by Camille Roy
J. and my fake i.d. got me into the gay bar. She liked to go alot. Every other night it seemed we'd close it. By last call, she'd be sliding across laps, running her fingers through her blond hair and jerking her head back as she flashed grins. The dykes thought she was hilarious. I'd stay back in the dark booth, jealous, watching her.
Still happy to be there. Orange & blue lights made rainbows in my glass.
I watched the different groups rub across one another. Fags clustered at the bar, in a bubble world of sports jackets and jeans. Occasionally one would break away and prance, the others laughing. The women were raucous and more shabby, sprawled in the pit and wings off the dance floor. Dykes were impossible to tell apart from whores. They were all wearing the same mask, and that interested me more than anything. It was the mystery I wanted, I could feel myself headed towards it but I didn't move.
It's hard to explain. There was the feeling of my body moving faster than my thoughts -- simple, forward momentum. Then a drop off. When you stop you go splat, or something. That's how you learn what you're doing. I watched J. display herself, arching back the way she did when she was interested in someone. She thrust one breast out and stood with her hips cocked, concealing her slightly crooked spine. The woman she was flirting with was tall and butch, with blue eyes so dark they were strange, but her smile was right there--easy and warm. I could see J. leaning into it. J. had arched her back and turned that charm on me, before she realized I wasn't what she wanted.
That girl was such a fuck up, she got drunk and fucked her mother. She got raped when she was buying speed. I used to wonder if J. would make it --- now she's a systems analyst for Bank of America, and she lives in Los Altos, with an accountant named Roberta. She looks pretty much the same, slim, green-eyed, that sprinkle of blond hair across her shoulders---a stereotype of pretty but it gives me pleasure.
I pulled into her driveway and we made out in the car. It felt like practicing, her thin lips swimming against my neck. I could sense J. 's willingness and disinterest at the same time. I pushed the car door open and leaned into the darkness; there was a garage looming out of a grove of trees with white papery bark. She was already trotting around the car, headed for a side door, up a narrow flight of stairs---her room was over the garage.
I followed J. up into a small studio with not much in it but a mattress, white boards on bricks, and neatly packed books. Most were by 19th Century American writers. I picked up a book that was on the floor by the bed---essays by Emerson. "So this is your private life."
She cocked her hip, lifted the beer she'd just gotten, ran her fingers through her hair --- the whole bar vocabulary. But she was talking about quiet evenings and philosophy. Crickets. I couldn't even follow what she was saying, it seemed so out of character. She rolled her eyes in exasperation and began pulling at my shirt. When she'd uncovered my belly button she ground her knuckle into it, sending nerve pulses into my gut that grated something inside. Nauseating and sexual. Then we were wrestling.
I caught a glimpse of a black window with bare branches pressed against it when her face floated by with a look of weird romance. Somehow my shirt came off. It landed with one shirt sleeve stretched out while the rest made a white cotton pile on the floor. As I jerked my foot around the sleeve she got me off balance, bent over, in a headlock, and I let myself fall. I thought we'd roll around among clothes, two girls, smooth and jabbering.
Then she pressed a blade against my throat, and I went blank. Breathing hard, bent over towards the floor, our bodies gently rocked together. No feeling, just silence and curiousity, a deeper level of attention. I like those things. We stayed that way for a long moment.
She sprang away, shaking her hand out, laughing a little hysterically. I looked for the knife but all I saw was her right thumbnail, long and curved like a horn. It was yellowish, coated with clear nail polish. She held it up like she was exposing a secret. "You're playing with my head," I told her.
J. wasn't listening. She sat on the couch and hunched over, staring at her hand. It lay there like a little claw. "The last time I did that," she said, "this guy was dragging me out of his car and into a cornfield. We were somewhere outside of Toledo. The fuckwad let me go after I stuck my thumbnail into his gut. It was dark, he couldn't see what I had or didn't have."
"That sucks," I said, sort of stupidly, and stuck my thumbnail against my throat. It felt convincing. "You're so streetwise, J. ," I told her, and she just looked at me. Smells of belly sweat and fear edged into my brain. Real fear clears my mind, I try to remember that. I sat down next to her, and awkwardly, buddy-style, put my arm across her shoulders.
"Where did you sleep after that?"
"I didn't sleep. I sat until dawn under some bushes at the edge of the field, listening to the trucks."
Appearances were dazzling and indiscipherable, I believed they hid real experience. So of course I still wanted to have sex, whatever that was. But I sank into her bed like it was my grave. I couldn't move. J. curled up next to me and ran her fingers across my stomach, breasts, neck. It was a dark night, the sky was a black sheet with stars. Our clothes were all over the room. We lay under her covers, the bare branches of a birch tree pressing against the window, until our brains emptied out and we slept.
J. was just another girl in a pile of girls, swarming. She grinned like a drunk. What was true about her made her so beautiful, perhaps it was the light behind her skin that spilled out at her elbows, her lips, under the arches of her feet. Or perhaps it was her deformity, the spine which kneaded her back into a slight twist so that her tits protruded, high and separate. It's a strange way to touch the world. Years later I read something about the appeal of blonds---they bruise easily. I put that thought next to J. , as though I were putting a piece of her hair in a locket. But it's nothing like the way I really feel. All I want to say to J. is this: