The waiter paused and then cautiously leaned down and studied Clee’s derriere.
She turned and smirked at him and his sly goatee came to the fore; their energies interlocked like a handshake, an agreement to have intercourse very soon.
“I’m Keith,” he said.
“Hi, Keith.”
I put my glass down with a bang and Keith and Clee exchanged looks of pretend fear. He thought I was her mother. He didn’t have enough experience to guess I might be stiff and shaking with violence. How shocked he would be when I bent her over the dinner table, pushed up her dress, and jimmied my member into her tight pucker. I’d thrust with both hands high in the air, showing everyone in the restaurant, including the chefs and sous-chefs and busboys and waiters, showing all of them I was not her mother.
With each course they grew more comfortable with each other’s bodies. He recited the dessert selections while giving her a shoulder massage.
“Do you know him?” Carl asked, confused.
“His name’s Keith,” she said.
But when Keith followed Clee out the door and asked for her number she said, “Why don’t you give me yours?”
She was silent on the ride home.
And the moment I shut the front door, she grabbed my hair and jerked my head back. A silly gasping noise escaped me. No scenario; she was fighting the old way. It took a moment to reorganize—to switch places with her and become Phillip. He shoved her against the wall. Yes. It had been a while since we’d given it any gusto; this was just the release I needed. She deserved it for her loose behavior. She slapped my breasts around, something she had never done before and not part of any simulation I had watched. It took a lot of concentration to experience what hitting hers would feel like. Maybe because of this I had an aggressive or manly facial expression, I don’t know. I don’t know what she saw.
“What are you doing?” she said, stepping back.
“Nothing.”
She took a few heavy breaths. “You’re thinking shit stuff.”
“No I’m not,” I said quickly.
“Yes you were. You were shitting on me. Shitting on my face or something.”
While I totally wasn’t, in general terms I guessed I was. I guessed I had been shitting on her unceasingly for the last month. She was waiting for me to say something—to explain, to defend myself.
“It wasn’t”—I was loath to say the word—“shit.”
“Shit, piss, cum, whatever. It was all over my—” She gestured to her face, hair, bosom. “Right? Am I right?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She looked utterly betrayed, as betrayed as the most betrayed person in Shakespeare.
“I thought you, of all people, would”—her voice dropped to a whisper—“know how to be nice.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Do you know how many times this has happened to me?” She pointed to her face as if she was actually covered in something.
I thought of different numbers—seventy-three, forty-nine, fifty.
“Always,” she said. “This always happens.”
She turned away, and because she had no room of her own she went into the bathroom, locking the door behind her.
The map of the world detached from the wall and slid noisily to the floor. I hung it back up slowly. Her feelings. I had hurt them. She had feelings and I had hurt them. I stared at the bathroom door, one hand against the wall to steady myself.
RUTH-ANNE SAID TO JUST stick with it. To not worry if the song was working or not working—just sing it. I’d have a few chaste and hopeful days, but something always pulled me down again. Once I began dreaming Clee was in Phillip’s shower, mutual soaping, and when I woke up I pretended I was still asleep while I creamed. Another time I shoved his stiff member into her mouth for a second just to prove I was the boss of me and I could do it once without falling back under the spell, but it turned out I was not the boss of me, the spell was, and doing it once meant doing it fifteen more times over the next two days, swiftly followed by a bog of shame. And she knew—now she could somehow tell when I had recently creamed on her. She talked with Kate on the phone about how much more money she needed to get her own place; it wasn’t much.
Sometimes I could only mumble, “Will you stay in our Lovers’ Story?” but it worked best if I really gave it my all, belting it out with full deep breaths, either mentally or in my car at full volume, “If you stay you won’t be sorry!” If she wasn’t home, I did it with some tai chi–like movements that seemed to bring the practice into my consciousness more deeply. Some work was being done on the sewer lines out front; they sawed the pavement with a deafening screech, and each time their yellow vehicle backed up it had to beep, beep, beep, beep. It took incredible concentration to mentally sing and maintain the rhythm of the song against the opposing rhythm of the beeps. I sang over the beeps three days in a row, five to seven hours a day, before finally marching out of the house. The yellow machine was quite formidable up close; its claw dwarfed me. And the man it belonged to, its master, was proportional to the claw. He was drinking Gatorade in big gulps; his head was tilted back and sweat was running down the sides of his enormous, meaty face. This was exactly the sort of man whose member I loved for Clee to suck.
“Excuse me,” I said. “Do you know how much backing up you’ll be doing today? I live in that house. The beeping is very loud.”
“A lot.” He looked behind himself. “Yeah, a lot of backing up today.”
A cool breeze moved past and I knew how nice that must feel on his sweaty face, but that was all. I didn’t know how anything else would feel to him.
“Sorry for the noise,” he added.
“Don’t be,” I said. “I appreciate everything you’re doing.”
He straightened up a little and I waited to see if his embarrassed dignity, so ripe with potential, would stir Clee. But no, nothing—the spell was broken. I had sung the song hard enough and often enough: now I never had to sing it again. I walked back to the house, noticing the neighbor’s orange tree for the first time. It almost didn’t look real. I breathed in the citrus, the ocean, the smog—I could smell everything. And see everything. My breath caught in my throat. I dropped down to the curb, bludgeoned by the vision of a middle-aged woman who couldn’t keep her hands off herself. Cars passed, some fast, some slowing down to stare and wonder.