I’M WALKING DOWN TO the beach. No place special to go. Just hanging around, looking for something to happen. Then she pulls up alongside me in her Datsun and rolls down the window. “Want to go for a ride?” she says.
I get in, no questions. Wherever she’s going it’s better than anyplace I had in mind.
“You shouldn’t be so trusting,” she says. “How do you know I’m not kidnapping you?”
“So what if you are,” I say. “Only if you are, you’d better not be looking for no ransom. My ma would be glad to get me out of her hair.”
She’s got her music blasting, same as always. “I had a boyfriend in the rock-and-roll business one time,” she says.
This isn’t what I want to be doing. What I want is to be kissing her. I want to be rubbing my face in her hair.
“He was a sound man for all these rock shows,” she says. “He got us backstage passes to see Aerosmith one time. I even met Steven Tyler.”
This was all pretty weird to me. Last time I seen her I was laying on top of her, fucking her brains out. Now we’re just shooting the breeze. You act like everything’s normal, when you both know it’s a fucking lie.
Seems to me it should work like this. Once you fuck someone, then everytime you see them after that, you just go right over to them and jump them. Go up to them, take off their shirt or whatever. None of this “nice weather we’re having” crap. Who’s she kidding?
Everyone tries to pretend fucking never happens. First your parents. You know they done it. Only once they’ve had you, they spend the rest of their life acting so fucking shocked any time you give them any idea you might be interested in a little nookie yourself. Like what kind of animal are you? When if it wasn’t for them fucking you wouldn’t even be there?
Mrs. Maretto, she was the same way. We’d screw our brains out one afternoon over at the clam flats and then next time I run into her it’s “Did you know we’re scheduled to do some taping next Tuesday?”
I’m going crazy from being this close and wanting to kiss her so bad. I’m too desperate to be like some movie star type, all cool and smooth. So I say, “We fucking today?”
She laughs. “Watch your language, James,” she says to me.
“OK,” I say. “We having intercourse?”
She don’t say nothing. Just keeps driving. We’re way out of town by now. No houses or nothing anyplace nearby. I can’t keep my hands off her one more minute. “Please,” I say. But no sound comes out of my mouth.
She pulls over by the side of the road. Opens her trunk, that has one of them aerobics mats inside. It’s blue, with pictures of all these exercises printed on it, in case you forget I guess.
She hands me the mat. She’s walking a little ways in front of me, so I follow her. I know what’s coming, naturally, so I’m getting pretty hot. I mean, it got to where basically the minute I laid eyes on her I’d get a boner.
“Here,” she says. She’s pointing to a spot on the ground with plenty of bushes around, so nobody could see us or nothing. Then she lays down and pulls up her skirt. For the first time it hit me that she never looked so excited about doing it as me. I mean, to look at her that afternoon you’d almost think she was doing her job. Not that I cared at that point, I was wanting to get in her pants so bad.
So we fucked. Whole thing was probably over in four, five minutes max. I just couldn’t wait, and that didn’t seem to matter to her.
When it was over, I was just laying there same as before, wishing we could do it again and knowing she was going to jump up in a second and say we had to get going. Only this time, she sits up but she don’t seem in her same rush.
“So,” she says, “We can’t keep putting off taking care of Larry. I’m getting all stressed out.”
“I don’t know if it’s such a good idea after all,” I say. “I been thinking about that. Maybe you two should just get a divorce.” I mean, up till this point, I don’t think I really believed she was serious. I thought it was kind of like a game, talking about killing Larry. I didn’t think it would ever really happen.
“I thought you understood,” she says. “But I was wrong about you. You don’t really love me like you said.”
“I love you more than anything,” I tell her. I wished I was better in English, so I could think of how to tell her. I just didn’t know the words for it. “Only I just don’t think I could kill anybody is all.”
“Right,” she says. She’s real quiet and cold all of a sudden. “I should’ve realized it was too much to ask. Forget it. Let’s just forget the whole thing. Forget we ever met.”
“Please,” I say. “You don’t understand. I want to be with you. I just don’t want to kill nobody.”
“Well grow up, little boy,” she says. “You can’t have the one without the other. You can’t ever be with me again so long as Larry’s around.”
I’m frozen there, just looking at her. That perfect face. Her golden hair. Her hands, with those delicate fingers of hers, that used to touch me all over. “It’s just that I never did something like this before,” I say. “It’s different from ripping off a cassette or something.”
“Well you never made it with a twenty-five-year-old married woman before either,” she says. “That’s unusual too.
“It would be better for everyone, you know,” she says. “Even him.”
I forgot how she figured that, but if I asked her to remind me she might think I was dumb. So I just said, “Right.”
“It would look like an ordinary robbery,” she says. “Nobody would ever know.”
“Yup,” I say. It’s like I’m hypnotized. She could’ve told me to stick a fishing knife in my own hand right then and I’d of done it.
“And then afterward of course, there wouldn’t be anything getting in the way of you seeing me anymore. We could get together as much as you wanted then. You could sleep over and everything.”
That gets my boner going again. I’m dripping with sweat. I say that sounds good. I can barely talk at this point but she’s back to that voice she uses on TV.
“I mean, I’d want to keep a low profile for a while. And naturally I wouldn’t want to broadcast it at work or anything. But eventually I’ll be finding a position someplace else. It’s just a matter of time.”
Now I look back on it, naturally, I can see all the problems that would’ve come up. Now I know it wasn’t ever going to work. She wasn’t ever going to be mine. But at the time alls I heard was how we could make love whenever we wanted to. That’s the way it was for me. It wasn’t just about fucking anymore, although that was incredible. It was about love.
So I said yeah. We were on. I’d talk to Russell. But I was pretty sure he wouldn’t give us no trouble. He was always up for anything.