The Encyclopedia of Exes Page 11

  “I never get sick of that,” says Lisa, just as I begin to get dizzy and sick.

  What is my problem? Why do I keep getting nauseated here? Back at her house that night, I look in the mirror and find a pasty boy I barely recognize. I’m different, too, a bit lopsided, like parts of my face have been trying to grow at different rates. My eyes are old, and there’s gray at my temples. Pallid is the right word.

  Lisa ignores my sickliness, which I appreciate. The next day (after another night of no sex) she takes me to what would be the cornfields of Iowa, or Nebraska—it’s mostly a smallish field, where dogs run around and kids are playing Frisbee. She brings me here because there’s nothing to remind me of where I am.

  We sit and reminisce a bit. Like I’ve done with dozens of other old friends. Eventually we arrive back at the first night we almost had sex. This is good. I can do this.

  “I thought we were going to,” she says.

  “I did, too,” I say. “I was sad that we didn’t.”

  “Why didn’t we?”

  “I have no idea,” I say. Which is a lie.

  I remember exactly why we didn’t. I remember every second of that entire night, because for about fifty minutes I thought I was going to lose my virginity, and then didn’t. No one forgets things like that. The memory of that night froze and then froze again and then solidified, a Polaroid frozen in amber, under glass. I remember the buildup, the foreplay, the feeling that I finally knew what to do here, knew what my tools were and how to use them, that I had, after fooling around clumsily with enough high school girls, finally had a complete inventory of my weapons and ammo, and that this was time to pull out all the stops. And I did, and things were going along just swimmingly, I thought.

  And then came one of those things that happens to boys, sometimes, which was: she took my hand and, I guess, corrected my technique, on a certain manual activity. And she whispered: “Do you know what you’re looking for?” And my face flushed. I was ashamed and mortified and angry that she’d dare suggest I wasn’t doing it right, and I sat straight up, on her bed, in her hot bedroom, and ran my fingers through my hair dramatically. She asked me what was wrong. I told her I didn’t know if this was right, because I wanted to lose my virginity to someone who loved me, and I knew I loved her but wasn’t sure if she loved me.

  All of this was a lie. I was angry that she had the gall to suggest that I didn’t know how to do something sexual—which she was clearly right about, as I learned many times over in college—and I did a classic seventeen-year-old-guy thing, which is: make it her fault.

  So we didn’t have sex. She sat up on the bed with me and hugged me, and I pretended to be caught up in the drama of whether we were in love.

  I thought for most of the next eight years that I was an asshole. It was a relief when I realized I was simply young and full of fear.

  “I have no idea,” I say again. I could leave it like that, but I go on. “I think I got freaked out.”

  This is an admission I never imagined I’d be making. Whence frankness?

  Lisa reaches down and picks up fifty-plus acres of Nebraska rye in her hand and tosses them into the breeze.

  In the distance, a Scottish terrier bounds across what would be southern Minnesota and on into Wisconsin, crushing St. Paul with a huge padded paw, tongue flapping and causing a three-hundred-knot gale to blow the doors off of everything east of Madison.

  The next move in the playbook is for me to say: “Have you ever wondered what would have—”

  “Of course,” she says, cutting me off, short-circuiting my utterly transparent attempt to find solace in a ten-year-old memory. She says “Of course,” as if she knew exactly what I was going to ask, knew I was going to ask it from the moment I showed up, from the moment I wrote to her saying I’d like to come visit. And she looks at me apologetically. Not because she’s sad about what happened, or didn’t happen, or hasn’t happened, but because she’s sad that I still ask such questions. And I realize, then, how much older she is than I am, how much more substantial, how much more fleshed out. And I realize how pitiful was my plan to flirt, reconnect, share, anything. How sad it is, when people take pity on you.

  She leaves me at her house, alone, as she goes to some kind of meeting. Because she’s in Congress, I remind myself, idly thumbing the boxes and boxes of bill drafts and faxes that litter her bedroom. She said she’d be back at dinner, and she’d take me to Tex’s, the only large restaurant in the state, which cutely takes up most of what would be Texas.

  I am alone in her house. I am really alone. There is nothing here for me, in this house, this state, this country. I am sadder right now than I have ever been. This is not how things were supposed to go.

  At home, where I live and work, in New York, I’ve been thinking for a while now that I want to grow up, really grow up, but now I realize I want nothing to do with growing up. I’m young, but I still want to be young. Younger. I want to play Little League and trade baseball cards with my friends. I want to wear shorts all the time and have to summon up the nerve to go off the high board at a park swimming pool. I want all the grown-ups I know to buy me toys at Christmas. I want to run around a soccer field for no reason and not always be conscious of what I’m doing. I want the next girl I kiss to be the first. I want to stop rolling my eyes and shaking my head at whatever I’m looking at. I want there to be nothing behind my laughter.

  And right now, I want to jump out of my own skin.

  I do not belong in Lisa Taymor’s house.

  So I walk outside, and I get into my clean car, and I leave, taking the dirt road that mimics I-90 through Massachusetts, past what would be Lisa’s and my old town (roughly delineated by someone’s porch), curving south-southwest at Boston, through eastern Maryland, then bending sharply back east right up to, and into, the ocean.

  HONESTY

  Ben Greenman

  (ŏn’ĭ-stē) n 1: the quality or condition of being honest; integrity 2: truthfulness; sincerity: honesty, she said, is the only thing that will save this relationship 3: Archaic: chastity

  Waning days of my marriage. My wife gets fed up, says so, and I go into the bedroom to use the telephone.

  I agree. I have become impossible and she suspects me of having an affair, although that’s not true. The truth is, I don’t want to touch anyone and I don’t want anyone to touch me. I am powerfully repulsed by Paula—can’t be in the same room with her without getting prickly skin. She says she isn’t sleeping around, and I believe her, although I wish she would. What woman wouldn’t, after a year of me like this?

  I dial her up. “What are you doing? Calling me from the line in the bedroom? Why don’t you come out here and sit with me?”

  “Because. I’m not comfortable with that idea,” I say.

  She groans. She sighs and sighs again. I look at a picture of us that hangs over the bed. She is on my lap, smiling, with one hand around my neck and the other flat against my chest.

  “Will you please not come in here?” I say.

  I take off my pants and shirt. My body these days is strange to me. It is an affront. In the living room, I can hear her turning on the television and changing the channels. I take off my underwear. I sit on top of the bed cross-legged, which hurts.

  Paula can put her legs behind her head. I used to be unable to think of this in a nonsexual framework. I would try, but then I would realize what happened to her ass and other parts when she put her legs behind her head. Everything about that process pleased me. I was in favor of it, entirely so. Now I have a hard time staying in the house with my own memories of this pose. I leave the house for hours at a time in the evening and drive around with the radio tuned between stations. That calms me down some, except when words jump out of the sea of static and startle me.

  In the other room, the TV is getting louder. There is a man’s voice reading the news, and then another man’s voice talking about stocks. Then there are three or four channels in a row that sound like baseball. Thi
s worries me, because right above the band of sports stations is porno. I can’t conceive that Paula knows about this, but then I hear a woman’s moans.

  “Oh, yeah,” she says. “Just like that, baby. Harder, harder.”

  “Turn it off,” I say quietly.

  One day everything was fine. We drank some wine, watched half of a movie on video, went to bed. The next morning everything was wrong. I left early to return the video to the store and never really got my balance back.

  “Shit, yeah,” says the woman on the television. “Oh, baby. Don’t stop now.”

  “I might just go to the fuse box and kill the power,” I say. I’m speaking less quietly now, but Paula has also turned up the volume on the television.

  I lay flat on my back on the bed and look down the length of my body. When we were happy, I was fatter than I wanted to be. My potbelly hung down into my business and made everything look smaller. But now, I have lost weight and I look as long as a garden hose. There is a red patch on the underside caused by chafing. I have been abusing myself whenever I can find the time, hoping to stir up interest again.

  It sounds like there are two women moaning now. I can’t tell whether both are on the television or one of them is Paula. It becomes apparent in time that one is Paula. She is making deep noises that are not quite human, and rocking back and forth on the couch, which I know because of the sound of the legs scraping on the tile. I know, too, because I recognize the noises.

  I walk to the door and press my ear against it. The second my ear touches the wood, the television sound snaps off. Paula keeps going. She says she is going to come soon, and I have no choice but to believe her. I go back to the bed and lie facedown with my eyes closed. When she comes, I realize the room is freezing.

  She opens the door to the bedroom.

  “Why would you go and do something like that?” I say. My eyes are still closed.

  “Like what?” she says. “Watching TV?”

  “Go it alone,” I say.

  “How so?”

  “You didn’t just work yourself over?”

  “You’re crazy,” she says. “That would mean that I would be capable, even for a second, of feeling pleasure.”

  I roll over on my back.

  “You don’t have to tell me,” I say.

  She walks over to the bed and touches me on the shoulder. Then she touches my chest. Then she reaches between my legs. Once I might have taken this as a positive sign.

  “Your hands are freezing,” I say.

  “My hands are not freezing,” she says. “It’s stuffy in here.”

  “If you’re not going to leave, then I am,” I say. “You’re not doing me any favors the way it is. Or do you think you might be able to bring it all back?”

  She gives it her best shot.

  A year later, I was still on the bed. I had gotten up in the interim, gone to work long enough to lose my job, spent enough time in the car to wreck it, accidentally bumped into the television and knocked it to the ground, where the screen cracked with a cruel popping sound. Paula kept trying to make things right. She was a real trouper. She bought sexy clothes and shoes with high, thin heels, but I couldn’t look at them without thinking terrible thoughts. The perfume she put behind her ears smelled like the worst nightmares I had ever had, which were the nightmares I was having almost every night.

  “Honey,” she said, “will you talk to me about what’s wrong? If there’s anything I can do to help, please tell me. Can I make you something else to eat?”

  I took her up on that. I had learned to eat again, at first just bits of meat and vegetables, but eventually entire meals. “I’d like a pot roast.”

  At the time, I was hooked on her pot roast.

  She went into the living room and went through to the kitchen. She took something out of the oven. I smelled pot roast. She rang the dinner bell.

  “Come and get it,” she said.

  I rolled onto my side with great effort. I had gained back all the weight I had lost, and then some. I pushed myself to my feet. Then I put on a bathrobe and made for the door.

  The pot roast wasn’t pot roast at all. There was no food on the table. Paula was sitting on the couch naked.

  I quickly covered myself with the folds of my robe so she wouldn’t see my passing interest.

  INNOCENCE

  Nick Fowler

  /’i-nə-səns/ n 1: freedom from fault or guilt under the law: as a: the state of not being guilty of a particular crime or offense—compare guilt b: the state of not being guilty of an act that constitutes a ground for divorce c: ignorance on the part of a party to a transaction of facts that would lead a person of ordinary prudence to make inquiries 2: The state, quality, or virtue of being innocent, as: a: freedom from sin, moral wrong, or guilt through lack of knowledge of evil b: guitlessness of a specific legal crime or offense c: freedom from guile, cunning, or deceit; simplicity or artlessness d: lack of worldliness or sophistication; naiveté e: lack of knowledge or understanding; ignorance

  I don’t actually remember meeting Monica Tate. It’s like she was always there on the fringe, almost existing, the shadowy thumb in the corner of our family photo.

  A leggy insomniac out of Birmingham, Alabama, Monica was six months shy of Florida’s age of consent (seventeen), twice my own, and half my dad’s. There was something both accidental and inevitable about her. Lucky and fatal. Her southern accent was as insinuating as the saxophone that would play on the eight-track Coltrane tape whenever she and my dad shut the door of my parents’ bedroom. She had an eerie insatiable quality, complete with Elvis Presleyan appetite, and she seemed incapable of ever getting totally clean. No deodorant soap could take away her raven hair’s greasy sheen, her intriguing mildewy aroma, or the shadows below her black eyes, which reminded me of the finger smudges around my bedroom light switch. She gave a tithe of her Burger King earnings to the Humane Society. In a rare moment of openness, she once told me she’d only ever seen her dad through the inch of bulletproof glass at the state prison’s visiting room where her mother had secretly conceived her. And that she never once touched him. She’d skipped grades eleven and seven, aced the SAT, and was the only other human (there were dogs) with whom my dad and I both fell in love.

  One day around this time, after having made a religion out of my father, my mother woke up an agnostic. She’d spent a decade believing absolutely in a failed writer whose demons had kicked her out of her own bed. My dad stills blames them for his having made love to her only a handful of times since things began with a whimper on their wedding night (“I’m sorry, Mary, but the whole symbolism of honeymoon sex just feels like such a middle-class cliché”). He’d been stifled by parents who, as far as he could remember, had never expressed or responded to a single genuine sentiment. Their exquisite indifference to him would eventually—although he’d achieve what nobody had prior or since by winning Cornell’s poetry, drama, and fiction awards—destroy the delicate gears of the music box within him. Then he discovered my mother, and realized every word he’d ever spoken had been inaudible. Suddenly someone was listening. Cutting classes on the day that they met, they’d strolled over the largest pedestrian suspension bridge in the world, an immense cat’s cradle strung above the gorge that severs Cornell. And suddenly he found himself confiding in her, shouting awkwardly over the roaring falls, that he’d trade his ability to walk to be a great writer. Turning to stare straight into his eyes, she told him she’d be willing to bet her life that he already was.

  Mary was the thrilling elixir that, when mixed with Douglas (and a few metaphors), would deliver him from the invisible ink he’d been on the pages of all his past days. He felt like a writer around her. Yet eventually my mother realized she’d lost touch not only with her own literary ambitions but, more important, with her narcissism. Desperate to keep her faith, my dad begged her to finally finish the PhD he’d once begged her to abandon. She conceded. The most convenient solution was that she attend the conventionally i
ncestuous English Department that had tenured him, a condition that called for, among other tangles, a string of babysitters. This included Monica, who would end up being my mother’s academic advisee, fellow Save the Manatees activist, and the student of both my parents.

  I remember a slimy August evening. The old Whirlpool a/c in our kitchen window was slurring and grunting. My parents were off teaching. I’d let Monica, barefoot in cleaving Levi’s and a pink gingham halter, convince me the a/c would work a lot better if she turned all the lights off. Sullivan, my Jack Russell terrier, and I padded after her as she lit candles throughout the house. We watched a galaxy drip from her cigarette lighter, which was monogrammed, silver, and a gift from my father. Monica led me up to the attic where, out of our Goodwill box, she made me dig out and squirm into the Daffy Duck pajama jumpsuit I’d outgrown that autumn. We ended up in the snug wooded study, a windowless time capsule into which my mind will still wander when I’m feeling especially lost. Killing time, my dad had covered a wall of the room with clocks that told all the time zones—a panel of portals into exotic possibilities. Monica laid me down on the old auburn sofa, as affectedly ratty as absentminded professors can hope their worldly possessions will become, and she plied me with that old foreplay favorite: The Back Massage. In the frantic candlelight, she mentioned that she “might be a pyromaniac.” I was too worked up to ask what it meant. She lit an illustrative joint. Explaining, “This fattie’s gonna kill your lungs the first time,” she flipped me onto my back, pinned my elbows with her knees, and gave me a shotgun, that risky little routine in which someone clamps the business end of a spliff in his teeth while blowing smoke down the other guy’s throat.