Walter Mosley: Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

A university professor I dated for a while told me that I was just a recreational reader, way outside of the educational system he lived in.

“You only talk about phrases and what the characters are feeling but you have no notion of the literary ideas or intentions,” he said one night after I’d untied him. “You’d be lost in one of my classes. If I hadn’t talked to you like this I wouldn’t have believed that there was a literate thought in your head.”

“But aren’t your classes about what people in books say and feel?” I asked, as if I were making an appeal in a higher court.

“No,” he said. “The study of literature today is about structure and underlying intention; it’s about the way in which the themes of literature, historically, resonate with one another.”

I stopped answering his calls after that. Professor Abraham was of no use to me if his world and mine were unconnected. We were, I thought, like two islands so close that one could see the other in great detail but the life evolving on each was separated by aeons of evolution.

I loved books and their stories and characters. Books were faithful and true in ways that real people could never be.

But that night, after Theon and Jolie had expired, I was paralyzed, unable even to imagine reading. Big Dick Palmer, completely without volition, had filled me with passion that Lana’s sorrow had punctured and depleted. The deaths were a part of my paralysis but not essential to it, no more than Myron was a part of my orgasm. I felt closer to Lieutenant Mendelson’s timidity and Lana’s unabashed grief than I did to my own husband, his weakness and self-demolition.

Theon had abandoned me but men had been leaving me all my life. His death was a more familiar occurrence than all the years we spent together.

After failing to summon up the will to reach for my book I tried to recall the feeling of my unexpected orgasm. I closed my eyes and imagined that spot of pain and Myron’s grunting and Carmen Alia’s clicking, insectlike camera. But none of it worked. I was numb, had been numb for years but never really knew it. I sometimes experienced this feeling of detachment as disinterest. At other times I mistook my lack of connection for the natural disdain a beautiful woman has for an ugly world. I had, for many years, taken for emotion the hungry look that men and women had for me. I had falsely perceived my own sensations as their oohs and aahs, grunts and groans, catcalls and blown kisses.

These ideas settled in my bed with Lana’s breathing and the thought of Theon on a slab somewhere.

I remembered when Theon had proposed to me.

We were in a small casino in Vegas and both drunk. Theon got sloppy when he drank too much. Matching him drink for drink I moved, and thought, a little slower. The inebriation brought on by alcohol was just a more leisurely version of my sobriety.

“Let’s get married,” he said while fingering me under the table.

I was young, and wet, and Theon had driven us to Vegas in a fire-engine-red Rolls-Royce (which was leased but I didn’t know that at the time).

“Okay,” I said with a leer, “but no more PJ for you until there’s a ring on my finger and we’ve both said ‘I do.’ ”

I didn’t think he was serious. I mean who would want to marry an eighteen-year-old girl who fucks for a living?

But Theon took me in a taxi to an aqua-and-pink-plaster twenty-four-hour chapel, where he presented me with a very expensive emerald and diamond engagement ring and paid a thousand dollars for the finest fast-food marital service.

What I remembered was the fact that he was thoughtful enough to have brought the ring on our little holiday, that and the smile on his face when I said the words of acceptance. I felt something then, like a smile drifting from my center up toward my lips.

Evoking that memory I tried to cry but couldn’t. Even the best moment of my thirteen years of marriage with Theon failed to summon up a tear.

I lay there frozen and unfeeling, like a corpse in the snow waiting for the spring thaw. This sense of death brought an unexpected calm into my breast.

Theon was gone, running into death after the same quim he’d chased since the day he achieved his first erection. Jolie, I felt, somehow died in my place, enticing him with her passion to be seen and adored while collecting a paycheck and pining for love.

These plain truths soothed me. I shifted onto my side and lost consciousness while breathing in the sweet scent of Lana’s troubled sleep.

Someone was kissing my left nipple. It was a feathery kiss with a small lick at the end. The kisser was experienced, knew how to keep their hunger at bay while physically expressing a rapacious desire.

“Hello,” I said.

I opened my eyes on a sun-drenched morning. Lana was leaning over me, retreating from my big, black, wet nipple.

She blew on it and said, “I’m sorry, Deb, I just always wanted to do that.”

“It’s okay with me but what would Linda Love have to say?”

“You won’t tell her, will you?”

“Of course not.”

Hearing this, Lana closed her small mouth and breathed in through her nose, somehow communicating that she’d like to show me other things she’d always wanted to do.

“Not today, baby,” I said. “I just couldn’t after all that happened.”

“I understand,” she said. And she did too. She understood that I would never be her lover but that I wasn’t rejecting her as a person.

“Help me up?” I said.

Little Lana got on her knees and pulled my wrists. This movement imbued me with energy again. I remember feeling that if I had been alone I might have never gotten up.

“I’ll go make us breakfast,” she said.

When Lana left the room I went to the closet and was rendered immobile again for a time. There were latex minidresses, and cashmere pantsuits with holes stitched in so that I couldn’t really wear underwear with them. I had a few Catholic-girl miniskirt uniforms and a dozen pairs of pants that fit so tight they adhered to my sex close enough that the casual stranger could know my form as well as Theon did. I’m naturally tall, so the rows of five-inch heels and platform shoes were designed to make me tower over most men. My blouses were all two sizes too small — T-shirts too. I couldn’t sit without exposing myself in the little black dresses, and all of my panties were white and thong.

“Black-and-white is my signature,” I often said, “from me and my Caucasian husband to this small black dress and my white silk panties.”

I could hear Lana in the kitchen making our breakfast. This act, more than the kiss, told of the love she harbored for me.

At the back of the twenty-four-foot-wide, five-foot-deep closet was a brown paper bag that contained a calf-length yellow-and-blue dress that I filched from a BBW named Wanda in a specialty film I’d once made. Wanda weighed two hundred eighty-five pounds and that dress fit her like a glove. Under that was a pair of worn blue tennis shoes. Inside the left shoe was a.32 caliber midnight special, the only legacy my father had left after being shot in the street by a thug named Kirkland. He’d staggered into the house and into my mother’s arms, blood spilling over her clean white dress and the floor.

As I was putting on the billowy dress the phone rang. I heard it but felt no need to answer. It rang five times before it stopped and Lana piped, “Hello?”

She talked intermittently. I could make out random words but not the sentences they formed.

I finished dressing, put my father’s gift into a big blue purse, and headed for the kitchen.

I don’t know why I decided to take my father’s pistol; maybe my meditations on death resonated with the hardware the way Professor Abraham’s books echoed through history.