“Just drive us around. Turn some circles, you know? Give us the grand tour of downtown.”
A few minutes later, I’m smiling pleasantly at Jesus’s eye in the rearview mirror, trying to act like Archibald’s head is not under my maxi skirt, between my legs, where it has been for some time now. I’m moaning quietly. Moaning so as not to be rude to Archibald, but trying to do it quietly so that I’m not being rude to the driver. The moans come out of me like hiccups. The truth is I’m too aware of Jesus, of the passing cars, the human traffic on the whooshing streets, the brightness of the city lights, to fully register what’s happening between my widely parted thighs. Mostly it’s as though the bottom half of me has been cut off from the top half and the top half is observing the happenings of the bottom from a curious, empirical height. This bland man is licking the crotch of my underwear, how nice. Now he has removed them. Now he is biting my thighs. Moaning quietly into my leg flesh. There are a couple of moments when the bottom and the top half fuse, when he bites one of my legs hard or I feel his moans hum against my skin, and I gasp. Then I become a whole body of actual flesh that he is actually touching, then I feel the brush of his tongue as an actual brush of an actual tongue between my actual thighs. That’s when I say, I love you, the words just flying out of my mouth like brassy butterflies.
Jesus looks at me. He heard it, but maybe, hopefully, Archibald didn’t.
When the meter gets to twenty dollars, I make my moaning more broken sounding, full of breaths and catches the way Mel’s is when I hear her having sex with her boyfriend through the wall, and then I pretend to orgasm. It’s been seven minutes or so. Mel knew a guy who could make her come in seven minutes.
Archibald lifts his head up from under my skirt, still between my legs.
“You came?”
I look at his face framed between my knees. Floating there weirdly in the dark. His lips are glossy, his thinning red hair in disarray. He takes his glasses off and his eyes are a different color—darker, greener, with bits of yellow in them, which are probably reflections from the lights outside.
I nod.
“You’re lying.”
“No, I really did.”
“It’s okay.” He pats my knee and sits back up on the seat beside me. “I’ll make you next time. Oh, hey, turn this up! Jesus, turn it up. Way up!” He thumps the back of the cabbie’s seat until the man obliges.
“I love this song,” Archibald says to me, leaning his head against the backseat. “Peggy Lee. ‘Is That All There Is.’ You heard it before?”
“No. I like it though,” I say. I don’t. It sounds too old-timey. That cheesy swell of strings. The elephantine trumpets. The woman’s world-weary voice sounding deep and dark as a well, but with one eyebrow raised, one side of her painted lips curled in a perverse smirk.
“It sounds like the circus,” I say.
“If that’s all there is, break out the booze and have a ball,” Archibald says; he’s looking at me intently but blearily. He’s got a big bottle of L’Ambiance he just took a swig from. He holds it out to me, but I shake my head. “I can’t believe you let me do that to you just now.”
“It was fun. I mean, I don’t see how it was fun for you.”
“Oh it was. It’s all I’ve wanted to do to you since I first saw you.”
“Really?”
“I have other fantasies too. Lots of them.”
“You do?”
“Sure. I’m grateful, you know. I’m grateful to you. Look at you. Look at me. I’m unworthy. It’s okay. I know I am. I’ve accepted it. The fact that you let me do this?” He shakes his head. “I’m shocked, honestly. But I’m not going to question it. I’ll take what I can get. It’s like this song. If that’s all there is, break out the booze and have a ball, you know?” He takes a sip of his wine jug. “Sorry we had to do it here, though. In front of Jesus. Guess I couldn’t wait. I was excited.”
“That’s okay. Maybe we can do it again sometime.”
“Anytime. Anytime you want, you just call. I hope you do.” He takes my hand, smiles at me a little sadly. “Do you mind if I bum one of your cigarettes?”
? ? ?
When I come home and tell Mel what happened she says, “Sounds like it was a bust.”
“Totally,” I say.