But I know better. I need all the hair I can grow. Without hair, what would cover my terrible pores? Biggie never understood that; she doesn't have any pores. Her skin is as sleek as Colm's bum. What she hoped for, I knew, was that Colm would have her pores - or, rather, her lack of pores. Naturally, this hurt me. But I thought of the child. Frankly, I wouldn't wish my pores on anyone.
Even so, those bathtub confrontations grieved me.
I took a walk to Benny's, thinking that Ralph Packer, the polemicist, might be holding court there or otherwise formulating maxims. But Benny's was unusually empty, and I made use of the silence by making a mindless phone call to Flora Mackey Hall for Women.
'Which floor?' someone wanted to know, and I pondered which floor Lydia Kindle would live on. High up, close to the eaves, where the birds nest?
Different extensions were tried. A girl with a suspicious voice said, 'Yes?'
'Lydia Kindle, please,' I said.
'Who's calling, please?' the voice wanted to know. 'This is her floor sister.'
A floor sister? Hanging up, I imagined wall brothers, door fathers, window mothers, and I wrote on the plaster above Benny's urinal, FLORA MACKEY WAS A VIRGIN TO THE END.
In the crapper stall, someone seemed to be in trouble. Under the door peeked thonged sandals, purple socks, a pair of fallen bell-bottoms and obvious grief.
Whoever he was, he was crying.
Well, I know how it can hurt to pee, so I could sympathize. At the same time, I didn't wish to look further into this. Perhaps I could buy a beer from the bar, slip it to him under the door, tell him it's on me and quickly leave.
The urinal flushed - Benny's famous self-flushing urinal. To save the strain on the water pump, it is rumored to be electrically timed to flush semiannually. To think that I was on hand for the rare event!
But in the crapper stall, he heard it too; he felt someone was there; he stopped crying. I tried to tiptoe to the door.
His voice came weakly from the stall, 'Please tell me, is it dark out yet?'
'Yes.'
'Oh, God,' he said. 'Can I leave now? Have they gone?'
A sudden fear was upon me! I looked around for them. Who? Peering under the urinal for strange, wet men lurking there. 'Who's they?' I asked.
The stall door opened and he came out, hitching his bell-bottoms up. It was the thin, dark boy who is a poet and tends to wear lavender clothes; a student who works in Root's Bookstore, he is alternately assumed to be a great lover or a fag or both.
'God, have they gone?' he said. 'Oh, thank you. They told me not to leave until it was dark, but there aren't any windows in here.'
A closer look at him revealed the savage beating he had taken. They had jumped him in the men's room and told him he belonged in the lady's room instead. They proceeded to roll him in the urinal; they scoured his nose with the deodorant cake, which graveled up his face and left him smarting, as if he'd been rubbed with a pee-soaked pumice stone. A terrible confusion of odors clung to him; in his pocket, a bottle of Leopardess toilet water had smashed. If perfume were poured in a privy, it could not smell worse.
'Jesus,' he said. 'They happen to have been right. I am a fag - but I might not have been. I mean, they had no way of knowing I was. I was just taking a leak. That's normal enough, isn't it? I mean, I don't hustle guys in men's rooms. I get all I want.'
'What about the toilet water?'
'They didn't even know I had it,' he said. 'And it's not for me, for Christ's sake. It's for a girl - my sister. I live with her. She called me at work and asked me to pick up some for her on my way home.'
He had trouble walking - they'd really stomped him around - so I said I'd help him out of there.
'I live right around here,' he said. 'You don't have to come with me. They might think you're one.'
But I walked him out of Benny's on my arm, past two leering couples in a booth by the door. See the boyfriends! One of whom drank a bottle of perfume and then pissed his pants.
Benny himself posed with his shining beer steins at the bar in studied, cultivated ignorance of everything.
'Your urinal flushed itself, Benny,' I said. 'Mark the calendar.'
'Goodnight, boys,' said Benny, and a wispy artist at the corner table sank his nose into the head of his beer to drown our passing odor.
'I knew Iowa would be awful,' the fag told me, 'but I never knew it would be this awful.'
We were outside his walk-up on downtown Clinton Street. 'You've been very nice,' he said. 'I'd ask you in, but ... I'm very attached, you understand. I've never been so faithful before, really, but this one ... well, you know, He's just very special.'
'I'm not like you,' I told him. 'I mean, I might have been, but you happen to be wrong.'
He took my hand. 'It's all right,' he said. 'I know. Some other time, we'll see. What's your name?'
'Forget it,' I said. I was walking off, trying to leave his reek behind. There on that shabby street in his bright clothes, he looked like some gay knight just entering a town wiped out by the plague: brave, silly and doomed.
'Don't be too proud!' he shouted after me. 'Don't ever plead, but don't be too proud.'
Rare advice from the strangest of seers! Down dark Iowa Avenue, a horde of fag maulers lurked in every shadow. Would they leave me alone if I showed them I was straight? If I meet a girl, should I rape her? Watch me! I'm normal!
Or I could have left the curtains open when I came home to Biggie, my great tawny lioness, propped in our well-grooved bed, lying on and under a wealth of magazines and little pillows with stitched-on Alpine scenes.
'My God, smell you!' said Biggie, staring at me. And the horror of the explanation struck me then as strong as the lush steam of perfumed urine wafting off me from my contact with the Root's Bookstore employee. I was a diluted version of his fragrance.
'What's that all over you?' said Biggie. 'Who's that? You prick ...'
'I just went to Benny's,' I said. 'There was a fairy in the men's room. The one who works at Root's, you know?' But Biggie came bounding off the bed, sniffing me all over, catching up my hands to her nose. 'Really, Big,' I said, and tried to nip her cheek, but she stiff-armed me away from her.
'Oh, you prick, you bastard, Bogus ...'
'I haven't been illicit, Big, I swear ...'
'God!' she cried. 'You even bring her smell back to my own house!'
'Biggie, it was this damn fag in the men's room. He got rolled in the urinal, broke some toilet water he had in his pocket ...' Shit, I thought. That doesn't even sound possible, not to mention true. I said with hopeless calm, 'It was very strong-smelling, it rubbed off ...'
'I'll bet she's strong-smelling!' Biggie screamed. 'Like some bitch in heat, she's got her damn scent all over you!'
'I didn't do anything, Big--'
'Something exotic, I'll bet,' said Biggie. 'One of those Hindus in robes, with their twitchy things. And smelling like a whole harem! Oh, I know you, Bogus! You always went for that, didn't you? Always ogling the blacks and those kinky Orientals and swarthy Jewesses! Goddamn you, I've seen you!'
'For Christ's sake, Big--'
'It's true, Bogus!' she yelled. 'You really go for that, I know. Hairy ones and whorish ones ... fucking gaudy dirt!'
'Jesus, Big!'
'You always wanted me different,' she said; she bit her fist. 'Look what you buy me for clothes. You buy me terrible things. I tell you, I'm not like that! My thighs are too big. "Don't wear a bra," you'll tell me. "You got great boobs, Big," you say. And if I don't wear a bra, I flop like a cow! "Looks great, Big," you say. Jesus, I know what I look like. My nipples are bigger than some girls' tits!'
'That's true, Big. They are. And I love your nipples, Biggie--'
'You don't!' she cried. 'And you're always saying how you don't like blondes. "I don't like blondes, as a rule," you say, and then you pat me some place rude. "As a rule," you say, with your little nudges, giving me a feel--'
'I'll give you a little feel right now,' I
said, 'if you don't shut up.'
But she stepped back and put the bed between us. 'Don't you touch me, goddamn you,' she said.
'I haven't done anything, Big.'
'You reek!' she screamed. 'You must have done it in a barn! Wallowed with some sow in ... in mulch!'
I tore off my shirt and bellowed at her. 'Smell me, damn you, Biggie! It's just my hands that stink--'
'Just your hands, Bogus?' she said with icy calm. 'In the barn,' she said slowly, 'did you finger-fuck a goat on the side?' I could see this was beyond reason, so I jerked off my boots, yanked down my pants and hopped at her, trying to get my underwear unsnaggled from my ankles.
'You animal!' she yelled. 'You keep your thing away from me, Bogus! Oooogh! There's no telling what you've caught! I won't have any, thank you just the same.' She dodged to the foot of the bed as I lunged at her, catching the bottom hem of her absurd, ballooning nightie - that wretched cotton-flannel one - ripping the thing up to the seam running around her neck and spinning her back on the bed. I had her almost strait-jacketed in the thing when she landed a high, skier-strong kick to my chest, leaving me holding the tatters of her nightie as she sprinted for the hall. I caught her from behind in the doorway, but she reached over my shoulder with one hand sunk in my hair; between her legs with her other hand, she gouged toward my vitals. I worked a neat back-heel trip - a better one, surely, than in my entire wrestling career. I was sure she'd be stunned, but she slashed an elbow back into my throat and bucked up to her hands and knees under me. With Biggie, you've got to control her legs. I tried a late body-scissors as she came up to her feet, but she bore me on her back across the room, tottering toward the dresser, in front of which she expertly tucked and rolled, diving my head and shoulders into the lingerie drawer.
I saw stars then, and tasted my tongue, which, despite half-biting off in every wrestling match I ever had, I've never learned to keep inside my mouth. I clung to her hip as she strode away from the dresser, deftly blocking her fierce uppercut with my forehead, and while she raged over the pain in her hand, I pivoted behind her knee and dropped her with a side-leg dive - this time scissoring her near leg and barring her far arm in my tightest cross-body ride (a desperate, hang-on maneuver I often used in my career). She thrashed well, groping with her free hand for something to hurt. I seized this moment to press my advantage and barred both her arms, spinning out at a right angle to her body and jacking her up on the back of her neck. Her fearsome legs crashed all around me, though she was stacked up good; in fact, I had her pinned, but there was no referee to slap the mat and call us quits. The double arm-bar hurt her, I knew, so I slithered my pale stomach up alongside her head, laying my navel against her hot cheek, watchful for her bite. I was careful not to lose my hold; it was at peak moments like these that I had developed the habit of getting myself inexplicably pinned. I inched my vulnerable part up close to her wild eye, ever mindful of her good teeth, just out of reach.
'I'll bite that damn thing off, I swear it,' Biggie grunted, and she heaved against my double arm-bar which held her like a vice.
'Be kind enough to smell it first, Big,' I said, brushing my belly on her smooth cheek; her heavy knees sailed around my ducked head and thumped my back. 'Just smell me, please,' I told her, 'and give me your honest impression of the scent. Whether my important part has any foreign odor, any reek of harems, Big. Or whether what you smell is strictly me.' Her knees pumped slower; I saw her nose wrinkle. 'In your estimation, Biggie,' I said, 'in your wealth of experience in this matter of my odor would you say that you detect the faintest presence of anything unusual? Would you venture a guess as to whether this belly has slid against some other belly and taken on a different reek?' I could feel her cringe - a disarming shiver against the double arm-bar - and I let her turn her face a little and slide her nose where she would, my frightened part rested on her cheek now. He put his life on the line to save his marriage.
'What do you smell, Big?' I asked her softly. 'Is there a stench of old stale sex?' She shook her head. My nervous part lay under her nose, across her upper lip.
'But your hands ...' Her voice had a thin crack in it.
'I touched a poor beat-up fag all covered with pee and perfume, Big. I walked him home. We shook hands.'
I had to sit her up against me before I could unlock the double arm-bar and plant a bloody kiss on her neck, my tongue still bleeding sweetly down my throat. Above my left ear, my scalp stretched tightly over the swelling knot where the dresser had clouted me. I imagined the damage to the lingerie drawer. Were the panties shaken up by the blow - unfolded and flung into the deepest corner of the drawer, where they lay worried? Wondering, whatever it is out there, I hope it doesn't want to wear me.
Later, in a gentler battle on our bed, Biggie said, 'Move your arm, quick. No, there ... no, not there. Yes, there ...' And making us both comfortable, she began to glide under me in a way she has that always makes me feel she's going to get away. But she never does, and she doesn't mean to. It's almost as if she's rowing us somewhere, and I'm just pacing myself to the easy strength of her stroke. The secret is in her tireless, driving legs.
'This must be good for skiers,' I told her.
'You know, I have some muscles,' said Biggie, rocking easily, like a broad boat moored on a choppy sea.
'I love your muscles, Big,' I said.
'Oh, come on, not that muscle. I mean, that's not even a muscle, really,' she said. 'I mean, I've got a lot of muscles for a girl.'
'You're all muscle. Big.'
'Well, not all muscle ... No, come on, that's not a muscle, you know damn well.'
'It's better than muscle, Big.'
'I'm sure you think so, Bogus.'
'And this is better for you than skiing, Big. And more fun too ...'
'Well, I'd hate to have to choose,' she said, and I gouged her for that.
Heavy as she is, Biggie can roll with momentum, like a boat caught and borne along by a breaker. I floated her - a slow ride. Apparently we weighed nothing at all. Then the sea shifted and pitched us suddenly ashore, where our weightlessness went out of us and I lay as beached and leaden as a log under sand, and Biggie lay under me as calm as a pond.
Later she said, 'Oh, bye-bye for a while. Bye-bye.' But she didn't move.
'Bye,' I said. 'Where are you going?'
But all she said was, 'Oh Bogus, you're not such a bad person really.'
'Why, no, I'm not, Big,' I said, intending to sound flippant. But it came out all hoarse and thick, as if I hadn't spoken for a long time. Oh, the slow, furry voice of the successfully laid. I remember how I met you, Biggie ...
15
Remember Being in Love with Biggie?
THROUGH THE QUAINT gloom of the Tauernhof Keller, I carried the swooned Overturf toward the stairs. I wasn't worried about Merrill. The mismanagement of his diabetes had him frequently fading out and in again - his system alternately empty and too full of sugar.
'Too much alcohol,' Herr Halling said sympathetically.
'Too much insulin, or too little,' I said.
'He must be crazy,' Biggie said, though she was concerned. She followed us upstairs, ignoring the harping from her ugly teammates.
'We should go now,' one said.
'It's not our car,' the other told me. 'It's the team's car.'
Crossing the landing with Biggie alongside me, I was conscious of her seeing how short I was. She looked a little down on me. To compensate, I pretended Merrill was no strain to carry; I tossed him around like groceries and took the next stair flight two at a time, letting Biggie see: he is not tall, but he is strong.
Marching Merrill into his room, I cracked his head on the doorjamb, which I had veered into thanks to blind spots induced by breathlessness. Biggie winced, but all Merrill said was, 'Not now, please.' He opened his eyes when I dumped him on his bed and he stared at the overhead light as if it were the ultra-high beam over an operating table where he lay rigid, awaiting surgery.
'I have
no feeling, no feeling,' he told the anesthetist; then he went limp and sleepy and closed his eyes. 'If you're going to take everything out of that suitcase,' he grumbled, 'you're going to put it all back, too.'
While I got out all the sugar-sampling vials and set up the test-tube rack above the sink, Biggie whispered with the harpies in the doorway, about the fact that the racing season was over, that there was no curfew, that the team's car had been lent in good faith, that it must be returned.
'Merrill has a car ...' I told Biggie in German, 'if you would like to stay.'
'Why would I like to do that?' she asked.
Recalling Merrill's lie, I said, 'I'll show you my poem about you.'
'I'm sorry, Boggle,' Merrill murmured, 'but they were such great boobs - Jesus, such a target - I just had to take a crack at them.' But he was sound asleep, out of the fray.
'The car ...' said one of the uglies. 'Really, Biggie ...'
'We've simply got to take it back,' the other one told her. Biggie looked around Merrill's room, looked me over too, with a cool questioning gaze. Where does the former pole-vaulter keep his pole?
'No, not now, please,' Merrill announced to everyone. 'I have to pee, oh, yes.'
Juggling the vials and tubes for his urine test, I turned to the girls in the doorway, repeating to Biggie in German: 'He has to pee.' And I added hopefully to her, 'You could wait outside ...' You warm solid hunk of velour!
Then I was shut off from their mumbles in the hall outside Merrill's door, where I could hear only the harsh whisperings of the unwanted teammates and Biggie's quiet, solid indifference.
'You know there's a breakfast meeting ...'
'So who's missing breakfast?'
'They'll ask you about tonight ...'
'Biggie, what about Bill?'
Bill? I wondered, as I led Merrill unsteadily to the sink, his arms flopping in the wild take-off motions of some weak, ungainly bird.
'What about Bill?' Biggie hissed in the hall.
Right! Tell old Bill she's taken up with a pole-vaulter!
But Merrill's precarious stance at the sink needed all my attention. On the glass shelf where the toothpaste goes was the test-tube rack with the gay-colored solutions for testing sugar in urine. Overturf gazed at these in the way I'd seen him ogle the bright bottles behind a bar, and I had to keep his elbows from slipping on the sink while I aimed his floppy prod into his special pee mug, a beer stein he'd stolen in Vienna: he liked it because it had a lid and held almost a quart.