Minna Somayan returned on the fourth day following her departure. She knocked on the door soon after he’d returned from the day’s work, perfectly timed to allow him a shower and a beer and few minutes of relaxation. The knock was strange, as if to allow him time to shoo the strange woman under the bed or out the window. Who would knock at her own front door?
The answer did not fit the question but transcended all questions. Like sunrise at quitting time, she filled the room and his heart on entering, effusing joy and love with a kiss, a gentle touching of lips. “Hi, you,” she said.
He’d rehearsed his response so she could fill in the nagging blanks — but rehearsal and Ravid verily melted, his happiness palpable between them, his eyes feasting yet again on his great good luck. With two sets of hands floating like butterflies in a garden, in which buttons are flowers, they cross-pollinated, opening, discarding, breathing steadily as a healthy young woman and a dive instructor can do, faced with daunting aerobic stimulation. Naked and standing, he lay her onto the bed, where they merely touched in exquisite anticipation, like travelers at the gates of Kingdom Come.
Moving slower than any old boyfriend ever could, he feasted his eyes and senses. She returned the electricity with equal fervor. He resisted, sensing that life would never be so promising as at that moment. He twitched against the voltage, prolonging the sweet agony till the stellar bodies and ocean tides could wait no more. Then, in the moment of his choosing, the world would be his. Why would a man so wealthy need to rush?
So he gazed upon her and the moment waiting to be claimed, in the spirit of love and triumph.
He didn’t mean to ask where she’d been. He meant to bemoan his days and nights without her, his distracted thoughts and, oh, his tarnished image on board due to errors caused by this...this love that knew no bounds, and so on and so forth — but it came out wrong. “Where were you?” It sounded like jealousy, like an accusation that she’d been in the wrong place.
“Oh, God! You’re not jealous?”
“No. I don’t get jealous.”
“What? You don’t get jealous?”
He shrugged to indicate simple curiosity in the emotional gamut of a man and wife reunited in questions of vague urgency. She’d slipped the most heinous human emotion in there to make his denial of jealousy stand out, as they spoke of love and his mundane schedule. The delay in physical contact went from exquisite to strained, but it felt necessary, so they could resolve the uncertainty, so the games could properly begin. He rolled onto his back and stared up. She lay beside him. “No. I’ve never been jealous,” he said. “That is a good thing, don’t you think?”
“Yeah. It’s the greatest...” She moved apart and away from him to sit up into a slumped posture on the edge of the bed. Then in a monotone meant to be free of emotion, or spent of emotion, she gave him the news:
She’d been home.
That was it.
She’d stayed at her parents’ place. She’d explained things to them. They wished the newlyweds well and hoped for a long and prosperous life.
The End.
Except that a man so seasoned at depth doesn’t need to see a thing to feel its presence in the periphery. He sat up too. She said that she also used the time to recover from an episode of...well, female things, if he must know, things of a personal nature.
If he must know? Oh, how little he knew. Since when did a woman go to her parents’ house to explain that she’d married a guy who hadn’t come along to meet them? Why would she need to leave for her parents’ house to wait out her period, if that’s what it was? He stood up. He took one step to the window. He looked back, squinting at her snatch to check for lingering clues. He laughed — at himself, though this too was not funny. He looked down at the old ramrod, rarely so rudely left all alone for so many days, so left out in the cold, as it were. But who said her female problem was a period, anyway? Maybe she has...
And, he might as well know, she made productive use of her time by getting rid of the asshole responsible for, well, let’s just say a major part of her problems. Or trying to get rid of him at any rate, though the incredible jerk had this sick notion that she was his property and would remain so till he was good and goddamn ready to send her on her way, and anybody who thought they could take what was his would be in for a bumpy ride on a very rough road.
Getting rid of the asshole?
She laughed, “What a jerk. You would not believe this guy. He can’t even talk. He says, ‘You like die?’ Unbelievable. Like I’m going to hang with that lowlife forever. Like it doesn’t even matter that I’m married now. Hell-oh-oh...” She turned to him, attempting the cute, pixie-like persona of their laughing, happier times. She failed on a quiver.
Frankly embarrassed that the woman of his dreams actually reached for his thumper within the same minute of disclosing what must have been a former thumper, Ravid shivered in awkward synchronicity. His skin contracted in the sudden cold wash of ugly realization. Goose bumps rose like a samurai army from cover in the underbrush, or as Minna Somayan playfully cried out, “Hey, look at you, with the chicken skin!” She laughed again, a small, forced laugh meant to salvage the difficult moment, playfully stroking the other little samurai.
“He’s...what? Your boyfriend?”
“Was. Fourteen years. But it’s over. It was a mistake. Hey. I’m twenty-six years old. Okay? This guy, he takes advantage when I’m only twelve. Yeah, I went along. I was mature for my age. But fourteen years? Enough already. One time, I fuck him. One. It wasn’t so terrible. The other times were nothing. It doesn’t work with him. He thinks he owns me. One abortion I get for him. Enough! I went give up my baby for adoption. My baby. Not his. Never his. But the baby never get born, because I miscarry. His fault. Because he too rough is why. I get out because I want something else, something new. That’s why. I want you.”
“You mean he didn’t know about me, so you had to go home to tell him we’re married?”
“Yeah, that’s what I mean. I tell him every time. I mean, not married every time. You the only one so far, married and all. Still every time he get all huff and puff, want to blow away whodaguy.”
“Whodaguy?”
“Yeah. This time, you da guy. Hey. No worries. He been saying that for years.”
“You didn’t tell me you had a boyfriend.”
“I don’t. I told you. I used to. You never have one girlfriend?”
“Why are you talking differently?”
“Psh. Because. I been around that guy. That’s why — hey. He been taking steroids?” She meant the thick-necked, muscle-bound bully in her hand, which she coddled and coaxed to give testimony one more time in the face of rigorous cross-examination.
“So what? He wants to...make trouble?”
“He won’t do nothing. He’s my cousin, Darryl. My uncle would kill him. My mother too. You know I always looked up to him, in school and whatnot, but I got so sick of him. He’s crazy. I been done with him since high school. Eight years already. Besides, we married already!”
“He wants to shoot me?”
“All talk. Listen. You the one. You different, Ravid. I love you. I want you. I want you to be strong. Look at you.” Taking the rigid tube in her mouth, she encouraged him briefly but expertly, removing him to underscore her case. “Look at you. You are strong. Look how strong you are.”
She’d proven her ability to speak Standard English with a subject and verb for each sentence. She’d displayed grammar, syntax, diction and enunciation, language skills that could be taken for granted. Yet here she dipped deeper — or rather, receded further — into pidgin security. It seemed like shelter from the real world, the world of outsiders relentlessly reaching to take something away. Pidgin security was meant to defend against those who could not penetrate the mystery and meaning of this jumbled slang, though anyone around it for any time at all could see that there was no mystery and hardly any meaning. Pidgin communicated common experience and agreement on da kine. He wanted her back in the world of communication, so he asked, “Can you please stop talking like that?”
She laughed, and in a caricature voice of the pridefully ignorant said, “Ah dunno.”
He had no response — wanted one, but didn’t know what to say to this other woman recently arrived with a reminder that marriage is forever. She saw his dilemma and knew exactly how to take them both back to former, lovely times.
So she sat up straight and grasped his thighs, as if the dialogue would now bear reasonable meaning between her and the only thumper that counted. Reaching behind him to grasp his backside she pulled him near for a most personal hug, taking the key witness of their love through the oath, that the testimony he was about to give would be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but, she glanced up — alas — to see a judge in doubt, his forehead as wrinkled as any old man’s.
Staring down on an object of scorn and wonder, Ravid squinted and finally spoke. “You tell him every time?”
Alas and alas, counsel for the defense could not fool the jury. Yet her guilty plea was more touching with a soft, sweet embrace that appealed for mercy and more, her regal head movement leaving no doubt in a lonely man’s mind that this was a terrific blowjob, and that the taste of alfalfa sprouts was surely as familiar as coffee and toast.
As if on cue, Skinny complained from her new perch on the dresser, safely distant from the recently flailing arms and legs. Her little fuzzy snout moved in a silent meow, as if to mock him. It’s not like I didn’t tell you. Yet she too sympathized for a fool under the spell of a wrong, furless female — because he was her fool, after all. I feel your pain.
Ravid shook his head, and dropped his load.
“No...you...didn’t. That’s not what you thought.” He meant that Skinny’s accusation was unfounded; that they both got fooled by the sweetness and light, which, when you thought about it, could fool anybody any time.
The strange woman below his waist moaned with pleasure — or maybe with hope that the pathos upon them would soon return to the boundless realm of pleasure. She peeked up humbly in selfless service to her one true man. But the kaleidoscope turned on a painful refraction of a scene hitherto wondrous and lovely, gone angular, distorted and bent.
Here was an event most esteemed in the charter community — in most communities for that matter — an excellent blowjob followed by concerns for a busy, late afternoon schedule and the best way to send this date down the road. He might even find time in the early evening to chart a new future. Who was that guy, the one who viewed this very act as proof of eternal bonding in a world turning perfectly at last, not so long ago?
Married?
Fuck.
So the world turned back, eclipsing light and magic with its more prevalent, more accessible, more insistent reality. Long shadows stretched over the garden, where nothing took root except the insidious tap seeking depth and dominance. Gone were the butterflies and nature’s gentle pollination. No more the mystery and metaphor, where buttons were flowers; this tiptoe through the tulips was just another jizz fest — and a great one at that, though a bit heavy on the sappy side, no pun intended.
Stray stimuli resurfaced like taunts, morphing to opposite meaning.
Then love died, the perfect love of loves ending like a life of days on the last day. The perfect woman gave a self-satisfied chirp and looked up with a swollen smile to better see his moment of great good cheer, of grand victory, winner take all. Whether she saw the difference between sweet agony and agonizing loss would remain conjectural, so hurriedly did she wipe her chin and announce with regret yet again. “Oh, God!”
Ravid felt this exclamation of disgust aimed at his lack of tact, cutting loose on four days of pent-up mustard. But what did she expect, working it like a top-drawer professional with every indication that she’d go to moonrise? Still, he stayed stuck on the quandary: Why on God’s blue earth would she tell the unstable ex-boyfriend about anything with a new boyfriend, especially marriage? Why would she not let him find out? So he asked again, “Why did you do that?”
Glancing quickly from the window to him, she asked, “You can make more, can’t you?”
Her response only underscored unseemly familiarity with manly function, not that Ravid Rockulz would begrudge a beautiful woman any romp in her past. He never had at any rate. But this was different. This woman was his...
Yes, many of his beloved sexual helpers in the past had also been married or with steady boyfriends. But this was different because of the level of spirit and intimacy — not like that nutcase Marcia who kept sucking him off and swore she’d keep at it till they were eighty — or ninety! Because she loved him sooo much. My God, this wasn’t like that! Minna must have had a reason to tell her former boyfriend, her Cousin Darryl, about her new boyfriend — er, husband. Maybe telling the cousin every time she scored a new boyfriend was the ultimate revenge. Some women sorely need to beat the macho men who “own” them.
Or egg them on.
Some women need the lead in the machismo play. Had Ravid’s own curiosity been natural, or did Minna taunt it? Either way, curiosity had rushed headlong like an ocean swell to the shallows, with questions of who, what, when and where cresting in sordid details. Then the wave collapsed, as a very strange woman he knew very little about sucked him off.
“Oh, God!” she said again when the claptrap rattle-bucket pickup truck roared the last half block and screeched to a halt outside, next to her car. Ravid looked out from the side of the window at the small truck from a former decade with a body four feet off the ground because of wheels and tires big enough for an airplane, two big transmissions, sixteen jumbo shock absorbers and a small fortune in extraneous hardware chromed or painted red or yellow between the truck body and the ground. Springs, shafts, gizmos, padlocks, exhaust manifolds, trumpets, U-joints and the works. Jumping from the cab to the ground, a swarthy little man with a potbelly slung low, a Fu Manchu on his lip and a handgun looked around for signs of life.
He yelled, “You little cunt! I’ll kill every bone in your body!” Then he fired a round in the air.
She whispered, “Sh. He’s so stupid. He’ll never find us. What’s he going to do, knock on the door?”
Ravid whispered back, “Why are you whispering then?”
She giggled. “Sh. God. You think you’re jealous. He’s insane.”
It was fun, except that it wasn’t. “At least I’m not haole.”
“Hey. You know what? I wouldn’t go out there right now and explain that to him. Okay? Aw, shit! Look! No wonder he get so mad. His windows all webbed.”
Besides that, the irate ex then bellowed like a sad animal, “Our son needs you!”