During the whole of his marriage, Jackson had chafed over a subtle inability to possess his wife. She was elusive; she held herself apart. Although Carol’s repleteness had always awed him, he didn’t covet the same blithe, needless wholeness for himself. However female the image, a little interior absence, that small soft bottomless hole that endlessly cried out for filling, made Jackson a more desirous and therefore a more desirable man. Why, were he suddenly to metamorphose into a kindred creature—a discrete, self-sufficient organism who puttered about his business as she puttered about hers, asking for and expecting nothing, efficiently and tirelessly doing what was required, well—Carol would be goddamned desolate.
For in the past, his frustration with his inability to … not own her, exactly … to have her had supplied Jackson an invigorating sense of purpose, and them both an inexhaustible source of entertainment. She enjoyed keeping herself teasingly just out of reach; he enjoyed playing the hunter who, since he never bagged it, would never run short of prey. But now Carol’s tantalizing quality had hardened to flat-out unavailability, and it was no fun going on safari when there wasn’t a single would-be quarry in the game park.
Since what had begun as his own whimsical, sexually freshening mischief-making had darkened to disaster, his folly came with inbuilt punishment, and Carol needn’t have punished him twice over. Fair enough, he hadn’t been consultative—which was merely by way of saying that he’d wanted to do something devilish, something unexpectedly impish and naughty and for once nothing to do with the kids, because, by God, the poor woman had little enough pop up in her life that wasn’t just another bill or, surprise! a brand-new bacteria to invade Flicka’s corneas. And sure, maybe he hadn’t adhered to the general rule that in relation to any part of the body that’s even halfway functional you leave well enough alone. But otherwise, he didn’t see how the catastrophic fallout of this impetuous tomfoolery was his fault. Could he have predicted the infection, and hadn’t he taken the full course of antibiotics? Hadn’t he done plenty of research beforehand, and after his cousin Larry’s rave testimonial how could he have known that the doctor was a hack? Was he to blame that the results of two exorbitant restorative plastic surgeries were disappointing, and his dick still looked like a lumpy, bun-crushed hotdog with a bite out of the middle? He was suffering plenty already, and Carol’s coldness was undeservedly cruel. Yet she had never revisited the conviction that he had vandalized not his own person but his wife’s. It turned out she really did think that his dick belonged to her—personally belonged to her, with the same simplicity and utterness with which she would own a spatula—and it was she who graciously lent it out from time to time, when he needed to piss.
Moreover, she pressed him into an introspection with which Jackson was impatient. It wasn’t that he didn’t “know himself” or some other claptrap; he just thought navel-gazing was girly and indulgent and pointless. What was done was done, right? So what was the use of an emotional autopsy? No matter how you cut it up, a corpse was a corpse.
Well, his dick was not exactly a corpse. It was worse than that. While deformed and slouching, it was still alive, which made it only more terrible. His dick reminded him of that story they’d read in Mrs. William’s eighth-grade English class called “The Monkey’s Paw”—the beloved son fatally mangled in an accident who was resurrected by evil magic and mooed, all cut to ribbons, behind the front door. Hell, at least in the story you were spared having to look at the thing with the merciful exercise of the please-God-make-it-go-away third wish. His dick was on its second wish—waving and mooing and wanting in.
A few weeks ago, Jackson had done his ever-loving best to try to explain why he did it, although as usual the elaboration seemed to make no difference, and he was left wondering why he’d bothered. “It was just for a kick,” he’d started out. “One of those kooky, jaunty ideas you get, like when you’ve always given chocolates and this year you want to come up with a more outrageous birthday present that for once your wife will remember. We’re surrounded by all these other folks getting piercings, or new noses, or liposuction—who treat their bodies like houses that you redecorate when you feel like it. I’m always fixing people’s houses, right? So I was playing, right? One little gesture, for fun. Jesus, otherwise I’m not getting my stomach banded, I’m not getting ‘man boob’ reduction; I don’t even have a tattoo.”
“You don’t mess around with that part of your body for ‘fun,’” she’d insisted. “I don’t buy it, Jackson. That the surgery was a ha-ha, a cutesy, off-the-cuff caprice.”
“I’ve said I’m sorry until I’m blue. But I don’t see the point in analyzing it to death. It’s like I went on an expedition, like up some mountain, and the idea for the expedition was just for an adventure, to fill a Saturday afternoon. Then suddenly the weather goes funny and what was a lighthearted lark suddenly turns life-threatening, with gales about to blow you off the cliff and half your party getting hypothermia. It happens, right? But when the helicopters swoop in for the rescue, the medics don’t give you the third degree about the deep, dark motivations behind your sick-fuck decision to go hiking on the weekend.”
“You’re making me tired, Jackson,” said Carol, lids at half-mast. “I don’t mind when you keep people at dinner parties at bay with a water cannon of crapola, but I don’t expect you to spout nonsense at me.”
He clapped his thighs, rose, and paced the bedroom—whose dimensions seemed to grow smaller by the day. He would have to throw her something meatier than the whimsy line. “Look. You want to know the truth?”
“That would be refreshing.”
“It’s awkward.”
“I can’t think of anything more awkward than present circumstances.”
“I …” Nuts, this was definitely, totally awkward. He stuck his head out the door to make sure one of the girls wasn’t up, pressed the knob until it clicked, pushed in the lock, and dropped his voice. “I came home once unexpectedly, since it turned out we had a job in the neighborhood. The girls were in school, so you must have felt … Well, you obviously figured you had the place to yourself. I came looking for you and you must not have heard me, ‘cause you were … distracted. Turns out you were in here, and you’d left the door open.” He stopped, and hoped she could infer the rest of it and instead she crossed her arms and said, “So?” He would have to spell it out.
“I wasn’t spying on you, Carol. I was only going to ask if you wanted to have lunch together. But you were—well, you’d taken all your clothes off and it was the middle of the day, and that was a little weird. You were standing in front of the mirror, and your hands were covered in—I don’t know, something greasy and creamy—”
She laughed. “Hair conditioner. Suave, the cheap stuff. It has the perfect texture.”
“I’m sorry I violated your privacy, and I don’t want you to think I was offended or anything—”
“Why would you be offended?”
“I take that back, actually. I was a little offended.”
“I’m not allowed to masturbate? You should have told me that a long time ago.”
“That’s not what I mean. And offended is the wrong word. I was hurt.”
“Hurt? Jackson, I work incredibly hard, the sales work for IBM is tedious, and sometimes I have to blow off a little steam.”
“You’re not getting it. The point is, you were high as a kite. You were doing something two-handed down there and obviously getting off on watching yourself, and this—so it was conditioner—well, it was all over the place. And you were gasping and talking dirty to yourself. Shit.”
“I obviously made quite an impression. But why on earth didn’t you join me?”
“I wasn’t a part of it. And you’re still not getting it. You were—you were getting off by yourself more than you do with me.” He looked down. There. He’d said it.
She reached for his hand with the tenderness for which he was starved. “So you saw me on my own. It’s a little different. Maybe it is a little m
ore uninhibited without you there. I wish it weren’t, but it’s almost impossible to completely shed self-consciousness with another person, even if you love that person, and even if you are, more or less, relaxed with them. I still don’t see why this little session you walked in on has anything whatsoever to do with your getting botched penis enlargement surgery.”
He always winced when she had to say it plain like that. Since he had his own private rituals whose frequency—that is, previous frequency—he was loath to admit, Jackson was reluctant to get into the fact that for the last couple of years the “session” he’d walked in on had been his touchstone for getting high as a kite himself. Even talking about it now had given him a hard-on. (Or what passed for one. Supposedly he was to be grateful that it roused even to this spongy level of enthusiasm, to which he was alerted mostly because it hurt; the scar tissue from the infection bound the shaft in the middle, like a cock ring stuck halfway up.) Thinking about Carol clutching herself all covered in goo in front of the mirror got him off like nobody’s business. But the home video also tormented him. God, you’d never know it to look at this woman, so composed, so … Well, other people probably thought of Carol as a little tight. He wasn’t about to repeat to her some of the things he’d overheard her say that day—her running commentary of smut would be too embarrassing for both of them, and at once such a turn-on that it would send his dick into agony—but she was a fucking animal! That afternoon, he’d felt so cheated, that he’d lived for years with a wildcat, a wildcat with big bountiful breasts and one hand shoved halfway up her own cunt and her face a contortion of twisted, gory pleasure, and meanwhile for years he’d been having sedate, conventional, well-behaved sex with a domesticated tabby.
“I wanted you to feel that way with me,” he said. “I wanted to introduce something that made you get as excited with me as you do by yourself. I didn’t realize until I saw you by accident that you were—that you were capable of getting that off your head.”
“Haven’t I seemed to enjoy myself with you? We’ve had a lovely sex life. If we hadn’t, why would I be so angry now that we don’t have one?”
“See? Enjoy yourself. A lovely sex life. That’s the kind of language you use when you go on a picnic. I don’t want you to enjoy yourself. I want you to go insane.”
“Congratulations, then. I am insane. Insanely disappointed and aggrieved. You could have talked about it with me, instead of carving yourself up like a rib roast. For pity’s sake, if all you wanted was a little more kink, I’d have caught the two-for-one sale on conditioner at CVS.”
In her humor he sensed a softening, and he sat beside her on the bed. She’d started wearing a nightgown despite the close, thick summer air, but the door was already locked and nightgowns come off. He put a hand on her thigh. She looked at the hand, then in his eyes; her expression was skeptical but not, for once, hostile. It was a little early after the second plastic surgery—the scars were still red and sensitive—but like a job seeker during an economic downturn he would have to apply for the few openings that came along. When he kissed her she was passive, though she did not recoil. Yeah, as he got into the idea the Monkey’s-Paw mangle mooed again, but nothing could be more painful than this months-long freeze-out.
As Jackson slid his hand up under the nightgown, they were miles from some breakthrough erotic melee with Suave. He was super gentle and super careful, implicitly asking permission with every caress, as if she were still a virgin and had to be broken in nice and slow, rather than his wife and the mother of his children. Still he did finally coax the boring white cotton sack over her head—heaven forbid she’d wear a negligee—and slipped his hands onto those twin scoops of vanilla ice cream. Carol didn’t participate much, but she didn’t stop him. There was only one stage to go, tearing off the damned boxers, an unveiling that now filled him with dread; he should have switched off the light on Carol’s side of the bed when he’d had the chance. As he hastily dragged them off the elastic smarted; he could see her hating to look and yet having to look and so looking and then looking away. His erection was about as good as it got, meaning not very, and though this was hardly the time to entertain such thoughts he had to concede that if anything after all that snipping and pulling and chopping and patching the mutilated nubbin—which looked like some half-chewed chicken neck that had got stuck in a garbage disposal—was now even smaller than it had been to begin with.
When he eased on top of her, Carol’s distorted, twitching face bore superficial resemblance to the expression she’d worn when he caught her slathering her pussy with Suave, but was probably closer to the wobbly grimace of a patient about to submit to a colonoscopy. Since Carol obviously wasn’t going to help, he rose up on one hand and with the other tried to position his disabled ward for entry, wondering if you could organize wheelchair access to a vagina. Pushing at her, he cringed as his dick buckled. He tried one more time by keeping his middle finger underneath the shaft like a makeshift splint, but with one, he had to admit, graceful maneuver Carol was out from under him and standing beside the bed. “I can’t.” Shaking despite the muggy July, she reached for the nightgown scrunched behind her pillow. “I’m sorry. I tried, but even if you could get it in, Jackson, I can’t do it. It’s too repulsive.”
Carol was not a theatrical person, and he didn’t really believe that she rushed to the toilet to throw up. But she did flee to the bathroom and close the door, and she was gone for a long time.
“Yes, Mr. Pogatchnik, it’s just that—”
“You hear me? Not on my time. I’ve cut you plenty slack because of your wife, Knacker. But I’m not running a hospice here. A business is a business.”
Jackson peeked around his partition. Spattered in freckles, Pogatchnik had short legs, a short neck, and short, Vienna-sausage fingers. In that red-and-white striped shirt, big-butt Bermudas, and a backward baseball cap that from this angle looked like a beanie, he needed only a large lollypop to complete the picture of an overgrown toddler. He was the only one in the office with enough natural padding to stay warm in summer togs; by contrast, in mid-August Shep was wearing a down vest, and he’d learned to type in gloves. Pogatchnik clearly took the Alpine gear as admonition, and since June the cycle had only accelerated: Shep arrived in a woolly scarf; Pogatchnik cranked the AC down two more degrees; Shep arrived in ear muffs.
“I’m afraid the phone lines at the World Wellness Group are only open during business hours,” Shep was explaining in a calm, inhumanly even tone that sounded like Carol. “While I’m on hold, I do keep fielding calls for Randy Handy—”
“What did you just call my company?”
“I mean, Handy Randy, of course. That was just, you know, a slip of the tongue.”
“You’re on thin ice, Knacker. Under the circumstances, you figure it’s smart to confuse the name of your only employer with jerking off?”
“No, Mr. Pogatchnik. I don’t know why that came out of my mouth. You must be making me nervous, sir. On account of your—displeasure.”
Fucking hell. It was like listening in on a pipsqueak draftee during basic training, quailing in front of his sergeant back in the days before the volunteer army began coddling the troops with Oreos. It made Jackson mad, and maybe it wasn’t fair, but mad at Shep. The groveling in the next cubicle made him feel personally betrayed. What do you want to bet that “Randy Handy” slip really was a mistake, and not the sly, purposive subversion that it should have been? A recently installed office rule, the “Mr. Pogatchnik” routine was at least not Shep’s ass-lick innovation. In an era when everyone from restaurant patrons to prime ministers went by first names, the absurd formality had gratifyingly warped to the tongue-in-cheek; though the fat red-haired toad was too stupid to notice, all over the office “Mr. Pogatchnik” rang with overt sarcasm.
“Personal calls are personal calls,” said Pogatchnik. “Which you make at lunch, on your own cell.”
While organizing work crews throughout the rest of the morning, Jackson chewed o
n a mystery that he’d never got his head around. The rest of the staff had always liked Jackson, or at least they put up with him—and tolerance, in such close-quartered, shoulder-to-shoulder work, believe it or not was something. But they’d always respected Knacker, even if back when Shep called the shots they hadn’t always liked him. He’d run a tight ship. Caught you taking a slug from an open white wine bottle in a customer’s fridge, and you were out on your ear. His lofty business principles may have been subject to mockery behind his back, but his workforce was still proud that stand-up practices brought in a host of repeat customers. When a licensed plumber had left behind a gaping hole in a living room ceiling, Shep would opt for a meticulously cut Sheetrock patch, which was cheaper for the customer, even though replacing the whole panel would’ve taken half the time and made Knack twice the money. He’d put in estimates on the low side when he sensed a homeowner was hard up. He’d stood by his price quotes, too, even when a job turned out more fiddly than they expected. It was their fault, claimed Shep, that a job took three times longer than it was supposed to; they should have seen the problems coming.
Of course, Jackson himself rarely ran over the allotted time, since he was fast—slapdash, Shep sometimes called it, and the word had stung. Jackson was fast but he was good, or good enough—and good enough was good enough. Polished workmanship was wasted on these outer-borough hovels. Most of the dumps they repaired were originally working-class housing stock, built for laundry workers or for that matter for tradesmen like themselves. Unless the place had been gutted and renovated from the ground up, the kind of la-di-da jobs that Shep had specialized in just made the rest of the house look worse. You know, he’d install a new closet door and frame, and it’d be the only door in the place that was parallel to the floor. The effect was to make the rest of the joint look like a funhouse, all out of kilter—as if he’d smeared “Clean me!” on the side of a dusty van.