by D. D. Miller
Suddenly, there is yelling coming from the cottage, and both Mark and I look toward it at the same time. Through the window, we see first Sandra and then Sylvia come into view. Although we can’t hear them, it is obvious they are arguing. Abruptly, Sandra turns and storms off. Sylvia’s hands slap her hips and she stands, frustrated.
Mark and I make our way toward the cottage. As we enter, Sylvia picks up her wine glass and plops down on the couch.
“What’s going on?” Mark asks.
Sylvia doesn’t turn to look at us. She hesitates. “Just girl stuff,” she says.
“Where’s Sandra?” I ask.
“I think she’s in your car, Tim.”
I begin to turn.
“But maybe Mark should go.”
We look at one another. There is a determined look in Mark’s eyes. I shrug and he hurries out.
“Why don’t you come sit with me?” Sylvia pats the cushion beside her.
I stand there awkwardly for an instant but eventually go over and sit. The couch is too soft; I sink in and feel my feet rise off the ground. Sylvia is sitting on the edge of it, her elbows resting on her thighs, and she’s staring straight ahead.
“Is everything okay? She’s not going to drive, is she?”
Sylvia sits and stares. Finally she brings her glass to her lips and takes a sip. “You know, Tim,” she begins, still not looking at me, “I like you. You’re a nice guy. You seem like a nice guy.”
“Um. Thanks.”
She empties the glass. “I’m going to bed.” She puts it down on the floor in front of her and stands. Without another word she walks unsteadily down the hall.
Eventually I also stand and make my way down the hall. Nothing has been cleaned up since dinner, but there is a certain stillness to the disorder.
When I get to the front of the cottage I peek out the window. Mark and Sandra are sitting in our car. Sandra’s on the driver’s side and they are both leaning far back and staring up at the roof and talking. Even from this distance I can tell that Sandra’s been crying. I want to go out. I feel like I should, but then I would have to sit in the back seat and that would be awkward, so instead I walk into the guest bedroom and get undressed. My phone slips out of my pocket, and I pick it up off the ground and notice that I’ve missed two calls and that there are messages. I check, but neither is from Angela.
As I lie down, I clutch the phone against my chest. I close my eyes and see Angela, see her turning away from the apartment building and staring at me in the car. I wonder if she’s figured out that was me she saw sitting there. I wonder if she’s lying somewhere thinking about that, wondering who I am. I will her to call so that I can hear her voice again, even just one more time.
Under my hand – clenched so tightly to the warm plastic and glass of the phone – I can feel my heart pounding.
pick up my glass and take a drink. When I tilt my head back, I have to squint for the sun in my eyes. The beer is cold – so cold – and I’m so hot that I can actually feel it cool me. I glance at those around us: the table of beautiful women in sundresses and sandals, a few couples, a table full of suits fresh from the office. It’s early evening on a hot summer day. The patio is full.
“Just ask her.” Mike won’t stop looking straight at me. Even when he takes a drink he makes sure to look around the bottom of his glass.
“Yeah, but –”
“Dude. Ask her.” He’s got one of those disappointed smirks on his face. It’s a particular twisting of the lips that I know he’s been working on since he was a kid. We’ve known each other that long.
“It’ll ruin it if I ask her.”
“You mean she’ll say ‘No’ if you ask her.” He sits back in his chair, arm comfortably slung over its back.
“I shouldn’t have asked you about it,” I say.
He laughs: one short burst of breath. “I don’t really matter here, do I?”
“No,” I say. “No, I guess you don’t.” I slouch forward, elbows on the table propping me up. I shouldn’t have said anything. I shouldn’t have ordered this second pint. I would’ve just kept my mouth shut if we’d stopped at one.
“She’ll kill you, right. You know that?” Mike leans forward and touches my hand, pats it a little. It’s a moment of affection that is rare, but he’s still got that condescending smirk on his face. “Rachel will kill you if you get caught.” He sits back, folds his arms across his chest.
I cringe when he uses my wife’s name. It reminds me that she’s real.
My favourite Internet porn site is called DinosaurPorn.com. And it isn’t really a normal porn site; it’s one of those amateur video-dump sites where users upload and share their own videos. The catch at DinosaurPorn.com is that the users are usually middle-aged and the videos are shot on old or cheap film and video recorders. Initially the site featured a lot of scenes shot on film, like Super 8 or 16mm, but it quickly expanded to include any grainy, non-professional equipment including surveillance videos and cellphones. There’s also a specific section reserved for hidden camerawork shot on digital cameras where one (or both) of the participants is being filmed unaware.
Wednesday evenings are my DinosaurPorn nights. Rachel has her pottery circle and our son, Jordan, being eighteen, could be anywhere in the city on any given night except, of course, at home.
I walk into the office and turn on the computer. I pull the blinds and check the clock. Rachel has another hour at the pottery circle, but they never actually finish on time anyway.
I sit down in my chair, adjust for comfort, go online and open the site.
I spend a little time catching up on the new uploads I missed from the week before. I’m getting better at filtering now, at knowing which ones I’ll like and I can even distinguish a certain style just by the thumbnail teaser. I don’t mind grainy. I don’t mind overweight, hairy. I like thinking that my porn could have been made by the couple next door. That conservative couple who you assume has bimonthly scheduled sex, when actually they’re going at it in front of old, loud film cameras and cellphones propped on bedside tables. Mugging it for the imagined viewer. Shifting to give a better view.
My hands are down my pants, and I barely even noticed. There was a particularly good video uploaded on the weekend. A hidden-camera video that features a chubby girl with dyed red hair and her skinny, tattooed boyfriend. You can tell she doesn’t know he’s filming by how natural she acts. When the guy’s going down on her she drifts away at one moment: her head turns and her eyes open and she seems to be remembering something, something to do at work, a shopping list. Anything. Then she closes her eyes and moans, gets right back into it.
I’ve always secretly thought that Rachel would approve of my watching this kind of porn. I’ve wanted to ask her if she’d watch it with me, but I don’t know how. There was this night, five years ago, at a hotel in Paris when we discovered that there was a porn station, and we put it on as a “joke.” Then we lay down on the bed to watch it. We started touching each other slowly, absently, as we watched. We kept it on all night.
The skinny tattooed guy pulls his head up from between her thighs. The redhead sighs and giggles as she adjusts. She gets on all fours and he gets behind her. He looks up to where the camera is hidden. It’s brief, just a quick glance before he looks away. Maybe he smiled just a tiny little bit.
I surprise myself and come too quickly to grab tissues. I look down and there’s a long, gooey line of it along my T-shirt.
I beat Rachel home on Friday, but only by a few minutes. I’ve got a few bottles of strong Quebec wheat beer and she’s picking up some food-court Thai. She looks frazzled when she gets out of the car, clutching a grey, generic plastic shopping bag. Her short hair is dishevelled. It’s only been a week, but I still don’t like it. Cropped close to her head, barely any bangs. It’s not that it makes her look older – it doesn’t – it just makes it look like she’s trying to look older.
I open the front door for her and she gives me a peck on th
e cheek as she rushes in. She heads straight down the hall.
“Oh God, babe,” she says as she enters the kitchen. She tosses the grocery bag onto the counter. “What a shitty day.” Her shirt is untucked, her skirt twisted in not quite the right direction. “People are mostly assholes,” she says and lets out a big sigh. She leans back against the counter.
I can’t tell if she wants me to go console her or to stay away. “What happened?” I ask. My wife is a sectional manager at a chain bookstore downtown. It often seems like her job consists of dealing with a continuous stream of assholes.
“Oh nothing, you know. Just general incompetence from the staff and stupidity from customers.” She looks up at me and tries to fake a smile and makes this odd motion with her hand near her head. It takes me a moment to realize that she is flipping her absent hair. I can’t tell if she notices what she’s done or not but then she runs her hand through what hair she does have and ruffles it a bit. “Where’s Jordan?” she asks.
I shrug. “Work?”
“Do you think he works, really?”
“He has money,” I say. “He bought his own iPhonething. He makes the payments himself.” He’s been working at a pizza place down on Bloor Street since he was sixteen, but Rachel once found a joint in the pocket of a pair of his jeans and managed to convince herself that he was selling drugs. I asked her how many joints she’d smoked when she was sixteen, but she said that had been different.
“When was the last time you saw him?” she asks.
I have to think. “This morning,” I tell her. He came down the stairs as I was walking out the door. I yelled “Good morning,” but he ignored me. He already had his earphones in.
“Did you talk to him?”
I shrug again. He’s eighteen, just graduated from high school. What do we possibly have to say to one another?
She doesn’t say anything for a few minutes. She just leans back and juts her hip out a bit. She’s filling out with age, but it’s nice, like she’s growing into herself. I notice that her legs are bare under her skirt. Her skin is pale, and looks soft, cool. I picture her legs as an image on a screen. Black and white would be best. They’d look milky. But the light would have to be right.
“Why don’t you go get changed, have a shower, whatever. Let me get dinner ready, okay?” I say.
She nods. She’s staring straight ahead at some point in the floor, her brow wrinkled. I walk forward and put my hand on her shoulder. She’s still attractive. Maybe just for her age, I don’t know. I can’t tell if maybe that’s just what I find attractive now.
She looks up at me and smiles. “Thanks, babe,” she says and gives me a kiss, brushing my lips. Her lids look heavy, like she’s just woken up from a long sleep.
When she’s out of the room I pull the individual boxes of noodles and curry out of the shopping bags. I pull some plates out from the cupboards.
On Fridays, Rachel and I try to always do dinner together. When you’ve been together for twenty years, when you both work full time and have spent the past eighteen years raising a child and when both of you still cling to ever-slackening artistic ambitions (guitar playing for me, pottery for her), setting one evening aside where the only goal is to be together is extremely important. Sometimes we’ll go out for dinner and a movie, sometimes we’ll just stay home, drink a bottle of wine or some beer and eat crap Thai food from the mall. Sometimes we just fall asleep watching a movie. Most of the time, we have sex.
I open one of the bottles of beer and pour out two pints. I raise mine to my nose. It smells sweet and bitter.
“So I saw Susan last night.” Mike leans one arm against the rail along the edge of the patio. His eyes follow two young women as they pass on the sidewalk. “This is definitely the best patio,” he says, shaking his head. We’ve been trying to go to a different patio each time we go for a pint this summer.
“So?” I ask.
“So what?” he looks at me genuinely perplexed.
“Susan? You saw Susan last night?” I remind him.
Susan is Mike’s ex. It’s been just over a year since their divorce. There were dramatic fights, changed locks, broken windows, a suspicious fire. I spent many long nights at pubs trying to make sure Mike got home all right.
“Oh right, yeah.” He takes a drink, licks his lips. Leans forward. “We fucked.”
“What?”
“Yeah, on my couch too – we didn’t even make it to the bedroom.”
“Jesus Christ, Mike.” I think of all those late night phone calls, all the melodrama.
“Well, it was bound to happen,” he says. “As sexually compatible as we are.” They had been on-again, off-again for years, but I thought the divorce was going to settle it once and for all.
“Isn’t she seeing someone?”
Mike shrugs, snickers. “Some banker douche bag. I don’t know.”
“So what happens now?” I ask.
“Between me and Susan?” He looks at me like I’m crazy. “Nothing,” he says.
“Right. Heard that before,” I say.
“No, seriously,” he says, and he does look serious. “I just wanted the last laugh, you know?” He shrugs. “All good things come to an end, my friend.”
We sit in silence and drink. I’m beginning to sweat from the direct sunlight. Mike checks out women without even hiding it. I wonder if he’s becoming an asshole as he gets older or if he’s always been one.
“Hey,” he says, suddenly remembering something. “Speaking of fucking, how’d it go with you? You go through with it?”
“What? That? Oh right. No. No, I didn’t.” I was hoping he’d never bring it up again. Last Friday Rachel never did come back down from her shower. When I went upstairs I saw that she’d fallen asleep in bed.
He laughs. “So did you chicken out? Or actually ask her?”
“I abandoned the plan,” I say, but decide that this will be the week.
I leave the office early on Friday so that I can get home in time to set up. Fredfeelie, the username of one of the leading hidden-camera uploaders on DinosaurPorn.com – his wife has been covertly filmed at least a dozen times – wrote a blog post with tips on how to set up a hidden camera. I printed off the instructions last night but it’s all pretty straightforward. My “safe place” is the laundry hamper. There’s an outlet right behind it, so I don’t have to worry about the battery.
I put the camera in and turn it on; I tilt it and cover it with some clothes. I walk over to the bed and check it out. Not bad. I figure we’ll start downstairs. Maybe even in the kitchen. By the time we get up here she won’t notice anything.
I lie on the bed. Position myself the way I think we’ll end up and memorize it. Fredfeelie warns against not seeming like you’re positioning your “subject.” No arms on shoulders to make readjustments mid-act, et cetera.
“And don’t ever,” he warns many times, “look directly at the camera.”
I walk back over and uncover the camera. I pick it up and play back the footage to check my positioning. It’s not perfect, but it’ll have to do. When I put the camera back down, I notice that my hand is shaking just a bit. I’m hard too, and pushing against the fly of my khakis. A little bit of sweat builds up at my hairline.
I check my watch. I have another twenty minutes or so before she gets home. I should go check my email to see if there is anything from her saying she’s going to be late or not. I walk down the hall and play out the evening in my head, the way I hope things work out.
I walk into the office and someone is sitting at my computer. I jump a bit, my arms flinging out in front of me. It’s Jordan.
He’s sitting with his back to me and he’s got his earphones in. I can hear the music faintly. He didn’t even hear me walk in. I look over his shoulder to see what he’s doing, but it’s all just lists and numbers and meaningless symbols. Now he jumps, cringing in the chair.
“Holy fuck, Dad.” He pulls at his earphones. Scowls.
“Language, Jordan,
” I’ve never heard him say “fuck” before. It’s nice, in a way, because there was something immature about the way he said it. It was practiced, like he’d been waiting forever for the chance to swear at me.
“Whatever. What’re you doing home?”
“I live here, I often come and go. What’re you doing on my computer?” I’m angry at him, almost. I feel like he’s using the spare pages of my journal or something.
“Nothing. Relax. Seriously.” He’s got his dirty blond hair long and shaggy, and he dresses in baggy jeans and T-shirts with skateboard brand names written on them. He owns a skateboard and he carries it with him sometimes, but I don’t think he’s really used it in about a year. “I’m synching my iPhone with my iTunes.” He closes a window on the computer.
“You’re doing what?” I know he’s talking about his flat, shiny thing. His phone/not phone. “And why on my computer? What’s wrong with your laptop?”
He unplugs his iThing from my computer. Shoves the cord and everything into one of his huge pockets. “My laptop doesn’t have enough space for all my songs so I keep them on your computer,” he says.
“That’s not the point,” I say. “And how much space is your iThingy taking up on my computer?”
“None, don’t worry.” He stands up, fumbles with his earphones and doesn’t look me in the eye. He brushes past me. “And it’s called an iPhone,” he mumbles, leaving the room. “Yer such a dinosaur.”
“What did you just say?” I ask.
He stops outside the door and looks back. He’s blushing just a bit, but there’s a grin there, hidden. “Ah, nothing,” he says and turns quickly and rushes off.
I stand for a minute, staring out into the hallway at the space where my son was. That’s the longest interaction I’ve had with him in weeks, months even, and I don’t know what to do. It always ends up like this, where I’m taken off guard, don’t know how to react, and he’s short and abrupt and dismissive. It saddens me that I don’t know when the last time I had a normal conversation with my son was.
