The Average American Marriage (19 page)

When I drop her off at her dorm we do not kiss.

some chapter

Advice from a Pro

T
odd calls me. He says, “You in the mood for a little booze?”

I am. I say, “Yes.”

He says, “Forty-five minutes? Zons?” I meet him forty-five minutes later at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. It's a Sunday night, so it's not that crowded. A few out-of-town businessmen who didn't fly back to wherever they're from on Sunday morning sit around the lounge as Todd and I take two seats at the bar. We get our drinks and he says, “So, how you managing the shitstorm?”

I say, “Not too well, man. Alyna wants me to sign divorce papers and Holly sucked some guy's dick last night at a party that I drove her to.”

He says, “By ‘some guy' you don't mean you, right?”

I say, “I do not mean me.”

He says, “Sorry, man. That's some real shit. I know I always say this, but seriously, thank you for constantly reminding me why I will never get married.”

I say, “Fuck you.”

He says, “Lighten up. This shit will all be behind you in a year or two.”

I say, “I don't know if you remember that I have kids. So, no, it won't.”

He says, “I know, man. I know.”

I notice a woman next to us, dressed a little too slutty for the Four Seasons, sipping a Diet Coke by herself. She's wearing enough perfume so that I can smell her from where I'm sitting. She smells good. She looks over at an old bald guy sitting at the end of the bar, then slides down a few chairs so she's sitting next to him and she says, “Hey, how's your night going?”

I look at Todd and say, “You see that shit?”

He says, “Yeah.”

I say, “You ever had a chick do that to you?”

He says, “Dude, she's a fucking pro.”

I say, “What? How do you know?”

He says, “The Zons, the Peninsula, Beverly Wilshire—high-class pros hang out in the bars and pick up rich dudes who are staying in the hotel.”

I say, “Are you fucking serious?”

He says, “Yeah.”

I turn and watch the prostitute work her game on the old guy. She says, “You staying here?”

He says, “Yeah.”

She says, “Very nice. I love this hotel.”

He says, “Yeah. I stay here when I'm in town.”

She says, “You leaving tomorrow?”

He says, “Yeah.”

She says, “Well, you should make sure you have as much fun as you can on your last night here.”

He raises his drink and says, “I think I'm just going to finish my drink and then go to bed.” He fucking knows the drill. I wonder if he's fucked prostitutes before. Maybe he's even fucked this one before.

She says, “Okay. Well, it was nice to meet you.” I wonder if she's fucked him before and doesn't even remember.

The old bald guy downs his drink, pays his tab, and heads off into the hotel. The pro looks around at her prospects, which are not too good, checks her phone, and then slides back over to us. In a tone completely devoid of any of the sexual charm she used on the old bald guy, she says, “How's your night going?” to Todd and me.

Todd says, “Not bad. You?”

She says, “Pretty slow.” She's not completely divulging the fact that she's a prostitute, but she might as well be.

Todd says, “Can I ask you something?”

She says, “Sure.”

Then, without even asking if it's okay with me, he says, “My friend here is going through a shitty divorce. Seems to me like you might know more than the average person about how relationships and shit like that work. You got any advice for him?”

Without skipping a beat she says, “Well, who cheated on whom?”

I say, “Uh . . . I guess technically I did the cheating.”

She says, “But it was because the Mrs. wasn't sucking your dick anymore, right?”

I say, “In so many words.”

She says, “And was the pussy you got worth ruining whatever you had with the Mrs.?”

I say, “I thought it might be, but I don't think so now.”

She says, “So lesson learned. You fucked up. Do you think you fucked up?”

I really think about this for a minute. I don't know if I think I did or not. I do actually feel at least semi-justified in fucking Holly. I don't know if I did or not. For argument's sake I say, “Sure.”

She says, “Well, that doesn't sound too sincere. But you just need to go back to the Mrs. and say, ‘Listen, honey, I fucked up.' ”

I say, “I don't know if it's that simple.”

And this is when the prostitute turns to me and says something I'll probably remember for the rest of my life. She says, “It's always that simple.
I fucked up. I'm sorry.
That's all she wants to hear—that you're sorry for fucking up, and that you've learned something from it, and that because of whatever you learned you're not even capable of doing it again. Everyone makes mistakes. She just wants to know that you know it was a mistake. Unless you kill somebody, it's pretty rare that the mistake is bad enough to fuck something up forever.”

When I get back to my hotel room at the Marriott, I force myself to jerk off thinking about Alyna's ass and tits. Memories of fucking Holly creep in from time to time, but when I blow my load I'm thinking back to a time when Alyna sucked my dick in the shower of my old apartment a few months after we first started dating. I fucked up.

chapter forty-one

The Transfer

I
haven't seen or talked to Holly since the party, and when I walk into the office Monday morning I'm not exactly sure what to expect. It doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility that she'll be sucking Lonnie's dick while she's getting fucked by some asshole from Legal or something similar. This is not the case, though.

I walk out of the elevator and onto our floor, and just as I do every morning, I pass Holly's desk on the way to my office. And, just like every morning, she's on Facebook and she says, “Hey,” when I walk past. But in a divergence from my usual practice, this time I don't respond. I just go to my office, sit down, and open a spreadsheet. I don't look at her Facebook page. I don't send her an IM. I even try not to look at her, but that can't be helped. I take in a few long glances at her ass and her back and try as hard as I can to remember the good things about her. In some way they all involve fucking.

I go back over almost every second we spent together and I can't recall one in which I was having fun with her that my dick wasn't in her or I wasn't high or drunk. Even if this isn't true, I force myself to believe it is. I force myself to take the image of her I have in my head and transform it into that of a retarded person who's really good at fucking and nothing else. Then I get an IM from her. It reads, “Are we cool?”

I'm not sure how to respond to this. The fact that she's even asking this can only mean that there's still some possibility of fucking her again, and I can't discount this. I try to force myself to imagine the taste of some other guy's semen in her mouth, but I know rationally that she's probably brushed her teeth and possibly even used mouthwash. I'm not sure I'm capable of never fucking her again if I know I still have the opportunity. The same logic the Four Seasons prostitute gave me about my marriage can also be applied here. Holly just fucked up. Her IM is her way of saying she fucked up. My fingers are on the keyboard and I'm about to write her back. I'm about to tell her that we're cool, and to see if she wants to get dinner after work, which always leads to fucking in my hotel room.

Then I look out at her and see her flirting with one of the young guys from the mail room. He has his hands on her shoulders. They're laughing. I don't know if it's her age, or her looks, or a combination thereof, but with a girl like Holly this will always be the case. She has too many options and too little regard for the importance of intimacy to ever give anyone anything approaching normal. I imagine her at my age, after her tits have started sagging, after her ass isn't quite as perky, after guys stop paying her the same attention they do now, and I feel like I know what she'll be. She'll just be another pretty girl who wasted her youth thinking it would never end, or not even realizing what she had while she had it. It's kind of sad, but I take comfort in the fact that I had my dick in every one of her holes when she was in her prime.

I minimize my IM window and compose the following e-mail to the head of HR:

“Holly McDonnel has performed with skill at her position of unpaid intern in the Accounts department. Her assignments, however, have come to a conclusion, and I strongly recommend utilizing her talents in another department, possibly Legal. Thank you.”

I send the e-mail, and by the end of the day someone from HR comes up and talks to her. Before she leaves our floor she comes into my office and says, “Hey. They're moving me to Legal.”

I say, “Oh. Good luck.”

She says, “What's up? Are you, like, still pissed off about the other night?”

I say, “No, Holly, I'm not mad at all. I get it. I get your whole thing and it's fine. It's just not something I'm interested in anymore.”

She slumps down in the chair across from my desk and starts crying. I panic. I don't know if I should shut the door so that no one sees her crying in my office or if that would be even more conspicuous. Through tears she says, “I'm sorry. Please can we still hang out?”

I say, “No. I don't really think that's a good idea anymore,” and then I realize: She's never been rejected before in her life. Every one of the hundreds of guys that comment on her status on Facebook have all either fucked her and want to again or are trying to for the first time. And that's the thing she needs. She needs to know that every guy she ever meets approves of her and wants her, and that's more important to her than having anything real with any one of them. I kind of feel bad for her. I kind of feel bad for her entire generation, because they all seem to be like that to me. I hope that, by the time my daughter is Holly's age, Facebook has become something else and girls have become something else. I briefly wonder what I'll be doing in twenty years, if I'll be fucking a girl who is my daughter's age.

I hand Holly a Kleenex and say, “We had fun. I think we just wanted different things out of this and that's fine.”

She says, “What did you want? A girlfriend or something?”

The simple answer to that question would be yes, but I say, “I wanted a connection, I guess. You know, just to feel like you gave a shit about it.”

She says, “But we have a connection. You bought me a MacBook.”

I say, “No, we don't. I don't think we ever really did.”

She sucks up her tears and says, “Okay. Bye, I guess.”

I say, “Bye,” and she walks out of my office.

some chapter

Getting Legal

B
efore my lunch break, I Google “marijuana doctors” and find one a few miles from the office. Dr. Kenneth Ridgemont III. I call his office and a girl answers. I'm not sure what to say. I say, “Hi, I was wondering, do I need to make an appointment, or how exactly does this work?”

The girl says, “No appointment necessary. Just come in anytime you want. The examination will take about fifteen minutes.”

I say, “Okay, thanks.”

I head over to a nondescript two-story office building on my lunch break and make my way to suite 206, which has no placard outside indicating that it's a doctor's office, just a plain door marked 206. There is no doorbell, so I knock and hear the same girl's voice that answered the phone. She says, “Door's open.”

I walk into a small room about the size of my own office. The girl I talked to sits behind a desk. She's pretty clearly high out of her mind. She says, “Hi,” then hands me a clipboard with one sheet of paper attached to it and says, “Fill this out and the doctor will see you shortly.”

The form asks for my name, driver's-license number, phone number—no address—and my symptoms. I have no idea what to write, but I figure I'll have to make whatever symptoms I list believable; I might even have to do a little acting. I write “back pain” and “insomnia.” These shouldn't be too hard to fake.

I give the form back to the girl behind the desk and she says, “Great. The doctor is ready for you now.”

A door behind her desk opens and out steps a guy wearing jeans and a T-shirt under a doctor's white coat. He says, “Hello. Please follow me to the examination room,” like he's a robot. I'm assuming he's following some carefully scripted protocol, quite possibly a routine that's required by law for this man to maintain whatever barely legal medical license he has. I follow him into the so-called examination room, half-thinking I'm going to get clubbed in the fucking head and wake up in a gutter with my wallet missing.

I sit down in a regular chair in the examination room. There is no examination table. In fact, there are no items in the entire room giving even the vague impression that this is a medical office at all. There are a few shelves with office supplies, like toner and reams of paper, but no cotton balls, no bottles of hydrogen peroxide or rubbing alcohol, no charts of the human ear. The only thing remotely medical is a stethoscope hanging around the good doctor's neck. It looks like he got it out of a doctor play-set from Toys R Us.

He reads over the form I filled out. I'm expecting him to ask me questions, to verify that I am, in fact, in need of medicinal marijuana. Instead he says, “Okay, everything looks good here. Now I'm going to perform the physical examination,” and I'm ready for the clubbing.

He bends down, takes one of my legs by the ankle, and extends it outward until my leg is straight. He says, “Great,” and puts my leg back down on the ground. He then puts two fingers on my sternum, gently taps it, and says, “Perfect.” Then he says, “Turn your head please.” Here comes the clubbing. I turn my head and he puts the fake stethoscope on my Adam's apple and says, “Exactly.”

Then the doctor whips out the form I filled out, signs his name on it, and says, “I'm going to prescribe you medicinal cannabis. Cannabis is most effective and least harmful to your body if ingested in the form of an edible, or if inhaled after being vaporized. Please take this to my receptionist and you're all set.”

The doctor leaves the room. I hand the form to the receptionist. She charges me forty dollars and I walk out with a signed and notarized document that allows me to purchase marijuana legally at one of hundreds of stores that sell it in Los Angeles.