She chuckled. “It’s funny you say that, because Laurie thought the same thing.”
“Really?” I said, with contract murder in my heart. “I thought I was just being paranoid!”
“I don’t know,” said the luscious Duchess. “At first I was too much in shock to pick up on it, but then he asked me to go to the movies, which I thought was a bit out of line.”
“Did you go?” The most appropriate method of death, I figured, would be blood loss through castration.
“No! Of course I didn’t go! It was inappropriate for him to ask. Anyway, he left the next day and that was the last I heard of him.”
“How come you wouldn’t come see me in the hospital, Nae? I missed you so bad. I thought about you all the time.”
There was a long silence, but I waited it out. I needed an answer. I was still struggling as to why this woman, my wife—who obviously loved me—wouldn’t come visit me after a suicide attempt. It made no sense.
After a good ten seconds, she said, “At first I was scared because of what happened on the stairs. It’s hard to explain, but you were like a different person that day, possessed or something. I don’t know. And then Dennis Maynard told me I shouldn’t come see you until you went to rehab. I didn’t know whether he was right or wrong. It wasn’t like I had a road map to follow, and he was supposedly the expert. Anyway, all that matters is that you went to rehab, right?”
I wanted to say no, but this wasn’t the time to start an argument. I had the rest of my life to argue with her. “Yeah, well, I’m here, and that’s the most important thing.”
“How bad are the withdrawals?” she asked, changing the subject.
“I haven’t really had any withdrawals, or at least any I could feel. Believe it or not, the second I got here I lost the urge to do drugs. It’s hard to explain, but I was sitting in the waiting room and all of a sudden the compulsion just left me. Anyway, this place is kind of wacky, to say the least. What’s gonna keep me sober is not Talbot Marsh; it’s me.”
Very nervous now: “But you’re still gonna stay there for the twenty-eight days, right?”
I laughed gently. “Yeah, you can relax, sweetie; I’m staying. I need a break from all the madness. Anyway, the AA part is really good. I read the book and it’s awesome. I’ll go to meetings when I get home, just to make sure I don’t relapse.”
We spent the next half hour talking on the phone, and by the end of the conversation I had my Duchess back. I knew it. I could feel it in my bones. I told her about all my erections and she promised she would help in that department just as soon as I got home. I asked her if she would have some phone sex with me, but she declined. I would keep after her about that, though. Eventually, I figured, she would break down.
Then we exchanged I love yous and promises to write each other every day. Before I hung up I told her that I would call her three times a day.
The next few days passed uneventfully, and before I knew it I had made it a full week without doing drugs.
Each day we were given a few hours of personal time, to go to the gym and such, and I quickly insinuated myself into a small cadre of kiss-ass Martians. One of the doctors—an anesthesiologist who’d had a habit of anesthetizing himself while his patients were on the table under his care—had been at Talbot Marsh for over a year, and he’d had his car shipped down. It was a piece-of-shit gray Toyota hatchback, but it served its purpose.
It was about a ten-minute car ride to the gym, and I was sitting in the right backseat, wearing a pair of gray Adidas shorts and a tank top, when I popped an enormous woody. It was probably the vibrations from the four-cylinder engine, or maybe it was the bumps in the road, but something had sent a couple a pints of blood to my loins. It was a huge, rock-hard erection, the sort that presses against your underwear and needs to be adjusted and then readjusted, lest it drive you insane.
“Check this out,” I said, pulling down the front of my gym shorts and showing the Martians my penis.
They all turned and stared. Yes, I thought, it looked good. Despite my height, God had been very kind to me in that department. “Not too shabby!” I said to my doctor friends, as I grabbed my penis and gave it a few yanks. Then I slapped it against my stomach, which created a rather pleasant thud.
Finally, after the fourth thud,everybody started laughing. It was a rare moment of levity at Talbot Marsh, a moment between guys, a moment between Martians, where the normal societal niceties could be stripped away, where homophobia could be entirely ignored, and men could be just that: men! I had a fine workout that afternoon, and the rest of the day passed uneventfully.
The following day, just after lunch, I was sitting in an astonishingly boring group therapy session. My counselor strolled in, asking to see me.
I couldn’t have been happier—until two minutes later, when we were sitting in her small office and she cocked her head to the side at a very shrewd angle and said, using the tone of the Grand Inquisitor, “So, how are you, Jordan?”
I turned the corners of my mouth down and shrugged. “I’m okay, I guess.”
She smiled warily and asked, “Have you been having any urges lately?”
“No, not at all,” I said. “On a scale of one to ten, I would say my urge to do drugs is a zero. Maybe even less than that.”
“Oh, that’s very good, Jordan. Very, very good.”
What the fuck? I knew I was missing something here. “Um, I’m a bit confused. Did someone tell you that I was thinking about using drugs?”
“No, no,” she said, shaking her head. “It has nothing to do with that. I’m just wondering if you’ve had any other urges lately, anything other than drugs.”
I searched my short-term memory for urges but came up blank, other than the obvious urge to bolt out of this place and go home to the Duchess and fuck her brains out for a month straight. “No, I haven’t had any urges. I mean, I miss my wife and everything and I’d like to go home and be with her, but that’s about it.”
She pursed her lips and nodded her head slowly, then she said, “Have you been having urges to expose yourself in public?”
“What?” I snapped. “What are you talking about? What do you think, I’m a flasher or something?” I shook my head in contempt.
“Well,” she said gravely, “I received three written complaints today, from three separate patients, and they all say you exposed yourself to them—that you pulled down your shorts and masturbated in their presence.”
“That’s a complete load of crap,” I sputtered. “I wasn’t jerking off, for Chrissake. I just yanked on it a few times and slapped it against my stomach so we could all hear the sound. That’s all. What’s the big deal about that? Where I come from, a little bit of nudity between men isn’t anything to write home about.” I shook my head. “I was just fucking around. I’ve had an erection since I got to this place. I guess my dick is finally waking up from all the drugs. But since it seems to bother everyone so much, I’ll keep the snake in its cage for the next few weeks. No big deal.”
She nodded. “Well, you have to understand that you traumatized some of the other patients. Their recoveries are very fragile at this point, and any sudden shock could send them back to using.”
“Did you just say traumatized? Give me a fucking break! Don’t you think that’s a bit extreme? I mean…Jesus! These are grown men we’re talking about! How could they have been traumatized by the sight of my dick, unless, of course, one of them wants to suck on it. You think that might be it?”
She shrugged. “I couldn’t say.”