28 – sometimes boys get lucky

 

  

By the time I got back from the deli, she had already settled into the living room, her cat, Jessie, patrolling the back of the couch like a border guard.

The bottle of valium had moved from the kitchen table along with the ingredients for her drinks to the coffee table. The TV was already on.

I settled beside her, feeling the day’s revelations fading, her valium affecting me even thought I hadn’t ingested any, my limbs growing heavy, my weary minding easing into a pleasant numbness I hadn’t felt for a long, long time.

 I could feel her calm breathing as she pressed into my side and felt myself reacting to her even thought she made none of her usual sexual innuendos.

This was the way it was supposed to be with boyfriend/girlfriend, I thought, keeping secret the pack of condoms, I had purchased at the deli along with the turkey clubs.

I still feared to set her off and didn’t want to lose this moment in m hunger to get something more.

The TV reeled off programing I did not recognize. I almost never watched television at home, except for the New York Yankees games in season, and that mostly with the sound off.

The lack of intimate knowledge made me something of a social outcast even among the night guards at the mall who talked about little else when not talking about sports or weather.

So, it came as no surprise when Peggy eyed me oddly over my naïve questions as to what we were watching.

“You really don’t know?” she asked.

“No.”

“You don’t get out much, do you?”

“Just because I don’t know what this program is?”

“It’s been on for years.”

“I haven’t watched TV in years.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t like to be brainwashed.”

“By TV?”

“By the ads.”

“You’re a sick puppy,” Peggy said. “Sometimes the ads are better than the shows.”

“Everything seems to run together for me,” I said, “Ads, shows, the faces change, but the situations don’t. It all seems repetitive.”

“You’re not supposed to analyze this stuff,” she said. “You’re supposed to sit back and get numb.”

“You mean like all the male characters are numb?”

“I don’t get you.”

“The bad guys seem normal enough – if a bit too clever. But the good guys, they’re all dotting and slow, always getting outwitted by the women in these shows.”

I didn’t say it, but these men reminded me of me over the las few weeks, and this scared me.

“And your point is?” she asked.

“Do all men seem as stupid as that to women?”

It took Peggy a moment to untangle herself from under my arm so she could rise up and stare more directly at me. She clearly needed to see if I was being serious.

“Of course, we do,” she said.

“Then why do you bother with us?”

Her blue eyes glinted with a look of disbelief, as well as an odd delight, as if she had discovered some new venue with which to poke fun at me. Her eyes rolled upward in a deliberate mocking plea for patience.

“Who are we going to bother with, dummy?” she asked. “Dolphin aren’t quite big enough where it counts.”

She poked me between the legs with the sharp tip of her fingernail.

“But…”

“Shush!” she said. “The show is back on.”

She slid back to her spot under my arm. She felt amazingly right being there like that.

But I still felt offended. I didn’t like being thought of as stupid, although I was scared to admit how naïve I actually was, one of those socially backwards kids in high school who had never learned the finger graces of male/female relationships, an angry, sometimes violent rebel who hated the whole social situation because it had no place for me.

Peggy, on the other hand, had learned all the rules, one of the popular girls in her high schools where boys fell over themselves to get closer to her, and she let them dangle until she needed something form them, always hanging out with her equally beautiful, best girlfriend, even later learning more outside of high school that she could use, the same routines to control men. This allowed her to hobnob with some pretty significant if equally stupid men in rock & roll and sports.

Then, something went wrong for her.

That kind of life wasn’t supposed to go on forever.

People – even popular girls – were supposed to grow up, shedding those experiences for more meaningful one such as marriage and childbirth, two institutions Peggy seemed unwilling to accept or had found no one acceptable to engage them with.

It wasn’t until many years later did I learn about the firefighter from Hackensack and her miscarriages, and how she fell into the sad pattern of an aging party girl. Even that fell apart for her when her best friend and party partner got married.

Although Peggy laughed about the marriage and made mocking, disparaging remarks about the man her friend had married, she clearly envied her friend and the ability to transcend when Peggy could not.

Peggy was hip enough to become maid of honor, showing off the photos with a begrudging pride.

“I don’t normally let people take my picture,” she told me. “But this was a special occasion.”

While Peggy smiled for the camera, it was clearly a forced smile.

She had lost her partner in crime and could find no one to replace her with, nor could Peggy find a way to follow in her best friend’s footsteps.

No man was good enough, but she continued to search.

Robert, of course, was the love of her life, someone I thought was someone she manufactured until I came across her high school year book and found he and she had been sweethearts even in school, the boy she talked about so much, hung around with so often, even cutting school with him, that even she assumed they would be husband and wife later, moving in with him at his family home in Hackensack, until he showed a mean streak she wasn’t aware of, and much of this jealousy over her strip club dancing.

He apparently still haunted her, even after she told him to get lost a year earlier.

A few days earlier, she and I were in the kitchen when something sounded in the hall. But unlike the previous visit by one of her drug customers, nobody knocked, but something slipped under the door.

When she retrieved the note and read it, she tore it to shreds.

“What was that?” I asked.

“It’s nothing,” she said, dropping the pieces into the trash, which still contained the wilted roses from a few weeks earlier.

I was still quietly fuming when the next commercial came on.

She eyed me with one eyebrow raised.

“You’re really disturbed about all this, aren’t you?” she asked.

“I like to think that life is more than just girls manipulating boys,” I said.

“That’s all it is.”

“What about all the romantic stuff, boy meets girl, boy wins girl’s heart?”

“Sheer nonsense,” she said, rising from under my arm again, standing, glancing down at me with that mocking smile of hers before she made her way back into the kitchen for more ice. She continued to speak from the kitchen amid the sound of cracking ice. “Some boys just get lucky. That’s all there is to it.”

“I don’t believe that,” I said.

She reappeared carrying a fresh glass filled with rattling ice.

“You’d better get used to it,” she said, “because it’s the way it is. Take my best friend and her marriage for instance. Do you really think she got won over by her husband? Hell, no, if anything, she laid in wait until she could spring her trap.”

Peggy didn’t sit back down on the couch next to me but fell into a stuffed armed chair near the window, looking and acting very much like a queen on a throne.

“A lot more happens in bed than men realize,” she said.

Peggy wasn’t looking at me, but off in space as some vision of her own, her eyes were hard, sparkling in the room’s lamp light as if her eyes were shards of glass. When she finally looked at me again, her gaze challenged me to argue the point.

“We’re not that stupid,” I said defiantly.

“Aren’t you?” she laughed. “You’re the one who thought I was frigid right up until you fucked my brains out.”

This was not an avenue of discussion I felt comfortable pursuing.

I could still see her agonized expression from when we made love, each stroke into her causing her more pain than pleasure, she enduring the whole ritual for some reason I still didn’t understand. If she wasn’t frigid, then she was something worse, the victim of some insidious violence I dared not imagine.

She seemed incapable of receiving pleasure from the act even some someone as gentle as I tried to be.

I could not mention it; I could not make her a victim twice.

“Which reminds me,” she said, putting her glass down onto the coffee table, as she shifted again to settle beside me on the couch, her fingers dancing playfully over my crotch. “I told you that you’re going to have to start wearing condoms. If you didn’t bring any, then don’t expect to get lucky tonight. I have no intention of getting myself pregnant.”

“That’s impossible,” I said.

“What’s impossible?” she asked coldly.

“Getting yourself pregnant,” I said. “You still need a man for that.”

“Not these days, darling,” she said, again smoothing over my pants with the palm of her hand. “It may not be as much fun, but science has found a way. Still, you’re going to have to use a condom, like it or not.”

“Is it different with a condom?”

Her brows jumped so high up her forehead I thought they might jump right off her face.

“Are you telling me you never used a condom before?”

“I won’t tell you,” I said, “But I haven’t.”

Peggy slapped her own cheek lightly with the palm of her hand.

“Oh my,” she said. “This is going to be a lot more complicated than I figured.”

“I did get these,” I said, drawing out the packet I had purchased while purchasing supper.

She took the packet, examined it for a long time, then looked at me.

“You just bought these?” she asked, eying me, then the packet again.

“That’s right.”

“You didn’t happen to notice these are unlubricated?”

“Is that important?”

“It could be,” she said with a shake of her head, then patted me on the shoulder. “Let’s not worry about it tonight. I’m safe for now. Later I can give you a course of Sex 101.”

Another program came on the TV. Peggy settled back under my arm, although she paid the TV less attention, glancing oddly at me and then again at the packet of condoms she still clutched, her shocked expression changing into one of suspicion.

I didn’t need to ask what she was thinking.

She wondered if I was lying, and if I could possibly be as naïve as I seemed.

I was that naïve. But I enjoyed her uncertainty. I wanted her to be a little off balance so that should con not so easily manipulate me the way she had so many other men.

Eventually, I started paying attention to the program, and realized I actually recognized one of the actors.

“What’s this show?” I asked.

“Moonlighting.”

“I know that actor,” I said.

“His name is Bruce Willis,” Peggy said. “The question is: where do you remember him from?”

“That’s a very good question,” I said, stumped.

Peggy let out a long sigh.

“Good going, Sherlock,” she said with a shake of her head. “Men aren’t really stupid, are they?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you just saw Bruce Willis in the movie we went to see, remember?”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Come on,” she said, rising. “Let’s go into the bedroom. There’s only some much brilliance I can stand for one evening.”

She flicked off the TV.

 

  Peggy Main Menu

email to Al Sullivan