Sugar in My Bowl (15 page)

Again, hoots and giggles from the backseat. “I know what it smells like, because I just know, but I don’t know how to say it in words. It just smells like a vagina.”

These aren’t the answers of a compulsive diddler; they’re too practical. It dawns on me that Callie doesn’t think of her Cho Cho in a romantic way. She’s just engaging in scientific investigation. She isn’t the type to consider her Cho Cho “a shell, a tulip, her destiny,” as one of Eve Ensler’s characters does—not that there’s anything wrong with that. Perhaps this child will turn out fine, in spite of her overthinking mother.

Callie interrupts my thoughts.

“Why did you ask me those questions?”

“Well, Callie, I read a book. About women talking about their vaginas. And the woman who wrote the book asked a lot of women those three questions.”

“Do you have any more questions to ask me?”

“Not really. She asked everyone those three, and then women told stories about their vaginas.”

“Can I tell a story about my vagina?”

My grip on the steering wheel tightens.

“Sure.”

“Once upon a time I was walking along and my vagina ripped itself off from my body and started walking with me.”

Wow. Rough opener.

“But,” continues Callie, “since vaginas don’t have legs, it didn’t really walk with me, it floated next to me.”

I’m comforted. Floating’s more pleasant than ripping.

“I couldn’t hold its hand at the crosswalk, because vaginas don’t have hands, either, so—wait a minute! Mom! Look at that puppy! It’s sooo cute! Aw, Mom, can we get a puppy? Please?”

And just like that, we’re off floating vaginas and on to Callie’s latest cause, GetMeAPuppyNowOrIWillDie.Org, to which I refuse to pander until the baby is chewing steak, potty trained, and sleeping through the night in his own bed.

Callie’s definitely gonna be OK.

Even with a coochi snorcher named Cho Cho.

The Dignity Channel

Jann Turner

Writing as Kit Thomas—the heroine
of her forthcoming novel
The Dignity Channel

I
wish I could say that the best sex I ever had was this morning, but I didn’t have sex this morning. I haven’t had morning sex in years. As a matter of fact, I haven’t had any kind of sex in a very, very long time. I don’t like to think about that too much, after all I am thirty-nine years old, have great tits, a curvy body, and an above-average capacity for fun. I am supposed to be approaching the shimmering summit of my sexual appetite and energies—yet I have to concentrate to remember the details of when and how I last got laid.

I was at work. I had just pulled an all-nighter, finishing off the cuts on thirteen episodes of the Alpine Air series. I stood up from my computer as the sun rose, needing a cup of coffee. I was at the machine, pouring milk into a mug, when Ivan, the channel’s head of development, stalked down the corridor. I leaned forward so my hair would obscure my face, hoping to avoid any kind of conversation. Not that he was in the habit of conversing with lowly editors, but just in case. Mercifully he walked straight past me. I peered up to watch his retreating back. His neck looked like it had been welded to his shoulders in an inflexible posture-perfect position, like the action hero dolls Jacqui and I played with when we were kids, because our mother and father disapproved of Barbie and Sindy as role models for their daughters. Ivan’s body was very action hero but dressed in neatly pressed studentlike gear—jeans and a close-fitting cotton knit T-shirt with a pair of bright white Converse all stars. I was still staring, noticing how his hair curled outward from the nape of his neck, when he stopped and turned around. As if he’d just remembered something. Like my name.

He was a good ten, long-legged strides away down the corridor, looking straight at me. I froze, my hand cramping around the handle of the milk jug.

“It’s Kit, right?” he said.

I nodded mutely.

“You vision mixed the pope’s funeral,” he stated in a tone that flatlined, like his eyes.

I nodded again. Ivan smiled, a gleaming, capped-tooth smile.

“Nice work,” he said.

I frowned, wondering if he was being sarcastic. Ivan was not known for compliments. “Really?”

“Really,” he affirmed, with a dip of his chin, and then he held out his arm, gesturing for me to walk ahead of him. “Come talk to me in my office.” It was not an invitation.

This was unusual, to say the least. I hesitated, trying to read his expression for some clue as to whether or not I was about to be fired. His features gave nothing away; they were as plastic and as set as action man’s, neither reproachful nor laudatory. So I put down the milk jug and did as he asked.

His office was vast, the same detergent bright white of the common areas and lesser offices at the Dignity Channel. I half expected someone in a lab coat to emerge from a secret door, as if we were in an ad for ethical pharmaceutical research. Against the back wall was a lean, low, chrome-legged white leather sofa facing toward floor-to-ceiling windows and a long narrow desk with a series of computer screens atop it, trailing streamers of wiring. Ivan’s screens faced away from the view; I would have had it the other way around.

I heard the door closing and seconds later he materialized beside me; not touching, but standing very close to me.

“I love that river,” he said. I looked up beyond the roof decks and water towers at the sun-dazzled stretch of the Hudson with its traffic of Circle Line cruisers and ships and barges and life going on and I felt like I was floating outside of a life, outside my skin. I shook my head in an attempt to shake the feeling out of me. He glanced over at me then strode toward his desk.

“Editors don’t often see this view. You keep us locked up, away from any natural light,” I said, straining for a light, humorous tone.

He pulled open a tiny drawer on his table. “Seems to me you like it that way,” he responded dryly.

“Really? How would you know?” I answered, sounding more edgy than I’d intended, and I wanted to take the words back, but Ivan appeared unfazed.

“Am I wrong?” he asked. Something in the intensity of his stare made me think about this. No, he wasn’t wrong. Darkness and shadows were precisely what I clung to.

He pulled a tiny envelope from the drawer, unfolded it, and shook out a pile of white powder on the glass surface of his desk. This was possibly the last thing I’d expected him to do, bar leaping through the window.

I watched as he cut two lines of coke on the glass. These were not like John’s wonky lines that came in all sizes so you always wanted to be the first to snort because that way you wouldn’t end up with the smaller share; Ivan’s lines were perfectly even. Suddenly my mouth was watering. He offered me a rolled-up ten-dollar bill. I did the line in several starts. He snorted his in one clean move. Then he stroked his forefinger over the glass and rubbed the dust into his gum, his finger pushing up the flap of his upper lip.

“So, why am I here? Are you going to fire me?” I asked, with an awkward chortle.

He shook his head. “I’m going to fuck you,” he said, his lips stretching in something approximating a smile.

“You mean right now?” I queried.

He nodded. But he made no move toward me. Instead he cut another pair of lines—these two fatter than the last. And once again he offered me the rolled-up note so that I could go first. I stepped toward him so that I could snort, and as I bent down he moved nearer. I could feel him so close that my hair stood on end with the electricity of his desire, though he wasn’t touching me. He took the note when I was finished, but he didn’t use it, instead he cleaned the glass with his forefinger and then pushed it between my lips, rubbing the coke against my gums and then my tongue.

I didn’t move at all, not even to suck his finger, which is what I imagined he wanted. That would have been the raunchy thing to do. But the possible eroticism of his finger probing my mouth was pushed aside by the onrush of the drug, which I could feel prickling in my fingertips and charging into all the veins and tissues and sinews of me with the power of a flash flood. This time it rendered me speechless and motionless. It had been doing this all too often lately, paralyzing my limbs. Only my mind ran wild, like a frantic chicken that didn’t understand the cause of its panic but knew that it must run, run, run. And my mind was running in ribbons of astonishment and pleasure and detachment and revulsion and confusion. Did he think I wanted him to fuck me? And my frantic chicken mind ran down the road of why would I want that? And then off down the road of yes, yes, that is so what I want and then no, it doubled back to the intersection of do I feel horny? Or don’t I? I wasn’t sure if I felt anything at all, at least not for him. And the chicken ran on and on and on. Even as he took me by my shoulders and turned me around and pushed in the small of my back so I was leaning forward and bracing my hands on the table as he deftly unbuttoned my fly and cold fingers touched my skin and slid my jeans and then my panties down my thighs, even then my chicken brain was running in pointless circles so that I was as acutely aware of the serifs in the typeface on the memorandum that was lying directly in front of me as I was of the rip of a condom packet and the fluttering fumble of his fingers as he got himself covered and then the rubbery thwack of his penis against my hip before he pushed himself into me.

And there was a part of me that was aroused by what he was doing. Or was it what we were doing? Though I wasn’t doing very much as he thrust slowly in and then out of me, his breath hot on my neck and pulsing in my ear in an itchy sort of way. All I was doing was pressing my palms into the cold glass of the desktop, willing myself to feel more than I did, willing myself to feel more than fractionally aroused.

But I couldn’t. And I didn’t.

He came. Not too soon, but soon enough. I could feel the quiver of his ejaculation inside me. A series of small, animal grunts accompanied the shiver and then he was still. The grip of his fingers on my waist tightened, but he didn’t fall against me, didn’t hold me, and didn’t pretend to any kind of intimacy, although there was a gentlemanly consideration in the way he pulled out of me. Then he was quick to dispose of the condom and to pull his pants back up and to bend once again to the task of cutting lines. “I like your work,” he said.

I resigned the next day.

That’s not the kind of sex I want to remember. Though it’s certainly not the worst sex I’ve ever had. My list of worst-evers is probably much like that of most other woman of my age, a labia-shrivelling inventory that’s best saved in the “forgotten” file. There was the holiday romance who jumped me several times a night, hammered at me like a jackrabbit for a couple of minutes before emitting a loud squeak, then rolling off and back into sleep—nothing to write home about. There was the confident guy at the company retreat—the gregarious jock who seemed to promise a big, swinging dick but couldn’t get it up, and when at last he did—after hours of patient soothing and coaxing of both ego and prick—ejaculated in a miserable little squirt on the bedclothes before he’d managed to get his penis anywhere near me. Then there’s the guy who fucked me for hours on a kudu skin ottoman in front of a blazing fire, but in the light of subsequent information the whole scene had to be regraded from sensational to seedy. Turned out my long-endurance lover had been brutally cuckolded and the house of the blazing fire and the ottoman would soon belong to his soon-to-be ex-wife and her new man. It never feels good to have been party to someone else’s revenge fuck; he might as well have been humping the kudu.

Curiously, good sex, for me, doesn’t require a postmortem—like an obviously natural death. Bad sex, on the other hand, involves a mandatory inquest, conducted by a friend and myself over coffee in the days following the event. Bad sex is something I blame—at least in my spoken testimony—on my partner in the crime. The truth, of course, is that it takes two to tango, and the success of the steps not only depends on grace and consideration of the individuals concerned but also is—crucially—a function of the dynamic between the dancers.

My married friends often ask me, with the hunger of deprivation in their eyes, for details of my latest encounter. As if my single life is a series of episodes in an adult rom com, to be devoured vicariously in the sexual desert of marital bliss. Truth is that when there is sex, it is often just middling, which—like a meal that’s not terrible, but not delicious either—always leaves the taste of disappointment on the tongue.

There have been promising instances that turned into fun sex. One of my most surprising flirtations ever popped up at the second-time-around wedding of my cousin Pearl. My seducer was twenty-two years old, the son of Pearl’s best friend—her bridesmaid on this occasion. He was a tall, blue-eyed, tousle-haired blond. And he was almost half my age. Too young for me to have taken note of him, which is probably why he made it his business to introduce himself to me before the service, told me how sexy I looked as he swirled past me carrying his mother’s confetti basket. I thought he was joking, but I thanked him. Sometimes even fake flattery feels good. Turned out he wasn’t joking at all. Later, when the reception was in full swing and the party was frilled out on sparkling wine, he took me by the hand, marched me down to the parking lot, pushed me against a car and bit onto my lower lip, sucked on it hard, and then slid his tongue into my mouth. Within seconds we were seminaked. He was hard as rock candy and as hyperactive as a toddler on ice cream. He seemed to think I’d be disappointed if he didn’t display an advanced knowledge of the entire Kama Sutra. As if he had to perform like some character in a porno. Perhaps that’s what I was to him, some character in a porno—the older woman, his very own Mrs. Robinson. He was so busy positioning and repositioning us that he didn’t come. I did—despite the complex entanglement of our limbs and the discomfort in my knees and elbows. I came deliciously.

That was delightful, but I wouldn’t call it great sex. Certainly not the best sex ever.