Roadmap Part 8

Back in Topanga, Carmelita throws her arms around me in a big hug.  She says she's been feeding the cat ("Your Daughter") for me and this guy, do I really like him?

We sit talking in the shadows outside of the range of the deck's sensor light.  Carmelita is smoking and complaining about her pimple ("Always I like my dress, my makeup, hair—everything to be perfect") and thinking about men.

"The men they want me to be nice," she's saying scornfully.  "But I am not so nice. I cannot be nice like they want.  I can give them passion.  And they want my passion. But I cannot be nice. That is not me."

She tells me that she always winds up with Cancer or Pisces men and since she's Libra with a lot of 'Scorp', that's not so great.  At least that's what Eva told her.

I tell her Tony is a Cancer.

"Yes, I know," she answers.  "Cancers are so nice.  I can't say about Cancer women."

"I'm a Cancer."  She throws her head back and laughs, no wonder she likes me so much, she says. I add that Tony and I are very much alike.  That's probably why we argue.

"You and Tony argue?" she says incredulously.  Without a pause, she looks straight at me, almost coyly, "Forgive me for asking...but you and Tony, do you have relations?"  I tell her no.  No sex.

She looks at me like I'm crazy.  "But why not?  You are so good together.  You are always laughing, you go together places."

"It's not going to happen," I feel the finality even before I say the words.

"But you are so close.  I can see you love each other.  It would be so good."

Never mind, I tell her patiently, it's not going to happen.

She giggles. "You know, this Tony. He is like my father. He talks to me like my father. He's so funny. Please don't tell him."

I find Eva in her R.V. where she’s been for days.  Meditating, she says.  On her computer, she calls up Shane’s and my astrological charts. "You've both got Mercury in the Seventh House. You can talk to each other." Then she moans, "You are so lucky. What I wouldn't give for an Aquarius man! I envy you.  I really do."  But she says it so warmly I take it as a compliment.

Before bed, I pet and play with the cat in the kitchen.  She squashes herself in my lap, curling around and around.  Did she really miss me or is it just animal need?  I can't tell.

CHAPTER 21 - GO FOR BROKE

I'm home on a Friday night. First time in a while. Shane's at a family dinner.  Tomorrow we'll go to Catalina. Edward has Suki over and while she's in the bathroom, he quizzes me about where to eat good Italian.

Suki comes into the living room in her kimono, her layers of elbow length hair still damp.  It's the first time I've seen her since she talked to Shane about her "concern."  She's still huggy and warm, but what we don't say throbs underneath our words. Or maybe that's the way it's always been.

At ten-thirty, Shane calls. Says he's all set for Catalina tomorrow morning, rattling off a neat, efficient list of what he's taking in his backpack:  pair of jeans, sweater, parka...sunscreen...

"The ferry leaves at eight," I tell him. "When I made the reservations, they say be there at seven."

"Seven? Isn't that awful early?"

xx

I can't sleep. It's four in the morning and I haven't slept even one minute.  Getting there at seven means leaving at six means getting up in an hour.  Let's see, if I leave at seven and drive really fast...After all, I have reservations.

So I leave at seven and land in the worst traffic jam I've ever been in on Saturday.  CALTRANS has blocked off all but one lane and I'm literally sitting in traffic with the speedometer at zero for half an hour. By seven-thirty I've made it past the laboring freeway crews and speed to San Pedro, pulling into the parking lot at eight sharp—past an Asian guy in a pink polo shirt, shorts and backpack.  Shane.  Standing in flat-footed surprise, eyes and mouth open in cartoon shock at the sight of me.  Did he just get here, too?

I park where he points, but when I get out, he gives it to me in a nutshell.  We missed the boat.  It left a minute ago and we couldn't have gotten on anyway because first in line were forty Boy Scouts—also with reservations.  Trying to make the best of this farce, I wave my hand toward the city, "Well, how about a different adventure?  We could…"

"I've got a lot of stuff to do to get ready for this France trip," he's heading for his car.  "And my brother wanted me to come over and watch the game, help look after his kid.  I'll call you.  We can get together later."

At home, I find a message on my voice mail from my Catalina student, "I met the ferry and you're not on it so I guess you didn't make it."  She goes on to say that she and her boyfriend are splitting and she's moving out anyway.

Edward finds me watering the yard.  "I thought you were going to Catalina." When I tell him what happened, he says, "Well, couldn't you guys do something else instead?"  Is he cutting me some slack?

I spend the rest of the day on the deck with Tony.  He picks out tunes on the guitar while I try to comprehend my life. About the traffic jam, I tell him, "It was very Zen...I sat there moving and not moving at the same time, trying to figure out what I was supposed to learn from all this."

"Get up earlier," he deadpans.

"Did you go out with that Vietnamese woman you met?"

"I'm gonna ask her out for next weekend."

Tony's cordless rings.  It's Venetia.

"You're at your mother's?" he asks. "And you can still hear and see and talk and everything?  So are you up for the Comedy Store tonight?"

My cordless rings. "Hi, it's Shane. I'm gonna be later here than I thought.  I'll call you in a couple hours."

I tell him about my student's message. "We probably couldn't have done the swimsuit thing anyway if she was having problems."

"We could have rented a land cruiser," his voice shrugs. "Seen the island."  Oh my God, I'm with a man who rents land cruisers! And after a couple of hours, he calls again.

When I get to his place, he’s not home, so I let myself in with the keys from his hiding place, and turn on the lights while his cats (Black Cat and Cleopatra) meow at my feet.  Both cats, he'd says, just "showed up one day and stayed."

Before I can sit down, Shane comes in behind me carrying three cantaloupes ("An old friend of the family always brings them when he visits...in memory of my mother.").  He settles me down with a glass of pear juice, and I ask about the game.

"Bruins won," he says,

I tell him about Tony. "My roommate played football in high school and he told me that he never really understood the details of the game.  He says he'd be out there in the field just spaced out most of the time.  The ball would come.  The ball would go."

Shane lights a cigarette and leans back against the sink, crossing one foot over the other, "Not me, boy.  I weighed one-thirty-five and was co-captain.  I knew everything.  I had to.  That's how I kept from getting killed." Cigarette over, he sits next to me at the raggedy wooden table filling up small plastic travel vials, "For the first time, I'm starting to feel excited about this trip."

The trip.  I ask questions and he answers.  There will be about seven hundred Japanese Americans going.  Among them will be Shane, his brother, his brother's wife, their daughter, and his aunt and uncle.

"I visited my uncle's grave a couple years ago by myself.  They've never been."  He hands me the official letter with its attached itinerary.  They will start off in Switzerland, move on to Italy and end up in France at Bruyeres, the village liberated by the Japanese American unit.  The night of the ceremonies, the movie about this troop of brave boys—Go For Broke—will be shown.

"Why is it called 'Go for Broke?'"

"That was what they named their unit."  Bored with his tasks, he stretches, takes out the TV guide, "Well, let's see what's on..."  Opens it, gives a sharp laugh, "I don't believe this!"

"What?"

"They're showing Go for Broke in two hours!"

He goes out onto the patio, lights up, drags on his cigarette, blows the smoke toward the ferns, while I stand in the doorway watching him.  "How about that? Six days before I leave...Now I'll get to show it to you."

All this without looking at me.

In his living room, with an hour and a half to kill, I'm sliding down to my knees, unbuckling him where he stands.  His hands on my hair. "It's like I'm fucking your mouth," he sighs.  But I'm not as great as I wanna be.  Sometimes it gets to be too much for me and even though I want to keep going, I have to stop before I gag.  Once, when Boris and I were first married, I vomited after getting a little too enthusiastic.  The next time, Boris joked, "Uh oh, here comes dinner!"

Taking a moment to rest, I sit back on my heels and tell him about the homework I've been doing.  I read the secret behind Linda Lovelace's sword swallowing trick.  She'd hang off the edge of a bed to create an unbroken line from head to neck.  ("Hm...interesting," he says.)  He pulls me into the dressing area before his bathroom where there's a mirror. Lighting two candles in front of it:

"I want to watch us."

Even though I'm busy, I can see how the light bounces off my pale hair, makes it contrast against his darkness.  Pure fantasy.        Midway through, he wants to finish in bed.

Once there, he murmurs, "Show me that Linda Lovelace trick."  Well, here goes...I lean back over the foot of the bed and he sits, knees against the sides of my face, and it is easier. Deeper. Only one problem. His entire lower half is like a pillow, surrounding my head, my shoulders, my arms...pressing and holding me so tight and close that I feel smothered.  There is nothing left for my senses except this feeling of submission and all loss of control.  Like an assault.  In spite of my desire, I find myself gasping for air, pushing him gently away, "It's too much.  I can't breathe.  Wait." 

He easily gives me space, patiently waiting.  A moment of rest and then we resume.  But I have to break for air again.  I can't continue. 

Linda Lovelace,  I'm not.

Pushing me face down across the bed, lying against me, kissing my neck, he whispers hoarsely, "What do you want me to do to you?  Do you want it everywhere? "

\No.

Like with the condoms, I find my own needs come to the foreground on this.  I'm still sore from last time, I explain, "I like it, but I don't want to lose control of my faculties." He says okay. I add, "I was going to research it actually.  Maybe call this gay man I know."

He grins, "'Hello, Fred, just exactly how do you put the salami up Joe's ass?'  'Oh, we don't use a salami anymore.'"

I lie back and let him part my legs and put his head between them.  His hands slide under my hips, "Open yourself."  I spread my lips and he tastes me.  It's been years since anyone's done this. I revel in the wavy, pleasurable sensations...coming and coming...small releases at first, now building, building...the efficiency of his technique, his uncanny ability to be so specific, hitting just the right spot at just the right rhythm...so precise and neat—like the flies he ties under the magnifying glass.  "Oh, Shane," I moan, "Shane...You...You fly fisherman, you!"

He's laughing too hard to go on, "I never heard that one before!" and he comes to rest beside me where we both laugh.

"Boris wouldn't go down on me."

"Why not?"

"Germs."

"Wow.  You haven't had..."

"A very long time.  In fact, once...after we'd been married for a year...and we'd just moved into a new apartment.  Boris is the kind of guy who always has to move stuff around until it's exactly perfect, you know. And we were in this empty living room, lying in a warm sunny spot on the floor and I started to give him a blow job. In the middle of it, he suddenly yelled out, 'Carrie, I know where we can put the couch!'"

"Sounds like he didn't like oral sex very much."

"I don't think he did."

"Yeah, well, the first time I did it, I was in high school and this girl and I, we were so horny for each other.  We were in the car and I got her to go down on me and in the middle of it, she asked me to open a window.  And I was so into it, I was like, uh, uh...sure...and all I remember is trying to find the handle."

He looks at the clock.  It's showtime.  Have we really been going at it for two hours?

xx

During the before-show commercials, Shane paces the room, agitated.  He puffs on a pipe, offers it, "Want some?  You don't have to." 

No.  I want to be fully conscious for this.

After telling me to get comfortable, Shane lights a cigarette and fidgets near the kitchen door as the movie starts. It begins by explaining how the Japanese Americans were rounded up after Pearl Harbor’s bombing by the Japanese, and forced from their homes into prisons called “internment camps.” The Japanese American young men volunteered for military service in World War II, to prove their patriotism. Shane angrily salutes the screen with his cigarette. 

The full weight begins to dawn on me; how important and painful this horrible injustice must be for him.

The film portrays the Japanese Americans without condescension or exaggeraton. The Four-Forty-Second Infantry Regiment took as its motto: "GO FOR BROKE." And that’s exactly what they did during an amazing rescue operation where they fought Nazis on a hill in Vignes, France to liberate a small Texas unit which had been trapped there. Three days later, they were victorious, and missing hundreds of their men who went for broke. This battalion actually received more medals of honor than any other troop of its size. Shane tells me all of this during commercials.

Watching the fight sequences, I say, "The directing here..."

"...gets better...because of the..."

"...moving camera..."

"They might have had a different director for the action sequences. Now he’s seated next to me.

The climax is frightening, graphically depicting how the Germans blasted the trees in the forest so the soldiers would be killed by flying wooden shards.

"That's how my uncle got it," Shane says quietly.

Movie over, I go to the bathroom and look in the mirror. I look a hundred years old. The sleepless, hard lovin' nights catching up. I stumble to the living room where he's watching CNN, "I look like hell."

"Just relax."

Getting ready for bed, Shane holds up his plaid shirt, "Isn't this the shirt you wore last time?"  He remembers.  I put it on and lie under the covers, watching him putter around his room.

"S-h-a-n-e..."

"W-h-a-t?" he whines back and swiftly sits on the bed, kissing me lightly, affection beaming from his eyes, as if that's what I'm whining for.

"What are you doing?"

"Getting the air mattress out, bed's too small."  He gets up and pulls the covers up over my naked toes.

I don't know what Grace was like in bed, but she's got me beat by a mile in this department.  I try not to mind that I'm sleeping in his bed while he sleeps next to me on the floor.

"How do you say good-night in Japanese?" I murmur.

"I don't talk that shit."

xx

At daybreak, I jump out of bed to go to work some Sunday overtime.  Dressed and ready, I peck his cheek, "Bye.  I'm going."

"Bye," he murmurs (in his sleep?).  I already know that he hates getting up in the morning.  But his reaction nags at me.  Passing through the kitchen, I think, "Well, what did you expect?  'Don't go, my darling!'?"

"Carrie!" he calls from the bedroom.

I stand in the doorway, "Yes?"

"Take a cantaloupe," he sighs sleepily.

I take one of the three cantaloupes from the kitchen table.

That night when I get home the message on my Voice Mail says:

"I'm sorry I didn't see you off this morning.  Gosh, I felt stupid about that.  Callin’ to see if you wanna see this play in Santa Monica.  We could meet at seven-thirty at Beachfront Theatre."

But the clock says I missed it.