This part I can tell in the first person. Why should Preacher have all the fun?
Late in the semester I said that Kafka was the Lenny Bruce of his era, or vice-versa, and I preferred to live in the former world. And Ilona Volkov laughed, and knew exactly what I meant, and I was smitten.
Ilona was from Chicago. Her parents were Russian émigrés. She was yet another in the line of depressingly gifted people I met at St. John’s. Her thing was languages. To this day she is the only person I knew who actually became fluent in a foreign tongue based upon the instruction she received in an American public school – when she got to St. John’s she spoke English, Russian, German, and Hebrew. At St. John’s she learned ancient Greek and French with the rest of us, plus Latin. She picked up Italian and Arabic later. I understand she works as an interpreter at the UN.
My primary talents involved sarcastic comments and lighting one cigarette off the end of another. In retrospect, I should have anticipated a future as an unemployed alcoholic.
(In keeping with my usual habits, I didn’t go see Ilona for this. I can’t go see ex-girlfriends. When I go to see someone we sit down in a restaurant and they give me a business card and we chat. How can I take your business card when I can still remember the smell of your hair? I interviewed her by e-mail. She now works as a translator at the UN. No surprise there.)
Before Ilona and I started dating I believe I described her as a bosomy sausage, and Preacher had corrected me with the more charitable “zaftig.” Rubenesque would have been an overstatement. She had a waist. “Voluptuous” is what I’ll use.
She had crystalline blue eyes and dark hair that she usually wore in a ponytail and she had no aversion to wearing tight clothes. Our first date was to a Cecylia Barczyk concert (most assuredly Ilona’s idea) and we sat on a bench outside her dorm and we made each other laugh and she took my hand and said “OK, you can cop a feel.”
I did.
Our second date was at party off of Union Street and we sucked face and she made sure I kept my hands outside her clothing. Because she was the sort of girl you could say anything to, I told her I’d never been so torqued up in my life.
It’s the tits, isn’t it? she said, looking up at me with those steel blue eyes and smiling with the serene confidence of a hot woman holding a four aces.
That’s just part of it, I said.
Take me to the movies next week and maybe you can touch ‘em, she replied, and winked. She bit her lower lip a bit to keep the smile from eating her face.
What if I buy dinner?
“You can still feel me up, but I won’t eat as much of your popcorn while you do it,” she said.
She quite deftly kept me out of her pants. For awhile. It got to the point where I would suffer a debilitating priapism if she so much as touched my arm. I don’t know that I’ve ever been as hot for anyone in my life as I was for Ilona Volkov.
Every year the school sponsored a three-day weekend in New York, right before the end of the semester. It was a hundred bucks and you got a bus ride to and from Manhattan, and two nights sharing a passable hotel room with another Johnnie. Ilona and I signed up that year. Also her idea. I figured it had to be more fun than the cello concert. She insisted on paying my way. We actually quarreled over it, until at last she said “look, I’m planning on putting out while we’re there, and if I pay, it won’t make me a whore.”
I promptly withdrew my objections. Instead I spent the next week worrying that there would be some freak blizzard or bubonic plague epidemic or nuclear catastrophe that would keep us from going on the trip.
OK, now we get to the part about Preacher. The day after we signed up for the trip I came home from class and Preacher was in the kitchen making Kurbispastete. The room smelled like fresh-cooked pork chops.
By this point in the semester, it was rare to see him doing anything like that. Classes, a little reading, and then he’d disappear until late at night. He was one of those people who only needed about four hours’ sleep (I compensated for him by needing twelve) and so he’d be up running or rowing or doing whatever other sweaty pastime he’d set for himself long before I was out of bed.
What are you doing? I asked him. I mean it looks like pumpkin vivisection.
At the moment, I’m trying to make a pumpkin pie with ground pork. But if you had been here a minute ago you would have heard me pissing off your mother.
My mother called? And, gross.
Yeah. I told her you were off nailing your hot Jewish girlfriend.
That would piss her off. Seriously, pumpkin and pork?
No, she seemed relieved you weren’t gay. What pissed her off was when I told her I wasn’t coming home with you for Christmas.
I watched him pour bits of pumpkin into a pot of water and add vinegar.
That’s a joke too, right? I said after a pause.
The Kurbispastete, or telling your mother you weren’t gay?
Not coming home for Christmas.
No.
But the pie is, right?
No. But I was kidding about the other thing. In fact I assured your mother that you were still gay.
I sighed. You have come back with me, I said. Otherwise I have to talk to my asshole brother.
DJ had gotten a job selling mobile phones. He attacked it like it was a six-pack of Genesee Cream Ale. I guessed – correctly, I might add – that the only thing I was going to hear about from DJ were the wonders of the mobile phone industry.
Can’t, he said. He was rolling out dough.
I’ve yet to actually copulate with Ilona Volkov, I said to him. I’m telling you this because it is the only thing you don’t know about me.
He gave me a puzzled look.
So now you’re going to tell me what the fuck’s been wrong with you all semester, I said.
He sighed. There’s nothing wrong with me.
Bullshit. You’ve been disappearing for longer and longer periods. This is the first afternoon I’ve seen you in… weeks. Which wouldn’t be so bad except that you’re becoming more and more of a pill when you are around. What the hell is going on? You don’t… you, of all people, you, Mr. Popularity, you have no social life at all. When I have a better social life than you, something has gone terribly awry.
There will be a time, he said, a long time in the future, when I can tell you. And when I tell you you’ll understand why I can’t tell you now.
I lit a cigarette and told him the three leading theories about his disappearances
First, you’ve taken some horribly demeaning job to make ends meet, and are ashamed to tell anyone.
He furrowed his eyebrows deeply. What kind of job could that be? he asked. And don’t get ashes in my pie.
Yeah, I don’t like that theory either, I told him. You could be working as a crack whore and you would be telling us about the ennobling qualities of gainful employment. The second theory is that you’re having an affair with a married townie.
Her husband must work some insane hours, he pointed out.
Right, that’s just one of the holes in that theory – you’re gone days and nights. Plus, while I wouldn’t put it past you to sleep with a married woman, I certainly can’t see you getting serious about one.
But clearly those two theories cover the entire universe of possibilities, he said, smiling as he lined the dish with his pie dough. So which is it?
No, there’s my personal favorite: you’ve been recruited by the CIA, I told him.
That is a good one, he admitted, nodding.
Sure, I said. You’re doing your training now. Your cover stays intact as a mild-mannered if slightly priapic college student. When you graduate you become an exchange student somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, and nobody suspects a thing.
Behind the Iron Curtain? he laughed. You’re the one dating a Russian.
The beauty of that theory, I continued, ignoring him, is that it automatically dispenses with any explanation you might come up with. You could have photographs and affidavits showing that you were spending all this time building housing for the homeless of Eastport, and we could dismiss it as nothing more than an Agency attempt at keeping your identity hidden.
And the trip to France last summer, just a training mission. It all seems so obvious now, he said.
Of course. You told me yourself you didn’t go to any of the classes in Paris.
And that would explain the miniature camera in my toothbrush, he continued, nodding sagely.
And the truth serum you gave Mark to uncover who drank all your Seven-Up.
He had a date over, Preacher said. Otherwise I would have given him my special CIA Touch Of Death. He sprinkled bread crumbs into the pan.
I was cool with Mark having sex with other men. In our house. While I was there. So long as I didn’t think about it too much.
Seriously, I said. What’s the story.
I can’t say, he told me, looking as if he wished otherwise.
Come to New York with us, I said out of the blue.
Right now?
The school’s sponsoring another one of those three-day excursions to New York. Bus ride, couple nights in a cheap hotel, do all the tourist crap with the millions of other people who show up during the Christmas season… how about it?
He mulled.
C’mon, I said. You told me once that you’d never been to New York City. Man of the world, been everywhere, done everything, never been to New York. Ilona and I are going. You need to buy my mom something nice to soothe her hurt feelings. You need to buy me about three keys of heroin to survive four weeks with my brother. Let’s go to New York. Whatever the hell you’re doing, you deserve a weekend off. The CIA can give you a three-day pass. Tell you what, you can bug the East German consulate while you’re there.
How can I turn down an opportunity like that? he concluded.
He signed up.
And god damn it, I hate to admit it, but Kurbispastete isn’t bad.
Morning of the trip he dragged me, blinking and stumbling, to the gathering point and we all got on the bus. There were maybe thirty of us, including three non-students: the director of admissions and her husband, and our scary preceptorial tutor, Moira Callahan.
(Preacher had given his oral performance a few days earlier. A passage from Finn McCool. He was, as always, a hell of a storyteller. But Callahan was, in my opinion, even harder on him than on the rest of us. At the time I attributed it to his choice of an Irish story.)
We were surprised by her presence. But she said she wasn’t about to spend a year in America without seeing New York. Fair enough. And on the way up she was actually pretty nice. Talked with us and not at us. Laughed a lot. I remember that I was able to realize how beautiful she was, something that was usually obscured by how intimidating she was.
But Dr. Callahan’s presence created an obstacle to my primary objective for the weekend, which was a prolonged visit between Ilona’s wondrous thighs. Originally a friend of Ilona’s had signed up as her roommate for the trip. We figured we could persuade her to go do… something. At the last minute she canceled, which seemed even better; Ilona would have a room to herself.
But then Moira took the open spot, and now we were back to having to evict a roommate. Namely, Preacher, who would certainly go along with it (he owed me big time in that regard, after our freshman year), but my hopes had been raised about the possibility of a room to ourselves and…
And so I had a good rant during the bus ride about the patent unfairness of it all. Because there were two gay guys who could room together, but straight couples couldn’t.
Moira interrupted my rant halfway up the Jersey Turnpike. You knew this was the policy when you signed up, right?
Right.
You and your lady-love are both over the age of consent, right?
Yeah.
There was nothing stopping you from buying your own train tickets to New York and getting your own room, right?
Except that it costs three times as much, I said.
So really your problem isn’t with the rules. You agreed to them up front, and they’re the price of the subsidized trip. Your problem is just that you can’t afford to do this on your own.
Well…
Your problem is that there’s no school subsidy for shagging your girlfriend in New York, right? I mean that’s what you’re looking for.
Preacher – who had headphones on and who was not, I thought, listening to any of this, sort of came to my rescue.
You’re ruining a good rant with logic, he told her. I’ve learned to just let him go until he’s spent.
My mistake, she laughed.
Well, I’ll let it slide this time, I said. I think it was the first time I’d addressed her without stammering.
I didn’t know then what I know now. But even in retrospect I saw absolutely no indication of anything between her and Preacher.
So we get to New York and proceeded to have a good time. If you are ever in a strange city, I highly recommend going with Preacher Haywood. People talked to Preacher Haywood. He found out about things, after-hours clubs, out-of-the-way stores, things like that. He took a bunch of us to this jazz club and we saw some old man playing a guitar – Tiny Something – and Preacher went back and talked to him after the set and he sat down with us and told a story about someone named Charlie Christian.
It was probably impressive if you knew anything about jazz. I didn’t.
Preacher said to Moira, that’s storytelling. That’s oral history. She didn’t argue with him.
When we got back to the hotel Dr. Callahan said that she couldn’t stand to see two horny kids kept apart by fate, so she was going to book another room and I could spend the night with Ilona. She and Preacher and a girl named Dana and a guy named Alex weren’t as exhausted as the rest of us and went off to some after-hours dance club and Ilona and I went up to the room and…
Now here I find myself in a quandary.
Modesty forbids waxing rhapsodic about the incredible night. Yet I had to go on and on about Preacher Haywood’s unparalleled heights of sexual ecstasy under his Page-3-model-turned-sensei, Moira Callahan. Do I succumb to temptation?
I had feared, truth be told, that after a month or two of anticipation there was no way the real thing could be anything but a disappointment. My fears were unfounded. But still, I should be discrete…
If I wasn’t discrete I would mention, for example, that Ilona gave me the first real blowjob of my life. Is that indiscrete? To date I have not encountered any other woman who could use her teeth so skillfully in that enterprise. There’s something about the fear of imminent amputation combined with intense stimulation… let’s just say it didn’t take very long. (In retrospect, that was probably why she started that way. It meant we were able to proceed at a much more measured pace subsequently.)
But I’m too discrete to write about that.
If I wasn’t such a liberated post-feminist modern man I would be tempted to use all sorts of vegetable imagery, too. Lots of different kinds of melons come to mind. But we know that’s demeaning to women. But let me just say that there’s something about a woman with an actual bottom, an actual honest-to-god soft bottom… I am not one to fetishize any particular body parts, I am not a butt man or a boob man or a leg man, per se, but in the case of Ilona it is difficult not to fetishize ALL of her body parts. She was... succulent.
OK, to balance the whole (admittedly indiscrete) thing about her teeth, let me talk about the sensation of having those two round knees plunk down on either side of my head. About her fingers in my hair, pulling hard enough to make my eyes water. When she came she couldn’t help but squeeze with those big thick thighs and I didn’t know if I was going to die from skull fractures or asphyxiation or delight.
And all this was during the warm-up phases.
Fortunately, I’m not the type to mention the fact that we went at it six times that night. But I will say that by the time I fell asleep I had sworn to myself I would never again so much as glance at a skinny woman. I wanted hips, not ribs.
(Sarah, my ex, was built like a pixie. I am trying to figure out when and where I deviated from that well-intentioned Ilona-inspired oath.)
In the morning I woke up before Ilona – sore – and tiptoed across the hall to my room for a change of underwear. When I slipped in the door I saw two lumps under the sheets and wondered if it was someone we came with or someone he’d met in New York. Then Moira raised herself up on one elbow and blinked at me from under a tousled mass of red hair.
I crouched there next to my suitcase like a deer in the headlights, underpants in my hand and chin on the floor.
You can breathe, if you want, she said, using one pale smooth flawless arm to push the hair back. Preacher sat up next to her.
Welcome to the CIA, he said.
Moira took a shower. He told me… well, not everything, but enough. He left out the tutorial aspects of their relationship. I kept repeating something while he spoke. I think it was “holy shit,” but it might have been something different. But equally profound.
That’s why I couldn’t tell you, he said. But she surprised me herself with the trip. Didn’t say a word, just showed up on the bus yesterday morning. And she’s why I’m not coming home with you for Christmas. I promised her cowboys. We’re driving to Texas, maybe other places.
But you have to keep this under your hat, he concluded.
That reminded me of Ilona, still (I hoped) sleeping across the hall.
Of course, I said.
Moira came out wearing only a towel. I fled.
When I got back to the room the sound of the door closing woke Ilona, and she told me I was going to come scrub her back, and pulled the sheets down to reveal that magnificent front, and I managed a half-hearted leer even as I sat on the edge of the bed, still dumbfounded.
And she had a really sneaky way of getting it out of me.
She touched my arm and said, “What?”
And I told her: I went across the hall and found Moira and Preacher together.
She did a double-take. Must’ve been some party they found last night, she said, eyes wide.
Apparently they’ve been having an affair all year, I added, completing my betrayal of the secrets. What the hell, I’d kept it to myself for almost 45 seconds.
Ilona wasn’t as shocked as I was. She was shocked, don’t get me wrong; she gasped, she gaped, she laughed. But she said she thought she’d seen something between them last night.
She was imagining things. There hadn’t been anything to give it away.
I swore Ilona to secrecy, too. I didn’t tell anybody else, myself. Except Mark. I mean he was sharing a house with us. Ilona later admitted she told her roommate, who also happened to be in Callahan’s class. By the time we returned for the Spring semester, everyone knew.
When I interview Moira, years later, she said that sometime in February the Dean had called her in to discuss the matter. "All he really wanted," she said, "was for me to deny it, and be a little discrete. But I decided, the hell with that. We'd been discrete half the year. I wanted to be able to eat in restaurants. So instead I mentioned the names of a few of my male colleagues whom I knew had been with students. Indicated that having a double-standard for the female faculty would not look good. And reminded him that I would be gone at the end of the semester anyhow. We reached an understanding, then."
Thursday, February 24, 2005
Sunday, February 20, 2005
Part Twenty One
“Now explain to me why you call yourselves misfit toys,” Moira said. The conversation and laughter had slowed considerably as the half-dozen students shoveled Preacher’s turkey and mashed potatoes and gravy and stuffing and broccoli and cranberries and black-eyed peas and yams and biscuits and a few adventurous types even tried the sauerkraut which, Preacher said, he didn’t like but he’d heard was a Maryland Thanksgiving tradition.
(These were the same people who had tried his homemade hummus and his hand-mixed guacamole earlier. And who would be sucking down his pumpkin and world-famous chocolate meringue pie later.)
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” a few students said simultaneously around mouthfuls of food.
“The children’s song?” she said, doing a pretty good job on the food herself.
“The TV special,” Preacher said. “The stuffing in the blue bowl is an experiment. The stuffing in the red bowl is the normal stuff.”
“Just how experimental?” a pudgy girl named Amy asked. She lived in Portland, Maine, but couldn’t get home because she worked at a WaldenBooks and had to be at the mall first thing Friday morning.
“What TV special?” Moira said.
“Cornbread, walnuts, and cranberries,” Preacher said. “The kid’s program. You know, animated reindeer, Burl Ives…”
“It’s good,” Mark said, his mouth full.
“The TV show, or the stuffing?” Moira asked.
“The stuffing. The TV show is pretty bad. It’s just sort of a nostalgia thing.”
The girl plopped a large spoonful of gold-and-burgundy stuffiing on her plate.
“You’re all too young for nostalgia,” Moira said.
“We’ll be sticking it in the VCR once we’re all in a calorie- and tryptophan-induced stupor,” Mark said, He-Who-Was-Banned-From-His-Home.
“When will this music be over?” a freshman named Greg said, wrinkling his nose at the tape that was playing.
Preacher slammed his fork down on his plate. “Bad-mouthing Kitty Wells? In my house!” He jumped to his feet in mock rage.
The others, who were used to his musical tastes, just laughed, and Greg (who had looked tense) managed a smile of his own.
Greg’s family was in Anchorage and a flight home just wasn’t in the cards that year.
“No, seriously, when this is over, go put in a CD, whatever you want,” Preacher said, sitting down. The stereo was in the living room, but the housemates had put speakers throughout the first floor. “What’s the difference between nostalgia and history?”
Preacher was the only Misfit Toy in Moira’s class, although the others all knew her by sight and by reputation – it was a small school. But she was on her best behavior fulfilling her unofficial duty of attending Preacher’s annual dinner, and the other students – who had been more than a little apprehensive at the thought of eating a meal with her – had quickly relaxed around her.
The wine helped. The ones who didn’t like wine were assuaged by the two six-packs of Harp that she brought with her.
“If you were born before the event occurred, it’s nostalgia,” she said. “If it happened before you were born, it’s history.”
“And Rudolph was first aired in --” Mark said, and pointed at Preacher without looking up from his plate.
“1964,” Haywood said. “So Rudolph is only nostalgia for those of us born before 1964.”
“OK, so I am a doddering old hag,” Moira said, laughing. Greg looked at a senior named Chris Mackey, who had the same retail-related reason for being there as Amy. Chris looked back. Both of them had noted the way Moira filled out her sweater, and neither of them had thought “old hag.”
“So, like, Vietnam is just nostalgia?” the last of the Misfits asked, a girl named Patty Warnick. She was one of those kind of girls who can’t stand to say nothing for too long, but at the same time had no sense of humor at all. Consequently she said things like that when everyone else was kidding around. Patty was a preppy girl from Rhode Island. She told everyone that she couldn’t go home because her family always went skiing in Switzerland over Thanksgiving.
“Yes, dear, eat your peas,” Moira said.
Afterwards Moira sat in the living room with the rest of them and watched the crudely animated special. “The storyline of the Lions game was much more compelling,” she said, halfway through. Greg and Preacher had given her a crash-course in American football before dinner.
A few of them laughed. A few of them glared at her. Preacher sat with a half-smile on his face. He thought she was much more beautiful when she wasn’t trying to be glamorous. Before the show was quite over he got up and went into the kitchen and brought out both kinds of pies and stacks of plates.
Like everyone else, Patty managed a slice of each despite complaining about being too full. Patty had missed the first few minutes of Rudolph while purging in the bathroom, and repeated the feat after dessert. When she came downstairs the second time Moira was sitting on the big chair-and-a-half, rummaging through one of Preacher’s boxes of tapes.
“Where does he find this stuff?” she asked the younger woman.
The others were in the kitchen and dining room clearing and cleaning and getting in one another’s way.
Patty shrugged. “What I want to know is, where does the money come from?” she said, softly, looking over Moira’s shoulder at the jumble of tapes. “He doesn’t act like he’s rich but he always seems to have money – for his car, for this place, for new tapes and CDs. He gave my friend Beth money for a train ticket home for the weekend.”
“Hey, are you playing Trivial Pursuit with us?” Mark asked, sticking his head in from the dining room.
“Perhaps in a bit,” Moira said.
Mark and Chris and Greg set up the board, called into the living room for Patty to turn up the Doors CD that was playing, and drank more beer; Moira and Patty had a quiet and fairly intense conversation, punctuated by Moira refilling the girl’s wine glass; Amy helped Preacher finish the dishes. There wasn’t much left to do in the kitchen; Preacher was one of those annoying hyper-efficient clean-as-you-go cooks. At one point Amy was putting something back in the refrigerator and Preacher had to reach over her to put a bowl in the cupboard overhead and he playfully put his hand on her bottom to warn her he was behind her and she didn’t know whether to scream or pass out so she just stood there, bent over, her face in the refrigerator, her eyes wide, her face red.
“How are we doing teams?” Greg called in. It just seemed natural that Preacher would make these sorts of decisions.
“How about,” Preacher said, turning back to the sink and utterly unaware of the arrhythmia he’d caused by his brief contact with the girl, “me and Mark, and Chris and Amy, and Moira, Greg, and Patty.” All Johnnies essentially major in Trivial Pursuit, but Greg was a freshman and Patty wasn’t that bright, so Preacher figured they needed Moira the most; and Chris and Amy were both single, and each year’s dinner had yielded at least one hook-up, so…
“You should run a restaurant,” Chris said to him, halfway through the game. “I love my mother, but your food put hers to shame.”
“I should do a lot of things,” Preacher said.
“Name the Hebraic folklore objects allegedly used by Mormon founder Joseph Smith to read the Book of Mormon,” Moira said, looking at one of the cards.
“Urim and Thummim,” Preacher said, without consulting with his teammates.
Greg looked over Moira’s shoulder. The actual question had been “How many presidential elections did Franklin Roosevelt win?”
“That’s not the question,” he said.
“Yes, but this one was too easy,” Moira said.
“Yeah, but how do we know he’s right?” Greg responded.
The others laughed.
“He’s right,” Moira said.
“How could I make up Urim and Thummim?” Preacher said.
“Are you a Mormon?”
Preacher had a bottle of beer to his lips when the question was asked.
“Never.”
“How many presidential elections did Franklin Roosevelt win?” Greg said.
“Four,” Preacher and Mark said at once.
“See?” Moira said.
“Seriously, dude, restaurant,” Chris said again.
“Yeah, what are you going to do when you graduate?” Amy asked him.
“I have no idea,” Preacher laughed. He rolled the die. “History or Sports?” he said to Mark.
“Sports,” Mark said. Preacher moved the token.
“You should think about a restaurant, seriously. Cooking school. Restaurant management school,” Chris said. He read from the card. “Who holds the NHL’s single-season scoring record?”
Preacher looked at Mark.
“I’m from Virginia, and I’m gay. What the hell do I know about hockey?” Mark said.
“When in doubt,” Preacher said, “the answer’s either Gretzky or Bobby Orr. I’m gonna say Wayne Gretzky.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Wayne Gretzky.”
“Son of a bitch,” Chris said.
“If I was going to go to cooking school, I wouldn’t need to be here,” Preacher said. “I guess I’m going to some sort of graduate school, though, right? I mean that’s what you do at St. John’s. you get a degree in Trivial Pursuit, and then you go to graduate school to actually learn something useful. Unless… do you think they’ll have a barnstorming Trivial Pursuit team by the time I get out of here?”
“Seems unlikely,” Mark said. He rolled the die. “Entertainment or Science?”
“Entertainment,” Preacher said. “The problem isn’t finding something I want to do, really. It’s eliminating things I want to do. Maybe I can get a master’s in Trivial Pursuit, too. Hopkins offers an MLA, I think.”
“On what network were The Honeymooners first presented?” Amy said.
“Thank God, a TV question,” Moira said. “He knows all the film and music questions.”
“NBC?” Mark guessed.
“Sounds good to me,” Preacher said, thinking to himself, DuMont.
“NBC,” Mark said.
“No, DuMont,” Amy said, taking the die.
Preacher and Mark won it – Denny McClain was the last major-league pitcher to win 30 games, taking 31 in 1968 – and the others retired to the living room. It was getting late but nobody wanted to leave. Preacher went into the kitchen to throw away some empties. Moira slipped in after him.
“I told you you’d have a good time,” Preacher said, softly.
“I did have a good time,” she said. “And I think you might have a great time.”
“You’re not suggesting something extracurricular, are you?” he said, leering a bit.
“No,” she said. “I’m talking about the fact that both of those little girls in there are aching for a trip upstairs with you.”
“Get out of here,” he said. “Patty has a boyfriend, and I barely know Amy.”
“Trust me,” Moira said. “The one told me as much, and while you haven’t noticed it, that rather Rubenesque blonde girl has done everything but throw her knickers at you tonight.”
Preacher laughed. “Not interested,” he said.
“Ordinarily I’d applaud your taste,” Moira said, “one’s too fat and the other’s a gold-digger, but in this instance I think you’re again showing a lack of imagination.”
The smile left Preacher’s face and some tension crept back into his shoulders. The sound of his friends in the living room grew far away.
“They’ve both been drinking, they’re both randy as cats in heat, and they’re both in a holiday mindset,” she continued. “With a fairly small amount of effort I am quite certain you could coax them both up there.”
Preacher sighed. “And then what?” he said. “As you point out regularly, I have enough trouble with one.”
“You have enough trouble with me,” she clarified. “Their standards are lower.”
“Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that was true,” Preacher said, “there’s the matter that I still have to go to school with them after this. There are repercussions from that sort of thing. Maybe not when you’re involved, but when normal people are involved, there are repercussions. One or both of them is going to really regret it later, and I’m here with the fallout. Patty’s boyfriend will find out. Amy will realize that this doesn’t make us a couple. And I have to deal with it.”
“I think you’d be surprised to see how these things work themselves out,” Moira said. “To the extent that they regret it later, they’ll both be too ashamed to tell anyone else what happened.”
“And this makes it OK, to you?” he said.
She shrugged.
“Are you telling me that I have to do this?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “We’re not there yet. I’m telling you that I release you from your vow of chastity if you agree to do it. But you have to put it in your journal.”
“No way,” he said.
“I think you’re making a mistake,” she said. He was unmoved.
She left, slightly angry, shortly thereafter.
Mark stayed the night and slept in Nick’s room. Preacher stayed up late and wrote in his journal, the one Moira had insisted they both keep so they could learn more about how the other gender experienced sex. He wrote it knowing that on Monday when he went to her house they would exchange journals and read about it. And when he was learning about how the Mare’s Trick felt when he was insufficiently rigid, and into which of the three categories she had placed each of her week’s orgasms, she would read this:
The fact of the matter was that she knows I don’t want to sleep with anyone but her. Whether she urged those two on me because she thinks it will cure me of that feeling, or because she feels the same way and is trying to overcompensate, the end result is that those two would have just been pawns in all of this. She has no qualms about doing that to people. I’m in this voluntarily, with my eyes open. But it is repulsive to me to even think about doing this to people who have no idea what’s going on. It would have hurt them, a lot. And it would have hurt me, too. And I think in the end she knew that. She knew it, and that was what she wanted, too. Because she has decided that we can’t have a normal relationship, even though I think she wants it almost as much as I do. So if she hurts, everyone else should hurt, too.
She read it, and if she thought it was true, she didn’t say anything.
(These were the same people who had tried his homemade hummus and his hand-mixed guacamole earlier. And who would be sucking down his pumpkin and world-famous chocolate meringue pie later.)
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” a few students said simultaneously around mouthfuls of food.
“The children’s song?” she said, doing a pretty good job on the food herself.
“The TV special,” Preacher said. “The stuffing in the blue bowl is an experiment. The stuffing in the red bowl is the normal stuff.”
“Just how experimental?” a pudgy girl named Amy asked. She lived in Portland, Maine, but couldn’t get home because she worked at a WaldenBooks and had to be at the mall first thing Friday morning.
“What TV special?” Moira said.
“Cornbread, walnuts, and cranberries,” Preacher said. “The kid’s program. You know, animated reindeer, Burl Ives…”
“It’s good,” Mark said, his mouth full.
“The TV show, or the stuffing?” Moira asked.
“The stuffing. The TV show is pretty bad. It’s just sort of a nostalgia thing.”
The girl plopped a large spoonful of gold-and-burgundy stuffiing on her plate.
“You’re all too young for nostalgia,” Moira said.
“We’ll be sticking it in the VCR once we’re all in a calorie- and tryptophan-induced stupor,” Mark said, He-Who-Was-Banned-From-His-Home.
“When will this music be over?” a freshman named Greg said, wrinkling his nose at the tape that was playing.
Preacher slammed his fork down on his plate. “Bad-mouthing Kitty Wells? In my house!” He jumped to his feet in mock rage.
The others, who were used to his musical tastes, just laughed, and Greg (who had looked tense) managed a smile of his own.
Greg’s family was in Anchorage and a flight home just wasn’t in the cards that year.
“No, seriously, when this is over, go put in a CD, whatever you want,” Preacher said, sitting down. The stereo was in the living room, but the housemates had put speakers throughout the first floor. “What’s the difference between nostalgia and history?”
Preacher was the only Misfit Toy in Moira’s class, although the others all knew her by sight and by reputation – it was a small school. But she was on her best behavior fulfilling her unofficial duty of attending Preacher’s annual dinner, and the other students – who had been more than a little apprehensive at the thought of eating a meal with her – had quickly relaxed around her.
The wine helped. The ones who didn’t like wine were assuaged by the two six-packs of Harp that she brought with her.
“If you were born before the event occurred, it’s nostalgia,” she said. “If it happened before you were born, it’s history.”
“And Rudolph was first aired in --” Mark said, and pointed at Preacher without looking up from his plate.
“1964,” Haywood said. “So Rudolph is only nostalgia for those of us born before 1964.”
“OK, so I am a doddering old hag,” Moira said, laughing. Greg looked at a senior named Chris Mackey, who had the same retail-related reason for being there as Amy. Chris looked back. Both of them had noted the way Moira filled out her sweater, and neither of them had thought “old hag.”
“So, like, Vietnam is just nostalgia?” the last of the Misfits asked, a girl named Patty Warnick. She was one of those kind of girls who can’t stand to say nothing for too long, but at the same time had no sense of humor at all. Consequently she said things like that when everyone else was kidding around. Patty was a preppy girl from Rhode Island. She told everyone that she couldn’t go home because her family always went skiing in Switzerland over Thanksgiving.
“Yes, dear, eat your peas,” Moira said.
Afterwards Moira sat in the living room with the rest of them and watched the crudely animated special. “The storyline of the Lions game was much more compelling,” she said, halfway through. Greg and Preacher had given her a crash-course in American football before dinner.
A few of them laughed. A few of them glared at her. Preacher sat with a half-smile on his face. He thought she was much more beautiful when she wasn’t trying to be glamorous. Before the show was quite over he got up and went into the kitchen and brought out both kinds of pies and stacks of plates.
Like everyone else, Patty managed a slice of each despite complaining about being too full. Patty had missed the first few minutes of Rudolph while purging in the bathroom, and repeated the feat after dessert. When she came downstairs the second time Moira was sitting on the big chair-and-a-half, rummaging through one of Preacher’s boxes of tapes.
“Where does he find this stuff?” she asked the younger woman.
The others were in the kitchen and dining room clearing and cleaning and getting in one another’s way.
Patty shrugged. “What I want to know is, where does the money come from?” she said, softly, looking over Moira’s shoulder at the jumble of tapes. “He doesn’t act like he’s rich but he always seems to have money – for his car, for this place, for new tapes and CDs. He gave my friend Beth money for a train ticket home for the weekend.”
“Hey, are you playing Trivial Pursuit with us?” Mark asked, sticking his head in from the dining room.
“Perhaps in a bit,” Moira said.
Mark and Chris and Greg set up the board, called into the living room for Patty to turn up the Doors CD that was playing, and drank more beer; Moira and Patty had a quiet and fairly intense conversation, punctuated by Moira refilling the girl’s wine glass; Amy helped Preacher finish the dishes. There wasn’t much left to do in the kitchen; Preacher was one of those annoying hyper-efficient clean-as-you-go cooks. At one point Amy was putting something back in the refrigerator and Preacher had to reach over her to put a bowl in the cupboard overhead and he playfully put his hand on her bottom to warn her he was behind her and she didn’t know whether to scream or pass out so she just stood there, bent over, her face in the refrigerator, her eyes wide, her face red.
“How are we doing teams?” Greg called in. It just seemed natural that Preacher would make these sorts of decisions.
“How about,” Preacher said, turning back to the sink and utterly unaware of the arrhythmia he’d caused by his brief contact with the girl, “me and Mark, and Chris and Amy, and Moira, Greg, and Patty.” All Johnnies essentially major in Trivial Pursuit, but Greg was a freshman and Patty wasn’t that bright, so Preacher figured they needed Moira the most; and Chris and Amy were both single, and each year’s dinner had yielded at least one hook-up, so…
“You should run a restaurant,” Chris said to him, halfway through the game. “I love my mother, but your food put hers to shame.”
“I should do a lot of things,” Preacher said.
“Name the Hebraic folklore objects allegedly used by Mormon founder Joseph Smith to read the Book of Mormon,” Moira said, looking at one of the cards.
“Urim and Thummim,” Preacher said, without consulting with his teammates.
Greg looked over Moira’s shoulder. The actual question had been “How many presidential elections did Franklin Roosevelt win?”
“That’s not the question,” he said.
“Yes, but this one was too easy,” Moira said.
“Yeah, but how do we know he’s right?” Greg responded.
The others laughed.
“He’s right,” Moira said.
“How could I make up Urim and Thummim?” Preacher said.
“Are you a Mormon?”
Preacher had a bottle of beer to his lips when the question was asked.
“Never.”
“How many presidential elections did Franklin Roosevelt win?” Greg said.
“Four,” Preacher and Mark said at once.
“See?” Moira said.
“Seriously, dude, restaurant,” Chris said again.
“Yeah, what are you going to do when you graduate?” Amy asked him.
“I have no idea,” Preacher laughed. He rolled the die. “History or Sports?” he said to Mark.
“Sports,” Mark said. Preacher moved the token.
“You should think about a restaurant, seriously. Cooking school. Restaurant management school,” Chris said. He read from the card. “Who holds the NHL’s single-season scoring record?”
Preacher looked at Mark.
“I’m from Virginia, and I’m gay. What the hell do I know about hockey?” Mark said.
“When in doubt,” Preacher said, “the answer’s either Gretzky or Bobby Orr. I’m gonna say Wayne Gretzky.”
“Sounds good to me.”
“Wayne Gretzky.”
“Son of a bitch,” Chris said.
“If I was going to go to cooking school, I wouldn’t need to be here,” Preacher said. “I guess I’m going to some sort of graduate school, though, right? I mean that’s what you do at St. John’s. you get a degree in Trivial Pursuit, and then you go to graduate school to actually learn something useful. Unless… do you think they’ll have a barnstorming Trivial Pursuit team by the time I get out of here?”
“Seems unlikely,” Mark said. He rolled the die. “Entertainment or Science?”
“Entertainment,” Preacher said. “The problem isn’t finding something I want to do, really. It’s eliminating things I want to do. Maybe I can get a master’s in Trivial Pursuit, too. Hopkins offers an MLA, I think.”
“On what network were The Honeymooners first presented?” Amy said.
“Thank God, a TV question,” Moira said. “He knows all the film and music questions.”
“NBC?” Mark guessed.
“Sounds good to me,” Preacher said, thinking to himself, DuMont.
“NBC,” Mark said.
“No, DuMont,” Amy said, taking the die.
Preacher and Mark won it – Denny McClain was the last major-league pitcher to win 30 games, taking 31 in 1968 – and the others retired to the living room. It was getting late but nobody wanted to leave. Preacher went into the kitchen to throw away some empties. Moira slipped in after him.
“I told you you’d have a good time,” Preacher said, softly.
“I did have a good time,” she said. “And I think you might have a great time.”
“You’re not suggesting something extracurricular, are you?” he said, leering a bit.
“No,” she said. “I’m talking about the fact that both of those little girls in there are aching for a trip upstairs with you.”
“Get out of here,” he said. “Patty has a boyfriend, and I barely know Amy.”
“Trust me,” Moira said. “The one told me as much, and while you haven’t noticed it, that rather Rubenesque blonde girl has done everything but throw her knickers at you tonight.”
Preacher laughed. “Not interested,” he said.
“Ordinarily I’d applaud your taste,” Moira said, “one’s too fat and the other’s a gold-digger, but in this instance I think you’re again showing a lack of imagination.”
The smile left Preacher’s face and some tension crept back into his shoulders. The sound of his friends in the living room grew far away.
“They’ve both been drinking, they’re both randy as cats in heat, and they’re both in a holiday mindset,” she continued. “With a fairly small amount of effort I am quite certain you could coax them both up there.”
Preacher sighed. “And then what?” he said. “As you point out regularly, I have enough trouble with one.”
“You have enough trouble with me,” she clarified. “Their standards are lower.”
“Even assuming, for the sake of argument, that was true,” Preacher said, “there’s the matter that I still have to go to school with them after this. There are repercussions from that sort of thing. Maybe not when you’re involved, but when normal people are involved, there are repercussions. One or both of them is going to really regret it later, and I’m here with the fallout. Patty’s boyfriend will find out. Amy will realize that this doesn’t make us a couple. And I have to deal with it.”
“I think you’d be surprised to see how these things work themselves out,” Moira said. “To the extent that they regret it later, they’ll both be too ashamed to tell anyone else what happened.”
“And this makes it OK, to you?” he said.
She shrugged.
“Are you telling me that I have to do this?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “We’re not there yet. I’m telling you that I release you from your vow of chastity if you agree to do it. But you have to put it in your journal.”
“No way,” he said.
“I think you’re making a mistake,” she said. He was unmoved.
She left, slightly angry, shortly thereafter.
Mark stayed the night and slept in Nick’s room. Preacher stayed up late and wrote in his journal, the one Moira had insisted they both keep so they could learn more about how the other gender experienced sex. He wrote it knowing that on Monday when he went to her house they would exchange journals and read about it. And when he was learning about how the Mare’s Trick felt when he was insufficiently rigid, and into which of the three categories she had placed each of her week’s orgasms, she would read this:
The fact of the matter was that she knows I don’t want to sleep with anyone but her. Whether she urged those two on me because she thinks it will cure me of that feeling, or because she feels the same way and is trying to overcompensate, the end result is that those two would have just been pawns in all of this. She has no qualms about doing that to people. I’m in this voluntarily, with my eyes open. But it is repulsive to me to even think about doing this to people who have no idea what’s going on. It would have hurt them, a lot. And it would have hurt me, too. And I think in the end she knew that. She knew it, and that was what she wanted, too. Because she has decided that we can’t have a normal relationship, even though I think she wants it almost as much as I do. So if she hurts, everyone else should hurt, too.
She read it, and if she thought it was true, she didn’t say anything.
Friday, February 18, 2005
Part Twenty
Truisms still need repeating sometimes, to remind one that they are indeed true. For example: after a few good cleansing orgasms, women think far more clearly, while men find it hard to remember their own names.
No doubt there is some sort of evolutionary basis for this. Perhaps it’s prehuman, something lodged way back in the limbic system. Maybe it was necessary so that some Precambrian insect could munch contemplatively on the head of her still-twitching mate before injecting their offspring into his carcass.
Moira, of course, was well acquainted with this phenomenon, and took advantage of it to learn about Haywood’s inexplicable perfect-kinetic-pitch and about his hyperdeveloped pubococcygeal muscles.
“So how did you learn to lift a dictionary with your PC?”
“My what?” He had been lazily tracing a mandala into her shoulder, even as he spoke dismissively of his uncanny muscle memory, but at the question his index finger stopped moving.
“The pubococcygeus,” she clarified.
“The puba-cok-sigeus?”
“The Kegel…?”
“Oh, that,” he laughed. “That’s what that muscle is called? Say that word again?”
“Pubococcygeus. Where did you pick that up?”
He laughed.
“I’m thinking some older woman in your neighborhood?” she tried. How old ARE you, they both thought simultaneously.
“It’s so… dumb. When I was like thirteen or fourteen Tommy Lincoln stole one of his dad’s Playboy’s. I remember it well. Teri Peterson was Miss July and the women of Maui were the aperitif. We all gawked at the pictures like perverted little teenagers are supposed to do. But when nobody was looking I… I read the articles.”
“What?!” she laughed.
He blushed. “I read the articles. I mean all I knew about sex was that I knew nothing about sex. And Playboy was supposed to be like, the sex Bible, right? In retrospect, all of that stuff was pretty stupid. But… anyhow, there was this article about the Kegel exercise. Made it sound like unless you could clench and hold it for ten minutes at a time, you were NEVER going to satisfy a woman. So… so I started doing it. Thirteen, just getting hair down there, no idea when or if I was ever going to get laid, and I’m squeezing that thing all the time. In class. On the baseball diamond. After awhile it…” he laughed and actually blushed. She liked that. “After awhile it got to be like, a habit. Like some people bite their nails or fidget? I… well, Kegel.”
“How old are you?” she said.
“Does it make a difference?”
Not at this point. Probably not, she thought.
“How old?”
“I’ll be 21 in March.”
He felt a sudden slackness in her shoulders.
But he was right -- it didn’t make any difference.
“Listen,” she said, turning in his arms to face him on the cramped sofa. Their faces were inches apart. “I know you’re going to think I’m just a dirty old woman, but I think you have a lot of potential that’s being wasted right now.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that you have a certain… youthful exuberance which, when combined with that muscle memory of yours and your bizarre Kegel habits, is no doubt sufficient to blow the minds of these silly college girls. But youthful exuberance only goes so far. You need some training and discipline to take advantage of these gifts of yours.”
He stared at her blankly for a moment. “What are you saying?” he said cautiously.
“I’m saying I taught tantra yoga for a year when I was in Denmark. And I’ve published articles about the Kama Sutra. And lectured at a Jewish women’s club in London on the Iggeret ha-Qodesh. I’m saying… I can help you develop your gifts into something real.”
There was a pause, and then he exploded into laughter. “For a moment there,” he managed, “it sounded like you were offering to be my sex coach.”
She wasn’t laughing back.
“Wait, I thought that was OK, what we just did,” he protested, when it became obvious she was serious.
“It was OK. Are you satisfied with OK? From my perspective, ‘OK’ is a waste. I mean OK is what I was hoping for, and if I thought that was the best you could do you would be getting my customary pat on the head and boot out the door. You can do more than OK. Or you can let it go to waste.”
“You’re serious.”
“I’m a teacher, aren’t I? Irish folktales aren’t my only area of expertise. This is probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Are you interested, or do you want the pat on the head now?”
He didn’t know her that well – yet – but he knew her well enough to ask this:
“What’s the catch?”
“The catch?”
“What do you want from me in return?”
She chuckled and sat up and ran her fingers through her long hair. Her back looked almost silver and he suppressed a shiver at the memory of her spine beneath his fingertips.
“The usual vows. Obedience, silence, chastity. You need to do what I say. You can’t tell anyone while it’s going on, mostly because I suspect the school would frown upon it. And we’re going to have to get rid of that Johnnie you’re sporting, so that means nothing below the waist with anyone else. So if you’ve got your eye on some little girl back on the campus…” she said, and curled her head to look at him coyly over one shoulder. “But you seem like the monogamous type. Insist on liking the person more than the act, that sort of thing. Lucky for you I don’t have the same limitations.”
“Lucky for me,” he said. “And how long will this clinic last?”
“Depends on how hard you study,” she said. “But I’m on a plane back to Oxford at the end of June, so no longer than that.”
Perhaps on some level he still thought it was a joke. Perhaps he thought it was a way for her to invite him back without admitting that she liked him. Certainly the way she looked had a lot to do with it. And at least in part it was because she’d hit on a sore subject with him – the difference between natural gifts and hard work. Whatever the reason, he agreed.
“When do I start?” he said.
“Now,” she said, facing away from him and grinning. “Come around here and get on your knees. And if the thought of putting your face in that after the fact bothers you, next time you’ll think of it before the fact.”
The more squeamish readers will be spared the ensuing training montage. In its place, a few of Moira’s aphorisms, dispensed as a part of her devoted tutelage:
“The world would be a better place if someone could persuade the lesbians to offer classes teaching cunnilingus to straight men.”
“Why on earth would a girl fake an orgasm? To make him feel good? He feels good enough at that point, thank you. If he wants to feel any better, he should have to earn it.”
“Your fingers are the most dexterous part of your body, and your tongue is the most sensitive. Therefore never attempt anything calling for sensitivity or dexterity with any other part of your body, until you’ve figured it out with your fingers and tongue first.”
“I would write a book called How To Sexually Train A Man, but it would have to be the sequel to How To Sexually Train Yourself, and I don’t have time for two books.”
“Anybody can pick up a violin and, on his own, saw out Mary Had A Little Lamb. It takes a lot of really boring work before you’re ready for Mozart. So take that thing out and let’s play some scales.”
From his perspective it was essentially a naked martial-arts course; strenuous workouts combined with exotic philosophies. They both got clean bills of health and he had sex without a condom for the first time since splitting up with his old high-school girlfriend. She had a few complaints, mostly pertaining to his rather plebian tastes; he didn’t like binding or being bound, he didn’t like spanking or being spanked, and while he was a good sport about role playing, he never seemed to come up with anything good on his own.
In all candor, Preacher was not particularly imaginative. Of course it was hard to come up with a fantasy that could top “a year of high-end sexual discipleship with an incredible gorgeous older woman.”
The first turning point was Halloween.
Fells Point, in Baltimore, was the scene of a big annual Halloween bacchanalia, one to which Preacher and his friends had repaired the year before and one to which they had planned on going again. But an even bigger one was in the Washington neighborhood of Georgetown. However the District was a pain to get to, and a pain to park in, while Baltimore was much more accessible, so those Johnnies inclined to go out on Halloween usually went to Baltimore.
So Preacher proposed to Moira that they go to D.C. She liked the idea of a national day of masquerade. Of being someone else for an evening. And she was a little lonely, too; taking on an apprentice meant being a teacher long after the school day had ended. Surprising herself she agreed – provided she could pick out their costumes.
Preacher balked for a moment. He was rather proud of the high-concept costumes he’d assembled for his friends in the past. A white T-shirt with a large letter “i” drawn in magic marker for his friend Drew; he became a Black Eye. A clerical collar for himself; thus, “Preacher” Haywood. E=mc2 written on the seat of Nick’s bluejeans; that worthy went through an evening explaining he was a “smart-ass.”
Upon hearing these examples Moira was more determined than ever to choose their costumes.
Preacher’s was easy to assemble. Hers became complicated and expensive, but in the end she decided it was worth every penny.
A few boxes arrived at his house on Halloween morning. Boots. Dungarees. Hat. Spurs. Gunbelt. Much more Sergio Leone than Roy Rogers. Preacher put on his cowboy attire, including the spurs, and practiced his steely glint in the mirror. Sometimes he could go ten seconds without laughing.
Correctly anticipating both excessive alcohol consumption and insane traffic tie-ups, Haywood hired a limo for the night. His friends were insistent – costume, limo, ditching us, what’s going on? Haywood simply smiled and remained silent. He had a maddening knack for that.
He got in the back, had the driver go in the opposite direction of Moira’s house, circled around the town, and pulled up in front of her door fifteen minutes later.
She looked out her window and saw the cowboy coming up her walk. The sensual experience of fitting into her own costume combined with that square-jawed, broad-shouldered cowboy at her door almost caused her to cancel the evening out in favor of a night in. Almost. After what she’d spent on her own costume, though, she felt obligated to go show it off.
Plus, she reflected, she looked so good in it, it really wouldn’t be fair to stay home.
Preacher came in the house, took one look at her, and said:
“The painting.”
In the heart of Annapolis, on Duke of Gloucester Street, there was (in those days) an art gallery specializing in fantasy and science-fiction art. Moira was of the opinion that this sort of art was to art what military music was to music, but the place did a relatively decent business trading in works by the Brothers Hildebrandt, Frank Frazetta, and the like.
While she’d seen the gallery while walking from campus to her home, she mostly ignored it. Until Preacher sent her in there to see a particular Boris Vallejo painting.
The painting was of a horse-sized white tiger. Except since it was a Boris Vallejo painting it was actually of the scantily clad woman sitting astride the tiger. She wore some sort of metallic bikini and some sort of gauzy translucent gold cloak and sandals that laced almost to her knees.
Perhaps this is standard riding attire when one harnesses a tiger.
Strapped to one bare hip was a long, curved, and excessively bejeweled dagger, stuck into a long, curved, and excessively bejeweled scabbard. A brass diadem sat in her mass of flowing and apparently prehensile crimson hair, her skin was as a snowdrift, and her eyes a vivid emerald.
And no doubt: the endangered-species-riding warrior-priestess bore a striking resemblance to the Preacher-Haywood-riding college professor. As Moira stood there staring at the painting the fat man who ran the gallery waddled over and looked at her, and the painting, and her.
“Can I have your autograph?” he asked.
She gave him one with a bored sigh, as if this happened all the time.
(One of Preacher’s friends had actually told him about the painting. Everyone at St. John’s knew about it before she did. It was sort of de rigeur for everyone to traipse in there and look at it that first semester, until it was sold to an anonymous buyer.)
So this was an obvious choice for a costume.
She actually had to hire a dressmaker for the miniscule lamé bikini and wrap. Because Moira (unlike Boris Vallejo subjects) existed in a dimension wherein there were both laws of physics and laws against indecent exposure, certain minor compromises had to be made. The laws of physics took precedence over the man-made laws, of course. In her prop room there was a replica kirpan and a copper circlet which could be modified to serve as dagger and diadem. Add spray-painted thongs to a pair of sandals and voila! Marginally street-legal warrior-priestess, sans tiger.
The act of putting on such an outfit titillated Moira to no end. This was compounded by the sight of her star pupil swaggering up to her door in spurs.
“No matter what they tell you,” Moira said, “every girl in Ireland dreams of coming to America and riding a real live cowboy.” He put his hand on the small of her back and gave her a deep kiss.
“Careful,” she said, “this thing will pop off if my nipples stick up too much.”
And laughing at the freedom of being someone else for an evening, they walked arm-and-arm down to the limo.
The driver tried not to close his fingers in the door when she sat down.
The sidewalks of M Street were packed when they arrived. Angels and vampires and nurses and presidents, school girls and inmates and monsters and athletes, drinking and dancing and laughing… there were a few other cowboys but nobody even remotely like Moira.
As usual. But with semi-transparent clothes.
Her outfit got them admitted directly into even the most crowded clubs. They danced to INXS. They danced to Kraftwerk. They danced to Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam. The bars smelled of bodies and beer and the noise was deafening. When they sat at the bar he would put his hand on the sweat-slicked skin of her leg or brush a finger along a rib and she would feel things move inside her.
A woman in a pirate costume followed them to three different bars and finally when an Adam Ant song came on Moira agreed to dance with her. When it was over Moira leaned forward and gave her a long lingering kiss on the lips. A man sitting next to Preacher put his fingers to his forehead. “I think my vas deferens just exploded,” he said. Preacher was drunk enough that this sounded funnier than it really was.
Later Moira insisted that he dance to The Fixx with a young man who fully expected – and received – the same reward afterward. Moira turned to the costumed woman next to her proudly. “I taught him that,” she said, eyes shining.
“Makes me sick to my stomach,” the witch sniffed, stalking away with her broom under her arm.
Moira was astonished by this. The fact that Preacher would do that, in a crowded bar, just to delight her… the next song was something slow and dreamy by OMD – Joan of Arc, maybe – and she pressed herself against him and the danced, and they kissed the taste of another boy and another girl from one another’s lips.
Finally, drunk and exhausted and more than a little horny they met their driver at 2 right where he had dropped them off. There was a minor incident, just before they got to the car; a drunk man who couldn’t let Moira out of his sight. Preacher put his hand on the man’s shoulder and talked to him quietly and walked a bit away from Moira and whatever he said must have worked, because the man thanked him and went on his way.
“What did you say?”
“That he had other options.”
On the way back they chuckled and kissed and groped one another in the back of the limo. Somewhere just outside of Bowie Preacher insisted that the driver stop at a convenience store so he could buy a six pack of Seven-Up.
That was Preacher’s thing. Seven-Up. He claimed it was the only thing that could properly rehydrate him after sex. He kept some in a mini-fridge in his room. Called it his favorite pericoital refreshment.
He went into the deserted store and after a moment Moira managed to reposition herself into her costume and followed him. When she entered the man behind the counter partially swallowed his gum and started coughing loudly. She walked up to the cash register.
“I guess you get all kinds here on Halloween night,” she said, leaning onto the counter to give him a better view. He managed to disgorge the gum and nodded weakly, his face red.
“What do you know about that guy back there?” she said, indicating Preacher with her head. He was sticking cold 7-Up into a cardboard carrier that had hitherto held Bartles & James.
“Ah, uh,” the man tried, shrugging.
“He looks like he could show a girl a good time,” Moira breathed coquettishly. The man spit his gum into the trashcan, showing a briefly lucid instinct for self-preservation. He nodded imperceptibly, unwilling to blink.
“You look like you have some experience in that department, too,” she cooed in a low voice, staring at a point just a few inches down from the clasp on his Sansabelts. By this time any attempt at communication would have provoked a cerebral accident, so the man simply stood, red and paralyzed.
Haywood walked – clomped, OK-Corral-style – up behind her and put the drinks on the counter.
“Hey, cowboy,” Moira purred, without turning around. “Find everything you were looking for?”
Without any expression he stepped forward a bit so that his crotch pressed against the gauze covering her buttocks. She could feel the warmth of his hand on her leg and she straightened up from the counter quickly and felt her right breast – it was always the right one, with that outfit – wriggle free. Not that she cared. Preacher nuzzled her neck and the breath from his nostrils curled in one ear and he lifted his fingertips to her lips. She took them in her mouth and moistened them and he slipped them down between her legs, unimpeded by the admittedly insignificant presence of her costume. He knew exactly where to go, and how fast, and how hard, and she could feel the swell of him against her back and while his other hand held that spot under her jaw and even with her eyes open the room turned dark and purple spots seemed to explode before her eyes and her hands, still resting on the counter, made tight fists when she came. It took no time at all.
Preacher still didn’t change expression. Just took his hand out of her pants and reached for his wallet. “How much?” he said to the cashier, drawling slightly and nodding toward the soda.
Moira held herself up with the counter.
“On… on the house,” the man said hoarsely, his eyes the size of saucers.
“Obliged,” Preacher said, nodding. He picked up the six-pack. “Ma’am,” he said to Moira, touching his hat with the same two fingers in a perfectly practiced gesture. He turned and walked out of the store and off into the night.
Moira watched him disappear into the darkness of the parking lot, and then turned to the clerk and slipped her breast back into the costume.
“I’m going to have to shop here more often,” she said, grabbed a Zagnut bar off the counter, and walked out giggling.
The clerk watched her go. When his legs would move again he raced to the back room to pop the security video out of the machine.
When Haywood and Callahan managed to stop laughing she went down on him in the back of the limo. That reminds me, she thought, I’m going to have to teach him how to suppress his gag reflex. Preacher tipped the driver extremely well and they staggered laughing into her house and they didn’t worry about technique or lessons for the last few hours before dawn.
He’d internalized them well enough by that point that they didn’t have to.
They didn’t realize it was a turning point until later, of course. The next day was a Sunday, he made her breakfast, and they resumed their textual analysis of Vatsyayana.
But on Tuesday he went to her office before class, and saying very little, pushed her skirt up over her hips. They fucked just for pleasure. And that was when they knew Halloween had changed things. A little.
Those who were in class with them an hour later detected absolutely nothing at all out of the ordinary.
No doubt there is some sort of evolutionary basis for this. Perhaps it’s prehuman, something lodged way back in the limbic system. Maybe it was necessary so that some Precambrian insect could munch contemplatively on the head of her still-twitching mate before injecting their offspring into his carcass.
Moira, of course, was well acquainted with this phenomenon, and took advantage of it to learn about Haywood’s inexplicable perfect-kinetic-pitch and about his hyperdeveloped pubococcygeal muscles.
“So how did you learn to lift a dictionary with your PC?”
“My what?” He had been lazily tracing a mandala into her shoulder, even as he spoke dismissively of his uncanny muscle memory, but at the question his index finger stopped moving.
“The pubococcygeus,” she clarified.
“The puba-cok-sigeus?”
“The Kegel…?”
“Oh, that,” he laughed. “That’s what that muscle is called? Say that word again?”
“Pubococcygeus. Where did you pick that up?”
He laughed.
“I’m thinking some older woman in your neighborhood?” she tried. How old ARE you, they both thought simultaneously.
“It’s so… dumb. When I was like thirteen or fourteen Tommy Lincoln stole one of his dad’s Playboy’s. I remember it well. Teri Peterson was Miss July and the women of Maui were the aperitif. We all gawked at the pictures like perverted little teenagers are supposed to do. But when nobody was looking I… I read the articles.”
“What?!” she laughed.
He blushed. “I read the articles. I mean all I knew about sex was that I knew nothing about sex. And Playboy was supposed to be like, the sex Bible, right? In retrospect, all of that stuff was pretty stupid. But… anyhow, there was this article about the Kegel exercise. Made it sound like unless you could clench and hold it for ten minutes at a time, you were NEVER going to satisfy a woman. So… so I started doing it. Thirteen, just getting hair down there, no idea when or if I was ever going to get laid, and I’m squeezing that thing all the time. In class. On the baseball diamond. After awhile it…” he laughed and actually blushed. She liked that. “After awhile it got to be like, a habit. Like some people bite their nails or fidget? I… well, Kegel.”
“How old are you?” she said.
“Does it make a difference?”
Not at this point. Probably not, she thought.
“How old?”
“I’ll be 21 in March.”
He felt a sudden slackness in her shoulders.
But he was right -- it didn’t make any difference.
“Listen,” she said, turning in his arms to face him on the cramped sofa. Their faces were inches apart. “I know you’re going to think I’m just a dirty old woman, but I think you have a lot of potential that’s being wasted right now.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that you have a certain… youthful exuberance which, when combined with that muscle memory of yours and your bizarre Kegel habits, is no doubt sufficient to blow the minds of these silly college girls. But youthful exuberance only goes so far. You need some training and discipline to take advantage of these gifts of yours.”
He stared at her blankly for a moment. “What are you saying?” he said cautiously.
“I’m saying I taught tantra yoga for a year when I was in Denmark. And I’ve published articles about the Kama Sutra. And lectured at a Jewish women’s club in London on the Iggeret ha-Qodesh. I’m saying… I can help you develop your gifts into something real.”
There was a pause, and then he exploded into laughter. “For a moment there,” he managed, “it sounded like you were offering to be my sex coach.”
She wasn’t laughing back.
“Wait, I thought that was OK, what we just did,” he protested, when it became obvious she was serious.
“It was OK. Are you satisfied with OK? From my perspective, ‘OK’ is a waste. I mean OK is what I was hoping for, and if I thought that was the best you could do you would be getting my customary pat on the head and boot out the door. You can do more than OK. Or you can let it go to waste.”
“You’re serious.”
“I’m a teacher, aren’t I? Irish folktales aren’t my only area of expertise. This is probably a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Are you interested, or do you want the pat on the head now?”
He didn’t know her that well – yet – but he knew her well enough to ask this:
“What’s the catch?”
“The catch?”
“What do you want from me in return?”
She chuckled and sat up and ran her fingers through her long hair. Her back looked almost silver and he suppressed a shiver at the memory of her spine beneath his fingertips.
“The usual vows. Obedience, silence, chastity. You need to do what I say. You can’t tell anyone while it’s going on, mostly because I suspect the school would frown upon it. And we’re going to have to get rid of that Johnnie you’re sporting, so that means nothing below the waist with anyone else. So if you’ve got your eye on some little girl back on the campus…” she said, and curled her head to look at him coyly over one shoulder. “But you seem like the monogamous type. Insist on liking the person more than the act, that sort of thing. Lucky for you I don’t have the same limitations.”
“Lucky for me,” he said. “And how long will this clinic last?”
“Depends on how hard you study,” she said. “But I’m on a plane back to Oxford at the end of June, so no longer than that.”
Perhaps on some level he still thought it was a joke. Perhaps he thought it was a way for her to invite him back without admitting that she liked him. Certainly the way she looked had a lot to do with it. And at least in part it was because she’d hit on a sore subject with him – the difference between natural gifts and hard work. Whatever the reason, he agreed.
“When do I start?” he said.
“Now,” she said, facing away from him and grinning. “Come around here and get on your knees. And if the thought of putting your face in that after the fact bothers you, next time you’ll think of it before the fact.”
The more squeamish readers will be spared the ensuing training montage. In its place, a few of Moira’s aphorisms, dispensed as a part of her devoted tutelage:
“The world would be a better place if someone could persuade the lesbians to offer classes teaching cunnilingus to straight men.”
“Why on earth would a girl fake an orgasm? To make him feel good? He feels good enough at that point, thank you. If he wants to feel any better, he should have to earn it.”
“Your fingers are the most dexterous part of your body, and your tongue is the most sensitive. Therefore never attempt anything calling for sensitivity or dexterity with any other part of your body, until you’ve figured it out with your fingers and tongue first.”
“I would write a book called How To Sexually Train A Man, but it would have to be the sequel to How To Sexually Train Yourself, and I don’t have time for two books.”
“Anybody can pick up a violin and, on his own, saw out Mary Had A Little Lamb. It takes a lot of really boring work before you’re ready for Mozart. So take that thing out and let’s play some scales.”
From his perspective it was essentially a naked martial-arts course; strenuous workouts combined with exotic philosophies. They both got clean bills of health and he had sex without a condom for the first time since splitting up with his old high-school girlfriend. She had a few complaints, mostly pertaining to his rather plebian tastes; he didn’t like binding or being bound, he didn’t like spanking or being spanked, and while he was a good sport about role playing, he never seemed to come up with anything good on his own.
In all candor, Preacher was not particularly imaginative. Of course it was hard to come up with a fantasy that could top “a year of high-end sexual discipleship with an incredible gorgeous older woman.”
The first turning point was Halloween.
Fells Point, in Baltimore, was the scene of a big annual Halloween bacchanalia, one to which Preacher and his friends had repaired the year before and one to which they had planned on going again. But an even bigger one was in the Washington neighborhood of Georgetown. However the District was a pain to get to, and a pain to park in, while Baltimore was much more accessible, so those Johnnies inclined to go out on Halloween usually went to Baltimore.
So Preacher proposed to Moira that they go to D.C. She liked the idea of a national day of masquerade. Of being someone else for an evening. And she was a little lonely, too; taking on an apprentice meant being a teacher long after the school day had ended. Surprising herself she agreed – provided she could pick out their costumes.
Preacher balked for a moment. He was rather proud of the high-concept costumes he’d assembled for his friends in the past. A white T-shirt with a large letter “i” drawn in magic marker for his friend Drew; he became a Black Eye. A clerical collar for himself; thus, “Preacher” Haywood. E=mc2 written on the seat of Nick’s bluejeans; that worthy went through an evening explaining he was a “smart-ass.”
Upon hearing these examples Moira was more determined than ever to choose their costumes.
Preacher’s was easy to assemble. Hers became complicated and expensive, but in the end she decided it was worth every penny.
A few boxes arrived at his house on Halloween morning. Boots. Dungarees. Hat. Spurs. Gunbelt. Much more Sergio Leone than Roy Rogers. Preacher put on his cowboy attire, including the spurs, and practiced his steely glint in the mirror. Sometimes he could go ten seconds without laughing.
Correctly anticipating both excessive alcohol consumption and insane traffic tie-ups, Haywood hired a limo for the night. His friends were insistent – costume, limo, ditching us, what’s going on? Haywood simply smiled and remained silent. He had a maddening knack for that.
He got in the back, had the driver go in the opposite direction of Moira’s house, circled around the town, and pulled up in front of her door fifteen minutes later.
She looked out her window and saw the cowboy coming up her walk. The sensual experience of fitting into her own costume combined with that square-jawed, broad-shouldered cowboy at her door almost caused her to cancel the evening out in favor of a night in. Almost. After what she’d spent on her own costume, though, she felt obligated to go show it off.
Plus, she reflected, she looked so good in it, it really wouldn’t be fair to stay home.
Preacher came in the house, took one look at her, and said:
“The painting.”
In the heart of Annapolis, on Duke of Gloucester Street, there was (in those days) an art gallery specializing in fantasy and science-fiction art. Moira was of the opinion that this sort of art was to art what military music was to music, but the place did a relatively decent business trading in works by the Brothers Hildebrandt, Frank Frazetta, and the like.
While she’d seen the gallery while walking from campus to her home, she mostly ignored it. Until Preacher sent her in there to see a particular Boris Vallejo painting.
The painting was of a horse-sized white tiger. Except since it was a Boris Vallejo painting it was actually of the scantily clad woman sitting astride the tiger. She wore some sort of metallic bikini and some sort of gauzy translucent gold cloak and sandals that laced almost to her knees.
Perhaps this is standard riding attire when one harnesses a tiger.
Strapped to one bare hip was a long, curved, and excessively bejeweled dagger, stuck into a long, curved, and excessively bejeweled scabbard. A brass diadem sat in her mass of flowing and apparently prehensile crimson hair, her skin was as a snowdrift, and her eyes a vivid emerald.
And no doubt: the endangered-species-riding warrior-priestess bore a striking resemblance to the Preacher-Haywood-riding college professor. As Moira stood there staring at the painting the fat man who ran the gallery waddled over and looked at her, and the painting, and her.
“Can I have your autograph?” he asked.
She gave him one with a bored sigh, as if this happened all the time.
(One of Preacher’s friends had actually told him about the painting. Everyone at St. John’s knew about it before she did. It was sort of de rigeur for everyone to traipse in there and look at it that first semester, until it was sold to an anonymous buyer.)
So this was an obvious choice for a costume.
She actually had to hire a dressmaker for the miniscule lamé bikini and wrap. Because Moira (unlike Boris Vallejo subjects) existed in a dimension wherein there were both laws of physics and laws against indecent exposure, certain minor compromises had to be made. The laws of physics took precedence over the man-made laws, of course. In her prop room there was a replica kirpan and a copper circlet which could be modified to serve as dagger and diadem. Add spray-painted thongs to a pair of sandals and voila! Marginally street-legal warrior-priestess, sans tiger.
The act of putting on such an outfit titillated Moira to no end. This was compounded by the sight of her star pupil swaggering up to her door in spurs.
“No matter what they tell you,” Moira said, “every girl in Ireland dreams of coming to America and riding a real live cowboy.” He put his hand on the small of her back and gave her a deep kiss.
“Careful,” she said, “this thing will pop off if my nipples stick up too much.”
And laughing at the freedom of being someone else for an evening, they walked arm-and-arm down to the limo.
The driver tried not to close his fingers in the door when she sat down.
The sidewalks of M Street were packed when they arrived. Angels and vampires and nurses and presidents, school girls and inmates and monsters and athletes, drinking and dancing and laughing… there were a few other cowboys but nobody even remotely like Moira.
As usual. But with semi-transparent clothes.
Her outfit got them admitted directly into even the most crowded clubs. They danced to INXS. They danced to Kraftwerk. They danced to Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam. The bars smelled of bodies and beer and the noise was deafening. When they sat at the bar he would put his hand on the sweat-slicked skin of her leg or brush a finger along a rib and she would feel things move inside her.
A woman in a pirate costume followed them to three different bars and finally when an Adam Ant song came on Moira agreed to dance with her. When it was over Moira leaned forward and gave her a long lingering kiss on the lips. A man sitting next to Preacher put his fingers to his forehead. “I think my vas deferens just exploded,” he said. Preacher was drunk enough that this sounded funnier than it really was.
Later Moira insisted that he dance to The Fixx with a young man who fully expected – and received – the same reward afterward. Moira turned to the costumed woman next to her proudly. “I taught him that,” she said, eyes shining.
“Makes me sick to my stomach,” the witch sniffed, stalking away with her broom under her arm.
Moira was astonished by this. The fact that Preacher would do that, in a crowded bar, just to delight her… the next song was something slow and dreamy by OMD – Joan of Arc, maybe – and she pressed herself against him and the danced, and they kissed the taste of another boy and another girl from one another’s lips.
Finally, drunk and exhausted and more than a little horny they met their driver at 2 right where he had dropped them off. There was a minor incident, just before they got to the car; a drunk man who couldn’t let Moira out of his sight. Preacher put his hand on the man’s shoulder and talked to him quietly and walked a bit away from Moira and whatever he said must have worked, because the man thanked him and went on his way.
“What did you say?”
“That he had other options.”
On the way back they chuckled and kissed and groped one another in the back of the limo. Somewhere just outside of Bowie Preacher insisted that the driver stop at a convenience store so he could buy a six pack of Seven-Up.
That was Preacher’s thing. Seven-Up. He claimed it was the only thing that could properly rehydrate him after sex. He kept some in a mini-fridge in his room. Called it his favorite pericoital refreshment.
He went into the deserted store and after a moment Moira managed to reposition herself into her costume and followed him. When she entered the man behind the counter partially swallowed his gum and started coughing loudly. She walked up to the cash register.
“I guess you get all kinds here on Halloween night,” she said, leaning onto the counter to give him a better view. He managed to disgorge the gum and nodded weakly, his face red.
“What do you know about that guy back there?” she said, indicating Preacher with her head. He was sticking cold 7-Up into a cardboard carrier that had hitherto held Bartles & James.
“Ah, uh,” the man tried, shrugging.
“He looks like he could show a girl a good time,” Moira breathed coquettishly. The man spit his gum into the trashcan, showing a briefly lucid instinct for self-preservation. He nodded imperceptibly, unwilling to blink.
“You look like you have some experience in that department, too,” she cooed in a low voice, staring at a point just a few inches down from the clasp on his Sansabelts. By this time any attempt at communication would have provoked a cerebral accident, so the man simply stood, red and paralyzed.
Haywood walked – clomped, OK-Corral-style – up behind her and put the drinks on the counter.
“Hey, cowboy,” Moira purred, without turning around. “Find everything you were looking for?”
Without any expression he stepped forward a bit so that his crotch pressed against the gauze covering her buttocks. She could feel the warmth of his hand on her leg and she straightened up from the counter quickly and felt her right breast – it was always the right one, with that outfit – wriggle free. Not that she cared. Preacher nuzzled her neck and the breath from his nostrils curled in one ear and he lifted his fingertips to her lips. She took them in her mouth and moistened them and he slipped them down between her legs, unimpeded by the admittedly insignificant presence of her costume. He knew exactly where to go, and how fast, and how hard, and she could feel the swell of him against her back and while his other hand held that spot under her jaw and even with her eyes open the room turned dark and purple spots seemed to explode before her eyes and her hands, still resting on the counter, made tight fists when she came. It took no time at all.
Preacher still didn’t change expression. Just took his hand out of her pants and reached for his wallet. “How much?” he said to the cashier, drawling slightly and nodding toward the soda.
Moira held herself up with the counter.
“On… on the house,” the man said hoarsely, his eyes the size of saucers.
“Obliged,” Preacher said, nodding. He picked up the six-pack. “Ma’am,” he said to Moira, touching his hat with the same two fingers in a perfectly practiced gesture. He turned and walked out of the store and off into the night.
Moira watched him disappear into the darkness of the parking lot, and then turned to the clerk and slipped her breast back into the costume.
“I’m going to have to shop here more often,” she said, grabbed a Zagnut bar off the counter, and walked out giggling.
The clerk watched her go. When his legs would move again he raced to the back room to pop the security video out of the machine.
When Haywood and Callahan managed to stop laughing she went down on him in the back of the limo. That reminds me, she thought, I’m going to have to teach him how to suppress his gag reflex. Preacher tipped the driver extremely well and they staggered laughing into her house and they didn’t worry about technique or lessons for the last few hours before dawn.
He’d internalized them well enough by that point that they didn’t have to.
They didn’t realize it was a turning point until later, of course. The next day was a Sunday, he made her breakfast, and they resumed their textual analysis of Vatsyayana.
But on Tuesday he went to her office before class, and saying very little, pushed her skirt up over her hips. They fucked just for pleasure. And that was when they knew Halloween had changed things. A little.
Those who were in class with them an hour later detected absolutely nothing at all out of the ordinary.
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Part Nineteen
Desmond Cutter was born into a lot of money, which was a good thing, because he was singularly ill-equipped to accomplish anything meaningful in his life.
Because of that, he went to St. John’s College, in Annapolis, where he did not distinguish himself at all, except that he was the last person to ring the bell upon turning in his senior thesis. And his fly was down when he did it.
In his defense, his parents had bought him a charming townhouse in the beautiful historic district of Annapolis, just a few blocks from the City Dock. Which meant that when he finished his paper he had to walk a considerable distance to campus. Cursed with a bladder the size of a walnut, this meant he had to make a brief pit stop behind a bush on State Circle en route to turning in his paper. Cursed with a superego even smaller than his bladder, he forgot to zip…
His paper was about Joseph Conrad. That’s not important.
Anyhow, upon graduation Des returned to his parents’ home in Savannah, Georgia, and while not particularly agoraphobic, he never really found cause to venture outside of it again. His parents died, staff came and went, and Des lived a fairly short, reasonably happy, and entirely indoor life before dying late in the Carter administration.
Upon his death came two gruesome discoveries. First, during his long seclusion he had written just over 600 romance novels, none of which were publishable, because while reasonably well written and true to the romance formula, they were all soft-core gay porn. In the late 1970s, there really wasn’t a market for all-male Harlequin novels.
Second, he left a will that bequeathed everything to St. John’s College but which included a positively Byzantine set of conditions, codicils, and caveats. Most of which he had written himself, apparently whenever the mood struck him. The lawyers St. John’s hired to try to wriggle out of some of the more bizarre conditions were, candidly, dismayed. A layman – a borderline psychotic layman, at that – a borderline psychotic layman whose legal background consisted of leafing through a copy of Black’s Law Dictionary which he’d acquired as his sole reference text when writing a gay-porn-romance version of 12 Angry Men – had managed to draft a will that would hold up in virtually any court in South Carolina or Maryland.
One of the provisions of the will endowed the Chrysoloras Visiting Scholar program. The Trustees wanted a new fine arts center, not a visiting scholar program. Des Cutter gave the school the charming historic-district townhouse, a valuable piece of real estate, but directed that it could only be used to house the Chrysoloras scholar. He gave the school big piles of money but insisted that all of it would revert to his Savannah elementary school if St. John’s cancelled any of the programs his will set up. Not just the visiting scholar program (with residence) but the annual contest to give $500 to the person who wrote the best tribute to Pythagoras (the visiting scholar had to be one of the judges) and the requirement that the school build at least four more men’s rooms scattered across the campus.
(The school ducked the Ode To Pythagoras competition requirement by simply not publicizing it. Once in a great while the Dean would take pity on a student in dire financial straits, whisper in his or her ear, and the prize would be awarded to the year’s sole contestant.)
The Chrysoloras scholar had few official duties. He or she had to offer a twice-a-week seminar. He or she had to offer a campus-wide lecture twice each semester, on any topic. He or she had to live in the charming townhouse.
That was about it. The visiting scholars uniformly regarded it as a sweet gig. The pay was good. Their only complaint was that they could only do it for one year.
In 1985 an unofficial duty was added to the list – the Chrysoloras scholar always attended the annual Island of Misfit Toys thanksgiving dinner for students who were stuck on campus over the weekend.
In the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Eighty-Seven the founder of the Misfit Toys feast, one Preacher S. Haywood, was a junior at St. John’s College. He lived in a surprisingly spacious Cape Cod off Prince George’s Street just a few blocks down from campus. His housemate, the resourceful and piercingly intelligent Nicholas D’Alessio, had procured a lease on the house the summer before, while Preacher was away attempting to strain Franco-American relations even more than the makers of Spaghetti-os had. Nick was rightfully proud of the charming yet affordable home, which beat the hell out of the homely brick rancher they’d live in the year before.
A third housemate, a tall and somewhat effete young man named Mark Carleton, hadn’t lived in the dump over by the hospital, and while he liked the house, he was so happy to be off-campus that he didn’t really care that it was infinitely superior to the abode Preacher had obtained.
All three men had signed up to take the seminar offered by that year’s Chrysoloras scholar, an Irishwoman named Moira Callahan. The description offered by the college read as follows:
“'Truth, Fact, and the Oral Tradition.' This year’s Chrysolorian seminar explores the importance of myth as a means of transmitting cultural truths, and the evolution of history as a normative medium. Dr. Moira Callahan received her undergraduate degree from Trinity College in her native Ireland, and her canidatus in ancient languages at Heidelberg. After a fellowship in epistemology at the University of Copenhagen she obtained her Ph.D. in comparative mythology from Oxford University, where she lectures in pre-Christian European history.”
So on a cheery September day in Annapolis (where it doesn’t become autumn until October) the three housemates sat in a classroom with a dozen other St. Johns students with, truly, no idea what the class was about. They had taken it primarily because this promised to be the first visiting scholar in three years who could speak intelligible English.
To the extent that anticipated anything, it was some chalk-dusted antiquities scholar with bad dentition. Just so long as it was someone they could understand. So they got to class a little early. They chatted. They joked. They waited.
And, a few minutes late, Moira Callahan swirled into the room and all chatter stopped.
It’s hard to chat, of course, when one’s jaw is on the ground.
Moira Callahan was beautiful. Not pretty, not attractive, not comely. Beautiful. Everyone-in-the-room-shut-up beautiful. Gay-men-and-straight-women-reconsider-their-options beautiful. Moira Callahan was, at that time, fast approaching her 30th birthday but she had that rare gift for hitting an optimal physical state and sort of… hovering there, indifferent to time, so that nobody was quite sure if she was a remarkably self-assured 25-year-old or a remarkably smooth-browed 35-year-old.
Her hair was copper and lava, her skin was flawless cream, her breasts scoffed at Newtonian physics, her cheekbones defied Plotinus. Each student mentally composed pastoral lays to the brilliant new-cut grass of her eyes, the rose petal lips, the curve of cheek and hip and calf that shamed the arc of space.
She was a hottie.
She carried a spear.
“Incipit táin bó Cualnge,” she said, without any introduction.
“Fect n-oen do Ailill & do Meidb íar n-dergud a rígleptha dóib i Cruachanráith Chonnacht, arrecaim comrad chind-cherchailli eturru.”
The students – those who had stopped ogling the new professor – looked at one another, bewildered.
“Let’s see how smart you are,” Callahan said. “Anybody here speak Gaelic? No? Good. What oral history did I just begin telling you?”
They looked at one another anew, even more bewildered. Except for Preacher Haywood, so leaned back in his seat and laughed.
She pointed the spear at him fiercely. “Let’s hear it,” she said. “Or were you just laughing at your own ignorance?”
“I didn’t hear you say Finn McCool,” he said, “so that must be the Ulster Cattle Raid.”
“That shows how much you know,” she said. “It could have been any one of a hundred other tales. But you’re right. Táin bó Cualnge is the Cattle-Raid of Cooley, the main part of the Ulster saga. 'Once upon a time, Ailill and Medb spread their royal bed in Cruachan, the stronghold of Connacht, and such was the pillow-talk that arose between them.'”
Fucking show-off, Nick and most of the others thought, glaring at Preacher.
“So tell me, smart guy, is the story of actual events?” she pressed on.
“No,” Preacher guessed.
“Wrong!” she snapped. “You, next to him. You’re thinking he’s just a showoff, right? Here’s your chance to show him up. Is this a story of actual events?”
“Yes,” Nick replied, by process of elimination.
“Wrong! The answer is, it doesn’t make any goddamn difference! It’s a good story. When a bunch of Irish boys were sitting in a drafty, smoke-filled hall watching their elders get drunk off their asses, shivering in part with cold and in part with terror at their first taste of battle against the English swine the next morning, they listened to this story about a 17-year-old taking names and kicking ass, and it helped them get a little sleep. Helped them charge headlong into a thicket of English arrows the next day.
“Today you can pick up a book that gives you a very detailed and factually precise account of the landing at Normandy. That’s not going to do anyone a damn bit of good the next time someone sticks a rifle in his hands. But Gary Cooper at High Noon…? That’s the difference between truth and fact. Fact is objectively verifiable. Truth is intuitive. In this culture we need them both, but for some reason we’ve set up this silly dichotomy between the two. For the next few months you’re going to hear lots and lots of stories, the veracity of which is… well, is irrelevant. You need to focus on whether they’re true, not whether they’re factual. And each one of you is going to perform an oral history of your own. NOT write one. Sweet Jesus, all I need is 15 adolescent weepies. You’re to find one pre-literate history, memorize a twenty-minute chunk of it, and deliver it.
“Any questions? ‘Course not, what could be clearer?” she said, without even a pretense at waiting for someone to ask a question. “Now, if this class was delivered by someone more organized you would all be receiving a list of the oral histories we’ll be analyzing in class. But if I was more organized I wouldn’t be nearly as fascinating. So instead when you find one you want to do, tell me, and I’ll let you know if I’m going to cover it instead. That means don’t look for the obvious ones. And there’s a reward for being the first one to come up with one. That reward being, you get to go first and get it over with. Plus, of course, you can really bugger your friends, because it’s first-come, first-served.”
“Where are we supposed to find these stories?” a girl named Madeline Barker said, having quickly determined that there was no sense in waiting for a pause for questions.
“What the hell are you asking me for?” Callahan retorted. “You go to this school, not me. Don’t you have a library or something? Any other questions? OK, then let’s continue.”
And she performed part of “The Combat of Ferdiad and Cuchulain,” which lasted the rest of the class – she performed it in English – and they were mesmerized, they were spell-bound, they heard and recognized Truth.
Twice a week she performed for them, interrupting the recitation to talk about the why and hows and wherefores. “Truth is not facts and dates,” she would remind them, demanding that they learn facts and dates anyhow – not of the events IN the sagas, but about their performance. How many times did Alexander hear Homer sung before launching a campaign to conquer the world – in the name of reclaiming Troy? What did it mean when the monks Christianized Beowulf? Why would they do it? What stories did the Mughals tell their foot soldiers when they swept into India?
No matter how intimate and/or heated the discussions, there was absolutely no question that Moira ran the class. She flatly refused to learn the names of anyone in the classroom. When pressed to address a person directly, she would simply refer to them by some readily apparent (to her) aspect of the person’s appearance, personality, or aspect. “You with the expensive haircut,” or “no, the one with the lazy eye.” It helped reinforce her position of authority.
And the classroom filled with the detritus of her performances. Artifacts. Spears, helmets, zithers, rosaries, rice bowls. Other users of the room complained. She ignored them, mostly. At length one of her fellow faculty members found a convenient way to persuade her to pick up after herself. “One of these bastards is going to steal something,” he told her.
(His name was Philip Pierce. She was keeping an eye on him. He was all right looking, in a scrawny sort of way. Happily married and a bit unsure of himself. A good combination, in her estimate. The kind you could lure into bed and count on to keep his mouth shut, and not do anything crazy like start chasing her around. She hadn’t been celibate long enough for that – yet – but it might come to that. Although some of those strapping Navy lads she saw around town might fit the bill, too. Except the young ones tended to wear their hearts on their sleeves.)
So one day right before her birthday – on the autumnal equinox, something nobody in Annapolis knew, any more than they knew it would be her 30th – she decided she would drag some of these heavy iron props back into her office. When the class was over she pressed a student into service.
“Hey, you,” she said. Half a dozen people turned around. “No, the good looking one. No, not you, I said good looking. Yes, you. Let’s put those muscles to work, shall we? I need to clear out some of this business.” She gestured at the pile of Iron Age weapons.
And Preacher Haywood scooped them all up in his arms. They weighed a ton.
“Out to your car?” he said brightly, trying not to act that they weighed a lot more than he had guessed.
She had only meant her office, one floor up. And she had only meant for him to grab one or two things. But if he insisted on demonstrating his stupid manliness…
“Just follow me,” she said, and led him down the stairs and twelve blocks across Annapolis on a rather warm and humid September day.
She deliberately walked a little fast, and listened for the clatter of heavy iron on pavement. Perhaps, she mused distantly, followed by the wetter thunk of college student hitting pavement; his face began to grow alarmingly red somewhere around Church Circle.
First he reddened. Then the perspiration sprang out on his brow. She was glad to see this slight dint in his savoir faire. The load in his arms shifted. Just a little more, she thought, and he would be properly chagrined. And then they were at her charming little house down by the City Dock, near Union and Conduit. She slowed her previously brisk pace to a leisurely saunter but he’d won this round merely by staying on his feet. And on some level she knew it was just round one.
“Jesus, you look like your head’s about to explode,” she said to him. “Come in and have a drink, or I’ll lose my job for killing a student.”
“I thought maybe this sword couldn’t be put away unblooded,” he gasped.
“Good point,” she said, opening the door. In he staggered. “Take them upstairs,” she said breezily, “the first room on the right, can’t miss it.”
He eyed the narrow and very steep staircase a bit cautiously, then took a deep breath and began clambering up. She watched his struggled with a grin on her face. When he got to the top she went into the kitchen, grabbed two bottles off the counter, and glided up behind him.
The second room on the right was ostensibly a second bedroom, but during Callahan’s residency it was more like a museum storeroom. There were two steamer trunks on the floor and… objects everywhere. A Greek harp and a Chinese fan, a Scythian bridle and a Filipino kris.
Haywood had dumped the hardware onto the bed and was looking around at the collection when she came to the doorway.
“You’re ruining all of my props,” she said. “Try to act surprised when I show up with these in class, all right?”
“I can almost picture all of these things being crammed into those two trunks,” he said, not turning around, “but what I can’t picture is getting those giant, loaded trunks up that staircase.”
He turned, smiling, and took the beer from her hand.
“You sound just like those crybaby movers,” she said to him. “Oh, those stairs are too narrow. Oh, this is too heavy. Oh, I’ve broken my leg. Americans complain a lot.”
“Yet they got it up here,” he said. He took a long draught from the bottle. “Guinness. We complain about your steamer trunks, and you no doubt complain about local beer,” he said.
“Some of it is fine,” she said, “provided I can persuade someone to serve it at a reasonable temperature.” She took a considered swallow and looked at him looking around the room nonchalantly. He did not seem particularly intimidated by her, something she wasn’t used to and wasn’t sure she liked.
“There’s something about you I don’t like,” she said, to make him look at her, and shifted slightly to better display the knobs. That was her sister's saying. Display the knobs. The thought of it almost made her smile too much.
“Is it that I look at your face when I talk to you?” he said. “Because that’s only when you’re looking back.” He gave an easy half-grin.
“That’s a part of it,” she said, starting to smile back. She covered it with another pull on the bottle. “God, it’s hotter than hell up here. Let’s go down a bit.”
She turned and moved to the stairs, and heard the floorboards creak a bit behind her, and she trotted down in a very even, quick rhythm. She listened for his steps to mirror it; that’s when she knew she was winning, when he followed unquestioningly, when he mirrored her stride without even noticing it.
He glanced up at the hatch that led to the attic. She needs a fan, he thought. These old houses don’t have AC, but an attic fan would help some. Probably gets cold up here in the winter, too. With a long tug he drained another third of his bottle and walked slowly down the stairs, not touching the banister, each step measured and sure.
She stood at the bottom, angry and intrigued. Gay? Didn’t seem like it, but he seemed relatively unfazed by her customary aggressive sexuality. He held his own in the banter, too. A bit taciturn but not speechless, not stammering, not…
“So what’s your story?” she said, pretending to leaf through her junk mail. Nothing even remotely interesting.
“Story? I have no story,” he said, still giving the house a good once-over. “This place is nice. Hot, but nice.”
“It’s a self-guided tour,” she said, tossing the mail back on the table. “While you’re in there get us another bottle,” she called as he disappeared into the kitchen.
“Nice kitchen,” he said, re-emerging. It was his turn to hand her a beer.
“Sure,” she said.
“You have no food in it whatsoever.”
“I have half a bag of frozen chips in the freezer,” she said.
“I take it the pots and utensils aren’t yours?”
“Have you ever heard of a famous Irish chef?” she said.
“Ah, no.”
“There's a reason for that. But I pour some of those chips on a tray and stick them in the oven when I’m hungry and can’t go out. They taste like shite so usually I just go out.”
“And that great kitchen goes to waste.”
She shrugged.
“Can I use it?”
“What, you’re a cook, too? Poofter, I knew it,” she said, and laughed a bit cruelly.
“I’m not sure what poofta means,” he said, “but I haven’t had a house with a decent kitchen in years.”
She cocked her head and looked at him thoughtfully. “OK, make us some dinner,” she said. “I thought I saw a market around here.”
“Right down the block,” he said. He plopped into a big overstuffed chair.
That was part of it, she thought. He didn't refuse to do what she asked he just... didn't. At least not promptly.
“So what’s your story?” he said.
“I asked first,” she said, leaning against the doorway that connected the living room to the dining room.”
“And I told you, I didn’t have one.”
“Then me neither.”
Mexican standoff. They looked at one another with the same quarter smile, the same barely perceptible arch to the eyebrows that said – bring it on. Except on some level she feared that he wasn't playing. That he was blissfully ignorant that there was any competition at all. Which made their stalemate even more frustrating.
“But you can’t cook,” he said.
“How do you know that?”
“Besides the dust on the stove burners? Because if you cook, you also have to wash the dishes. Whenever I meet someone I try to imagine them washing the dishes. And I cannot, for the life of me, picture you scrubbing a pot.
She laughed. “Oh, lad, there are so many other things I can do, cooking never really comes up.”
“But still,” he said. He drained the bottle and got to his feet. “You’re like me. It bothers you when there’s something you can’t at least fake your way through.”
“So show me how to fake my way through dinner,” she told him, and wondered where in the world that came from.
“First we have to fake our way through shopping,” he said.
They walked out of the house and for just a brief moment it felt so normal and natural and easy that he almost stuck his arm out and she almost took it. But instead they sauntered down the street laughing and sparring, neither of them following the other, walking instead in elaborate looping orbits about one another so that they were never quite facing, never quite turned away.
It occurred to her that she had no idea what his name was.
“Preacher!” the man who ran the produce stall said cheerfully when they walked into the City Market. Preacher? she thought.
“Larry,” Preacher replied, nodding at the older man. “How’s business today?”
“Pretty good,” Larry told him. Haywood took some tomatoes, showed them to Callahan, who for her part was out of her element and hated feeling out of her element. She made a point of bending over in front of the greengrocer so he couldn’t help but look down her blouse a bit. It made her feel a little more in control. Haywood caressed the fruit almost obscenely; he was telling her about fresh ingredients but showing her his fingers on the curve of the flesh, dimpling the skin. Still he looked at the red plum tomatoes when he spoke, not her, and when they came to the dry goods stand he flirted a little with the older woman who rang up their dried pasta, parmesan cheese, dried herbs, extra virgin olive oil. The counter-girl giggled and laughed and when Preacher turned around she glared at Callahan, which helped Moira feel a bit more comfortable, too; the black man at the butcher’s stall gave them a few links of Italian sausage, eyed Moira, winked at Preacher (who ignored him); lastly the bakery, redolent of fresh loaves, and the bakery woman purposefully undercharged him.
Everyone called him Preacher. He knew everyone’s name. Moira fished a quart of Rocky Road ice cream out of the freezer in another stall and paid for it herself.
On the way back to her house he kept making her laugh, the bastard, but at one point she put her hand on his shoulder in a mock-playful mock-push and there was a slight hitch in his step then, a slight pause in his story about living over top of a bakery in France, and she thought: A bit skittish about being touched, are we? Round two to me. There was a chink in the armor after all. Nice muscles, though. No wonder he survived toting that crap halfway across town.
Then into the kitchen as the sun drooped low and the evening cooled a bit. They opened fresh beers while the water boiled. The tomatoes blanched. He fished them from the water, skins loosened, and ran cold water on them, and took her hand in his and showed her how the skin came off. “What we’re making is a fake pomodoro sauce,” he said. “As long as you don’t give it to an actual Italian you’ll be fine.” He stopped talking for a moment and they both became acutely aware of their position and she waited for him to suddenly pull away, giving her the best two out of three, but he didn’t.
“Almost fall,” he said, showing her how to quarter and crush the skinned tomatoes. “Darker noticeably earlier. Cooler in the evening. You’ll be trudging up Gloucester Street in the snow soon enough. Walking home in the dark.”
Idle conversation about the weather. But no pull-away. She decided to call that one a draw, because she hadn’t been able to say much of anything herself.
“Why do they call you Preacher?” she said.
“That’s my name.”
“Your given name,” incredulously.
“My given name,” matter-of-factly.
“Why did they name you that?”
“Oh, that’s a story in its own right,” he said, “suitable for one of your performances, complete with props.”
“A collar and cross?”
“A book about Cotton Mather, actually,” he said. He dropped dried spaghetti into boiling water and set the sauce to simmer. Garlic was crushed beneath the flat of a knife. Oregano and basil. “Again, never do this to an actual Italian, but in America – and in Ireland, is my guess – dried spaghetti will do just fine. The idea isn’t to actually make dinner, it’s just to fake your way through it.”
“So why not just a jar of sauce?” she said. “And who is Cotton Mather?”
“Because bottled spaghetti sauce is to spaghetti sauce what Budweiser is to beer,” he said. “You wouldn’t serve anyone Budweiser, would you?”
“I had it my first night here,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I wanted to see what American beer was like.”
“So you know,” he said. “Look, here’s the absolute most important part of faking your way through this dinner. First, when you put a little salt in the pomodoro, don’t just pour it from the shaker into the pot. Pour it into your hand, so you can see how much you’re using.”
“How much do I use?”
“If I gave you an exact amount, it wouldn’t be any fun,” he said. “You pour some in your hand, and put it in the sauce, and try it. If it’s not enough, put more in.”
“What if it’s too much?”
“Don’t put in too much. But look, here’s the key to the fake cooking. After you pour a little in your hand…” and he poured a pinch on his palm, “don’t just dump it in the pot. You have to kind of throw it in there.” He used his other hand to pick it up in his fingertips and then jabbed his hand toward the pot and snapped it back, like a snake striking. “See, that makes people think you know what you’re doing.”
“Oh, let me try,” she said. He poured a little in his hand, and she took a pinch (her fingertips stroking the skin of his palm) and shot it into the pot.
“See?” he laughed.
“Oh, I felt like Julia Childs,” she said. “But who is Cotton Mather?”
“A 17th century Puritan minister,” he told her. “In New England.”
“You don’t seem like the Puritan type.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Here’s another way to fake it. I notice you have stolen sugar packets in one other these cabinets.
“Yes, I took those from a Denny’s a few days ago. In case I made some tea.”
“Take a pinch of sugar from that packet and toss it in the pot, too.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Sugar? On spaghetti?”
“Just a pinch. It cuts the acidity of the tomatoes a little, but mostly it makes you look like you know something.”
She did as instructed. “I like this flinging food about,” she said, laughing.
He dumped the spaghetti into a colander and steam filled the kitchen. The air was starchy for a moment, and she felt her blouse cling a bit.
“Not a dish for a hot summer day,” she noted.
He shrugged. “If the kitchen isn’t fragrant and overheated, it’s not really cooking,” he told her.
"My mum used to say the same thing about the bedroom,” she said, and he laughed easily. Not a hint of a blush. Damn, she thought.
The sausage browned in olive oil and the magnetic charnel scent of the meat blended with the steam, and the tang of the pomodoro. She wet her lips without realizing it, and he drained some fat from the frying pan.
“Where did you learn this, exactly?” she said.
He poured the sauce onto the sausages and inhaled deeply. “Salsicce al pomodoro. They tell me that’s what Naples smells like,” he said.
“Smelled like another Italian city with bad sewers, to me,” she said. The sausages simmered and the spices wafted throughout the house and a man walking down the sidewalk was suddenly very hungry. And his dog started humping his leg uncontrollably.
“We undercooked the pasta a bit,” Preacher said. He dumped some of it into the simmering pan and turned it slowly, languidly through the sauce until it was dressed and had softened just a bit more. “Nothing worse than mushy pasta, so you need to leave room for this last turn. The other thing is this -- boil the pasta in salty water. Should be as salty as the ocean.”
She was watching him, intent on what he was doing. He has the strong hands, she thought, seeing him stir. “You do this all the time, right?” she said. “The whole sexy sensitive gourmet thing?”
He looked up at her laughing. “I told you, I haven’t had a decent kitchen since I moved out here. Plus, I have too much fun cooking to try to be impressive while doing it.”
She had to know if it was -- as she sincerely hoped -- a lie. Because if this was him being unimpressive... She looked straight at him, held him with her eyes. Her brilliant green against his hazel eyes gold-flecked. At first and even second glance there was something a little too smooth and easy and… effortless for her taste. She liked men – and women – who were a little uncomfortable in her presence. But more alarmingly she detected, lurking far in the background, something wild and lonely and sad. Something feral. She could stand to look directly at it, briefly, but she knew that there were more than a few who couldn’t, more than a few college girls who got just a glimpse of it and…
“Wipe that smirk off your face,” she said, smiling more broadly as the faint grin faded from him. “You’re just making dinner. I know some of these college girls suddenly find some irresistible force-field between their knees when you give them that look, but you need to remember when you’re way outside your league.”
And that’s two out of three to me, she thought, as there was a two-beat pause before he came up with a response.
“Believe me,” he said, “I knew I was beaten before we even left campus.” He turned his gaze back to the pan late in the sentence. Too soon and he was looking away in embarrassment. Too late and he was watching for her reaction. He did it just right.
Oh, he’s good, she thought. Worst of all there was a certain vague inflection that let her know he wasn’t even competing, let alone worried about being beaten.
So they ate their meal with fresh Italian bread and parmesan cheese and he told her that he had half a dozen things he could fake his way through like that and nobody would be the wiser.
“Isn’t it easier to just wear a tight blouse and get him to take me to a nice restaurant?” she said.
“That doesn’t work with everybody.”
“It has so far.”
He shrugged, chewing, raising his glass. “Not with me,” he said offhandedly, and she laughed loudly, even as she thought:
Damn, two to two.
"To me it’s just bangers and mash, without the mash,” she said, pushing the remains around on her plate. It was delicious, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. As if he had somehow missed the pace with which she’d shoveled it into her face. As if he missed much of anything.
“I’ve never actually heard someone from Ireland use the term bangers and mash before,” he said. “I mean I’ve read about it, but I didn’t know it really existed.”
“Don’t push your luck with me, lad,” she said. “Filling my belly doesn’t change the fact that I still don’t like you. You’re not like the others.”
“You don’t like the others, either,” he pointed out.
“Good point.”
She sat in the dining room and worked on her fourth beer. The remains of dinner lolled before her and he stood in the kitchen rinsing the pots. His sleeves were pushed up a bit and the hair on his forearms was damp. And she told herself she was getting up to get the ice cream and, maybe, two spoons, but halfway across the floor she knew it was going to be some time before they got to the ice cream.
He shut off the faucet yet seemed to be – was genuinely, she decided much later – truly surprised, when she grabbed him and stood on her toes and put her mouth over his.
Then she was tearing at his shirt. Then her skirt was around her hips but it was his hand there, first, and down her leg, and another traced her face even as their breath grew ragged. It was too much for a moment, and then not quite enough, back and forth, so that as they moved into the living room and their clothes came off they would pull apart and then lunge back for one another, she for her part determined that this would be a round he would not win, he for his as seemingly unaware of the competition as before. He looked her in the eyes. He never closed his eyes. When he pressed her against the arch connecting dining room and living room and her legs wrapped around him and his right hand moved unerringly to that spot behind her knee and her head fell back and her nails pressed into his neck his eyes remained open, and he wouldn’t… go…, damn him, and into the living room and naked and the lights on and the front curtain open (it’s not as if anyone was on the porch… it’s not as if either of them would have really cared anyhow, by that time) and the only sound she made was breathing, damn her, and her eyes stayed open the whole time, even when he traced her neck with his lips, and let her feel just a hint of teeth near the larynx, he knew her eyes were open, and when she tugged at his hair, and pressed her face into his collarbone, eyes open.
And she resolved she wouldn’t let his opened eyes keep from enjoying it, anyhow, and Jesus, she thought, when they finally got that far, what a Kegel, he could crush bricks with that pubococcygeus, didn’t really even have to slow down much, I mean he needed work, but he can find that spot on my hip without missing, and that place on my jaw, right there, and not just placement, angle and velocity, too, once he feels a response, it’s like he’s got a map of me in his head…
Preacher Haywood often remarked that he couldn’t think and screw at the same time, so one assumes his interior monologue was far less interesting. On the other hand, there were many people – including most of his former lovers – who suspected that was a big fat lie, perhaps the only one Preacher ever told. Although why he would choose that particular lie was beyond knowing.
There was a moment – very brief – during which Dr. Moira Callahan wondered about possible ramifications of sleeping with one of her students. It wasn’t an ethical qualm, exactly; Callahan was such a good Nietzschean that she both despised Nietzsche and never, ever considered herself bound by other people’s ethical considerations – it was more of an idle musing that passed quickly. At the same time she had, for the first twenty minutes or so, a serene confidence that this was going to be a one-time thing, and counted herself very lucky that of all her students, Preacher was the least likely to be bothered by that.
An hour later she had other plans.
Because of that, he went to St. John’s College, in Annapolis, where he did not distinguish himself at all, except that he was the last person to ring the bell upon turning in his senior thesis. And his fly was down when he did it.
In his defense, his parents had bought him a charming townhouse in the beautiful historic district of Annapolis, just a few blocks from the City Dock. Which meant that when he finished his paper he had to walk a considerable distance to campus. Cursed with a bladder the size of a walnut, this meant he had to make a brief pit stop behind a bush on State Circle en route to turning in his paper. Cursed with a superego even smaller than his bladder, he forgot to zip…
His paper was about Joseph Conrad. That’s not important.
Anyhow, upon graduation Des returned to his parents’ home in Savannah, Georgia, and while not particularly agoraphobic, he never really found cause to venture outside of it again. His parents died, staff came and went, and Des lived a fairly short, reasonably happy, and entirely indoor life before dying late in the Carter administration.
Upon his death came two gruesome discoveries. First, during his long seclusion he had written just over 600 romance novels, none of which were publishable, because while reasonably well written and true to the romance formula, they were all soft-core gay porn. In the late 1970s, there really wasn’t a market for all-male Harlequin novels.
Second, he left a will that bequeathed everything to St. John’s College but which included a positively Byzantine set of conditions, codicils, and caveats. Most of which he had written himself, apparently whenever the mood struck him. The lawyers St. John’s hired to try to wriggle out of some of the more bizarre conditions were, candidly, dismayed. A layman – a borderline psychotic layman, at that – a borderline psychotic layman whose legal background consisted of leafing through a copy of Black’s Law Dictionary which he’d acquired as his sole reference text when writing a gay-porn-romance version of 12 Angry Men – had managed to draft a will that would hold up in virtually any court in South Carolina or Maryland.
One of the provisions of the will endowed the Chrysoloras Visiting Scholar program. The Trustees wanted a new fine arts center, not a visiting scholar program. Des Cutter gave the school the charming historic-district townhouse, a valuable piece of real estate, but directed that it could only be used to house the Chrysoloras scholar. He gave the school big piles of money but insisted that all of it would revert to his Savannah elementary school if St. John’s cancelled any of the programs his will set up. Not just the visiting scholar program (with residence) but the annual contest to give $500 to the person who wrote the best tribute to Pythagoras (the visiting scholar had to be one of the judges) and the requirement that the school build at least four more men’s rooms scattered across the campus.
(The school ducked the Ode To Pythagoras competition requirement by simply not publicizing it. Once in a great while the Dean would take pity on a student in dire financial straits, whisper in his or her ear, and the prize would be awarded to the year’s sole contestant.)
The Chrysoloras scholar had few official duties. He or she had to offer a twice-a-week seminar. He or she had to offer a campus-wide lecture twice each semester, on any topic. He or she had to live in the charming townhouse.
That was about it. The visiting scholars uniformly regarded it as a sweet gig. The pay was good. Their only complaint was that they could only do it for one year.
In 1985 an unofficial duty was added to the list – the Chrysoloras scholar always attended the annual Island of Misfit Toys thanksgiving dinner for students who were stuck on campus over the weekend.
In the Year of Our Lord One Thousand Nine Hundred and Eighty-Seven the founder of the Misfit Toys feast, one Preacher S. Haywood, was a junior at St. John’s College. He lived in a surprisingly spacious Cape Cod off Prince George’s Street just a few blocks down from campus. His housemate, the resourceful and piercingly intelligent Nicholas D’Alessio, had procured a lease on the house the summer before, while Preacher was away attempting to strain Franco-American relations even more than the makers of Spaghetti-os had. Nick was rightfully proud of the charming yet affordable home, which beat the hell out of the homely brick rancher they’d live in the year before.
A third housemate, a tall and somewhat effete young man named Mark Carleton, hadn’t lived in the dump over by the hospital, and while he liked the house, he was so happy to be off-campus that he didn’t really care that it was infinitely superior to the abode Preacher had obtained.
All three men had signed up to take the seminar offered by that year’s Chrysoloras scholar, an Irishwoman named Moira Callahan. The description offered by the college read as follows:
“'Truth, Fact, and the Oral Tradition.' This year’s Chrysolorian seminar explores the importance of myth as a means of transmitting cultural truths, and the evolution of history as a normative medium. Dr. Moira Callahan received her undergraduate degree from Trinity College in her native Ireland, and her canidatus in ancient languages at Heidelberg. After a fellowship in epistemology at the University of Copenhagen she obtained her Ph.D. in comparative mythology from Oxford University, where she lectures in pre-Christian European history.”
So on a cheery September day in Annapolis (where it doesn’t become autumn until October) the three housemates sat in a classroom with a dozen other St. Johns students with, truly, no idea what the class was about. They had taken it primarily because this promised to be the first visiting scholar in three years who could speak intelligible English.
To the extent that anticipated anything, it was some chalk-dusted antiquities scholar with bad dentition. Just so long as it was someone they could understand. So they got to class a little early. They chatted. They joked. They waited.
And, a few minutes late, Moira Callahan swirled into the room and all chatter stopped.
It’s hard to chat, of course, when one’s jaw is on the ground.
Moira Callahan was beautiful. Not pretty, not attractive, not comely. Beautiful. Everyone-in-the-room-shut-up beautiful. Gay-men-and-straight-women-reconsider-their-options beautiful. Moira Callahan was, at that time, fast approaching her 30th birthday but she had that rare gift for hitting an optimal physical state and sort of… hovering there, indifferent to time, so that nobody was quite sure if she was a remarkably self-assured 25-year-old or a remarkably smooth-browed 35-year-old.
Her hair was copper and lava, her skin was flawless cream, her breasts scoffed at Newtonian physics, her cheekbones defied Plotinus. Each student mentally composed pastoral lays to the brilliant new-cut grass of her eyes, the rose petal lips, the curve of cheek and hip and calf that shamed the arc of space.
She was a hottie.
She carried a spear.
“Incipit táin bó Cualnge,” she said, without any introduction.
“Fect n-oen do Ailill & do Meidb íar n-dergud a rígleptha dóib i Cruachanráith Chonnacht, arrecaim comrad chind-cherchailli eturru.”
The students – those who had stopped ogling the new professor – looked at one another, bewildered.
“Let’s see how smart you are,” Callahan said. “Anybody here speak Gaelic? No? Good. What oral history did I just begin telling you?”
They looked at one another anew, even more bewildered. Except for Preacher Haywood, so leaned back in his seat and laughed.
She pointed the spear at him fiercely. “Let’s hear it,” she said. “Or were you just laughing at your own ignorance?”
“I didn’t hear you say Finn McCool,” he said, “so that must be the Ulster Cattle Raid.”
“That shows how much you know,” she said. “It could have been any one of a hundred other tales. But you’re right. Táin bó Cualnge is the Cattle-Raid of Cooley, the main part of the Ulster saga. 'Once upon a time, Ailill and Medb spread their royal bed in Cruachan, the stronghold of Connacht, and such was the pillow-talk that arose between them.'”
Fucking show-off, Nick and most of the others thought, glaring at Preacher.
“So tell me, smart guy, is the story of actual events?” she pressed on.
“No,” Preacher guessed.
“Wrong!” she snapped. “You, next to him. You’re thinking he’s just a showoff, right? Here’s your chance to show him up. Is this a story of actual events?”
“Yes,” Nick replied, by process of elimination.
“Wrong! The answer is, it doesn’t make any goddamn difference! It’s a good story. When a bunch of Irish boys were sitting in a drafty, smoke-filled hall watching their elders get drunk off their asses, shivering in part with cold and in part with terror at their first taste of battle against the English swine the next morning, they listened to this story about a 17-year-old taking names and kicking ass, and it helped them get a little sleep. Helped them charge headlong into a thicket of English arrows the next day.
“Today you can pick up a book that gives you a very detailed and factually precise account of the landing at Normandy. That’s not going to do anyone a damn bit of good the next time someone sticks a rifle in his hands. But Gary Cooper at High Noon…? That’s the difference between truth and fact. Fact is objectively verifiable. Truth is intuitive. In this culture we need them both, but for some reason we’ve set up this silly dichotomy between the two. For the next few months you’re going to hear lots and lots of stories, the veracity of which is… well, is irrelevant. You need to focus on whether they’re true, not whether they’re factual. And each one of you is going to perform an oral history of your own. NOT write one. Sweet Jesus, all I need is 15 adolescent weepies. You’re to find one pre-literate history, memorize a twenty-minute chunk of it, and deliver it.
“Any questions? ‘Course not, what could be clearer?” she said, without even a pretense at waiting for someone to ask a question. “Now, if this class was delivered by someone more organized you would all be receiving a list of the oral histories we’ll be analyzing in class. But if I was more organized I wouldn’t be nearly as fascinating. So instead when you find one you want to do, tell me, and I’ll let you know if I’m going to cover it instead. That means don’t look for the obvious ones. And there’s a reward for being the first one to come up with one. That reward being, you get to go first and get it over with. Plus, of course, you can really bugger your friends, because it’s first-come, first-served.”
“Where are we supposed to find these stories?” a girl named Madeline Barker said, having quickly determined that there was no sense in waiting for a pause for questions.
“What the hell are you asking me for?” Callahan retorted. “You go to this school, not me. Don’t you have a library or something? Any other questions? OK, then let’s continue.”
And she performed part of “The Combat of Ferdiad and Cuchulain,” which lasted the rest of the class – she performed it in English – and they were mesmerized, they were spell-bound, they heard and recognized Truth.
Twice a week she performed for them, interrupting the recitation to talk about the why and hows and wherefores. “Truth is not facts and dates,” she would remind them, demanding that they learn facts and dates anyhow – not of the events IN the sagas, but about their performance. How many times did Alexander hear Homer sung before launching a campaign to conquer the world – in the name of reclaiming Troy? What did it mean when the monks Christianized Beowulf? Why would they do it? What stories did the Mughals tell their foot soldiers when they swept into India?
No matter how intimate and/or heated the discussions, there was absolutely no question that Moira ran the class. She flatly refused to learn the names of anyone in the classroom. When pressed to address a person directly, she would simply refer to them by some readily apparent (to her) aspect of the person’s appearance, personality, or aspect. “You with the expensive haircut,” or “no, the one with the lazy eye.” It helped reinforce her position of authority.
And the classroom filled with the detritus of her performances. Artifacts. Spears, helmets, zithers, rosaries, rice bowls. Other users of the room complained. She ignored them, mostly. At length one of her fellow faculty members found a convenient way to persuade her to pick up after herself. “One of these bastards is going to steal something,” he told her.
(His name was Philip Pierce. She was keeping an eye on him. He was all right looking, in a scrawny sort of way. Happily married and a bit unsure of himself. A good combination, in her estimate. The kind you could lure into bed and count on to keep his mouth shut, and not do anything crazy like start chasing her around. She hadn’t been celibate long enough for that – yet – but it might come to that. Although some of those strapping Navy lads she saw around town might fit the bill, too. Except the young ones tended to wear their hearts on their sleeves.)
So one day right before her birthday – on the autumnal equinox, something nobody in Annapolis knew, any more than they knew it would be her 30th – she decided she would drag some of these heavy iron props back into her office. When the class was over she pressed a student into service.
“Hey, you,” she said. Half a dozen people turned around. “No, the good looking one. No, not you, I said good looking. Yes, you. Let’s put those muscles to work, shall we? I need to clear out some of this business.” She gestured at the pile of Iron Age weapons.
And Preacher Haywood scooped them all up in his arms. They weighed a ton.
“Out to your car?” he said brightly, trying not to act that they weighed a lot more than he had guessed.
She had only meant her office, one floor up. And she had only meant for him to grab one or two things. But if he insisted on demonstrating his stupid manliness…
“Just follow me,” she said, and led him down the stairs and twelve blocks across Annapolis on a rather warm and humid September day.
She deliberately walked a little fast, and listened for the clatter of heavy iron on pavement. Perhaps, she mused distantly, followed by the wetter thunk of college student hitting pavement; his face began to grow alarmingly red somewhere around Church Circle.
First he reddened. Then the perspiration sprang out on his brow. She was glad to see this slight dint in his savoir faire. The load in his arms shifted. Just a little more, she thought, and he would be properly chagrined. And then they were at her charming little house down by the City Dock, near Union and Conduit. She slowed her previously brisk pace to a leisurely saunter but he’d won this round merely by staying on his feet. And on some level she knew it was just round one.
“Jesus, you look like your head’s about to explode,” she said to him. “Come in and have a drink, or I’ll lose my job for killing a student.”
“I thought maybe this sword couldn’t be put away unblooded,” he gasped.
“Good point,” she said, opening the door. In he staggered. “Take them upstairs,” she said breezily, “the first room on the right, can’t miss it.”
He eyed the narrow and very steep staircase a bit cautiously, then took a deep breath and began clambering up. She watched his struggled with a grin on her face. When he got to the top she went into the kitchen, grabbed two bottles off the counter, and glided up behind him.
The second room on the right was ostensibly a second bedroom, but during Callahan’s residency it was more like a museum storeroom. There were two steamer trunks on the floor and… objects everywhere. A Greek harp and a Chinese fan, a Scythian bridle and a Filipino kris.
Haywood had dumped the hardware onto the bed and was looking around at the collection when she came to the doorway.
“You’re ruining all of my props,” she said. “Try to act surprised when I show up with these in class, all right?”
“I can almost picture all of these things being crammed into those two trunks,” he said, not turning around, “but what I can’t picture is getting those giant, loaded trunks up that staircase.”
He turned, smiling, and took the beer from her hand.
“You sound just like those crybaby movers,” she said to him. “Oh, those stairs are too narrow. Oh, this is too heavy. Oh, I’ve broken my leg. Americans complain a lot.”
“Yet they got it up here,” he said. He took a long draught from the bottle. “Guinness. We complain about your steamer trunks, and you no doubt complain about local beer,” he said.
“Some of it is fine,” she said, “provided I can persuade someone to serve it at a reasonable temperature.” She took a considered swallow and looked at him looking around the room nonchalantly. He did not seem particularly intimidated by her, something she wasn’t used to and wasn’t sure she liked.
“There’s something about you I don’t like,” she said, to make him look at her, and shifted slightly to better display the knobs. That was her sister's saying. Display the knobs. The thought of it almost made her smile too much.
“Is it that I look at your face when I talk to you?” he said. “Because that’s only when you’re looking back.” He gave an easy half-grin.
“That’s a part of it,” she said, starting to smile back. She covered it with another pull on the bottle. “God, it’s hotter than hell up here. Let’s go down a bit.”
She turned and moved to the stairs, and heard the floorboards creak a bit behind her, and she trotted down in a very even, quick rhythm. She listened for his steps to mirror it; that’s when she knew she was winning, when he followed unquestioningly, when he mirrored her stride without even noticing it.
He glanced up at the hatch that led to the attic. She needs a fan, he thought. These old houses don’t have AC, but an attic fan would help some. Probably gets cold up here in the winter, too. With a long tug he drained another third of his bottle and walked slowly down the stairs, not touching the banister, each step measured and sure.
She stood at the bottom, angry and intrigued. Gay? Didn’t seem like it, but he seemed relatively unfazed by her customary aggressive sexuality. He held his own in the banter, too. A bit taciturn but not speechless, not stammering, not…
“So what’s your story?” she said, pretending to leaf through her junk mail. Nothing even remotely interesting.
“Story? I have no story,” he said, still giving the house a good once-over. “This place is nice. Hot, but nice.”
“It’s a self-guided tour,” she said, tossing the mail back on the table. “While you’re in there get us another bottle,” she called as he disappeared into the kitchen.
“Nice kitchen,” he said, re-emerging. It was his turn to hand her a beer.
“Sure,” she said.
“You have no food in it whatsoever.”
“I have half a bag of frozen chips in the freezer,” she said.
“I take it the pots and utensils aren’t yours?”
“Have you ever heard of a famous Irish chef?” she said.
“Ah, no.”
“There's a reason for that. But I pour some of those chips on a tray and stick them in the oven when I’m hungry and can’t go out. They taste like shite so usually I just go out.”
“And that great kitchen goes to waste.”
She shrugged.
“Can I use it?”
“What, you’re a cook, too? Poofter, I knew it,” she said, and laughed a bit cruelly.
“I’m not sure what poofta means,” he said, “but I haven’t had a house with a decent kitchen in years.”
She cocked her head and looked at him thoughtfully. “OK, make us some dinner,” she said. “I thought I saw a market around here.”
“Right down the block,” he said. He plopped into a big overstuffed chair.
That was part of it, she thought. He didn't refuse to do what she asked he just... didn't. At least not promptly.
“So what’s your story?” he said.
“I asked first,” she said, leaning against the doorway that connected the living room to the dining room.”
“And I told you, I didn’t have one.”
“Then me neither.”
Mexican standoff. They looked at one another with the same quarter smile, the same barely perceptible arch to the eyebrows that said – bring it on. Except on some level she feared that he wasn't playing. That he was blissfully ignorant that there was any competition at all. Which made their stalemate even more frustrating.
“But you can’t cook,” he said.
“How do you know that?”
“Besides the dust on the stove burners? Because if you cook, you also have to wash the dishes. Whenever I meet someone I try to imagine them washing the dishes. And I cannot, for the life of me, picture you scrubbing a pot.
She laughed. “Oh, lad, there are so many other things I can do, cooking never really comes up.”
“But still,” he said. He drained the bottle and got to his feet. “You’re like me. It bothers you when there’s something you can’t at least fake your way through.”
“So show me how to fake my way through dinner,” she told him, and wondered where in the world that came from.
“First we have to fake our way through shopping,” he said.
They walked out of the house and for just a brief moment it felt so normal and natural and easy that he almost stuck his arm out and she almost took it. But instead they sauntered down the street laughing and sparring, neither of them following the other, walking instead in elaborate looping orbits about one another so that they were never quite facing, never quite turned away.
It occurred to her that she had no idea what his name was.
“Preacher!” the man who ran the produce stall said cheerfully when they walked into the City Market. Preacher? she thought.
“Larry,” Preacher replied, nodding at the older man. “How’s business today?”
“Pretty good,” Larry told him. Haywood took some tomatoes, showed them to Callahan, who for her part was out of her element and hated feeling out of her element. She made a point of bending over in front of the greengrocer so he couldn’t help but look down her blouse a bit. It made her feel a little more in control. Haywood caressed the fruit almost obscenely; he was telling her about fresh ingredients but showing her his fingers on the curve of the flesh, dimpling the skin. Still he looked at the red plum tomatoes when he spoke, not her, and when they came to the dry goods stand he flirted a little with the older woman who rang up their dried pasta, parmesan cheese, dried herbs, extra virgin olive oil. The counter-girl giggled and laughed and when Preacher turned around she glared at Callahan, which helped Moira feel a bit more comfortable, too; the black man at the butcher’s stall gave them a few links of Italian sausage, eyed Moira, winked at Preacher (who ignored him); lastly the bakery, redolent of fresh loaves, and the bakery woman purposefully undercharged him.
Everyone called him Preacher. He knew everyone’s name. Moira fished a quart of Rocky Road ice cream out of the freezer in another stall and paid for it herself.
On the way back to her house he kept making her laugh, the bastard, but at one point she put her hand on his shoulder in a mock-playful mock-push and there was a slight hitch in his step then, a slight pause in his story about living over top of a bakery in France, and she thought: A bit skittish about being touched, are we? Round two to me. There was a chink in the armor after all. Nice muscles, though. No wonder he survived toting that crap halfway across town.
Then into the kitchen as the sun drooped low and the evening cooled a bit. They opened fresh beers while the water boiled. The tomatoes blanched. He fished them from the water, skins loosened, and ran cold water on them, and took her hand in his and showed her how the skin came off. “What we’re making is a fake pomodoro sauce,” he said. “As long as you don’t give it to an actual Italian you’ll be fine.” He stopped talking for a moment and they both became acutely aware of their position and she waited for him to suddenly pull away, giving her the best two out of three, but he didn’t.
“Almost fall,” he said, showing her how to quarter and crush the skinned tomatoes. “Darker noticeably earlier. Cooler in the evening. You’ll be trudging up Gloucester Street in the snow soon enough. Walking home in the dark.”
Idle conversation about the weather. But no pull-away. She decided to call that one a draw, because she hadn’t been able to say much of anything herself.
“Why do they call you Preacher?” she said.
“That’s my name.”
“Your given name,” incredulously.
“My given name,” matter-of-factly.
“Why did they name you that?”
“Oh, that’s a story in its own right,” he said, “suitable for one of your performances, complete with props.”
“A collar and cross?”
“A book about Cotton Mather, actually,” he said. He dropped dried spaghetti into boiling water and set the sauce to simmer. Garlic was crushed beneath the flat of a knife. Oregano and basil. “Again, never do this to an actual Italian, but in America – and in Ireland, is my guess – dried spaghetti will do just fine. The idea isn’t to actually make dinner, it’s just to fake your way through it.”
“So why not just a jar of sauce?” she said. “And who is Cotton Mather?”
“Because bottled spaghetti sauce is to spaghetti sauce what Budweiser is to beer,” he said. “You wouldn’t serve anyone Budweiser, would you?”
“I had it my first night here,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “I wanted to see what American beer was like.”
“So you know,” he said. “Look, here’s the absolute most important part of faking your way through this dinner. First, when you put a little salt in the pomodoro, don’t just pour it from the shaker into the pot. Pour it into your hand, so you can see how much you’re using.”
“How much do I use?”
“If I gave you an exact amount, it wouldn’t be any fun,” he said. “You pour some in your hand, and put it in the sauce, and try it. If it’s not enough, put more in.”
“What if it’s too much?”
“Don’t put in too much. But look, here’s the key to the fake cooking. After you pour a little in your hand…” and he poured a pinch on his palm, “don’t just dump it in the pot. You have to kind of throw it in there.” He used his other hand to pick it up in his fingertips and then jabbed his hand toward the pot and snapped it back, like a snake striking. “See, that makes people think you know what you’re doing.”
“Oh, let me try,” she said. He poured a little in his hand, and she took a pinch (her fingertips stroking the skin of his palm) and shot it into the pot.
“See?” he laughed.
“Oh, I felt like Julia Childs,” she said. “But who is Cotton Mather?”
“A 17th century Puritan minister,” he told her. “In New England.”
“You don’t seem like the Puritan type.”
“Exactly,” he said. “Here’s another way to fake it. I notice you have stolen sugar packets in one other these cabinets.
“Yes, I took those from a Denny’s a few days ago. In case I made some tea.”
“Take a pinch of sugar from that packet and toss it in the pot, too.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Sugar? On spaghetti?”
“Just a pinch. It cuts the acidity of the tomatoes a little, but mostly it makes you look like you know something.”
She did as instructed. “I like this flinging food about,” she said, laughing.
He dumped the spaghetti into a colander and steam filled the kitchen. The air was starchy for a moment, and she felt her blouse cling a bit.
“Not a dish for a hot summer day,” she noted.
He shrugged. “If the kitchen isn’t fragrant and overheated, it’s not really cooking,” he told her.
"My mum used to say the same thing about the bedroom,” she said, and he laughed easily. Not a hint of a blush. Damn, she thought.
The sausage browned in olive oil and the magnetic charnel scent of the meat blended with the steam, and the tang of the pomodoro. She wet her lips without realizing it, and he drained some fat from the frying pan.
“Where did you learn this, exactly?” she said.
He poured the sauce onto the sausages and inhaled deeply. “Salsicce al pomodoro. They tell me that’s what Naples smells like,” he said.
“Smelled like another Italian city with bad sewers, to me,” she said. The sausages simmered and the spices wafted throughout the house and a man walking down the sidewalk was suddenly very hungry. And his dog started humping his leg uncontrollably.
“We undercooked the pasta a bit,” Preacher said. He dumped some of it into the simmering pan and turned it slowly, languidly through the sauce until it was dressed and had softened just a bit more. “Nothing worse than mushy pasta, so you need to leave room for this last turn. The other thing is this -- boil the pasta in salty water. Should be as salty as the ocean.”
She was watching him, intent on what he was doing. He has the strong hands, she thought, seeing him stir. “You do this all the time, right?” she said. “The whole sexy sensitive gourmet thing?”
He looked up at her laughing. “I told you, I haven’t had a decent kitchen since I moved out here. Plus, I have too much fun cooking to try to be impressive while doing it.”
She had to know if it was -- as she sincerely hoped -- a lie. Because if this was him being unimpressive... She looked straight at him, held him with her eyes. Her brilliant green against his hazel eyes gold-flecked. At first and even second glance there was something a little too smooth and easy and… effortless for her taste. She liked men – and women – who were a little uncomfortable in her presence. But more alarmingly she detected, lurking far in the background, something wild and lonely and sad. Something feral. She could stand to look directly at it, briefly, but she knew that there were more than a few who couldn’t, more than a few college girls who got just a glimpse of it and…
“Wipe that smirk off your face,” she said, smiling more broadly as the faint grin faded from him. “You’re just making dinner. I know some of these college girls suddenly find some irresistible force-field between their knees when you give them that look, but you need to remember when you’re way outside your league.”
And that’s two out of three to me, she thought, as there was a two-beat pause before he came up with a response.
“Believe me,” he said, “I knew I was beaten before we even left campus.” He turned his gaze back to the pan late in the sentence. Too soon and he was looking away in embarrassment. Too late and he was watching for her reaction. He did it just right.
Oh, he’s good, she thought. Worst of all there was a certain vague inflection that let her know he wasn’t even competing, let alone worried about being beaten.
So they ate their meal with fresh Italian bread and parmesan cheese and he told her that he had half a dozen things he could fake his way through like that and nobody would be the wiser.
“Isn’t it easier to just wear a tight blouse and get him to take me to a nice restaurant?” she said.
“That doesn’t work with everybody.”
“It has so far.”
He shrugged, chewing, raising his glass. “Not with me,” he said offhandedly, and she laughed loudly, even as she thought:
Damn, two to two.
"To me it’s just bangers and mash, without the mash,” she said, pushing the remains around on her plate. It was delicious, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. As if he had somehow missed the pace with which she’d shoveled it into her face. As if he missed much of anything.
“I’ve never actually heard someone from Ireland use the term bangers and mash before,” he said. “I mean I’ve read about it, but I didn’t know it really existed.”
“Don’t push your luck with me, lad,” she said. “Filling my belly doesn’t change the fact that I still don’t like you. You’re not like the others.”
“You don’t like the others, either,” he pointed out.
“Good point.”
She sat in the dining room and worked on her fourth beer. The remains of dinner lolled before her and he stood in the kitchen rinsing the pots. His sleeves were pushed up a bit and the hair on his forearms was damp. And she told herself she was getting up to get the ice cream and, maybe, two spoons, but halfway across the floor she knew it was going to be some time before they got to the ice cream.
He shut off the faucet yet seemed to be – was genuinely, she decided much later – truly surprised, when she grabbed him and stood on her toes and put her mouth over his.
Then she was tearing at his shirt. Then her skirt was around her hips but it was his hand there, first, and down her leg, and another traced her face even as their breath grew ragged. It was too much for a moment, and then not quite enough, back and forth, so that as they moved into the living room and their clothes came off they would pull apart and then lunge back for one another, she for her part determined that this would be a round he would not win, he for his as seemingly unaware of the competition as before. He looked her in the eyes. He never closed his eyes. When he pressed her against the arch connecting dining room and living room and her legs wrapped around him and his right hand moved unerringly to that spot behind her knee and her head fell back and her nails pressed into his neck his eyes remained open, and he wouldn’t… go…, damn him, and into the living room and naked and the lights on and the front curtain open (it’s not as if anyone was on the porch… it’s not as if either of them would have really cared anyhow, by that time) and the only sound she made was breathing, damn her, and her eyes stayed open the whole time, even when he traced her neck with his lips, and let her feel just a hint of teeth near the larynx, he knew her eyes were open, and when she tugged at his hair, and pressed her face into his collarbone, eyes open.
And she resolved she wouldn’t let his opened eyes keep from enjoying it, anyhow, and Jesus, she thought, when they finally got that far, what a Kegel, he could crush bricks with that pubococcygeus, didn’t really even have to slow down much, I mean he needed work, but he can find that spot on my hip without missing, and that place on my jaw, right there, and not just placement, angle and velocity, too, once he feels a response, it’s like he’s got a map of me in his head…
Preacher Haywood often remarked that he couldn’t think and screw at the same time, so one assumes his interior monologue was far less interesting. On the other hand, there were many people – including most of his former lovers – who suspected that was a big fat lie, perhaps the only one Preacher ever told. Although why he would choose that particular lie was beyond knowing.
There was a moment – very brief – during which Dr. Moira Callahan wondered about possible ramifications of sleeping with one of her students. It wasn’t an ethical qualm, exactly; Callahan was such a good Nietzschean that she both despised Nietzsche and never, ever considered herself bound by other people’s ethical considerations – it was more of an idle musing that passed quickly. At the same time she had, for the first twenty minutes or so, a serene confidence that this was going to be a one-time thing, and counted herself very lucky that of all her students, Preacher was the least likely to be bothered by that.
An hour later she had other plans.
Monday, February 14, 2005
Part Eighteen
Like Gaul, all narrative is divided into three parts.
The first-person narrative is typically the most honest. Because you, the reader, know up front that you’re getting a one-sided, half-assed perspective. You know that the “I” telling the story is missing things, leaving out details, and utterly in the dark about some goings-on. You read a first-person narrative skeptically. Up front, you know you’re not getting the whole story. In The Great Gatsby, when the narrator tells us “I’m the most honest person I know,” you know he’s full of crap.
The second-person narrative is less honest than the first-person narrative. A second-person narrative (I’m thinking of Bright Lights, Big City as a prime example) is a tarted-up version of the first person narrative. As a reader, you know that you’re still only getting a one-sided view of things… but you don’t care as much, because you have been inserted into the story and thus are suddenly made more interesting, more intelligent, and more eloquent. It’s like when a pretty salesgirl flirts with you – you know it’s a crock, but you’re flattered into playing along.
The third-person narrative – like the one I’m about to launch into – is just a blatant lie. It creates this illusion of omniscience. It camouflages the author’s biases and ignorance and omissions. The third party narrator assures you that you’re learning everything there is to learn. That nobody has said anything important behind your back. That a main character didn’t, out of the blue, sneak off one day and boff some co-ed when nobody was looking. When in fact the third-person narratives are just as biased and selective in their truth-telling as the first-person narratives. Read The Stand. Classic third-person narration. All that interior monologue. All these different characters in different parts of the country. You think you know everything, reader, until a few decades later when Stephen King lets us know that it was all just a subplot in the Dark Tower story.
But when Preacher graduated I wasn’t around anymore, and so I have to depend on other people to know what happened to him then. When I only know about some chapter of his life from a single source I don’t have any objection to simply presenting a heavily edited version of that person’s reminiscence. That’s how I’ve handled it so far. You, reader, know I am editing the crap out of these things, and you know I have my own axes to grind, and so you take in this information with a properly jaundiced eye.
But when I have fairly detailed accounts of the same event from several different sources – and when I’m not one of those sources – I am in a quandary. Do I attempt to create what I think is a truthful (if not necessarily factually accurate) version of what happened? I knew Preacher pretty well, once. When some of these people would tell me a story about something they did with Preacher – especially before the desert, but afterwards, too – often I can picture him in that situation, hear the timbre of his voice, see his expression. But I wasn’t really there. So while I can offer some educated guesses as to his motivations and his thought processes, in the end they are nothing more than guesses.
Do I create a fake third-person narrative from these sources? Or do I tell the story Rashomon-style, one interview after another, and let the reader draw his or her own conclusions about what really happened?
There is never one correct answer to the question “what really happened,” of course.
All of this dithering is a prelude to trying to justify the next few passages. Because slogging through this sordid tale in a sort of thematic chronological order I have run smack dab into Moira Callahan. In 2001 Preacher Haywood ran into an old classmate of ours who asked him about Moira Callahan and he replied:
“It’s impossible to overstate the importance of what I learned from Moira Callahan. And it’s impossible to overstate the important of unlearning most of it later.”
What this says to me – other than the fact that Preacher is the sort of person who can unselfconsciously use expressions like “unlearned” – is that I had better pay more attention to this saga than I might otherwise have done.
And I have the advantage of a pretty detailed parallax view of that period of Preacher’s life. He never talked much about it, except for one time toward the end. But Moira told me EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING, in excruciating and (for me) embarrassing detail. Proudly. Plus I talked to a lot of our old college friends who knew bits and pieces of the story. And, most revoltingly, a big chunk of that time is documented in two journals that Preacher and Moira kept. In due course I will relate more on the how and why of those journals, but suffice it to say that when she handed photocopies of them to me – photocopies missing a few pages, I might add – I was able to learn far more than I wanted to about those months. And because part of the journal “exercise,” as Moira called it, was to highlight the differences in the way she and Preacher perceived the same events, I find it easy to succumb to temptation and write a sort of synthesized third-person narrative blending together my own recollections, the interviews, the journals, and what I think Preacher was like back then.
So forgive me the great dishonesty I am about to perpetrate in the name of Truth. Sometimes it’s necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.
(It occurs to me that I should also seek forgiveness for destroying the narrative flow with this little Apology. That last bit of Haywood sermon was a perfect segue to the Moira story, and I’ve gone and wrecked it with this prolonged meditation on why I’m a goddamned liar.)
The first-person narrative is typically the most honest. Because you, the reader, know up front that you’re getting a one-sided, half-assed perspective. You know that the “I” telling the story is missing things, leaving out details, and utterly in the dark about some goings-on. You read a first-person narrative skeptically. Up front, you know you’re not getting the whole story. In The Great Gatsby, when the narrator tells us “I’m the most honest person I know,” you know he’s full of crap.
The second-person narrative is less honest than the first-person narrative. A second-person narrative (I’m thinking of Bright Lights, Big City as a prime example) is a tarted-up version of the first person narrative. As a reader, you know that you’re still only getting a one-sided view of things… but you don’t care as much, because you have been inserted into the story and thus are suddenly made more interesting, more intelligent, and more eloquent. It’s like when a pretty salesgirl flirts with you – you know it’s a crock, but you’re flattered into playing along.
The third-person narrative – like the one I’m about to launch into – is just a blatant lie. It creates this illusion of omniscience. It camouflages the author’s biases and ignorance and omissions. The third party narrator assures you that you’re learning everything there is to learn. That nobody has said anything important behind your back. That a main character didn’t, out of the blue, sneak off one day and boff some co-ed when nobody was looking. When in fact the third-person narratives are just as biased and selective in their truth-telling as the first-person narratives. Read The Stand. Classic third-person narration. All that interior monologue. All these different characters in different parts of the country. You think you know everything, reader, until a few decades later when Stephen King lets us know that it was all just a subplot in the Dark Tower story.
But when Preacher graduated I wasn’t around anymore, and so I have to depend on other people to know what happened to him then. When I only know about some chapter of his life from a single source I don’t have any objection to simply presenting a heavily edited version of that person’s reminiscence. That’s how I’ve handled it so far. You, reader, know I am editing the crap out of these things, and you know I have my own axes to grind, and so you take in this information with a properly jaundiced eye.
But when I have fairly detailed accounts of the same event from several different sources – and when I’m not one of those sources – I am in a quandary. Do I attempt to create what I think is a truthful (if not necessarily factually accurate) version of what happened? I knew Preacher pretty well, once. When some of these people would tell me a story about something they did with Preacher – especially before the desert, but afterwards, too – often I can picture him in that situation, hear the timbre of his voice, see his expression. But I wasn’t really there. So while I can offer some educated guesses as to his motivations and his thought processes, in the end they are nothing more than guesses.
Do I create a fake third-person narrative from these sources? Or do I tell the story Rashomon-style, one interview after another, and let the reader draw his or her own conclusions about what really happened?
There is never one correct answer to the question “what really happened,” of course.
All of this dithering is a prelude to trying to justify the next few passages. Because slogging through this sordid tale in a sort of thematic chronological order I have run smack dab into Moira Callahan. In 2001 Preacher Haywood ran into an old classmate of ours who asked him about Moira Callahan and he replied:
“It’s impossible to overstate the importance of what I learned from Moira Callahan. And it’s impossible to overstate the important of unlearning most of it later.”
What this says to me – other than the fact that Preacher is the sort of person who can unselfconsciously use expressions like “unlearned” – is that I had better pay more attention to this saga than I might otherwise have done.
And I have the advantage of a pretty detailed parallax view of that period of Preacher’s life. He never talked much about it, except for one time toward the end. But Moira told me EVERYTHING, and I mean EVERYTHING, in excruciating and (for me) embarrassing detail. Proudly. Plus I talked to a lot of our old college friends who knew bits and pieces of the story. And, most revoltingly, a big chunk of that time is documented in two journals that Preacher and Moira kept. In due course I will relate more on the how and why of those journals, but suffice it to say that when she handed photocopies of them to me – photocopies missing a few pages, I might add – I was able to learn far more than I wanted to about those months. And because part of the journal “exercise,” as Moira called it, was to highlight the differences in the way she and Preacher perceived the same events, I find it easy to succumb to temptation and write a sort of synthesized third-person narrative blending together my own recollections, the interviews, the journals, and what I think Preacher was like back then.
So forgive me the great dishonesty I am about to perpetrate in the name of Truth. Sometimes it’s necessary to destroy the village in order to save it.
(It occurs to me that I should also seek forgiveness for destroying the narrative flow with this little Apology. That last bit of Haywood sermon was a perfect segue to the Moira story, and I’ve gone and wrecked it with this prolonged meditation on why I’m a goddamned liar.)
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