Charmed Thirds Page 3

  As always, Marcus had the perfect entrance line. He gently stroked my pink pelt (any plushy pervs who weren't already turned on are definitely wanking it now) and said, “My, how you've changed, Jessica.” His surprise arrival proved that he hadn't changed at all. On the inside at least.

  He definitely looked different since I'd last seen him. He gets so immersed in his studies that he forgets to eat, making him even leaner than he was before he left for school. He doesn't look gaunt and stricken; quite the opposite. The overall effect makes all that is Marcus even more so. His angular nose isn't merely dignified, but aristocratic. His eyes, more feral than feline. His cheekbones could slice through diamonds. He hasn't trimmed his hair since our good-bye, and it reminds me of fallen leaves, all burnt red and curling at the edges. His dusty jeans dipped down below his hips, and I could see the V-cut of his pelvis, pointing the way to happy territories below.

  And he was wearing the summer version of the same outfit he was sporting the last time I saw him; that is, he'd removed the thermal from underneath his old COMINGHOME T-shirt. The iron-on letters I once wanted so desperately to stroke with my fingertips are faded beyond legibility and nearly translucent from so many sudsy tumbles through the washing machine. I once ached to touch those letters on his chest, to touch him. It was at the infamous high school Anti-Homecoming party at Sara's house, infamous not only because everyone who had ever attended Pineville High showed up for the beery lechery, but because it served as the backdrop for my first kiss with Len, not my first kiss with Marcus as it should have. (We wouldn't kiss until months later.) I compensated for that night's longing by wearing the COMINGHOME shirt after we made love for the first time, the second time, the third time. On those June nights, it smelled pungent yet sweet, like autumn decay. It still does.

  Toward the end of last semester, I was dangerously close to running out of dining dollars, but I didn't want to replenish from my bank account because I was trying to save myself from financial ruin. So I went almost totally freegan: I limited my food budget to five dining dollars a day, and supplemented the rest of my meals with whatever I could get gratis at the various events thrown by any one of the bizillion campus organizations at Columbia. Bagels with Six Milks improv comedy group. Pizza with the Philolexian Society. Spicy chicken wings with Acción Boricua. No affiliation was too inappropriate for my hunger. (Actually, I did draw the line at the Columbia College Conservatives Club BBQ.) Sometimes the spread would already have been vultured by my fellow starving students by the time I got there, but most nights I'd be in for a feast. And no matter what was being served, it was always the most finger-licking deeeeeelicious meal I'd ever had in my life . . . not only because I needed it so badly, but because my nourishment was never guaranteed.

  Seeing Marcus was like that. I wanted to devour him. Figuratively. Okay, more than a little bit literally, too.

  So my initial response was: “MARCUS!”

  Followed by: “I hate my hair! It's okay if you hate my hair!”

  And: “Get me out of this poodle suit!”

  However, stripping off the Pinky the Poodle costume was not something that could be done spontaneously or (let's face it) erotically. So I just went with my canine instincts. I leapt off the bed with surprising agility for someone weighed down by fifty pounds of fur and pounced on top of Marcus. I howled as we tussled on the floor.

  “AHWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

  “Happy to see me?”

  “BOW-WOW-WOW YIPPIE YO YIPPIE YAY!”

  “I'm happy to see you, too. Happy anniversary!”

  Our anniversary. He remembered that he had deflowered me one year ago. It's nice to know that mine stands out among all the many petals that had fallen before me.

  I licked his laughing face.

  “Down, girl, down!” he said, rolling out from under me.

  “I'm just! So! So! So!”

  Words failed me. I barked.

  “Happy?” he offered.

  “WOOF-WOOF! ARF-ARF!”

  No surprise that all this commotion attracted the attention of my mother, even amid the deafening chaos of a one-year-old's birthday party.

  “Jessie,” I heard her shrill voice coming up the stairs, “what are you d—?” She stopped in my doorway midinquiry, stunned by the sight of her daughter dry-humping Marcus's leg.

  “Oh,” she grumbled, tugging at the bow at the back of her halter top as if it were a silken noose. “It's you.”

  She would have been happier if I'd been rutting bin Laden.

  Marcus hopped to his feet. “Hi, Mrs. Darling. It's nice to see you again.”

  Mom ignored him. “Jessie, we need you back downstairs. We want Pinky to bring out the birthday cake for Marin.” She turned on her high heels and went out the door.

  Marcus waited a beat before whispering, “Did your mom get some work done?” He froze his face into a startled Halloween mask. It would have been funny if it weren't so true.

  “Botox,” I replied. “She willingly injected a deadly toxin into her flesh.”

  “She looks permanently pissed off.”

  I patted his head with my paw. “No, honey,” I said. “That's only her expression when she sees you.”

  Marcus was unfazed. “I've been hated by more fearsome moms,” he said. “Besides, your dad is feeling me, so I can settle.”

  “My dad tolerates you,” I said. “There's a difference.”

  “Well, we better get downstairs if we want our mediocre rapport to continue. . . .”

  But I wasn't ready to face my family yet. I kissed him. And he kissed me back in his liquid-lipped way I had missed. I don't mean that in the sense that it was wet and sloppy, but that our mouths melted away. . . .

  “Mmmmmmm,” I murmured. “I don't want this to end . . .”

  “We have all summer,” he said, nuzzling my furry shoulder.

  “No, we don't,” I corrected him. “We've only got half of June and just weekends in July. At least we've got August before we go back to school. . . .”

  “I just got here,” he said, reaching out to stroke my cheek. “Why are you saying good-bye to me?”

  He was right. I was already feeling nostalgia for this moment.

  “I'm sorry,” I replied. “Hello! Hello! Hello! Hello!”

  “That's more like it,” he said, lifting my furry helmet onto my head.

  Hours later, before we shared a legitimate good-bye, he told me he liked my hair.

  He's a liar.

  But I love him for it.

  the fifteenth

  Marcus has been home for a week.

  AND WE HAVEN'T HAD SEX YET.

  It's my hair. I just know it.

  Let's look at the positives of this situation. If left up to our devilish devices, we could, conceivably, have sex all day long. But since we've been deprived of these pleasures, we've been forced to come up with more ways of spending our time. So in the past week alone we have: kayaked on Cedar Creek, hiked in Double Trouble Park, surfed (well, he did—he picked it up in California—I wiped out and nearly drowned), and done several other very physical activities that help sublimate our sexual urges.

  It's not working.

  Marcus is pure celibait. The longer we go without, the more difficult it is for me to stop myself from just ripping off his clothes. It's not my fault. I know from my Mind, Brain, and Behavior class that it's all biochemical. Blame the surge of serotonin in my ventral tegmental! Curse the dopamine in my caudate nucleus!

  Men are much more affected by visual stimuli, so it's not Marcus's fault that he doesn't want to have sex with someone sporting mental-patient hair. Of course, he has assured me a bizillion times that my hair isn't the problem. It's a time and place problem. We are never totally alone.

  In the past, this wasn't an issue. A lack of parental supervision is what allowed Marcus to lead his former life of drugging and male whoring. (The opposite situation in my household explains why I was 9944⁄100 pure until I turned eighteen.) Mrs. Flutie h
as always worked at a day-care center, which is ironic and sad because it means she was too busy taking care of other children to keep watch over her own. And when he's not restoring historic vehicles, Mr. Flutie has always been out on land, air, and sea escapades. It's the elder Flutie's need for speed that has led to our sex-free predicament, as a broken leg suffered in a Jet Ski skirmish means he'll be couched for most of the summer.

  Of course, there are other options. Like a motel room. We're both poor, though, and I can't get over the sleaze factor. And I just know that we would bump into one or both of our parents in the parking lot just like it always happens in bad movies.

  Or outside somewhere. But I have this irrational fear of insects crawling up inside places they should never be.

  Or the Caddie. It's a '76 with a ginormous backseat designed for consequence-free couplings. But I don't have an autoerotic fixation, I guess. I simply can't let myself go in his car.

  These are my hang-ups. Ultimately, our extended celibacy is mostly my fault.

  It doesn't seem to faze Marcus. “We've got all summer,” he said again tonight, after we had exhausted all the sweaty, partially clothed Cadillaction.

  I was still breathing heavily and had trouble getting the words out. “How can you be so calm? Don't you want to have sex with me?”

  He reared back, hitting his head on the fogged-up window, surprised by what, to me, was an obvious accusation. “Of course I do. But if this isn't the way you want to have sex with me, then I must accept that we aren't going to have sex. I have to let go of that desire.”

  “So you don't want to have sex with me!”

  “I won't if you insist on keeping up this conversation!”

  But he was smiling as he said it, and I obliged with a laugh, though right now I don't think it was that humorous.

  the eighteenth

  In our relentless pursuit of things to do instead of having sex, today Marcus and I visited an outdoor exhibition held at Allaire State Park by the New Jersey chapter of the Church of Creativity and Song. Their creed: “Finding spiritual enlightenment through fine arts inspired by music.” Um, okay.

  With its forest of pine and oak trees, wildflower-tangled meadows, and cool, rushing waters of the Manasquan River, it would be hard to find a freak show with a more lovely setting. Among the more interesting installments were a series of pipe cleaner depictions of Michael Jackson's noses through the years, lanyards (allegedly) made from locks of Jim Morrison's hair, and a portrait of Bono painted entirely with breast milk. Yum. As we passed from one insane stall to the next, I heard the strains of a nasally, Brooklyn vibrato, wringing every ounce of melodramatic emotion from each syllable . . .

  “I've been up, down, tryin' to get the feeling again / All around . . .”

  “Barry Manilow!” I shouted, running toward the music.

  I have a soft spot for the Copacabana Man now, but it wasn't always that way. For years I complained about my mother's embarrassing habit of blasting Barry on the stereo whenever she did her down-and-dirtiest housework. But that was before Barry crooned with cheesy gusto at two key points in my relationship with Marcus: on our first nondate, when Marcus tauntingly nipped my lip instead of kissing it (When will our eyes meet / When can I touch yoooooouuu?), and later, at Gladdie's retirement home, when Marcus assured me that my failed relationship with Len was for the best, as it would help prepare me for the true love I deserved (I'm ready to take a chance again / Ready to put my love on the line with yoooooouuu . . . ).

  Here was an entire tentful of decoupaged objects devoted to none other than the Showman of Our Time. Plant holders. Vases. Cutting boards. Tissue boxes. And . . . a toilet-seat cover!

  I grabbed it off the rickety folding table.

  “I must have this!”

  Barry was resplendent in an electric blue, bedazzled jumpsuit, unbuttoned to midchest. His head was thrown back, legs spread wide, arms outstretched, making a perfectly symmetrical X. A triumphant celebration of song by the man who writes them.

  “I must have this,” I repeated, trying to get Marcus's attention, which had wandered somewhere behind my shoulder.

  “It's not for sale,” wheezed an emphysemal voice from the back of the tent. It came from a lumpy-faced woman with cheap platinum extensions that looked more like pull cords on a windbreaker than genuine human hair. She was dressed in red stretch pants and a BARRY FANILOW T-shirt.

  “Excuse me,” I said, in my sweetest voice. “What's your name?”

  “Lorna.”

  “Surely, Lorna, you can part with this one.”

  “Nope.”

  I groaned. “Then why do you have it on display?”

  “To share my love for the Showman of Our Time,” she said, taking a cancerous drag on her cigarette.

  “Hey, Jessica,” Marcus said, sidling up to me. “Why don't we get going?” There was a hint of urgency to his voice, one I'm unaccustomed to hearing. I thought I was embarrassing him.

  “I'm not leaving without this toilet-seat cover!” I shouted, clutching the most kick-ass, most absurd thing ever. “Name your price!”

  “It's not for sale,” Lorna and Marcus replied simultaneously.

  And that's when it finally happened, the realization of my darkest fears about being Marcus's girlfriend. An inevitability that has been stalled for so long that I had fooled myself into thinking it would never come to pass.

  “Holy fuck! It is you,” exclaimed a scratchy female voice approaching the tent from behind me.

  “Hey, Sierra,” Marcus said, his dark eyes casting me an apologetic glance.

  And with that look, one I'd never seen before, I knew: Sierra was one of the forty-something girls Marcus had sexed before me.

  If I had opened my mouth, it would have elicited a leonine roar, so completely overcome was I by primal, territorial jealousy. And it's not like she made a compelling nemesis. Sierra was shorter than I was, and scrawnier, with thinning hair that she pulled into a malnourished braid running down her back. The small, sporadic patches of skin not covered in freckles were as white as milk. She would probably object to this comparison, as she was clearly of the vegan variety in her cruelty-free plastic shoes, hemp shorts, and I THINK THEREFORE I'M RAW T-shirt.

  “How the fuck are you?” Sierra asked.

  “Oh, you know . . . ,” Marcus said vaguely.

  Sierra burped. Loudly. And didn't excuse herself. Ack.

  A top-heavy nymphomaniac with limited intellectual capabilities? Okay. That I could understand. But a vulgar raw-food freak? What had he seen in her?

  Sierra launched into an expletive-riddled monologue about how much she loves Reed College and how she took his advice and has been putting her poetry to music and how she's been clean for three years now. Meanwhile, my insides threw furniture off balconies and crashed cars into trees and set buildings on fire.

  “This is my girlfriend, Jessica,” he said, pulling me closer and closer until I was actually in front of him, acting as a human shield.

  “Well, fucking A,” she said. “You're the girl Marcus is with now.” She emphasized the word now. My anger burned hotter than the asphalt beneath my feet. But I felt oddly cold, like when you've got a 104-degree fever but can't stop shivering. I almost couldn't blame her for being blatantly unimpressed. After all, why should she think that he'd be more serious with me than with her? Than with any of them?

  “We've been together for a year,” Marcus said.

  “Well, fuck me,” she said, jumping up to playfully ruffle his hair.

  And there was an excruciating fraction of a second in which I could feel Marcus physically shrink at her words, knowing that I would respond in the obvious way. I lunged at the opportunity, like a cornered animal.

  “He already did,” I spat before shaking off his arm and darting for the Caddie.

  I would have loved to have made a dramatic getaway. To instinctively know how to hot-wire a car, or even better, for my female fury to fuel a paranormal event that would spontan
eously turn on the ignition without a key. But, alas, I couldn't even open the door, and I burned my hand on the sizzling metal handle in my attempt.

  “FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!”

  “Are you okay?” asked Marcus, coming up behind me and reaching for my hand.

  “I'm fine.”

  Marcus stretched out his white T-shirt with his fist and used it as a buffer between his skin and the hot handle, opening my door. He walked around the front of the car and did the same on his side, and adjusted the Holiday Inn towels meant to prevent our asses from blistering on the leather interior. He slid inside and cranked up the air-conditioning.

  I was still standing, the rubber soles of my flip-flops melting and melding with the parking lot.

  “Jessica,” he sighed.

  I got in the car and slammed the door so hard that the plastic pink flower tied to the radio antenna quivered as if in fear.

  “Jessica,” he said again, only this time with his hand on my knee. “I hope you understand . . .”

  “Oh, I understand!” I said, with sarcastic venom. “I understand that we live in a very small town, and that you slept with a good percentage of the female population before you met me. And I understand that it was a statistical inevitability for us to bump into one of your former conquests. I understand that this is a consequence of dating someone like you . . .”

  “Do you understand that she meant nothing to me? Do you understand that?”

  Of course I understood that. This understanding is what makes it possible for me to be with Marcus at all. Outside of the awkward but necessary STD-clearance conversation we had prior to our first time, Marcus and I have barely acknowledged his industrious, illustrious sexual history. I accepted his past under the premise that he was “a different person” then. After all, he was largely under the influence of various mind-altering chemicals during his prime fuck years. (Ages thirteen to eighteen. Forty girls over five years. An average of .666 girls a month.) It was a necessary conceit for our survival.