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Double Blind
Michael J. Vaughn
For
Katrina Galway
She
had had boyfriends, had made love, but Rodin’s work she knew to be something
else, something about power and surrender and weakness and force and then all
those things getting mixed up, so that you couldn’t tell which was which. They
weren’t actually two figures. They were some kind of storm. Some kind of storm
at sea with the clouds and waves and winds tossed about, and was it the sea
that made the rain or the rain that made the sea?
--JCWatson, from Current Wisdom
One
My mother wanted me to be a doctor. But I knew how awful
I was with people, so I botched the exam. She expressed her disappointment for
years.
Mom
was a cabernet alcoholic, much more elusive than your square-bottom whiskey
swillers, your pitcher-a-night barflies. She carried on for years, hidden by
her custom wine cellar, her weekends in Napa – and never, ever tired of
complaining about her wretched, alimony-fueled existence.
One
day in Calistoga, she jumped the embankment, her brain swollen from all-day
tastings, and planted her Jaguar in the crown of a live oak. Watch the picture
in stop-motion, drunkie Mom rocketing through the windshield, dangling seat
belt erect with inertia, a jag of glass slicing her head clean off.
I
was relieved. Relieved to get on with my life without the constant board
review, the endless filibuster, the eternal making up for my father’s desertion
(when I couldn’t really blame him). I was also relieved that she hadn’t taken
anyone with her. I always thought she would.
I’m
a drunk, too. Half the time that shit touches my lips, I end up behind bars –
or married. There’s your free will, your predestiny. The fault lies not in our
stars, but our cells.
It’s
1973. A psychiatrist, Donald Goodwin, rounds up a pool of 67 Danish children –
sons of alcoholics, adopted soon after birth by non-alcoholic parents. Didn’t
matter. Eighteen percent became alcoholics, compared to five percent of the
control group (sons of non-alcoholics, adopted by non-alcoholics). Dancing to
the tune of their DNA, they were three to six times more likely to become
alcoholics.
The
tune I dance to is science. I love the human body. I love every part of the
human body except the larynx, which produces so much more shit than the colon.
Abolish the larynx, give me mutes for patients, and Voila! I’m a doctor.
I
haven’t had a drink since the bachelor party. Whenever I drive past a liquor
store, I picture 23-year-old Davey, climbing a live oak in his paramedic
jumpsuit to fetch my mother’s noggin from the high limbs.
It’s four o’clock Tuesday. I run
the last of my gels, give the high sign to Marty Quock (my guardian, my
wing-man) and hop on my bike for a ride down Palm Drive. Palms are not a native
species here, but they give the campus a regal entranceway, leading through
small twin towers to El Camino Real, highway of the Spanish missionaries. (We
call it “The El Camino,” which translates as “The The Road.”)
I
track the spooky sidewalk underpass, tunneling under the train station, then
reemerge in the townie chaos of Palo Alto. Cars stack up at the light as
pedestrians scatter across like pigeons. I wing a right at the bead shop, lock
my bike to an S-shaped rack, and cut around to the side door. My secret knock
(the opening beat to “My Sharona”) is answered by the sexiest woman on the
peninsula.
Kelly’s
got one of those short, mousse-dependent haircuts that spindles out like an old
broom, falling from her crown in triangles of black and purple. For her it
works, because she’s got the face: long lines, sharp chin, Mediterranean nose
with a midway bump, brown cat’s eyes and a loose-lipped smile. She’s the
library book I always check out.
“Hey,
Hoppy. In for the usual?”
“Sure.
How about you?”
Kelly
turns around, bends over and flips her skirt. She’s painted her ass like a
hooker’s face: blue eyes with overlong lashes, a broad nose straddling her
crack, and pouty lipsticked mouth surrounding her bubble-gum labia. She has
pre-lubed herself with massage oil, so my mission is clear. I open my fly, give
my dick a couple of pulls and ram it home. Then I close the door.
“Oh!”
she groans. “God! I never feel complete without that cock in me. Could you just
follow me around the rest of the day?”
“I
think the necklace-makers of Palo Alto would frown on it.”
“Charge
them admission!”
I
slide out till nothing’s inside but the helmet, then thrust back in. The blue
eyes jiggle.
I was waiting for a train to San
Francisco, taking the kids to a Giants game. Laura tapped her finger against a
bulletin board.
“Daddy!
Look! It’s a cat with a tuxedo.”
Or
a picture of a cat, name of Corialanus, on a “Lost” flyer. I spotted the same
cat ten feet away, on a “Found” flyer, tore them both down and said, “Look,
Laura – two of a kind!”
She
screwed up her face. “Does that beat… a straight?”
“No.
But it will give us a happy pet-owner.”
“You
don’t know what it’s like!” said Kelly. “I’ve got a seven-year-old who’s been
mooning over that cat all week.”
“I
could hazard a guess,” I said.
“Let
me buy you dinner.”
“I
have this ‘wife’ thing. And you sound entirely too good-looking.”
She
laughed. “I am. But how can you tell?”
“I’m
a geneticist.”
“Of
course! How ‘bout coffee?”
I
thought about it. “Coffee’s safe. Four o’clock? University Café?”
“See
you there. I’ll be wearing denim.”
Indeed
she was. And a necklace of lapis lazuli. I might have been okay if it weren’t
for that necklace – kept drawing my eyes to her cleavage. Milk-white. I’m a
sucker for goth girls. But I was not
the one who brought up sex.
“The
single-mom thing is hell,” she said, chewing a biscotti. “The men all think I’m
looking for Daddy number two, when all I really want is a robust fucking. I
think that’s why I’m so attached to the goddamn cat. Hah! I must have walked
right by that ‘Found’ poster.”
A
half-hour later, she was perched on the break-room table at her bead shop, legs
splayed as I pounded into her. I certainly don’t mind foreplay, but there was
something thrilling about a woman who treated you like a human dipstick.
Afterwards, I conducted some negotiations.
“I
don’t love my wife. I never have. But she’s the one who’s raising my kids. I
have a vested interest in keeping her happy. How about once a week? We get off,
we don’t get too attached – you get to keep your prospects open.”
I
reached for my wallet and extracted two hundred-dollar bills.
“Before
your mind goes anywhere near convention, let me say that this a free-will
offering, an acknowledgement that some people get the shaft and others get rich
wives. But there are attachments. Don’t tell me about your boyfriends, don’t
tell your boyfriends about me. Use a condom with your boyfriends. Are we
agreed?”
Kelly
smiled and folded up the bills. “You’re a real good fuck, Hopkins. But I will
take your money.”
This time is different. She stops
me, takes me out, and I finish in her mouth.
“We’re
hungry today?”
She
peers around my dick sort of… shyly (what kind of a trick is that?).
“I
like it, once in a while. You taste pretty good. Nutty-fishy. A touch of
almond.”
“I’m
on a tasty-sperm diet,” I say. “What some men won’t do to please their…”
“Looking
for a noun?”
“Why
does ‘lover’ sound so fucking French?”
“Don’t
worry,” she says. “I doubt you’ll ever have to introduce me at a dinner party.”
I
head for the bathroom to clean what’s left of Kelly’s ass-hooker from my
privates. When I come out, she goes in, and I take the opportunity to fetch my
wallet. Kelly’s been pretty good, but I still like to maintain a certain mythos
about the process – as if the money appears by magic. I open my usual drop-spot
– a brass box engraved with Hindu figures – and find it occupied by a hunk of
yellow glass, cloudy like lemon marmalade, size of a horse-pill.
“What’s
this?” I ask.
She
re-enters in her bathrobe. “Trade bead from Kenya. Made in Venice, fifteenth
century. I thought you’d like it.”
“I
do.” I drop it in her pocket. “Keep it here for me.”
She
frowns. “Shithead.”
I
tap my temple. “Smart shithead.” Then I slip on my windbreaker. “Next Tuesday?
Lover?”
She
hesitates. She has every right to say no. I wouldn’t blame her. “Yeah. Next
Tuesday.”
“See
you then.”
“Shithead.”
There’s
no time I like better than Tuesday evening, wheeling past the immigrant palms
of Stanford. Relieved of my lust.
Photo by Paul Grenside
Photo by Paul Grenside
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