by Tom Perrotta
“It was a step,” Larry said cheerfully. “A really good first step. Now we just gotta keep up the pressure.”
Todd rolled down his window as soon as Larry started the engine, but it didn’t do much good.
“I hate to say this, Larry, but something doesn’t smell too good in here.”
“No kidding,” Larry replied.
“I checked my shoes,” said Todd. “It’s not me.”
“It’s not me, either,” Larry assured him. “It’s that bag of dog shit I got in the back.”
On the way home from practice, Larry took the usual detour to Blueberry Court. A week ago he’d spray-painted Child Molester in Day-Glo letters on the McGorvey’s driveway. The week before that he’d planted himself in the middle of the front lawn and lobbed a dozen eggs at the house, including two that exploded against the picture window. Todd had sat in the van both times—Larry didn’t ask him to join him in the dirty work—watching the vandalism in silent disapproval. It reminded him of his fraternity days, when his Deke brothers would pull stupid pranks in his presence without expecting him to participate or even approve. It just seemed important to them that he provide an audience while they Krazy-glued a flowerpot to a dog’s head or threw darts at a drunk guy’s ass.
Todd didn’t have to be here, he understood that. He could have walked home, or driven himself back and forth from practice. But instead he continued on as Larry’s passenger and supposedly reluctant sidekick. Sometimes he told himself that he was keeping an eye on his teammate, making sure he didn’t do anything really crazy. Other times he wondered if he wasn’t just a coward, if his real feelings toward Larry involved a little more admiration than he wanted to admit.
“Could you grab that bag for me?” Larry asked. “It’s on the floor behind you.”
The dog shit was in a plastic supermarket bag, knotted at the top. It felt bottom heavy, overfilled, like a sack full of mud.
“Jesus, Larry. This thing weighs a ton.”
“I got a friend at the Humane Society. There’s some lighter fluid in the glove compartment.”
Larry didn’t hurry, didn’t act like a man on a furtive or illegal mission. He walked up to McGorvey’s front stoop like a mail carrier making a delivery. He dropped the sack, calmly doused it with lighter fluid, and then set in on fire with a match. He sprayed a little more fluid on the bag for insurance—the flames spiking and subsiding, just like on a barbecue grill—and then rang the doorbell several times before walking back to the van and climbing inside. They stayed right where they were, watching from the curb as the front door swung open.
It wasn’t McGorvey, though, who appeared in the doorway, illuminated by the dying, but still noxious, flames. It was an old woman in a nightgown, holding a coffee cup in one hand. She stood there for a couple of seconds, taking stock of the situation, and then calmly shut the door, as if a shit fire on your welcome mat was just something you had to live with, something that happened every day.
Part Two
Madame Bovary
Sex Log
RICHARD WAS PAST THE GUILT. EVEN THE EXCITEMENT—THE aching indecision and wild anticipation of the past few weeks—had pretty much run its course. What was left, now that he’d taken what only a short time ago had seemed like an unimaginable step, was a calm sense of detachment, as if he were watching himself from a great distance, wondering if there was any chance he could stop before he did something he might regret.
But he also knew that it was beyond his power to stop, now that he’d come this far. Besides, if there was one thing life had taught him, it was that it was ridiculous to be at war with your own desires. You always lost in the end, so the interlude of struggle never amounted to anything but so much wasted time. It was much more efficient to give in right away, make your mistakes, and get on with the rest of your life.
The irony, of course, was that he had so strenuously resisted his own inclinations in the present case. He’d agonized over his decision for weeks, mainly because he couldn’t accept the reality of his desires. Day after day he’d laughed at himself, and said, You don’t want this. You can’t want this. You’re not the kind of creep who orders a pair of used panties over the Internet.
He was a married man, after all. If he wanted to get his hands on a pair of unwashed panties, he didn’t have to look any farther than the bathroom hamper. But the panties within easy reach held no erotic interest for him whatsoever. They were just his wife’s dirty underwear. The thong he’d received in the mail that afternoon—a wisp of white silk decorated with lime green polka dots, to be exact—was a different sort of garment, worn by a different sort of woman, and Richard could not have found it more fascinating.
At the moment, the thong was still enclosed in a Ziploc freezer bag—he was unaccountably delighted by this odd domestic touch—the kind that had a white bar running beneath the seal. On this bar, where the user was meant to identify the food in the bag and the date it was frozen, was the following message, written in big, flirty cursive: “Worn by Slutty Kay, 6/02/01. Enjoy!!!” Inside, along with his purchase, was an envelope containing a photo of Slutty Kay wearing the thong, and a detailed log of her sexual activity for the day on which she’d worn it. Richard knew all this without opening the bag or the envelope; he’d had a long e-mail correspondence with Kay before placing his order, and she’d walked him step by step through the process. The only thing she hadn’t told him was the thing that couldn’t be put into words, the mystery that was about to be revealed to him.
He could easily imagine what people would say if they could see him now: exactly the same thing they’d say if someone had told them that Ray from work was a transvestite or that Ted from next door had anonymous gay sex at highway rest stops. They’d shake their heads with the standard combination of amusement, pity, and smug superiority, and say, Ha-ha-ha, poor Ray. Ho-ho-ho, poor Ted. At least I’m not like that. But we want what we want, Richard thought, and there’s not much we can do about it.
He took one last glance at his computer screen. In a rectangular box that took up a little less than half of the available space, was one of his favorite images of Slutty Kay. She was sitting naked in front of her own computer—if you looked closely you could see that the picture on her screen was identical to the one on yours—and smiling over her shoulder with that look of friendly complicity that always undid him. Hey, she seemed to be saying, isn’t this fun? Richard’s hands, he was pleased to note, were almost completely steady as he peeled open the bag and pressed his face into the aperture.
He had stumbled upon sluttykay.com nearly two years earlier, while doing research for a client. Richard worked for a consulting firm that specialized in marketing and branding—his own area of expertise was in company and product names—and was trying to devise a clever take on “Y2K,” a phrase that had worn out its welcome well before the arrival of the new millennium. In the course of compiling a list of domain names that utilized some combination of the three constituent parts, he found himself staring at a digital photo of a woman, neither particularly young nor particularly beautiful, standing on the beach at sunset, her back to the ocean. With her hair scraped back and her long, almost horsey face, she might not have even seemed sexy, except for the fact that she was lifting her tank top to flash her decidedly natural and—or so he thought at the time—none-too-fetching breasts. Hi, said the caption, bright pink letters on a pale blue background, I’m Slutty Kay, a 36-year-old married bisexual exhibitionist actively pursuing a swinging lifestyle. To read more about me and the unique ways I’ve chose to explore my God-given sexuality, Click Here.
Richard was at work at the time, his office door wide-open, lots of activity in the hallway, but he clicked on the link anyway. There was something in Kay’s voice, some combination of the brazen (calling herself “slutty”) and the banal (“actively pursuing a swinging lifestyle” “my God-given sexuality”) that threw him into a state of high alert. In some dim intuitive way, he sensed the presence of a real, possibl
y somewhat confused person speaking directly to him. It couldn’t have been more different from the boilerplate you came across at most porn sites, greedy male businessmen speaking through the mouths of young women with big fake tits: “Hi, I’m Amanda, and I love to suck cock!”
On the “Read More About Me” page, Richard found a series of questions and answers from Kay, the terseness of which reminded him of the catechism he’d had to memorize some thirty-odd years ago, back when he’d made his confirmation.
Q: Are you married?
A: Yes.
Q: Does your husband approve of your lifestyle?
A: Absolutely. He’s a swinger, too, but not bi (sorry, guys!).
Q: Is this your only job?
A: No, I’m a corporate professional with advanced technical and business degrees.
Q: Are you worried that your business associates will see this web site?
A: What I do on my own time (and on this web site) is my own business and has no connection whatsoever with my professional life.
Q: What kinds of sex do you like?
A: All kinds! Straight, bi, group, phone, solo. I also like integrating toys, vegetables, and household objects (bottles, utensils, etc.) into my sex play.
Q: Are you doing this for fun or money?
A: Both! Isn’t that the American Dream?
He was halfway through this catechism when Ray knocked on his door, taking orders for a lunch run. Casually, but with great haste, Richard banished Slutty Kay from his screen, told Ray that he’d like a small chicken caesar, and reentered the flow of an ordinary day. He didn’t think about Kay or revisit her web site for several months, but a seed had been planted in his brain. She was out there, and he knew where to find her.
Like a lot of men, Richard was of two minds on the subject of pornography. Part of him was a responsible adult who disapproved on moral grounds and understood quite clearly that the porn industry exploited and violated young women, and part of him was a horny teenager who just thought it was incredibly cool to see pictures of naked ladies doing crazy stuff.
After his first marriage collapsed, Richard had gone through a period when he was more or less addicted to pornographic videos. Alone at night in his grim little townhouse, he’d jam Dirty Debutantes 3 into his VCR the way someone else might pop a bag of Orville Redenbacher’s into the microwave. Hours upon hours of his life were devoted to the activity of watching people he didn’t know have sex. He was a fan, fully capable of conducting an intelligent water cooler conversation on the respective ouevres of Nina Hartley and Heather Hunter, had he known anyone who would’ve been interested in hearing his opinions.
At some point he just got tired of it—the sameness of the acts, the histrionic moaning, the god-awful music. What am I doing? he asked himself. Is this why I was put on the earth? Fueled by a sudden burst of moral fervor, he tossed all his tapes into a garbage bag, drove to a construction site a few blocks away, and flung the bag into a Dumpster. This act of self-purifying rebellion left him feeling righteous and exhilarated.
A period of unusual physical and mental health ensued. Richard joined a gym, took some yoga classes, started reading books again. No longer distracted by the fantasy women on his TV screen, he began paying closer attention to the flesh-and-blood women he encountered as he went about his day, including the sullen, but obviously very intelligent young woman who took his orders at Starbucks, and who, to his amazement, agreed to go out with him the very first time he asked.
Lately, though, Slutty Kay had become a problem. He thought about her far too often, and visited her web site several times a day. He was neglecting his work and his family, and staying up until ungodly hours composing lyrical e-mails in her honor that he couldn’t quite bring himself to send. It was as if he were back in high school, pining after some girl in chemistry class, knowing he’d never find the nerve to talk to her. Only this time he didn’t have to go to the trouble of fabricating his own fantasies. They were all right there for him on his computer screen, thumbnailed and neatly archived.
Some of Kay’s practices struck him as bizarre, even off-putting (she had a thing about kitchen utensils, spatulas, barbecue forks, and the like), and some were inexplicable (dressing up like a little girl and playing with balloons), but who was Richard to judge? She traveled to national parks and sites of historical interest—the Redwood Forest, Civil War battlegrounds—where she would invariably be photographed in front of some monument or marker, sans underwear, with her skirt hiked up to her waist. She had a vast collection of sex toys and used them in every possible permutation. The web site contained literally thousands of still photos of Kay alone and with various admirers, including a voluminous series memorializing a “hot tub encounter” she had with eight male members of the Slutty Kay Fan Club. The youngest guy looked like he’d just finished final exams; the oldest looked like he’d slipped out of the nursing home for the day. Kay didn’t mind; she took care of everyone with the same no-nonsense air of friendliness and good cheer that made her seem so paradoxically wholesome, as if she were convinced that being a slut and being a really nice person were just two things that naturally went together.
The niceness—it verged on a kind of innocence, Richard thought—just radiated from her face. When people were mean or selfish you could see it even when they smiled. By the same token, Kay’s sweet nature was unmistakable, even when she was performing unspeakable acts with a champagne bottle. She just did what she wanted, sharing her pleasure with the world without shame or apology. Richard wished he’d attained her level of moral and intellectual clarity; it would have saved him a lot of mistakes and would have kept his face from looking so tense and furtive all the time. If he’d been more honest, he would have had a smile like Kay’s, joyful, self-assured, and full of kindness.
But as close as he sometimes felt to her—as much as he believed that he knew her—he could never get past the uncomfortable fact that she existed for him solely as a digital image. He’d never heard her voice, never touched her skin, never made her laugh. The more he dwelled upon this inequality, the less satisfied he was by her pictures. Sometimes he’d have to click through dozens or even hundreds of images before finding one that brought him to the state of arousal that a single picture used to inspire. It had gotten to the point where she was just taking up too much of his time.
The panties were an attempt to solve this problem. He thought they might provide a connection to the actual woman and her physical body, liberating him from the sanitized stillness of a photograph. Maybe a sniff or two would hurry things along, so he could get back downstairs to his real life, where his wife and daughter were waiting for him, their impatience increasing by the minute.
Though it had lasted for almost twenty years, Richard’s first marriage had been wrong from the start, based as it was on a serious misunderstanding. Peggy had become pregnant during their final semester of college—this was in 1975, two years after Roe v. Wade—but they’d decided, in a fit of self-defeating undergraduate bravado, to do “the difficult and honorable thing rather than the shameful, easy one.” Actually, this was Peggy’s formulation; Richard just wanted her to get an abortion, though he never quite got around to stating this preference in so many words.
His silence and passivity in the face of an event that so profoundly transformed his life was something that still baffled him. He didn’t love Peggy, didn’t want to become a father. And yet he married her and accepted the burden of parenthood without a squeak of protest. To make matters worse, “the baby” turned out to be twins, a much more difficult and honorable project than even Peggy had bargained for. Their domestic circumstances were so chaotic and relentless for so long that Richard was in his midthirties before he realized how badly he resented his wife and children for imprisoning him in a suburban cage and forcing him onto the hamster wheel of corporate drudgery while his college buddies were off backpacking through Asia and snorting coke in trendy discos with high school girls who looked much older than the
y actually were.
By this point in his life, Richard had a night school MBA and a series of professional triumphs under his belt, mostly in the fast-food sector—The Cheese-Bomb Mini-Pizza© and The Double-Wide Burger© were two of his notable achievements. He traveled a fair amount on business and consoled himself with a string of hotel flings, as well as a long-term affair with a client’s receptionist in Chicago that went sour after he forgot her birthday for the second year in a row. She retaliated with a long, informative letter to Peggy, complete with surprisingly well-written excerpts from her diary.
His daughters were sophomores in high school when this bomb-shell struck; Richard and Peggy agreed to stay together until they graduated. Oddly, those last two years were their happiest as a couple, though they rarely slept in the same bed and kept their social calendars as separate as possible. Something about the expiration date on the marriage made each of them more generous than they’d been in the past—your spouse’s annoying habit becomes a lot less oppressive if you don’t have to imagine putting up with it until the day one of you dies. By the time they split, he’d developed a real affection for her, and still called once or twice a week to see how she was doing.
The envelope in the bag contained not one but three Polaroids of Slutty Kay wearing the polka-dot thong, each of them bearing a scrawled inscription. In the first one (Hi, Richard!), she was standing otherwise naked in front of what must have been her bedroom closet, looking unusually contemplative as she brushed her hair. In the second, she was wearing a sleeveless turquoise minidress and sitting in a car in such a way—open door, one leg in, one leg out—that you got a very clear glimpse of her crotch (Hope this gets you hot!). The trio concluded with a rearview shot of Kay bending over and smiling up at the camera from between her knees (Love and Kisses, S.K.). The enclosed sex log was written in the same girlish cursive on a sheet of plain yellow legal paper: