Getting Off

“Well, so was Kellen. He wouldn’t go down on me.”

“He wouldn’t? The moron. I would.”

“Would you?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh, tell me. Tell me what you’d do.”

In the morning she showered and put on her sweater and jeans and walked to work. On her break she sat down at one of the backoffice computers and Googled her way to Mormon proxy baptism. It was pretty much as Rita had reported, and there was no question about it, the whole business was deeply weird.

On the other hand, who was she to hang that label on anything anybody did? She was crisscrossing the country, trying to regrow her psychic hymen by killing every man who ever had sex with her, and she was involved in a wildly exciting lesbian affair with a woman she’d never laid a hand on. How was that for weird?

Two nights later she couldn’t sleep. She’d sat in her room reading until she couldn’t keep her eyes open, and then she got undressed and slipped under the blanket and hovered for half an hour on the edge of consciousness. She almost went under, and then she surfaced, and she sat up in bed, knowing it wasn’t going to happen.

There was one man left, one blot on her record, and no way on earth to track him down. You could find anything and anybody with Google, but you had to have at least a vague idea what you were searching for, and all she had was a first name and the vaguest possible recollection of a face, undefined in her mind but for a gap between his two top incisors.

And she knew where she’d picked him up, in a Race Street bar in Philadelphia, but all that told her was that he was from some place other than Philadelphia, because he took her to his hotel room, and he wouldn’t be staying in a hotel if he lived there, would he? And he’d told her his name was Sid, and maybe it was and maybe it wasn’t, and where did that leave her? The one man who’d fucked her and lived to tell the tale was not from Philadelphia, and his name was or wasn’t Sid. And, just to narrow it down still further, he had a gap between his teeth.

Wonderful. Google that, see where it gets you.

She got out of bed, put on the clothes she’d worn earlier. Was it too late to call Rita? No, not with the time difference. She picked up the phone, put it down again. It was, she decided, not too late to call but too early. Maybe in a few days, maybe in a week, but not yet.

She didn’t know what she was going to do about Rita. Well, how could she? She didn’t know what she was going to do about her whole goddamn life.

She couldn’t keep on doing this forever, could she? Shedding one name and taking on another, leaving one town and moving on to another, sleeping with men and leaving them lifeless? How long could you do that?

She’d rarely stopped to take long views, living in the moment, but something had happened to her in Hedgemont. She couldn’t define it or figure it out, but it had changed her by more than the simple subtraction of a name from her list. She’d left North Carolina feeling somehow ennobled, and ever since then she’d seen herself and her life not in extreme close-up but as if from a distance.

Like she was seeing a bigger picture, sort of.

She added a hoodie for warmth and walked down a flight of stairs and out of the hotel. The city shut down early, and the streets were empty, with no traffic to speak of. The bars were closed. There was sure to be an all- night cafe somewhere, but she wasn’t hungry, didn’t want coffee, didn’t want company. She just felt like walking for a while and letting her thoughts run free.

Could she possibly have a life? A life, say, where she stayed in one place, and had the same name all the time? A life she might even share with another human being?

Like, for example, Rita?

It seemed ridiculous even to imagine it. She’d never had sex with another woman, never wanted to, never really gave it a thought. Then she and Rita spent one unplanned night, having a weird sort of phoneless phone sex, and the next day she was out of there like a bat out of hell. And since then they’d had real phone sex, which is to say they did it over the phone, telling each other stories, and most recently talking about what they’d do to each other if they ever found themselves under the same roof again.

Would she even want to?

Would it be repulsive to kiss another woman on the mouth? Or on the breasts? Would it turn her on to go down on another woman? Or would it turn her stomach?

She’d done just about everything there was to do with men, and she always enjoyed it. The fact that some people regarded an act as perverted or unnatural never bothered her. For God’s sake, hadn’t she killed a guy, crossed him off her list, and then fucked him one last time? If she could get off doing that, why draw the line at eating pussy?

No, that wasn’t the problem. The sex would be all right. It might be quieter and less exciting if it was girl on girl, but it might just as easily be better.

The question was what came afterward.

With men, there was no question. The bed a man shared with her was his deathbed. As soon as she could arrange it, she whisked him out of the world and wiped him off the slate.

And with women? Would she feel the same compulsion, the same genuine need to take her partner’s life?

Maybe. Maybe not. She could see the logic in either answer.

It was her father’s sexual abuse that sent her down the path she’d been walking all her life. He’d been her first lover, and she’d killed him for it, and all the men since then had been her lovers on the way to becoming her victims. If she slept with a woman, that wouldn’t be her father all over again, would it? Women were different. Women were soft where men were hard, yielding where men were obdurate. Women had never abused her.

And yet…

The first person she ever killed was her mother.

That was something she didn’t think about too often. For some reason it was easy to forget, even as her mother had been an essentially forgettable person. And it was easy, too, to regard her mother’s death as a means to an end. By killing her mother, she set the stage for the murder/suicide the police would discover.

Still, it was hard to pass off matricide as an afterthought. And, no question, she blamed her mother for the abuse. Either the woman deliberately overlooked it or she was willfully obtuse, refusing to see what was right in front of her eyes. She probably welcomed it, because it saved her from the unpleasant duty of satisfying her husband.

Well, she had a lot of ways to look at it. But it was hard to get past the fact that she’d killed the woman, and would she feel a need to kill other women?

She didn’t want that to happen to Rita.

For God’s sake, she had fun with Rita. She enjoyed being with Rita. And it wasn’t just girls being pals, girls dashing off to the bathroom together to talk about which boys were cute and which weren’t.

No, it was sexual. It was sharing sex histories — Jesus, getting her gay hairdresser to teach her how to give a blow job! And it was phone sex without a phone, and then phone sex with a phone, and lots of mutual assurances that there was nothing genuinely lesbian about what they were doing, until they’d passed that point and recognized that it didn’t matter whether their actions made them lesbians. If you were here I’d touch you. If you were here I’d go down on you. Wish you were here…

All she had to do was get on a plane to Seattle. A nice dinner for two in a comfortable suburban house. Rita would cook, she’d bring the wine. Nuits-Saint-Georges, because it had certainly done the job before.

And then what?

What was required, she realized, was an experiment. She had to go to bed with a woman and see what happened. Not what happened in bed, although it would be good to know if the acts repelled or delighted her, but what happened afterward. If she could walk away from her female partner without harming her, and if the woman’s continued existence didn’t drive her crazy, then maybe she and Rita had a chance.

If not, she’d stay the hell away from the whole state of Washington. Because she didn’t want anything bad to happen to Rita. Because, well, she seemed to care about Rita.