I follow Charisma into the stairs of the upstairs. We go up in the attic, lie down behind the futon, between it and the wall that is made of drywall split into pieces with that space between made by us hiding an eight ball 🎱 deep inside the darkness of the attic eaves—so deep we would trouble ourselves to find it later.
Charisma would lay out a blanket which had previously been resting over the back of the futon. She would fold it twice to increase its softness quotient, lie herself on it, unzip her jeans.
I would pull on her belt loops, Charisma kicking her feet out of the legs. Her waist-area fat bubbled out and I laid down on top of her, letting my cock get hard—it always did with her—Charisma thinking of her smell since her smell is what did it to me—that’s what always made me hard, whether though natural perfume or store bought, that is how we mated: smell, suicide, that conversation we keep having about how I could pull off the natural man smell even though all that meant was that I hadn’t showered 🚿 or used deodorant in a couple of days. That’s all it meant!—Except it also meant that she liked (or didn’t mind) my armpit smell. It didn’t mean she loved it but it did mean she would tolerate it. It meant she liked the rest of me so much that when she said the pull off the natural man smell thing, she wasn’t asking me to take a shower or put on deodorant.
Charisma’s puss was not like before. The first time I fucked her the thoughts that were going through my mind were: Your pussy is so tight and so hot that you could make me cum in about five strokes and I know you said don’t cum in me but I am going to cum in you and that’s exactly what I did that first night. Made you call a hotline for girls whose boys had just cum in them—or maybe it was her gynecologist. Who said that if she had just had her period, that it shouldn’t matter if we used a condom. My first girlfriend was on birth control so I was spoiled, I guess—I’ve always liked cumming in my girls. Now Charisma’s puss was sour, and loose, not as loose as I’ve ever had but it stank—I mean it fucking stank, not like fish 🐟 or salt 🧂 or that lovely smell like ink 🐙 that I had loved to inhale a thousand times before, but now something wrong, rancid, retired—a good for nothing smell. It had nothing of the soap suds from our youth, that tight, squeaky feeling on every in and every out that I made to her.
Now I pushed. I swang from side to side—hit that shit from an angle. I didn’t mean to close my eyes but I did, right back to the earliest girls, K Stroup and M Heckert, which is the first pussy I ever smelled through kid jeans turning M’s body upside down and swinging her in a circle, her legs spread, crotch in my face, and that fish smell came over my nose and it was lovely, wonderful, probably the smell of an unwashed puss—but it was beautiful to me, glorious. The first puss I ever touched was S Holtz (almost fucked her), the first I ever fucked was Ashley N, then Deidre T, then Charisma D (who was squeaky suds). There was brown-haired ink, red-haired ink, black-haired ink. And blonde hair..I guess blonde hair was soap suds. Those slick tight hot fucks could go for six hours or six seconds. Not the fuck I was getting now: it would never work in six seconds, I would never live for it over six hours.
Charisma said, “This is what I hoped our whole weekend would be like,” and I looked at her and said, “Me too,” even though it wasn’t true, I said it as believable as possible, I tried to feel the fuck right—how can it be possible to not feel it with anyone. How can there be girls, women, who are hard for me to fuck. My friend Mike from film school said he fucked a woman in her late thirties and that her pussy was “just like a young one”—that it didn’t lack any of the qualities of schoolgirls he had fucked—but for me this was so different..impossible..like her vagina was rejecting me, throwing me away.
“Does this feel good to you?”
“Yes!”
“Mmm,” I said.
A minute passes. “Does it feel good to you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Of course.”
“Are you able to get past my body smell?” Charisma asked. “I’m asking in the sense that I’m taking a survey. Not like I’m asking for myself,” she said. “It’s like I’m asking for somebody else.”
I stop 🛑 fucking. Stop right there. Pull out. Lie by Charisma’s side. Grab her fingers with my own. Twiddle them.
“I just need a break.”
“Are you alright?”
“I’m ok,” I said. “I’m nervous about my flight.”
“What about it? Do you want some coke to take with you?”
“It’s not that. I’m nervous about catching my flight. On time. Like we might fuck too much and I’d miss my plane. These thoughts ring around my mind, you know, it’s busy in here.”
“Are you nervous about getting back to LA?”
“Yes! I am!! There’s nobody like you for me there. Not even a friend.”
“What about Mike?”
“Yeah, Mike is good if I want a cinematographer or someone to do coke with. He’s who first introduced me to it—did I mention that?”
“Maybe.”
“LA is like: leave the house, run into my ex-girlfriend. Ex-girlfriend invites herself over for a fuck and while I have her bent over the kitchen counter my dick slips into her ass and I cum in her ass without even knowing that it is her ass and I don’t find out till she tells me afterward—you know what I’m saying?”
“She must have a tight puss.”
“She has a tight everything—most of all her heart. Her will. Her emotions. Her soul is locked so tight I’ve only ever seen it four or five times.”
“In how long.”
“Three years.”
“I thought you said she was your ex.”
“She is! This is all happening while she’s my ex. I deleted her phone number she comes over anyway.”
“Why?”
“To get her ass fucked—I don’t know!”
“Sounds wonderful.”
“Oh, it is! It’s great as long as she keeps her mouth 👄 shut. The fucking psycho bitch engages me in arguments, though. Like philosophical arguments. With Kant saying to Derrida, ‘What would you do with a man who owned property but didn’t work it?’ Actually, that would be Locke and Hobbes. Arguments about property rights and the uselessness of voting—shit like that. But then I catch her looking through my copy of Being and Time she’s like ‘I thought this was written by someone else,’ and I’m like ‘No, it’s still by Martin Heidegger and yes, Heidegger is still a Nazi.’ “
Charisma is looking over at me. I’m twisting on the hard floor with its blanket and Charisma is completely still. At first I think this is some metaphor for us as people along our spiritual journeys but then I see that it’s just a function of weight—that hers holds her to the floor and mine doesn’t pin me down. Maybe that is some kind of reflection of our spiritual ways.
“Your book is written by a Nazi?”
“Yeah. He was. But he’s writing about being..but the problem is did his Naziism taint his ability to think about being?”
“Did it?”
“It colored it. It didn’t necessarily taint it. But you know how it’s impossible to ever say that two things are not related but it’s sometimes possible to say that two things are?”
“I think you’re losing me, Matt.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You know how I said I wanted to fuck a genius?”
“Yeah.”
“I think maybe I don’t want to fuck one anymore.”
I laugh and look at the ceiling.
I think back over the course of our relationship. I think of the hardest days: when Charisma would have me drive her around to tarot parlors to get her palm read after a night of sex. When we would go to every thrift store in the area, looking for Clinique bags to fill out her collection. To the greatest days: the first time we had sex and the second set of days when Rebecca had just died and Charisma had come over basically to save my life. And maybe the greatest day of all: the first day we ever spent together, watching The Great Gatsby in her basement, kissing, watching the film, and developing our feelings of lust which have lasted continuously from that first day to this last one.
And I remember a day I look back on now, about 18 months after Charisma and I fucked for the last time. It can hardly be called a fuck. But on this day I’m recalling, Mike and I shared an apartment and I showed him that old picture of Charisma, before she let herself go and became fat—this was that picture of Charisma in a leopard print hat that I later stole from her, and she was cute and hot and biting her lip—and Mike said, “You fucked that?” And I was like, “Yep.” And that ended his entire line of questioning to point out how old and dead I was. For all Mike’s beliefs about how SoCal girls were the hottest, he had never been to Ohio. Ohio is the best for cute girls, serial killers, presidents. Even beef is better in Ohio. Some say Texas. But it’s not: beef is best in Vermont and Ohio.
And on this day, showing Mike Charisma’s Facebook page, I was counting numbers on my fingers—Mike knew what I was doing.
There was a picture of Charisma’s baby—the first she was able to keep. I was adding up the number of months of gestation (nine) and subtracting that from now, considering the baby’s age. And he did have features that were a lot like mine! Dimpled cheeks and that classic Temple smile. But the math worked in my favor—he couldn’t be mine. So when I read the caption saying Rambuncto was the father, I believed it.
Mike put his hand on my back.
“He’s not yours.”
I looked at Mike.
“Nope. He’s not mine.”
“You dodged a bullet,” he said.
And I said, “Yes.”