All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers: A Novel Read Free Page B

about my shooting that squirrel. I finally tucked the dish towel into my shorts and straggled into the other room, feeling sheepish and quite apprehensive. I don’t think she approved of Sally, either. She was standing by our bookcase in her tennis outfit, a drink in one hand.
    “Hi,” she said. “I wanted to ask you something. Does your wife like cunnilingus?”
    The question completely disoriented me. I had been about to try and explain that shooting the squirrel had been a rare, isolated act, one that could never possibly repeat itself.
    “Beg pardon?” I said.
    “I think that’s the way you pronounce it,” she said. “Cunnilingus.”
    “That’s the way I’ve always heard it pronounced,” I said, though truthfully I don’t think I’d ever heard it pronounced before at all.
    “Does Sally like it?”
    “I don’t know,” I said. “We’ve only been married a week.”
    “You better hurry up and try it. A girl that pretty’s not going to stay around very long if she gets bored. I saw her walking down the sidewalk and she looked pretty bored.”
    “She’s not bored,” I said. “We just got married. How come you asked me that?”
    “I’ve never done it,” she said. “I lead a pretty routine life. I thought maybe you could show me about it while your wife’s taking a walk.”
    I’d been horny for her the whole two years I’d lived in the apartment, and she’d never so much as given me a look. Now I was married and there she was. There was no bull about her, either. She was obviously ready to peel off her tennis shorts. Nothing ever happens conveniently for me.
    “I’m just a student,” I said. “How about Sammy?”
    “Oh, come on,” she said, indignant that I would even suggest it. “Sammy’s not going to root around like that. He doesn’t like to expose himself to germs—his mother scared the shit out of him when he was a kid.”
    “I meant where is he,” I said, though I hadn’t. Sammy was very fastidious. I had forgotten that.
    “He’s in Ecuador. He has a client with a ranch there.”
    “I don’t understand why you came here now,” I said.
    “I told you in plain English,” Mrs. Salomea said. It was obvious her patience was being strained.
    “If you don’t think you know how say so and I’ll go home and get drunk,” she said. “You’re not as
macho
about sex as you are about badminton, are you?”
    Her manner was awfully irritating. “I know how,” I said. “I just got married, remember?”
    “Big deal,” she said. “I bet she was desperate to get away from somebody or she wouldn’t have taken up with you.”
    Oddly, I had come to the same conclusion. It made me furious, that Jenny Salomea could figure it out so easily.
    “Go to hell!” I said. “I didn’t even invite you in.”
    “Why don’t you just admit you don’t know how? You don’t have to get vulgar. I know you’re just a kid. You’re so sloppy you look like you’d be good at it—that’s why I asked. Also, we’re handy to one another.”
    “We’ve been handy to one another for
two years
,” I said.
    “Yeah, but you weren’t sexy then. You looked too studious. You even looked studious when you were drunk. Maybe it took a little sex to make you sexy. They say it works that way. Makes the feathers shine.”
    “I just fell in love,” I said. “Didn’t you notice that?”
    “Sure,” she said. “I wouldn’t have come here when you weren’t in love even if I
had
thought you were sexy. You don’t think I want you in love with me, do you? You’d be harder to keep out than the goddamn mosquitoes. I don’t like love anyway. I was just hoping for a little cunnilingus.”
    “It’s the wrong time of day,” I said. “Sally was probably just going around the block.”
    “That’s a bunch of horseshit,” Jenny said. “I know her type. She’ll be gone for hours. We could have already done it if you weren’t so slow off the mark.”
    Just then there was a knock on the door. I was