“Don’t act like a street whore!” I blurted.
Before I knew what had happened, Annie brought both of her fists down on my chest, nearly knocking the wind out of me. I gasped both for breath and in shock. She growled and grabbed hold of my splint. “I swear I’ll break it if you ever say something like that to me again. Dishonor our blessed union with that kind of filthy talk one more time and I will kick you out in a minute, Daddy or no. I have dealt with tougher men than you.” Waving my splint in the air as if that would ease the pain, I thought of telling her that I’d meant to say Don’t talk like a street whore. But then she might have asked how I knew what street whores talked like.
“I must be the only newlywed wife in Florida who has to argue her husband into bed.”
I let her anger fall off for a few moments. “Maybe there’s something wrong that you feel you need sex so much,” I whispered.
“Huh? Maybe it’s a huge part of marriage and a fun way of expressing love and trust. I thought sex was only ungodly before marriage. I feel tricked!” She put a pillow in her lap and pulled on the corners like a pet’s ears.
“Just because something feels good doesn’t make it right, even when you’re married.”
“There’s nothing kinky about the missionary position,” she harumphed, turning on her side and embracing her new lover, the pillow. “Missionaries did it!”
One of the other survey-takers left his job at Daytona Reports and started working in the marketing department of a company called Bradley’s biscuits. He recommended me for a position as a junior account executive. Bradley’s Biscuits had started out selling dough in pop-open cylinders, but they made more money selling Dietz’s Special potato Chips. They were popular with auto mechanics and landscapers. I loved working for a company where eating potato chips counted as part of the job.
On the evening I came back to Tudor Valley with my first big paycheck, I was so happy that I showed it to Annie. I smoothed it down on the kitchen countertop for her to admire.
“That’s a whole lot of numbers there, isn’t it?”
I wore a suit and tie every day—the same one until my first paycheck arrived. Later, I bought a brass money clip and a nice watch with a little crown on the face. With dental insurance, I finally fixed the tooth my father had chipped back in sixth grade. Bonding it made me smile more, and healed some of the bad emotions I still held against him. Cheryl got a beanbag doll of Ariel from The Little Mermaid.
Annie, Cheryl, and I left the old condo and moved into a larger apartment in a complex called the Ponce de león. It had wavy terra-cotta tiles on the roof, a fountain in the courtyard, and blue porcelain numbers stuck in the blinding white concrete walls outside the front doors. It was a place where you thought you would see a flamenco dancer married to a bullfighter in the next apartment. The Ponce had a washer-dryer, and a refrigerator with an ice-maker. Suddenly I could consider myself a real American man. I felt like I had gotten away with something. The marquee above my life advertised a movie called Totally Normal. If only I could stay silent. Because the thoughts in my skull were a different story. My same-sex desires hadn’t gone anywhere. They had backed up inside me like water in a bent garden hose. The harder I choked them off, the harder they’d spurt out whenever I let my guard down.
Unlike at Daytona Reports, a whole lot of the guys on my floor at the new job were handsome, well-groomed, and clean. On my fourth day, as I stood by the elevator about to leave, the doors opened on Hank, a friendly, sandy-haired fellow who always seemed like he’d just come from swimming. His hair gleamed brighter from chlorine in some spots, and it looked wet. I’d only met him once before, but since then I had found out everything I could about him without asking. I guess I had a thing for blonds.
Hank beamed as he held the door open. “Gary!” he exclaimed, like somebody talking to a long-lost friend. Holy smokes, I thought, Hank remembered my name! Nobody else was in the elevator, and we would probably get to ride to the parking lot alone.
“Oh, I left something at my desk,” I said. “You go on ahead, Hank.”
“You’re on the Cheeze-A-Roonies account, right? You should come by and talk to me. I’ve been reading up about oil-based lipid substitutes.” Bradley’s Biscuits was fixing to expand into Bradley Foods, and they’d started making nonfat versions of all their snacks.
“Sure thing,” I said. “Have a good night.”
“Happy trails,” he said, giving me a military salute as the elevator doors shut. Once the doors closed, I hid my face in my hands. You have to beat this thing, I told myself. You can’t let it interfere with your work. Let Jesus guide you.
At a big meeting the following week, I put my binder down in a seat close to the head of the table, to the left of a no-nonsense woman named Harriet. I would have to cross her line of sight if I wanted to moon over any of the guys who always sat in a group at the far end, including Hank.
Before the meeting, we milled around the refreshments. A chocolate-chip muffin caught my eye. It sat on a tray next to Hank, who stood pasting cream cheese onto a bagel. He had on a wide gold wedding ring, so tight it made the rest of his finger plump up like a hot dog. Since I didn’t want to get too near the warm space that surrounded his body, I edged around him and picked the muffin up. Oh boy, it was hot. I peeled it out of the frilly paper and broke it in half. The muffin steamed slightly and the chips inside were gooey when I bit down.
Just then Hank’s crisp North Carolina twang tickled my ears. “Hey Gary. You said you were gonna come by last week. Were you just swamped? Why don’t you swing by after the meeting and we’ll talk Olestra. It’s pretty exciting what’s going on. Sounds like a great opportunity.”
With my mouth full, I made a noise that didn’t mean yes or no.
“Great!” he said.
I poured myself a cup of coffee to wash down the thick wad of muffin. By the time I served myself and took a sip, Hank had sat down and the meeting had started. I spent a lot of time fretting about what was going to happen later. When I stood next to him, I could always smell his flowery shampoo.
Hank pulled me aside after the meeting and demanded that I come by his desk right then. His way of doing it was real good-natured. I wanted to be near him, so I didn’t say no. I stood just outside his personal area, and used the cubicle wall to brace my shaky legs. The odor of Hank’s hair was kind of herbal, but syrupy. It shot up into my nostrils and made me woozy.
“Why don’t you sit down?” he said, pulling a plastic chair toward him. I said I had a presentation to get done in two days, so I couldn’t stay too long. He shrugged, printed out a few articles, and handed them to me as he raved about the miracle fat substitute. When he handed me the printouts, his silky hand accidentally touched mine. Well, my ghost just about jumped out of my body. For a split second I wanted to feel all that hot skin against my own nakedness. I pictured us at work after hours, grinding our flesh together on the carpet-guard under his desk.
Stomping the thought out almost as quickly as I’d had it, I hugged the photocopies to my chest. I was grateful that he didn’t have his own office, and that the temperature always stayed pretty chilly at work. Careful to show no emotion, I thanked him and hurried back to my desk. I rolled the chair up to where my belly touched the edge and thought hard about dead dogs to keep my erection down.
Hank’s presence distracted me enough that I had to take the stairs all the time. I told people I wanted the exercise, but we were only on the second floor. It got to the point where I needed to spend less time in the office. I kept an eye out for opportunities to leave town and avoid him.
The first couple of business trips I took were short ones, to nearby cities like Tampa and Jacksonville. As part of a team putting together a proposal, I spent most of my time with my close associates. Some of those guys I liked, but not a one of them sent me over the edge like Hank. We usually stayed in the hotel room, ordered room service, and pored over bullet points and PowerPoint files. We only went out to meetings, not to socialize. T
hat’s probably why our proposals were mostly big hits. I can do this, I thought sometimes. I’ll be fine.
My third trip was a weekend conference, a small convention of pork rind brands that my boss, Mr. Price, wanted me to check out. He sent me by myself. The plane ticket came to my desk and I noticed that I’d been scheduled for a Sunday return. I thought it was a mistake, so I knocked softly on Mr. Price’s door, even though he always kept it partway open.
“Mr. Price, I think Rhonda made a mistake. The convention is only Wednesday night, Thursday, and Friday.”
Mr. Price, a vice president of marketing, was still pretty young for somebody so accomplished. His black hair had only a few needles of white in it. He was a Yankee. He dressed casually and he treated his employees like friends. Instead of following the rules, he wanted everybody at the company to think outside the box. He was the first person I ever heard use that expression. For a long time I thought he’d made it up, because so many of our products came in boxes.
“Spend the weekend,” said Mr. Price. “Explore a little. Chicago’s a great town. You’ll like it.”
“What would I do in Chicago?” I asked.
His voice boomed so much that everybody outside his office could hear him. “Have you no curiosity? Go to the top of the Sears Tower! you can see all the way to Canada from there. There’s a cross-section of a human body in half-inch sections on display at the science museum. Wouldn’t you like to see that? Go to the ballpark, the lake, go look at the hammerhead sharks in the aquarium. Visit the goddamned Robie House. But I’m not changing your plane ticket and that’s final.” He smiled like a game-show host handing me the keys to my new car. I didn’t even ask him not to swear.
Annie’s face fell when I told her my plans had changed. I repeated something Mr. Price had said about wanting his execs to experience the world and have class. She didn’t completely understand, maybe because she had seen more of the world than I probably ever would. “Maybe I can join you there,” she said. For a moment she got excited by the idea and grinned. “But I have to work.” Annie had just started a job at a travel agency. “That’s okay. Take lots of pictures!”
The next morning she made a special breakfast of boiled rice and eggs all stirred up in a pot. It warmed my insides as I stepped into the street with my bag. Annie shuffled out to the curb in her housecoat and slippers to see me off, pushing her thick black hair out from behind her glasses and throwing a brave little smile up at me. She deserves a much better man than me, I thought, one who doesn’t keep big secrets and can satisfy her in bed. Sometimes I wondered if she was such a good person that she’d figured it all out and still decided to stand by her man.
The cab driver unlatched the trunk and it bounced open like the car was happy to see me. Once I got in the back, he asked where I was going, and I said Chicago. Laughing out loud, he said he couldn’t drive that far, but it would be a good fare.
SIX
After it became a habit, I gave it other names—“getting a favor,” “guy stuff.” Not sex. Not sin. Not infidelity. That is, if I admitted anything to myself. By any darned name, though, I knew Annie would be devastated if she found out, and I would’ve had one heck of a time explaining what it really was. So in order to keep a sense of morality, I made up a whole mess of rules about it in my head. One of them was to limit my guy activities to business trips.
My responsibilities at work kept increasing, unfortunately, and I went out of town more often. It always felt good to get away from the demands of having a child and a wife for a little while, even though I missed them both. But temptation lurked in every airport bathroom stall and public park, and since nobody suspected anything, I got bolder. The more I did it, the less guilty I felt. Each encounter with a different fellow added to a pattern and they all became the same man, instead of sticking in my mind as individual earth-shattering events. By and by, the tune in my head changed from “I’ve Got to Stop This” to “It’s not like I’m Having an Affair.”
The possibilities of Chicago stunned me. From the plane that evening I could see its whole shape down there, the long avenues scratching pink scars across the shoulder of Illinois, the giant curve of lake Superior Cutting them off in the northeast. The taillights of cars stopped and started across the city like blood cells pumping through a gigantic heart. I had a hard time believing that so many people could live in one place. How did they make a city so huge without using up the world’s supply of brick and metal?
On Friday morning, after munching on pork rinds all day Thursday, I woke up with some powerful gas. I called Annie and she told me to drink a large coffee and a glass of water. Thanks to her, my gas mostly went away, so I managed to go to some of the panels. By 3:30, my stomach began growling again. I swapped business cards with a few people I thought Mr. Price should know, but I decided to skip the rest of the networking session. I went back to my hotel room and had another glass of water, then lay down and flipped through all the cable TV channels. My stomach growled and whined like a sad dog. My boredom mixed with horniness—a dangerous combination.
Using my tiredness as an excuse, I paused on the sinful channels. German bodybuilder and former action star Klaus Rassmussen had a half-hour show about the Ab Crunch Machine. Mr. Rassmussen never wore a shirt, and his oily torso glowed in the reddish spotlights. A white neon line ran around the border of his perfect silhouette. I couldn’t take my eyes away.
As soon as I’d given in to the urge to look, though, the program ended. My stomach had mostly calmed down. It dawned on me that I had a whole bunch of free time ahead of me. I could run through the wild, crazy avenues of Chicago, where nobody knew me and nobody was watching. Nobody from back home would ever find out if I did something ungodly, as long as I kept it to myself.
Of course, God was watching. But God never spoke about what He saw. Certainly not to me. How long had I pleaded with Him to help me, to fix me, to show me a sign, only to be ignored? If you thought on it, God let everything on Earth happen. God plunked Himself down at a big desk and okayed everything with a fat rubber stamp. Should it be a sunny day? Why, yes! Today, let’s wipe out the coast with a hurricane. Great idea! Should there be roller coasters? Yeah, let’s build a whole mess of ’em! How about a train wreck, Lord? Fine with me! Do we need a snack food called Cheeze-A-Roonies on Planet Earth? Heck yeah, bring on the Cheeze-ARoonies! What say you create an evil dude named Adolf Hitler? yessiree! eemed He didn’t even have a rubber stamp for no. He let good and bad stuff happen all the time and didn’t care if folks did what they pleased if they could handle the consequences and keep the secrets.
But maybe there wouldn’t be any consequences.
For a moment, after klaus Rassmussen’s show ended, the tide of my lust went out. I changed my mind about going out and getting a favor. But then a food-processor infomercial came on, and the young, attractive man and woman on the show demonstrated the salad spinner. The fellow, whose name was paul Cantor, appealed to me with his dimples and honey brown eyes. When he broke a dripping wet head of lettuce in half with his thumbs, it was the sexiest thing I’d ever seen. Water went everywhere, dotting his thick, manly hands and hairy forearms with fat droplets. Carefree, he dabbed his arms with a dishtowel and cranked the mechanism. Lettuce leaves flew around willy-nilly inside the cage. Overcome with desire, I knelt on the plush carpet and kissed his lips through the screen.
When that show got done, I turned the television off and imagined klaus Rassmussen’s stomach. His abs poked out like an upside-down muffin pan. I let myself think about them and got semi-hard. Automatically, I crawled over to the side of the bed and found the phone directory on the bottom of the nightstand under the Gideons’ bible. I spread the book and flipped my way through the tissuey pages.
The yellow pages didn’t list anything gay. The entries went from “Gauges” right to “Gears.” I couldn’t force a new category to appear in the space between them, so I looked up “Homosexual” and even “lesbian.” nothing. It was like same-sex des
ires, after torturing me for so long, had been erased from the world as soon as I decided to seek them out.
Usually this kind of situation would’ve made me give up, but this time, determination growled in my gut. I stood up, put on my winter clothes, turned the lights off, and strolled right out of that hotel. Of course, I didn’t have the gall to ask the concierge where was gay to go. But I decided I had to do something. Even though I didn’t know where I was fixing to go, I couldn’t stop myself from gamboling out into the freezing afternoon like a primitive hunter with a mean hunger and a spear full of poison.
The notion that acting on my secret lust wouldn’t bring any consequences was a bet against the reality of Hell. But no matter how much I believed I would burn, I couldn’t shake my desire. Like a demon with his claws in my shoulder, desire tore at my flesh, howling, trying to make me defy the lord’s word and throw away eternal peace for earthly delight. I couldn’t get the lord to respond to my prayers and make it stop no matter how hard I tried. If this problem had turned into a choice between my flesh probably being burned but not consumed in the hereafter and my body and mind definitely being consumed but not burned in this life, it had begun to feel like I should take my chances. Was this satan’s influence corrupting me, or the voice of my true self? was my secret sexuality my true self? more true than my wife and family? I didn’t have an answer—I was a walking question mark. I only knew what I wanted—and not even specifically.
Outside in the loop, I followed men I saw walking alone, or in pairs, searching for signs in their walks and actions. It was December, though, and everybody’s winter clothing made it hard to tell anything about folks from the way they moved. The men I singled out waddled into steakhouses and sports bars. One of them stepped into a station wagon full of groceries, and another met his girlfriend with a passionate kiss in the crystal lobby of a department store decorated with poinsettias and holly. I stayed outside, watching the lovers, my hot breath steaming in front of my face.
God Says No Page 8