Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [27]
“Melissa, stop. We can’t do this.”
“Give it up!” she shouted.
“Come on Melissa, stop.” His voice was soupy underneath, losing tensile strength; what man didn’t dream of being ravished this way? She had his pants open and was starting her dive when he shuddered and grabbed her hands, pulled her up short.
“Melissa,” he said steadily, without cruelty, “enough.”
“You aren’t sleeping in there tonight.” Her voice surprised her, the harpy venom in it—could she take it back?
“But I have to sleep in there.”
“Bullshit!” When she pushed she could feel the strength in his hands, how he could snap her wrists like cheesesticks if he chose.
“I made a promise—”
“Uh, hello? I seem to recall you making a few promises to me.”
“I did. And I’m not forgetting that.”
“Well it sure looks like it to me.”
There followed the worst argument of their married lives—the worst, anyway, for Melissa, who couldn’t provoke a decent angry word from him. It was like trying to punch out a roomful of shadows, her frustration climaxing with a placid kiss from Dirk and the announcement that he was going to bed.
“You aren’t sleeping in there with her!” she rowled at his back. “You aren’t!” she cried as he turned the corner. “Dammit, Dirk!”—one final shout before futility overtook her, the realization of how dumb, how utterly clueless you were to think you might control anything about your life. She went to the kitchen and banged pots and pans for a while, then took herself to bed in a wicked funk. After cutting off the lights she masturbated, scraping herself into a shallow, passionless clench which as an act of revenge was a total failure. Then she lay there dry-eyed and completely still, wondering if she could live with this.
Five years ago, at the end of her job interview, Mr. Bryan sat her down in his corner office and gave Melissa what she described forever after as “the talk.” “This is a pretty lousy business,” said her future boss, a short, cheerfully caustic man with Gucci pouches underneath his eyes and a Little Richard cloud of jet black hair. “We get rapists, murderers, drug dealers, child-molesters, just about every bad deal you can think of walks through that door, and it’s our job, it is our sworn constitutional duty, to work like hell to get these scumbags off. So. Think you can handle that?”
Melissa was not quite nineteen. She was living away from home for the first time and would have dug ditches not to go back. “Yes sir,” she said, “I think I can handle it.”
Fayetteville might not be the big city, but it offered all the excitement a small-town girl could reasonably want. In her first several years on the job she was flashed at her desk, had a knife pulled on her, watched a gang fight erupt in the reception area, and called social services on a hooker client who slapped her toddler three times in as many minutes. As an education she couldn’t have asked for more, and the strenuous sleeping around she did those first few years, that was part of the education, maybe the main part. At the time she’d felt the truest way to live was by tunneling down to the wildness at your core, though she regularly shocked herself with what she found there. Did other women feel this way? she wondered. She suspected that she had unspeakable things inside her, a black hole of lust that might suck her past the point of no return, and she took her share of hits, pushing the limits of that—plenty of men were more than happy to exploit her sexual nature. Luckily Dirk had come along just as she’d found herself at the cusp of a premature cynicism.
“So whadda we got?” Mr. Bryan asked this morning, puffy-eyed, tie dangling loose around his neck.
“You’ve got your sanity hearing at ten, the guy who shot his ex’s dog,” she called through the door to his office. “Then you’re due in Judge Hershoff’s at eleven-thirty, that’s your motion to suppress James Fenner’s kilo. Okay, phone calls.” She switched to a different pad. “You know Miss Blinn, our stripper? She called and said a hose in her car broke, she’ll bring the cash over as soon as she can but