She had been staring at me all day and into the evening. I liked the way her eyes twinkled whenever they just so happened to glance my way. I imagined myself, if it was at all humanly possible, quantum leaping back into my own body, walking up to her at the bar, and inviting her out afterwards, wherever she desired that place to be.
In my fantasy she followed me back to my hotel. We were intoxicated and stumbling flirtatiously down the hallway, and because the lock was tricky she threw her arms around my neck and kissed my lips while I fumbled with the card key. The door opened quite suddenly and we both fell in together, laughing hysterically. A trail of clothing led to the bed. I smiled just imagining what might be transpiring on top of it.
From the darkness of my own bed I preformed yet another imaginative quantum leap to the bar in Chicago. This time, after initiating conversation and inquiring to know her better afterwards, she took my hand, slid an index finger to her mouth as a way to shush me, and led me to the ladies room in the back instead of following me to my hotel room. The sweet little girl bent over the skink, lifted her dress, and encouraged me to take my own imaginative action. But just as quickly as she’d lifted her dress, begging for ejaculation, I was back at Saint Eleanor’s in New Orleans. Only I wasn’t in my hotel room while the bed board pulsated against my skull. I was three feet over on the other side of the wall experiencing the most sensually acrobatic somersaults known to man.
And every time I was lonely.
7
“SEX, SEX, SEX!” Mother was unhappy with the very word. She elevated her voice and flailed her arms whenever she rehearsed its pronunciation. “Everything’s always about SEX these days. Books are about SEX. Movies are about SEX. Music is about SEX. All people talk about is SEX, SEX, SEX!”
I tried to calm her down from our breakfast table at The Friendly Toast. People had begun to stare. But then again, public conversations with my mother typically included at least a stare or two. My grandmother sat in the third chair carefully contemplating the matter.
“Well, I’m sick of it,” Mother continued. “It didn’t used to be that way.”
“Mother,” I said in a hushed voice. “I hate to break the news, but it’s always been about sex. How do you think Cain and Abel were born?”
“When I was a little girl in the fifties, people just did it on occasions. And if they did, they weren’t infatuated by it all the time.”
“Mother, if people weren’t infatuated by it, then why have so many children been born since the beginning of time? There are seven billion people alive on the planet today. That’s a lot of bed banging.”
Mother opened her mouth and let it hang there. It was a wonder that I was born.
“You know what I don’t understand,” my grandmother finally chimed in, “is why the church is so against sex and so totally OK with violence. BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD! It’s everywhere in the movies these days. And meanwhile you’d think the devil came along when God wasn’t looking to slap the man’s thing-a-ma-jig on.”
Mother opened her mouth again.
“Mother,” she said.
“It’s nice to know that my mom and all her siblings came into the world with a thing-a-ma-jig,” I grinned. “Or that the thing-a-ma-jig in question came from Ira Chamberlain.”
“Well, that’s what we called it back then.”
“While the two of you listen to yourselves talk,” Mother scooted her chair out, “I’m going to the restroom. Try not to think about SEX for once. I for one am tired of hearing about it.”
Grandmother waited until mother was out of sight before she lifted her head from the menu. “You know what I’m sick of? It’s the constant violence. BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD! Why are people so obsessed with blood all the time?” She lowered her head to let the subject marinate. “You know what we need more of?”
“What?”
“Love,” she said.
It was a nice thought. There wasn’t enough love in the world these days. I let that thought marinate, humming the Burt Bacharach song as I gazed over my breakfast menu.
“And SEX.” Grandmother finished her sentence.
This time I let my mouth hang open.
8
At Saint Francis, Jesus just hung there on the cross. That’s how you can tell the difference between a Catholic crucifix and Christian cross. Western Evangelicals, as it pertains to God’s penalty for sin, choose to focus on the done deed and the resurrected Christ, Catholics the atoning sacrifice. I liked the imagery of the second image. Seeing the blood drip from his open wounds, the anguish on his face, it moved me. I liked viewing images of the saints too. They reminded me that there were those who had already lived their lives through, struggling daily with the same temptations as me, and at the finish line they could look back and know they lived their tasks as servants well.
“Joshua,” Father Williams parked himself in the pew at my side. The crown of his rounded head was bald, but what remained of his hair was thick and white, and his beard was neatly trimmed. “It’s always a pleasure seeing you at the Saint Francis Parish. What can I do for you?”
“You know I don’t believe one needs to confess to a priest in order to be forgiven,” I told him as a matter of fact.
Father Williams cheeks gleamed. “Yet here you are.”
“Yes, Father. I’ve confessed my sins to God, but I guess I just need to be heard by someone.”
“You don’t feel like God hears you?”
“He hears me, I suppose, sometimes. I don’t know. I hope this isn’t inappropriate, but I’m highly curious to know.”
“Is this a confession or a theological question?” He sagged his bones into the pew.
“Both, I guess.”
“As a priest, I listen to the deepest darkest closeted confessions imaginable. And every time, God forgives. It would be mighty difficult to shock me.”
“In Catholicism, is masturbation a sin?”
Father Williams pulled a long thoughtful breath through his nose. “I have two answers for you. One answer’s longer and the other is shorter. The short of it is…yes.”
“How about a paraphrase of the longer?”
“The Vatican’s answer every time is gonna be yes, and I have to stand by that. But my take on it personally, if I weren’t in this choking clerical collar and silly robe,” he tugged on his clothes and leaned in, “would be to say: inconclusive.”
“My thoughts exactly.” I sighed with relief. “The scriptures have absolutely nothing to say on the subject. You’d think in the fifteen-hundred years it took to write it that….”
“I admit there’s a tension there,” Father Williams interrupted me. “But let’s not avoid the elephant in the room. I’m so very sorry that Elise left you, Joshua. I pray for her, and the two of you, every day. While my wife was dying of cancer, I made a clear-cut decision to live a life of purity as a priest once she was gone. You, my friend, did not. You had the freedom to explore all sorts of sexual expressions in your marriage. Believe me, I’ve been there, and it’s beautiful – as God intended it. But now you have a difficult decision to make. Are you gonna continue exploring sexual expressions without your wife, or will you seek to be pure not just in the flesh, but in your mind?” He prodded at my head with his index finger. “God cares as much about what you do as what circulates within and throughout the imaginations of your soul.”
“You mean lust.”
“Bingo.” Father Williams shot me with his finger. He pointed to the confessional booth. “Care to enter my office and confess it?”
I took him up on his offer.
9
“So tell me about sex addiction.”
“Are you asking for Elise or for yourself?” Barbara said from her therapist chair. Sparky the Therapeutic Schnauzer hugged her bare legs and frowned at me as usual.
I didn’t immediately answer her. “I guess I’m just asking because I’m paying over a hundred dollars an hour to know.”
“There are several symptoms.” Barbara
paused. “Uncontrollable compulsion and obsessive thoughts lead the way. Addicts will frequently seek to engage in sex, spending hours viewing porn online and often with more physical partners than intended, despite its immoral behavior or adverse consequences. Eventually sex addicts will find themselves in an escalating scope or spiraling frequency simply to achieve the desired effect.” She cleared her throat. “In my career, I’ve watched many addicts desire nothing more than to quit. That’s what people simply don’t understand. They want so desperately to quit but find it unbearably difficult to do so.”
As she dug through the individual details of what constituted a sex addict I wasn’t happy with the fact that she somehow described my struggles in every one, even if they were on a minuscule level.
“Would you label Elise a sex addict?”
“I’m not sure if it’s that easy without further dialogue, but at the moment, I’m certainly leaning in that camp.”
“It all stems from her troubled childhood.”
“Precisely. Roughly eighty percent of female sex addicts are untreated sexual abuse victims. They’re simply medicating unresolved pain through the ongoing and seemingly endless pursuit of sexual pleasure, and in the end completely void of its intended gratification.”
“Well, I certainly wasn’t abused as a child.”
“No, you weren’t. But you do struggle with sex, do you not?”
I blushed. “I never said that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“I’ve always remained pure to Elise.”
“Yes, physically, perhaps. But it’s an endless struggle, is it not? The darkness preys on you. I sense a constant need to be loved and validated, both physically and spiritually. You struggle in your relationship with God.”
I didn’t say anything.
“You feel like He doesn’t care to listen when you pray, but if and when He does, He can’t relate to you. He’s bored. You see yourself as the black sheep in the salvation family.”
I didn’t say anything.
“What it all comes down to, I suspect, you’re obsessive traveling and the way you’ve manipulated that lifestyle into receiving the praise you so desperately need from others, is an intimacy issue.” She leaned in. “Tell me about your relationship with your father.”
10
Penny Parker’s pictures of the Boston wedding had arrived, and she’d already uploaded images onto my website. Jay and Stephanie were given their own gallery, but when it came to my website’s opening images, Leah Bishop was no doubt the star. She was the first person to spotlight the screen.
The photograph in question was taken during the ceremony in the dimly lit sanctuary of an orthodox church. A single wax candle illuminated Leah’s face, and by the directional shift of her eyes it was clear, she was staring at me. I returned to her portrait regularly for a couple of hours. Tears filled my eyes. It was haunting.
As I lay in bed that night I tried not to think about Leah Bishop or the possibility of finally seeing her breasts. There was the Seven Wonders of the World to consider as a moral distraction. I couldn’t recall them all. The Great Pyramid of Giza, the Great Wall of China, and Stonehenge were three of them. But my favorite wonder of the entire world, now that I thought about it, was breasts, in all their various fatty shapes and sizes. When it comes to product placement, it’s all about the packaging, and if milk for adults from the paper carton doesn’t come across nearly so exhilarating as milk for babies, it’s because God certainly knew how to bag the perfect seller.
My thoughts drifted back to Leah Bishop and the fact that I’d helped her undress for the shower while simultaneously keeping my eyes closed. I could still taste her throw up in my mouth. The very notion that I could have opened them and seen her fully exposed was thrilling. Why did I have to be such a gentleman? That was my future, the Big Apple, a mighty wonder in itself. I was decidedly a New Yorker. It was where I was really born, now that I thought about it, even if I was a young adult when the towers fell. And I was destined to spend that future with the girl from my high school homeroom. None of this was a coincidence.
Why hadn’t she called me like she’d promised? She’d call. I knew she would. I utilized the next ten to fifteen minutes staring at my phone, waiting for it to ring. I fantasized a number of possible scenarios, including the call she’d make in the morning before I jumped on my flight to JFK. She’d be waiting for me on the other end. Sparks would fly. And perhaps shirts would be removed. Alexander Pope once poetically said hope springs eternal in the human breast. By the time I fell asleep, I was trying to imagine what she looked like in that Boston shower with her clothes off, and lusting at the possibilities.
THE NEW YORKER
1
Only minutes before the surfer girl was poised near her pick-up truck changing with a towel as it barely clung on for life around her breasts. She slipped her wetsuit on and leashed her flowery surfboard to one ankle. Loitering on a wet slither of sand where the Pacific tide washed over her toes, she watched choppy waves and splintered swells. I knew she was unhappy with the conditions, but the surfer girl, my surfer girl, sculpted where she stood against a wall of rudimentary waves, was perfect.
I pulled earphones from the sides of my head, having repeatedly listened to the Beach Boy’s Surfer Girl three or four times through on my iPod, and stared at the flight attendant Delilah, thirty-thousand feet up in the air and en route to New York City, as she leaned her immaculate body over the head rest to smile at me.
“Round-round get-around, I get around,” she said in the cutest voice imaginable, singing the words slightly out of tune. I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
“I love The Beach Boys,” I told her.
“I know you do.” She squished her face together as she smiled, also unimaginably adorable.
“You two have something really weird going on.” Alex said from the window seat once Delilah returned to the rear of the plane. He never pulled his eyes away from the pages of Rolling Stone Magazine. I unbuckled my seat belt. “Where are you going?” Alex finally looked at me.
“Nowhere, I’m just going to the bathroom.”
“Good.” He unbuckled his seat belt. “Because I’ve needed to take a dump since I woke up this morning.”
“Please, you first.” I pointed to the only vacant lavatory.
“No. I must insist, you first.”
“Why the sudden valor? You haven’t used the bathroom since before you woke up this morning. That’s really gross. I insist, you first.”
Alex entered hesitantly, being sure to stare at me with wide-eyed curiosity as he closed the plastic door half an inch from his nose.
“So, Delilah.” I turned towards my favorite flight attendant. She was busy packing bags of chips, pretzels, and assorted cookies into a basket.
“Yes, Joshua? I’m kind of busy. I’ve got to get these orders out or there’s sure to be some sort of riot, especially from the gentleman in 12B.”
“So, I was thinking…. about what you said.”
“Oh?” Delilah grew dimples without retracting her full concentration from the basket. “And what would that be?”
“About wedding rings falling off,” I whispered, pointing to my own finger, conspicuously absent of its marriage ring.
“Why Joshua, I haven’t a clue as to what you’re talking about.” She packed the next assorted cookie with flustered intensity. I enjoyed the pinprick of her dimples.
Alex opened the door of the lavatory and stared at us, highly curious but apparently disoriented, and then stammered down the aisle for his seat. Turbulence shook the walls of the plane.
“I’d like to see you tonight, in New York, if you’re free.”
“You’re a sweetie.” She gently grasped my arm. “But I’m afraid I’ve already made plans to go out with the girls. And I don’t, you know…. sleep with passengers”
“Right,” I awkwardly pulled away. “I guess I’ll be seeing you then.”
“Yes,” sh
e said, packing the last assorted cookie into her basket. “Perhaps on the flight home.” Her lovely dimples had ironed out.
“You get her number?” Alex never lifted his eyes from Rolling Stone.
I buckled myself back into my seat.
“No, of course not. We were just chatting.”
“I’m sure you were.”
“Her younger sister is getting married next summer, and she’s looking for a wedding photographer. Really Alex, you could learn a thing or two about being friendly and marketing yourself.”
“I wouldn’t doubt it for a second.”
Delilah paused in front of us with her basket of snacks. “Would you two boys like anything?”
“Yeah,” Alex gazed into the display. “I’ll have a chocolate chip and a bag of pretzels.” She handed them to him.
“And for you, Joshua?” she said, body not only professional in posture but stiff as a board, and not at all flirtatious as usual.
“Nothing, I’m good, thanks.”
“I really think you could use some Mix-Bits,” she said.
“No really, Delilah. Thank you, but I’m afraid I’m just not in the mood.”
“I think you are. I think what you need,” she said sharply, “is a bag of Mix-Bits. Or perhaps a Key Lime Cookie” She handed both packages to me.
I grudgingly took the bags. A piece of paper was wedged in-between them.
“And I suppose that piece of paper there has her sister’s e-mail on it, just so you can contact her about availability and wedding prices,” Alex said as a matter of fact once Delilah moved on, never lifting his eyes from the magazine.
I didn’t answer him. I opened her note.
I’m gonna work you so hard tonight, dusk-till-dawn, it said, before I’m through with you you’ll be begging for the sun to rise – Delilah, with her cell number and hotel where she was staying scribbled underneath. P.S. You’ll know it’s the right place by the girl who answers her hotel room door without a single stitching of clothing on.
Wrong Flight Home (Wrong Flight Home, #1) Page 28