“You don’t even have to go on a date if you don’t want to,” said Marlene. “Just shop around, see what’s out there.”
“Gold diggers and identity thieves,” said Dad. “That’s what. I wouldn’t put any personal information on the Internet if I were you, son.”
“Maybe you could get one of those dating apps for your phone. My ex-niece’s cousin has one. Met a guy at the bar and click—knew he was into reggae and cocker spaniels, had a degree in computers, her kind of guy. They had a drink and bam—now they got a one-year-old.”
Like most divorcés, I’d given dating sites a passing thought—had even pulled up questionnaires a few times, overthinking my answers, imagining the kinds of women they’d attract, gaming my responses, visualizing the awkward first date, the first stilted coupling, the postpassion chatter spiked with melancholy, ineffable odors of animals in decline, middle-aged genitals drooping under stale sheets.
“Post coitum omne animal triste est, sive gallus et mulier,” I muttered.
“Excuse me?” said Marlene, cocking her head to study me through her tiny twinkling specs.
“Pig Latin,” said Dad. “Yada yada yada, as the Yankees say.”
“Romie, honey,” Marlene murmured, pressing my hand, “sometimes you just got to let go. It’s been, what, a year? It’s time to forget about Helen and move on.”
I sat there for two minutes, waiting for Marlene to remove her hand. She finally did, leaving a sheeny film of scented moisture.
The waitress brought our food. Marlene and I ate while Dad picked through his potpie like a prison guard, pulling out suspicious morsels.
“What the hell is this?” Dad squinted at a small black orb coated with dark pink ooze, a strange gland or organ perhaps, pulled from the steaming mess of his gutted pie.
“An olive, you moron.” Marlene rolled her eyes. “Can’t you just enjoy yourself?”
The waitstaff moved to and fro, talking of Michael Cera and JLo.
Drizzle spattered against plate glass.
Out in deep space, supernovas collapsed.
“What kind of fool potpie has olives in it?” Dad hissed. But he ate the tidbit anyway. Marlene and I both watched with interest as he chewed, his caution turning into curiosity, swinging back to suspicion, and then veering sharply into disgust. He spat a lump of chewed olive into his napkin and secured the bundle beneath the edge of his plate.
“Man hands on misery to man,” I muttered, spearing a pickled arthropod on my fork. “It deepens like a coastal shelf.”
“I like to look on the bright side,” Marlene said. “I read in O magazine that optimism makes you live longer.”
“If you’re born a pessimist,” said Dad, “there’s nothing you can do about it. I always knew I’d die early. My father did and his before him. Colon cancer took Daddy while a stroke snatched Granddaddy. Weren’t none of us Futches born to last.”
“Maybe Romie took after his mama’s side,” said Marlene.
Dad sniggered grimly. Marlene went red in the face upon realizing her faux pas.
I saw my mother’s ghost hovering over our table, summoned to the earthly realm of flesh, mud, and sorrow. She slipped into the extra seat. She sat silently, her face pudgy, a crisp cloud of gray hair above her big empathetic eyes.
Marlene’s right, Mom whispered. It’s time to move on. Helen’s not your thing anymore, Romie. Just think about that for a minute. You’re not the same boy you used to be.
And then she melted into a cloud of white mist. She floated up into an air-conditioning vent with an eerie whoosh.
• •
That night I reached a sorry state, exceeding my beer allotment by two units and popping excessive Excedrins as a preemptive strike against migraines. I e-mailed the Center again, describing my regression, the blackout-flashback combo suspiciously characteristic of a brain download, and I received a form response directing me to a twenty-page PDF explaining the Kafkaesque grievance submission process. I sent a fresh barrage of texts to Trippy conveying my latest trials in dark, breezy bleeps: Monster migraine last night, man, followed by a doozy of a blackout. After a couple of hours poring over the HogWild message board, I plunged deep into E-Live voyeurism.
Using the Time Machine feature, I quick-scrolled six years back on Helen’s profile to view the unraveling of our marriage. Helen, a private person, hadn’t said much. But I could see our decline in the reduced frequency of status updates and the bleakness of the links and pics she’d occasionally posted. For example, during the height of our attempt to get her pregnant, Helen posted nothing for two months, and then, out of nowhere, a lone grotesque photo appeared with no comment, a high-resolution ultrasound of a lemur in utero, its little gargoyle face scrunched in fetal wisdom.
This was during the worst time, when Dr. Quick prescribed gonadotropin injection therapy, which required daily injections of hormones for ten days, with expensive ultrasounds and estrogen monitoring, none of which was covered by the crappy insurance we got from Helen’s job at Technomatic Quick Lab.
My recent blackout had made all of these memories raw again, and I’d spent the last week staggering miserably down memory lane. I clearly remembered administering the shots with a pen-like doohickey. When an ultrasound revealed that Helen’s largest ovarian follicle had swollen to ideal ripeness and her uterine lining had thickened to a luxurious eight millimeters, Dr. Quick plied her with a human chorionic gonadotropin injection (ensuring ovulation in thirty-six to forty hours) and sent us home to couple.
We went through this cycle three times. Each time, the copulation window loomed before me like a high school exam for which I was dreadfully unprepared. The third time happened at three thirty in the morning. The clock ticked. I suffered difficulties. We bickered. I threatened to leave. Helen begged me through tears to please forget about everything and just go with the fucking flow. She reminded me how much money we were spending, citing specific sums with decimal points. I experienced an agonizing leg cramp and leapt from the bed. Paced like a madman, whereupon Helen advised me to sit on the couch and think of pleasant things.
My mind went blank. I dozed off. Woke up. Achieved a viable erection just before dawn. We went at it on the floor. After I released my precious load, Helen dampened my face with kisses and tears.
But still, no dice. Her period came, this time with alarming clots. She suffered stabbing pains in her abdomen and wept at the drop of a hat. She had nightmares about her dead father, kept dreaming he was under our house, crouched behind our furnace. She couldn’t get enough water, felt dehydrated no matter how much she guzzled, peed every five minutes. Her little sister was pregnant. Her best friend from high school was pregnant for the third time. The television was haunted with pregnant actresses. They sported their so-called bumps, traipsed in trapeze dresses, displayed their spawn on the covers of magazines.
Helen decided to give it one more go, this time with intrauterine insemination.
“Basically, you whack off into a cup.” She said. “And they inject your stuff directly into my uterus. They’ll keep some in cryogenic deep freeze. Just in case.”
“Just in case what?”
Helen shrugged.
On a drizzly June afternoon, after a week of home-administered shots, we drove to Live Oak Fertility for the insemination. A nurse ushered us from a large waiting room into a parlor-like cube hung with yonic O’Keeffe prints. They fetched Helen first, spirited her off, I imagined, to some nook where, with her legs in stirrups, she waited for the plastic grail of my opalescent spunk. And then they directed me to a small room equipped with a love seat and a wall-mounted plasma screen. The nurse, a short muscular woman with a cap of dyed red hair, said I’d find what I needed on the television. She turned on the lamp. Killed the overhead lights.
“Put your name and social on the cup.” She pointed to a stainless-steel basin brimming with plastic vials and slipped discreetly from the room.
The TV menu featured a dozen porn flicks, ranging from vanilla hetero inte
rcourse to light S&M sprinkled with male homoeroticism. I chose SuicideGirls Do Seattle, sighed, and unbuckled. I got off to a good start, especially after noting a resemblance between one of the actresses and my beloved Taco Loco waitress. But then I realized that I’d neglected to equip myself with a receptacle. I stumbled, half hog-tied by my own pants, to the bowl of vials, which was inconveniently located on a small table that also held a dispenser of antibacterial towelettes. By the time I sank back down onto the sofa, I’d lost my groove.
The first moment of truth had already occurred on-screen. I struggled with the faulty rewind feature and found myself back at the film’s tedious beginning. Again, I watched my favorite SuicideGirl chain her fixed-gear bike to a parking meter and trot down a stairwell that led to a subterranean bar. Again, I watched pinup girls purr in retro lingerie as male hipsters sporting ironic mustaches swilled retro cocktails. Again, I watched the female lead discuss business opportunities with the manager. Watched her strip off her polka-dot frock. Watched her fondle the pointy cups of her vintage bullet bra. Release the tortured flesh of her sweet little bosom, both dainty nipples pierced.
Second time around, the film depressed me. I felt the presence of all the harrowed men who’d sat on this couch before me, shivering in the excessive air-conditioning, breathing in smells of disinfectant as digital vixens sneered and parted the pink mysteries of their anatomy. I wondered if there was another sad couple out in the little parlor with the O’Keeffe paintings, waiting for me to finish up. When I noticed that I’d neglected to lock the door, my penis shriveled. I heard husky laughter trailing along the hallway. What if someone barged in at the height of my quiet frenzy?
I got up to lock the door. Sat back down. Took my shrunken johnson in hand. I couldn’t help but imagine Helen, clad in a hospital gown, her legs awkwardly agape. I couldn’t help but see Dr. Quick, sucking up my semen with a syringe, jamming his latex-gloved hands into my poor bride.
A melodramatic moan interrupted my train of thought. I glanced up at the screen just in time to catch my favorite SuicideGirl getting double-teamed by two emaciated hipsters with full-sleeve tattoos. She was bent on all fours, displaying the lovely curve of her buttocks. I felt a stirring in my groin and fumbled for my tool, closed my eyes, and imagined myself ramming it to the Taco Loco waitress in my boyhood bedroom. I growled like a baby tiger as I spurted my 10 cc. And that was that. I turned off the TV. Capped my cup. Wiped my hands with a Wet-Nap. I strode out into the blinding fluorescence, where a bespectacled gray-haired nurse smiled maternally as she took my warm sample.
On the way home, drizzle thickened into storm. Rain sluiced down the gutters, and I could barely see the road. Helen rode shotgun, clutching her gut.
“I think the bastard bruised my cervix.” She smiled a sickly smile, her chin crusted with a fresh crop of zits. “By the way, I know who you were thinking about in there.”
“In where?”
“When you were in the cockpit.”
“The cockpit?”
“That’s what the nurses call the masturbation room. Isn’t that funny? I heard them talking about it.”
“Very clever.”
“That waitress.”
“What waitress?”
“The cheesy Goth bimbo at Taco Loco.”
“No way. She is a total cheeseball. Dumb as a vat of nacho cheese.”
“That doesn’t matter, does it? She’s young and fertile.”
Helen sneered at me, her face pasty, her lips cracked.
And then we were screaming at each other as we drove through a shocking torrent of apocalyptic rain. When I felt the car hydroplane, I pulled into a strip mall, sat idling in front of Future Dragon Chinese Buffet as Helen wept.
“Don’t stress out,” I said. “Remember what Dr. Quick said.”
“Go to hell.” She eyed me through tears. “This is the last time. I don’t care if it doesn’t work.”
And it was. We never went back to Dr. Quick. Never discussed in vitro fertilization. Helen tossed her ovulation predictor, her supplements, her copy of A Spiritual Companion to Infertility into the trash. We never called to ask the office about the sperm sample they had banked in cryogenic deep freeze.
When she got her period, she posted that pic on E-Live, the hideous lemur in utero, puffy and scrunched before a veiny placental backdrop, its little paws outstretched, reaching toward the mysterious flash of light that had invaded its dark aquatic realm.
Helen didn’t say one word about the image, or respond to any of the commentary. She joined a gym. Became a mean lean creature with pumped Amazonian arms who subsisted on fish and spinach. I became a sulky drunk with a swollen gut and spindly limbs. Each day, a new medical bill appeared in our mailbox, always more than we’d expected. We set up a payment plan. Fell behind in our bills. Refinanced our house.
We bickered our way through another festering summer.
I thought autumn would save us. But we two who had once been lonely together now retreated into separate mental dungeons. Each of us stared out from the isolation tank of his/her newly individualized misery, stung by all the beauty—the blazing blue skies, the smog-streaked sunsets, scarlet with particulates, that went down each evening behind a fringe of red and gold trees.
SEVEN
I chugged a Miller in the truck. Idling outside the Dogwood Gallery, my boar head resting on the seat beside me, I watched costumed guests stream into the party. Checking my ascot in the mirror, I recoiled from the sight of my weathered face, jaded eyes that spent too much time eyeing a computer screen. We all become parodies of our former selves. We all end up donning cadaverous masks, withered leering versions of ourselves that fit looser upon the skull. It was All Hallows’ Eve, that night when spirits of the dead have one last romp upon the warm planet before sinking into the cold slime of winter soil. Perhaps my mother was out there somewhere, skeletal, impish, dancing in the shadows.
The Japanese maples planted along Main Street wore their blighted autumnal cloaks. The shop fronts displayed quaint harvest themes. But the world was still half green. Mosquitoes still patrolled the humid air. I felt hot and overdressed in my pseudovelvets. I’d cut myself shaving. My mouth tasted weird, as though I’d swallowed a penny.
But when I slipped the boar mask over my head, I felt calmed by the musky tinge of hide—a cozy animal odor that I associated with childhood. I felt a rascally grin overtake me as Lord Tusky pocketed his keys and exited his vehicle. I had a plan.
Lord Tusky would stroll around creepily, nodding greetings to people but never speaking. Hand on chin, Lord Tusky would consider the art. With impeccable posture, Lord Tusky would pose in various corners, steeped in an otherworldly je ne sais quoi. No one would guess Lord Tusky’s true identity, except for perhaps one damsel, a lady of a certain age who’d known him in his youth, who understood his deepest passions, his frailest hopes and darkest fears.
Lord Tusky was unnerved by his lack of peripheral vision as he entered the crowded room. He saw a trio of Lady Gagas giggling over a sumo wrestler’s inflated physique. Saw a gorilla putting the moves on a Playboy Bunny. Saw Sarah Palin flirting allegorically with a skeleton and a king. Sensing a whir of whispers in his wake, he strode toward the refreshments and obtained a Sierra Nevada from a young barmaid wearing plastic devil horns. He repaired to a corner, retrieved his straw from an inner pocket of his frock coat, and slurped his beverage as he scoped the room.
Although he did not recognize his old beloved among the throng of revelers, he kept hearing her iconic laugh emerging from the mouth holes of plastic masks: a sexy kitten (no way Helen would dress as a kitten), a zombie pirate (too fat), the Bride of Frankenstein (wrong skin tone). But then he spotted her, dressed as a blue squid in a pointy hat and a skirt of wavering tentacles—a store-bought costume, yes, but at least it was weird. At least it didn’t reek of desperate sexiness, of middle-aged flesh jacked up in corsetry and decorated with fluffy animal parts. But his heart sank when he saw Boykin beside her, dec
ked out as a fisherman and holding an expensive spinning rod.
Lord Tusky took several fierce slurps of beer through his straw. He turned toward the art. Relieved to see that it sucked, he snorted. There was some good photography out there—even haughty Lord Tusky, who possessed imaginary galleries of fine oil paintings, would admit that—but this was pretty dreary stuff. The digital photos were displayed on wall-mounted flat-panel computer monitors. The images consisted of hip youths in various states of undress, lolling on rumpled beds and moldy-looking couches while sulkily holding up twee handwritten signs that said shit like WHAT WOULD THE HONEY BADGER DO? or FREE MUSTACHE RIDES! or DREAM CATS FOR SALE. Upon reading the artist’s bio on a flier, Lord Tusky discovered that Adam Nicholas Hagman was a recent graduate of Savannah College of Art and Design. Lord Tusky was wondering how such vapid hipster froth had found its way into the backwater of Hampton when he felt a tug upon his velvet sleeve.
There stood Helen, her face scrunched in quizzical bemusement beneath her squid hat. “Romie?” Her frown made it apparent that she had not intended to invite Lord Tusky, but she quickly recovered.
“Oh my God, Romie.”
She laughed, a rich snigger that reminded Lord Tusky of better days.
Lord Tusky took the fair lady’s hand. Pressed it to his lips. Made a smacking noise.
Helen peered into his eyeholes. “How are you, Romie?”
Lord Tusky bowed, almost sweeping the floor with his fingertips.
“Oka-a-ay. Well, then. How do you like the art?”
Rubbing his left tusk noncommittally, Lord Tusky took a slurp of beer through his straw.
“The artist is pretty young,” said Helen. “Boykin’s nephew, actually. Would you like to meet him?”
Lord Tusky nodded theatrically. And Helen led him to a corner where a slouching dude with meticulously mussed platinum hair and jumbo horn-rims tapped at his phone.
“Adam,” said Helen, “I’d like for you to meet an old friend of mine.”
“Whoa,” said Adam. “That mask is sick. Did you make it yourself?”
The New and Improved Romie Futch Page 16
