not? We don’t have any competitions coming up.”
Miranda knows the rule: no sex for two weeks prior to a fight. Key Element No. 21: Intimacy Softens the Combative Spirit.
“I just want to conserve my energy for tomorrow,” he says.
“What’s so special about tomorrow?”
“Vitality Sermon,” he lies, his pulse starting to pound like a mallet against his larynx.
“You figure you need extra energy for that? You do them every month.”
“Yeah, well, I always like to have my wits about me, give a good performance.”
“Performance is right. Got to make it sound good in case Hitler’s listening.”
“Don’t call him that.”
“Why? You can be such a limp noodle sometimes. Look, do you want me to come over or not?”
He thinks about it for all of three seconds: if he says no, she’ll sulk for weeks. She’ll misplace his telephone messages at work and overbook his Introductory Lessons. Master Zahbar will notice and take Moey into the office for a Man to Man Talk.
He sighs in defeat. “Of course I want you to come over.”
But, of course, he doesn’t. Miranda fucks the way she fights — intently, ruthlessly, her sole purpose to conquer. In her twenty-six years of life, she’s taken twice as many lovers and won twice as many kickboxing trophies as Moey. The last thing he needs right now is to be conquered.
Oh, to be sure, Miranda won most of her trophies point sparring, not full-contact fighting. At five foot two and 115 pounds, she lacks the necessary mass to knock her opponents’ blocks off. Lightness of feet, accuracy of strikes, and unbridled energy can’t, in full-contact kickboxing, overwhelm thundering poundage. Not in the competition ring, anyway, where brute force is always combined with deadly skill. Miranda bears this knowledge pragmatically, and what she lacks for in the ring she makes up for in the bedroom.
Once, after an unusual round of celebratory tequila shooters (both of them rarely imbibed alcohol), Moey asked her why she hadn’t become a dominatrix.
“Because I don’t go for all that sadomasochistic crap,” she scornfully replied.
Since then he often wonders how she defines sadomasochism, given her fondness for whips, wrist shackles, and anal beads capable of delivering mild electrical shocks. Not that he ever, ever, lets her get anywhere near him with those beads. Or, for that matter, anything else that suggests a back-door entry. Miranda views this as his great flaw, his total abhorrence of even the idea of anything entering his rectum. At least once a month she says irritably, “For Christ’s sake, I’ll use plenty of lube. A couple of thrusts and you’ll be hooked. Come on, you’re wasting a perfect pair of balls.”
Not the slightest pleat, wrinkle, or crimp mars the taut surface of Moey’s testicles, but why this should endow him with the desire for derrière drama is completely beyond him. Miranda can suck on his testicles endlessly, sometimes gently, sometimes a trifle rough, her tongue flicking hummingbird-style to and fro or slinking wet and stealthily over their smooth terrain. She can — and on what she terms her lazy nights, frequently does — climax solely by curling catlike between his legs and sucking contentedly on his privy parts. Those are the nights he likes best.
As Miranda walks into his basement suite a scant fifteen minutes after their phone conversation, her wet Rastafarian braids and delicate Negro features framed by the halogen streetlight a mere five feet from Moey’s door, he can tell by the gleam in her eyes that this isn’t going to be one of her lazy nights.
Alas.
At least the rainstorm will muffle her screams of pleasure from his landlords above.
As cramped as Moey’s writing is, Morris’s script is neat and fastidious. Every evening his letters march from his Bic pen with the precision of soldiers on parade.
Morris keeps these obedient alphabetical symbols in a journal. For the most part, his entries describe his unusual podiatric cases, all lovingly and lavishly described. This evening he briefly touches on a case scheduled for surgery tomorrow morning: Mr. P. Chapman, a thirty-eight-year-old man suffering from Madura foot, a fungus infection characterized by chronicity, tumefaction, and multiple sinus formation.
But occasionally the River appears among his meticulous recordings. Morris mistrusts the River, fears it even. Tonight, while his wife lies sleeping on their Sears king-size bed, he writes these words beneath his medical notes:
Another person drowned in the River today. A fisherman, according to the six o’clock news. He waded in too deep while trying to unsnag his line. I fail to understand why he was fishing during a torrential downpour in the first place.
This is not the only casualty this fall. Five weeks and two days ago, a sixty-four-year-old woman was walking her Chihuahua in Lynn Canyon and failed to realize the danger of trying to cross that River without benefit of a bridge. One wonders if it was a suicide, though apparently this has been discounted. She was wearing heels, too. Outrageous footwear for such an activity. They cause no end of damage to the metatarsus.
What is wrong with people, I’d like to know, that they feel a need to approach that River as if it were immovable concrete. It is a force of nature, unpredictable and therefore dangerous.
I would call it a menace, but that seems inappropriate, as it was here long before we were.
Thirty-three lives have been lost since we’ve moved into this house. I have kept track. Today was the thirty-third. I don’t know how many more must die before our Council members do something about it. Can’t people exercise at a recreational centre? A complete waste of taxpayers’ money to erect such centres if people insist on exercising in that canyon instead.
Karen walks along that River. I don’t understand it, don’t understand it at all. I would talk to her about it — have talked to her many times — but she doesn’t listen. So I’ve stopped. I suppose I could order her to refrain from walking there, but there’s no point in issuing a command that will never be obeyed. That only undermines the authority of the one issuing the order. Besides, she’s my wife; one mustn’t be reduced to believing one’s wife is something one can command.
But good God, you’d think she’d show some common sense, some responsibility to her children, and stop entering that bloody canyon! What would I ... [Morris pauses, frowns, crosses out “I,” and replaces it with “we.”] What would we do with out her?
Perhaps we should move.
The fisherman was only thirty-eight.
Two doors away Andy, too, is confessing his fears, only not in written form and not to a journal. He is sharing them with his Buddha.
The Buddha was given to him as a Christmas present two years earlier by Nanny Woodruff. (Lately, Candice has refused to call her that, saying it sounds babyish; she now calls her “Grandmother” instead.) Nanny Woodruff is Andy’s favourite grandparent. Grampy Woodruff simply overwhelms him, the way he heaves his massive bulk to and fro like an active volcano, constantly erupting with deafening bellows of laughter or biblical quotes, and Nanny Morton scares him a little with her embarrassing belches and drool and perpetually gummed-up eyes. Andy has no memory of Grampy Morton, long since buried at the local
