Edward Lee (5 page)

“Wow, I—”

It was a lark, Flood knew. But what the hell? The only person he’d ever talked to about this was Dr. Untermann. Back in Seattle, and Seattle was a long way away.

“I want to tell you about this problem I have,” he began.

“Okay. Sometimes it’s good to talk about a problem with someone you don’t know, and someone you’ll probably never see again. It feels better afterwards, and sometimes a different perspective helps. An anonymous one. You can talk without worrying about what the other person might think of you.”

“Yes,” Flood said. “I’m hoping so, anyway. And I’ll try not to bore you.” Then he began: “I have a sexual dysfunction which my psychiatrist charmingly refers to as a thematic-erotic inversion with ejaculatory incompetence and sequent erectile failure. How’s that for a diagnosis?”

“It’s a mouthful, all right.” She popped a shrimp in her mouth, then whispered, “But they have stuff for that now.” Then she held up her wrist purse. “If you need a Viagra, I’ve got ‘em.”

“It doesn’t work, none of that does.” He tapped his temple. “It’s all psychological. It’s like a toggle-switch in my brain. When I’m with woman, and it gets past a certain point, that sexual switch gets turned off, by a single image, a single memory.”

“What memory?”

“My ex-wife. Even after three years, it’s like sabotage.”

“Do you still love her?”

“Yes, and I know that’s ridiculous and illogical. She ruined me—lied, cheated, stole, and left me—but after all that, I know deep down, I’d take her back without thinking twice.”

“Why?”

He gave an honest shrug. “Because she was the best sex of my life, and now I can never have that again. My psyche’s still obsessed with her; it’s not even a conscious thing, at least that’s what my therapist has told me. And I believe it. What else can I believe?” Flood’s eyes panned over the nearly nude breasts and pubis, all that erotic flesh showing through the net—one of the most erotic images of his life. His penis—and his heart—felt like dead meat. “It’s like I’m being haunted,” he dragged on, lowering his voice. “It doesn’t matter what the circumstance is sexually. Whenever I’m with a woman, right at the moment before I’d...come...I lose my erection, and...no orgasm. As if, right then, right at the moment of
my pleasure,
the woman I’m with becomes my ex-wife, and all that anger and negativity shoots right into my head, and kills all sexual function.”

Carol’s eyes blinked as she thought. “Okay, so...what about...”

“Masturbation? Same thing. Whatever image is in my head...while I’m doing it—whatever beautiful, stimulating woman— changes into
her.
Felicity.”

“Maybe there’s something you don’t really know about yourself,” she suggested. “Have you tried to get it on with guys?”

Flood winced, shaking his head. “No, no, no. I’ve never been attracted to men, never.”

“What about porn?”

“Tried it, doesn’t work. Oh, I’ll get hard, I’ll get excited, but—”

“Right before you’d get off, you lose it.”

“Yes,” he groaned. His heart had picked up while he’d been telling her, his blood-pressure shooting up. Any reference to Felicity did that, it put him in a state of subdued terror. “Porn, call girls, oils, lubes, herbs, oysters, prescription drugs, even penis-pumps—” He was beginning to blush—“I’ve tried it all, and it all fails. That toggle gets turned off. Then—nothing.”

More contemplation. She’d replaced her hand on his thigh, ran her tongue over her bottom lip as she thought. “Well, now that you’ve talked about it to someone else, maybe that unplugged the toggle. Let’s try. .” Her eyes darted off. Now the barmaid was conversing with a bus boy at the other end of the bar, chattering away. Before he could look back to Carol, her face was in his lap, his waistband hauled down. She suckled his bal s in her mouth, one at a time, then slipped the deflated penis past her lips. She worked the limp meat like a milking-machine nozzle on a cow teat. When turgidity requited, the action became more dainty, her tongue-tip running slow, excruciating lines up and down the shaft, tracing the veins. She even seemed earnest when she stopped a moment and whispered, “Don’t let her come into your head. Think about me,” and then she commenced with what he could only guess was the finest act of fellatio ever performed in the history of human sexuality.

His mind felt squashed with images of her, and just when he would fill her mouth with the horrendous back-pressure of sperm—

Felicity fell into his head like a guillotine blade; an instant later, his penis was a tiny and pathetic strip of nerveless meat.

There was nothing to say, yet she smiled just the same and offered, “Jake, whatever this problem is of yours, I know you’ll get over it in time.”

Flood doubted it but he nodded anyway. He ordered another round of drinks in silence while she patted his thigh in a lost condolence. “And when you
do
get over it,” she continued, “find that card, fly back here, and call me.”

“I will,” he said uselessly. Now it was all gone, any rapport that had been there previously. He drained half his beer in one slug, trying to think of small-talk, but a sudden encroacher saved him:

“Hi, guys!”

An unseen arm was around him, and what felt like a very firm and very large breast pressed against his back.

“Hi, Therese,” Carol said.

Flood turned to face a stunning, bright-eyed girl with ember-red hair cut like a flyer’s cap. Breasts even larger and more gravity-defying than Carol’s gaped back at Flood, jutting from a spritey, lissome pixie. A see-through white sarong and veil flowed off her hips and shoulders—a sun-ghost. Her skin, eyes, and smile radiated a cast of perfect health and vitality.
Sure as hell doesn’t look like the prescription-dope
junkie Leon was talking about,
Flood surmised. She leaned over and gave Carol a peck on the cheek.

“Therese, this is my friend, Jake. He saved me from the grossest scumbag earlier—yeck! You should’ve seen this guy. But Jake whipped his ass.”

“Defender of Women!” Therese exclaimed, then it was Jake’s cheek that got pecked.

This is fucking killing me,
Flood thought.

Therese was petite and short, and would’ve been shorter were it not for the heavily-soled beach sandals that elevated her. She lowered her face between the two of them, grinned impishly. “So are we doing a threeway, or what? I’m so horny I’m starting to show through my thong! Look, Jake—” and she squeezed next to him and pulled her thong down beneath the bartop. Flood’s eyes roved down the flat belly to see that what she revealed: an adorable little toy of a pussy, dusted by the lightest red fur. The meticulous cleft below glistened.

“She’s such a bad girl, Jake—and I mean sometimes she’s
really
bad,” Carol giggled. Then, to Therese: “Put that away!”

Both girls laughed; Therese repositioned the thong, then patted the adhesive triangle of fabric.

Flood ordered another round of drinks, testicles tingly.
Yes. This is definitely fucking killing me...

“Jake and I just did some business,” Carol sort of lied. “Now we’re just talking.”

“Oh. That’s cool. Sorry I missed the fun. Maybe next time?” She gave Flood’s tortured crotch a finger-tickling squeeze.

“Sure,” Flood answered and drank more.

He was grateful that the next few minutes of banter didn’t regard any manner of sex—just enlivened chit-chat. He
wasn’t
necessarily grateful for Carol’s hand on one thigh and Therese’s on the other. Flood slowly grew erect again, painstakingly so, and at this point—the futility of it all now burying him as if in a hole—he felt as though an abstract bullet had been put through his head. Flood was the diabetic working in the Godiva chocolate factory; the Olympic swimmer standing in the middle of the Sahara Desert. So he drank gluttonously, pretending to listen to the girls’ chat but hoping that enough alcohol would deaden his sexual nerves.

“Well, I better get going now,” Carol said. “Thanks for everything, Jake. It was great hanging out with you.”

Flood took a last useless look at the perfect breasts suspended in the big fishnet cups. “Likewise.”

Therese gave his thigh another squeeze. “Where are you staying, Jake?”

“The Rosamilia Hotel, just up the beach.”

Her breasts jiggled flawlessly when she stood up. “Cool. That’s where I’m staying too.”

“Maybe we’ll run into you before you leave,” Carol offered.

Flood was done talking, done thinking, and very much
done
with seeing what he couldn’t have. “That’d be great,” he said for formality. “You girls have a great day.”

“‘Bye.”

“‘Bye!”

Two more pecks on the cheek (and a final insufferable crotch-rub from Therese), and they were off. It was relief from the humiliation that overwhelmed Flood when they left. Their shadows lengthened to sultry jet-black threads as they departed back to the sand.

His head droned with an arid silence, noise that wasn’t noise. The sound of his soul? Because that’s what his soul felt like just then. Arid, sterile. A husk.

It occurred to him that if he died at that very moment...he wouldn’t have cared in the least.

His hangover dragged through the dinner hour and on into the night. He didn’t bother checking in with Farris and Nathans to see how the day’s business went; he didn’t care. He lay naked and dried out on the hotel bed, head thumping, sparks of pain behind his eyes, throbbing along with the images of those two impeccable women: the abundant flesh of Carol’s breasts blaring through the fishnets, the sparse mist of downy red hair covering Therese’s mound. The coltish legs and flat abdomens. Each image twinged in his head with his heartbeat, and each heartbeat made him feel more hopeless. He thought of calling Dr. Untermann and telling her he felt like maybe committing suicide but didn’t for two reasons.

One:
She’d think I was even more pathetic than I really
am.

And, two:
I don’t have the balls.

The sun had set brilliantly—a fireball that looked nuclear—and soon full dark bled into the room. Flood stared at the ceiling, not listening to the baseball game that shot scatters of wavering light on one wall. He wished he could fall asleep, erase the humiliating day, and begin a new man in the morning.

But he
wouldn’t
be a new man, would he?

He’d be the same impotent, royally-fucked-up-in-the-head man he was today and had been for the last three years.

As his senses began to drift, he heard voices...

“It ain’t bad really, we’re doing better than the rest. We got fifteen girls and only a handful went bad. I’m sure Jinny won’t fuck us over again. I think the skinny bitch learned her lesson.”

Flood sat up in bed, glanced to his window. It was Oscar’s voice, the big bad bald guy.
I left the window open,
Flood realized. The curtains billowed at a breeze. And the maids hadn’t come in because he’d left out the do-not-disturb sign.

Flood sprang out of bed, seized, but not exactly knowing why. Just as he arrived to the window’s edge, Leon’s voice was floating up.

“I know. You’re one terrifying motherfucker, Osc. Jinny’ll have nightmares about you.” A laugh.

“Bitch sucked my balls the whole time I was driving her home, then begged me to fuck her in the ass back at her joint.”

A darker resolve shifted into Leon’s next words. “But the other two are liabilities.”

The other two?
Flood recited.

“I had dinner with Therese tonight. Cunt lied to my face all through her steak. Got no idea Stoolie’s ratting on Phipps’ stable.”

“You’re shitting me?”

“Nope.”

A pause drifted in with the warm breeze. Oscar said, “Lemme kill her. I’ve always hated the bitch.”

Flood’s heart stilled. He felt frozen, half his face peering out his window down into the window of Room 415. He could see the salmon-pink drapes fluttering, and in their gap, the brightly lit room. Oscar sat on the bed drinking a Heineken; Flood could see his knees and back of his large, shaven head. Leon sat in the chair along the wall, legs crossed.

“I don’t want her iced, but I want her uglied up bad for when we boot her lying ass back to Phipps.”

The back of Oscar’s bald head nodded.

“It’s that other lying cunt I want iced,” Leon added.

“Good. It’d be a pleasure.”