THE S CLUB

“Everything changed after the People Magazine article,” said Farley, “suddenly “Losing and Loving It!” became the new pop credo. It was on the Best Seller lists for months. The advance from Dell was astounding.” She laughed. “It was sensational. Finally we could afford to be a family of four and live in New York.”

“So does he beat you?” slurred Neil. The question was incongruent. Incredulous. Insulting.

“Who beat me?” replied Farley vexed but proper.

“Who yourself,” sniveled Neil dangerously. “Who do you think? The Good Doctor-Doctor Beating and Bearing It”

“Oh you’re drunk,” said Farley dismissing him.

And that he was. Neil had eclipsed in the last fifteen minutes from what he thought was staggeringly funny to being simply staggering. His head swayed in an alcoholic palsy over his own dark abyss.

“Why don’t you have some coffee?” inquired Chris.

“Fuck the coffee,” said Neil. “If I want coffee, I’ll go to A.A.!”

“Well, the book has done so much for a lot of people,” continued Farley in a proud wifey manner. “Those other self-help books lead you on. Not everybody is a winner for Chrissake! Herbert’s book is different, if you can’t change your life, change your reaction to it. For example when your wallet get stolen with your credit cards. Enjoy calling up the Visa, Master Charge, and Diner’s Club people to put a stop on the credit. Enjoy life! No matter what,” said Farley with a zest.

“That’s all right, little sister isn’t it? Enjoy it.” rejoined Neil slowly picking up some energy. “Mazeltov!”

“Please Neil,” pleaded Boom.

“Please what??” said Neil, “You never really liked Kikes until you could unload your nut house daughter on one.”

“Neil really,” said Boom.

“‘Neil really,’” replied Neil in mimicry. “I am the only one here who know the score and none of you,” he looked directly at me, ”even, you little observant worm, can stand it. Because I saw it all when I was very very young.” He stopped. “I have a memory of my own. I would like to ‘share.’”

His tone was condescending, sweet and scary.

“When we lived in the Big House with Harvey. God rest his soul.” He stood up and held his drink in the air. His hand wavered and the scotch spilled out. His eyes glistened. His drinking arm returned back to his side. “Well I was all of seven then, wearing a coon skin cap,” he began.

“At seven you wanted to be Davy Crockett,” said Boom remembering.

“That’s right, Dottie, Go on.”

“Oh at seven, you still minded. You had an active, lively mind and you were very attractive, a good-looking boy. You would play around your Father’s pool in your coon skin cap pretending to shoot at Indians.”

“But one day, that changed. It all changed. I wasn’t well behaved and I stopped minding you.” Neil said very slowly. “And to this day, I still haven’t. Have I?”

“No, I must say, you really haven’t.” answered Boom holding her head like aimed artillery.

“Do you want to know why?”

At this point, I hated myself (nothing new) for being there. Granted, it was more out of curiosity than concern that bought me here. Yes, I had come to see how everyone grew up, developed and warped. Their hopes threaded in an irony that would tie it all up. But now I felt I had seen that and now I was about to see too much.

“Tell me why you have stopped minding,” said Boom in a tone that a card player would say “deal.”

“I was all of seven then. I never understood why men kissed women the way they did on television. And the dirtiest word in my vocabulary was “shit ” or “crap”. In fact, to be perfectly truthful, I didn’t even know what a pussy was for.”

" All right, all right, you vulgar Ian,” stormed Boom, “let’s get on with it.”

“I came home early that day from school and the maids said you were out. But that was all wrong because your car was in the garage. So I looked for you in the living, dining room, the bedroom, the den, then I looked for you in the east wing of the house, which we weren’t allowed to go because the workmen were painting, wall papering, and fixing it up. Remember?”

“No,” said Farley.

“Either do I,” said Chris.

“Well, you were too young to remember but this is Dottie and my special memory isn’t it?”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” she said.

“Bullshit. I will never forget this. It was mid-afternoon and there was a steep stairway to get to those room because these rooms were over the garage. And I can still see the light and the limbs of the trees through the window on the landing at the top of the stairs.”

Neil stopped. The silence was thick.

“Oh,” he yelled in falsetto.”Oh again, Give it to me harder.” He sipped his drink. “Well you can believe I had never heard anything like that before.” He smirked. “Dottie, you were such a ‘screamer’”

Again, he did the falsetto.” Please, you fucker harder.”

Neil gazed at all of us. “I crept up the stairs, shaking, shitting in my pants, unable to speak. I turned the corner and looked in the doorway. Oh, I didn’t know what the plumber was doing on top of you. But when I saw him kiss you.”

“Liar, you pathological liar,” shouted Boom.

“And then when you kissed back. I knew then that everything was... nothing. A lie. The bottom fell out. You were a liar.”

“You are a liar,” said Boom. ”You are using this story as an excuse for your own inexcusable behavior.”

“You said you loved us. But obviously you loved the plumber more.”

“It never happened!” shouted back Boom. “It never happened. I took you to a therapist and he said you were a liar, a liar of the worst kind.”

“Oh yes, he put me under hypnosis and it all came out. I had repressed it for years. He told you that, and once I remembered it. You repressed it.”

“I love you. I love each of you children. I love your Father and for you to accuse me of this lie, this horrible lie is...” Boom wavered. “I took EST and I have learned to accept myself. But this I can not...” she trailed off. She was pulling her hair and she was in some secret agony. “I am unable...”

“To accept this truth,” added Neil.

“No,” shouted Boom, “not in front of them.”

“Yes,” said Neil, “in front of them and everyone. Whore.”

“Don’t call me that!”

“What?” said Neil feigning bewilderment. “Whore. Nymph. Slut.”

“I am not that. I am your mother and I love you,” she screamed.

“And you are a whore.”

“You don’t understand,” said Boom shattered. “You don’t understand at all.”

“Oh! but I do, dearie,” replied Neil with a stinging sangfroid. “All too well.”

In the unbearable humiliation, she twisted on her high heel and walked in quick tick-tock steps to the door. She opened and slammed it. A sad, long wail wallowed behind the closed door and then the clicking of heels running down the hallway.

“You didn’t have to do that,” said Farley.

“What?” said Neil.

“What you did-that,” she said pointing to the door, “to mother.”

“Oh didn’t I?”

“It was cruel,” said Chris.

“Well, then what was that with the plumber, the baker, the candle stick maker?”

“A lie.”

“My asshole! It was a lie! I swear it happened. I can tell you the name of the shrink who dredged it out of me. It is amazing that am as well adjusted as I am.”

“You adjusted?” said Farley, “that’s a laugh.”

“Still no matter, two wrongs don’t make it right,” said Chris.

“Fuck two wrongs. This is life,” spat back Neil.

“But she is dying,” pleaded Farley. ”She is not well.”

“That, dearie, is hardly news, she has never been well. And now, you say, she is dying, well, a woman her age should be dying.” He mused. “I wonder who gets the condo?”

“She is your mother, no matter what,” said Farley.

“She is nothing but a well paid whore,” replied Neil.

“You are nothing but a philandering John,” said Chris.

“So?” said Neil.

Chris said nothing.

“So what,” Neil said, “everybody does something, some way or another.” He exhaled. ”Now how about you, Farley?” I am sure old Farley does something off the side.”

“I do not,” she said.

Neil yawned.

" I don’t,” she said in assertive lady-like tone.

“Last winter, I had two secretaries I could shtump one...”

“Who cares,” screamed Farley.

“You’re not jealous are you? Come, come my sweet little sister, we don’t have any secrets, not us, now tell your big strong brother, if they aren’t fucking you the way you like, well, I’ll just go beat them up.”

“I have nobody like that,” she said.

“He is that good?” said Neil in a marvelously patronizing stance.

“Shut up.”

“Oh! That good? Heh!”

“Shut up.”

“As good as me,” he then grabbed her by the nape.

“Yes,” she yelped. “As good as you.”

He let go.

“I find that hard to believe,” he said.

“Well you are right,” she said massaging the back of her neck, ”no one is as good as you! Thank God!”

“You know you really like that...a lot,” he said. “And you know that I know that, don’t you?”

“Yes, I do,” said Farley resolute and calm.

“I taught you real good, didn’t I?” he said soft-spoken but still showing off.

“Yes, you did. The night Kennedy got shot,” she said.

“Sit by me,” he said.

She got up from her chair obediently. A willing participant in a midnight secret sibling ceremony.

“Now tell us all,” said Neil.

“The day Kennedy got shot and the Club ended,” clarified Farley. “Well Mommy was drunk and cried herself to sleep in the den watching the tube. I was by her. By the time, Jackie was back at the White House; Mommy was out on the couch. I put some covers over her and turned off the set.” Farley picked up her drink and sipped it thoughtfully.

“Well, Chris and Neil were confined to their room and my room was across the hall from theirs. The hall way was dark and as I was walking toward my room. Neil grabbed me and dragged me into their room.” She paused. “And there he taught me a lesson as Chris just watched.”

“And you loved it,” he said.

“No I didn’t. I hated it,” she said.

“Don’t lie just because Edmund is here,” Neil said. “You loved it. The way Hillbillies love it.”

“I did not,” she spat.

“You were begging for more.”

“I was not.”

“You were,” boomed Neil. “You were.”

“You loved it,” he said. “You loved it so much, you didn’t tell anybody about it. Because it was just too good.”

“O.K.” Farley replied exhausted. “It was really good.” The ‘good’ was guttural in a lower register rarely uttered. “I loved it. And it was sick. I thought for a moment you actually liked me…sort of.” Her lip was gnarled and her tone pathetic. “But I knew the next day, that was all wrong.” She stopped. “O.K. are you happy? Happy that I thought it was great...still great twenty years later?”

“And you never got over it,” he said.

Farley looked away.

“Say you never got over it,” he said raising his arm.

“All right,” she said suddenly standing up and looking over to her seated brother.” I never got over it! “she screamed as both of her arms made a sweeping crescent movement and plunged a four pronged dinner fork into Neil’s right steromastoid.

Neil’s tongue gagged in shock. He got up only for his knees to buckle. “You bitch,” he screamed and sat down. The fork wobbled in his shoulder as he grabbed it. The four red gushers started spewing forth and his shirt was bloodied.

“I’ll press charges, you bitch,” he threatened.

“You do and I will too and I’ll win,” she said. She then giggled.

Chris put a napkin on the wound. “I think we should go to the Emergency Room, it is a very deep puncture.”

“Bullshit,” said Neil.

“Look,” I said. “There is blood everywhere. You are going to need a tetanus shot.”

Neil slowly gazed down at his shirt, his pants and the area around him. “Yeah,” he said,” let’s split before we are billed for cleaning the carpet.”

Neil grabbed his sports jacket and Chris checked his pants pockets for his keys.

“Well it was really great seeing you, Edmund,” said Chris suddenly unshaken and social.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Neil, “now what am I going to tell them at the hospital?” His head shook as he made his egress. He looked over at Farley at the door. The moment teeter tottered. Farley gave him the finger. She turned around and laughed to herself. And like a demon’s last assault at the tail end of an Exorcism, Neil lunged after her, she ran and he pelted her with his fist right across the back. She shrieked and spun into the sideboard.

The door slammed and Farley keeled over in pain. “That motherfucker hurt me,” she grimaced, “but not as much as I hurt him this time.” She looked up at me and smiled.

“Here, dear, have the rest of your drink,” I said helping her into her chair.

“Oh! My what a night!” she exhaled.

“What a revelation, I...I...I…” I stuttered. ”I had no idea about any of that and in a world where everything is permitted, you were more than justified.”

“I wish I could have cut off his dick,” she dreamed. “But that would have been too divine.” Again she giggled, she shook her head. “I really am beat.” She checked her purse. “Oh good, a hundred dollar bill! Edmund, would you mind calling me a cab? I want to go home to the city.”

Her almond eyes then peered directly into my blue hyperthyroid eyes and into my dense gossipy soul, she smirked,” Aren’t you pining to tell Madge what she had just missed?”

“Well, where is everybody?” asked Boom with her hands on her hips like a misunderstood, disheveled and bewildered showgirl on the cover of an old paperback novel. Her mascara streaked into two dribbled spiders.

“They left,” I said folding and then unfolding a cloth napkin at my place at the empty table.

“They left?!” she repeated with an incredulous cadence.

“They left,” I echoed.

“They left,” she said definitively. “Well that’s a fine howdy-do! Where did they go?”

“Home,” I said like Om.

“Didn’t any of them have the decency to seek me out? I was hysterical in the ladies room downstairs. It would have been easy to find me.”

“Farley looked there.”

“When? ”

“About fifteen minutes ago.”

“Well, at that point I had been bawling in the powder room for ten minutes and I needed some air so I decided to take a walk around the block and get it together.”

“Well a lot happened here,” I said.

“Like what?”

“Oh nothing,” I said. I realized I needed time to get the story together.

She looked at me. ”How could it be nothing, if something happened that was so distressing that they left without even saying ‘thank you and good by’?”

Oh fuck it, I thought feeling the tattle-tail between my legs. “Farley and Neil had a fight. A big fight.”

“About what?” she asked.

“Well it started out about you....“I began.

“About his lies,” she interrupted, “those terrible lies, I know it hasn’t been easy for them and him especially being the oldest and the smartest, but, to say those things, to ruin our last dinner together like that. It never never happened,” she said. Instant Suburban Stalinization. “Never like that when he was young.”

“I believe you.”

“You must believe me,” she said. “I love those children. They are all I have.”

“Yes, I know,” I said lethargically.

“Well what happened in the fight? No one was hurt, I hope.”

“No, not at all,” I lied. “But a lot of vicious ugly vicious things were shouted across the room.”

“That goes without saying.”

“But what was unusual was that Farley won. Neil had to retreat and Farley was so exhausted, she had me call her a cab to go back to the city. While she sought you out in the ladies room and when she couldn’t find you, just when the cab arrived, so she asked me to hang around in the hopes that you would show up and explain all this.”

“Well, what about me?” she said. “I was suppose to drive her back to the city and stay with her. The boys are staying at their father’s house but I can’t go there with Harry’s wife or widow there.”

“You can stay at my mother’s. In Madge’s room,” I offered.

Already the image was Pre-Raphaelite to me; the pale sleeping Boom underneath Madge’s Swiss dot covers in the blue of the night. In a room, wall papered with repeating Hunting Dog motifs and shelves and shelves of china dogs and horses.

“Fine,” said Boom.

Boom sat on the couch bundled up in a flannel plaid bathrobe. Her eyes were still red but her face was scrubbed like a child’s. Silently she was nursing a cup of decaff.

“Well, what do you think of my kids?” she asked.

“Oh, they are amazing.”

“Yes, aren’t they!” she remarked, she leaned back in the sofa ready for a full evening of over-analyzation. Like all parents she is intensely interested in repeating herself about all facets and questions involving her children. “Despite the fact that Neil despises me, Chris has lost his mind, Farley has turned into a responsible and kind young woman. And beautiful too, if I might add.”

“Oh absolutely.”

“But why do you think Neil hates me? ”

“Neil hates everybody. It simply is the way he is.”

“But I’ll tell you one thing, he loves his children and they are so well behaved for the first six minutes.” She paused. “I don’t know about Chris.” She looked at my Scotch.

“Do you think you have anything more for this?” she said holding her cup up.

“No problem,” I said looking behind the bar and found a green ovid bottle. I poured the Benedictine into her Sanka.

She sipped it. “I just don’t I know what I have done to him. Neil, I mean. Why must he hate me for being so attractive? Why does he hate me so much to demolish our only night together? I cannot understand it for the life of me. I can’t.” She looked at me.

“You are the son, I should have had.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” I said. “I really do like to drink a lot. To alcoholism, ” I said ” to a disease I can live with.”

“Are you really that way?”

“Oh absolutely,” I said. “How could I not be, to the brown round feeling booze emanates wise irony that simply makes life livable.”

Boom’s lips rose, her dimples (which weren’t lost in surgery) deepened, her eyes amused, she coiled her body up underneath her bathrobe and she nuzzled into the arm of the couch, getting set and comfortable to continue her long lovely drunk.

“Yes, I am an alcoholic, I defend every drop of Visine for my Monday through Sunday hangover. To me, hangovers don’t make much difference at all. I defend them. Hangovers are the great equalizer. They keep you on par with all the stupid people and put you neck to neck with all the intelligent hungover people.”

“Just what do you mean by that?”

“I hate to imagine all the confusion I would cause by showing up to work not hungover. Something might get done on time and right! That would upset a great many people who depend on your mistakes for something to do, soon they would find themselves without a job. This would upset them and I don’t want to upset them since....” I stopped. I felt the pressure behind my eyes. My jaw began to shake. I really shouldn’t drink but I do.

“Since what?” questioned Boom.

“Since I am so upset with myself. You know the old antage; why hate other people when its you who you really hate.”

When I took the EST course,” remarked Boom Boom,”a few years ago. It really changed my life for two months. It was all I could talk about ‘Confronting Confrontation.’”

“And?”

“And I confronted hating myself,” she said. She stopped and went on. “And what I do when start hearing that horrible inner voice is to repeat that I love myself over and over.”

“Does it work? ”

“Sometimes.”

“And when it doesn’t”, I asked.

“Oh! then, it is hopeless, you say “I love myself, I love myself over and over but even I know that I am trying to just block out the....”

“What?”

“The It.”

“Yes, when I admit it. I surrender to it. I let it run its course. Thank God. It doesn’t last forever.”

Boom knocked on the wooden part of the coffee table with a rat-a-tat-tat. “We are still here, aren’t we?”

“I take life by the horns and wrestle with it. Even if it ends up goring me. I rejoice in it.”

“How? ”

“Well it’s a kind of bouncy way of dealing with it. I sing,” I said.

“Sing?” she said.

“Yes I sing, ‘I hate myself’ over and over but I do it to the tune of the “Yellow Rose of Texas.” It admits your true feelings and it is still upbeat and hopeful. Allow me, ’I hate myself, I hate myself, I really hate myself!”

“I don’t get it.”

“Here listen, I hate myself, I hate myself, I really hate myself!” I clapped my hands and moved like a jubilant dancing panda. “I hate myself, I really hate myself,” soon it was getting as if I were foisting a jingle on a client.

“Get it?” I asked.

“Kind of,” she said.

I smiled an in unison, we sang, “I hate myself. I hate myself. I really hate Texas! ” We were an update and out of tune Tom Ewell and Marilyn Monroe playing “Chopsticks” reverberating in our self rancor. “I hate myself. I hate myself, I really hate myself.”

Again.

We sang and this time Boom danced. We spun around spilling laughter into the air and dissipating the song into giggles as we retreated to our seats at the opposite ends of the den.

We caught our breath, tried to calm our separate but respective dizziness in the amber dark.

“Now tell me,” said Boom.

“Tell you what? ”

“About the fight,” she said.

“Again?”

“Yes, again.”

“Why?”

“Just tell me,” she said.

“Farley told Neil what he did to you was totally uncalled for. Especially because…” I stopped. I didn’t want to say ‘dying’.

“Why?” she asked quick like a bullet, hoping the booze would carry its loquacious moment and it would slip out.

“Because it’s a lie,” I said.

“Fucking ’A” it is a lie,” she rejoined.

“And then Neil counter attacker her about something.”

“What something?”

“I forget.”

“You forget when you want to forget,” she said.

“And then it was a shouting match and they left,” I said.

We gazed at each other in a simmering stalemate.

“What you should do is this,” I said, “call her tomorrow and ask her.”

“Why do they hate each other?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Bullshit,” she countered, “you’re a well paid advertising man, you know what motivates people.”

“Manipulates people,” I said hiding behind the word choice, “not motivates people.”

“Well, then, what manipulates Neil to hate Farley so, and while you are at it...me too. Why?” she said and her hands wound around in a knot. ”You try to eek out a decent happy life but everything ends up being made of pain. Why?”

“Oh,” I wondered. I pondered about it the way philosophy students smoke pipes. “Maybe it is like a principle of physics.”

“Huh?” she winced.

“It is like entropy; all energy turns to heat and burns out and will burn us out inevitably. Innocence inevitably turns to a capricious smirk. Youth inevitably turns to age. Happiness is a whim while sadness seems to stick. Ying to yang. Truth to lies. Life to death. Everything becomes destructive and desultory. Inevitably,” I paused. ”Glad you asked?”

She said nothing.

“But the business of life is to spite all that,” I said.

“Losing and not loving it,” she muttered bitterly. She put out her cigarette with a twist as if she decided in the same gesture to change her tact or gears. From depressed to coquette, she transformed.

“Now do you think I still look like Marilyn Monroe?” she asked.

“I said that?”

“Oh yes, you used to say that all the time.”

“Well you were always so,” I gasped for the right way of saying this, “always so…I mean you are still glamorous.”

“Do you really think so?”

I was in no position to belittle seven decades of vanity. Absolutely.” I said regretting that I hadn’t given her Ovaltine instead of Benedictine.

“Good,” she whispered to herself. She turned and then asked. “Why aren’t you married?”

Yuk. I really didn’t want to get into that. “I don’t want to be,” I said simply.

“Aren’t you lonely? ”

“Loneliness is a relative term. I have found that most married people are the ones who want to stay up late and talk and talk about how lonely they are.”

“I wish people would realize that there are some people who don’t have the need to be a bourgeois center of attention or have someone else be it for them. And really what is there to share?” I stopped then so I could continue. “Only your selfishness,” I added emphatically. “All of this coupling just to avoid your own internal emptiness.”

“Emptiness! What sort of bullshit is that! It’s a natural thing, do you think animals know about emptiness?”

“Probably not. But in that case, they are much happier than we are. That sort of explains it all, doesn’t it?”

“Jesus! Eddie, this bullshit infuriates me! Where did you pick up this crap?”

“Life,” I said. “I am not fucked up for nothing. Let me think, probably in college, in the cafeteria, watching people and their relationships develop, envelope, exasperate, dissipate. Or maybe it was in philosophy class, a seminar, a book from our old friend, Sartre.”

Obfuscation veiled Boom’s face. ”Sartre?” she said searching, “did he live next to...No. Who do you mean?”

“You remember Sartre. Existentialism. Paris. You told me all about that.”

“I did! ”

“When?”

“Again, a long time ago,” I said looking into my Scotch wishing it was a wishing well. “On one of those long chlorine soaked and shriek-filled afternoons by the pool.”

“Oh yes, that was a long time ago.” She said with a shiver like a ghost had walked right through her. She had finished her Sanka and was now just pouring the Benedictine in her cup. “A long time ago,” she said as she poured. “Before everything had fallen apart, even though everything had already fallen apart privately, but not in THE BIG WAY, the way it is now. When we were still an empire with Eisenhower, when your mother still had her Woody…”

“Way before the first made-for-TV movie,” I said. Ugh, I thought even in conversation, I still can’t help but be an ad man. I repeated that thought to Boom and Boom said what I had was a ‘gift’.

At that I went to the bar to make myself another drink. Not that I needed another drink. I simply wanted another one. Nor would I get any drunkier, either. Believe it or not, quite the opposite happens to me, the more I drink, the more lucid, calmer, and clear-headed I become. Sure I may slur my words and stagger. But that is in the physical realm, but on the spiritual level, I am much the same, if not more.

“Do you remember the Halloween you came over and wanted a drink like gin and tonic and I think you wanted to seduce me or really me to seduce you.”

“No, I don’t remember.”

“Oh you do too,” she said. ”You were Kennedy that year. Remember. And you were trying to impersonate the guy on The First Family Album. It turned out rather embarrassing but cute, nonetheless. Now tell me you remember.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about.”

“You sound like one of my ex-husbands,” she said gleefully. “Now, of course, you remember it was the year Kennedy got shot.”

“You must have been all of thirteen or fourteen then.”

“Well I stopped Trick or Treating at twelve. I am positive of that. I think I remember reading “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Ad Man” that night,” I said with a sly smile.

“Oh! See you are lying!”

“No, I am not. I was just being facetious. I think you are confusing me with Neil. I didn’t screw anybody at thirteen. I had to wait a long time, I was a virgin up to my last week of college, which for the late sixties was unheard of.”

“I didn’t say you screwed me. I am saying you tried to screw me.”

“Well I still don’t remember any of this. Honestly.”

“You are not different,” Boom declared, ”than any rest of the schmucks out there, all of you men so convenient forget”

“I suppose that makes me applicable for the Four F Club.”

“The what?”

“One of my treasured memories of my youth is you telling us all about the Four F Club by the pool, one day.”

“Oh Jesus-you mean find them, feed them, fuck them and forget them?”

“Exactly.”

“How old were you when I said that?”

“Eight.” I lied. I was twelve.

“I said that to a eight year old. Oh brother.”

“Well now,” I said, “they fuck at eight.”

“I have heard that too.”

We paused.

“I can’t believe how well you remember everything else,” she began with her harangue, ”but you so beautifully repress that Halloween night.”

“Well, I have.”

“A twelve year old.”

“A thirteen year old,” I corrected her.

“Asking for a drink to get laid,” she laughed, “you were so cute and polite. A part of me was flattered.” She leaned back. “Oh I do like them young.”

“How young,” I asked with a curiosity that would pump Pandora up with truth serum so she could open her box.

“Young enough, so it is legal. But then again...” her smile was sly. “He was a strawberry blond lifeguard at the pool. You know it is blond when dry and strawberry or actually raspberry red when wet. Well, it just happened when we ran into each other at the market. First in liquor and then in dairy. He was wearing his bathing suit and flip-flops. His body was well proportion and just so young. So whatever it is that makes young...young. I turned around in the checkout line and there he was behind me. His knee was shaking with such an anticipation that in the parking lot, I invited him up to the house for a drink.”

She sipped and continued.

“He talked about his diving scholarship to Norte Dame. Yes, it was Norte Dame. He was a little petrified having never been further north than Atlanta. He was so endearing sitting on the white couch that it was like the boyfriend I never had as a teenage girl. As a teenager, I always ended up dating twenty year old or so men. But here was God giving me a teenager. Finally.”

“Well, did you screw you him?”

“Of course, I screwed him,” she answered indignantly.

I freshened her drink and returned to my seat.

“It was awkward at first but once he got the hang of it. I rode him and he rode me for hours. There I was a sixty seven year old grandmother straddling a child entering freshman year at college.”

God knows, I wondered what he is saying in the locker room at Notre Dame. Norte Dame, I thought then and I realized it was all a lie. It is hard to imagine the Vatican issuing a diving scholarship. Nonetheless, it was a beautiful lie and one we clearly both enjoyed. It is curious, I shrugged, how people need lies to tell the truth about themselves.

I thought then of Neil and his story about Boom and the plumber and now Boom’s story about the lifeguard. One story flagrant and the other romantic (but also flagrant); separated by only a scant hour of excessive drinking. His story was used as a rationalization for his hatred of women and her story validated her desirability as well as a paean to womanhood. And yet they both complimented each other perfectly.

She sat on the couch crossed legged and myopic in ego and fantasy.

It was deep into the black of the night and I had the disturbing sensation that she was just beginning.

“O.K. Eddie,” announced Boom being very, very grand, ”you may have me tonight.

“What??” I said hearing her but feigning deafness.

She cleared her throat. “You may,” she began maintaining a balance between coquette and queen, ”make love to me.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Oh what?” she said.

“Oh, I don’t think so.”

“You don’t think what?”

“That I want to.”

“Oh,” she said. Surprised and passive as if the inner din of the alcohol had made it unable to register.

I got up to make myself a drink hoping (like a fool) that in doing so that would gracefully change the subject.

“Why?”

“Why what?” I said sitting down and having the ice rattle.

“Why don’t you want to?” she perused.

“Because I don’t. Some things are left better untouched.”

“Why?”

“Well I don’t have to tell you.”

“Why?”

“Because it is now the eighties and it is perfectly permissible (again) to be evasive, lie and hold in your feelings even get a bleeding ulcer than gross out you friends with your own turmoil.”

She stared at me dumbfounded.

“Please don’t be insulted. You are still a very striking woman,” I said.

“Why then won’t you? ”

“Many reasons, all of them personal.” I said. “In fact, very personal and belong to my inner hell.”

“Oh,” she said. She sipped from her cup. “Tight ass.”

I yawned. “Have you seen any good movies lately?”

“No,” she answered sharply. My behavior was going against the grain of all the Encounter Sessions, she had partaken in. She wanted the TRUTH. “Why?” she persisted.

“It would be a flagrant, stupid, and meaningless act.”

Boom’s eyes narrowed and her skin taut, her head shook as if there was nothing wrong with something being flagrant, stupid, and meaningless. Her need superseding all reason. “You think you are so smart.”

“Well maybe I am.”

“Well maybe I am,” she mimicried. “Tight ass,” she snarled. “I have never had anything like this in my whole life, my whole frigging life. An able bodied, good looking man not wanting to roll in the old sack with...”

“An old sack,” I blurted out and already I wished I hadn’t.

It was as if I had pierced her with an invisible poison lance.

And then she slapped me. My glasses flew off and my right cheek singed.

A frantic panic swept through me. The prospect of not having eyes for the rest of the weekend instantly made me drop to my knees to reprieve my glasses. My glasses skidded across the floor to underneath the coffee table. “You stupid bitch,” I screamed as my proscription for ATZ flew out of sport coat pocket.

Underneath the coffee table, I found that my glasses were miraculously intact.

As I got up, I saw Boom holding my medicine.

“What’s this?” she asked as she looked at the label in a frown. Not only did she realize that I was a fairy but I was an infected fairy.

“It is my prescription for ATZ.”

She gave it back to me. “When you said ‘inner hell’, you mean it didn’t you?”