The Average American Marriage (4 page)

chapter six

My Gay Buddy

I
don't eat lunch with my gay friend Carlos as often as I used to before I got married and had kids, but we still get together from time to time. He sent me a very demanding e-mail this morning that said I had no choice but to have lunch with him today. He apparently has big news.

I'm sitting outside the Cheesecake Factory in Woodland Hills. The place is always packed at lunch hour with other shitty people doing shitty jobs that no one gives a fuck about. I thought talking loudly into your cell phone to seem important ended in the nineties, but there's a bald guy with a giant gut talking as loudly as possible into his Bluetooth earpiece about buying and selling something. I almost don't believe it's real until Carlos walks up and actually says to the guy, “Hey, nobody gives a fuck about what you're buying and selling on your fake phone call.”

The guy is surprised and embarrassed. He walks off without saying anything. Carlos gives me a hug and says, “Long time no see, pussylicker.”

“Yeah. The wife-and-kids thing. You know how it is . . . Oh wait, no you don't, you're a gay man.”

“Fuck you. Let's eat.”

We sit down outside, which I hate but Carlos insists on, and get some bread and water. I say, “So what's the news?”

He says, “Tedward and I are getting fucking married. Can you believe that shit?”

I say, “Wow. No. Where?”

“Not in California, obviously.”

“New York?”

“Uh . . . no. I'm not a faggot.”

“Uh . . . yes you are.”

“No I'm not. I'm gay. I'm not a fag. Every fag in this fucking country is getting married in New York now. It was a cliché before it was even legal. Tedward has an aunt in Boston who has this gorgeous house she's going to let us use. It's going to be insane. And you and your brood are invited.”

“We'll be there. When is it?”

“Four months from now. I'll send you the date and everything, but about four months from now.”

“Shit, that's quick.”

“It seems like it, but Tedward and I have been together for like almost five years now. Can you believe that shit?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

The waiter comes to the table to take our orders. We order, and when the waiter leaves Carlos says, “I would put my tongue up his ass so fucking hard I'd be French-kissing him.”

I say, “You better do it while you're still officially single. In four months that shit is over.”

He says, “No. See, despite all of my best efforts, you still really don't understand how I operate, do you?”

“What in the fuck are you talking about?”

“Do you think I'd get married if it meant I couldn't get fucked by other guys?”

“So you're going to cheat on Tedward?”

“No, you fucking idiot. We bring a third party in all the time. Shit, sometimes even a fourth. Marriage doesn't mean the end of your sex life . . . unless you're straight. Thank god I'm not.”

“Jesus.”

“I've told you about this.”

“You told me you had a threesome with Tedward
once
. I thought that one time was it.”

“I don't know why I have to keep breaking it down for you in terms you can understand, but I will. If Alyna told you that not only was she cool with you bringing different chicks home for the two of you to have threesomes with, but she actually wanted you to because she liked eating pussy as much as you do, don't you think you'd be doing that pretty much as often as you possibly could?”

“Yeah, I guess I would.”

“No shit. Well, Tedward likes to fuck . . . a lot. And I like to get fucked . . . a lot. So we find guys who want to fuck and get fucked and we're both happy as fucking clams.”

“Sounds like a good setup.”

“It is. And then, if we want to follow in your footsteps and have a family and the whole nine yards, we just go on the Internet and get a cute little Chinese baby. Which we don't, by the way. Kids are fucking disgusting and they ruin your life. No offense.”

“None taken.”

“So, that's my big news. I'm a bride to be.”

“Well, congrats and welcome to the ranks of the happily married.”

“Happily? So you're getting laid more, then?”

“I guess I meant welcome to the ranks of the legally married.”

“You can't keep jerking off in the office.”

“Yes I can.”

“You always make me glad I was born to suck dick.”

“I do what I can.”

“When's the last time you fucked?”

“On my birthday and it wasn't even that good.”

“You guys should be in couples therapy.”

“You always say that shit.”

“Because it's fucking good advice, asshole. I know you ruined your life with kids and shit, but you need to be fucking.”

“Thanks.”

“Anytime. If you want, I can give you the number of a good couples therapist.”

“I'll pass for now, thanks.”

“Suit yourself.”

We order our food and eat. The rest of the conversation is about nothing important. We talk about movies and TV shows. Carlos tells me one of his clients just booked some huge but top-secret movie, and he's hoping that this client, who he explains loves him more than her own mother, will come with him when he jumps ship to a bigger agency like CAA or WME so he doesn't have to endure the humiliation of being an agent at Paradigm anymore. I tell him about the intern I'm going to hire. He laughs and tells me I'm pathetic.

He picks up the check, which he loves to do because it gives him a chance to use his black AmEx. He pays the bill and writes his phone number on the check, along with the following sentence: “Call me if you want the best blowjob you've ever had in your fucking life.”

some chapter

Reverse Grip

I
t's Saturday. We're in Toys R Us buying a birthday present for some other kid's birthday we have to go to that afternoon, which means I'll also be buying a toy for Andy and one for Jane. Can't fucking leave Toys R Us without shit for somebody else's kid's birthday and shit for all of your own kids.

I'm manning the shopping cart while Alyna has the kids somewhere in the store. As I answer a few e-mails on my phone, I hit the Internet app, which opens up the last page I was looking at—a video of a chick sucking cock on her knees. Although opening the video was an accident, I realize that I probably have a few minutes to myself, and I remember that the chick in it is hot, so I decide to mute the video and watch the rest of it while I wait for my wife and kids.

This chick is petite with blond hair and she has a great ass. She's cute in a way that isn't slutty. She really could be the girl next door. She reminds me in some way of Alyna when she was younger. I make a mental note of her name for future use: Lexi Belle.

As parents and children wander around me in the middle of Toys R Us, I watch Lexi Belle gag on some guy's cock to the point that her eyes start tearing up. She's slobbering all over his dick with that slobber that you only see in porn, when the guy is really ramming his cock deep into the back of a girl's throat. It's got a higher viscosity than normal saliva. It's more like phlegm than spit. I'm not a fan of this kind of shit, but I keep watching. What else am I going to do in Toys R Us?

The guy is about ready to blow his load, so he rips his dick out of Lexi's mouth, takes one hand and pulls her head back with it, then takes the other hand and uses it to aim his cock at her face and starts jerking off. This is all pretty normal. The thing that is strange to me is the grip he uses. It's reversed.

The only way I've ever jerked off in my life is with my thumb and index finger toward the head of my dick. This motherfucker has the thumb and index finger toward his balls. It's fucking bizarre. Even Lexi Belle, who is paid to react to everything this guy does like it's the hottest thing she's ever experienced even if he's ripping her asshole apart, making her cry from gagging on his cock or shitting on her face—even Lexi fucking Belle can't hide a brief hint of surprised, mocking confusion when she sees this dude jerk off backwards and blow three giant white ropes across her eyes.

That night, after Alyna goes to sleep without touching my dick, I sneak into my office, cue up some POV porn of some Latina chick getting fucked in the ass, and try to jerk off backwards. I try for five minutes before I give up, not even close to cumming, and revert to the style I'm used to. I blow my load in under a minute, then slip back into bed wondering what strange events must have transpired in that guy's life to force him into jerking off backwards.

chapter seven

Holly's First Day

W
hen Holly shows up for her first morning at work, I assign her to my department and give her a desk far enough away from my office that it won't be blatantly obvious what's going on but close enough that I can still see her if I wheel my chair slightly to the left and keep my door open. I've been staring at her ass for half an hour, trying to figure out some excuse to get her into my office, when an e-mail from my boss, Lonnie, pops up in my inbox:

Accounts Receivable just released all of the financial statement hard copies. Can you get the new intern to tackle filing them in the library.

I fucking hate how Lonnie never uses question marks. I fire off an e-mail to Jeff Johnson in Records telling him to have those hard copies delivered to my office, and then I walk out to where Holly is sitting. She's fucking around on Facebook on the office computer, not even on her phone or anything—no attempt to be sly about it. And as I walk up behind her she doesn't even try to minimize the window or log out. She sees nothing wrong with it and apparently doesn't care at all if I read everything on her screen. I wonder if she's just an entitled individual who sees nothing wrong with checking her Facebook at work, or if it's her entire generation. I try to imagine any of the guys who interviewed for the internship doing the same thing. It's extremely easy to imagine. This country is beyond fucked.

I say, “Holly?”

She turns around in her chair and says, “Yeah?”

“I've got your first assignment.”

“Cool.”

“Come into my office and I'll lay it out for you.”

“ 'Kay, one sec.”

She spins back around in her chair and actually finishes the message she was typing out on Facebook. It's something about a party to some guy named Tim. If she were actually an employee, not an off-the-charts piece-of-ass intern, I'd fire her on the spot. Instead, I wait for her to send the message and then watch as she leaves her Facebook page open on the screen, stands ups, and walks toward my office. She doesn't give a fuck who knows she was on Facebook and she doesn't give a fuck who reads her Facebook page. I'm baffled by this for a few seconds before I catch a glimpse of her ass that effectively erases my ability to think about anything else beyond what my dick would look like in her asshole and what color that asshole might be.

Once we're in my office, I notice her smell. That same cinnamon-and-melon combo that I picked up in her interview. I think back to fucking girls who smelled that good when I was younger and not washing the sheets until the smell wore off. I can't remember the last time Alyna smelled like anything other than Desitin and baby shit.

I say, “So this is not very fun or anything, but we have a bunch of stuff that's going to need to be filed.”

She says, “Cool.”

“The files are on their way to my office now, and when they get here I'll explain how they get filed and everything. It's not that complicated once you learn our little system.”

“Cool. So should I wait here in your office for the files to come or go back to my desk?”

I didn't really think this out very well before getting her into my office. I just wanted some excuse to interact with her. I have no idea how long it will be until the files are delivered to my office, but I shake off the mesmerizing effect of how hot she is for a few seconds to remind myself that I'm technically her boss. She is my subordinate. I say, “Stay here. I guess we're going to be working together for the next few months, so let's get to know each other a little.” As soon as I say it I feel like there's no way she could have taken it as anything other than what it actually is: an attempt to make her more comfortable with me so that I might eventually be able to fuck her. I imagine some variation of that same line has been used on her a dozen times by every professor she has at CSUN.

She says, “Okay. What do you want to know?”

I say, “You're from Chatsworth, right?”

“Yeah.”

I realize that is the end of the conversation. She's twenty-one fucking years old. What else can I possibly ask her? What kind of interest rate she got on her home loan? A few seconds pass of me nodding my head and I'm about to ask her something ridiculous like what she likes to do on the weekends or if she lives on campus or not when I'm saved by our mail guy wheeling in two carts full of files.

I say, “Oh, well, there are the files. Guess it didn't take as long as I thought.”

She says, “Cool.”

I take a cart and she takes a cart and she follows me to the elevators. We go down to the records room, which used to be managed by this creepy old bitch named Cathy Fenner. She got laid off last year and now the records room is left unguarded. No one ever comes down here. As soon as we get off the elevator I start conjuring fantasies of fucking Holly in every possible location in the records room. I'm specifically imagining fucking her in the ass against the copy machine when we get to the accounts section.

I say, “Okay, here we are,” and show her the six rows of filing cabinets where we've kept the hard copies of these records since before I started working here. I explain the inefficient filing system we use and file the first few with her to make sure she gets the hang of it.

I say, “Okay, I'm gonna head back up. If you need any help or have any questions or anything, just use that phone over by the copier and dial my extension—448. Other than that, just let me know when you're done.”

She says, “Cool.”

I take one more deep whiff of her before I head back to the elevator, knowing I'll be jerking off to imagined scenarios involving my dick in Holly McDonnel's ass tonight after my wife doesn't fuck me.

I dick around in my office for the rest of the day, watching videos of Bill Hicks and Joe Rogan on YouTube. At five-thirty, I notice I still haven't heard from Holly. I look out at her desk and she's not there. My first two thoughts are that she's been dicking off on her phone all day in the records room or that some guy wandered down there and got so worked up that he raped her. I know the probability of that second event happening is close enough to zero that my first guess is probably accurate.

I know Lonnie left at four-thirty, so I decide to fuck off half an hour early to go downstairs and check on Holly. When I get down to the records room, I find that neither of my two previous predictions was accurate. Holly's sitting in the middle of the two file carts with a few cabinets open, holding several files in her hands and crying. She's not sobbing, just crying a little. I assume she's gotten some bad news—a dead grandparent or a pet. I say, “Hey, are you okay?”

She looks at me with these big cartoony eyes that make me want to fall asleep with her while we're watching a movie on my couch and says, “Uh, not really, I don't think.”

I say, “Do you need to leave? If there's an emergency or something, you can always leave if you need to.”

“No, everything's fine emergency-wise. I think I just really messed up these files.”

I'm stunned. How she could have fucked up this basic task is beyond me. The filing system, although completely outdated and inefficient, is nothing more than an alphanumeric code that gets filed in order of letter followed by number. My four-year-old son could probably do it. Beyond that, if she'd taken every one of these files and tossed them in the trash, no one would have known. Every file we keep is backed up digitally in a database, which is what everyone in the company uses if they need to find something. The hard-copy records room is just some bygone piece of protocol that the company refuses to discontinue. I suppose she has no way of knowing that, though. And instead of telling her I say, “Don't cry. It's fine. I'll help you and we'll get this done.”

She says, “Really?”

“Yeah. It's no big deal,” I say. “This system can be kind of confusing,” I lie.

“I know. Thank you so much.”

I take out my phone and text Alyna that I have to work late. She texts back, “k can you get dinner yourself?” To which I reply, “Yes.”

I take Alyna's idea and say, “We'll probably be here for a few hours. Do you want to order dinner?”

Holly says, “Can we?”

“Yeah, we're working past six, so we get dinner.”

“What can we get?”

“Anything you want that delivers around here.”

“Is it cool if we get Stonefire?”

I find something endearing in her enthusiasm for getting shitty pizza instead of something from a decent restaurant in Woodland Hills. I say, “Yeah. If that's what you want.”

I order a pizza and some salads and we start filing. As we file, we talk about nothing important. She tells me that she doesn't really know what she wants to do after college. She just wants to graduate and then figure things out. It's been so long since I was in college, I have nothing relatable to add to the conversation. I just listen. Eventually we start covering things like favorite TV shows and movies, though, and I find things to talk about. It turns out we're both big fans of
Tim and Eric Awesome, Show Great Job!
She accidentally lets it slip that she and her friends get high and watch it. Before she can apologize or retract the admission I lie and say, “Me too,” in an attempt to put her at ease but also to make myself seem younger, cooler, more like what I imagine guys her age are like, more like what I imagine guys she likes to fuck are like.

We take a break when the pizza comes, and when I go to meet the delivery guy at the front door of the office I notice it's dark outside. For a brief second I feel guilty about having the conversation and the interactions I've had with Holly. I know Alyna would hate it. I know that, and yet I'm still kind of excited to go back into the records room and share a shitty pizza with Holly.

We eat and file and keep talking about innocuous things. She never mentions a boyfriend and I never mention a wife and two kids. An hour or so after the pizza is gone, I'm taking three or four files at a time and just cramming them into the file cabinets wherever they'll fit, knowing no one will ever come down here to look through them. With my new technique, we finish the job in another thirty minutes or so and then head back up to my floor to get our stuff and head out.

I walk her to her car, using the excuse that it's dark, and she says, “Thanks for walking me to my car. That's really sweet. And, seriously, thanks for helping me tonight.”

“Listen, it was no problem. First days on new jobs usually suck. Hopefully I made it suck a little less.”

“You definitely did.”

We stare at each other for a few seconds. It feels like that moment at the end of a first date when you have to gauge what the girl is thinking and either move in for the kiss or not, but I know that feeling is probably only on my end. Then she says, “Would it be weird or against some kind of work rule for me to give you a hug?”

I can feel my dick getting hard just thinking about her tight little fucking body pressing up against mine. I say, “I don't think so.”

She moves over and hugs me. It isn't a loose, barely-touch-the-other-person, end-with-a-pat-on-the-back work hug. This fucking hug is a here's-what-my-tits-feel-like-against-your-chest, here's-what-my-tight-flat-twenty-one-year-old-stomach-feels-like-against-your-older-less-flat-gut, here's-what-my-perfect-little-cheek-feels-like-brushing-against-yours, and here's-what-it-would-smell-like-if-I-was-fucking-you hug. I have to conjure every ounce of self-control I have not to squeeze her ass, and not because I'm so worked up by feeling her against me or anything, but because that hug makes her feel so familiar to me that it seems almost natural to let one of my hands slide down and get a little squeeze, like she's my college girlfriend or something.

I keep my hands where they should be and give her waist a little squeeze that I hope reciprocates but doesn't overstep the level of contact she initiated. We separate and she says, “Thanks again. See you tomorrow,” then gets in her Mini Cooper and drives off.

I get home at nine-thirty or so. The kids are both in bed and Alyna is asleep on the couch. I can still smell Holly on me. I get in the shower and jerk off standing out of the stream of water so I can still smell her. After I blow my load I scrub down so that Alyna won't pick up any strange perfume, even though she'll probably be suspicious of me taking a shower, and I go back out in the living room. I wake her up by rubbing her feet. She says, “Oh, you're home. What'd you have to do that kept you so late?”

I say, “The new intern couldn't figure out our filing system so I stuck around to help.”

She says, “Oh, that was nice. Did he finally get it?”

“Yeah.”