Relics by Gary Earl Ross :: Sliptongue Magazine

Relics

by Gary Earl Ross

Excuse the mess. Just make yourself at home.

Newly single at 44, your only son grown, you find yourself pursuing the bachelorhood you missed by marrying at 19. You are determined to make up for the abstinence of the final years of your marriage. You’re still a good-looking man, with a body toned from years of sublimating unspent sexual energy into jogging and exercise. With a solid career and no one to support but yourself, you’re glad you had a vasectomy. No unplanned pregnancies to complicate your planned adventures. You have no fear of AIDS or heartbreak or premature ejaculation. Despite a religious upbringing that makes sex outside your first and only marriage the dirtiest of dirties, you look forward to wet spots and having a woman’s hair caught in the crown of your wristwatch and the carnal hat tricks you haven’t attempted in two decades. Your lips and tongue long for the deep kisses denied you by your wife?your ex-wife, you must remind yourself regularly. Your arms hunger for passionate embraces. You are ready, eager to immerse yourself in all the city’s willing women, women you’ve known for years were waiting, just waiting, for a man like you.

Would you like some wine?

You love women, truly, and are unburdened by size, age, or racial biases. Most of the women you date at first are friends or acquaintances from the social circles you move in as an educator and consultant. They have long admired your work or complimented you on your appearance or wondered aloud what it would be like to be with you. Now is their chance, and yours. A petite teacher from the beleaguered public school system feeds you spaghetti and wine and invites you to a game of strip Scrabble. The overweight owner of an arts district bookstore rains kisses on your belly, her waist length brown hair spreading over your body like seaweed, tickling you as it wraps about your manhood. A Ph.D. with microbraids spilling across her copper shoulders balances bottomless on the edge of the pool table in her vacationing brother’s suburban rec room and invites you to chalk your cue. A prominent city council widow smashes wine glasses in her fireplace and forces your lips to her mastectomy scars. The undergraduate daughter of a former colleague straddles you on the wooden desk chair in her dorm room while her roommate is away for the weekend. The sex is frenzied and exciting, detached but liberating, each penetration of a new partner another loss of virginity burned clearly into memory.

What was she like, your wife?

Telling each the sad tale of your marriage, you commit to no one. You are unready to do so yet, you insist, to be in a relationship. They all understand, even those in search of a husband, who offer themselves to you in the hope their special love will change your mind, change you. Inevitably, they break up with you in anger and look for their next husband elsewhere, while those in search of the next orgasm drift away to find it with someone else. Recollections of those who have passed through your new bachelorhood are sparked by the relics you find later in your car or apartment: lost earrings, discarded hair clips, unclaimed panties, mounds of spent candle wax, a never returned book, wads of tissue stained by lipstick, stockings still knotted to the corners of your bed. After a few months, as your dating radius grows, the women become faceless, more flashbacks of body parts than memories of whole persons. Faces first encountered through a haze of martinis and wine and singles bar cigarette smoke are the first to go, but others soon follow. You recall a pair of extraordinarily long nipples on large dark breasts but cannot match them to a name or face. You remember the strength in the hand of a massage therapist and the curve of her belly but not the color of her hair. Even as you flatten yourself behind a door like a cartoon character, your nooner with a bank clerk interrupted by her mother’s surprise visit to her apartment, you cannot picture the young woman’s smile. A mole on a cheek. The smell and stiffness of a particular hair spray. A scar on a knee. A hair curling out of a follicle at the edge of an areola. Small hands and feet bound by nylon. Somebody’s soapy hands on your scrotum in the shower. The signature fold of vaginal lips. You carry such images home at two or three in the morning, replaying them in the reliquary of your mind as you stuff yourself full of crackers covered with cheese or peanut butter and jelly. God, you are so hungry after two or three screws.

I called you because Sandra told me you were a really nice guy...

A decent time having passed since your divorce, a few of your closest friends try to set you up on dates with women they say are perfect for you. On one such blind date you meet Liza, with short black hair and large black eyes. A writer going through a divorce, she is small and thoughtful, given to precise movements and brief smiles. You are amazed to discover how many likes and dislikes you share in foods and books, music and movies. For your second date she comes to your apartment, where you serve her salad, chicken and pasta in white sauce, and white wine. Afterward, over more wine, you dance to an Ellington CD and at the end of the third track kiss. In bed there is no tension. The sex is unhurried and gentle, your rhythms perfectly matched. This feels different, somehow more real. Afterward, there are tears in your eyes and your mind floods with possibilities, delightful and delirious, perhaps even dangerous. Maybe, just maybe...

But as she starts to leave next morning, she catches her breath at the sight of her soon-to-be-ex-husband’s silver van parked across the street from your building. Deep inside you know the future you had dared to imagine will never materialize. Oh, you will call her and she will be polite at first, but eventually she will run out of excuses for not seeing you and her voice will grow curt as she says, “I’m not ready yet.” Even before he guns the engine and pulls away, having made his point to her, even before you walk her to her car, you know you will never see Liza again.

You know the dating line I hate the most? That break-up classic: It’s not you, it’s me...

You wait three weeks before you accept another date. This time the invitation comes from Laurel, a tall, dark-haired college counselor you’ve known professionally for many years. She calls to propose a joint program for your respective schools, and several working lunches lead to dinner and a play. When you make love after the play, the sex is dizzying and sweaty and you both want more. You agree that you are friends, busy professionals in pursuit of a no-strings-attached end to celibacy. So you begin to see each other, casually, without proclamations of love and in spite of your many differences. She smokes and you don’t. She hates this provincial, overcast, no longer industrial city and wants to leave; to you it is home. There are no tears this time, but the absence of a stalker suits you just fine. You are both determined not to fall in love because you know it will never work. But after two months you begin to wonder if, maybe...

One day, as you are driving, Laurel mentions that on the street you just passed is the home of her ex-husband’s father, unemployed since his factory shut down. You tell her the same thing happened to your older sister’s husband, but he found another job. She says, “I haven’t seen Tuttle in a long time.” You say, “Tuttle?” and she says, “Wilbur, but everybody calls him by his last name, Tuttle.” Something thickens in your throat as you try to explain that her former father-in-law is your brother-in-law’s pal, a man you’ve met at barbecues and bowling alleys. Laurel is silent for a long time. Then she says, “Don’t tell him you know me, okay?” Later that night, after you have made love for the first of your last three times together, she lays her head on your chest. Instead of the usual giggling and cuddle talk, she says, “Tuttle, huh?” And you can almost see the handwriting taking shape on the yellow bedroom wall.

I’ve been hurt before, so I’m not looking for a husband. Every now and then I just want to have some fun.

A week after Laurel drifts on to someone else, a mutual acquaintance suggests to Angelina that she sit in on one of your lectures. A wiry, brownskinned woman in her mid-thirties, she introduces herself afterward. At your invitation she returns for several additional lectures. After the fourth or fifth you exchange phone numbers, which leads to dinner.

From the beginning Angelina seems a sexual adventuress. Surprisingly candid, she tells you she has done exotic dancing and nude modeling in another city and has enjoyed the company of many lovers, including women. For two years she lived with a wealthy man but returned to her home town after the relationship ended, hoping to start college soon as a late-in-life student. But there is an edginess to Angelina that you don’t understand. She is fiercely independent but insists that you unlock and hold open the car door for her for exit as well as entrance. Her kisses are passionate but just as likely to push you away. Her hands stop yours from beginning any bodily explorations. Some of her comments are caustic, as if tinged with an anger that lingers beneath her surface. You are drawn to her but wary of her, wary of something you cannot quite explain.

After several dinners and a movie, you end up in her bedroom one night, where you make quiet love. Afterward, to your dismay, she bursts into tears and claims that you took advantage of her. You try to comfort her but she screams, “Don’t touch me! Get away from me!” She is hysterical, terrified and terrifying. Someone in a neighboring apartment dials 911. Angelina is still screaming when the police arrive, and they break down the door to stop what they believe is a rape-in-progress. Naked, you are thrown to the floor and cuffed, your genitals and left cheek sustaining carpet burns. Certain you are about to be the first person ever arrested for sexual assault with the victim on top, you are hauled into the living room and dropped on the couch by the burly male cop. After a few minutes the second cop comes out of the bedroom with your clothes in her arms and tells her partner to remove the cuffs. When he shoots her a look of disbelief, she says, “Just take ‘em off, Billy. There’s been a mistake.” Then she looks at you, fear of false arrest charges in her eyes. “Sir, did you come here by car? If you didn’t, we’ll give you a ride home.” At that moment Angelina, robed and sheepish, emerges from the bedroom. As you pull on your boxers and slacks in the presence of the police, making sure your wallet and car keys are still in your pockets, Angelina apologizes. This was her first attempt at sex in over three years, she says, because after she broke it off with her wealthy lover, he hired four men to gang rape her. She never reported the crime.

Here’s something I don’t get to say too often: Let me slip into something a little more comfortable.

Now, six months later, you are in bed with another woman, a faceless accounts clerk from City Hall, a middle-aged divorcee whose bedroom is aglow with candlelight, whose thick body is sheathed in a diaphanous black negligee, whose stubby hands are all over your nakedness, bidding you to rise, rise. You want to, really want to, but her kisses fall on insensate lips and her fingers pinch resistant nipples. “Just relax,” she whispers. “We both want this, so relax.” You want to tell her you are relaxed, too relaxed, that you were just as relaxed with the woman before her, and the one before her, and?

Even as her lips and tongue scrape the dead flesh of your penis, you say nothing, can say nothing that you haven’t said before, can offer no apology that will mean anything to either of you. “Relax.” Your tear-filled eyes are drawn to the pale blue wall opposite the bed, where there floats a mass of indistinct faces with penetrating eyes and great tangles of hair, nipples long and short, breasts and legs and asses of all sizes and shapes, moles and birthmarks and scars, and index fingers, all of them furiously stabbing the air, pointing at you. Worse are the sounds behind the swirl of multi-colored flesh?slamming doors and crackling candles, Scrabble tiles thrown to the floor, wine glasses shattering in a fireplace, the click of billiard balls, a van engine with a small hole in its muffler, tears and screams, the ratchet of handcuffs biting into skin, and the murmur of voices, soft and insistent and angry, their words unclear but all of them, all of them, promising to tell.

_______________

Gary Earl Ross is a professor at the University at Buffalo, a fiction writer, and a playwright. His books include The Wheel of Desire and Shimmerville. His plays include the Edgar Award-winning Matter of Intent and the political drama The Best Woman. Visit him at The Writer's Den (www.angelfire.com/journal/garyearlross).