“Reginald?” her father barked. “You know, Sherry’s husband. Navy man? Prominent teeth? They usually brought a quiche to the neighborhood potlucks.”
“Drawing a blank, Dad. Why?” Curiosity really seemed to want Hazel to reach out and give Diane’s left hooter an inquiring squeeze. She wondered if it would feel like those memory-foam mattresses. If she pressed down firmly, would the shape of her fingertip linger?
“I know you kids don’t like to hear it, but people don’t stop having sex just because they get old.” Suddenly Hazel felt quite lucky that she didn’t remember what Reginald and Sherry looked like. She felt like she’d won something. “So Reginald and Sherry, you know, they’re both retired and fornicating around three in the afternoon on a Tuesday. Suddenly Reginald’s ticker gives out. Now you’ve got to understand the physics of this thing—Reginald’s barrel-chested and hearty. Sherry’s an osteoporotic twig. He collapses on top of her and she’s trapped beneath her husband’s corpse. Feels like she’s being suffocated, can’t move. It was like that for over a day. Finally, their son comes over. Because he’s a good son and calls every day and she wasn’t picking up the phone.”
“I’m not good on the phone, Dad!” Hazel interrupted. “And if you’re telling this story to inspire me to call more, I’m not sure this particular narrative’s prize of getting to be the one to roll your dead nude parent off your live nude parent is the penultimate carrot to dangle, in terms of incentive.” For the moment, she decided to refrain from adding that there would be no more calling at all now since she no longer owned a phone.
“It wasn’t an indictment. Though I do sometimes think of the many weeks my corpse would have to abide, should I die suddenly, before you’d get a whim to drop by again; just telling the story though. Anyhow, this kind of thing gets into your subconscious. Every date I went on that was there in my head—I’m thinking, ‘This lady is way too nice for me to die on top of. She doesn’t deserve that.’ But Diane here . . . I can die on top of Diane all I want.”
Hazel noticed the conversation was failing to lead into a natural segue about how she’d just ended her marriage. She opened another beer.
“All bets are off,” he continued. “I don’t have to hold back! Of all the ways to go, isn’t extinction via sex the best you can think of? Let me tell you something about monitoring your heart rate while you’re trying to jerk off: it’s for the birds.”
“Are you saying you’re trying to commit suicide using Diane?” she asked. Hazel began to look at the five-foot four-inch silicone princess a little differently now: Penthouse pet from the waist up, Dr. Kevorkian from the waist down. Although the robe had fallen to Diane’s waist, her greater mysteries were not visible. “Do these things come with pubes?”
“None of your business,” her father snapped. “But yes. And I’m not saying I’m intending to die via intercourse. I’m just saying that I’m going to die, and I’d like to have intercourse many, many, many times before I go, and if that happens to be my chariot out of the natural world, I think that would not be the worst ride to hitch.”
“Okay, Dad.” Hazel eyed the remaining beers.
“Go ahead, they’re yours. I’m already high on simulated lovemaking. Diane exceeded my wildest expectations. I wasn’t hoping that it would feel great; I just wanted it to not feel painful—I was worried there’d be, you know, an irritating seam maybe, or that her hair would have a strong manufactured plastic odor, to the point of it seeming like I was undergoing some kind of aversion therapy. Boy was I an idiot. She smells like a new car!”
“I guess that’s fitting, seeing that you traded in your old one.”
Hazel noticed her father eyeing her empties, his fingers going up into the air one by one, counting. “You’re sure thirsty tonight, Haze. Have I noticed before how quickly you drink?”
Her father wasn’t the type who liked to feel encroached upon; Hazel knew she needed to make it seem like her moving in was at least half his idea so that he’d feel okay about it. “Well, I’m glad you’re set in terms of romantic love,” she began. “Speaking of people who might notice if you died though—as in someone who would be in a position to realize your passing on the very day that it occurred—do you ever think a roommate might be nice? Some supplemental human companionship for playing cards, conversing, shooting the breeze?”
Her father let out a hard laugh that caused Diane to plunge sharply forward. Hazel was shocked to find her own arms extending out with worry—she felt instinctually moved to catch the doll and make sure it didn’t fall.
“Are you loony? Living alone is the greatest thing that ever happened to me! And now that I’ve got Diane, that takes it to a whole new level. We can have candlelight dinners naked. I can use her abdomen as a plate! That is something I’ve never done that I will not mind doing—eating a ham sandwich off the chest of a beautiful woman.” He stared once more at Diane’s breasts, his brow crumpled with admiring scrutiny. “She’s a goddamn miracle. What’s the saying? ‘Today is the first day of the rest of my life.’”
“A miracle,” Hazel mused. In a way, the crate on the floor did resemble an opened tomb, Diane a modern-day Lazarus delivered from stasis to take her place amongst the living.
It was then that her father saw it. He twisted uncomfortably in the seat of his Rascal, his movement pushing Diane’s extended arm slightly to the left and into the horn, which gave a resonant, protracted toot.
“Hazel?” he asked. “What’s with the suitcase?”
2
“YOU’RE LEAVING BYRON?” HER FATHER HAD BEEN REPEATING THIS for over a minute. When outraged, his voice became a mythic roar, to the extent that it seemed odd he wasn’t holding a trident. He suddenly looked naked without one. “But Byron’s a genius! Every time I leave the house, all I see are Gogol products!” This statement was almost a whine, high-pitched, with a hysteria that made Hazel think of overzealous infomercial entrepreneurs. She remembered one disturbing commercial where a man with a machete was chopping up a mattress, or trying to, while screaming, Pick up the phone! Pick up the phone! But she couldn’t recall if it was the knife being sold or the mattress. Was he cutting the bed to show how effective the knife was? Or the mattress’s layers? Or was it a kind of guilt-inducing sales tactic: we won’t stop harming beds until enough of you phone in an order?
“I understand it’s surprising news,” Hazel said. Her father had placed a protective arm around Diane’s waist and drawn her in close: his posture suggested that Hazel was not so much his daughter in an hour of need as a hopeful suitor who’d been flirting with his girlfriend at the bar and was being told to back off or agree to a fistfight.