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LEE: Bitch.
GAYL: You like it like that.
§
My dad was taking Jeff to his overnight hockey tournament. I was making dinner for Elijah. I had an old recipe book of my mom’s, a yellow binder with quick leek quiche and spaghetti and meatballs, all these family standards. My mother’s writing marked up the margins: Neil likes onions. Jeff finds carrots too hard. Jody and Myra eat broccoli in this.
I decided to make the whole dinner the day before: unpacking the meat, frying garlic, two onions, boiling in a couple of cans of skinned-out tomatoes, a cinnamon stick, bay leaf, five peppercorns. Add one cup of wine. Less, if the kids. When I measured the spaghetti for boiling I cooked enough for five – our old number around the table. But my mom and Jody had fled the coop. Dad and Jeff would be gone for the night. I was a lone Hegelian, with a horny pig’s tail, a self-conscious slave. I drank our last bottle of burgundy, masturbating, coming ten times in a row.
§
Aaron was drunk, he told me on the phone to warn me. I did not want to see him just because we’d fucked but he basically forced me to see him because he said it wasn’t fair that I wouldn’t see him, like I’d just been with him and how could I not see him after what we did together?
When I got to his room on the third floor, Aaron’s eyes were dim grey, like the light had blown out in a bulb. He was laughing at his book, Gravity and Grace.
‘“Base feelings, envy, resentment are degraded energy,”’ Aaron read out loud. ‘Come over here, baby. Does anyone call you baby?’
He stunk extremely of smoke and beer. Aaron looked up at me so needy that it made me really squirm. He was holding a pipe. He was going to light it.
‘I don’t think you need that,’ I said.
‘I’m insatiable, don’t you know that?’
I felt sorry for him. Aaron lit the pipe. His cheeks got hollow sucking in. I sat down beside him. He was insatiable for drugs. He wasn’t insatiable like I was insatiable. The thing was, he would’ve been so easily satisfied. I knew I could’ve done it too, just by kissing him or something. He would’ve been so happy.
‘Why didn’t tell me you were with someone else?’
‘What do you mean?’ It was my first instinct to lie.
‘Lee told me.’
Aaron read my silence. He sucked in some more. Fuck. Lee was like Jen and Charlene? Aaron had three paperbacks on the crate beside his mattress. One was called The Violent Bear it Away. Flannery O’Connor. Those three books were for me.
‘Myra, don’t you have anything to say?’
‘The violent bear it away.’
Aaron cursed on an exhale. Then he started to whine. ‘First, Wils, like, told me about Chris calling you titillating, all right? Next Lee tells me about you and this American dude. Some fucking Rasta? That’s just fucked up. It’s baffling. I mean, I was the first one to find you.’
‘Find me?’
‘Yeah. It’s a fucking travesty.’
‘What are you talking about?’
Aaron opened a can of beer. He pointed to the one beside it for me. I didn’t want it.
‘Look. I know you think about fucking all the time.’
He seemed so hurt. I could not speak. It’s true that that was what I was thinking about. My essay had evolved into thinking about fucking. You could be raped a thousand times and still be a virgin. I was writing about fucking by a master and fucking as a slave, about Hegel, the comfort women and teenage porno stars. Ms. Bain and Mr. Rotowsky could fail me, I didn’t care. I’d pass just with the bibliography. I was compiling a list of every single book I’d read or that I wanted to read that was about power and sex. High school should have a whole fucking course on just this. I was helping the school make curriculum.
Aaron lay on his back on a lumpy stained pillow, holding his beer. ‘I’m smarter than you think, Myra. I know you don’t wanna sleep with just me. I bet you probably want to sleep with Wils too. It’s okay, you’re young. I know ... ’
His eyes couldn’t stop closing. I felt sorry for him. I took the can of beer from his hand.
‘You’re beautiful, Myra. Not titill ... titillit ... titillat
ing ... ’
