“Men?”
“Figure of speech.”
“She’s all right,” Harry said again. He felt all messed up inside, as if everything he had just learned to understand had suddenly gotten scrambled.
“Oh, that’s our number,” Talia said.
Harry got up to get the burgers.
It was a sweater night up in the hills, or what served as hills in East Texas. Up there, where the night was closer and the stars were brighter and the thick pines surrounded the narrow clay road, they sailed along in his car as if propelled not by the engine and gasoline, but by air.
They went to a little place blatantly named Humper’s Hill, way up in the trees where there was a clearing from what appeared to be the landing of a great spaceship, but was most likely the result of a once-terrific lightning blast that blew out the trees and burned a circle.
Talia knew the place, led him up there. He pulled into the empty circle. The moonlight, from a half-eaten moon, was bright and silver and clean.
There was a slight rise, and near the front of the car the rise fell off and there was a dip. Not a cliff exactly, just a slope, and Harry had heard that a car had actually gone off of it once, down into the brush, and no one knew it was there for some three, four years. It was a couple, and sometimes the story said they had been shot, pushed over the side in their car. But no one knew they were down there until years later when hikers found the car and discovered their remains inside.
Somehow the story, true or not, made the place more exciting, that and the tale that a flying saucer had burned the place black.
So when Harry parked, he did it at the peak of the hill, just before it dropped away, his headlights pointing at the sky. And when he killed the beams, there was the moonlight, and after a moment their eyes adjusted and the stars seemed to pop out, sharp, like shiny spear tips falling toward them.
Harry was thinking: She’s been here before. Do I say: “Have you been here before?” No. That’s not good. ’Cause if she has, I know what she was doing, and she’ll know I know, and maybe she just likes it up here, and this lonely place has got nothing to do with passion, maybe she’s just a goddamn nature lover, and—
She put her hand on the front of his pants.
—maybe not.
“Get me naked,” she said. “Show me the moon.”
It was the first time they made love, and it was constructed of writhing flesh, flowing moonlight, and cool fall air; it was ripe with the smell of pine needles and drying leaves and red clay and the acid sweetness of clashing sexual organs.
They changed positions a number of times, went from sweater-cool to naked-warm, and one time, when he was behind her, her head out the window, her midnight hair jumping as he went into her, back and forth, she said, quite loud, “You’re my poor boy, aren’t you? Fuck me, baby. Fuck me, baby.”
Poor boy?
He thought that one over and it tumbled in his head like junk falling down attic stairs, but the feeling was so good and the night was so fine, and the really bad noises, the ones that hid in the texture of this and that, that clanged and whanged and bammed and whammed, had been absent from him for some time now, at least in a big way, and the universe, it was his (when he didn’t tangle his feet in roots), and he was long gone from being who he was and how he was, so it didn’t matter.
Not at all.
35
Next day, in his apartment, lying on the couch, hands behind his head, contemplating the date with Talia, running it over and over in his mind, especially the parts out there on Humper’s Hill, the phone rang. Slowly he got up from the couch, went over, and looked at the caller ID.
It was Joey.
It rang three times and the answering machine kicked in.
There was a pause.
No message was left.
“Damn,” Harry said. He picked up the phone and dialed Joey.
“I just called,” Joey said.
“I know. I saw your name. I couldn’t get to the phone in time.”
“Must have been taking a shit. Small as your place is, you can get anywhere under, say, oh, I don’t know, two seconds.”
“You’re right. I was on the toilet.”
“The other night, your friend—he don’t like me much, Harry.”
“Figured as much.”
“He tell you about it?”
Harry lied. “No.”
“Want to know about it?”
“No.”
“He hurt my feelings, man. He didn’t treat me like I was your friend.”
“Got to admit, Joey, sometimes I got to look real hard to find the love.”
“Come on, man. Don’t go homo on me. This all got started over some girl. We don’t want shit like that to come between us. Thing is, though, I wanted to ask you. You really end up seeing her? Talia?”
“Yeah.”
“No joke?”
“No one laughing here.”
“She a good fuck?”
“Come on, Joey.”
“Is she?”
“I got nothing to say about things like that.”
“You must be lousy. That must be the thing.”
“Joey?”
“Yeah.”
“Blow me.”
Harry hung up.
36
A week passed.
It went by like a bullet, because he was seeing Talia, a lot. And all over, and in all kinds of positions. Next to a nonstop flight to heaven with free peanuts, things couldn’t have been better.
“You should meet Daddy,” Talia said.
“Daddy?” Harry said, not knowing what to think of this. Was it that they were so serious he should meet Daddy? Or was it that Daddy thought anyone dating his little girl should be met?
What was up?
As for himself, was he serious? He certainly thought so. Felt high all the time, way he felt when he drank, but without the hangover.
She had surprised him this morning, when he’d been sleeping in, and he answered the door in his boxer shorts.
“When?”
“Today.”
“Today?”
“Now.”
