June 27, 2003

On the Couch

By George K. George

The faded sofas and senior portraits of his parents were washed out further by the fog of smoke lingering from several lit cigarettes in the musty cellar. Curling posters of groups recently retired to the oldies’ station, an also faded clock depicting a swimsuit-clad model advertising inexpensive beer, and a prized neon “Schlitz–Open” sign, having long since leaked its last flickering Nobel gases, were reminders of Jack’s parents’ more untamed nights in his early childhood; when Jack would wander downstairs in his pajamas and be fed beer by chuckling men with tight tee-shirts and visible chest hair. If he didn’t fall asleep in the stairwell these weekends, he was discovered in the early hours sprawled in front of the television, blaring to drown the noise from below.

These years, a new wave of rock-n-roll pounded through the living room floor, where Jack’s parents slept, television blaring, now more drunk on their own clever cynicism than the same cheap swill that Jack and his friends were losing teenage inhibitions with downstairs. These years Jack’s parents drug their bloated selves from lounger to separate sides of the bed, at separate times. It didn’t cross either of their minds, the days when one would lead the other to bed by the hand; when the last talkative guest was shoved out the screen door.

Angel clomped down the stairs in her mock-Docs in her decided position at the middle of the group of her girlfriends. One of the boys farted. His girlfriend pulled closer to him and snuggled his shoulder. Jack himself was sitting in a small wooden chair facing most of the group. His legs were apart. An elbow was rested upon each. Without breaking his curled position, he craned his spine to have a look at what the stairwell had to offer. He had put out a cigarette about five minutes earlier, but in a chair with no arms there wasn’t much to fidget with, so he lit another.

The other girls took up chattering with Jack’s senior guests. Angel, in one deft movement, removed her backpack and folded her legs under herself on the floor, not far from Jack’s tiny throne. Jack’s neck went limp. He watched the ballet through slowly exhaled cigarette smoke. Angel looked around as if preparing to cross a street on a flying carpet. The others were ignoring Jack and Angel. Angel had enough of ignoring Jack.

“Can I have a cigarette?” she daringly darted her eyes to him.

“Are you trying to start a conversation with that?” Jack asked in mock disgust. Angel didn’t understand, and passed it off that he was probably halfway, or further, to drunk.

“No. Yeah. Maybe,” she stopped herself from saying she didn’t know.

“Well if you are, you’re doing it all wrong.”

“Oh?” Angel was nervous, and she rather liked it.

“Conversations start with drinks. Everyone knows that. So, try again.”

“Got any pop?” she played along.

“No, no!” Jack took a deep pull and sucked the smoke in through his teeth, “We don’t serve pop here. Do you want a beer?”

“I’m only sixteen.”

“Do girls become nuns because they hate sex? Here,” Jack reached beside the chair, produced a twelve-ounce can of domestic, and handed it to her.

“It’s not cold,” she complained.

“Welcome to underage drinking. Just imagine you’re in an Irish pub.”

“Crude and cultured you are,” she smiled up at him.

Jack had a smile himself and pounded his heels to the beat of the stereo.

“I’m Jack, what should I call you?”

“Angel.”

“I need one,” Jack chuckled once at his double meaning and helped himself to another can. He was on his fourth and well into automatic transmission mode, almost interrupting with a response before the last presented syllable. Angel noticed this and kept her sideways glance on the boy’s closely spaced blue eyes and short, frosted, tightly curled haircut. Jack, aware of this, looked at nothing in particular in another part of the room, keeping his attention on Angel’s acid-washed jean jacket, whose shoulders were draped with straight dishwater strands. His mind was blank, but he panicked not. It was her turn to speak, and no matter what came out, this beer was soon to render him even more loquacious.

“This your place?” Angel forced the conversation to a restart. The silence was longer to her than to Jack, only having had a few cautious sips.

“It is sometimes,” Jack gestured with his chin at the surrounding mob of friends and acquaintances.

Something caught Jack’s attention from the chatter on the couch. He stood, and the room spun. Defending his position in a seemingly eloquent way to himself was powered by the presence of the new girl, Angel, listening, but not having joined the debate herself. She didn’t even move her neck, but to take a long pull on her can, and sat waiting for Jack to return to his seat. He did, but nearly missed it. He gritted a toothy smile at Angel and rattled the wooden chair against the concrete floor to the position it should have been in to catch his collapse, closer to Angel.

Angel flinched consciously, the only reaction she thought proper to this vague advance. She was a bit struck dumb, as often was the case.

“So what do you want to talk about? School? Music? Cigarettes?” Jack blew a plume over Angel’s head, and squinted against the smoke that wisped into his eyes.

Angel ventured for the foremost option, “What do you want to do when you graduate?”

“Have you seen me in school lately, Angel?” he used her name, and she skipped a breath, “G.E.D. if I can’t get away with it. What are your big plans?”

“I’ve applied—at…” Angel began and trailed off as Jack erupted shouting at the couch to affirm his alpha-male status in the group once again. While Jack’s back was to her, she gave up her cross-legged arrangement on the floor, to a reclined position nearer to the chair where Jack would surely soon return.

“Can I have another one?” Angel swished her can close to Jack’s amusedly disgruntled face when he sat down.

“Huh? Yeah. Just can’t learn these people,” Jack twirled a beer to Angel, and one to himself. Their fingers brushed, and slowed like in a music video, thought Angel, soaking in the chance touch for all its potential. They cracked pop-tabs at the same instant, flicked their eyes at each other, and giggled.

By the end of her twenty-four ounces, Jack’s eyes had gone from peculiar to familiar, as they switched focus from something ten thousand yards away, in the throes of a rant, to the solid, straight ahead gaze into Angel’s glinting eyes, when paraphrasing. By thirty-six ounces, they looked Japanese to one another, doubled over in laughter at some hilarious observation Jack had, or Angel’s clever appendage to it.

Amidst all of this, all but the group of girls Angel had arrived with, and two males, had been dismissed with a brief, “Yeah, bye,” or another weak send off, barely interrupting Jack’s and Angel’s otherwise unbroken exchange. The two boys on the sofa were frustrating the girls with a game of, “No, you can’t sit down, and no, we’re not leaving.”

One of Angel’s friends had the idea to get to her man’s cooperation through his stomach, and proposed a trip to the local greasy spoon. He leapt up from the couch, and gestured for the rest to follow him to his car. The girl who suggested it sat down on the couch and refused to follow, starting a game of her own.

“Give me your hand,” the boy asked of his girlfriend.

“No.”

“Just give it to me, I promise.”

“Promise what?”

He was losing patience. He lunged for her hand, and pulled her up into a full embrace. He dipped her to where her hair was brushing the concrete, and locked his lips with hers for several seconds.

Angel and Jack watched. When it was over, they caught each other’s glance and quickly glanced away.

“Angel, you coming? Jack should come too.”

They both started to respond, but Jack signaled for Angel to speak first.

“I think I’ll walk home, it’s not that far.”

“Sure,” one said and paused, “Have fun, you guys.”

A faint, “Fools.” was heard through the clomping from the stairwell.

Angel thought she was losing her buzz, “Got any more?” Swish swish.

The tape hiss clicked to a stop on the stereo, and Angel heard her ears buzzing. Jack picked up the cardboard case and shook it at an angle to show Angel that he was out.

“Aw… What are we going to do?” laughing and looking ravishing to Jack.

“Be right back.”

Jack tiptoed up the stairs. Angel took time to notice the décor of the basement. She stood and half-stumbled backwards in a circle, admiring the antiques. Eventually, she tripped and fell on her side on the couch. She straightened, closed her eyes and heard distant noise from the stairwell.

She felt the couch sag from the opposite end.

“Angel?”

“Yes, Jack—Music, please.”

Angel heard a liquid-filled glass container clink on the concrete. After what seemed like an eternity of her own voice echoing in her skull, music was delivered. It was a melodic selection involving keyboards. Jack adjusted the ambience setting of the music to “three.”

The couch sunk again. Angel raised her eyelids, a smile plastered all over the place.

“I got this?” Jack raised a bottle of Tennessee whiskey for her to see. Angel grabbed at it recklessly, and caught hold. She tipped it to her mouth, missing it and pouring amber liquor down her pink shirt.

“Sit up, girl!” Jack laughed.

She sat up, and kept sitting up until she was draped over Jack. Clutching the bottle by the neck slightly past his armrest, Jack took it from her hand.

“O-kay!” she righted herself, and fell into an alcoholic pout.

Jack took a pull from the whiskey, then another. He put his arm up on the conveniently low backrest of the sofa. Without opening her eyes, Angel slid closer to him. He was overpowered by the smell of her shampoo, or whatever it was.

They stayed this way. Neither knew for how long. They began speaking at the same instant.

“You go ahead,” said Jack.

“No, you go, Jack.”

“I was just going to say. It was nice meeting you.”

Angel moaned into laughter.

In the moments that followed, Jack slithered closer, as Angel reciprocated by slinking closer to Jack. This slithering and slinking escalated until, as if by chance, their lips met in delicate smacking, audible over the mellow keyboard solo barely leaking from the stereo speakers.

Jack peered down at Angel through glassy, barely open eyes. In their passion, their chins were pointed parallel to the plane of the earth. There was longing for continuation on Angel’s face.

But Jack whispered only, “Be right back.”

Angel fell into the void where Jack had sat. She stroked the cushion, warm with his heat. She stretched herself to the full length of the sofa, and buried her face in the cool flipside of a pillow.

Jack returned with a wad of unzipped nylon sleeping bag. He covered her legs with it and sat partially fetal next to her, with the toes of his shoes resting on the concrete, wondering what to do next.

Jack waited for something to happen. Nothing did for what seemed to be minutes. He feared Angel had succumbed to the drink, but as soon as he did, she rotated, smiled through two mascara-covered slivers and played with her hair as though she were putting it in a ponytail, a nervous reaction. She flung her hair up and let it fall into position on the pillow at random. Ravishing, thought Jack, again.

“Stand up,” Angel slurred, and Jack complied. She extended her forefinger above Jack’s belt, curled it around the top hem of his jeans, and pulled him down beside her in one fluid motion.

Jack, figuring that this was the green flag, squirmed next to her, and tried to do something with his arms other than trapping them behind or in front of the girl.

She patiently took Jack’s hands, and placed them on her hips, after scooting over to the maximum.

The prior cautious kissing was obsolete. With Angel’s obvious consent, Jack proceeded to drag his lower lip madly around her general mouth-area, sealing each deal with a downward slide of his upper lip, to where he would pause, take a breath, and repeat.

She tilted her head back, and Jack rolled his attention to her neck. Angel writhed. Her smallish, though sufficient, breasts pressed against his chest. They set about entwining their legs in the most tantalizing way.

Buttons, clasps, zippers and snaps were systematically undone. Each seemed to give way at the exact resolution of each stanza building up from the hit single now playing from the stereo.

Clothing slid from body to concrete. Angel sat up, and with one hand, groped for the sleeping bag, not bothering to stop wrestling with Jack’s tongue in her mouth, or to loosen her grip on his cheek. She pulled the blanket up over their heads, and ran her hands down Jack’s sides, giving him chills.

The final delicates of their clothing were frantically removed, and Jack shifted himself to the topside of Angel, who cowered into the couch, and planted both her palms up on Jack’s collarbone. The moment was interrupted, but not abolished.

“Do you really want to do this?” Angel’s look was serious, an expression of hers Jack had not yet observed. Jack couldn’t get the word, “ravishing,” out of his head. Jack sighed, let his locked elbows give way, and felt Angel’s cool, glowing body next to his. He adjusted his position, and rested his head below her shoulder. He ran his forefinger around Angel’s clavicle and the soft upper region of her chest, eventually to her chin, smiling up at her.

“I suppose we should be safe, do you have one?” Jack asked with dire hope in his eyes.

Like a clip from an episode of “I Dream of Jeanie,” Jack saw Angel produce a small square package from nowhere, complete with an alcoholic frame skip.

With one article of polymer clothing between them, the two were slowed only by the tape deck hitting silence and auto-reversing. Once Jack’s victorious synapse was reached, and Angel’s instinctively muffled gasps and wails were reduced to murmurings in the aftermath, she lay silently in his crook until the hit single played once more.

She turned her half-moon eyes to Jack, whose face was lit in a loose grin, “How about a cigarette, now?”

~

Jack decided he would go to school on Monday. He thought he spotted Angel several times in the hall, and walked up quickly behind each dishwater mane only to be disappointed. He blew out of the place at halftime, and smoked cigarettes in the park.

The three-O-five bell rang, and soon, clusters of denim began filtering into the park, followed by billows of white smoke.

Jack took up a position at the gate of the only bridge leading to the parking lot. His bleached curls vibrated in the spring breezes blowing from the water.

Again, even from frontal views, he was tricked into seeing Angel in the faces of several girls.

Finally, the unmistakable foursome of stonewashed blue jeans marched forth. Without warning, Jack got nervous. He didn’t know whether to hug her—would there be a kiss? Or should he stay in his jester pose, and pull coolly on his Camel.

Jack’s eyes grew closer and closer together as Angel approached. Neither this, nor even seeing Jack soon, was expected. Having rested up since Saturday night, and abstained wholly, she saw Jack’s eyes in the afternoon sun, rather than in his shady basement. The word, “freakish,” fluttered into her mind before she could chase it away.

“Enormous,” crossed Jack’s mind in reference to Angel’s nose, even at her current distance. Every cell in his body was screaming to run, but Angel walked closer, and made eye contact.

“H-hi,” they spoke at once. This time, neither turned the floor over to one or the other. Angel’s friends were looking surly and impatient in the background. Jack scanned them, searching for something to say.

Angel kept her distance, and tried moving his eyes apart with her mind. She couldn’t do it.

“How are you?” she broke off the silence.

“You know…” Jack faded out.

“Uh, huh,” she noticed Jack’s voice lacking the same smart edge, one of the many things she’d coaxed herself into lust with that evening. So this was the sober Jack.

He thought he’d lead up to getting her phone number, but couldn’t think of a lead line to get there. He tried looking deep into her eyes, as he did the other night, but didn’t get past her nose.

“Right, well, I’ve got homework, so…” pointing to her backpack.

Jack snickered, “Yeah, right…” and flopped his arms at his sides, without a book in his possession, much less a backpack to grace them with. He thought of a last-ditch joke about those straps schoolchildren used to carry their books around in, but he knew not what they were called, nor how to execute the joke. He should have brought some beer in a backpack, he thought. Then he’d know how.

“Right, well, see you.”

Jack watched the girls walk to the far end of the bridge, catching a glare or two from her friends. Jack realized he had seen a new expression on Angel’s face. Less than ravishing, it was. It gleamed only of regret.

ã Copyright 2003 George K. George