The First Bad Man (11 page)

But it was Dr. Broyard’s office, calling to confirm my upcoming appointment on Tuesday, June 19. I imagined telling him my globus was gone and then trying to explain the cure by referencing his relationship with Ruth-Anne. I could hear her breathing.

“Ruth-Anne?”

“If you need to cancel, please call forty-eight hours in advance.”

It was definitely her.

“Would it be possible to talk now? A phoner? I’m in the midst of some complicated new feelings.”

She was silent.

“I guess I can wait until tomorrow.”

“We’ll see you Thursday the nineteenth,” she said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

I described tapping into Phillip’s lust, his overwhelming appetites and aggressive explosions that convulsed through me. Ruth-Anne seemed unsurprised, as if I were late to my own party.

“Right. And perhaps we don’t even need to call it Phillip’s lust? Maybe it’s just lust.”

“Well, it’s not
mine
. These just aren’t the kinds of things I would think about, on my own, without him.”

“So you don’t find it arousing when she attacks you?”

“Everything she does to me, I pretend I’m doing to her, as Phillip.”

“I see. And how does Cheryl Glickman feel?”

“Me?”

“Yes, what do you feel?”

Me
, I thought.
Me. Me. Me.
Nothing specific came to mind.

“Are you masturbating yourself to orgasm?”

I smiled at the floor. “Yes?”

“Are you asking me?”

“
Yes.
I am. But that’s just, you know, behind the scenes.”

Ruth-Anne nodded as if I had just said something very astute. Maybe I had. I wondered if I was her favorite patient, or at least the only one who could talk on her level.

“Can I ask you something that’s a little bit related to this?”

“Of course,” she said.

“Remember when you called yesterday, about my appointment with Dr. Broyard?”

Her face changed.

“Well, I’m not sure I should keep seeing him—it might feel funny now.”

“Funny how?”

“Not funny, more like uncomfortable. To see you in your receptionist role. And him. Now that I know.”

She stared at me for a long time and I wondered if I was her least-favorite patient.

“Well, it’s up to you,” she said finally. “But I believe you’ve missed the forty-eight-hour cancellation window.”

CLEE THOUGHT HER PINK BOXERS
covered her but they didn’t. If she was sitting cross-legged I could see the edge of her dark blond pubic hair and sometimes more. One morning I saw a flash of labia, pink and hanging loose. Not the tidy, concealed meat that I had been imagining. With this new information Phillip had to go back and redo all the sex he had already done. He really wanted to see her anus, though he wouldn’t have called it that. I reread all his texts but didn’t find a word for it. I went with
pucker
. I’LL ADMIT IT, he might have written, I WANT TO RAM MY STIFF MEMBER INTO HER PUCKER.

When he was mentioned at work, usually in terms of fundraising, I felt a shiver of invisibility—not that I
was
him, but it was strange to hear him talked about so freely.

“Phil Bettelheim’s donation was on the smaller side this year,” said Jim, “but it’s only June, he might give again. Has anyone walked him through the high-risk outreach initiative?”

We hadn’t spoken since I gave him my blessing; I guessed he was busy actually doing all the things I was pretending he was. The thought gave me a sad ache, and even this ache was arousing. I felt so close to him. It could never be proven, but I suspected we were becoming stiff at the same time, possibly even ejaculating in unison, the way women’s menstrual periods sometimes become synchronized. I wondered where Clee was in her cycle.

“Cheryl.” I looked up. A face so like and unlike hers. “How’s my daughter? Is she behaving?”

“Oh yes,” I said, too quickly. “Absolutely.” Suzanne crossed her arms, waiting. She knew everything.

“Be honest. I know how she is.” She looked me dead in the eye.

“She watches a lot of TV,” I whispered.

Suzanne sighed. “She takes after Carl’s mother—not a ton up here.” She tapped her forehead. For an uncomfortable moment I felt almost protective of Clee.

“She’s more instinctual,” I said.

She rolled her eyes. “But thank you. Carl and I are thinking of some way to repay you. Not—I don’t mean money.”

HER COWLIKE VACUOUSNESS DIDN’T REALLY
bother me anymore. Or it didn’t matter—her personality was just a little piece of parsley decorating warm tawny haunches. Clee was bouncing up and down on Phillip’s stiff member every day, many times a day, and at first it seemed he would never get tired of creaming in her puss winged by the dark blond pubic hair. But now, ten days later, I had a problem. He wanted it just as much, even more, but it took longer and longer to get there—sometimes as many as thirty minutes. Sometimes never. I tried unusual positions, new locations. One fantasy involved Ruth-Anne observing the intercourse, admiring and applauding with clinical approval. It was so unlikely that it worked, for a short time. But the smallest thing could stymie Phillip’s release.

Clee’s foot smell. Before it was the least of my problems; now it was a real turnoff. Phillip sometimes put plastic bags on her feet, trapping in the smell with rubber bands just so he could become stiff.

Cream in my puss
, she begged.
In me! In me!
her puss whined, through aching mushy lips.

Not until you get your feet taken care of
, he barked.
I know a chromotherapist who specializes in this, best on the west side. Tell him I sent you.

I waited for a neutral moment to bring it up, then I plopped down on the arm of the couch. She was slurping ramen from a cup.

“Good stuff?” She stopped eating and frowned distrustfully. We hadn’t exchanged unscripted dialogue since Kate’s visit. “First of all: peace. Okay?”

She furrowed her brow and looked at the V my fingers were making. I had no idea what I was doing.

“Okay,” I continued. “We live together, we are sometimes . . . physically close?” My voice rose to a question here; it was an insane thing to say given that I plowed her many times a day as Phillip. But I meant the fight scenarios. She nodded, putting her soup down. She was listening with an almost disconcerting level of attentiveness. I fingered the Post-it in my back pocket.

“Look, I don’t want to be too forward here, or say something that you’re going to take offense to.” Clee shook her head like
No, no, I won’t be offended
.

“I can speak candidly, then?”

She actually laughed, and her mouth broke into a smile, a real smile. I’d never seen that before. Her teeth were huge.

“I’ve been hoping that you would,” she said, now pressing her lips together as if there was an ocean of other smiles and more laughter on the other side and she was trying to hold it back for just a few more seconds. She nodded for me to go ahead, to say it.

My hand had been waiting for its cue and I watched with a distant horror as it came forward with the Post-it. She peeled it off my palm and studied Dr. Broyard’s address and the date of my appointment with soft, quizzical eyes. Thursday, June 19, tomorrow. There was nothing to do but continue with the plan.

“The situation with your feet—the odor, I mean—”

I’d never seen a face change shape like that. It dropped: every feature fell. I hurried on.

“My friend Phillip swears by Dr. Broyard for athlete’s foot. When you get there, tell the receptionist I sent you—I’m giving you my appointment.” I pointed at the paper.

Now her face was red, about to explode. Her eyes were watering. Then she took a breath and all at once she was perfectly calm. More than calm—blank.

THE LAST THING I EXPECTED
was that she would go. But Friday morning there was a sundrop crystal hanging from the lock on the bathroom window and a tiny glass bottle next to her toothbrush.
WHITE
. Was that even a color? But I could see it just looking at the back of her blond head; she was subtly but utterly different. It was impossible to put a name on it. Not happier or sadder or less foul-smelling. Just whiter. Paler. I couldn’t wait for therapy; Ruth-Anne had actually seen her now. Which maybe was the whole point.

I leaned back in the leather couch. “So. What did you think of Clee?”

“She seemed young.”

I nodded encouragingly. Ideally she would say “shapely” or “curvaceous” in a clinically approving way. But Ruth-Anne seemed finished with her appraisal.

“Would you say she’s what you pictured?”

“More or less, yes.”

“Any man would become stiff looking at her, right?” I had hoped I would be brave enough to use one of Phillip’s words in front of Ruth-Anne, and I was. It was working; my groin felt warm and full of cream. As soon as I got home I would use the Ruth-Anne–watching fantasy.

Suddenly Ruth-Anne stood up.

“No,” she barked, slapping her hands together violently. “Stop immediately.”

My blood went cold. “What? What?”

She crossed her arms, walked once around her chair, then sat again.

“
Not
okay. Not okay to do with me. Okay with Phillip, okay with a janitor, or a fireman or a waiter. Not okay with me.”

She was talking to me like I didn’t understand English. I felt like a gorilla. My finger went to my eye; maybe she had made me cry. No, she hadn’t.

“I don’t want to be a part of it.” Her voice was a little softer now; she gestured toward the window. “There’s a whole world of people you can use, but not me. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I whispered. “Sorry.”

MY EMBARRASSMENT SHADED THE REST
of the morning. I tried to involve a pair of her thong underwear but it only made things worse, my fingers became clumsy and pruned as Phillip pounded away. We gave up. I tried to work. I took a shower. Because of Clee’s long hairs the drain had gradually become clogged to the point that the water filled the stall like a tub and I had to hurry to finish before it overflowed. Clee came home and put on her labia-revealing boxer shorts. I was furious and the bathroom was a mess and I was always stiff but could no longer achieve cream.

I called the plumber. Hurry, I said. We are completely clogged up over here. He was a chubby Latino man with no chin and eyes that grew sluggish at the sight of the juggy woman on the couch. I couldn’t even wait; I gestured toward the shower as I hurried to my room. “Knock when you’re done.” It was better than Ruth-Anne; it was like the first time with Phillip. The plumber’s eyes were wide with amazement when she entered the bathroom with her shirt off. He wasn’t sure at first, he didn’t want to get in trouble. But she begged and tugged at the wide, matronly front of his pants. In the end he was not as polite as he seemed. No sirree. He had quite a bit of pent-up rage, possibly from racial injustice and immigration issues, and he worked through all of it. Then he fixed the drain and to test it they did mutual soaping. The repair was two hundred dollars. I showed Clee the mesh hair-catcher and how to empty it; she looked right past me. Was she still mad about the foot thing? I didn’t have time to wonder; there was suddenly so much to do.

A thin, nerdy lad I saw in Whole Foods: Clee followed him out to his car, begged him to let her hold his stiff member for one to two minutes. An Indian father who politely asked me directions with his shy wife in tow: Clee rubbed her puss all over his body and forced stiffness out of him, he was whining in ecstasy when his wife walked in. Too nervous to say anything, she waited silently until her husband creamed on Clee’s jugs. Old grandfathers who hadn’t had sex in years, virginal teenage boys named Colin, homeless men riddled with hepatitis. And then every man I had ever known. All my teachers K through twelve and college, my first landlord, all my male relatives, my dentist, my father, George Washington so hard his wig slipped off. I tried to work Phillip in here and there, for example, inviting him to enter her from behind while I was an old man in her mouth—but this was just out of guilt, it didn’t really add anything. Perhaps we were both sowing our wild oats. Or maybe Kirsten, being real, outweighed my hordes of imaginary men. Mostly I was too busy for guilt; there was almost no time that I wasn’t rubbing myself. The postman delivered a box and before I could open it Clee had to unzip his government-issued pants; I helped him push his little nub into her. The penises were getting more abstract and unlikely—I couldn’t rein them in. Some were slightly pronged, some pointed and willowy at the end like a wild yam, or serrated like a fleshy pinecone. I took the box into the kitchen and opened it with a butter knife. What could it be, what could it be? Right as I pushed my hand through the flaps I realized, with horror, what it was. Rick’s snails. One hundred of them, all with their butts high in the air. They crawled upon broken pieces of each other, watery yellow guts smeared on brown shells. The inside of the box was thickly encrusted with layers of snails moving over each other, hundreds of blindly reaching antennae, and the smell—a rotten tang. My phone was ringing.

“Hello?”

“Cheryl, it’s Carl calling from the cell phone store. I’m testing out a phone. Free call! How do I sound?”

“You sound very clear.”

“No noise? No echo?”

“No.”

“Let’s try the speakerphone function. Say something.”

“Speakerphone. Speakerphone.” A snail was on my hand; I knocked it back into the box.

“Yep, that works. It’s a nice little phone.”

“Should I hang up?”

“I don’t want you to feel like I just called to test the phone.”

“It’s okay.”

“Hang on, lemme ask this guy if we can talk a little longer.”

I listened to him ask if there was a time limit on the free call. An aggressive-sounding man said, “Talk all day if you want to.” Clee was on her knees and my hand was back down my pants before I even knew what happened. It smarted; whatever was on my fingers from the snails was stinging my privates. Just an aggressive voice wasn’t enough, though—she couldn’t suck a voice. Carl was standing by to watch but I couldn’t pull the picture together. Clee shuffled around the store on her knees, mouth open like a fish’s.

“We can talk all day!” Carl said.

Clee was making a beeline for her father.
No, no
, I thought.
Not him.
But my fingers were already accelerating, zeroing in.

“How’s tricks? How’s Clee doing?”

Clee latched on to him just as he said her name. Needless to say, he was shocked.

“She’s doing great.” It was hard not to sound breathless. “She loves her job.”

Shocked but not displeased. There was something that felt very right about this, wrong of course, but right. He put his hand on the back of her familiar head and pushed down a few times, helping her find the right rhythm.