Pierrot was thinking of flying foxes. He was imagining peeking into peepholes at girls changing out of wet bathing suits. He imagined they were the Dionne quintuplets and he was making love to all of them. They would fight for their chance to go first. They would yell at Pierrot that he had already made love to that particular quint and that she was actually coming back for seconds.
Poppy thought about all the gin in the bathtub. She had been thinking about what they would eat for dinner. She was thinking about who owed her money. She was thinking about a little gosling she had chased around the backyard in her rubber boots when she was little, for just a moment, and then she went back to thinking stressful thoughts. It’s sort of impossible to be absentminded and vacant and daydreamy during sex. You are either enjoying it intensely or you are in a state of high stress.
Pierrot had a fantasy about making love to a housewife up against the meat counter. She held her little number in her hand. He was trying to come before the butcher got to that number and called it. Because she would be distracted and tell him to get the hell out of there. He wasn’t even sure what that fantasy meant. It had something to do with the Great Depression, though. For whatever reason, it made him burst inside Poppy before he could withdraw.
When he was done and lying next to her, he did take a long look at her face. There was something so affable about it that he gave her a big kiss on the cheek.
When he was making love to a girl, in his mind he made love to about thirty-three girls on average. He felt guilty that he had to do this with Poppy. She didn’t cross his mind once while he was having sex with her. Although he hadn’t been with any woman since they had met, he felt as though he were cheating on her now. He felt terrible.
But when he was done, he shot up and stopped caring. He closed his eyes and fell asleep in the chair with a cigarette in his hand. The ash of the cigarette grew and resembled the trunk of an elephant.
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POPPY FOUND A RING in one of the coat pockets she was rummaging through. She was happy. She put it on her left hand. It had a blue glass stone the color of blue eyes that had been crying. She figured people would assume that she and Pierrot were married.
At one point Poppy was bragging to the neighbors about how Pierrot was so possessive of her—he would never let her talk to any other man. He felt that Poppy was tricking him into becoming some horrible version of a man that he had no interest in being. He knew this was what she believed love was and that she was just trying to be normal, but he didn’t like it at all. It seemed sordid to him. He felt bad about himself all the time.
He did like to make her laugh nonetheless. She would toss back her head and open her mouth and reveal the terrible brown mess in there. They had a jar of money. They kept saving up money so they could buy some new teeth for Poppy. But then every time the money got to the top of the jar, they would spend it on heroin. She would hold up a warm rag to her face the next morning and really regret her actions.
What could be more darling in a woman than regret?
? ? ?
HE FELT THEY WERE never quite meant to be together. Pierrot’s old infatuation with Rose started popping up. He used his love for Rose as an excuse never to commit to anybody, and now he used it to find fault with Poppy. She was kind of crass, wasn’t she? When she was thinking up a solution, she would sometimes stick her hand down the front of her pants. She would burp while she was eating. She always stuck her tongue way out at the side of her mouth when she was doing a chore. She was obsessive. Poppy had all these piles of rags in the living room. She was going through them and sorting them. The bottoms of her feet were black. She was holding her breasts in two hands. “Tits for sale!” she yelled out.
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ONE NIGHT he had to leave the room for a while and get away from Poppy. And on the same night, on the other side of town, Rose left her hotel, wanting to escape the room McMahon rented for her. Pierrot’s coat collar was pulled up so you could only see the top of his head. Rose had her fur hat down over her eyes so just the bottom half of her face was visible. Pierrot leaped back quickly as the trolley rang its bell at him and then surged by. Rose stopped at a streetlight as a car rumbled past the tips of her toes. Pierrot lit a cigarette. Rose inhaled from her cigarette. Pierrot exhaled smoke rings. Rose let white swirls escape from her nose. Pierrot tossed the cigarette onto the ground. Rose ground the cigarette with the sole of her shoe. Pierrot stopped to look at a mannequin wearing a pink dress in the window of a store on the west end of Saint Catherine Street. Rose stopped to look at a mannequin wearing a black suit in the window of a store at the east end of Saint Catherine Street.
“Are you there?” Rose said aloud.
“I’m here,” Pierrot said to himself. “Where are you?”
“It’s funny how often I think about you,” Rose said. “I still miss having you in my life.”