Looking for Mr. Goodbar (20 page)

“Hi, hon,” he said. “Sorry I’m late.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “I fell asleep.”

He had a proprietary air that she got a kick out of. He dropped his leather jacket on her desk as though he owned both the jacket and the desk, bussed her cheek loudly, flopped down on the bed, pulled off his boots (the object that fell out was a switchblade knife, she could see now) and stretched out.

“Boy, I’m bushed.” But he began drumming on his chest with his fingers. He reached back and turned on the radio, waited to get the feel of the song that was on, and then began moving his arms, and his legs as well, with the music.

“Want some wine?”

“Ah, I dunno. What else you got?”

“Nothing much. Orange juice.”

“No beer, huh?”

“No.” She was about to say that one of them could run out and get some but he didn’t really seem all that interested in the beer.

“Uh . . . okay. Wine.”

“Jesus,” he said, when she’d brought the wine and glasses and he’d propped all the pillows under himself, “what a day.”

“What happened?”

“It didn’t stop. There was no one or two rush hours, it just went on and on all day.”

“What went on all day?”

The garage. He worked in a parking garage in midtown. She had to know that. She didn’t? Crazy. He worked in a parking garage while he was waiting to get back his license as a horse trainer that he’d lost for some dumb reason. It would take him three years to get it back. That was the only thing in the world he really wanted to do. He must’ve told her.

“Anyhow, this really great-looking chick pulls in with a white Continental. In front of her is this beat-up black Volks that gets all uptight because every guy in the lot is trying to get to the Continental first. Meanwhile there’s this red Chevy Nova trying to.” He continued with an incredible elaborate description, by player and position, reminding her for all the world of her father and Patrick going over the baseball game in their ritual fashion. As soon as he finished the description he began his finger tapping again.

“How come you lost your license?”

“How come you ask so many questions?”

“Sorry. Ignore the question.”

“Dope.”

For a moment she thought he was still calling her names; then she realized he was talking about drugs.

“What kind of dope were you taking?”

“Boy,” he said, “you’re so dumb you’re almost lovable. C’m’ere.”

She put her wine on the floor and moved to him so that his arm was cradling her. He made her get up to give him more wine a second later, then she settled back.

“Buh, buh buh buh,” he said to the music. He didn’t seem at all interested in making love to her but that was all right, she was contented to just lie there for now, and wait. Except that she was very excited.

“Here,” he said, “I’ll show you something.” He held out his arm, the wine tilting precariously in the glass. “Roll up my sleeve.” She rolled it up and he showed her his tracks, which she would never have seen if she hadn’t understood what he meant to show her.

“Come on, Tony,” she said, “I’m not
that
dumb.” But she was enjoying the role. Funny, he was the first one she hadn’t told she was a teacher. There’d been no conscious strategy behind the omission but tonight it
had
occurred to her to put away the school stuff before he came. He might be turned off by it. By the suggestion of authority, perhaps, or even intelligence. Not that the teachers she knew were such geniuses, but still . . .

“What are they, then?” he challenged.

“Needle marks.”

“Tracks,” he corrected.

“Tracks.”

The phone rang and she picked it up. It was Evelyn. Apologizing for calling at this hour but she needed to talk. Terry said she was sorry, she couldn’t talk right now, she’d call back in the morning before she left for work, and hung up.

“Who was that?” Tony asked.

“Now who’s nosy?” she asked.

He got interested in her for the first time. He turned to look at her. She felt shy; she had no idea of how she looked to him. He sat up, rolled up her sweater. But in a strange way. Not as though he was excited and wanted to touch her but as though he were considering whether to become excited. He examined her breasts. One hand still held the wine glass. With the other he played with one nipple, then the other, smiling when they got hard. She was excited but she was also embarrassed. She thought of how he’d kept saying, “You like that, huh?” when he was making love to her. It was one thing to sin and another to enjoy it so thoroughly. One of the characteristics of acts like cursing and petty thievery was that you never really enjoyed them because what was on your mind the whole time you were doing them was what the priest would say if you really confessed. (Masturbating was in a class by itself, too terrible to confess, and so both pleasure and guilt mounted indefinitely until you had to stop for a while lest you explode.)

He spilled a little wine onto one of her nipples, bent over and sucked it off.

She closed her eyes. Some of the wine trickled down her side and onto the blanket but she couldn’t worry about it just then. With his fingers he painted the other nipple, then the whole breast with the wine, then sucked that off. She was enormously excited and wanted to pull him down to her but she was afraid that if she moved at all he would withdraw from her. She opened her eyes. He was looking at her breasts as though trying to decide what to do to them next. He was doing his “buh buh buh buh” to the music from the radio. Without turning over she reached back, groping for the light. He told her to leave it on; she brought her hand back to the pillow, some useless tool she’d only thought of using.

“Take off your jeans.”

She opened her fly and pulled them down, wriggling out of them without getting off her back. He waved at her flowered bikini pants to signal that those were to go, too. She slipped them down, feeling nauseated by her own shame and desire. He inspected her as though she were a piece of pale freckled meat and he was a government inspector. She closed her eyes again. Felt him painting her public hair with the wine. She waited to feel his lips on her again but instead felt the cold splash of wine between her legs.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she screamed, bolting to a sitting position, trembling with rage and fighting back tears at the same time.

He grinned at her like a bad boy caught doing something he’d known was wrong but he hadn’t realized anyone else knew.

“Look what you did, you crazy son of a bitch,” she screamed, pointing to the quilt between her legs, her beautiful quilt, soaked with wine that looked, because of where it was, like menstrual blood.

“Hey,” he said, “what’s you screaming about?”

“What’d you do it for?”

“Hey,” he said again, softly, coming on sexually now, “relax. Some girls really dig that.”

“Dig what?”
But she felt her anger slipping away from her. “Having their bed ruined?”

“Uh uh. Here. I’ll show you.” Very sexy now. Turning over to put the wineglass down on the floor, returning to her without his tinted eyeglasses. Gently pushing her back down on the bed, now playing with the wet hairs, sucking them as she’d thought he was going to before. Eating the lips of her vagina and very slowly, too slowly, sticking his tongue, then his finger, then his tongue, then his finger into her. She moaned with pleasure until he finally stuck his finger in all the way without taking away his tongue. She was reaching for him, trying to hold him, but he was too far down on her. And he was dressed. Her face was next to his feet in their smelly socks. She pulled off the socks and let them fall on the floor.

“Don’t stop,” she whispered.

With his help she got off his pants, fondled his penis, which was huge and hard. She wanted him to come up to where she was and get into her but he kept doing what he’d been doing and so she began doing the same thing for him. Playing with his penis, kissing it, finally sucking it a little. She’d never done that to anyone before and it felt strange. Pleasant but not quite right. In her imaginings of that same act the penis had been soft and fit into her mouth easily, while in point of fact it was much too big to do that and she had to be careful that he didn’t thrust too far in and make her gag. Now she was coming. She didn’t want to come because she was afraid he would and if she had to swallow his come she would throw up, but she didn’t know how to get her mouth out from around his penis without having him stop what he was doing to her. She couldn’t bear it if he stopped right now. She made an attempt to get him to switch around but his response to this was to thrust into her throat more deeply. She gagged but he kept doing it and she got really frightened and then all of a sudden he was coming and she was gagging and heaving, a nightmare
from which she couldn’t rescue herself, it just seemed to go on and on and on. Then, mercifully, just when she was sure she was going to choke to death, he stopped and got soft. She pulled away from him and buried her face in the quilt and spat out what she could, coughing. She moved her face to a dry spot on the quilt.

She thought that if she could have one wish granted at that moment it would be to die instantly. She was fairly certain she would never raise her head from that quilt again. Certainly not while he was there. Certainly she could never meet his eyes again. Or listen to . . . the radio was blaring some particularly loud and inane group. Without raising her head she groped for the dial, turned it off, found the wire and pulled the plug out of the wall so he couldn’t turn it on again.

“What was that for?” he asked, sounding innocent of any reason that she might be angry with him.

She didn’t answer. If he would just go away. Vanish. Disappear. She could never look at him or speak to him again.

She was getting cold now and she wanted to be under the quilt in the warmth and the darkness, but she was afraid to move. With difficulty, without taking her face out of the quilt, she edged up into the top corner of the bed and squirmed her way under.

“Hey,” he said, “what’s going on?”

Make him go away. Make it so I don’t have to do anything, let him just go.

“Hey! Whosie! Terry!”

He knew her name. It just took a while. Maybe she should be glad she wasn’t just some anonymous mouth he’d come into. No. It would have been better if they’d been someplace else and he didn’t know her name and she could run away now.

“Is anythinga matter?”

Just go away.
The taste in her mouth made her feel sick all over again when she became aware of it. If she only had a pickle to suck on. Or a lemon. Something strong and sour to drive away this taste. She could feel his moving toward her on the bed. She was
rigid. Then he was over her, trying to see her face, gently pulling down the quilt so he could see all of it. She hoped he couldn’t see how tightly her eyes were closed.

“Ter?”

He kissed her cheek and at the same time pushed the hair off her forehead, the motion so soft and tender that she nearly burst into tears.

“You mad at me?”

Without opening her eyes she shook her head.
What was she supposed to do?
What could she tell him? He seemed to really not know what he’d done to her. Maybe this was a usual thing to him. Maybe she was crazy! She remembered the force with which he’d driven into her mouth, her throat, and shuddered.

“You cold?”

She nodded. He wrapped himself around her quilt-covered body.

Maybe it hadn’t been that much force. Maybe it had seemed worse from her side because she hadn’t wanted it. Maybe if she’d tried to
tell
him instead of struggling in a way he could misinterpret.

“That better?”

She nodded again.

“Okay if I get under the quilt?”

She couldn’t tell him it was okay.

“I know you don’t feel like talking,” he said gently. “But tell me if it ain’t okay.”

Since she didn’t respond he got under the quilt and again wrapped himself around her. He was so warm, so soft and so smooth that she wanted him to stay there forever, never to move or talk to her or make her look at him. Nor was there any way she could reconcile this desire with the way she’d felt about him a few minutes earlier. With the way she felt
now,
actually, except that somehow it had gotten pushed into her mind. Not even her mind. Her
eyes.
She was
seeing
the way she’d felt before while all
she was feeling now was the pleasure of having him hold her. She considered opening her eyes so the
image
of how she’d felt would be replaced by the room’s solid objects, but then it didn’t seem worth it because the image wasn’t even that painful any more. She was looking at it through the wrong end of a telescope and it was very far away.

He lifted her hair and kissed the back of her neck. He reached around under her arm so that he was holding her breasts. He began moving gently back and forth against her. She felt his penis growing bigger between her legs and realized, after a while, that she was moving back and forth against him, too, and that her whole body was warm and excited and that once again she wanted him in her. But then the very desire brought back a
feeling
memory of the last time and she froze briefly, then tried to move away from him. Except at the moment she did that he gently pressed her abdomen back against him so that his penis almost naturally without help slipped into her. Then he began slowly moving around inside her and almost instantly she began coming, her whole body heaving with pleasure. He kept his arms tightly around her and pumped inside her, and it was so incredibly good that she thought, as she threw off the quilt because she was burning up, that she wouldn’t be able to stand it. Finally she stopped coming and he stopped moving although he was still big inside her.

“You like that, huh?” he whispered.

She reached back and brushed the hair away from her neck, which was wet with perspiration. He blew on her neck. She smiled.

“Still not talkin’ to me?”

Talking was so much more complicated than making love . . . fucking, she should call it, since it was hard to see how anything she did with him could be about love. To talk with people you had to ignore the way you felt and speak from the front of your face . . . or else go through the effort of distilling those feelings into something that made some kind of sense, was acceptable in some way. That was what words did, really, make some kind of order out of
the dark jumble of feelings and perceptions and nightmares inside you. And there was no way to do that in this situation. No way to explain in an orderly fashion how, without being drunk, stoned or out of her mind, she was having the most incredible sexual pleasure of her life with someone who at best amused her, and at worst frightened her half to death.