Page 310 - What They Did to the Kid

298 Jack Fritscher

honey. You give me poison.” Oh, if the priestlings could see this
occasion, this Jocelyn Jennings, this living occasion of sin, ah, not
sin, they’d scream perdition and mortal sin, yes, mortal, not venial,
mortal sin, and ruin, lovely ruin. I stood ready, waiting my cue, wait-
ing the director to call “action,” but there was no director, and no
action, and I stood embarrassed by the phonograph, breathing with
the recorded actors’ voices speaking now and again over the music,
watching Jocelyn Jennings watch me, silken cigarette smoke rising
through her hair, listening to the music.
“Lovely,” she said, meaning the music, watching me. All the
stuff of seduction surrounded us, but something was amiss. I smiled
ha because we felt ha ha nothing for each other ha ha ha. I mean I.
Not her. Who knew about her? What the virgin-slayer really felt?
The whole charade made me suddenly sad. My spirits nose-dived.
How could I make the first time, so long saved, be perfectly right?
My breath came short. Get it over with. Maybe it didn’t need to be
right; maybe it only needed to happen: no plot, no props, one take.
The room was hot, “too hot for May, don’t you think, maybe it’s
not the heat, but the humidity.”
Sometimes people panic.
Sometimes a glass or two of wine turns out to be cheap wine,
sangria, even, in a jelly glass, with a record playing, scratched, even,
and the apartment, a far cry from Misery’s luxury, fifty bucks a
month, and all the stuff, phoney stuff, a reproach, going down the
old evolutionary ladder, and the record turning, the clock ticking,
and actors saying lines, written lines, scripted lines, about wasted
lives and time lost, and the other person keeps on being glamorous,
not noticing that sex, lurid, bumping sex has reared up in the room,
wrestled itself around, hardened itself, denying, desiring, delaying,
coming undone, scared, spent, thankful, happy to get out alive.
“So you liked Phaedra?” she asked over her glass.
“Yes.”
We listened for a while not speaking, she smoking, until the
record finished Side Two. I said I had to go, and left her my manu-
script. At her door, searching for ignition, I asked, “Maybe, that is,
if you’re not busy or anything, we could go out Saturday night. To
a movie or something.”

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