GIRL 93
ISRAELI AIR FORCE GIRL
PART 3
(Continued)
And then my consciousness winked out. One second I was reaching for the door handle of the Saleen in the fading sunlight of a Saturday afternoon in August, and in the next my hand was in the exact same position in front of me, but the outdoor light had faded to the sepia mellow glow of the front of the bar of the Brew Pub, and I was reaching out to take the hand of Girl 93, Israeli Air Force Girl.
I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing came out. I felt the skin of her hand touch the skin of mine, and I writhed and twisted in the agony of ten thousand volts shooting through my body as the thunderbolt hit me. Through a filmy fog I could see her gorgeous face and her amazing eyes looking at me, and in that instant I knew that her face could launch a thousand ships, and that I'd seen her before in my dreams and I'd known her before in half a dozen previous lives, and that for all I knew, Girl Zero was just the opening act, shelling my beach to pave the way for the main battle invasion force of Israeli Air Force Girl.
Like the aftermath of a deafening grenade explosion, there was no sound for a few minutes, until the third or fourth sentence she uttered to me. And that speech was caressed by her mouth, her words in front of me hanging in the air like the red and green lights of a lovely Christmas tree. Her accent was beautiful, it was a sound that had put me to sleep for three thousand nights and awakened me three thousand times at dawn.
She was a goddess.
The evening, to my altered consciousness, was a series of snap shots, each one frozen in time as if by a supernatural strobe light. She laughed at what Rex was saying as he took pictures of her face to put by her phone number in the cell phone, and though she hated the pictures, one was more perfect and beautiful than the next. And as the anxiety would rise in me over the marriage bait and her resemblance to Girl Zero, time would stop and I'd go to that blackness again, waking up suddenly with twenty minutes having passed, but eerily I had total recall of what had happened since I had faded out. It was as if Rex had a sort of "live feed" to my memory as he conducted the date, and at one point I floated silently out of my body and watched Rex operate its machinery as he spoke in animation to Israeli Air Force Girl about adventures from my distant past. The near drowning during Navy Scuba School, the flooding at test depth on the USS Hammerhead, and the time they scrambled the entire east and west coast submarine forces to sea on a Sunday night, so suddenly and with so little warning that we all were convinced it was World War III. And Israeli Air Force Girl's face was bathed in the warmth coming from Rex, and then filaments of fire seemed to pass between the two.
I looked at myself and thought it odd how good I looked with Rex at the helm. It was as if he fully inflated my sagging corpse and I was young again. He was all confidence and animation and certainty. He was funny and intelligent and slick, and then I looked at this perfect woman who so reminded me of the woman who pulverized my heart, I realized that she was falling in love with Rex as well.
In the next instant Rex moved close to Israeli Air Force Girl as she leaned against a dark wall in a deserted parking lot. The bastard put his - or rather our - hand on her smooth face and pulled her toward him, and in slow motion I saw her lips part, and he kissed her and it was like a scene in a sappy romantic comedy. The kiss went on and on, and although I floated ten feet above the couple, I could feel her lips and mouth as if they were on me, and suddenly I was back inside myself, alarms shrieking in my mind as I felt the skin under her panties as my hand moved past her waistband and fondled her. I expected to hear anger andfeel a stinging slap on my face, but there was only a soft moan in that tender, lovely voice as her hand came up and caressed me. And then she said the only words I remember from that whole night.
"I know you would be an amazing lover," she said, that east-of-civilization accent melting my heart.
And suddenly I was behind the wheel of the Saleen a mile from Nassau Street heading back to my townhouse. Rex was riding beside me, with a smitten, dreamy expression on his face. I locked up the brakes, shrieked to a halt and ordered him out of the car.
"You're serious?"
Out. I was ready to punch him, and hard. I guess he realized how furious I was.
"Fine."
Once he was gone, that sallow, sick feeling returned, but a moment later the supreme being had taken his place.
Why do you do that? I spat, as furious as I could ever remember being, and very near my breaking point.
"Do what?"
Dress like me, look like me. It's not funny anymore. It's fucking disturbing.
"You ever go to a Chris Rock concert?" he said calmly. "For three days afterward you're talking like him, straight from the ghetto. Or watch George Clooney in the movies, and on the way home you're walking like him, with that wicked cocky walk of his, rockin' your head back and forth?"
Yeah. So what?
"Mikey, you imitate what you think is cool."
I stared at him, almost going through a red light.
What?
"You heard me. I'm imitating you because sometimes I wake up in the morning wishing I were you. You're like, I don't know, like a real life James Bond."
You've got to be fucking kidding me.
He smiled and shook his head slowly, as if it were the funniest thing he'd heard all day.
I decided to cut to the heart of things. Why did you put Rex in for me on this Israeli Air Force Girl thing? What the hell was that about? You've never done that before.
"Rex could do it right, that's why. You're hostile and licking your divorce wounds still."
This isn't a football game you can just send a replacement player into. This is my fucking consciousness we're talking about. It's my life, for God's sake.
"For your sake, you mean. Listen, you want to know what the funny thing is?" He smiled even wider, that movie star grin of his making me even more irritated. "You said YOU were the one who wanted a relationship and that HE was the one who just wanted to go from girl to girl. Turns out HE wants a girlfriend, a satisfying girlfriend, and YOU just want to remain disconnected, playing with one girl after another. Between the two of you, YOU'RE the player."
He was right. We'd reversed roles.
So what now, he'll take over my life and I'll be relegated to looking over HIS shoulder every now and then? For an instant I felt fear, that fear of no longer existing.
The supreme being banged my thigh with his fist. "What do you want?"
Hell, I don't know. But I did know.
You know what I want, supreme being? I want a tall, sexy, adoring blonde with stripper tits who fucks like a porn star, but I don't want her to be China-doll delicate, but more, I don't know, overtly sexual. I want to look at her and just want to bend her over and fuck her, not paint an oil portrait of her face. I want this sexual, sexy blonde to be my girlfriend, a blonde who won't make want to kill myself every time we have a lover's quarrel. I want to be in charge in the relationship. The leader. I don't want her to be thirty, that's too young, and I'd lose my soul yet again and marry the bitch. Give me a woman who won't be laser focused on getting married. Give me a woman without a damned biological clock ticking away like an armed suitcase nuclear weapon. Give me a calm healer who's a maniac when she's naked, who will share my quirky sexual fetishes, who will watch porn with me and love it, who will get turned on by this freakish sexuality you gave me, not be repulsed by it.
A steno pad appeared on his lap, and a Monte Blanc pen, and he scribbled quick, efficient notes to himself. He asked me forty questions, like:
Intelligence level?
Cheekbones?
Eye color?
Height?
Breast size?
Nationality of ancestry?
Siblings?
He wrote it all down.
And then I was in bed and the sun was rising, and I was certain that the last woman I'd dated had been Anal Third Base Girl.
(Continued)
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