Watch Your Mouth (6 page)

able to hear everything, too. My room is directly below this one.”

“Who slept here?” I asked, looking around. “This feels like half a bedroom and half an attic.”

“Well, it’s
all
attic,” Cyn said, “but it’s been a bedroom too. My parents put my old bed in it when they redid my room, back in eighth grade. I slept up here while the workmen built those shelves and laid down carpet and everything. In fact”—here she slid over to me, draping her sweaty hair on my shoulder and both hands in my lap like a napkin—“in fact, it was here that I first heard my parents having sex.”

“Really? Sleeping all those years in the next room and every- thing?”

“Well, I was in eighth grade, so maybe I never knew what I was hearing. Or never paid attention. I just remember sleeping in this room and hearing my parents directly below me, in
my
room. I think they were celebrating the new soft carpet or some- thing.” She stretched; the giraffe found a mate. “It was weird, figuring it out. It was about this time of year, so it was really hot.”

It was indeed. I squinted at her shifting legs, feeling her float around me like the haze of humidity. The giraffes necked above us on the wall as her voice got hazy, her body got hazy, the whole room clouded over. “It was this sort of muted—
cushioned
thumping. And I was right above them. The sound was so
ob- vious
I felt like I was floating right above them. And then I just realized that thing you realize eventually—that your parents had sex and that’s how you were born. I mean, when you think of your mom you don’t think of her having sex. You know? At least, my
mom
. My
dad,
yes, for some reason I can picture him

having sex, but my mom just seems like my
mom,
maternal and everything. But I’m just telling you”—here the rhythm of the aria is broken, so this thematic phrase won’t be missed even by the densest of ticketholders—“you can hear everything that goes on in my room from this room. The room is right on top of
my
room. The
bed
is right on top of
my
bed. That’s all.”

She stopped talking and we looked lazily at each other from across the bed, our come between us like a disputed lake. My body was warmed through at her sex talk; as the house creaked around us in the cooling air I could feel the summer evening’s consummation of the entire house. My room was above hers, my bed above hers, and as the floorboards crackled it felt like our separate bedrooms were going to go at it with the same ferocity of their inhabitants. Cyn watched my interest pique with a wry smile before reaching over and touching the tip with her still-damp finger like she was seeing if the cookies were done. Shrugging she walked over to the closet. On her back I could see the picket fence of leaning against the headboard.

“See?” she said. “There are still some of my clothes here. Just the stuff I never wore.” She pulled out something covered in plastic wrap, muted pink like a fetal mouse. “Gramma gave me this. It made me look like a scoop of strawberry ice cream.”

“Good enough to eat?” I said.

“No,” she said, putting it back. “More like very cold and fattening.”

“But able to melt at any time.”

“Shut
up
. And here’s my bright green vest that was all the rage for ten minutes. And this dress with matching shawl that somebody brought me from Israel. Oh, look! My green flowered bat mitzvah dress! I looked like a shrub.” She stepped into the

closet and bent over like somebody waiting to be spanked. She bobbed her head back up, flamingo-like, wearing a bright or- ange ski cap. “What do you think of
this
?”

“Very nice,” I said. “You look like a ski-bunny centerfold.” She grabbed it off her head and pulled out something else.

“Oh, I
love
this one.” I couldn’t get a look at it because in a brief blur of color she tossed it off the hanger and onto her body, her arms sputtering for a moment as it went over her head like she had fallen into quicksand. Then she turned around and I saw her in it. I’m not going to describe the cut of the dress, or even the color, which I still see on my eyelids whenever I’m tossing and turning, because I feel very strongly that a costume designer should be given as free a rein as possible in designing an excru- ciatingly sexual garment. It wasn’t absurdly obvious like some- thing black that raises curtains at the thigh, or some strict stripe at waist-level that offers the breasts like a pushy caterer. Off the body it would look like something respectable. It covered every- thing, but like wrapping paper you can’t wait to tear off. You can imagine what it looks like. It looks like what you want. I know that deep down you know what I’m talking about.

I felt my lips drizzle with the juice of my gasp. “Wow. That— you look—why don’t you ever wear that?”

She turned around slowly in it. “My father asked me not to.” The music changes. “What?”

“A few days after I bought it my father came upstairs to tuck me in and asked me never to wear it again.”

“Your father came to—”

“Yeah, he did that for years, even when I was in high school.

I miss it sometimes. He asked me not to wear it anymore.”

“Why? It’s perfectly respectable.” I looked at her again. “Sort of.”

Cyn smiled. “Dad never cared much about respectability. He always said that caring too much about society’s rules could lead to—what did he call it—
hypervigilance.
You know, always wor- rying about what’s happening instead of actually doing some- thing.”

“Right,” I said. But it didn’t feel right.

“Yeah. So it wasn’t the respectability. He said it would give him a heart attack. He was really uncomfortable about it. I can understand why; it’s one of the few times I can remember him telling me specifically
not
to do something. But he said as a favor to him. Please stop wearing it. So I put it up here.” She shut the closet door and with a start I saw that the outside of the door had a mirror on it. My own naked body, leaning against the footboard, swung into view. With Cyn standing by the door I could see both sides of the dress, all of her body offered up at once. I wanted to have sex with her. The foreboding music has dissolved back into the sensual themes of the scene’s opening. Cyn followed my gaze to the mirror and our eyes met in the reflection. “Yeah,” she said. “It’s a little creepy to see yourself

when you are going to sleep.”

“But that’s not what
we
could use it for,” I said, getting up and walking to her. I felt the footboard-brand on my back in geometric, sticky dents, and my erection toggled in front of me like I was taking something for a walk. She watched me in the mirror as I approached her, her face so close to the glass that her breath clouded both of our faces. Do you want to know what she looked like? Imagine her now, so you can be as

turned on as I was. Aroused. Picture who you want—hips, mouth, hands, birthmarks, curves and skin and all the features you need to keep you here—because she was who
I
wanted. She was all the features I needed to keep me there. That’s what she looked like, as the cloth of her dress purred against me. With my hands I parted her buttocks so that I could slide thick between them, the folds of the dress cradling me like a ham- mock. She put out one arm to steady herself against the mirror, wiping away the fog. Our eyes met again.

It’s an important point in a romantic relationship when you can talk dirty, out loud. You’ve achieved a state at which you don’t think your lover is going to repeat your sex whispers over coffee with friends and everyone will throw back their heads and laugh at you. Hopefully opera will achieve a state at which outright eroticism can be sung without giggles or scan- dal, because aside from encores in my mind this opera has only been performed once and it seems sort of a waste. We’ll see. Watch.

My hand crept up her dress and one of us unzipped it, de- pending on where the costumer puts the zipper. The dress slid down her body catching for a second where we were pressed together. “Look,” I said. “Watch.” Both my hands crept around her shoulders in the mirror. Her eyes went from my eyes to my hands, where my fingers rested on her collarbones like I was feeling a pulse, which of course I was. “Watch my hands.” Un- steadily she stepped out of the fallen dress. Her hand left the mirror and she put her hands on her own neck, nervous but watching my hands. I took each hand and travelled with them down her chest. “Watch
your
hands.
Our
hands. Watch your breasts.” Our hands travelled to them together, me rubbing her

rubbing herself. She swayed and I stepped to her, sliding against her back like a hungry chair. We moved lower. Watch us. “Watch your nipples. Watch your stomach.” I couldn’t see much of my own body in the mirror but I felt heated, fused into a column as flagrantly symbolic as the posts of the bed, yearning straight up toward the spinning blades of the fan. All the love we were having felt like
mine
, her body caressed by
me.
I could tell by Cyn’s half-lidded eyes, glued on her own hands, that she felt the same way: it was all for ourselves, separate and sexy. I took her hands in mine and led her down, down. “Watch your hips. Watch your thighs.” Our fingers curled together like a last- ditch grip on a building, the villain falling at the end of the movie. “Watch your—”

“Watch your
mouth,
” Cyn said, smiling and disentangling. Shuttered in shadows as the fan kept turning, she strode con- fidently across the room. She turned to me, her mouth hanging open. “I couldn’t stand up any longer,” she said. “Come here.”

“I plan to,” I said, bounding over to stand by the bed.

“
Shut
your mouth,” she said, and shut hers. Now
I
was sway- ing, my body bending in an arc like a fishing pole, having caught something. “Now
I
can’t stand up any longer,” I said, and stag- gered a knee onto the bed.

“On top,” she said, and as usual lowered herself onto me like a wet guillotine after the ritual fumbling with the rubber device that probably won’t make the opera. I moaned something. In the mirror it looked like Cyn was sitting alone, contemplating my severed, staring head, but the music is unmistakable: those curling waves of strings, up and down the fluttering scale, along with thunderous rolls of mallets travelling on upright, quivering cymbals. It’s either sex or a storm at sea and we ain’t on a boat.

Her arms spidered down the mattress to balance herself. “You know,” she said, “it’s a shame we’re going to be together for the rest of our lives.”

I couldn’t answer for a couple of bobs. “It feels pretty good to
me,
” I said.

She smiled. “Not
together,
” she said, italicizing the word with some sort of torque.
“Together.”
And here one of the spiders spun back up and clasped the breast that blocked her heart from view.

“Why?” I said. I reached one hand up and held it on hers, my hand over her hand over her breast and eventually over her heart. “I love you.”

“Oh, Joseph, I love you, too,” she said, toggling forward.
Ex- quisite.
“But I haven’t slept with very many people.”

“Oh,” I said. It was if the red-haired actor stepped into the room. Could I meet him later?

“I want to have all the possible tricks for you,” she said. “I wish I’d learned more before I met you.”

“You’re doing fine,” I said. “Jesus, Cyn, we have incredible— wait!”

A stinging tweak of horns, there and gone.

“Great,” I said again, and we smiled at one another. She leaned forward and dangled a breast into my mouth like Greeks dropping grapes. I munched, briefly. “Don’t you think we teach
each other
enough?”

She tossed her hair; in the mirror it was like some brown bird fluttered by. “But that’s like one of those schools that doesn’t really have teachers, just supervisory adults and the kids learn from one another and it’s all one happy family and blah blah blah.”

We shifted together, like continental plates. Our breath grew hot and weird—earthquake weather. “What are we talking about?” I asked breathlessly.

She shivered away from me and fell back to the bed. The music should invert here, too; I’m not sure how. Still inserted I curled over like a beckoning finger, my legs climbing hers like trenched soldiers advancing. “No, no!” she cried sharply.
Re- treat.
“On top!” Cyn gave me a sweaty grin and we resumed. “I just wish I
knew,
” she said. “I wish I was
sure
I’d had sex with enough people.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. Conversation was getting dif- ficult to carry on as we carried on.

“I just—I’ve only learned about sex from other people who were learning about sex. I feel a little empty. I feel, I don’t know, a void. The void of—I don’t know, if it weren’t so traumatic I think I should have learned about sex from somebody older, and experienced. Except that obviously that would be psycho- logically weird. That’s why—no, stop that, listen to me—” She grabbed my hand from behind her and put it back on the bed firmly. “That’s why in many ways learning about sex from my father would have been perfect.”

Here it is again: T.U.D. The Unknown Dread, this time with trombones and bassoons as Joseph performs a brief soliloquy:
She can’t possibly be saying what I hear her saying.
Chord.
What I hear her saying.
Chord.
It is not possible.
Chord. It’s dead quiet except for the rustle of rude playbills.

“Sex with—”

“My dad.
One’s
dad. I don’t know.”

“I think,” I said, stiff and stiffly, “that one would feel an enormous sense of shame.”

“Not shame,” she corrected. “Probably
guilt.
” She leaned back her head and looked down at me like a nude judge. She licked her lips and quoted something, I don’t know what. “ ‘Guilt says I
made
a mistake, shame says I
am
a mistake. And I’m not a mistake.’ ”

“Not a mistake,” I repeated, the same notes but a different register.

“Right,” she smiled. “So I’d probably feel some
guilt,
the power of society telling me I made a mistake.” At this point the music should say:
What?
“I mean, I know there’s a big
thing
against it.” She thrust herself against my trembling hips, pinning me to the bed. “But all behavior exists within a social and cul- tural context. Imagine if there wasn’t a
thing.
It makes a lot of sense, educationally. Usually a girl and her father grow apart as a woman is developing sexually.” She dangled one of her sec- ondary sex characteristics into my mouth again, which was gap- ing open. “The mother is usually the one who teaches about periods, and the father doesn’t know what to do. I think that’s why he was so weird about the dress.” She tossed her head back to the discarded dress, curled up near the mirror like shed skin. “It showed off my puberty. But if the father were traditionally responsible for teaching someone the ropes, so to speak”—here she grinned at me, in reference to a brief bondage experiment we’d tried back in bleary March—“then I could learn so much from somebody. And you would pass it on to your children. I mean, my father is an attractive man, fit, and—”