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And it was someone else's voice from another time. I can't remember even now
who it was. Another girl I had known, when I was young enough to be able to
remember everyone who had said yes, and
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.txt count them on one hand. Perhaps it was that second girl I'd slept with. I
can't recall who she was. There isn't anyone, man or woman, who can't recall
the first. But the second ... ah, that's another matter. And perhaps it was
her.
Whoever it had been, this was now, and Jenny had said, "Oh, Kenny ..." and I
was holding her slim body very close to mine, and my hands were locked behind
her back, still clutching the gin cards.
Her face came up, and there were dust motes spinning in her eyes of whatever
color those eyes might be.
I smelled her hair, and it was very clean. It was another reminder of things
from before, but they were silly, irrelevant things, like a field of winter
wheat I had run through once, on a picnic day, when there had been such things
as days right for nothing but picnics. It was a stupid thought, and it passed
quickly, but not before I recalled having run and run and finally fallen down
on my back, and lain there, completely hidden from all but the sky, staring
straight up and feeling sorry as hell for myself. I kissed Jenny, and her
mouth was soft, precisely as a woman's mouth should be. I kissed her the way a
gentle lover would kiss someone he revered.
"Not like that," she murmured, pulling my face down harshly. "Like this." She
opened her lips and worked at me fiercely, as though it was something worth
doing and hence, something worth doing well. It was possibly the grandmother
of all Soul Kisses, and when she was done, I knew I'd been kissed. My hand was
on her thigh, and she moved slightly, so my hand went over the rise, down
where her slacks were tightest. I had a mad thought that someone was going to
pop out of the clothes closet ant take movies of it all, but that thought
passed, too, and in a moment we were wriggling with each other's clothes,
trying to keep our mouths together, and yet get naked.
Jenny was young, but Jenny was expert. She took me the way Hillary and Tenzing
Norgay took
Everest: all the way, and chiefly because it was there. Anything worth doing
was worth doing well.
Midway, she arched up and there was a feral gleam on her face, a drawing back
of the lips and an exposure of small teeth that reminded me of a timber wolf
I'd shot up near North Bay. Sometimes, though, she was a flower, and sometimes
she was a hot shower, and sometimes she was a pitch pipe whistling an elegant
tune. She had a small habit of twisting her hips sidewise at special times.
When we were over the final hill, and the road behind seemed much too rough
for anyone to have crossed alone, much less two people as strangely locked as
we had been, I went into the bathroom and took a bath. Not a shower. A bath. I
have taken showers since I was sixteen and had a bad back. Baths are a pain,
and they leave a dirty ring around the tub.
I felt I needed a bath.
And I wanted to see that dirty ring around the tub.
Thursday was two hells and a decapitation away. Every time Rooney looked at me
I could swear she knew. And when Jenny leaned over in a movie we three
attended, with her hand on my leg, and whispered, "At least I know for sure
you couldn't make me pregnant," I wanted to open my wrists with a beer can
opener. What had I stumbled upon: a key to the depravity of the young? Or the
key to my own yin and yang? I didn't feel guilty, I felt unclean, which was
infinitely worse. I, Kenneth Duane Markham, became a case in point for myself.
This, I thought angrily, is how we fool ourselves into thinking we're
honorable men. Jenny's mere existence became a constant reminder of the other
side of my nature; an ungovernable side that didn't even have the consistency,
the decency or the stamina to be constant. I was a mealymouthed, smiling
sinner who took his pleasures and pains as they comfortably fit into the
regimented scene of everyday life. Dorian Gray be damned! There isn't one of
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