Penance by David Housewright Page A

said she would swing by about ten-thirty. It was now 10:23.
    I wanted to get to the videotape, but I also had to be ready for Heather. So I left the tape on the table and went upstairs to my bedroom. I unlocked the drawer built into the pedestal of my waterbed, selected a Beretta .380 from the guns I keep there and loaded it carefully. I slipped it into the back pocket of my jeans and went downstairs.
    I grabbed a handful of chocolate-chip cookies and the videotape and went into what I used to call the family room when I still had a family. Ogilvy, my gray-and-white French lop-eared rabbit, was waiting for me. I opened his cage and he hopped out. I scratched his nose for a moment and then went to the TV and VCR, turning both on. I slipped the tape into the VCR, grabbed the remote and went to the couch. Ogilvy hopped onto my lap and I petted him some more. “Want to watch a movie?” I asked him. The rabbit did not reply. The TV was dialed to “Monday Night Football.” The Bears were giving the Cowboys a game, trailing by three in the middle of the third quarter. I stayed with it for a minute, watching Steve Walsh, a local boy made good, complete his fifth consecutive pass for Chicago. I glanced at my watch: 10:35. I thought of Heather. If I worked this right, I should have time to catch the last quarter. Not that I’m a sports freak, mind you. I follow most games—football, basketball, hockey, golf, baseball—especially baseball, which we all know is the only sport God approves of. But I’m not a fanatic. I don’t go around reciting obscure statistics like the record number of consecutive Gold Gloves won by former Minnesota Twins southpaw Jim “Kitty” Kaat (it’s sixteen, by the way); it’s just a pleasant way to pass the time.
    I hit the play button on the remote …

    I sat in the dark, munching chocolate-chip cookies, watching the images flicker across the screen. I’ve seen porno films before, mostly at bachelor parties, and I’ve viewed them with disinterest. Only I didn’t know the stars of those films. This one I did. This one starred Carol Catherine Monroe.
    “She might be our next governor,” I told Ogilvy. He leaped off my lap and hopped to his cage, taking a hit of alfalfa.
    C. C. was lying in bed, nude except for a gold chain and bad lighting, caressing her co-star whom she identified simply as, “Fuck me, Dennis; fuck me, Dennis.” No inhibited language there. Dennis was an only slightly more lifelike version of the man I found earlier.
    The camera zoomed in close on C. C.’s face, her head rolling back and forth, strawberry locks frosted with gold covering her eyes. It pulled back to reveal what “Fuck me, Dennis” was doing to her, then panned in slowly again as C. C. moaned, “Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes.”
    Oh, brother. I ate another cookie.
    I was not impressed. The film did not fill me with excitement. It emptied me, left me feeling the way I did when I was a child hiding in the bushes, watching the older kids coupling on “Bare Ass,” a white-sand beach along the Mississippi River. It was the same emptiness I felt several years later when my school friends and I lied our way into our first hard-core, quadruple X-rated film, paying five dollars to see just how unsexy sex can be.
    There was no love, no affection, no tenderness. Thoreau attacked C. C. like she was a speed bag, giving her about as much consideration. I understood him. I’ve known plenty of men who treat women as prey. What I did not understand was why a woman would put up with it, how she could find pleasure with him, how she could respond as C. C. was responding—rolling her head and wetting her lips and moaning like an animal in heat. And then it hit me and I understood perfectly.
    “It’s acting,” I said, waving my hand with a flourish at the TV screen. Acting, and nothing more.

    Someone used the brass knocker several times more than necessary to summon me to my front door, apparently not trusting the doorbell. I