Watch Your Mouth

by Daniel Handler

  She turned around slowly in it. “My father asked me not to.”

  The music changes. “What?”

  “A few days after I bought it my father came upstairs to tuck me in and asked me never to wear it again.”

  “Your father came to—”

  “Yeah, he did that for years, even when I was in high school. I miss it sometimes. He asked me not to wear it any more.”

  “Why? It’s perfectly respectable.” I looked at her again. “Sort of.”

  Cyn smiled. “Dad never cared much about respectability. He always said that caring too much about society’s rules could lead to—what did he call it—hypervigilance. You know, always worrying about what’s happening instead of actually doing something.”

  “Right,” I said. But it didn’t feel right.

  “Yeah. So it wasn’t the respectability. He said it would give him a heart attack. He was really uncomfortable about it. I can understand why; it’s one of the few times I can remember him telling me specifically not to do something. But he said as a favor to him. Please stop wearing it. So I put it up here.” She shut the closet door and with a start I saw that the outside of the door had a mirror on it. My own naked body, leaning against the footboard, swung into view. With Cyn standing by the door I could see both sides of the dress, all of her body offered up at once. I wanted to have sex with her. The foreboding music has dissolved back into the sensual themes of the scene’s opening.

  Cyn followed my gaze to the mirror and our eyes met in the reflection. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s a little creepy to see yourself when you are going to sleep.”

  “But that’s not what we could use it for,” I said, getting up and walking to her. I felt the footboard-brand on my back in geometric, sticky dents, and my erection toggled in front of me like I was taking something for a walk. She watched me in the mirror as I approached her, her face so close to the glass that her breath clouded both of our faces. Do you want to know what she looked like? Imagine her now, so you can be as turned on as I was. Aroused. Picture who you want—hips, mouth, hands, birthmarks, curves and skin and all the features you need to keep you here—because she was who I wanted. She was all the features I needed to keep me there. That’s what she looked like, as the cloth of her dress purred against me. With my hands I parted her buttocks so that I could slide thick between them, the folds of the dress cradling me like a hammock. She put out one arm to steady herself against the mirror, wiping away the fog. Our eyes met again.

  It’s an important point in a romantic relationship when you can talk dirty, out loud. You’ve achieved a state at which you don’t think your lover is going to repeat your sex whispers over coffee with friends and everyone will throw back their heads and laugh at you. Hopefully opera will achieve a state at which outright eroticism can be sung without giggles or scandal, because aside from encores in my mind this opera has only been performed once and it seems sort of a waste. We’ll see. Watch.

  My hand crept up her dress and one of us unzipped it, depending on where the costumer puts the zipper. The dress slid down her body catching for a second where we were pressed together. “Look,” I said. “Watch.” Both my hands crept around her shoulders in the mirror. Her eyes went from my eyes to my hands, where my fingers rested on her collarbones like I was feeling a pulse, which of course I was. “Watch my hands.” Unsteadily she stepped out of the fallen dress. Her hand left the mirror and she put her hands on her own neck, nervous but watching my hands. I took each hand and travelled with them down her chest. “Watch your hands. Our hands. Watch your breasts.” Our hands travelled to them together, me rubbing her rubbing herself. She swayed and I stepped to her, sliding against her back like a hungry chair. We moved lower. Watch us. “Watch your nipples. Watch your stomach.” I couldn’t see much of my own body in the mirror but I felt heated, fused into a column as flagrantly symbolic as the posts of the bed, yearning straight up toward the spinning blades of the fan. All the love we were having felt like mine, her body caressed by me. I could tell by Cyn’s half-lidded eyes, glued on her own hands, that she felt the same way: it was all for ourselves, separate and sexy. I took her hands in mine and led her down, down. “Watch your hips. Watch your thighs.” Our fingers curled together like a last-ditch grip on a building, the villain falling at the end of the movie. “Watch your—”

  “Watch your mouth,” Cyn said, smiling and disentangling. Shuttered in shadows as the fan kept turning, she strode confidently across the room. She turned to me, her mouth hanging open. “I couldn’t stand up any longer,” she said. “Come here.”

  “I plan to,” I said, bounding over to stand by the bed.

  “Shut your mouth,” she said, and shut hers. Now I was swaying, my body bending in an arc like a fishing pole, having caught something. “Now I can’t stand up any longer,” I said, and staggered a knee onto the bed.

  “On top,” she said, and as usual lowered herself onto me like a wet guillotine after the ritual fumbling with the rubber device that probably won’t make the opera. I moaned something. In the mirror it looked like Cyn was sitting alone, contemplating my severed, staring head, but the music is unmistakable: those curling waves of strings, up and down the fluttering scale, along with thunderous rolls of mallets travelling on upright, quivering cymbals. It’s either sex or a storm at sea and we ain’t on a boat.

  Her arms spidered down the mattress to balance herself. “You know,” she said, “it’s a shame we’re going to be together for the rest of our lives.”

  I couldn’t answer for a couple of bobs. “It feels pretty good to me,” I said.

  She smiled. “Not together ,” she said, italicizing the word with some sort of torque. “Together .” And here one of the spiders spun back up and clasped the breast that blocked her heart from view.

  “Why?” I said. I reached one hand up and held it on hers, my hand over her hand over her breast and eventually over her heart. “I love you.”

  “Oh, Joseph, I love you, too,” she said, toggling forward. Exquisite. “But I haven’t slept with very many people.”

  “Oh,” I said. It was if the red-haired actor stepped into the room. Could I meet him later?

  “I want to have all the possible tricks for you,” she said. “I wish I’d learned more before I met you.”

  “You’re doing fine,” I said. “Jesus, Cyn, we have incredible—wait!”

  A stinging tweak of horns, there and gone.

  “Great,” I said again, and we smiled at one another. She leaned forward and dangled a breast into my mouth like Greeks dropping grapes. I munched, briefly. “Don’t you think we teach each other enough?”

  She tossed her hair; in the mirror it was like some brown bird fluttered by. “But that’s like one of those schools that doesn’t really have teachers, just supervisory adults and the kids learn from one another and it’s all one happy family and blah blah blah.”

  We shifted together, like continental plates. Our breath grew hot and weird—earthquake weather. “What are we talking about?” I asked breathlessly.

  She shivered away from me and fell back to the bed. The music should invert here, too; I’m not sure how. Still inserted I curled over like a beckoning finger, my legs climbing hers like trenched soldiers advancing. “No, no!” she cried sharply. Retreat. “On top!” Cyn gave me a sweaty grin and we resumed. “I just wish I knew ,” she said. “I wish I was sure I’d had sex with enough people.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. Conversation was getting difficult to carry on as we carried on.

  “I just—I’ve only learned about sex from other people who were learning about sex. I feel a little empty. I feel, I don’t know, a void. The void of—I don’t know, if it weren’t so traumatic I think I should have learned about sex from somebody older, and experienced. Except that obviously that would be psychologically weird. That’s why—no, stop that, listen to me—” She grabbed my hand from behind her and put it back on the bed firmly. “That’s why in many ways learning a
bout sex from my father would have been perfect.”

  Here it is again: T.U.D. The Unknown Dread, this time with trombones and bassoons as Joseph performs a brief soliloquy: She can’t possibly be saying what I hear her saying. Chord. What I hear her saying. Chord. It is not possible. Chord. It’s dead quiet except for the rustle of rude playbills.

  “Sex with—”

  “My dad. One’s dad. I don’t know.”

  “I think,” I said, stiff and stiffly, “that one would feel an enormous sense of shame.”

  “Not shame,” she corrected. “Probably guilt.” She leaned back her head and looked down at me like a nude judge. She licked her lips and quoted something, I don’t know what. “‘Guilt says I made a mistake, shame says I am a mistake. And I’m not a mistake.’ ”

  “Not a mistake,” I repeated, the same notes but a different register.

  “Right,” she smiled. “So I’d probably feel some guilt, the power of society telling me I made a mistake.” At this point the music should say: What? “I mean, I know there’s a big thing against it.” She thrust herself against my trembling hips, pinning me to the bed. “But all behavior exists within a social and cultural context. Imagine if there wasn’t a thing. It makes a lot of sense, educationally. Usually a girl and her father grow apart as a woman is developing sexually.” She dangled one of her secondary sex characteristics into my mouth again, which was gaping open. “The mother is usually the one who teaches about periods, and the father doesn’t know what to do. I think that’s why he was so weird about the dress.” She tossed her head back to the discarded dress, curled up near the mirror like shed skin. “It showed off my puberty. But if the father were traditionally responsible for teaching someone the ropes, so to speak”—here she grinned at me, in reference to a brief bondage experiment we’d tried back in bleary March—“then I could learn so much from somebody. And you would pass it on to your children. I mean, my father is an attractive man, fit, and—”

  “You’re talking like some male fantasy character in a dirty book,” I said. I felt like I’d been caught reading it.

  She shrugged and her whole body twisted in such a way that crossed the inevitable line. We both quickened with military precision and ferocity, like a field drum roll. Our faces grew furious and fell closer and closer to one another—we didn’t want to fire until we saw the whites of our eyes. It occurred to me that all she’d said had maybe been nothing but talking dirty. Not a plan of action but some new toy to try, some way of taking the family stress after an invigorating year in the dorms and turning it into further fuel for our exploits. The idea of her telling me secrets to egg me on aroused me even as the secrets repelled me, and the accelerando of our our bodies drowned out T.U.D. and the unblinking mirror saw another splashdown. Cyn’s exhausted flesh collapsed on top of me and I placed my hands behind her, pressing myself further in even as I retracted. I imagined the view from above, fluttered as the fan still spun, of my damp hands upon her like those of an exhausted castaway. The image of her body stirred me even more than the body itself, the idea of her being viewed, like this was all in front of an audience. She must have felt my resparking, because she raised up on one arm and one eyebrow, and shook her head.

  “I must get to bed,” she said, and hopped off me and the bed like her examination was over. She crossed the room and bent down to grab the robe she’d snuck up in. She picked it up by the scruff of its neck and regarded it for a moment before figuring out how to turn it right-side out—a perky oboe solo should do the trick. I myself felt wet, shaky, squinty. Fetal. In the usual bout of post-coital gloom I wondered bleakly how Cyn could be so casual. All our wailing and gnashing of teeth were measures and measures behind us, right now only the polite pastorals of the scene’s opening accompany what we did. I stared at the room, gawky as a marionette; Cyn looked for her other sock with yawning patience. She was a loose woman. I had slipped in and out of her almost unnoticed, so clogged was her brain with the memories of listening to her parents and from the educational prospects of sleeping with her father. I remembered suddenly how her expert unbuckling when we finally succumbed in my dorm room, peeling away her own pants like the greedy unwrapping of birthday presents, had distressed me as well as hardened me, her refusal to even pretend that we were exploring new territory. How loosely had I slipped inside her, and now how loosely did I find myself in her family attic, embarking on a summer on the basis of so much fucking. She was a loose woman, and as she tied the cloth belt with a brisk strangling gesture I thought of what she’d told me about her father, what her father had told me about her, all the things I didn’t know and wouldn’t notice until I stepped on them like shards of glass on the beach. She was a loose woman, and as I considered all that lay untold between now and the last few gasps of August she felt like a loose cannon as well.

  I could have spent the summer anywhere, called her on the phone in the evenings after grumpy days at some job. Thought of her discarded jeans before I slept at night, led myself to sweaty explosions in a sagging bed in some room creaking with unfamiliar noises. Then I wouldn’t have heard the ones below me after Cyn had left the room and I was alone between the fan and her downstairs bed. The paternal knock on her door could have been the house settling, but all the muted gasps after that, whispered cadences creaking up from the house, had to be more than my dirty mind. My brain soiled as I strained to hear more, and obligingly the sound of the ceiling fan faded and I could hear low moans, familiar to my attic bed as the wind through the window. I pictured Cyn from above, fluttered as the ceiling fan I’d noticed when she showed me her room spun above them. My dirty mind could picture the doctor with his surgeon hands upon her like those of an exhausted castaway. I closed my eyes to hear better and the room turned to steam around me. I pictured myself floating through the vapory floor, down to her bedroom with the consummated carpeting and entering her body from behind. Would I be joining anyone there, like a guest? I couldn’t trust the sounds of a house I’d never lived in, couldn’t trust my body for an appropriate response as I shifted on the wet sheets and felt my own hands fumble down my hips. But the offstage aria, if indeed it’s being sung, is lost to the audience’s ear as the orchestra closes the act and leaves the dirty minds of the audience sputtering in the sudden surge of the house lights, on for intermission.

  A brief intermission

  [The audience strolls out of the auditorium and chats about subjects tangentially related to the action.]

  A typical day at Camp Shalom that summer went as follows: Cyn and I would leave the Glass home with the sticky stagger of people who are hot, tired and late. We’d be clutching identical plastic mugs emblazoned with Mather College’s crest, Cyn’s marked with a little red ribbon so we could tell them apart.

  She drove us to Shalom in the same automobile that had bumped and ground our way to Pittsburgh, the same automobile in which Cyn had fondled our pimply employer, the engine rumbling beneath my denim shorts. We usually both wore denim shorts—the weather too hot for long pants and the campers too messy for sensitive cloth—and, at least at first, one of the two official Camp Shalom Counselor T-shirts we’d been issued. As the summer dragged on we grew lazier and lazier about rinsing the T-shirts every night and despite the occasional griping of the pimply actor the shirts appeared with less and less frequency, like the electronically rendered heartbeat of somebody dying in the hospital.

  We never spoke, the whole way there, the whole summer long. We didn’t need to. We never needed to. It was a mutual, unspoken agreement, like some family tradition that later requires extensive therapy. We didn’t need to, but it meant that between Camp Shalom and the Glass dinner table the only private conversations that Cyn and I had were during or immediately following sex. The ride to camp would have been an ideal time for conversation, but never, the whole way there, the whole summer long. It was usually a twenty-two-minute drive, meaning that we could leave Byron Circle at a quarter to eight and only be seven minutes late. We’d slink into
the Mandatory Staff Meeting and the pimply actor would glare at us, less for tardiness than the way we’d come in. In a mutual, unspoken agreement we’d always enter the meeting smiling or even laughing at one another as if we’d been chatting blissfully the whole commute instead of waiting for our coffee to cool and listening to the grating radio announcer update us on our tardiness. The hit song that summer was “Bing Bing Bing,” which acccording to the chorus, is the sound my heart makes when I see you babe.

  It was also the sound of the gong which divided up the Camp Shalom Day into Hello, Peace and Goodbye. The gong wasn’t a gong proper but three empty cans of government surplus peanut butter glued together to make a large hollow column and suspended from the Mitzvah Tree. Each summer the Arts & Crafts students repainted it. Mitzvah means “blessing” in Hebrew and even the campers with no religious education at all knew that “Shalom” could mean hello, goodbye and peace, depending on when you said it. “Like if you said it when someone was leaving,” the Camp Director said in her pert little voice, “it would mean ‘goodbye.’” And if you stood around the flagpoles in the morning and sang the national anthems of America and then Israel, it would mean Hello, the first third of Camp Shalom’s day. The Camp Director would make some announcements. Then there would be an All-Camp Activity which I remember only from the brief blurry snapshots of All-Camp Activities in the Camp Shalom brochure: A water-balloon fight, leaving everyone’s bodies soaked and the grounds littered with small rubber fragments of blue and white, the colors of the Israeli flag. Capture-the-flag, using one ragged blue panel and one ragged white panel that I had cut at the Arts & Crafts Shack. Cyn and I breathlessly pressed together during All-Camp Hide and Seek, my orgasm rivering into her cupped hand as one of the Rosen twins checked the nurse’s office, but not, thank God, its closet. A tinny hora from portable speakers, with us romping around the flagpole. Something in the pool.