LIKE A GLISTENING GREASED PISTON, RICK DRIVES IN
and out of his assistant’s body. Staving off orgasm, he focuses on the bob of her thick red blond hair, letting the rhythm lull him into a deeper place. He lifts his eyes and tries to focus on the art poster on the wall. Modigliani, the weirdly sexy-unsexy chick with black hair and great hips. Now I’m thinking about it too much. Why do I have to think so much when I’m fucking? Why can’t I just fuck like a man?
Through clenched teeth, Zoe moans, rubbing herself down there. Even if he can’t see her face, Rick can imagine it. Her brow barely furrowed with concentration, lips parted. Her hair hangs down, swaying, obscuring her further. I can touch her hair all I want now, but somehow it’s different here, wherever we are. Maybe I should try tugging it? Her moaning grows, he thinks, oh she likes that.
Zoe groans louder, reaches around behind herself and urges his buttocks toward her. Rick’s train of thought misses a cog. His hand slips over her slick skin, finds a breast, then sees the Modigliani again. She’s coming. Screaming. Can’t stay focused. I’ve been trying to get into her pants for months, maybe years, and now all I want to do is come. Please. Please let me come. Please!
Rick wakes, his wife asleep beside him.
Until I brush my teeth, no way is Laura going to kiss me, let alone have sex with me. It’s not my fault. She’s the one who put red onions in the salad. Plus the Burgundy. Plus the coffee and the surreptitious cigarette. Probably stink like a homeless wino. But look, you wake up with a hard dick, you should put it somewhere. It’s a health issue. The prostate gets clogged.
Rick creeps into the bathroom and scrubs at the plaque, gargles, rinses. In the mirror, his eyes are puffy and dim, his cheeks slack. His hair forms a matted, asymmetrical sculpture. This is what I will look like when I’m old. No, friend, this is what you look like now.
Freshened and inoffensive, Rick slips between the air-conditioned sheets and burrows into the warmth of Laura’s large slack body. She wiggles her ass into him and yawns. He lifts her nightgown, presses himself against the back of her thigh. Bumping. Someone’s bumping up the stairs. Pause.
“Daddy, I’m hungry.” Rick can sense the little girl standing by the bed, her face inches from his. Don’t move. Don’t breathe. But children are hard to fool because they are survivors. “Daddy!!!”
With a violent flourish, Laura whips back the eiderdown. “Daddy’s sleeping, honey. I’ll get you something. Did you go wee yet?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure? Show me.” Laura and Trina head for the bathroom the four-year-old shares with her older brother, Henry. Rick shifts onto his belly and mime-fucks the mattress. He can hear Laura’s muted approval of bladder evacuation, doors opening and closing, more footsteps, all of which draws Rick along the escarpment of sleep. He can almost see them in the sunny kitchen as Laura fills bowls with Honey Nut Cheerios and skim milk.
Rick floats in his bed, unready, resistant to the new day. Bladder full, he meditates on the excretions collected from children, the excretions he will soon be collecting from his patients.
This is how you know someone, by changing their diaper, by taking their blood. By looking inside, getting inside. Urine. Blood. Fecal smears. Semen? Only the week before, Rick had examined a young stockbroker. As the patient shimmied his pants up and Rick washed his hands he saw a droplet of cum on the tip of the guy’s prick. I made him cum. Like a five-buck hooker. That’s me, nothing but an old whore. Prostates. Bladders. Urethras. My prick. In Laura. Maybe. Rarely. Not that rarely. What is the urge to spritz sperm at a womb? Only the greatest force in the universe. Kingdoms won and lost. Let’s face it, Macbeth just wanted to get laid. And look what happened to him.
Rick tries to make a mental list of everyone he’s ever fucked. Blow jobs don’t count. Comes up with twenty-two first names. Twenty-three if he includes Laura, which is kind of perverse. Wife on the fuck-list. Too weird. So, twenty-two. Can’t remember all the last names. There was that time in med school when sex was just a part of getting drunk. You got drunk, ended up with someone. That’s all. Intercourse happened in there somewhere. Usually not memorable. Unless you caught crabs. Or worse. And then there was that other period as an intern and too exhausted to fuck. If I had started my medical practice when I was a bachelor, I’d have had a much longer list of women. Cheated two times. Those count. Definitely count.
Maybe the list is more like thirty. If I had any balls, the number would be over one hundred. I’m a doctor, for god’s sake! Doctors are supposed to get laid! Over a hundred would be something to be proud of. I could walk with my head high, even if my own wife is bored by me. Pride can be a good thing. Pride fixes things. Dad was proud. Used to swagger around town, and everybody knew. “Now there’s a guy who knows how to use his schlong!” A fucker who was a real fucker. Admit it, I want to be a fucker, too. But I have no balls. Wanted the easy road. Afraid of being alone. Still wanted the action, though. Is that why I became a doctor? For the pussy?
In the shower, Rick weighs the pros and cons of masturbation. Decides it’s not a good way to start the day, too much like defeat. He shaves and dresses and lets the missed moment fold into the nothingness that is this particular morning. He trots downstairs, joins his family, reads the paper and drinks coffee. The headlines eclipse his horniness. Clearly, Laura’s mind is elsewhere, too. Where are you in your life when you forget your own sex drive? Near the end, probably. Maybe if I flossed before going to bed Laura would have sex with me. Floss gets into those crevices of putrefaction. Removes the essential grossness. If she fucked me, the morning would go so much better. And if I arrived at work satiated, I wouldn’t find Zoe so interesting. I’d be able to focus, do my work.
A horn cheeps outside and Laura ushers the kids to the door. Out on the street, an undersized SUV lingers and a fellow car-pool parent waves. Can’t remember her name. After a while all the parents look the same. Slightly anxious. Sexless. The kids run to the car. The smell of fall enters the house. First days of the school year, everything is potential. Rick watches Laura cross the lawn.
As she reenters the house, the cool air clings to her robe. Rick says, “Uh, what are you doing, say, for the next fifteen minutes?”
“I have the gym.” Her eyes are warm, but her mouth is set.
“Skip the gym.” Rick follows Laura back into the kitchen and as she refills her coffee, he embraces her from behind and cups a breast. “You go to the gym to look good, right? What’s the point of having that if you don’t put it to use pleasing your horny husband?”
“Maybe I’m not doing it to please my horny husband. Maybe I want to preserve my health, Doctor.”
“Sex is the best thing for your health.”
“And debating it like this really turns me on.” She flashes her bathrobe open. “Look at me. Do you want me to get fatter?”
“Uh, yes. I want you to get fatter.” He wants to say, “Laura, you are overweight. You will always be overweight. Who cares? My libido doesn’t know the difference.” She treats her leisure time like a job. Reading, exercising, meditating.
Laura fits a plate into the dishwasher and gives Rick a maternal kiss. “Tonight, when the kids are in bed. Not now.”
“I have my shift at the ER tonight. I’ll be home after midnight.”
“I have a lot of reading to do. I’ll wait.”
When Rick gets to the clinic, Zoe smiles at him. Zoe with the peach-colored skin, miniature breasts, and frizzy red hair. Today she’s wearing slacks that offer her butt like a gift. The top two buttons of her blouse are undone. She’s wearing extra-moist lipstick. She has the barest hint of sunburn.
The waiting room is full and this cheers Rick up. He’s proud of his waiting room. Cool and sparsely decorated, featuring exposed cement walls and muted lighting, it’s Laura’s finest hour. She selected every element, from the chrome fittings to the hand-made Uzbeki kilims scattered artistically over the industrial carpeting. The hi-tech lighting and the eight-foot-tall potted ming arelia in the corner give the place the feel of a Malaysian hotel lobby designed by Germans. It says “new age,” it says “cutting-edge medicine,” it says, “no HMOs.”
The day has begun like most days and continues that way. Rick takes blood pressure, dispenses Lipitor and discusses omega-3 fatty acids. His patients like the new-age nutritional talk, then want the same pharmaceuticals everyone else takes. For this, Rick charges double and accepts only the highest grade of insurance.
Zoe brings Rick’s lunch to him in his office and he dreams of her naked body collapsed over the front desk while he has his way with her sweet bottom. Passersby on the street stop and watch through the plate glass window. She says, “Fuck me, Rick.”
After work, Rick eats a slice of pizza off a paper plate and wanders up to the hospital. Ten hours a week at the ER balances out his exclusive practice. He checks in at the nurses’ station, dresses and scrubs. Tonight unfolds like most of the others, fraught with an edge of drama but in the end, forgettable. During the shift he stitches up five lacerations, bandages a burn, writes three ampicillin scrips and orders seven X-rays. No gunshot wounds. No massive bleeding. No deaths.
The time passes quickly, and soon he’s on his way back to the suburbs, feeling as he does every Thursday night, how lucky he is not to be stuck in an urban wasteland in which the hospital is the only oasis.
On the ferry Rick considers the hour, considers imminent union with his wife and swallows a Viagra washed down with half a can of Sprite. Better safe than sorry. The ferry docks. It’s late. Rick and his fellow ghosts wander off the ship and find their respective vehicles, no one acknowledges the other. In the almost empty parking lot, each commuter is anonymous. Soon we’ll all be home, safe and sound and reconstituted.
Rick motors up the hill toward his quiet town and the press of his foot on the accelerator reminds him of his horniness. Or maybe it’s the pill he’s popped. The libido is a nasty little pet that has to be fed and taken for walks. He neither likes nor dislikes the sensation. It’s just something that’s part of him. Rick thinks, someday I won’t feel this way and I probably won’t miss it.
Laura has left the kitchen light on and the house is still. Rick tiptoes up the stairs, past the night-light glow of the children’s rooms. He finds Laura sprawled against pillows, eyes closed. Her book has fallen off her lap and the bedside lamp bathes her in sweet light. Gotta give her an A for effort. When Rick switches off the lamp, Laura begins to snore. Fifteen years ago, she slept like a fairy princess. Now she snores because she’s carrying the extra forty pounds she kept after Trina was born.
Rick returns to the kitchen, pries open a tub of Häagen-Dazs and roams the quiescent house ladling frozen cream into his mouth. He likes the place when it’s calm like this. It feels like a home, the polished floors cast with moonlight, the aroma of food and children. A very clean house. The woman from Nicaragua comes twice a week and injects her simple energy into their congested life, fixing it briefly.
Rick surveys the detritus of the time they spend here—the dead screen of the TV, kids’ tattered books, unidentifiable electronic junk trailing a confusion of wires, forgotten bits of clothes, shoes. Could I live here alone without them? Without the relentless clamor of domesticity? Without their clatter and babble and warm respiration? No. I’d be lonely and sad. But aren’t I lonely and sad anyway, living with them? No, that’s not true. I like my life. I’m proud of my life. I brag about it to my patients. Even to Zoe. Everyone thinks I’m lucky, and I am. I like my life, it’s just living my life that makes me unhappy.
In the den, Rick sprawls on the couch, scraping the dregs, stoned on sugar and fat. He tosses the spoon into the damp carton and leaves the whole mess on the coffee table. Laura will find it in the morning. So what? Rick’s foot nudges a camcorder lying under the coffee table.
Propping the machine on his slightly distended belly, Rick inserts a tape from another time. Trina not born yet, Henry just turned four. Laura gorgeous and in a good mood. A young family, as frisky and carefree as puppies.
He doesn’t recognize himself. Tan and thin. Laura laughs out loud. Who’s holding the camera? It must have been someone we saw every day, someone important to our lives then. A parent from Henry’s preschool? A blur of a face, a name, lost. Yes, wait a minute, there he is. Old what’s-his-face—Charlie. Whatever happened to Charlie? Didn’t they get divorced? Or the kid had ADD? Whatever.
I used to talk to this guy. Told him about that one-nighter with the Dutch hematologist at the convention. All chewed up about it and Charlie had said, “Shit happens.” I guess so. That must have been why you got divorced, Charlie. You didn’t take it seriously enough. I should never have told him. This guy doesn’t know me, doesn’t know why I do what I do. What was I confiding in him for? Because I was bragging, that’s why. He probably told his wife. Wonder if she told Laura?
The camera is passed back and again Charlie holds Rick’s family in the palm of his hand. A long time ago. Cut to: Rick telling a joke. He makes a face. The camera angle drops, Laura has the giggles. Henry is wheeling and screaming.
On the couch, in the present, Rick wonders. Was I there? Do I recall living any of this? Do those memories exist in me somewhere? No. It’s on the tape but I could never come up with this on my own. That guy on the tape isn’t me.
I don’t remember being happy then. I remember being tired. The clinic was overwhelming and that was when Henry was wetting the bed and we had no money and Laura and I never had time for sex. Then when we got past all that, she got pregnant again. What’s changed? Nothing, except I am five years older.