The Parallel Apartments (46 page)

“So,” continued Rose, “if I meet someone new and then race through my files and a name and a face comes up that shouts
Bingo,
then I figure out how to get them hooked up. That's the fun part.”

In high school Rose made many matches, including a complicated one between Candace, a slow twenty-year-old senior with two lethal boyfriends and tens of thousands of suitors, and Punch, a precocious freshman who had skipped, based on merit and the opinions of his tutors, the first half of high school.

“It was one of the most intense bingos I ever got. It was a complete surprise—I saw Punch in line to register for the SATs and ran him through the database, strictly routine, and I got a blow-me-down match with Candace. I'd never come up with such disparate matchees. I called my grandmother in Honduras to find out what to do. My grandmother is really a horrible person—I'll tell you about her someday.”

Someday
? You mean I'll see you again?

“But she shared a few secrets—including potions. I know it's a shitty stereotype that Latin Americans always have mystical relatives, but in my case it's true. Before long, Punch and Candace—who I'm sure never would've met—met.”

“So how'd it turn out?”

“Oh, not so great,” said Rose. “Pretty terrible, to be frank.”

Rose had been talkative and liberal with information up till now, but she suddenly quieted down. Her Sugar Babies hands dropped dusty chunks of gravel into Justine's can.

“I talk a lot, I know,” said Rose. “Anyway, it wasn't as lousy as my Matt match. I'm blaming him for fucking it up, though. He doesn't know what he had.”

Of course. It hit Justine like a bare fist. Rose was going to set her up with the person in Austin for whom her distaste was freshest.

“A while back me and Matt and some other Crammed Shelf people dropped by a Cinco de Mayo party at somebody's house after work. It was late, really Seis de Mayo by that time, and much alcohol had already filtered through the partiers. New relationships were being formed everywhere you looked.

“A van-load of Aggies crashed the party. They came inside the house wearing conical party hats and pinching bottles of beer out of a big ice-filled plastic trash can in the kitchen and counting down from five to one and then hollering ‘Happy New Year!' Then they ran around the house, wetly and dramatically kissing everyone on the lips.

“A silly man with a scratchy moustache kissed me, almost completely missing my lips,” said Rose. “But I wasn't really paying attention to him. I was watching the room, watching for bingos.

“And there one was: in the corner of the TV room, a tall woman wearing a T-shirt and black pegged jeans and no shoes had gently placed Matt against a stereo speaker and was sucking at his neck like a vampire.

“I thought those two would catch fire,” said Rose, shaking the Dr Pepper can like a martini mixer. “Such a wicked, sparkling bingo.”

But the woman vanished, leaving Matt slumped in a corner, drooling, head lolling against a lowing woofer. Rose was still in the silly embrace of her own New Year's Day celebrant.

“I had to hit him in the ribs, but he let go,” said Rose. “And then I ran off
down the street after the van, which was already up to Riverside. It turned into traffic, but I kept running and running and running. Finally, you won't believe it, but I caught up with it at the light just before the I-35 on-ramp. The tall woman was driving.”

Rose upended the Dr Pepper can and shook the rocks out into a little knoll. It reminded Justine of the piles of dirt that fresh-dug graves produce.

“Let's just say my evening ended with the tall woman—Evenie—driving off in my Jeep with Matt, still intoxicated with passion and malt liquor, buckled into the passenger seat. I was so excited I couldn't sleep at all that night. I was dying to call him but I held out. The next day he wasn't at work. I didn't know whether to be worried or ecstatic.”

“They can feel the same sometimes,” said Justine.

Rose paused to put her head on Justine's knee and smile at her just long enough to make Justine wonder what the hell was going on. Justine swallowed wrong and began hacking away in the dusty parking lot.

“So,” said Rose, whacking Justine on the back, “early the next morning, about an hour before he was supposed to be at Crammed Shelf, he called the store. He was at his great-granddaddy's ranch outside of Norman, Oklahoma, sitting on a metal stool in a barn, milking a cow. He told me he hated me.”

Rose had later found out from Evenie that she and Matt had gone to her place, had lain down on her genuine Tabriz, and watched
Shaun of the Dead
together, cheek to cheek, on her tiny iPod, then had pretty good sex right there on the floor.

“But then,” Rose continued, “Evenie, pointing out that since it was the first time they'd ever met, neither of them had anything to lose and everything to gain by admitting to and experimenting with the private, taboo fantasies and kinks that were the
true truths
of their real sexualities, to see if they really had what it took to embark on a genuine, truth-based eros-governed relationship. Evenie told me that Matt, with a devilish, de-Sadian look in his eye, said he liked sucking on women's toes. Evenie told him to knock himself out. When he was finished, Evenie said that she had always wanted to bind her lovers with zinc bobwire, face-up, to a big beechwood workbench she had in a shed out back and then irrumate them with a saguaro-like strap-on she'd picked up from a Japanese sex-toy test-marketing firm.”

Justine wanted to hear no more. She wanted to kiss Rose goodbye, and die before Matt could suck on her toes.

“Evenie tied him up, explained about safe words, and he whimpered and cried while a varicose erection tossed and turned on his stomach. She went to work. But, in spite of the new experience and notable orgasms had all around, Matt, after being disbound, accused her of rape, accused me of facilitating rape, and hated me for setting him up. I promised I'd make it up to him, even though I think he was the one who fucked it up. After all, he could've stopped whenever he wanted, and I think he was having a great time even though ashamed to admit it.”

Justine despaired. Mixed in with her loathing of Matt was some empathy for the guy. Still, she did not ever want to see his thrumming erection.

“So that's why he was such a dick to you. I think he sensed that I might be formulating you as a new match for him. Justine. Justine. Justine. Justine… what's your last name, anyway?”

“Uh, I'm not sure. Maybe Moppett. Or Johnsonson. Or Durant.”

“You'll explain that to me sometime.”

“Okay.”

“So, Justine Unsure, here's the thing.”

I know. I can't do it. But I will, for you, Rose.

“Justine, you have air conditioning in your Room?”

“Yeah…”

“Take us there, so I can finish my story in the cool and quiet.”

Justine did.

“Are you really, really full,” said Rose, sitting next to Justine on the floor at the end of the bed and squeezing off channel after channel with the remote control, “or might you be pregnant?”

“I'm…”

How quickly circumstances can change. Rose had prevented Justine's half-serious traffic-suicide plot, and was now touching her hip with her own.

“Can I stop here?”

“I love
Law & Order.
”

“Me too. So, which is it?”

Rose pointed the remote at Justine's belly and clicked the FFWD button over and over.

“A little of both,” said Justine.

Justine realized that this was the first time anyone had asked, and the first time she'd ever told anyone. Except Franklin. Justine hadn't been to see an obstetrician or even a GP, not once. Even Amy downstairs had never seemed to notice, and it was hard to hide a fifth of a volleyball stuck to your belly in the middle of summer when thin, snug cotton was the chemise de rigueur. But maybe Amy was just being polite.

“I can't get pregnant,” said Rose.

“Why?”

“I'm kinda guevedoche, but different.”

“What's that?”

“A little of both.”

“Oh.”

“But me?” said Rose, leaning in to Justine a little. “A
lot
of both. Most guevedoche are kinda a little of both, and none of it works all that great. But
all
of mine works. Except for the getting-pregnant part.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I'm really my own thing, not gueve at all. I'm terribly rare and valuable, and in great demand.”

“Oh?”

“And everything works. Uterus, clitoris, lots of semen, lots of sperm. And I'll never go bald. Just no eggs.”

Rose fell sideways, letting her head come to rest delicately on Justine's volleyball, ear down. Matt, and his thrumming erection, seemed far, far away.

“Any kicking or hitting? What month does that nonsense start? Boy or girl? Or is it too soon for that? Who's your boyfriend? Where's your boyfriend? Hubby? Any other kids? How far along?”

Rose's voice made Justine's body vibrate in such a pleasant, extrasensory way that she wondered if there weren't an actual sixth sense, an additional bodily sense, whose organ, perhaps effaced inside the body just at the base of the spine, registered only sub-tangible vibrations. If so, Justine was now experiencing the jasmine, the northern lights, the pure cane sugar of all vibes.

“About eight weeks.”

“So you're due…?”

“January 14. But I'm not sure I'm going to keep it.”

Instead of sitting up Rose spun a quarter turn and was now facing up, the back of her head pillowed between Justine's belly and the tops of her thighs.

“My big fat head won't hurt the baby, will it?”

“Oh, no.”

“What's your sperm-dispenser say?”

“He doesn't have any.”

“Sperm?”

“Say.”

“Well,
I
hope you keep it. Babies are fun. I'll be a godparent if you don't already have one.”

Where was Matt? He seemed to be turning into less of a factor in the algebra of Rose's visitation.

Rose turned to give her attention to Richard Belzer, who was discussing his father's suicide with another cop, but Justine's thighs were in the way. Rose pushed them apart like reeds.

“Thank you,” said Rose. “Don't you think the Belz is kinda hot? In a way?”

Justine couldn't move or speak. She was aware of the mortifying possibility that her vestibular perfumes, less than four inches from Rose's sexy nose, might betray her stellar arousal.

But if Rose did sense anything, she said nothing. She rested, breathed, occasionally chuckled or gasped at the minor levity and major horror that most
Law & Order: SVU
episodes comprised. Justine tried to follow her cues. What if Justine gasped at something Rose found funny, or, worse, chuckled at something horrible? Her parted thighs began to cramp along the adductors.

Something needed to be done. If Justine waited (and she always waited—waiting was her nature and foe; to allow; to pass by the scene, rubbernecking), Rose might sit up and kiss her and take off all her clothes and show Justine how their parts would work so well together and then give Justine a fucking that was precisely the kind Justine was sure could never happen—a clear kind, lieless, with huffing and
yeses
and fresh sorts of trembles.

But, on the other hand, it was possible that if Justine waited, Rose might turn around, begin to discuss the logistics of Justine's upcoming
date with Matt, and leave, taking her flirty, black-tar-heroin vibrations and better-than–Sugar Babies skin with her, leaving Justine as alone as she'd ever felt.

But what if Justine
didn't
wait; what if she acted—say, reached down and took Rose's hand, or gave her earlobe a little pinch, or said,
Ow, my bottom is falling asleep
during a Viagra commercial—Justine might destroy what was only ever supposed to have been a sweet little innocent acquaintanceship.

But no. This was no sweet little innocent anything: Rose was lying with her head almost in Justine's lap, Justine's legs spread at an angle large enough that it subtended a thirty-six-inch separation of her knees. An
invitational
angle. And, if a mouth and a vagina—no matter how thick the material hiding the latter and deflecting the former—were as close as theirs were now, there should be no question about
whether
it was just a friendship, but
when
it would prove itself more than.

Justine waited anyway.
SVU
ended. A
Criminal Intent
began, ended. Rose scarcely moved. Justine didn't move at all. She couldn't tell if Rose had dozed off. God. Justine.
Act,
you sheep.

Justine continued to not act. She let her head fall back against the bed. Something hard and angular was there, poking at the back of her skull. Oh, the corner of a magazine. Big, thick. Maybe
Brides.
She let her head rest on the sharp corner. She watched the curl of delaminating wallpaper. She prayed for help, for a sign. She prayed for an angel with a pair of scissors to squirt out of the ceiling and snip off all their clothes and then order them to lick lick lick. She prayed for Dot to speak into her ear, to tell her it was okay to—