Motherless Brooklyn

“That’s right, Tony. Fucking Frank Minna Junior. I’m sorry, Lionel, did you want to be Frank? Did I hurt your feelings? I’m afraid Tony has the inside track.”

“That cigarette is going to burn the wood.”

“Let it burn,” she said.

“Is that a quote from a movie? ‘Let it burn’? I feel like I remember that from some movie-Burnamum Beatme!”

She turned her back to me, moved again to the bed. Untangling the dresses from their hangers, she stuffed one into the suitcase, then held the other open and stepped into it, careful not to snag the heels of her shoes. I gripped the closet doorframe, stifling an impulse to bat like a kitten at the shimmery fabric as she slid the dress up around her hips and over her shoulders.

“Come here, Lionel,” she said, without turning around. “Zip me up.”

As I reached out, I was compelled to tap each of her shoulders twice, gently. She didn’t seem to mind. Then I took hold of the zipper tab, eased it upward. As I did she took her hair in her hands, raised her arms above her head and turned, so that she rolled into my embrace. I kept hold of the tab, halfway up her back. Up close I saw how her eyes and lips looked like something barely rescued from drowning.

“Don’t stop,” she said.

She rested her elbows high on my shoulders and gazed up at my face while I tugged at the zipper. I held my breath.

“You know, when I met Frank I’d never shaved my armpits before. He made me shave.” She spoke the words into my chest, her voice dopey now, absent-sounding. All the anger was gone.

I got the zipper to the nape of her neck and dropped my hands, then took a step back and exhaled. She still held her hair bunched above her head.

“Maybe I’ll grow the hair back. What do you think, Lionel?”

I opened my mouth and what came out, soft but unmistakable, was “Doublebreasts.”

“All breasts are double, Lionel. Didn’t you know that?”

“That was just a tic,” I said awkwardly, lowering my eyes.

“Give me your hands, Lionel.”

I lifted my hands again, and she took them.

“God, they’re big. You have such big hands, Lionel.” Her voice was dreamy and singsong, like a child, or a grownup pretending to be a child. “I mean-the way you move them around so quickly, when you do that thing you do, all that grabbing, touching stuff. What’s that called again?”

“That’s a tic, too, Julia.”

“I always think of your hands as small because they move so fast. But they’re big.”

She moved them to her breasts.

Sexual excitement stills my Tourette’s brain, not by numbing me, dimming the world like Orap or Klonopin, those muffling medications, but instead by setting up a deeper attentiveness in me, a finer vibration, which gathers and encompasses my urgent chaos, enlists it in a greater cause, like a chorus of voices somehow drawing a shriek into harmony. I’m still myself and still in myself, a rare and precious combination. Yes, I like sex very much. I don’t get it very often. When I do, I find I want to slow it down to a crawl, live in that place, get to meet my stilled self, give him a little time to look around. Instead I’m hurried along by the conventional urgencies, by those awkward, alcohol-fueled juxtapositions of persons that have so far provided my few glimpses of arousal’s haven. But oh, if I could have just spent a week or so with my hands on Julia’s breasts, then I could think straight!

Alas, my very first straight thought guided my hands elsewhere. I went and plucked the smoldering cigarette off the dresser, rescuing the finish, and since Julia’s lips were slightly parted I stuck it there, filter end first.

“Double, see?” she said as she drew on the cigarette. She combed her hair with her fingers, then straightened her slip under her dress where I’d held her.

“What’s double?”

“You know, breasts.”

“You shouldn’t make fun of-Lyrical Eggdog! Logical Assnog!-you shouldn’t make fun of me, Julia.”

“I’m not.”

“Did something-Is there something between you and Tony?”

“I don’t know. Screw Tony. I like you better, Lionel. I just never told you.” She was hurt, erratic, her voice straying wildly, searching for a place to rest.

“I like you, too, Julia. There’s nothing-Screwtony! Nertscrony! Screwtsony! Tootscrewny!-sorry. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

“I want you to like me, Lionel.”

“You’re-you’re not saying there could actually be something between us?” I turned and slapped the doorframe six times, feeling my face curdle with shame, regretting the question instantly-wishing, for once, that I’d ticced instead, something obnoxious to obliterate the conversation’s meaning, to smother the words I’d let myself say.

“No,” she said coldly. She set the cigarette, what was left of it, back on the dresser. “You’re too strange, Lionel. Much too strange. I mean, take a look in the mirror.” She resumed crushing her clothes into the suitcase, more than seemed possible, like a magician stuffing a prop for a trick.

I only hoped the gun wouldn’t go off. “Where are you going, Julia?” I said tiredly.