Original Love. J.J. Murray
when the Captain blew the Argo’s horn, the tanner of the two looked up at Peter, giving him his first glimpse of a girl’s breasts. Since all he knew about breasts came from the Song of Solomon in the Bible, Peter could only compare them to little fawns.
I was so naive sexually. In sixth grade, Woodhull required all boys to sit with their dads or moms at a big sex education meeting complete with overheads, a movie, and a question-and-answer period, which was punctuated by a question asked by Timmy “The Squirrel” Bottomley, a bigger geek than me: “What happens if the male should urinate in the vagina of the female?” On the way home, the Captain had asked, “Anything you didn’t understand?” “No, sir,” I had replied. And that was the only time in my life that the Captain ever talked to me about sex.
The girl’s breasts weren’t little deer at all, though they had two little button noses. Her breasts were two-toned—circles of white surrounded by bronze. And even after she flattened out and giggled something to the other girl, Peter was still staring. It wasn’t so much that he had seen a girl’s breasts; it was more that he had fallen in love with the contrast there, how the white part stood out against the brown, how the brown drew his eyes more than the white, how the brown made the white so much purer, more natural, more innocent and clean somehow.
Which probably destined me to pick out the exotic, the sensuous, the tan for the rest of my life—except for Edie. What went wrong there? She didn’t have a cute inny, she didn’t have rough hands, she didn’t have long, shiny legs and flashing eyes. After Ebony, I had a cornucopia of the melting pot…but somehow I settled for Edie, who is whiter than this computer screen.
Which made him wonder that morning, as he watched the Captain’s coffee boiling to a froth, if Ebony’s breasts looked the same…or were they tan all the way to those little deer noses?
Jesus, twenty-five-year-old memories are making me horny. I have to cool off, and Henry needs another chapter.
I know, I’ll introduce Edie the Ice Queen into Ebony’s classroom. That will cool me off. Edie could probably solve global warming just by being.
Chapter 3
Since I already know how to write, while Professor Holt rambles on and on about syllabus this and course requirements that and due dates the other, I take a closer look at Johnny. I don’t grit on him out in the open, though. I sneak peeks by slowly taking off my coat while looking at him, gradually rolling my pen toward him then catching it—and his eye sometimes—and painstakingly repositioning my chair until I am almost facing him. It’s an art that I learned from watching the seventh grade hoochies in my classroom. They aren’t nearly as subtle about it as I am, but they are effective. I know the little boys are popping boners left and right in my classes because of them, a few of them even having to sit at their desks after the bell rings until their jenks get back to normal.
Johnny is sort of a C-minus in a lot of little ways, but the overall package is definitely a solid B. He does not have a handsome face—nose too big and bent, eyebrows looking like hairy spiders, ears sprouting gray hairs, skinny lips, cheeks and chin unshaven and scarred, hair too long and uneven in front. Taken apart, he’s a scary man. Put it all together under those coal-dark eyes, and he’s a relatively handsome scary man. His knuckles are bigger than they should be, big circular walnut-looking things, and his nails are way too short, like he chews them maybe. At least they’re clean. His arms have more hair than arms should have. I’ll bet I could comb and style the hair there. His arms are huge, muscular, his shoulders round, his neck pretty thick, his chest…probably so hairy a bird could nest up in there. I won’t even imagine the hair on his back.
Dag, he could be in the Mafia!
But he doesn’t wear a bowling shirt and polyester pants like those Mafia guys do in the movies. He sports a light blue oxford shirt, clean white T-shirt underneath, a thin gold chain barely visible, faded blue jeans, and black Nike hiking boots. He dresses kind of Wal-Mart, like me.
Then I see this pale blond girl standing in the doorway. She wears a tight light-pink T-shirt with the word “Angel” stenciled above her perky little breasts, the shirt leaving a gap where the whole world can see her pierced shiny white belly button. The girl has absolutely no hips, her legs are as skinny as broomsticks, and she’s standing with one pink shoe turned ninety degrees to the side, like she’s getting ready to do some ballet move.
“Pale Edie’s in the house,” I say with a smile. Coleridge had her down pat: “Her skin was as white as leprosy.” Like paper. And she was always in some pose or other, as if she were the subject of some artist painting her in dreamy pastel oils. I swear that she used to dress to match the furniture in the house—pastels and white chiffon for the living room, earth tones for the family room. Sometimes when I looked at her lounging around the house, sighing mostly to herself, I envisioned her as a model in the pages of L.L. Bean and Lands’ End catalogues. And those sighs drove me up the freaking wall!
I hear her sighing, only it’s more like a constant hiss, like air slowly escaping from a bicycle tire, like a foot sliding across a concrete floor, like fingernails scraping across a damn chalkboard, like the sound the Sidekick makes on cold days but I can’t find out where it’s coming from and the mechanic says I must be hearing things and it pisses me the hell off!
It’s that kind of sigh.
“May I help you?” Professor Holt asks.
“I think I’m supposed to be in this class,” she says softly, almost in a whisper but more like a murmur. I know her game. She’s trying to get our attention so we can see her, her matching pink-and-white angel’s outfit, and the two hours of makeup slathered on to her face. All the girl is missing is a halo.
Professor Holt falls for it, walking to the doorway. “I didn’t hear you.”
And that’s the first thing I ever said to Edie Elizabeth Melton, only daughter and youngest child of Edith Elizabeth Melton and William Strong, sister to William Strong, Jr., and Horace Strong Melton. I was grading papers in my classroom at Sewickley Academy, and there she was at the door, murmuring something, posing, sighing. Out of loneliness and a need that I still don’t understand, I pursued her—and she was everything I didn’t want in a wife. She was a debutante and dancer, a bleached-blond sigher, a daughter of privilege with dollar signs for eyes, and an all-around angel from hell who owned a horse, a car, and a boat named Edie E. by the time she was sixteen. She owned that “waif” look long before Kate Moss was even born. Told she had a dancer’s body by some ballet director kissing William Melton’s abounding buttocks, she became anorexic long before the term was well-known, taking brutal ballet classes that reduced her toes to stumps of calloused flesh. Since William Melton was on the board of a Pittsburgh arts council, she was a shoo-in for a spot in the Pittsburgh Ballet. It didn’t happen, so she settled for me, a teacher at her old school.
She smiles at the rest of us, as if we really give a shit. “I think I’m supposed to be in this class.” She hands him a piece of paper, jingling her fake-ass gold bracelets in the process. Oh puh-lease, honey. Get over yourself. You are just a late bitch who wants to make a grand entrance.
“You are…
Now what am I going to name her? Edith? Evie? Eden? Eve? If I make it too close to her real name, she’ll sue me for half of my money for the book. But at the rate I’m going, Edie wouldn’t want to admit that this character is her…would she? Who would admit, “I am that horrible person in that book”?
Edie might, especially if it involves money she didn’t earn.
I’ll just call her “Rose Goulet” for now. Where “Goulet” came from, I have no idea.
“You are…Rose, uh—”
“It’s pronounced ‘Goo-lay,’” she says.
She isn’t a rose, and that last name isn’t fooling anybody. It’s probably pronounced Goo-LEE or GULL-et. This isn’t the south of France. This