If I Should Fall: The Second Book of Geshichte Falls
FOURTEEN
LOVE
(Part One)
“Niall! Niall! Niall!” she panted.
He put a finger to her lips and then bit his own and moaned. Sonia pressed down on his chest. He was on his back. He hoped no one heard the squeaking of the bed springs.
“You gotta—” he started. The sensation cut him off. “You gotta be quiet,” he pleaded.
He turned her over and on hands and knees drilled her quickly, following the sensation at the end of his swelling prick. It was coming to an end much too quickly. He had to learn how to control his body better. He gasped in his dark bedroom, relied on Sonia to put a hand over his mouth for him, and then turning his face to the wall, Niall groaned as he ejaculated.
Neither one of them moved for a long space, and then Sonia said, “We’re supposed to meet the gang at seven. We gotta go.”
With the same cloth that Sonia wiped herself, Niall wiped, and then pulled up his pants and he and Sonia took turns straightening each other’s clothes without turning on the light. He made the bed look better while Sonia fidgeted with her hair.
Niall straightened his beret and opened the door. Shrugging, he led Sonia out and then closed the door to his kingdom.
“I’m surprised she even let me come up into your room.”
Niall wondered about that too, but shunted it to the back of his mind.
“You sure you got everything?” Sonia asked at the head of the steps.
“Yes, dear.”
An hour later at Lake Chicktaw, Niall was scrambling around in his backpack and swore. “Shit!”
They all looked at him, Sonia’s eyes were mildly amused.
“Yes, dear?” the girl said, tilting her head.
Niall gave her the dirtiest look he could muster and then told them all, “I left it at home.”
“Shit!” Bill cried at home from the driveway.
Dena didn’t even care.
“Dena,” Bill called, coming in. “Do you know where the manual is to the car?”
“In Niall’s room,” she returned, not looking up from her magazine. “He was studying so he’d know how to fix a car—when it comes time to drive a car.”
Without hearing the rest of the sentence, Bill went upstairs, opened Niall’s room and flicked on the light. It smelled like the windows needed to be opened more. He looked around the room, found the manual lying next to the stereo and then, as he picked up the manual, found a twisted bag on the dusty stereo top.
“Well, well,” Bill murmured.
He could envision himself ripping into Niall the next morning and then—just as quickly, he had no desire. He could envisage himself in possession of something he rarely had recourse to.
Bill looked around with a raised eyebrow, as if someone might be hiding in his son’s room, then pocketed the bag and, slapping his thigh smartly with the manual, flicked off the light and closed the door behind him.
Bill Dwyer walked to the gas station on Market Street, and walking back he was in a sort of jaunty mood. Really, that night he was in a naughty mood. He was still dressed in suit and tie from work. The night air was warm but not cloying. A few cars raced up Market and across the Street, where Breckinridge officially ended, was the depressingly named Gray Morning apartment complex.
But that was if he made a turn across busy Market Street, to his left. He turned toward his right and was lost in the trees and quiet of the Breckinridge. Back on his block, Passing David’s house he wondered if his brother-n-law was meditating upside down, or something stupid like that. He thought of going to see his sister, but all too often she was a pain in the ass as well. Thom and Patti’s lights were on and he wondered if only three people needed a house quite that large, but then thought that they were good enough neighbors, really good people. It was a shame he didn’t know them better. He stared in the large picture window that showed the living room, and then walked on. He went up the yard along the Lewis driveway and let himself into his own backyard through the side fence.
The Dwyers had a two tiered yard with a huge maple tree that stood in the middle at the end of the first drop. There was a row of other trees and then the back yard of the Mc.Carrens, and here Bill dropped down, his back to a tree he always called an oak though he didn’t really know what an oak looked like.
he took out the rolling papers. In college he’d only personally known one guy that used recreational drugs, and he had claimed that he did not know how to roll a joint. It had seemed an easy enough task to Bill. Now he saw that it wasn’t, but he also saw that if no one else could do it for you, you might have to learn to do it yourself.
And so he did. His first joint was a pathetic enterprise. He lit it, tried to inhale, tried to light. When it was burning well he was shocked by the awful burning smell. He was afraid the police might come at any moment, or the dean of Saint Alban’s college.
He puffed. Waited a second. No one was coming. So he puffed on.
Somewhere between concentration on inhaling and obsession with a beetle crawling up his shoe, Bill realized that he was high. Absently he looked to his left where one light was on in the Lewis house.
Thom Lewis and his wife were laughing and the bathroom was filled with cigarette smoke.
“I told you we should open the door,” Thom said to the wife in his arms and between his legs as they lay in the bathtub.
“Russell won’t be home tonight, and if he did come home... I can’t imagine that the sight of his parents taking a bath would shock him for life.”
“It would shock me for life,” Patti said, taking a drag from her cigarette and ashing in the tray she’d precariously placed on Thom’s right knee.
“Yeah, but look at your parents.”
“Watch yourself.”
“They could be lathering each other right now.”
“You’re really disgusting you know that, Thom Lewis?”
Patti lifted the bottle of red wine beside the tub, swigged, and Thom, reaching forward said, “Don’t hog it, you drunk.”
“You don’t deserve vino,”
“Fine,” Thom took a swift puff from his cigarette and leaned back, feigning indifference.
Patti gave in. Thom swigged from the bottle and sank lower, his wife in his arms as she removed the ash tray from his knee..
He began to wash her gently, gathering up the floating lather, washing her arms and her back, her neck, kissing her ears. He began to murmur.
“Oh, Frank, Oh Sara, Oh Frank, Oh, Sara—”
“Stop that!” Patti laughed and elbowed his thigh. Thom grazed her neck.
“Don’t stop that,” she said.
“Remember when you and Chayne and Felice came over to Zahm Hall that one night, and I was trying to get this job with... I can’t even remember the company now, and I had a suit and tie on... Everything. And I was showing them around. They want to see the chapel, so I bring them there. But the three of you were in the chapel and you all started—I don’t know what you were doing...”
Thom took a drag from his almost extinguished cigarette.
“We were playing exorcism.”
Thom laughed and shook his head,
“And I walk in and Chayne’s shaking holy water all over Felice, and she’s crying, “I’m melting! I’m melting!” and you’re kneeling in the middle of the floor singing—”
“Ave Maria! Oh, my God, I thought you’d never forgive me for that!”
“I almost didn’t, Patti. The look on that man’s face. And then you get up off the floor and introduce yourself as my girlfriend. ‘And these are my friends,’ you say, just as kind as you please.”
“I thought you hated Chayne for that.”
“I did. For a long time. I don’t think I saw the humor in that whole thing until just now.”
Thom leaned closer to his wife and hugged her.
“When you’re younger it’s so many stupid things that are important to you.”
Patti reached back to touch her husband’s hair, still soft, still dry. They rocked, Thom’s eyes closed, and he whispered to her that he wanted to make love tonight.
“I gathered,” she returned.
“Hum?” Thom’s eyes opened.
“Your not so little friend downstairs has been poking on my back for the last twenty minutes.”
“Well, he’s happy to see you,” Thom said drowsily. “Now wash my back, and we’ll call the tub quits.”
He stood up and straddled her, a shower of sudsy water washing down into the tub. Patti watched the suds and water glisten over the roundness of his hirsute buttocks, watched his genitals hanging heavy and wet over her head before he sat down in the water before her. Only twenty years could make this so ordinary and so beautiful in the ordinariness.
She scrubbed Thom’s back and neck and massaged him, and he moaned and told her it felt so good and she was sure that this was lovemaking too.
She said, “A week ago or so I saw this couple in the library. They were so happy—especially the man, and I was happy for them. I thought, how good it would be if everyone was that happy. The two of them reminded me of us—only young. But, I suppose they weren’t that young. Actually, the woman looked like she was close to our age.”
“Well, Patti, we’re not exactly relics.”
“No, but we’re not exactly fresh off the assembly line either.”
Suddenly she dunked Thom in the water and he shot up, spluttering, “What the hell was that for?”
“For the earlier remark about my parents—which I’m sure you thought I’d forgotten. Besides, you needed your hair washed.” Patti began scrubbing her husband’s head and Thom reached for the towel to dry his face.
“Guess who’s been coming to me lately. No, I won’t make you guess. Dena Dwyer.”
“It makes sense,” Thom said grimly.
“Um?”
“I carpool with Bill, remember?”
“Is he as unhappy as she is?” Patti asked. “I always thought she was such a bitch, but today I felt really bad for her. I wanted to help her. She’s coming over next Friday. I don’t even know that we get anywhere. What’s going on with Bill?”
“Oh, honey, I don’t know.”
“Whaddo you mean you don’t know?”
“Honey, we’re men. Men don’t talk about things like that.”
“Don’t make me dunk you again, Thomas!”
“Well, it’s true,” Thom said weakly.
“I know,” Patti said at last. “And it’s not like I know Dena and Lee. My life isn’t Steel Magnolias. Women do all that unity and sharing and girl power bullshit in the movies. In real life we got a hard way to go too. Not, maybe, as hard as men. Because you all aren’t supposed to have feelings.”
“Unless you’re Dave Armstrong, who’s probably beating on a bongo right now.”
“You know I caught Bill Dwyer staring into our window tonight?” said Patti. “He didn’t think I saw him, but I did. He seemed so lonely.”
They drained the tub, showered, began to make love right there, came directly into the bedroom, and Thom lay his wife down and didn’t care that they weren’t dry or that they’d make the sheets wet.
“No,” he said, “Don’t turn off the lights.”
“Thom!”
“I want to see you. I need to see you tonight.”
Make noise. You can make noise. Taste this, taste that, the eyes, the lips, the necks, the breasts, the arms and yes, don’t stop, the hands clawing down the back, raking his ass, bringing him further in. Slow, be slow. No, not slow, not, not , oh, my God! Oh, my God! Thank you, God!