When Paul gets a load of the set-up—the shag, the dark, the mirror, the levitating silver band and the tiny creature in earphones and oversized cat’s-eye sunglasses, her white hair blooming barrettes and ribbons, her forehead beaming a white horn—he whispers, “Oh, wow,” in a reverential voice that, for Marcia, shrivels all his previous raptures.
They stand just inside the door, which was open. The instant Paul speaks, Joan spins around and whacks them with the beam.
“Joanie, this is Paul,” Marcia says softly.
Joan stops the tape, then mimics the sound of that. Nails him with her ray. Marcia nudges him to go closer, and he does, stooped over and on tiptoe, bellowing, “How are ya?” With the ray in his eyes he can’t see Joan flinch, but Marcia can and whispers, “Not so loud.”
“Do you mind turning that thing off?” Paul rasps. Click. Done. A second identical click is Joan’s fingernail tapping the earphone. Paul, always happy to join in,
says
click—“Click, click, click.” It is like the end of a movie … the tape clicking out, the house lights coming on, a grey powder wash whose source is the rec-room windows. “Groovy operation,” Paul says, bobbing his head in a half circle. Joan’s head tips. As Marcia knows, she is studying his hair. “Groovy dress,” Paul says.
It’s a white sleeveless sailor dress with a big square collar and a criss-cross of red string at the throat. “That used to be mine,” Marcia says. “When I was in kindergarten.”
“No kidding,” Paul says. Then, “Hey,” addressing Joan. “Why aren’t you humming?”
“She only hums in the closet,” Marcia hisses. This wasn’t a confidence but hearing him mention it, it sounds like one. “She wants to touch your hair,” she says, yanking his arm. “Crouch down.”
“I’m crouching, man.” He holds the edge of the table and sinks into a knee bend that brings him and Joan eye to eye. She tucks her stocking feet under the stool’s rung, the stool in the crux of his grasshopper thighs. “Help yourself,” he says, bowing his head. “Touch away.”
First she switches the penlight back on. Click. Click. Over his skull and shoulders the beam skims. Along his part it stops. A white wand there, balanced at a precarious tilt. Her arm, another white wand, she holds straight out and up in a Heil Hitler gesture, then lets it drift down until her hand touches his hair.
“Go ahead,” he tells her, “muss it up.” She draws strands between her fingers and studies them in the beam. She squishes her palm on the crown. “Yeah, dig in,” he says. She seems to consider it but changes to stroking. Slow, gentle. As if he’s a sleeping child, Marcia thinks. Then she thinks, a lover. Then, a dying man. His hair lies flat and has the grain of blond wood. Four times Joan caresses the length of it. “Feels great,” he says. Instantly she stops and switches off the light.
“All done?” he says. He looks up at her. Their faces are close together, hers half the size of his. Their breathing sounds like people on respirators. She leans even closer and starts sniffing. That scrutiny Marcia knows. To witness him under it, her face prickles. Pure wordless interest—telepathically that is all she is picking up.
Ten, fifteen seconds pass. When Joan suddenly twists around in the stool Paul drops backwards onto his hands.
“That was far out,” he says, standing up. “I was seeing doves and beautiful… oh wow, like, electric eyes.”
Joan turns on the tape recorder. It’s over.
“Let’s go,” Marcia says.
Paul raises one hand. “It was a trip,” he says to Joan’s back.
“Come on,” Marcia says, tugging his other hand.
“So, Joanie, can I come and see you again some time?”
“Leave us alone,” Marcia hisses.
“Huh?” He looks at her.
“Leave
her
alone, I mean.”
No, she doesn’t. She means “us.” In Joan’s treatment of Paul—complete absorption but only for as long as he was completely absorbing to her—Marcia has seen the blameless playing out of her own instincts. Now, pulling Paul from the room, she is seeing all the boys she has relinquished for monogamy, and a wind is blowing through her ribs.
And yet another three more months go by before she takes a bus to the Village and in front of the Old Folks’ Home (long-hairs floating by on the sidewalk, whitehairs flopped in wheelchairs on the lawn) picks up a muscle-bound boy named Lance. Eyes that zoom, reddish curls she slips the four fingers of one hand into and wears for a second like brass knuckles. They are stoned on his cigar-sized joints. He bounces on his toes. He is shorter than she is but only every half second. He talks fast. About the war in Vietnam, about revolution, Black power. He mimes pulling the pin from a grenade and lobbing it at a police car. “Pigs!” she calls out to impress him. His gaze whistles down her torso, lassos her hip-hugger jeans. He keeps patting his shirt pocket where the lump of a real grenade might be. Isn’t… as she learns at his parents’ mansion.
On the way there, on the bus, they drop a half-tab each of acid for the moon landing. She pretends it’s not her first trip. By the time they get off the bus she is a giantess holding the wee hand of a walking boy doll, and all the trees are upside-down females
exposing their crotches. She and Lance go straight to the greenhouses, through the kitchen—where he grabs a jar of honey—and out the back door. It’s a jungle in there, flowers going off like fireworks, trees shooting up like fountains, alive vines, exotic smells she will call spikenard and saffard and calamus, shrieks she will assign to scandalized ladies before she sees the birds. He says, “Go like this,” and stretches her arms in the crucifixion pose. Her fingers brush fronds, giant green tongues. Her skin secretes crystal studs. For the symmetry and the thrill she stretches out her legs.
Stand like that and a boy might throw knives. Not this time, not him. He takes the lump out of his pocket, rips it open and sprinkles golden seeds from her shoulders to her wrists. Almost immediately aquamarine and peach-coloured birds drop onto the stamens her arms have become. The birds cling and peck like little lovers, tickling. But that’s nothing. Next he leads her to torch flowers, opens the jar and dabs the inside of his lips with the honey, and from out of nowhere three tiny helicopters appear. No, hummingbirds! They are hummingbirds! They are kissing him on the mouth.
“Okay, they’re revved up,” he says, twisting his head away from the next bird in line. With a finger huge as a zeppelin he dabs her lips. The hummingbirds buzz near her face like flies. “They dig your lipstick,” he says as the first tongue pokes into her mouth.
“Turn you on?” he says after the third bird.
It does. Why? Their tongues are just toothpicks. But it’s an incredibly erotic sensation. By the last bird she is pulsing her body into the thrusts.
When it’s all over he kisses her up on tiptoe. Their mouths glue together. She unzips his fly and his penis flips out, long as his legs, white as a root. On the concrete floor, on a bed of bird droppings, he pins her arms and churns up her insides. Then they go into the house and switch on a TV and watch spacemen bouncing on the moon.
Nobody can say that her first time fooling around on Paul was any old roll in the hay. Her second and third times are more along that line. These are with another boy after bird boy doesn’t return her phone calls. As far as she knows, neither boy has a weirdo at home, although who knows? Still, that seems to be the end of that phase. Along with her monogamy phase. And her no-secrets phase.
She doesn’t out and out lie, she just doesn’t tell Paul until he asks. By then, a month later, his refusal to see the clues strikes her as valiant since they must be hitting him right between the eyes. “Nowhere,” she answers when he wonders where she was last night. “Some guy downtown,” she explains her access to
LSD
. Her flesh is polka-dotted with hickeys and bruises, she reeks of smells she can’t be bothered to wash off—Brute aftershave, sex strong as bad breath.
What a sultry summer that is. It isn’t just her. Everybody seems to be drugged out, everybody’s an exhibitionist. Her mother tie-dyes T-shirts for the whole family, wears hers without a bra so what you have is a woman whose breasts go from her throat to her crotch. Her mother bleaches her hair platinum blonde. On Saturdays in the back yard she rubs suntan lotion on her friend Angela’s freckled thighs and back. She slips her fingers under the straps of Angela’s bikini. Under the waistband. Alone in the kitchen, she sings “You Give Me Fever,” and breaks out into a slow, twisty, snake-armed dance that makes Marcia scream with embarrassment. Her father grows sideburns and starts doing exercises in front of the
TV
before breakfast. Marcia would die before telling him that when he stride-jumps you can see the shape of his penis flapping under his pyjama bottoms. Her sister Sonja doesn’t seem to notice, goes on smiling at the card table across from him. Marcia wonders, does Sonja have any idea what a penis
looks
like? And yet even with Sonja there’s a
moment that summer when if you didn’t know her you’d think she was sitting there having an orgasm. Marcia has just come home from work and she goes into the living room and Sonja is clipping her pins at full steam but she’s slid down the chair, she’s flushed and moaning and her eyelids are fluttering.
“Are you all right?” Marcia says.
“Hmm?” Sonja says.
“I said, are you all right?”
“I’m a bubble,” Sonja says, sitting up straight. “A bubbly, bouncing bubble.”
“Are you stoned?” This would be as mind-blowing as her having an orgasm.
“How do you mean?”
Marcia stares at the shrinking circles of pink on Sonja’s cheeks. When you turn off the TV you get that same implosion to a dot. “Nothing,” she says, but she is entertaining the idea of Sonja as capable of broadcasting who knows what startling programs. “Forget it,” she says.
“How was your day?” Sonja asks.
Marcia has a summer job typing and filing at a large employment agency in a renovated Victorian house. The boss, a stocky middle-aged man, greasy black hair, a habit of announcing himself by means of tragic sighs in the doorway, pats her bum and makes her promise never to wear a girdle. His secretary, who is also pushing fifty, and married, takes dictation with one hefty leg hoisted over the arm of her chair. The night after Marcia’s first time having sex with the secretary’s shy, girlish son is the night Paul asks.
They are lying naked on his bed. It is so soon after his saying “Mercy” that she hasn’t spit the semen out yet. Unintentionally she swallows it and her sense is that it acts as a truth potion because before she knows it she is saying, “Yes, I have. Fairly steadily with two other guys right now. Since school ended, though, there have been four, sorry, five altogether.”
He is propped up on one elbow, hair falling straight past the bed like drapes. He cocks his head this way and that as he is prone to but for what seems like hours, cocks it, shakes it as if to dislodge a response. Which, after all that, is, “I thought you were, like, too uptight about your breasts.”
“I’m not any more.” She looks at him, her love a motherly pang. “Thanks to you.”
He frowns.
“I love you,” she says. “That hasn’t changed. You are still my beloved.”
“Do you love any of them?”
She nods, pulling the smelly grey sheet up to her neck. She feels translucent with honesty.
“How many?”
“All of them. I wouldn’t have done anything with some boy I didn’t love.”
“All
four?”
“Not as much as I love you.” Here come the lies, she thinks.
Down the hall in the kitchen Brandy snaps the newspaper and hacks. Never in a year and a half has she demanded to know what the two of them are doing in there.
“Man,” Paul says. He reaches for his cigarettes, mouths one out of the pack and lights it. “Do I know any of these cats?”
She shakes her head. He knows one.
“Like,” he says, “like, possessiveness is nowhere, man, but, man…”
With the tip of one finger she touches his forearm. “It doesn’t mean I don’t want you any more. And if
you
want to have other girlfriends, that’s okay.”
He glances at her. “Fuck that.”
A new tone, it quivers between her legs. She rolls into him but he jolts away.
“You’re not even all that pretty,” he says. “Your head’s too
small. I hate the way you talk, like a fucking librarian. And by the way, you look like shit in your glasses.”
She laughs, shocked.
“Fuck off,” he says and jumps out of bed.
While he pulls on his jeans she lies there scanning herself for the wound. Not a scratch. She watches him doing up his shirt. He is stuck on one button. She thinks of his dead father and crazy mother and her heart starts ripping. Why can’t she be true to him? Why can’t she forsake all other gods for him, be a nun for him? “What do you want?” she asks. Whatever it is, she’ll do it.
“What do I want? You want to know what I want?” His voice is unnaturally high. “I want you not to have told me you loved me. I want you never to tell anybody else you love him because you don’t know what the fuck love is, man!” He’s shouting. The button comes off and he pitches it at her, then lunges for her neck. “I want this—“ He grabs the necklace, jerks it like a collar. She gags. He lets go. “I want you to get the fuck out of my house, you fucking slut!”
She can’t take back having said she loved him, but she gives him his fingernail peace necklace, leaves his house and never tells another boy she loves him.
Though she knows what love is. Though she loves him.
B
ack in June, Marcia graduated from high school second out of 197 students and won a scholarship to York University. Her parents presented her with a twenty-four volume set of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica
in its own two-level mahogany bookcase, her father holding her shoulders and standing her back from the case for the panoramic view. “Try to read them before Joanie does,” he joked. In July he cashed in a Canada Savings Bond to pay for her textbooks. But in August she tells him that she has decided to keep on working at the employment agency.