August Falling

by Les Zig

  Julie kneels by me, our faces inches apart. ‘You all right?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She helps me to my feet as the rain stings us and we stand there, getting wet, neither of us knowing what sort of goodbye is appropriate. Is a kiss too much? Is that a sign of acceptance? Is nothing a rebuke? I don’t know what to do.

  ‘I’ve gotta get going,’ Julie says.

  Before I can respond, she sinks into her car and closes the door. I don’t even have the chance to say goodbye before she’s driven off. I watch the lights receding until there’s nothing, nothing but darkness and a curtain of rain that obliterates everything around me.

  I sink onto the grass at the end of the road, where the garbage is usually left out, and sit there as the rain pounds me.

  20

  Sunlight through the window wakes me. I turn initially to get away from it, but then the brunt of it hits me. I curl up, drag the covers over me, but hear the muffled ringtone of my phone. My instinct is to ignore it. But then logic kicks in: it might be Julie, and while I don’t know why she’d be ringing, I don’t want to miss the call.

  I haul myself out of bed, but my jeans are nowhere to be seen. Of course, I stripped off as soon as I got in last night. I get up, teeter, throat dry, head clogged, muscles tired, and trundle into the lounge, my knee stiff and purple. There’s my shirt, my T-shirt, underwear and there, trouser legs at unnatural angles, are my jeans.

  The ringing stops.

  I remain crouched, naked, hand half held out, and feeling the cold now. My jeans vibrate, and the ringing restarts. I take my phone out of my pocket and spin it around to check who’s calling, but it’s only Gen.

  ‘Hey,’ I say.

  ‘Hey! Big night?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  ‘I wanted to talk about Monday night—does Julie have any dietary requirements? I don’t want to poison your girlfriend the first night we meet her.’

  I head over into the kitchen, get myself a juice, and drink it in a single gulp.

  ‘You there?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Okay, what happened?’

  I return to the bedroom, get back into bed, and pull the covers up over me.

  ‘Did you fight?’ Gen asks. ‘If you’re fighting at this stage of the relationship, it’s probably not the right relationship.’

  ‘We didn’t fight. Not really.’

  ‘Then what?’

  I grunt.

  ‘She didn’t hook up with somebody else, did she?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Not exactly? What’s that mean?’

  ‘She’s a porn star.’

  Now Gen is silent, and I can hear Pat prodding in the background, ‘What’s gone on? What’s happened?’ There’s no response from Gen, and Pat presses, ‘What? What’s that mean?’ so Gen must have tried mouthing the words. Then, whispered to Pat, ‘He says she’s a porn star’, before directly to me, ‘A porn star? Like movies and shit?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And she neglected to tell you this?’

  ‘She said she wanted me to get to know her first.’

  ‘So where does that leave you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you still interested in her?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Is this a deal-breaker for you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Can you get past it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Are you gonna do anything stupid?’

  The question surprises me and I clench my right fist. The scar gleams at me—that jagged half-smile almost mocking, See what you started?

  ‘August?’

  I relax my hand, wiggle my fingers, watch them work.

  ‘August?’

  ‘No. No. I’m trying to process it all. It’s a lot to take in. I’m going to go, okay?’

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m okay. Like I said, I’m processing it all.’

  ‘You want to come over tonight? It’ll be good for you. Get out. Talk things out with me and Pat.’

  I’m tempted and almost say yes, but Gen and Pat will have questions that I’m not ready to face—or even to ask myself.

  ‘Not tonight—’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Gen, I—’

  ‘Tomorrow. Dinner as planned—with or without Julie.’

  I know that for Gen, this is as good a check-in as she’ll get from me—she’ll see I made the effort, see that I’m okay, and that’ll satisfy her. I don’t blame her for needing the assurance given what I’ve put her through.

  ‘August?’ she says. ‘Tomorrow, right?’

  ‘Okay, tomorrow.’

  ‘Good. Seven-thirty. No backing out. I better not get a message beforehand that you can’t make it. I don’t care what happens. You’re coming. Right? Or I’ll get Pat to go down there and haul you over.’

  ‘Okay, okay, I’ll be there,’ I say.

  ‘Good.’ Gen takes a deep breath. ‘I know it’s a shock, but don’t waste the day moping in bed.’

  ‘I’m not in bed—’

  ‘August.’

  ‘Okay, okay.’ I throw the covers aside.

  ‘If you need to talk to me—’

  ‘I know, Gen. Thanks. As always.’

  ‘Bye.’

  ‘Bye.’

  I get back out of bed, shower, get dressed and clean up, then force down a sandwich. I’m washing up in the kitchen when the doorbell rings. I wait, unsure who’d be visiting—I just spoke to Gen on the phone. That leaves Julie. I spring to the door and swing it open.

  Ronnie.

  ‘Hey, where’d you go last night?’ he says as he brushes past me to get in. He peers around, like he expects Julie might jump out, then heads to the kitchen, opens the fridge, grabs a beer, and holds it up. ‘Want one?’

  ‘No thanks.’ I close the front door and sink back onto the couch.

  ‘So,’ Ronnie opens the beer and leers at me, ‘have a good time last night? Or did you freak out? You freaked out, didn’t ya? That’s why you drank so much.’

  ‘What do you want me to say to that?’

  ‘This is like a free pass to sexual exploration—except anal. She’s never done anal. Shame, because she’s got such a cute—’

  I jump up from the couch. ‘I don’t want to hear this!’

  ‘Not even that she does women too?’

  ‘Ronnie!’

  ‘Why’re you freaking out? It’s her job.’

  ‘Her job which involves fucking, Ronnie. Fucking.’

  Ronnie sips from his beer. ‘What if she hadn’t been a porn star? What if she’d just had like a promiscuous past? Would that be any different?’

  ‘And I know she’s had a promiscuous past?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘That would probably be daunting.’

  ‘Why? She’s experienced. You fly on a plane, you want an experienced pilot or a novice pilot?’

  ‘You want the right pilot.’

  ‘And what makes them the right pilot?’

  I open my mouth but have no answer for that.

  ‘See, you’re prejudiced about what’s ideal. Fifty years ago, men wanted women who were saving themselves. Now we’ve evolved a little, lifted our knuckles from the ground a little. We can accept that most women aren’t gonna save themselves, so what we want is somebody with some experience, but not too much experience. Give it another fifty years, and we’ll probably be happy if they’re overloaded with experience. Things change.’

  ‘You believe that?’

  Ronnie frowns as he holds the beer aloft, as close to a Thinker pose as he can muster. ‘I don’t know. But a lot of these people don’t stay in that industry forever. They get married, they have kids, they move on. Just because they do what they do, why should they be different to you or me?’

  ‘Because,’ I say, ‘they do what they do.’ The picture of Bobby beams at me from the coffee table, the dog-ear folded o
ver Lisa’s face. Lisa would be repulsed. Of course, that didn’t stop her fucking some other guy for five years. ‘How do I contend with that?’

  ‘Is that what you’re actually worried about? You and your little dick?’

  ‘My dick’s not … Where do you get this stuff?’

  ‘If I was in your situation, that would be my concern. You watch these women getting hammered by these guys with gargantuan cocks, how do my two minutes and forty-three seconds compete with that? That’s what I’d always be wondering: am I satisfying her, or is she putting on the show for me that she does on camera?’

  ‘You’re really not helping.’

  ‘Julie’s good; she doesn’t overdo it.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You get some of these actresses, they go into hysterics when they’re having sex, or they overdo the sluttiness. It’s really not that hot. Julie’s good that way. She’s believable.’

  Of course Ronnie’s seen her—he recognised her. Who knows how many of Julie’s performances he’s seen? Knowing Ronnie, he would’ve looked her up once he got home from his birthday. The bigger issue now is his observation: she’s believable. Maybe she’s believable because it’s not an act. It might all be real for her. Or an act with me.

  ‘You should watch her,’ Ronnie says.

  ‘No. God no. Fuck no. No!’

  ‘The way I read it, you don’t like the situation because she has all this experience, you don’t think you can compare, and I think you’re scared to watch her because you’re afraid you’ll see her respond on camera exactly as she responds with you.’

  I slump onto the couch. Is that it? That seeing her in action might put what’s between us in a totally new context? Make it cheap and tawdry, or—worse—as disingenuous as my relationship with Lisa? But how could it be? Julie’s real. She’s real with me, unless her definition of real is something different, or something warped.

  ‘If it were you,’ I say, ‘if she were with you, you’d—’

  ‘Fuck her? Oh yeah. I’d want to do everything I’ve seen her do on screen.’

  ‘Even if she wanted some separation from that life?’

  ‘But isn’t that her? Regardless?’

  ‘So you’d be fine, to be with her?’

  ‘Like in a relationship?’

  ‘Yeah—’

  ‘No. Fuck no. God no. Not like boyfriend-girlfriend, happily ever after. To fuck. That’s it.’

  I scowl at Ronnie. ‘What about all the stuff you just told me? About changing preconceptions and sexual evolution and stuff like that?’

  ‘There’s probably a number of sexually liberated people out there, and I’d like to think I’m one of them, but in terms of a relationship, no. I would have trouble getting past this. She’s a porn actress, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, but could you maybe leave? I need to figure this out.’

  Ronnie downs what’s left of his beer in one gulp, and puts the empty bottle down on the coffee table. ‘Okay.’ He looks at me, seemingly—for once—at a loss for what to say. He shrugs, gets up. ‘Sorry; I didn’t mean to upset you. But this is like dating a rockstar.’ He starts for the door.

  ‘I’m just a normal guy,’ I say.

  Ronnie spins as he reaches the door and points at me. ‘You’re an abnormal guy.’

  ‘Thanks. Thanks a lot.’

  Ronnie twirls, just as he opens the door. ‘Why would you want to be normal anyway?’ he asks.

  Then he’s gone.

  21

  I try to stop myself from what’s coming next: I finish washing up; I flick through my movies, trying to find something to watch; I pace; then, I get on my laptop with the intention of working on my play, but getting on my laptop is about the worst thing I could do, because now that I have the internet at my disposal, I do the inevitable—I look up Julie.

  First, it’s the images. They’re easy to find. Pictures of her naked. Pictures of her masturbating. Pictures of her masturbating with toys. Pictures of her with her legs spread. Pictures of her showing everything off. Then pictures of her having sex. The men are big. Strong. Muscular. Unnaturally endowed. They’re inside her. In all sorts of positions. Or they have their faces buried in her crotch. Or her mouth is poised over their erections. Or they’ve ejaculated on her face. Others are with women. Toys are often evident. Every picture I see is carnage, a moment not so much frozen in time, but scarred there. Still, I can delude myself, because I don’t know what happened between the shots. It’s all staged. Like she told me, this is the illusion. I hang onto that.

  So I move onto looking for clips from her movies—equally easy to find. The first one I watch is of her and some guy, labelled ‘Jewels Chaste Pounded Hard’. Pop-ups offering various channels and chat forums explode onto my screen. I close them, hit the link, and sink my head into my left hand. The sound is muted, so I hear nothing. I peek through widening fingers at some guy having sex with Julie.

  My biggest concern—at least initially—is I’m going to find this arousing, but I don’t. Neither do I feel repulsed. There’s nothing—not an absence of feeling, but a response that’s so confused that it can’t be articulated.

  The guy takes Julie in various positions with an erection that has to be at least nine or ten inches, and her whole body shakes as he thrusts into her. Her responses seem genuine. I turn the volume up just enough to hear it and listen to her moans. Her face is contorted in a sense of irreconcilable bliss, like she’s struggling to process how good this feels. My hands tremble and I cower into myself. Now it’s becoming like watching something unpalatable, like a surgery on one of those medical shows where the camera gives you close-ups of all the incisions. I cringe when the guy ejaculates over her breasts.

  I shoot to my feet, walk away from the laptop, walk back, find another link. And another. And another. It’s typical porn: lots of positions, lots of frenetic activity, but it’s Julie. When, in one of the videos, her partner comes all over her face, I see—I read—in Julie’s face that sadness I thought I saw that night in the club just before she pushed the guy over, only she’s smiling, she looks gratified, and she fellates him as if she’s struggling for breath and has been offered oxygen.

  But, still, it’s a sadness I see all the same.

  Or maybe it’s what I try to impress on her to tell myself she’s not into this.

  I spend hours and hours going to sites, battling insidious pop-ups—my anti-virus software frequently warning me it’s caught something malicious trying to infiltrate my computer. Lots of the videos are repeated. Some are teasers, with links to pay sites to see the rest. But I search and search, find alternate sites, and even see videos where Julie has sex with other women.

  Somewhere, there’d be guys who are turned on by this. Others, I’m sure, would accept it as part of their partner’s past. But who are those people? Are they used to that as a lifestyle? I feel so far removed from that, I don’t know if it’s just me, or who I’ve become in light of what’s happened to me.

  The last three videos are the most disconcerting. In the first, she fellates eight different guys who cheer her on, a couple—particularly one guy, with slicked-back hair that makes him seem greasy—occasionally playing with her, the clip ending with each of them ejaculating on her face in turn. Her eyes beam at me, but they’re not the eyes I always see but vacant, and the smile is without warmth, without any connection to happiness. The next is her and two seedy guys; they alternate between having sex with her, or two of them having sex with her simultaneously—one vaginally, the other orally. The final video is similar, but it features three big black guys with cocks that are pendulous. Their attentions border on aggressive, and verbally they demean her, call her all sorts of names, tell her to demand to be fucked.

  I slam my laptop closed, sink onto the floor, cradle my arms around my knees. Watching this hasn’t offered context. It’s degraded her, objectified her. She’s the victim in this; somehow, she’s got to be. The sadness I see in he
r has to be real, because if I’m just inferring it, whatever feelings I have for Julie threaten to unravel and noose me in the process.

  I grab my phone, fetch the bottle of scotch from the cupboard, retreat to the bathroom and clamber into the bathtub. I uncap the bottle of scotch, take one swig, grimace, then take another. I drink fast, because it’s the only way to slow the thoughts. I’m being petty. No, I’m just in my criticisms. She should’ve told me. I understand why she didn’t tell me. How much sex has she had? Is what we’ve had real? She’s tolerated me. On they go—conflicting, jarring, until the inside of my head is raging, and every pounding thought is like a shard of glass trying to jab its way through. I scull the scotch, even though I gag. But it does its job, and eventually I drift off into a restless sleep.

  I don’t know the time when I wake—everything’s quiet, still, and dark. It has to be early morning. The muscles around my neck are sore from being in an awkward position. I sit up. The empty bottle of scotch clatters onto the tub’s porcelain floor, and then my phone—tumbling from my lap—lands next to it. I pick it up, tense. Nothing. No messages. I’m unsure if what I feel is relief or disappointment, or if the shock still blankets everything. The calmness scares me. Maybe I’ve had a breakdown. Maybe this is what it feels like.

  Hauling myself up, I ease out of the tub and retreat to the bedroom. I fall into bed, drag the covers over myself, and sleep uneasily, waking regularly, until morning rides the first shrills of birds into my bedroom. I flip over, grab my phone from the bedside table and check it.

  Nothing.

  Work beckons, but I’m bleary eyed and exhausted. I know I should force myself to get out of bed, to get moving, but the day feels closed to me—something I can only observe from outside it. I stay in bed until it ticks over to nine o’clock, then grab the phone and ring work. Boyd answers immediately.

  ‘Hi, Boyd, it’s August,’ I say, hoping the slowness and lowness of my voice tells a story in itself. ‘I think I’m coming down with something. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it in today.’