This was when we still lived in town. Before Thomas’s father died and left him all that money and we moved back to the farm he had grown up on. Before he had his surgery. Before everything went sour. Thomas had a hand around my neck and he would tickle it when he laughed. I looked at him with love. He had a glint in his green eyes and his baby-soft hair was sticking up in the back, and he was nice and tan from working in the fields all those years. We both had our legs stretched out on the glass coffee table. Underneath, my magazines were stacked neatly by name and by month, the magazines that would tell me how to be a better woman, lover, and wife. The remote control rested between us. It all felt nice, like we were matching parts that together formed one big piece of something. What something, I do not know, but something. It was special, the two of us together. This was when I felt him most, his insides and outsides next to me.
Thomas switched channels like he was shooting off a machine gun. They sped by with hardly a second to know what was playing, but I guess he knew what he was looking for. It was not a sports show, he did not like sports. He had never been able to play any in high school. Some people are not meant for athletics. It was not the news. We had both given up on the news. There were too many wars. Once Thomas had threatened to join the army when we had started a new war. That was years before, right after we graduated from high school, a few months before we got married. “I should sign up,” he said. “Serve my country. Do my time.” I did not even want him to go down to the recruiting office. I was worried they would laugh at him when he walked in the door. It is not going to make you taller, I thought. There is nothing you can do to make you a bigger man than you already are.
I saw flashes of color while he flipped, the peach of a swatch of skin, the turquoise of a gigantic swimming pool, the almost-white of a perfect beach, the green of a stack of twenties (or maybe they were fifties), and on and on, like playing the slots at the casino, only it was in your head. There were little matching blips of sounds: music and conversation and laughter. Screams and moans and yells. The TV rolled onward, and I just sat there with my legs stretched out, and let Thomas barrel on. It went on like this for a while, I can’t say how long. Five minutes? Ten? I looked at Thomas, and he had a grim set to his face. I could tell he was clenching his teeth, and his lips were puckered together. His eyes were holed out, and his eyebrows stuck out in long sprouts near the center. Right then I began to feel separate from him, and I put my hand on his arm and quietly said his name. He did not hear me, he could not hear anything. I said his name louder, and I told him to stop.
“Huh?” he said. He sounded just like he did when I woke him up in the morning to tell him coffee was ready, just the way he liked it. Milk, with lots of sugar. He drank coffee all day long to keep him going.
“Just pick a channel and stay there,” I said.
He looked confused.
“It’s all the same anyway, right, honey?” I wanted him to know I was not picking a fight.
“Yeah, of course,” he said, and he sat up straight and pulled his arm from around me and put it in his lap. He stretched. “I don’t know where I went there for a second, Moonie.”
I wanted him to put his arm back around me but he did not. He had left me, at least for the moment. He was always leaving and then coming back to me. I scooted closer to him and put my head on his shoulder, and hoped my hair felt nice on his neck, and that the scent of it would drift up to his nose.
I turned my head to the TV. It was one of those make-over shows: extreme, incredible, outrageous. People were always getting new body parts, or moving them around from one end of their body to the other. Injections of flesh, or sometimes there was a giant sucking sound.
The show host appeared. It was Rio DeCarlo, in a bathing suit. She stretched her hands in the air and her whole body stretched with her, her suctioned stomach, her poked-out ribs, the low tide of flesh on her hips. She welcomed us to the show.
“I used to have such a boner for Rio DeCarlo,” said Thomas. “Look at her now. Ain’t nothing real on her. I like my woman all natural, thank you very much.”
That was right, he did not even like it when I wore makeup. “Stay real,” he always said to me.
“I guess she got old,” he said. He put his head on his hand and puffed his lower lip out under his upper lip.
“She is not even that old,” I said.
There was a shot of a man lying in bed in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, above the covers, arms above his head. He was a little older than Thomas and me, and he looked sad. He had pretty green eyes with long eyelashes, and his hair was cut short, not even an inch above his scalp, like he was ready to go off to war. “I have a lot to offer a woman,” he said. “But I’m still missing the most important thing.” He unfolded his hands and one traveled down to his boxers. He lifted up the waistband and peered down his shorts. “Yup,” he said. The screen froze him. He was captured forever looking down his shorts sadly, and then Rio’s voice came on: “Today Larry Stoneman will be having penile enlargement surgery.”
Thomas’s jaw dropped. “Moonie—” He pointed at the screen. “Moonie, watch.”
“I’m watching,” I said. I pulled away from him, just a scootch, but I hoped he noticed.
“The wonders of modern technology,” he said, and I could tell he was truly amazed. “This is it. This is what I need. This is me.”