“Worms,” Veronica is saying, “are both. Male and female. They fuck themselves.” Veronica loves to say “fuck.” She uses it whenever she can.
His father throws his hands up, exasperated. “They’re better off than we are, then, aren’t they, Elliot?”
They are eating lunch at an overpriced restaurant in the Village. His father is acting like a country bumpkin, mispronouncing items on the menu, ordering beer and drinking it straight from the bottle. And now this, fighting with Veronica, loudly, about the sex habits of worms. Elliot is hungover and has small splinters in his lips from drinking out of Gorbachev’s head, but somehow he feels enlightened. Perhaps, he thinks, startled, his father is uncouth, perhaps he always has been, with his sherbet-colored clothes and loud, overly enthusiastic voice.
“This salad,” his father is saying, “is going to send me straight into cardiac arrest.” He picks at it. “Too much bacon.”
“Lardons,” Veronica says. She lights up a cigarette and inhales deeply, even though they are all still eating.
“Whatever,” his father says, and waves his fork around, sending lardons and some lettuce—“Free-zays,” his father had called it when he’d ordered—flying onto the floor. Ignoring it, he leans toward Elliot. “Cholesterol, hypertension, blah blah blah. You can’t relax for a minute.”
Veronica is gazing at everyone else in the restaurant, her eyes flickering, settling, moving on.
“Now there’s all this safe sex you have to worry about,” Elliot’s father continues in his boisterous, “atta boy” voice.
Elliot looks around too, embarrassed. He remembers a night out with his parents back before they got divorced. They went to a new Japanese restaurant for sushi and his father kept squinting his eyes and saying, “Ah so,” as if it were the biggest joke in the world. His mother had gotten up, gathered her jacket and purse, and left, her head bent, her cheeks red. But Elliot and his father had sat and finished their dinner, had taken their time, really. Elliot had been surprised to find his mother sitting in the car when they went out to the parking lot. Somehow he had expected her to be home, gone. But she was sitting in the front seat, looking out the window, waiting.
“Do you?” his father is asking, and Elliot realizes he missed some important part of a conversation.
“What?” he says.
“Do you have safe sex? Use condoms? Whatever?”
Elliot looks around again, certain that everyone is listening.
“Of course,” he lies, thinking again of the Rickey sister last night. This morning he had been unable to get the grass stains off his knees.
Veronica leans back in her chair, blows a long stream of smoke, and says, “Cats have barbed penises, you know.”
At least she spoke softly, Elliot thinks, grateful.
“That’s why they scream that way during sex. It hurts,” Veronica says, studying him.
His father laughs. “You’ve got to see these videos, Elliot.”
ELLIOT WALKS UP and down Bank Street, trying to find Georgia’s old building. He is certain of the block, but all the brownstones look the same. Sitting on a stoop, he wishes he could find Georgia herself, wishes he could lose himself in her black curls, her sex smell. He imagines what her breasts would look like, feel like, taste like, imagines himself suckling on them, drawing out the long, hard nipple, feeding off her. Like a baby, he finds himself thinking.
All these years, Elliot’s fantasies about Georgia have been sexual. In junior high, his wet dreams alternated between Kristie Madden, a science whiz with strawberry blond hair and freckles, and Georgia. Suddenly, he is imagining something else, something more. He thinks of his father and how embarrassed he had made him feel; he thinks of his mother stealing Mr. Rickey away from his family. Is that who he’s a part of? Or is he someone else, cut loose from them, really, taken in?
Elliot closes his eyes and pictures himself inside Georgia. In the past, he has imagined himself there often, riding her, thrusting himself into her. But this is different; he thinks of floating in her, the way this new baby floats inside his mother, cushioned there, warm, safe. He imagines sliding out of her, Georgia squatting and pushing until he emerges. For an instant, it does not feel like pretending. It feels real. Maybe, Elliot thinks, maybe it is real, a buried memory. Maybe these two other people had nothing to do with him at all. Thinking it, he feels light, uplifted, hopeful.
He stands, knowing what he has to do.