The Parallel Apartments
THE PARALLEL APARTMENTS
by
BILL COTTER
SAN FRANCISCO
Copyright © 2013 Bill Cotter
Cover illustration by Ron Regé, Jr.
All rights reserved, including right of reproduction in whole or in part, in any form.
McSweeney's and colophon are registered trademarks of McSweeney's, a privately held company with wildly fluctuating resources.
ISBN: 978-1-940450-31-5
For Annie, whom I can't do without.
Contents
THE PARALLEL APARTMENTS
May 2004
Justine Moppett knew more or less why she didn't want to fuck Franklin. He scared her. He had many affairs. She didn't like him. And she had found him physically disgusting ever since the state of New York turned him loose from Sing Sing, in 1995, an event that ended not only Justine's own series of affairs (which began with one Henriette Desaulniers, a tidily self-scarified waitress from Chelsea), but the only years of occasional contentment that Justine had known, at least in New York.
And she did not want to fuck Franklin because she didn't want a baby. Why would she want a child if it might turn out the way she had? A cowardly runaway, a sexually imprecise mouse, a product of passive dysfunction, a suicide waiting to happen, a pharmacy employee? No. No children. And with only 99.98 percent effectiveness,
at best,
any form of birth control must be considered risky. One pregnancy per twenty thousand couplings was not assurance enough.
Conveniently, Justine rather preferred girls. Or, to be more precise yet less clear, she preferred non-men. She was still in love with her high-school
guidance counselor, Gracie Yin, with whom she'd had no contact since Justine left Austin more than sixteen years ago. (In fact, she'd never had any meaningful contact with her at all; it had all been fantasy.)
Though she didn't like fucking Franklin, Justine stayed with him because it was easier than
not
staying. Justine wasn't going anywhere. She was a coward. Justine wanted to collage and be alone and watch
Law & Order
and experiment with the cognitive techniques for forgetting one's past that she read about on the internet but that never worked very well. Something really promising or ruinous or fetching or irresistible would have to happen to allow her to leave: Franklin going back to prison, her mother calling to apologize, a real shot at love, a Manhattan-sized comet exploding over Manhattan. The only real possibility among these was Franklin's recidivating.
Justine told herself she
had
to stay with Franklin. She told herself that Franklin had once saved her life. Whenever she grew ornery, Franklin would remind her that she owed him, that she had better let him fuck her now and then. And occasionally she did. She just made sure to douche with Krest Bitter Lemon Soda right after, and steal a few morning-after pills from her job at Midgie's Pharmacy, where she had started working within just a week of arriving in New York.
She had been seventeen, and freshly arrived in Port Authority, where she disembarked from a bus that smelled like the floor of a brothel, broke, alone, bleeding, wearing a torn, smelly, blood- and semen-striped blouse and Gracie Yin's underwear, with plans to become a hooker, which was the state of being the furthest removed from her sheltered Austin life, a life she would never, ever return to. In Austin, forty-eight hours earlier, she had witnessed something in her garage that she wished she had not. The hours leading up to that moment had begun, more or less, with a blow jobâher sixteen-year-old Austin boyfriend, Troy, taking receipt, in his bedroom, while his profoundly deaf father sang sixties music in the den downstairs; the episode had ended two days later, also with a blow jobâFranklin, thirty-four years old, under cover of a Hudson News kiosk in the world's largest bus terminal. After ejaculating in her mouth, Franklin, Justine's first and last customer, gave her ten dollars, took her by the hand, brought her upstairs to Forty-Second Street, hailed them a cab, lectured her on insisting on payment
before
performing the next time she fellated a stranger, and brought her home to his apartment in Hell's Kitchen, a not-unpleasant one-bedroom, where she spent the next half
of her life tolerating a triple-bogey boyfriend, denying him a child, avoiding his rampant, bar-sinister penis, and growing to like him less and less, while at the same time he grew less and less likable, more aggressive, meaner, more controlling, more Franklin. This promenade was interrupted only once, very early on, by prison, where Franklin was placed after getting caught with his commodity in an underage throat at, where else, Port Authority.
One of Justine's only escapes from this existence was television. For instance, tonight's
Law & Order: SVU
marathon. It started at eight, in three hours. There sure as heck better be at least one episode Justine hadn't seen before. With luck, Franklin would find some reason to go out, leaving her alone with the remote, the refrigerator, and the thermostat, the last being the household contrivance over which Franklin held the most inflexible and fearsome dominion. Franklinâcompact, neckless, insulated in pallid adult baby fat, coated with fur-like hair from collarbone to toe knucklesâwas always hot. Justineâthin, unmeaty, paper-skinned, highly metabolicâwas always cold.
The regular
L&Os
were great, even if they didn't bite quite like
SVU,
but
Criminal Intent
? A regularly scheduled letdown. Justine so loved Olivia Benson! She wished she was Olivia Benson. Liv would never have sucked off Franklin in a bus station when she was seventeen. Well, maybe, but she'd have arrested him right after, instead of moving in with him and spending the second half of her life trying to convince herself that the reason she wouldn't leave was her stick-to-itiveness, when it was really psychic intransigence borne of innate passivity. Only a few times in her life had Justine actually
acted.
At the recommendation of their couples' counselor, Justine and Franklin went to see a sex therapist, Dr. Darling M'Nabb. The doctor insisted that Justine and Franklin go to the first of Darling M'Nabb's sexploration classes together. Dr. M'Nabb, whom Justine guessed to be about sixty, was in command of a huge, padded loft. She was built like Rosey Grier, and was wearing a tight, low-cut pink baby-doll tee emblazoned with glittery Pegacorns. Her entire face and neck were spackled with teriyaki-colored tanning makeup, yet her caulky décolletage she left unprimed: she looked as though she spent her spare time buried up to her neck in the Gobi.
Darling M'Nabb had her class pair off man-woman for digital prostate demystification. When Justine declined to participate, Franklin promptly partnered with the youngest-looking female in the class, Pilar, a thick-fingered but otherwise slender Cuban Chinese florist from Tenafly. Justine took her leave, descended from the West Village loft in a freight elevator through whose bars the chirps, shrieks, and moans of the prostate demystifiees three floors above reached her ears.
Of its own command the elevator skipped the ground floor and went straight to the basement. The door opened. In front of Justine was one of those old-fashioned soda vending machines whose access mechanism was not a trough into which an aluminum can is violently barfed, but rather a column of green-glass returnable bottles visible and identifiable only by their bottle caps, which all point at the consumer like vertical frigate cannon, and are accessible only by opening the long, slender glass jalousie door that protects them. Justine jammed a few quarters in, selected a Dr Pepper, seized it by the neck, and yanked it out like a baby tooth. She bought two more.
She never went back.
Franklin never missed a class. Over the following winter, spring, and summer, he went for special immersion retreats in the Berkshires, citrus buccal-stimulation delimited autoerotic asphyxia tutorials in Sedona, and warm river-stone gluteal hammerings in New Canaan. He would bring home sexual intelligence and vinyl tools and marital technics, none of which Justine would allow him to try out on her.
Late one night, some ten months into his erotic studies, Franklin, for the first time, came home with a third party.
Justine was sitting on the leather couch surrounded by mutilated books and magazines, spears of paper clippings, and a collection of glue sticks of varying adhesive powers. No
Law & Orders
were scheduled, but 4:15 a.m. was often rich in artistically inspiring programming, so Justine had the TV on mute, surfing between snippings, watching for arresting color schemes. She crossed her eyes and blurred her vision so that only abstract color and movement made it to her right brain. Ah, look thereâa nice gazpacho red. What channel was this? Didn't matter. Justine knew exactly where a printed example of this color lay. She picked up a well-lanced copy of
Fútbol Mundial
and flipped to a page featuring some pencil-thighed drone from Arsenal. Justine snipped out a paramecium-shaped patch of his pepper-red jersey
and stuck it down to her collage, a fantasia on
La poupée
featuring chimerical farm animals.
“Justine!”
Justine jumped, poking her thigh with the scissors.
“Ow.”
“Look what I've got!”
It took Justine's eyes a moment to uncross and unblur, but when they did, she was not terribly surprised to see Franklin striding toward her, carrying, over one shoulder, bottom-first, a woman clad in grasshopper-green latex. “This is Epitymbria,” said Franklin. “She's from Cyprus.”
Franklin spanked the woman's bottom, eliciting a charming Mediterranean
ylp,
and set her gently on top of his ebony coffee table.
The coffee table, an inverted Malawian casket acquired at an open-air market in Queens, and its parallel companion, a huge, black-calfskin, bellows-like couch that farted out of an imperfect seam when sat upon, were two of the many objects that Franklin, immediately upon release from Ossining, had awarded himself for completing his sentence without getting raped or stompered or shivved or dropped in the hole. Franklin had behaved well in prison. Franklin had in fact cakewalked his stretch. To precise further, Franklin's sentence had been a lark, a goof, a success, an accelerated five-year undergraduate program in gaol arcana that graduated him, summa cum laude, in perfect preparation for his new life and fresh livelihood as a consultant. A prison consultant. Not just to meek, desk-jockey types convicted of bloodless financial enormities, but to any vulnerable convicts that would otherwise be Cheetos to the famished monsters who filled the modern-day American correctional facility. Franklin had finally settled on Bottom Bunk as a name for his sole-proprietorshipâthis after rejecting Stirmaster, Keeper of the Rosebud, Gang of One, and others.
