Slut Lullabies by Gina Frangello Page B

to.” He was that cinematic breed: the soulful gang-leader. His hair, in a sea of Brillo-pad Italian-boy heads, fell into his eyes in loose locks. They made such a beautiful pair that, hair wet, in skimpy swimsuits on Oak Street Beach, people gawked. But out in society, in clothes that grew progressively more expensive the more Nicky sold, a certain gaud easily distinguished them from the righteous affluent, those whose establishment she and Nicky gladly skirted. Women averted their eyes; men tightened their grips on their wallets. Nowadays, even though it has come back in fashion, Annette refuses to wear gold.

    The facts: It was a Friday when the window washer first arrived (or rather, when she accidentally flashed him and noticed his existence—he had probably been at this job for some time). So, each Thursday night she makes certain to sleep at Brent’s, which is easier now that his wife and their three children are in South Haven for the summer, and Brent drives up from Friday night to Sunday morning. Thursday evenings he is desperate to see her, desperate to fuck her brains out, even though he admits he and his wife do have sex. “It’s easier than having to talk about why we never screw,” he says. Clearly no brains will be hitting the headboard in South Haven.

    Annette sat, a tight coil beside Nicky’s sprawled-wide legs. He was purposefully bored, having only come as a favor to her, one he wasn’t intending to let her forget. Annette had read a review of The Unbearable Lightness of Being and needed to see it. She nursed a fantasy of herself as the kind of girl who liked foreign films, but the prospect of getting anyone she knew to sit through subtitles was nonexistent, and this movie—in English, but with its European stars and director—seemed a possible compromise. “You’ll like it,” she’d begged Nicky. “It’s supposed to be sexy.” To which he replied, “I don’t need to go to the movies to get off.” He’d smuggled in more candy than they could eat, just to make a point.
    This was the only cinema they’d ever visited together. Childhood movies they both loved— Grease, Saturday Night Fever —they’d seen separately, or on cable, getting high around the glow of somebody’s mother’s old TV. Yet he was here. It occurred to neither of them that she should go alone.
    Nicky’s every squirm and twitch jarred her. She imagined him berating her in his head for not reading the part about the movie being three hours long . When the credits finally rolled, she felt numb with relief. The Unbearable Boredom of Being , Nicky called it, filing out of the theater with his arm around her, periodically knuckling her head like when they were kids. “Those chicks weren’t even hot,” he said. “One was old and the other had no tits. You put them to shame—why do you always wanna be somebody else?” It was the first time Annette ever felt embarrassed in front of Nicky, like he’d figured out something weak about her that she hadn’t even known herself.
    Afterward, though, clips from the film began playing in her sexual fantasies. She went out and bought the novel, by a strange Czech dissident whose jacket photo looked aggressive, angry, potentially violent. In the book, the Tomas character was supposed to be a much older man than scrumptious Daniel Day-Lewis—probably near fifty. The author used simple words, but his train of thought was confusing, preoccupied with classical music and philosophies with which Annette was unfamiliar. While she could sense the same erotic current of the film swimming just beneath so many inaccessible ideas, she ultimately tossed the novel aside and allowed Day-Lewis and his voluptuous on-screen lover, Lena Olin of the sultry bowler hat, to claim space in her head again, dismissing the book on which their roles had been based as part of a giant heap of