door closed. His chest felt thick and achy. The driver turned the Stones back up and pulled out onto the highway. John looked back at Mac drenched in reflected red light.
The backseat of the cab reeked of smoke and the beige vinyl was sticky, details that seemed to foreshadow the chaos and shabbiness of his new life.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
The car sped down the highway toward the band of yellow at the horizon, and John lay his cheek against the cold window flecked with tiny drops of water. God’s voice came back to him.
So you can know yourself
.
The first week outside the monastery, car alarms, garbage trucks, the subway, all grated on his tender nerves. Women on the city streets hurt him with their fragile preoccupied features. He missed the bells that had rung every few hours, and the offices haunted him, vespers in particular. The monks’ plainsong was loud inside his head. At first he felt his fifteen years in themonastery had been wasted, but then he realized that constant prayer had honed his perceptions. He saw that nothing was wholly static; color hummed with a kind of energy. He noted each individual leaf on each individual tree. Every person on the street sent out a delicate aura.
He rented a studio in Brooklyn Heights and began in the evening to go to a bar on Court Street, a generic place called Murphy’s. There the television blasted football games and the regulars were mostly red-faced men and a few slack-faced ladies who laughed too loud. He’d been drawn to a petite Hispanic woman who had, when he approached, explained curtly that she wanted to be left alone. At Bar Tabac, the woman with feather earrings said she was waiting for her boyfriend, and at Churchill’s, the attractive lady in the business suit told him she was gay. Similar scenarios resulted in all the watering holes around Brooklyn Heights.
He was frustrated and usually woke with a hard-on that was biblical in its intensity. Sometimes he masturbated, but afterward he always felt depressed. One day he picked up a
Village Voice
and flipped to the ads in the back.
Cheap Sluts. Hot Local Girls. Live One-on-One Action
. Thethonged rear ends and cleavage stimulated him, but he’d be too shy for phone sex.
The listings under
Adult Body Work
confused him. The pictures were flagrant, women’s hands cupping their surgically enhanced breasts and pulling back the cheeks of their rear ends to show their anuses. There was only one ad that appealed to him.
Kathy
, a blonde in a white nightgown standing before a fireplace.
Outcalls Only
, the ad said, and John assumed this meant she’d come to his place.
The money was sealed in an envelope on the mantel and he poured brandy into two teacups. He’d showered, shaved and dressed carefully in his khakis and white button-down. When the buzzer rang the woman who walked down the stairs was not the Kathy from the picture. This Kathy had thick reddish hair, cut full at the top with long straight pieces coming down against her neck. Her eyes were huge and brown and her lips full but flat. She wore a leather miniskirt with metal studs and a tight black blouse. Her accent was Slavic with some New Jersey underneath. He felt his face get warm as she went over the economics of their endeavor.
John watched her walk to the futon, pull off her boots and spread her legs, exposing the crotch of her black panties. John assumed there’d be conversation, but he appeared to be mistaken, as he watched the woman arch her back and look at him with her mouth open. Her underwear was slick, the skin around the black material pink and hairless. He walked over to the futon and removed his shoes. His tennis shoes looked pathetic. Kathy pulled at his arm and he lay down beside her. He noticed that in the center of her right eyebrow was a patch of white hair.
“Do you want to fuck me?” Kathy said. She sounded like Natasha from the Bullwinkle cartoon. He closed his eyes and nodded. Kathy undid his pants,
The backseat of the cab reeked of smoke and the beige vinyl was sticky, details that seemed to foreshadow the chaos and shabbiness of his new life.
My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?
The car sped down the highway toward the band of yellow at the horizon, and John lay his cheek against the cold window flecked with tiny drops of water. God’s voice came back to him.
So you can know yourself
.
The first week outside the monastery, car alarms, garbage trucks, the subway, all grated on his tender nerves. Women on the city streets hurt him with their fragile preoccupied features. He missed the bells that had rung every few hours, and the offices haunted him, vespers in particular. The monks’ plainsong was loud inside his head. At first he felt his fifteen years in themonastery had been wasted, but then he realized that constant prayer had honed his perceptions. He saw that nothing was wholly static; color hummed with a kind of energy. He noted each individual leaf on each individual tree. Every person on the street sent out a delicate aura.
He rented a studio in Brooklyn Heights and began in the evening to go to a bar on Court Street, a generic place called Murphy’s. There the television blasted football games and the regulars were mostly red-faced men and a few slack-faced ladies who laughed too loud. He’d been drawn to a petite Hispanic woman who had, when he approached, explained curtly that she wanted to be left alone. At Bar Tabac, the woman with feather earrings said she was waiting for her boyfriend, and at Churchill’s, the attractive lady in the business suit told him she was gay. Similar scenarios resulted in all the watering holes around Brooklyn Heights.
He was frustrated and usually woke with a hard-on that was biblical in its intensity. Sometimes he masturbated, but afterward he always felt depressed. One day he picked up a
Village Voice
and flipped to the ads in the back.
Cheap Sluts. Hot Local Girls. Live One-on-One Action
. Thethonged rear ends and cleavage stimulated him, but he’d be too shy for phone sex.
The listings under
Adult Body Work
confused him. The pictures were flagrant, women’s hands cupping their surgically enhanced breasts and pulling back the cheeks of their rear ends to show their anuses. There was only one ad that appealed to him.
Kathy
, a blonde in a white nightgown standing before a fireplace.
Outcalls Only
, the ad said, and John assumed this meant she’d come to his place.
The money was sealed in an envelope on the mantel and he poured brandy into two teacups. He’d showered, shaved and dressed carefully in his khakis and white button-down. When the buzzer rang the woman who walked down the stairs was not the Kathy from the picture. This Kathy had thick reddish hair, cut full at the top with long straight pieces coming down against her neck. Her eyes were huge and brown and her lips full but flat. She wore a leather miniskirt with metal studs and a tight black blouse. Her accent was Slavic with some New Jersey underneath. He felt his face get warm as she went over the economics of their endeavor.
John watched her walk to the futon, pull off her boots and spread her legs, exposing the crotch of her black panties. John assumed there’d be conversation, but he appeared to be mistaken, as he watched the woman arch her back and look at him with her mouth open. Her underwear was slick, the skin around the black material pink and hairless. He walked over to the futon and removed his shoes. His tennis shoes looked pathetic. Kathy pulled at his arm and he lay down beside her. He noticed that in the center of her right eyebrow was a patch of white hair.
“Do you want to fuck me?” Kathy said. She sounded like Natasha from the Bullwinkle cartoon. He closed his eyes and nodded. Kathy undid his pants,
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