My Mouth, Her Sex, the Night, My Heart

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HER BREASTS | She was wearing one of those dresses with a hole at the top, like someone had cut a circle out of the fabric, so her breasts were sort of framed and you got to see all the way to the bottom, the full inward curve, her pretty brown skin shining under the lights with this hot strip of air between the two of them where I wanted my tongue to go. Every guy in the club, a few of the women too, took one look at those tits and something inside of them, some careful architecture of restraint, collapsed. Boom. She had two friends with her, deputy goddesses, all three of them in flimsy rayon dresses, taking quiet pleasure in their ripple effect.

I was up in the DJ booth. It wasn't even a booth. A booth would imply glass. This was more like a stall. The sound board was the kind of thing you'd find in a college station at the dawn of the '80s. I was total crap as a DJ. I didn't even get paid for my services. I got drink tickets.

It wasn't the best time for me, overall. My sisters were both in a mess. Jen was strung out on some kind of new speed they'd invented. Cynthia had panicked on her thirtieth birthday and leaped ass-first into a lousy marriage. There were a couple of kids now, and her husband was cheating on her. I'm mentioning this—why? Context, I guess. I don't want you to think I'm some drooling idiot with no context.

The breasts belonged to a woman named Alison. I didn't know Alison's last name. She'd been a few years behind me at Drake, which is one of those lousy downtown colleges specializing in New Media. It was full of dumbshits like me with grand designs of becoming record producers. We hadn't gotten the world's bad news yet. That was still a few years off. Or actually, if you were me, that was now. I edited software manuals and lived in a basement in the South End of Boston. On weekends, I DJed at a failing club called M-80 and later, in the small hours my sisters favored for calling, I dozed off on the fold-out futon, my limbs heavy with vodka, hoping for the phone not to ring.

Alison was called Ali. I'd served as her TA in Beginning Audio. Back then she'd been a chubby little frosh in sweatsuits. But something had happened to her, some dramatic physiological thing. The flab had melted away, leaving behind womanly curves. She'd grown her hair out. She had this certain way of walking, with her chin up high. And there were those breasts, bulging flagrantly against the fabric. Later on, when I talked to the bouncers down below, they couldn't get out full sentences.

Ali walked right up the stairs and presented herself to me. This was the great delight of her life. She could present herself to people, particularly those who had known her in her previous incarnation, and they would be struck dumb with gratitude.

She said hey. I said hey. We made dumb postcollegiate small talk. She touched my arm once or twice. Her friends went to sit at a table. They thought the whole scene was ridiculous. Guys kept coming up to them and getting swatted away like flies.

Ali said, I didn't know if you'd remember me. She said, Why don't any of the girls in this place wear a dress? Can't you smoke in here? What kind of bar is this? She went outside to smoke.

I'd smoked myself for a while, but I'd managed to kick the habit for the most part. My sister Jen was just through rehab, and she...