9:37 a.m.
YOUR DICK GETS HARD every time you pass a pharmacy, a car wash, a cab stand, a homestyle diner, or a Starbucks now because you usually find them there, standing in line for their nonfat soy no-whip Caramel Macchiatos and the pre-work is easy: some banter, some pointed elevator looks, some lingering casual touch, and then maybe you exchange numbers and a few texts, but that’s not always necessary. Neither is taking off your wedding ring. You can sometimes even get them in the same day and you don’t know whether to thank technology or the old-school women’s libbers because you always get to the same place: nose-deep in new vagina and thanking every digital god that you learned the game though it was a little later than you’d like and sometimes while they’re giving you a turn if you can keep a thought in your head, it’s along the lines of “this is as far as it goes” because this is not really sex and these girls don’t touch any other part of your life so everything should keep running smoothly because you don’t give them any way to interfere further than these few moments.
9:42 a.m.
You run your hands down this one’s legs and they’re so soft, firm, like the first. You met her at the gym and she was the only one you fucked but it was so long ago you don’t even count it, you have a statute of limitations on penetration; if it’s more than two years and you only committed it once, it erases itself. This one must work out too, by the look of her calves. You can tell she’s about to come because her thighs are clenching beneath your hands. She bucks slightly against your face so you try to keep focus to get it done but then as you stroke your hands along her legs you touch her knees and think of your wife whose knees made you physically weak when you were talking to her on campus under the fall skies when your hair was a little bit longer in the way that college boys do and she wore skirts just above her knees and boots just below so that was all you could see of her legs – the last lingering curve of her thighs and the knees, you never thought knees would do it for you but hers did; they were the only hint to the secret of her long legs hiding beneath her clothes – and just as this stranger begins to thrash and pull your hair you think that maybe, just maybe, the nice guy you used to be has imploded and his remains have scattered internally but his cells have not dissipated so there must be some way to put him back together within the walls of your skin so that no one sees that he’s been absent all this time.
9:46 a.m.
You stick your fingers in to speed things up and she goes off, but you give her a last gentle flick to finish her. She quivers from the aftermath as you pull her skirt down and your pants up, stroking her hair and thanking her because you have to get back but instead of driving to work you pull over and stare at a blank billboard that shields the city from you – this city that feels new even though you and your wife moved here years ago to make more money to afford the kids. You let that blankness calm your over-stimulated senses. You’re still hard and the picture of your wife’s knees blurs your vision so that you can’t shake any part of what just happened as you usually do during your drive back. You wonder what’s different about this time, why you let your wife in. You usually succeed at keeping her separate – careful to never let it touch her because it has nothing to do with her: this belongs only to you, it’s the only thing you keep just for yourself, you do just for yourself – and when you look away from the billboard you see only yourself in the rearview: brown hair with a touch of gray showing up here and there, earnest brown eyes, not young but youngish – a good-looking guy out of the Midwest with a good work ethic, good home life, good intentions – and you start your car up again to reenter your day.
10:17 a.m.
Back at work with a clear head and a successfully deflated prick you check your voice mail. Your wife asks whether you’re going to the gym tonight because she’s been invited to a movie; she needs to know if a sitter is needed. You decide to call later. You haven’t considered the gym and you can’t talk to her yet – just the recorded sound of her voice has activated a sweat response. Instead of calling her you turn the computer on and check your email, but you realize every other word in every message looks like different words for vagina – your boss’s request for performance reviews reads as:
Good afternoon, Hank, just letting you know that I need your taco done for the pussy reviews that need to be sugar-boxed on Monday so Twat can turn them into Corporate HR and they can poontang them ASAP.
A drop of sweat falls into your eye and you press your hand against your forehead. You must have a fever or physical ailment because you’re also a bit nauseous. You close your eyes and breathe deeply as your wife does when she has morning sickness to prevent or at least stall the vomiting. At the thought of your wife’s current pregnancy, the third and final, you hyperventilate which hasn’t happened since you were thirteen years old and your father made you try out for the basketball team because of your impossible height and lack of any other drive to achieve. His hope was that you’d set the courts on fire and yours was just that you wouldn’t get hit in the face with the ball in front of your dad like you always did in PE class. You do now what you did then, a scrawny scared kid without any idea what he was supposed to do next but just wanted to do something right, you lay on the floor with your trousered legs against the office door, a capital L desperately seeking calm slow breath.
When you close your eyes again to count the breaths, instead you begin counting strange vaginas as though you’ve had a director, cinematographer, and film editor in your head recording every experience you’ve had in the last two years, a cinematic mash-up with quick cuts between each glistening pink adventure with different colored and patterned blankets behind to signify each different lady. You can’t remember every name, but you can differentiate them by the bedclothes – like the girl who preferred to be over you squeezing your head a little with her knees while you licked her from underneath. Oddly enough, she had a country style quilt with old-fashioned blue flowers and ruffles. Finally, you can’t take it anymore and you call your doctor.
10:58 a.m.
He fits you in because you are his favorite pharmaceutical rep and when you arrive, he swoops in like Captain Cureall while you describe your malady. You don’t know how closely he’s listened. After you’re done, he prescribes an anti-anxiety pill and an STD test and recommends some time off, maybe a day or two here and there for time on the golf course. You protest and say, “But Doctor, what about my breathing and perspiration, could this be my heart?” and the doctor agrees that the breathing is strange but you’ve recently had a full work-up and your heart seemed fine – present and beating without any sign of irregularity so “I understand that your upset. I can treat your anxiety for now, but that’s just a symptom. Maybe consult a counselor,” and you slide off the table after his exit and put your pants on for the third time today and think about what you should try now to feel normal again.
11:30 a.m.
You return to the office. You can’t go home for the day. You’re still sweating and have to appear as though you’re working hard since your performance will also be reviewed on Monday. You see another billboard, this one touting 24-hour help hotline for those in need. You scribble the number and call once you get back and close your door against the teeming secretary pool that you secretly fear because of their sixth sense for any sort of wrongdoing even though you’ve maintained your work face as steadfastly as you have your home face. You put the phone on speaker and lay on the floor with your legs against the side of your desk so your voice reaches the mic, but you’re on hold so long that you fall asleep and wake yourself up mumbling “don’t squeeze so hard you’re hurting my face.” The nurse picks up just as you startle off the floor shaking your head and rubbing the sleep from your face and she says “Thank you for calling Suicide STOP! I’m here to listen” and you respond “Hi, I’m looking for help” and she interrupts “I can help you through this hard time – are you having suicidal thoughts?” and you say, “no, no, I just saw a billboard that says you’re here to help,” and she says “if you’re not thinking of killing yourself, I can’t help you,” and you say, “but…” and she says “sorry, every second counts for the next person,” and you say “I was on hold for twenty minutes and I…” but you’re speaking to a dial tone which certainly can’t help you with its monotone “eeeeeeeeeeeeee.”
12:01 p.m.
You hang up and call your best friend, Jay. You’re suddenly hungry for a hot lunch – gravy, meatloaf, maybe some lemon pie. Your favorite diner is down the street from his office and you need man-time, meat, and potatoes style. He says yes as he always does because between work and families and gym memberships and sleep the two of you don’t get to see each other much. You get there, shake hands, slap backs. You feel good. You met him your first week in a town at a golf tournament at which you both played terribly. You got wasted but no one could tell because you kept the giggling at jokes about the other golfers’ dead-serious attitudes about their plaid pants sufficiently under your breath. The food makes you feel human again, less like a walking syndrome or whatever you would call the breathing and thinking problems.
Jay finishes about his wife’s new hot obstetrician that really pisses him off and you mean to commiserate but instead say, “I think I may have messed up.” He stops talking and waits. You don’t mean to report every detail, but you tell from the beginning – the first chick you met who picked you up at the gym; the way, a few weeks after it happened and the fear of getting caught allayed, you started seeing these faces everywhere that intrigued you – these fascinating, strange females all around but it wasn’t really their whole face or whole person that intrigued you – one feature would flash like a camera bulb so you’d focus on it; with one girl it was her fluffy cotton-candy pink lips that wore only a clear gloss or a perfectly arched eyebrow or the way one lit a cigarette or sipped her hot coffee so carefully that it looked like foreplay… You stop when you see him push away his bowl of bread pudding. He scowls. “I wish you hadn’t told me this.” You shrug and put your hands out palm up, a peace offering even as you realize you’re offering peace to the wrong person. “I’ve known you a while, Hank. This town is weird for you, even now, but I thought you had the sac to hold onto your marriage and ignore all the big city bullshit. Like hot, easy, stupid sex.”
You backpedal and say there’s only been one instance of actual sex, but Jay stops you with a swipe of his hand. He asks you what you want from him – do you want the truth or do you want to be happy? Without waiting he starts with truth – “don’t bullshit me and say all this pussy wasn’t sex – you just hope maybe I’ll be some douchey guy and tell you you’re right, it’s all nothing and means nothing. But it does.” He stops and shakes his head again, takes a drink of water, and says one more thing. “Now if you want me to tell you something to make you happy – okay. I’ll lie to your face for a minute. Here:” and he tells you that it doesn’t matter because everybody does it, that you’re a good person and would never do anything to hurt your wife and kids, that it was just a phase that you should forget and never tell your wife about because it would just hurt her and ruin a really good thing that you’ve got going. He pays the check and leaves. You stare at the lemon pie, creamy, tart, and wholesome. It has somehow broken its promise to you.
1:27 p.m.
You slump into your office feeling like a recently stomped mushroom whose head is still intact. Your brain literally hurts. You still want help to make it stop. You get your insurance card from the monogrammed leather wallet your wife gave you when the second baby was born and you were right there for her again; bringing the baby as she settled into the velvet “nursing” couch you bought when number one was born; pulling her feet into your lap, rubbing them gently while she fed; playing Brahms to cue the baby that it was time for everyone to get more sleep – you deserved a gift too. The card has a mental health hotline. You dial the 800 number and someone answers with a very thick ambiguous accent and you tell her that you have to be seen today, and she asks “Are you having suicidal thoughts?” and you drop your head down onto your desk and say, “no, I’m not, but I’m having trouble breathing – I think I’m having anxiety attacks” and she says “then our next available appointment is four weeks from now” and you insist and she breaks in “I’m sorry, sir, I can only make appointments – would you like to take the next available?” and you disconnect the line this time. You say while forcefully rubbing your forehead and thick chestnut eyebrow, “Jesus Christ.”
Light bulb.
1:48 p.m.
You leave for a “meeting” and drive to the largest Catholic church in the city. It’s closer to downtown, but you can still hear the bells chiming from time to time when you’re in your office, and it’s calming because you think that some sort of something is signified by those bells – priestly works or answered prayers, action – so you know on your way over that someone there can do something for you too and you think about the last time you went to church: it was your wedding day, because neither you nor your wife is religious but the families had wanted a conventional wedding and you both agreed it couldn’t hurt to give the families that one thing, but your wife, whose sense of humor has always veered toward the irreverent, couldn’t help but lean in once she got past the standing congregation and the blooming white flowers decorating the aisles and tell you, “I’m not wearing any underwear – do you think the angels are crying?” and you laugh at the memory of this as you step onto the sacred ground, toward the heavy oak doors that seem so old and important, and you stand up straighter because this is a place where no one can hide, not even from themselves, and you close your eyes and take another deep breath before you open them again widely – ready to face your confessor unflinchingly – and you pull on the elaborate brass door handle to the church only to find that the door is locked.
2:01 p.m.
You enter the church office and a permed, overplucked woman in her mid-fifties hears you out for a minute as you try to tell her that you need help right away and you were hoping to speak to a priest. She interrupts to inform you that the priests are on a mission to help abused women in Mexico build a halfway house and will not be returning until the end of the weekend, but Father Bryce can hear your confession. You admit you’re not even Catholic and she gives you some Converting to Catholicism brochures and sends you to the confessional to await Father Bryce.
You hear clomp-step, clomp-step, and peek out of the confessional, wondering if you’re breaking the rules of ritual already. Father Bryce stoops over his cane, trudging interminably toward the booth, two wisps of silver hair slicked back over each ear, wearing tremendous hearing aids woefully out-of-date. You push the curtain back in place and sigh.
Father Bryce enters finally and wooshes the window open, though the screen still filters your identity and probably what hearing he might have. He intones, or maybe croaks, “In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit…” and hacks and sputters and spits until you fear he’s stopped breathing altogether and you leap into the other side of the confessional prepared to resuscitate but you find him still breathing, but fast asleep, forehead against the screen just firmly enough that the crosses create a pretty design above his brow. You pat his shoulder lightly, not sure if you’re thankful he’s alive or confirming that he is, indeed, still in the mortal realm. He nestles in and shrugs you off.
You drop the brochures on a pew as you exit.
2:09 p.m.
You sit in your car next to the church and your cell phone rings – it’s your wife and you answer because she’s still waiting to hear from you about tonight, and you tell her to get a sitter because in your head you know you can’t go home yet, not until you’ve sorted this out, not until you’ve found someone to listen to you and tell you that you’re okay, that you’ve protected your wife as best as you can under the circumstances, and that you should continue protecting her and loving her in the way that you know how while still being yourself, still feeding this self who has morphed from a nice guy into a guy who looks nice enough to continue living his home life the way it stands now because doing anything else would disrupt this world that he’s created for himself – and your wife says, “Ok, honey! No big deal – my mom had offered to take them anyway so you can pick them up at her house tonight when you’re done at the gym.”
2:16 p.m.
You lean your head against the steering wheel because the sound of your wife’s voice is still, after all these years, an aphrodisiac and a tranquilizer and a motivator and a goodnight kiss, and you thump your head over and over and over because you want to hear her tell you everything is all right when you know you know in your head and your heart and your legs and your hands and your dick and your stomach and your earlobes and your toenails that your wife would be the last person in the world to grant you any sort of absolution in this situation and you still want to feel her hands, her long-fingered, short-nailed, rough-skinned hands that she always promises to take better care of but that you silently love because they prove everything that she does every day – babies, dinners, dishes, laundry, thank-you cards, calendars, kitchen floors, cake walks, birthday parties, grocery stores – you want to feel her hands on your bare neck, pressing your face softly against her shoulder with her long dark hair brushing against you and telling you that everything is going to be the same, that nothing has been changed or ruined.
2:46 p.m.
Back at work, you throw yourself into pharmaceuticals and successfully ignore-forget-repress that you have fucked up the personal life that you’d built so easily and beautifully – the marriage and family that most women and romantic comedies project as the goal, the prize, the end and the means. You comfort yourself by making money. You think about all the toys you’ll buy for your kids and the sushi dinners you’ll treat your wife to. Pretty soon you’re even thinking about the massage chair you’ve wanted. You decide on the spot you’ll order online because your career and your bonus are, again, the dream that most people don’t live. You revert back to feeling like the good guy because you can do and give so much with the money you make and your kids and your wife are comfortable and happy, and the kids won’t have to work through college and your wife doesn’t have to work through having the kids and you are a good person for making that happen. You go online to Google and type in “massage.” Rather than gray leather with a cup-holder on the side and a place to stick the remote and 14 different pressure settings, you see a variety of pictures of accidents and wounds. You startle and look at the search subject. It says, “messed up.”
5:47 p.m.
After three hours of Zantac and Zyrtec and Xanax orders, you go to the gym looking for your personal trainer to work you out, tear you up, keep you strong – you feel suddenly like it’s a promise to your wife that you need to keep – but your trainer’s out with bronchitis. You don’t like working machines by yourself because you don’t have kinesthetic memory and if you do something wrong you could break or tear or pull something, do irreparable damage, so you play it safe and run on the treadmill for as long as you can stand it. You listen to your breathing because of this afternoon’s hyperventilation fun but your lungs and heart pump air and blood in perfect unison so that you run even longer than usual and you sweat even harder than you did this afternoon, but it’s a good sweat, a clean sweat, and finally, for the first time since you licked that morning’s clit, you feel normal again. You sidestep the sauna – feels too much like punishment – and take the hottest shower your skin can withstand.
You wash all over. Under the arms, the fingernails, the soles of your feet. You’ve always liked feeling clean at the end of the day. Your mom, your brothers and sisters, your wife, all have teased you for this OCD-ness. When you’re dry you feel ready to go home. You drive over to get the kids and when her mother opens the door to you and your home face and says, “They’re sleeping but I’ll help you with them into the car so they don’t wake up…” you see your wife in the angles of her jaw and the lines around her eyes, so quick to laugh. Tears trail down your face, shocking her and she takes you into the living room and pats you on the shoulder as you sob next to her on the couch, surrounded by her life and your life in the photos of weddings and newborns and the kids’ artwork and your wife’s diplomas and tell her that you need help, that you didn’t mean any of it, that you never knew that it was this hard to be human, and you break so far down that you end up on the floor squeezing your arms around her legs and pressing your face to her ankles as you tell her everything – this woman who’s loved her baby and your babies and must have some answer for you because you know that something inside you that was good, that only ever wanted to love and be loved, was overcome by something else – some fetish or weird addiction or greed or unfulfilled self-image that you didn’t even know you had or where it came from – and now you just want that good something back.
8:14 p.m.
This woman who raised your smart, sexy, incomparable wife, listens until you run out of breath, shakes her head when you pause and says, “You really need to stop touching me. I don’t know where you’ve been.” You fall back on your haunches and gawk at her. She looks around the room and you follow her gaze: Every photo of you with her daughter or one of her grandchildren burns. “My daughter,” she says. “All this time.” She picks up a Mothers’ Day gift from your wife and the children – it’s a pillow made from the children’s art, soft and sweet and bursting with color and terrible drawings and misspelled “Luvs” and “Grammas” and hits you with it over and over and over. You say “owowowow” even though it’s not the pillow that’s hurting you and she whisper-shouts at you, “Shutupshutupshutup,” perhaps so you don’t wake the children or maybe because she doesn’t want to hear about your pain because all she can think of right now is her baby, her child, her daughter, who is out right now with a new child growing inside and rightfully so, because suddenly now that’s the only person you can think of, should think of.
She tosses the pillow aside and addresses the photos in the room. She turns you over. Around. Takes you down off the walls. Removes you from her history. You sit on the floor, on your knees, broken, penitent, waiting, for what you want but knowing you’re about to get something completely…else.
She steps briskly past you, violently, without touching, to the kitchen sink. You stand, uncertain what to do, but you follow without knowing why, you’re drawn to watch her as though she has you on a leash or a string or a chain or a noose. She grabs a fresh rag, douses it with water so hot you can see the steam from the faucet, and scrubs the clean counters viciously. She looks at you. “Does she know?” You shake your head. Tell her that you’ve been trying all day to work this out, decide what to do, who to see, how to say, and she stops you with a look you know well, because your wife makes it when she has had absolutely enough and needs to send the kids or you or herself or the neighbors’ wives into another room.
It’s mostly in the eyebrows and a deep crease in between asking “what the fuck” or “who do you think you are” or “what is happening right now?” That crease acts as judge, plaintiff, jury and the decision from the courts is exactly what it looks like and probably should be. You sense she would sear the grout clean if she stared at it the way she’s staring at you. She slaps the rag into the sink and turns with her arms crossed over her chest. Usually self-protective, the gesture from her feels like a threat. “Why tell me this? Did you think I’d be on your side? What can I give you? What do you want?”
— JAMIE ALBRIGHT
Jamie Albright lives in New Mexico with a very bossy rescue Chiweenie. She has an MFA in Creative Writing and an MA in Writing, during which she wrote a feature-length screenplay for each thesis. Both screenplays advanced to the Second Round level of the Austin Film Festival. She also writes living, breathing fiction from quirky vantage points and angry-sweet poetry.