Bob watched, mesmerized.
“Can I use your bathroom?” she said.
Bob almost broke his legs showing her where the restroom was in back. I surveyed the candy bars and studied my pimply face in one of the curved corner mirrors. I saw Bob coming up behind me, a pinheaded blob in the mirror. “Where did you find her?” he said.
“We work together.”
“And you’re what, out on a date?”
“Just drinking wine at her house.”
“Alone?”
“Yeah.”
“How did you do that? A fox like that. With bombs like that.” He bit his hand. His lips were all shiny and flecked with saliva.
“Take it easy, Bob. Do you want me to call a veterinarian?”
“Jesus,” he said. “I couldn’t get a date with my own sister. How did you do that?”
I shrugged. Now I knew what it was like to have a beautiful girl. It was not as Bob or I had imagined it. How did anything happen to you? It just happened.
“How old is she?” he demanded.
“Twenty-two.”
“She’s old enough to buy booze.” He grimaced as if recalling spleen surgery. “Oh, man, I’d kill for something like that. Has she got any friends?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long have you been going out with her?”
“Just one night.”
“One night?” Bob spun around giddily, slapping his hip.
“Shhh,” I said. “Here she comes.”
“What are you fellas whispering about?” she reprimanded hoarsely, wiggling her shoulders so the necklace on the top of her breasts jingled and slid. “You’re not talking about me, are you?”
We bought apple wine and Trues and waved goodbye. Bob stood alone in his bright little station and watched with melancholy wonder as we walked away.
“Look what I stole,” she said, when we were back in the car.
I looked down at a bubble package with a little tube of Blistex inside. “What did you do that for?”
“It was right out there in the open. Nobody will miss it. You’re not unhappy with me?”
“No, that’s all right,” I said. “Do you need it? I mean, do you use it?”
“No,” she said.
At three o’clock that morning we were sitting on the floor next to the stereo and it was time to make my move or fall asleep on the carpet like a good little Cub Scout. I had no knowledge of the passwords to carnality, but I had seen a lot of pornography in the hot lunch shops downtown. Annie Green Springs had filled me with sloppy confidence. And she was leaning back before me in steamy invitation, the buttons of her blouse coming undone, so I tossed off the last of my soda-pop wine and reached across to help her with the rest.
“What are you doing?!” she cried in a gruff tone that was meant to sound like reproof, but was instead almost trilling with delight.
“I am unbuttoning your blouse.”
“Are your intentions honorable?”
“My intentions are to take off your blouse.”
“Have you ever been with a woman before, Baby?”
“No,” I said.
“Are you sure you want this?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“You might not.”
The word transvestite went off in my head, all those stories I had heard about the small-town (usually Navy) boy who meets the big-city girl and later on that night, to his horror, reaches down and honks the frankfurter. But she wasn’t a transvestite. I wasn’t that green. Then I thought transsexual (the husky voice, the pale masculine mouth, the weird fuzzy black eyes)—well, if he was a she, or however it worked, I thought, hats off to the surgeon! It was too late to turn back now.
“Not here, Baby,” she said, and led me by the hand down the hall. Her bed seemed to glow like an orange grove or a field of lilacs in the dusk. I was vertiginous with brimming, neck-cricking, hydrophobic ecstasy. I groped and grabbed like a blind suckling pig. Her body was sleek and splendid, abundant, refuting all notions of Scandinavian surgery. My jeans, in my robust haste, got jammed like a pair of handcuffs around my ankles. She asked me breathlessly, “Are my titties too big?”
“God, no.”
“Is my pussy too tight?”
“No.”
“Some men think it’s too tight.”
“No, it’s just fine. It’s perfect, honest, really...”
“You’re very nice, Baby. You know that? I like nice men.”
She claimed to have five orgasms that night. I was lucky to have one. I humped and hunched away, like an insect with its head cut off. I seemed to be numb below the waist. My greatest fear had come true. I was not normal. I had masturbated too often, or dulled my senses by seeing too much sailor porno downtown.
For breakfast we ate Hostess Ho Ho’s and Oscar Mayer smoked links on paper plates with plastic knives and forks. I had been sneaking glances in the mirror and congratulating myself whenever possible all morning. She sawed away at her smoked wienie. “Baby,” she said. “Would you consider moving in with me?”
“Moving in with you?”
“It’s not too soon, is it?”
“Well, I hadn’t—”
“I like you, Baby. I don’t want to be alone . . .”
When I returned to my smelly, teenage apartment on Central Avenue that afternoon, Goldie and Woodchuck were sitting stoned at the kitchen table with Steve Jebets, one of the few people in the world I disliked. Jebets was a dark, square, blank-eyed lad with one permanent Alfalfa cowlick projecting from his side-parted hair. He drove a purple Buick Elektra 225 that his father had bought him and dressed as if he’d just escaped from a Saudi Arabian discotheque. He also worked for his father, a developer from the largest city in Pennsylvania, which Jebets pronounced “Philadelthia.” Jebets made fun of my job as a hospital orderly. He said it was “wiping assholes,” and that all orderlies were fags. Woodchuck, with the fine discriminating eye of a rhinoceros, had brought Steve Jebets into our ragged high-school group from his homeroom or somewhere. At nineteen, Jebets was thirty pounds bigger than me. One day I was going to take karate or work out with weights, and sock him in his Philadelthia kisser.
Smoked trailed up lazily from the mouth of a bong. Six raw and drug-drenched eyes stared at me. “Where you been, man?” said Woodchuck, a burly, bucktoothed blond whose hair still had a greenish tint from so many years on the high school swim and water polo teams.
I could smell refried beans. J. Geils’s Full House finished and the needle arm swung back and parked itself in its cradle. “Met a girl,” I said.
“What!?” Steve Jebets roared. “You?”
I moved straight to my bedroom and began to fill a Chiquita banana box with clothes and shoes, my alarm clock, and playing cards. Bonnie was waiting downstairs, and I did not want her to change her mind and drive away without me. I didn’t want anything