Sexcapade

From 'Dirty Stories'

Rachel and Jerianne were friends and, like all friends, they settled into agreed-upon roles. It was funny for Rachel, when she reflected on this subject, to think that with lots of other people, probably more often than not, she was the risk-taker, the wild one. That’s who she had been in her family, to her mother and both her sisters, it was who she was for her husband, and, when she was away from Jerianne it wasn’t at all clear why she always seemed so back-footed in comparison, but, when they were together, it was always Jerianne who was suggesting rolling a joint or asking the kids to stay with the sitter all night or telling her that electro music was actually the highest form of music – whatever it was, it was the kind of thing that would never have occurred to Rachel on her own, it was the feeling of the older girls in school telling you about a secret source to buy cigarettes or the existence of oral sex, just some kind of paradigm shift, the world constantly becoming more complicated, more dangerous than she would have imagined – and always in a way that seemed to perfectly reverse everything that she thought she knew.

What was ironic was that Jerianne had, in some sense, in the way that it would register with the US census or the IRS, a perfectly conventional life, much more so than Rachel’s. She had gotten married very young – no real surprise there – had a kid when she was 22. “I was finishing up Northwestern,” she said, “and I would just show up to classes pregnant.” Something had gone very wrong with the father of her daughter – no matter how many bottles of Sauvignon Blanc they polished off together, or on the headier occasions, how many joints or magic mushrooms they took, Jerianne never told her about what had happened. He seemed to have vanished completely from their life. She came up with the aptly-named Port (short for Porter), who was from an old WASP family, one of the few that had held onto its wealth. He was a very straight corporate lawyer who worked at what must have been the last white-shoed law firm in existence. He was wealthy, cute, responsible, almost totally humorless but completely charmed by Jerianne and somehow didn’t mind that she had a three-year-old in tow. And, in that schematic way which means nothing, that was her life – she was a stay-at-home mother. She’d never had a career. She was wildly ambitious with various entrepreneurial schemes, usually of the Mary Kay variety, and Rachel carried many memories of licking envelopes and of dutifully trekking around in winter, selling cosmetics and hand creams and whatever else to, at one time or another, probably every single house in their neighborhood, but none of them had ever seemed to amount to anything. She had gotten a real head start on Rachel in the parenting department. At 40, she was already sending her daughter, shrewd, precocious Monica (beneficiary of some really shocking, development-accelerating parental confidences) off to college. By Monica’s sophomore year, she was activating the nuclear option in her marriage, and Port, doting, long-suffering, patient Port was shipped off to a hotel room, while Jerianne, nursing various grievances against him that Rachel could never manage to understand, prowled around her three-story house, called Rachel at increasingly erratic times of night, went into these monologues about how they had been cheated of their potential, squandered their sacred femininity.

Mostly, though, she talked about Anthony. She was becoming a bit of a shut-in was Jerianne. After all the stories, all the havoc, frankly, that she had created around her wherever she went, it was very sad to realize that she spent whole days alone, didn’t have any friends really other than Rachel, that pretty much her only visitor was Anthony. “He’s like all the porn fantasies rolled into one,” she said. “I call him up and I ask him to bring me pizza or groceries and then as he hands it to me, instead of my saying thank you, I’m down on my knees sucking his dick. Or I have a problem with my bathroom sink and I don’t want to go all the trouble of getting a plumber, Anthony’s handy, so he comes over and he does whatever the hell men do with pipes and when he finishes, all sweaty, I’m just lying there on the bed waiting for him.”

“Wow, all of the porn fantasies,” Rachel said.

“All of them,” Jerianne confirmed.

And then Jerianne told her in such detail about Anthony that Rachel, who had been talking on the phone in the living room, had to walk out to the porch. Not that her kids could hear her say anything – Jerianne was doing the talking, and her kids had reached the age where they had no interest whatsoever in her – but her face was changing so much, she was blushing so red, that she had an overwhelming urge to be alone. She stood on the porch, the warm summer night, the dogs on leashes, the kids on bicycles, their parents shouting encouragement behind them, and she tucked the phone between her cheek and her ear, she covered her face with her hand, she felt the skin on her neck blotching.

On the phone Jerianne was saying improbable things. She was saying that it been such a long time since she’d had young dick that she’d forgotten what it was like. She had gotten used to dick that sagged downwards – “grave-bound,” was how she described Port’s dick – that young, “spry” dick struck her as being like an alien object grafted onto a human body, like some kind of unlikely and very brilliant practical joke. She was saying that the smoothness of an erect penis came from a very different and stronger material than anything else on the body, and half of the time when she was fellating Anthony – which was a lot of time – she felt as if she were some kind of biologist, and she was just fascinated by this organ, the rubbery material that went into making this organ. The rest of the time, she said, she didn’t think lucid thoughts at all. Anthony was short and squat, powerfully built, “like a brick shithouse,” she said, and his dick was the only thing about him that wasn’t bulky and rectangular. What she liked to do was to sit  on his cock on a chair, or just with him squatting athletically beneath her, to pretend to try to escape from it, sometimes to really try to escape from it, and for him to not let her, to grab her firmly by the arm, by the shoulder, by the hair, under no circumstances to let her get free. If she did get free, she would race around the house, the handsome town house which had now become a three-story fuck pen, and he was ordered, disregarding anything she might say otherwise, to hunt her down, to drag her out from underneath beds and behind chairs, and then to resume his posture, to take his powerful squat, to grab her tight, to impale her on that spry giant cock of his.

Rachel actually met Anthony. Jerianne invited her over for a very improbable and awkward dinner party. “To celebrate all the extra space!” Jerianne texted. When she got there, Anthony was acting as the butler – he opened the door and gave her this great ear-splitting smile, then ushered her to the dining room where Jerianne was waiting at the head of the table. Actually, Rachel thought at first that he was the butler – he was wearing a tuxedo with cummerbund, to complement Jerianne’s evening gown, part of a dress code that Jerianne had neglected to tell Rachel about. The outfit was definitely part of the confusion, but, also, he just looked so different from how Rachel pictured him – by this time, she had heard enough about Anthony that she had improvised a very vivid mental picture, which she was now forced to disregard. He was several years younger than both of them, that part held, but his face was very boyish and at the same time somehow wizened, like a baby’s. He was bald, in the fashionable MMA style, with a very crinkled forehead. His smile was extremely wide and toothy. His features were very square and lumpish, technically probably good-looking, but it seemed like there was no subtlety at all in their composition. He was short – she had known that, but he was so much shorter than she had been given to expect. She could tell that he worked out, it seemed like he had a strong, powerful body underneath his tuxedo, that at least was accurately advertised, but he just seemed to belong to a different class from either of them. There was a guilelessness about him, that was a dead giveaway, and then he looked like he could easily be a fitness trainer or part of the household staff – in fact, his tuxedo was left over from his time in catering, which had taken up most of his 20s.

“Welcome,” Jerianne said when she stopped into the dining room. The table was set with her old wedding china. There was a champagne flute already at each place. “To fresh beginnings,” Jerianne proposed. “In with the new, out with the old.”

Of all of the many dinner parties she had been exposed to in her time as Jerianne’s friend, theme parties and costume parties, come-as-your-childhood-self parties, all with Port sitting at the head of the table pounding his armchair with appreciation like a demented ringmaster, this one was the wackiest. With a gracious, flowing sweep of her arm, she allowed Anthony to go to the kitchen and bring in the Italian takeout food they had ordered for the occasion. As soon as he was out of the room, Jerianne grabbed her forearm and hissed, “What do you think?” and Rachel laughingly had to insist on the thing she always instead on, ‘Commandment One of Rachel-Land,’ as Jerianne had called it, that she needed time to absorb information and impressions before she could form an opinion. And the rest of it, the champagne, the bottles of red wine, the spaghetti that had gotten cold in transit, the panna cotta afterwards, was really an attempt to elicit from Rachel her opinion – she kept throwing out leading questions to Anthony, would he talk about being a captain of his high school football team, would he tell the story of how his father had arrived in the U.S. by marching completely alone through the remotest part of the desert, these résumé items that she had gleaned in the interludes between fucking, and Anthony, who really did seem like a very sweet guy, would duly supply whatever story was asked of him. He and Rachel had formed a camaraderie a bit the way two children might who had been summoned to perform stunts for the adults, he grinned at her before each story to show that this wasn’t normally how he conducted his conversation and he discreetly topped off Rachel’s wine glass whenever he could sense that she was struggling to remain upbeat – and, after every story, Jerianne, who really was unhinged these days, pounded the table and said, “No – that is not how the story is told! Anthony told me a far superior version of that story, I mean a version with art. I have no idea why he’s being so mealy-mouthed about it now.”

***

About a month after that, Port was readmitted to the house and to his seat at the head of the table. Rachel was temporarily expelled as a friend. “Port is very tribal,” Jerianne explained. “He thinks you were against him – you were supposed to send him a supportive e-mail or something. I don’t know why he thinks that – if you had, I would have ripped your labia off.”

That was just as well. Jerianne, by almost any calculation, brought in more trouble than she was worth. Rachel’s husband seized the opportunity to deliver a few stored-up thoughts on Jerianne’s manipulativeness and the ‘black hole-ness’ of having her as a friend. And Rachel couldn’t argue with that, she found Jerianne just as maddening as did anybody else who knew her, but as she tended to her suddenly-much-better-organized life, the meals and the book clubs and the growing-up of her daughters (their distancing, which had at first seemed like a phase, was now clearly a permanent reality), there was something missing, just an excitement, just a feeling that anything could happen at any time.

She ran into Anthony when she was on her way to pick up a birthday cake for her daughter and Anthony was carrying a pair of grocery bags. He was in a bright blue shirt, a little large on him, that looked like it had come right off the rack. It suited him much better than the evening wear did. The top two buttons were undone and there was a large gold cross mixed in with his chest hair. He put his groceries down on the sidewalk. He actually seemed thrilled to see her.

“I didn’t know if I would see you again,” he said. 

“It is a very different setting from last time,” she agreed.

It turned out he lived in the same neighborhood that she did – went to the same stores, he was close enough to the grocery store that he didn’t have to drive. He was working in a graphic design house now. “Crazy hours,” he told her, doing a pantomime of rubbing the exhaustion from his eyes. She had a feeling that this detail had been elided over at the dinner – Jerianne had solicited a lot of stories from him, but they had all been about the gangs in his neighborhood growing up, or his time in the Golden Gloves, or a couple of funny stories about catering. There was definitely no hint of offices or white-collar work.

“Really cleaned out the store,” he told her, shrugging towards the bags, as the conversation was winding down. “I’m making a big dinner for my daughter – gonna spend the whole afternoon cooking.”

“You’re married?” Rachel said, trying and failing to keep surprise out of her voice.

“No,” he said, scratching at his nose, he used his hands constantly while he talked, “well, haven’t been married for a long time. My daughter’s with me this weekend. She’s my little princess – she don’t eat anything, in one of those phases, but I gotta cook up a storm for her, can’t help myself.”

They smiled and waved goodbye. She watched him trudging off, his broad back; with what he was wearing today, she could better see the muscles rippling under his shirt.

Apparently, Rachel had become some sort of fall guy for the split, and Port really had forbidden contact with her, but it didn’t take Jerianne long to defy that embargo. She called her late at night and Rachel went to the porch to take the call.

“He’s completely impossible,” Jerianne was saying. One thing about her – she didn’t bother with introductions before she launched into the point of the call. “A drunk, can’t cook for himself, can’t clean for himself, doesn’t even have the decency to throw out his liquor bottles – you know that the hotel where he stayed is after him for damages for what he did to the room. I thought they didn’t even make them like this anymore, I thought this whole class went extinct like the dodo – it’s like what is wrong with me, how in the world did I manage to find the last dysfunctional WASP?”

That was what kept Rachel in the friendship, she thought, as she listened silently to Jerianne’s monologue. She had so much irony, that was the quality she valued most, and Jerianne seemed to have none – except that, every so often, Jerianne really surprised her, had these bouts of self-awareness, like somewhere in there was a very wise, very bemused Jerianne who was watching this over-heated cartoon character go around making a mess out of her life and the lives of everybody around her. It was these bouts of clarity, lucidity, that got to her, that kept her coming back.

And then, just as quickly, it was gone again. “That time without him was fun, wasn’t it?” she said. “It was like being a kid alone in the house when the adults have gone on a canoeing trip and disappeared – I mean, just no one to tell you what time to go to bed or who not to fuck or when it’s time to stop fucking and do your chores.” She sighed wistfully. “But here’s the thing,” she said, “he would be lost without me, I mean lost, like no shoes, wandering around along the highway, stains in his crotch, lost. He’s a baby, a big rich WASP baby, and I’ve had a good life, I have, and when I needed a daddy for Monica and a sugar daddy for me, he turned up, he was the answer to the prayers, and now that he’s a sad aging drunk who can’t work a dryer himself and is on the fast track to nowhere, he needs a mommy, he needs a mommy to look after him, and Monica, when she comes home from college – she needs to see a family, a happy healthy family no matter what it looks like from the inside.”

She was sniffling a little. Rachel could hear her pause to sip her martini. “That’s what I do,” she said, “in the end, I give way, always give way in the end. Always, Jerianne comes in second.”

So that’s the pose Jerianne had settled on – well, it was better than the mad woman in the attic placing phone calls at 2 in the morning, but not by much. Really, of all the possible poses, Rachel thought, Jerianne was least suited to being a martyr. 

She came across Anthony fairly regularly. He was buying groceries or picking up something from the hardware store. Once, he was there with his princess, his little jewel. He stood balancing his hand on the top of her head as if it were a table top. By some common consent, they didn’t discuss Jerianne. “It’s kind of been a wild ride,” he said once when he was talking about the difficulty of taking care of his daughter, raising his eyebrows in such a sighing, overwhelmed way that she assumed he could only be talking about problems dealing with women, and took that as a veiled reference to Jerianne. There was no question of there being anything between the two of them – Anthony was a little flirty, but she felt safe in assuming that that was how he talked to everyone. There could be nothing on her end. Even leaving aside husbands and children, there was an ironclad pact with Jerianne – and Jerianne was as territorial as a Kindergartener; at the bare minimum, she would rip off Rachel’s labia. 

Tom, Rachel’s husband, was a conservationist. Unbelievably enough, he had started to be really successful at it. He had worked out a kind of wildlife preserve that abutted right up against the outskirts of cities, and governments from around the world had begun to contact him and ask him to set up similar preserves for them. It was one of these miracles of white-collar work, she thought. It had been Tom’s crazy vision for a long, long time, for decades at this point, he had gone to graduate school, done a very dubious masters’ degree in order to better pursue it, she had, very privately, in her heart of hearts, been deeply contemptuous of it – and she had been wrong, clearly she had been flat-out wrong, Tom was apparently a genius and his hare-brained idea which he’d been boring her family with since as long as she could remember was clearly some sort of signal achievement for mankind. He was supposed to go to Japan for six full weeks to advise the national parks ministry on his plan, which, by this point, had become a genuinely head-breaking, multi-layered thing, involving permits from various different agencies. There were all kinds of discussions about managing the kids’ schedules. By this time, all they really wanted to do was sit around behind the swimming pool of a park near the school, cage cigarettes, and talk about boys, but it was deemed advisable to keep them occupied. Rachel put together a janga-like schedule of sleepovers with friends and summer camps and some soft-sell extra-curriculars, and by the time the plan was executed, and Tom was put on his flight to Tokyo and the girls were off on their gauntlet of activities, Rachel felt herself alone, unexpectedly alone – in all the planning, somehow, nobody had taken her time into consideration.

She spent the morning like she was a general at HQ tracking the movements of her brood, and then there was a long stretch of time in the middle of the day when she had trouble getting into her book club book, and she lay on the bed, the large fluffed bed with its many pillows, and she stared towards the cloudless sky outside her window, and her hand inched down towards her jeans and unclasped them and then she raised her thighs to slide away from the fabric of the pants and of her underwear.

She thought of Anthony – yes, whatever image she visited, she returned inexorably to Anthony. It felt like a bad practical joke, like some broken carnival ride. There he was, the squat body, the bald head, the chain hanging loose off his neck, the erection that seemed totally improbable, like he was a regular guy wearing a strap-on, and the erection lowered itself into her, or impaled her when she was on top, and she clutched, helplessly, she clutched at his arms, at his neck. The way he looked was like the cage fighters in the few times she’d channel surfed past them, how close in they got to their opponents, just how much they seemed to sweatily enjoy their intertwinement with someone else. And like a fighter she tried to crawl away, tried to push him away from her, to no avail. He held her by the shoulders, he was in her, and his crinkled face was over her, he was leaning in for a kiss. 

As her period of aloneness lengthened – Tom was gone, her oldest was constantly busy, Becky her youngest now went off to sleepaway camp – Rachel found herself spending more time out in the neighborhood, taking yoga classes, signing up for trials of classes, pilates, gyrotonics, things that she was not at all sure she was interested in. Anthony was becoming a somewhat regular feature of her route.

She had a suspicion that his idea of long hours was different from hers – certainly different from Tom’s. He seemed always to be running errands or he would drive by when she was running and chat out the window while she jogged in place and panted for breath. As she had back at that original dinner, she found his conversation to be highly undirectional. He made references to figures from his life that couldn’t possibly have meant anything to her. He told her, for instance – he was in the midst of giving her a tip about her running – that Ray, whom she surmised might be his old boxing coach, always told him to try to kick his ass as a way of lengthening his stride. “But, you know, that’s Ray,” he said with a wry, conspiratorial look, a cryptic brushing of his nose, and she had no idea why he expected her either to get who Ray was or to share his opinion of him. In the same vein, he said once, “Are you still close with your friend?” and immediately set his features into a poker face so that she couldn’t quite figure out what response he was looking for.

But that question, the way he tried to pass it off as casual interest, told her what she had been interested in knowing. Jerianne was apparently thinking along similar lines. She once again violated her embargo to call Rachel. She said she missed her, she just wanted to hear her voice, but it didn’t take long for Jerianne to undermine her own pretense. “You will never guess who I started seeing again,” she said and something went cold in Rachel’s extremities.

“Who?” she asked – Jerianne always preferred a nice call-and-response in her conversations.

“You remember that man meat I had over when Port and I were on our break? Did you meet him – Anthony?”

Rachel said that she did – she’d been over for dinner.

“Well, the house is off-limits and that was three-quarters of the fun, but he does supply the rest of it – he does do that does Anthony. He’s in this dumpy little house. Upstairs tenants. Neighbors crawling all over. He keeps having to put his hand over my mouth to keep me from screaming.”

Well, clearly Anthony hadn’t mentioned to her that he kept running into Rachel – why did she take such odd satisfaction out of that?

In the fluffed, pillowed bed, she didn’t develop anything as elaborate as Jerianne’s rape fantasies – there was no suffocating of screams, no dragging out from behind couches. It was just the two of them locked in tight together, there was her clamped underneath him, the way he pushed his tongue down her throat, which was so intimate, so scary, even though by this point of the fantasy he had been inside her a long time. What was distinctive in the way she imagined it was that she sometimes changed perspective. Sometimes she seemed to be the one with the pulsating torso and the gold cross around her neck. Sometimes she had an image of Jerianne underneath, Jerianne like an unmade bed, her blondness, her fleshiness. And it was hard to compete with that, small brown Rachel with her pert little breasts, her stretched pussy, but there she was, clamping onto his neck, scraping her nails across his chest, baring her teeth. She was losing her perspectives a bit – but, strangely, that wasn’t such a problem, they were bound together, Anthony who wanted to take her and move on to the next one, Rachel who wouldn’t let him out of her grasp.

Her summer idyll collapsed quickly. Becky cried every night during summer camp and had to come home. Tom finished with his edification of the Japanese. He looked somehow bizarre in the house, like an extra who had wandered onto the wrong set. She expected this whole weird fantasy to collapse quickly on his return – he was so pleased with himself, sat straighter at dinner, gave her instructions with a curl of his fingers, which was new – but instead it just took on a new life, it went underground. She started running steam baths for herself. It wasn’t the same as the big bed, the cloudless sky, but she adapted, she did adapt. Anthony sat on the rim of the bathtub, he was as unattractive as ever, his broad chest leaned in towards her, his fingers went through the soapy water.

She and Jerianne fell out of touch. It was one of these lulls that started off like some accidental thing – she noticed one day that it had been a couple of weeks since she’d heard from Jerianne – and then deepened into something vindictive. Jerianne had been a flaky, unrewarding friend, she always had been, Rachel decided to draw a line in the sand, to not call Jerianne first, to not respond to Jerianne until Jerianne took a genuine interest in her. She told her plan to Tom and Tom approved wholeheartedly.

She was in the house much more often now. There was Tom and there was Becky and there was the matter of her getting back to work. The excuses were almost out now – it was just a matter of Becky being able to get through sleepaway camp and then it really would happen, her kids would have no further use for her. She started the awful process of updating and submitting her résumé – it was a decade out of date, it was a museum piece – but one thing about Tom, he didn’t let her get away with not sending it out. She allowed her memberships to lapse, to the yoga study, to the gyrotonics place, the cost of them burned in her conscience. She went months without seeing Anthony. It didn’t seem to matter. They were more important than anybody else, these imaginary lovers we take into our bed. When she went into the bathtub, he was there. When she had the place alone for an afternoon, there he was. The two of them, not because she found him cute or interesting, it was something other than that, the two of them grappling with each other.