one another in class. They drove to her house, had sex and then lay in each other’s arms dozing until he had to return to class. In the evenings, he had sex with Dorothy, who acted pleased at his new-found passion.
Nick had never remembered feeling happier. He felt physically the way he felt mentally when reading: as the words he read magnetically centered upon himself, so Dorothy and Rachel buzzed round him, fed him, wanted him.
Nick quickly got past the guilt he felt the night he hid Rachel’s note, just as he had moved on from whatever feelings (he couldn’t even remember them now) he’d had for Sheila. He realized the circumstance, the context – living with one woman and having sex with her, while going to school with another woman and having sex with her – was just another affectation, something outside Rachel’s and Dorothy’s truer meaning. Their truth lay wrapped in the moment, in the spaces between passionate kisses and horny looks, within the certitude Nick felt when either woman wanted him and made herself available to him.
It was fun, too. He never seemed to tire, ready to equally perform at either Dorothy’s or Rachel’s request. He was so proud of himself, staring for long periods at his face in the mirror after a shower or bath, looking down at his penis in awe. He didn’t dare feel bad about feeling self-possessed, powerful and proud of pleasing the women who wanted him.
He learned he also could demand it without shame. One day, Nick and Rachel studied together in the library, in one of the private study rooms Rachel had signed up for in advance. They actually did do some studying, until Nick, looking over at Rachel who was looking over at him, unzipped his pants and pulled out his penis. He held it solemnly in his hands, then grazed it lightly with both sets of fingertips, until Rachel walked over. It was a thing to behold for Nick. It seemed a foot long, and Rachel’s mouth and hair browsed, caressed, tickled and licked it for minutes. When Nick ejaculated, Rachel’s enveloping mouth showed only the trace of a smile.
It all seemed so reasonable. Even Rachel’s and Dorothy’s sexual insatiability he saw with meticulous certainty. He came to believe he could rule his own body at will, commanding sexual arousal the way some can wiggle their ears. Both women liked to be pleased on silent command, and Nick liked doing the pleasing.
There was a drawback: his activity took him away from his studies, and this slowly needled him. After Christmas and as he approached his twenty-second birthday, he felt unsure about how and with whom to spend it. Although most of his grades remained A’s, at least two teachers told him he had begun to slack, cruise through some papers and assignments. He wasn’t himself, they said.
Bothered by their comments, Nick began to get impatient with Dorothy, who began to suspect something was wrong. Nick was getting lazier in bed. Once, he sat up on the bed naked while Dorothy removed her clothes. He began stroking himself, concentrating solely on his penis, waiting for Dorothy, who, puzzled, stood at the foot of the bed for the longest time, watching him. Nick looked up and stretched back, waiting. Dorothy mounted him. Nick closed his eyes impatiently. “What’s your problem?” she asked as she jounced. “Nothing. I guess I’m just tired.” “You want to stop?” “No.” “You sure?” He rocked back and forth with her motion, squeezing her sides. “Yep.” His eyes remained closed.
Her eyes remained opened. For the next two days, she looked through his papers. On the third day, she looked through his wallet. There, Dorothy found Rachel’s breathless note folded neatly behind a picture of Nick’s parents.
When Nick arrived home that evening, Dorothy met him at the front door. She smiled and kissed him. “You forgot your wallet,” she said. She handed it to him with Rachel’s note sticking out. “You can stay till you find a place, but I want you to leave my house as soon as possible.” She closed the door.
Nick stayed outside on the stoop for several minutes staring at the closed door with the wallet sweaty in his hands and his stomach gurgling acid. He wanted to go in the house, but he just stood there, thinking about how ugly the front door was with its cheap oak-brown lacquer peeling in strips at the bottom.
When he finally built up enough momentum to go into the house, he heard the familiar, comfortable and now discomfiting sounds of Dorothy clinking glasses and dishes in the kitchen, pots and pans on the stove. Nick made a puzzled face as he watched her make dinner.
When they sat down to eat, Nick asked, “Where’s Annie?”
“At my mother’s,” Dorothy said. “What difference does that make?”
“None.” Nick ate perfunctorily. “I’ll sleep on the couch.”
“Why? What would be the point? You’ve been sleeping with me while you were fucking her.”
When she looked at him, she looked past him, her eyes unable to focus.
“How stupid can you be, Nick?”
“Pretty stupid.”
“Whatever.” Halfway through the meal, she finally fixed her eyes upon him. “Who is this Rachel cunt, anyway?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Want to bet?”
“I mean, what difference does that make now?”
“It makes a lot of difference, seeing that I’m changing my life now.”
Nick smirked in acknowledgment. “Yeah, I guess you are, aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess I am, aren’t I?” she mimicked, and no longer looked at him.
When night fell and Dorothy went to bed, Nick lay on the couch. He wasn’t sure how much time passed.
“There’s no point in you staying out there,” she said to him through the darkness.
“I can’t go in there.”
“You’re a real asshole, you know that? You haven’t said one word to me about it, not even I’m sorry.”
Nick rose a notch on the couch, thinking: Is that all I need to say?
“You haven’t really tried, ever,” she said. “Have you?”
He said nothing.
After Dorothy silently went to work the next morning, Nick called Rachel and told her the news. When he heard the relief in her voice, Nick looked sharply at the mouth of the receiver. She told him he could stay with her and her parents; that, in fact, she had already talked to her parents about him and that he might need to stay with them for a while, at least until he was done the semester and could apply to a real college.
“What made you think to do that?” he asked.
“A feeling.”
After Nick hung up the phone, he stared at the wall.
It was Friday, and he didn’t bother going to school for the one class he had. He walked downtown, prowled the used bookstores, and walked some more until he felt hungry. The hunger made him feel physically stronger, more alive. But the feeling faded by the afternoon; he couldn’t get Dorothy out of his mind. Rachel, whom he’d known three months, wasn’t even in the equation. It surprised him, but he felt nothing for her – like Sheila and that goddamn chunk of hamburger slowly going down her soft, thin throat. He tried hard, even desperately to think about Rachel, her long legs, hair, lips, body. Instead, he longed for Dorothy, her unglamorous ease, her mediocre dreams of a house and a family and sex. Nick hated himself so much he couldn’t stop thinking of Dorothy. He longed to drop to his knees, kiss her feet and beg forgiveness.
He ran most of the way home. He made five greeting cards from a stack of construction paper in Annie’s room, and filled them with Shakespearean quotations, begging forgiveness, to be allowed to stay. As he was writing, he ceased to think, focusing upon his passionate humiliation.
When Dorothy arrived home that evening, Nick stood by the front door with his hands extended, the cards splayed in his hands. She unlocked the door and they went inside. He dropped to his knees and offered the cards to her. She looked at him with narrowed eyes. She took one card at a time from his hands, read and threw each one haphazardly on the couch.
“What do you have to say?” Dorothy asked, visibly thinking.
“That I’m sorry, that I fucked up, that I want you to forgive me.”
She was still, but he saw her mouth begin the shadow of a smile. “I don’t know,” she said.
Nick stood, held either of her shoulders in his hands. “I mean it,” he said, looking at her nose.
“Here’s the deal,” she said. “If you want to stay, we get married.”
Nick said nothing, resting his head in the crypt Dorothy’s left shoulder made as it softly sloped and became her breast.
© 2023 Victor Greto