Free The Dream Merchant by Fred Waitzkin Page B

the woman’s underwear, put it to his face and inhale her. At the time Jim had still been sleeping on the floor with his two brothers. It was Sally who asked her friend if Jim could sleep on one side of her big bed—he was working so hard to support the family. The thirty-year-old had been amused and perhaps also intrigued to share her bed with the child master of their house. One night she allowed the boy to touch her ample body, more than allowed. Jim’s mother had been complicit. She was so grateful to her hardworking son whom she depended on for everything. But if the thoughtful clever boy never learns the meaning of “no,” what happens later on when doors begin to close in his face?
    It occurred to me that Jim’s sexual exploits with younger women, much younger as he’s grown older, was perhaps born in the tabooed indulgence of the child with a shapely woman nearly three times his age, this sublime incongruity. Over the years, Jim’s young lovers have given him confidence and vitality but most essentially the license to shed his skin and move on from static and occasionally dangerous circumstances—to stay alive as he saw it. Moving on for Jim, starting over, was staying alive.
    I was thinking about Jim’s younger women and had lost count of the lights and turns to his place. Fuck! I was completely lost. Again. It was humiliating. Each visit I have to call him on the cell and Jim gives me detailed directions: past the Catholic church, past a large empty lot, take a left, then the next right.
    But it wasn’t just my distracted driving. There was a desolate sameness to this neighborhood that played havoc with my sense of direction. The baking asphalt streets were interchangeable; each numbing house had exactly the same penumbra of sadness.
    Eventually Jim hustled out onto Nowhere Street waving his arms so that I would stop circling. He was grinning as if I’d pulled into the number-one spot for happiness in the state of Florida. He never seemed to notice the rusty barbecues, jalopies, and broken bikes, the heat rising from driveways, or one of his neighbors carrying out the garbage with an alarming torpor.
    For my dear friend, life’s tawdry surface had been transformed by this young woman’s allure and artful coaxing, by the public theater of their foreplay (her thick maroon lipstick and brazen invitations astonish me while they incite him), by the daily routine they had worked out: when the kids were at school she guided him to the bedroom for a quickie; and after their abundant evening meal with wine, when he was indolent with food and alcohol, his lips a little greasy from chicken thighs or liver, she led him into the bedroom. She was always moist and hungry for him. But if Jim happened to be reluctant, which was rare, she turned her back to him and lifted herself a little. She reached around and slowly opened herself with her fingers. The sight of her young wet pussy hit him with a reckless surge, her needy smell and little sounds. He stiffened and threw himself against her back and ass while she laughed and he reached for her little breasts. Baby, she said, pushing him inside, taking hold of his old hanging balls and caressing them like dice. Jim fucked for nearly an hour, thrusting into her with his still powerful thighs. My friend reported all of this while giggling and shaking his head to say, Can you believe this kid?
    I’m getting younger, he said to me, sucking in his belly and looking at himself in the narrow mirror on his closet door.
    But if Jim happened to wake in the middle of night wracked with dread (lost somewhere between lives; or, much worse, when he heard the call of his waiting wife, Phyllis)—and this had been happening two or three times a week—the girl put her hand on his shoulder. It’s all right, baby, she murmured in her beguiling accent, pardoned his sins with a hand on his shoulder. He adored her voice and the smell of