(Becky)

"TEARJERKER"

(She has only to speak to him on the phone, as he calls her out of the blue while she is nude in her bed--two minutes of catch-up conversation, and then she goes to masturbate, dizzy. Her roommate can hear but as a married thirty-five-year-old she's uncurious and lets masturbate who will. And the roommate is no voyeur or anything. Just a nice lady. Becky saw nothing as she was bringing it home: no cock or hips or back of neck or anything. She saw him smiling at her in seventh grade but her focus came to be all about the pencil drawings he made of baseball players. The notebook paper and all the eraser marks, that were so delicate, and so attentive, as bad as the drawings were, the eraser marks so meticulous and artful and fretful, so vigorous and then swept all clean with the darkened side of his palm with such rigor, he must have frowned over them, he never signed the drawings. His hand against the strewn hot spliffs of twisted eraser rubber. She shuddered and gulped and gulped.)

Who's an artist? Who's a real artist? Who's some boring cliché? She looked for the last wine bottle. Who is a real specimen, and who's the knock-off? Who's the true Animal, the animal intelligence with whatever, with God showing through, and who's the Scholastic with chalk on her sleeves and goo all in her bedsheets from the rubbing? She found a flask with something and put that in her cold coffee, and drank that down in one, two swallows. The north wind was picking up outside on the avenue. What a conversation that had been! She remembered them doing the dirty pictures on the Lite-Brite in his mother's basement and she felt like crying. It was some bad PMS. It had been an ugly year, too.

The other dude had told her that when boys cry it felt like busting a nut. That was somehow true, it was all tied together down there, in the waterworks and all that leaky endocrine shit that accounted for the leftover bullshit in human affairs. Gordon, with his sadistic expertise in slowly fucking her, bringing her to real tears. Why couldn't this whole tragedy be brought to a close already. Why weren't we all given clear vision one day so we could get out of bed as the Solstice was hitting and see what a lump of junk it was. Her room was so dirty! Her room was so fucking dirty, and half of this stuff was Gordon's! And the other half was quite useless to her. She needed, what? A toothbrush and a fucking tampon. She was moving to Los Angeles. She was moving to Los Angeles. It was fucking freezing.

It was better to go than stay. It was better to go out than stay in. It was better to be open, to share and attack and move forward, than to slink back and retire and nurse one's shame. It was better to go out, be drawn into the world and brought back under its power, and to fall in love with a man's face and body. And now she thought of in the Starbucks, the couple right out of college who were so mature but in two different ways. They were healthy, tall, and clean but with a hippie edge like rich Vermonters or liberal arts in Massachussetts. She was acting out the role of Being in a Healthy Relationship. She was saying plainly, 'Can't you just tell me you're mad at me?' He was mad, his grey eyes shone, but he wouldn't admit it to her. Just tell me. No, I'm not mad at you. She made it her business to get him to admit. They were mature but he would not admit. At last he refused with great finality and gathered her in his arms, his hands thrust between her backpack and fleece, drawing her close with a look of angry, devoted love. She was defeated by his emotion and by her own emotion returning. Becky wandered out and in her imagination watched the scene repeat and repeat. Sometimes the girl was played by Becky. Sometimes the boy was played by Becky. Sometimes it was other people watching Becky and the boy, or Becky and the girl, and weeping at this defeat. What good, after all, was discipline and carefulness. It was just like rock and roll. Everyone was overmastered.