Chapter
7
She was standing in front of the mailbox at the road, waiting for me. She opened the door and got into the car.
We exchanged pleasantries and then there was a tense silence.
I said, “Anne.”
“Yes.”
“I have something to say that is going to be difficult to say.”
I drove past the large white house where Betty and RoxAnnee
lived and turned into the driveway of the next house about a hundred yards
up the road. I backed out quickly and
sped down the road towards
She said, “You’d better say
it fast. I can’t stand long silences.” She was wearing a very short black skirt that
exposed well-shaped thighs.
“I don’t want you to misunderstand me, Anne.
I mean I want you to listen to what I’m going to say and to hear me
out until I’m finished. I don’t want
you to get emotional.”
Her eyes glowed in the twilight. We
were going to Cody’s Bookstore to listen to the infinity-drunk, Timothy Leary. We wanted him to remind us that we had evolved
from an ape species that had just barely learned to talk on a planet that
circled a star on the far edge of the Milky Way galaxy among billions of other
stars.
In anticipation, perhaps, of Timothy Leary, we were aware not only
of the unspeakably beautiful twilight that entered through the windshield
but also of the fact that the light itself was only a record of the past:
that it had taken eight and a half minutes to reach us from our mother star
and that the light from Proxima Centauri had taken
three and a half years to burst from the night sky and that our only
theologians were the cosmologists.
I said, “I don’t want to have
sex tonight.”
“Fine.” She tugged at her skirt
self-consciously, as if she were trying to cover her legs.
“Listen to me.”
She was silent.
“I don’t want to feel like I have
to have sex, that’s all. I didn’t
mean to say that I don’t want to
have sex but that I don’t want to feel obligated
to have sex.”
She was silent.
I said, “Thank you.”
“Thank you? For what?” She smiled to herself, and I studied her profile
and saw that she was very pretty, even though she did nothing to make herself
pretty.
“For not saying anything.”
“Oh.”
“I mean it wasn’t easy to say that.
To be really honest and clear about it.”
I paused, giving her the opportunity to say something, but she didn’t. “I mean, sure I want to.... But ... I don’t want you to think that I expect to have sex and that you can’t say
no and I ... I mean it makes me tense.
My stomach gets tense.”
We passed Kasper’s Hot Dog stand and came to a halt in front of a stoplight. I was surprised by her long, meditative silence,
and it gave me time to gather my thoughts.
“I’ve been having this tension in my stomach and...”
I wanted to say that the tension was one of the things that caused
me to begin meditating again. “I think
it might be because I feel like I’m obligated to have sex. Like it’s a kind of duty and I’ve decided the
feeling is ... well ... caused by the male-female stereotypes. You know, men are supposed to always want to
“get some pussy,” and women are always trying to “keep their virginity.” I think we should cut through that crap and
you should respect me, and not expect to have sex every time we go out on
a date.” Her silence made me nervous. “I will feel less nervous, and we can be more
spontaneous.” She looked at me with
feeling, and I said, tentatively, “I
feel better already.” We laughed, nervously. I suddenly thought of Candy, whom I hadn’t seen
in over a week.
“I’m really glad,” she said.
“Glad?”
“I’m glad that’s all it was. I
thought it was going to be something big.
That you were going to tell me you were a homosexual or something like
that.”
I said, “How could you possibly
think I could be homo sexual?”
“I wasn’t speaking literally, I guess.
I was speaking metaphorically.”
I took out my pipe. It was already
stuffed with marijuana. I lit it, took
a hit and passed it to her. She pretended
to inhale and gave the pipe back to me. We
drove in silence. I said, “Well, I feel a lot better now.”
“Good.”
“I pitched two innings against
“Baseball!”
“They beat us 13 to 0. They
knocked all our other pitchers out of the box.
I was the last pitcher and I shut them out for two innings.”
“Baseball is overvalued in American society.”
Her voice was sharp and stentorian.
It sounded, ironically, like a sports announcer’s voice. “If anything, it’s a game for boys, not grown
men. I won’t waste my time at baseball
games.”
We leaned into the darkness of the Warren Freeway.
I said, “Anne! We faced the best pitcher in college baseball,
Andy Dangerfield. He pitched a no hitter
and I almost hit a homerun. The centerfielder
made a spectacular catch.”
“Brad, you sound so juvenile, so out of character.
How can a man with your talent get excited about a boys’ game?” She made a face and her voice was full of sarcasm.
“And it sounds like you’re bragging on top of it, like you’re trying
to impress me.” She laughed a dry,
unemotional laugh.
“Well, it’s funny that you would say that.
I’ve been meditating a lot and I think the reason I had such good control
this afternoon is that I didn’t give a fuck about baseball anymore. I wasn’t nervous or self-conscious at all and
so my control was almost perfect.”
“But you still put on a uniform and went to the game. And you pitched. You cared enough to do that.”
I put a pinch of marijuana into the bowl of my pipe. “Let’s forget about it.” I lit the pipe and took a long hit. I passed it to her and she stared out the passenger
window until the fire went out. She
adjusted her glasses and pulled down her skirt, which was riding very high
on her white thighs. I lit the pipe
again. “Go on, take a hit.” She put the stem to her mouth and sucked it
with a sensual movement. Her face was
close to mine, and her breasts jiggled in her low cut blouse. When she let the smoke out I said softly,
“Bring your face over here.”
“What?”
“Bring your face close to mine.”
“Why?”
I started to say, “Because
I want to kiss your face, stupid,” but I said instead, “I want to look down
your blouse and see your tits.” She
laughed. I said, “I
want to kiss you on the cheek.”
She moved close to me in the darkness and I kissed her cheek.
I
said, “You’re very pretty and you usually do everything you can to hide it.”
The
tension entered my stomach again. She
snuggled up to me and I put my arm around her and we drove into the darkness
of
We got back to
“I thought you said you didn’t want to fuck.”
“I said I didn’t want to feel obligated to have sex.”
She put her arm in mine and we walked up the stairs to my apartment. I opened a bottle of good wine and we drank
it quickly. I opened another one and
we drank that quickly too.
We started to make love on the couch but she was cold. I asked, “What’s
the matter?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is it tomorrow morning?”
“Yeah. Probably.”
“I’ll be meeting your brothers and parents for the first time. Are you nervous?”
“I guess so.”
I said, “Maybe we should go to bed.
It’s almost one.”
“Yeah.”
My bed was a single bed mattress. It
lay on top of a box spring on the floor. We
undressed in the darkness and moved into the little bed. I kissed her on the
lips.
She
whispered, “I don’t feel like it.”
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” I said, sitting on the edge of the bed.
“No. I want to sleep with you. I just don’t want to fuck.”
I said, emphatically, “I can’t do that.
The bed is too small. I can’t
sleep on top of you without any clothes on and not make love.”
She said, “We can sleep in each other’s arms.”
Skeptically, I got into bed and we lay in each other’s arms.
I kissed her again.
She said, “I said, I don’t
feel it.”
“Baby. I can’t sleep with you like this and not make
love. Let me sleep on the couch.”
“No.”
With my erection pressed against her I dozed and fell into a dream. I awakened making love. She was wet and responsive but struggling against
me. I came quickly and with great intensity.
I asked her if she wanted me to give her an orgasm and she said no
and almost immediately, I fell into a deep sleep.
The next morning, I knew that she hadn’t slept all night. I said, “I fell asleep. That was selfish.”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Did you sleep at all?”
“No.”
We drove to her parent’s house in silence and the tension was in my
stomach again. At the breakfast table, she didn’t say a
word. Her brothers were wary and her
parents were baffled. After we finished
breakfast her mother walked with me to my car.
She was a large boned, Germanic woman, and I could see that Anne was
a combination of her tall, fine-boned father who sympathized with me, and
this woman who wanted the truth.
When we were alone, standing by my car, she asked,
“What happened that caused her to be so angry?”
The intensity in her face disarmed me.
“Nothing. I can’t understand
it.”
Her large black eyes widened, as if they were trying to look into the
bottom of something she was afraid didn't exist.
There was an uncomfortable silence.
I said, “We had sex last night
and...” Her eyes softened. I knew she wanted the truth. “She, uh, didn’t have an orgasm and she didn’t
sleep all night.”
Her face was soft and sensuous and her eyes swam in the universe of
a mother’s anguish. “Is that all? Did anything else happen?”
“What do you mean?”
“Never mind.”
I said, “I’ll call her tomorrow,
after she’s had some sleep. She’ll
be back to normal.”
“No. You’d better wait for her to call you.”
“How long should I wait?”
“I don’t know.”
“I want you to know that I don’t really understand why she is so angry. Did she tell you something?”
She didn’t answer.
“Will you talk to her and try to find out why she's angry? And tell her that I don’t know what I did.”
The expression on her face softened. “I’ll talk to her.” She smiled.
“It’s not your fault.”
“I didn’t do anything.”
“I know.”
“Thank you.”
I drove to my apartment feeling sorry for myself, thinking that I might
never understand women and that it was probably Rhonda Bradford’s
fault.