Frank Portman - King Dork

Too late, I realized I had committed some horrible (devil-head) faux pas. I quickly got rid of my shoes and slithered out of my jeans and sat there in my U.S. Army shirt and white 220

BVDs leaning against Deanna Schumacher’s headboard. It had a horse on it. I looked pretty stupid, I’m sure, and I’m not surprised that Deanna Schumacher started snickering a little bit. “You’ve got to get some boxers,” she said.

What she did then was kind of weird, or I thought it was weird. She put her glasses on the pillow next to me, slid under the sheet, and put it over her shoulders like it was Superman’s cape or something; and then she moved the sheet so that it was over her head, too; and then she kind of swooped down and the official blow job part of the program began. I wasn’t really in a position to complain, but the sheet was kind of a bummer. I wanted to watch, to see what it looked like, as I had been fantasizing about this precise scenario since time immemorial and I was pretty interested in how the reality would match up to the pretend images and the porn. She clearly didn’t like being observed while she worked, however. She also wasn’t very into having a person’s hands on her head during this operation, even though I couldn’t help putting them there anyway, just a bit. That wasn’t a deal-breaking faux pas, though. I realized, with a bit of a shock, that even King Dork, the (devil-head) embodiment of the faux pas, hadn’t committed a deal-breaking faux pas the whole time. Maybe, in the end, there weren’t any deal-breaking faux pas in this situation. I didn’t have a lot of data at my disposal, you understand.

It was great. It really was. But I was also very aware of the ticking pumpkin-meter, and it made me nervous and distracted. Yeah, that was probably it.

At one point she leaned up, the sheet around her face like a—what’s it called? Babushka, I think. But she didn’t say

“matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match.” What she said, in a hurried whisper, was:

“We only have around ten minutes left, Tom-Tom.”

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“Okay, okay,” I said. It was nice to get the reminder, though hearing her say it made me even more nervous.

However, I wasn’t going to let this one go. It was my big chance. I concentrated and replayed my memory of the episode with the real Fiona in my head, as I had done hundreds of times before, and it relaxed and excited me at the same time as it always did. We were back on the right track.

And it wasn’t long before I was feeling glad all over, believe me.

Then she emerged from her little sheet fort, leaned up, and pulled my hair back from my face so it was flat on top of my head, staring at me up close from above for what seemed like quite a while, despite the still-ticking clock. Then she said:

“My boyfriend gets off at ten, and he’s going to be here any minute, so you’re going to have to get out of here.

Don’t”—she paused—“Don’t, um, please don’t—” I could tell she wasn’t sure how to ask me not to tell anyone about what had just happened. It was the only time during the whole episode where she seemed less than perfectly composed and all-knowing.

My look said “oh, absolutely not. Absolutely not. Your secret is safe with me.” But she was no slan, so I added, out loud, “Don’t worry—I won’t tell anyone. Promise.” She smiled, and then leaned over and kissed me softly and lightly on the mouth. A hefty twenty-four words and a couple of urgent inarticulate spasms had escaped my lips during the whole affair, but I couldn’t help adding another four words in spite of myself. “You’re very pretty, Deanna.” And I meant it, too. I suddenly realized that she kind of reminded me of the

“Thinking of Suicide?” girl from the pamphlet, which really pushed my buttons. But Deanna Schumacher didn’t seem too interested in discussing the matter any further at the moment.

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Maybe “you’re very pretty” was laying it on too thick. It’s really hard to know.

She said she was going to have to run upstairs to brush her teeth. Straightening up the place for the next customer, I guess. “It was very nice seeing you again, Tom-Tom, after all these years,” she said, back in her well-mannered element.

“Say hello to your mother and sister for me. Maybe you could come by again sometime. . . .”

I was very, very proud of myself.

On the way home, I was singing “Glad All Over,” “My Baby Loves Lovin’,” and “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy,” at the top of my lungs as I rode through the near-deserted streets.

When I did “Fox on the Run,” I tried to sing the “I” loud enough that it would echo, “I . . . I . . . I . . . , ” just like on the record. And it kind of almost did.

TH E F O G OF DEAN NA

Believe it or not, it didn’t hit me till I woke up the next day that Deanna Schumacher was not only a confusing sex kitten I had never made out at a party with, but also the daughter of a man who had known my dad and worked with him in some capacity. In other words, he was a potential source of information about the circumstances surrounding his death. Somehow I knew it wouldn’t be easy to engage Deanna Schumacher on that topic—nothing was easy when it came to talking to her. But I resolved to give it a shot sometime, if I ever had the chance.

Here’s how I knew I was starting to fall for Deanna Schumacher: I began to take time off from trying to psychoanalyze her and from replaying the mental video of our “date”

and from splashing around in a pool of self-pity and instead 223

started writing love songs about her. “I Wanna Ramone You,”

for example:

I wanna ramone you

hier and ici.

I wanna ramone you

là and aujourd’hui.

If your boyfriend’s been postponed

and if we won’t be chaperoned

and if you wanna get ramoned,

comment? come on, come on . . .

There’s more where that came from, but it should be enough to demonstrate: I am a Romantic Genius, and a Dreamer.

I was still scared to call her, though. In fact, it took me a couple of days to get up the nerve even to dial Holden Caulfield style—that is, with the intention of hanging up. Our secret date had been on Thursday, Veterans’ Day. I stalled on Friday. I took the weekend off. Then I took a deep breath on Monday and picked up the phone with steely determination.

I needn’t have bothered with the s. d., however. Her answering machine was full, and I couldn’t have left a message even if I tried. I hadn’t realized that it was possible for frustration and relief to come in the same box, but it did. Maybe her family had gone out of town for a long weekend. So who had been leaving all those messages on her machine? That thought drove me crazy and made me cry, though not quite literally.

She could have gone away with her boyfriend—Tim, was it?—instead of with her family. Or perhaps the boyfriend had 224

gone along on the family excursion. Maybe they were riding in the backseat of the family car surreptitiously groping each other underneath a blanket. Maybe they were ramoning right now. I was starting to feel a little jealous of Ted, or Dan, or whoever. In fact, I thought I might be starting to hate him. But I squelched that thought. There was no future in that line of thinking. And I was impressed with my own maturity for realizing it. The whole thing was very adult and sophisticated.

I had settled into a comfortable pattern of dialing and being informed by a robot voice that the machine was full, which I did several times a day, causing some turmoil in the household because Amanda thought of the phone as her exclusive property. So I dropped the phone in shock when, on Thursday evening, I heard not the robot voice, but the voice of my imaginary girlfriend saying “Didi’s phone, leave a message.” I picked the phone off the floor without being able to think of anything to say, but it was too late anyway, so I had to dial again, once the dial tone came back on. Then it was busy. In its own way, this unexpectedly retarded attempt to make a phone call was like a little Hitchcock film: all suspense and delayed gratification with plot twists and multiple false endings. I waited ten minutes and dialed again, and waited another ten minutes and dialed again, thinking that I would not be too surprised if it were answered by a mysterious German-accented voice asking me if I had the formula and telling me to wear a red carnation and come to the Oberausterplatz. But no. “Didi’s phone, leave a message.”