by Yuvi Zalkow
I’m not surprised when my wife tells me that she’s slept with another man. Not a fake napkin man. A real man this time. With two strong arms. A full head of hair. And— I assume—an enormous, uncircumcised cock.
A FACE LIKE THAT (PART 2)
It was a week later when I found the sketch in the trash can. I knew it would make it to the trash eventually, and so I waited, patiently, for it to arrive. I’m a man who looks in the garbage for insight.
I placed the sketch between two clean pieces of clear plastic and kept it under the bed so you wouldn’t be able to throw it away again.
Your father had taken you to the mall for ice cream. I knew at least that. But there was more.
The ice cream was too cold and it hurt your teeth and you asked him why ice cream had to be so cold, and he said because it’s ice and ice has to be cold. And you asked why does ice have to be cold and he said, “Just because,” but he said it like he had coughed up something solid.
When you looked up at him, you expected to see his mean eyebrows, but he was smiling one of those gorgeous sneaky smiles that you loved to see. This was common: to find him beautiful and scary at the same time.
But it turns out he wasn’t even looking at you, he was looking at a woman with high heels and a tight red skirt and a hoop in each ear as big as your head. She was smiling at him too. Neither of them said anything, but when she walked past, it smelled like your favorite kind of Hubba Bubba bubble gum, the one your dad said was so bad for you.
You asked him why he was smiling like that and why she was smiling like that and if he knew her from somewhere. Without answering your questions, he said that if you don’t learn how to smile then nobody will want to be with you.
And you wondered what that had to do with him smiling at this woman and you wondered what he meant by “nobody will want to be with you.” But you didn’t look up at him because you knew you had done something that you weren’t supposed to do and your face was hot from his staring at you.
And then he said in the cruel way he could say things, “Especially with a face like that.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
Off with the Pots
Here’s the deal. When Julia tells me that she’s been sleeping with another man, I don’t like it. But when I see how close she is to crying. When I see how ashamed she is. When I look at her beautiful face. There’s no anger. For a goddamn instant, I’m not dwelling on myself. I hold onto her, and I tell her it’s okay. I tell her I made plenty of mistakes that got us to this point just the same. I tell her I’m not offended that she went off with a beautiful gentile man.
“How did you know he was gentile?” she asks.
I smile at her and her look reminds me of the way she used to look at me when we first met. “You have that goyishe smell to you.”
In fact, I feel more affection for Julia than I’ve ever felt. And I don’t know what to do with the feeling because I’m scared it’ll go away. It feels so clean. I’m almost tempted to ask her to do this to me again so that she can come back again and I can feel this clean feeling again.
“It’s darker than you realize,” she says.
“What?” I say. “What’s darker?” And I look around the room so that I can ground myself on a particular object. I look down at the floor at the pages of my novel.
“Me,” she says. She pauses for too long. “I’m so insecure.”
I don’t expect this. I picture her occasionally frustrated and never insecure. I want to ask her more. I wonder if I should look again at her sketch of her and her father. Perhaps there was anger on her face too.
Her breathing isn’t right. Her hands are shaking. “I hated him for cheating on my mother,” she says. “And now I’m no better.”
I’m sitting up on the bed and Julia lies down on my lap and I put one arm around her and rub her shoulder. “Your father,” I say, “deceived your mother for years and then left his family without an explanation. That’s a lot different.” I find a knot in her shoulder and press on it to get the muscle to relax. “We’ve got some cleaning up to do, but it’s not such a long way for us to get back on the bus.”
“What bus?” she says with a seriousness that has no room for my terrible metaphors.
“I just mean we can still fix things if you want to.”
“Do you want to?” She’s as small as the little girl in her sketch.
I rub my knuckles softly against her cheeks. And then she looks up at me so sweetly. She reaches a hand up to my face and gently rubs her fingers below my eyes.
I lean toward her. And we kiss.
And it’s funny because we’re suddenly affectionate in a way that we haven’t been in a long time. We’re like a normal couple.
But she pulls away. “I don’t mind spanking you if that’s the way it has to be. But I wish there were another way.”
“I know,” I tell her. “I’m totally attracted to you, even if my schmeckel doesn’t always get the message.”
Julia hops out of the bed right in the middle of my ridiculous explanation and grabs me by the hand and pulls me off the bed so fast I suspect she’s saving us from a live grenade. She says, “I have an idea,” and then she pushes all the pots and pans off the bed without asking why they were there in the first place. They crash onto the floor, on top of the scattered mess that is my novel.
“First of all,” she says in a big rush, “take off your clothes.” And then she has to clarify: “That includes your underwear.”
CONFESSIONS
Ezra and I were biking through the woods to the creek behind my house when I was explaining to him about the porn film I had just seen—my first one. It was at Adam Silver’s spend-the-night party, and Adam had just recently found his father’s porn collection. We were eleven at the time and the porn was called Secretarial Duties.
One thing I possessed even at that age was an awe about the way people behaved. Even in situations that scared me, even when I didn’t understand what was going on, even when I was being betrayed. While my friends were fixated on using however many weeks’ allowance to buy Pac-Man or Combat or Jungle Hunt for their Atari 2600, I was more interested in the way the cashier was staring at my friend’s mother.
The scene I was recounting to Ezra went like this: the boss walks up to his secretary and stands silently in front of her. With a look of annoyance, the secretary says, “Can I help you?” The boss barely makes a nod, but it’s enough for her to know to pull up her skirt and show him her vagina. The man does not say anything. He doesn’t even touch this woman. But he drops his pants and ejaculates right on her face. She still has an unmoved expression when she says, “Let me know if you need anything else,” and she wipes her face with a tissue.
On top of the eeriness of this scene and the other scenes, my main confusion stemmed from the fact that I had no idea what semen looked like. My parents’ technique for teaching me about most any subject was by way of giving me a book about it, which was fine by me and often did the trick, but even though I read The Origin of Johnny through and through and I knew that sperm fertilized the egg, I somehow missed the messiness of the act, particularly when it came to sexual acts that had nothing at all to do with the origin of Johnny.
“It kind of looked like he was peeing,” I told Ezra, “but it was just a few squirts. And it was white. And it stuck to her cheek.”
Ezra and I made it to our usual spot against the bank of the creek and dropped our bikes in the dirt. We started skipping rocks on the water.
“Are you sure it wasn’t cum?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “It seemed like it was pee.”
“Do you know what cum is?” Ezra asked me, and he threw a rock high up in the air so that it made a loud plop in the water when it fell in. And then Ezra explained it to me in such great detail I wanted to ask him how he learned it so completely.
“Oh,” is all I said to Ezra. And we were silent for a few minutes. Me, because I had just learned one of the most fasc
inating things about the male body I had ever heard. And Ezra, because he was deciding whether or not to tell me what else was on his mind.
A few rocks later, I found out. At age eleven, Ezra Roth was so obsessed with masturbating that he was doing it five or six times a day minimum. At first, he just did it at night in his bed. But then he started doing it in the shower every morning. (And why not?) He started setting his alarm twenty minutes early so he could do it once in his bed and then once again in the shower. When his folks went out—for dinner or to the grocery store or even just outside to do yard work—he’d do it on their bed, though I didn’t quite understand why. He loved almost getting caught, though he was still careful enough not to get caught. Soon he noticed that his cum went from clear and watery to white and sticky, but it didn’t bother him, it just required a little more cleanup work, a small price to pay, and so he began carrying a wad of paper towels in his pocket just in case. He did it in the school bathroom, in the woods during recess, once he did it in the back seat while his mother drove him home from a piano lesson. He named the socks and towels and pairs of underwear he enjoyed humping the most. It was sooooooo addictive, he told me, the best feeling in the world.
By the time he spilled out this story to me, he was nearly hyperventilating, and he was squeezing a rock so hard his hand trembled.
The thing about Ezra is that he felt no shame at all in his obsession. It was a very un-Jewish trait—just like his love of fishing. He masturbated like it was allowed. As a Jewish boy, you should not only fear God, who is, of course, absolutely displeased with you, but you must also fear the far bigger dilemma of disappointing your parents. Ezra was concerned with neither.
As Ezra finished his confession, I could tell he was hard through his jeans. And he held that rock in his hand and he was trembling and I took a step back, not knowing what would happen next. I was scared of Ezra just like the man in the porn scared me. But I also was dying to find out what he would say or do next.
Ezra took a deep breath, handed me the rock, and then said, “Look away for a second.”
I nodded at him and put the rock in my pocket and kept one hand on it like it was fifteen weeks’ allowance, but I did not look away. And he didn’t mind. I watched him take off his shirt, unbutton his pants, and in just his underwear he stepped into the creek. He swam to one of the deeper eddies and his head dropped under the surface as he masturbated in that creek, only needing to come up for air once.
When I think about Ezra telling me his confession and then watching him ejaculate in a creek (that is now plowed over by the Tamarisk Creek subdivision), I think that I’ve never heard anyone more excited to tell me any kind of story. His confession was even more amazing to me than the act itself. I didn’t actually think about writing it down at the time, but I did think about what it would take to get to hear more stories like the one Ezra had just told me. How many times do you get to see a storyteller hyperventilate?
When Ezra came out of the creek, he howled up at the sky— something that seems silly when I put it on paper, but Ezra in the woods often involved some kind of howl or cry. His voice was just beginning to change, far earlier than any of the other boys. This wouldn’t be the last time Ezra was scouting out the world years ahead of the rest of us.
Ezra shook off the creek water and put his clothes back on, and we biked home in silence. There wasn’t anything more to say that afternoon. I kept that rock in my pocket like it was an essential part of the story. And unfortunately, it was also an essential part of why our dryer broke that afternoon while my mom was cleaning my dirty clothes.
Just before Ezra put on his clothes, while he was still wet from that creek water, I remember hearing him whisper (more to himself than to me), “Nothing in the world gets any better than this.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
This Is Normal Sex
The missionary position is an awfully crazy position when you’re completely naked and you’re not tied up and you’re not being spanked and you’re actually touching another human being rather than jamming your face into a pillow while imagining yourself being ridiculed by a gorgeous woman who loves to see you suffer.
I’m in this position because Julia has told me to be in this position. I’m naked because she told me to be naked. She is naked too and I’m on top of her, because that was her request.
But I’m not inside her. I’m just lying on top of her. And I’m so flaccid it feels like six Grand Canyons’ worth of Viagra couldn’t save me.
I see she has a condom on the nightstand and it worries me. “I love you, Julia,” I say to her, “but what now? Is this where the virile gentile man steps in?”
She puts her hands on both sides of my head. “It’ll be okay,” she says, except with her hands there I can’t hear a thing. But I can read lips.
“Julia?” I say with my voice echoing inside my head. “Did your gentile use a condom?”
She lets go of my head and closes her eyes. I can see she is trying not to cry. “Yes,” she says. “It happened one time. We used a condom. But…” A few tears drop down her face fast enough that I’m not sure if I’m seeing things.
“I know,” I say, even though I don’t quite know what I know. So I wipe the wetness off her cheek and I try not to think about her gentile man.
“Are you still willing to be with me?” she asks, in a way that sounds like she doesn’t believe she deserves me. It takes me some time to imagine that this is possible: that she could feel not good enough for someone like me.
I’m not positive whether she’s asking about being with her for the rest of our lives or about me being on top of her right this second. So I say, “Yes.”
And she nods. She takes a deep breath. She asks me to take a deep breath. And I do. And then she begins moving her body a little bit—how those hips of hers can move—as if we were planning to have sex.
And so I start getting nervous. I want to make it all good for us but the more I want to make it all good the less possible it seems to make it all good. It’s like I’m giving a presentation to ten thousand people about my failings. And my vicious impotence. Vimpotence is what I would call it in my presentation.
And then there are other thoughts: of my father, how he became impotent after the prostate surgery and how I cared for him during those weeks while he was healing, counting in milliliters all the urine that came through his catheter; and I think of Shmen, who I still worry so much about; and I think about Yousef and his dead father; and I think of Ally and her hats, and the horse that I came on; and I think of all those times I masturbated while thinking I would never in my life have (or be capable of having) a lover. With Shmen, Dad, Yousef, Ally, Fatty Lumpkin, and intimacy problems all in the same room, I just don’t know how I’m going to make space for intercourse and Julia tonight.
Julia puts her arms around me and brings my head down so she can whisper in my ear. “Tell me,” she whispers, “some of them.” The heat of her voice goes through my ear and across my neck. “Your kinky fantasies.”
I pull my head back, so I can see the look on her face. “Are you sure?” I’m starting to sweat in the wrong places: behind my ears, on the neck, at the crown of my head. “Kinky is a polite word for it,” I say. “Some are just idiotic stories of you getting mad at me for being a pervert. They’re anti-fantasies. They’re shame stories. I basically have a million shame stories in my head.”
“Tell them to me anyway,” she says. “Give it all the kink and shame and idiotic you want. But stay there,” and she adjusts me on top of her just right, like I might slip off otherwise, which I could easily do, without anything really fastening me to her.
“Well,” I say. “I guess I could tell you a little bit.” But they’re not the kind of stories that would be fun to tell. If I tell them to her, they’ll be all shamitude and no sexitude. She’ll be horrified and I’ll be even more horrified than her.
“Yuvi?” she says, and she says my name so patiently and so sweetly that I’m tota
lly not expecting the impatience and frustration that comes next: “Tell me your fucking story already.” She flexes her legs underneath me a little like she’s going to push me off the bed if I don’t hurry up.
But there’s some play in there. It’s a game, maybe. But it’s also not a game, because I feel under pressure to tell her something. I don’t want her to leave. Again. And so I start.
“Well,” I say, “I like to imagine you catching me doing something embarrassing. I like it when you’re angry at me. At least in my fantasies. Does this make any sense?”
“No,” she says. “Of course it doesn’t make sense.” She blows into my face. I smell cigarette smoke coming from inside her.
I’m convinced that this is a bad idea. There is something so risky about right now. With her. Totally wrong time for this experiment. But she grabs my hips with some force. She centers me on top of her like I’m a piece of furniture. And I start to get hard.
“Are you going to tell me your pathetic story already? Because I have better things to do.”
SHAME STORY #11 (TELL, DON’T SHOW)
There are two ways for your wife to find out the strange little details about who you are. There’s “showing” and there’s “telling.” Telling is where you sit her down and say, “Honey, there’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”
This is the preferred way. For one, it lets her know that you’re communicative. You are expressing yourself in a rational and thoughtful way and this can get you some sympathy—even if your little quirk is unusual.
But there’s another way for your wife to find things out about you. It can happen when your wife unexpectedly comes home during lunch to find you naked on the floor, watching a porn, with your feet tied together using her best leather belt, your hand on your cock, Bengay burning all over your body. And with an empty bottle of root beer halfway up your asshole. That way is called showing.
