Tampa

by Alissa Nutting

  When Buck returned from the call, I was stepping into a pair of shiny beige heels. “Dressing up for dinner.” Buck smiled.

  “I really should probably be going,” I tried, playing the traditional-wife card. “I need to get supper on for my husband.”

  In the area of my estrangement from Ford only, Buck did seem to have an oddly intuitive streak. “He’s waiting on you right now?” he asked. There was an air of conquest in his tone; he knew, somehow, that Ford was not waiting.

  “Not right now, no,” I conceded. “He works pretty late.” Buck’s face lit up like a winning pinball machine. He seemed to think the sole determining factor in whether or not I’d have an affair with him was Ford’s schedule.

  Jack mechanically set the table as Buck droned on about work—the large number of people he supervised, the fire alarm malfunction that had ended their training night early. Not once did his words slow in order to ponder the extended amount of tutoring Jack and I might have accomplished, all without his ever knowing, had this accident at work not occurred. He also spoke openly of lavish vacations he’d taken past girlfriends on and his knowledge of where to buy jewelry, insinuating that if I hooked up with him there could be a nice bracelet in my future. “You want some of the best emeralds you’ve ever seen?” he asked coyly. “Get off at St. Thomas on a Caribbean cruise.” It was hard not to laugh. Sure, Buck seemed a comfortable level of middle-class, but dating him in exchange for gifts wouldn’t qualify as gold-digging; it would be more like panning for nuggets.

  I sat across the table from Jack during dinner, loving the way he shunned chopsticks in favor of a fork, as though sex had made him so hungry he couldn’t bother with anything that compromised his ability to shovel food in his mouth. At one point I took my foot out of my shoe and ran it up his leg, rubbing front to back again and again along his crotch while Buck spoke of upcoming concerts that his company could get box-seat tickets to. Watching Jack eat made the conversation bearable; his lips became visibly flavored with oil and sauce, and I delighted in the torture of knowing just what they tasted like by eating the food. By the time Buck asked if I could stay for dessert, though, my patience had been sufficiently used up.

  “No thank you,” I said. “I have to watch my figure.”

  “Self-control.” He smiled. “I like that in a woman. Outside of the bedroom I mean.” The three of us stood there for a moment, paralyzed by the awkwardness of this remark, then Buck tried to come in for a good-bye hug. I managed to trap one of his stumpy hands and shake it thoroughly instead.

  “I would really love to see you again,” he said.

  “Thank you for a lovely evening.” They were the only polite words I could manage.

  I had a near-giddy sense of optimism afterward, knowing that if Buck ever came home earlier than expected, all would be well as long as Jack could make it to the table with a notebook and a pair of shorts on.

  But Jack wanted even more freedom than this. That Friday, at Jack’s insistence, I took him to a drive-in movie. We went all the way out to Clearwater, about an hour away. I insisted we both wear party-store wigs since I’d have to roll the window down and be seen in order to buy a ticket. My faux hair was a short red bob, Jack’s a shaggy blond mop that might have accompanied a surfer costume. “It’s like we’re going to rob a bank,” he joked, putting his on.

  We watched the film casually, his hand resting against my bare crotch with two fingers blithely inserted, my own fingers gripping the base of his penis, our limbs irregularly coming alive with motion, then hanging in stasis to watch one of the more interesting moments of a scene. “You know my dad keeps asking me to get your number for him,” he finally mentioned.

  “I feel for you. That guy is a boob.” The movie centered on the quarterback rivalry between two opposing high school football teams; disappointingly, the youngest actor in the film still appeared to be at least twenty-six. Yet the sentiment lodged in one of the pregame locker-room speeches nearly moved me to tears. We’re high school seniors, the lead actor gushed. Due to the passion in his voice, I was able to momentarily suspend disbelief and think of him as an eighteen-year-old despite having seen in the tabloids that he’d recently cheated on his wife with their children’s nanny and fathered a set of illegitimate twins. Tonight is all we have. This is the night we’re going to dream about for the rest of our lives. Some of us aren’t ever going to make it out of this town, but for the next two hours we can go out on that field and feel immortal! It’s true, I thought; the adult world has so much less to offer than adolescence does. It seemed to me that the happiest possible ending to the movie would be both teams playing impeccably and tying at the end of the fourth quarter, then the entire stadium being blown up by terrorists and their young lives ending on a high.

  Jack turned to me, a sudden excitement making his words sound jumpy. “So I think I know a way that you can be at the house a lot more and it won’t matter if you’re there when my dad comes home,” he said. “You just have to lead him on a little. All of my dad’s past girlfriends have had keys to our house. They’d come over even when he wasn’t there and lay out by the pool or whatever. Bring groceries over and make dinner so it would be ready by the time he walked in the door—that kind of stuff. If you pretend to date him, you could come over all the time.”

  My hands fell away from his penis, suddenly unsure of everything about Jack. “You want me to sleep with your dad?”

  “No!” Jack looked at me like I was completely insane. “God, are you kidding me?”

  “Well adults don’t usually date without having sex, Jack. It’s just the way things work. I’m sorry to break it to you, but those women coming over to cook for him were most certainly putting themselves on the menu too.”

  “Ewww!” he screamed, cupping his hands over his ears. “Stop saying gross things. I know they were, I get that. I’m not saying you actually date. Just tell him you want to get to know him better or something.”

  The thought of Buck’s frontal-scalp hair plugs rubbing against my skin made my toes curl inside my shoes. “It’s a slippery slope, Jack.”

  “You just pretend to be a little interested. Then if he gets home early and you’re there, he’ll think you came over to see him. You could even stop by on weekends and stuff.”

  On-screen, a tubby linebacker with a heart of gold took a concussion-inducing hit to protect the quarterback. The camera zoomed forward to follow the trajectory of the bite guard, expelled from the linebacker’s mouth on impact, as it soared over a pileup of bodies and landed across the end zone with a poignant bounce. “Jack,” I pointed out, “he’s not interested in simply eating pot roast and watching Jeopardy! He’ll start wanting more and more.”

  I thought of Buck’s shining red face mid-proposition, the way his flushed cheeks would gleam like griddled ham. “Eventually I’ll have to either reject him or give in.”

  Of course what Jack didn’t know was just how temporary our own relationship was going to be. As I argued, I began to realize that several months from now, when Buck would likely reach his sexually frustrated breaking point, Jack would probably be due to hit a growth spurt—I’d need to be waning away from both of them anyhow. Buck could prove to be a perfect excuse to begin going over to see Jack less and less, and eventually I might be able to play the conflicted-conscience card with Jack: how I’d wronged them both and needed some time to soul-search, that my pretend relationship with Buck had made me realize Jack needed to be a normal kid and bound into high school without the heavy tethers of an adult love affair.

  Jack was still trying to solve the puzzle I’d set before him of how I could engage Buck without the flirtation becoming physical. “I think if you just keep telling him you need more time or whatever, he’d go along with that. Say he’s totally free to date other people and stuff. I know he likes going to the strip clubs. He’s sick; sometimes he’ll get a lap dance, then come home and tell me about it.”

  “That is very, very nauseating.” Jack smile
d; illuminated by the movie screen, his expression caused a series of micro-wrinkles to form at the corners of his eyes. Perhaps he wouldn’t be opposed to starting a preventative regimen of retinol? Surely I could gently convince him of its benefits.

  “I know he’s disgusting. But I mean, you’re so much hotter and younger than anyone he’s ever dated. I think you could string him along for a super-long time. At least until I can drive and have a later curfew. Think about it—you’ll be able to come over whenever you want.”

  The thought of unbridled access made my crotch seize up in a robust squeeze. I realized I’d be able to go over in the early hours and peek in on Jack, perhaps catch him with bedhead and a sleep erection and wake him up by putting his penis into the warmth of my mouth. This image was more than enough to let greed cloud my judgment.

  “I guess we can give it a try,” I agreed. “But tell him he can’t call me, ever, so there’s no point in giving him my number. My husband’s a cop, and he’s the jealous sort. We can’t be too careful.” I didn’t clarify to Jack whether or not the cop detail and the jealous detail were true, and oddly, he didn’t ask. I suppose in the same way I wanted the details of Jack’s future to remain vague and blurry in my mind, he wasn’t looking to cement the particulars of my home life. It could work, I figured. I’d explain to Buck that I’d never had an affair and probably never could. That I wasn’t looking for anything physical and he needed to understand that. I was simply looking for a friend. And of course I’d mention he was free to date and sleep with whomever he wanted. Dating wasn’t what he and I were doing, I’d explain—I was just getting some space from my husband.

  One of the teams in the movie scored a touchdown; cannons filled with school-spirit-colored confetti shot into the air as football players ran to cheerleaders for congratulatory kisses. Jack slurped the last dregs of his cola through his straw.

  “This is going to be so cool.” He smiled and gripped my hand in a way that I can only describe as juvenile—like we were at the fair and he wanted me to follow him over to the Ferris wheel.

  chapter ten

  Not having to worry about being in the house when Buck came home meant more time for play—in the kitchen there were food games where Jack, keeping his eyes closed, sampled dollops of salad dressing off my chest and had to guess at the flavor, getting a hearty spank with a wooden spoon when he was wrong; in the living room we’d often play a soft-core movie from one of the racier on-demand cable channels on the big-screen TV while copulating atop Buck’s electric reclining chair, operating the control switch so that it slowly shifted positions the entire time like we were riding on the back of a somnambulant horse. Although I worried the increased contact was making Jack grow too needy—he’d begun to call any time Buck stepped out, even for a moment to return a DVD—the variety and frequency the arrangement added to our exploits made it hard to turn back from, even at its lowest moments, when I didn’t make it out of the house before Buck arrived home and I had to pretend I’d dropped by for a visit. To my surprise, Buck actually was simply entertained—fine with watching a few television programs together and then accepting my exit. He required only an extended hug upon departure that often morphed into a quasi-grope, his hand squeezing the flesh of my upper buttock with the probing tenacity of a fruit inspector. Occasionally as we untangled he’d plant a wet kiss against my jawline and audibly inhale the fragrance of my hair.

  But the moments before he came home made this suffering worth it—times when Jack would urgently call and I’d open the door to find him sitting on the couch waiting for me, naked and erect, wearing the baseball cap I liked (its Little League vibe made him look just a shade younger). Sometimes we knew we had only minutes alone and there was a harried and apocalyptic violence in the way we went for each other—our joined bodies slamming into the wall, quaking with a fortune of pleasure that we had just seconds to spend. I began to dress for efficiency—skirts that could be lifted, shirts that could be slipped overhead, never any panties.

  It was an optimal situation, save for the additional ripples it made at home. I now saw Buck enough that he drained the reserves of patient energy I had used to spend tolerating Ford. Evenings when Ford returned home from work and came into the bedroom wanting an inspired quickie inevitably led to hurt feelings—I encouraged him to look at pictures online, to buy videos. “Teaching all day takes everything I’ve got,” I complained; “it exhausts me wholly.” But Ford’s appetite was for real flesh and he’d insist that at the very least I let him look at me naked while he pleasured himself; this led to offensive scenes of Ford’s face in the dim-lit shadows, his jaw fixed as tightly and aggressively as an assassin about to pull a trigger while his body hunched over me panting and dripping sweat.

  Sensing that I was drifting even further away from him, Ford’s mind went into overdrive. He’d recently tried to get the baby conversation going again—he wanted us to go to a fertility doctor, get the ball rolling. “If we ever have a child, it’ll be through adoption,” I stressed, trying to play to both his vanity and my own. “You didn’t marry me for my stretch marks.” I had no interest in children; even if Ford raised the thing completely by himself and we trained it not to talk to me or interact with me whatsoever, I would surely end up moving out of our home within days of its arrival. There was an impulse of self-protection surrounding the decision as well; I knew if I ever had a son, at a certain age it would be impossible to ignore him, and I never wanted to force that transgression upon myself.

  “You know there are benefits,” he reminded me. It was true—as soon as we became parents, we’d gain additional monthly income from his father’s trust.

  “What, you want more money?” I asked. He shook his head, in a cursory way at first, but then an anger mounted behind his eyes that soon forced him from his chair; he began to pace around the living room, fists closed, chest forward. “I don’t care about the money,” he stated, nearly a growl. “But yeah, I do want more.”

  “More what?” I asked; this was the end of the line, the brink of his rage. His fist sank into the drywall with a loud crack. “More!” he shouted, then stammered incoherently. He opened his hand and beat his palm against the wall several more times before grabbing his jacket and walking out the door—he didn’t take his keys. When he returned three hours later it was raining heavily; his waterlogged sneakers made long sucking noises as he entered the hallway and walked straight to the kitchen phone, leaving a puddled trail. I brought him a towel, which he accepted but did not use. Instead he continued to drip, every inch of him from his hair down to the ends of his soaked jeans, as he called the cable company and ordered three new premium upgrade packages of digital sports channels.

  *

  I ended the fall term assigning Lord of the Flies to read over the holiday. “It’s the perfect Christmas story,” I told them. “Think of these boys when you see news footage of shoppers getting trampled as hordes of consumers race for an on-sale video game console.”

  “Is this book like that TV show Survivor?” Marissa asked. Stained red from candy canes, the students’ tongues appeared to have been dyed by communal blood in a satanic cult ceremony.

  “Sure,” I said, opening the door and practically pushing them out of the classroom. “Happy holidays. Bon voyage.” Of late, Jack had begun to exit the class with a too-cool air: not looking at me, slightly sauntering, effortfully aping casual. But today he gave me a smirk of foretold pleasure—his birthday was over the Christmas holiday, which he mostly had to spend at his mother’s. As a final hurrah before his departure, we were going to make the drive to the Toucan Inn after school as a seedy holiday gift to ourselves. Seeing angel-faced Jack standing nude inside a room normally used for hourly blow jobs and heroin binges struck me as a delicious treat: the juxtaposition would vividly magnify all his boyish qualities.

  I picked him up at dusk behind a gas station; when I pulled in he was wandering to and fro with a small bow-topped box in his hands, as though he was working up
the courage to walk in and propose marriage to the station’s attendant. I wore my red wig and had cash for the hotel desk clerk; if asked for ID, I figured I could simply claim not to have it on me and he wouldn’t refuse the money, but no such ruse was required. “An hour?” he guessed, taking in the faux electric hue of my hair and the oversized sunglasses that eclipsed most of my face. He was smoking behind the counter and watching a reality cop show. The same show’s crew had once visited Ford’s precinct, but no footage of him was chosen. This had deeply interrupted Ford’s sense of entitlement. His friends had already taken to calling him “movie star”—when the Fordless episode aired, he’d turned to me on the sofa and repeated, about twelve times, “Can you believe it?”

  I wouldn’t let Jack touch any of the carpeting or bedding in the room—“You could get crabs just thinking about it,” I told him. Instead I had him take off all his clothes and lie down across the bathroom countertop with his penis hanging down in the sink and his butt positioned directly below the faucet.

  “This is weird,” he said, not judging so much as objectively noticing. He started to set his face down on the counter, then recoiled and placed an arm underneath his cheek. “The counter’s kind of sticky.”

  “You’ll survive.” I turned on the water, watching his cheeks momentarily buckle together, then began to carefully wash his asshole, which made him laugh.

  “Does it tickle?” I asked, pressing the tip of my soapy finger centimeters inside him.

  He nodded and I rinsed and patted him dry before I started giving him his very first rim job. He made no sound or expression, perhaps equally afraid to like it or dislike it, but when I turned him over he was exceptionally hard and it took only seconds of sucking the tip of his penis for him to come down the back of my throat. For a moment he sat very still on the counter, ass in the sink and head back against the mirror, and I wondered for a second if he felt too out of control—too molested perhaps, his orgasms a seeming consent to acts he didn’t fully enjoy. But then he bounded off the counter and grabbed the box he’d brought with him. “Here,” he said, immediately sheepish. “This is for you.” He looked so anxious that for a moment I worried it might indeed be an engagement ring—that somehow he’d gotten a diamond band, or even a cubic zirconia one, figuring it’s the thought that counts—and was about to suggest that we embark upon a four-year engagement to legality. When he opened the box to reveal only a pair of gold hoop earrings, Jack easily misinterpreted my flooding relief as happiness.