Max Collins - Quarry

I flipped over on my back, reached over to the nightstand and yanked a tissue from the Kleenex box and wiped myself off. My stomach muscles were aching, but pleasantly; I felt drained, but in a nice way. And my shoulder wasn’t bothering me at all. I propped a pillow up behind me, half-sitting, half-lying, and stared at the ceiling.

Earlier, when we’d finished the second grapefruit, we had moved into the living room, continuing our small talk. But as we approached the sofa, Peg had said, “This place is too goddamn depressing, it’s like talking in a rest home,” and I’d followed her into the bedroom, where her unmade double bed had obviously been slept in on one side only. The room wasn’t much different from the rest of the apartment; the furniture in here was just as pedestrian as out there, though unlittered by doilies and knickknacks. Just another study in stucco-walled apartment complex typicality, though considerably livened up by a smattering of posters, the brightest being reprints of gaudy old film ads from the Thirties, one showing King Kong having a gay old time atop the Empire State Building, another showing the Marx Brothers having equally good a time at the circus. There was also an orange poster showing an underground cartoonist’s vision of pinheaded men with very thick legs and large feet dancing in a line, the words “Keep on Truckin’” over their heads. Next to that was a poster of that pointy-eared spaceman from TV, while on another two rhinos humped below the words “Make Love Not War.” The most striking was a black and white poster of Marilyn Monroe’s face, right over the bed. The effect of them was strange, as instead of counteracting the elderly aura of the outer apartment, these posters, these free spirits, seemed imprisoned in this room in this old folks home of an apartment, and seemed to be looking at me, saying, “What are we doing here?” I couldn’t help but wonder if Peg had put them up to keep sanity while her mother was alive and dominating this world, or if she had put them up since her mother’s death, for company. I didn’t ask and she didn’t tell me. All she did was sit down on the bed, right under the Monroe picture, and looked at me with her lips slightly parted, as though she were going to say something, going to actually continue the small-talk we’d begun over grapefruit. But she hadn’t done that. I’d put a finger to her lips and had pulled the blue sweater gently over her head. She hadn’t protested. In fact she’d gone on to slip out of her hotpants and the blue lacy panties and helped me out of my clothes.

I heard water running in the other room and I sat up straight and called out, “What are you doing?”

“Taking a bath! Care to join me?”

I walked into the bathroom. She wasn’t in the tub yet; she was leaning down testing the water. I touched her back and she turned around and came into my arms and we kissed. It was a long kiss.

She said, “That’s the first time you ever kissed me.”

“I’ve only known you an hour and a half. Give me a chance.”

“Well, you screwed me. I’d think you would’ve had the decency to kiss me before you screwed me.”

“You didn’t seem to be interested in kissing.”

“I guess we both sort of skipped the preliminaries.”

“I guess so.”

“I guess people don’t kiss as much as they used to.”

“I guess not.”

“I guess they’d rather get down to business.”

“I guess.”

We kissed again. Just as long. “You know something?” she said.

“What?”

“It’s too bad kissing’s gone so out of style.”

“Why’s that?”

“It’s nice. Next time, tell you what.”

“What?”

“Let’s not skip the preliminaries.”

“You complaining about my technique?”

“Hardly.”

We kissed again. Shorter this time.

“Let’s get in the tub,” she said.

“Okay,” I said.

We got in, her in front; I soaped her back and kissed her neck.

She said, “I always take a bath after I screw.”

“Always?”

“Always.”

“What if you screw in the backseat of a car?”

“I sponge-bathe,” she said, and laughed. “No, you silly bastard, I take a bath as soon as I get home, in that case.”

“You like baths.”

“Yeah. You suppose I take baths after I screw because of guilt feelings? Like Lady Macbeth washing the blood off her hands?”

“I don’t know. I like to swim.”

“That’s like bathing.”

“Only you don’t have to fuck around washing.”

“Why do you suppose you like to swim, Quarry?”

“I like the feeling of water on me. All over me.”

“Pass the soap up here.”

“Okay.”

“Quarry.”

“Yeah?”

“You want to hear about the pink Mustang?”

“Sure.”

“It’s kind of personal.”

“I just screwed you, didn’t I? How much more personal can you get?”

“Screws aren’t always personal.”

“Oh?”

“Ours was a pretty personal screw. In twenty years I could tell somebody about that screw. How many screws can you remember well enough to tell about them the next day, even?”

“What about the Mustang?”

“There was this guy in Chicago. I was working as a Bunny in the club there, you know? He saw me in the magazine, the nude pose. He fell in love-at-first-sight with me, he said. He kept coming around the club, bothering me. It was getting me in trouble, almost lost me my job, you’re not supposed to fraternize with the customers, you know. So I agreed to go out with him, if he wouldn’t pester me. I went out with him and I didn’t like him at first. He wasn’t crude or anything, not your preconceived notion of what a gangster would be.. oh, I didn’t mention that, did I? He was a mob person of some kind. I suppose he killed people, or had them killed, but I didn’t think about that. If I’d’ve known for sure, it might’ve bothered me, so I never asked. We went together for a year and six months. He took me all over, Las Vegas, the Bahamas once. Then I found out he had a wife. I was humiliated. Oh, I wasn’t that much of a Iowa hick, I’d dated married men before, but I’d always known. I was with him a year and six months and he never told me, never mentioned it. He was older than he looked, he was fifty maybe and looked forty, and he was married to some old broad who didn’t care if he studded around. When I got upset, upset about his being married, he bought me a present. See, Playboy picks a Playmate of the Year, you know, and that year they gave the winning Playmate a pink Mustang. So he gave me a pink Mustang. He said I was his Playmate of the Year, and I guess I should have been insulted by the implication of that, but I knew how he meant it and it made me cry. He gave me the pink Mustang and told me he’d call me in a week, after I had some time to forgive him. But during that week he died. Or was killed, maybe, I don’t, know. He was found in his garage, door shut, car running, the carbon monoxide killed him, accidentally, on purpose, whatever. What’s it matter? That was seven years ago. I keep the Mustang in top shape. It’s like new. It’s going to kill me when I have to junk it, eventually.”

“Do you remember the first time you screwed with him?”

“No,” she said, a hint of surprise in her voice. “No, he couldn’t screw for shit.”

She didn’t say anything for a moment and then I realized she was crying. I wanted to help her but didn’t know what to do. I touched her shoulder and that seemed to do the trick.

We were putting our clothes on in the bedroom when I heard something outside that sounded like thunder. I went to the window and drew back the curtain and it was thunder. “I’ll be goddamned,” I said, “the sky’s black. It’s going to rain like a son of a bitch.”