I drove slowly and took the back roads on the way home, the dust from the gravel rising in thick clouds behind me in my rearview mirror. Me and my wake. By the time I pulled into our drive, I had sobered up enough that he would never know a thing. Plus I had chewed some gum. Not that he would care if I was drinking, just that he might worry. I hated it when he worried.
When I walked inside the house, the screen door banged behind me loudly and I felt the split of a headache start in my head. The TV was blaring from the living room, and I was not in the mood, so I headed for the bedroom instead to take a nap. If only I had joined my husband on the couch like usual, instead of leaving him alone with his devices, those goddamn remote controls. There were at least a dozen of them, one for the stereo, one for the satellite, three for the TV, one for the video game, one for the DVD, one for the VCR, one for the DVR—and then a bunch more that I did not recognize. There he was, playing with his toy. I could hear the whirl of him channel surfing, and I put a pillow over my head, until I heard “Honey,” loud, and then louder. Then he was standing at the bedroom door, and he said, “Honey, are you sleeping?” He pulled the pillow up from my head and said, “Baby, are you asleep?”
“I was trying,” I said.
“I didn’t know,” he said, and he looked so bashful and silly that I forgave him right away. “Anyway, you should come watch this show with me. That Rio DeCarlo show. Do you remember, we watched it a while back? It’s that guy who had the surgery I want to get. They’re showing what happened to him after the surgery.”
Now it is one he wants to get? Oh boy. I roused myself and he held out his hand and pulled me up from bed and then he led me—dragged me, more like it—to the living room, where the tail end of a diet pill commercial was playing. The “after” version of the woman was beaming on the screen in her old pair of blue jeans, the front of which she stretched out in front of her as if she could not get that part of her past away from her fast and far enough.
Thomas pulled me onto the couch next to him and threw his arm around me. He happily threw his legs up on our coffee table, the new one, bigger and shinier than the last one, though in all other ways, exactly the same. It was as if we had taken our old life and inflated it.
He patted me on the leg and pointed at the screen. “Now watch.”
There was our old friend Rio DeCarlo, lips puffed out like a million bees had stung her. I bet she did not feel a thing, though, not one little prick. Those lips had to be numb already. She was wearing a ball gown that shimmered with glittery red stones and a diamond necklace with a giant heart-shaped stone at the end. She moved her hands up in the air again, then swung around for no reason. I thought about the first movie of hers I saw when I was a kid. She played the spunky teenage daughter of the president of the United States, though she was probably in her twenties by that point. She ran away from home and backpacked across America while the FBI and Secret Service chased after her, and we all rooted for her in the theater to keep on running. It made no sense, we were all happy to go home to our parents at night, but in that theater that day, we could see how there was another way that was possible. There was the chance of freedom. She had freckles then. Now she had a nose sculpted like a pencil, two nostrils sticking out like tiny peanuts.
“One year ago, Larry Stoneman had penile enlargement surgery, adding a grand total of three inches to his penis. . . .” Rio DeCarlo hesitated for a moment, and I thought I saw her crack a smile, but maybe I was just imagining things. And then she added, “When erect.”
There was a shot of Larry holding a ruler and grinning.
“Let’s check in with Larry to see how his surgery has changed his life!”
“For a while I played the field,” Larry said.
There were a few scenes of Larry sitting in a bar that had flashing disco lights in the background. There were women surrounding him, girls with their hair blown out straight. They were all smiling and laughing—they were having the best time ever—and then they all clinked glasses. I looked at my husband’s face and I could see he was impatient. Playing the field was never his thing.
“But finally, I’ve found the girl of my dreams.” There was Larry, with a pretty brunette in a low-cut sweater. Her breasts looked suspiciously like Rio DeCarlo’s breasts, carved out and propped high on her chest. They were holding hands in a café. The sun struck down between them and around them and they both laughed. I reached for Thomas’s hand and squeezed it. It was nice to see Larry happy.
“I can satisfy her needs,” he said. Larry’s girlfriend gave a little thumbs-up sign to the camera, and then winked. “And, boy, does she satisfy mine.” They were on a beach, in bathing suits, embracing and kissing. Larry’s hands were on his girlfriend’s ass, which was clad in a thong. So it was basically Larry’s hands, cupping her bare ass, on national television.
“That could be us, honey,” said Thomas.
“That is us,” I said. “We’re already happy.”