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We both collapse in an abbreviated hug, her head to my belly, until I become too scared of being so exposed in a public building.
“You don’t mind my calling you Peach?” I ask.
“I like it. Almost as much as I like you,” she says. “This was a good idea you had,” she continues.
This is where I’m most afraid. What if it’s only been a lark for her and nothing more? God, please, I promise to be good, if you don’t make that so, I pray silently.
“I want to see you again,” I tell her.
“God, I hope so,” she replies, “but can we do it someplace besides this library, my God this floor is too hard!”
We pick each other up laughing, and walk out arm in arm.
That is, after I’m zipped and buttoned again.
Chapter Two
Peach moves in with me. I have the bigger apartment. I tell her when I’m helping her pack that it might be better if we stayed in hers. “It’s cozier.”
“Believe me,” she says, with one of her huge planters in her arms, “bigger is better. Less likely we’ll tire of each other soon.”
I know that I’ll never tire of her. I can watch her for hours. I’m not like her at all, that bubbly and infectious, with an easy attitude. She’s funny the way she takes charge without people thinking she’s a bitch. She makes me laugh, and cry.
We weep together when an old boyfriend dies with too much coke in his blood. She tells me that’s why she won’t love men anymore. “They are just too risky. They can’t take care of themselves, and when bad things happen to them, I feel guilty.”
“You don’t feel that way with women?” I ask.
“We’re much more self sufficient. We can take care of ourselves, especially emotionally. Oh yeah, we’ll cry when we’re hurt, but that’s the point, we’ll cry and then go on. Men are too fragile for me; I just end up busting their balls, and I hate weak men, so it’s better I find my equal in a woman.”
That’s the sum total of her philosophy of life.
She doesn’t need more. All she needs is a place to put her emotions, no matter what they are. And believe me they are plenty, plenty big and plenty various and plenty crazy at times. Living with Peach is like living on one long roller-coaster ride.
Me, I’m very inside myself, given to fits of melancholy. I’m looking for spiritual passage through my cunt. I figure that God’s got to have planned it this way for me, since he gave me such an active one. With Peach it’s all in her Solar Plexus, her emotions. With me, it’s got to be the cunt.
She says she can’t believe the crazy things I think about and write about and daydream endlessly about. She says they’re extraordinary! She says it with such exuberance. I’ve been writing my stories for years, and finally found someone to appreciate them.
When she reads about “God and my cunt”, she laughs. She must laugh for ten minutes straight, tears rolling down her cheeks. I can’t stop her.
Then I’m in tears because I think, she thinks, I’m stupid.
“Hey, putz, it’s quaint,” she finally says.
“Quaint?” I snap at her.
“Yeah quaint, and it makes sense. What do you feel when you’re having an orgasm, some kind of spiritual high?” she asks. “I mean I feel really, really good, but it’s very physical. Am I missing something?”
“It’s not like that,” I tell her.
“So?”
“It’s like,” I muse for awhile and make her wait, she loves the drama of it and so do I. “It’s like, I’m never not with my cunt…” I fish for words.
“Of course, you’re not without it, it’s between your legs,” she points out the obvious, as if I haven’t already figured that out.
“That’s not what I mean,” I tell her. “Will you shut up so I can explain?”
She pouts and I ignore her.
