Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

“I never thought about it, but there is something wrong … something is missing … something bothers me about modern jazz,” said the owner of the phonograph, the brunette, and I did not hasten to point out that Beethoven would sound like a tin dish thrown down the alley on that music box of hers.

“Anyway, let’s dance !” I said, getting up. Ferg and crowd were into a hard bop number now, and I couldn’t keep still. Apparently these gals weren’t used to dancing and thought it was a bit gauche and goofy to do, but I had them all up imitating me in a little number called the beau-bitch back home, which requires a lot of shrugging in time with hands on the ribs. All five of us were out on the floor, kicking paper around and jarring the phonograph. Ten minutes of this, and we’d passed high tide in the party.

“My God, what a night!” the girl with the dehaired cat’s face sighed. She and the other two thought they’d turn in. God knows what passed for fun among this crowd — probably a flat tire on the bus back to North Carolina. I noticed the apartment was strange in that each girl went to a separate sleeping room, tiny rooms; each room had a thin ply-wood door, and the girls closed each one resolutely.

Then I heard breathing in back of the doors, and a bump of wood somewhere.

“You know what those girls are doing, don’t you? “whispered Sylvia. We were sitting on the longest wooden bench. I didn’t know what she was talking about. “They’re all listening to us. They’re leaning against the doors holding their breath.”

“Why?”

“They know I’m engaged. They want to hear what you and I are going to do. They know I like you.”

“Really? Thank you. I like you, Sylvia. What can they hear?”

“Almost everything. They can hear in here just about what we can hear in there.” I listened and did in fact hear one girl who seemed to have her lungs pressed against the door. “Let’s just talk a while. We can turn up the record player.”

She talked a long while, beginning on an excursus about her roommates and ending with her boyfriend. It seems all four of the girls had gotten so scared of New York by their second week that they had each written letters to the boys back home saying Yes, darling, she would marry him. Sealed With A Kiss. Dumped into the envelope almost an ounce of an intriguing perfume she had bought in a weird shop in Greenwich Village. Caused the faithful weather cocks to spin around deliriously on the roof down at Charlotte, or Ashville, Winston-Salem, or Rayford, once the boy received the letter.

As for Sylvia Wyche, the girl from Durham, N. C., she was affianced to a sad cat who couldn’t even make his C’s at Chapel Hill. He was from Rayford and drove fast cars which his old man, an old bard as concerns gasburning engines, rigged up for him. Sylvia said this boy was good-looking and she had never figured out any way of forgetting him. She said this boy, in his one semester at Chapel Hill, was the best-dressed boy on campus. He wore seven different suits, rotating them every week, and her heart went out to him and his family because she knew his folks couldn’t afford to dress him like that and he wasn’t even comfortable in those Ivy League suits, but wanted to make himself proud so badly as a college man. He attended all his classes and received D’s and F’s. Sylvia liked him also because he knew when to call it quits. “Here, I’m going to make a B at N.Y.U. in History of American Indians, but I’m still just so unhappy ,” she sighed. But her lover-boy went back to Ray-ford and getting speeding tickets and having his driver’s license suspended and working at the fiberg lass plant.

She almost never stopped talking about him, and sung out his name, Charles! Chbrles! so it went echoing in agony down the hall of doors.

“Are you really everything you say you are, Harriman? Are you really a trumpet player from Tulane that plays on Bourbon Street in the night clubs? Are you as sweet as you seem, even so, when you know that you really ought to be swell-headed and have nothing to do with a nothing like me?” Sylvia had finished a second glass of champagne and was flinging around doing her limbs everywhere. I swore to her that I had always tried to be sweet when I saw some-body like her, who deserved it. She put her hand on the neck of this striped shirt I was wearing and dragged it down so it peeled off my shoulders.

I had been shyly cupping her breast in my hand since we’d slid off the bench and eased to the floor (hard as a bone, ugly tiles of brown), but I was so high from champagne it was like my hand was working separate from me. I didn’t expect that Sylvia would be this serious so soon, and my body was still lax, my head still thinking about poor Charles in the fiberglass plant down at Reyford.

“Let’s get these out of the way,” Sylvia said. She reached up in her skirt and dragged out her panties, which were yellow. She got them over her blue tennis shoes with a little effort and kept them clutched in her hand. I had my arms under hers and was not daring to look. The phono-graph was going high. Sylvia stared at me for several moments, giving me her face. She was tense and desperate, and the long hairs along her forehead were lying stiff in an upside-down crown of red, and I could see tears of sweat bursting out of her pores; her eyes were green and watery.

“ Please don’t think this is stupid, but — Do you know what a girl’s hymen is? That’s what makes a girl a virgin. I don’t want you to go through that. That’s for Charles. I know I have some space before you get to that, and I want … Please, now.”

I was kneeling between her legs studying the white, unfreckled thighs, the. shocking red hair with roots of brown. She was lifting the purple wound below it so very high. Her tennis shoes came back to rest under her thighs. What a sight! There are some I’ve talked to who have no trouble comprehending the beauty and slavish, passive cunt of a woman, with its thorny, rather prohibitive hair. But me! I’m so sensitive toward these way-out foreign shores, it’s like I’m a blubbering near-corpse washed up in Rangoon harbor, with crabs ganged around me and pinching me out of the water, and I stand on the beach seeing a temple of jewels in a flying architecture. So I go in.

“Not too far!” she begs of me. My first woman is telling me that. “Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t. Please, please, please. No, No, No!” These are the words I got from Sylvia, who labors with brown shirt and pearl buttons and pale blue skirt lying around her stomach. Her tennis shoes flap on the floor, Sylvia looks down astonished. She looks up at me, with some kind of cautious love on her face.

“I love you,” she huffs. “Again! I don’t care.”

I got out of there. The phonograph had stopped some-time about three-quarters way through our act. I could hear the silence and all our sighing. The hall doors were bowing in, cracking at the joints of the plywood; the girls had listened to enough and were lying on their doors to hear more. Sylvia had been loud. “A-a-a-a-a-a-ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhwrrrrrr!” she’d yelled and had kept it up almost all the way.

One thing about New York: you really can tell some-body goodbye. You aren’t going to see them again. Not in the bus station, not in the train station, not at the airport, and even if you do see one another (like I saw Sylvia at the airport with her friends, running back and forth along the seats, so nervous about her life that she couldn’t stand to take anything as slow as a bus back to North Carolina, and her friends were raising their eyes and seeing her off), even if you do see one another, this is Idlewild Airport, and there are ten people between you and whoever you don’t want to see.