by Nic Kelman
“Come on, Ro, get out of there, come on,” you command, pointing at your feet. The dog stands in the middle of the room, stares at you blankly.
Clay looks at him and says, “It’s cool, don’t worry about it, I don’t mind if you don’t mind.”
“No, I don’t mind,” you say. “He’s allowed to sleep anywhere except our room, so . . . ”
“Just don’t let him up on the bed,” says Penny, “he’ll ruin those sheets. . . .”
“OK, no problem — good night,” says Clay. The dog, somehow comprehending, curls up on the rug. Before you even close the door, Clay has his T-shirt off and is standing up to undo his pants.
In your own room, after you have both brushed your teeth, after you have both undressed, after you have hung your clothes up because they are too expensive to just toss on a chair or the floor no matter how tired you are, after Penny has put her jewelry away in its box, after you have asked her if she needs the alarm set for some reason, after you’ve closed the door and turned off the lights, after you both get into bed, she rolls on top of you and says, “Oh no you don’t — we have a transaction to conduct, mister.”
You open your eyes and look at her, tiger-striped by the orange light from the street. She slides down your body and begins sucking your cock. She knows that almost always gets you interested no matter how late it is. And sure enough, you find you begin to push your pelvis up into her face, sure enough your hands find their way to the back of her head, your fingers into her hair.
Once you are hard enough, she flips over onto her back, spreads her legs, and, while fingering herself, says, “Fuck me.” She is careful to use her middle finger, she knows that also makes you want to fuck her.
And as you fuck her, she keeps her eyes closed more than usual, keeps her hands off your body, grips the headboard. You find yourself wondering if she is pretending you are someone else, wondering if she is pretending you are Clay. And suddenly you are imagining Clay fucking her. It makes you want to cum. You ask, “Who are you thinking about?”
“What do you mean?” she says. She keeps her eyes closed.
“It’s OK — I don’t mind, tell me.” You have slowed down, almost stopped. She doesn’t answer. “It’s Clay, isn’t it?” She opens her eyes, studies your face for a moment.
“Maybe,” she says.
“Yeah?” you say, starting to fuck her again, hard but slowly. “You want him to fuck you?”
“Maybe,” she says again, closing her eyes every time you push into her and then opening them again as you slide out.
“Yeah?” you say. “You think he’s got a big cock?” She doesn’t answer, only moans. Your thrusts are more violent now. “You want to suck his big, fat cock while I fuck you? You want him to cum in your mouth while I fuck you?” Her eyes are closed again, she is moaning.
“Yes,” she says. “Yes. I want to suck his cock. . . .”
Hearing her say it almost makes you cum. Almost. Instead, before you even know what you’re doing, you stop moving in and out of her body and say, “Let’s do it.”
She opens her eyes and looks at you for a minute. You just meet her gaze. “Really?” she asks.
“You want to?” you ask.
“I don’t know,” she says, a little confused. “You don’t mind?”
“God no,” you say. And it’s true, you realize, you wouldn’t mind at all. Clay is no threat to you. If it was one of your banker or lawyer friends — especially one or two in particular, the ones with the biggest accounts — then maybe you’d mind. But not Clay. You know your girlfriend would never be foolish enough to leave you for someone like him.
Suddenly conspiratorial she asks, “Do you think he’d be into it? Doesn’t he have a girlfriend?”
“Of course he would — he’s only been seeing her a few weeks. . . besides, no man in their right mind would turn down a chance to sleep with you.” Now you are conversing, even though you are still inside her, the word “fuck” seems suddenly inappropriate.
“What should we do?” She is intrigued by the idea now, you can see it excites her.
“I don’t know,” you say. “Go in there — get in bed with him . . . get him interested then ask him if he minds if I join you — tell him you want both of us at once — he won’t say no if he’s already thinking he can have you. . . .”
“Really?” she says.
“Yeah — go on, try it — it’ll work . . . ,” you say, telling her to do something you would never have the balls to do yourself.
She slips out of bed and you follow her into the hall. She looks at you before she opens the door to the guest room. “Go on,” you hiss. She opens the door and disappears. You stand close by and listen but you can’t hear anything. You jerk off a little, imagine her sucking Clay’s cock. You can’t tell how much time passes. Maybe two minutes, maybe twenty. Then she opens the door and, without saying anything, turns around and walks back to the bed. Clay is sitting on the edge, naked. She pushes him back, gets on the bed herself, on all fours, and starts licking the shaft of his cock, up and down. She looks at you as she does this and you almost cum right there in the doorway, looking at your girlfriend’s mouth on another man’s cock. You hurry over to the bed and kneel behind her. When you push your own cock into her she is as wet as she’s ever been.
After a minute or two she straightens up, bends back, slips a hand around behind your head, and pulls your ear down to her mouth.
“Can I fuck him?” she whispers.
You just nod but you think it’s amusing that she asked. She obviously has no idea how much this turns you on, how much it overcomes your habituation to her. She obviously doesn’t understand how watching her fuck someone else will make her stand out against the world she has long since blended into, the world you have made together, a world you know so well that, by now, you have long since lost not merely the desire, but even the need to look at it. It will be like fucking her somewhere new, somewhere you’ve never fucked her before — a dressing room, a rental car, a hiking trail — somewhere she can no longer hide in plain sight and where, therefore, you become capable of noticing her once more, once more become capable of noticing her once more, once more become capable of seeing her body. It will be like that only better. She obviously doesn’t realize that, for you, this is as exciting as fucking her for the very first time.
And when, after she has cum with you in her pussy and Clay in her mouth, after she has cum with Clay in her pussy and you in her mouth, after she has recovered from cumming with Clay in her pussy and you in her ass (screaming — yes, screaming so you worry about the upstairs neighbors for a second, just a second — screaming: “ohgodohfuckohgodOHFUCK,” eyes rolled back in her head, you barely moving in case you cum yourself because the tip of Clay’s cock feels like a little tongue inside your girlfriend’s body, a little tongue inside your girlfriend’s body sliding up and down the underside of your own cock), after that, when she tells you both to cum on her tits, all it takes is for her to wrap her hand around your cock. That’s all it takes. She has to move her hand back and forth once or twice before Clay cums, but for you all she has to do is wrap her hand around your cock. Just knowing that another man is about to cum on her, that she wants another man to cum on her at the same time as you, is enough.
You wake not too long after dozing off. At least you think it’s not too long, you can’t really tell. You just know there isn’t enough space in this one bed for all of you to be comfortable. You nudge your girlfriend, wake her too, beckon her back to your room. It doesn’t occur to you to leave her sleeping there with him. Clay is snoring heavily, he doesn’t stir even though by now the sunlight in the room is quite intense. As you get into your own bed you realize you are smiling, have been smiling. To have done something like this, something you feel certain none of your friends have done with their girlfriends (with hookers, yes, perhaps, but not with anyone they have a relationship with), makes you feel superior. You feel as if, of all the people you know, you are
the only one who has dared to live. As you pull the covers up to your chin, you imagine you know how the Caesars must have felt.
And you sleep so soundly that, later that morning, you do not wake when your girlfriend wakes. Instead, you are asleep when she smiles at you and kisses you lightly on the forehead and gets up to go pee. You are asleep when she finds Clay standing in the bathroom, naked, washing his face, your dog at his feet. Are asleep when they look at each other and grin, sheepishly. Are asleep when she finds herself unable to avoid glancing down between his legs, when she looks up to find Clay still looking at her but no longer sheepish. Asleep when she finds herself shooing the dog, reluctant to move, out of the bathroom, finds herself making the space to kneel. Asleep when, even though she has always spit your cum out and always will, always let it dribble out over her chin by way of compensation, she not only swallows, but whimpers when the cock in her mouth ceases to pulse.
And you will be asleep when, even though only a few hours before you watched her do almost this same thing to this same man, even though she still has his dried semen encrusted on her chest like salt crystallized in the sun, even though you are quite right in thinking she will never leave you for someone like him, you will be asleep when she stands up and says quietly, “Don’t tell him about this, OK?”
There is a pop music star on the covers of all the magazines. She is sixteen but she poses in cutoff shirts and plaid miniskirts hiked up to her waist as she lies on beds covered with stuffed animals. She is sixteen and has had her tits done. She is sixteen and her hit song is titled, “Give It to Me Again.”
Then she says in an interview, “I wear skimpy clothes — sure — but it’s only because it gets so hot onstage. I get a lot of criticism from mothers’ groups about being under eighteen and building an image as a sex object — but I don’t know what they’re talking about, I don’t try to do that.”
And you have to laugh. Not just because she’s lying so shamelessly but because the mothers’ groups want to believe she has to try.
When your life first became not-living, when you first became undead, you tried other things, so many other things, things that could make you feel alive again or forget that you weren’t, things that let you escape, things that set you free. Skydiving, bungee jumping, mountain climbing, video games, heroin. But you habituated to all of them. You had to keep opening the chute later, jumping over something sharper, increasing the rating, playing longer. With all of them you had to keep upping the dosage until there was nowhere left to go.
And maybe, just maybe, that night after the girl had left but before you fell asleep, you had an epiphany that this was not an epiphany. That this had nothing to do with Pusan, or the business card with the pimp’s name, or the mist, or any of that crap. Maybe you realized that somewhere along the way you had begun to feel like this but you couldn’t have said precisely where or when or how. Maybe this is, in fact, much more likely.
“‘Brother by marriage to me, who am a nasty bitch evil-intriguing, how I wish that on that day when my mother first bore me the foul whirlwind of the storm had caught me away and swept me to the mountain, or into the wash of the sea deep-thundering where the waves would have swept me away before all these things had happened. Yet since the gods had brought it about that these vile things must be, I wish I had been the wife of a better man than this is, one who knew modesty and all things of shame that men say. But this man’s heart is no steadfast thing, nor yet will it be so ever hereafter; for that I think he shall take the consequence. But come now, come in and rest on this chair, my brother, since it is on your heart beyond all that the hard work has fallen for the sake of dishonoured me and the blind act of Alexandros, us two, on whom Zeus set a vile destiny, so that hereafter we shall be made into things of song for the men of the future.’” — Helen, Iliad 6:343
You are in South Beach with some girl, somebody a friend of yours set you up with, not a hooker exactly but a party girl, a girl men like you can call when you’re in town and say, “Hey, so-and-so gave me your number and said we should get together,” and she’ll say, “Sure, sounds like fun,” and let you take her out to dinner and buy her some clothes or even some jewelry and let you fuck her.
So you’re there with her and you’re walking around and you buy a pretzel and a soda and then she wants to go into the Versace boutique. So you go in. And as soon as you go in, the manager comes over to you and says he’s sorry but they don’t allow food or drinks in the store. And the girl says, “Oh, OK, no problem — we’ll just come back in a bit — come on, you can finish that on the beach and we’ll come back after.”
But for some reason — maybe the young manager just bothers you somehow — for some reason anyway, you say, “No — if you want to shop here now, you’re going to shop here now,” and you put your soda and your pretzel down on one of the leather chairs and you take out your wallet.
And the manager laughs. “Sir — please,” he says.
And you say, “No, I’m serious, how much will it cost me to eat a pretzel and drink a soda in here?”
And he says, “Sir, it’s a store policy.” The girl shifts around, a little embarrassed, she has been in here before and would like to come again, she lives here, she smiles nervously at the sales assistant over by the counter, pushes her hair back behind her right ear with one finger.
And you say, “Fifty bucks?”
And he says, “Sir . . . ”
“A hundred?” you are taking fifties out of your wallet. The girl has stopped fidgeting. The manager has stopped talking. Now he too looks nervous but he’s stopped talking.
“Two hundred?”
“Fine,” the manager says at last. And you hand him the money and he slips it in his pocket and you pick up your pretzel and your soda and sit down in the leather chair and say to the girl, “Well, go on — try some things on.”
Over by the counter the manager gives one of your fifties to the sales assistant to keep her quiet. He probably thinks you’re a fool, that you must be an idiot to spend two hundred dollars the way you just did. What he doesn’t realize is that he lost out on the transaction. What he doesn’t realize, may never realize, is that what you just bought was worth much more than a lousy two hundred bucks.
And afterwards, when you leave, when the girl leaves with a bag or two, she has forgotten her embarrassment and she says, “That was SO funny — you are SO cool!” And she slips her arm through yours and snuggles up to you. But you didn’t think it was funny, you’ve never thought it was funny.
As he watched General Hooker’s troops and their traveling brothel cross the river at Fredricksburg, General Lee observed: “It is well that war is so terrible or we should grow too fond of it.”
But do you remember when, that first night, there was a mouse?
There were cardboard boxes of different shapes and sizes everywhere and we sat on a rug we had unrolled and ate Chinese food from the smallest cardboard boxes of all. And just as I handed you the chicken you dropped it and leapt to your feet and said, “ohmygodamouse!” Even in the dim light of the one halogen lamp we had managed to find and unpack and plug in, I could see a long dark thick stain spreading out over the rug from the dropped box of chicken.
I set the chicken upright and stood up and said, “Where?”
“Somewhere over there,” you said and pointed.
“Well, we’ll just get some traps in the — “
“There!” you said. “Look!”
And I looked and there was a mouse shooting across the channel between two rows of boxes, his shadow much bigger than he was. In fact I might have only seen his shadow, not the mouse himself.
“We have to get rid of it now,” you said but you looked at me.
So I sighed and I said, “OK but you get to clean up that sauce — I’m glad this wasn’t one of the good rugs,” and I found the box you had labeled LEGS and got out a table leg and pushed some boxes around until the mouse made a break for the skirting board. But when he got to
the wall it was in the middle and there was no hole and so he had to run the length of the dim empty room hugging the wall closely, his tiny claws skittering on the bare wood floor and I intercepted him in the corner, cut him off at the pass, and smashed his head in with one blow of the table leg. I was so accurate his body was completely intact, it was only his head that had become a matted clump of fur and red and one bulging black eye.
You didn’t even want to look at it so when we were done eating I picked him up with my chopsticks and put him in the box of chicken where what was left of the dark, almost-black sauce swallowed him up like a tar pit and I closed the box up and threw it away with the rest of the trash. We ended up throwing the rug away too, the stain wouldn’t come out.
Do you remember any of that?
“‘ . . . this was no lie when you spoke of my madness. I was mad, I myself will not deny it. Worth many fighters is that man whom Zeus in his heart loves, as now he has honoured this man and beaten down the Achaian people. But since I was mad, in the persuasion of my heart’s evil, I am willing to make all good, and give back gifts in abundance . . . seven unfired tripods; ten talents’ weight of gold . . . twelve horses, strong, race-competitors . . . [and] seven women of Lesbos. . . . I will give him these, and with them shall go the one I took from him, the daughter of Briseus. And to all this I will swear a great oath that I never entered into her bed and never lay with her as is natural for human people . . . ’” — Agamemnon, Iliad 9:115
You never discuss your business with them, never talk about the thing that occupies most of your thoughts and time, not just because they won’t understand, not just because they will find it boring, not just because, in their naiveté, they will criticize you for your practices, for winning, for generating the wealth they are enjoying at that very moment, but because it will pollute them, make them dirty, just as it did with that first one, that one you kept around the longest, that one you mistook for love.
