Robby suddenly concentrated on his bowl of muesli—having pushed aside the oatmeal Marta had placed in front of him—and reached for a carton of soy milk. Jayne kept forgetting that Robby couldn’t stand oatmeal, but it was something I always remembered since I couldn’t stand oatmeal either.
He finally shrugged. “It’s okay.”
“The school counselor said that getting a child into an Ivy League school starts in first grade,” Jayne said casually, as if not to alarm the children, who I assumed weren’t listening anyway.
“Actually earlier,” Marta reminded her.
“She’s hyping you, baby,” I sighed. “Don’t play dat game, sistah.”
Robby suddenly giggled, much to my gratification.
Jayne scowled. “Don’t use fake rap talk around the kids. I hate it.”
“And I hated that counselor,” I said. “You know why? Because she was feeding off your anxiety, baby.”
“Let’s not have this conversation now,” Jayne said, washing her hands in the sink, her neck muscles taut. “Are we almost ready, kids?”
I was still dumbfounded by Robby’s schedule and I wanted to say something consoling to him but he had finished the muesli and was reloading his backpack. He studied a computer game, Quake III, as if he didn’t know what to do with it, then pulled out his cell phone to make sure it was charged.
“Hey, buddy, what are you doing taking a cell phone to school?”
He looked nervously over at Jayne, who was now drying her hands with a paper towel. “All the kids have them,” she said simply.
“It’s abnormal for eleven-year-olds to have cell phones, Jayne,” I said, hitting what I hoped was the right tone of indignation.
“You. Are. Wearing. A. Sheet,” Jayne said—this was her response.
Robby seemed lost, as if he didn’t know what to do.
Finally, thankfully, Sarah broke the silence.
“Mommy, I brushed my teeth,” she offered.
“But don’t you brush after eating, honey?” Jayne asked, pointing out something to Marta in her datebook concerning the trip to Toronto next week for the reshoots. “I think you should brush your teeth after breakfast.”
“I brushed my teeth,” Sarah said again, and when that got no response from Jayne she turned to me. “Bret, I know the alphabet.”
“Well, you should by now,” I said encouragingly but also confused about why a girl so proud of having learned the alphabet should be reading Lord of the Flies.
“I know the alphabet,” she stated proudly. “A B C D E F—”
“Honey, Bret has a big headache. I’m gonna take your word on this one.”
“—G H I J K L M N—”
“You can identify the sounds letters make. Sweetie, that’s really excellent. Jayne?”
“—O P Q R S T U V—”
“Jayne, would you please give her a sugar-free doughnut or something?” I touched my head to indicate migraine approaching. “Really.”
“And I know what a rhombus is!” Sarah shouted gleefully.
“Fabulous.”
“And a hexagon!”
“Okay, but take pity on me just now, munchkin.”
“And a trapezoid!”
“Honey, Daddy’s grouchy and sleepy and about to throw up so couldn’t you keep it down a little?”
She immediately turned to Jayne. “Mommy, I’m keeping a journal,” she announced. “And Terby’s helping me with it.”
“Maybe Bret can get a little help from Terby with his writing,” Jayne offered caustically, without looking up from the notes she was going over with Marta.
“Baby, my novel is so happening right now I can hardly believe it myself,” I droned, flipping through USA Today’s Sports section.
“But Terby’s sad,” Sarah said, pouting.
“Why? I thought he was doing okay,” I said, partially disinterested. “Is he having a bad fur day?”
“He says you don’t like him,” Sarah said, twisting in her chair. “He says you never play with him.”
“The thing is lying. I play with him constantly. While you’re at school. In fact, Terby beat me at backgammon on Tuesday. Don’t believe a thing Terby—”
“Bret,” Jayne snapped. “Stop it.”
“Mommy?” Sarah asked. “Does Daddy have a cold?”
“Honey, your daddy’s contaminated right now,” Jayne said, placing a bowl of oatmeal topped with raspberries in front of Sarah.
“And Mommy’s all bitched up,” I muttered.
Jayne either didn’t hear me or pretended to ignore that one. “And we’ll all be late if we don’t hurry.”
And then I zoned out on everything surrounding me until I heard Jayne say, “You’ll have to ask your dad.”
When I snapped out of it, Robby was looking at me anxiously.
“Forget it,” he mumbled.
“No, come on,” I said. “Ask me what?”
His face was so troubled that I wished I knew the question myself and could simply answer it without Robby having to ask it.
Dreading this, he asked, “Can we get The Matrix DVD?”
Quickly, I thought this through. He braced himself for my answer.
“But we already have it on video,” I said slowly as if answering a trick question.
“Yeah, but the DVD has extras and—”
“Of what? Keanu—”
“Bret,” Jayne said loudly, interrupting her discussion of Sarah’s ballet schedule with Marta, then turned on Robby. “Why are you wearing that T-shirt?” she suddenly asked him.
“What’s wrong with it?” I interjected, trying to save myself.
“We can’t wear costumes to school, remember?” Robby darkly muttered. “Remember?” he asked accusingly.
He was referring to the e-mail sent out to parents about Halloween this year. Even though there would be parties in the afternoon, the school was warning against costumes, preferring that the kids come as “themselves.” The school originally had okayed “appropriate” costumes while actively discouraging anything inappropriate (nothing “violent” or “scary” or “with weapons”), but predictably, the children, even on all their meds, started to freak out en masse, so costumes were simply banned (exhausted parents pleaded for a compromise—“Nominally frightening?”—which was rejected). This disappointed Robby gravely, so while Jayne was inspecting glasses that had just been in the dishwasher, I tried to console my son. In a fatherly way I assured him that going without a costume was probably in everyone’s best interest, offering as a cautionary tale my own seventh grade Halloween when I’d gone to school as the Bloody Vampire and wasn’t allowed to march in the annual parade for the elementary students because I had slathered so much Fun Blood on my mouth and chin and cheeks that it was certain to frighten them, according to the principal. This had been so deeply embarrassing—a pivotal moment, really—that it was the last time I ever wore a costume. It was that shameful. The memory of sitting alone on a bench while my classmates marched in front of the delighted elementary students still burned. I suddenly expected Robby to find me far more interesting than he previously had.
An awkward silence filled the kitchen. People had been listening to my story. Jayne was holding a cracked margarita glass and staring at me strangely. I slowly noticed that everyone else—Sarah, Marta, Robby, even Victor—was also staring at me strangely.
Robby, looking completely confused, finally spoke, quietly and with as much dignity as he could muster. “Who said I wanted to go as . . . the Bloody Vampire?” He paused. “I wanted to go as Eminem, Bret.”
“Just because your father was a total freak at your age doesn’t mean you are, honey,” Jayne said.
“The Bloody Vampire?” Robby stared at me, aghast.
I looked helplessly at Jayne, whose face now suddenly relaxed. She studied me for a longish moment, trying to figure something out.
“Yeah?” I asked her, as I slowly handed Robby a fifty-dollar bill.
“I just realized some
thing I wanted to ask you,” Jayne said.
“What is it?”
The dog became interested in my answer. It gave me a quick sideways glance.
“Have you ever had to empty a dishwasher? I’m just curious.”
“Um, Jayne . . .” The dishwasher line sounded like another in a long series of loaded insinuations. The strange guilt I felt—the sense of having done something wrong—never left me in that house. I tried to appear quiet and thoughtful, instead of my only other option: fainting in pain and defeat.
“Well?” She was still waiting for an answer.
“No, but I am seeing Dr. Kim today.”
I imagined relief filling the kitchen in a great oceanic wave. I wanted badly for breakfast to end—I closed my eyes and wished it—and for everyone in the house to slip quietly away. And then they did.
4. the novel
I had started the outline for Teenage Pussy over the summer and a lot had been accomplished despite the hours playing Tetris on my Gateway and constantly checking e-mails and rearranging the endless shelves of foreign editions that lined the walls of my office. Today’s interference: I needed to come up with a quote for a banal and harmless book written by an acquaintance of mine in New York, yet another mediocre, polite novel (The Millipede’s Lament) that was bound to get a spate of respectful reviews and then be totally forgotten. The quote I ultimately devised was glib and evasive, a string of words so nonspecific that they could have applied to just about anything: “I don’t think I’ve probably come upon a work so resolutely about itself in years.” And then I turned to a short story by one of my students from the writing class and quickly went through it. In the margins I wrote question marks, I circled words, I underlined sentences, I corrected grammar. I felt I made some balanced decisions.
Before resuming work on Teenage Pussy I went through my e-mails. There were only two. One was from Buckley: something about a parent/ teacher night next week, with a pointed P.S. from the principal noting that Jayne and I had failed to make the one in early September. And then I sighed when I saw where the other e-mail came from (the Sherman Oaks branch of the Bank of America) and when it was sent (2:40 a.m.). I sighed again and clicked on it, and as usual was faced with a blank screen. I’d been receiving these e-mails since the beginning of October, unaccompanied by any explanation or demand. I had called the bank several times since I had an account at that branch (where my father’s ashes were still stored in a safe-deposit box) but the bank had no record of these sent e-mails and patiently explained that no one could possibly be working at that hour (i.e., the middle of the night). Frustrated, I let it go. And the e-mails kept coming, with a frequency that I simply became used to. But today I scrolled through my filing cabinet until I found the first one. October 3 at 2:40 a.m. The date seemed familiar, as did the time, but I couldn’t figure out why. Annoyed at my inability to piece this together, I clicked off AOL and eagerly went to the Teenage Pussy file.
The original title of Teenage Pussy had been Holy Shit! but Knopf (who’d shelled out close to a million dollars for the North American rights alone) assured me that Teenage Pussy was the more commercial title. (Outrageous Mike was considered briefly but finally deemed “noncontroversial.”) Knopf was going to call it a “pornographic thriller” in their catalogue, which excited me immensely, and told me privately that Alfred and Blanche Knopf would be rolling over in their graves when the thing was published. Since I realized I was creating an entirely new genre, my bout of writer’s block had vanished and I was working on the book daily, even though it was still only in the outline stage. The book was the story of Michael Graves and this young, hip Manhattan bachelor’s erotic life—a “guy who loves to give love and loves to get loved back” is what I promised my publishers—and I had envisioned a narrative that was elegantly hard-core and interspersed with jaunty bouts of my trademark laconic humor. It was going to contain at least a hundred sex scenes (“I mean, Jesus, why not?” I guffawed to my editor over lunch in the bar at Patroon while he idly checked his blood sugar) and you could read the novel as either a satire on “the new sexual obnoxiousness” or as the simple story of an average guy who enjoys defiling women with his lust. I was going to turn people on and make them think and laugh. That was the combo. Scatological humor intended and achieved. That was the plan. It seemed like a good one.
Teenage Pussy would contain endless episodes of girls storming out of rooms in high-rise condos and the transcripts of cell phone conversations fraught with tension and camera crews following the main characters around as well as six or seven overdoses (attempts on the girls’ part to win our lothario’s attention). There would be thousands of cosmopolitans ordered and characters camcording each other having anal sex and real-life porn stars making guest appearances. It was going to make Sodomania look like A Bug’s Life. Chapters were titled “The Facial,” “The Silicone Queen,” “The Porta-John,” “The Intrepid Threesome,” “Her Boobage,” “The Cliterati,” “The Getaway,” “Hairy Pinkish Tacos,” “Am I Too Big for You?,” “You Know, I Really Don’t Want a Girlfriend Right Now,” “Look, I Have to Catch an Early Flight, Okay?,” “Hey—Did You Get a Chance to Pick Up My Dry Cleaning?,” “I Am Probably Going to Be Quite Distant Now” and “Do You Mind If I Just Jack Off?”
Our hero, who calls himself the Sexpert, dates only models and carries around a large bag filled with various lubricants, ben-wa balls, vibrating clitoral stimulators and about a dozen strings of anal beads. Every girl he meets he makes wet with excitement. He has the cute habit of licking their faces in public and fingering them beneath tables at Balthazar while drugging their gimlets with OxyContin. He fucks one girl so hard that he breaks her pelvic bone. He fucks a semifamous TV actress in the greenroom minutes before she’s supposed to appear on Live with Regis and Kelly. He flashes his biceps and shows off his washboard abs (“Michael didn’t have a six-pack—he had a twenty-four-pack; a case!”) to anyone who might look. Women keep pleading with him to be more open and emotional, and they indignantly throw out lines like “I am not a slut!” and “You never want to talk about anything!” and “We should have gotten a room!” and “That was rude!” and “No—I will not have sex with that homeless man while you watch!” as well as my two favorites: “You tricked me!” and “I’m calling the police!” His usual answers: “Swallowing is about communication, baby” and “Okay, I’m sorry, but can I still come on your face?” A lot of his bad behavior is excused because in many respects Mike is an innocent, though it’s far more likely that forgiveness is always extended because he makes every girl he fucks multiorgasmic. But many women become so upset by his behavior that they have to be tranquilized before returning to their “lesbian pasts,” and then there’s the scandal involving videos Mike had made while having sex with various older married women that “suspiciously” started surfacing on the Internet. “What? You’re gonna fuck your way through life?” one of these older women (the wife of a wealthy industrialist) shouts at him. He stares at her as if she’s a ditz, then forces a gas mask onto her head. He also invents a variety of cocktails, including the Bareback, the Crotchless Pantie, the Raging Boner, the Weenus, the Double Penetration, the Shag Man and the Jizzbag.
His most recent conquest is—hence the title—a particularly vapid sixteen-year-old who thinks you can get pregnant from oral sex and contract AIDS from drinking a Snapple. She also talks to birds and has a pet squirrel named Corky, as well as a problem with silverware; at restaurants, when a waiter recites the specials, she always has to interrupt by asking oh so slowly: “Do you have to use a fork to eat that?” But Mike finds her innocence alluring and soon initiates her into his world, a place where he makes her wear flimsy clothes (transparent lace thongs are high on his list) and has her say, “Throw me a bone” before they have sex and “Who’s my daddy?” once he’s penetrated her. He applies cocaine to her clitoris. He forces her to read Milan Kundera paperbacks and makes her watch Jeopardy! They fly to L.A. for an orgy at the Chateau Marmont a
nd buy sex toys at the Hustler Boutique on Sunset Boulevard and pile them into the trunk of his rented black Cadillac Escalade SUV while she giggles “amply.” He even charms her father—who had threatened to personally kick our hero’s nicely shaped ass if he didn’t stop dating his underage daughter. In a very tender moment, Mike buys her a fake ID. “She doesn’t mean to be that stupid,” he always apologizes to his aggravated friends, other bachelors living in the same lost world as Mike’s. One night he gets her so high on mushrooms that she is unable to locate her own vagina.
But beyond all this riotousness is the tragic ex-girlfriend who has done so much cocaine, her face has caved in on itself (“You damn Russian whore!” Mike screams at her in despair) and there are rooms filled with dead flowers and Mike loses almost all of his trust fund at the Hard Rock Casino in Las Vegas and then attends yet another orgy (this one in Williamsburg—Brooklyn, not colonial) that descends into “utter depravity” and the novel ends sadly with an abortion and a tense Valentine’s Day dinner at Nello (a powerful scene). “How could you do that to me?” is the novel’s last line. The book was all about the hard sell (the million-dollar advance guaranteed that) but it was also going to be poignant and quietly devastating and put every other book written by my generation to shame. I would still be enjoying huge success and notoriety while my better-behaved peers were languishing on “Where Are They Now?” Web sites.
Today I was going through a list of all the sex “injuries” Mike was going to endure: rug burn on knees, back clawed until bleeding, intense muscle cramps, ruptured testicles, testicular hickies, broken blood vessels, bruises due to excessive suction, a penile fracture (“There was a loud pop, then excruciating pain, but Tandra wrapped crushed ice in a Ralph Lauren towel and drove Mike to the ER”) and, finally, just general dehydration.
The phone rang—my line lit up—and I screened the call while staring into the computer. It was Binky, my agent. I picked up immediately.