Free Lucky Us by Joan Silber Page B

radio loud and fool around a little while he was driving down the highway, and then we’d pull over to the side of the road. Often we were silly and stoned as well as hotly eager to have sex. A small obstruction—a stubborn bra hook, pants legs that wouldn’t roll easily down the knees—struck us as more hilarious than we could stand. “Stop laughing,” Chris would say, holding his breath. “Stop it right now.”
    Naturally, condoms were often funny to us; putting a latex sack on an engorged organ is inherently funny. In time lust always outran the instinct for comedy—we wanted each other pretty fiercely—and then we made love like serious lovers, solemn and beyond the ridiculous. After the exalted finale, it often surprised me to see the condom again, that shred of disagreeable rubber on what had seemed so distinctly naked.
    One night—it was autumn and I remember the carwas cool and dank—Chris looked down and said, “Science has failed us.”
    He had to take the thing off to show me what he meant. He held it up, glistening and ripped.
    â€œWe were too much for it,” I said. I had a small thrill of panic. One friend had had an abortion, and it had been expensive and awful but okay. Interesting even.
    â€œWant to save it?” Chris said. “Want to put it in your scrapbook?”
    â€œWe’re sending it back to LifeStyles for a refund,” I said. “We’re suing them and getting rich.”
    â€œI want an airline ticket around the world,” Chris said. “I want a car that doesn’t have a transmission that’s shot. I want a new leather jacket.”
    â€œLucky us,” I said. “We’ve hit the jackpot.”
    3. In my second year with Chris he was druggier. Sometimes I did stuff with him and sometimes I didn’t. He was a great proselytizer for different sensations, but he didn’t pressure me, aside from giving out toothsome descriptions. Some drugs made him horny and urgent, some made him speedy and strange; heroin made him languorous and distant and only mildly sexual. I couldn’t help it, I was always trying to get him to want me when he thought he didn’t. How unsubtle I must have been,preening and tossing myself around, larding my conversation with coy and bawdy references, touching his arm or his back.
    When I had him on the linoleum floor of the laundry room in our friend’s parents’ basement, he smiled at me with his eyes closed. I was proud of myself for his erection, but it was an unreliable miracle, and I had to keep coaxing it back. I was patient and stubborn, I wouldn’t let him be. I brought him back, with glee and triumph, only to have him soften and slip away from me again. From my mouth! From all my artful and generous attention! I was deeply insulted, I was near weeping. When he had a sudden resurgence of unmistakable desire for me, I was so grateful that I moved up the carpet and lowered myself over him at once, to get the best of him while I could, and I didn’t even think about whether we were using any protection.
    4. I was kind of fascinated by the needles. It was such a professional way to do drugs, an open sacrifice to absolute expedience. The boys—it was always boys—were intent as musicians, methodically melting down the powder in a spoon, binding their arms with some girl’s pantyhose, drawing the liquid up through cotton into the syringe. And I saw their faces, their scientific gazes, asthey watched their own arms and waited, the curl of pleasure in the slow stretch of their lips. Boys I had known since kindergarten.
    It felt different than I had expected. I tried it first before we went to a concert, out of a long-growing eagerness and a belief (through the music, which Dennis Kotke cranked up on the stereo in his basement) that this was the one true life, the blaring phantom life of extremity. I was sitting in a scuffed rocking chair in a