Love Love (28 page)

He never used to be so ruminative during sex, but it'd been like this since Alice, and now he thought of her, the last time they made love. She was on top but facing away from him, leaving him with the view of her backside as she rocked rhythmically down and away from him. It wasn't his favorite position because he enjoyed seeing her face while they were doing it, and this was exactly the opposite, as anonymous as sex can be between two people, especially for her, since she was turned away completely.

For a second, Kevin thought Claudia was going to strike him, but she slammed both hands by his ears instead.

“Holy Jesus Christ!” Claudia screamed. “I'm coming, oh my fucking God, I'm coming!”

An orgasmic tsunami, hot waves of vibrations through a gush of sticky wetness. And just like that, he was on the edge himself. He wrapped his arms around her thighs, squeezed her and pumped into her, his movements no longer his own.

Was it this good with Alice? Maybe in the beginning, but if so, he honestly couldn't remember. With Claudia slumped over him, her breath as ragged as his, he hugged her sweat-slick body and realized he was doomed to forever compare every new woman to the love of his life. At the same time, he knew he was being melodramatic—there was life after Alice, whether or not he wanted to recognize it. Because this was what that afterlife was: making love in San Francisco, meeting
his porn-actor biological father. He needed to open his eyes and consciously experience what was in front of him.

“I've always been a messy fucker,” Claudia said. “When it's good, that is.”

Kevin looked up at her. “I like messy.”

When she ran her hand through her hair to tame the wildness, Kevin found her self-consciousness endearing. She lay down next to him on the Oriental rug, shoulder to shoulder, arm touching arm. They stared at the chandelier, crystal teardrops twisting lazily.

“Thank you,” she said. “You could've said no.”

“I suppose. But why?”

She giggled. She propped her head on his chest and walked down the expanse of his stomach with her index and middle fingers, her paint-spattered nails barely grazing the surface of his skin. Her finger-feet waded through the jungle of his pubic hair, digging and lifting through the thicket. She held his limp penis between her thumb and index finger and flopped it back and forth.

“It's one thing I'll never know, what it's like to have one of these.”

“If you keep doing that, he'll wake back up.”

“Really?”

“It might take a little while, though. I'm not as young as I used to be.”

“Are you one of these guys who names his penis?”

“No, but I do say
him
and not
it
. Come on, it's a penis. Of course it's a
him
.”

They watched him grow back in size; it was like seeing a time-lapsed photograph of a flower blooming.

“I'll miss this,” he said, “when I'm old.”

She wrapped her hand around his shaft, and the enclosed warmth made him harder.

“It's just sex, but it's so much more, isn't it,” Claudia said. “It's power, it's life, it's everything for a man. No wonder all those boner drugs have been a godsend for big pharma.”

“I don't know if it's everything, but it is more than just sex.”

She climbed on top of him again and kissed his lips, her hair falling over his face like a million little hands, and she sighed ever so slightly when he slipped inside. She was warm and wet, and he cradled her ass in his hands as if he owned her. She laughed and rocked and threw her head back, her hair still a tangled, untamed mass.

“I have to say,” she said, “it—I mean he—is quite a trooper.”

A
fter they showered together and noshed on cold leftover pizza, they returned to the couch and turned on the television. His father came back exactly as they'd left him, except now it was they who were different.

“We look like him,” Kevin said, and it was true, in their matching his-and-her bathrobes, the white terry cloth plush like a fresh towel.

She picked up her glass of water and took a sip. “This was a little weird, huh? Because when you really think about it, we fucked because your father and his sex stories turned us on.”

Kevin leaned back and slung his arm over his eyes.

“Can I just blame this on you?”

“Of course you can,” Claudia said. “But it does take two to tango, and as I recall, it was you and I who tangoed. Naked. Like right there, where that wet spot still is?” She pointed with her bare foot. “I'll have to get that rug cleaned.”

“I bet this would make him proud. If I told him that watching his movie led us to this.”

Claudia nodded. She filled his empty glass with the decanter of water sitting on the side table and handed it to him. “Are you okay? I can't even pretend to imagine what's going through your mind.”

Kevin took a long drink. He wanted to know what he was feeling, but all he could sense was the cold water going down his throat and settling into his stomach. A deep chill spread through his body.

“Let's finish this thing,” he said, and he clicked on the remote.

To this day, I still remember the first moment I held you, marveling at your impossible, tiny hands. Everything about you was so small and yet so fully formed, a human being in miniature. Of course that's what babies are, but when you see your own, it really is true, your life changes. For seventeen days of my twenty-second year, I was a father. On your birth certificate, we put down Norman, but we called you Little Man. That was, as I'll always remember, your name.

We couldn't keep you, Kevin, because we weren't ready, it was as simple as that. For two weeks we pretended we were, but your mom was still taking a cocktail of drugs, and I knew I couldn't do this alone. One day we had to rush you to the ER because you wouldn't stop crying, and when the doctor looked at you, he asked one of the nurses to get a bottle
of formula. It turned out that we'd forgotten to feed you and you were just really, really hungry. Your mother had thought it was my turn and I'd thought the opposite, and you were crying so loudly that we panicked like frightened children ourselves.

So we gave you up. I'm not going to lie and tell you this was a difficult decision. We knew there was no other way, and we were still young enough to fool ourselves into thinking that there was a future ahead of us. Grace died two years later, a day shy of her twenty-first birthday. To wake up in the morning and find the woman you love dead in your own bed—it's a day I wish I could erase from my memory banks, but I can't.

Here I go, getting ahead of myself again. To this day, I'm not exactly sure how the transaction transpired because Grace did it alone. We had a horrendous fight the night before, because she wanted to keep you, even though she was in no condition to. So if you want to blame someone for your abandonment, blame me. When I threatened to leave if she kept you, it was she who disappeared for two days. When she returned, you were gone, so I didn't even get a chance to say a proper good-bye. All she told me was that you were in good hands, that you would be raised without prejudice and as if you were the couples' own baby. She would never bring you up again, even though she thought of you every day for the rest of her days.

She just got worse from that point forward.

Don't get me wrong; it wasn't as if every day was misery. There were many moments of happiness, especially after a long day of shooting. Many people find it surprising that a couple who make porn movies can stay together in a normal relationship, but what those people forget is that sex is not intimacy. It can be, and it often is, but they are not mutually inclusive. Passing a box of popcorn while watching Three Days of the Condor, listening to her breathing as she drifted to sleep, sweating in the kitchen as we cooked up our favorite dish, duck à l'orange—these became our secret couplings. That's not to say that we didn't have sex—I don't think we ever went a day without fucking. To some eyes, we might have been sex maniacs, but would they reserve the same judgment for Michael Jordan if he shot hoops every day? If you're good at something, you do it because it gives you pleasure.

But your mother was unhappy. For most of her life, she'd been unhappy. A fair number of people who come into pornography do so because they were sexually abused or suffered some other form of childhood trauma, and so it was with your mother. She hated to talk about her
past, but eventually I pieced together that she had an uncle who started touching her when she was eight years old and it just got worse until she ran away at sixteen. In this business, there's a decent chance that you're working with somebody who's emotionally damaged, and here's the thing: If you're fucked up coming into it, you're not going to find any answers here. If anything, it'll just fuck you up more. The business drew your mother in, sucked the life out of her, and shit out what remained. Left her in the toilet is what it did.

I'm sorry if I sound bitter. I try not to be because I owe my livelihood to porn, but I can't forget the broken people I've worked with, especially women. That's why I'm still with the industry, trying to do what I can to make it better, working from the inside. I listen well and I've been through a lot myself, so I know I can help. I'm a survivor. And I don't give up—look at us, you and me. Even though I knew there was virtually no chance of me finding you, here we are. I've been searching for you for almost twenty years. I'd contacted various adoption agencies, even hired private investigators to track you down, but because Grace gave you up secretly and through nonstandard means, I knew it would be almost impossible to find you.

But we are together now, son. Through perseverance and luck and the generosity of whatever power that may or may not be out there, you are hearing about how the three of us came to be. I wish I had the courage to tell you all of this in person, but this is the best I could do. Which is also true of forty years ago. Your mother and I did the best we could, which we know wasn't good enough. Whatever hurt you have been harboring since you found out about your adoption will remain with you for the rest of your life, but if it's any consolation, you can count on me to be there for you going forward. I'm well aware you already have a father, but there can't be any harm in having another person who loves you, who cares for you—is there?

Thank you for listening, Kevin. I hope you'll find it in your heart to call me so we can talk about this and whatever else. And I want you to meet your sister before you go back to New Jersey. We are a family. I'm happy. I'm so very, very happy.

19

F
or fourteen days Judy woke up to the distant cry of gulls. As she made her way to the bathroom half asleep, her bare feet warm from the geothermal heat rising off the marble floor, she squinted against the sun-reflected surface of the bay. Iridescence and tranquility assaulted her from every window, and there were a lot of windows. None of this felt real, and yet it was absolutely real, especially when she sat down on the toilet to pee.

Snaps uncurled herself from the plush shag of the black bearskin rug that sat in the middle of the room. She placed her two front paws together and arched her back for a full stretch, her bones cracking like popcorn, then trudged over to greet Judy.

“Hey, girl,” Judy said. She scratched the top of Snaps's head, the shape of which had always reminded Judy of a horseshoe crab. Even though it was more than a decade ago, she could see the puppy in this old dog, that day Kevin and Alice had gotten her. Snaps had stood up in her palms, two tiny paws balanced on each hand, the entire dog cradled in the span of her outstretched fingers. Most of Snap's muzzle was gray now, as were her whiskers.

This ridiculous expanse of a bathroom, its dimensions roughly the size of her apartment's living room, seemed just as foreign as it had two weeks ago, when Roger had brought her to his home in Cape Cod. The Jacuzzi bathtub was big enough for the Brady Bunch, its inside walls lined with jets to soothe every muscle, and it was adorned with a circle of track lighting above that not only dimmed or brightened but shone different hues to enhance the mood. There were two enormous sinks, each basin large enough that Judy and Roger could stand side by side and still have plenty of room. The stand-up shower, which was shaped like a bottle, had just one showerhead, but it was as wide as a tire and rained a warm drizzle that was as nurturing as a mother's hug.

She was living an illusion, but she didn't care. This was the power of money, the greatest illusion of all.

“You don't care, do you?” she asked Snaps, who stared with her mouth ajar, pink tongue ensconced within the fence of her bottom row of teeth. Her lower canines jutted out like stalagmites, yellow pillars streaked with brown. They were all bone white in her puppy days.

Judy had always been afraid of death. Even as a child, she'd never experienced the fascination like so many of her friends or her brother. The games often involved someone getting shot or pushed over the precipice to the imagined abyss below, the kids clutching their chests, twirling and swaying in an elaborate dance of demise. Not wanting to be seen as a party-pooper, she reluctantly went along, but her deaths were always quick, never dramatic.