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Roxanne |
Slip up to Johnny's, Part Nine or slip back to The Tough Talk or
to Part Eight or back to Part One or back to Part Two or to
Part Three or to Detective Rousseau or to Wanda or to Richard or to Lee.
You of course notice my full, generous mouth. Well, I use it. I'm an English professor at NYU. I teach. I was awarded early tenure at the age of 30 not for my beauty, but for my scholarly articles, paper presentations at major conferences, and for the promise of my book on the Anglo-Saxon Heroic Ideal and Dark Ages Warrior Poetry -- the mood of which is often elegiac. For three years, I was the youngest tenured professor on campus. My lips.
But that's only part of my life.
Beneath my lively surface (I'm wonderful at a party) is a delicacy of temperament and some edgy wiring. They come from my early teenage years, which was when I had those taste-altering, desire-altering, and direction-altering experiences. But I don't want to go there now. I'm thinking about my two sides. Actually there are five or six, but essentially two. I'm a divided person. And my thought about this is like who isn't? I'm just describing my singular version of this human phenomenon.
First, I will confess that I take pleasure in two intoxicants: marijuana and champagne. I actually smoke cigarettes, too. In moderation and with restraint.
And then there are these two new things Johnny introduced me to, these two new things he keeps locked in his safe upstairs: absinthe and opium. I mean . . . reach back into your safe, boy, and make sure I'm nearby when you do it.
I don't know why I came back after Johnny knocked Richard out. It was part curiosity, part instinct, part engagement by Johnny's lurid aesthetic, and part some mysterious thing I can't explain. I was bored one night and feeling restless, so I got high and took a taxi up there. I toyed with him for a few hours. It was nothing more than that, the first time.
The next time I showed up he made his move, but I smiled and pretended not to know what he was talking about. The time after that, I let him have his way with me upstairs in his office.
That evening I started talking to Detective Rousseau, and now he interests me far more than Johnny . . . who's really just some living-large cliche.
Rousseau has this way about him that I just love. He slows me down when I need to be slowed down, he makes me feel so real, and he like gives me room to be myself . . . and he won't ever talk to me about the force. We talk about everything else, though. We go on and on, sometimes until 3:00 in the morning.
Lately I've been thinking about him when I wake up. Every morning.
I've tried everything, but I haven't been able to seduce him yet. Johnny was easy; he's transparent. Rousseau's not; he has things in reserve.
Once, when he was talking on the phone, I slipped into the booth (it's almost private, except for a green wire-glass window in the upper half). I got down on my knees, but he wouldn't let me do it.
The only thing he'll let me do is breathe in his ear and dart my tongue of flame in and out. He loves that, and it gets him every time. His eyes flutter and he tells me I'm a dangerous woman. We smile at each other.
I know what he's doing: He's making me wait, even though he says he's in love with someone else.
The way I feel is, someday I'll be a blown rose. I fear that more than anything except death, the desert of vast infinity. Maybe that's why most of my friends are younger than I am. Who knows? Many things shouldn't be examined too closely. I recognize what I want to recognize, and that's enough. Not really, but that's what I say. Like I said, I'm divided.
Johnny's absinthe actually comes from Spain. It's illegal because people think prolonged drinking causes permanent brain damage -- like to Van Gogh, for example. He gets it from The Fat Man, the one down on South Street at the import-export office.
It's actually made in the Pyrenees by a slender Basque woman (Johnny actually showed me her picture) who uses the classic herbs and wormwood. It's green, it louches nicely when you add the water, and it tastes much like Pernod, but lighter on the licorice flavor, more like real anisette. But I want to tell you what it does to me . . . as I sip it and smoke opium up in Johnny's office.
The afternoon I went up there . . . it wasn't something I had planned. It just happened. Wanda With The Eyes, Wanda who can do an owl-like 360 degrees when she wants to locate Johnny, hadn't come in yet. I was sitting at the bar and Johnny just looked at me and said I needed something. "You need something," he said. "Follow me."
So I followed him -- back to his door in the corner, through it, and then upstairs. I watched him from behind, and I was thinking this guy can walk up a staircase.
We went inside and he actually motioned for me to sit down on his leather couch. Then he put on some jazz from a CD he had burned. After that, he walked over to his little refrigerator and brought out a dozen raw oysters on ice. They were beautiful and so fresh and I loved the ocean smell. He set them on the coffee table in front of me and began slicing two limes into wedges. We held he lime wedges high and squeezed them hard, the juice splashing down onto the oysters.
After we'd had about three each, he asked me if I liked them and I said yes.
After that, he walked behind his desk, opened the safe, and brought out the absinthe, the opium, and a pipe he got in Shanghai, a Yen Tsiang. It was bamboo, at least a foot and a half long, maybe two. One end was sealed, the other open, and there was a little ceramic bowl about six inches from the open end.
Johnny stuck the opium on the tip of a needle, held it there while he lit it, and then put it to work.
You can guess the rest, but I'll tell you part of it anyway. I mean it was dreamy. That's the only adjective.
After half an hour of sipping and smoking and feeling those oysters in my mouth, I went down on him. Then, he made me bend over the arm of his couch, he jerked my Capri pants down to my knees, and he did it to me from behind with my legs tight together.
It was sex. He had me squirming. I mean, if the moment is right and both of you want it, what's the problem? I'm not married. I'm not engaged. We should be more like Europeans.
That night was the first time I really talked to Rousseau. Johnny was gone. He was off somewhere. I was at the bar feeling relaxed and I was actually composing a thank-you note for Johnny. Actually it was a thank-you poem titled "Oysters, Opium, and Absinthe." He'd been so generous and I'd enjoyed it. And he'd been right -- I had needed something.
So I was writing this thank-you poem, and on impulse I asked Rousseau for his opinion about a line. I didn't tell him what it was about, I just wanted to know what he thought of this line -- as a line in a poem. He, of course, had to know the context, one thing led to another, and then he told me Johnny should be writing a thank-you poem to me.
That's when I began to notice that Rousseau is archaic on some subjects. I mean sometimes he's just a Neanderthal. And base, too. Maybe it's our age difference. He's 47 and I'm 35.
One night, it was really hot outside, a girl came in Johnny's wearing a tight t-shirt and no bra. She was actually with her husband or boyfriend, whatever he was. Rousseau glanced over at her and then said to me, "That chick wants the boys' attention. She needs it badly."
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"What do you mean, what do I mean?" he said. "Take a look. What do you see?" I told him I saw a woman with a man at a table. But he wouldn't quit. He was like a dog with a bone. "So you don't see her tight dark nipples. Her tight dark nipples aren't the first thing you see? They don't catch your eye immediately?"
There's something wrong with him. He goes on. "She's broadcasting her need. She might as well have a bullhorn."
Even if he's right, why make an issue of it? What's wrong with him? Johnny would never say anything like this, or even think it. He'd just look quietly and say nothing.
"That's ridiculous," I told him. "It's hot and she wants to be comfortable. That's all."
He lit a cigarette and smiled at me. Then he rolled his eyes and looked away.
"You can be so base sometimes," I told him, "so lowest-common-denominator. It's not very becoming."
"You must think all men are dopes," he said, "plus, she's making a monkey out of her boyfriend. To his face, she's saying he's not enough. She wants everybody else looking, too."
What can you do when a man gets like this? I mean he can't accept the simple truth -- the girl wants to be comfortable on a hot day. Like I said, he's a Neanderthal. And base, as well. I'm talking Stone Age.
But here's what I really think: One, he takes way too much pleasure in raving around. Johnny's like that also. Two, he doesn't really care what anyone wears. It's up to them. He simply doesn't want his woman showing it to everyone on the street. He's conservative on this subject. Men are a bunch of bluster. I'm in love.
