by Jane Underwood
(06/09/04)
"Please," I implore him, "suck on my nipples!"
"Aha!" Victor exclaims, triumphant. "You said when we first met that your nipples weren't all that sensitive! But you like my mouth on them now, don't you? You like it very much. Say it to me. Say, 'I like your mouth on my nipples very much.'"
I hesitate. Saying it out loud once was hard enough.
"Say it," Victor commands.
"I like your mouth on my nipples very much."
My battery was dead until Victor, who is a bonified "car expert," came charging into my life. Let there be no mistake. Victor is not an auto mechanic. He is a Car Expert -- a mechanical engineer who makes his living solving other peoples' car problems. He frequently testifies as an expert witness in court cases involving cars. He advertises in the Yellow Pages in three different sections: Engineering, Automotive Solutions, and Innovations. Last month, he also ran an ad in the Personals section of The Advertiser, and one day when I was feeling particularly depressed over My Recent Heartbreaking Breakup, I answered it.
During our first phone conversation, it was easy to see that Victor had a knack for getting people to open up about their car problems. Soon I found myself telling him all about Bessie, my 1963 Plymouth Valiant. Bessie had been stalling at intersections and was, so I had been told by my ex, burning far too much oil. Victor said that if we decided to meet in person, he would help me sort out my options, car-wise.
The first time we met, Victor lifted Bessie's hood, stuck his head down beside her carburetor, and looked around for an eternity.
"I am going to plumb her depths," he announced when his head finally popped back up. Those were his very words. He then proclaimed that Bessie was in dire need of new spark plugs, and immediately made it his mission in life to explain to me the how and why of them.
"You've got to learn the facts about cars," Victor said. "Now here's the way that spark plugs work..."
"Stop!" I shouted, after he had droned on for longer than I could bear. "Spark plugs have something to do with sparks. That's all I want or need to know."
That was our beginning. Now I am lying on my back, beneath Victor, on Victor's king-sized bed, looking over his shoulder at the light fixture -- an orange globe made of crusty, bubbly-looking plastic, suspended from a gold chain. The globe goes well with the large plate glass mirror at the foot of the bed, and with the Playboy pin-ups near the light switch.
Victor's suburban bachelor style of interior decoration, which also features a brown and cream plaid living room couch atop a royal blue shag rug, clashes with my love of citified shabby chic, my preference for antique brass combined with ubiquitous distress. Victor's globe symbolizes our total incompatibility in all areas except one.
Victor takes great pride in his professional title: "Victor Armbrust: Car Problem Solver." That is his honest-to-god title as listed in the business section of the phone book. His is a world that revolves around factual evidence.
As for me, I'm a writer who wrests meaning from the paradoxical world of poetry. Many's the time I've owned a rattletrap car that was beset by perplexing problems that came and went, came and went, came and went. "You've got an intermittent problem," my mechanics would say. But sometimes these intermittent problems would go away and never come back.
That's when I started to suspect that there were invisible forces at work, that there was more to every engine than met the eye -- something lyrical, something magical, maybe even something mythical. That's when I knew that some powerful and secret chain reaction of mechanical events had made whatever had gone wrong go back to being right.
"Hogwash," says Victor when I try to tell him my theory about lyrical, magical cars.
I have already forgotten all the facts about spark plugs that Victor has told me. What I have not forgotten is the truth: Spark plugs make sparks.
Sparks must be nurtured, protected, and coaxed into a state of combustion. Combustion results in a surging release of mysterious energy that can make even the oldest or coldest engine tremble, rumble, and coalesce into an explosive burst of noisy activity.
"You want to be fucked, don't you?" Victor says.
A spark inside me starts to wiggle. It feels nervous but at the same time excited, like it wants to make a leap, bridge a gap.
I breathe harder as Victor and I exchange urgent kisses, and he begins to press his cock everywhere all at once. Night has fallen and the orange globe has not been turned on; in the darkness it looks like nothing more than an eclipsed moon hanging just beyond the outline of Victor's left ear.
I like remembering the first time that Victor raised my skirt and inched his fingers up my thigh until he found the site of the leak that was causing quite a puddle. I also like recalling how he hooked his jumper cable up to my terminals and sent such a bolt through my broken heart that I was jolted back to the land of the living.
"Say it!" says Victor loudly. "Say 'Yes, I want to be fucked!'"
"Yes I want to be fucked!"
"Say it again," he says a little less loudly.
"Yes I want to be fucked."
"Say it again," he says softly.
"Yes I want to be fucked."
"Say it one more time," he whispers.
That's when my spark ignites.
