Watch Your Mouth by Daniel Handler Page B

“I wish I was sure I’d had sex with enough people.”
    “What do you mean?” I asked. Conversation was getting dif- ficult to carry on as we carried on.
    “I just—I’ve only learned about sex from other people who were learning about sex. I feel a little empty. I feel, I don’t know, a void. The void of—I don’t know, if it weren’t so traumatic I think I should have learned about sex from somebody older, and experienced. Except that obviously that would be psycho- logically weird. That’s why—no, stop that, listen to me—” She grabbed my hand from behind her and put it back on the bed firmly. “That’s why in many ways learning about sex from my father would have been perfect.”
    Here it is again: T.U.D. The Unknown Dread, this time with trombones and bassoons as Joseph performs a brief soliloquy: She can’t possibly be saying what I hear her saying. Chord. What I hear her saying. Chord. It is not possible. Chord. It’s dead quiet except for the rustle of rude playbills.
    “Sex with—”
    “My dad. One’s dad. I don’t know.”
    “I think,” I said, stiff and stiffly, “that one would feel an enormous sense of shame.”
    “Not shame,” she corrected. “Probably guilt. ” She leaned back her head and looked down at me like a nude judge. She licked her lips and quoted something, I don’t know what. “ ‘Guilt says I made a mistake, shame says I am a mistake. And I’m not a mistake.’ ”
    “Not a mistake,” I repeated, the same notes but a different register.
    “Right,” she smiled. “So I’d probably feel some guilt, the power of society telling me I made a mistake.” At this point the music should say: What? “I mean, I know there’s a big thing against it.” She thrust herself against my trembling hips, pinning me to the bed. “But all behavior exists within a social and cul- tural context. Imagine if there wasn’t a thing. It makes a lot of sense, educationally. Usually a girl and her father grow apart as a woman is developing sexually.” She dangled one of her sec- ondary sex characteristics into my mouth again, which was gap- ing open. “The mother is usually the one who teaches about periods, and the father doesn’t know what to do. I think that’s why he was so weird about the dress.” She tossed her head back to the discarded dress, curled up near the mirror like shed skin. “It showed off my puberty. But if the father were traditionally responsible for teaching someone the ropes, so to speak”—here she grinned at me, in reference to a brief bondage experiment we’d tried back in bleary March—“then I could learn so much from somebody. And you would pass it on to your children. I mean, my father is an attractive man, fit, and—”
    “You’re talking like some male fantasy character in a dirty book,” I said. I felt like I’d been caught reading it.
    She shrugged and her whole body twisted in such a way that crossed the inevitable line. We both quickened with military
    precision and ferocity, like a field drum roll. Our faces grew furious and fell closer and closer to one another—we didn’t want to fire until we saw the whites of our eyes. It occurred to me that all she’d said had maybe been nothing but talking dirty. Not a plan of action but some new toy to try, some way of taking the family stress after an invigorating year in the dorms and turning it into further fuel for our exploits. The idea of her telling me secrets to egg me on aroused me even as the secrets repelled me, and the accelerando of our our bodies drowned out
    T.U.D. and the unblinking mirror saw another splashdown. Cyn’s exhausted flesh collapsed on top of me and I placed my hands behind her, pressing myself further in even as I retracted. I imagined the view from above, fluttered as the fan still spun, of my damp hands upon her like those of an exhausted cast- away. The image of her body stirred me even more than the body itself, the idea of her being viewed, like this