Don't Cry: Stories Read Online Free PDF Page B

hoped, eyes bright in scaly heads, each with the unerring sense of the other’s heartbeat, a signal they never knew to question.
    And maybe she didn’t start the marathon in a gold lame suit. Maybe she appeared in a simple white gown with a slip and a bra and stockings and beautiful panties that the first man (hand-selected for his sensitivity) had to help her take off to the sound of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Maybe they even took time to make out, acknowledging romantic love and the ancient truth of marriage. It would be the stiff and brassy acknowledgment of showbiz, but deep in the brass case would be a sad and tender feeling—sad because they could stay only a moment in this adolescent sweetness, could not develop it into the full flower of adult intimacy and parenthood. But this flower comes in the form of a human; it must soon succumb to disease, atrophy, ruined skin, broken teeth, the unbearable frailty of mortality.
    The marathon woman is not interested in mortality or human love. Right now, the marathon woman has infinity on her mind. Roberta Flack’s crooning fades. The first man mournfully withdraws. Then: the majestic pounding of kettle drums and brisk, surging brass! It’s 2001: A Space Odysseyl The lights go up! The silhouettes of naked men are revealed on the screen behind her bed, above which spins a giant disco ball! Men step from behind the screen and array themselves about the bed, splendid in their nakedness, even the ugly ones, like gladiators poised to wade in! This one now, number two, is very short and muscular, covered with hair. His face is handsome; his body exudes physical swagger shadowed by physical grief. The woman cannot know that, at eighteen, he was a gunnery mate on a PT boat in Vietnam, or that Time once ran a photograph of him posed with his machine gun, the brim of his helmet low across his eyes, a cigarette sticking up at a jaunty angle from between his clenched, smiling lips. She can’t know it, but she can feel it: the stunned cockiness of an ignorant boy cradling Death in one arm, cockiness now held fast in the deep heart of a middle-aged man. Just before he enters her, she pictures his heart bristling with tough little hairs. Then she feels his dick and forgets his heart. He pulls her on top of him and she feels another man ready to climb up her butt while number four bossily plants himself in her mouth, one hand holding his penis, the other on his fleshy hip. The referee, a balding fellow in a smart striped shirt, weaves deftly in and out of the melee, ensuring that real penetration is taking place each time. The music segues into hammering dance music, the kind favored by porn movies, only better. The music is like a mob breaking down a flimsy door and spilling endlessly over the threshold. It celebrates dissolution, but it has a rigid
    form and it hits the same button again and again. It makes you think of Haitian religious dances where the dancers empty their personalities to receive the raw flux of spirit—except this music does not allow for spirit. This is the music of personality and obsession, and it is like a high-speed purgatory where the body is disintegrated and reanimated over and over until the soul is a whipsawed blur. It is fun! People dance to this music every night in great glittering venues all over the world, and now the woman and the men fuck to it. They are really doing it and it is chaos! The referee furrows his brow as he darts about, occasionally giving the “Roll over” signal with his forearms, or a TKO hand sign barring a man who’s trying to sneak in a second time.
    And because it is chaos, there are moments when the womans mind slips through the bullying order of the music and the assault of the men. There are many trapdoors in personality and obses-sion, and she blunders down some of them—even though she doesn’t realize that she has done so. Like the killer, she is now able only to occupy her surface because extraordinary