Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore (9780385538398) Read Free

African American costars.
    That night, after Theon’s ridiculous death, lying there next to Lana—her rough breath like hope or something—I wanted to read but didn’t have the strength to sit up or even reach over to the night table where
Dead Souls
was sitting, waiting for me to reread it for the seventh, or maybe eighth time.
    A university professor I dated for a while told me that I was just a recreational reader, way outside of the educational system he lived in.
    â€œYou only talk about phrases and what the characters are feeling but you have no notion of the literary ideas or intentions,” he said one night after I’d untied him. “You’d be lost in one of my classes. If I hadn’t talked to you like this I wouldn’t have believed that there was a literate thought in your head.”
    â€œBut aren’t your classes about what people in books say and feel?” I asked, as if I were making an appeal in a higher court.
    â€œNo,” he said. “The study of literature today is aboutstructure and underlying intention; it’s about the way in which the themes of literature, historically, resonate with one another.”
    I stopped answering his calls after that. Professor Abraham was of no use to me if his world and mine were unconnected. We were, I thought, like two islands so close that one could see the other in great detail but the life evolving on each was separated by aeons of evolution.
    I loved books and their stories and characters. Books were faithful and true in ways that real people could never be.
    But that night, after Theon and Jolie had expired, I was paralyzed, unable even to imagine reading. Big Dick Palmer, completely without volition, had filled me with passion that Lana’s sorrow had punctured and depleted. The deaths were a part of my paralysis but not essential to it, no more than Myron was a part of my orgasm. I felt closer to Lieutenant Mendelson’s timidity and Lana’s unabashed grief than I did to my own husband, his weakness and self-demolition.
    Theon had abandoned me but men had been leaving me all my life. His death was a more familiar occurrence than all the years we spent together.
    After failing to summon up the will to reach for my book I tried to recall the feeling of my unexpected orgasm. I closed my eyes and imagined that spot of pain and Myron’s grunting and Carmen Alia’s clicking, insectlike camera. But none of it worked. I was numb, had been numb for years but never really knew it. I sometimes experienced this feeling of detachment as disinterest. At other times I mistookmy lack of connection for the natural disdain a beautiful woman has for an ugly world. I had, for many years, taken for emotion the hungry look that men and women had for me. I had falsely perceived my own sensations as their oohs and aahs, grunts and groans, catcalls and blown kisses.
    These ideas settled in my bed with Lana’s breathing and the thought of Theon on a slab somewhere.
    I remembered when Theon had proposed to me.
    We were in a small casino in Vegas and both drunk. Theon got sloppy when he drank too much. Matching him drink for drink I moved, and thought, a little slower. The inebriation brought on by alcohol was just a more leisurely version of my sobriety.
    â€œLet’s get married,” he said while fingering me under the table.
    I was young, and wet, and Theon had driven us to Vegas in a fire-engine-red Rolls-Royce (which was leased but I didn’t know that at the time).
    â€œOkay,” I said with a leer, “but no more PJ for you until there’s a ring on my finger and we’ve both said ‘I do.’ ”
    I didn’t think he was serious. I mean who would want to marry an eighteen-year-old girl who fucks for a living?
    But Theon took me in a taxi to an aqua-and-pink-plaster twenty-four-hour chapel, where he presented me with a very expensive emerald and diamond engagement ring and paid