Full Frontal Fiction

by Jack Murnighan

  “Let’s find you a place to stay.” Les stood up and grabbed our empty cups, and as he helped me over the sand to his car, I didn’t say anything. We rode quietly through Corona into San Bruno, where he turned north just before the El Camino Real Highway. Under the gray sky we passed one-story houses with small grass lawns. Behind them was the highway, and I could see the cars and long trucks going south for towns like Hillsborough, I guessed, San Carlos, Menlo Park, Los Altos, and Sunnyvale, towns I’d driven through alone for months now, telling myself I wasn’t looking for my husband’s gray Honda. Les was quiet behind the wheel and even though we were in his police cruiser, it was so familiar to be sitting on the passenger’s side of a car with a man driving again that I felt sort of up and down all at once. Then we were away from houses and in a neighborhood of gas stations, fast-food restaurants and a shopping center right next to the highway. “So where’re we going, Les?”

  He looked at me, then rested his hand on my knee and turned left, driving past the shopping center to a stretch of motel and travel inns on a grassy hill along the El Camino Real Highway.

  “You want a pool?” Without waiting for me to answer he turned into the small parking lot of the Eureka Motor Lodge, a two-story white brick building with a fake-looking terra-cotta roof. Outside the office door were two Coke machines and an ice machine. A carved wooden sign hung over its window: EUREKA: I HAVE FOUND IT!

  “This neighborhood’s better than the other one, Kathy. I can’t let you sleep in your car.”

  “I’ll have to pay you back.”

  “Shh.” He put his finger close to my lips. I pretended to bite it and he smiled, then went into the office, all uniform, gun and wedding ring. For a second I asked myself just what I was doing anyway, but then I concentrated on how good a bath would feel, a firm bed with clean sheets.

  The room was in the back, away from the highway, facing the pool. Les helped me in, then excused himself to go to the bathroom. I sat at the foot of a queen-size bed covered with a periwinkle spread. The floor was carpeted and clean. Against the curtained window were two cushioned chairs on each side of a small glass-topped table. In front of me was a color TV on a stand next to a walnut dresser and mirror. I couldn’t see my reflection from where I sat, so I started to stand when the toilet flushed; the water ran, and Les walked back into the room drying his hands on a towel he dropped on the dresser.

  “Looks like you’ve done this before,” I said.

  “Why do you say that?” He stood where he was, a hurt look on his face, his hands resting on his gun belt.

  “Sorry, it was just a joke.”

  He opened his mouth like he was going to say more, then he squatted at the mini-fridge on the other side of the dresser and pulled out two cans of Michelob, handing me one. It was cold in my hands and I looked down at it in my lap, like I was seeing an old Polaroid of somebody I used to know and for a second didn’t know why I didn’t anymore. Les opened his and drank from it right there, standing over me. But I couldn’t even look up at him. I let the can drop to the floor and I flopped back on the bed and covered my face. What was I doing? I wondered if my thighs looked fat from where he stood. I heard him rest his beer can on the dresser, then squat to pick up the other, the leather of his gun belt creaking. The mattress sank with his weight and I lowered my hands and he was looking into my face, leaning on one arm so his shoulder moved up to his ear. He looked almost feminine that way, and for some reason it made me want to kiss him again. He was moving his middle finger over my wrist and forearm, and though his eyes didn’t have that boldness, they didn’t look sad either.

  “You have no idea who I am, Lester.”

  “I think you’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

  I put my hand on his warm hairy arm and he leaned down and kissed me. His tongue was cool from the beer and I could taste it and that did something to me. I scooted away from him and sat back against the headboard.

  “What, Kathy?”

  I wanted a cigarette, but didn’t know where I’d left them. I crossed my arms in front of me. Les sat at the foot of the bed looking at me like I was about to say something deep. “I haven’t had a drink in almost three years, Lester.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

  “I know you didn’t, but you don’t know much about me, do you?”

  His lips were parted beneath his mustache and he looked away, stood, then walked over and took his can of beer into the bathroom and I could hear him pouring it down the sink. I wanted to tell him he didn’t have to do that, but I didn’t trust my voice not to sound bitchy.

  “You didn’t have to dump that beer, Les. It’s not like that.”

  His eyes caught mine. “What’s it like then, Kathy? I’d like to know.”

  “You would?”

  “Yes. I would.”

  I put my hand on the spread. “Come here.” He hesitated a half second, as if he didn’t know what I had in mind, and truthfully, I don’t think I had anything in mind. But when he sat on the bed beside me, then leaned over and kissed my forehead, my cheek, my lips, his hand pressed to my rib cage, the other stroking my hair back, it was like I was an empty well and didn’t know it until just now when he uncovered me and it started to rain and I pulled him on me and opened my mouth and I held the sides of his head and kissed him so hard our teeth knocked together; I kissed his cheeks, his eyes, his nose; I licked his mustache and kissed him openmouthed again. I began to unbutton his shirt and he pulled my T-shirt over my head, then everything slowed down as he touched my breasts. A change came over him, and me too. He looked into my eyes, checking on something one last time, then he sat up and very slowly untied his shoes. He put them aside, unsnapped his pistol from its holster and laid it on the bedside table. When he pulled his shirttails from his pants, I swung my legs to the other side of the bed, unsnapped my shorts, and pulled them and my underpants off. My fingers were shaking, and I was thirsty, but a throbbing heat had moved between my legs and I lay back on the bed just as Les stepped out of his boxer shorts, his rear small and dark. He turned to face me and I made myself look up at his crooked mustache, at his messed-up hair, his narrow shoulders. I was sixteen all over again, Ma gone shopping, Dad at work, plenty of time before we get caught. I gripped his shoulders, drew my heels up along the backs of his legs and pulled him forward.

  Folk Song, 1999

  BY MARY GAITSKILL

  ON THE SAME PAGE of the city paper one day:

  A confessed murderer awaiting trial for the torture and murder of a woman and her young daughter is a guest on a talk show via satellite. His appearance is facilitated by the mother’s parents, who wanted him to tell them exactly what the murder of their daughter and grandchild was like.

  “It was horrible to talk to him,” said the talk show hostess. “He will go down in history as the lowest of the low.” There was a photograph of the killer, smiling as if he’d won a prize.

  A woman in San Francisco announced her intention to have intercourse with 1,000 men in a row, breaking the record of a woman in New Mexico who had performed the same feat with a mere 750. “I want to show what women can do,” she said. “I am not doing this as a feminist, but as a human being.”

  Two giant turtles belonging to an endangered species were stolen from the Bronx Zoo. “This may’ve been an inside job,” said the zoo president. “This person knew what he was doing, and he was very smart. We just hope he keeps them together—they’re very attached.” The turtles are valued at $300.00 each.

  It was in the middle of the paper, a page that you were meant to scan before turning, loading your brain with subliminal messages as you did. How loathsome to turn a sadistic murder into entertainment—and yet how hard not to read about it. What dark comedy to realize that you are scanning for descriptions of torture even as you disapprove. Which of course only makes it more entertaining. “But naturally I was hoping they’d report something grisly,” you say to your friends, who chuckle at your acknowledgment of
hypocrisy.

  And they did report something grisly: that the grandparents of the murdered girl wanted to know what only the murderer could tell them. You picture the grandmother’s gentle wrinkled chest, a thick strip of flesh pulled away to reveal an unexpected passage to hell in her heart.

  Then you have the marathon woman right underneath, smiling like an evangelist, her organs open for a thousand. An especially grotty sort of pie-eating contest, placed right beneath the killer, an open body juxtaposed against the pure force of destruction. Why would a woman do that? What do her inane words really mean? Will she select the thousand, is there at least a screening process? Or is it just anyone who shows up? If he had not been arrested, could the killer himself have mounted her along with everybody else? If she had discovered who he was, would that have been okay with her? Would she have just swallowed him without a burp?

  You picture her at the start of her ordeal, parting a curtain to appear before the crowd, muscular, oiled, coifed, dressed in a lamé bathing suit with holes cut in the titties and crotch. She would turn and bend to show the suit had been cut there too. She would “ring-walk” before the bed, not like a stripper, more like a pro wrestler, striking stylized sex poses, flexing the muscles of her belly and thighs, gesticulating with mock anger, making terrible penis-busting faces.

  Might the killer enjoy this spectacle if he could watch it on TV? He may be a destroyer of women, but his victims were regular, human-style women: a concerned mother trying to connect with her daughter on a road trip in nature—the trip that delivered them into the hands of the killer.

  You picture her reading Reviving Ophelia the night before they left, frowning slightly as she thinks of the teenage boy years ago who fucked her bottom and then took her to dinner at Pizza Hut, thinks also of her daughter’s co-ed sleepover last week. Getting out of bed to use the bathroom with only the hall light on, peeing in gentle darkness, remembering: grown-up pee used to smell so bad to her, and now the smell is just another welcome personal issue of her hard-working body, tough and fleshy in middle-age, safe under her old flowered gown. The daughter is awake too, and reading Wuthering Heights. She is thirteen, and she is irritated that the author has such sympathy for Heathcliff, who abuses his wife and child. What does it mean that he is capable of such passionate love? Is this realistic, or were people just dumber and more romantic back then? She doesn’t think that the mean people she knows are the most passionate; they just want to laugh at everything. But then she remembers that she laughed when a boy in class played a joke on an ugly girl and made her cry. Sighing, she puts the book down and lies on her back, her arm thrown luxuriantly over her head. On the ceiling, there are the beautiful shadows of slim branches and leaves. She does not really want to take this trip with her mother. Her mother tries so hard to help her and to protect her, and she finds this embarrassing. It makes her want to protect her mother, and that feeling is uncomfortable too. She rolls on her side and picks up the book again.

  Thought and feeling, flesh and electricity, ordinary yet complex personalities, the like of which the killer had found impossible to maintain inside himself from the moment of his birth—and yet which he could erase with the strange, compulsive pleasure of an autistic child banging his head on the wall. You picture him as a little boy alone in an empty room, head subtly inclined as if he is listening intently for a special sound. In the top drawer of his dresser, there are rows of embalmed mice stacked neatly atop one another. At age twelve, he has killed many animals besides mice, but he embalms only the mice because uniformity satisfies him. He likes embalming because it is clean, methodical and permanent. He likes his mind to be uniform and inflexible as a grid. Below the grid is like the life of animals: sensate and unbearably deep.

  There are people who believe that serial killers are a “fundamental force of nature,” a belief that would be very appealing to the killer. Yes, he would say to himself, that is me. I am fundamental!

  But the marathon woman on TV would be fundamental too. She would not show her personality, and even if she did, nobody would see it; they would be too distracted by the thought of a mechanical cunt, endlessly absorbing discharge. However, with her lamé bathing suit and her camp ring-walk, appealing to everyone’s sense of fun, she would be the fundamental female as comedy: the killer could sit comfortably in the audience and laugh, enjoying this appearance of his feminine colleague. Maybe he would feel such comfort that he would stand and come forward, unbuckling his pants with the flushed air of a modest person finally coming up to give testimony. Safe in her sweating, loose and very wet embrace, surrounded by the dense energy of many men, his penis could tell her the secret story of murder right in front of everyone. Her worn vagina would hold the killer like it had held the husband and the lover and the sharpie and the father and the nitwit and every other man, his terrible story a tiny, burning star in the rightful firmament of her female vastness.

  Hell, yes, she would “show what women can do!”

  In the context of this terrible humanity you think: the poor turtles! They do not deserve to be on the same page with these people! You think of them making their stoic way across a pebbled beach, their craning necks wrinkled and diligent, their bodies a secret even they cannot lick or scratch. The murdered woman, in moments of great tenderness for her husband, would put her hands on his thighs and kiss him on his balls and say to him “secret Paul.” She didn’t mean that his balls were a secret. She meant that she was kissing the part of him that no one knew except her, and that the vulnerability of his balls made her feel this part acutely. That is the kind of secret the turtles are, even to themselves.

  But now all natural secrets have been exposed, and it is likely the turtles have been sold to laboratory scientists who want to remove their shells so that they can wire electrodes to the turtles’ skin in order to monitor their increasing terror at the loss of their shells. Scientists do these experiments because they want to help. They want to alleviate physical suffering; they want to eradicate depression. To achieve their goal, they will take everything apart and put it back together a different way. They want heaven and they will go to hell to get there.

  But still, there is grace. Before the mother met the murderer, her vagina had been gently parted and kissed many times. Her daughter had exposed her own vagina before her flowered cardboard mirror (bought at Target and push-pinned to the wall), regarding her organs with pleased wonder, thinking, “This is what I have.”

  And maybe the turtles were not kidnapped but rescued: There are actually preserves for turtles, special parks where people can take turtles they have found or grown tired of, or rescued from the polluted, fetid fish tanks of uncaring neighbors. Or maybe they were simply set free near the water, wading forward together as the zoo spokesman had hoped, eyes bright in scaly heads, each with the unerring sense of the other’s heartbeat, a signal they never knew to question.

  And maybe she didn’t start the marathon in a gold lamé suit. Maybe she appeared in a simple white gown with a slip and a bra and stockings and beautiful panties that the first man (hand-selected for his sensitivity) had to help her to take off to the sound of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Maybe they even took time to make out, acknowledging romantic love and the ancient truth of marriage. It would be the stiff and brassy acknowledgment of showbiz, but deep in the brass case would be a sad and tender feeling—sad because they could only stay a moment in this adolescent sweetness, they could not develop it into the full flower of adult intimacy and parenthood. But this flower comes in the form of a human; it must soon succumb to disease, atrophy, ruined skin, broken teeth, the unbearable frailty of mortality.

  The marathon woman is not interested in mortality or human love. Right now, the marathon woman has infinity on her mind. Roberta Flack’s crooning fades. The first man mournfully withdraws. Then: the majestic pounding of kettle drums and brisk, surging brass! It’s 2001: A Space Odyssey! The lights go up! The silhouettes of naked men are revealed on the screen behi
nd her bed, above which spins a giant mirror ball! Men step from behind the screen and array themselves about the bed, splendid in their nakedness, even the ugly ones, like gladiators poised to plunge in! This one now, number two, is very short and muscular, covered with hair. His face is handsome, his body exudes physical swagger shadowed by physical grief. The woman cannot know that, at eighteen, he was a gunnery mate on a PT boat in Vietnam, or that Time once ran a photograph of him posed with his machine gun, the brim of his helmet low across his eyes, a cigarette sticking up at a jaunty angle from between his clenched, smiling lips. She can’t know it but she can feel it: the stunned cockiness of an ignorant boy cradling Death in one arm, cockiness now held fast in the deep heart of a middle-aged man. Just before he enters her, she pictures his heart bristling with tough little hairs. Then she feels his dick and forgets his heart. He pulls her on top of him and she feels another man ready to climb up her butt while number four bossily plants himself in her mouth, one hand holding his penis, the other on his fleshy hip. The referee, a balding fellow in a smart striped shirt, weaves deftly in and out of the melee, ensuring that real penetration is taking place each time. The music segues into hammering dance music, the kind favored by porn movies, only better. The music is like a mob breaking down a flimsy door and spilling endlessly over the threshold. It celebrates dissolution but it has a rigid form and it hits the same button again and again. It makes you think of Haitian religious dances where the dancers empty their personalities to receive the raw flux of spirit— except this music does not allow for spirit. This is the music of personality and obsession, and it is like a high-speed purgatory where the body is disintegrated and reanimated over and over until the soul is a dislocated blur. It is fun! People dance to music like this every night in great glittering venues all over the world, and now the woman and the men fuck to it. They are really doing it and it is chaos! The referee furrows his brow as he darts about, occasionally giving the “rollover” signal with his forearms, or a “TKO” hand-sign barring a man who’s trying to sneak in a second time. And because it is chaos, there are moments when the woman’s mind slips through the bullying order of the music and the assault of the men. There are many trapdoors in personality and obsession, and she blunders down some of them—even though she doesn’t realize that she has done so. Like the killer, she is now only able to occupy her surface because extraordinary physical demands are being made on her surface. By turning herself into a fucking machine, she has created a kind of temporary grid. But underneath, in the place of dream and feeling, she is going places that she, on the surface, would not understand.