It wasn’t
really a question of whether God existed, the pussy had to be eaten and there
was a certain righteousness to that. Eli was saying so. Daniel and some others
were in the basement of the synagogue for the annual lock-in, and they sat rapt
in Eli’s company. The girls were in the social hall upstairs. A pile of mini 3
Musketeers bars collapsed under its own weight.
Eleven
years later, Daniel walked down Harrison Place toward the gallery where his
friend worked. He found himself then summoning, or summoned by, the image of a
dark haired girl he’d once known; the crescent of her pale ass transported him
such that he was soon not much less than drifting behind her in this daze of
being, looping that ephemeral bloom. He quickened his pace, past the middle-aged
mechanics, two lain out on the stoop marred damp with heat, another, supine
under the body of a car, and as he approached closer, just before the
intersection, where her vision would cross to the right, departing the sidewalk
like into the ocean of their separate burdens, her face revealed to him as some
tense node concentrated only on a path of what he knew as total indifference,
while he’d go left, on to pick up a painting about which he no longer cared,
still married, letting that final glimpse flutter through him, and down the
block, sparking from the heart of his loin, as he took out his cell phone and
found that it had overheated, displaying a bold exclamation mark within yellow
triangle, atop iPhone needs to cool
down before you can use it. He
waited for a minute in the shade outside the gallery. Then he called Todd to
let him in.
Fourteen
years earlier, he tried to imagine what a woman looked like naked in the car on
the way to taekwondo practice.
He had seen his mother’s breasts for the final time, and perhaps
the first conscious one, three years earlier, sunken and hugely drooped, like
two horrible mesh nets filled with millions of small soft rocks, not yet able
to be called a beach, the drawstrings closed tight like a pucker at the tops,
descending, descending from gravity. He might have compared the slow falls of
astronauts on the moon to the manner by which they hung, suspended, as he had
around that time, at the age of six, lied about wanting to pursue the occupation
in some classroom activity, but her cry out, ―Daniel, with the simultaneity of
his own action, closing the bathroom door, stifled any hope for thought. Still,
he did not recall any of this then. It was as if in the car he had discovered
something new, and for the sake of what it was, he had.
This woman’s age could be any, and hers were definitively not
breasts, but boobs. They were round and soft and white and nippleless. They
were not so much a part of her, but an extension, and their relative size
remained a mysterious lurch within him. Between her stomach and thighs lay an
emptiness. He knew of bush, but knew it only as gina. When, two years
later, he learned of its proper name, he found it both offensive on ear and
paper, and it would take explaining from a high school girlfriend that it
existed independent of the organ, or system or part or whatever, that was
responsible for urination.
The figure jiggled around her tabula rasa of a self, and he became
so hard that he pushed forth his athletic cup, projecting a noticeable
codpiece-like bulge at the crotch of his exercise pants. He thought about
something else, and when his mother parked he got out of the car, refusing
hers, but exerting upon himself, in a distance of bowlegged strides, a painful
embrace, which was already gone as the door to the dojang swung closed.
