Perfect Fifths (25 page)

Oh, shit, he thinks. I'm lasso-dicking again.

At once he remembers the ticket for tomorrow's flight to St. Thomas and wonders how Jessica might react to its existence: bittersweet reunion or restraining order?

As of right now, he imagines this $895 reconciliatory gesture sinking him into credit card debt wouldn't go over too well. To hide the anxiety now coursing through him, Marcus goes out of his way to appear more relaxed than ever. This masquerade is much easier to pull off with his back to her, his afflicted face hidden from view. He rolls his head around on his neck, releases his taut shoulders, then, without a care in the world, shrugs off the dress shirt and hastily tosses it aside. It clings to the edge of the duvet for a moment before slipping to the carpet on the far side of his bed, out of Jessica's view and therefore in no competition with the sweater.

Ask me, he silently urges Jessica. Ask me so I can tell you.

He clutches his T-shirt and jerks it up and over his head. It launches into the air and lands in an ignoble heap in the farthest corner of the room. Now that he is nude to the waist, his own unwashed smell is hitting him, and he knows that it will be only a few more seconds before it reaches Jessica.

He had underpacked for New Orleans, finding himself with three more days than pairs of boxer briefs.

So he's not wearing any underwear. Only a pair of corduroys separates him from stark nakedness. Jessica has seen him unclothed so many times before, what should it matter now, especially when she has made it abundantly

clear that there is no sex to be had? If she's so intent on chastity, seeing him naked shouldn't be a trigger for arousal. But does he dare? Or should he excuse himself to the privacy of the bathroom?

Maybe I should just ask Jessica if she wants to hear the rest of the story, he thinks. Or maybe I should tell it without asking her first After all, if she doesn't have to ask permission to say anything, then the same should hold for me.

A contented moan comes from behind him, followed by a ruffle of pillows. With thumbs poised at the top of his fly, he turns toward the sound, toward her, and discovers that all questions and answers, all truth and dare, will have to wait for the time being.

Because Jessica Darling is sound asleep.

S X

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essica is walking along a white sand beach. Under her arm, she holds a small white-gift-wrapped box all tied up with an enormous, perhaps overcompensatory, white

bow. She is wearing a familiar red T-shirt and nothing else. She isn't in much of a hurry. She's taking a leisurely stroll near the water's edge, but not so close that the tide washes away the scattershot trail of footprints that Jessica is definitely, if distractedly, following.

She's so taken with the brilliance of the blue sky and the even bluer sea that she hardly notices when she abruptly happens upon the bridal party that led her here. At the center of this group is the beautiful, beaming Bridget, who is elevated several feet above the crowd by means obscured under the whitest, widest, and most wildly overwrought wedding dress in the history of wedding dresses.

Despite the farcical attire, Bridget is unabashedly happy. Woo-hoo! Nous nous marierons demain! Percy has scaled a stepladder to reply to his future wife, also in French. J'epouse un phenomene. Un beau phenomene. Back on the ground, surrounding the gown on all sides, are the bridesmaids and the matron, all as underdressed as Jessica. Wearing red Crocs and a Pineville High Class of 2002 T-shirt is Sara D'Abruzzi-Glazer, who has just finished bib-tucking layers of lace under the drooling chins of the infant twins screeching on her hips. Something new! Sara cries out before turning her attention to the nose-picking three-year-old at her ankle. Destiny! Use the hem as a hankie; blow the boogie-yuckies out of your nose! Jessica winces as the toddler more than happily complies with a liquidy honk. Jessica continues to orbit the gown and meets up with Hope, who is wearing a thin paint-splattered tank top. Hope is using a large swath of satin as a canvas for her latest masterpiece.

Something blue! Hope cries out enthusiastically as she hurls another cerulean brush-blob of paint onto Bridget's gown. You don't think it's too derivative, do you? Hope asks no one in particular. Too Mondrian meets Pollock? As Jessica progresses around the dress, she catches a fleeting glimpse of Manda backward-burrowing beneath the voluminous train. Curious to see what Manda is doing under there, Jessica uses two hands to lift up the weighty bugle-beaded fabric. She ducks her head under

multiple crinolines and comes face-to-face not with Manda but with Len Levy, wearing the Mighties official fan club T-shirt. The acoustics are. Urn. Excellent, he says. He strums his guitar and begins to sing. Something old ... Something cold ... Someone I used to hold ...

Jessica involuntarily sways to the music. She refused his band of gold

... Jessica knows the chorus and can't help but sing along. But my song will never mean as much ...As the one ...He once sang ... For you, yes, you ... She wants to watch the whole performance and congratulate Len on his success, but she's being lulled away from his voice by an insistent tap on her shoulder. When Jessica turns around, she sees Manda kissing none other than Marcus Flutie in the sloppy, unselfconscious manner of the newly in lust. When the lascivious twosome finally break apart, Manda smiles at Jessica and says smugly, Something borrowed. Manda is wearing a red YOU.

YES. YOU. T-shirt that is identical to the one Marcus is wearing, which makes it also identical to the one Jessica is wearing, or rather, was wearing, because when Jessica looks down at her body, she discovers that she isn't wearing it or anything else.

I'm naked in paradise, Jessica says.

Without shame? Marcus asks.

And before she can answer, Marcus smiles and reaches for her hands.

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seven

arcus cannot believe she's asleep. There's no way she's actually asleep. Maybe she is under physical duress this afternoon, maybe she is exhausted by the double whammy of influenza and menstruation, though he came to the conclusion very early on in their conversation that she isn't suffering from either. Jessica has always been a conspicuous liar, and today's feigned coughing and cramping were a typically unbelievable performance. Marcus is pretty much convinced that she is perfectly healthy and is just using those medical excuses as an added buffer against sexual activity. The need to resort to such dramatic measures, and her devious glee in

pointing out all the places where they are not going to have sex, only betrays the obvious: Her determination not to have sex with him is only barely, by the most infinitesimal measure, winning out over her desire to have sex with him.

This encouraging revelation doesn't change the fact that Jessica is asleep. Asleep. This must be another test. Another game to play. He's tempted to belly-flop on her bed and call bullshit on this catnap, but he opts for a more tactful approach.

"Jessica," Marcus says at a volume that is half conversational, half conspiratorial. "Are you really asleep?" He expects her to crack a smile, wink open an eye, and sound off with a "Gotcha, sucka!," but she doesn't stir. "I want to tell you the rest of the story," he continues, thinking this gambit might persuade her to end the charade.

"I want to tell you about..."

He pauses here, stoops down, gets within an inch of Jessica's face. He hovers above her a moment, studying her features for any subtle shifts that would reveal she's really awake and faking it. But her mouth is unattractively slack, her nostrils flare in and out with each breath, and her eyeballs roll beneath the surface of her thin lids. All signs that she is indeed authentically asleep. If she is faking it, this is a triumphant moment in her acting career.

Marcus stands up and guffaws out loud, not even bothering to muffle his amusement. When he considered bedding Jessica down, this was not what he'd had in mind.

Still shaking his head in wonderment (How can she sleep at a time like this?), Marcus decides to go ahead with his shower.

But not without exploring a measure of last resort.

He plants himself directly in what would be Jessica's field of vision, that is, if her eyes were open. He pops open the button on his corduroys. Pauses. Then, as if in time with an imaginary burlesque drumbeat, swivels his snake hips as he begins to unzip ... lower...

lower... as low as it goes. When his pants slip to the floor, Marcus cartoonishly, coquettishly cups his privates with his hands and even mouths Oops! just to keep in ridiculous character. With one hand still providing obscenely inadequate coverage for his crotch, he uses the other to take hold of a trouser leg, which he then, with a great sense of pageantry, swings around in circles above his head (yes, like a lasso) before finally letting it fly. With a final showstopping flourish, Marcus ta-das! with his head flung back, feet wide-stanced, arms outstretched.

Whether he knows it or not, it's nearly identical to Barry Manilow's triumphant pose on the infamous decoupage toilet seat cover at the heart of Jessica's half-told story, only the Showman of Our Time was wearing an electric-blue bedazzled spandex jumpsuit, and Marcus is
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starkers.

Jessica snorts and rolls over but is otherwise unmoved by this comedic lasso-dickery. Now thoroughly convinced that she's genuinely asleep (How can she sleep at a time like this?), Marcus retreats to the privacy of the bathroom to take his long-overdue shower.

/ need to come clean, he thinks as he stands in front of the bathroom mirror, and then he laughs again, at himself and the situation. Knowing how much pleasure

Jessica gets out of parsing double meanings, he makes a note to repeat this thought out loud later on for her enjoyment. / need to come clean.

He considers his naked reflection and isn't too impressed. He has always been too skinny. He can't tell the difference between his abdominal muscles and protruding internal organs. The hair on his chest is darker and coarser than the reddish-brown hair on his head, and patchy. It collects in thick bunches around his nipples, then again in the trail that would lead down, down, down into his pants if he were wearing them. But he's not, so Marcus contemplates his cock. This modicum of attention, when combined with the awareness of Jessica on the bed on the other side of the door, inspires his cock to jump up and be noticed: Huzzah! Yes, it's bigger than most, but not as big as the numbers ("ten inches of New Jersey Whitesnake" was the refrain that echoed loudly in the Pineville High School locker room) he's heard over the years. Like the amount of sex he's had or drugs he has done, the size of Marcus Flu-tie's cock looms larger in salacious imaginations than it does in reality. This exaggeration is a necessary component of perpetuating that poet/ addict manwhore myth that fooled them all, from the first (a friend of his brother's, a degenerate JV

cheerleader who thought it would be hilarious to seduce an oversexed thirteen-year-old) to the last (Greta), into believing that she would be the one who changed his life. All of them—however many there were—believed it. All but one. And she's sufficiently unimpressed with Marcus Flutie to fall into a deep sleep.

Marcus, now fully engorged, needs not only a shower but a cold one. He tilts the nozzle as high as it will go to accommodate his height, then turns on the water.

"Yi! Yi! Yi!" he yips, hopping from foot to foot under the icy stream in a way that resembles a Native American rain dancer, or so he has been told. He always likes the shock of that uncontrolled rush of cold water, likes making his bones crackle and his skin pucker before adjusting the flow and relaxing into warmer, more tolerable temperatures. He'll keep it cold until his cock calms down. He thinks about unpleasant subjects. Like how he'll tell Jessica about Greta.

"Natty calls her Regreta ..."

The bad joke does little to make him go limp. He thinks more about Greta.

Greta was the one who likened him to a Cherokee under the cold water. She liked comparing him to other people, as if she could understand Marcus better by

studying similar subject matter. In that vein, she assumed wrongly that this cold-shower habit was born out of a desire to conserve hot water, as many eco-minded

coeds his age try to do. When Marcus explained that, no, his actions had nothing to do with saving the planet, Greta guessed again.

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"Did your family have many children sharing a single bathroom?"

"Two kids, two adults, two bathrooms."

"Self-abnegation?"

"No."

"I'll figure it out."

Jessica, Marcus realizes as he bounces under the freezing rain, never noticed this dance, or if she did, never mentioned it. For all their years as a couple, they spent remarkably few days in consistent cohabitation, and Marcus has often wondered whether things would have turned out differently if they had regularly shared a bathroom before he proposed. Would they be married now if she'd had the opportunity to grow accustomed to peeing while he was hopping around in the shower? Or if she'd come around to accepting the two toothbrushes in the holder as indistinguishable and interchangeable?

His cock points straight up at him accusatorially. It's not my fault! it sneers. You're the one who offered to share a room with her!

Greta was a sociocultural anthropologist specializing in authority and identification, kinship, sexuality, gender, historical consciousness, comparison and translation, and finally (at least according to her official CV), narrative theory and the ethnographic method. She was curvaceous and blond and in the habit of wearing low-cut embellished silk tunics in acidic brights. At forty-eight, she had earned the marionette mouth wrinkles and brow furrows that made her look her age, but not unattractively so. In fact, she had earned the red-hot-tamale symbol alongside her high rankings onRateMyProfessors.com , and was widely considered one of the more doable instructors on campus—a distinction that had been entirely theoretical until Marcus came along. Or so she claimed.