Our Country Friends(55)
“Goddamnit it,” he said. “Why do you have to be like this? You’re so bellicose.” Dee thought of her mother, the angry way she flirted with policemen and magistrates and bill collectors. Bellicose. But it was too late for her to change the basic formula. Someone like Ed made sense for her. He cooked well; he spoke nicely; he would, as they used to say without irony, take good care of her. So why, besides “being central to the culture,” as Senderovsky had once described him, was she here with this man?
“I’m helping you,” she said. “I’m chipping away at the algorithm. I’m making you feel less special about yourself for being quote-unquote in love with me. Because Karen or no Karen, there’s nothing special about your feelings. The world is burning up, if you haven’t noticed. We’re all Generation L now.”
“Go ahead, quote your boyfriend. The only reason you like him is that you’re not intimidated by him.”
“Who wants to be intimidated?”
“People should be intimidated. Love should be a scary thing. We should tremble in its presence. Or else you end up like Sasha and his wife.”
“You mean your girlfriend.”
“Please. We’re all just trying to pass the time.”
“Unbelievable.”
“You know what I overheard him say once to his agent? He called me ‘the honey-eyed man with the rotten soul.’ This was before I touched his wife.”
“And you let that get to you? Sasha’s career peaked so long ago I can hardly remember what all the hullabaloo was about. Russia something-something.”
“Like you haven’t read his pilot script. Like that’s not why you’re here.”
“No, I’m not a spaniel who does as told. Though if I were you, I would just do this fucking show with him and get it over with. Not like your career’s going anyplace special these days either. I looked up the reviews for München am Hudson and Terabyte. Jesus.”
“Great. Thanks for that. And now you just want to fuck to get this over with, too, don’t you?”
“That’s life. It moves forward. To its logical conclusion.”
“You’re going to fuck me without any pleasure.”
“That’s entirely up to you.”
He grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around. “No,” she said. “Don’t even try it like that.”
“I wasn’t trying—” He let go of her shoulders. “You know what?” he said. “I’m supposed to be the Actor, but I’m the only one of you who’s not acting all the time. I’m the only one who’s not just copying or imitating. Because that’s now what my craft calls for. Look at you bunch. The Russian writer. The soulful Brahmin. Asian Brideshead Revisited. And you. The drunk Southern fireball.”
“Take off that filthy wet T-shirt,” she said. “How stupid to dress like that on a cold day. While there’s a virus floating around. You want to impress me? You think I don’t know what your body looks like? We all know what your body looks like. Hooray for having a nice body.”
He started to take his T-shirt off, but managed to rip it under the armpits in the process. “People can see us,” he said, nodding at the road curving before the theater space.
“And that bothers you?” she said. “The whole world’s a stage.”
“?‘Actors show us the true face of the world,’?” he said.
“What?”
He pointed to the sign above them.
“Off with the jeans,” she said.
“No.”
“No?” She avoided his little boy’s gaze, the trembling of his eyes. “Fine,” she said. She unbuttoned his jeans, one by one by one. With his underwear halfway down around his ankles, he looked trapped in the moment. But he was also erect, and the triangle of his pubis had grown in especially dark. If she ignored the look on his face, she could be with a man.
After she had taken off her fleece, he noticed the perfection of her body, skin still taut and young, along with a gloomy pink bra that seemed a size too large. The sweatpants came off like a sheath. The underwear was different from the bra, filigreed, and now he wanted her warmth more than anything. What could he take and what had to be given away? “I go down on you?” he asked. “Or?”
She rolled to her side, looking away from him. He spooned her, hands on her bra, awkwardly massaging her breasts. This was the best part, she thought. Skin to skin. She did not look into his eyes or try to understand the smell of his hair, the awful conditioner he used on his Samsonian locks. There was a delicious loneliness to the hands on her bra not daring to go beneath the straps but also the warm, panting bulk of a man behind her, his breath professionally sweet against her earlobe. She tucked aside her panties—Panties, he thought to himself, registering the miracle of them and the miracle of their absence—then guided him inside and he smiled when he heard the familiar sound of entry.
She hadn’t realized how hard the wooden planks of the pollen-covered floor would feel against her hip (for sure, there would be a bruise, a memento to be examined in the shower, if there was any water left tonight), and now her eyes settled on an old Nerf football, long abandoned by the likes of ?mercan Güldal and Jo?o Sousa, the teeth marks of a local possum still visible against its tender skin. And the graffiti everywhere, these kids proclaiming themselves for the next generation of campers, a generation that would never come. This was all part of the moment that she was inhabiting, alongside the billions of moments that constituted the daily madness of the planet. She pushed harder against him, felt her buttocks against his soft hairless flanks, wanting to give him something extra of herself, maybe even to prove that love was still possible. Her breath was fog in the pregnant air.