2. Ali and Wallo go to bed
The thick liquory jet fuel coated her throat.
In honor of National Novel Writing Month, your daily dose of “Sorry For Partying”
“Carmen got fired?” Wallo asked. Ali handed him one of two glasses of Fernet she’d poured in the kitchen to accompany their retreat to her bedroom. She sipped slowly, the thick liquory jet fuel coating her throat. She felt stronger already.
“Laid off,” she said. She turned and looked at him, Wallo, Mars prone on the bed, his right eyebrow raised.
“No shit,” he said. “Thus tomorrow’s Emergency Meeting.” He bobbled his head with mock seriousness.
Ali sat down beside him, on the edge of her bed. She slid her hand under his shirt and let her fingers burrow into the soft hair on Wallo’s belly, matted like the forest floor, like a dog’s dense fur.
“Cermak Elementary wouldn’t have done this.”
Wallo considered the obvious. “Well, at Cermak E, we were unionized.”
Ali’s eyelids fluttered. How amazing it was to find, each time she blinked and opened her eyes again, the same fine white man still laying on her Laura Ashley duvet cover. How incredible that the lavender bedding set her mother had bought her in a Bethesda mall could coexist in the same visual field with this familiar handsome teacher she’d met cute, fairy-tale style, in her workplace computer lab. When Ali arrived with her fourth graders on the first day of school, this tall scrawny Prince Eric type had been leaning lithely over one of the printers, turned and asked, “You my next class?” and Ali had replied, “I sure hope so,” before she’d even had time to think, so that three hours later when they found themselves leaving the building together somehow they ended up in a Russian dive bar down the street where a waitress offered vodka shots and sent plates of pickled tomatoes their way and Alison, spinning the gold ring around the middle finger of her right hand so insistently that Wallo announced, “You have beautiful nails. I used to bite mine,” and presented his hand, ten small neat impressions of nail-plates atop ten narrow, columnar digits, laid upon Ali’s knee.
“Your hair is funny,” Ali had replied, ever uncool.
“I know,” said Wallo. “I have no control over it.”
“But the rest of it,” Ali had said, feeling the vodka swish around her inhibitions. “You got control over the rest?”
“Sometimes,” said Wallo, eyes twinkling. “Not always.”
So now here they were again in Ali’s bedroom, not for the first time, while Wallo’s fingers worked themselves around the lilting parabola of Ali’s waistband, testing the stretch to the denim, testing Ali’s limits. Carmen sang in the kitchen, SCRUBS, I DON’T WANT NO SCRUB, A SCRUB IS A GUY WHO CAN’T GET NO LOVE FROM ME, pouting and stomping like a furious bird of paradise, crooning his jealous call so that it filled the apartment along with the lingering smells of fajita night, slipped under the crack beneath Ali’s door to surround the bodies of the two lovers whose shirts had since been unbuttoned and zipper flies unzipped and underwear tugged down into a mechanically-mediated Twister game Ali believed the ancients could not have imagined when they dictated to their scribes the multiple spiderous facets of the actions of love.
If you enjoyed part 2, read part 3 here.
