"I don't care where you go. Betty's here to take care of me. She's a better mother, really."
"Even if she takes up all the toilet paper you want to use on your precious butt?"
"Even then," he said. They heard the dog barking, an opening of the door, and a rush of footsteps.
"It's the favored one," said Nathaniel.
Rick rushed against Gabriele's body and this physical presence made her feel a sense of aversion to the boy. As much as she cared for him his grip was like a monkey upon her bark. Her niveous limbs just stood out awkwardly and she did not know what to do. But where thawing caused snow and ice to crack and fall to the ground, her thawing was a cold chill that caused her legs to begin to shake. Her arms embraced him in the desperate clinging of love and she began to cry. It was the first time she had cried since she was a little girl. It was the first time she had ever cried according to her memory.
"So the darker reefer is richer?," she asked. "You got it, Mama." "I don't know the difference really. Maybe you just better mix it all together and we'll hope for the best." "Sounds sensible. All right, I can do but with a bunch of the cheap stuff since you are getting a discount." "I want to know what is in this drink." "That's abita' mountain dew with some lemon juice, abita' water, tad bit of urine, and some truth serum. You feel that you want to tell the truth?" She was picked up and lifted off by a wind and it took him several minutes to call her back. "Gabriele? Gabriele? Gabriele?" "Who?" "You. I was wantin' to know if you are wantin' to be truthful and tell me your dark secrets. "Okay," she said. "Okay, start talking." "Okay, she said. "He slapped her cheeks with his fingertips. "Do you want to tell me all your secrets and be truthful with me?" His hands were now in her shirt unbuttoning the remaining buttons. "I am so inclined but have found the necessity of a facade." "Keep your dictionary closed, sister, and talk straight talk." "I like being honest even when it gets me into trouble unless I think it might be too disadvantageous. When I was a little girl I witnessed a beheading of a Turk in Istanbul." "Turk?" "In Turkey—the country…not the bird. Everyone was clapping and my parents were glad that justice had happened. I knew that justice was savagery and that crying about it wouldn't accomplish anything but just get people to loathe me. Loathe meaning hate and not love. I decided that if I asked questions and looked like I wasn't bothered by it all I would be left alone with my sensitivities intact. I did my consummate performance to look like an adult and appear as if I did not need them." "What would they have done to you if you cried?" "As I've said, they would have looked on it as weakness and they would have despised it. I didn't want to be hated or loved. I wanted to be a graduate from childhood that could only come from an adult action of pompous stoicism. You don't understand?" "Why did you become a whore with such fancy- dancy words?" "I wanted to know fancy-dancy words but I didn't want to get a job using fancy-dancy words. I didn't want to be one of those professional bureaucratic slaves. I decided that everything was a form of prostitution and that bodily prostitution was quicker than mental prostitution and with bodily prostitution I would never have to relinquish my thoughts. Does that make sense?" "Weird, Sister, but go on." " I didn't want to be there behind a desk working for an agency that represented societal interests. If all of society's institutions were a refined form of atavistic savagery I didn't want to be there contributing to any bit of it: writing documentation, red tape, bureaucracy of this and that sucking up my ideas." "You are one heavy, twisted sister." "You've got that right Candyman." The two began to kiss to et cetera.
Candyman, to his own astonishment and hers, got a second erection a minute after their intimacies were completed; and so Gabriele went to the car for her sketchbook, and drew him nude. A few minutes after she was done she was again in a confused state of not knowing if she had flown to Ithaca or had driven there. She was fading fast. All earlier utterances that she had to make to Candyman, where she had to pull down some ethereal sense of self in order to have some coherent conversation and some degree of rationality behind her situation, had exhausted her more than the sex act itself. She fell asleep. And when she woke up she smelled cooking and went into the kitchen. Candyman was frying bacon in the skillet and she knew that he was thinking about their experience together as he watched the hardening bacon shrink on a paper towel bedding.. "Well, I guess I need to pay you, Candyman." "Yeah, what'd we say—forty so that you could have ten bucks for gas money." "That's what was said." "I'm wondering something there, Husky. Why'd you come all this ways when you could get drugs anyplace." "Didn't know where to go there, Candyman, and I needed to get out and think about things, you know."
She paid Candy Man his forty dollars — a discount price for the sexual services she rendered unto him, and the two shook hands. "Going back to your son?" "Oh, did I tell you about him?" "Sure — you were tellin' to me lots you don't know nothin' about. One time you were spacing out and talkin' 'bout your son and a Russian boy, packing and coming here." She remembered: shortly before she went to bed last night, Nathaniel came into her room. She was packing at the time. He looked at her maliciously.
"You bored?" she asked.
"Maybe," he said.