“Just ask!” Wendy suddenly shouts, and Paul flinches.
“Okay, o-kay,” he says, and drops the blade of grass—now just a frayed mess of angry green knots. “What would you do if Hank came to you and … and proposed that, maybe, just as some sort of, like, experiment or something, you guys try to have a … like, a guest star in the bedroom once in a while? Not anyone with a recurring role—that’s not what I mean. Not like when Lisa Kudrow played Phoebe’s twin once in a while on Friends. That’s not what I’m talking about. More like when—”
“Paul.”
“Yes?”
“I’m standing in garbage. I am literally standing in garbage.”
“Okay? I mean, yes, of course, I know you are, and I’m very proud that you are, and—”
Wendy shakes her head, slowly. Her white Carol Brady cut doesn’t move an inch. “I’m literally standing in garbage and you’re speaking in metaphor.”
Paul scratches behind his ear. He shifts how he’s sitting, uncrossing his legs and then crossing them again. His ass is wet; the seat of his pants sticks to his skin.
“I guess I see what you’re saying,” he mumbles. A spot of brightness burns on the back of his neck, and he feels his cheeks flush red. He says: “What would you do if Hank told you he wanted to start having threesomes?”
“No one would want to have a threesome with Hank and me. My tits—which, incidentally, were nowhere to be found when I actually could’ve used them—sag around my ankles, and Hank’s got liver spots on his pecker. Anyone who saw us naked would run in terror.”
A solid point, Paul concedes. This whole time he’d been wondering what would happen if he and Mark woke up with some John Doe sandwiched between them, but he’d never considered the fact that John Doe might not even want to be sandwiched between them to begin with.
“But let’s just pretend for a second that they did,” he says. “Let’s pretend that you’ve got a horde of men lining up—”
“Are they good looking?”
“Sure. Yes. They’re good looking.”
“How good looking?”
“Very good looking. Now let me finish. Let’s say you’ve got a horde of very good-looking men lining up to have sex with you. Would you … I don’t know, would you want to sleep with a few of them? Under the pretext, of course, that it was sex and absolutely nothing more, and that it in no way was going to threaten your emotional relationship with Hank. I mean, would you … ask him for permission to, you know, do it?”
Wendy thinks. For once her face is flushed free of the clicking jaw and twitching eyes and other anxious tics that have controlled her features since climbing into the can. A small success, Paul thinks.
“Of course I would,” Wendy says. “And anyone who says that she wouldn’t is trying to sell you something.”
Another plane arcs across the sky, and its contrail bleeds into the last remnants of the clouds.
Paul asks, “Now, what if the tables were turned? What if Hank had a line of gorgeous women wanting to sleep with him, and he came and asked you for a get-out-of-jail-free card?”
Wendy swats at a fly that’s circling her nose; she grips both sides of the trash can to steady herself.
“Who says that he hasn’t?” she says.
She looks uncomfortable, Paul thinks, and it’s got nothing to do with the trash can.
He asks, “What’d you do?”
“I slapped him,” she says. “And then I told him he was lucky I hadn’t kicked him in the balls, and that if he asked me again, he’d better start looking for a divorce attorney.”
“You sound like you regret that.”
“Maybe I do? I don’t know. I’m a jealous bitch, Paul. I really am. But then I think to myself, a lot of women would have done the same thing, right? More than that—a lot of people would have done the same thing.” She clicks her jaw and says, “So, what, Mark’s asking you to spice things up?”
“I never said that.”
“You’re an awful liar.”
She peers down into the trash can and says: “Relationships are awful. They’ll kill you, right up to the point where they start saving your life.”
Paul reaches for another tuft of grass. He scours his brain for some winning response—a gem of wisdom that will complicate and trump Wendy’s—but nothing comes to mind. Instead, the alarm on his phone starts singing: a digitized Bach cantata that Mark downloaded for him, and that he hardly ever recognizes.
“Twenty minutes is up,” he says, looking away from his watch and standing up. Blood rushes to his head. A wave of dizziness washes over him. “You’re done for the day.”
Wendy’s shoulders fall away from her ears, and her chest deflates, like some balloon that’s been lodged just above her heart has finally burst.
“Give me a hand getting out of here, would you?”
She wipes both palms against her khakis, then reaches a hand out for Paul. He takes it, wrapping his fingers around hers to help her balance, and she carefully steps out of the trash can and onto the grass. They both stare down at her feet. Oil-soaked basil coats three of her toes, and her ankles are caked in what looks like vodka sauce. Three worms of spaghetti orbit her left calf.
Wendy stares down at the mess and paws her soles against the grass. Paul moves a wiry strand of hair away from her eyes, then leans over and quickly kisses her cheek.
“What was that for?” she asks. She’s still hoofing her feet against the ground, trying to wipe them clean.
“I don’t know,” Paul says.
Behind him, Paul hears the smooth swoosh of the clinic’s electronic door sliding open. Then, a voice Paul recognizes calls his name. He cringes as he hears it beckon him inside.
*