“Yep, I’m pretty harmless,” I said, with a nervous chuckle. I stood and stretched. She picked up the handles of the car seat and lifted it to knee-height. I noticed that her arm was muscular for a woman’s and thought that might be on account of carrying Dyson around. I helped her secure the car seat in my car and we pulled out of the parking lot.
“Turn left,” she told me. We rode in silence for a moment, going in the opposite direction from Annie’s place at Tudor Valley. I opened my mouth to ask Penny for directions to Pinecrest Avenue, but she spoke first.
“So what do you like?” she asked.
“Food,” I answered. “Man, I love food. Hamburgers. Strawberry ice cream. Egg foo young. And Disney World. And cartoons, and family movies. I just got married and I have a beautiful daughter. How about you? I mean, what do you like,” I said, “not are you married, too.” She cackled loudly, and a worldly, piercing expression that reminded me of Sareena crossed her face.
“Are you for real?”
“Sure,” I said, slightly taken aback. “I’m very for real.”
“You’re not a police officer, are you?”
“No…”
“Say it. Say, ‘I am not an officer of the law.’”
I said it.
“So what do you like?” Her tone got sort of impatient.
“I told you,” I said, trying to match her edge with some of my own. “But you never answered my question about what you like.”
“It don’t matter what I like. C’mon. Tell me what you like. Like, what do you like.” She pressed down on her words like she was trying to mash extra meaning out of them. She lit a cigarette and rolled down the window part of the way. “Mind if I smoke?” I did mind, but it was too late to say so.
“I told you what I like.”
She blew a cloud through the crack in the window. “So you want to go get some ice creams, honey?” She burst out laughing, and I laughed with her, though I didn’t know what was so funny.
“Sure. You know, there’s a Dairy Queen just up the road here.” She doubled over, laughing so hard that she couldn’t make noise anymore.
“Wow, you’re really a fun person,” I told her, although I was starting to wonder. “How far is… was it Pinecrest Avenue?”
She was still laughing. “Sugar, there ain’t no damn Pinecrest nothing.” Smoke drifted out of her open mouth. She tapped her ash out the window and suddenly got dead serious in a way that seemed almost mean. Her jaw tensed. She took a quick glance at her wristwatch and slapped the dashboard as she spoke. “so what do you want to do, Mister Gary? To me.” She cupped her breasts and stuck her hand between her thighs, grunting and gesturing in a very impolite way.
“Oh,” I said, with a start. Did she carry the child around to fool the police about her profession? Was it even her child? I felt swindled. Still, I decided that if she found my innocence funny, I would play it up. She probably didn’t get much of a chance to laugh in her line of work. And introducing her baby to that kind of life! I was worried, especially for Dyson, and nervous that somebody might see us together. My eyes burned from tobacco smoke, and I needed to air the car out. So I swerved into the Dairy Queen lot and pulled into a parking space lit by the fluorescent glow from inside.
“What’s your favorite flavor?”
“Honey, I’m sorry, I’m lactose intolerant.”
“They probably have frozen yogurt, or Tofutti.”
“Look. You’re very nice, but I’m trying to work here. Unless you paying for my time, I can’t be all up in no soda shops on cute little dates and whatnot. This ain’t 1953.”
“I can pay. And it isn’t a date. I’m married.”
“Gee, I’ve never heard that line before,” she said, laughing again. There was something cruel in her voice now, like the thought of my being nice to her and treating her like a human being made her sick.
I returned with a container of large fries for her, a Pecan mudslide for myself, a sample-size sundae for Dyson, and a small, undecorated Just Because cake to share with Annie later. What an interesting opportunity, I told myself, thinking about Christ’s ministry to women like Penny, and deciding to tell her the good news about being saved. That made me less nervous about anybody seeing us together. We sat in the car and ate our treats together. Penny spooned sundae into Dyson’s mouth. Mostly it went on his shirt. She used a handful of napkins to wipe his chin.
At first Penny wouldn’t believe that I didn’t want what men normally wanted from her. But as we sat, I showed her respect. I asked her about her life and she stopped fidgeting. Penny told me that she had come down from New York for the weekend to visit and her sister had thrown her and Dyson out of her house because she figured out what Penny’d been doing for a living. She needed to get enough money to either change her Amtrak ticket back or pay for a hotel for the next two nights.
She said that Dyson’s daddy was a prominent city councilman in the town she came from, and that I could look him up if I went there. I wasn’t sure whether to believe all of her stories, because she talked so big. But I gave her some extra money to help pay for the ticket and told her that Christ could offer eternal life and salvation. She sucked her teeth and wouldn’t look me in the eye when I said things about Jesus. Maybe she had come from a religious background and the Lord had shown her to me as an example of what happens when you go against His word. Maybe He had put me in her path so that she could hear about Christ’s mercy.
When we finished our food and threw our garbage out, I asked her where I could take her. She told me she wanted to go back to the rock club because she still needed money. I didn’t have much cash left.
“You’ve got to leave this life behind,” I urged.
She demanded that I take her back, so I started the ignition. The car vibrated and sputtered under us. She glanced my way, triumphant and nasty. The scary feeling came over me that she could read my thoughts. Or worse, that she could see other things, like the thoughts under my thoughts—stuff I couldn’t even guess at.
Since the moment I’d figured out the situation, I’d thought that this might be an opportunity to find out once and for all whether I could fix my urges myself and put them toward a female. Maybe God wanted me to do this instead of having Him correct the problem overnight. I couldn’t imagine that He’d want me to use one kind of sinfulness as a weapon against another. But how else would I find out the truth, spare my wife the pain of blaming herself for my difficulty, and keep anybody in my life from knowing about the terrible feelings that were rotting me out from the inside? Now it’s easy to go back and piece together what I might have thought as I stared blankly back at Penny. In my eyes she must have seen the look of every married john, the dull face that says Help me avoid the blame.
“You just pull around back,” she said.
When I walked through the archway at Tudor Valley, $116 poorer, dragging my feet with disgrace, the Just Because cake I bought for Annie had softened into a goopy mush, dripping out of the box into the plastic bag and leaving a trail of milky droplets behind me. At that point, even showing it to her would make her ask why it had been sitting out for so long. I would have had no explanation. I tied the plastic handles together twice and forced the bag down into the swinging door at the top of one of the public garbage cans near the statue of a knight with a lance in the courtyard. Penny’s voice played on a loop in my head as I dawdled there, watching the shadows of headlights play across the horse’s bronze backside. It’s okay, she’d said. It happens to a lot of guys.
You learn more from failure than success, as my daddy always used to say unless he failed. The experience with Penny hadn’t gone well, but it did give me a little bit more confidence. I reckoned it like this: sure, I blew it with Penny, but if I could give it a go with a prostitute, what kept me from trying it with my own wife? Plenty of ungodly men cheated on their wives with hookers. But what kind of scalawag only cheated with hookers? The longer I chewed on that bone, the madder I got with myself.
The only two pieces of proof I had that I didn’t like women were the fact that I’d never had any sexual feelings for them, and my lack of experience. Big things, sure, but here came experience, ready or not. One night, as I sat on the edge of the bed taking my shoes off, Annie stepped toward me and put her knees between my thighs. I pulled her further in toward me. Once she realized what I had decided to do, she giggled, but I could hear a little bit of irritation behind the laughter. Weighing Annie’s breasts in my palms, grabbing hold of her waist, and poking my tongue into her mouth, it comforted me to know that God approved of what we were doing. His okay alone raised my level of excitement higher than it could have with Penny, and my years of unsatisfied urges had made it so that touch carried a charge all by itself. Contact alone aroused me about 55 percent. Once we’d gotten undressed, my male part stood out enough to be convincing.
Probing around in the folds of her thighs, my fingers kept expecting to find a hole somewhere, but they got more and more lost. I’d had a whole lot of beginner’s luck that first time. Sex turned into a project, and I got so frustrated with the job of it that I lost track of myself. I gave up trying to find the hole with my fingers and probed around with my penis instead, sort of aggressively. After the kissing, I got Annie onto the bed, tugged down her panties, and climbed on top.
“Ow! Gary! You’re crushing me!” Annie cried out. Embarrassed and apologetic, I leapt backward off her and twisted my ankle. That hurt so much that I rapidly began to lose my hard-won 55 percent. Now, if a woman sees you lose your erection, I figured, that signals to her that either you don’t like her or you don’t like women at all, so I panicked. For a split second I wondered if I was allowed to masturbate, but time was disappearing, so I didn’t worry. I got back to about 45 percent and raised myself up on the bed again. In a minute or three I had succeeded in penetrating my wife with my floppy johnson, pinching it tight at the base to make it seem harder. But by then I had lost another 5 percent. My male ego hung in the balance there, so as a last-ditch effort, I thought about Russ and jammed myself into her over and over, using the repetition to erase reality. In twenty seconds I went up to 95 percent, but by the twenty-fifth, it was all over.
“That was great,” I said, confident I had beaten back the demon of homosexuality a little bit.
Annie smiled weakly and pulled the covers over her head.
One slightly chilly night the next January, we’d pulled the covers up to our necks, and I woke up to feel the comforter taking in air and blowing it out like a bellows. A warm, moist pressure weighed down my crotch. I’d just fallen out of a wonderful dream about hand-crabbing on Lake Kissimmee. Thinking I had wet myself, I reached toward my groin area to find that the pressure was my wife’s body on top of mine. She had pulled me through my boxer shorts during one of the natural cycles of arousal that happen to a sleeping man, and was riding my body up and down. It felt kind of like falling asleep at the wheel. I nearly jumped up and pushed her off, but I then I got the notion that her scheme might work, so I went with it.
Annie grunted as she threw herself down on me, gently at first. Our round paunches connected like continents slamming back together after ages apart. Bump. Bump. Bump. About one per second. For a little while, I played possum to avoid breaking the spell. But then her success made me sort of proud, like I had made it happen, too. My breath caught in my throat, thinking for a moment that my prayers had been answered at last.
I groaned to let Annie know that I was awake, and stepped up the pace. Bump bump bump. I reckoned that if she got pregnant again, she’d want to know that I knew I could be the father. Within minutes, though, my manhood started to droop. Desperate to keep hard, I thought about a muscular fire dancer I’d once seen at Disney World’s Ohana restaurant, and went wild with the pace. Bumpbumpbumpbumpbump! It helped that Annie didn’t wear feminine perfumes, makeup, or much jewelry. I reached up and dug my fingers into her shoulder muscles so they’d seem bulkier. All women have mustaches, and fortunately for me, Annie didn’t bleach hers. In the dim room I could see light reflecting off the tiny hairs under her nose, so I focused on them. I bucked so hard I almost tossed Annie off the bed, but I finished what she’d started.
Once Annie had broken the ice, she discovered that she liked making love. I doubt it had anything to do with me—I wasn’t much of a lover. I sweated a lot and usually didn’t get so manly. I didn’t know the first thing about bringing her to orgasm. She never admitted to wanting sex out of lust, probably because of the Bible passsages I always quoted.
Once when I tried to sidestep her advances, she caused me to jam my index finger against the kitchen counter. That kept me in a splint for a good while—a good excuse to avoid the sex act. But the afternoon we came home from the hospital, she wanted to use the time for intimacy, even with my hand wrapped up in aluminum and gauze. I brought up Christian chastity stuff again. But now when I did that, Annie knew how to fight back. She quoted the verse from Corinthians where Paul says that couples should only be celibate if they both agree to it. She took my injured hand and yanked me into the bedroom.
“I’m beat,” I sighed.
Annie wasn’t discouraged—no sir! “I will be your strength! Build your rock upon me!”
We went on into the bedroom and she stood in front of me with her arms at her sides, just like the young man I pretended to see in her place. When she demanded lovemaking, she’d follow up by waiting for me to take charge. It felt kind of unfair. Every time I stood there dumbstruck, like a cow chewing cud. I always forgot what had gone well the time before. I had to make everything up again. I’d take a step forward and hug her. She’d moan and loosen her spine, and I’d squeeze one of her breasts.
“Ow!” she’d say. “Not so hard!”
I’d move my hands to her waist and touch her more gently there. I’d lean down and kiss her, first on the side of the mouth, where tiny hairs stuck me. In my mind they’d become a beard. That would excite me, so I’d press my lips to hers and work them open and shut. I’d keep my tongue far back, because when we were kids Joe showed me a nature magazine picture of two slugs mating, tangled together and hanging from a tree by a thread of slime. The thought of tongues wrapping around each other always brought that image back into my mind. Annie would open her mouth wider, so I’d move mine away and kiss her cheek for a while. She’d raise a finger to her ear and tap it to say I should kiss her there, but I didn’t like the idea of earwax one bit more than slugs, so I’d make like I hadn’t seen her do it. In a few more minutes I’d let go and take a step back.
“That’s enough of the kissing part, right?” I’d ask, sitting down on the edge of the mattress. When I sat, we’d meet eye to eye.
Annie would step forward, tucking her plump legs between mine. With the palm of her hand, she’d stroke the flat surface my hair had been buzzed into. She’d play with the collar of my golf shirt, raising and lowering it in a flirty way. I’d unbutton her blouse and take off my shirt and pants. She’d shimmy out of her skirt and panty hose, then turn to give me access to her bra hook. I’d tug at it too hard and it would get frustrating. I must have pinched her up front doing that. Finally she’d tell me, gently but firmly, how to take it off. Then she’d climb on top of me and I’d have to lie back on the bed.
We’d roll around, kissing and touching, and I’d think about Mama. How her cholesterol levels were rising, or how she was trying to change her diet. I’d worry that she was going to die of a heart attack. I’d wonder if we should try to get Cheryl into a good nursery school, even though we couldn’t afford one. Then I’d remember that I should concentrate on what I was doing. A boy would appear in Annie’s place, and I’d become more excited.
But usually Annie started talking to me and calling me Pookie-Pie. Her feminine voice wouldn’t allow me to get involved in the fantasy as much as I needed to. Eventually she’d push her panties down to her knees, hook her toe into the elastic band, and slide them off and onto the floor. That meant I should probably to do
the same, so I’d get off the bed and take my boxers down.
Every time I turned around, her face would fall. I hadn’t been able to perform sexually very often, or for very long, and Annie got frustrated by that. She wouldn’t mention it too much, but I’d see confusion and hurt bubble up in her eyes. One time it took on a special intensity, pinching the corners of her face in a way that made her look older, so I climbed onto the bed and pulled her toward me. She held back a little. Outside, somebody started a lawnmower.
“It’s okay if you can’t,” she began, making me think about the awful time I’d had with Penny, who kept trying and trying for twenty minutes with me in her mouth and didn’t get anywhere. “but I would like—I have been talking to minister mike about this, and he says that the Lord—that God wants married couples to experience intimacy and pleasure in the bedroom, not just to make children.”
“Well, I disagree with Minister Mike.”
Annie went silent, stewing for a while. She swung her legs under the covers and brought the sheet up over her nakedness. I followed suit. The buzz of the mower came closer and then moved away. “Is there somebody else?” she asked, almost in a whisper, once the noise died down.
“Of course not.”
“Do I— Are you not attracted to me anymore?”
“No.”
“No as in no you’re not?”
“No, no as in that isn’t it. I’ve just been working so hard. I’m not used to it. I come home exhausted every night, you know. And now this—” I raised my splinted hand into the air.
“Minister Mike said you might be somebody who has a secret turn-on that he is too shy to share with his partner. Is that true? Do you have a secret turn-on, Pookie-Pie? you can tell me.”
“You’re talking about turn-ons with Minister Mike? this is hard enough as it is. Don’t make it harder.”
“I wish I could make it harder,” she joked.
God Says No Page 7
