Sex for America: Politically Inspired Erotica (23 page)

“We don’t make good partners,” he said. “It wasn’t that,” I said, even though it was.

We drank some more. A thirtysomething man in chinos sat at the other end of the bar smoking. I slid off my stool and walked over to him.

“Could you spare a cigarette or two?” I asked.

He looked at me with a strained expression but didn’t say anything, then lifted two cigarettes from his chest pocket and held them out to me with a limp hand.

Russell talked about touring as we smoked and drank. I re- sisted telling him everything I knew about that kind of life, which was actually a lot, and something I felt I’d left behind a year be- fore.

“I sort of got stuck in New Orleans,” he said, twisting his face and scratching the back of his neck.

“You fell in love?”

“With dope.”

“Oh, that,” I said. “That’s the one thing I didn’t try in college.

Practically everything else, but not that.”

He didn’t say anything. A tendril of his personality—the one that had lain his weakness on the bar for me to touch, the one I liked—seemed to curl up and disappear.

“I’ve always been curious.” I drew on my cigarette. “You kicked it or what?”

“I keep it under control.”

“You seem fine,” I said. I thought of the junkies I’d known, peripherally, in college and wondered how often they were high without my realization. I remembered a guy who’d lived in the same house as a girl I spent weekends with. He was a twig of a man, with long, straight, wheat-colored hair and a face like a scarecrow’s. We used to have short conversations while waiting to get into the bathroom. I couldn’t remember any of them now. What I did remember was seeing the girl at a party months after we’d stopped talking, and her telling me he was dead.

Russell shrugged his shoulders and threw back his beer with a vigor that appeared almost healthy.

“When’s the last time you did it?” “Before I left for work.” He smiled. “Today?”

“Just a little,” he said.

I hid my reaction—I didn’t even know what
it
was—by drink- ing the last of my beer.

“We should get going.” I slid off my barstool. It was light out- side. I didn’t want to be in the dark, but as soon as we were on the street, I regretted not kissing him inside.

The closest apartment building on our list was a block north on Eighty-ninth. We swaggered uptown with the buoyant flair of intoxication. We found the building and sneaked in under the guise of holding the door for an elderly woman in a beige house- dress who happened to be using a cane. “You’re so kind,” she told us, steadying the rubber tip of her cane with each tiny step. “Thank you, that’s good.” I turned to watch her drag herself to- ward the sidewalk.

“It always makes me sad to see someone struggling like that,” I said.

“She was a sweet lady and she let us inside.” “Without suspicion.”

Russell spotted the elevator without the least bit of delibera- tion. He pushed the twelfth-story button before I told him where we were going. This minor decision seemed to express an underly- ing willingness to take charge. We were still swayed by Guinness, and Russell had already told me too much. Nothing could ever be as it was intended when he’d walked into my office.

I extended my finger, touching the placket of his ugly shirt. Two transparent buttons had broken off; one hung from a strand of white thread. I nudged it with my nail until it balanced on my fingertip like a drop of water.

“What happened with this one?” I asked. “I don’t remember.”

“There’s no story?”

“If there were, you wouldn’t want to know it.” “You’re wrong.”

The elevator released itself and lifted us toward the sky. He lowered his head onto my shoulder, rubbed his nose over my col-

larbone. Our mouths found one another and opened. We broke through our hesitations and celebrated in slurred grunts until the elevator held still and opened its door. We gasped, stepped into a long, cream-papered corridor with sconces of light glowing like scallop shells. Across the vestibule, a uselessly small inlet was carved into the wall. It seemed like the place for an end table and a lamp, but none was there. Russell grabbed my hand, dragged me to the inlet, where our lips reattached and our fingers groped beneath our clothes.

Then a door down the hall opened and shut. I heard the
swish
-
swish-swish
of approaching legs, but I didn’t stop. His mouth was pouring into me.

When I turned my face, I caught the angular figure of a young woman sheathed in pink linen tapping the sole of her high heel against the carpeted floor. She sighed loudly. Our clipboard and lists of names and campaign pamphlets were scattered about our feet like waste. I lowered myself slowly, carefully grabbing the clipboard, as if subtle movements might save us from detection.

“What are you doing in this building?” The woman asked. “We were just campaigning,” I said, hoping she was at least

a Democrat.

“Who let you in here? You’re not allowed to be in here. If you don’t get the hell out, I’m calling the police.”

A metal exit door was next to the elevator. I hadn’t noticed it before, but sure enough it was there. We rushed past the woman and into the stairwell, which had been painted vanilla and lit by fluorescent strips beaming from the ceiling. I quickly descended the stairs and Russell followed. For a brief moment, I thought I’d

trip, my legs were moving so fast. Russell ran one floor below me, as if he were ready to ward off dragons or a janitor who wanted us out. Once I arrived on the second floor, I lost my will to continue. Sweat had beaded at my hairline. I waited on a landing, my back against the cool cinder-block wall, my arms at my sides, catching my breath. Russell stopped when he no longer heard my steps, then rushed up one flight of stairs and stood before me, his heart rising out of his chest.

“We don’t have to leave here.” His hands were on my face. “I’m trying to be good.”

“You’re not trying very hard.”

“I know.” I plunged my tongue to the back of his mouth.

The rhythmic smack of someone’s jeans against the inside of a dryer caught my attention. I took Russell’s hand and lured him gingerly toward the basement. The final flight of stairs turned into a hallway smelling of mildew and the floral perfume of fabric soft- ener. At the far end, a wall of windows cast misshapen blocks of light onto the cement floor.

“I want to find someplace to shoot up,” Russell said. “How long does it take?”

“A few seconds.”

We entered a laundry room with walls painted the color of storm clouds. Dryers lined one side, washers the other, all shiny and white. I felt the urge to climb on top and sprint across the entire row. I abandoned my clipboard on the brown folding table, boosted myself onto a washing machine.

“I could do it in here,” he said.

No one was around, but someone would be back. The dryer was running. Russell sprinted across the room and read the dial.

“Thirty minutes left.”

“What if whoever comes early?” “They won’t.”

He bowed slightly, kissed me, then reached into his pants pocket and retrieved a black eyeglass case. He crouched against the last dryer, facing the wall. I hid my hands behind my back, watched him pour yellowish powder from a square plastic bag into a spoon. He held a lighter beneath the spoon and the stuff bubbled into liquid. He pulled it into a tiny syringe; it was so small and clean and perfect the sight of it reminded me of how blameless we all begin. He hiked up his sleeve and shot it into a vein in the crook of his right arm, which was hardly scarred at all. I stared, knowing I was breaking some rule, but by then I felt he owed me something and all I wanted was to look at him.

Russell shook his head like a wet dog, then moaned. “How do you feel?”

“Great,” he said, tapping his fingers against the floor. “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know. For being okay with this.”

I offered my hand as if to pull him up, but he rose directly into my arms, wanting to be there, and for a moment I had him, all mine. His chest was sunken and the skin over his heart, thin; each pump of blood tapped like a finger on my breast. I wanted to hold it in my hands, just for a little while.

“I want to do some, too,” I whispered. “Are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said, still in a hushed voice. “I know you have to ask, but I really do. Just once.”

I half-expected to hear that there was no such thing as “once,” but he said, “I have another needle.”

“But just a little,” I said, “I only want to taste it.”

He dumped the remainder of the powder into the spoon and heated it with the lighter. It didn’t look like much, but what did I know? “Promise me it’s not a lot,” I said. “I don’t want to be found

in a laundry room.”

“We’re among clean things. Can’t you be happy for this?” “I am happy. Can’t you tell?”

“All right,” he said. “Let me see your veins.”

I straightened my arm and turned it underside up. He ran his fingers along its center, pressing lightly on my most promi- nent vein. What a tender feeling, his fingertips playing against this protected piece of my body. His bewildered expression lifted into sudden piousness.

“Maybe you shouldn’t look,” he said.

“Just do it perfectly and only the littlest bit.” “I promise.”

“Don’t give me a bruise.” “I’ll do my best.”

“The best you’ve ever done.” “The best I’ve ever done.”

I turned my head and squeezed my eyes shut. I winced when I felt the skin break, then drew a succession of deep breaths as the needle entered the center of my vein, him slowly pushing the plunger of the syringe, then pulling it out quickly.

He cradled my fingers into a limp fist, placing his entire hand over them like a birdcage. “If you’re not dead now, you’re fine,” he said.

Before I could think to tell him that I felt nothing at all, the ceiling multiplied, drifting up and up and over and over and over again. Russell’s eyes through his glasses were two gems of light, white-green tunneling backward. Unable to stand, I lay like a strip of rubber against the dryer, opened my mouth, released the con- tinuous moan of a mean cat, then puked a small, gray puddle next to my hand. I examined its perfectly circular shape, wreathed in tiny rosebuds of saliva.

Russell wiped my mouth with the hem of his shirt. “At least it didn’t land on your hand,” he said. “That’s what happened to me the first time.”

I didn’t answer—speaking now lay far beyond my capacity. I allowed my eyelids to drop and held myself in simple darkness, wondering where my clipboard was. I thought I heard Russell from down the hall, telling me something about the jeans, the jeans, almost dry, the jeans. Someone was coming. His fingers pet the hairs on my knee, brought my fist to my shoulder, closing my arm as if it were the hinge of a door, and at any moment we’d be lifted away.

CAPITOL
‌

PUNISHMENT

LIZ HENRY

“The people! United! Shall never! Be! De-Feat-ed!”

“I fucking hate that chant,” Jenna said. “It’s so fucking stu- pid.”

“Whatever. Just get on your knees and kiss me. Here,” I said, grabbing the crotch of my leather pants. I smirked. She got on her knees and started licking my pants. Mosh, next to her, didn’t need to be told. I yanked on her dog collar a little, and down she went to devote herself to my battered combat boots.

On the march we had been herded from the campus to the Capitol by anxious, strident rally officials. You could tell them from their orange safety vests. “Stay on the sidewalk!” they ad- monished through their megaphones. “Stay on the sidewalk! Walk

in an Orderly Manner!” Cops on horses followed the snaking lines of the sidewalk march, ready to arrest anyone who didn’t follow rally protocol.