A closeup of Rick and Laura smooching. She touches his face as she kisses him. Look at her! My god, she’s so beautiful! On the couch Rick is suddenly bawling. Oh shit. This is so fucked up. It’s like we died or something! He stops the tape. Sits, heart aching, damp-eyed, alarmed by his own emotion. Rick slips the camera back in the carrying case.
The Viagra is calling. Fuckit.
Once the computer boots up, Rick logs onto the Internet. What choice do I have? Should I wait and see if Laura will be in the mood tomorrow morning? And what, roll around all night with a hard-on? Nah, her mind is elsewhere. Face it, you don’t turn her on anymore.
Rick begins the free porn site odyssey. Not that I’m cheap, just don’t want Laura questioning credit card billings from the Netherlands or the French Antilles. Wouldn’t take her long to figure it out. Not that she’d be shocked. She thinks my sexuality is about as interesting as my bowel movements. If she ever figured out I was checking out cyber porn, she’d just wrinkle her nose and yawn.
After half a dozen pop-ups promise “Latin Bondage Babes” and “Co-Eds Who Thrive on Cum” and “Refinance your Mortgage Now!” Rick uncovers a site featuring a smorgasbord of downloadable digital “thumbnails.” He begins the arduous process of sorting through the various categories and dead ends.
There is a repetitiveness. Lots of dick-sucking and silicone-inflated jugs. A girl with cum dripping off her nose. Another girl holding on to a swollen ropy-veined cock, smiling a toothy smile for the camera. More cheerful girls getting fucked in the butt while spreading their labia with their fingers. Girls lip-locked onto even more enormous cocks, bigger than possible, wincing with the task at hand. Girls getting fucked by two guys at once, by three guys at once, four guys. Everyone is hung like a Shetland. Are there that many big-dicked guys in the world? Someone once told Rick that the guys actually aren’t that big, it’s the girls who are small. Right.
Rick is bored and moves on.
Girls in bobby socks. Girls wearing leather masks. Girls in pigtails. Girls in frilly panties. Girls being tied up. Girls pulling strings of giant beads out of their ass. Girls lifting their T-shirts, pulling their underwear down. Girls getting pissed on. Girls spreading their thighs on couches, on desks, on floors, on beds. Girls kissing each other, licking each other, sticking dildoes into one another, into themselves. Girls grabbing two cocks at the same time, beaming at the camera.
Most of them have shaved their pubes. Many have tattoos on their backsides. Some have pierced belly buttons or pierced tongues. Their eyes are eager and flat at the same time. The girls look as if they are playacting with their own flimsy lives. In sum, the girls are all attractive, but none really first class.
Rick imagines a story behind each picture. These are lonely people, looking for attention, right? Maybe a plain-Jane discovers that men pay attention to her if she’ll do these things? Or maybe it starts out gradually, the girl poses for soft porn, then harder and harder stuff, next thing you know she’s doing anal. Then she’s selling herself. Or maybe they’re all prostitutes in the first place. From Eastern Europe? Vegas? Ottawa?
It’s a mystery. What are they? Who are they? Where are they? Is there a suburb of L.A. where hundreds of people screw ’round the clock surrounded by film crews and photographers? (And if prostitution is illegal, how come it’s legal to film people who are paid to fuck each other?) What do they get paid, anyway? A thousand bucks? Two thousand? A hundred?
Maybe these photos are months old. Years old? Maybe the girl posed for one session five years ago, she’s got three kids and a teaching certificate and now the picture is being endlessly recycled in a vast sea of j-pegs? Maybe these women have renounced sex and become nuns? Or no longer alive. But digital photos never die. They are like characters in novels or history, even. We’re out here fantasizing about them, and they don’t even exist.
Rick likes the girls who smile at the camera. Why is that? More nurturing, maybe? In the sixties, stroke mags always featured doe-eyed women with huge breasts. When did tastes change? And why do some men need to see women getting fucked three ways? And what is it about ass-fucking that is so compelling? Maybe pictures of ass-fucking stimulate a specific part of the brain? But I don’t give a hoot about ass-fucking. I do care about naked spread-eagled girls. Is that perverse? Am I, in some way, pathological? No. Not possible. They’re not making these sites for me. Or are they?
The depressing fact is that hundreds of thousands of men, if not millions, are simultaneously jerking off, fiery eyeballs glued to the same collection of megapixilated flesh. It’s one thing to secretly groove on some anonymous babe’s derriere, but it’s sickening to think some other slob has his BVDs around his ankles, beating to the same rhythm. The human soul has melded with silicon technology. We’re automata, this proves it. The machine knows what we want before we want it.
Once in a while Rick sees the same girl on more than one site. But apparently there are an unlimited number of women in the world who want to be ravaged before the camera. Is the world that big? And if it is, how small am I?
Rick gets it. He’s seen all these girls before. These are the poor white girls who walk the fairway at the county fair or pick through the cheap cosmetics the street vendors sell. These are the girls who show up on the confessional talk shows, the ones whose lives are such messes. These are the girls who have nothing, come from nothing, and go nowhere.
Of course, there must be lots of men like me who are either single or divorced or can’t find the time to have sex with their wives. On the other hand, how sad is that? It’s really sad. It’s pathetic and disturbing. Rick’s gone soft. So he logs off.
Pants back up, Rick makes the rounds of the house one more time, pausing in each of the children’s rooms to observe the slack-jawed slumber. What are you dreaming about, guys? Something fun, I hope. I love you so much, I am so lucky. And I am so alone.
When he was eleven, Rick caught his dad cheating on his mom in their own home. Actually found the woman in a closet in his parents’ bedroom. Heard a noise, went to investigate and there she was sandwiched between his father’s herringbone and seersucker suits. Her luminous face frightened him. What’s worse, she was pretending to be invisible. She put a finger to her lips and said, “Shhhh! Honey, I’m working for your daddy. It’s a secret. Make sure you don’t tell Mommy.” And Rick let it go. What else could he do?
Years later when he went into therapy and was urged to relive the experience, Rick realized she must have been drunk. In those days, if Dad wasn’t working, he was drinking. And anybody hanging out with him was drinking. Hard stuff: highballs, Manhattans, even boilermakers. But the ridiculousness of her explanation worked. Not because Rick believed her, but because he knew if he told his mother, his parents would fight. Maybe split up. Something bad. It made his stomach hurt and he spent hours locked in his bedroom alternately fantasizing revenge against his father and jacking off to bondage fantasies starring the closet lady. He planned to wait the fifty or so years until his mom passed away and then he would confront his father with the facts to be followed by a spectacular act of patri-suicide.
Rick never got the chance. Dad divorced Mom, married the woman in the closet and moved to another suburb only a few miles away. There, he established another family and was too busy with the new babies to bother with Rick. The less Rick saw of his dad the more he obsessed about him. In his mind’s eye, his father grew into a massive, bullnecked tyrant. Around that time, he had seen his father almost completely naked at the beach. The sight of his father’s broad hairy back as he trotted down to the roaring surf was indelible. Somehow everything connected. Dad was a real man who could never be matched. He drank, he fucked, he had a hairy back and he abandoned his family.
Rick never became a tough guy like his dad. Maybe it was the difference in diet. Dad grew up on matzo, fatty soups, corned beef and smoked fish. Rick’s dad was a true Jew, a “schtarker,” a bad-ass. Rick’s dad lost uncles and aunts in the Holocaust. Dad had been that much closer to the death and destruction of war. Gave him some kind of license to do whatever the fuck he wanted.
Rick has always just been Rick. A vaguely Semitic-looking guy with brown eyes and no feeling for his roots. Never bar mitzvahed because Dad and Mom were too busy getting divorced. Hadn’t entered temple in years. Always forgot to observe the holidays. Couldn’t stomach gefilte fish. People from the Midwest (Laura?) thought he was Italian. Uncle Morrie used to call it “passing.” Like “passing as a non-Jew.” Passing over. Passover, right? Two different things, or is it the same? Trying to be invisible. Being invisible.
My kids have inherited my lack of self. They’re not Jewish, not Christian either. Just suburban Disney-worshipping, electronics consumers. Like most of their little friends, they’re mutts, little olive-skinned blond kids whose hair will turn brown and wavy when they hit puberty. Kids with no roots other than an address where two parents live. Or maybe two addresses?
Rick figured his father was happy to be absolved of any kind of deep responsibility. The guy was more interested in a deck of cards than the Torah. Any sense of roots he might have had had been left behind a generation ago in Europe, burned to ash in the Nazi ovens. I’m getting to be more like him all the time. No sense of tradition, no sense of anything. Him and me, all we have is our physical selves, our bodies, our dicks. How can I blame him for being nothing more or less than what he is, a man?
Rick shuts himself into the downstairs bathroom. Laura has decided that a clutch of periodicals in a large handwoven basket is a nice touch. All fashion and homemaking mags. Rick picks out a copy of
Elle
. Does Laura subscribe to this dreck? He finds a swimsuit ad. The babe in the ad has something. She’s looking right at me, slim and pretty. What is that look? What does it mean? Is it just an accident of the moment? Is it real? Is there someone in her life who gets this attention? Could anyone be this deeply passionate? Doubtful. When you meet them, models and famous people never look like their pictures. Always shorter. Grayer. Homelier.
But this one girl. It’s as if she’s looking right into my heart. Like she wants to penetrate me with her eyes. I guess that’s why they pay her the big bucks. To look like that. Rick squirts a dab of Laura’s hand lotion onto his palm.
If Laura ever caught me at this, what would she think? How insanely embarrassing would it be to have your own wife catch you choking the chicken while checking out a swimsuit ad in
Elle
?
Dad never felt guilty. Just lived his life. He was married to Mom and then didn’t want to be married anymore, so he fucked around, left her and married his second wife. He’d had kids with Mom and then more kids with his second wife. He earned a living, watched TV, played golf, drank with his buddies and as far as anyone can tell, never had a second thought about anything.
And here I am at two
AM
, with my putz in my hand, in the guest bathroom surrounded by embroidered towels and scented soap cakes. Something Dad never would have done. If he wanted some tail, he went out and got it. Probably masturbated two times in his whole life. Doesn’t matter. A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do. Rick hunches over and with hollow fury focuses on the swimsuit girl from
Elle
. Those eyes. Sad like mine. I know you, baby. I know you. Finally it comes, the energy building. The wrecking ball of orgasm. Rick comes so marvelously and terrifically he moans out loud. Everything disappears for a moment.
“Daddy?” The bathroom door opens a crack. Rick lets his robe drop closed, draping his erection. He turns, red-faced from the exertion, reading glasses still hanging off his fat, aging nose. “Daddy, I can’t sleep.”
Kids know when something’s up. They’re attracted by any disturbance, curious, sometimes fatally. Henry stands in the doorway, sleepy eyes adjusting to the fluorescence.
The canned response pops out of Rick. “What are you doing up?”
“I was having a nightmare. Why were you shouting?”
“I wasn’t shouting. Must have been part of your nightmare. Well, maybe you have to pee.” Welcome to the club, kid. The wonderful world of excretion. It rules your life. “Pee. Have a drink of water and I’ll tuck you in.”
Henry eyes him suspiciously. A picture’s worth a thousand words. “What were you doing, Daddy?”
“I was reading. I didn’t want to wake your mother.”
“Oh.” Henry shuffles over to the toilet and turning his back on his father, tugs out his tiny white wiener and blasts a surprisingly strong jet into the limpid pool.
“OK. All set? Back to bed. I’ll be right there.”
Henry leaves and Rick snatches an extrasoft facial tissue, collects the coagulating gob and tosses it into the pastel water. Ah yes. Father and son. The passing of the phallic torch. He flushes.
REBA HAS INHERITED THE BUSIEST WINDOW, THE MIDDLE
window. Everyone comes to her first. A red-faced elder in pressed overalls hobbles up and passes her a check. His fingers are callused and the backs of his hands speckled with liver spots. She gives him her best smile. “Hello, Mr. Van Pelt, and how are we today?”
Mr. Van Pelt fondles a beet red boil under his right ear. “Alive.” The parchment skin on his rosy cheeks flakes off like dandruff.
Reba tries not to stare. “Well, it is a lovely day, that’s for sure.”
“What’s that got to do with the price of fish?” Van Pelt runs his tongue over his brown teeth.
“When it’s a nice day out I always think I’m happy to be alive.”
Van Pelt stares at her with pinhead pupils. “Don’t gimme any fifties. I can’t use the fifties. I don’t even know why they make ’em. Ulysses S. Grant was a lousy president and a drunk.”
“Yessir.” Reba glances at the clock over the drive-through window. Five more hours.
“Just gimme my money. Did you put the ten dollars in the Christmas Club?”
“Would you like me to do that, sir?”
“You do it every week, don’t you?” Van Pelt turns and bellows at Frank in his cubicle. “Cheese Louise, Frank, where do you get these girls?”
From behind the plate glass, Frank glances up and waves to Van Pelt. Frank wants none of this. A clear drop of pus has appeared on the boil. Anne, Reba’s teller-mate, arrives, crowding into her just as Van Pelt lets out a loud fart.
“Good morning, Mr. Van Pelt. Is everything OK? Reba?” Anne’s warm, reassuring breast brushes Reba’s arm. Anne, like almost every young mother in town, is overweight and her hair is snipped into a frizzy poodle curl. Reba imagines dropping to her knees, lifting Anne’s sweater and hiding away in those pillowy breasts until the old jerk goes away. Until they all go away. Until everything goes away.
“Is everyone here a retarded moron?” Van Pelt squeezes the pearl of fluid onto his grimy fingertips and wipes it onto his shirt-front.
Anne, unaware of his grossness, keeps things moving. “Reba, why don’t you go refill the ATM cartridges?” Anne has it covered. Anne is good at this. I’m lucky this time.
As Reba stacks piles of tens and twenties, Maureen, the third bankerette, joins her. “See any good-looking guys down in the city Saturday?” Maureen’s breath is shallow and rapid, her fingers gray from pouring the filthy nickels and pennies into the sorting machine.
“Why don’t you grab the bus one day and take a look for yourself?” Maureen looks more and more dried out with each passing day, like those miniature bouquets of yellow roses they sell at the crafts fair. On Fridays Reba sees Maureen steering her cart at the Shop-Rite, her mom tottering at her side. Maureen’s mom wears the pinched look of a martyr exhausted by life with an unmarried daughter.
“Go to the city? No thanks. I went down there once with mother and we saw things you wouldn’t believe. A Negro man was standing on a street corner just clapping his hands! Can you imagine? Wearing three overcoats, clapping his hands like a lunatic. I bet he hadn’t taken a bath in a week. I just don’t feel comfortable around those kind of people, especially the blacks, Negroes, whatever you call ’em.”
Reba loses her count and begins again.
Having disposed of Van Pelt, Anne sidles up to Reba and Maureen. “He hasn’t been the same since his wife had that stroke. Now she’s blind. I dropped by there once to bring a cake from the church? The place smelled like pee-pee, newspapers stacked all over the place. His daughter told me she won’t even go in there anymore. And he’s not the only one. All the farmers are getting older and older. Sometimes we don’t know they’re there until they die. No one knows they’re there.”
Across from the bank, the woods are deep. The cars pass on the two-lane and Reba thinks, in those deep woods are the farmhouses and in the farmhouses are the old people. The living dead.
Maureen chirps, “Reba wants me to go to New York with her and pick up guys.”
Anne, an eye on Frank in his cell, whispers. “I knew a fella who used to go down there all the time. And you know what he did? Rented stretch limos and picked up whores. Had sex with them in the back while he drove around.” Anne assumes her wisest expression, “I wouldn’t go down there if you paid me a million dollars.”
Frank emerges clutching a sheaf of paperwork, steps behind the three women and types entries into the computer terminal. Under his breath he says, “Maureen, could you run next door and get me a Diet Coke, please?” In the two months since she’s been there, Reba has learned that this is Frank’s way of warning them to get back to work. Frank alternates between gruff verging on rude and exceeding politeness, as if he isn’t sure how he should act. Reba sees that Frank is more complex than she first thought. And he isn’t all that old. Not even forty.
Frank has developed minty breath. And despite his apparent testiness, he’s always full of pep. Reba is drawn to this energy. Frank seems to be a person who has taken control of his life. She watches him more carefully, noticing the way he dresses, the way he chews his food.
Frank gives Reba lots of room, never bosses her around. He respects her. One day he visits her window and asks for her advice about the correct way to change the paper in his adding machine. That’s when she notices his breath. And his cleanliness. He’s a bachelor and yet he’s always spic and span.
The afternoon of Van Pelt’s visit, Frank asks Reba to stay and help him sort out some old files he wants moved to the main office in Albany. He’ll pay her overtime. While they work, he neither speaks to nor looks at her. Reba likes spending time like this, side by side, in unspoken companionship. In the fading light outside, the cicadas begin to whir.
Frank gives Reba money for dinner from the Italian place four doors down the mini-mall. While waiting for the take-out meal, she contemplates the framed photos of the Colosseum and the Forum on the walls of the restaurant. Reba wonders what it would be like to go to Italy. She’s pretty sure no one who works in the pizza place has ever been there. Does Frank wonder about things like that? It’s hard to tell what he thinks. Obviously he thinks about something.
When she returns with the food, Frank tells her it’s his treat. She figures that’s fair. The food comes in round aluminum pans. Pried open, some of the rust-colored sauce sticks to the underside of the circular lid. The garlic bread steams when the foil is unwrapped. They eat in silence until Reba asks him, “Worried about work?”
As if roused from a catnap, Frank blinks and knits his thick eyebrows. “No. Not work.”
“You’re thinking about something.”
Frank swabs sauce with a piece of bread, looks up at Reba with his flat eyes. “I was thinking about you.” He places the piece of bread in his mouth and swallows it whole.
“Me?”
“I was thinking that you’re a good person. In your heart, you’re kind. You’re loving. More than most people. Your eyes are kind, your smile, your hands.”
“My hands?”
“You’re very gentle. Like your mother was. Your mother was very beautiful. And gentle. Like you.”
“I never think about myself that way. I’m just me.” Reba examines her hands. They’re just hands. If anything they’re too long and skinny.
Frank pushes on. “Maybe you can’t tell because it’s just the way you are. Me, I have a hard time being a nice person. Inside, I feel like a nice person, but I don’t think people see me that way. It’s not easy for me. Being a boss and all. It’s…it’s a struggle.”
“But I can see that. In you. I think.”
“People don’t like me. I know it.” Frank picks a crumb of garlic bread off his pants and hurls it into the now empty bank lobby.
“That’s not true.”
As if thwarted by an insurmountable roadblock, Frank hunches over his food and resumes eating. Reba collects her rubbish and shoves it into a large clear plastic sack of shredded documents.
It’s almost nine o’clock by the time they’ve sorted out the heaps of slips and receipts. As Frank locks up and sets the alarms, he mentions he’s going to drive out by the old canal to scout the height of the water, since he was hoping to go fishing this weekend. Reba asks, “Mind if I go with you?”
When they get to the banks of the canal, Frank switches off the engine. He says nothing more about how gentle Reba is or how people don’t like him. He hooks an arm around her shoulders, pulls her toward him and presses his mouth against hers.
For almost five minutes, Reba is in love. For almost five minutes Frank is affectionate and handsome and sexy. She gazes into his black eyes and sees that his good side has been there all along—kindness and passion and intelligence and even empathy. He’s a man, complete and fine in many ways. His dark eyes are masculine, his anger is masculine. His arms are firm. With this man, I could make a life. Frank just has difficulty showing his love. But with me, it would be different. He opens up with me. I could work at the bank and we could make a life. Affection between us would be our secret. People will talk, of course, but so what?
Frank kisses Reba again and her heart lifts. When they stop for breath, Reba thinks, I could nurse him when he’s sick, I could have his babies. I could love him.
And when Frank nudges her head down into his lap, she isn’t surprised. He is a man, after all. It doesn’t seem like the most natural thing in the world, but she once read a piece in
Cosmo
which explained that men need this and really appreciate it when women who love them do this kind of thing. Frank helps her by opening his pants and tilting the seat back so she can get her face down past the steering wheel.
His touch is gentle as he caresses her hair. Reba can barely see the thing in the gloom, but it’s there, waiting. Reba smiles to herself. This isn’t so bad. It’s almost fun. She opens her mouth and a shiver runs over her shoulders.
With surprising urgency, the knobbed stem springs upward. She bends over the insistent thing and treats it like the little baby it is. She caresses it and fondles it and then, finally, kisses its taut bald head. Frank helps out by pressing her downward and now, she’s doing it. She doesn’t really need to move, because he’s thrusting himself upward, holding her steady with his thick fingers, clutching her head with one hand and her breast with the other. She imagines the fur on the backs of his knuckles.
When Frank stiffens and begins to shudder and bellow, Reba looks up, fearful he’s having a heart attack. Frank bucks upward, writhing. He growls through clenched teeth, “Swallow it, swallow it! What’s wrong with you? Jesus God Almighty, fuck!”
Reba isn’t sure what “it” is and when she bows down to slip the shrinking head back into her mouth, she can see the beads of Frank’s discharge clinging to her hair, glittering in the moonlight. Then Frank’s face looms, creased with anger, his eyes bare slits, glimmering, malevolent. “Fucking bitch!”
The thing in her hand is not part of her lover’s body. It’s only the purplish brown penis of a boss who’s wanted to fuck her for weeks. She can’t hold back her tears of fear, anger, and they mix with Frank’s cum, covering her hands, smearing her face. She doesn’t care what he thinks. She cries as hard as she feels, raining sorrow onto Frank’s crumpled dick. She can feel her mom’s dead spirit watching.
Finally, weak and silent, she cleans up as Frank drives back to the bank’s parking lot. She tries to read him, but he doesn’t take his eyes off the road. I’m not what he had expected. He’s angry at me. Maybe I should have tried harder? Reba mumbles she’s sorry, but Frank only grunts.
The parking lot is empty and Reba’s Honda stands alone, waiting for her. As she gets out of Frank’s car, she wonders if she’s going to be paid for the overtime, and if so, when exactly that overtime began and ended. But she doesn’t ask and before she’s in her own car, Frank is arcing his way out of the lot.
Billy’s not home yet, it being Friday night. If Billy were home, he’d take one look at me and figure it all out. That wouldn’t be good. Reba wipes off her makeup. Maybe this was a missed golden opportunity? Not necessarily for love, but for something more. Maybe being with Frank would have opened up possibilities? Frank is a man of the world. Maybe I fucked up?
Reba drops her clothes onto the bare bathroom floor, twists the taps on full and slips into the spray. As the water grows hotter, she stands with head bowed, unmoving and mute, a dagger of slick hair bisecting her thin shoulders. Lifting her face, she lets the flow tear at her lips, sandpaper her tongue and teeth. She slides the soap cake over herself, caressing the negligible mass of breasts, butt cheeks, legs.
This is me. This is all of me. There will never be more or less. Two legs, two arms, two breasts, a belly button, a head, a stupid face, a mouth. Everywhere I go, I take me with me. There’s no way to escape. No one knows me but me. They think they know me by looking at me, but no one will ever know. Ever. My thighs, my ass, the soles of my feet. It’s all I am and everything I am.
Reba dials the faucet ten degrees. Maybe I’ll faint in here, fall down and hit my head and drown. That would be nice. I could slice my wrists so Billy can find me all red and runny and blue and floppy. Then he’d notice how I look. I’d love to see that. He thinks I’m a cunt, let him see it. A dead cunt. He’d miss me then because there’d be no one to fry his fucking chicken legs.
Reba racks back the shower curtain, her long outline vague in the steamy mirror. She wipes it bright again with a palm, startled by her own face. Look at me, nothing but a big stretched-out bird. Even my face is like a bird’s, like an ostrich. Gigantoid mouth, gigantoid eyes. If they were any farther apart I’d be looking in two directions at the same time. Nothing but a plucked ostrich, that’s what I am. Tits so small they don’t even jiggle. Billy’s right. I’m nothing but a useless skinny geek.