Chapter 10
Brad
eyed Jasmine with curiosity. There was
nothing really extraordinary about her except for her amazing ability to contort
her body into virtually any position. They
were alone in her bedroom and he was beginning to regret that he had allowed
himself to get so close to her. She
was very young and not too experienced. There were certain situations that were dangerous
for Brad and he knew that this was one of them.
She was very
flirtatious and clever and had played her cards quickly. Brad knew that if he refused her offer, when
it came, with a movement of her body or a quick, frank stare, she would not
let him forget it. Cheryl had not yet
returned, after almost a week of absence. Jasmine
and Brad had been flirting for quite a few days and it was clear to both of
them that they had already passed over the down-hill divide that led into each
other’s arms. He said, rather cold-bloodedly
but politely, “Let me see you do the
full lotus.”
She was sitting
in the middle of the large, unmade double bed, naked except for her shorts and
halter. Her bare feet slipped over her
large thighs with ease.
Brad said,
“You do that without any sense of effort.”
She smiled
and shook her dark hair from her shoulders.
He said,
“Do you meditate?”
“Sort of.
But I do it my own way. I guess I discovered it all by myself. It’s yoga. It
helps. I’m a very nervous person by nature.”
“You learned
it by yourself?”
“Well, you
know my mother does a lot of yoga. I
did it by imitation, I think. She never
exactly taught me. I just watched and
did it too, when I was very little, before I can even remember. It seems like I’ve
always done it. It’s just a very simple
philosophy where you control your emotions.”
She smiled mysteriously, as if it wasn’t really that simple and she was
guarding an immense secret.
He said, in
his blunt, often irritating way, “
The mysterious
smile didn’t change. She said,
“
He said, “You
like them but you think they are inferior to us.”
She unhooked
one of her legs, pulled it over her head and slipped it behind her neck, still
not looking at him. Then she pulled the
other leg around her neck. For an instant,
Brad thought that he might be able to get a quick piece of ass and they would
be able to forget about it afterwards and pretend as if nothing had happened.
He laughed out loud at his flimsy attempt to fool himself.
He said, “So that’s why you didn’t
go to
She said,
“They’re always making remarks. They
call you names.” Her brown eyes made him uncomfortable. He sensed that there were still several moves
available to him but they all seemed to end up in her arms. He stood up and stretched and looked enormous
to her. She had already decided to make
love to him. He looked down at her with
wide eyes. From a distance of ten feet
they looked brown but she knew that their true color was hazel and that there
were small gold flecks in the blue-green irises. She said to herself, “to be as handsome as Brad is, is a sign of
nobility.” She turned her head upwards
and smiled at him. His mouth turned downwards
into a pout and he asked with genuine concern, How old are you?”
She pushed
her torso past her thighs, effortlessly, like
a circus performer. Without answering
his question, she bent her head all the way to the bed and touched her forehead
on the bedspread with her thighs still locked behind her neck.
After a silence she answered, “Seventeen.”
Jasmine was
not a beautiful woman. She was not even
pretty by ordinary standards. But Brad
had never been put off by women who were not pretty by ordinary standards. He didn’t mind if a woman was twenty or thirty
pounds over weight or was too skinny or had breasts that were too large or too
small.
Jasmine raised
her torso back to the vertical position, pulled her legs from behind her neck
and went into the full lotus position again. She was aware of the lovely curve of her thighs
and she was proud of her well-shaped feet and long, curvaceous hands. Her arms were firm and white and of a pleasant
plumpness that was not unusual in the late sixties which antedated the workout
gym by at least ten years.
“That’s beautiful.
The way you did that,” Brad said. His
eyes were dark with emotion and his nostrils flared slightly. She prided herself on having a yogi’s ability
to read other’s feelings and thought it was a sign that he was trying to master
his sexual feelings
She said,
“My dad was against letting them play sports.”
Brad didn’t
hear the words, at first. Or rather,
he heard them but the didn’t make any sense.
When he finally understood what she had said, he asked, blankly, “What?
You mean not allow them to play in the big leagues?”
“Yeah. People in the North don’t understand Nigras.
In the South we have had hundreds of years living close to them and we
know what they’re like.”
“What’s wrong
with letting them play sports?” Brad asked, without animus, not wanting to break
the spell she was casting.
She said,
“My dad thinks they will take over sports completely.”
He laughed
indulgently and said, “They can’t play
football, I can tell you that. Piedmont
high school played against some all black teams from the Oakland Athletic League
in pre season games and they were so bad that we made jokes about ‘em.
We actually had to go easy on ‘em so we wouldn’t hurt ‘em.
We beat McClymonds 48 to nothing in one game.”
She continued
with her thought, as if she hadn’t heard him, “In the South, the Nigras play sports all the
time. They even have their own leagues. My father says they will take over sports someday
because it’s all they care about. It’s
all they do. And they play dirty too.
They’ll do anything to win. They’ll never play by the rules.” She had disengaged herself from the full Lotus
and was lying back on three large pillows that lay against the wall behind her
and looking up at him flirtatiously. Her
body was very white and voluptuous against the wood paneled wall of her bedroom.
Brad said,
dryly, “There are referees.” He had no idea
how much time Negro athletes devoted to sports. He had refused a scholarship to Stanford so
that he could dedicate all of his time to educating himself.
She frowned
and looked away, as if it wasn’t important.
“I’m not a big sports fan. That’s
what he says.”
He said,
“They can play basketball. I know that from experience too. We played the McClymonds basketball team a few
times and they always beat us. We came
pretty close to beating them once though. But
some fans threatened us at half time and said if we won the game we wouldn’t
get out of the gym alive. We were ahead
by two points at the half. I think it
scared the coach. It was at night in
the middle of the
“My dad says
they aren’t better at sports than we are but that they are more animalistic
and they’ll do anything to win. Also,
they don’t care about academic stuff and don’t study at all.”
Brad was silent
for a moment. He hadn’t ever seen her
studying either and the
“It isn’t.
It’s just the way they are. You people up here don’t know anything about
them. You’re naïve about the problem. The people in the South should be left to solve
the problem themselves.”
Brad laughed
and said, “State’s rights! You still haven’t finished fighting the Civil
War.”
“Some day
you’ll realize we were right. When they
start to destroy your cities and schools. They
don’t recognize our laws. They take the
law into their own hands. They administer
their own justice. They punish their
own. They don’t recognize our laws.”
She looked
at him with her dark eyes just a little longer than necessary and he knew that
she was testing him. He said, playfully, “I
can hear your southern accent getting stronger.” He paused and then said, without animus, “I have to say that you sound like a fucking
racist to me.”
“You don’t
know anything about Nigras, Brad”
“I suppose
you’re right. There were only a couple
at
“It isn’t
that we don’t like them. We think they
should go to their own schools so that they can educate themselves. If they are integrated into our schools they’ll
ruin them. All the white people will
leave and the liberals first. It’s already
starting in
They had both
already decided that they would make love and neither really cared what the
other said. She stretched voluptuously.
She pulled her knees to her chest and showed him her profile which her
mother had always told her was her best feature.
After a silence, he asked, in a husky voice, “What about George Washington
Carver?”
She giggled.
“George Washington Carver. My soul.” Her
“You probably
thought the Freedom Marches were …” He
let his voice trail off and waved his hand in the air, as if he couldn’t find
the right word. She was silent for a
moment. She looked across at him.
She said,
in a soft, sexy way that didn’t reflect the meaning of her words, “The northern press is totally biased.”
He said, in
a guileless way that was not characteristic of him, “Do you really think they are inferior to us?”
He wasn’t talking about Negroes any more but was testing her ability
to contort her mind into difficult perspectives.
It was the last thing about people that tempted him to promiscuity and
he knew that he was dancing around the edges of perversity.
“Some of them
aren’t.” She stared into his eyes again.
“But the smart ones are lighter. They’ve
got white blood. They feel superior to the darker ones.” She looked up at him, to see if he was surprised.
She was fascinated with what she thought was a highly unusual foreplay.
He said, “Well,
it doesn’t sound like I’m going to change your mind.”
She gave a
little laugh and stretched voluptuously again.
She closed her eyes and lay back in the soft pillows, he thought as if
she were waiting for him to come to her and remove her halter.
He said, softly,
“But you like their music.”
She opened
her eyes. Her voice had an impatient,
almost cross tone, “Did I say that? I like the Doors. I like the Stones.” She paused as if she were reading a mental list.
She said, “Little Richard, Jimmy Reed, James Brown.
And, what’s his name? ” She waved
her hand in the air. She laughed a little high pitched southern laugh,
“Muddy Waters.” She was silent for a moment, as if she was afraid
he might be offended, looked him in the eye and then continued, “We call it nigger music in the South.”
He looked
at her large, shapely breasts and said,
simply, “I like it.”
“So do I,
but it isn’t …” She let her voice trail
off. She sat up and stretched her legs
out in front of her, grabbed the soles of her feet with her two hands and stretched
her torso forward until she could clasp her hands together behind her feet.
She said “I wish I could talk to you in ten years. After they’ve ruined your schools and made your
cities unsafe to live in. I suppose you
like Huey Newton and Bobby Seale.”
He looked
down at her supple, very white body. He
said, “Hey Jas. I’m not a revolutionary.”
Her
“It’s America
Jas, not the Negroes,” he said.
She purred,
“
Brad wanted
to silence her with a kiss. He looked down at her slightly pimply, seventeen-year
old face and thought of her father whom she said was a failed novelist.
He turned his head away and looked somewhere into the future.
She added,
“The Mexicans. Here in
“Sure. Many times.”
She had pulled
herself into a full-Lotus position again, effortlessly. She asked, “Where
did you stay? Did you ever go walking
in the cities at night?”
He moved from
the straight backed wooden chair to the edge of the bed. “
She said,
“It’s the same here in
He asked,
“Why don’t you teach me to do yoga.”
Her face expressed
an impish humor. “OK, but next time
I’m going to tell you about the Jewish problem too. I didn’t even mention them. You northern liberals get all your ideas from
New York Jews like David Susskind on channel 9.”
He laughed.
“You’re not going to tell me that you’re an anti-Semite too!”
Her brown eyes and deeply composed features suddenly reminded him of
his mother and he moved backwards, involuntarily and felt his eyebrows arch
in astonishment. He looked into her face
and she had turned her head away from him, pretending that she hadn’t noticed
his reaction.
After a very
long silence, she fell backwards into the pillows, arms and legs akimbo, like
a rag doll. She was suddenly the brash,
gum chewing seventeen year old girl again, “You’re amazing Brad. So naïve. I’m
just going to have to educate you I suppose.” She shook her head of thick brown hair like
a young puppy and eyed a package of Winston cigarettes that lay on the table
just out of reach.
Brad knew
that if he didn’t make his move now, he would have to endure a room full of
cigarette smoke and a discourse on Jews. He
said, “I’ve tried the full-Lotus but
I can’t do it.”
She put the
pack of cigarettes back on the table. “You’re
too tense. Your muscles are all balled
up.” She sprung forward and put her long
white hands on his shoulders. “Lay down
on the bed. Face down.”
He stretched out on the bed and she began massaging his back.
“Your muscles are so tense. You’ll never be able to do the full Lotus. Your best position is the plow and probably
the cobra too.” She guided his body into
the plow and then into the cobra.
He said,
“Let me see you do the full-Lotus again.”
She moved
into the full-Lotus in a fluid motion without even using her hands.
“You make
it look so easy. You’re so flexible.”
He put his hand on her shoulder and pushed her gently back into the pillows
behind her. It was what she had been waiting for. Their bodies moved together on the bed and
they were quickly locked together in a long kiss. She entwined her legs around his torso like
an octopus and they kissed for several minutes, rolling on the bed with their
pent-up sexual energies vibrating through each other’s bodies. Without disengaging, they managed to undress
each other. They made love for a long
time before Brad moved her into the position that he had imagined her in, from
the very first time he had seen her perform yoga on the living room rug. Without protest she bent her spine and stretched
her neck so that she could perform oral sex on herself.
Afterwards,
they lay in each other’s arms, dozing and listening to the sounds of birds in
the large garden surrounding the house. The
house was empty and they didn’t expect anyone until that evening but a long
squeak from worn brakes awakened them from their early afternoon slumber.
Jasmine sprung out of bed and in one fluid movement bounded into Brad’s
room, completely naked. Her firm, high breasts jiggled as she ran.
Zeta scampered out of the open window onto the roof and Jasmine stuck
her head through the window. She turned and hissed to Brad in a loud whisper,
“It’s him.” She walked back into the room. She said, “Fuck. It’s
Brad sat on
the edge of the bed and got dressed.
“And he’s
got that smelly wolf with him.” She made
a face. “He’s carrying that bottle of
wine with him again too. He must be a
fucking wino.”
“What bottle
of wine?”
“Haven’t you
seen it?.”
Brad lied,
“No, I haven’t.” She got up and rubbed her naked body against
his like a huge cat. He said, “There’s always another day, Jas. You’d better get dressed unless you want him
to see you like that.” They could hear
Holmes,
Brad put on
his shirt and when he turned around Jasmine was standing next to him in her
beige shorts and halter. Homes ran through
the door and jumped on Brad, almost knocking him over. He yelled, “Hey
you fucking mutt, get down!”
Jasmine cooed,
“Come here pooch.” She sat on the bed and began kissing him on
the top of the head. He tail wagged so
violently that Brad had to get out of the way of his slapping tail. Holmes wiggled free and ran back down the stairs.
Jasmine said, “He doesn’t love me.”
Brad reached
out his hand and said, “Hey beautiful,
let’s go downstairs and meet the karate champion and his wolf.”
She squeezed
his hand and he pulled her off the bed. She snuggled up to him and put her arms around
him and put her long, elegant, white fingers in his hair. She was almost