“Clinty, the sex is great, you know the sex is great, I’ve told you how you fill me up, but sex is only like a few hours a day, you can’t let it totally rule your life,” said a raspy bird voice from down the hall.
“Little fucker sounds pretty healthy to me,” Candy Mandible said, walking naked down the hall, Lenore in the bathrobe behind her. “If Mrs. Tissaw hears this stuff, we’re really up the old fecal creek. We better start teaching him some Psalms or something.”
Candy went into her room and Lenore into hers. In Lenore’s room it was very pretty now. The floor and lower walls were liquid black, and dark tree shadows moved in the orange bath of sunset on the upper walls and ceiling.
“Sex is a few hours a day?” Lenore called to Candy.
“Clint, Clint, Clint, special-wecial,” Vlad the Impaler crooned into his mirror.
“Jesus wept,” Lenore said into Vlad the Impaler’s cage. “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.”
Vlad the Impaler cocked his head and looked at her.
“Lenore, Clint is just something else, I have to tell you. He’s super. He turns me inside out. He’s a horse, a camel, a brontosaurus,” Candy said from her door, demonstrating with her hands. “Like this.”
“Yes, well, ummm,” said Lenore.
“Inside out! Like this!” shrieked Vlad the Impaler.
“Shit on a twig,” Lenore said.
“But he’s so possessive,” Candy continued. “He keeps asking me to marry him, and getting mad when I laugh. He thinks making me come gives him the right to my heart. How can such a big boy be such a little boy? My eye’s on the president of the whole company, Mr. Allied.” Candy stood on dancer’s point in Lenore’s doorway and let the last orange bits of sunset fall on her cheeks. She was a really pretty girl, all curves and ovals and soft milky shine, with thick dark hair, even darker now when wet. It lay like a blanket of chocolate over her breasts and back. A plane flew over, low, rattling the windows in their frames for a moment.
“Now let’s have a night to remember, and remember each other always,” Vlad the Impaler said to his reflection.
Lenore slipped a clean dress over her head. “When does this night to remember begin?”
Candy looked at the clock just as it clicked and buzzed a new minute. “Any time now. I’m just going to go over to his place for dinner, then I imagine we’ll mate like animals for hours and hours and hours.”
“A real romantic,” said Lenore. “Jesus wept, Vlad the Impaler. The sins of the fathers. I shall not want.”
“Jesus shall not want.”
“Attaboy.”
“I’m still waiting to hear about Rick, you know, mating-wise.” Candy called from back in her room. “It’s been months, after all, and if he’s as super as you say… I’m waiting for minute anatomical tale-telling. Otherwise you’ll just force me to find out for myself.”
“Yes, well, ummm.” Lenore put on clean socks.
“Just kidding. But really, we are partners in crime after all. And describing one can make you feel closer to it. I mean him. Really. Angles and bends and birthmarks and everything. It makes you intimater.” Candy came in, in a pale old violet cotton dress that had been Lenore’s for a long time, and was just perfectly too small for Candy, and clung to the not insignificant swell of her hips. She knelt at the window in the shadow and put mascara on, looking at her reflection in the black lower rectangle of the clear glass pane. Outside, crickets were starting.
“Making me come. Me as a person,” said Vlad the Impaler. “Where is that ditzy bitch?”
“Sorry about that.”
“May I please have a ride to Rick’s? I left my car at the Building.” Lenore finished tying her shoes and brushed out the curves of her hair. “I think Vlad the Impaler’s going to be OK food-wise. He must not be eating much.”
“Yes you may have a ride. Listen, you going to water that plant, or what?”
“It’s like an experiment.”
“The sins of the feathers!” screamed Vlad the Impaler. “Who has the book?”
“What book?” Lenore asked Candy.
“Search moi. Listen, I’m late. Shall we.”
“Yes. Good night, Vlad the Impaler.”
“Love has no meaning. Love is a meaningless word to me.”
“Maybe we could get him on ‘Real People.’ ”
“ ‘Real Birds.’ ”
“Thanks again for this dress. It may get tom, I’m warning you now.”
“People should have wedding nights like your breakups.”
“Women need space, need space!”
/c/
“Are you bothered by speculations about whether it bothers me that you never tell me you love me?”
“Maybe sometimes.”
“Well you shouldn’t be. I know you do, deep down. Deep down I know it. And I love you, fiercely and completely — you do believe that.”
“Yes.”
“And you love me.”
“…. ”
“It’s not a problem. I know you do. Please don’t let it bother you.”
“….”
“Thank you for telling me the Grandmother news. I apologize for being a pain in the ass at dinner. I apologize for Norman.”
“Well, God, I wanted to tell you. Except I don’t really even feel like it’s telling. You tell facts, you tell things. These weren’t things, they’re just a collection of weirdnesses.”
“Even so. Are you bothered by the book being gone, too?”
“…. ”
“The book is a problem, Lenore. The book is your problem, in my opinion. Hasn’t Jay said you’re simply investing an outside thing with an efficacy to hurt and help and possess meaning that can really come only from inside you? That your life is inside you, not in some book that makes an old woman’s nightie sag?”
“How do you know what Jay’s told me?”
“I know what I’d tell you in his place.”
“…. ”
“Be legitimately concerned about a relative who’ll turn up with a Mediterranean tan and a terse explanation from your father, Lenore. Is all.”
“You fill me up, Rick, you know. You turn me inside out.”
“Pardon me?”
“You turn me inside out. When we.. you know. What we just did.”
“I fill you up?”
“You do.”
“Well thank you.”
“A story, please.”
“A story.”
“Please. Did you get any today?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Good.”
“I actually began a journal today, too, really. Just jottings. Random, et cetera. It was interesting. I had wanted to ever since I was young.”
“Well good. Can I read it, ever?”
“You most certainly cannot. A journal is almost by definition something no one else reads.”
“I guess I’ll just settle for a story, then, please.”
“Got another interesting one today.”
“Goody.”
“Sad, though, again. Do you know where all the really sad stories I’m getting are coming from? They’re coming, it turns out, from kids. Kids in college. I’m starting to think something is just deeply wrong with the youth of America. First of all, a truly disturbing number of them are interested in writing fiction. Truly disturbing. And more than interested, actually. You don’t get the sorts of things I’ve been getting from people who are merely… interested. And sad, sad stories. Whatever happened to happy stories, Lenore? Or at least morals? I’d fall ravenously on one of the sort of didactic Salingerian solace-found-in-the-unlikeliest-place pieces I was getting by the gross at Hunt and Peck. I’m concerned about today’s kids. These kids should be out drinking beer and seeing films and having panty raids and losing virginities and writhing to suggestive music, not making up long, sad, convoluted stories. And they are as an invariable rule simply atrocious typists. They should be out having fun and learning to type. I’m not a little worried. Really.”