“I think you know what I’m about to say.”
His face was stern. My chest heaved.
“Suzanne wanted to be here too, by the way. So this comes from both of us.” He raised his spoon in the air. “Cheryl, would you do us the great honor of joining the board?”
Clee shut her eyes for a moment, recovering. Carl watched a redness sweep over my face; luckily the rash wasn’t subtitled or waving any explanatory signs. I bowed my head.
“Carl and Suzanne and Nakako and Jim and Phillip can be on the board alone,” I began, “they are the best at being on the board, I am joining them even though I’m not much help, because I’m not good at being on the board.”
Carl dinged each of my shoulders with a spoon, not something we did in the office and probably not done in Japan either. Then he raised his glass.
“To Cheryl.”
Clee raised her glass, and maybe it was just our shared relief but I suddenly felt almost tender toward her. I hadn’t really considered her recently, apart from trying to mentally push tubers and polyps into her vagina or mouth. How was she doing these days? The wine was quite strong; its vapors expanded behind my forehead. Carl refilled my glass.
“Phil Bettelheim is stepping down. So we had an opening to fill.”
My face didn’t change, I made sure of that.
“But there’s no hard feelings. He made a major donation when he left.”
I smiled at my napkin. Of course the point of being on the board was to be near him, but taking his place was interesting too. Almost better. For the first time I understood cigars and the urge to light one up and lean back.
Clee and I had both ordered the Mandarin beef; mine was placed in front of me at an ordinary speed but Clee’s was lowered in slow motion. I looked up at the waiter’s long, red gullet as he swallowed drily. It had been a little while since I’d seen this kind of thing happen in reality and suddenly it didn’t seem like such a fantastic idea for her to hold this man’s stiff member for one to two minutes. Especially since Phillip’s was right there, swelling under the table. I shot the waiter a look to let him know she was spoken for; he hurried off.
Three minutes later he was back to ask how everything was. He used the question to lick Clee’s jugs with his doglike eyes.
“That waiter was way out of line,” I said after he left. This accidentally came out in a low, brusque voice, Phillip’s voice. It was a subtle thing; Carl didn’t notice. But Clee cocked her head, blinking. She shot her hand into the air, signaling the waiter.
“I think there’s something wrong with my chair.”
“Oh no,” he said, stricken.
“Yeah, I think it’s snagged my dress.” She stood up and the waiter examined the chair.
“I don’t see anything, but let me get a new chair.”
“Are you sure? Is there a snag on my dress?”
The waiter paused and then cautiously leaned down and studied Clee’s derriere.
She turned and smirked at him and his sly goatee came to the fore; their energies interlocked like a handshake, an agreement to have intercourse very soon.
“I’m Keith,” he said.
“Hi, Keith.”
I put my glass down with a bang and Keith and Clee exchanged looks of pretend fear. He thought I was her mother. He didn’t have enough experience to guess I might be stiff and shaking with violence. How shocked he would be when I bent her over the dinner table, pushed up her dress, and jimmied my member into her tight pucker. I’d thrust with both hands high in the air, showing everyone in the restaurant, including the chefs and sous-chefs and busboys and waiters, showing all of them I was not her mother.
With each course they grew more comfortable with each other’s bodies. He recited the dessert selections while giving her a shoulder massage.
“Do you know him?” Carl asked, confused.
“His name’s Keith,” she said.
But when Keith followed Clee out the door and asked for her number she said, “Why don’t you give me yours?”
She was silent on the ride home.
And the moment I shut the front door, she grabbed my hair and jerked my head back. A silly gasping noise escaped me. No scenario; she was fighting the old way. It took a moment to reorganize — to switch places with her and become Phillip. He shoved her against the wall. Yes. It had been a while since we’d given it any gusto; this was just the release I needed. She deserved it for her loose behavior. She slapped my breasts around, something she had never done before and not part of any simulation I had watched. It took a lot of concentration to experience what hitting hers would feel like. Maybe because of this I had an aggressive or manly facial expression, I don’t know. I don’t know what she saw.
“What are you doing?” she said, stepping back.
“Nothing.”
She took a few heavy breaths. “You’re thinking shit stuff.”
“No I’m not,” I said quickly.
“Yes you were. You were shitting on me. Shitting on my face or something.”
While I totally wasn’t, in general terms I guessed I was. I guessed I had been shitting on her unceasingly for the last month. She was waiting for me to say something — to explain, to defend myself.
“It wasn’t”—I was loath to say the word—“shit.”
“Shit, piss, cum, whatever. It was all over my—” She gestured to her face, hair, bosom. “Right? Am I right?”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She looked utterly betrayed, as betrayed as the most betrayed person in Shakespeare.
“I thought you, of all people, would”—her voice dropped to a whisper—“know how to be nice.”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Do you know how many times this has happened to me?” She pointed to her face as if she was actually covered in something.
I thought of different numbers — seventy-three, forty-nine, fifty.
“Always,” she said. “This always happens.”
She turned away, and because she had no room of her own she went into the bathroom, locking the door behind her.
The map of the world detached from the wall and slid noisily to the floor. I hung it back up slowly. Her feelings. I had hurt them. She had feelings and I had hurt them. I stared at the bathroom door, one hand against the wall to steady myself.
RUTH-ANNE SAID TO JUST stick with it. To not worry if the song was working or not working — just sing it. I’d have a few chaste and hopeful days, but something always pulled me down again. Once I began dreaming Clee was in Phillip’s shower, mutual soaping, and when I woke up I pretended I was still asleep while I creamed. Another time I shoved his stiff member into her mouth for a second just to prove I was the boss of me and I could do it once without falling back under the spell, but it turned out I was not the boss of me, the spell was, and doing it once meant doing it fifteen more times over the next two days, swiftly followed by a bog of shame. And she knew — now she could somehow tell when I had recently creamed on her. She talked with Kate on the phone about how much more money she needed to get her own place; it wasn’t much.
Sometimes I could only mumble, “Will you stay in our Lovers’ Story?” but it worked best if I really gave it my all, belting it out with full deep breaths, either mentally or in my car at full volume, “If you stay you won’t be sorry!” If she wasn’t home, I did it with some tai chi — like movements that seemed to bring the practice into my consciousness more deeply. Some work was being done on the sewer lines out front; they sawed the pavement with a deafening screech, and each time their yellow vehicle backed up it had to beep, beep, beep, beep. It took incredible concentration to mentally sing and maintain the rhythm of the song against the opposing rhythm of the beeps. I sang over the beeps three days in a row, five to seven hours a day, before finally marching out of the house. The yellow machine was quite formidable up close; its claw dwarfed me. And the man it belonged to, its master, was proportional to the claw. He was drinking Gatorade in big gulps; his head was tilted back and sweat was running down the sides of his enormous, meaty face. This was exactly the sort of man whose member I loved for Clee to suck.