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Show 115 "Oh shit, Chess. Her bosom." "Looked OK to me." Bess's perfume turned me dizzy, she wasn't small at all. "Have another drink and we'll go back to the hotel," I said. "Oh shit!" she giggled. "Are you trying to get me shiteous drunk?" Bess never hesitated to come up to my room and lie with me in the dark on my bed, where I found she was a San Francisco expert at tongue kissing. I knew I was in like Flynn, for how could anyone who tongue kissed like that and was so promiscuous about saying shit ever draw a line anywhere? But all she ever took off were her shoes, and whenever I moved my hand up or down or around, she'd give me a shove or an elbow, sometimes a knee. Never her treasure. She was a husky girl and as tough about her favors as a Sicilian virgin-while in his room Ross and Lily were no doubt stripped naked and doing all kindsof spectacular things. I tended to get low about it, all the more so because recently I'd had a tooth pulled. I had actually been the one to discover pistachio nuts and introduce them to Ross, ahead of him for once, and the first one to break a molar on one too, one with a shell that wasn't split open. For two months I tried to pretend that tooth didn't hurt but finally I had to go to this dental place, upstairs on Market Street, about a dozen dentists in cubicles. Getting it pulled was as bad as I thought it would be, like when we used to pull the testicles out of bull calves to make them steers. A piece of my living body had been pulled out of me and from then on I was very nervous whenever I was alone with Bess. The partial bridge to replace it, a phony tooth set in silvery metal with two prongs on each side to clamp onto the adjoining teeth (it looked like a spider), was just loose enough so that I could get my tongue under it and flip it out. It was a game I played with myself to move it around in my mouth until I could reposition it: close my jaws on it and snap it back into the cavity. When I got nervous I |
