Billy Speare

Thanks to the review in the Times, The Sex Life of Me took off like a bottle rocket in Baghdad. Six months earlier, Knopf had put me on the road. Thirty-six cities in thirty days. One hotel room after another—they all looked alike. Cities looked alike; bookstores looked alike. And so did the handful of lonely little old ladies who came to hear me read. Three to five blue-haired biddies at each stop. Washed-out, watery eyes, thin-toothed, thick-ankled. And every one of them in a book club. Hell, I started to think that Knopf had hired them. So I drank my way across America, all on my publisher’s tab. Maker’s Mark, Wild Turkey, Jack Daniel’s. As long as it was whiskey, I was all right. The liquor helped me not care that the asshole interviewers hadn’t read my book, or that the old biddies said they would wait to buy it until it came out in paperback, or that the airlines lost my luggage not once but three times.

Oh yeah, that was all behind me. Thanks to one well-placed brilliant review, I was almost a hairbreadth away from making the List. Best-seller, here I come: That’s what God began to whisper in my ear morning, noon, and night.

And it got even better, because my good fortune with Sex paled (well, almost) in contrast to the extraordinary time I was having with Murmur. After that day on the river, it wasn’t long before we landed in the sack. She was a sexual leviathan, hungry all the time, pushing for more.

Oh yeah, buddy, the first time: candlelight dinner and the works at her place. I can’t recall what we ate. It didn’t matter. I was focused on those firecracker blue eyes, which sparkled with bad-girl playfulness. I watched her shovel something in her mouth and I thought, Oh what she could do with a long, hard prick.

We rumbled over to her bed—a big, high altar of a bed, covered in peacock blue silk—as soon as the dishes were stacked. We kissed gently and we kissed hard and my fingers explored way up there and her hand worked my member. We went on and on like that, but my fucking dick would not get hard. It was the damnedest thing. The thought crossed my mind that maybe she’d put something in my food. I did everything I knew. I sucked her. I boldly watched her. I fantasized that I had three chicks doing me. Nothing.

I was embarrassed, but mainly I was angry. I mean real anger. Like I wanted to shoot out the lights. So I took it out on Murmur. I made her come so many times, she finally begged me to stop.

Next morning, though, it was a different story. I reprised my manhood with a dick as hard as an old oak log. She took it all, with her legs up over my shoulders. Yep, it’s what I thought when I first laid eyes on her: She was all twat.

So after a good long, hard fuck, there we were, wrapped in each other’s arms and a postcoital glow, our first romp in the sack, and she etched my cheekbone with a finger that smelled like sex and asked, “So, what do you write?”

I pinched her nipple. “I write,” I said, kissing the tip of her puck nose, then her freckled shoulder, “great”—kiss—“fucking”—kiss—“novels”—kiss. Throat, neck, lips.

She leaned up on one elbow and rested her pointed little chin in the cup of her palm. “I know you write. But what I want to know is, do you write anything I would have heard of?”

Well, that certainly put it on the table. “My most famous book is a collection of short stories called Good People from a Bad Town. But the Sex Life of Me is well on its way to outshining Good People.”

“Wow, that’s amazing. You don’t strike me as a literary type.” She fumbled with my chest hair. “The way you were talking last night, I figured you wrote travelogues or something.”

“Oh yeah?” I rubbed my hand across her breasts. She was staring to piss me off. “What would you know about literary types?”

She flicked her tongue across my lips. “What I know just might surprise you.”

I pulled her close. “Listen, if we’re going to keep up this sort of activity, you need to read my books.”

She pressed her pelvis into my groin, arched her back, fiddled with something beyond her tousled hair. “Nope. Not yet.”

“What? Why not?” What the hell was she talking about? I rolled her off of me and slapped her ass.

“Because I want to know you, the real you, before I start reading all that fiction you evidently churn out. I’m interested in what’s up here, and here, and here,” she said, touching my head, my heart, my dick. “And then we’ll get to the rest.”

I wasn’t sure what to think of that, or even how to respond, so I kissed her deep and long. But we didn’t fuck, because I was tapped out. The limp dick from the night before would certainly not see the light of day. Again, she arched her back and presented to me the slender curve of her neck. I kissed it. She tasted salty. Then, exhibiting an innate feline grace, she sat up, stretched her arms over her head, yawned with a manly timbre, and slid onto the floor. That’s how high the damn bed was—when she sat on the edge, her feet didn’t touch the ground.

“How about some coffee, bacon, eggs?” She stood naked before me, her hips just a slight swell and her breasts small, firm, with dark owl-eyed nipples. I had a sudden urge to cry. This woman was so honest, without pretension. I lay there looking at her, thinking, Why the hell hasn’t a woman this fine been snatched up by somebody by now?

“Why don’t you have a man?” I asked. “You’re gorgeous and funny and smart. Seems like men would be knocking down your door.”

“Ha!” Her face turned sly. She walked away but said over her shoulder, “Who’s to say they aren’t?”

Bitch. I laughed, got out of bed, and followed her to the kitchen. I wrapped my arms around her, cupped her breasts, pressed myself against her back and behind. I whispered into her ear, “You rock my world.”

She reached back and squeezed my dick. “You’re pretty amazing yourself,” she said. She spun around and touched my face. “Why don’t you go take a shower while I fix breakfast?”

“I’ve got a better idea. Why don’t we take a shower and then we’ll both fix breakfast?”

“Is that right?” She had two dimples, both of them at the corner of her left lip.

I leaned over and gently kissed her cheek. Then I took her by the hand and led her into the bathroom. I shampooed her hair and slathered lavender suds between her breasts, down her thighs. I rubbed her shoulder blades and the small of her back. I knelt down and washed the spaces between her toes. I massaged the valleys and rises of her bone-thin ankles and lightly traced a grim mouth of a scar on the back of her right calf. Hers was not a perfect body—I mean, she wasn’t fourteen anymore—but that’s not what I was looking for. Murmur’s body reflected her soul—a little wild, a tad bit off center, honest, basic, full of yearning.

We toweled off, slipped into tees and jeans. I can’t remember what we talked about. That’s because our words were unimportant. Imagine that—me saying words were unimportant. But that morning, in that kitchen, what mattered is that we spoke about things of little consequence. Ours was an easy conversation, one that flowed illogically, simply, like a stream sliding over river rock. We ate eggs and drank strong black coffee. We laughed. We found ourselves humming along to an old Beatles’ CD she’d popped into her stereo. She dabbed toast crumbs off the corner of my mouth and I put a slice of bacon between my teeth and leaned into her and she bit clear through it. We told each other stories. I don’t remember those, either. All I can recall is that for the first time since my divorce ten years past, I felt as if I might actually become, under Murmur’s influence, a decent man.