Rules of the Game (61 page)

On a more positive note, after we hang up and I collapse onto the floor of my bedroom, I realize something: My balls haven't ached all day. I seem to have made it through the pain period.

The next afternoon, I'm in a cab to LAX to take a plane to New York. At the same time, Kimberly is in a cab to JFK to take a plane to Miami. Neither of us has slept. We spent the night arguing, showing each other our worst sides. And now we are texting each other the ugliest good-bye in the world: “Have a nice life.”

On the plane, I'm a wreck. Sleepless, unshaven, blanched, I hold my head in my hands the whole ride and replay the conversation in my mind, regretting all the stupid things I said and wondering if Kimberly sabotaged the relationship
on purpose. Perhaps she's scared to meet, worried that either she'll disappoint me or I'll let her down. Perhaps she never planned to meet in the first place because she has a boyfriend in Miami or is a lunatic telephone stalker or has a fake MySpace profile and actually looks like a linebacker.

None of these possibilities alleviates the heartbreak. I didn't know I could feel this way about someone I've never met.

The empty bed fills my hotel room like an accusation. I'd spent so many nights imagining lying here with Kimberly, seeing each other naked for the first time, acting out all our phone fantasies, taking a candlelit bath together, and then getting under the covers and talking until we fell asleep in each other's arms. I feel like a fool for trusting her, falling for her, spending all those hours on the phone building a future with her that she knew would never exist. At the same time, I wonder how much my infatuation with her was a result of transference from the 30 Day Experiment: replacing one addiction with another.

I decide to go to her favorite lounge in the city, Amalia, to search for someone just like her. Instead, I find Lucy, a young, thick Brazilian girl with a lisp, a too-tight black dress, and no interest in 60's garage-rock or grocery carts.

She follows me around Amalia, touching me at every opportunity. So I tell her, not really caring whether she accepts or rejects me, “We should take one of these girls home with us tonight.”

It is presumptuous and I prepare for her to snap back, “Who says I'm going home with you?”

But instead, she snaps back, “We should take, like, five of them home.”

“Who's your favorite?”

She points to a tall, frail girl with pale skin, long auburn hair, and a big, toothy smile.

Two hours later, my hotel bed is full. Lucy takes my computer and plays a Shakira video online. Then she rises and lisps along in perfect harmony while working her hips in slow circles. The tall girl, an off-Broadway actress named Mary, lies in bed on her stomach and watches. By the end of the dance, she's on her back and we're making out.

She gets the chills every time I kiss and bite her neck, each shiver shaking off a little more inhibition, until she tells me, “I want to see your cock.”

I'm taken aback by her sudden boldness. It seems less like she's turned on and more like she's decided to play a role.

“Get naked,” she orders. “I want to see it.”

I play along, and within seconds I'm completely nude. They're both still wearing their dresses. Without clothes or even actual desire, I feel awkward. I miss Kimberly.

“I want to watch you fuck Lucy's tits.”

Having something to do helps. Lucy joins us on the bed and removes her shirt. I kneel over her, put my dick between her breasts, squeeze them around me, and start sliding up and down. It is as unsexy as it sounds.

“I like watching you fuck her tits. I want to see you come all over her.”

On that command, I lose what little arousal I was able to muster.

“There's something I should tell you,” I begin.

They both tense, assuming the worst.

“No, it's not that.”

After I explain the 30 Day Experiment, we start fooling around again. But it's not the same. Mary eventually gathers her clothes and leaves, and Lucy falls asleep while I'm going down on her.

It is the worst threesome ever and I don't care. I am beyond desire. But I am not beyond loneliness.

When I reach over to the nightstand to check my phone, I notice a text message from Kimberly. My heart clenches. I feel excitement, anxiety, curiosity, fear, and, when I see the message—“Are you phonable?”—relief.

Careful not to wake Lucy, who's lying naked and spread-eagled over the sheets, I slip into jeans and a T-shirt and tiptoe into the hallway. There's a window ledge next to the bank of elevators, and I perch there and call Kimberly.

“Hey,” she says. I adore her voice. It is the sound of gravity sucking me into her world. I never thought I'd hear it again.

“I'm glad you texted.” I want to tell her that I wish she were here, but I know it will upset her. “I'm sorry for overreacting. I just had my heart set on seeing you.”

“I did, too. I really thought we would be together, like, really be together. But last night changed things. I saw another side of you.”

“Yeah, I understand. I think the relationship went as far as it could go on the phone, until there was nowhere to go but down.”

We spend the next hour trying to talk things back to the way they used to be. Eventually, we succeed. “I wish I could be with you right now,” she whispers.

Minutes later, I'm squeezing myself through my jeans. “I'm imagining you fucking my face,” she is saying. “You're just grabing my head and thrusting into my mouth, as hard as you can. And you're reaching down my back and putting a finger inside.”

I'm not sure if this is even physically possible, but it's making me feel like I'm thirteen again and stealing my father's copies of
Penthouse
to read the letters. I undo the button of my jeans and reach into my pants.

I imagine the night as it should have happened. She is here, in my hotel room, pale body against the crumpled sheets, lips swollen and chin red from endless kisses, thighs wet from …

I hear an elevator whirring, people laughing. I don't stop. I'm half-exposed. The pressure is building, the body is separating.
Wet from
… This is the night I was supposed to end it all, the night of the toothpaste and the hammer.
Thighs wet from . .
.

I lower myself into her. I could stop. I should stop. I can't stop. She's coming. I'm coming.

I watch it release. It doesn't fly everywhere the way I expected and, on some level, hoped. It just flows out, into a giant pool, like the first time I ever came—except this time, instead of fantasizing about a public place, I'm actually in one.

An immense wave of relief spreads through every nerve ending, my eyes fill with tears of joy, and white fireworks explode lightly in my head.

“Did you come?” she asks.

“Yes.” I already feel guilty: less for masturbating than for not even making it halfway through the 30 Day Experiment.

“I can't believe it took me so long to get you to do that.” She pauses and I hear her suck in air. She's having an after-phone-sex cigarette. “You were giving me a complex. I thought: I'm no good. I'm not turning this man on, and he's giving me all these orgasms.”

I suppose she needed the closure. And so did I. We basically had an entire relationship over the phone: we met, fell for each other, dated, had sex, fought, and broke up without even meeting. Tonight was just makeup sex.

It is clear that we will never meet. Like the idea that I could actually go thirty days without an orgasm, the relationship was just a pipe dream.

Before I go to sleep, I call Crystal in Los Angeles. She's handling the experiment
just fine: no pain, no anxiety, no attraction to cartoon characters. But she's of a different gender, the one more likely to hurt after the orgasm than before.

I tell her about the benefits of the Experiment: I've been less tired during the day, possibly attracted more women, and definitely saved on Kleenex. Then I tell her about the downside: I failed. As she tries to console me, I realize that I actually set myself up to fail. I went on a diet, then hung out at Baskin-Robbins every day.

The Buddhists are right. Desire is my pilot. Most of each day is spent giving in to it. When I'm not fucking, I'm chasing. When I'm not chasing, I'm fantasizing. I have had sex with tens of thousands of women in my mind. And now that the Experiment is over, they will be back. All of them. A parade of innocents. The college girl swinging her hips through the supermarket aisles. The secretary posing at the crosswalk as I drive past. The party girl making out in the hot tub on the reality show. The girls who have gone wild. Cartman's mom. Kimberly. If I can't have them in real life, I will have them in my imagination.

I am an addict.

I am a man.

Love is a velvet prison.

That's what I think when Dana rolls on top of me. Her eyes are shining, her lips smiling but not too much. She doesn't have to say it, but she does.

“I love you.”

And then I feel the bars come down around me. They are only made of velvet. I have the physical strength to escape, but I don't have the emotional strength. And so this velvet is thicker than iron. At least I can bang my head against iron.

She looks at me, expectant, awaiting a reply. I can't speak it. I'm doing all I can to keep my eyes open. I want to go to sleep. I want her off me. Her emotions are now my burden. The wrong look, word, or gesture can singe her like a poker.

She lies on top of me, naked, her eyes searching for something in mine. When she doesn't find love, she will settle for hope. And so I am trapped. In this velvet prison.

“If one of your skanky fucking whores calls and hangs up on me again,” Jill fumed, “I will kill her.”

“What are you talking about?” I never knew what sort of mood she'd be in when I walked through the door. “Who did what now?”

“One of your whores called,” she yelled. “She said it was the wrong number, then she hung up.”

“Did you ever stop to consider that maybe it actually was a wrong number?”

“Oh, she knew,” she spat. “She knew it was me. The bitch.”

I left the house, climbed into my car, and drove down the Pacific Coast Highway. I'd seen Jill work herself into such a frenzy over the skanks and whores I'd slept with in the past that her mouth would actually foam. I had to get my life back.

I used to tell girls that if relationships were a funnel, I wanted a woman who would travel with me up to the wide side. I never realized the inaccuracy of the metaphor until that drive: Funnels only go one way, toward the narrow side.

You can smell Roger a block away. He sleeps in the streets of Boston and yells at lampposts. The people at a local bookstore who look after him tell me he was drafted to play major league baseball in the early seventies. One day, though, someone slipped acid in his beer as a joke. He was never the same.

Roky had a small, influential rock 'n' roll hit in the late sixties. Arrested for possession of a joint, he pled insanity to avoid a jail term. Successful, he was sent to a sanitarium, where years of electroshock and Thorazine treatments melted his mind. In 1981, he signed an affidavit stating that a Martian was in full possession of his body. At age fifty-four, a mental and physical wreck, he was put into legal custody of his younger brother.

My grandmother had a stroke when she was in her seventies. Afterward, she regressed to the age of thirty-two. She no longer recognized my brother or
myself, and instead spent every day waiting by the telephone for her mother to call from the hospital. Her mother had died in the hospital forty years before.

There is just a thin string connecting each of us to reality. And my biggest fear is that one day it will snap, and I'll end up like Roger or Roky or my grandmother.

Except, unlike them, there will be no one to take care of me.

“Kind of a cynical ending, don't you think?”

“I wouldn't say cynical. Maybe sad. Or afraid.”

“After the way you've carried on with all these women, do you expect me to feel sorry for you or something?”

“That's the last thing I'd expect, especially from you.” In the years that had passed, the scene hadn't changed. The producer, his houseboy, his dog didn't even appear to have aged. He was a creature of habit. And one of those habits was pointing out the inconsistencies in my thinking.

“So it's just about you feeling sorry for yourself then?”

“It's more about feeling confused. I wrote the stories you just read after the failure of two relationships. Afterward, I talked to hundreds of married men and women who felt unhappy or stuck. And I just want to make the right decisions in life.”

“I see.” The book manuscript sat on top of a blanket in his lap like an offensive drawing made by a schoolboy. “So why did your last relationships fail?”