by A M Homes
I can wait no longer. I have dealt with the details. All has been answered, sealed, stamped, and rests on the desk awaiting return to its rightful recipients.
Her envelope is thick, heavy, too promising to put off. I tear at it.
Hi. How are you? What’s new? It’s July. I’m sweating. There’s an air alert. The cleaning lady fainted yesterday and I had to drive her back into the city. Chinatown. Took Matt and co. with me. Everything is sticky.
A ride. Her boy and his friends. I’m jealous. She’s buoyant, breezy, too caught up in the events to elaborate, to do more than list the dates and locations, the briefest documentation of her deeds.
Greenwich Village. Eighth Street.
I quote directly, too overwhelmed to paraphrase. My heart speeds. Unbeknownst to me, in these few quiet days, between communications, my feeling for her has grown. My girl. My girl—sweetest thing out on a summer adventure, with this boy, her toy, the practice playmate. So much has changed and she doesn’t know it yet. Mine, all mine—I myself am just catching on. In these letters, and how quickly I have come to look forward to them, cannot live without them, am, in fact, living on them, in them; it is as though I am her, she is me, and we are in this together, doing this twisted tantric tango. If only she were a lezzy, a lady licker, the experience would be more satisfying, more mutually agreeable. The talk of boys, of little men, is fine, but when it comes down to it, when we get to the great and gritty, she’ll have me fucking the boy, essentially fucking myself, which is all too familiar, slightly degrading, and hardly enough fun. Except for special occasions, my incarceration being one, I like pussies not pricks, it’s as simple as that.
Love. It’s only come to me now, in this moment. Love. I am in love. Don’t tell her. Don’t tell anyone. I’m telling you, only you. Never tell them, or rarely. It’s the kind of thing, the exact thing, one doesn’t want them to know. They take advantage. To admit it is to let on that one is weak, vulnerable, ready for the wound.
I am stunned. This unexpected rush of fine feeling, this revelation, has come as news to me. Clearly I suffer from a kind of internal blindness—so much of my life, my feelings occur unbeknownst to me.
The letter. The letter is still in my hands. I try to read it but can’t. It appears not to be in English. I struggle with the language, a pidgin-twisted tongue—the anxiety of my awakening has crippled me.
I beg you, translate for me.
Matt bought Doc Martens. Took Matt to Tower. Wash Sq. Pk. Ate falafel, baba ganoush. Matt had an egg cream.
Matt. Matt. What is this Matt, like a door-mat, like a thing I should wipe my feet on, a thing I should walk over to get through to her?
She must be on drugs. Her language, the words she uses are brainless, convey nothing. They come with no pictures, no complement. That, or she is retarded—with pathetic eating habits, like those of some third-world villager. A poor correspondent; I have given her so much and she fails me. Nearly every time she fails me. I am close to hysterical with confusion. My breath is short. I don’t understand what she is saying except that she let the boy cajole her into being his chauffeur. She’s taken the boy and his friends into the city on some sort of medicinal (Doc Martens?) shopping spree instead of doing what she ought.
Riled. Despite my flash of fine feeling for her. This girl is a fool.
“Ink worm,” Clayton says while I furiously scrawl back the first draft of my reply. It often takes several tries before I get it right. “Ink worm.”
I continue to write. I write faster and faster and more furiously.
In the back of my head, I hear Clayton singing to me. “Inchworm. Inchworm. Measuring the marigolds. You and your arithmetic will probably go far. Inchworm.
“Ink worm,” he says again. I shake my head as if to brush him from my thoughts. “You’re getting into something you won’t be able to get out of.”
Fuck off, I think, but am too busy crafting my reply to say it.
“You’re in too deep.”
Ink worm.
He’s jealous. I’m glad. It is a test. If he were really as indifferent as he pretends to be, I’d worry. That I continue to evoke emotion is heartening after all these years. After all, jealousy is but another form of arousal, and some people will do anything to get a stiffy.
He puts his arms around me. My movement is restricted. I can no longer work the pen across the full line of the paper. I am writing in short columns—four words wide. Clayton squeezes my arms tighter.
“Stop,” he says. “Stop.” He pins me down. I cannot write anymore. He wants my comfort. I offer none.
He goes for my zipper. I allow it. Paper and pen fall to the floor. I have no will. I will always allow it—who can pass up the opportunity to be serviced, especially when service is such a rare occurrence? Clearly, Clayton is trying to get on my good side. I close my eyes, ignore him, and think about my girls, all my girls, all that has come before, will come again. I am aroused. I am hard. It is Clayton. I know it is Clayton, and yet where it counts, I think it is someone else, some exceptionally talented member of the junior committee.
The silky slipper of a mouth swallows me whole.
I pray he doesn’t talk. Not now. I am not interested in the lurid lullaby of an innocent man. We are all innocent men. Our innocence is our crime.
My pants are down. I am erect in my breezeless cell. His mouth, his most experienced organ, is upon me, and despite how he thinks of himself, Clayton is best at sucking. He is on me, indefatigably dipping up and down on my cock. And all I can think of is that he is a she, a ten-year-old frisky filly with a long brown mane that I yank to make her whinny and neigh.
I shoot. Clayton swallows my milk, a thirsty babe, a starving suckler, choking for a half-second, inhaling his enthusiasm and then drinking it down. And while I’m still pumping out empty but deep relief, he rolls me over. As I’m turning, I see his face, the stubble of his beard, and am disgusted: a man. How unlikely, how rude and raw. How could I have come to such a thing? What has happened to me? What has happened? He turns me over, I assume to take his turn, to beat and bugger and remind me of who I am. This is the price I pay for my age, my desire, my experience. I expect to be fucked, but instead there is the heart-stopping tickle of a tongue between my legs, coming at me from the back, licking the long hairs, teasing the tops of my thighs, tonguing me in places a man is rarely touched. He is kissing my ass, licking my loving piles. He parts my cheeks, my white moony mounds, and his mouth is there, tonguing my tushy hole. Too much. Too good. I am too old for something so new. I shake, rattle, tremble, and begin to fill again with blood. This has not happened in a long time, a very long time. I am flush with youth, fresh with possibility, am literally overcome—frightened and repulsed from whence it comes and where it goes. It is one thing to fuck it, to lose oneself in that way, but quite another to kiss it, to tenderly poke one’s tongue around the ruffled edges of the darkest, foulest mouth. The more interesting it is, the better it feels, the less I think of Clayton. To have a head down there, two eyes in such a place, is not the right thing. In his desperate depression he is making himself be what he thinks I want him to be—a lover.
I am an old man, set in my ways. I will kill Clayton before I let him do this again.
I squirt onto my stomach, staining myself, my belly hairs.
Wordless, with shit on his tongue, Clayton leaves.
In this late life, the genitalia hang thick, puckered, and nearly nude. The skin—brown, dark, deep with wrinkles and flappy turkey toughness—is dotted with coarse and crispy hairs, follicles of negritude that burst through the surface, further ruining it. The budding breasts that are so arresting on a twelve-year-old are suddenly one’s own, bulging out of the former flat like fatty tumors; the exposed pink dot of nip spreads out, glowing like a baboon’s red butt. Spare tire, not the graceful rounds of a Rubens or now a Balthus, mine is the Michelin man, white circles of cheap lard, Crisco—hard but soft—the Pillsbury doughboy personified. And the greatest part,
our private giantess, begins to droop, to hang low; it begins to behave erratically like a sulky monkey, slow to respond, slow to begin the long climb, the rise to attention, sometimes entirely a refusenik. The internal walnut, the ring-o-prostate, clamps down demanding to piss constantly, further humiliating the tired old owner by forcing him to stand at the pissoir surrounded by boys and their hoses, their high-vol-ume water pumps, while he squirts in short, uneven streams. An article—written by a woman no less—tells us that we never learned to pee right: we press and push when we should relax, that it is not about forcing it out, but about letting go. And so we go and go and go.
That Clayton finds this attractive, something he can put himself close to, is the final straw. I have no feeling for him but the worst.
We of great seniority, awaiting our senility, the complete forgetfulness of the sensual, live with the memory of softness, of impossible tenderness—something far too subtle for our weathered fingertips to comprehend were we even to come upon it now in this deteriorated condition. Although, I wonder. I wonder if I would not feel more deeply upon the alteration of several layers of finger skin. Perhaps things could be improved upon. I think that now before I would try again, I would make certain preparations. In advance, I would boil my hands until they were puffy and pink, open to sensation. I would warm them over the fire of a stove, the flame of a Bunsen burner, the heat of a candle, a match, until they were ripe and ready. And when they were so parboiled, when they were abuzz, tingling, then and only then would I touch the girl. My hot hand cupped over her mound, my fingers prepared to play her like the best Knabe, my baby grand, I’ll tickle her ivory. I hold her under my thumb and feel the shock, the recoil of recognition, as she realizes that she is in fact being brushed by a stranger for purposes not entirely necessary. These are the touches that aren’t quite touches. There is a quiver, a waver during which time it is important that the hand does not move, ground must be held. A short breath is drawn and we are past the initial surprise. She coats herself with greasy goo. With a second finger, I part that curtain and begin my investigation in earnest.
* * *
The letter. I go back to the letter. I will always go back to the letter. She is there, waiting for me, waiting with something to tell me, needing me. Without me she is nothing.
What do you like about girls ? she writes.
Their secrets.
Blueberries. She’s been out picking berries and has sent me the stained white sheets, eight and a half by eleven, marked with purple juice, the would-be wine or vinegar, a special pot of jam, pressed into the pages. Thinking of you, always thinking of you.
I imagine she has sent me these pages so that we may lie together in the fields among the beetles and bees, lie together on the cricket floor at the height of day, heat of noon, in the full force of God’s light, and have it done— blessed with the necessary relief of an urgency that couldn’t wait. Our personal swellings so engorged, nearly anaphylactic in their shock, that they could not be ignored, and so we’d hump, bump, frig, and fuck, and just in the nick of time, I’d remove myself, spraying my fertilizer, my own dangerous DDT, into the fields while her own quiet passion nectar slowly trickles out. She has mailed me such so that we might be together and enjoy the day.
I bring her pages to my nose, smell the out-of-doors, the curious honey of a fruit field, the uncaged air, the scent of her envelope, her paper, her fingers—Lord knows where they’ve been. I breathe, grateful that at least my olfactories are intact. Once, long ago, I saw a wooden board, a sign that said free wind take some. Her letter is like that, filled with so much. I breathe. Breathe and touch.
Matt’s mom took us picking in Fairfield County. We had a contest to see who could pick most, fastest, etc. I kept dreaming of pie, steaming hot with a lump of vanilla ice cream across the top. Matt picked most and fastest and kept throwing berries at me so I punched him, hard. I think he liked it.
Take note and notice, I am old, more concerned with what is wasted, what fruit falls to the ground and is trampled upon than the intent of their game. Foreplay. Affection expressed. She tells me these things and then adds as if an endnote, an afterthought, And then we did it.
Did what? What did you do? Did it. Done it. What does that mean? Why does no one tell me anything anymore?
I cannot forgive her the imbecilic nature of her communication. There are people who perpetually drool, who cannot hold their head up straight, cannot unfurl their hands well enough to grip a pen, who have a better command of the language than she with her university years seems to display.
How do you even know what you’re doing? You are so backward that your idea of “doing it” might be to pull down your pants and bump butts the way Sissy Hobson and I did as children. We slid our shorts down, had our heinies kiss, and got the greatest thrill.
Is that what she’s getting at—some kind of game? Or did they really do it? Did she stake a claim and steal his slippery stream? Did his minute member grace her saintly shrine? Did he even know what was happening? Did he ask for it, beg, get down on his hands and knees and pant, “Can I? Can I?” And did she simply say “do” and it was done? What happened?
We did it. So she says.
Slut. Whore. Fucking cunt. Does she think I am immune to her musings? Does she not see that I am drawn still further in, that I am to share her with no one else? Does she think that because I am here, because I have been here for so long, that I’ve gone queer? Does she assume that because I am so old, I have no interest?
What do I care that she plays with the boy, learns a trick or two off him? What do I care? I must be crazy, half-gone. I must be. It matters. It matters so much to me.
Shut eyes. Clench jaw. Hold tight. The din, the warble. Roar. Screaming siren. I will not be awake. I will not stay for this.
More soon.
TEN
Prison. Night. My gut burns in the bottom of my belly. Searing, deep, starting on the right and spreading left. A smoldering fire is buried in me. Toss. Turn. It is worse lying down, worse yet on my side. I bring my knees to my chest.
“Boy,” my grandmother calls, and I run. Apple pie. Mother is back. She comes out of the door and stands in the yard, white and gold, porcelain and milky glass. Everything is good and right. She smiles. She laughs. So fragile, so cracked. She is the former Tomato Queen. Queen for a day in Morgan County, in the tiny town of Bath, of Berkeley Springs, buried in the Mountain State, West Virginia.
“You and I,” she says a few days after she’s back—we’re still staying at my grandmother’s house. “We’ll take a little trip. We’ll go back to see where I was raised.”
My grandmother, bent over the oranges, elbow bearing down, shakes her head.
“It’s not up for discussion,” my mother says.
Somewhere near the Fourth of July, the Tomato Queen returns to her hometown. She drives slowly, pausing on the outskirts to brush her hair, freshen her lipstick, to suck in the long deep breath that will glue her together. She eases her Chevrolet into town, holding herself as if she expects the streets to be lined with well-wishers waving, a band of trombones and tubas waiting to play a certain pomp and circumstance, as if she is still the Tomato Queen and this is still her day.
“A bath,” she says to the attendant at the old Roman baths. “A great big bath.”
The woman leads us down the hall to a room with a heavy wooden door. “You have an hour,” she says, turning on the tub. Mama ushers me into the narrow room. The water is running.
“How much does it hold?” I ask.
“A thousand gallons,” Mama says.
As wide as the tub and only a little longer, the room has a small space for the steps that lead into the water. There is a narrow chair and a thin cot dressed in a clean white sheet, and that’s all.
“Sometimes, it’s just too hard, it’s just too much,” she says, sitting on the narrow chair, taking off her shoes, reaching up under her dress and rolling down her stockings.
I sit on the cot
watching.
She smiles.
I’m watching Mama, more than watching, looking.
“I’m so glad to be home. Missed you,” she says, unzipping her dress, sliding it off her shoulders. “Thought about you three times a day.”
She escapes her underthings and I look away. I’ve been looking too hard, looking instead of watching, looking instead of not noticing.
Her body continuously unfolds, a voluminous and voluptuous twisting, turning monument to the possibilities of shape, to the forms flesh can take. A body. A real body.
“Are you getting shy?” she asks. “Getting too old for your ma?”
My face goes blank, all feeling falls out of it. She reaches over and starts to unbutton my summer shirt, the one my grandmother has starched and pressed so stiff that it’s sharp, painful in places. I raise my hand and take over the unbuttoning. I undress with the awkwardness of a stranger, wondering if this is the way things are supposed to be, if this is simply how it is done, wondering if my discomfort is my own peculiarity. I have no way of knowing.
Mama turns off the tub.
At dawn I call for the guard. I am doubled over, bent in on myself. “The doctor, the doctor,” I say.
In shackles. That’s how they do it, how they move us from place to place. Guards and guns, flanked front, back, and sides. Arms and legs in steel shackles.
You’d think I was an ax murderer.
I am led through chambers, twisting paths, through doors that must be locked behind me before the one in front of me is released. I am held for several minutes in what feels like a vapor lock, in what could be a gas chamber. I listen for the hiss of pellets, sure they would be willing to sacrifice the guards as well, if only they thought it could be done with no complaint.
