He laughs. He tries to ignore me. He sits on the bed tying his shoes. He continues to laugh, shaking his head. “Oh my my. Who told you this one? Susan? Roxanne? Come on, who?” he asks, innocent smile.
Dramatic pause. Look at Seymour, also innocent, sitting near the doorway, licking its paws. It looks up at me too, waiting for my answer.
“Judy,” I say.
Now he stops laughing. He stops shaking his head. His face falls. He puts the other shoe on. He mutters, “I have not bitten the inside of anyone’s thighs. I haven’t bitten yours, have I?”
“What do you want me to do?” I ask, mystified. “Tell her to spread her legs and let me check?” What are we talking about? I don’t even care that much. It seems to be so minor that I don’t understand why I’m harassing him like this. Probably because I want this thing to be over with, and Judy’s a convenient marker.
“Oh Christ,” he’s saying and he looks disappointed. “I don’t believe this. Are you serious or like having your period?”
“You’re right,” I say. “I’m having my period. It didn’t happen.”
The moron actually looks relieved, and says, “I thought so.”
Trying to look crushed and heartbroken, I say simply, “Why did you do it, Sean?”
“I’m leaving,” he says, unlocking the door. Steps into the hallway. People are in the bathroom cutting their hair, making noise. He looks freaked. I light a cigarette.
“Are you really serious?” he asks, standing there. “Do you really believe her?”
I start laughing.
He asks, “What’s so funny?”
I look at him, think about it, stop laughing. “Nothing.”
He closes the door, still shaking his head, still muttering, “I don’t believe this.”
I push the chair away from myself, put the cigarette out, then lay on the bed. In the next room someone takes the needle off the record and starts to play side one again. There is Ben & Jerry’s ice cream in the hall freezer that I plan to steal and eat, but I can hear him standing outside the door, listening. I sit still, barely breathing. The cat meows. The record skips. His footsteps sound up the hallway, clump down the stairs; downstairs door slams. I move to the window and watch him head towards his house. Halfway across Commons he changes direction and moves toward Wooley, where Judy lives.
PAUL While in town one afternoon early in November I happened to pass by the pizza place on Main Street and, through the flurries of snow and the pane of glass and the red neon pizza sign, saw Mitchell sitting by himself in a booth, a half-finished pizza (plain cheese; that was how Mitchell always ordered them; bland) on the table in front of him. I went in. He was tearing open packets of Sweet’n’Low, pouring them out and dividing the powder into long lines that resembled cocaine. I assumed he was alone.
“Are you lost or something?” he asked and lit a cigarette.
“Can I have one?” I asked.
He gave me one but didn’t light it.
“How was the party last night?” he asked.
I stood there. How was the party? House crammed with drunk sweaty horny bodies dancing to old songs aimlessly wandering around blindly fucking each other? Who cares? I was entrusted by Hanna to watch her seventeen-year-old brother, who was visiting from Bensonhurst to see if he wanted to go to Camden. I was attracted to the guy but he was so straight (he would inquire about certain ugly girls, all of whom I told him had herpes) that I pushed whatever kinky thoughts I had out of my mind. He talked about the basketball team he was on and chewed tobacco and had no idea that his sister was Queen Lesbian of McCullough. We went back to my room to have a final beer. I went into the bathroom and washed my face, and when I came back he had taken off his sweatshirt, had poured what was left of my Absolut out and was using the empty bottle as a spittoon, asking if I had any Twisted Sister records. Needless to say, he had a great body and he drunkenly initiated a rather hectic bout of fucking. In between moaning “Fuck me, fuck me,” he’d alternately whisper, “Don’t tell my sister, don’t tell my sister.” I obliged on both accounts. How was the party? “Okay.”
Mitchell had taken his American Express card out and slapped it on the table next to the two lines of Sweet’n’Low and he looked at me with such vehemence that I felt like a blip, a fart, in the course of his life. He tells me that this lawyer who he’d been seeing last summer in New York (before me, before us), a real jerk who liked to light everyone’s cigarettes and who winked all the time, just got back from Nicaragua and told him it was “dynamite” so Mitchell might be heading down there for Christmas. He said this to irritate me, but I didn’t wince. He knew that was a real conversation stopper.
I didn’t wince even when Katrina, that blond Freshman girl who told everyone I couldn’t get it up, sat down in the booth, slipping in next to him.
“You know each other?” Mitchell asked.
“No,” she said smiling, introducing herself.
SEAN I’m in the middle of having lame nightmares when the phone rings on the other side of the room behind the green and black striped parachute Bertrand hung up earlier this term and wakes me. I open my eyes hoping it’ll pass, wonder if Bertrand’s answering machine is on. But the phone keeps ringing. I get out of bed, naked with a hard-on from the nightmare, walk through the slit in the parachute and lean down to answer it. “Hello?”
It’s a long distance call and there’s a lot of static. “Allo?” a female voice calls out.
“Hello?” I say again.
“Allo? Bertrand?” More static.
“Bertrand’s not in.” I glance over at the pumpkin with the beret on it. Jesus.
“Is it Jean-Jacques?” the voice calls out. “Allo? Ça va?”
“Jesus,” I mutter.
“Éa va? Ça va?”
I hang the phone up, walk back through the slit in the parachute and lie down. Then it hits me: I remember last night. I moan and cover my head with the pillow but it smells like her and I have to take it off my face. Why in the hell did Judy tell Lauren? What in the hell was going through that girl’s mind when she told Lauren? I tried to talk to the bitch last night but there was no answer when I stopped by her room at Wooley. I moan again and throw the pillow against the wall, depressed and tense and horny. Move my hand over my hard-on, try and jerk off for a little while, reach beneath my bed and pull out the October issue of Playboy, reach a little further and find Penthouse.
I open up the Playboy to the centerfold. First I check out the girl’s face, though I’m not sure why since it’s her body, tits, cunt, ass, that seem so much more prominent. This girl is okay-looking; contemptibly pretty; her tits are tan and big and smooth; the flesh looks salty; run my hand over the thick, glossy paper, the small triangle of hair between the legs is carefully brushed and fluffy. I don’t like the legs too much so I fold part of the centerfold over. This girl thinks she’s smart. Her favorite movie is Das Boot, which is weird since a lot of these girls’ favorite movie has been Das Boot lately, but she’s obviously retarded, even though she does have nice tits. Spitting on my hand I think she might even look slightly horny, and I move my hand faster, but spit always dries up and I can’t find any Vaseline in the mess of my room so I hump the discarded pillow instead and check out her measurements. 35-22-34.
And then I see it: Next to the measurements, next to height and weight (is that information supposed to turn us on? maybe it does) and color of eyes, is her birthdate. My mind does some quick subtraction and I realize that this girl is nineteen and me, Sean, is twenty-one. This girl is younger than me, and that does it — instant depression. This woman, this flesh was always older and that was part of the turn-on, but now, coming across this, something I’d never noticed before upsets me more than thinking about the conversation Lauren and Judy must have had. I have to close the Playboy and reach for the Penthouse and flip it open to the Forum section but it’s too late and I can’t concentrate on the words and I keep wondering if I really did bite the inside of Judy’s thighs and, if so, then why? I can’t even remember why it happened or how. Was it a week ago? It was the night of Vittorio’s cocktail party. Had there been anyone else since Lauren? Shut my eyes and try to remember.