Significant Others

B
RIAN’S INTERNAL CLOCK ALMOST ALWAYS WOKE HIM
at four fifty-six, giving him four whole minutes to luxuriate in the naked human body next to him. Then the Braun alarm clock on the nightstand would activate his wife with its genteel Nazi toot-ling, and her morning marathon would begin.

Today, with three minutes to go, he slipped his arm around her waist and eased her closer until her back had once again settled against his chest. It was risky, this part, because sometimes she would jerk awake with a start, as if frightened by a stranger.

He pressed his face against her neck, then traced with his forefinger the shallow swirl of her navel. It was smooth and hard now, miraculously aerobicized into a tiny pink seashell. She stirred slightly, so he flattened his hand to keep from tickling her and made sure their breathing was still in sync.

At the two-minute mark, he eased his knee between her legs and tightened his grip around her waist. She groaned faintly, then cleared her throat, so he let his hand fall slack against her belly. She countered by squeezing his knee with her thighs, telling him not to worry, he wasn’t smothering her, she needed this time as much as he did.

The French had it wrong about
le petit mort.
If you asked him, “the little death” was not so much the slump after sex as these few piquant moments of serious cuddling before the demands of Mary Ann’s career sent her vaulting over his piss-hardened manhood in the direction of the toilet and the coffee machine.

Another Nazi, that coffee machine. Even now, as he fondled her navel again, it was grinding its beans in the kitchen. The sound of it caused her to shift slightly and clear her throat again. “Like that?” she asked.

“What?”

“My belly button.”

“Mmm.”

“Took seven hundred hours,” she said. “I figured it out.”

He chuckled at the tyranny of numbers that governed her existence.
Everything has a price,
she was telling him. It was her favorite theme these days.

She rolled over in his arms and poked her finger into his navel. “Hey,” he muttered, uncertain whether the gesture was one of affection or reprimand. She wiggled her finger. “Watch out,” he said. “You fall in there and we’ll have to organize a search party.”

He waited for a faint cry of protest, but none came. A half-assed “Come off it” would have sufficed, but all she did was remove her finger and prop herself up on one elbow. “Well,” she said, “I guess I’m up.”

He knew better than to argue with this pronouncement. He would only receive the standard recitation of her crypto-fascist morning regimen. Aerobics at six. A bowl of bran at seven. A meeting with the producer at seven-thirty. Makeup session at eight. A meeting with staff and crew from nine to nine-fifteen, followed by promo shots for the next day’s show and a session in the green room with this morning’s guest celebrities. Life was a ballbuster for San Francisco’s most famous talk-show hostess.

“So what’s the topic today?” he asked.

“Fat models,” she replied.

“Huh?”

“You know. Those porkos who model for the big-and-beautiful fashions.”

“Oh.”

“It’s a huge racket.” She laughed. “Pardon the pun.” She bounded over him and swung her legs off the bed, yawning noisily. “The book’s on the dresser if you wanna take a look at it.”

As she headed for the bathroom, he brooded momentarily about the extra ten pounds around his waist, then got up and went to the dresser, returning to bed with the book. He switched on the bedside light and examined the cover. It was called
Larger than Life: Confessions of the World’s Most Beautiful Fat Woman.
By Wren Douglas.

A glamorous star-filtered cover photograph seemed to confirm the claim. The woman was big, all right, but her face was the face of a goddess: full red lips, a perfect nose, enormous green eyes fairly brimming with kindness and invitation. Her raven hair framed it all perfectly, cascading across her shoulders toward a cleavage rivaling the San Andreas Fault.

“What is this?” Mary Ann was brandishing the roll of paper towels he had left in the bathroom the night before.

“We ran out of toilet paper,” he said, shrugging. He could do without her rhetorical questions at five o’clock in the morning.

The alarm sounded.

“Fuck off,” he barked, not to her but to the clock, which deactivated obediently at the sound of his voice.

Mary Ann groaned and lowered the roll of towels, banging it angrily against her leg. “I specifically told Nguyet to make sure we had enough to—”

“I’ll tell her,” he put in. “She understands me better.” She also liked him better, but he wasn’t about to say so. He’d shared a special rapport with the Vietnamese maid ever since he’d discovered she couldn’t tell the difference between Raid and Pledge. His pact of silence about the incident seemed the very least he could do for a woman whose uncle had been killed in an American bombing run over the Mekong Delta.

“It’s just a language problem,” he added. “She’s getting much better. Really.”

Mary Ann sighed and returned to the bathroom.

He raised his voice so she could hear him. “Paper towels won’t kill you. Think of it as a learning experience.”

“Right,” she muttered back.

“Maybe there’s a show in it,” he offered, trying to sound playful. “A dreaded new medical condition. Like … the heartbreak of Bounty butt.”

She didn’t laugh.

He thought for a moment, then said: “Viva vulva?”

“Go to sleep,” she told him. “You’re gonna wake up Shawna.”

He knew what she was doing in there. She was reading
USA Today,
briefing herself for the show, learning a little about a lot to keep from seeming stupid on the air.

He picked up the book again and studied the face of the world’s most beautiful fat woman. Then he switched off the light, burrowed under the comforter, and slipped almost instantly into sleep.

He dreamed about a woman who had tits the size of watermelons.

The next time he woke, his daughter was conducting a Rambo-style maneuver on his exposed left leg, propelling a green plastic tank up his thigh in an apparent effort to gain supremacy of the hillocks that lay beyond. Shawna invariably chose some sort of guerrilla theater over the simple expediency of saying, “Get up, Daddy.”

He remained on his stomach and made a cartoon-monster noise into the pillow.

Shawna shrieked delightedly, dropping the tank between his legs. He rolled over and snatched her up with one arm, tumbling her onto the bed. “Is this my little Puppy? Yum-yum. Puppy Monster eats little puppies for breakfast!”

He wasn’t sure how this Puppy business had begun, but he and Mary Ann both made use of the nickname. In light of Mary Ann’s distaste for the child’s given name, maybe it was simply their way of avoiding the issue without being disrespectful to the dead.

Connie, after all, had named the little girl, and Connie had died giving birth to her. They couldn’t just choose a new name the way people do when their pets change hands.

Was that what “Puppy” really meant? Something that wasn’t theirs? Something they had picked out at the pound? Would the nickname hurt Shawna’s feelings when she was old enough to consider its implications?

He seized his daughter’s waist and held her aloft, airplane fashion.

The little girl spread her arms and squealed.

He rocked forward, causing her to soar for a moment, but his butt made a graceless landing on the toy tank.

“Goddamnit, Puppy. Mommy didn’t buy that, did she?”

She managed to keep a poker face, still impersonating an airplane.

He lowered her to the bed and reached under him for the offending war machinery. “It’s Jeremy’s isn’t it? You’ve been trading again.”

The kid wasn’t talking.

“I didn’t buy it, and Mommy didn’t buy it, and I know you don’t take things that don’t belong to you.”

She shook her head, then said: “I’m hungry.”