“I was going to ask you,” I said, “whether you had completely lost your mind. But coming from me, I suppose, the question is presumptuous to the point of quaintness.”
“I don’t think I’m out of my mind.” She frowned. “To finish up the fantasy, I should turn this—” she pulled a five dollar bill from under her knee—“over to you. Or Denny…” She sucked in her lower lip, then let it go. “Actually I’d like to keep it.”
“Fine by me,” I said. “Just don’t get into this money thing too seriously. You’ll end up like Jack.”
“It isn’t the money,” she insisted. “It’s a symbol.”
“That’s just what I mean.”
“I think you should take your own advice.”
“I try,” I said. “Hey—this wasn’t intended as some kookie way to get back at me for mugging that guy in the street?”
“Kid!” She sat back. “You just shocked me for the first time since I’ve known you!”
“Tread delicately,” I said. “Where do you come off with this shit about me shocking you?”
“I didn’t even think of it. I mean, how are they even comparable? I mean what would…Wow! Is that what you thought?”
“No,” I said. “I didn’t know. So I asked.” We sat for a few seconds, rather glumly. Then I said: “Was he any good?”
She shrugged. “It’s five bucks.”
Then, because there was nothing else to do, I began to laugh. She did too. I put my arms around her and she sort of fell into them, still laughing.
“Hey!” Denny came up over the edge. “He was a real creep, huh? I’m sorry. Some guys you get, they aren’t so bad. Some are even pretty nice. I figured, you know, if I’m gonna get some john set up for your first time, you know, I should find somebody nice. I thought he was nice when I brought him back here but—what’s so funny?”
Which got us going all the harder.
Denny crawled behind us. “I wish you’d tell me what’s so funny about trickin’ with a creep like that.”
“While we’re skirting the subject,” I got myself together enough to ask, “have you balled any of the other guys in the nest?”
Lanya wriggled a little in my arms. “In the nest? Well, not here—”
“Where did you ball ’em?” Denny asked, rather sharply.
“Who,” I asked, “did you ball?” I guess I was surprised again.
“Revelation,” Lanya said.
I nodded.
“…and, well, Copperhead.”
“Jesus,” Denny said. “When?”
Lanya raised a forefinger to bite on the green polish. “You remember the night of Kid’s party, when he went off to Cumberland Park, during the fire, and found those kids, with George? You’d wandered off somewhere, Denny, and I was just sitting around here talking with everybody. Gladis and I were telling them about the House—that place where all the girls stay? They were very interested. So finally Gladis and I took Copperhead, Spitt, and Glass over—that’s where I pick up my birth-control stuff, anyway. The evening is a little hazy, but as I recall, Revelation wandered in just a little later—” She sat up, scowling at her lap. “Spitt retired early with a young lady he met right away—they just went upstairs. And Glass wasn’t feeling well so he left to come back here. But Copperhead and Revelation stayed around downstairs with the rest of us—Dragon Lady had come over, and everybody was yakking about old times—and got incredibly stoned. And—” She paused, her expression between consideration and confession—“eventually, I balled them. And—” she nodded at Denny—“your little girlfriend there balled them. And Gladis balled them. And Filament. And Dragon Lady. And, all in all, about—” she raised her fist and began opening it, finger at a time; raised her other fist—“nine other women balled them too. Not in that order: I was fifth or sixth.”
Denny said slowly and wondrously, “Wow…!”
“It was very funny.” Lanya dropped her shoulders. “I really thought the two of them had flipped out or something, at first. I was sort of scared for them. I don’t think they could have stood up and walked. It was almost like they were in some sort of half-trance. Revelation was lying on his back crying through most of it. That part didn’t turn me on too much. But it got some of the ladies off, and how! And he didn’t lose his hard-on.”
I was surprised and I was curious: “Did they come?”
“Maybe a couple of times at first. I think. But after that, they were just permanently up. Nobody gave ’em a chance to go down. You just did anything you wanted with them. And anyone who was interested did.”
In the middle of a corrective complaining about Risa’s/Angel’s joint cooking effort, Lanya turned to me as I came into the kitchen and said: “Kid, I had a thought, about your memory thing.”
“You all full of thoughts,” Angel said. “Whyn’t you shut up and let us cook?”
“She’s just helpin’,” Risa said.
“And she knows I’m just jokin’,” Angel said. “Don’t you?”
“I’ll shut up,” Lanya said.
I sat on a corner of the kitchen table. “What’s your idea?” A piece of silverware fell on the floor.
“Actually—” Lanya picked it up—” you have an amazing memory! I was snooping in your notebook again—forgive me, and I know you wilclass="underline" but your memory for conversation is practically photographic!”
“No it’s not,” I told her.
“I said ‘practically.’”
“No,” I said again. “About a third of any conversation I write down is just paraphrase.”
“Being able to remember two thirds of what people say, even a few minutes after they’ve said it, is very unusual. Even your account of the night in the park; and you told me you hardly remembered any of that.”
“I just wrote down what you said happened.”
“If you don’t have the lines right, you’ve certainly got the feeling! And with my hustling escapade, you’ve got all the lines. Those I remember.”
I said: “You read that too?”
“And also your accounts of some of the talks we’ve had together. I don’t know how they would stack up next to a transcript, but it’s still impressive.”
“So what’s your idea?”
“Just that, maybe, since you’ve got such memory for details, it has something to do with your losing track of whole periods of time or…well, you know.”
“That’s so interesting,” I said, “I think I’ll forget it right now.”
“She’s just tryin’ to help!” Risa said from the stove, clashing pot tops.
“And she too knows I am joking,” I said. “But even if you’re right, so what?”
Of course I didn’t forget it, witness this. Still, I suspect my highly creative renderings are more convincing than accurate, no matter what she says—I think (hope?).
“All girls?” Denny asked.
Lanya nodded.
“Shit.”
Lanya leaned against me. “I’ve never seen men in a state like that before. The whole thing was really very dyke-y.” She crossed her arms under her breasts. “I dug it. It was a little scary. But it was…an experience.”
“You’re just having experiences one after the other, aren’t you?” The first thing I thought of was what Risa had said to me that day out in the yard; what I found myself grinning at was that the possibility of a genital expedient for taking her suggestion left me just as dubious as an anal one about whether or not I wanted to go through something like that. Oh, well; maybe some people can’t have everything.