The Encyclopedia of Exes Read online

  I coughed. She laughed.

  Two Js later, after polishing off a six-pack of warm Old Milwaukees, a Stouffer’s (still somewhat) frozen sausage pizza, and two paper doilies’ worth of mint Milanos, Monica was just warming up. With a grunt, she scrambled onto my shoulders, reached up to a corner of our kitchen’s cathedral ceiling, and torched: a potbellied spider and his web (crackling wistfully as distantly fireworks); later, from her denim purse, a letter whose melting scrawl looked quite familiar; and a musky lavender negligee she’d come across at the bottom of my mother’s wicker hamper. “The bitch should’ve burned the thing anyway,” she concluded, as I ran around stamping out fire. Sullivan, disgusted, scowled in the corner. Over a burn mark on the floor, Monica dragged the sofa.

  We slumped down upon it . . .

  . . . and stared straight ahead in our respective cannabis trances. My stoned reactions to these astounding events were internal and elastic. Five minutes or a month might’ve passed. At some point, from the corner of my eye, I noticed that Monica was fingering the worn crotch of her Levi’s. In her tuneful twang, she remarked how bad it needed “fixin.’ ” And that we’d both be a lot cooler without our clothes anyway.

  There was a pause. The blasé clocks tisked, tisked.

  Then Monica slowly opened . . . then closed the bright little smile of her Levi’s zipper. So she wouldn’t catch me swallowing a lump in my throat, I looked away, over the fireplace mantel at our big oval mirror. Above a candle and its wincing twin, I could see in my eyes the oddly affronted stare with which I’d later equate lust. Back then I only knew that it made me sneeze.

  “Gesundheit, sugar,” she said and in one cat-smooth motion, Monica yawned, stretched, stood up, pulled down, and kicked off her Levi’s. We followed them down our long rippling hallway, on whose far wall drowned the Millais Ophelia whose stare was as black and baffling as my escort’s. She tugged my clammy hand into my mother’s yoga workroom. Inside was a tiny grazing pony—my mother’s Singer sewing machine. Sully and I sat under its table, deep in shag carpet, while Monica fixed her jeans.

  I couldn’t take my eyes off her crotch. Black oily hairs teased out of her gauzy white cotton panties. Prim Sullivan sniffed at a row of lilac painted toes as they pressed a foot pedal, which caused a very satisfying whir.

  Then suddenly it stopped. I looked up. Monica leaned back on my mother’s wooden stool. With her thumbs, with her fathomless eyes upon me, she peeled off her panties. She grabbed a fistful of my blond hair and spread her very pretty legs.

  “Taste me,” she whispered.

  “Are you gonna tell my father?” I needed to know, kneeling.

  She wouldn’t answer. Monica could deaden the ambiance, cause any word in the air, especially a question, to fall flat, like a noise-absorbing lake.

  I tried to swallow. I couldn’t. I had cottonmouth. I was sweating. A billion tiny ice picks were lodged in my veins. Even in the forgiving candlelight my heart was doing an audible hundred. But I realized: Monica’s feet were steadying my shoulders; I was choosing to interpret her lack of response to my question as a no not only because some dark fraction of me was willing to risk, was actually wanting my father’s discovery, but because what so attracted me, and my father, to Monica, what about her made us feel so alive, was the sense that she could and would kill us. All I could do was breathe on the mysterious sea urchin in front of me.

  Taming my cowlick with one hand, pinning a jealous terrier to the floor with another, Monica told me I wasn’t “trying to cool off soup, Sugar.” I forced a loud laugh.

  And then I touched her.

  There was a dangerous gasp. She was, actually, conch smooth and pink. And in several seconds, a lot wetter than I’d expected. Without kissing her mouth (she was never to let me), I licked her fingers as she unsealed herself. Eventually, as I began to get the hang of it, I realized on some level that I was filling a violent emptiness. I saw just how hungry I’d been. In front of me was the center of the universe.

  Monica stripped me out of my pajamas, in whose canvas feet I’d once felt so sure, and she dragged me through a series of tangles and piles on my parents’ wrought iron bed. None of which I was exactly enjoying—I didn’t know how to yet; it was beautiful music, turned up way too loud. All this time Monica held a running commentary, in wild tongues, a sort of Yeatsian coaching session, with herself. For the most part I was petrified, her hesitant marionette, suffering her terrible ecstasies. Sullivan umpired.

  But the low point came just after I slid out of her. Above me, in her lust and rage, Monica tried to cram me back inside of her. My erection folded excruciatingly back on itself. One sodden Boxing Day at the Tallahassee Zoo my dad had amused himself and Monica by convincing me that, like the sperm whale emerging like blown glass from the surface of the pool in front of us, there was a bone in the human penis as well. Now I thought my own might be broken. Doubled over in exaggerated agony, I had an excuse to leave the Oedipal bed. But Monica yanked me back. She licked her palm and cooing in my ear, gingerly revived me until, when I was just on the verge, she suggested, so that we might “come together,” I envision a variety of climax-delaying scenarios I still find handy; having intercourse with: the burn victim whose fragrant Enquirer photo she’d earlier that evening unfolded from her hip pocket to share with me; Duane, the retarded neighbor boy who’d once bowled a perfect game; my dad.

  It worked.

  Until at last, with Monica on top, cleavage pearled with candle-lit sweat, poised on the edge of her personal abyss, she squinted herself around me as if I might try to leave her again.

  And then, the explosion. One epic sneeze.

  We sorted the sheets with the awkward civility of two strangers untangling their seatbelts after a transatlantic flight. Then we smoked another joint in the waxy silence. We lay there for a while, opened gifts among the torn wrappings of the people we’d failed to be. I thought of Christmases when I hadn’t gotten what I’d wanted. Now neither of us had.

  I pressed PLAY on the nightstand’s eight-track tape module, and Coltrane’s Love Supreme wandered into the room. Monica said she had a headache, so I shut it back off.

  Soon sleep was painting itself on our insides.

  On the corner of a great city block, I was imprisoned within Monica’s left eye and she was imprisoned within a neon crosswalk sign as our father walked to work forever.

  I awoke to the sticky sounds of someone licking fingers. In Monica’s naked lap was a bucket of the KFC she’d apparently had delivered (what tales must be heard by the kids of former delivery boys!) Undreaming, unsheeting myself, I refused the drumstick Monica was offering me. She was immersed in the denouement of her nightly Quincy repeat, feeding Sullivan the skins. In this episode a divorced but doting father of four gets a sex change operation. As the credits soberly rolled, Monica got an idea. She pulled my hand onto her still damp crotch and, fixing me with those starless eyes, informed me, “My cunt’s the work of a surgeon, too. Your dad gave it to me last Christmas. He told me he’s gonna make you get the same operation on your birthday.”

  I scrambled out of bed, stumbling through rooms and halls all mad with candlelight, into a damp velvet night.

  These days I wonder through what dim mental chink my retarded neighbor Duane might’ve perceived the street under his third-story window; with Monica yelling that she’d only been joking about the whole transsexual thing. But wasn’t it cool not to know who I was for a minute? Not to really even know who you were, either?” Then her voice going low and shaky, “Don’t you see you’re all I’ve got? The three of us can go away and build a huge house in the woods, forever, we don’t need your mother, we can be each other.” I wonder about the illusion that lets us think love must be mutual, lets a feeling so seemingly undeniable go unrequited, lets us assume that if a problem can be phrased it can be solved. I wonder if that night was full of stars, or if the ones I recall are the handiwork of memory, that farsighted seamstress, who’s been known, when need be, to sew
a few spangles onto shabby old velvet.

  And so, double-blind, the three of us led our lives in a kind of paranoid panorama, like the infinte hall of mirrors charmed out of a three-paneled medicine chest. Cause and effect had lost sight of each other. Possibility was endless and impossible. None of us knew how much the other ones knew, felt, or desired. Which is why I feared and hoped my parents would discover it all. That any moment I’d be revealed by the same hidden camera I’d first conjured after passing the $500 Fine For Littering highway sign on that summer’s school field trip to Bickley’s Gorilla Kingdom. From the window of the sunny rear bus seat, I’d tossed my banana peel (landing it next to a nonchalant cow), figuring I’d be forced to finally confess: the banana crime, Monica, everything. At which point the panoptic gaze, after reviewing the photos, would visit on me merciful justice (spanking, orphanage).

  Then one afternoon at gymnastics practice I finally broke down and confessed to John McDonald, who was born with one ball, the whole Monica debacle.

  “Me, too,” he shrugged, chalking his hands inside the cloud of white dust produced from chalking his hands. “Last April, after my dad left, Jennifer Lauson started babysitting me, and she devirginized me.”

  “Was it fun?” I feared, hoisting him up to the high rings on which I guided him through the iron cross (that after years of my help he’d still never manage to master).

  “I had an orgasm,” he said, a vein bulging in his forehead. “But nothing came out. She said I won’t have any sperm until puberty. But she’s gonna teach me to give her a blow job Labor Day Weekend.” John gave up on the cross, skinned the cat, and suggested, upside down, that if I “wasn’t doing anything for the holiday, we should swap.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I mean, maybe, cool. Yeah, I’ll run it by her.”

  “Don’t ask her,” he said, dismounting. “Just let things take their course. We’re all doing it.” On his chalky fingers he then listed “David Hohne, Charlie Dickson, and even sweaty little Ernest Kurtz,” who, apparently, had all been cheerfully deflowered by their minders.

  I was flabbergasted. The next day at recess I conducted a circuitous poll of my pals (“Wouldn’t it be weird if, say, somebody were to fuck their babysitter?”). And almost every one of them (said they) had! But my misery didn’t love company; for while it’s probably a testament to Marxism’s failure that collectivism doesn’t relieve the individual’s guilt, I realized my situation was a bit more complex. For the rest of the summer I chanted both aloud and in my head, as I sat on the silky bottom of the community pool, the thought of Monica sneaking up on me, secret and warm, like a warm spot of pee; or at tennis camp each time I smashed the ball (my father’s face) that the Autoserve spat at me—“I’m dirty!”

  And yet I was disastrously in love with this daemon. Although every moment alone with Monica was a victory against my father, each moment without her seemed a fraud. Even when I’d managed to entertain a thought not involving her, it wasn’t long before I’d hear that little rattle in my skull, where she’d be crouched in the dark, shaking her can of spray paint, getting ready to once again vandalize my brain with her wild black graffiti.

  When I was eleven, my dad finally left my mother. For Monica. One secret can be corrosive, and by that time there’d been years of us keeping them: Monica and I from my father; he and she from my mother; my father and Monica, no doubt, keeping many from me. Of course secrets need lies to cloak them. And each lie, being dirty, keeps needing another—a clean set of clothes (or of sheets). So even after Monica had slipped into my parent’s brass bed, we never discussed it. We had to hide her from the world, lest she lose my mother’s friendship, and my dad lose the divorce he’d preemptively filed. A divorce that blamed my mother, using more evidence than metaphor, for her passive aggression. For the twenty years of lethal injections she’d delivered in her nurse’s syringe. A divorce that only three weeks after it finally drained the dregs of my father’s monetary and emotional reserves, despite his winning that divorce, caused Monica to evaporate forever. As we reached the end of this grotesque cartoon, my father and I were at least left with something in common: a Monica-shaped hole through which she’d walked in and out of our hearts.

  The last time I saw my dad was at Christmas. Writing in the study, I’d finally finished a nightmare chapter of the novel whose deadline to my publisher I’d long ago blown. I looked up from my laptop to my father’s wall of clocks. Once every face had promised escape. Now, looking from page to clock, I was only swapping one kind of a sentence for another.

  I found my father downstairs, chain-smoking on the old auburn sofa. Scratching fat Sydney, a pet more like a giant goldfish than a golden retriever. The two of them were suffused in blue television vapor. The sound, as always, was off. I sat halfway down the staircase and bitched about the unpleasantness of writing.

  “I would have traded the past thirty years for that unpleasantness,” he said.

  I sat there a second. “I’m sorry, Dad. I forg—”

  “It’s quite all right,” he rapid-fired the remote with his thumb. “I don’t want to sound like a victim.” He lit a Camel, shifting his jaw—right . . . left . . . right—before blowing out a gorgeous tumor of smoke.

  “I wish I were you,” he told me, an old game of ours.

  “I wish I were you,” I said. For the first time it was a lie.

  He nuzzled Sydney even closer, keeping his eyes on the silent screen.

  “Dad,” I said softly. “Didn’t you think ahead?”

  “Probably not. But in regards to what, exactly?”

  “I can’t help it that I’m her son.”

  Exhaling, he stubbed his long cigarette out in the three-legged turtle ashtray I’d made him in first grade.

  “You think I like being this person?” I persisted.

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  “So then why did you have me, Dad?”

  He killed the TV and got to his feet.

  “So I wouldn’t off myself,” he said, gently shoving Sydney toward the front door for a walk, gently cursing her sloth as he closed the door behind him.

  It was very quiet then. I stood there in the big vaulted living room. A house empty of its master, especially a neurotic one, seems relieved. With my foot I slid the sofa so I could see a black smudge on the floor. I looked around the house I’d grown up in. In a far ceiling corner hung a spider. Spinning infinity. As was always the case, and one that always drove my mother nuts, my dad could never make himself destroy these creatures. He always bragged that he owned the finest cobweb collection since Vincent Price. As I walked over, close enough to see the thing’s anguished little baby face, I thought I finally I understood why. It wasn’t out of a laziness in housekeeping on his part, or out of his excuse that spiders trapped all of man’s greasy little enemies. It was out of his fear that in killing them he’d be upsetting some cosmic symmetry; that any creature capable of twirling a world out of the delicate silks of its own imagination deserved to be left to its own device. They were artists.

  JOHN

  Joshua Braff

  (jŏn) n Slang 1: a toilet 2: a man who is a prostitute’s customer [From the name John.]

  Normalcy is what she sought. A kinder pace. I wore circular frames at the time and khakis and a small variety of horrible ties to work. So she picked me. A safety who couldn’t possibly have or sell or use the shit she craved. For me, the full tattoo sleeves were erotic and dangerous in a way, and I was intrigued by the effort she’d put in to distort her obvious beauty. I met her in Seattle. “A dancer,” she said over the crunch of live guitars and primal crooning that leapt at us from the stage at Rock Candy. But “dancer” on its own would prove to be misleading. Because employment at the Lusty Lady meant something other than, let’s say, ballet or modern or ballroom dancing. Nudity, for example, would need to be thrown in and exhibitionism and more than a smidgen of suggestive undulating. But what we did for a living held zero importance that night. There was ju
st too much else to discuss.

  The first kiss came suddenly and was of her doing. It was random and sensual and when it ended we drank three rounds of Jaeger and some clear and harsh tequila the bar called gasoline. The shots were followed by a ridiculous display of public tongue-flailing, which would drag us into a cab and lead us to some very impressive bipedal fornication in her vestibule. An hour later, wasted on her futon, I questioned her answer of “dancer” as I gazed down at the long, unique body before me. The girl was a mural. A human canvas of overlapping color that flowed into bursts of gray-green swirls that appeared soft somehow as they ran along her hip and covered her entire right ass cheek. The tattoo ended in a pool of purplish hues in the nook behind her knee. It all looked wet to me, as if done that day. And as I gently placed my palm on her body, a part of me thought my hand would be stained. “I really like that,” she whispered from her pillow.

  “You really like . . . what?” I asked.

  “When you touch me. I like it when you touch me.”

  I had never been to the Lusty Lady but a guy named Roy I worked with sort of lived there at his lunch hour. Without saying that I “knew” someone employed there, Roy explained that men went to whack off while gawking at nude women through Plexiglas. “I bring rolls of quarters,” he told me. Like kids in an arcade, I thought, but instead of zapping droids the reward is voyeurism, a legal and carnal peek at what goes on behind closed doors. The room is small and mirrored, he said, and the women dance and lean into the Plexi and even touch themselves for the right amount of quarters.

  “They touch themselves?” I asked, taking a long sip of my coffee.

  “Oh yes,” he said. “And if you really want to see something special, you can pay more and go into another room to have a private session. In the back.”

  I nodded with mock approval. “Private. You mean, she . . . touches you?”

  “No, no,” he said. “It’s not a whorehouse. It’s just a bigger piece of Plexi and you get to talk to her alone.”