I nodded encouragingly. Ideally she would say “shapely” or “curvaceous” in a clinically approving way. But Ruth-Anne seemed finished with her appraisal.
“Would you say she’s what you pictured?”
“More or less, yes.”
“Any man would become stiff looking at her, right?” I had hoped I would be brave enough to use one of Phillip’s words in front of Ruth-Anne, and I was. It was working; my groin felt warm and full of cream. As soon as I got home I would use the Ruth-Anne–watching fantasy.
Suddenly Ruth-Anne stood up.
“No,” she barked, slapping her hands together violently. “Stop immediately.”
My blood went cold. “What? What?”
She crossed her arms, walked once around her chair, then sat again.
“Not okay. Not okay to do with me. Okay with Phillip, okay with a janitor, or a fireman or a waiter. Not okay with me.”
She was talking to me like I didn’t understand English. I felt like a gorilla. My finger went to my eye; maybe she had made me cry. No, she hadn’t.
“I don’t want to be a part of it.” Her voice was a little softer now; she gestured toward the window. “There’s a whole world of people you can use, but not me. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I whispered. “Sorry.”
MY EMBARRASSMENT SHADED THE REST of the morning. I tried to involve a pair of her thong underwear but it only made things worse, my fingers became clumsy and pruned as Phillip pounded away. We gave up. I tried to work. I took a shower. Because of Clee’s long hairs the drain had gradually become clogged to the point that the water filled the stall like a tub and I had to hurry to finish before it overflowed. Clee came home and put on her labia-revealing boxer shorts. I was furious and the bathroom was a mess and I was always stiff but could no longer achieve cream.
I called the plumber. Hurry, I said. We are completely clogged up over here. He was a chubby Latino man with no chin and eyes that grew sluggish at the sight of the juggy woman on the couch. I couldn’t even wait; I gestured toward the shower as I hurried to my room. “Knock when you’re done.” It was better than Ruth-Anne; it was like the first time with Phillip. The plumber’s eyes were wide with amazement when she entered the bathroom with her shirt off. He wasn’t sure at first, he didn’t want to get in trouble. But she begged and tugged at the wide, matronly front of his pants. In the end he was not as polite as he seemed. No sirree. He had quite a bit of pent-up rage, possibly from racial injustice and immigration issues, and he worked through all of it. Then he fixed the drain and to test it they did mutual soaping. The repair was two hundred dollars. I showed Clee the mesh hair-catcher and how to empty it; she looked right past me. Was she still mad about the foot thing? I didn’t have time to wonder; there was suddenly so much to do.
A thin, nerdy lad I saw in Whole Foods: Clee followed him out to his car, begged him to let her hold his stiff member for one to two minutes. An Indian father who politely asked me directions with his shy wife in tow: Clee rubbed her puss all over his body and forced stiffness out of him, he was whining in ecstasy when his wife walked in. Too nervous to say anything, she waited silently until her husband creamed on Clee’s jugs. Old grandfathers who hadn’t had sex in years, virginal teenage boys named Colin, homeless men riddled with hepatitis. And then every man I had ever known. All my teachers K through twelve and college, my first landlord, all my male relatives, my dentist, my father, George Washington so hard his wig slipped off. I tried to work Phillip in here and there, for example, inviting him to enter her from behind while I was an old man in her mouth—but this was just out of guilt, it didn’t really add anything. Perhaps we were both sowing our wild oats. Or maybe Kirsten, being real, outweighed my hordes of imaginary men. Mostly I was too busy for guilt; there was almost no time that I wasn’t rubbing myself. The postman delivered a box and before I could open it Clee had to unzip his government-issued pants; I helped him push his little nub into her. The penises were getting more abstract and unlikely—I couldn’t rein them in. Some were slightly pronged, some pointed and willowy at the end like a wild yam, or serrated like a fleshy pinecone. I took the box into the kitchen and opened it with a butter knife. What could it be, what could it be? Right as I pushed my hand through the flaps I realized, with horror, what it was. Rick’s snails. One hundred of them, all with their butts high in the air. They crawled upon broken pieces of each other, watery yellow guts smeared on brown shells. The inside of the box was thickly encrusted with layers of snails moving over each other, hundreds of blindly reaching antennae, and the smell—a rotten tang. My phone was ringing.
“Hello?”
“Cheryl, it’s Carl calling from the cell phone store. I’m testing out a phone. Free call! How do I sound?”
“You sound very clear.”
“No noise? No echo?”
“No.”
“Let’s try the speakerphone function. Say something.”
“Speakerphone. Speakerphone.” A snail was on my hand; I knocked it back into the box.
“Yep, that works. It’s a nice little phone.”
“Should I hang up?”
“I don’t want you to feel like I just called to test the phone.”
“It’s okay.”
“Hang on, lemme ask this guy if we can talk a little longer.”
I listened to him ask if there was a time limit on the free call. An aggressive-sounding man said, “Talk all day if you want to.” Clee was on her knees and my hand was back down my pants before I even knew what happened. It smarted; whatever was on my fingers from the snails was stinging my privates. Just an aggressive voice wasn’t enough, though—she couldn’t suck a voice. Carl was standing by to watch but I couldn’t pull the picture together. Clee shuffled around the store on her knees, mouth open like a fish’s.
“We can talk all day!” Carl said.
Clee was making a beeline for her father. No, no, I thought. Not him. But my fingers were already accelerating, zeroing in.
“How’s tricks? How’s Clee doing?”
Clee latched on to him just as he said her name. Needless to say, he was shocked.
“She’s doing great.” It was hard not to sound breathless. “She loves her job.”
Shocked but not displeased. There was something that felt very right about this, wrong of course, but right. He put his hand on the back of her familiar head and pushed down a few times, helping her find the right rhythm.
“I’m coming down on Friday—how about I take you two out for a fancy dinner?”
Everyone else in the cell phone store was transfixed; someone whispered something about the law but the man with the aggressive voice pointed out that the law’s hands were tied because no nudity was involved. He was right—the bottom of Carl’s dress shirt parted around his member and was stuck to Clee’s lips, so each time she pulled her head away this curtain came with her. Forward and back, forward and back. Carl suddenly made a warrior noise to indicate he was about to shoot. He had wanted to last longer but his paternal pride had engulfed him.
“That would be great,” I said fervently.
“I’ll pick out a nice place,” he said. And then he creamed, not into his daughter’s mouth, which really would be against the law, but up inside his own shirt. Clee’s hand was under there, discreetly milking out the last drops. A flood of nausea and sadness washed over me. I missed Phillip’s familiar member. Where was I now and where was he? The snails were everywhere. Not only underfoot and glued to the kitchen walls, but all over the rest of the house. They weren’t the slow kind. One was procreating asexually on a lampshade. I watched two disappear under the couch. Was this the bottom or would my problem get worse? It was a problem. I had a problem.
SOMETHING LIKE THIS HAD HAPPENED to me once before. When I was nine a well-meaning uncle sent me a birthday card. It wasn’t really an appropriate card for a young girl; a group of rough-looking birds in rakish hats were playing cards with cigars in their beaks. It said something I can’t remember, but on the inside was a phrase like a virus or a self-replicating parasite waiting for a host. When I opened the card it flew out, gripping my brain with merciless talons: “Birds of a feather flock together.” It couldn’t be said just once, only repeated and repeated and repeated. Birdsofafeatherflocktogether, birdsofafeatherflocktogether. Ten million times a day: at school, at home, in the bath, there was no way to hide from it. It receded only as long as I was distracted; at any given moment a bird or flock of birds or a cigar or playing card or anything could bring it on. Birdsofafeatherflocktogetherbirdsofafeatherflocktogether. I wondered how I would live a full and normal life, how would I get married, have kids, hold a job with this handicap. I was under this spell, on and off, for a full year. Then, quite unknowingly, the same uncle sent a card for my tenth birthday. This one had a Norman Rockwell painting of a girl covering her eyes on the front. It read: “Another year older? I can’t bear to see!” And then on the inside: “Because what’s happening to you, is happening to me.” It worked like a gunshot. Each time a flock of grimy birds began to descend, I incanted What’shappeningtoyouishappeningtome and they immediately dispersed. The uncle is dead, but the card is still on my dresser. It hasn’t failed me once.
“Until now,” I finished gravely, leaning forward on the leather couch. “It doesn’t work on this new spell.”
Ruth-Anne nodded compassionately. We were moving past my inappropriate behavior in last week’s session.
“So we need an antidote,” she said. “A corrective, like the card, for this particular spell. But not What’shappeningtoyouishappeningtome, it’s too short.”
“That’s what I thought, that it might be too short.”
“You need something that will take a little time.”
We tried to think of a longish antidote.
“What songs do you know? ‘O Come, All Ye Faithful’? Do you know that?”
“I really can’t sing. I can’t hold a tune,” I said.
“I don’t think that’s a problem, you just have to know the words. ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’?”
I bleated out “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”
“What do you think?”
“Well . . .” I didn’t want to disparage her idea. “I’m not sure I want to sing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ all day.”
“Of course you don’t. That’ll drive you crazier than the blow jobs. What’s a song you love? Is there a song you love?”
There was a song. A girl in college played it all the time; I was always hoping to hear it on the radio.
“I’m not sure I can sing it.”
“But you know the words?”
“Yes.”
“Just say them. Chant it.”