-Here, Dion said, handing her a book, yellow-jacketed with china blue lettering.
-the one I was telling you about in Rudz the other night.
Mary glanced at the cover. Enemies Of Promise. Cyril Connolly.
Dion smiled.
-Doesn’t ring any bells?
-Um. Clapper’s muffled maybe.
-Don’t worry, we were both five pints in by then.
The two had just enjoyed a late lunch at Chapultepec’s (soup gratis, whether asked for or not) and Mary had suggested a bus ride on the old 25 down Richmond, out past the Loop (gasp!) for a drink or two of time-killer. The bus was not crowded for a Saturday and Mary clapped delighted hands at the vacancy of the back row, both window seats to choose from.
-So tell me about it, she said.
And he did, dropping names and titles some of which she knew, some not, none of which she’d read. Orwell, eton, waugh, powell, burgess, acton, palinarus, aspidistra, horizon, children of the sun, enemies of promise. Not any of her obsessive back-alleys of interest, little-‘c’ catholic as her tastes might be.
Mary scooped her lazy net by instinct, fishing for the Why of his gift, trying hard to avoid saying What does this have to do with precious me? Precious little, as it turned out. Read this book her friend was saying, and you’ll know the real me, which was a silly thing to be saying, wasn’t it? Wee sorrow and snarl-mouthed irritation wrestled nude in the attic of Mary’s mind. Sorrow that Dion held her in such lonely esteem that her knowing the real him would amount to anything more substantial than a promiscuous honeybee’s millisecond bounce from one amber-lipped quim to the next, and irritation at the use of a cat’s paw, be it Cyril or Nigel or Prancer or Dancer.
How many times had she bitten her bilious tongue (and how many times when she had not) over some bubbly cherub’s eruption of ooh they’re playing my song! No, darling, not your song. That one belongs to Bob or Lou or Mick or Patti or Joni or Ozzy. She wondered if there were any bodies out there who heard one of her own songs and thought ‘mine!’ The possibility made her shudder.
Dion was telling her something about the south of France, the interwar years, and now he was telling her something about caned bottoms in English public schools, London brothels, velvet slippers, rowdies and pansies.
James Coney Island. Rockin’ Robin. Exotic Aquarium. Exotic Modeling Studio. Greenway Plaza. Mary ticked the landmarks and hummed out the necessaries: sounds pretty interesting … I’ll look forward to reading it …
Mary liked this little stretch of Richmond, where the trees on either side almost almost touched leaves at about the third story level. If it was rainy and twilight and she was two degrees stoned it reminded her of Baltimore, on the way to or from something wicked and sweet.
Dion had taken the book out of her hands and was looking through it, a phrase to please her, to pleasure her with preview, the bookman’s foreplay. Not that she minded. She might yet forget the past in order to repeat it and if his need to plunder her body were to itch beyond her powers of dissuasion than perhaps their friendship, like Iphigeneia, was the sacrifice demanded by the malicious mocking gods, holed up in Mount Olympus with their melon-breasted cockteasers and aphrodisiac peacocks.
To the left were shops and to the right were takeaways. Indian, Korean, Chinese, Cajun, fake-American. The takeaways made sense but who were the brave creatures who kept the shops in business? Poodle-barbers, lamplighters, auriferous spendthrifts, neat freaks idling in for a raid of ikon-snatching and bauble-pillage.
The bus jostled over the railroad tracks and then a few blocks on, under the humming torso of freeway, and there was the Galleria, looming to the right.
A tumbling jumble of drunken memories from her first days in Houston.
Balancing herself on the chopper’s handlebars while a hee-hawing biker roared her through the topiaried parking lot, all belly laughs and smoker’s cough, howling that she was light as a feather and he was dead set on riding her round till the sun came up or he ran out of gas; staring down at the skaters, cellular and chaotic on the rink, Pat Benatar providing the soundtrack for skaters, her, and the three primping youths shoplifting in the store behind her, whom she ran into again by the crowded crepe restaurant, agreeing to sell them her survivor’s kit of five tabs of acid, a squishy square of hash, and the baker’s dozen of pills which might have been for dietary purposes or for menstrual cramps, she couldn’t remember for sure, and whom, out of pity, amusement, and sheer bloody mindedness, she allowed to pick her up and take her to a motel still under construction, where she motivated their attempts to pick the back door lock by performing a strip tease on the loading dock before showing them what they were doing wrong and bobby-pinning the tumblers into place; by now they were high and out of their depth and happier than they’d probably been in their dim short lives but she didn’t care that they were also a little bewitched and scared by her, stumbling goose-footed and clumsy down the hallway behind her, while the scaredest and therefore the smartest of them kept repeating in diminishing volume and sincerity are you sure you’re not a narc?; hit me she said and showed them how to reverse the joint in their mouths and blow-kiss her high and they were all ready as she could see and two of them enjoyed her in succession, straight missionary on the crinkly tarp, fast as she’d expected, and gently as she’d also expected, given their awe, their luck, and the third was barely inside her when the ceiling strobed with blue and red lights and a siren hollered way too close for comfort and she was up, grabbing jeans and blouse and down the hall and out the back door and over the fence wearing nothing but some perfume and a bite mark on her ass; she was dressed and stealthily across the street in time to see the cops tossing two of the kids into separate cars while a beefy blue boy knelt on the back of the third, face down on the sidewalk, his nightstick rising and catching fire in the headlights while the kid screamed and the cop brought the stick down on each bellowed word: Three! Strikes! And! You’re! Out! Punk!