Full Frontal Fiction

by Jack Murnighan

  So I got the cabbie to drop me off at Roddy’s and there was this guy sitting at the bar alone, and even though he had B&T written all over him, he was so big and looked so uncomfortable in his ten-dollar tie, it was like he had to be too fucking dumb to start any bullshit. He had one of his oversized mitts wrapped around a whiskey sour with the cherry and the straw still in it and I don’t think he realized it’s a woman’s drink, and then I realized that he probably had no idea what to drink in a bar, and suddenly it all became clear to me that this guy probably works in Hoboken and lives with his bedridden mother and was supposed to meet some coworkers here or something but they blew him off or he got it wrong and he was trying to make the most of a broken evening, his first one out in months, and that I could make this guy very happy and maybe what I needed was someone to make me feel normal, to make me feel clean, like it was me that lived in some ticky-tack house in the suburbs and worked a 9 to 5 and had a kid and a car payment and plans for the future.

  When I sat down next to him, he looked up at me with bovine, disbelieving eyes. He was the opposite of what I normally find attractive, but I was thinking, Fuck, all I ever pick are assholes, maybe it’s time to try something new. So I turned on my bar stool so he couldn’t see the tear in my tights and I asked him for a light and he fumbled in his pockets but it was obvious he didn’t have one so I told him to buy me a drink instead and I ordered a whiskey sour and he laughed, saying, “That’s what I’m drinking,” like I didn’t already know, like I didn’t totally fucking have his number, the dumb piece of Jersey shit. I’ve never gotten over how easy it is, how much they’re willing to believe. At first I thought it was a kind of magic, that I could be anything I wanted; then I started to see that the only reason they had stars in their eyes was that they were not really looking, that they didn’t see anything at all, that they were looking up my skirt and down my shirt and saying yes, yes, but they weren’t seeing shit of me. And the sensitive ones would pretend to listen; and the smart ones would finish my sentences; and the rich ones would tell me they’d get me something nice, but I was never anything more than what they wanted me to be, their fantasy of the tramp they’d save or the angel they’d fuck up the ass.

  The day I gave Alice the keys I thought back to an evening I’d spent with some people I met through a dishwasher at work. They were passing around a joint and one of the women wanted to play this game. You were supposed to say, if you were shipwrecked on a deserted island and could bring one animal with you, what it would be. My first thought was a dog that would protect and love me and whose love I’d never question, that would follow me and be loyal to my death. But then another idea insinuated itself, truer than the first: I thought of a falcon, that I would fear, but respect. That would return to me, but I wouldn’t control it. That would sit blinded on my arm until I’d set it free, to go and kill, and come back only if it so wanted. And each time as I placed the hood back over its head I would wonder why it ever did.

  He was so odd, so sad and nervous. I had to keep talking to keep the conversation going. I’d ask him questions and he’d answer in three words then sit silent again and stir his drink. I asked him his name but I didn’t really understand what he said—it sounded like “Lucid” or something—and then he didn’t even ask for mine back. And part of me is thinking, This guy is a total fucking loser, but then another part of me thinks, Maybe he just doesn’t know how to win, and that’s when I decided that I’d fuck him in his own car that night and see how long it took him to tell me that he loved me.

  Happy, happy—I was going to make him so happy. So I walked him out to his car and got in alongside him and he started to ask where we were going and I just raised a finger to my lips, “Shhh,” then ran it down his, then down his chest, and then when I reached into his pleated navy pants he came all over my hand. I felt the laughter rising up in me, and the shame on his face made the cruelty rise up too, but I forced it under and leaned over and kissed him on the mouth and said, “Oh baby, I’m ready to burst now too,” and then I ran his come through his hair and laughed and said he looked like James Dean and pushed him back on his seat and told him to close his eyes and I put my hand back between his legs and took him in my hand like it was a broken wing and worked beneath his balls until he started to groan and move with my touch and I told him to keep his eyes closed while I pulled my skirt up above my garters and climbed over him onto my knees with my ankles pressed to the edge of the seat and I held myself open with one hand and guided him in with the other and he started saying, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” but I pushed my tongue into his mouth and pulled down hard on top of him and was grinding back and forth until, a minute later, he was ready to lose himself again. And then I stopped on a dime and pulled off him and said, “Uh uh,” waving my finger back and forth like a schoolmistress.

  And he tried to speak and I said, “Tell me your number,” and he said, “Hold on, let me find a pen,” and I said, “No, just tell me; I’ll remember,” and he said, “I work late,” and I said, “I know,” and he said, “226 2809,” and before he could get his pants zipped back up I was out his door and across the parking lot, getting into another cab.

  On the first night we fucked; on the second night we were in the car again, and again when I was about to come she lifted herself off me and looked away. But this time she didn’t leave, she just turned in the seat so she was on her knees looking out the passenger window and pushed her ass firm against my face. She was wet and sticky and told me not to press so hard and while I was fumbling around trying to figure out what to do with my tongue she just rubbed against me and tucked one hand between her legs. I don’t know if anything is scarier than a woman taking her pleasure when you’re just sitting there not knowing where to put your hands. So I just ran my tongue up and down her sweaty cheeks trying to stay out of the way until she finally came and looked back at me and gave me a deep heavy kiss. You’re the best, she said. And I looked at her and had no fucking clue what I had done.

  All my life I’ve wanted something. The tiara that would make me a princess, the pony I’d ride into my dreams. Later the horse had a rider, and he’d lift me out of the cosmic mess I had made and take me to his castle in the dunes. But then the real men would come with their glittering watches and I’d look the poor fucks in the face and think, Is this what I get? Is this all there is? But Lucien seemed so neutral, so average and grounded that maybe I could get lost in him like in a big field of grain. Just close my eyes and take five steps and never find my way out again.

  It’s like looking up from under water, seeing the lights flicker above the surface, reaching up with your hand, and not grasping. I have lived my life this way: wanting to desire, holding back. I am weary of dodging experience. It’s like as a wind too brisk to be borne; I close myself and turn away. Perhaps for some passion is a thing both viewable and viewed; for my part, I would rather not dream than dream and be denied. When Alice touches me I flutter. A window opens and, in a blink, closes. She feels me retreat. And like a huntress she pursues. She pursues, not to find me, simply not to be eluded. And ever the acceleration, as if the trigger of my great abandon were simply around the corner, dependent on some key code of positions or perversions. She pulls off of me, turns me over, sticks something in, pours something over, binds or bites or burns me until my wellconfected moans convince her she’s hit it, that she’s touched that part of me she thinks my fear would have me hide. She thinks she can work me like she works every other man, but I see their faces, bent over her, frozen in vulgar masks of pleasure and I feel very far away. Over and over I see it; I see her with all the others, the ones who don’t understand her, never cared for her, would take and take and take from her and never bother to find out who they were taking from. Maybe I’m wrong; I’ve never fucked a man. But then I’ve also never met one who wasn’t selfish. They don’t realize that Alice is like a butterfly: if you touch her, you’ll rub the dust off her wings and she’ll never fly again.

  H
e doesn’t even seem to care. I stroll in at any hour strung out of my fucking head and take his coffee and wait for the burning words, the hard hand that never comes. He just looks at me with that pathetic, understanding, impassive face, as if to say, “Don’t worry, honey, it’s okay, I know you’ve had a long night,” and I can barely fucking stand it. I want to scream out, to smack him in the face, to wipe off that smirk, to humiliate him, to knock him off his angel’s peg and make him feel what it’s like to feel ashamed. He thinks he’s doing me a favor by always being there and “taking things in stride” and doesn’t even see that he only sits at home ’cause he’s too scared and lost to go out and all his so-called devotion to me is just his need to have someone else call the shots and treat him like a dog and give him the chance to show how noble he is ’cause he keeps coming back for more. Oh, my big hero, how I need you. I need you I need you I need you. And I keep repeating it over and over under my breath as I kneel down and unzip his pants. And he comes, thinking that he loves me.

  I wonder whether love is anything other than giving. To lose yourself in commitment, to bend beyond your needs for the other, to be perfect and beautiful and true. Everything else is shit: shit to fuel our ego, our vanity, our greed. With Alice I have learned that events of beauty are hand-rungs in the succession of time; we climb toward the bright window and hope to find stillness.

  Bed of Leaves

  BY DANI SHAPIRO

  LATER, SHE WILL REMEMBER THE LEAVES. The way they scratch and crumble against her back. The way her panties are smudged with dirt and she will have to ball them up and stuff them into her knapsack where her mother won’t find them. Years later, as a woman, there will be a moment at the end of each summer when the scent of fresh-mowed grass will fill her lungs through an open car window, and she will close her eyes and her tongue will go soft, her inner thighs moist like the pale insides of a half-baked cake.

  Eddie Fish is unbuttoning her shirt. There have been boys before this moment, boys who have stuck their fingers between her blouse and jeans, tugging the fabric loose, pushing their hands up around her bra and cupping her breasts. There have been boys—two, to be exact—who have unzipped her pants in the school basement, pushing their hardness against her cotton panties, eyes squeezed shut. But Eddie Fish is not a boy. Eddie is a man—twenty-eight years old— and Jennie knows these woods are about to become a part of her history. She is writing the story of her life, the story of her body on these damp suburban grounds with the man she has chosen precisely because he is a man. The blond hairs on his wrists glisten as he reaches around her and unhooks her bra. She is impressed by his skill at bra-unhooking, the ease with which he pulls the straps off her arms and hangs it on a nearby branch, a white cotton 32B flag of surrender. She is impressed by his warm dry palms which brush against her nipples, and by his eyes, dark blue in the noon of this clear Indian Summer day, staring straight at her. “Lisa Wallach,” he says, murmuring the name of his last girlfriend as he stares at Jennie’s breasts.

  She looks at him, flushed.

  “Sorry,” he laughs, “I can’t explain it. Your hair, your tits—you look just like her now...”

  She doesn’t know enough to be horrified. To slap Eddie Fish across his pale stubbled cheek, grab her bra off the branch and streak through the woods, away from him. Instead, she is flattered by the comparison to Lisa Wallach, who is a woman, after all—at least twenty-six—and who is very beautiful in that frosted-blond urban way. Lisa is a lawyer. She has an apartment in the city, and wears leather boots with stacked heels, long velvet skirts almost brushing the floor.

  “What am I doing here with you?” he murmurs as he undoes the top button of her tennis shorts, bends down and unlaces each sneaker, pulls off her Fred Perry socks with their small green wreaths. He unzips her shorts and shimmies them down around her ankles, along with her panties. Parts of her have never felt the breeze before. Her ass, her crotch, each nipple seems to braid together into a rope twisting deep into her stomach, twining around itself, a noose which will remain forever inside her.

  “Jailbait,” he says, kissing her belly-button.

  Years from now, Eddie Fish will be a gynecologist in Scarsdale. He will drive a Volvo, own an espresso maker, be the father of two daughters of his own—two daughters he would kill if he ever found them in the woods with a man resembling his younger self. But today, as he lights a joint and places it in Jennie’s mouth, he is not focused on his future, the bright golden-boy future which unfurls before him like an heirloom rug. He has no doubts, no fears. His medical school degree is at the framer’s, his internship in the city will begin in just a few weeks, and Lisa Wallach is finally a thing of the past. And here is Jennie, the beautiful neighborhood kid with the crush on him, Jennie, twelve years younger than he—sixteen, for chrissake—three years ago he had attended her Bat Mitzvah! His eyes travel over her shoulders, down her breasts, lower to the blond depths of her. A virgin? He doubted it. She had written him letters all through medical school, letters so steamy he and Lisa had read them to each other late at night. He stubs out the joint on a tree trunk, next to a carved heart with no names, no initials inside it.

  Gently, he lays her down on a bed of leaves, her head resting against the root of a tree. She crosses her legs, her arms, trying to cover herself. She has no idea how sexy she is. He quickly pulls his polo shirt over his head, undoes his own shorts and steps out of them. Then, in his sneakers and tight white briefs, he lowers himself on top of her, careful to prop himself on his elbows.

  Later, after it is all over, a friend will ask him why, after all, he did it.

  “She was so beautiful,” Eddie will say. “So fucking beautiful.”

  Eddie’s head is between her legs. His mouth is moist, chin dripping, and he looks up at her as he twirls his tongue around and around. With his fingers, he spreads her apart. “Are you using anything?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she says. She wants him to think she’s a woman of the world. A woman whose motto, like a Boy Scout’s, is “Be prepared.” Her heart pounds as he slides a finger into her. Can he tell that she’s lying?

  He kisses her on the lips and she tastes herself. She is anticipating something awful, vomitous, some reason why her mother lines up bottles of sweet-smelling potions on the bathroom sill. She is surprised. The taste is not unpleasant: oceanic, vaguely like seaweed. Something dredged from the depths.

  She wonders what he tastes like, if she will ever know.

  Eddie wriggles out of his underwear and moves up her body so that his thing, this thing that she has been waiting for, is swinging above her mouth like a heavy, hypnotic pendulum. The last one she saw was Steven McCarthy’s, back in third grade, when she accidentally-on-purpose opened the bathroom door while he was standing over the toilet.

  Tentatively, she opens her mouth, darts out her tongue, runs her lips over the shaft. She is expecting something rough, something that feels like stubble. She is surprised by his smoothness, and she dips her head down and covers him. He moans a high-pitched sound she has never heard before, blending into the chirps and rustles all around them. Suddenly, Eddie pushes himself farther into her mouth with a small grunt and she tastes something faintly metallic at the back of her throat.

  “Whew,” he says, pulling away from her. “You sweet thing. Where’d you learn that?”

  She feels heat rise from her breasts to her cheeks. Without even looking, she knows that a blotchy, red rash has spread across her chest and neck, a map to her inner world. She always turns blotchy when she feels anything complicated. She fights back the urge to gag at the drop of thick slippery fluid trickling down her throat.

  “I almost came,” he said with a grin. “Naughty girl.”

  He slides down her body, his stomach pressed against her own, and thrusts into her. Jennie braces herself and grits her teeth, waiting for the pain. Will there be blood between her legs? Will he find out she’s a virgin and recoil? Jennie knows this: Eddie Fish does not want her to be a virgin. For
the rest of her life, boyfriends and husbands will ask about her first time, and the name Eddie Fish—that unfortunate moniker—will forever be whispered in a progression of beds.

  Who was your first?

  Eddie Fish.

  And how was it, my darling?

  It was—it was what it was.

  He has pushed all the way inside her and she feels nothing. No pain, no magic. Her insides have widened to accommodate him as if a door has always been open, as if a room inside her has been drafty, just waiting to be entered.

  Her breath seems loud to her ears, and her heart pounds erratically as Eddie moves to the rhythm of music only he can hear. She tries to time her heart, her breath, to his. Ba-da-dum, ba-da-dum. A tribal forest beat. The hairs on his thighs tickle her and she fights an urge to break into hysterical giggles. Her stomach is hot beneath him, an interior soup. She twists her head to the left and sees Eddie’s hand flat against the dirt, his wrist encircled by a thin strand of leather that she remembers Lisa Wallach brought him from Brazil. The leather strand had magical powers, Lisa told him, and he would have very bad luck if he unknotted it himself. Jennie wonders if Eddie Fish will wear that strand of leather until it disintegrates.

  Eddie speeds up. A vein in his throat pops out and he is looking down, down to the place where their bodies are joined. With a gasp and a grunt, he collapses on top of her. Jennie can feel his heart through her chest. Eddie Fish’s heart! She will remember this moment, she promises herself: the faded blue summer sky, the worm inching along the edge of a pale yellow leaf, the soft smell of dirt. She will color it with a patina of great beauty. She thinks about Eddie’s question—Are you using anything?—and her fingers grow icy. She wonders if it can happen the first time, if the grassy mess oozing between their legs can grow into something more complicated—a punishment, a life sentence. She closes her eyes and prays: just this once, never again, please not now.