Walter Mosley: Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

“Why obviously?” I asked.

“The fact of you sitting there like that, like I said before.”

The way he talked was playful. I couldn’t remember the last time someone played with conversation — with me.

“My name’s Rash,” he said. “Don’t ask me why.”

He held out a hand and I shook it against my better judgment.

“Sandra. Sandra Pinkney.”

“Vineland is my family name.”

“You don’t know why your parents named you Rash, Mr. Vineland?”

“My dad always said that it just seemed right. My sister’s named Susan and the younger brother is John.”

“They must hate you,” I said, feeling the smile take over my suspicions.

“Why do you say that?”

“Here your siblings were given vanilla names and you got something special, a name that one out of ten million don’t get. You might be the only Rash Vineland in the whole world. I bet you are.”

He squinted at my explanation and I liked him... some.

“You know,” he said, “you might be right about that. I have to call John three times before he’ll call me back, and Susan had a birthday party and invited everyone in the family except me. She said that the invitation must have gotten lost in the mail. But the way she said it made me wonder.”

“You see?” I said, realizing that somehow Rash Vineland had lured me into conversation.

“Are you a therapist?” he asked.

“What do you mean?” The word had many connotations in my line of work.

“You know... a psychoanalyst or something like that.”

I grinned. That might not seem like much but it was rare for me to express any kind of goofy humor. I’d pretty much stopped thinking that silly moments were worth laughing about on the day my father died.

“Why is that funny?” Rash asked.

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-two.”

“And what are you doing here?”

“I like this place. I come here to read The New York Times at least twice a week.”

“We’re in Los Angeles.”

“I know,” he said, looking down at my worn blue tennis shoes. “It’s kinda egotistical, I guess, something like that. I feel important reading the New York paper.”

“Are your parents from there?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been there?”

“Naw. Have you?”

“A few times.”

“On business?”

“I have to go.”

“To New York?”

“No. I have to leave... here.”

There was no artifice to the disappointment in his expression. Rash wasn’t going to ask me to stay or even if he could talk to me again. I imagined that he would come to Monarc’s almost every day for a couple of weeks hoping to see me again... Me, dressed in a pale-yellow-and-faded-blue muumuu with tattered tennis shoes on my feet.

I was liking him more.

“I’ll tell you what, Rash.”

“What?”

“I want you to write down your phone number on my place mat. I have no idea if I’ll call you but at least I’ll know how. Okay?”

“Absolutely.”

When I got home I turned on our state-of-the-art security system, retrieved my father’s pistol, and made sure that it was loaded.

I changed the bullets yearly so that they’d have pop. My daddy taught me how to shoot on a range east of Riverside.

The answering machine had twenty-seven messages on it but I didn’t listen to any of them. Instead I strolled through the dark house into the master’s bedroom (as Theon always called it) and rolled up into the blankets thinking of a worm luxuriating in its own silk.

I turned on a lamp and started reading The Autumn of the Patriarch . That was a book I read often because it made poetry out of the rot and disarray of a life that seemed a lot like mine. The president was Theon and I was an unremarkable peasant among the hundreds who sometimes lived in his sphere. With these ephemeral ideas in mind I nodded and soon found myself asleep.

I loved Theon in my sleep that night. He was an ideal husband, a man who took care of so many people and things that he didn’t have time for children — or even a proper job.

He broiled me steaks while preparing avocado salsas, squeezed lemonade from the fruit off our own tree, and then, after the meal, he washed the dishes before asking could he fuck my ass.

The sour lemonade on my dreaming lips ushered me into another dream:

I was on a posh set that I had once shot on in southern France. It was the living room that led to an outside veranda of some duke’s mansion on the Mediterranean. There were four cameramen (not including photographers) and some of the most beautiful men I had ever seen. They were all naked and fully erect, looking at me haughtily and yet somehow hungrily.

“All right, Deb,” Linda Love shouted.

I knew even in the dream that she didn’t belong there. The director at the beach house was Polish, very tall, and dripping with the veneer of sophistication.

I looked in a full-length mirror that had been placed on the set and saw myself. My hair was long and white. The tattoo was there under my left eye. I could tell somehow that it was now permanent and a sadness filled me. My breasts were small again, sagging a little.

“Debbie.”

“Yes, Linda?”

“This is going to be a revolutionary shoot. We’re going to make millions on it.”

“We?”

“The owners.”

Then there was a tall beautiful man with tanned skin and no pubic hair standing before me. I fell to my knees and took the head of his huge, upstanding erection in my mouth.

“Slower, Deb,” Linda whispered from across the room.

I could hear the waves crashing because the doors to the veranda were open wide.

“Slower?” I asked. All Linda had ever asked me for was more passion.

“You’re making love to him,” she said.

“What shot are you trying to get?”

“Don’t worry about the shot. Just go with your feelings.”

Whatever he did to me I wanted him to do. The feeling inside me was the sound of waves: waves in my womb, flushing out my rectum, across my clitoris, and rushing between my toes. I screamed with pleasure but the sounds were drowned by the turbulent Mediterranean Sea.

“I’m going to enter into your side now,” my well-oiled lover said.

The room had grown to infinite proportions. The cameramen had put down their cameras. Linda was reclining in her director’s chair. The crew members were all sitting on the floor smiling and watching.

“You’re going to turn me on my side?” I asked.

“No,” he said. He had a slight accent but I couldn’t place it. “I’m going to press my cock in through your skin and under your ribs, into your body.”

“But that would kill me.”

“You can learn to live with anything.”

I wanted to say no but the scene of the dream shifted and I was on a hassock with the Adonis there next to me moving his erection deeper and deeper into my side. It was a very uncomfortable feeling, like gas and freefall at once.

“See?” he said. “You feel it inside. They all are watching me fuck you. They want to see it from every side and in every way. You feel me between your intestines, under your heart, pressing, pressing?”

And for the briefest moment I tried; I tried to accept his presence inside my body, a sexual surgeon on a syndicated reality TV program. I could feel the hunger and fear of the crew as he pushed farther into me.

Then I woke up.

Actually I threw myself from the bed, landing hard on the side of my left knee. I was up immediately, fleeing from the bedroom. I turned on lights as I ran. I choked on a sour taste that seemed to rise up from my defiled internal organs. I made it all the way to our white-on-white sunken living room.

Theon had called it my polar bear room.