'Get off my back,' he said.
Still holding on: 'So. Only smoked pot once and already he's hooked. Is that your monkey talking?'
'It's me talking. Off.'
She moved away. 'How off is off, Ben.' Things were quiet then. Soft, penitent, 'If I am hooked on anything it's you, Rachel O.' Watching her shifty in the mirror.
'On women,' she said, 'on what you think love is: take, take. Not on me.'
He started brushing his teeth fiercely. In the mirror as she watched there bloomed a great flower of leprous-colored foam, out of his mouth and down both sides of his chin.
'You want to go,' she yelled, 'go then.'
He said something but around the toothbrush and through the foam neither could understand the words.
'You are scared of love and all that means is somebody else,' she said. 'As long as you don't have to give anything, be held to anything, sure: you can talk about love. Anything you have to talk about isn't real. It's only a way of putting yourself up. And anybody who tries to get through to you - me - down.'
Profane made gurgling noises in the sink: drinking out of the tap, flushing out his mouth. 'Look,' coming up for air, 'what did I tell you? Didn't I warn you?'
'People can change. Couldn't you make the effort?' She was damned if she'd cry.
'I don't change. Schlemiels don't change.'
'Oh, that makes me sick. Can't you stop feeling sorry for yourself? You've taken your own flabby, clumsy soul and amplified it into a Universal Principle.'
'What about you and that MG.'
'What does that have to do with any -'
'You know what I always thought? That you were an accessory. That you, flesh, you'd fall apart sooner than the car. That the car would go on, in a junkyard even, it would look like it always had, and it would have to be a thousand years before that thing could rust so you wouldn't recognize it. But old Rachel, she'd be long gone. A part, a cheesy part, like a radio, heater, windshield-wiper blade.'
She looked upset. He pushed it.
'I only started to think about being a schlemiel, about a world of things that had to be watched out for, after I saw you alone with the MG. I didn't even stop to think it might be perverted, what I was watching. All I was was scared.'
'Showing how much you know about girls.'
He started scratching his head, sending wide flakes of dandruff showering about the bathroom.
'Slab was my first. None of those tweed jockstraps at Schlozhauer's got any more than bare hand. Don't you know, poor Ben, that a young girl has to take out her virginity on something, a pet parakeet, a car - though most of the time on herself.'
'No,' he said his hair all in clumps, fingernails gone yellow with dead scalp. 'There's more. Don't try to get out of it that way.'
'You're not a schlemiel. You're nobody special. Everybody is some kind of a schlemiel. Only come out of that scungille shell and you'd see.'
He stood, pear-shaped, bags under the eyes, all forlorn. 'What do you want? How much are you out to get? Isn't this -' he waved at her an inanimate schmuck - 'enough?'
'It can't be. Not for me, nor Paola.'
'Where does she -'
'Anywhere you go there'll always be a woman for Benny. Let it be a comfort. Always a hole to let yourself come in without fear of losing any of that precious schlemielhood.' She stomped around the room. 'All right. We're all hookers. Our price is fixed and single for everything: straight, French, round-the-world. Can you pay it, honey? Bare brain, bare heart?'
'If you think me and Paola -'
'You and anybody. Until that thing doesn't work any more. A whole line of them, some better than me, but all just as stupid. We can all be conned because we've all got one of these,' touching her crotch, 'and when it talks we listen.'
She was on the bed. 'Come on baby,' she said, too close to crying, 'this one's for free. For love. Climb on. Good stuff, no charge.'
Absurdly he thought of Hiroshima the electronics technician, reciting a mnemonic guide for resistor color- coding.
Bad boys rape our young girls behind victory garden walls (or 'but Violet gives willingly'). Good stuff, no charge.
Could any of their resistances be measured in ohms? Someday, please God, there would be an all-electronic woman. Maybe her name would be Violet. Any problems with her, you could look it up in the maintenance manual. Module concept: fingers' weight, heart's temperature, mouth's size out of tolerance? Remove and replace, was all.
He climbed on anyway.
That night at the Spoon, things were louder than usual, despite Mafia's being in stir and a few of the Crew out on bail and their best behavior. Saturday night toward the end of the dog days; after all.
