Sketch: In a Room

Netbooks, I say to her, running my bare hand over the swell of her haunch as she turns over on her back. Laptops are getting passe. Young kids like netbooks or smart phones.

What about you? she says.

Well, I say, you know me. I don’t go for the new stuff so much as most kids. I’m not a Facebook kind of guy.

I pass my hand over her belly as she speaks of her grand son in Florida. She wants to retire in Florida. She knows people there. I would imagine I'm only about 5 years older than her grandson. I wonder if she thinks of him when I'm pressed hard against her making her wheeze a little with the insistence of each thrust. What do women think of when men climb onto them and take up that ridiculous humping posture? I don’t have the courage to ask.

There is a world of difference between a girl and a woman. When you’ve had a woman, you can’t go back. Not just a woman, but a beautiful woman at the moment in her life when she's gloriously gone to seed. Her wild verdure and my root sunk deep in the raw of her. Saw grass. Milk weed. Hawthorne. Thistle. Dandelion. Wild violet. Wild strawberries. Wild catnip. Wild oats and wild wheat; gloriously gone to seed.

The room we lie in is her room; quiet and small, lived in and fragrant. But also with a feeling of the best things having already passed away before we showed up. It’s a place where a couple might go to pass the time while waiting for the next act of their lives to begin. This room is at the top of a walk up stairs in a two story house. For me there is always that feeling of anticipation as I climb the cheap wooden planks, hold the wooden railing of white washed two by fours, knock plaintively on the door wondering what she will be wearing, or not, when the chain rattles and it spreads solicitously wide. Its become such that the feeling of wooden planks under my feet and wood under my hands has become enough to arouse me from habit when I’m somewhere else. What we do in these rooms, on this noisy loose jointed bed, becomes a habit over time, like walking the dog, like being fed at a certain time of day. Appetite and answer.

After a year of habit, the habit of walking upstairs, the habit of the opened door, disrobing her is as easy as making a sandwich. Its understood. She keeps nothing on but her white gym socks, which she does for me because it arouses me. She likes to warm the soles of her bare feet against my thighs under the blanket on cold afternoons. With her gym socks on, she’s a schoolgirl. Thick white pure cotton socks with rows of thick cotton ridges with elastic tops with a thin blue band and a tiny hole in the toe, and the taut outline of her toes which she curls tightly when she’s diving deep in her pleasure. When she’s at her final moment, on each foot she lifts up only her big toe; lifting her toes right when I’m bending down on my elbows to take her ear lobe between my lips as I feel the agony of pleasure defeating my will to last an instant longer for her, and her strained cigarette breath against my cheek like a hot bellows as I bear down against her belly, groan her name and let go with a curse. I like her best when she comes back sweat slicked and unshowered from the gym. She waits on the shower for me to join her because I’m strange and gross in that way. I want all of her, even her smells. I'm not like other young men. I’m a strange beast at a time in her life when she longs for the strange things because she has nothing left to lose or be embarrassed about.

There was a time early on, she met me once with her cool damp hair all up in gray plastic curlers held in place by springy brass clips with plastic tips. I was surprised at the intensity of excitement it stirred in me seeing how much in that moment she reminded me of my mother. I manhandled her, stumbled her protesting across the room in pink bunny slippers and a ratty old bath robe of thick soft cotton. I took her on her back with brute selfishness, too urgent to even bother taking my jeans all the way off. All the while the plastic curlers rained off her head like little bombs on the hard wood floor beneath the squealing old bed; plop plop plop. Her head dangled over the edge of the bed, desparately clutching at the rumpled sheet together with my face nuzzled hard behind her ear trying not to tumble off with me on top of her. It was over in a minute. She rolled me off, sat next to me, scolded me, sulked, lectured me perfunctorily about women's rights. But she didn't ask me to leave. I stole one of those curlers which my rapacious vigor had joggled loose. I sleep with it under my pillow at home.

We can’t last. What will remain is the oily smell of the room which will haunt me whenever someone fries up bacon and eggs. The floozy tobacco smell on the cloth of my clothes when I leave. The easy smoke that curls towards the ceiling fan from the rough leafy brown cheroot between those skillful warm hands at rest, which have been provoking and using my conjured firmness to nurse some secret wound in private dignified ecstasy. She’s been lying beside me, looking through me in the late afternoon blues with the corner of a fastidious Kleenex poking up between her reddened old thighs.

She renews her chatter about her grandson graduating high school next month and wondering what she should get him. What would be a good netbook?

My hand passes over her lolling breast, then down passing along the hard knobby ridge of her caesarian scar and she lifts up a little to give my roaming hand access to her. My hand wanders down between her loose thighs which have the beginnings of wrinkles, and take away the wet Kleenex.

The hair between her thighs is mixed with gray. It can’t be colored, or at least no one does. Gay boys always want to know if the drapes match the carpet. Well, hers don't. The gray down below is like opening an inner sanctum, an expression of trust, a confession of hidden truth. This is who I really am, say the hairs. The hair is shamelessly unbarbered, thick and wiry. I love the rough, long strands like the rough edged weeds of her seedy meadow. I love to run my fingers through that hair between her thighs and linger there, take a curly salt and peppered hair and gently draw it to its length and look. This languidness, looseness, this pliant longing mixed with a bit of stiffness in the joints, makes my lover so easy to seduce. I offer her a massage, a foot rub, anything will do, and her clothes melt away with an unctuous eagerness contrived to make me feel masterly over her.


I don’t know, I say. Anything by Sony is always good. Acer is cheap but I hear they don’t last long. Radio Shack used to make good products out of Texas. Now it’s all the same cheap junk from China.

China is where Japan was when I was a girl, she says. Her hand travels down between my naked thighs and makes me jump. She smiles, feeling the unspoken shift of power from me to her.

Her fingers wander over my junk, affectionately more than sensually. What do you mean, I say.

Japan used to make all this cheap tin shit you’d get in dime stores like Woolworth's. You've never heard of Woolworth’s have you? After WWII Japan was bombed into the ground and just rebuilding. All their stuff was so cheap -

Ah! Whoa!

- do you like that? Anyway. So if it said 'Made in Japan' on the bottom, well that was a big joke. It meant junk. Made in Japan, that’s what you’d say about something weak.

Now Japan is the best.

Time changes everything, she whispers. Have you been to New York?

No I say, feeling myself surrender to her down there.

I grew up in New York.

Yes, I say. To what I don’t know. I’ve stopped listening.

The chinelle bed spread we lay on is a kind of thin, tightly woven cotton cloth, died red with a couple of drying stains in the middle. Two so far, but the afternoon isn't over. The cloth is very soft and thick like a baby blanket. It has crisscrossed rows of cotton tufts like little caterpillars you can feel when you’re moving over them, when your face is being shoved down into them, or your ass being rubbed rhythmically against them with warm meaty weight pressing on top of you.

Daring menial, she says.

What's that?

You look like an elevator boy, she says.

What's an elevator boy?

Sometimes you still see them in big hotels in foreign cities. They open and close the doors for the people in the elevator. He brings them to their floor.

It sounds boring.

It is. Except that in an age without service, all the rich women imagine what it would be like to take a handsome menial servant to their room, someone so much lower than themselves. And then fuck the daylights out of him. And then send him back to his dark little elevator alone.

If I were an elevator boy, would you bring me to your room?

Oh yes.

And her hand is still down there.

I should have stayed in New York, she says.

Why didn’t you?

I was going to marry this man who worked on Broadway, writing plays. He's a big shot now. But you wouldn't have heard of him.

She mentions his name and she's right, I've never heard of him.

Why didn’t you marry him?

He was a Jew. My parents wouldn’t let me marry him.

Because he was a Jew?

Yes.

That's crazy.

Time changes everything, she says again. She takes her hand away and I feel some of the shine go out of me.

She rolls over on her other side, giving her back to me. Thinking. After a very long time she speaks and her voice is cracked and old - what are you good for? she says.


C. Sanchez-Garcia