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  He gets to his knees, strips down the lace panties and puts his mouth straight on her. His tongue works in and I can feel the juices seeping out of me in response. Becca starts cooing like those cockatiels we used to have, and I bite my lip not to make a noise. Remus moves up and guides himself in, and I swear I can feel the stretching and burning. I’m clutching my vaginal muscles rigid against nothing, but it’s the fullest, most intense feeling I’ve ever had.

  Becca starts with sound effects from The Exorcist, and I join right in because I know she can’t hear me over her own voice, and Remus is puffing and grunting enough not to give a fuck about anything but the fucking. His hip bumps mine in fast rhythm, as the two of them locked together pound the bed. I clench and rock my pelvis skyward and groan with the need, stretching tighter and harder, until I feel a letting-down as if an eternal dam has broken. I’m flooded with a current that lays me into the mattress and brings out a long, thready weep. It’s like the eerie love song of a sperm whale. I sink into the blue and listen to my breathing and theirs settles down.

  I wake up later and look to my side. Remus has curled up next to Becca with one arm over her chest and a lock of the magenta hair spread across his forehead. His fingers are touching my ribs through my shirt, but I know he doesn’t realize it. I have tears in my eyes. I want to be closer, held tight in the little world of his arms, protected, loved—but I know he is hers now, and she is his. I’m an invisible attachment of nerves, muscles, organs and bones.

  It’s after one when we walk Remus to the door, and he tells Becca he’ll call her at work the next day. He gives her a long, gentle kiss, and I feel her melting into sweet cream inside.

  “Good night—I mean good morning,” Remus says to me. He gives me a salute. Comrades, it means. It’s not a feeling I can return, but I salute back. I know he sees the worry in my eyes. I try to take my mind out of the funk, before Becca gets a twinge.

  Remus calls her twice that afternoon, and a pattern takes shape over the next three days: whispered calls at work, a walk down the street after dinner, a 9:10 Remus visitation. I act gruff and uninterested.

  When we go to bed I try not to get involved. You’d think once I’d seen it, I could block it out, catch up on some sleep. But the caresses are turning more sure and more tender, the sounds more varied— delicate but strong with passion, unearthly. My heart is cut in two— like Becca and I should be. I’m happy for her, but I’m miserably lonely.

  On the third day, I can’t hold back my feelings anymore. Of course, Becca knows already. It’s time to compromise.

  “I think we should limit Remus’s visits to twice a week. I’m tired every day at work and I can’t take this routine every night. Besides,” I tell her, “you shouldn’t get too serious. This can’t last.”

  Becca sighs with relief. “I thought you were going to ask me to share.”

  I don’t say anything. It had crossed my mind.

  “Just give us a few more nights,” she says. “He’s bound to need sleep sometime too.” I notice her use of the pronoun us, that it doesn’t refer to Becca and me anymore.

  She puts her arm around my shoulder and squeezes. “I know it’s hard, but—”

  “Seems to me that’s your only interest—how hard it is.”

  I feel the heat of her anger spread across into my scalp. I’ve hit a nerve. She’s like a stranger.

  “You can’t undermine this, Reb. It’s my dream.”

  “We’ve been taking care of each other all our lives. Now you’re treating me like a tumor. What am I supposed to do?”

  “What can I do? It’s not fair!” she screams. Her body is shaking.

  “It’s not my fault, for Christ’s sake!” I turn toward her, which makes her head turn away. She starts to sob.

  I take my hand to her far cheek. I wipe the tears. I can’t cause her more pain.

  “I’m sorry. I know I’m cynical and obnoxious. But if I don’t have a right to be, who does?” I stop for a second. “Well I guess you do . . . So how come you’re not?”

  “Nobody could stand us,” she sniffs.

  I smooth her hair till she stops crying. “I love you, Becca...Fuck— I’ll get earplugs and a blindfold.”

  That night we take our walk down the street. There’s nobody in the store but Remus. He walks up and I feel Becca radiating pleasure just on sight. He gives her a peck on the cheek.

  I smell his scent. I’m accustomed to it. I try to act cheerful. I’ve pledged to let this thing happen, but I can almost feel him inside of her already, and the overwhelming gloom that follows. I put a finger in my ear and start humming “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” to block them out. Then it hits me.

  “Headphones—that’s what I need. I can immerse myself in music.”

  “What?” asks Remus.

  “Oh, nothing,” I say, and then whisper to Becca, “I’ve found a solution.” I give her a hug. I can do this.

  The little bell on the door rings. Remus turns to see behind us. “Hey there, Rom,” he calls, “how was the cichlid convention?” He looks back at us. “Did I mention my brother? He’s just home from L.A.”

  Becca and I turn and do a double-take. In the last dusky rays of sunset stands a mirror image of Remus—identical, but a tad more attractive. A zing runs through my brain. I know Becca feels it too.

  Girls

  BY JOSEPH MONNINGER

  FRANCIE USED TO TALK about the Wailing Wall, Israel, life on the kibbutz. She had gone there once and picked weeds for a summer. She showed me a slide show her parents had put together of a family trip to Jerusalem. She shot the slides against the white wall of the playroom, bright squares of light and desert, and afterward let me work through the zipper of her jeans, gold teeth clawing the back of my hand. This was in New Jersey, a long way from Israel.

  Marie cocked her thumbs in the sides of her panties and stepped out of them. Beside her bed, on a rainy afternoon, she lay down and spread her legs, her right knee propped on a Kermit the Frog doll. Other dolls spilled to the floor and the white, puffy curtains breathed in and out with the damp wind. When I stood to go to the bathroom afterward the dolls stared up at me. Later, she made tea and loaded it with cream and sugar. She sat on the backyard lawn furniture, though it was April and chilly, and watched leaves collect in the corner by the patio door.

  You’d go to Friendly’s, order a milkshake, park around the back. Three or four guys in the car with you, waiting. Then the girls showed up, their cars smaller somehow, gum, cigarettes, barrettes scattered on the dash, birch inchworms coating their windshield. “Hey,” you’d say. Then out in the darkness leaning against the car, the engine warm, the painted lines on the parking lot smooth under your bare feet, and you’d notice she has painted her toenails, maybe for you.

  Up and down, up and down, faster, faster, her hand yanking and swirling your penis, her head against your shoulder, her eyes closed against this courtesy. “Hmmmm?” she asks and when you say “nnnnnnn” she works her hand faster, her face somewhere else, thinking about her outfit, about her mom, about the slow steady beat of the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood.” When it starts she steps away and holds your penis out, introducing it to the large maple you had been leaning against, letting you finish anywhere, anyplace, as long as not near her.

  In the eighth grade Chris Lambla played the same song five times on the turntable, “Never My Love,” by The Association, and we danced in the basement of her parents’ house. Her breasts lived in the soft wool pouch of her angora sweater. She told me that her mom had gone with her to pick out the sweater, the skirt, too, and that she hated shopping with her mom. Once, she said, she had gone shopping with her mom, had fallen asleep on the way home, and had come awake, hours later, in the vault of the garage. She thought she had been buried alive, something she had been learning about in Tuesday afternoon catechism. The saints, she meant, they had sometimes been buried alive. And she danced against me, the lights dim, the music syrup, and I moved my hand to her bra strap
, to her waist, and once, at the end of the night, to the round hump of her ass, weighing it like a farmer judging soil.

  Cindy: “If you love me then you won’t ask me to do anything I’m not comfortable doing. Do you really like me? Do you? Because I like you, I do, but it’s not all about what we do right here. I mean, in a car like this. I mean, what do you really think of me?” She chewed cinnamon gum, the kind with the liquid center. “Cum gum,” she said, laughing at the way the gum squirted when she bit into it. That was when she wasn’t talking about love and respect.

  In the school hallway, we tried to spot Jane Ritzo, who supposedly went on the pill her sophomore year. She went on the pill for Grady Whittle, lead guitarist in The Balloon Farm. The Balloon Farm played at every high school dance, every Teen Canteen, every backyard Sweet Sixteen. Jane Ritzo went on the pill as a gift to Grady is what we heard. She put a bow on the pill packet and gave it to him. Now they were seniors. We had never heard of anything so fine and generous. When we managed to spot her in the hallway, we speculated about those pills. We pictured them, one by one, on her tongue, going down.

  Snack bar cook, you grill hamburgers at Echo Lake Swim Club. Mrs. Staub has a plain piece of lettuce with cottage cheese glopped on top. A slice of pineapple, if one is available. She wears a white visor and comes to the snack bar in her bathing suit, bends to rub her foot free of sand or bark bits. You peek down the top of her suit, feel you must keep your distance from the counter. She pays with red nails, her purse snapping primly when she puts the change inside. “Thanks,” she says. She walks to the picnic table and sits, eats with knife and fork balanced carefully in her hands. She is brown as pine ship tar, her lipstick pale pink. You see her legs sometimes under the table, watch as they live what seems a life separate from the one her hands live. At the end of the summer, at the pool dance, you kiss her daughter, Sally, who is small and timid, a ghost of Mrs. Staub. You put your hand on Sally’s breast fast, faster than you should, and she lets you. She knows she is a ghost, a daughter ghost, and finally you dry hump on a pool pad in the towel room at the back of the men’s locker room. Through movement, she becomes her new self, is no longer a ghost, and you kiss a lot, kiss like crazy, Sally becoming a new Mrs. Staub.

  She left a note in my locker, slipped it through the vents, the note all curlicues, circle-dotted-I’s, red paper. Hi! it said. I had a great time last night!!!!!! See you in Chemistry, 3rd period!!!!!!!!

  I rode Sarah on the bar of my English racer bicycle, my arms braced on either side of her. She sat sideways to me, her hair smelling of Prell, my thighs stropping against her body as I pedaled. She turned to me and kissed me and closed her eyes. She closed her eyes while I pedaled and steered.

  Skip and I once took this girl Carol out and we had her sit between us in his truck, and we both fiddled around with her crotch, our hands touching sometimes. She let us. She put her hands on our crotches, too, arms out like she was flying, like she was holding our wankers as handles and leaning away, a hood ornament, a bowsprit. Even then, I wasn’t sure what she got out of it.

  Janie smelled like something sweet, something made up, like a candy store with the door closed too long. Claire smelled like a lawn product, hazy, aerosol, capped. Only Molly smelled of the outdoors. She kept crickets in the top drawer of her desk all winter. It became a ritual with her: in Autumn, before the first frost, she captured a dozen crickets, carrying them to a Hellmann’s mayonnaise jar with hollow hands. She dumped them in, screwed on the top, and later put them to graze in the top drawer of her desk. They lived in grass clippings and cedar and maybe that’s why Molly smelled so good. At night, after we had turned to spoons, I put my nose against her hair. The crickets rubbed from the desk, summer, winter, spring, and cedar baked into the air at every breath.

  Coach B said girls can drain you. Before the game, for a few days, he said stay away from them. Keep your head on the game, he said. I used to meet Sue at the 7-Eleven in Mountainside. She wasn’t my girlfriend so it really wasn’t against Coach B’s rules. We stood on either side of the comic kiosk and spun it back and forth. I liked Silver Surfer, she liked Spider-Man. In the buggy fluorescent light outside she smoked cigarettes and told me about her boyfriends. We pretended we were friends, that I was just listening, but we always ended up kissing in a group of beeches a block from the store. I used to put my hand on her breast and let it rest there, afraid to go further, afraid I wouldn’t keep my head in the game. Her nipples, though, felt like buttons to some place I wanted to go.

  They would place the rubber on the tip of your penis, check it for size like a mechanic checking a nut, then roll it forward. They did it while they looked up, or kissed, or did anything in the world except look at what they were doing. Some of them made you do it yourself, so you felt like a fireman suiting up or a surgeon fitting on gloves. The slow wrap of the thing squashed your penis like the muscle movement that lets a boa slowly swallow a rat. Afterward, when you saw your mom put shelf paper in the cupboards above the washing machine, you understood: no unsightly rings, no mess, always spongeable, always hygienic.

  In the Lido Diner on Route 22, Paula reached her bare foot under the table and put it squarely on my crotch. She gazed at me and let her eyes go slack. We both pretended that was the first time anyone had done that to me, pretended, too, that she had never done that to anybody else.

  One summer night, in the heart of heat, you walk with your best girl out onto the Echo Lake golf course. You don’t dodge the sprinklers at all. You let them go over you and see her skin showing through her shirt, the hint of her skin, and you get water on your hair. You start kissing and you pull her down, or she pulls you down, and you get her out of her clothes fast. You too. Naked, with the water whipping you once every twenty or thirty seconds, you screw like mad, like wild things, grunt, shove, dig into the dirt, grass, sky, the sprinkler, her, shove shove, and kisses, kisses like maniacs kiss, like dying people kiss, you love her, love everything, love that she likes the sky above you and the sprinkler, and you keep going. Then she says she’s cold so you lead her to a tall bank of grass, both of you carrying your clothes, and under a tree, out of the sprinkler whips, you make love, kiss more, talk to each other, say you love one another, and when you come it starts somewhere down deep, far away, and it arrives like a sound you have been waiting for, like a key in the door. You feel like crying and she holds you, and that starts you again. This time more simply, more gentle, and you kiss until you know it is late, very late, and then together you gather your things, dress, cut through Wittingham Place, over to Baldwin, and you can’t stop kissing. You wonder why you can’t sleep beside each other, what would it hurt, why is the world like this, and you kiss her one last time at her door, see the lights go up her house as she makes her way to her bedroom. You run for the holy hell of it back toward your house, roses out, stars up, the maple leaves throwing puppets of shadows from the streetlights. A part of you knows it will never be like this again, not quite, and you smell honeysuckle, hyacinth, soil. You sit at the kitchen table of your house and eat a bowl of Cheerios, it’s late, the smell of her on each spoonful, milk, oats, sugar. You put the bowl in the sink, run water, splash it around. Your mom has left you a note telling you you’re the last family member in, lock the door, so you do that, turn out the lights, climb the stairs. It is hot upstairs, coolness just outside, and you lie in a single bed, a childhood cowboy lamp beside you, your hand absently on your crotch. You think of her, remember her pulling you closer, using gravity to draw you to the center, and you fall asleep like that, one white sheet over you, your left leg out to get the last of the air on a summer night.

  Terrarium

  BY SUSAN NEVILLE

  IT WAS ALWAYS DAYTIME when she saw him, but there was never light, and there were never other people. He came to her room, and the room was dark with drawn drapes, and after he left, it smelled of sex.

  He said this thing would never hurt a soul. He would never tell a single human being. She would never tel
l a single human being. It was a completely enclosed system. If anyone saw him enter her room, even once, they would deny everything and end it. She loved him, and she knew it had to be that way for now. He was married. He had children. He was a responsible man.

  He left dried semen peeling from her skin, flaking off like sunburn, or was it in fact her skin that was peeling off in layers, leaving her unprotected? Or paint from the walls, which were shrinking to fit her? She was convinced the room was shrinking to fit her.

  Pretend with me. His sack crawled like the skin of a squid. It was always moving, no matter what his face was doing. She couldn’t begin to imagine being him, that particular kind of bondage. He had beautiful eyes and dark hair with flecks of silver. There was the same silver honeycombed in the window glass.

  Her room was in a converted factory where once men had manufactured parts for cars. There was still a red Stutz in a room by a former loading dock that was now a restaurant. There was no door wide enough to drive it through. It had been put together in that room as a novelty, like a ship inside a bottle, and it had remained there.

  All her clothes were drenched with the smell of him. Nothing would wash it out. Not a thing in the world would wash it out. It was a musty smell, like decaying leaves. If only she were sure he loved her. If only she were sure he wouldn’t leave her here alone. Outside the window there were people walking through the sunlight and the dust. How did they get outside? The room was shrinking to fit her. It was a completely enclosed system. When he left the room, she felt the oxygen and moisture seep out around the windows. It drew the walls and ceiling toward her. It was a completely enclosed system. She couldn’t breathe. She loved him. She was madly in love with him. Pretend with me, he said.