So this is how I ended up sitting in a rented artist's space in Somerville, outside of Boston. discussing the angle of my erection with my cousin Liz and a girl from Ireland.
Phone call on a Saturday afternoon.
Lizzie. First cousin on my mother's side. Tall, pretty, way crazier than anyone in my own family. Grew up with her. Had a just-shy-of-incest crush on her since I was twelve. That's thirteen years of low-grade, unrequited lust.
Typical Lizzie phone call. No hello. Just, "Fuck, Tommy. Total screaming fuck up."
"Love you too, Liz. And hello. That's what they say, y'know. Polite society, etc."
"OK. Hello."
"Hello."
"Shit, Tommy, don't be a dick. I gotta problem."
I look out my window to the streets of Allston. BU kids walking by. I was two years away from that and still without a steady job. Then love and years of history win out over the desire to give shit. I've known this girl since before she had tits.
"Ok, babe," I tell the phone. "What's the problem? What can I do?"
"You're not gonna like it."
"I dunno. Tell me and we'll see."
I hear the sound of an indrawn breath at the far end of the phone.
Then: "OK, coz, how'd you like to get naked in front of me?".
*
Which is how I met Tess Riordan.
Two girls. Mass College of Art. Rented space in a warehouse split down the middle. Where Lizzie painted, Tess sculpted. Both under deadline to produce something for their respective Senior projects the following Monday. One model who didn't show. Calls to half a dozen other models, half a dozen friends from school. Nobody available. Finally, Lizzie calling in the family chit, no matter how weird.
*
Quick subway ride. Green Line to Red. Quick walk from the station to a long row of former factories along the Mystic River. And finally to the second floor. I never could say no to Lizzie.
I walk in through a heavy oak door with a clouded window.
A large, messy room washed in light from high, long windows. Smell of oil paint, clay, water, stone. Lizzie, in a sleeveless t-shirt and overall shorts, a pale Irish-American girl, her thick mane of jet-black hair caught in a kerchief. At twenty-two, just short of three years younger than me.
And, I always suspected, infinitely older.
And beside her
Tess Riordan.
Though I didn't know her name as I walked into the door.
That would come, politely, a minute later.
What she looked like: unlike my sister, she is tall, five nine or so, thin hipped and boyish, with small breasts that move loosely under a vintage Doors t-shirt as she moves around a lump of clay on a table, dampening it with water A full lipped, freckle-sprayed red head. Just to look at her you know she is an Irish girl through and through. Though she wears her obligatory red hair buzz cut down to almost nothing. She is not, it will turn out shortly, a dyke, but, because she is a twenty-first century woman, she cultivates a dykey, aggressively asexual look. Later, that night, or early the next morning, when the Brookline traffic has quieted down outside the studio windows and Lizzie has curled up sleeping in a corner, and she and I are sitting against the wall, sharing a cigarette and a joint, and I am coming down off an experience of a lifetime, she will tell me that the hair is because she works with clay and stone and is a nuisance to maintain and wash. I watch her as she talks. Her small breasts moving loose beneath her t-shirt. Her arms, bare feet, the delicate skin of her neck all an Irish alabaster. And I beside her, modest in blue jeans, shirtless, spent. But also, she will tell me, the whole look works to just keep unwanted men's eyes off her. "You're a distraction, all of you," she'll say to me. "You either try to fuck me when I don't want you to, which is a great, bloody bother; or you don't want to fuck me when I want to get fucked coz I'm a skinny pale bitch. And none of you willing to take me serious as a fookin' artist, which is way worse than just not wantin' to fuck me, I can tell you that. You're a pathetic race, all of yeh."
Patting my leg. Looking down at my recently unruly lap. Putting her hand onto my zipper, saying, "Present company excluded, o'course, boyo." Laughing as I stir again beneath her hand.
But that'll be later. For the moment, she looks up at me from her clay-laden table and says, "Hullo, Lizzie's cousin. What'd you say your name was? You ready?"
*
"Weird," I say to Lizzie, as I stand inside the studio doorway. "Weirdest goddamn thing you ever asked me."
Liz was a Murphy. And the Murphy's -- all eight of them -- were risk takers, drunks, artists and occasional whack jobs. And she, the youngest, was by far the ballsiest of them all -- as if, a late and possibly accidental child, she was always anxious to prove she belonged to their wild tribe. When we were kids, she was the one who climbed trees all the way to their thin-branched tops. I was the studious only child of her mother's older sister. So, of course I took orders from her; I spent a childhood, in our tight knit Irish-American neighborhood in a Massachusetts mill town, standing at the base of trees, watching Lizzie as she climbed them. Of course she'd called me for this. And of course, as always, I'd obeyed her.
There was nothing Lizzie couldn't get me to do.
She was a bulldozer in a tiny body.
At least as far I'm concerned.
Says: "C'mon, Tom, I've seen you naked."
"What, when I was sixteen you walked in on me in the bathroom, you mean."
"No, last summer. Ned's place, Vermont. We went skinny dipping."
"That was with a bunch of other people. Doesn't count."
"Yeah but, hey, my tits. Your dick."
Tess, from her table: "I've seen me brothers naked. Little wankers never wore a fookin' towel on the way back from the loo. They embarrassed me when I was little. Then one day I told them, I seen bigger on a pigeon. I was ten. That shut them up. Thing was, it turned out true. When I started having sex, I found out me family was the worst hung in Dublin"
Lizzie: "Oh great, Tess, now he'll think you're sizing him up."
"I won't. But hey, cousin d'ye got little hands? Like yer President?"
I hold my hands up for her. Deciding I kinda like this woman.
Liz, of course, I've always half-loved.
"Looks normal," Tess opines.
"I'm glad you think so."
Lizzie: "Oh come on, you two. Can we just do this? I really need to get started and fuckin' Tony's no-show's cost us two hours already."
Tess: "We can work the night, though can't we? Tommy, you got plans tonight?"
"Other than this insanity? Nope."
"Then, let's go, it's all artists for chrissake. Get up out of your knickers and let's get to work, eh?
To my cousin: "I don't know how you talk me into this shit, Liz. It's like incest or something. Is there such a thing as artistic incest?"
"Between first cousins?" Liz asks innocently.
"Well if there is," Tess pipes up. "I'll be your chaperone. You'll need me permission if you decide to fuck."
*
Turns out, as Tess would say, I didn't need a chaperone for Lizzie. Tess was another matter.
