“Maybe I won’t find someone

  As lovely as youuu

  I should care

  And I dooooo—”

  They shouted and clapped and without a pause, her eyes closed now, she swayed and sang:

  “I used to visit all the very gay places

  Those come what may places

  Where one relaxes on the axis of the wheel of life

  To get the feel of life

  from jazz and cocktails—”

  She was in their center, yet somewhere above them; beyond her closed eyes she felt their bodies, but as a snake senses body heat; and she felt their spirits drawn into hers, and hers leaving her body, moving in song out of her mouth:

  “I know that if

  I took even one sniff—”

  She opened her eyes to their laughter, flipped a hand downward and gestured with upturned palm at the mirror on the table, the razor blade, the straws—

  “It would bore me

  Terrif-ically too—”

  She did not want to stop and she could not stop; she danced backward away from the table and couch, spun into the center of the room, spreading her arms. Someone put a can of Budweiser in her hand.

  “—just one of those fabulous flights

  a trip to the moon on gossamer wings—”

  She looked at the can, frowned with disdain, held it out and someone took it and gave her a bottle of Dos Equis. She nodded, drank from it, and sang. Bruce was holding her; tall Bruce. He was at her side, his arm around her waist, moving with her, his body with hers, swaying with her melody, his feet moving with hers and her rhythm. She sang “Something Cool” and “Laura” and “Autumn Leaves” and “Moonlight in Vermont.” And she kept singing: these songs she had heard on the evenings and nights and weekend mornings and afternoons of her childhood, and she saw her mother’s pretty face with the faces in the songs, for all the songs had faces, and Molly’s was in them too. Her body was weightless as music and had boundless energy; and everything—the summer night, the party, the people there and herself there, Molly in the basement room and on the earth and in her breath of eternity—was as clear and lovely as a long high note on a trumpet.

  She stopped when the songs did. They simply stopped rising inside her. She was not tired. And she did not care whether people had heard too much of her; she did not even consider it. She ended with “It Could Happen to You” and took a cold Dos Equis from an extended hand, a girl’s hand, a senior’s, and moved with Bruce, his arm at her waist, her body weightless still, her heart racing, through applause and shouts of surprise and delight, to the coffee table, to Belinda beaming at her from the couch, pretty Belinda holding out her arms, standing now, and coming around the coffee table, losing her balance and snatching it back with a quick shift of feet, Belinda hugging her tightly, prying Bruce away, saying at her ear: “God damn, Molly.”

  Belinda moved back, looked at her eyes, kissed her lips.

  “You’re beautiful. Where did you get those songs?”

  “My mother’s songbook.”

  “Songbook?” Bruce said. His hand was on her hip, his arm resting across the back of her waist.

  “You know. Her records.”

  “She’s a great mom,” Belinda said to Bruce.

  Wanda and Dotty appeared from behind her. They stood on either side of Belinda. They wanted to know where Molly learned all those songs, and how come they never knew she could sing like that. Wanda was drunk, and the color was leaving her face; she weaved and stared and drank from her bottle of beer, and Molly knew she would be in the bathroom soon, on her knees, hugging the bowl, riding the porcelain bus. Dotty said she had heard that Janis Joplin got started at a party, just like this; Janis hadn’t known till then she was such a good singer.

  “Me and Southern Comfort,” Molly said.

  “Smack and death,” Bruce said.

  “Somebody change the subject,” Belinda said.

  “Dos Equis,” Molly said, and turned away from Bruce to get one, but he said he would, and he left for the ice chest across the room. Time stopped, or sped. She was leaning against a wall with Dotty, and Bruce stood facing them, talking, and Molly saw that he only remembered now and then to look at Dotty; and Wanda had been in the bathroom since she first hurried there a cigarette ago, or two, or an hour. A girl kneeled at the coffee table, bent over the mirror, holding a straw in her nostril and bending farther, following the straw as the white line vanished into it.

  “Vanished,” Molly said.

  “What?” Bruce said.

  Molly shrugged. Somehow she knew people were upstairs, in bedrooms. She remembered a girl and boy going up the stairs. Then another girl and boy. And others. In her mind she saw them as clearly as if she were watching them now, across the room, holding each other and climbing the stairs, their faces flushed, their eyes bright and glazed. But she could not place them among her images of the party, could not establish a sequence. The entire night seemed to be in the present, moving in concentric circles. But she felt them up there in the many bedrooms of this house and on the sunporch couch and living-room couch, her spirit cringing yet fascinated as she watched them, her spirit up there in the enchanted forest where demons made vicious love, their faces neither soothed nor ecstatic: they hissed through clamped teeth, and their eyes shone with the vengeful and raging hate of lust. Belinda came from dancing, sweat dripping on her face, as Molly heard her mother’s moans through the wall and down the hall to her bedroom door and through it to her ears, her face on her satin-covered pillow; saw her mother’s face next morning, lovelier in a different way, private but not secret, as though her cheeks and eyes were nourished by lovemaking, as a flower by the sun. Her lovers’ faces looked only comfortable, contented. Belinda said, “My parents should stay in Maine all week. Think of it. Think of the party we’d have.”

  “Is Wanda still throwing up?” Molly said.

  “Wanda? Is she sick?”

  Bruce pointed at the end of the room where it became L-shaped; in that leg with the ping-pong table was the bathroom. Belinda said she would go check on her and Molly said Maybe she’s upstairs and Bruce smiled and shook his head and said he didn’t think so.

  “A lot of people upstairs,” Molly said to Belinda.

  “Wicked,” Belinda said, and left them, walked between clustered people, walked slowly, swaying when she had to change direction to skirt a dancing couple or a group standing and drinking. It was strange for Molly to be so drunk yet to see clearly how drunk Belinda was, how much effort she expended on controlling the balance of each step.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” she said to Bruce, and felt in her purse for cigarettes. He leaned to kiss her but she lowered her face, looked into the open box: two cigarettes. “I can’t believe this. I came with one open pack and another whole one and I still ran out and Belinda gave me these. Look. I must have smoked fifty cigarettes.”

  “It’s the cocaine.”

  “What is?”

  “You smoke a lot. And you can drink all night.”

  “No more of that shit.”

  “You sang too.”

  “Yes. I sang.” He took the cigarette from her and lit it and put it between her lips. “Come on,” she said.

  She took his hand and, bumped by dancers, led him through the room; she climbed the stairs, pulling him behind her. They would always follow you. She knew that. Their cocks got hard and their faces looked helpless, no matter how they tried to disguise it, and they would follow you anywhere. She had never let any of them follow her to nakedness. No. And she was not a tease. She simply had not let any of them follow her to where they thought they were leading. She emerged from the stairs into the dark kitchen and turned into the living room, dark too; Bruce was beside her now, holding her hand between them. She went down a hall to the stairs, and stopped. Her fingers flicked ashes before she could tell it not to, and with the sole of her shoe she rubbed the carpet and hoped her foot had found the ashes.

  “You guys are so rich,” she said.

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “I know. Let’s go to the woods.”

  “What woods?”

  “Upstairs.”

  He moved to her front to kiss her, but she stepped around him and pulled him up the stairs. At their top she looked down the dark hall past closed doors. She looked at him and raised a forefinger to her lips and whispered: “They’re so quiet.” She looked down the hall. “My mother’s not. Probably she thinks she is.”

  “What are we doing?”

  “Ssshhh. Whisper.”

  Holding his hand, she moved down the carpeted hall. The music in the basement room was faint, and she did not know whether she heard its repetitive bass or felt it through the soles of her sneakers. She stopped at the first door and heard nothing but the music and her clandestine breathing, and Bruce’s, faster and louder beside her. She went to the next door and flicked ashes again and when she realized it, her foot moved over the carpet. She followed the hall, turning into another wing, past doors closed to silent rooms, and stopped at the master bedroom at the end of the hall. Behind it the mattress was moving, and Bruce whispered: “It’s Goldilocks.” She wanted to hear a girl’s voice from the bed.

  “Your parents’ room. They shouldn’t do it in there.”

  “Why not? No: I guess you’re right.”

  She caught his wrist as he lifted his arm to knock on the door. She pulled him away, and all down the hall to its corner she listened behind her for a girl’s voice. She imagined hissing, in there on the huge bed. She turned into the first wing, hurrying, pulling him; the heat of her cigarette was near her fingers. One of the doors was open now, and she glanced through it at the dark and the bed’s silhouette and smelled marijuana smoke. At the top of the stairs she drew him beside her for the descent. She said aloud: “Get me to an ashtray.”

  Now he led: into the empty living room with its large windows, and he leaned away from her, then an ashtray was in her hand. Her fingers burned as she put out the cigarette. He took the ashtray and put it on a lamp table beside them. Then he was holding her, kissing her with his open mouth, his tongue, and he was hard against her pelvis. Slowly she was moving backward with the pressure of his weight, and when her calves touched the couch she lay on it and held and kissed him as he moved on top of her and mimed lovemaking between her legs that she spread and then lifted around his waist, her sneakers crossed above him. She had done this before and she would do it now with him, let him come against her in his jeans, listen to the soft cries and groans from his throat and receive his weight as he collapsed on her. But he stopped and shifted and was beside her; with closed eyes she saw herself singing, saw the mirror and the line and the straw from her nostril, and Belinda hugging her, and the smoke of fifty cigarettes pluming from her lips, and Wanda’s face so pale just before she pushed herself from the wall and into the crowd between her and the bathroom; Bruce unbuttoned her jeans and carefully, slowly, eased down the zipper; she raised her hips and he slid the jeans down to her ankles, then he was off the couch, squatting, working at the laces of her sneakers and taking them off, one at a time, a hand holding her heel; then he pulled off her jeans and laid them on the floor. She waited for his hands to move up her legs for her pants, waited to twist away from them, and to close her thighs. But he rose and, standing on one leg at a time, pulled off his sneakers; then he unbuckled and unzipped and pushed his jeans down his hips and stepped out of them. His erection was white cotton. He pulled his tee shirt over his head. When his hands touched the waistband of his jockey shorts she turned toward the floor and found her purse on it and lit her last cigarette. She reached to the coffee table for an ashtray and lay on her back again and placed the ashtray on her skin and the front of her bikini pants. She remembered they were pale blue. He lay on his side, at the edge of the couch, the cock pressing her left thigh. She held her cigarette to his lips, then said:

  “Can we just lie here?”

  “Sure.”

  But when they finished smoking he moved the ashtray to the floor and kissed her. For a long time he kissed her in the dark and the distant music and low beat from the basement and once the steps and voices of a couple descending the stairs and in the hall and through the dining room and kitchen, music rising through the basement door as they opened it, then they closed it and her sounds again were those of kissing and fast breath, and his hand was gentle on her breasts, under her loose white Mexican blouse. When he pushed it above her breasts she raised her shoulders and head and arms, and for an instant her face was inside its white, then it was gone and she was naked with him, save for her pants. When his hand went there she closed her legs and he kissed and softly sucked her breasts and she opened her legs to his hand, and lifted her hips; he pulled her pants away from her, then pushed them past her knees, and she drew one leg out of them and with that foot she pushed them down and over the other foot. He was on top of her, kissing, hard against her, and she drew back and twisted away.

  “I can’t.”

  “Please.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t have anything.”

  “I do.”

  “No you don’t.”

  She held him tightly and kissed him and it was touching her again; she moved with it, felt it slip between her lips, and she jerked back from it.

  “In my room,” he said. “I’ll go get one.”

  “No. I can’t. I won’t.”

  “Please. I can’t stop.”

  “Here. Move.”

  Holding his waist, she tenderly pushed him toward the back of the couch, and she shifted to its edge. When she held the cock, he lay on his back. She kissed him. She had never touched one, and its surface was smooth. She moved her hand up and down and he moaned. Now that she was not afraid, she wanted to give him his pleasure or his release from it; and warmly she kissed him, gently she moved her hand. Then he said: “Molly. Your mouth. Please.”

  She did not want to and she wanted to and this made her feel her drunkenness again, and the cocaine, and she moved with them, between his legs, and said What if I don’t like it? then knew she had not said it aloud and she did not; she lowered her face, her hair falling down her cheeks and forehead, her jaws widening, and she saw a large bird, a swan, eating from the earth; then, as if she were beside the couch, she saw her mouth moving down and up. He squirmed and gasped and moaned, then it twitched: only a tiny spurt of salty liquid, it was nothing and it was over; but then she felt the rush beneath its skin and it convulsed and warm bitter liquid softly slapped the roof of her mouth, and then again, her mouth filled with it and the bitterness of lemon rind; she swallowed and oh shit oh God she had done it, it was in her, and her soul recoiled from her throat, from her heart, and lay soiled and sticky in her stomach while she swallowed again, then did not move. In her mouth it throbbed. She did not move; she kept her face hidden in her soft hair. Then his hands were on her cheeks, her shoulders, and he pulled her up to him, her face to his, and kissed her: her dirty mouth and fouled breath and her soul lying cold beneath her heart. She felt both abused and unworthy, so she gratefully received his kisses, and wept. He licked her tears. He was murmuring to her. She was beautiful, she was wonderful. His tongue went from her tears to her breasts, and he moved, and licked her belly and moved again and was licking her, she could hear him lapping juice, his tongue inside her, then on it, oh on it where at night in her bed and in the morning in her bed and afternoon in her bed her finger— She moved against and with his tongue and pressed his hair and head with her hands. Then she heard her voice, the girl’s voice above her with its deep strange cry like a prayer as she became her climax and her voice grew louder with its chant: “Oh God—”

  In the morning, heat woke her. She was naked and she got up and turned on the oscillating fan on her bureau at the foot of her bed, and knew from the angle of sunlight in her room that it was between eight and nine; as she went to the fan and back to bed she did not look at the clock. She opened her eyes only to the sunlight and the fan’s switch, and closed them as she walked to the bed and lay on it and saw through her headache and nausea the cock in her mouth. His semen was in her blood. She was nearly asleep again; she had to piss and she tried to will her bladder to sleep too but it was insistent and now she was fully awake to the day she did not want to wake to. She got up and lit a cigarette and went to her bathroom and sat and sighed and shut her eyes and smoked. Then her bowels held her there, the Dos Equis leaving her with more solidity than they had in their bottles, all those bottles she had drunk, and with a stench that repulsed even her. Pain moved laterally through her stomach, and the next release weakened her, and her legs quivered. She sat and waited for her body to set her free so she could sleep, and regain that freedom too, from her knowledge that she deserved this punishment. Then she washed her hands and face, and studied its pallor and her dark eyes for a sign. There was none: only the fatigue in her eyes, and the drained skin and the expression of painless damage on her face. Only a hangover. Gueule de bois, the French called it. Mug of wood, Mrs. Conway said. Wooden face.

  But she wanted a mark: deserved one, had earned one as Dorian Gray earned his. Late one night she had watched the old movie on television, in black and white until he pulled the cover from his portrait and it was in color; and sitting in the dark living room, she had exclaimed in horror; or her flesh had, her body tightening upright in the chair, and sending from her mouth an articulated gasp: oh. She rinsed her toothbrush glass and filled it with water and imagined her photograph on her mother’s dresser: that eternal smile when she was fourteen changed by a downward turn of one corner of the mouth. She almost believed it, and felt the picture drawing her to her mother’s bedroom, to gaze at the grim set of her lips. Then she saw her mother’s mouth going down and up on a cock. From a bottle in the medicine cabinet she took three aspirins and swallowed them and gagged, on the tablets or the water, but she held her breath, then slowly released it, and leaning on the sink she told her body to relax, and she did not vomit.