Threesome

“…and with shaving, I see it the very next day,” she says. She is caressing her left forearm with a piece of plastic and she is nodding in approval of the piece of plastic to someone off-camera. The piece of plastic may be a pregnancy test and it may be some depilatory device. The scene shifts and three girls in bright pink wigs are dancing in evident praise of the piece of plastic. I don’t know what I am looking at or why I am looking at it.

It is late in the afternoon. The house is uncomfortable and the walls tilt inward. I need to leave. I go for a walk along the rec trail. I pass strangers and I catch wisps and fragments of words. Cypress trees. The bay. A hundred veneers of cheerful faces. Families. Dogs.

I walk. And I drift.

“…Scott? Hey man, you want another?”

It is years earlier and I am in the Rose & Crown. I am drinking and reading Vonnegut’s “Sirens of Titan.” I stop reading and I look up at the bartender and I gesture in agreement. My name is not Scott and I don’t bother to correct him because I want more beer. The fresh pint arrives and my ashtray is cleaned and I go back to “Sirens of Titan.”

Deeper into that night I am in the loo and peeing and counting. My count stops at fifteen. If the count exceeds twenty I know I will be useless in bed. Fifteen provides a margin. When I return to my seat a girl is there and she is not happy.

“Shell’s here. I had to drag her out.”

I have seen her before. Tall. Red hair. Petite frame. A pretty but currently angry face.

“Um. Who?”

“Shell? Shelly? My God you’re a pig. You don’t even remember her name.”

I think. I must have had sex with someone called Shelly at some point and from what I can now determine, this girl, this friend of Shelly’s isn’t altogether pleased with me for screwing and forgetting Shelly. And I try to say so. I say, “You’ve got it all wrong” and I get the bartender’s attention. From the vague periphery, Shelly refuses my offer of a conciliatory drink.

I look at the cover of Vonnegut’s “Sirens of Titan” and I light a cigarette and I hope that Shelly’s friend will simply fuck off.

She doesn’t.

Shelly’s friend is relentless.

The bar is noisy. The crowd and the din and the shitty disco music and Shelly’s friend’s intermittent bitching. I can’t read.

“You really fucked her up,” Shelly’s friend says at some point.

At another point she says, “You have, like, no respect for women.”

The bartender offers Scott more beer. I repeatedly accept on Scott’s behalf.

After last call we spill out of a cab beside an apartment building on a cul-de-sac off of Ramona Avenue. Inside, I say I need the bathroom and Shelly’s friend tells me, “Quietly.”

When I pee I count to twenty-three.

She is waiting by the bathroom door and when I’m done she ushers me to her bedroom and she whispers she has roommates. I say “okay” in a regular speaking voice and again she’s pissed.

We are standing and kissing and Shelly’s friend’s shirt is off. Her breasts are small and they are perfect. Atop the bed is a heap of laundry and she grabs a blanket and directs me to the floor and she keeps telling me to be quiet. Moonlight filters through open blinds and splashes shadows of the slats across her body.

When the light through the blinds is gray I wake up. Shelly’s friend is asleep. I find my clothes and I try not to make a sound as I pull and I tug and I zip. The heap of laundry on Shell’s friend’s bed shifts, moves, sits up. It is rubbing its eyes and it is looking at me.

It says, softly, “Hi.”

He says, “Are you my dah-dee?”

I say “No, Buddy.” Which might sound like “nobody” to a three-year-old.

Which might be fitting.

I leave.

And I drift.

---

The sun is setting and my walk is done and I am keying the lock on the front door. The TV is still on and it is still yelling at an empty house. Alcohol replaces noise by creating its own. My TV does much the same. I sit in front of it and I absently look at the images that flash and pulse across its screen. I open a beer and I sit and smoke and watch nothing. I doze. Later I am faintly aware that I was dozing and that now I am not because that fucking commercial has come on again. With one squinting eye, I see the nodding girl with the hairy arm and the piece of plastic and the dancers. My thumb finds a button on the remote and everything goes silent.