The Girl w/500 Faces

Warning: ADULT Content

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The Girl w/500 Faces

by

D.A. Schulman

     We walk to the park; I pull and he drags. Walter’s pink puppy paws chafe against the sidewalk. I swore I’d never pull him, that I’d be all about positive reinforcement; but after three weeks, I’m a noose with feet that drags his furry four-month-old ass. He fights me all the way—half-choking—searching for his booty, as I search for mine. Every girl who slingshots herself past me on her g-string whispers, "You are not ready."

   I’d only seen her once and that was six days ago. She’s not as pretty as my fiancée and I wonder if she’ll forever belong to no one. She’s twenty-one, or at least that’s what she said. And it wasn’t me that she was attracted to as much as it was my wingman, Walter; and I would never have Walter if it weren’t for my fiancée and that makes me really hate myself.
     I swore that after tonight, if she didn’t show, I’d forget the whole thing. It isn’t like we planned to meet. She asked if I’m usually in the park with my puppy around this time and that she hoped to see me later this week. Then she did this wink thing with her jawbreaker eyes that I imagined changing colors with each lick. She tossed her dark hair from the side of her face, exposing four silver hoop earrings on her left ear. Jeans tugged on her in all directions like she was in some secret harness in a Peter Pan play waiting to be lifted to the sky.
     But my favorite part was her teeth, or really the mouthful of metal hiding them. There was something about her metallic grin that brought me back to my first kiss, when rubber-bands, like fireworks, shot out of my mouth as secrets were unbuckled.
     She was more than her braces, though. She had qualities that even the conventional man would appreciate. Legs so long they deserve two knees each; they begin at my navel and could wrap around me twice. On her lower back lives a tattoo of a crucifix—an old promise she made with God—forgotten behind a white tag stained pink attached to a red g-string. It stuck to the upper half of her sweaty cross. She had another tat peeking from where her cleavage met her blouse. I think it was a cherry connected to something that looked like one of those stickers you’re supposed to scratch and sniff. She was like stale icing on a Christmas cookie and she was using what was left of her sweetness to lure me back here so she could suck all the infidelity out of me in one apocalyptic squirt.
     I’m sitting right where we were—on a park bench near Hell Gate Bridge just off the East River. I stare at my feet in my sandals. A tuft of hair grows out of the joint of my big toe. I hate that. I saw that on my Dad when I was little and all I wanted to do was shave it off. But now I let it grow, and strut around like an untended lawn. My feet are framed by leaves that have fallen prematurely and lie in gravelly graves with pieces of green and white broken glass mixed in. Picnic remains are tossed to my other side: a half-eaten beef burrito stabbed by a broken plastic fork, a noodle mayo salad on a wet paper plate, an opened potato chip bag crumpled in a Baskin Robbins cup, and one of those soda plastic things that dolphins get their heads stuck in.
     Across the river, the lights of Manhattan remind me that I’m living on the wrong side. The buildings are like legs to a glass case in the sky displaying stars that shine with the coldness diamonds do in engagement rings I can’t afford.
     A dead pigeon lies beside a tree to my right on what’s left of its rotted back. It looks different than when I first saw it six days ago. Now it’s covered with black bugs and small yellow worms. The movement of these snot-filled creatures make the pigeon appear more alive—or less dead—than when I first saw it. Walter tries to pull me toward it. If there’s one thing I know, it’s that bones from dead things can splinter inside puppies and kill them. I snap his leash and yank him back. His puppy throat gags. I tie his leash to the iron rail on the side of the bench. He attempts to move the bench (and the sidewalk it’s attached to) toward the dead bird. And just as I’m wondering what death smells like, I make out her shadow, her personal dark cloud melting over concrete, bending over dead leaves, and devouring plastic spoons and bottle caps. Streetlight and moonlight fight to outline her as the Earth revolves her to me. The girl w/500 faces.

   I recall what the bald guy with the nipple ring at the gym told me. He said that I’ll never stop looking at girls because I’m a guy and that’s okay; but I never thought I still would once I found my someone.
     I don’t know how long it takes her to reach me because everything about her—every nice smelling something, every dirty something else—sticks me in her spilled honey. All I think about is her walking down the aisle to my wedding of infidelity, marrying me back to myself.
     I untie the leash from the bench and hold it with my left hand while I sit, my legs spread apart. Green paint chips from the rotting wood tangle into hairs on the underside of my thighs. I’m like some frat boy who thinks his junk is too big and the only way he can sit is to spread his legs and lean back to avoid poking himself in the eye.
     Her heels scream, “Click Clock!"
     "Hi," she says, and with that single word I hear a crack in the glass carrying everything I hold precious.
     "Hi there yourself,” I mumble, having never put those three words together. I kick a half empty coca-cola can to my left and its sugary insides, more syrup than liquid, pool onto the concrete. Enter gnats.
     She says, "May I have this seat?"
     It's not a seat. It’s a bench. She’s being cute. Splinters poke my right thigh. I motion for her to sit beside me. I say nothing. She doesn’t need to know I was expected home ten minutes ago, that it doesn’t take this long to walk Walter, that I’ve committed my heart to my fiancée (who is waiting for me), and that secretly I worry about promising myself to her—my someone—because she can’t change faces and bodies the way the girl w/500 can.

   She scoots herself toward me. I feel the little denim hairs of her skirt—that she cut to be even shorter—press against me, and I close my eyes and imagine a brush painting her tattoos on my skin. And just when I’m wanting to tell her how afraid I am to make big decisions that are “forever” things, like tattoos and marriage, her right hand lands on my left thigh, casually, as if I were part of the bench. This isn’t a kind of friendly two-tap in any way. This is a deliberate motion that gets me biting the inside of my lip and tightening my asshole.
     And that’s when I know that I’m no longer controlling this ride: I’ve passed her the keys, the bench has grown wheels and she is driving, taking me to an undisclosed place. And at first, as I look out to Hell Gate Bridge and the East River, I want it to feel like we’re sailing on some kind of romantic something, like the bench grew a mast—but this isn’t the case. I’ve been carjacked and I wish this girl will take all my fantasies (that exclude my fiancée) and turn them into reality so I won’t want them anymore.
     Her fingers burn holes through my army pant cut offs. I imagine I’ll have a permanent handprint, and that it’s no longer denim brushes on her skirt bottom that paint my tattoos on, it’s her hands finger-painting my flesh, engraving lines into me that bend when I breathe.
     “So,” she sighs, “you’re quiet.”
     She whispers as if not wanting to disturb the hush that our collision has created. Her hand on my thigh sucks every thought that isn’t her out, and half my vocabulary with it.
     “I’m not quiet, I’m just…”
     I’m just what? I’m just about to get married.
     “Oh, we have ourselves a shy one, do we?”
     She says this with a kind of southern drawl twang thing like New Orleans just fucked New Jersey. And she speaks like there’s more than one of her, like there’s this whole underground brothel cult of women vacuuming all the infidelity out of the race of man, or that she’s here to supply the only eroticism, the only fantasy I will ever need. And I will do everything in my power to ration it so it may last me the rest of my masturbatory life, ridding me of the girl w/500 faces so I can embrace the girl with only one.
     “I’m not shy,” I respond. Then resorting to a line I used in high school I add, “I just think some things surpass words.”
     “Like what?” she asks.
     “Like us,” I quickly reply, not knowing what I mean.
     She fires back, “So, what do you think we should do about it?”
     I’m now in some badly written porno and I’m thinking maybe pornos aren’t really written that badly after all and that maybe this stuff actually does happen. I imagine a fast forward button I can press to get through this crap dialogue. I cross her right arm awkwardly with my left, and then realize I need to go behind it—which I do—and my left hand lands on the flesh of her right thigh.
     “Ooh, Mr. Aggressive,” she coos.
     There is this quiet standstill, as if everything is holding its breath before drowning in the East River that’s overflowing with her honey.  We turn away from each other and stare out at the bridge and the river and all the engagement rings shining in the sky.

    Her hand moves to the inside of my thigh. Both of us are looking straight ahead. Her right knee is cool between my left thumb and pinky—the finger man was supposed to have evolved out of by now. It finds its primeval self in her warmest place. The heat I feel makes me think less about her sexually and more about how we have a warmth that comes from somewhere and we don’t know where, and I’m sitting here wanting her, which would have been okay around the time of the creation of man with a need to populate ASAP in order to build an army to defeat dinosaurs or some crap, but now it’s completely unnecessary and I blame evolution that I haven’t evolved out of my pinky and my—
     There’s nothing subtle about my throbbing junk worming its way down my left shorts leg—the same leg that belongs to the thigh she is maneuvering her hand onto. I wonder if she notices what’s there. Sometimes it camouflages itself against my thigh like some washed up James Bond who wants nothing more than to finally be caught.
     But she finds Mr. Bond, as if she’s always known the places he hides, and she was onto my game when I suggested six days ago that maybe I’d see her here again. I feel sad for her that she needs to play games and that she doesn’t have somebody waiting for her at home like me. Then I feel her small hand through my shorts grab me. She giggles.
     “Ooh, somebody wants to come out and play.”
     For a moment I think how clever she is and that maybe she’s a writer too, but then I realize everything she says sounds brilliant because her hand is in my pants. I feel the denim press against the top of my hand sliding up her skirt as I try to return the favor. Just as my middle finger reaches to feel her, she stops me and says, “Whoa, I don’t think so.”
     What?
     “You’re being bad,” she teases. “We can’t do that here. Follow me.”
     She stands and begins walking, still holding onto my member like it’s my leash. I follow. I’m holding Walter’s leash but he walks in line with her.
     Worried someone might walk by and see her hand on me, I remove it, and playfully swing it, our fingers locked together right where my ring is going to be. It makes me nervous, like she’s going to feel remnants of the wedding bands I’d tried on at the store, which is really stupid, because even if she could, I don’t think she’d care. The long grass is cold against my feet. I hold Walter’s leash tightly in my right hand and stroke the leather with a tenderness I normally share with the hand I’m holding. She hums a tune to herself that sounds like a song a birthday girl might sing when it’s time to open the presents.
     As we near Hell Gate Bridge and the stone archway beneath it, she veers to the left. Walter stops and sniffs the sand. I tug him forward tangling his leg in the leash.
     “Walter, let’s go!”
     “Come on, boys,” she says, and says it like she’s our mother and we’re on our way to a family picnic, and for some Oedipal reason, this further turns me on.
     We follow her under the arch; she guides us towards the inner wall and leans against it. It’s covered with bubble gum and graffiti informing me Rick is “phat”, Natasha “wuz” something, and Tammy and Jorge are “2getha 4eva”. She places one foot against the wall, stares at me and smiles. Her teeth are grey in the half-light; her metal reflects Manhattan.
     I stammer and blush and feel my ears get red because I know from the movies I’ve seen—and from the four women I’ve known biblically—that this is when the man kisses the woman. Walter tugs on the leash; the leather jerks in my hand and I say, “I should tie him somewhere.”
     “He’s okay. Let him go, he’ll stay nearby.”
     “No, I should. He’s a puppy.” I search for a tree, anything to tie a leash to; the side of the concrete bridge, a big rock—anything. But trees don’t grow in the sandpit under the bridge.
     “I’ll just hang onto him,” I say.
     “That’s a shame,” she says.
     “Why?”
     “I was thinking you might want to use both hands.”
     The porno begins again. She’s the teacher and I’m the innocent student on a field trip learning about bridges.
     “My God. Do I have to do everything?” she groans.
     She grabs my shirt as if she’s about to punch me and pulls me against her. Walter and I lurch forward. Her tongue reaches me before her lips do—all 500 tapeworms lunge down my throat. Walter tugs free; I step through the handle of his leash and grab onto her waist for support.
     My head arches to accommodate her tongue descending down my throat. It’s as if she’s on autopilot, and it reminds me that she doesn’t know my name. She grabs my right hand and pushes it up to meet her breast.
     She breathes, “Yeah, you like that, huh, baby?”
     It feels silly she’s calling me “baby” because I’m pretty sure I’m older than her, but I still squeeze her breast as she holds my hand to it. Not only is it bigger than my fiancée’s, it’s the biggest of the four sets I’ve felt in my life. I’m surprised that bigger doesn’t make them better—just mushy. She pulls my hand away, which I don’t understand because she’s the one who put it there. She turns me with a karate motion and starts unzipping my pants faster than I ever have, defying everything I’d learned about running the bases by earning the trust of a woman. She drops to her knees and pulls down my shorts with a practicality that feels clinical. I spring out of the fly of my boxers.
     “Yum, yum,” she whispers.
     I’m conscious of how outside we are and how exposed I am. I lift my leg to catch my shorts on one knee and say, “Whoa—I don’t think…”
     “No one’s here. Don’t worry, baby. Puppy will guard us.”
     I don’t like that she calls him “Puppy”. I look around to Walter who is chewing a mound of yellow weeds growing out of the sand. I straighten my leg; my shorts drop. She puts me into her mouth like she’s drowning underwater and just found her snorkel. I hear Walter chewing his cud as she devours me. I see the shadow of her head bobbing against the wall.
     Chew.
     Suck.
     Chew.
     Suck.
     I want to stop. But I’m a people pleaser and what if I hurt her feelings? She’s obviously insecure to put herself in this position with men.
     Chew.
     Suck.
     “I want to… stop… I want to…”
     Suck.
     “What do you want, baby?” Her tongue’s doing a weird circle thing that my fiancée has never tried.
     “I want to…”
     “I’m so wet, baby. I’m dripping.” She stands up and grabs my hand.
     Chew.
     “Feel me. Feel how wet.” She pushes my hand up her skirt and I don’t feel panties. Walter is chewing and coughing and sounds as far away as everything else. She turns around and bends over, pressing against me.
     “Come on, baby. I want you inside me.”
     She hikes her skirt and the denim hairs lay against the top of her tattooed cross. She plants one hand in the sand and reaches the other around to navigate me into her. It makes me think how good she must be at Yoga. I look down at her body doing what mine can’t. I see no leash on my foot. My mouth goes dry. I scream, “Walter!”
     My left foot loses its sandal, my legs are caught on my shorts, and I trip forward. My junk, still wet from her mouth, hits the sand followed by my chin. I look up and see Walter’s white tail wave in the distance. I call his name again. He turns.
     The dead pigeon is in his mouth.

   “Drop it!” I yell. Kicking my shorts in the air along with my other sandal I race back into the park toward him. Naked from the waist down, my balls ping-pong between my thighs. He’s heading out of the park and onto the street but circles back around.
     “Drop it! You drop it NOW!”
     I catch him by his tail and tackle him.
     “You’re gonna kill yourself!”
     He thinks I’m playing. Maggots run up and down the rotting wings. I smell death and every part of me wants to get away from it and every part of him wants to devour it. Grabbing onto a wing, I ram my left hand between his jaws, but all it makes him do is chew harder, swallowing and gagging.
     “God-dammit, drop it!”
     His baby teeth scrape against the pigeon’s beak. He plants his feet in the grass and whips his head in a swooping gesture left to right. My hand goes with it and I hear a wing tear. It sounds like Velcro and makes me want to vomit. I fall backwards with the wing and the back of my head slams against a rock. I groan. Walter turns toward me. I’m lying on my back half-naked with my arms spread out like I’ve been crucified with some symbolic wing in my hand. I let out another groan, a little too dramatic, because that’s what I do.
     It’s laying still that makes Walter interested in me again. He saunters over, and just as he’s about to press the dead bird up against me and lick my face with his maggot tongue, I grab his leash and pounce on him. I pry his jaw wide open from behind; my bare balls slapping up against his backside like I’m some dog fucker. Walter coughs. The broken beak presses into my wrist, followed by a clump of feather, bone and flesh. I loosen my chokehold. He rolls onto his back and submits; and so do I, the two of us alone. Panting.
     It’s quiet.  I don’t know where the girl went, or the faces. All I feel is the grass on my back, the wind on my balls—and something closer than touch.