Kicking Tomorrow by Daniel Richler Page B

he really felt and determined not to end up lying again for no good reason.
    “They’re pretty nice, I guess. But just cause they’re big like that, uh, –”
    Bingo. Ivy took his hand and pressed it to her chest.
    The next day
they fucksed
school altogether and lurked in the Bookbinders’ empty house. They got drunk, and fondled – whenever Ivy initiated it; the first time Robbie laid a wooden arm across her waist, she jolted away and said, “One track-minder, one night-stander.” The next she was a wildcat, biting his lips, yanking at his ears, mashing his testicles, forcing his hands to squash her breasts. When his fingers brushed her pubic hair, sprung tight as a mattress within her unsnapped Osh Kosh B’Goshes, she recoiled. “You just want to get into my pants,” she said. He couldn’t make head or tail of her.
    Ivy smoked and read aloud to him. She carried several books in her satchel, and they were thumbworn, broken-spined, booze-crinkled, and densely underlined volumes with the pages raggedly cut. “Baudelaire, he’s incredible. Listen:
It is essential to be drunk all the time. That is all: there’s no other problem. If you don’t want to feel the appalling weight of Time which breaks your shoulders and bends you to the ground, get drunk, and drunk again. What with? Wine, poetry, or being good, please yourself. But get drunk.”
    Robbie’s lap warmed under Ivy’s weight, his head resting on her back, the afternoon waning, filling up the drunk old house with a grey, gruelly light. The rush-hour traffic at a whishing pitch on the slushy streets outside. He took a hit off of her cigarette, and the nicotine made him nauseous. “That’s only because,” he told her when she looked at him funny, “while weed is organic and natural, eh, the chemicals in tobacco always throw me for a loop.”
    She wriggled free of his embrace. He watched her walk over to the bookshelf. And the way her body moved inside her dungarees, like she was sweetly, naturally, doing the twist! What wasit like, he wondered, awestruck, to never have to worry about the way you look, to just be beautiful. How does she fall asleep with herself at night? If he were her, he figured he’d be up caressing himself till dawn.
    “This place is a treasure trove,” she said. “At my house the parents say there shouldn’t be books, we’d only wreck them.” She ran her fingers along a row of books like she was searching for a secret button to push, and stopped at
Nadja
, just one title of hundreds there that Robbie had always found easier to dismiss as boring, than pull out and try. “André Breton,” she said. “This book’s incredible. Your parents have good taste. The architect of Surrealism. In one bit they’re driving in the country, he’s at the wheel and she covers his eyes. Whew! The motto is,
Beauty will be convulsive, or not at all
. Isn’t that incredible?”
    “Uh, sure,” Robbie said, pushing his lips out to help him figure it. “You bet.”
    After that they necked and rolled about on the floor, and just as they were getting hot and heavy, Ivy said she wanted another drink. They swigged mouthfuls of raw anise straight from a bottle in the parents’ liquor cabinet, and when their gums were numb, Robbie went to the kitchen to top it up again with water.
    “Don’t be an idiot,” Ivy said, “That’ll make it go yellow.”
    Down in the den he showed off his sketches – first the nudes copied from the classics, then his own surreal bestiary, a bunch of stuff he feared was way too crude to show; a mean-spirited collection all right, unkindly conceived, rudely rendered, about as appealing as spit on the street.
    “It’s just stuff, for fun only,” he said, his cheeks blooming hot. “I did them years ago.”
    Ivy smoked, and examined them for a long time. There were scrums of figures, bullock-headed, all muddy blots of ink and furious scribbles, the lines scratched deep into the surface of the paper; there were