Choke (27 page)

Beth and Denny look at me for real, and I look at all three of us reflected in the window.

“Sure, yeah,” Denny says. “I need your help.” To Beth he says, “What’s this about us being on TV?”

And Beth shrugs and says, “It was Tuesday, I think.” She says, “No, wait, what is today?”

And I say, “So you need me?”

And Denny still sitting in the chair, he nods at the paper tube I’ve got ready. He lifts his dirty ear to me and says, “Dude, do it again. It’s cool. Clean out my other ear.”

It’s dark and starting to rain when I get to the church, and Nico’s
waiting for me in the parking lot. She’s struggling around inside her coat, and for a moment one sleeve hangs empty, then she snakes her arm back inside it. Nico reaches her fingers inside the cuff of her other sleeve and pulls out something lacy and white.

“Hold on to this for me,” she says and hands me a warm fistful of lace and elastic.

It’s her bra.

“Just for a couple hours,” she says. “I’m not wearing any
pockets.” She’s smiling with one corner of her mouth, her top teeth biting a little on her bottom lip. Her eyes sparkle with rain and streetlight.

Not taking her stuff, I tell her, I can’t. Not anymore.

Nico shrugs, and tucks the bra back inside the sleeve of her coat. All the sexaholics have gone inside already, to Room 234. The hallways are empty with shiny waxed linoleum and bulletin boards on the walls. Church news and kids’ art projects posted everywhere. Finger-painting pictures of Jesus and the apostles. Jesus and Mary Magdalen.

Heading for Room 234, I’m a step ahead of Nico when she grabs the back of my belt and pulls me over against a bulletin board.

The way my gut aches, the bloating and cramps, when she pulls on my belt, the pain makes me belch acid up the back of my throat. My back against the wall, she slips her leg between mine and lifts her arms around my head. Her breasts wedged warm and soft between us, Nico’s mouth fits over mine, and we’re both breathing her perfume. Her tongue’s more in my mouth than in hers. Her leg’s rubbing not my erection, but my impacted bowel.

The cramping could mean colorectal cancer. It could mean acute appendicitis. Hyperparathyroidism. Adrenal insufficiency.

See also: Intestinal obstruction.

See also: Colorectal foreign bodies.

Cigarette smoking. Fingernail biting. It used to be my cure for everything was sex, but with Nico swimming against me, I just can’t.

Nico says, “Okay, we’ll find a different place.”

She steps back, and I bend double with the ache in my guts and stumble down to Room 234 with Nico hissing behind me.

“No,” she’s hissing.

Inside Room 234, the group leader’s saying, “We’re going to work on the fourth step tonight.”

“Not in there,” Nico’s saying until we’re standing in the open doorway being looked at by the crowd of people sitting around a big, low table stained with paint and lumpy with dried paste. The chairs are little plastic scoops so low everybody’s knees jut up in front of them. These people just stare at us. These men and women. Urban legends. These sexaholics.

The group leader says, “Is there anybody here still working on their fourth step?”

Nico slides against me and whispers into my ear, she whispers, “If you go in there, in with all those losers,” Nico says, “I’m never getting with you again.”

See also: Leeza.

See also: Tanya.

And I come around the table to drop myself into a plastic chair.

With everybody watching, I say, “Hello. I’m Victor.”

Looking into Nico’s eyes, I say, “My name is Victor Mancini, and I’m a sexaholic.”

And I say how I’ve been stuck on my fourth step for what seems like forever.

The feeling is less like an ending than just another starting point.

And still leaning in the doorway, not just eye juice but tears, rolling black mascara tears, burst out of Nico’s eyes, and she smears them away with her hand. Nico says, she shouts, “Well, I’m not!” And out of the sleeve of her coat, her bra drops on the floor.

Nodding at her, I say, “And this is Nico.”

And Nico says, “You people can all get fucked.” She snatches up her bra and she’s gone.

It’s then everybody says, Hello Victor.

And the group leader says, “Okay.”

He says, “As I was saying, the best place to find insight is to remember where you lost your virginity. …”

Somewhere north-northeast above Los Angeles, I was getting sore,
so I asked Tracy if she’d let up for a minute. This is another lifetime ago.

With a big hank of white spit looped between my knob and her lower lip, her whole face hot and flushed from choking, still holding my sore dog in her fist, Tracy settles back on her heels and says how in the Kama Sutra, it tells you to make your lips really red by wiping them with sweat from the testicles of a white stallion.

“For real,” she says.

Now there’s a weird taste in my mouth, and I look hard at her lips, her lips and my dog the same big purple color. I say, “You don’t do that stuff, do you?”

The doorknob rattles and we both look, fast, to make sure it’s locked.

This is that first time, what every addiction is about getting back to. That first time that no subsequent time is ever as good as.

Nothing’s worse than when a little kid opens the door. What’s next worst is when some man throws open the door and doesn’t understand. Even if you’re still alone, when a kid opens the door you have to, fast, cross your legs. Pretend it’s all an accident. An adult guy might slam the door, might yell, “Lock it next time, ya moron,” but he’s still the only one blushing.

After that, what’s worse, Tracy says, is being a woman the Kama Sutra would call an elephant woman. Especially if you’re with what they call a hare man.

This animal thing refers to genital size.

Then she says, “I didn’t mean that to sound the way it did.”

The wrong person opens the door, and you’re in their nightmares all week.

Your best defense is unless somebody is on the make, no matter who opens the door and sees you sitting there, they always assume it’s their mistake. Their fault.

I always did. I used to walk in on women or men riding the toilet on airplanes on trains or Greyhound buses or in those little single-seat either/or unisex restaurant bathrooms, I’d open the door to see some stranger sitting there, some blonde all blue eyes and teeth with a ring through her navel and wearing high heels, with her g-string stretched down between her knees and the rest of her clothes and bra folded on the little counter next to the
sink. Every time this happened I’d always wonder,
why the hell don’t people bother to lock the door?

As if this ever happens by accident.

Nothing on the circuit happens by accident.

It could be, on the train somewhere between home and work, you’ll open a bathroom door to find some brunette, with her hair pinned up and only her long earrings trembling down alongside her smooth white neck, and she’s just sitting inside with the bottom half of her clothes on the floor. Her blouse open with nothing inside but her hands cupped under each breast, her fingernails, her lips, her nipples all the same cross between brown and red. Her legs as smooth white as her neck, smooth as a car you could drive two hundred miles an hour, and her hair the same brunette all over, and she licks her lips.

You slam the door and say, “Sorry.”

And from somewhere deep inside, she says, “Don’t be.”

And she still doesn’t lock the door. The little sign still saying:

Vacant.

How this happens is I used to fly round-trip from the East Coast to Los Angeles when I was still in the medical program at USC. During breaks in the school year. Six times I opened the door on the same yoga redhead naked from the waist down with her skinny legs pulled up cross-legged on the toilet seat, filing her nails with the scratch pad of a matchbook, as if she’s trying to catch herself on fire, wearing just a silky blouse knotted over her breasts, and six times she looks down at her freckled pink self with the road crew orange rug around it, then her eyes the same gray as tin metal look up at me, slow, and every time says, “If you don’t mind,” she says, “I’m in here.”

Six times, I slam the door in her face.

All I can think to say is, “Don’t you speak English?”

Six times.

This all takes less than a minute. There isn’t time to think.

But it happens more and more often.

Some other trip, maybe cruising altitude between Los Angeles and Seattle, you’ll open the door on some surfer blond with both tanned hands wrapped around the big purple dog between his legs, and Mr. Kewl shakes the stringy hair off his eyes, points his dog, squeezed shiny wet inside a glossy rubber, he points this straight at you and says, “Hey, man, make the time. …”

It gets to be, every time you go to the bathroom, the little sign says vacant, but it’s always somebody.

Another woman, two knuckles deep and disappearing into herself.

A different man, his four inches dancing between his thumb and forefinger, primed and ready to cough up the little white soldiers.

You begin to wonder, just what do they mean by
vacant.

Even in an empty bathroom, you find the smell of spermicidal foam. The paper towels are always used up. You’ll see the print of a bare foot on the bathroom mirror, six feet up, near the top of the mirror, the little arched print of a woman’s foot, the five round spots left by her toes, and you’d wonder,
what happened here?

Like with coded public announcements, “The Blue Danube Waltz” or Nurse Flamingo, you wonder,
what’s going on?

You wonder,
what aren’t they telling us?

You’ll see a smear of lipstick on the wall, down almost to the floor, and you can only imagine what was going on. There’s the dried white stripes from the last pull-out moment when somebody’s dog tossed his white soldiers against the plastic wall.

Some flights the walls will still be wet to the touch, the mirror fogged. The carpet sticky. The sink drain is sucked full, choked with every color of little curled hair. On the bathroom counter,
next to the sink, is the perfect round outline in jelly, contraceptive jelly and mucus, of where somebody set her diaphragm. Some flights, there’s two or three different sizes of perfect round outlines.

These are the domestic leg of longer flights, transpacific or flights over the pole. Ten-to-sixteen-hour flights. Direct flights, Los Angeles to Paris. Or from anywhere to Sydney.

My Los Angeles trip number seven, the yoga redhead whips her skirt off the floor and hurries out after me. Still zipping herself up in the back, she trails me all the way to my seat and sits next to me, saying, “If your goal is to hurt my feelings, you could give lessons.”

She’s got this shining soap opera kind of hairdo, only now her blouse is buttoned with a big floppy bow in the front and everything, pinned down with a big jewelry brooch.

You say it again, “Sorry.”

This is westbound, somewhere north-northwest above Atlanta.

“Listen,” she says, “I work just too hard to take this kind of shit. You hear me?”

You say, “I’m sorry.”

“I’m on the road three weeks out of every month,” she says. “I’m paying for a house I never see … soccer camp for my kids … just the cost of my dad’s nursing home is incredible. Don’t I deserve something? I’m not bad-looking. The least you can do is not shut the door in my face.”

This is really what she says.

She ducks down to put her face between me and the magazine I’m pretending to read. “Don’t make like you don’t know,” she says. “It’s not like sex is anything secret.”

And I say, “Sex?”

And she puts a hand over her mouth and sits back.

She says, “Oh, gosh, I’m so sorry. I just thought … ” and reaches up to push the little red stewardess button.

A flight attendant comes past, and the redhead orders two double bourbons.

I say, “I hope you’re planning to drink them both.”

And she says, “Actually, they’re both for you.”