It’s not that Kirsten is stupid, in fact she’s very bright, but she’s into numbers and the markets and good health and doesn’t have time for a lot else. The first thing she said to me was, “I really admire your portfolio.”
It was late on a Friday. Kirsten had been on staff for a week. I’d noticed her. She’d noticed me noticing and hadn’t seemed to mind. So, Friday she comes into my office just as I’m going out and hits me with the portfolio line. I don’t know what to make of it, but she’s young and pretty and standing very close, so I decide to smile and wait.
She steps slightly close, too close for normal conversation but not close enough to touch. “I’ve been told you have the biggest one in the office.” No doubting the tone there. She looks me up and down, slowly. Then she says, “Maybe we could stay late one night and you could show it to me?”
“How about Monday,” I say.
“I’ll look forward to it,” she says. She stepped back and then turned to walk away. I enjoyed watching her walk. When she got to the elevators she looked back over her shoulder. “I hope you and your wife have a great weekend.” To me it seemed like she’d just offered a no-strings-attached fuck. I couldn’t believe my luck.
That night I took Barbara to bed early and fucked her hard. She was delighted that, for once, I did the asking. That made me feel bad. We don’t fuck much and I felt like a shit when I saw how pleased she was. But I was a shit with a hard-on and, hell, if I could win points and get off at the same time, why not? Well, because it’s the wrong thing to do and I’d feel bad about it later is why not. But with me, now always wins out over later, so I fucked her anyway.
She was a little dry at first, but once we got going, she lubed up just fine. We did it doggy style, my favourite. When I was in the rhythm, slamming into her and making those flesh-slapping noises that are sort of nasty and exciting at the same time, I closed my eyes and imagined Kirsten in her place. I dug my fingers into Barbara’s buttocks and wondered how Kirsten’s smaller, rounder ass would feel. I came hard, deep inside Barbara. It was good. At least for me. I knew Barbara hadn’t come yet. I knew I should’ve done something about that. What I actually did was pretend to fall asleep. I do that real well. I wish I had really slept, then I wouldn’t have had to lie there listening to Barbara trying to cry silently.
Shit, I hate it when I make myself think about stuff like this. It’s like part of me just wants to keep rubbing my nose in it and say “bad boy”. Well, fuck that. We all do stuff we shouldn’t. It’s part of being human.
I’m glad when room service interrupts my thoughts by bringing me my meal. They know how to do this here: real linen tablecloths, heavy cutlery and crystal glasses. For an hour I manage to lose myself in tastes and smells and textures. The wine is full-bodied and mellow. I probably shouldn’t have drunk the whole bottle, but I enjoyed every sip.
Food is a passion of mine. I don’t cook but I love to eat. Barbara is a great cook. I sometimes think food is the closest we ever came to satisfying each other’s desires.
Now I’m back on Barbara again. That keeps happening to me. It won’t do me any good. Deep down I know she’s right to divorce me. The thing is that my mother-in-law was right: she is too good for me.
I lay back on the bed, wine glass resting comfortably on my belly, and pull out the mental picture album labelled BARBARA AND MARK: THE EARLY YEARS.
The couple in the album is young and inexperienced. Young Mark has learned how to make the quiet and mysterious Barbara laugh. Her laugh is a wonderful thing. It knows no inhibitions. It fills him with warmth, close to lust, that he thinks for a while is love. He will do anything, no matter how absurd, to provoke that laugh.
In the early pictures, Barbara is always laughing, one hand in front of her face, as if trying to cover up accidental nakedness.
In the wedding photos, Barbara has a faraway look, as if she cannot quite believe that she has gone through with the wedding, Young Mark looks as though he has just won the lottery.
I know I am going through these memories because I am drunk. For all my practice, I have never learned to be a happy drunk. Alcohol makes me too honest with myself.
I go to the bathroom and splash my face, hoping to drive away the ghosts of my marriage. They refuse to leave. I know what they want. They want a confession. I look in the mirror above the sink and say the words that will lay the ghosts.
“I am a lousy fuck and I’m sorry.”
This is what I’d always wanted to say to Barbara and never could.
Barbara, in those early years, was a good lover. She wanted to fuck the way she laughed. She was uninhibited and enthusiastic. And she intimidated the hell out of me.
I’d mainly done one-nightstands and orgy fucks before. I’d never had to try to fuck the same woman night after night. It’s not that she was a bad lay, the opposite in fact. But when we had sex I had this image of her as a powerful car that I never got out of first gear. She was patient. She got into foreplay. She read me erotica. She dressed up in sexy lingerie. She shared her fantasies. And every single thing she did made me shrivel up a little more.
Eventually, in the third year of our marriage, she stopped all the fancy stuff and settled for my clumsy, short-lived fucks. She even faked orgasms. And, dumb fuck that I am, I didn’t notice. I thought I’d cracked it. I was walking around thinking, First I learned to make her laugh, then I learned to make her come.
The bubble burst when I came home early one afternoon. I heard her as soon as I came through the door. She was moaning. A deep, low, continuous moan that I could not mistake.
So this is what she really sounds like when she comes, I thought.
I was angry. Some bastard was fucking my wife in our bed and making her come better than I could. I moved up the stairs quietly, looking forward to my dramatic entrance.
The moans were subsiding as I reached the bedroom door. I went in via the bathroom, which has doors to the hall and the bedroom. Barbara was on her belly. Her face was buried in one of my sweatshirts. She was alone. The room smelled of sweat and sex. Her fingers were still trapped beneath her cunt.
When I realized what I was seeing, I left at once. I didn’t want her to know that I knew she preferred her own fingers to me.
My drinking increased after that, and I started to chase women. I hoped that one of them would prove to me that I was a good fuck after all. None of them have. Oh, most of them enjoy themselves, but they aren’t looking for the same thing as Barbara. They fuck me because they like fucking, and I’m safe and generous and no worse than average. Barbara fucked me in the hope that we would fly together. She is the swan who married the penguin because he made her laugh.
OK, so now I’m getting maudlin. Penguin! Jesus wept, where do I get this stuff?
I should get dressed now and go home and wait for Kirsten. But what I want is to talk to Barbara. I want to tell her that I miss her and that I don’t deserve her and I want her back. With the certainty of the very drunk, I know this is the right thing to do.
I dial Peter’s number. The gods are on my side; Barbara answers.
“B,” I say, “It’s me. Mark.”
“What did you do to Peter?”
“What? Nothing. Listen. I have something to say.”
“I saw his hand. Did you hit him?”
“Yeah, real hard. With my chin.” I’m laughing and I want to stop but I can’t.
“You’re drunk aren’t you?” She sounds sad, not angry. “Is she there with you, listening?”
“Who?”
“Who? Can’t you remember her name now?”
“Oh, Kirsten. No she’s coming later. Listen. I wanted to tell you . . .”
“I don’t want to hear it, Mark. I’m not listening to you any more. It hurts too much.”
“But . . .”
“Tomorrow is Independence Day, Mark. Take it as a sign. From tomorrow we are completely independent.”
She is almost crying now. I can hear it at the edge of her voi
ce.
“Please, B, I just want . . .”
“Goodbye, Mark.” She hangs up.
I feel a hundred years old. The phone stays in my hand because I can’t think what to do with it. I listen to the drone of the dial tone and it seems to be singing the song of my life.
Anger helps. Anger is good. I throw the phone away.
Bitch, I think.
I say it out loud, “Bitch.”
Then, “Heartless, man-eating BITCH.”
That’s better; much better.
The hotel arranges a taxi for me. Soon I will be home. Maybe Kirsten will want to fuck when she gets in. Or maybe it can wait until I get my eight minutes tomorrow morning.
Labor Day
“You OK?”
The concern in Peter’s voice makes me smile.
“Yeah, I’m fine. Just taking a moment, you know?”
His stillness in the doorway calms me.
I stand, check my hair in the mirror and say, “I’ll be out in a minute and I’ll be the life and soul of the party, honest. After all, it’s a holiday, right?”
He says, “You’ve done the right thing, Barbara,” like it’s not a non sequitur. Then he leaves.
I hope I’ve done the right thing. I hope it with all my heart.
There has been so much change in my life, in such a short time, that I feel giddy. I sit back down, composing myself, staring at the woman in the mirror, looking for signs that she has changed.
When I was a child I used to love to play blindman’s bluff; to be blindfolded and turned round and round and round until all sense of direction was lost and the only way left was forward, into the arms of whomever I could catch. These past months I’ve been playing that game with my life. Now it’s time to take off the blindfold and seize what I have found.
God, I sound like some New-Ager peddling rebirthing seminars. How Mark would laugh at that. I can imagine the “commercial break” voice in which he would say, “Tired of the old you? Give birth to a new and improved one after only five days at our woodland retreat!”
I’ve always sneered at the idea of such fundamental change. You are who you are. You don’t suddenly become someone else. But maybe, sometimes, we settle for not being all of who we are. We shut down the parts that don’t fit. We grow, but we grow stunted, like plants raised in a too-small pot. At the beginning of the summer it came to me that my life had become pot-bound. So I smashed the pot.
God knows, Mark had already put a few cracks in it, with his serial seductions of silly girls. But in the end it was me, not him, who shattered our marriage beyond hope of repair.
When he abandoned me, in the middle of a Memorial Day barbecue with our best friends, so that he could go and fuck his latest Barbie, everything suddenly changed. I didn’t get angry. I got cold and still and then I cracked, like an iceberg snapping off from a glacier and sliding into the sea. One moment Mark and I were connected, the next we were separated by an unbridgeable stretch of despair and disappointment.
I think I might have frozen for ever on that day. Gone into shock and never come out. But Helen and Peter rescued me, right there and then. They took me into their hearts and, for a while, into their bed. I know that sounds bizarre and weird, but it didn’t feel that way. I’ve known them both for ever and I love them in my way. Helen, so brave and fierce and full of energy. Peter, her rock, her keel, always there for her, always calm and true. Being with them felt like coming home. Like rejoining my family. Except, of course, I don’t fuck my family.
But now it’s time to leave. The summer, that started so badly, is coming to an end. It’s Labor Day today. Helen and Peter are having a little party to wish me well in my new job in big bad Chicago. All my friends are waiting out there and yet I can’t bring myself to leave this room which has been my refuge from having to deal with the reality of divorcing Mark and learning to live on my own.
I know I should despise Mark. Everybody else does. But I can’t. He’s weak, not wicked. I know all about being weak. I was weak for years. In a way, my whole married life was a result of weakness.
I let Mark marry me because he wanted it so much. He was the first man in a long time to see past the cloak of invisibility I had wrapped myself in. The dowdy clothes, the shyness, the lack of make-up, didn’t put him off. He wanted me and he wanted to please me. That was flattering. He found ways to make me laugh. That was endearing. And he was always there, like a faithful hound waiting to be taken for a walk. All I had to do was look at him for his tail to start to wag. That, in the end, turned out to be irresistible.
It’s not that I didn’t love Mark, I did. I still do. But the thought of him never made me wet. When we kissed it was nice rather than good. When we fucked it was urgent rather than potent. I told myself that things would get better; that we would learn how to please each other; that we had plenty of time. But that isn’t how it worked out. Things got worse, not better. We never talked about it, but it was always with us; an absence of the passion that should have made our marriage grow.
In the end, that absence became the centre of our marriage. We walked around the hole it left in our lives every day, until it became our habit to circumnavigate sex, at least with each other. Mark found solace in sport-fucking shallow, undemanding women. I let my fingers release what I couldn’t suppress.
I wonder sometimes if things would have been different if I’d been a virgin when I married Mark. But I wasn’t. Not by a long shot. Todd had seen to that.
“You thinking of Mark?” Helen says. “You look upset.”
I didn’t hear her come in. I knew she would want to see me alone before I left. I have, I realize, been avoiding it. Now she is here, looking at me in the mirror, and I can’t read the expression on her face. She can do that sometimes; just switch her face to neutral. It’s disturbing because she is normally so expressive. Mark christened her “Helen, the face that launched a thousand quips”.
“Actually, I was thinking of Todd,” I say.
“Todd the Impaler? What brought him to mind?” Helen moves closer to me. Her face has softened a bit. She knows Todd is a difficult subject for me.
“I was wondering if being with him screwed up my marriage.”
My voice sounds like I’m on the edge of crying. I didn’t expect that. I hate that I cry so easily.
Helen is smaller than me. When she hugs me, I have to bend slightly to put my head on her shoulder. She leads me to the bed and we sit for a moment, next to one another. She holds both my hands within hers and, suddenly, I see her as she was when we were both in our first year in college.
She was my first adult female friend. She told me everything about herself. No embarrassment. No restraints. It was infectious. And one night, when we were sitting on her bed in her room, I started to tell her about Todd. I hadn’t told anyone about Todd. She let me talk. For hours. I think that Helen performed an exorcism that night.
When I had finished she said to me, “You are a good person.” It felt like a blessing.
If I had been prettier earlier, I would never have gone with Todd. Up to my senior year in high school, I was the invisible girl. The one everyone wrote, “I hope you have a great summer” to when they signed my yearbook, trying to remember who the hell I was.
The summer before my senior year I had a growth spurt. I grew three inches, lost some weight, and acquired a waist and hips. Suddenly I had long legs and a good ass. Barbara the boring became Babs the beautiful overnight.
My mother was so pleased that she bought me outfit after outfit. “I’ve been waiting to take you shopping for such a long time,” she said. In the store I became the centre of attention. My legs were applauded and I was encouraged to buy skirts that would display them. I went back to school feeling wonderful.
It didn’t last long. I’d broken one of the prime rules of high school: I’d tried to move out of the slot that my peers had allocated to me. My best friend, Alice, felt slighted by my new look. My study mate, Carl, suddenly became tongue-
tied and uncomfortable. But the toughest reaction came from the wannabe prom queens. They started to call me Babs the Booty. They said I looked like a slut. But I wouldn’t give in. I wouldn’t sacrifice the look of pride on my mother’s face just to fit in in high school.
So now I looked good but no one talked to me. Then the boys found me. They weren’t bad boys. They were polite and nice and muscular and I ached for them. I hadn’t dated much so I wasn’t really sure what to do. I knew enough not to fuck on the first date. But the second seemed reasonable. And the boys wanted it so badly. And they were so nice to me. And besides, the sex was good. Sometimes very good.
I was Barbara the Queen Bee, surrounded by a group of adoring drone-boys. We went everywhere together. We had fun. And at the end of the evening one of them would take me home and on the way we would park and I would find out one more time just how good it felt to ride a fresh strong cock.
Looking back now, I think I went a little crazy for a while. The thinking me was switched off. I stopped being shy and introverted and tried hard to live in the now. The now where I was beautiful and the boys were eager. I was aware that they didn’t love me. I knew I didn’t love them. But it felt so damned good.
I’d been Queen Bee for about a month when Todd Rawlins showed up. Todd was two years older than me and had been the star of our football team in his senior year. If it hadn’t been for a knee injury, Todd would have made it to college on a sports scholarship. Instead he was working at his daddy’s Chrysler dealership.
Every girl in school knew three things about Todd: he drove a brand-new LeBaron Convertible, he partied hard and he had the biggest dick in town. One Friday night the drones and I were coming out of the bowling alley and I was teasing them about who would get to drive me home, when Todd pulled up next to us in his killer car. No “hello”s. No “baby, you look good”s. He just said, “Get in,” and I did.
The Mammoth Book of the Best New Erotica Page 44