Nobody's Fool

said to Ralph, “Okay, but just ask when he gets home, okay? Just ask him. Do I, or do I not, give the best head on the East Coast.”
    â€œI met her at a poetry reading,” Peter told him in answer to his question.
    Ralph nodded soberly, feigning comprehension. “The women who go to those things all like her?”
    Peter couldn’t help but grin. “A surprising number.”
    Ralph shook his head. He’d never been to a poetry reading. The reason he’d never gone to one—that people would be reading poetry there—had always seemed sufficient, but now he had another reason if he ever needed one. Vera’d never asked him to attend a poetry reading, but it was the sort of thing she might do someday if she got annoyed at him and was searching for a punishment and was tired of the educational channel. The good news was that there weren’t any poetry readings in Bath, but Schuyler Springs wasn’t very far away and they probably had them there. Maybe Albany, for all he knew. It was a scary thought. A man could be surrounded by poetry readings and not know it.
    Ralph had been too embarrassed to pass along to Peter the young woman’s question about whether she did or did not give the best head on the East Coast. Ralph would no more have repeated what the young woman said to him than he would have confessed to having, when he was a young man, once been the recipient of a blow job. It had happened in South Carolina, where it had been against the law, and not just the fact that they’d paid for it, either. Like most horrible experiences, Ralph had not been able to forget it. What had he been thinking of, to go along? Now, at fifty-eight, he asked himself the same question he’d asked himself as an eighteen-year-old. And answered it the same way. That he hadn’t known what it would be like until it was too late to back out. Ralph had imagined,for one thing, that they would
each
have a girl. And a room. A different girl and separate rooms. That was the way he’d thought it would go. Not the same girl for all of them and all of them crowded into a hot, dark little room. It was a private act he’d imagined, not a public performance. And pleasure, not some vague distant rumbling, like a churning stomach. He’d imagined two naked people, not a fully dressed girl servicing six men who dropped their trousers down around their ankles when it was their turn and pulled them up again as soon as they were finished. He had not imagined performing to a gallery, accepting advice, criticism and finally applause. How had he allowed himself to take part in something so sordid?
    Well, he hadn’t meant to, was about all he could say in his own defense. He honestly hadn’t meant to. He hadn’t known what he was getting into, and he felt certain that the same thing must be true of Peter, whom Ralph refused to think badly of. If Ralph blamed anyone, as the two men and the boy stood awkwardly at the back door, limited in what could be said by the presence of the boy, he blamed himself for not knowing what to advise. He hadn’t even advised Peter about the existence of such women as this one he’d fallen in with, the kind who could make a man feel like something not quite a man and accomplish it in a way no other man, however jeering and contemptuous, could do. “You ain’t quite up for this, are you, Mr. Limp?” the sneering girl they’d hired in South Carolina had said after she’d been working on young Ralph awhile, to little effect, and a couple of his friends had howled appreciatively at this insult. But a boy who hadn’t had his turn yet and probably feared a similar difficulty had come to Ralph’s defense and told the girl not to talk with her mouth full, and this act of friendship had allowed Ralph to relax and concentrate until the vague rumbling finally came and went, like a train into and then out of the station of the next town over. No, Ralph refused to think badly of his stepson. He would have liked to say something witty and comforting like the boy had done in South Carolina, something like Sully always came up with, but about the best he could do was tell Peter he and the boy were welcome to stay with them as long as they needed to. Hiding, Ralph suspected, was what Peter was doing, and Ralph didn’t blame him a bit. Even forty years later, if that girl from South Carolina ever turned up in Bath, Ralph would