Perfect Fifths

  I’m naked in paradise, Jessica says.

  Without shame? Marcus asks.

  And before she can answer, Marcus smiles and reaches for her hands.

  seven

  Marcus cannot believe she’s asleep. There’s no way she’s actually asleep. Maybe she is under physical duress this afternoon, maybe she is exhausted by the double whammy of influenza and menstruation, though he came to the conclusion very early on in their conversation that she isn’t suffering from either. Jessica has always been a conspicuous liar, and today’s feigned coughing and cramping were a typically unbelievable performance. Marcus is pretty much convinced that she is perfectly healthy and is just using those medical excuses as an added buffer against sexual activity. The need to resort to such dramatic measures, and her devious glee in pointing out all the places where they are not going to have sex, only betrays the obvious: Her determination not to have sex with him is only barely, by the most infinitesimal measure, winning out over her desire to have sex with him.

  This encouraging revelation doesn’t change the fact that Jessica is asleep. Asleep. This must be another test. Another game to play. He’s tempted to belly-flop on her bed and call bullshit on this catnap, but he opts for a more tactful approach.

  “Jessica,” Marcus says at a volume that is half conversational, half conspiratorial. “Are you really asleep?” He expects her to crack a smile, wink open an eye, and sound off with a “Gotcha, sucka!,” but she doesn’t stir. “I want to tell you the rest of the story,” he continues, thinking this gambit might persuade her to end the charade. “I want to tell you about…”

  He pauses here, stoops down, gets within an inch of Jessica’s face. He hovers above her a moment, studying her features for any subtle shifts that would reveal she’s really awake and faking it. But her mouth is unattractively slack, her nostrils flare in and out with each breath, and her eyeballs roll beneath the surface of her thin lids. All signs that she is indeed authentically asleep. If she is faking it, this is a triumphant moment in her acting career.

  Marcus stands up and guffaws out loud, not even bothering to muffle his amusement. When he considered bedding Jessica down, this was not what he’d had in mind. Still shaking his head in wonderment (How can she sleep at a time like this?), Marcus decides to go ahead with his shower.

  But not without exploring a measure of last resort.

  He plants himself directly in what would be Jessica’s field of vision, that is, if her eyes were open. He pops open the button on his corduroys. Pauses. Then, as if in time with an imaginary burlesque drumbeat, swivels his snake hips as he begins to unzip … lower … lower … as low as it goes. When his pants slip to the floor, Marcus cartoonishly, coquettishly cups his privates with his hands and even mouths Oops! just to keep in ridiculous character. With one hand still providing obscenely inadequate coverage for his crotch, he uses the other to take hold of a trouser leg, which he then, with a great sense of pageantry, swings around in circles above his head (yes, like a lasso) before finally letting it fly. With a final showstopping flourish, Marcus ta-das! with his head flung back, feet wide-stanced, arms outstretched. Whether he knows it or not, it’s nearly identical to Barry Manilow’s triumphant pose on the infamous decoupage toilet seat cover at the heart of Jessica’s half-told story, only the Showman of Our Time was wearing an electric-blue bedazzled spandex jumpsuit, and Marcus is starkers.

  Jessica snorts and rolls over but is otherwise unmoved by this comedic lasso-dickery. Now thoroughly convinced that she’s genuinely asleep (How can she sleep at a time like this?), Marcus retreats to the privacy of the bathroom to take his long-overdue shower.

  I need to come clean, he thinks as he stands in front of the bathroom mirror, and then he laughs again, at himself and the situation. Knowing how much pleasure Jessica gets out of parsing double meanings, he makes a note to repeat this thought out loud later on for her enjoyment. I need to come clean.

  He considers his naked reflection and isn’t too impressed. He has always been too skinny. He can’t tell the difference between his abdominal muscles and protruding internal organs. The hair on his chest is darker and coarser than the reddish-brown hair on his head, and patchy. It collects in thick bunches around his nipples, then again in the trail that would lead down, down, down into his pants if he were wearing them. But he’s not, so Marcus contemplates his cock. This modicum of attention, when combined with the awareness of Jessica on the bed on the other side of the door, inspires his cock to jump up and be noticed: Huzzah! Yes, it’s bigger than most, but not as big as the numbers (“ten inches of New Jersey Whitesnake” was the refrain that echoed loudly in the Pineville High School locker room) he’s heard over the years. Like the amount of sex he’s had or drugs he has done, the size of Marcus Flu-tie’s cock looms larger in salacious imaginations than it does in reality. This exaggeration is a necessary component of perpetuating that poet/ addict manwhore myth that fooled them all, from the first (a friend of his brother’s, a degenerate JV cheerleader who thought it would be hilarious to seduce an oversexed thirteen-year-old) to the last (Greta), into believing that she would be the one who changed his life. All of them—however many there were—believed it. All but one. And she’s sufficiently unimpressed with Marcus Flutie to fall into a deep sleep.

  Marcus, now fully engorged, needs not only a shower but a cold one. He tilts the nozzle as high as it will go to accommodate his height, then turns on the water.

  “Yi! Yi! Yi!” he yips, hopping from foot to foot under the icy stream in a way that resembles a Native American rain dancer, or so he has been told. He always likes the shock of that uncontrolled rush of cold water, likes making his bones crackle and his skin pucker before adjusting the flow and relaxing into warmer, more tolerable temperatures. He’ll keep it cold until his cock calms down. He thinks about unpleasant subjects. Like how he’ll tell Jessica about Greta.

  “Natty calls her Regreta …”

  The bad joke does little to make him go limp. He thinks more about Greta.

  Greta was the one who likened him to a Cherokee under the cold water. She liked comparing him to other people, as if she could understand Marcus better by studying similar subject matter. In that vein, she assumed wrongly that this cold-shower habit was born out of a desire to conserve hot water, as many eco-minded coeds his age try to do. When Marcus explained that, no, his actions had nothing to do with saving the planet, Greta guessed again.

  “Did your family have many children sharing a single bathroom?”

  “Two kids, two adults, two bathrooms.”

  “Self-abnegation?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll figure it out.”

  Jessica, Marcus realizes as he bounces under the freezing rain, never noticed this dance, or if she did, never mentioned it. For all their years as a couple, they spent remarkably few days in consistent cohabitation, and Marcus has often wondered whether things would have turned out differently if they had regularly shared a bathroom before he proposed. Would they be married now if she’d had the opportunity to grow accustomed to peeing while he was hopping around in the shower? Or if she’d come around to accepting the two toothbrushes in the holder as indistinguishable and interchangeable?

  His cock points straight up at him accusatorially. It’s not my fault! it sneers. You’re the one who offered to share a room with her!

  Greta was a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in authority and identification, kinship, sexuality, gender, historical consciousness, comparison and translation, and finally (at least according to her official CV), narrative theory and the ethnographic method. She was curvaceous and blond and in the habit of wearing low-cut embellished silk tunics in acidic brights. At forty-eight, she had earned the marionette mouth wrinkles and brow furrows that made her look her age, but not unattractively so. In fact, she had earned the red-hot-tamale symbol alongside her high rankings on RateMyProfessors.com, and was widely considered one of the more doable instructors on campus—a distin
ction that had been entirely theoretical until Marcus came along. Or so she claimed.

  Greta’s career had shown early promise but had been quickly waylaid by marriage and motherhood. Greta had divorced twelve years ago and had worked hard, researched hard, published hard to make up for lost time. Her son was a graduate student on the opposite coast, at the same university where her ex-husband, also an anthropologist, has served as the glorified cornerstone of the department for over two decades. The husband, in fact, was once Greta’s professor. But she didn’t talk much about the husband, and especially not the son.

  “Natty says I was an Oedipal surrogate, and he’s probably right.”

  Marcus preempts this joke, too. He strenuously ignores his resilient erection by working his armpits into a lather.

  Greta taught ANT201 Introduction to Anthropology. Such entry-level classes are often the purgatorial bane of the untenured assistant professor’s existence, even at a prestigious school like Princeton. But Greta liked the assignment, liked “getting them early,” as she would explain to Marcus later, because she truly believed that the right teacher could turn curious interest into a lifetime calling. Her own husband had done that for her when she was eighteen, she said. The ex’s influence on her intellectual life had—with the obvious exception of the genetic contribution to the creation of her twenty-three-year-old son—long outlasted his influence on her emotional life.

  Marcus had enjoyed the class about as much as he enjoyed most of his classes, which was to say a lot. As his professor, Greta hadn’t treated him differently from anyone else, hadn’t acted inappropriately toward him in any way. He showed up every Monday and Wednesday at 10 A.M. and did the readings, took the exams, wrote the papers, learned more about anthropology than he had known before. He got an A and considered taking another, higher-level anthropology class—Human Adaptation, perhaps?—the following semester, that is, if he could find room in his schedule. There were so many classes to take and so little time. Of course, knowing what he knows now, he wishes he had taken another class instead of taking Greta up on her offer to go back to her apartment and see a certain self-portrait of a nineteenth-century painter whom she claimed he resembled in both appearance and raison d’être.

  “Natty says he’s surprised she didn’t offer to show me her etchings.”

  Another joke remembered and rejected. Marcus swivels this way and that, his hard-on cutting like a rudder through the arctic water. It’s like my cock’s been winterized, Marcus thinks. He nudges the nozzle toward H.

  All the years in academia had turned Greta into a relentless questioner. Even the simplest answers were too straightforward for Greta to blindly accept without a debate. Her inquisitiveness and refusal to accept face-value truths were the qualities that first attracted Marcus to Greta; at least, that was what he told her when she asked. (Of course, this response just begged for obvious follow-up questions, to which Marcus replied “Your breasts” and “You don’t need a lift” and finally “Greta, you’ve got better breasts than any eighteen-year-old on campus, now come over here and let me show you how much I enjoy them.”) These are also traits he appreciated—still appreciates—about Jessica. Greta appealed to Marcus not only for the challenging similarities she shared with the woman he had wanted to marry, but because those qualities contributed to making Greta the very opposite of the simple, unchallenging girl (emphasis on “girl”) Jessica had assumed Marcus would fuck in the effort to get over her. Marcus was Greta’s subordinate. Both knew it and preferred it that way. Their relationship, such as it was, depended on that imbalance of power.

  He squirts liquid soap into one hand and takes a firm grasp of his hard-on with the other, pulling back at the base, near his balls.

  In all those years with Jessica Darling, she never pressed him to try to explain what had drawn him to her. He never offered such an explanation, not even in the form of cryptic postcards or elliptical lyrics, always believing that such analysis was needy, unnecessary, and impossible. He loved her because she was Jessica Darling, that’s why What better explanation could there be? And he would hope that if asked why she stayed with him as long as she did—had she been asked in the years since the breakup?—she would respond in kind: because he was Marcus Flutie, that’s why.

  He closes his eyes, taking slow, soapy-smooth strokes up and down and up and down and up and down …

  Not that he would have, but Marcus never had to ask Greta what attracted her to him. She had told him straightaway.

  “You look like Gustave Courbet.”

  “Who?”

  “A brilliant nineteenth-century French painter,” she replied. “Equally famous for his art—which rejected romanticism for realism—as he was for his scandalous reputation.”

  That was the first time Greta made the comparison, an offhand remark as he got up from his seat and went out of the lecture hall. The second time was a few months later, carnally, as she got up and off his naked lap. Only the second time did Greta provide photographic evidence in the form of the print of the self-portrait that ostensibly—but not really—lured him to her apartment in the first place.

  “This is called The Desperate Man,” Greta said in a tone not unlike that which she used to address her students. “This is what you looked like every day when you came to my class. Your beard is thicker, but otherwise, he could be you.”

  Greta handed him a heavy art book split to reveal a wild-eyed man tearing at his uncombed hair in a mad panic, his mouth half-open as if he’s about to beg for help. Marcus saw only a vague physical resemblance but couldn’t argue the titular comparison. He was a desperate man, had been a desperate man for quite some time, but never more desperate than in the moments leading up to his spontaneous marriage proposal. Proposing to Jessica had been the most desperate act of a most desperate man, a last-chance effort to hold on to something—someone—he knew in his heart was already lost to him.

  Greta then pointed out the pull quote accompanying the portrait. “‘When I am no longer controversial, I will no longer be important,’” she read. “Sounds like someone I know.”

  Marcus’s gut twisted as he looked into the face of this long-dead artist whom he resembled just enough to provide a necrophilic thrill. It was in that moment Marcus realized that Greta, for all her advanced degrees, was no better than any of the high school or college girls who had drawn similar comparisons to other tragically sexy antiheroes—Jim Morrison, River Phoenix, Kurt Cobain, Heath Ledger—all damaged madmen who could have been saved, according to the mythology, if the right woman had come along to fix him, make him whole. Marcus was profoundly disappointed in this discovery, having masochistically hoped that Greta’s innate intellectual superiority, combined with a worldly lifetime of wisdom through experience, would trump his meager offerings to the relationship. And yet that disillusionment didn’t stop Marcus from playing the passive role and letting Greta dominate him for several more months.