The School of Beauty and Charm (20 page)

We staggered around the kitchen, stepping all over each other's feet. Then he whispered in my ear, “I want to eat your pussy.”

I punched him in the gut.

“Sorry.” He held up his hands as if he were being arrested then pushed them in his pockets. “Am I going too fast?” He stumbled, regained his balance. “I had a couple of beers before I came.” He lit a cigarette for himself and one for me. “I'm sorry I molested you. I guess I got carried away.” He looked at my dress. “You are sexy, though.” His hand reached between my legs, and I hit him again.

“Stop it!” I yelled.

“I'm sorry. Excuse me. Are those diamonds fake or real?”

“These are zircons,” I said with dignity.

In the dining room, he glanced over at the life-sized portrait Florida had done of Roderick. In the painting, Roderick looked like his corpse in the casket. Technically, that was his mouth, his nose, his forehead, but his eyes were hollow and dead.

“That's my brother.” For a moment we looked at each other like actors who have forgotten their lines. T. C. breathed heavily, like an old man. I realized that I had made a mistake. I had invented a man; T. C. was not him.

“Do you know how to grill steaks?”

“Yep.” He examined the bottle of Moët & Chandon I had set in a plastic bucket of ice. He fingered the steak tongs I had laid on a white linen napkin beside the bucket. Then he filled my sorbet dishes with tequila.

L
EANING AGAINST THE
deck railing, I shook salt onto the web of skin between my thumb and forefinger, licked it, took a sip of tequila, winced, and bit into a lime.

“Let me try that.” T. C. was across the deck before I could turn my head, licking first my hand, then my neck. “What's the
matter?” He was pushing his hand between my legs. Without waiting for an answer, he swept one arm behind by back, underneath my jacket, and unfastened my bra. It had taken my other date four tries to get my bra off, and then he was so embarrassed trying to fold it that we didn't go any further. T. C. snapped it off like a piece of tape. This bra was called the Mary Jane, white with pink rosebuds. In his hand it looked ridiculous.

“You're going too fast.” I pushed at his chest, but he pressed himself tighter against me, until his wang poked into my leg. It felt like another hand, a baby's fist.

In my ear, he whispered, “I'm going to rape you.”

All around us the kudzu and the vines in the trees formed a green fence, a green ceiling. The last little poke of sun in the sky shot through the leaves in a green light—like the light at the plant. It was hard to breathe. A few katydids said, “Katie did,” once or twice, like musicians tuning their guitars. I tried to go limp. I had read in a magazine that a man can't rape a woman if she relaxes all of her muscles, but I couldn't relax a single one. He had my jeans unzipped and was trying to stuff his hand inside them when I bit him.

“Shit!” he cried. “What the hell?”

“You can't rape me,” I said in a high, strained voice, backing away until the smoking grill was between us. I saw Florida's ashen face the first time she looked at the photo of the burned-out farmhouse in Red Cavern. “My home,” she said, touching the photograph. “My home is gone.” And Henry at the grill, back turned to us. No one else had ever touched the grill. “This place is wired all over with alarms.” I tried to make my words sound official. “All I have to do is push a button, and the police will come.”

T. C. scratched his neck. Then he ambled over to the grill and flipped the steaks. “S-7 security system. The main box is buried by the bird feeder. I installed it myself, two years ago. It's the kind that ain't connected to the police station.” He salted the meat. “And y'all's neighbor is out fishing with my cousin Charlie. I loaned him my pole, as a matter of fact.”

“You're lying.” I took another step away from him.

“You scared of me?” He put on the cow-shaped grill glove I had given Henry last Christmas and said, “Moo.” Then he made the sound of an alarm, “
Whooee, whooee
.” He thought this was very funny. I considered darting past him, into the house to call the police, but I had invited him to Owl Aerie. He was my guest. The only thing to do was make him uncomfortable; then maybe he would go away on his own.

I corrected my posture, smiled icily, and said, “Come into the dining room and have a seat.” I set his place at one end of the long table, and mine at the other. All around the china plates I laid rows of silverware, including salt spoons. From the back of a cabinet, I produced two saucers and filled each one with warm water and a sprig of mint.

“These are finger bowls,” I said airily. I searched for an intimidating word. “They were handcrafted by the Ungulates in Indonesia.”

Swigging from his tequila bottle, he watched me with bleary eyes.

“Why do we have to sit so far apart?” he asked finally, moving his plate next to mine. “I want to sit next to you.” As soon as I sat down and picked up my fork he put his hand between my thighs. I decided not to react.

“Aren't you going to eat?”

“I'm going to eat you,” he said. I handed him the champagne to distract him and made a haughty face while he fumbled with the corkscrew.

“You unscrew it. Think you can do that?”

“You're a funny woman. You're—different. Not in a bad way. I guess that's why everybody calls you Experiment. They call me Tiger. That's what the T stands for.”

“I thought it was Theodore.”

“No, it's Tiger.” He growled.

When the cork popped and the champagne bubbled through his nicotine-stained fingers, we laughed. The champagne seemed to cancel out the tequila, and everything else in my head. T. C. began to look attractive with his thick legs spread on the Queen Anne chair, his hair mussed and curly, one big paw around the sorbet dish, lips wet with wine.

“You can't rape me if I want to make love to you,” I said. “It's my idea, too. I invited you over.” When I leaned over to kiss him, he touched my nipples through my shirt and said, “Let's go over to the couch for a minute.”

On the couch, the white curve of my breast surfaced like a fish in his hand. My legs seemed to spread by themselves.
Oh
, I thought,
this is sex
. I hadn't expected it to feel natural. When he kissed me, I didn't taste spit; I tasted champagne and then nothing; all my senses merged together into a single, heady craving. I put my hand on his knee, daring myself to touch his zipper.

On the count of ten, I was going to touch his zipper, but on three he pulled me beneath him so fast I lost count. “I'm going to eat your pussy,” he said again, and I went cold. That was a rude thing to say. I wanted him to say something personal:
You have the most intriguing eyes. But he probably didn't know that word. I noted that he hadn't told me I was beautiful since he gave me the rose. What if he didn't think I was pretty? He hardly looked at my Mary Jane panties before he jerked them down to my ankles.

“You'll like it,” he argued, when I kicked him in the chest. “All the ladies say I eat pussy good. I can make you come. I ain't lying. It's the truth. You'll go wild.” He laughed all to himself.

“Gross.” Yanking my panties up, I slid into the corner of the couch. We were both panting, and I could still feel the wet spot his lips had left on my labia. “You can sit on the couch. Just don't lick me.”

He sighed and lit a cigarette. “You don't have to sit all the way over there. I ain't gonna bite ya. And I ain't gonna lick.” Then he grinned. “I swear, you'd like it. Women love that. You never had a man go down on you before?”

“I haven't even had regular sex yet.”

“Shit.” Drawing on his cigarette, he looked out the window. “What am I doing here?” He rubbed his head, and suddenly I was afraid I had lost his interest.

Florida had told me to encourage boys to talk about themselves, explaining that in some mysterious way this would make them find me interesting. I focused my attention on T. C. What would he like to talk about? I didn't know much about his life, except what I had read on his employee record, which I had pulled while filing papers in Mr. Patch's office. For some reason, the file contained his testimony in a divorce suit. Reading them, I was fascinated by his spelling: “Shee dont lik my skedule but she liks my kash i tole her i wuz triing.”

“So, what's it like to be married?” I asked, crossing my legs as I lit a cigarette.

“We're separated.” He had his hands flat on his thighs and didn't move them except to pick up his drink. He drank, then added, “It's hard work.”

“When you were married, did you live in a trailer?”

“Naw. I built her a real nice home. Washer, dryer, dishwasher, satellite TV. She had everything.”

“What's it like to have sex when you're married?”

“With your wife? Well, it's good. I mean, I like sex. Every morning you wake up, and she's right there. What is this? An interview?”

“I just want to know. Is being married like having a roommate?”

“Yeah, when she puts you on the couch.”

“Didn't you ever want to sleep by yourself?”

“No, like I said, when you're getting along with a woman, having sex with her is nice. Do you want to turn on the TV or something?”

“I don't watch TV. What's it like when you get along?”

“Well, let me think.” He took the cigarette out of his mouth with his thumb and forefinger and stubbed it in the ashtray. Then he lit another one. “Say I get off work at four-thirty and get home around five. She's waiting for me in her housecoat, lying on the bed, like.”

“Why is she wearing her housecoat at five o'clock in the afternoon?”

“Maybe I'm working second shift. I'm just saying, okay? Say she's wearing her bathrobe. So I take a shower and come lie down beside her.”

“What kind of bathrobe is it? Is it terry cloth?” I hated terry cloth. When T. C. married me, we'd live in a real trailer and I'd wear Victoria's Secret gowns.

“It's a short one or something,” he said impatiently. “Anyway, I reach inside it, feeling her titties and all, and say, ‘Hey honey.' Then we make love.”

For a while, he was so quiet I was afraid he had fallen asleep. I was miffed that he didn't have his arm around me and hoped he wasn't sorry to be here with me instead of with his wife. I decided to touch his zipper on the count of one hundred.

“So have you ever slept with a whore?” I asked him.

“That depends on what you call a whore.”

“Do you think I'm a whore?”

“No,” he said with an irritated shake of his head that reminded me of Henry.

“I bet you wish I was a whore.” I was silently counting,
Seventy-two, seventy-three, seventy-four
. . .

He rubbed his temples and sighed. “Well, we've both got to go to work tomorrow, so I guess I'd better be going.”

“Stay.”

“I'd like to, but I think I'd better be going.” He stood up and began to look around for his shirt.

“We could sleep together without having sex,” I offered.

“You think I'm going to sleep beside a naked woman and not have sex with her?”

“We could wear pajamas.”

“You ain't doing too good at being a whore. Anyway, I sleep in the raw. Are you sitting on my socks over there?” He stood in front me, scowling. I reached up and touched his zipper. Then we both froze.

Finally, he said, “I don't mean to be crude or nothing, Louise, but if I go to bed with you, I'm going to fuck your brains out.”

Then I took him to the only double bed in the house, in Henry and Florida's bedroom.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, even though Florida gave me the usual 6 a.m. wake-up call, I spent forty-five minutes writing in my journal and was late to work. At lunch, I sat alone at my table, eating a steak sandwich while the men discussed my tardiness.

“Her daddy wasn't home to tie that string on her,” Polecat said. “Every morning, he's got to tie that string on her so she can find her way out of that big house.”

“Florida wasn't there to write ‘Louise Peppers' on her lunch bag, so she lost it.”

“She looks peaked to me, this morning. Experiment, what did you do last night?”

T. C. sat in the corner with Smiley and didn't even look at me.

“Wink at me,” I commanded at the water fountain.

“I can't.”

“Do you think everybody knows?”

“You might as well wear a sign.”

“Really?” I grinned. “Do I look different?”

“You look like trouble.” He shuffled away with his head down, and just when I began to hate him, he turned and winked.

That morning, T. C. cut doors and windows into a Frigidaire box, drew a license plate on the back and a Mercedes symbol on the front, fitted the whole thing over his forklift, and
drove up to the bailer to ask me for a date. He blew the horn twice.

That's when I saw Jeremiah's temper. It was cold and slow, like Henry's. His face was frozen in fury. In three quick, graceful strides, like a Panther, he was on top of the forklift. There was a blur of arms and legs, a hiss, shriek, and then the Frigidaire box came off the forklift. Jeremiah wrapped his arms around it, crushed it flat with one blow, and rammed it into the bailer. Watching from the forklift, T. C. pretended to be amused.

“Get out of here,” said Jeremiah.

“Whatever you say, nigger-boy,” said T. C.

Just as Henry would have done, Jeremiah stood with his shoulders back, silent, staring at the man until he was gone. Then he went into his office and made a phone call.

I
MADE A
note to explain racial equality to T. C., but I was drunk with sex and couldn't really think about anything. All I could do was remember sex and dream of more sex. At last I believed I understood the line from Keats that Mr. Rutherford put on his final exam: “Oh for a Life of Sensations rather than Thoughts.”