T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

VIII

The girl in the department store asked me what size my wife took. I hesitated. “She’s a big one,” I said. “About the same size as me.” The girl helped me pick out a pink polyester pantsuit, matching brassiere, tall-girl panty hose. Before leaving the store I also visited the ladies’ shoe department and the cosmetic counter. At the cosmetic counter I read from a list: glosser, blusher, hi-lighter, eyeshadow (crème, cake and stick), mascara, eyeliner, translucent powder, nail polish (frosted pink), spike eyelashes, luscious tangerine lipstick, tweezers, a bottle of My Sin and the current issue of Be Beautiful. At the shoe department I asked for Queen Size.

IX

After two weeks of laying foundation, brushing on, rubbing in, tissuing off, my face was passable. Crude, yes — like the slick masks of the topless dancers — but passable nonetheless. And my hair, set in rollers and combed out in a shoulder-length flip, struck close on the heels of fashion. I was no beauty, but neither was I a dog.

I eased through the gate, sashayed up the walk, getting into the rhythm of it. Bracelets chimed at my wrists, rings shot light from my fingers. Up the steps, through the front door and into that claustrophobic hallway. My movement fluid, silky, the T-strap flats gliding under my feet like wind on water. I was onstage, opening night, and fired for the performance. But then I had a shock. One of the biker girls slouched at the end of the hallway lighting a cigar. I tossed my chin and strutted by. Our shoulders brushed. She grinned. “Hi,” she breathed. I stepped past her, and into the forbidden room.

It was dark. Candlelit. There were tables, booths, sofas and lounge chairs. Plants, hangings, carpets, woodwork. Women. I held back. Then felt a hand on my elbow. It was the biker. “Can I buy you a drink?” she said.

I shook my head, wondering what to do with my voice. Falsetto? A husky whisper?

“Come on,” she said. “Get loose. You’re new here, right? — you need somebody to show you around.” She pinched my elbow and ushered me to a booth across the room — wooden benches like church pews. I slid in, she eased down beside me. I could feel her thigh against mine. “Listen,” I said, opting for the husky whisper, “I’d really rather be alone—”

Suddenly Rubie was standing over us. “Would you like something?” she said.

The biker ordered a Jack Daniel’s on the rocks. I wanted a beer, asked for a sunrise. “Menu?” said Rubie. She was wearing a leather apron, and she seemed slimmer, her shoulders rounded. Whipped, I thought. Her ears protruded and her brushcut bristled. She looked like a Cub Scout. An Oliver Twist.

“Please,” I said, huskily.

She looked at me. “Is this your first time?”

I nodded.

She dug something — a lavender card — from an apron pocket. “This is our membership card. It’s twenty-five cents for a lifetime membership. Shall I put it on the bill?”

I nodded. And followed her with my eyes as she padded off.

The biker turned to me. “Ann Jenks,” she said, holding out her hand.

I froze. A name, a name, a name. This part I hadn’t considered. I pretended to study the menu. The biker’s hand hung in the air. “Ann Jenks,” she repeated.

“Valerie,” I whispered, and nearly shook hands. Instead I held out two fingers, ladylike. She pinched them, rubbed her thumb over the knuckles and looked into my eyes.

Then Rubie appeared with our drinks. “Cheers,” said Ann Jenks. I downed the libation like honey and water.

An hour and a half later I was two sheets to the wind and getting cocky. Here I was, embosomed in the very nave, the very omphalos of furtive femininity — a prize patron of the women’s restaurant, a member, privy to its innermost secrets. I sipped at my drink, taking it all in. There they were — women — chewing, drinking, digesting, chatting, giggling, crossing and uncrossing their legs. Shoes off, feet up. Smoking cigarettes, flashing silverware, tapping time to the music. Women among women. I bathed in their soft chatter, birdsong, the laughter like falling coils of hair. I lit a cigarette, and grinned. No more fairybook-hero thoughts of rescuing Rubie — oh no, this was paradise.

Below the table, in the dark, Ann Jenks’s fingertips massaged my knee.

I studied her face as she talked (she was droning on about awakened consciousness, liberation from the mores of straight society, feminist terrorism). Her cheekbones were set high and cratered the cheeks below, the hair lay flat across her crown and rushed straight back over her ears, like duck’s wings. Her eyes were black, the mouth small and raw. I snubbed out the cigarette, slipped my hand under the jacket and squeezed her breast. Then I put my tongue in her mouth.

“Hey,” she said, “want to go?”

I asked her to get me one more drink. When she got up I slid out and looked for the restroom. It was a minor emergency: six tequila sunrises and a carafe of dinner wine tearing at my vitals. I fought an impulse to squeeze my organ.

There were plants everywhere. And behind the plants, women. I passed the oriental girl and two housewives/divorcées in a booth, a nun on a divan, a white-haired woman and her daughter. Then I spotted the one-legged girl, bump and grind, passing through a door adjacent to the kitchen. I followed.

The restroom was pink, carpeted: imitation marble countertops, floodlit mirrors, three stalls. Grace was emerging from the middle one as I stepped through the door. She smiled at me. I smiled back, sweetly, my bladder aflame. Then rushed into the stall, fought down the side zipper, tore at the silky panties, and forgot to sit down. I pissed, long and hard. Drunk. Studying the graffiti — women’s graffiti. I laughed, flushed, turned to leave. But there was a problem: a head suspended over the door to the stall. Angry eyes. The towering Grace.

I shrugged my shoulders and held out my palms. Grace’s face was the face of an Aztec executioner. This time there would be no quarter. I felt sick. And then suddenly my shoulder hit the door like a wrecker’s ball, Grace sat in the sink, and the one-legged girl began gibbering from the adjoining compartment. Out the door and into the kitchen, rushing down an aisle lined with ovens, the stink of cooking food, scraps, greased-over plates, a screen door at the far end, slipping in the T-straps, my brassiere working round, Grace’s murderous rasping shriek at my back, STOP HIM! STOP HIM! and Rubie, pixie Rubie, sack of garbage in her hand at the door.

Time stopped. I looked into Rubie’s eyes, imploring, my breath cut in gasps, five feet from her. She let the garbage fall. Then dropped her head and right shoulder, and hit my knees like a linebacker. I went down. My face in coffee grounds and eggshells. Rubie’s white white arms shackles on my legs and on my will.

X

I have penetrated the women’s restaurant, yes, but in actuality it was little more than a rape. There was no sympathy, I did not belong: why kid myself? True, I do have a lifetime membership card, and I was — for a few hours at any rate — an unexceptionable patron of the women’s restaurant. But that’s not enough. I am not satisfied. The obsession grows in me, pregnant, swelling, insatiable with the first taste of fulfillment. Before I am through I will drink it to satiety. I have plans.

Currently, however, I am unable to make bail. Criminal trespass (Rubie testified that I was there to rob them, which, in its way, is true, I suppose), and assault (Grace showed the bruises on her shins and voice box where the stall door had hit her). Probation I figure. A fine perhaps. Maybe even psychiatric evaluation.

The police have been uncooperative, antagonistic even. Malicious jokes, pranks, taunts, their sweating red faces fastened to the bars night and day. There has even been brutality. Oddly enough — perhaps as a reaction to their gibes — I have come to feel secure in these clothes. I was offered shirt, pants, socks, shoes, and I refused them. Of course, these things are getting somewhat gritty, my makeup is a fright, and my hair has lost its curl. And yet I defy them.