by Jason Starr
After about five minutes of good cushion pounding, he felt much more relaxed and ready to do some actual problem solving. One area of his marriage that certainly needed improving was his and Dana’s sex life. They didn’t do it nearly enough, and if he were his own therapist, he would tell his patient to schedule time for sex, make it a priority, and be more creative sexually. So before Adam left the office he called Dana and told her he wanted to make love tonight at ten o’clock.
“Why?” she asked.
Adam wasn’t sure whether she meant why did he want to have sex with her or why at ten o’clock as opposed to eleven or midnight. Deciding to take a less confrontational approach, he said, “Because I love you very much and I miss being close with you.”
Okay, so maybe he was overdoing it a little, but he felt like he was communicating honestly, not apologizing for his emotions.
Later, on his way to the subway, Adam stopped off at a Ricky’s drugstore where he remembered seeing an adult section and bought a sexy cheerleader’s outfit in Dana’s size. Several times she had told him about a fantasy she had of making love while dressed as a cheerleader, but they’d never explored it because he’d never had a cheerleader fantasy himself. That had been selfish of him, to flat-out reject her fantasy. He certainly wasn’t opposed to her dressing as a cheerleader if it was a turn-on for her, and it was wrong of him to have stonewalled her like that.
At home, he noticed that Dana seemed to be in a much better mood than she’d been in this morning and the past couple of days. She was starting to believe that Gabriela had been the second intruder in their house the other night and that the threatening note had been left by some prankster. She was also encouraged by a new theory the police had, that Gabriela may have been killed by a drug dealer she was in debt to and who possibly had nothing to do with Carlos Sanchez.
“I thought she needed the money for her father,” Adam said.
“She did,” Dana said, “but her sister doesn’t think she would’ve robbed a house to pay for her father’s operation, and I don’t believe it either. I know she lied to us about a lot of things, but I can’t imagine her actually coming into our house to rob us unless she was hooked on drugs and needed to pay off a drug dealer.”
This logic made sense to Adam, and he hoped it was a sign that things were on their way to returning to normal.
Dana cooked a nice dinner—chicken cutlets, rice pilaf, a salad—and they ate at the dining room table, finishing the merlot from last night. Marissa was out with her friends in Manhattan, seeing some band, so they had the whole house to themselves. Adam actually couldn’t remember the last time he and Dana had a quiet, romantic dinner alone, and he made sure to ask her a lot of questions about her day and things that were going on with her in general, knowing that in the past she’d had the complaint that he didn’t take enough interest in her.
At one point Dana asked, “Why are you acting so nice?”
Her tone was vaguely accusing, but he answered honestly, “I know I haven’t been the greatest husband in the world lately. I want things to improve around here, that’s all. I’d like it if we made the marriage more of a priority.”
He was purposely trying to use I-statements so she couldn’t interpret anything he was saying as criticism. Her eyes started to tear, but he knew it was because she was so happy, realizing how much he meant to her. He reached across the table, held her hand gently, and said, “Remember our date tonight.”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m a little tired.”
If she’d said this last week, he might’ve backed down, but instead he did what he would’ve instructed a patient to do in a similar situation—don’t be passive, be assertive; ask for what you want and you’ll get it—and he said, “I like it when we make love and we’re both tired. I think it’s sexy.”
That was perfect—rather than accusing her of not wanting to have sex, he’d expressed himself in a positive way without getting confrontational.
“Okay,” she said, “but I have to do the dishes first and clean up.” “I’ll help,” he said eagerly.
He hardly ever helped her clean up after dinner—another common complaint of hers—and he could tell how much she appreciated him making the extra effort.
Later, he entered their bedroom, holding the bag with the cheerleader’s outfit behind his back. She was lying in bed in her bathrobe, reading some hardcover novel.
“I got something for you,” he said.
“What?” She seemed more worried than intrigued. “You have to close your eyes,” he said.
She smiled as if she thought he was joking and went back to reading. “I’m serious,” he said.
She looked at him again and asked, “What is it?” “You have to close your eyes,” he said.
She breathed deeply, as if it would take an enormous effort, then finally shut her eyes.
“No peeking,” he said as he took the blue and gold outfit out of the bag.
Then he said, “Okay, open up.”
Her reaction wasn’t exactly what he’d expected. She seemed, if not shocked, then slightly offended.
“What is that?” she asked.
“What does it look like?” he said, smiling, waiting for her to join in. “You don’t expect me to wear that, do you?”
“What’s wrong? I remember you said you had a fantasy about this, right?” “When did I tell you that? When I was twenty-five? Do you seriously think
I’m going to put that thing on?”
She’d told him about her cheerleader fantasy a few years ago, okay, maybe five years ago tops, but he didn’t want to get into an argument about it. At the same time, he didn’t want to keep his resentful feelings to himself.
Trying to express himself in a nonthreatening way, he said, “I thought you’d be excited. But if you don’t feel comfortable about it I understand, though I thought you’d be . . . I don’t know . . . turned on by it.”
“What is that thing, a size two? Even if I wanted to put it on, I’d have to use a shoehorn to get into it. Come on, what did you expect me to do, get up on the bed and do a cheer for you?”
Actually that was exactly what Adam had expected her to do, but he was starting to feel attacked, belittled, and he said, “I feel like you’re getting upset with me for no reason. I feel resentful toward you right now.”
“Can you please stop talking to me like that?” “Like what?”
“Like you’re one of your fucking patients. I’m not your therapist, I’m your wife.”
He knew this was just more of her stonewalling, her typical way of deflecting conflict.
Validating her rather than confronting her, he said, “I understand if you don’t want to wear it. I just want to work on ways for us to get closer in this marriage.”
“This is how you get closer?” she said. “We haven’t made love in I don’t know how long and then you come home with some outfit an anorexic sixteenyear-old would wear, talking to me like you’re lying on a couch?”
“I feel like you’re not being fair,” he said. “I feel like you’re purposely distorting everything I—”
“Oh, stop with that crap,” she said. “What if I came home, out of the blue, with some slinky Speedo and made you put it on?”
She was acting defensive again, but he remained calm and objective and said, “First of all, I’m not making you do anything. Second of all, if I’d told you I had a fantasy about wearing a Speedo, no, I wouldn’t be upset at all.”
“Fine,” she said, “I’ll get you a Speedo tomorrow and you can wear it. I’ll make sure it’s four sizes too small, too.”
“Why do you always have to—” He caught himself using the word “always,” which was disrespectful. He took a couple of deep breaths to subdue his anger, not wanting to get sucked into an argument, then said, “If it’s something you feel uncomfortable with, I understand. I can return it, it’s no big deal.”
He put the cheerleader’s outfit back into the bag and got into bed with
her.
He started kissing her neck and under her chin. She was stiff, not reacting at all.
Finally she said, “Well, you really did a good job of setting the mood, didn’t you?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. He always told his patients to compliment their lovers, so he said, “You look so beautiful tonight.”
“You’re just saying that,” she said.
“No, honestly,” he said. “I know I haven’t been telling you that nearly enough lately, but it’s true, you look very beautiful.”
He started kissing her again, undoing her robe. During sex, he continued to kiss her and looked in her eyes as much as possible because in a marriage counseling session she’d said that it bothered her that he didn’t look into her eyes when they made love and that made her feel distant. Maybe he was overdoing it because she seemed uncomfortable and kept looking away.
“Is something wrong?” he asked assertively. “You keep staring at me,” she said.
“Sorry,” he said. “It’s just you’re so beautiful, I can’t stop looking at you.” Finally, after they switched from the missionary to the woman-on-top positions several times, Dana seemed to have an orgasm. He was starting to lose his erection, which had been happening a lot the last few years, so he did what sometimes worked—he blurred his vision and imagined Dana was Sharon.
“Is everything okay?” Dana asked.
Adam didn’t know if she meant okay with his erection or if she’d noticed the weird look in his eyes.
“Fine,” he said and went back to imagining Sharon’s full, heavy breasts, the scent of her perfume. At one point he almost blurted out Sharon’s name, but he managed to restrain himself.
Adam lay in bed next to Dana, not touching her. She was sleeping soundly, snoring, but he was restless. Finally he went downstairs to get a snack and watch some TV.
It was past midnight, and Marissa wasn’t home yet. Now that Adam was on his way to fixing his marriage, he wanted to make it two for two and improve his relationship with his daughter. He was tired of Marissa and all of her acting out and attention-seeking behavior; it was time for some serious tough love. From now on, for as long as she was living in his house, he wasn’t going to let her come and go as she pleased. She was going to have to tell him where she was and who she was with and when she was coming home. He wasn’t going to allow any more drugs in the house—that bong was going in the garbage pronto, that was for sure—and he wasn’t going to let her parade strange boyfriends through the house anymore either. He was going to meet all her boyfriends first, and if she didn’t like it she could pack her things and move out.
He started falling asleep on the couch, so he went back upstairs. As soon as he lay down he heard voices from outside, Marissa and somebody else, a guy. He went to the window and looked out. From his angle, he couldn’t see them; they were probably right below him, near the front door. He couldn’t make out what they were saying either, and then for a little while he couldn’t hear them at all. The police car was still there, parked out in front, hopefully for the last night. Police protection seemed so unnecessary now.
Adam heard Marissa call out, “Good night,” and then he saw a guy he’d never seen before—longish hair, a leather jacket—heading away from the house toward the sidewalk. The guy didn’t exactly look like a doctor or a lawyer. God, where did she find these losers?
Adam heard Marissa’s footsteps on the stairs. He waited until he heard the door to her room close; then he went down to make sure she’d set the alarm properly.
JOHNNY DIDN’T waste any time hooking up with Marissa. First thing Saturday morning he texted her:
hey had great time last night wanna hang today? hope so! lemme know! xan
Xan. Just typing that stupid name cracked him up.
He knew there was zero chance she wouldn’t get back to him. He didn’t peg her as the game-playing type who would play hard to get. No, she was definitely an all-or-nothing girl, the type who decided she was into one guy and one guy only and blew off the rest of the world.
As usual, his instincts were dead-on because she texted back:
I’d love to! Call me in a few!!
With exclamation points no less. Talk about being primed.
They spoke on the phone for about a half hour. They could’ve gone longer— hell, all day—but Johnny knew how important it was to always leave phone conversations on a high point, to leave them wanting more. Nobody was better on the phone than Johnny Long. He knew exactly what to say to girls to get them—well, there was really no other way to put it—totally wet. He was so charming, so funny, so—what was the word?—personable, yeah, personable, and girls ate that shit right up. He knew he could pick a name out of the phone book, call the girl up, and there was a pretty good chance he’d be able to screw her. He’d actually done this one time just for fun, to see if he could pull it off. He called a couple of dozen women, pretending he was a cable guy from Time Warner. Well, that was the opening, but when the women starting talking to him, he turned on the Johnny Long charm. Yeah, a bunch of them hung up on him, and some were going to let him come over to check out their cable, but he wasn’t convinced he’d score with them. But it was all about percentages and he finally hit pay dirt with a woman on Staten Island. She was in her sixties and had gone back for seconds on the ugly line, but what difference did that make? She invited him over to her house, where he checked out her cable—actually fixing a problem receiving premium channels—and then screwed her twice and got away with a few hundred bucks in cash and jewelry. It proved that Johnny Long wasn’t just eye candy. He could use his voice and charm to seduce women, too.
Johnny invited Marissa to spend the afternoon with him at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and naturally she thought it was an amazing idea. She’d actually said, “Wow, that’s an amazing idea.”
He met her at two o’clock on the top of the steps at the main entrance, and when he saw her approach he was impressed with how good-looking she was. In the bright sunlight her hair looked shinier than it had last night, and there was no doubt that she had a hot little body. She was in preripped jeans, some trendy-looking black lacy top, and a short black leather jacket.
To sound like he knew his shit, before he’d met her he’d gone to Burger King and logged on to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Web site and memorized info about twenty or so paintings. So when they went inside and she asked, “So what do you want to see first?” he said, “How about The Storm? That’s one of my all-time favorites.”
“Oh my God, I love nineteenth-century French romanticism,” she said, obviously trying to impress him.
He’d only picked The Storm because it looked so sappy, so girly, with the guy and the girl running in the wind, their clothes coming off, and him trying to protect her. It looked like something that would be on one of those faggy books with Fabio on the cover, and he figured every girl in the world was looking for a guy like that, a guy who would save his girlfriend, do anything to keep her safe, even if she was kind of fat and not very hot.
As they looked at the painting, he told her some of the crap he’d read online about it, going on about the romance and passion in the painting and how he tried to get “that feeling” into his own work. She said, all serious, “The Storm always reminds me of Rodin’s sculptures, such as Eternal Spring.” He knew she was just repeating some uppity crap some uppity teacher at Vassar had told her or she’d read in some book. Johnny wondered how much Adam Bloom had spent to send Marissa to college—probably a hundred grand. A hundred grand and she didn’t know any more than Johnny did after spending one morning in Burger King.
They went into one of the little rooms off to the side—“the Impressionist wing”—and she showed him some of her favorite pictures, acting like she was a tour guide, going on and on about them, using big college-type words like “symmetry,” “aesthetics,” and “illusionistic.” Johnny didn’t understand half the shit she was saying, and he wondered if she did either. She took him to ot
her “wings” of the museum, walking him around until his feet hurt. All the pictures looked the same to Johnny, and the artists sounded the same, too— Monet, Manet, Pissarro, Picasso, how did anybody keep track of who painted what? While she was blabbing away, trying to impress him with how much she knew about paintings nobody except other uppity people gave a shit about, Johnny was looking at her with an interested expression, like he was totally gripped, but inside he was laughing his ass off, thinking about the things he was going to do to her and her family when the time was right.
After the museum, he was expecting her to invite him back to her place. Taking her up to see that Storm painting, showing his deep, sensitive side, had pretty much sealed the deal. Walking down Fifth Avenue, alongside Central Park, she even hooked her arm around his and said, “It’s amazing. I feel so normal around you, I feel like I can be myself.”
“Yeah, me, too,” he said, trying to look sincere.
She invited him out to some party later on, but he said he couldn’t make it, that he had plans. His only actual plan for the night was to hit some bars and pick up a woman or two, but he’d already spent a couple of hours with Marissa today and didn’t want to spend too much time together too fast. If he wanted this to turn out right, it had to be a slow build.
They stopped at a Starbucks for Frappuccinos; then he walked her all the way downtown to the subway at Fifty-ninth Street. He offered to ride with her back to Forest Hills, but she said it was okay, she could go alone, and he decided not to push it. He made out with her for a long time near the subway entrance, and when she was all worked up he said good-bye, leaving her wanting more.