cont’d from First, In Anger

“Here, drink this down and calm yourself.” A delicate hand shoved a cup of Brut to my mouth. It was Bridgette who’d saved me. A big boned girl with a sophisticated Sophia Loren look (a young Sophia Loren). Her hair was pulled up in a messy ball and held in place by two lacquered chopsticks painted with the same rickety bridge over a turbulent river. She’d poured herself into a sleeve of black velvet which stopped just below her crotch. Her breasts jiggled in their cups like two amnia alive with embryo.

I drank down the Brut and she poured out more.

“Are you okay?” she asked, laying her heavy maternal arm over me.

Hers was not the saintly compassion, but that of a Madame tending her whores: neither cold nor warm, but sustaining. She didn’t care about anyone in particular, though she favored the underdog, which she apparently found me to be. By some strange inner light (pity) with which she impregnated me, I luminesced. I became the underdog. Ribbed with inanition, a little mange, some fleas. More than once she had grabbed me by the corners and taken me out to dry. More than once I had neglected to thank her.

“It’s not a good idea to let Sharon catch you screwing around. She was reluctant enough to invite you. You can thank me for that by the way. But anyway, come on. I’ve got something to show you.”

We moved on, to where did not concern me. I followed faithfully for I was content in the security of her kindness.

Though she hadn’t made it apparent, she seemed unsure where our destination lay. I was quite lost. Sharon’s house had erupted into a labyrinth. We’d passed through several rooms, none of which I recognized as having been through before. The décor changed in every room; a haze of Victorian, Mandarin, Dutch. It was a mélange of mood ring, chameleon and kaleidoscope twisted in a warped smear of sensationalism. I burped and felt my stomach turn.

Bridgette must have seen it in my eyes because she stopped at a cove between rooms and fixed me with another cup of Brut.

“Try to hold it in.”

She dragged me through several more rooms and then shoved me into a large walk in closet. Inside she flipped on the light and with the nonchalance a drunk urinates against an alley wall in broad daylight, she flipped her breasts out the top of her dress.

“See?” she smiled proudly, holding them in her hands as if they were trophies she’d just won.

They were gargantuan, amorphous. They draped over her hands like the languid legs of two complacent bullfrogs. I didn’t quite understand the gesture, but smiled politely. Then I was drawn to the objects, what Bridgette had meant for me to notice. Beaming like two polished crescent moons from each nipple hung a steel hoop the size of a nickel. Her nipples were as phosphorescent as two Maraschino cherries, still swollen where the steel pierced her flesh.

“Well? What do you think?”

I stared at the things. I ogled her naked flesh long and hard. What did I think? The way her breasts shifted in her hands it seemed they existed independently of her, two drunken pixies dancing on bar stools, laughing at me, mocking me. It was the alcohol, no doubt, how the night thus far was so dream like, how nothing seemed possessed of consequence.

What did I think? I was seeing well past the steel rings now. I was seeing raw naked flesh, rich with life, deserving more than mere token admiration.

And suddenly, I was on her.

The scene flashed like photographs. A struggle on the carpeted floor, a mouth painted in a scream. In that moment there came to my tongue a faint familiar taste, like that of drinking from a can. And following, the crushing weight and hollow pain of Bridgette’s knee to my groin, which sent me over on a pile of shoes, ladies’, with heels and buckles and plastic flowers and such.

Inundated with pain, I struggled to free myself, yet every time I rose I would set my hand on a heel or my knee on an unbalanced shoe and topple again. In the end, I rolled my weight over the pile until I was clear and laid there, swollen in dull agony.

“Bridgette?”

She didn’t answer me. I looked up. Her husky figure was propped against the wall. She was jerking with sobs, her hands clutching a breast.

A little blood coming through her fingers.

“Are you all right?”

I cannot describe the misery that befell me then when she cut her eyes at me. It was that despair of seeing your favorite pet crushed beneath the wheel of a truck, that helplessness attached to it as it flops around violently in its death throes.

Then she lunged at me. “You son of a bitch!”

Her weight penetrated me with the force of a creeping glacier. My pelvis twinged, my ribs buckled under her girth. A sudden panic sobered me. In that moment of clarity I understood Bridgette’s anger. It was her trust I assaulted, not her body.

I fought to reason with her, but a wild hatred burned in her eyes. She’d lost her senses. I’ve seen this before in a woman. It’s a primal instinct, beyond any fight or flight issue, beyond any notion of self-preservation. It was purely homicidal.

In a last ditch effort to save myself I kicked upward with all my strength and sent her up over my head. Her weight crashed against the closet door, flinging it open and sending her out, bared before a room full of guests.

As I crawled out everyone burst into laughter. Bridgette was flushed, struggling with the top of her dress and trying to get to her feet. Whether it was the absurdity of her nakedness or that I was behind it all that caused the eruption was no longer my concern, for I was drawn to the smoldering creature bounding into the room now. A devil in high heels and red sparkle. Her cool saturnine eyes burning holes in the atmosphere.

Sharon had found me. Again.

She snatched me up with a titan’s strength and shoved me toward the front door.

“I should have never wasted my time inviting you! But Bridgette begged, pleaded with me to give you another chance. And look! You ruined it.”

“Show me one thing man hasn’t ruined!” I said, but my words were ineffectual on her.

“And you think it’s all a big fucking joke. That’s what pisses me off. No one even likes you. I don’t like you. And you will never, EVER come to my house AGAIN!

And with that she shoved me out the door and slammed it at my back.

It was by this final rite of disrepute I felt my abjection complete. I rubbed my hand across my chin. The stubble had come on quick. My jaw was bruised below my right ear. My back ached. I looked back at the house, the light luminescent in the windows, then back to the blackness engulfing the rest of the world and my thoughts ran to the woman I’d dismissed earlier this evening.

I started across the green of the lawn and on reaching the edge of the street looked back at the house, first, in anger then in regret.

“So this is what she meant.”

Then I turned and set upon my long journey home into the night.