Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates

“To get in her pants?”

“To help her write her first high-school term paper.” He paused. He smiled. “And . . .” He broke off.

“And what?”

“And get in her pants.” Instantly, he regretted the statement, not because it was false—he had every intention of consummating their relationship and believed she felt the same—nor because he was especially embarrassed by sharing his intent with his best friend, but, rather, because the crudeness of the remark, the casual male baldness of it, misrepresented the depth of his feeling for her. His beach-blanket buttercup. His dewy wolverine.

As for Bobby, he failed to respond right away. He, in fact, gave every indication of being pensive. Lost not only in thought but in vastness of sweater, he looked as small as an offscreen movie actor, and not many years older than Suzy herself. “Oh, you Switters,” he said at last. “You poor bastard. Do you know what you’re messing with here? Do you know you’re giving your address out to something that’ll make a shaman’s curse seem like a get-well card from Mother Teresa?”

Switters was mute, his beer arm stalled in midair between ice chest and mouth, so Bobby continued: “Do you know you’re messing with the single biggest taboo in our culture? A taboo worse than taxing the church and burning the flag rolled up in one, a taboo that’ll get your balls handed to you on a paper plate and every doctor in America’d break his Hippocratic oath and three golf dates rather than sew ’em back on?” He set down his beer and leaned forward toward the wheelchair. “I’m talking, of course, about the taboo against the sexuality of adolescent girls.

“Yes, son. The taboo of taboos in the United States of America, and I’m sticking my scrawny Texas neck out even to mention it. Good thing we swept for bugs.” Bobby retrieved his Sing Ha, took a long, unsatisfying swig, and leaned back. “It’s an indisputable, observable fact that even infants have sex lives—purely recreational, mindless, and self-centered, obviously: a simple matter of being pleasured by genital stimulation—but it continues kinda marginally throughout childhood until by the time puberty hits ’em full force, they’re masturbating at such a rate it’s a wonder they don’t develop repetitive motion syndrome. Girls as well as boys, por favor. In fact, because human females mature faster, they get there first, and it’s doubtful if we slow boats to China ever catch up.”

Half-closing his eyes, Switters, perversely, tried to imagine Suzy masturbating, but it was beyond him, and, besides, Bobby was pressing on.

“The unadorned truth is, adolescent girls are horny as jackrabbits. It’s not their fault, nature designed it that way. For the protection of the species. And there’s nothing politics or religion can do to alter that physical reality, short of drugging the girls with medical depressants or siphoning off their hormones with rubber tubes. But because modern society is by nature unnatural, we’re in a state of absolute denial over it. Absolute denial. That our daughters, granddaughters, nieces, and little sisters might be highly charged sexual dynamos makes us so uncomfortable, so queasy, that we, men and women both, have to lie to ourselves and each other and pretend it doesn’t exist.

“Well, that which you deny sooner or later rises up and bites you in the ass. That ol’ boy Miller dealt with this very subject in The Crucible, but we applauded the play and pretended it was about witchcraft or some such shit and went right on with our denial. And with our witchhunts. It’s the witchhunting that worries me. For Suzy’s sake as much as yours.”

“Uh-huh.” Switters nodded dumbly, but his beer bottle remained stationary midway between the Styrofoam container that had lowered its temperature and the organic container that would empty its contents and warm them up again.

“We ain’t in Thailand anymore, son. Remember that. It ain’t Denmark or Sweden, neither. Here, a girl’s got to sweep her natural biological urges under the rug. Keep ’em to herself and feel guilty about ’em. If not, she’ll be charged a stiff price, socially and psychologically. Our girls are culturally unprepared for the . . . the, uh, emotional intricacies of fucking. Although, at sixteen, your Suzy’ll be getting there pretty damn quick. In the meantime, though, I know you wouldn’t want to muddy her sweet waters. Not you, who’s got such a thing about innocence.”

“That again,” grumbled Switters.

“And you also have your own self to consider. Listen. Any adult male heterosexual who says he isn’t never turned on by pubescent girls is a liar or a geek, and you can tell him Bad Bobby said so. But we’re in denial over that, too. Serious denial. A man go Humbert-Humberting around in America, he’ll find himself thrown into the volcano, a sacrifice to appease the gods who’ve blighted humanity with all these nasty, unwanted, upsetting transgenerational cravings. The morality police’ll tar a romantically smitten fool like you with the same wire brush they use, justifiably, on the sicksacks and twisttops who actually prey on children and injure ’em out of a psychotic need to exercise power over somebody weaker than their own weak selves. The smut sniffers from the victimization industry are also into exercising power, remember, and drawing fair and intelligent distinctions has never been one of their long suits. Some of ’em, sad to say, are only seeking revenge for hurtful things that happened to them as children—but, then, the same could be said of the child molesters. Two sides of the same unlucky coin. At any rate, we got us a climate where normal men are scared to admit, even in the mirror, that they occasionally get bit by the lust bug whilst gandering at a junior miss. And I reckon society’ll go right on lying about it until the day it reaches enlightenment.” In one swift gulp, he finished off his beer. “ ‘Course, as long as it keeps lying to itself about itself, there ain’t much chance of it ever becoming enlightened. Anyhow. Don’t do it, Swit. That’s my advice. For a dozen good reasons, don’t do it.”

When Bobby stood up and stretched, Switters said, “That was quite a speech, pal. Thanks. I’ll chew every bolus of it many times I’m sure, and I’ll carefully consider your counsel. But . . .”

“But?”

“But you haven’t met Suzy.”

“No, and I don’t want to, neither. ‘Cause every word I said, though true, was hypocritical to the core. If it was me in your place and she was willing, and I thought she knew what she was doing, I’d be in her pants quicker than she could bring ’em home from The Gap. But I’m white trash from Hondo and don’t have the morals of a flea.”

Like chip dip with a short shelf life, the imported Scandinavian sunshine had commenced to degenerate, reverting to the cod paste from which it was synthesized. Scud blew by close to the surface of the sound like dank puffballs of bacterial fuzz, and the men could almost taste mildew in the air. The atmosphere was leaden and thin simultaneously, as if composed of some new element that defied known laws of atomic weight and could be properly breathed only by lifelong residents of the Pacific Northwest. Feathery and innocuous on one hand, sodden and ill-willed on the other, it was the meteorological equivalent of Pat Boone singing heavy metal.

Switters was actually quite fond of Seattle’s weather, and not merely because of its ambivalence. He liked its subtle, muted qualities and the landscape that those qualities encouraged if not engendered: vistas that seemed to have been sketched with a sumi brush dipped in quicksilver and green tea. It was fresh, it was clean, it was gently primal, and mystically suggestive. It was all those things and more—but it was never vivid.

The vivid excesses from which he recoiled in nature Switters found irresistible in language. Bobby’s pointed rhetoric, the platitudinousness of its content notwithstanding (that teenage girls were sexual beings and society didn’t like it wasn’t exactly news), had left Switters lightly hypnotized. It was Bobby who broke the spell by abruptly asking, “You worried about how little Suzy’s gonna react to finding your ol’ butt stuck in a chair? Meals on wheels? Not the most virile of images, I wouldn’t reckon.”

“What? Oh. No. No.” Switters smiled confidently. “Women love these fierce invalids home from hot climates.”

“Heh! So I keep hearing. Sounds like a slogan from a recruiting poster.” The voice was not Bobby’s but Maestra’s. She was standing on the threshold of the French doors, which she had managed to open undetected. How long she’d been there, how much she’d overheard, how an octogenarian widow with a walking stick had sneaked up on a couple of swashbucklers from the Central Intelligence Agency were questions of immediate concern. “What does a woman have to do to gain some attention around this place?”

“Dreadful sorry, ma’am,” said Bobby, in his most courtly manner. “We’ve been pining away for your companionship but assumed you were enjoying a soothing respite from the likes of us two polecats.”

“I was, indeed,” she said, “until it reached the stage where I felt the two polecats were ignoring me.”

“Never,” Bobby assured her. “Impossible. Say, how’d you like to take a little spin?”