“Yes, like at your bat mitzvah.”
“Um,” she says, following Erin into the living room. “The theme was ‘Places I’ve Been’—which was like, Hawaii and Paris and the Grand Canyon on family vacations and Philadelphia to visit my grandparents and whatever. It was so fucking queer.” She clamps her hand over her mouth, shakes her head, and looks over at Gertie, who’s sitting in her beanbag chair a foot from the TV, enthralled by the Teletubbies. “Baaaaaaaaaa!” says Tinky-Winky.
“But what was your Torah portion? What was your speech about?”
“Um…the Bible? I don’t know.”
Alex is jangling his keys by the front door. “Can we please not be late?”
Disregard for the time of others was yet another therapy topic. Erin can practically see the complaint taking shape, being given its very own brand-new file in Alex’s deliberate little brain. She’s always late; she doesn’t even try to make an effort. It was my niece’s bat mitzvah, and she couldn’t get it together to be on time.
Go fuck yourself, Erin will say, or: My mother just died. Dr. Goodkiss will nod.
Erin kisses an oblivious Gertie, faces the mirror in the entry hall. Beige lip gloss, push-up bra, funeral dress all jazzy. Alex looks at her, says nothing. She waited months to broach the sexlessness with Goodkiss. She finds it deeply, deeply mortifying, has not told even her closest friends. She gazes longingly at Sarah, who’s lying next to Gertie on the floor, doing her best Teletubbies impression for a heh-heh-hehehehe-heh-ing Gertie. Sarah would understand. Erin wants nothing (not even three enormous black dudes at once) so much as she wants to bow out of the bat mitzvah party and order in pizza with Sarah.
But, instead, since they’re magically on time, since she’s wearing a push-up bra, because today’s combination of teamgangbang and parsha.com has filled her with all sorts of strange and familiar wanting, because in her better moments she believes wholeheartedly in the discipline of Fake it ’till you make it, and despite the presence of the empty, terrible car seat, Erin undoes her seat belt and leans over the parking break as Alex turns onto Wilshire.
“Hey,” she whispers in his ear. He flinches as though a fly had grazed him, or a bee with a stinger. He keeps his eyes on the road. He’s a good driver. Tense but pretty good: exactly what he’s like as a lover. Erin kisses his neck. He likes this unequivocally, has always liked this. “Hey,” she whispers again, feeling the jersey dress brush against her exfoliated knees, catching sight as she leans further down of her own shimmering, pushed-up cleavage. She slides a hand up his thigh.
“Erin,” he says. “What are you doing?”
She continues the hand up his thigh, does a lap around his balls. For the life of her, she can’t figure out the sexlessness. She’s tried asking him. Is he cheating on her? Does he masturbate a lot, like she does? Did he just get old and stop caring? Was there a physical problem? She just wanted to know, she assured him. Whatever it was, it would be okay; she just wanted to know. He’d tried to get Goodkiss to back up the excuse that it was his Prozac, but she’d spoken, for once, these words from on high:
“Antidepressants can make it difficult to reach orgasm, but generally they help with the libido, they don’t hinder it.”
“She’s only an LCSW,” Alex had muttered on the way home from that appointment.
So recently Erin has tried to simply bypass Alex’s brain. She’d wake up before him and put him in her mouth, just like all the women’s magazines instructed. He’d jolt awake—Goddammit, Erin, get off me! — jump up and out of bed and into the bathroom. If she could just get him hard, she thinks, he’ll remember what sex is like, how good it can be, how connective and fun. And he’ll snap out of it, grab her, hold her tight, whisper dirty nothings in her ear. Until this occurs, Erin knows—unless it occurs — there is no hope for them. Because something was inexorably altered, something was lost forever, some capacity for friendship and parity between two people, when one had been known, with breathy, earnest seriousness at the height of passion, to beg the other to “shoot [his] cum inside [her],” and the other wouldn’t so much as make eye contact.
She manages to get his fly unzipped partway, but he’s squirming away from her, trying to keep his foot on the gas as he wriggles to the far edge of the driver’s seat.
“Stop,” he whines. She manages to somehow undo his pants entirely, to twist her hand down past the elastic of his boxer briefs, but then she gets snarled in his copious pubic hair. “Ow!”
He pulls over and puts the car in park just as she’s grabbed hold of his penis. His cock, she’d called it giddily back when they used to fuck. She holds on to it stubbornly, ridiculously, even as he’s trying to pull away, twist his body out of her reach, which, needless to say, is awkward, given the seat belts, the running engine, her grip. Not to mention the empty, terrible car seat.
“What are you doing? Jesus!”
Erin strains against him, aware only of her heaving bosom in the push-up bra, her own sweet-smelling skin, the way it would feel to be wanted like teamgangbang would want her. Then she lets go.
“What is wrong with you?”
“Jesus, Erin.” He tucks himself back into his pants, pulls serenely back onto the road, hands placed precisely on the wheel. “Don’t yell.” Blood courses through her temples, boom, boom, boom like the slap, slap, slapping of a good fuck.
She tried to rape me, he’ll tell Goodkiss.
They follow a thumping base line toward the ballroom at the far end of the hotel lobby, and are greeted by a bored coterie of kids standing around the place-card table.
“Par-tay,” Alex tells them festively. They drift off and away. The thumping base arranges itself all at once as the B-52s. “Love sha-a-ack, that’s where it’s at! Love sha-a-ack, that’s where it’s at!”
Mr. and Mrs. Alex Abrahms, first even among the As, are sitting at Eleanor of Aquitaine. This is preferable to Hillary Clinton, certainly, but a marked step beneath either Golda Meir or Madonna, Erin feels. The ‘Great Women in History’ theme is compromised slightly by a big black-and-white, glittery foam-board approximation of a scene marker by the ballroom entrance. In the space marked “production” is “Dorit’s BM!” In the space marked “scene”: 13. And in the space for “take” is, of course, 18, for chai, the collective lucky number of the Jews. Other than that brief, unavoidable foray into Hollywood (with the unintentional scatological overtone), it’s “Great Women” in full effect. There’s Queen Esther, Eleanor Roosevelt, Princess Di, Marilyn Monroe (perched hugely in cardboard relief above her demarcated table, trying half-assedly to keep that billowing white dress down), Marie Curie, even little Anne Frank. Who, Erin reasons, had indeed experienced the onset of menses, and so did indeed count. Joan of Arc, though, Erin takes issue with. Ditto Scarlett O’Hara, who’s fricking fictional. Plus, Erin’s last name is not Abrahms, goddammit. Dana willfully ignores this, as a rule.
The ballroom is decked out in hysterics of glittering streamers, confetti, pink and white balloons, and looming Great Women. Face to face with a berobed Katharine Hepburn from The Lion in Winter, Erin unofficially gives up on the recollection of her Torah portion, sinks into a chair, and starts picking at the jelly beans scattered atop the table.
Also at Eleanor of Aquitaine are four other couples: all cousins but for Libby Pressman, Dana’s best friend (a single mother of one) and her date. “It took me almost three years to get rid of my baby weight,” she says to Erin by way of greeting.