Blue Movie Read Online Free PDF Page B

take it. Suddenly she was very much in the wrong—now he would think of her as some sort of dopey flower-person, and not a serious actress at all. “But I thought you . . .” she began, holding the smoldering stick helplessly between them, “. . . well, I mean, I don’t really . . . that is, I’ve never actually . . .” She stammered, holding it at a distance now, as though it were a hateful thing which had surely destroyed their future.
    “Don’t worry about it,” he said, taking it from her, “it isn’t important.” And he took a few deep pokes and sat it on the ashtray. “You know . . . the thing that really attracted me to you,” he began quietly, as though thinking aloud to himself, “the thing I find really . . . beautiful, maybe even uniquely beautiful in you, at least for today—and I say this with all humility and respect, because I know you must have other qualities, and I recognize that it may be some kind of weakness in myself—not weakness exactly, but still not the sort of thing I’d like to be able to say, the sort of thing I imagine you’d like to hear . . . but the thing that makes you really . . . exceptional—well, I mean to me, anyway . . . is your ass.”
    He said it with such patent, introspective, almost childish sincerity that the girl was unable to take offense. It was as though two art dealers were discussing the qualities of a Dresden mantelpiece. In her loss for a reaction, she reached out and picked up the cigarette. “Well,” she began uneasily, but then channeled that into the motion of relighting it.
    “I’ve been thinking about it,” said B., “I’ve been trying to figure it out—I mean, in the aesthetic sense. I’ve seen a lot of great, marvelous asses.” Saying this in an objective, clinical way, and proceeding then to give as examples a bevy of famous nifties, about whom his familiarity with their derrières could not be questioned. “Is there such a thing as the ‘perfect ass’—and if so—what does it mean?” Then he turned to Penny, looking at her very directly, almost as if he had suddenly remembered she was there. “I don’t think it’s homosexual,” he said, and she just stared at him and nodded dumbly. “I mean I don’t care about making love to a girl in the ass . . . you know, fucking her in the ass—it isn’t that. I’m not sure what it is. I mean, why should a girl’s ass be so aesthetically erotic? Maybe it’s just something to hold on to . . . an extension of her thing, you know, her cooze.”
    He reached over and took the dead cigarette from her.
    “Oh sorry,” she said, a little flustered, having forgotten it entirely.
    He relit it, inhaled deeply, and stared out at the blinking world, his world, below.
    But Penny was the kind who couldn’t stand silence—perhaps a subconscious cultural memory of the “no dead-air” radio concept. “Well,” she said, “I just hope that, uh . . .”
    He handed the joint back to her.
    “Take you, for example,” he said, “I mean, what was it about . . . your bottom that was so attractive? You leaned over, right?”
    She nodded.
    “But I’m sure you weren’t doing it deliberately to provoke.”
    “Oh no, I . . .”
    He retrieved the joint.
    “I don’t mean to say you may not have been vaguely aware of what was happening. I don’t mean you’re insensitive, or imperceptive, or anything like that. I just mean that you weren’t really thinking of it as your best shot. Right?”
    “Oh right, yes, right.”
    “And yet . . . it was.” He sighed as though at a loss with himself to understand the vagaries of human nature, mostly his own. “Maybe it was . . .”—he searched for the answer, one hand to contemplative brow—“. . . maybe it was the underwear, maybe it was something completely superficial. Here, let’s do it again. Now, how was I sitting? Yes, I was sitting like this, and you were . . . yes, you stand here, and . . .”
    The girl, under his direction, obeyed like