“Oh,” Kid said. “Yeah. You give therapy to people now?”
“Yes, I have been for quite a while now.”
Lanya said, “I told Madame Brown you’d been in therapy before.”
“You told her I’d been in a mental hospital?”
“You mentioned that to me once yourself,” Madame Brown said.
Kid drank some wine. “Yeah. I’d like to come and talk to you. Thanks. That’s nice of you.”
“You think he’s crazy?” Denny asked. He’d only drunk from the coffee. “He acts pretty funny sometimes. But I don’t think he’s crazy. Not like Dollar.” He looked over his cup at Madame Brown and explained: “Dollar’s killed somebody already. Beat his head in with a pipe. Now Dollar’s a real nut. You wanna talk to him?”
“You shut up, huh?” Kid said.
Madame Brown said: “I’m afraid I don’t have facilities for handling…real nuts. ‘Crazy’ and ‘nuts’ are terms doctors don’t use—or shouldn’t. But, no, I don’t think Kid’s crazy at all.”
Denny’s head had gone to the side and his tongue into his cheek, listening for patronization. His mouth changed shape over the cup. He’d apparently found it.
“I don’t want to start any long-term thing,” Kid said, “where I come back and back—yeah, I know that’s how it works. But I just don’t want to get into that.”
“Whether or not you needed something long term would more or less depend on what we found out in the first sessions, wouldn’t it? So we’ll do first things first.”
“Okay…” Kid felt wary.
“You know—” Lanya’s chair legs came down—“that whole thing about Dollar killing Wally has really got me upset.”
“What is this,” Madame Brown asked, “about someone killing somebody?”
So they told her.
“Now he sounds nuts.” Madame Brown nodded.
“Oh, he ain’t that nuts,” Denny answered.
Madame Brown sighed: “Well, I suppose that afternoon did provide some extenuating circumstances.” But she sounded more worried than convinced.
The bell rang.
“Well, my break is over.” Madame Brown left the room.
As soon as she’d gone, Denny said: “Did you know that while you were asleep last night, the guys had two girls in the back they were shagging? Man, them niggers really went to town! I used to watch a lot, but I never took no turn before. One of them, the little white one, she was freaky, man! Really. Freaky. Glass said I could take a turn, if I wanted.” He revolved the cup to align the handle with a crack between the table boards. “So I did. To come, though, I had to pretend—” Denny glanced at Kid—“stuff with you.”
“You been busy, huh?” Kid hadn’t known; he was surprised.
Denny looked at Lanya. “I pretended about you too.”
“I don’t know whether I should be flattered or not.” She rocked her chair again. “I’ve always pictured myself as a pretty worldly young lady, but you guys have a way of making me feel like I just got out of a convent. Not—” she let the chair legs down—“that I’m trying to keep up…well, maybe I am, just a little.” She stood, stepped around the table corner, and put a hand on either side of Denny’s face, which rotated between her palms, mouth opened. She dropped her mouth on his. He held the edge of the table and strained his neck to kiss her. Finally, he let go with one hand and put it around her waist. “Hey—” he pulled his face away from hers—“that’s nice,” giggled, and kissed her again.
Kid’s laughter made them look.
“What would you do,” Kid said, “if I brought the whole nest around and had them all lined up, taking turns?”
Leaning against Denny’s shoulder, Lanya frowned. “I wouldn’t put it past you, you bastard…Naw, that’s not true. You wouldn’t.” She glanced down and sat on Denny’s knee. Denny immediately settled one hand over her breast and frowned at her. “Gang bangs, chains, leather—it isn’t my scene.”
“I’ve got a hard-on,” Denny said.
“You’ve had a hard-on ever since I met you,” Lanya told him. “Look, you two: two guys making it together turns me on. That’s all. Most of my friends have always been gay. That’s what I dig.”
“I know a lot of guys who dig dikes,” Denny said.
Lanya bit his ear.
“Owww…!”
“Anyway,” she said, “that’s the turn-on for me. Not getting gang-shagged.”
“Glib.” Kid rocked his stool legs now. “But logical.”
“I think you look cute in my vest,” Denny said. “You think I look cute without it?”
“As a bug, babes,” Lanya told him.
“Hey,” Denny said. “Are you mad at me?”
“No,” she said. “Just a little confused.” She looked at Kid. “I can never figure out if you’re the person I keep thinking you are.”
Kid stood up, walked over, and stopped with his hands on Lanya’s shoulders, his legs astraddle Denny’s knee. “If I talk about you screwing Denny or me, it’s for real. If I talk about you screwing anybody else, I’m joking. See? And you can do or talk about whatever you want.”
“And I think you misunderstand me entirely—” she nodded with a look both wary and wry—“sometimes.”
He kissed her (face turning between his palms) and had to bend his legs. She turned her head gently back and forth, rubbing his tongue with hers, and meshed her fingers behind his neck, pulling him down, harder. Finally he had to settle his weight on Denny’s thigh. Denny took Kid’s shoulder with one hand. The knuckles of the other moved against Kid’s breast, fondling hers. Kid’s hands slid between Lanya’s back and Denny’s belly.
“Both of you,” Denny said, “weigh more than I do. Either me or the chair is gonna go, one.”
Lanya laughed into Kid’s mouth.
“Let’s go back into your room and ball.” Kid said.
He had actually thought one or the other of them would protest.
Geoff Rivers
Arthur Pearson
Kit Darkfeather
Earl Rudolph
David Wise
Phillip Edwards
Michael Roberts
Virginia Colson
Jerry Shank
Hank Kaiser
Frank Yoshikami
Gary Disch
Harold Redwing
Alvin Fischer
Madeleine Terry
Susan Morgan
Priscilla Meyer
William Dhalgren
George Newman
Peter Weldon
Ann Harrison
Linda Evers
Thomas Sask
Preston Smith
At her desk, he read the list for the sixth time. The sky beyond the bay window, dense and low, darkened toward evening. Roberts or Rudolph, Rivers or Evers: Fantasize a persona for any. Which, he pondered, would I pick myself? Some permutation…Gary Morgan, Terry Rivers, Thomas Weldon? None was his. Was one perhaps nearer than the other? No…if they are all real people, he reflected, then each is just as important. Hey, Kamp, isn’t this what that democracy’s about that put you up on…a moon? (But I don’t want one. I need one about as much as I need a handful of dollars.) Lips tight, he picked up the papers: Three sheets from the phone pad, two pieces of newsprint, the back, blank pages of a paperback, some sheets of Lanya’s paper—all he had written since Brass Orchids. I promised not to write anymore; Newboy promised I would. Kid smiled, putting one paper behind the other. He slipped Brass Orchids from beneath the notebook, opened it, closed it, opened it again. Holding it on his palm too long made his stomach ache. Such a strange, marvelous, and marvelously inadequate object! He was still unable to read it through. He still tried. And tried again, and tried till his throat was constricted, his forearms wet, and his heart hammered down where he’d always thought his liver was. Neither dislike nor discomfort with the work explained that. Rather the book itself was lodged in some equation where it did not belong, setting off hyperradicals and differentials through all the chambers of his consciousness. He looked over at the notebook, read what was on the page behind the list: