out by where it led me, but there was no faking it.
Women, however, had drunk so very deeply of the cultural Kool-Aid that they couldn’t even figure out if they were cumming. Were they moaning right? Did their tits look good? How were they supposed to let go, get carried away? They were in deepest drag and they didn’t even seem to know it. I felt bad for Bunny but also ill-suited to help, and a little bit grossed out. It just seemed unnatural to me. Not a man and a woman having sex, although that wasn’t my favorite thing to picture, but someone not understanding or being able to detect their own sexual pleasure. It was like someone confessing they liked eating soap and dirt, that they couldn’t tell what was food and what was not food.
“But isn’t the pain,” I said, trying to figure it out, “like, at first it hurts, and then it gets hot and it stops hurting?”
“No,” she said, “definitely not, it hurts the whole way through.”
“Like, pardon me if this is too intimate, but are you really dry or something?”
“I have nothing to compare it to,” she said.
“Has he said anything?”
“He said I’m really tight, which is a compliment, right?”
“Yeah, but if it’s causing you active pain, then not so much.”
She took off her sunglasses and sat up on her lounger then, and she looked more sad than I had ever seen her, even after Ryan Brassard told everyone she had bitten his ear. “But it’s supposed to hurt! That’s like the first thing anyone tells a girl about sex is that it’s gonna hurt and she’s gonna bleed, but no one ever tells you when it will stop being like that. I don’t even care,” she said, “I would keep doing it except—”
She broke off and there was a wet sound in her voice like tears were coming, but then none came. She put her sunglasses back on and sat perfectly still, like she was killing someone far away with her mind.
“What is it?”
“He has a girlfriend,” she said with a tremendous exhale. Sometimes I marveled at the sheer size of her lungs. They must be the size of grocery bags in her chest. “Which I knew! And I thought I didn’t care, but obviously I do.”
“Well,” I said, searching for a bright side. After all, my boyfriend had a fucking wife.
“And I told myself I was fine with it, but he teases me about it. He’ll be on the phone with her and start fingering me and keep talking to her, and when I pull away or get mad, he’s like, ‘Don’t get all butt hurt.’ Or he will make fun of me for being jealous. He says I’m irrational, he calls me his irrational little bull.”
I hesitated, because calling Bunny an irrational little bull was both apt and kind of cute, but these were all still giant red flags, just waving in the lusty breeze. “I don’t like this, Bunny. It’s one thing to have a girlfriend but to call her in front of you and then try to finger you—that’s power-tripping.”
“I think he thinks he’s just being funny,” she said. “He says if he didn’t know better he’d fall in love with me.”
“What is that supposed to even mean?”
“I have no idea,” Bunny said. “But I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to be a compliment.”
“That’s the shadiest compliment I’ve ever heard.”
“I don’t know,” she said, and shrugged. It struck me as perverse, a grown man treating such a majestic creature as Bunny Lampert this way. With her large hands and soft little titties, she was a Wagnerian fantasy of a milkmaid, a baby Valkyrie. Was Eric insane? Did he stomp on flowers and piss on kittens?
“Fuck that boy,” I said.
She smiled. “Indeed, I already have.”
“Walk on him in your heels, grind his face into the mud, honey. That boy is trash.”
“You are sweet to me,” she said, and picked up my hand, kissed my wrist. “But I don’t think I’m the kind of girl who is going to get Prince Charming.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “Just nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” I said.
“Well, Michael, I’m a fucking murderer.”
“No, you’re not,” I said, before I could think about it.
“But I am,” she said, with such sureness I was terrified.
* * *
—
Because I was living with Ray and Bunny, I had front-row seats for everything that came next. We did not attend Ann Marie’s funeral; Ray thought it would be