Who You Know (17 page)

RETTE

I
lay naked and spread-eagle, my extremities tied to the four corners of my bed. Greg sat beside me, his thin body slumped into a nervous question mark, his penis inert against his leg. Plaintively he examined my body: the large breasts that rolled into my armpits, the reddish-brown pubic hair between my thighs, the thick calves with dark, two-day-old hairs poking out.

Greg asked what came next.

“Sweetheart, this was your idea.” I was inexplicably nervous, and though I wanted to be supportive, I couldn't quite keep the tension out of my voice. “I think the idea is to experiment,” I added.

He nodded, his face crumpled with shame. He said he'd be right back.

Greg knew exactly how to touch me. Our routine was usually effective but dull.
Cosmo
suggested bondage as a way to take our erotic relationship to new levels. Now I was wondering why I was taking advice from a magazine that put the ability to fellate a man as a skill on par with running a country or managing a Fortune 500 corporation.

Would the sex on our wedding night be explosively good? Maybe we shouldn't have sex for two weeks before the wedding to make it all the sweeter. What if we were too tired or too drunk? Our first post-marriage coitus had to be memorable.

A strand of hair stuck to my forehead, tickling me. I shook my head and blew from the corner of my mouth, but it adhered tenaciously. Without other distraction, the tickle became all consuming, tortuous.

Greg returned grinning. He was holding something behind his back.
A videocamera? Hot wax?
My heart raced and not, sadly, from erotic excitement
.

“Gregory, get this hair off my face!”

He set what he was holding down on my stomach, and reached to move the hair. I screamed and jerked up, spilling the ice cream sundae he'd brought over my breasts and abdomen. I screamed louder.

“Off! Get it off! Freezing! Freezing cold!”

Greg bolted up. “Shit, sorry. Sorry.” He looked around for something to wipe it off.

“Use a pillow case! Anything!”

Greg ran to the bathroom and got a towel to wipe the gooey chocolate syrup and the whipped cream off, managing to leave both me and the bed sticky.

“I thought it would be fun,” he said.

“You were wrong. I want to be free. Now.”

“But . . .”

“Now.”

Greg loosened the knots of the silk scarves that attached me to the bedposts. Was he disappointed with me or himself?

“Do you want to join me in the shower?” I asked. “I'm sorry for screaming. Look, I appreciate you experimenting with me. Now we know I don't like arctic desserts dumped on me. Next time we'll find something we both like.”

“I'm really sorry.”

“Sweetie, don't worry about it. I'm sorry too.” And I was sorry. Sorry that our sex life was on its death bed. He followed me, dejectedly, into the shower.

I relaxed in the spray of the hot water and tried not to think of which bouquet style to order for the bridesmaids.

 

 

Greg and I had met at my Psycho Landlady's Christmas party two years earlier. I rented a room in a house from her when I first got my job teaching. It wasn't so much what she said that made it clear she was mentally unbalanced, but this way in which she would in one instant treat me like her best friend and in the next look at me like I'd just slaughtered her puppy. I was an emotional, moody person myself, so I had a high tolerance for people whose moods swung dramatically, but her highs and lows were so extreme, so sudden, they could scare someone far braver than I.

I didn't want to go to the Psycho Landlady's Christmas party, but I didn't want her to hate me. After all, she had my deposit. I was just going to pop in and make an appearance and then leave.

Greg worked with one of her friends, which is how he ended up at the party. He was sitting on the couch by himself, and I was trying not to look like the complete friendless dork that I was. I thought that he was cute, but in a nerdy, nonthreatening way that gave me the confidence to sit down and ask him if he was a friend of my landlady. We talked for the rest of the night. We had been talking for hours when his friend came up to Greg and said he was ready to go and Greg said, “Well, it was nice to meet you,” and just left. Without asking me for my number. I was crushed; I'd thought we'd really hit it off. But then, a few minutes later, just before I was about to leave, he came back in and asked, all awkward and shy, would I maybe like to go get a cup of coffee sometime? I said I'd love it and gave him my phone number.

By our second date, I knew we were going to get married. We'd gone Christmas shopping together and, as we waited in line at the cash register, he joked around with a little girl who was standing in line with her mother in front of us. He made the girl squeal with laughter. Watching this big, tall guy making these funny faces, making this little girl laugh, not at all concerned with looking hip or cool . . . his sweet grin, the genuine pleasure he got from playing around with her . . . he just seemed like such a sweetheart. Right away I could envision us as an old couple, shuffling along the beach together, arm-in-arm.

Your future in-laws, of course, aren't something you consider when you're busy falling in love. If I'd been smarter, I'd have fallen for a guy whose parents lived somewhere interesting like New York or San Francisco. Greg's family wasn't the most thrilling group of people, and spending a four-day weekend with them seemed an interminable amount of time. I had precious few days off, and this was not how I wanted to spend them. I'd only been working full time for three weeks, but I was already ready for a vacation.

Greg's mom was nice, but she always looked so weary, like life was so difficult and largely horrible and there was nothing she could do about it. She had long ago resigned herself to a dour, joyless life. All she did was talk about recipes, constantly sharing tips with me, which I'm sure would have been fascinating,
if I cooked,
which, as I'd told her more than once, I didn't do. Greg's mom was adamant that we have a church wedding, even though Greg was agnostic and I and my entire family weren't religious. I wasn't looking forward to a weekend of defending why we just wanted a judge and not a minister. And I didn't like Greg's dad, Ralph, at all. The first time I'd met him, Greg's mom, Claire, was busy cooking dinner in the kitchen and Greg hopped in the shower, leaving me and Ralph alone together in the living room watching a sitcom. Just when a punchline was about to be delivered, Ralph flipped to the Home Shopping Network. After a minute or so, he flipped back to the sitcom, and so on, back and forth, totally oblivious to the fact that I might be trying to watch the sitcom and might appreciate being able to follow along uninterrupted. The more I got to know him, the more he proved how rude and self-absorbed he was. It was amazing that Greg could grow up with such a Neanderthal for a father and still turn out to be such a sweetheart. Greg's younger brother, Sean, didn't take after his father, happily, but he was an eighteen-year-old obsessed with videogames and motorcycles, so we never had more to say to each other than polite hi, how-are-yous. The more I thought about spending a long weekend with these people, the more unhappy I became.

Greg and I said nothing to each other for much of the drive, absorbed in our own thoughts.

“You're pretty quiet,” I said.

“I'm kind of annoyed. I'm working on a project with three other students, and one of them has blown off three of our meetings, he's not doing any work on it, and all of us are going to suffer. And then one of my professors is behind on his lectures. He can't stick to the point. Anyway, he got all behind, so we have three thundred pages to read for this test in two weeks, and next week we have a fifteen-page paper due. It really bugs me when I suffer for other people's laziness and incompetence.” He shook his head. “I'm sorry, I don't mean to complain.”

“It's okay, it's nice just having some time to actually talk to you,” I said. “I can't wait to go on our honeymoon. We need to figure out where we're going to go.”

“And where will we get the money?”

“I have absolutely no idea. Should we go to Hawaii?”

“I always wanted to go to Hawaii. Or what about Mexico?”

“Ooh. Good idea. I cannot wait to be sipping piña coladas by the ocean.” Greg and I really needed to get away from school and work, friends and family. We needed to focus on each other. I couldn't wait to go on vacation together and luxuriate in unabashed laziness. I closed my eyes and envisioned making slow love to Greg with the sound of the ocean lapping the shores just outside the windows of our hotel room.

Greg and I got to his parents' place late Wednesday night. We had to share a bedroom with Greg's younger brother. There was a full-size futon on the floor of the room for Greg, and I was supposed to sleep in the single bed Greg had as a kid. I thought the futon was a nice touch. As if Sean's presence wasn't enough, they needed to make it even clearer that Greg and I wouldn't be getting any for the weekend. Yet another of the many things that sucked about having to spend my weekend marooned with Greg's family.

The next morning, Sean got up early, before Greg and I woke up. We had the room to ourselves and Greg crawled into bed with me. Wordlessly he began kissing my neck—he knew I loved when he did that. It had been awhile since we'd had time to just enjoy each other. To my surprise, Greg went down on me. He'd done that maybe seven times in the two years we'd known each other. Not that I minded. Greg's attempts at oral sex had all the erotic flare of a dog lapping at a water bowl. I was trying not to fall asleep when Sean opened the door to the bedroom without knocking.

Greg looked up from my crotch with a look of horror on his face as he dove on top of me. Unfortunately, my leg had been over his arm, so when he propelled his body forward, my leg was shot straight up until my calf was crushed up against my ear.

I waited for Sean to figure out what was going on, excuse himself and close the door. Instead he opted not to notice that my leg was sandwiched between Greg's body and my own, my foot dangling piteously beside my head as Sean asked Greg if he knew what time they were supposed to pick up Grandma.

“I don't know. I think around three since dinner is going to be at five.”

“Were you going to pick her up or should I?”

I looked back and forth between brothers. On and on they went, all the time with my leg up by my ear and Greg on top of me. I began giggling and couldn't stop. I pressed my face into the pillow as my body convulsed with suppressed laughter. I didn't stop until Sean finally left, mercifully shutting the door behind him.

“Oh my god,” Greg groaned, rolling off me.

I finally unleashed my laughter, and for a moment, Greg tried to protest that it wasn't funny, but then he started laughing, too.

This turned out to be the best part of my day.

The day began with a big breakfast of sticky rolls, eggs, sausage, and hash browns. I never escaped the sickly full feeling as Claire plied us with a steady stream of fattening hors d'ouvres all day.

I tried to help Claire in the kitchen, but she insisted she was fine and I should enjoy myself. Ralph, Greg, and Sean were busy watching football, so I locked myself in the bedroom and read until the guests started to arrive.

Most of Greg's aunts, uncles and cousins had had the good sense to move out of Nebraska, but the ones who still lived in the state began arriving by the carload, and their loud voices filled the house. Finally, I put my book down, put a smile on my face, and emerged from my sanctuary.

The scene was chaotic. Little nephews and cousins played videogames in the family room and the distinctive noise of spaceships being zapped to destruction rang throughout the house. Dishes clattered in the kitchen and voices fought to be heard over the din.

I didn't feel like talking about the weather, cranberry sauce recipes, or wedding plans, so I avoided the adults and stationed myself on the loveseat near where Greg's two adorable cousins were playing with Barbies. Kate was three and her sister, Anne, was four. Each girl had a huge springy mass of dark curly hair. They were getting Barbie ready for her job as a fashion model when Anne declared that she wanted her Barbie back. Kate pointed out that Anne already had another Barbie.

“It's my doll and I want it,” Anne said.

“Mom said we should share.”

“Gimmee.” Kate held the doll close and glared at her sister. Anne tightened her hand into a fist and lightly struck Kate's head. “You are stupid!” she declared. Kate balled up her fist and bopped her sister on the head. “You are stupid!” she retorted. They did this to each other several more times. I tried to suppress my amusement.

“What's going on?” I finally asked, feeling guilty, thinking that if I were a real adult I would have put a stop to their bad behavior immediately rather than sitting there being entertained by it.

“Kate stoled my Barbie, but it's mine,” Anne said.

“Mom said we had to share,” Kate protested.

“Sharing is good. Anne, don't you want to play with another Barbie? Then you can play together,” I said.

“But it's mine!” she said. She began to cry.

I was out of ideas. I'd made a child cry. Oh shit. I would make a terrible, terrible parent.

Fortunately, Kate and Anne weren't my responsibility. I slunk away from the crying children and sat at the end of the couch on the other side of the room until at last it was time to eat.