an endless red light, Teddy’s hand moved up slowly.
Without waiting for the light to change, Kwame turned down a narrow street that ran behind his building. Knowing nobody ever walked there at night, he pulled the car over and stopped.
“What are you afraid of now?” Teddy said.
“Shut up,” Kwame growled, his excitement almost unbearable as he put the car in park and turned off the lights.
Teddy didn’t hesitate, knowing his friend’s answer to the question. In this moment, Joyce Ann’s daddy was fearless.
13
I t was almost eleven o’clock by the time Aretha left her studio and stepped outside. The big blue front door clicked shut behind her and she turned to look at it before she started down the walk and headed for home. Pulling her jacket around her shoulders, she saw that the door needed a little touching up. She had done the door project when she was only eighteen. Five years later, the paint was looking a little less vibrant, a little less like something special, and more like just another fading front door.
Aretha frowned at her own carelessness. A neglected
anti-evil-eye device
was worse than no attempt at all. Maybe that was why her life was falling apart. What had happened? Everything had been so good, and then all of a sudden it wasn’t. Or had it been all of a sudden? Had there been signs all along that she had missed? What if in her mad rush to be with this man, she had ignored the warnings like the people always do in the horror movies even though there is blood seeping through the wallpaper and strange noises emanating from behind the wine cellar’s locked door? Maybe that’s the power of really great sex, she thought. It clouds your vision until all you want is
more.
Crossing at the corner, Aretha tried to remember the last time she and Kwame had had great sex. She felt herself wanting to modify the definition of
great
so that she could count a few recent exchanges that had showed promise, but had never achieved anything approaching the sweating, straining, licking, lifting, groaning
grindingness
that distinguishes great sex from the simply adequate, where everybody gets off, but the earth does not move.
It had been more than a year, but Aretha wasn’t sure how much more. Could it really be
two
years? Since before Joyce Ann was born? She couldn’t remember. At this point, she couldn’t even remember if she had stopped wanting to, or he had, but the reality was that sex had become an every-other-week,
what-the-hell
kind of exchange. Admitting the sorry state of her sex life made Aretha feel sad and her feet slowed down without her realizing it. The end-of-summer wind in the trees was a soft whispering sound above her head.
She had read about relationships where people were sexually obsessed with each other, but she’d never been in one until Kwame. Her fear of AIDS and pregnancy had made her vigilant since she’d become sexually active her junior year in high school. It had been great curiosity, not a great love affair, that led her to bestow the onetime gift of her virginity on a shy young man who afterward sculpted her nude body in stone in such loving detail that she blushed seeing it in the gallery as part of his senior show.
Between that first fumbling effort, complete with slippery, uncooperative condoms and a final verdict of close but no cigar in the female-orgasm department, and her first unforgettable night with Kwame, Aretha had had two other lovers. Both possessed abundant energy and an openness to new ideas that matched her own. She became proficient at role-playing and was delighted to discover the utterly safe, totally dependable pleasures of mutual masturbation.
But being with Kwame back then had been different. She had realized that she didn’t want to be creative anymore. She had wanted to experience sex the old-fashioned, preplague way with no latex anywhere in sight. She realized she had never had unprotected sex, and in that sense,
she was still a virgin.
The
Without waiting for the light to change, Kwame turned down a narrow street that ran behind his building. Knowing nobody ever walked there at night, he pulled the car over and stopped.
“What are you afraid of now?” Teddy said.
“Shut up,” Kwame growled, his excitement almost unbearable as he put the car in park and turned off the lights.
Teddy didn’t hesitate, knowing his friend’s answer to the question. In this moment, Joyce Ann’s daddy was fearless.
13
I t was almost eleven o’clock by the time Aretha left her studio and stepped outside. The big blue front door clicked shut behind her and she turned to look at it before she started down the walk and headed for home. Pulling her jacket around her shoulders, she saw that the door needed a little touching up. She had done the door project when she was only eighteen. Five years later, the paint was looking a little less vibrant, a little less like something special, and more like just another fading front door.
Aretha frowned at her own carelessness. A neglected
anti-evil-eye device
was worse than no attempt at all. Maybe that was why her life was falling apart. What had happened? Everything had been so good, and then all of a sudden it wasn’t. Or had it been all of a sudden? Had there been signs all along that she had missed? What if in her mad rush to be with this man, she had ignored the warnings like the people always do in the horror movies even though there is blood seeping through the wallpaper and strange noises emanating from behind the wine cellar’s locked door? Maybe that’s the power of really great sex, she thought. It clouds your vision until all you want is
more.
Crossing at the corner, Aretha tried to remember the last time she and Kwame had had great sex. She felt herself wanting to modify the definition of
great
so that she could count a few recent exchanges that had showed promise, but had never achieved anything approaching the sweating, straining, licking, lifting, groaning
grindingness
that distinguishes great sex from the simply adequate, where everybody gets off, but the earth does not move.
It had been more than a year, but Aretha wasn’t sure how much more. Could it really be
two
years? Since before Joyce Ann was born? She couldn’t remember. At this point, she couldn’t even remember if she had stopped wanting to, or he had, but the reality was that sex had become an every-other-week,
what-the-hell
kind of exchange. Admitting the sorry state of her sex life made Aretha feel sad and her feet slowed down without her realizing it. The end-of-summer wind in the trees was a soft whispering sound above her head.
She had read about relationships where people were sexually obsessed with each other, but she’d never been in one until Kwame. Her fear of AIDS and pregnancy had made her vigilant since she’d become sexually active her junior year in high school. It had been great curiosity, not a great love affair, that led her to bestow the onetime gift of her virginity on a shy young man who afterward sculpted her nude body in stone in such loving detail that she blushed seeing it in the gallery as part of his senior show.
Between that first fumbling effort, complete with slippery, uncooperative condoms and a final verdict of close but no cigar in the female-orgasm department, and her first unforgettable night with Kwame, Aretha had had two other lovers. Both possessed abundant energy and an openness to new ideas that matched her own. She became proficient at role-playing and was delighted to discover the utterly safe, totally dependable pleasures of mutual masturbation.
But being with Kwame back then had been different. She had realized that she didn’t want to be creative anymore. She had wanted to experience sex the old-fashioned, preplague way with no latex anywhere in sight. She realized she had never had unprotected sex, and in that sense,
she was still a virgin.
The
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