The house of God

glitter that I had whenever I thought of Molly.

Whenever I thought of Molly, I thought of her bendovers and her lacy underwear and the tears that she'd shed when she knew she was going to die when she pulled down her panties to show me the mole on her thigh. Whenever I thought of Molly, something rolled over in my pants and I felt younger than I was, and I got a glitter in my eye and I thought about my first love, and that bittersweet chaos of fumbling with hooks and belts and zippers and parents on couches on front seats on hack seats on movie seats on rocks and everywhere except in beds. I imagined Molly as young and innocent and fun.

Young and innocent? How could I have known that that preceding figment had been brought to me through the courtesy of my imagination? Feeling guilty about trying to seduce this young and innocent fun, I tried my hardest to seduce her. In the House, I would touch her, when we worked together, putting a hand on her shoulder, on her hip. She would brush my arm with her breast, she would leave her dress unbuttoned, and in addition to the bendover, she showed more of her repertoire, including what Fats had called the 'flash sit?down,' where in the instant between the sit down and the leg cross, there's the flash of the fantasy triangle, the French panty bulging out over the downy mops like a spinnaker before the soft blond and hairy trade winds. Even though, medically, I knew all about these organs, and had my hands in diseased ones all the time, still, knowing, I wanted it and since it was imagined and healthy and young and fresh and blond and downy soft and pungent, I wanted it all the more.

So finally she asked me to go out with her and some other nurses, and we went to this bar where the rock music blasts off only the ossicles of those, like me, over thirty, and leaves unshaken the under?thirty, who want the volume turned up, and then she taught me to do a dance I'd never heard of to music I'd never heard of, and then we went back to her apartment she shared with a toothpick of a nurse named Nancy, and Molly asked me if I'd ever seen her place before and I lied and said No and she started to show me and we wandered in on Nancy undressing and Molly said, I was showing him the place, and Nancy, remembering that I'd been there before, said, He's seen the place before, and Molly looked me in the eye and I gulped and said, Yup, I've seen the place before, and she said, Well, let me show you my bedroom.

Delight delight. She showed me her bedroom with her little?girl trinkets, furry toys and an alive furry kitten and Halloween masks and temple bells from the Far East and a makeup kit with backstage?type light bulbs and the usual prints and strewn pantyhose and bras and then in a fit of romance I feared I was too old for, we embrace, and I fumble with her bra, hooks and then I get caught up in things so I don't notice what I'm fumbling and after a little bit of protest from her with my mouth all over her long nipples and my hand on her own furry thing we are kind of wrassling, she gets on top of me, in the middle of a NO she says OOPS and in I slip, and she shows me her secret, which is that she fucks not like a young innocent little girl but like a moaning Byzantine courtesan, all gold and warm oil and myrrh.

'Now you know my weakness,' Molly said the next day in the middle of the nursing station, holding a Fleet's enema in her hand like a pistol.

'What is it?' I asked.

'I'm very physical.'

'How is that a weakness?'

'It just is.'

'Not if you can handle it.'

'What do you mean handle a weakness?'

'You wouldn't call it a weakness in me, would you?' I asked.

'That's different, you're a man'

'You're not going all sexist on me, are you?'

'No.'

'Then it's not a weakness in you any more than it is in me. You're just going to have to learn how to handle it.'

'Yeah,' she said in a way that confused me, since I couldn't tell if she were concerned or not, 'I guess I just will.'

Only later, when it became obvious that both of us loved the sex and, in a loose way, each other as much as we did, when the moaning mons had moved out of the little?girl bedroom into the on? call bunk bed whenever I could get rid of the Bruiser, and then moved into the ward bathroom for a five?minute one sitting on the can, and even, late one night, crooned to by the gomer band of renown, moved to a darkened corner of the ward standing up with our orgasms racing against the appearance of the patrolling night supervisor, only then did Molly?who called the feeling of making love the feeling of having a centipede walk through wearing gold cleats? only then did she tell me that she didn't give a damn about my having another woman, a steady woman, that she had been hurt by 'involvement' and hurt by the nuns with their spiritual whips and that what she was 'into' was 'freedom in relationships,' which I thought was terrific and too good to be true until I wondered whether someone else with the old gold cleats was hearing those chuckles and moans and glittering rainbows of orgasms when I was with my long love, Berry.

Berry must have suspected something was up. She'd remarked on my changed mood, on how suspicious I'd become of her, accusing her of going to bed with other men when I was on call in the House. She must have known that my jealousy came from my guilt, my fury from my jealousy of who was with her or with Molly when I was not. Things became strained, although at first the least strain was the emotional one. I was having a fantastic time making love to two women on the same day, enjoying the way that I could separate which aching muscle group went with which woman's moves. The real strain was how to hide Molly from Berry. What contortions I went through, as Molly began to come to my place, to hide her traces?her hair on the pillow, her spoor on the sheets, her hairpin on the bureau, her earring left on the bathroom shelf, her perfume in the air. I began to spend all my time doing laundry. I dreaded the ringing of my phone. Yet I couldn't tell Berry. I cared too much. I was too ashamed. I had too much to lose.

Berry and I had thought that we might try living together, but when we found out that my being on call turned me into a snarling bear, we'd decided that it was not a good idea. We'd also decided that we'd not see each other the night after my night on call, because all we did was bicker and bitch. That left only one night in three, the night that I was supposedly not exhausted. With our contact decreased, with Molly zinging through my rectos abdominus and ball?tingling cremaster muscle groups, with Berry the Clinical Psychologist off into mind and with me off into body, we began to drift apart. I began to think her cat hated me.

We tried hard to enjoy the fall. We went to a football game, but instead of the bright cheeriness I remembered from going to football games in college, the day turned cold and wet and somber, filling us both with the dread of winter. Exhausted, more or less in silence, skin catching on the rough edges of our love, we dragged back to my apartment, and Berry, feeling woozy with the flu, curled up in my bed with her cat. A, safe warm fetal ball, she slept. Her cat, eyes closed to me, purred. She snored. I felt so much in love with her, with protecting her from the flu and the world and my wry and guilt, that I was filled with joy. But as my joy for what had been and could be showed itself, my sadness for what had' happened to us crushed it. What a terrific turd I was.

She awoke, we talked. We talked about the gomers and about how furious Jo and the Fish and the Leggo making me, and about how Berry couldn't Possibly understand.

'You know what your problem is?' she asked.

'What?'

'You've got no role models. You can't look up to any of them.'

'What about the Fat Man?'

'He's sick.'

'He's not,' I said, starting to get angry. 'Besides there's Chuck and the Runt and Hooper and Eat My Dust. And Potts.'

'Oh, sure, there's the camaraderie, and you're right, the only reason men go to war is to die with then buddies, but it seems to me that what's happening to you is the total institutionalization of the internship, a la Goffman.'

'What did you say?' I asked as evenly as possible, swallowing my rage at her high?ass theory of my pain.

She started to repeat it, and seeing that the wordsweren't registering, said, 'Never mind.'