The Dark Space (11 page)

This is not a drill.

This is not an exercise.

Nobody’s going to give you a grade.

This is your life, baby-girl.

Find your truth and take it.

“You know how I told you about that weird couple I used to housesit for in college?”

I was spinning on the metal stool in Mom’s office. I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember.

“Yeah. The ones with the carpet on their walls, and the sunken living room, and the Kali mural?”

“The Grants.”

“Mrs. Grant gave you a subscription to
Playgirl
for Christmas.”

“She did. I was just thinking about when
I
graduated from college.”

I squinted at her to see if I could get a bead on where she was going with this.

Her energy was as rosy-mauve as it always was, pooling around her, breathing in and out of her. Winnie claimed that it was hard to let go of my mom once you starting hugging her because she felt so
settled
.
She’s all nook
, Winnie would say. I do remember that I was embarrassingly old before I stopped draping my arms and legs all over Mom whenever she had a chance to sit or lie down, and it always seemed like all the parts of me snugged into all the parts of her.

She looked at me like she knew what I was thinking.

“Don’t panic,” she said. “I’m not going to talk about graduation. Or at least, not
your
graduation.”

“Okay.” I was glad. “Because I’m not ready to talk about that.”

“I know.” She reached out with her foot and stopped my stool from spinning. “Why?”

“Asking me that is talking about it.”

“True, but why?”

“Are you trying to ask if I’m going to shack up with Winnie in some dumpy fourplex apartment and get a job as a Spanish translator for nine bucks an hour at the literacy initiative office?”

“No. I was not trying to ask you that. Though that is a highly specific accusation, and in case you’re wondering, I don’t care if that
is
what you do after graduation.”

“Tell me about your graduation.”

“So I had my last weekend working for the Grants. The next weekend was graduation. I was done with classes.”

“Did they ask you for a threesome?” I gave the chair another spin.

“Yes. But they did that every time I worked for them. This is not that story.”

“There’s a story?”

“Do you want me to tell that story? Think for a minute.”

My mind went to last night, curled in Winnie’s bed naked, because we were always naked now. She asked me to lie perfectly still so she could explore every millimeter of my cock and balls with her devious hands, letting me see exactly how hard she came against Marv, how shiny Finn’s dick got from Jason’s mouth and his own come, letting me feel her breath and her face against my raging erection while her finger insinuated itself over my asshole, where I could suddenly feel my heartbeat like a kick drum.

She licked the desperate and dripping stripes off my belly and thighs like some kind of evil cat, kissed me and let me taste myself in a sloppy French that went on and on while she furiously rubbed her clit, and never once did she so much as buss my dick. She made me come harder than I imagined was possible with just her soft hands, and breath, and filthy, delighted, high-definition thoughts about the friendly orgies she was having while I wrote a paper about guest labor practices in Texas border towns.

“I do not want to hear about the threesome you did or did not have with the Grants.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“You can tell me about graduation.”

“So I think they were short on cash, because they paid me exactly what they owed me, when they were usually extravagant, but they did give me a Gurkha.”

“A what-a?”

“Mr. Grant, in his business travels, went to Cuba all the time. I don’t even know if it was entirely legal. He had a humidor, a whole cedar-lined room off the master bedroom. I think they thought I was surprised when they showed me, but I had actually found it snooping around before, and I liked to sit in there, opening the cigar boxes and smelling.”

“Creepy.”

“I know, right? I can kind of be a creeper sometimes. Anyway, he pulls this box down and stands too close to me, like usual, and tells me about how the box is carved from bone. He made it sound like it was made from human bones, and who knows? Maybe it was. Inside were these huge cigars, like . . . well. Like
dicks
, Cal.”

“Big cigars, is what you’re saying.”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

“Then he tells me, this is a Gurkha, the most expensive cigar in the world. I think I acted suitably impressed. I’m not sure. Then he hands one to me, and I didn’t know if it was to smell or hold or what, and then Mrs. Grant puts her arm around me, and it was pretty weird.”

“I’m really sure I don’t want to hear the threesome story.”

“So we stand there, packed inside his humidor, and I think I smelled it, trying to work out the cultural vibe of what was going on, and then Mrs. Grant started crying about me going out into the world and Mr. Grant was closing the box, and I realized that this Gurkha was my graduation present.”

“A cigar as big as a dick.”

“What was I supposed to do with it? Put it in my purse? Tuck it behind my ear? I went back to my dorm and put it in my pencil box.”

“Sure. That or your nightstand.”

Mom kicked at my shin, but I was revolving too fast.

“At dinner sometime that week, I told your dad about it.”

“You weren’t going out, though?”

“Oh, no. He was this total player. I was just Becky Mailer, Friend with a capital F for Friend, a.k.a. Don’t You Dare Even Hope, Becky. He got all excited. Apparently, the way to get boys to come to your yard was to be in possession of a seven-hundred-dollar cigar and no idea what to do with it.”

“This is getting to be a really fucking confusing story.”

“Shush. He tells me, ‘Becky, you’re going as my date to the seniors’ party at The Mine, and we are going to smoke that cigar.’”

“What a douche.”

“You don’t even know. So I had been pining for John Darling for four fucking
years
, going to his stupid room parties, listening to him recite shit in Attic Greek, following him around like a pathetic ass, and this,
this
was how he asked me out? Over a
Gurkha
?”

“Yeah, I can see why though, it’s a
Gurkha
.”

We snorted.

“So I’m kind of pissed, but also, let’s face it, desperate and in love with him.”

“Sure.”

“So I turn to my friend Karen, who is the most fantastically slutty person I know, and I tell her, ‘However you dress me, that’s how I’m going to this party.’ She puts me in this gold dress, it’s a wrap dress, like a six-inch rectangle that ties in a tiny bow at your waist, and it’s all sequins. I was naked. I was naked, and I was sparkling. There was no room for anything but naked in that dress, is what I am saying.”

“I get it.”

“I put the cigar in my cleavage. Who knows what that even looked like, but that’s what I did. The Mine was a bar, just a double-wide trailer with a half-acre gravel parking lot. The kind of place that made you bring your own glass and sold one kind of beer and shots.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. I’ve never been in a bar in my life.”

“Everyone was there, the whole class, parts of the other classes. I’m thinking, I am never going to find John. Ever. Then I remember, I have a cigar as big as a baby’s forearm in my boobs, I’ll just spark it up and smoke him out.”

“Did he come?”

“Are you kidding me? It was like I had parted the seas. I leaned against The Mine, naked, and filled the air around me with seven-hundred-dollar burning leaves, and there was John, half-drunk, wearing a bowtie. He said, ‘You gonna share, Becky Mailer?’”

“I’m speechless. I can’t tell if I’m learning something or getting scarred for life.”

“This is not a parable, Calvin, this is life. This is
my
life. Just as real as your life. It happened, there is a way that it’s still happening, has always happened. Will continue to happen.”

I looked at my mom, her dark curly ponytail, her red plastic eyeglass frames, the jeans, T-shirt, and sweater she always wears. But all that pink had kind of magnetized around her, and I could
see
her. See the short girl with big brown curls and a sparkling dress. See how strong she was in the moment, framed in smoke and neon bar lights.

“What happened?”

“I told him I’d share if he danced with me, and for the first time ever, he grabbed my hand. I don’t think he had ever touched me before that moment. And it’s probably hard to believe this about your dad, but if he wants to, he can dance. That’s what we did, all night long, we danced and smoked that Gurkha, and because it was so stinky, there was this space around us, just for us to dance in. I laughed so much that night that the next day I had to take aspirin to get out of bed, my ribs were so sore.”

“But I thought you didn’t get together until some college reunion thing.”

“Nope. We graduated. He went to Cambridge for grad school. I started that radio internship. I never heard from him after that night. It was a really hard time in my life. That’s when I rented that room from the station manager and never really felt safe, got assaulted, moved back home for a while, worked at the public library. I thought I was going to start reading on the radio, work my way up to stories, have a syndicated program no more than ten years after graduation.

“I got the invite to the college alumni night and thought,
Why not?
I didn’t get out of the house much, and it was free. I saw John, and he looked the same. Just the same.
God.
Of course he did, it had only been five years, but for some reason it had felt like this whole life. This entire, endless life. Except, as soon as we started talking, I kept thinking,
What happened?
All that stuff we used to talk about until three in the morning, that was real life. All this stuff I’ve done since graduation? Didn’t feel real. Not while I stood there, talking to John Darling.”

I spun on the stool. I closed my eyes. I could see it, the expression on my dad’s face in a banquet room, his eyebrows pushed together like he was trying to get my mom into focus but couldn’t, because she was so unbelievable. I could feel him see her and think of dancing, of sequins and smoke, of the way my mom laughed.

“Where’d you go?” I asked, because even though I had never heard this story, I knew he’d asked her if she wanted to get out of there, and she did, and then they walked all over their old campus together, their hearts throbbing like they had been stubbed against life and broken.

“You were born nine months later,” is what she said, but her voice was far away.

“A dance and five years,” I said.

“Don’t forget the cigar.”

She got up and stopped me spinning by hugging me. “This is your life. It’s real.”

I couldn’t stop laughing.

I never thought about if I was ticklish, but there is only so much of a finger circling your navel you can stand before you’re going crazy.

“I’ll tie you down.” Cal’s voice had a smile in it, but he was serious. My skin went warm and slack with his threat.

I was on his bed, his double bed, on top of a quilt that was so soft I wanted to wallow in it like a buffalo.

His parents were on some kind of a getaway at a bed and breakfast.

Spring break was ahead of us, quiet and private and endless.

I was naked.

He wasn’t. He was in jeans, a T-shirt, and his feet were bare.

He pulled his desk chair to the side of the bed, and I tried not to squirm. Last night, he told me he wanted to spend an entire afternoon
eating me out
. We were drowsing and kissing in bed, and he started kissing me around my ears, telling me that, telling me what he would do with his tongue, what I would taste like. Then he kissed me deeper and asked me to show him, again, what it had been like with Marv and Finn and Jason, and I made it last as long as I could, one impression of skin and mouths and touch at a time, until we both had our hands between our legs, finishing ourselves, side by side.

I told him I wanted to taste him, too.

He told me,
Later.

He leaned over and licked the nipple closest to him.

“Sit up on your arms and watch,” he said.

I hiked myself up. He licked the nipple again, slow, watching my face. I smiled at him, and he smiled at me around my breast, then closed his eyes and sucked.

I had to bend my knees.

I had to grab onto the quilt, tight.

“I don’t know,” I whispered.

“What don’t you know, baby?”

“I don’t know.”

“Some girls don’t like a lot of breast play. You’ve liked the touching I’ve done when we’ve been really into kissing, but it’s okay if you don’t like it intense like this.”

It was the first time he’d taken a real lead, and he was careful, offering his experience so gently that I died from the earnestness in his voice. By some mutual agreement we held onto our energy, kept ourselves centered. It was so strange to be around him and be that seated in my body.