Reed Coleman - They Don't Play Stickball in Milwaukee

That was. . Jesus, I don’t know. I wasn’t keeping time. I wanted to join her in the shower, but she resisted. She said she liked the scent of sex on a man. I was stunned by her, by her skillful blend of ritual and spontaneity. I had never been with a woman so understanding of her partner, so aware of herself and so young. It was an addictive combination to a man with as many miles on him as I had. She had the rare ability to make the few seconds leading up to orgasm more exciting than the orgasm itself. It was no wonder that Zak was intimidated by her. At nineteen I was so unsure, so inexperienced that I wanted to jump out of my own skin. I would have been completely overmatched by a woman like Kira. I was overmatched now.

As I waited for her to return to my bed, I wondered if Zak had been embarrassed by Kira, if he still hurt when he thought about her. I wondered if he was all right. I fell asleep wondering.

I felt her slide herself around me as I opened my eyes. Light crept in through the shade, but it was so diffuse that it did not blind me. My vision was grainy, faded like a blowup from a cheap photo lab. Her back was to me, riding slowly, the muscles of her vagina tight against me. I lay back for a minute and let her ride. I reached up and ran my fingers through her thick, straight, ebony hair. It was frighteningly like silk, too perfect.

“Pull it!” she demanded, picking up her pace. “Pull it! Make it hurt!”

As I pulled, I got an eerie feeling that I had done this before. I hadn’t. Believe me, I would remember. But I couldn’t escape the familiarity of the scene. There was a resonance in her words, even in the way she rode me.

“That’s it!” she sighed. “Harder!”

I pulled harder. She quickened the pace. She reached back, taking my right hand, and guided it onto her right nipple. I pinched it, but not too hard. She gasped. Her back muscles flexed erratically. Her thighs began to stiffen. And as they did, another wave of resonance passed through me. My head was swimming, fighting to keep one part of itself uninvolved. Was I losing it completely? Had I done this before?

“Harder!” she repeated. “Pinch it! Pinch it!”

I sat up some and placed my left index finger on the moving target of her clitoris. When I found it, Kira wrapped her hand around my finger and rubbed herself. We rubbed together, fast and faster. We were very close now. I waited for her to start crying: “Please! Please! Please!” But that cry never came.

“That’s it, lover,” she sang. “That’s it! Hard-er. Hard-er”’

Breathless, she could barely speak the words. And again the words, even the intonations were familiar to me. But how?

“Oh God, Wyatt! Wyatt! Wyatt!” she screamed, stiffened around me, and shook so fiercely the bed moved. “Wyatt.”

As I writhed in orgasm beneath her, the confusion vanished. Wyatt Rosen was my character, the detective featured in my two novels: Coney Island Burning and They Don’t Play Stickball in Milwaukee. In They Don’t Play, Wyatt Rosen hooks up with a newspaper reporter named Anne Curtis. In an attempt to gain insight into Rosen’s investigation of an allegedly corrupt Wisconsin congressman-a transplanted Brooklynite, hence the title of the book-Curtis enters into a steamy affair with the detective. On the morning after their first night together, Anne Curtis wakes Rosen up in exactly the same manner Kira did me. Curtis speaks the same words Kira spoke. No wonder the scene was familiar to me. I wrote it.

“You’re better than Anne Curtis,” I said, pulling Kira onto my chest.

“Thank you,” she whispered. “That scene between Wyatt and Anne is the most erotic thing I have ever read. It’s ironic, when Zak bought me your book, I avoided reading it at first.”

“Not much of a detective fiction fan, huh?”

“No. And I didn’t want to hurt Zak’s feelings anymore than I already had.”

“What hap-”

“Let’s not talk about it,” she cut me off. “I’ve wanted to meet you for a long time, but I never thought I could be with you.”

“Dream big, that’s what I say.” I laughed.

She punched my arm playfully and slid her hair down my chest, down my belly. “As I recall, Anne couldn’t get enough of Wyatt,” Kira said as she put me in her mouth.

Anne Curtis, of course, was lying about that. But for some odd reason I chose not to remind Kira of that.

We showered together. Kira was more playful in the light. I wanted to take her to breakfast, but she turned me down. She had acted out a dream. Dreams end in the morning, she said, don’t push them. To push them is to destroy them. We had real lives to get back to. She had to go to her room and find her paper on twentieth-century existential novels. I had to find Zak.

We talked while she dressed. I asked about her loneliness. She didn’t run away from the subject. She had been born in Tokyo, but her father, a V.P. for Japan Airlines, was transferred to Chicago when she was only four, to San Francisco when she was nine, to L.A. when she was eleven, and finally to New York when she was fourteen.

“I was kind of an army brat,” she said sadly, “but without the support of others with the same fate. At least army brats have the base. Then, when I was seventeen, my father was given his big promotion and called back home.”

“You stayed?”

“What choice did I have, really? I wasn’t Japanese. I wasn’t American. I was both and neither. I had no good friends here, but I had none there. My family in Japan were strangers to me. In America at least, there is room for misfits. At home-listen to me-sorry. In Japan, a misfit is treated like a protruding nail. It is hammered down. I will not be hammered down.”

“I can see that. You’re pretty brave,” I said.

“No, Dylan. Only people with choices can be brave.”

I asked again, as I had the night before, if she knew any other of Zak’s friends who might be able to help. The answer was unchanged. She and Zak guarded their friendship jealously. They did not mix in the other’s circle. She asked if she could check in with me. I said that was a silly question. I asked if we might dream again. She said we would have to see what the night would bring. We left it there.

I went down to the local pancake house and had a breakfast that would have made my Uncle Saul jealous. Uncle Saul was the only man I knew who could have lunch while still eating breakfast. He had also consumed enough scotch whiskey to float an aircraft carrier. It worked for him. Saul was eighty-four and looked like sixty. Who needed bran and mineral water?

Somewhere between the cheese omelet and the corned beef hash, I managed to read the local paper. It was pretty much what you’d expect: two pages of local news, two pages of national and international news off the wire, an editorial about zoning variances, and twenty-three pages of advertisements.

I was about to put the paper down, when I overheard two guys who seemed to be groundskeepers from the college angrily discussing somebody named Jones. Their anger had a nasty racial bent. “Crack-pushin’ nigger” topped the list of their favorite phrases. “Black bitch is just like her daddy” was a close second. I turned back to page three of the Riversborough Gazette. The headline read: “JONES JURY SELECTION TODAY.”

Valencia Jones was big news in Riversborough. A freshman last year, Ms. Jones was stopped for a broken taillight as she was leaving town at Spring break. In spite of the fact that both her license and registration were in order, the cops searched her vehicle. In Riversborough, apparently, black face plus BMW equals reasonable cause. Their search netted two vials of a drug the cops were calling Isotope. Relatively cheap and easily produced, Isotope was a far more potent chemical variant of LSD. The paper said that the cops said that one of the vials found in the spare tire compartment of Ms. Jones’ car contained enough Isotope to dose all of New York City. But since you can never believe what you read or what cops say about drugs, I figured there was enough Isotope in the vial to dose the Bronx. Anyway you cut it, that’s a lot of stoned New Yorkers.