Loose Ends

by Raskin, Barbara;

  “Listen,” she began, “why don’t you …?”

  But then, because he was standing beside the bed right near her face, Suede just pushed his huge swollen penis into her mouth, and Coco smelled the homey, buttery odor of an organ kept under wraps all day, sticky and sweet—not the rancid, sourish smell that rose from behind, but the cozy, rumpled odor of sweat turning sweet from lack of ventilation, like the warm uriny odor of baby pajamas first thing in the morning, no longer wet and sour but transcendingly subtly sweet.

  Okay, okay, Coco thought, and let her tongue ripple along the vein beneath the shaft, that long inside-out seam that sewed up his penis like the thick rolled hemming on a football jersey. But when the vein began wiggling under her tongue, she felt certain that it would go off, depriving her other really famished, dehydrated mouth. Because only Suede’s penis, pressed between her legs and stuffed up inside her, could release the response wailing inside—like the artform lurking in an unsculptured rock needing a chisel to liberate it.

  So Coco stopped sucking and tongued the wet rubbery object out of her mouth and then pressed her lips tightly together so that even though it slid around against her face, bumping hard against her teeth, slipping around in wet saliva or sperm, trying to re-enter, she wouldn’t oblige him.

  Finally Suede groaned and lay down on the bed next to her.

  Just put it in me, Coco moaned silently. Please. Now.

  For a moment the heavy slab of hard flesh bumped against her clitoris producing an instant irritation like the scratch of a fingernail against a blackboard. Quickly Coco reached down, like a helpful Girl Scout, to direct the fumbling, one-eyed creature toward the secret tunnel to the Interior. And then, having pointed the sightless traveler in the proper direction (why should the darkness down there bother the blind?), she lay back and finally felt the thick insertion between the soft, inchoate, insensible walls of her vagina. Now the tissue that lacked any power of self-determination felt the pushing, shoving, tormenting invasion of Suede’s bludgeoning penis.

  It was only when she was stoned that Coco stopped caring about progress or success, lost the impulse toward orgasm, and remained infinitely happy with the constancy rather than climax. Unstoned, she fought for a conclusion; spaced out, she perferred permanent pleasure. So she began to ride Suede’s X-L like a rodeo star on a prize bucking bronco—high and wide over its spectacular shattering spread.

  For hours they made love, punctuating their passion either with orgasms or sleep.

  It was growing light outside the window when Coco got herself together and finally slipped out of bed. She gathered her clothes and then walked naked upstairs to her own bedroom. The sex had left her physically satisfied and psychologically strengthened. She climbed into bed, nude beneath the sheets, and slept again until the baby woke her up a little before seven o’clock.

  eighteen

  Coco was sitting next to Joshua’s high chair feeding him cereal and absorbed in catching the slosh-over that squished out of his mouth by scraping the side of the spoon over his puckered chin. Open, fill, squish, drip. Then she would try scooping some of the sweet rejected mess back into his mouth. Clenching a wad of crumpled buttered raisin toast, Josh used his fist to push Coco’s spoon away from his mouth. Then he would scrape a layer of crumbs off on his bottom teeth and trail a batter of toast and cereal across his face and over the high-chair tray. Scrape, spoon, scoop, slosh. A fat fist filled with floppy toast moved near Coco’s face and she flashed out her tongue to lick Josh’s plump sticky fingers. Sometimes babies made her mouth ache from love so that she had to grab and gnaw at something like a yellow lead pencil so as not to munch on some baby flesh.

  “Want eggies, Joshie?” She wiped her hands on the sides of her blue jeans and stood up.

  “Good morning.” Suede barreled through the kitchen doorway dressed in fresh chinos, white shirt, and his seersucker sport jacket.

  Coco smiled, flushed, and pirouetted toward the Frigidaire.

  “Do you know whether the shuttles leave on the hour or half-hour from here?” he asked.

  Hands trembling, Coco lost her grip on the Frigidaire door. It swung out combatively and cracked Happy on the side of his head. There was a quick yelp from the dog at the same time Josh’s milk glass hit the floor with a plop.

  “On the hour,” Coco said, bending over to find the eggs and hide for a moment. “Why?”

  “Well, I want to get back to New York before noon.”

  The hands of the electric daisy clock near the sink swished away another minute and Coco heard a whisper from her heart as it started to break.

  “Today?” Shut door, walk toward stove, don’t faint. Why wasn’t there any air in the kitchen this morning? Why wasn’t there any oxygen?

  “Yah. This morning.”

  “Oh. Would you like a glass of orange juice?” It was only 7:30.

  “Sure. Is there any coffee?”

  “It’s perking. Is there something you have to do back in New York?”

  “Well, as long as I’ve finished up here, I want to get back so I can start writing.”

  She looked up then, because the pain was very intense as it traveled through a main artery toward her heart. Suede walked past the high chair, studied Joshua for a moment, and then pushed one chair a safe distance away from the baby.

  “How about some eggs?” Coco asked, visualizing Herzog’s Ramona again. Her chest had constricted so she could neither draw nor expel a breath of air without concentrating. The heavy bag of constipation in her stomach kept knotting tighter.

  “Yah, I could use a couple of eggs. You-know-what gives me an appetite.”

  He was sitting at the table quietly awaiting the appearance of some food. He didn’t even look up when Joshua began kicking his shoes against the tin legs of the high chair and distending his stomach against the tray to show he wanted out.

  Coco walked over to liberate her baby and put him down on the floor. Immediately Happy left his station near the stove and trotted over to lick Josh’s hands and face. The baby sat stoically, like a midget Buddha, watching Coco move around the kitchen while Happy lapped congealed cereal from various crevices in his face and between his fingers.

  “You know, Gavin’s going to be gone four or five days,” Coco said, too embarrassed to turn around. She stood at the stove sliding a lump of butter from one side of the frying pan to the other, chasing it back and forth with flicks of her wrist while it squirmed, heated up, and slowly liquefied itself.

  “Yah, you fold me yesterday.” Suede struck a match.

  Coco could smell sulfur infiltrate the odor of her own sweat. The more desolate she felt, the more her chest constricted. Her breath grew more shallow every moment, as if the oxygen were too sheer and thin for her needs.

  Coco cracked four eggs while she measured her intake of air. She had once read an article about hyper-ventilation. Was it in some Reader’s Digest at the pediatrician’s office? Or at the obstetrician’s? Or was it a Woman’s Day at the Safeway checkout counter? The location didn’t matter, except that she couldn’t recall the remedy. If you were short of breath, you were supposed to … breathe into a bag (a paper bag, or was it a plastic bag?) so that you could recycle the pure oxygen (or was it nitrogen?) that your system expelled. What about a sandwich Baggie? What about a 10 gallon trashcan Baggie so she could crawl inside, and die?

  Just be calm, Coco’s post-liberated raised consciousness said to her heart, her lungs, and her lower bowels, whose functional development had already been stunted during her pre-lib, adolescence.

  The trouble is simply that right now you feel you’re in love like when all you’re really experiencing is a desperate need for love. Consequently, you’re fixating on the only man who’s around because he happens to be just a few feet away, with the bottom half of his body hidden below the table and his X-L tucked inside those tight chinos that press his crotch down flat—obliterating what you’re really interested in. So you are misreading and misinterpreting sympt
oms that you think are love but which very clearly are sexual needs. Needs. It’s nothing to worry about, the post-lib voice reassured her with post-grad authority. It’s a simple displacement of a physiological sensation. It’s like acupuncture.

  But I do dig that guy, Coco’s pre-lib libido insisted. He’s very handsome and flashy and he does some fancy things in the sack.

  Forget it, said her post-lib super-duper ego. He’s just a classic seducer type, a lightweight. See how his shirt pulls into horizontal creases across his back? That’s what’s causing the minor contractions you’re feeling in the upper thighs, uterus, and groin. It’s not him. It’s just his prick.

  Coco melted, scrambled, salted, set, poured, and served. She moved around the kitchen, skirting the baby, avoiding the dog, trying to inhale the aching protrusion of her tummy and feeling exactly the same as when she was locked inside a jet coming down for a landing, upright and uptight in an unyielding seat without a steering wheel, anxiously awaiting a beautiful touchdown procured at the price of a reckless bargain with God that if He let the landing gear descend it would be all right with Coco if the jet slid off the runway. But then, of course, after the high of coming down safely, flushed with the thrill of rebirth, Coco always reneged on the runway accident. So it was only fair that now, caught in the fever of panic, the celestial control tower radioed her to remain in an eternal holding pattern over National, fated to flirt forever with the tip of the Washington Monument which always tried to prick the bellies of passing jets. Now she was last in line to receive landing clearance and was left in a suspended state of horror at the cocktail hour of air traffic destined to remain forever on the lookout for high-rises, weather, private planes, flocks of swallows, and confused pilots from other commercial airlines. Perhaps Coco would never be able to land, would never be able to catch her breath ever again. Perhaps she would have to keep an Eastern Airline barf bag in her purse (like the two tired, crumpled Tampax she carried) in case of emergency.

  She served Suede his food and when he began eating she sat down across the table from him and pulled Joshua up on her lap. Instantly he reached out, grabbed a paper napkin, and stuffed it in his mouth, so that Coco had to start extracting small wet leftover paper balls from between his clenched lips. Under the guise of rescue work, she clung to her baby, inhaling the warm smell of sweet dried urine, cereal, powder, and semisour milk.

  I’m hanging on, Joshie, she thought, retrieving the last piece of napkin with the tip of her finger. I’m hanging on to you.

  She tried to anatomize her panic and decided it was the same kind of fear she would feel as if she had opened her closet door in the middle of the night and saw a man standing inside in the darkness. Or if she saw a truck pitching down the middle of a black highway toward her car. Or if she slipped on a patch of ice in the center of a busy intersection. Or if she didn’t see one of her children in a crowded kiddy pool when she made a head count. Coco was paralyzed at the apex of panic, petrified at the peak of a scream when every nerve freaked out—like an alley cat caught by the headlights of a speeding car frozen and unable to run in either direction.

  Beg him, her lungs cried from within the vice of her chest. Beg him to stay just one more day. Then we can relax and expand so you breathe again.

  Help, panted her diaphragm. Give me air.

  “Why don’t you spend the weekend?” Coco asked, hiding her face against Josh’s head. Beneath the sheer black curls, she could see small brown splotches of cradlecap on his scalp. When was the last time she had rubbed cotton balls soaked in warm olive oil onto his scalp? Only newborn infants were supposed to have cradlecap, not year-old toddlers. Oh, yes, Coco was a negligent mother. A terrible mother. Dr. Spock should only know.

  “I’ve got to start writing this article, babes.”

  “Can’t you work upstairs?” she asked pitifully, humbled and humiliated by the enormity of her needs and the gargantuan terrors that were piling through her system, hyping her up to a crazed pitch. Never before had she felt so imperiled, so dependent, so endangered. Never before had she been forced to beg help from an unrelated, unrelenting man who had total control over her psychological survival but over whom she had neither claim nor clout. For at the moment Suede Bellock was the only human being who could alleviate, not obliterate, just lessen her panic a little. Stung by the pain of powerlessness, Coco was seeking assistance from a technical adviser whose only contribution to her recovery was his physical presence, like the military advisers Kennedy had sent to Vietnam.

  “Baby,” Suede said with a little conciliatory smile, “I can barely work in my own pad, let alone anyplace else.”

  Work, Coco thought. Work. The Great Escape and apology for crumping out. It was like sending a note to God. “Please excuse Suede’s absence from Life today. He had to work so he couldn’t attend. He will try to make up whatever he missed. Sincerely, His Mother.”

  “But you have been working,” she insisted, holding onto Joshua who was banging a spoon against the table. All at once Coco saw herself and her baby through Suede’s eyes—a disorderly, noisy, messy, madonna and child. What a bummer!

  And then, suddenly, unexpectedly, Coco gave it up.

  Oh, go, she thought, just go. Like an addict unable to score she was momentarily high on her own deprivation. Go. Though I’d give up almost anything to keep you here, I really don’t like you one little bit.

  Suede finished his eggs and pushed the dish away. To where did men think the dishes they pushed into the center of the table disappeared? Did they believe in secret hatchways.

  And it was at that same moment Coco realized Suede was going to leave without mentioning anything about the future. He was not going to say anything about coming back to Washington or about Coco coming to New York to visit him. While the wild impulsive pre-lib coach in Coco’s brain frantically urged her to correct his oversight, to remind him of the proprieties of sin, but her post-lib prompter cautioned her to be silent on behalf of the other Coco, the new vulnerable creature who had to be provided for and protected. Now there was another Coco who at some future time of greater need, would want the illusion of a reunion with Suede. A confrontation must be sacrificed for long-range planning. Salvation—some day or night in Suede’s bed in Manhattan—must not be jeopardized or precluded by a struggle for justice now.

  Observe. Conserve. Preserve. Talk softly to the big stick. Use caution and make passes with care. Bridges ice before roads. All of Coco’s careless, reckless lawlessness was gone. The casual consumer had become a hoarder. The seller had become a buyer.

  Suede pushed his chair away from the table.

  There are other men around, Coco thought, breathless with misery. There had always been so many, so many, others who wanted her long ago or even now after many years. Let Suede go. Let him disappear. She could call someone else. She wouldn’t be alone.

  “Well,” he began, looking a trifle awkward since he wasn’t a total fool. “Thanks for everything. I hope you get things straightened out the way you want.”

  What did that mean? Had he guessed? Probably. People could smell hysteria miles away.

  Now the dangers of accidentally exposing herself as the victim of a desertion ripped through her, slowing her already labored breath. Isn’t this what you wanted, Coco, baby? pre-libby queried. Didn’t you choose this path of pain, this superhighway of fear Ms. Masochist?

  Gavin, Coco called silently. Gavin, she screamed, without making a sound.

  Then Michael walked into the kitchen. “Good morning,” he said, folding himself into a chair and smiling at Suede who remained oblivious of Mike’s nice manners.

  Coco smiled. Michael. Oh, Mikey.

  “What’s for breakfast?” Mike asked in a Gavin tone of voice.

  “Want some eggs, honey? Where’s Jessica and Nicky?”

  “Are there any pancakes?”

  Coco’s son wanted pancakes. Her seven-year-old son, her oldest child, wanted pancakes. Coco hated making pancakes, hated pushing the ing
redients into the narrow neck of an empty bottle—as prescribed in the shaking method—because later, after negligently letting the residue harden for hours, cleaning the bottle was impossible. But, do it. Do it for Mikey. He doesn’t even know that his father is gone. He has no inkling yet that his life has been spoiled. He doesn’t know what has happened. All he wants is a few pancakes swimming in a lake of sweet syrup.

  My children don’t have a father, Coco thought. My children don’t have a father. But she shouldn’t tell them because any minute now the phone would ring and she’d have to rush and find a baby-sitter so she could meet Gavin somewhere—at Schwartz’s drugstore for breakfast?—to engage in a stormy reconciliation scene leading to a truer, more lasting relationship.

  Go on, she commanded her body. Don’t sit still. Don’t look pathetic in front of that schmuck you blew last night. Don’t look weak. Get up. Make pancakes.

  “Okay,” Coco said. “I’ll make some. But you go get the kids dressed so they’ll be ready to eat. And here, honey, take Josh upstairs with you so he won’t be under my feet.”

  Mike stood up, respectful, honest, sincere, and growing handsome. He reached out high above the table to grasp Joshua, his arms flexing to lift the baby from such an awkward angle (he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother), and something in Coco—was it her soul?—died for a moment and then was resurrected and sanctified so that she could get to her feet, finished now with needing, diverted by the prospect of providing, and she smiled because she had two sons whose arms were wrapped about each other.

  Only Suede, foreigner to feeling, noticed nothing, felt nothing, erased both fact and fantasy with his earth-moving-sized insensitivity.

  “Well,” Suede said again. Eager to move out and yet to avoid any confrontation, he was briefly uncertain as to how to proceed. “Those were good eggs.”

  Coco stretched up toward the cupboard above the stove where she kept the box of pancake mix, and then bent down to find an empty orange-juice bottle beneath the sink, twice exposing the width of her hips and buttocks in the tight Levi’s, which revealed, rather than girdled her and making her humiliation physical as well as psychological. Forget it, she said to herself, crack eggs, pour milk, stir batter. The fry pan is still dirty from the eggs. Wash it. Okay. Think of all the things to do later. Think of all the things to clean, scrape, scour, shine, tighten, repair, refinish, rescrew, fix, sew, glue, paint. Coco felt a growing desire for order. Later … later she could steel-wool all the pots and pans, polish the once-copper-bottomed wedding-gift Revere Ware. Later she could separate the good from the bad silver. Later she would hang up the spatula with the hole in the handle so that it didn’t jam up the utensil drawer. Indeed, she might even replace the long nail to hang potholders that had fallen out of the wall.