Shelby (8 page)

“Uh … five hundred?”

“
Five hundred
!”

“I meant five hundred thousand.”

“Try nine million. Nine fucking million. And you know why?”

“Um … I'd have to think about it.”

“Because they were different. Because they stood up for what they believed in. What that means, Shel, is that if you were dull, if you were subversive, you lived. If you were an original thinker, you were burned at the stake, Imagine the genetic void of brilliance that was left by that?”

“Hey, Lucy?”

“Yeah.”

“About yesterday—”

“Don't worry about it.”

“But I—”

“Shit, I'm late! I got to go. Give me a call soon, okay?”

“Lucy, how do you feel about pre-marital sex?”

“Good or bad?”

“I'm asking you.”

“I'm really late. Call me.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

I did. But it was another twenty calls and two days after that before I got hold of her again. I had no idea where she'd been and I didn't ask. It was ten after nine on a gray Sunday morning and I woke her up. She wasn't overly friendly but I was able to wrangle a lunch date at the Alma Street Cafe for later that day. It opened my eyes.

In the middle of pancakes and fruit and muffins and coffee we started talking about God and divine inspiration, and then began name dropping our own heros. My mentioning of William Blake and the episode with Christmas future that took place with the teacher in the auditorium when I wrote the MCAT and then quit school was greeted with enthusiasm—as were all other poetical references. Science did not fare so well.

“Newton?” she said. “He's a total asshole.”

“Pardon?”

“Him and his buddies; assholes.”

I chuckled and picked up my orange juice. “I think you have him mixed up with someone else.”

“I think you do, dick-head. Copernicus, Gallileo … Bacon. The Scientific Method. They've sanctioned world rape. They make the Serbs look like fuckin' saints.”

“I … I don't know what you mean.”

“Then don't laugh at me like a dick-head.”

“I didn't.”

“Let me tell you something, ass wipe. The Scientific Method is the reason we're twenty minutes from being a fucking fossil footnote.”

“Really?”

“Shel, if you solve problem B with experiment A, you better damn well know what C is.”

“C?” I said meekly, avoiding eye contact. Lucy's voice had attracted attention throughout the resturant.

“Chernobyl is C.”

“Hm.”

“The Hiroshima survivors are C. Women with PCBs in their breast milk are C. Frogs with fucked up genitalia are C. The repercussions, Shel. Newton didn't care shit about repercussions.”

Our eyes fastened and I became self-consciously aware of both embarrassment over the staring patrons and my loins pulsating in needy throbs at her display of passion. “Crumpet?” was my lame retort.

After the outburst, the meal actually proceeded along with laughter and affection, and walking back to Lucy's apartment beneath a thin drizzle, I could feel the walls of my heart crumbling as would a small sea port in a typhoon; all protection gone, I surrender. Mount me on the sidewalk.

Sitting on the couch, Lucy laid her hands upon me with the warmth of a faith healer. My eyes filled with grateful tears that I hid. Later, with the blinds down in her bedroom, we lay on her bed and I shook. Her kisses were smokey but I was unoffended; dazed, in fact, to be with a lover that wanted to be there—that wanted me to be there!—that took control. It was also an added bonus to be with an older, beautiful woman—out of my league, if you will. In the turn of a short phrase I was protected, and Lucy was on top of me, offering soothing words of encouragement. Just as the head of my erection touched for the first time a woman's juices, I uncontrollably blurted: “Oh my! I'm about to be taken!”

I was in. It didn't last long but it was magical just the same. In short, I transcended religious guilt and subsequently abandoned all I was worth to the woman I loved.

“You okay?” she said in the dim light.

“Wonderful,” I said, unable to unclench my body. Lucy bent down and kissed me before climbing off. We lay in silence; no words, no cigarettes, just breathing. I felt deep empathy for those clowns who have sex without love. I thought of my parents and their separate beds and hoped that my dropping out of school wouldn't hurt them too much. I thought of Gran and how much I loved her. I thought of Minnie and wished her well. I thought about Derek and his well-defined chest. My condom started slipping off so I reached down and held it on. Lucy suggested we shower. I agreed, wholeheartedly in voice, tentatively in spirit, and let her get out of bed first for fear of having her gander at my boniness. She turned on the light. Never had I seen her naked in a well lit room before. She had a remarkable body.

I followed her into the bathroom (about a minute behind) and turned off the light. We didn't make love in the shower. In darkness I loofahed her back.

“Lucy,” I said, “I'm embarrassed to say this but your body is well sculpted.”

Lucy laughed. “What does that mean?”

“Statuesque.”

“Well … it pays the rent.”

“What does that mean?”

“I'm a dancer.”

“I didn't know that.”

“I thought I told you.”

“I thought you were a psychic.”

“I'm that, too—about once a month and fading. But I pay my rent dancin'.”

“You leave me perpetually amazed. First accepting me into your fold. Now you're telling me you're a diva … a ballerina.”

“Actually a stripper,” she said.

“A stripper?”

“Is that a problem?”

“I … I don't think so. Do you enjoy doing it?”

“It's good money,” she said.

“Hm.”

We were silent for the rest of the shower. I didn't know what to say. On the one hand, I was titillated in that Lucy's job was about sex. Shelby Lewis was dating an exotic dancer. If I'd had friends to tell, they'd have been shocked. On the other hand, the thought of men ogling her every move and then masturbating in public urinals was disconcerting.

We made dinner together—another vegetable stir fry casserole with a little too much ginger. Conversation remained sparse.

Returning to bed neither of us moved. The new awareness of her employment seemed to have put additional pressure on me as a partner.

“Night,” I muttered.

“What's going on?”

“I'm just so sleepy.”

“I'm the same person, Shel. Take off the fuckin' Vaseline lens. I don't have time for this shit.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Don't bullshit me.”

“I—”

“I mean it. If you're fucked up 'cause I'm a pealer you can go to hell.”

“Lucy … I … oh god, how can
I
judge? My primordial instincts barking out of the Dark Ages. Please forgive me. I can't imagine anyone more disappointing to God than me.
So
you're a stripper? Whitman exalts the form and so do you!”

“I do it for cash.”

“Nonetheless, look at me: I'm uneducated and un … un …”

“—happy?”

“Happy … and un …”

“—comfortable?”

“Comfortable … and un …”

“—usual?”

We both laughed. “Lucy, I apologise. I am grateful to be sharing this time with you.”

Lucy took my hand in hers and squeezed. “Come here, my little ex–virgin,” she said. We embraced, and sometime thereafter we slept.

We woke up rotating in time. In a dusky daze I was motioned onto my backside as Lucy positioned herself on top of me, balanced herself and inserted me as she deemed appropriate. I smiled a sleepy, half dreaming smile, my engorged penis, confused at first, gradually finding comfort in what reminded me of a fully inflated water wing. Lucy dropped her hands on my shoulders and accelerated her motion. All at once reality smacked me on the face.

“Stop!” my head screamed.

The virgin and the stripper were exchanging body fluids.

“Stop!” I closed my eyes and covered them with my hands; my pelvis pulsating up and down like a wounded animal.

“Stop!” The stripper's history was now the virgin's history.

“
Stop for Christ's sake
!”

Scenes flashed through my mind.

Test results.

Hospital beds.

Hanging I.V.'s.

Wheelchairs.

Visiting hours.

AIDS.

AIDS.

AIDS.

And through it all I just kept pumping.

When it was over I lay in silence, the darkness my only protection. Then came the self-loathing part. Lucy softly stroked my ugly chest.

“You okay?” she said quietly.

“Me? Yeah, fine,” I said as thankfully as I could without giving away the lie. My body ached with an internal scream—and there the scream remained.

Lucy's breathing quickly deepened and I could see the angle of her face silhouetted by a streak of light that had crept in through the partially open blind. I reached over her, lifted the blind a little higher and looked out. It was the moon. It didn't move. It didn't even react. It just hung there offering light for free. “Say something!” I yelled from inside my head. The moon didn't answer. The moon didn't have to.

VII

O rottenness! O monstrous life!

—
St. Augustine

Day one at the sausage factory consisted of eight hours up to my armpits in entrails while putrid slabs of pig with the smell of death hung all around me. After a couple of minutes I made a vow to never eat sausages again. Two hours later I made a vow to never
eat
again. Sitting through lunch watching supposedly intelligent employees inhaling foodstuffs from a huge pot of outhouse-smelling chili dried up my intestinal lining.

By midafternoon my olfactory tract shut down. All I could think about was Lucy. My feminist saviour had turned out to be something far different. On coffee break number two I checked my mouth for sores. There was one. Just before the end of the day I slipped on some slop and, in an attempt to maintain balance, splattered the ground-up, diseased bowel of a heifer across my cheek and lips and down my tie. I dry-gagged and a co-worker let out a jolly laugh.

After work, while the rest of the employees chewed on old meat and bellowed out their nightly good-byes, I thanked Uncle Mannfred and Auntie Carol for the opportunity to work at their factory and apologised for my inability to commit to such a fine profession. There was nothing else I could do. Their reaction punched me right in the sternum. Uncle Mannfred was standing off to Auntie Carol's right, leaning against the frame of the office door, his moribund frown indicating he was close to tears. Auntie Carol seemed disappointed but understanding. Without me even having to ask, she disappeared into a back room for a couple of minutes before returning with a check for $56. My first and last day and they were already treating me like family. Joel (one of the workers) had mentioned during a coffee break that they'd been trying unsuccessfully to have a child for the past seven years. Infertility. Now they were attempting to adopt but bureaucratic barriers were blocking their every move. If it ever works out, I envy that kid. Auntie Carol oozed maternal instinct. So did Uncle Mannfred for that matter. They were so passionate about their sausage making I feared I was passing up the chance of a lifetime. As I pulled out of the parking lot, they simultaneously wished me well and then waved, with five or six employees following suit.

Arriving home, I collapsed on the pull-out couch, closed my eyes and reminisced about being lost in the short-lived throngs of passionate lovemaking. An errant whiff of weiner seasoning on my hands shut that memory down, and my heart sank at not having worn a condom; there was something grossly immoral about being connected with every lover she'd ever had. Then again, I reasoned, I was in love and prepared to see it through any nightmare.

I called Gran and it was wonderful to hear her voice. When I told her about my day at the sausage factory, she laughed with such gusto she dropped the phone. Henceforth in the conversation I was referred to as “Little Smokey.” I further confessed to her that my exam marks would be shattering to Mom and Dad and that I had no intentions of returning to university come September.

“Don't expect me to tell them,” she said. She knew I knew what she meant. That was her way of keeping a secret.

That evening, darkness fell slowly upon the city, the night unsure of whether or not it was late spring or early summer. Thoughts of Lucy and joblessness and future outlook and unprotected sex with a stripper had pummelled me into a corner. I decided, much as I often did in my simpler days frolicking through university, to go out walking.

By eight forty-five I was standing on the corner of Broadway and Granville waiting for a bus downtown. Attractive women were on both my flanks. I smiled confidently and puffed up, reasoning that sex with Lucy might be causing me to be giving off a different aura. I turned to the woman on my left. She was well made up. I nodded and smiled.

“Wonderful night,” I said. She replied with a blank stare bordering on disgust.

On the bus I thought about how there once was a time when practicality was the key ingredient behind choosing a mate. How effective are her childbearing hips? How easily can he pin a cave bear? Then some ten thousand years ago the first sedentary civilizations cropped up along the River Tigris and people suddenly had time to examine their spouses' physical properties, much as one would study a Monet in the Louvre. Overnight, natural selection became a question of cheek bone structure and charm and the width of one's lips. Homely intellects like myself were ostracized to perpetual bachelorhood, expected to update primitive tools and the like. And here we are today filling up our secondary sexual characteristics with silicone and exercising to improve calf definition while the planet—sadly, still the only one known to harvest this thing called life—goes up in smoke.