A Sport We Use To Pass the Time
We drive across a bridge intended for shepherds. The shame of our un-village manners forces the laughs from our throats—the ha ha ha how funny. The crossing is a trick we manage, a ruse rather than a foolhardy accident which comes from fiddling with the radio en route.
In the village, no billboards relieve the tension. No women in impossible pumps lean forward with that look of breathless astonishment, the mock-innocence (you know what she means) while kids in the backseat hardly notice. No billboard face to kiss the boo-boos. No breasts to make it better. My metaphysics comes out frail and commercially-driven.
“I’d hate to be a virgin again,” Ralph says as a young female in black wool pants and boots guides three cows across the street.
“What does beef have to do with virginity?”
“I wasn’t thinking about beef—really. It’s the milk, I guess. The cow milk. And the girl.”
The radio jumbles the emanating moos. The cows pose as backlit silhouettes, their lips cracked open, soundless.
“I hated being a virgin from the moment I first heard the word hymen. The word bothered me so much—hi men! I couldn’t wait to get rid of it.”
He clucks his tongue. “I think girls like to stay virgins. I slept with several girls who lied about being virgins. Maybe they thought I couldn’t tell the difference.”
“But you could?”
“Of course. It was obvious. But hard to explain.”
“Did you confront the faux virgins after the fact?”
“Actually, I tried. I confronted the first two—look, I said, I know you aren’t a virgin, you don’t have to lie about it, I still had a great time—but both shook their heads and blushed and screamed tiny sharp little words of denial. Tiny no no nos. Even then, they refused to relinquish their virginity.”
I feel carsick, disappointed. Ralph is not the mammal I’d imagined.
My silence gives the impression that perhaps he should expand on the topicperhaps ground the topic in firm economic theory. So he does.
“To lose your virginity is like losing an investment—a value you only have once. A magic gold coin that gets you through a gate and then what? If its value is so large as to be unexchangeable, I say virginity is a great hedge against future loss.”
“Don’t tell me,” I mutter.
Dark chocolate will solve anything from birth control to missed turns in Transylvanian villages.
I think one thing and say another. Other times, I think one thing and say no thing which leads me to think about something else I never said. And what if I had?
We stop outside a small cafe, its sign “Mama’s Mamaliga” blazed in thick black serif font atop a plastic Coca-Cola banner, the kind you see on the fence at baseball games. The waitress ushers us inside—the outdoor seating pre-occupied by a massive puddle.
“I’ve always preferred Pepsi myself,” I tell the waitress who looks like an early variant of a thought inside David Lynch’s head.
She ignores the joke and pulls the chair out for Ralph as she angles forward, a top-heavy tulip, to guide his eyes through the drink menu. She giggles and laughs as I try not to think the word tramp.
I try not to trample her in my head, especially after Ralph squiggles his eyebrows and laughs to fill in the silent spaces. Together, the waitress and Ralph leave no silence unfilled between them.
“I’ll have whatever he’s having,” I say.
The waitress nods and tells Ralph she’ll be right beck vit dat beer.
“It’s all soft porn from here,” I lament.
“What? Noooo—her? Really?” he shakes his head slow as a time lapse shot—the extended, drawn-out nooooo-noooooooo-noooooo of a girl who says one thing and means another. Truth be told, Ralph’s denial has all the cinematic exertion of fake female orgasm. All those no’s have different tenors.
I know what I have to do, and it’s not like I haven’t done it before when faced with a fembot-waitress.
Look. Stare it square: the exaggerated display of porn is meant to arouse a man through flattery. There’s Ralph secretly thinking the waitress isn’t putting on a show for him. There’s Ralph pretending to read the menu and believing it’s genuine home-cooked village fare.
Forget the historic ruins, the Roman what-nots, the conquering Huns, the Art Museum That Matters—for the purposes of foreign travel, little in the tour guides is relevant. Because there is no place in the world you can walk ten miles without running into a bosom that wants you. No place without the coming attraction.
“I think she appreciates being treated with respect,” Ralph offers, his eyes limpid as double-barrelled moonshine. “I mean, imagine how curt and rushed her customers might be. A little courtesy goes a long way.”
My eyes roll back in my head until I drag them back out to face the wreck that is Ralph. It’s impossible to convince him her behavior is geared towards male-kind in general as opposed to this One Courtesy-Knight seated at the table. Because look, and look again: What’s faux in the context of a good show?
Now watch and learn: “I don’t know Ralph, this place gives me the creeps. I’m not all that hungry anyway. Let’s just go.”
At first, he protests because a beer has been ordered and the waitress—no, look, you are outta there. You are a chair pushed back from the table. You are walking full tilt back to the car and he will follow. Ralph or Trent or whatever his name will follow you to the car to avoid a scene.
And then you will tell him you want a hotel. You want a bed and a bath and a glass of water and what you want most is him. Now. Credit cards and dark chocolate solving all the world’s problems. Back it up with a line from William Blake: “Sooner murder an infant in its crib than nurse unwanted desires.” That’s where this is going.
The hotel is second-rate but Ralph has the glitter of jitter in his eyes. It doesn’t take much from here. A girl knows when to spit in her hand to get things moving. A girl knows how to make things hurry in the same rapid motion, a coaxing movement undergirded by the clenched anxious fist. Not that it matters.
He lies like a icon beneath me—a solid piece of wood with gold glazed in the crevices where the light hits. I can feel the sweat dripping down my stomach from the fold under my breasts. I can feel the soft seer of his squint—what it takes to me see me, a bas-relief. The part of him inside me and the part outside, the untidy combination of sex.
Half-conscious, I draw my fingertips along the trail of downward-sloped sweat and touch it to my lips. The salt is unspectacular. How many Ralphs think their salt tastes special? How many girlfriends pretend to savor it?
“You don’t have to act things out to get my attention,” he says.
“But—I wasn’t.”
Or was I? How much of this is something we want?
“I’m here,” he whispers from the space between the pillows.
“I’m here,” I reply from the air pocket above.
The fan blows the hair round my head like a cyclone and I think for a second how clear we are here, joined at the hip, with all this same-old air and familiar impasse between us.
Bio: Alina Stefanescu was born in Romania, raised in Alabama, and reared by the love-ghost of Tom Waits and Hannah Arendt. She won the 2015 Ryan R. Gibbs Flash Fiction Award and was a finalist for the 2015 Robert Dana Poetry Award. Her poetry and prose can be found in current issues of PoemMemoirStory, Tinge Magazine, Jellyfish Review, New Delta Review, Lunch Ticket, Change Seven, and others– as well as Objects In Vases (Anchor & Plume, March 2016). She aims for a clean ontology. More online at www.alinastefanescu.com or @aliner.