Read Online An Atomic Romance by Bobbie Ann Mason - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Bobbie Ann Mason
Tags: Fiction
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the responses to his ad, along with all the junk messages. After the rebuke he got from Hot Mama, he soured on the notion of a blind date. Then he noticed—among dozens of bogus alarms about anatomical size—that she had written again.
“At first I was going to write you off, but then I decided I’d give you another chance. Our zip codes are touching and nuzzling. We’ve probably passed on the road a hundred times. We may as well meet and say hello sometime. It was ‘Kubla Khan’ that did it for me. A man who would like a poem is unique in my world. I like Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ as well as pie. I Sing the Body Electric. Do you think men and women stand a chance together? Have you met others in this manner? Actually, I think we should get to know one another a bit on the Net before we go through with it.”
Hot Mama went on for two or three screens. Reed skimmed. Apparently
Leaves of Grass
expressed her soul. But she offered few specifics. Reed clicked another reply to his ad. And he laid eyes on Jennifer—melon curves, apricot hair, apple cheeks, grapefruit boobs, cherry lips. She had sent her photograph, with a teaser, “Hey, Atomic Man. What do you think?” Reed fired back a reply and by the next afternoon he had met Jennifer at a coffee place downtown near the hospital. Atomic Man to the rescue, he thought.
She was young, with a short butter-blond bob and brownish lipstick. She said she was just out of college and had a job at an investment company downtown. She had on dark office-wear, with a plunging neckline that revealed her soft breasts. Sipping her iced mocha, she told him about her trip to Cancún her senior year.
“It was the coolest time of my life,” she said, playing with her straw. “You know, the kind of thing you know you’ll never have again unless you like work at it and really
try
? I can’t tell you how cool it was.”
“Try,” Reed said.
She prattled about some of the memorable things she and her roommate did in Cancún, as if nothing they had done was either stupid or trite, or there had never been a spring-break movie.
“My roommate got TMJ—that pain you get in your jaw?—from sucking cock.” She didn’t avert her eyes from his. “There’s this bar, the Happy Top. And after everybody’s been through a couple of pitchers, a row of guys like holds on to a sort of bar overhead, and the girls line up and do blow jobs on them. The last guy to keep holding on to the bar wins.”
“Wins what?”
She slapped his arm playfully.
“Did the guys have their pants on?”
“Bathing suits.”
“Damn, I missed a lot in college,” he said.
“You could probably get a cheap ticket to Cancún,” she said.
“Yeah, they’d see an old guy like me coming and call the police.”
Reed’s erection could have levitated the table. But it wilted. He realized suddenly that he knew who she was. The lift of her eyebrows, the lilt of her voice—he remembered a sulky teenager sprawled in front of the TV. Reed used to fuck her mother on winter afternoons, and on one occasion the children came home from school early. In a moment he would remember the mother’s name. He remembered a velvet parting beneath loud-colored underwear—lime, orange, bright pink. Sue?
Reed bowed out of the coffee shop—gracefully, he thought, and unrecognized, he thought—paying for their coffee and buying Jennifer a poppy-seed muffin with caramel icing to take home with her. Nice to meet you.
Julia. Julia. It had surprised him that someone so brainy could enjoy sex so much. He was used to women whose minds dwelt on clothes and schedules and recipes. Their heads were all wound up with intricate little rules, and sex was somehow an elaborate concoction, a romantic idea that was supposed to take shape the way an extravagant gourmet creation did on a TV cooking show. But not Julia. No matter how involved she was in some theoretical problem in her books, or a messy case of administrative incompetence
“At first I was going to write you off, but then I decided I’d give you another chance. Our zip codes are touching and nuzzling. We’ve probably passed on the road a hundred times. We may as well meet and say hello sometime. It was ‘Kubla Khan’ that did it for me. A man who would like a poem is unique in my world. I like Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’ as well as pie. I Sing the Body Electric. Do you think men and women stand a chance together? Have you met others in this manner? Actually, I think we should get to know one another a bit on the Net before we go through with it.”
Hot Mama went on for two or three screens. Reed skimmed. Apparently
Leaves of Grass
expressed her soul. But she offered few specifics. Reed clicked another reply to his ad. And he laid eyes on Jennifer—melon curves, apricot hair, apple cheeks, grapefruit boobs, cherry lips. She had sent her photograph, with a teaser, “Hey, Atomic Man. What do you think?” Reed fired back a reply and by the next afternoon he had met Jennifer at a coffee place downtown near the hospital. Atomic Man to the rescue, he thought.
She was young, with a short butter-blond bob and brownish lipstick. She said she was just out of college and had a job at an investment company downtown. She had on dark office-wear, with a plunging neckline that revealed her soft breasts. Sipping her iced mocha, she told him about her trip to Cancún her senior year.
“It was the coolest time of my life,” she said, playing with her straw. “You know, the kind of thing you know you’ll never have again unless you like work at it and really
try
? I can’t tell you how cool it was.”
“Try,” Reed said.
She prattled about some of the memorable things she and her roommate did in Cancún, as if nothing they had done was either stupid or trite, or there had never been a spring-break movie.
“My roommate got TMJ—that pain you get in your jaw?—from sucking cock.” She didn’t avert her eyes from his. “There’s this bar, the Happy Top. And after everybody’s been through a couple of pitchers, a row of guys like holds on to a sort of bar overhead, and the girls line up and do blow jobs on them. The last guy to keep holding on to the bar wins.”
“Wins what?”
She slapped his arm playfully.
“Did the guys have their pants on?”
“Bathing suits.”
“Damn, I missed a lot in college,” he said.
“You could probably get a cheap ticket to Cancún,” she said.
“Yeah, they’d see an old guy like me coming and call the police.”
Reed’s erection could have levitated the table. But it wilted. He realized suddenly that he knew who she was. The lift of her eyebrows, the lilt of her voice—he remembered a sulky teenager sprawled in front of the TV. Reed used to fuck her mother on winter afternoons, and on one occasion the children came home from school early. In a moment he would remember the mother’s name. He remembered a velvet parting beneath loud-colored underwear—lime, orange, bright pink. Sue?
Reed bowed out of the coffee shop—gracefully, he thought, and unrecognized, he thought—paying for their coffee and buying Jennifer a poppy-seed muffin with caramel icing to take home with her. Nice to meet you.
Julia. Julia. It had surprised him that someone so brainy could enjoy sex so much. He was used to women whose minds dwelt on clothes and schedules and recipes. Their heads were all wound up with intricate little rules, and sex was somehow an elaborate concoction, a romantic idea that was supposed to take shape the way an extravagant gourmet creation did on a TV cooking show. But not Julia. No matter how involved she was in some theoretical problem in her books, or a messy case of administrative incompetence
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