Whores for Gloria

15. The cave of sheets

Jimmy walked around all night admiring the whores and thinking how nice it would be to stick his tongue up their dirty asses oh—oh! but the unhappy girl had upset him with her weeping ways; it now seemed that he could never be tranquil anymore like the transparent greenness inside a nice fat botde of Cutty Sark, with the surface of the whisky barely trembling so that you know that it is there and waiting for you to drink it and it is right in front of you and all you have to do is reach over half a foot and start unscrewing that navy-white cap with the clipper ship on it and Jimmy had once counted all the sails on that ship let's see in his mind's eye a bank of four and two banks of five big ones each but Jimmy rarely drank Cutty Sark anymore because it was not that cheap a drunk. So maybe Code Six was right, and Jimmy did need to escalate it a little farther. He saw a pair of dirty panties on Larkin Street, but they were not good enough; he had to buy them from a whore to make them pure. In his dreams of Gloria he was hammering at Being, hammering at lightness to shape someone who would not turn her face away from him the way the whores he flatbacked did; she had to have a shape; he could no longer bear a glowing white facelessness for a face no matter how holy it was; he had to have Gloria and Gloria had to be comfortable with all her things around her — not as many as Imelda Marcos's shoes, but enough to make her feel at home. But even this late (it should be said) Jimmy still knew that he was pretending like Phyllis pretended with a pretty wig whose locks half hid lips pouted into a heart, with false eyelashes meticulously applied, with the same care that an entomologist might apply to reassembling the legs of some rare and brittle millipede that he hoards inside his cabinet of types, and he remembered how Melissa had said to him well one of the things I used to do to combat that boredom was building forts, building like a little cave with the sheets, crawling under it, like a little tent I was inside by myself, setting up housekeeping, just pretending I was somewhere else. It was kind of easy in that dark environment. That's what being a kid is about, pretending. You've got to pretend you're this, pretend you're that, pretend you're a grownup, pretend you're not, pretend you're somebody else. — That's right Melissa, sighed Jimmy to himself sitting on his bed, and when you're a grownup you've got to pretend you're with somebody else. What a lot of work and trouble everything is.

The questions

Gloria, are you still crying? I guess you're just doing what you've got to, but I wonder if happiness is growing inside you? Is it going to be a boy or a girl? A girl I guess because all the whores were girls. I'm just trying to understand you Gloria but it's so hard. I'm doing what I can. If I love you hard enough will I be able to see you? How many more happy stories do I have to hear because they're sticking to me like mud and making me walk more and more heavy so I need to know how many? How many? Gloria, do you understand what I'm saying? Gloria, I never stop thinking about you.