Free David by Ray Robertson Page A

nigger, you mean,” I said, resplashing my glass.
    â€œOf course not.”
    â€œOf course not,” I snorted. “Why ‘Of course not’?”
    â€œBecause you ask me to read to you.”
    â€œSo?”
    â€œSo, why else would you ask me? Of course I think it is because you cannot read. It is only what makes sense, yes?”
    I hung a smug smile on my face and nodded into my glass like I knew something she didn’t. Because I actually didn’t, kept smugging and nodding until I could think of something I did. Before that had time to happen, though:
    â€œMy father, he knew Latin like you, too,” she said. “A minister, you see. Part of his job.”
    â€œYour father was a minister?”
    â€œI am sorry, you do not understand English either? I thought it was just German you need my help with.”
    I could feel my face stretching into a smile in spite of myself. I poured some more whiskey into her glass. “I suppose I was just surprised to learn that you don’t know Latin,”I said. “What with your father being a minister, I mean. It would seem to come with the territory. Was it because you were a girl?”
    She stood up and walked to the fire and warmed an open-palmed hand; switched the hand her glass was in and warmed the other hand the same way. “Oh, no. It was not because he did not try that I do not know. Believe me, he try.”
    I knew I didn’t have to ask, knew that if I waited long enough, she’d tell me what I wanted to know. Finally, still facing the fire:
    â€œBut I try harder,” she said.
    I thought I hadn’t heard her right. “Sorry? You tried harder at what?”
    She turned around, the glass in her hand empty again. She took the bottle from me this time and refilled her drink and handed it back without bothering to do the same with mine. Toasting herself, “I tried harder not to learn,” she said.
    *
    The first time I saw Loretta naked, I thought: You could crack an egg on that stomach, you could fry it on that ass. I’d known from the beginning she wasn’t what most men would consider beautiful—it was as if nature had gotten tired three-quarters of the way through the job, couldn’t be bothered to make the final effort to mould her nose just a little less wide, to place her eyes just a little farther apart—but until I saw her naked, and what she did with her nakedness, I didn’t know that what I had imagined made a woman beautiful, didn’t. An expertly painted face or a perfectly formed nose or a tantalizingly shaped figure seemed, seeing Loretta readily release herself from the bondage of her clothing and move toward me already lying in bed, simplistic at best, embarrassingly puerile at worst. Climbing atop me, sticking me inside her,unthinkingly moving every muscle in unison to help create the perfect friction for the long final shudder she was after, I found myself being fucked for the first time. I had always thought that was what men did.
    I was never a customer—I never once paid for her body, only her translating tongue—so what other men saw and felt when they were in bed with her, I don’t know. What I saw was honest desire and healthy greed, the same unmistakable satisfaction I later came to expect when watching her cut into a thick, greasy pork chop or when she snuggles down deep for the night underneath the small mountain of blankets she likes to pile high on top of our bed when it’s particularly cold. Loretta’s flesh told you precisely what her soul was thinking. Loretta’s flesh was her soul. Loretta solved the mind–body problem for me once and for all, and she didn’t need René Descartes or any other long-winded bore to help her do it.
    Finished, then waiting for me to finish, then climbing back off me like a satisfied rider after trying out a new horse, Loretta walked away from me to where she’d left her discarded