A Supposedly Staggering Infinite Work of Heartbreaking Illumination I'll Never Read

Room full of mirrors

For You, The Stars
Chapter Seven: Installment 5

Cecilia started getting a little self conscious about me knowing her secret and about all the attention I’d been paying to her sexual dysfunction. To get me to stop prying and stop trying so hard, she started asking me about my fantasies and then made a point of fulfilling them. I had mentioned once that I’d always wanted to get head in a shower, so she got down on her knees in the shower off of her little room and crossed that one off the list.

We got hold of some cocaine and used it in our sexual play. That was sort of interesting since it put us both into the same kind of space, never quite reaching the climax but suspended in a state of high arousal. Much later I remember reading that it’s dangerous to apply cocaine directly to mucous membranes, but nothing really bad seemed to happen because of it.

We’d sometimes ride the bus together between the city and her sister’s place, and when we were traveling at night, she liked to fondle me and then, after getting me hard, lean across the seat and take me into her mouth. I wasn’t sure if she wanted to get caught or not, but whenever anyone came down the aisle she’d sit straight up and act like nothing was happening.

I showed her how peep shows worked in the tenderloin, but they didn’t like us both going into the booths together, which I thought was kind of ironic, given that men were always trysting in those spots with other men.

We even went to one of those old-school porno theatres where you bought a ticket and sat in seats and watched the movie on a big screen with a bunch of other perverts in the audience. She asked when the next movie was starting and the ticket taker laughed. I explained to her that they just show the movies one after another and nobody worries about when they’re starting or ending.

Partway through the movie (one of the many sequels to Taboo), Cecilia leaned over to me and told me that the old black man sitting next to her had taken his penis out. I couldn’t tell if this was a problem for her or not.

“Do you want to move?” I whispered

“No, it’s OK,” she said.

“Do you want to touch him?” I said.

“Not really,” she said.

Later we agreed that it must have been a turn on for him to have this sexy young white girl next to him while he exposed himself.

Cecilia told me that her parents were coming out to visit. I’d met them once before, at my college graduation, but I wasn’t looking forward to seeing them now. All I could think about was that Cecilia was still suffering from this molestation in her family and that everyone else just wanted her to drop it.

She’d gotten love and sex mixed up and nobody else seemed to care.

I did agree to go out with her parents for dinner one night.

That evening she modeled some of the clothes she’d been shopping for with her folks. They were the kind of outfits she favored, mostly matching shorty tops and miniskirts, showing her bare midriff. One outfit was in a sort of gold brown, and another was black.

The clothes were form fitting, they really showd off her curves and they shaped her breasts high and prominent. I tried to picture her trying these on for her mom and dad.

I had in mind the typical father saying, “You’re not going out dressed like that!”

“Does your dad like seeing you dress this way?” I asked her.

“Sure, why wouldn’t he?” she said, defensive.

“Well, you know…” I said. “I mean, most dads don’t—”

“He likes knowing I’m his little sexy girl,” she said, cutting me off.

I let it drop.

I needed someone else to talk to about all of this confusion, so against my better judgement I wrote a letter to Maura hinting at the problem. She and I were still corresponding regularly, although I hadn’t sent her any more tapes for a while.

Cecilia knew about Maura. She had noticed the big folder full of letters prominently labeled in my bedroom, and having no boundaries one afternoon she had read a bunch of the letters from Maura. She asked me about her and I told her how I had pursued her all through college and she had slept with all kinds of other guys but had always freaked out around me and cut me off, and how somehow that had made me want her all the more.

I emphasized that I knew that the “relationship” if you could call it that, that we were having in our letters wasn’t real. It was romanticized and it had something to do with us both trying to be writers and writing ourselves into a story where we were better, cooler, sexier, more desirable than we were in real life.

We were both having real relationships in our real lives, but we both enjoyed having this alternate channel through which to explore our possible selves. Maura sent me books she was reading and books she thought I should read and books about literary romances. I told Maura about Simone and Dannie and Cecilia—partly to be brutally honest but a big part of it was I just wanted her to be jealous and to see me as someone who could actually get a girl, if not her.

Cecilia knew about the thing Maura and I had about the song Crazy Fingers, how I had sung it to her softly on one of our good days when we were just hanging out together, spooning, and how I now associated that song with her and how I somehow rarely ever managed to hear that song live even though I was going to, like twenty or more Dead shows a year.

Maura wrote back a week or so later and told me a story about incest from her own family but really had no advice to offer and, really, how could she?