“Buy your shoes,” Sal said. “Buy your shirt, buy your tie.”
“That’s right,” I said. “I forgot.” I stood up.
“Tell the shoe man a brown oxford.”
“A brown oxford. Yes.”
“Maybe a tan shirt with a thin stripe. A dark, solid-color tie, no pattern. If there’s a pattern it should be delicate, no heavier than the stripe on your shirt.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“You got a decent leather belt? Something the color of new shoe soles, I think, but stay away from oxblood.”
“All right,” I said, “thank you.”
“Stockings,” he called after me. “Black. Knee length.”
It is perhaps the first time he has ever really examined himself in the glass. Looking for blemish, sorting rash, feature, the inventory of surface, the lay of the skull. He sees with wonder the topography of his hair, the evidence of his arms beneath his suit coat, the hinged and heavy wrists. He leans forward and splays his lips, stares at the long teeth, touches them. Before, if he has looked in the mirror, it has been with the shy, cursory glance of a customer into a barber’s glass, that automatic, that mechanical.
I was no virgin, you understand.
His sexual encounters had been in bars, low dives, his conquests drunk, mostly older, fumbling his cock in the alley, blowing him in cars, deeply, deeply, smothering his foreskin on their sore throats, scratching it on dentures. Hoarsely they had moaned, called out someone else’s name. Or come to them always in their beds, in cold rooms, in badly furnished apartments above beauty parlors. So that he believed, vaguely, that females had regulated intervals of abstinence, cycles of seasonal rut, their need encoded, driven by the calendar, the tides, the moon, by floundering glands, secret biological constants. (He stayed away from whores not because he believed their need was shammed but because he believed they had no need, that their natures had been torn from them, that their cunts were quite literally holes, hair and flesh covering nothing, like houses built on the edges of cliffs. He thought of them as amputees. He did not go with whores.)
[I did not go with anyone. When I wanted a woman I knew where to find her. Those bars. Maybe once a month I’d leave my neighborhood and take the bus north or south, get off somewhere in the city I had never been and find a tavern, and usually it was the only place with the lights still on, settled among the frame houses and dark apartment buildings — bowling alleys too, the lounges there, those Eleventh Frames, Lovers’ Lanes, Spare Rooms and Gutter Bowls near the pinball arcades and shoe rentals — so that I always had the impression I had come to the country. I didn’t waste time. I ordered my beer, showed them my money — I didn’t have a wallet; in those days I carried my cash in my pay envelope — and looked around, smiling not broadly so much as inconclusively. If I saw a woman put money in the jukebox I listened to hear what songs she’d picked and I played them too, leaning backward or forward when the music came on, waiting to catch her eye, raising my glass to her, toasting our taste. Almost always she smiled. I took my beer and moved down the bar toward her. If the stool next to hers was empty I sat down. I’d read the label on her beer and signal the bartender to bring us another round, talking all the time, not lying, you understand, but this wasn’t conversation either, telling my name and where I worked, the position I played, other things about me, all I could think of who didn’t know what my hair looked like or what were my strong points or the condition of my teeth, and never asked anything about her unless it was what she was drinking if it wasn’t beer or something I recognized, the difficulty being finding things to say after I’d told her my name, what I did for a living, where I was from, conversationed no better than a candidate, some pol at a gate when the shifts change, but talking anyway, having to, the distracting spiel of a magician, say, the cardsharp’s chatter, friendly, open, frank for a man in work shirts, boots, but steering clear, too, of questions and promptings and preemptive reference, not rude or aggrandizing but shy for
her, modest for the lady, in charge only through consideration, a ricochet restraint, the billiard relationships and carom closures and retreats tricky as dance steps. Because I figured we both knew what was what, who, one of us at least, knew nothing. And assumed she assumed I would not mention it, her presence a matter of course, the body’s will, some compulsion of the skin, shame’s innings and lust’s licks, as if, were I to permit her the edgewise word that word would be a groan, a speech from heat, not conversation either, as if the both of us were mutes, but the driven diction of desire, I more than hinting she had gotten there as I had, on a bus, come in a car from some distant neighborhood, as much the stranger in those parts as myself. And where, I wonder, did those gestures come from, that silent toast, that almost knowledgeable little bow of deference and tribute, that polite, bar-length greeting, romantic, so close to civilized? How would I have learned these signs who had learned nothing? Not my profile, not my air. But deferential, always deferential, as deferential to her hormones as a gent to disfigurement or some grand-mannered guy to handicap, deferentially drilling her with my attentive small talk, clocking the parameters of her drunkenness all the way to its critical mass. Like a scientist, like a coach, like a doc at the ringside, gauging, appraising and contemplative, only then stepping in, cool as a cop: “That’s enough, don’t you think so? Look, you’re beginning to cry. Listen how shrill you’ve become. You don’t want to throw up, do you? You don’t want to pass out. Where are your car keys, where is your purse? Is that your coat? Did you come with a hat? Splash water on your face, go relieve yourself first. Beer, pee and estrogen. That’s a tricky combination. The beer’s in the pee. The pee floods the estrogen. Go on, go ahead, I’ll wait.” And damned if she didn’t. Do as I say. And grateful as well. As if I’d actually helped her. So that by the time I had her skirt up, her brassiere down, lowered her corset, raised her slip, sucked the garters, kissed the hose, and had the cups of her bra loose on her belly or awry at her side, she was actually watching, amazed as myself at her condition, convinced by her gamy, ribald chemistries, struck by what was neither rape nor love but only my simple, driven confidence, a kind of carnal transfusion, sexual first aid and the terrible blunt liberties of emergency, averting her eyes not even when she came, her moans and cries and whines and whimpers and skirls of orgasm a sort of breathless yodel, Baby Shameless beneath this fellow like some heavy lifter or love’s day laborer who did all the work and insinuated knees, fingers, hands, lips, mouth, tongue, teeth and cock too at last, not as weapons — as little seduction as rape — and not even as parts, members but as tools, the paramedical instrumentality of the available — as if I lived off the land, made do like a commando — so that only when I came did she avert her eyes, blink, as if only then I had exceeded my warrants, behaved less than professionally. But reassured the next moment by my withdrawal, suddenly thoughtful, charmed and sad. “Oh, say,” she’d say, “where’d you learn to do a girl like that? That was really something. Really something. You know I never…I didn’t frighten you, did I? When I made those sounds? Did I? Tell the truth, were you embarrassed? Honest, I never…It was like someone else’s voice. I swear it. It was like someone’s voice I’ve never heard. I never have heard it. I didn’t know I even knew those noises, words.” I all skeptical reassurance, muzzling my doubts as till the last minute I had muzzled my lust, as accomplished a dresser in the dark back seats of cars or on the damp sheets of those strange beds as undresser, saying: “Oh, hey, listen, that’s okay. That was only nature. You mustn’t mind what Mother Nature says. You’re not to blame — here’s your stocking — you couldn’t help it. Don’t you think I know that much? Sure. Anyway, it was your glands talking, only your guts’ opinions, just some tripe from the marrow. You think I pay that any mind? That I listen to endocrines? Women do that stuff when they get excited. They’re not in control. I know that much. It was just Nature and your ducts’ low notions. Hey now, cheer up. Do I look like the kind of guy who sets store in a fart? Here’s your earring. It must have slipped out when you were thrashing around like that.”]