The Indifference League (6 page)

TIME BOMB

“You mean to tell me you've been married to
her
for fifteen years? And they call
me
Superman!”

— Superman, to Ricky Ricardo, from the
TV series
I Love Lucy
, 1951–1957

T
ime Bomb reaches out and slaps the Snooze button on the digital alarm clock beside their bed for the fourth time.

“Ten more minutes,” she moans, turning over on her side.

Beside her, The Statistician stirs. He sidles over to her, puts one arm around her waist. Soon she feels his erection poking into the softness of her behind, like she's hiding in a utility closet and has backed into a broom handle. How romantic.

“Aw, honey,” she sighs, “not this morning, okay?”

The same response as yesterday
,
thinks The Statistician.
And the day before that. And the fifty-six days before that
.
One more day, and we will have set a new personal record for marital abstinence.

He slips out from under the duvet and plods into the en suite, his erection bobbing before him like the prow of a sailing vessel. When he closes the door behind him, she knows he's going in there to jerk off into the bathroom sink. He leaves the door wide open when he's brushing his teeth, showering, or using the toilet, but masturbation is still private business for The Statistician.

This is okay with Time Bomb; it means she has a few minutes to herself. She rolls over onto her back, spreads her legs wide, and begins turning slow circles with her middle finger. As her finger spins faster, pushes down harder, she is not thinking about The Statistician. Just like when he goes down on her, she is thinking about someone else.

Before the clamshell-shaped masturbation altar in the en suite, The Statistician is also thinking about someone else. Until a few days ago, he had never fantasized that his lotion-lubricated fist was another woman; he had been faithful to his wife even in his fantasy life. But now he is imagining the slick, rubbery lips of The Protégée sliding up and down on him.

Actually, he isn't imagining so much as
remembering
.

The Statistician can't prevent himself from moaning with both satisfaction and regret as he blasts into the sink. He masks the noise with a few fake coughs, but it doesn't matter anyway, because Time Bomb doesn't hear anything. On the other side of the wall, she is hovering on the edge of an explosion. Her face is flushed, her back is arched, her legs twitch and kick, and she pants like she's running a hundred-yard-dash. At the moment, she wouldn't hear the sound of a bomb falling on their Forest Hill mansion.

The Statistician ambles back into the bedroom, and Time Bomb rolls onto her side, curls up into a fetal-position ball.
So close
, she laments.
So close.

“Come on, lazybones,” The Statistician says, reaching over to pat her bottom. “You'll have to get up if we're going to make it to Mr. Nice Guy's cottage by this afternoon.”

“It's Saturday,” Time Bomb moans. “I want to sleep in.”

“You sleep in every day,” The Statistician says.

“Why don't you just go alone?” Time Bomb says, burying her face in her pillow, imagining a whole long weekend to herself.

“Aw, come on, honey,” he sighs, “I don't want to go without you.”

“Why not? All of them want to see you. None of them want to see me.”

The Statistician suspects that this statement is true.

“You know that's not true,” he says.

“None of them ever talk to me. They couldn't care less about me.”

“SuperBarbie talks to you all the time.”

“She's the only one. And the last time, Hippie Avenger tried to kill me!”

“Hey, she felt terrible about that. She grew those flowers herself. She couldn't have known you would react like that.”

“She could have asked.”

Time Bomb suffers from “respiratory and dermatological sensitivities.” Her skin sunburns easily, and she suffers rashes from natural cloth fibres and most grasses. She also has sneezing fits when exposed to cat dander, certain kinds of dust, and most plant pollens. On their last trip to The Hall of Indifference, Hippie Avenger's all-natural flower-oil moisturizing lotion caused Time Bomb a fit of sneezing that forced her to retreat to their bedroom upstairs for the remainder of the night.

Also, Mr. Nice Guy's cologne gave Time Bomb a migraine. She also complains of migraines when it is too hot, too cold, too humid, too dry, too bright, or too noisy.

“You've got a long list of sensitivities, honey,” The Statistician says. “It's easy to forget one of them.”

“Well, everyone knows that I react to ground pepper, and yet the so-called Mr. Nice Guy had to grind pepper all over everything he cooked. I didn't have anything for dinner last time but a banana and a cucumber.”

The Statistician specifically remembers the banana and the cucumber.

“We'll bring a cooler full of food just for you, okay? Some of your tofu burgers, some rye buns, and some raw vegetables. You'll be fine.”

Undercooked beef is another of Time Bomb's “migraine triggers,” and sometimes commercial wheat buns are brushed with white flour, which makes her sneeze. Time Bomb simply doesn't like the texture of cooked vegetables, and she refuses to eat them.

“I suppose the new blankets Mr. Nice Guy bought are
wool
,” she sniffs.

Oh yes. Wool makes Time Bomb's skin break out in hives.

“And he probably bought down-filled pillows.” Time Bomb is allergic to goose feathers, too. She sneezes preemptively, in her characteristic triplets.
“Ah-shee! Ah-shee! Ah-SHAH!”

It takes great effort by The Statistician to prevent himself from rolling his eyes or sighing. He estimates that the ratio of the number of his wife's spurious, psychosomatic ailments, compared to the number of actual physical/chemical reactions she suffers, is about 4 to 1.

“We'll bring our own blankets,” he offers. “And the hypoallergenic pillows, okay?”

“It would be a lot less trouble if you just went by yourself,” she says.

Indeed
, the Statistician thinks to himself,
it
would
be a lot less trouble
. He is very careful to ensure that his facial expression does not betray this thought, though.

Yesterday, The Statistician merely raised an eyebrow when Time Bomb mispronounced every other syllable in the phrase “unequivocally effete” over champagne and ch
è
vre-on-toast with her favourite shopping/manicure/lunch buddy, and Time Bomb countered with a “joke” that they would be still be eating Kraft Dinner and sipping Budweiser from plastic cups if they had to rely solely on The Statistician's income.

“Thank God for my trust fund!” said Time Bomb.

Her father is the CEO of a large tobacco company, the one famous for commissioning and publishing its own “independent medical studies” that “prove” smoking is as good for a person's health as eating an apple or taking a brisk autumn walk. Time Bomb's daddy does not smoke cigarettes, but he drinks enough Scotch to power the crew of a British battleship.

“Thank God your father made him sign a pre-nup!” Spa Buddy giggled.

After Spa Buddy went home, The Statistician angrily offered to resign his position as an untenured junior professor, to pursue a less academically stimulating, but more lucrative job crunching numbers in the private sector.

Time Bomb's response was to shrug and scoff, “What difference do you think an extra twenty grand a year will make in
this
neighbourhood? At least being a professor
sounds
respectable.” She slugged back the last of the champagne and said, “Don't make me look stupid, and I won't make you sound worthless. Fair enough?”

The Statistician is not eager for a replay of this conversation in front of his friends at Mr. Nice Guy's cottage, so he will carefully regulate his facial expressions around his wife for the time being.

“Hey,” The Statistician says, smiling, squeezing Time Bomb's shoulder, “my brother will be there.”

For some reason, Time Bomb is quite fond of The Drifter.

“Will we get to meet his new girlfriend?” she asks, her countenance brightening.

“Yes, he's bringing her along. Apparently she's quite a stunner.”

“Oh, okay, fine,” Time Bomb says, finally sitting up in bed. “I'll go. But I bet I won't have any fun.”

That
, thinks The Statistician,
is a safe bet, indeed.

THE STUNNER

“No one can resist the golden lasso.
It binds all who are encircled …”

— Wonder Woman, from the TV series
Wonder Woman
, 1975–1979

T
he Stunner was magnetically attractive to men, especially older men, from a fairly early age, but she didn't become fully aware of her powers until the night before she went away to university in Toronto.

Because she spent her first eighteen years living with her parents in a Northern Ontario copper-mining town, The Stunner breezily dismissed the frequent advances toward her as a function of the town's twenty-to-one male-to-female ratio. When the men's shifts in the mine ended on payday, there wasn't much else for them to do but go out drinking, and certainly all that Labatt 50 and Molson Export didn't clarify their perception of an early-blossoming girl's age relative to their own.

During her last summer up North, when she tended the bar at the Rockslide Pub, the men often left behind exorbitant 100-percent tips for her. When she worked the odd shift at the curling-rink snack bar, the grinning old-timers usually told her to “
Keep the change, beautiful,”
when they handed her a ten or a twenty for a bag of stale mixed nuts. Yet, The Stunner didn't suspect that she was being treated any differently than any other girl in town.

Then, on her last Saturday night working the bar at the Rockslide, just hours before she would catch a ride in Red Brown's Piper Cub to Thunder Bay to board her flight to Toronto, The Stunner heard a confession that changed everything. She was pouring another pint for Eddie Jansen, who was only five years older than The Stunner, and already a foreman at the copper mine. Eddie was pretty cute, and she had felt a friction between them ever since he came to town, but he had never once made a pass at her. She decided to ask him why. What did she have to lose?

Eddie's already glassy eyes filled with tears. “Aw my Gawd,” he said, “Aw my Gawd. If only I'd known, Gawd … I would have …”

“You would have what, Eddie?”

“Aw, I couldn't have, anyway. Nobody could.”

“Huh? What are you talking about?”

“You're … you're
untouchable
.”

“
Untouchable
? What? Come on, Eddie! I don't have cooties.”

“Aw, it's, it's not that. It's …”

“I'm not stuck-up. I'm not a prude. I've always been nice to you, haven't I? I've never pushed you away.”

“Nope. You sure haven't.”

“And I'm not the worst-looking girl in town.”

“Gawd no. Gawd no. You're the … every man in town wants you.
Every
man.”

“Eddie, I really don't care about the other men. But I've always kind of liked
you
.”

“Aw, Gawd, yeah. I know.”

“Well, then? How come you never …?”

“It's your father,” he blurts.

“My father?”

“He scares the shit outta me. He scares the shit outta
everyone
.”

“But … how do you know my father? He never comes in here.”

“He doesn't come in while you're
here.
He always shows up about a half an hour before your shift starts. He'll walk up to a guy randomly, and say, ‘You know that little cutie who works the late shift here?' And when the guy nods approvingly, he'll point to his big hunting boots, and say something like, ‘Well, she's my daughter, and if you so much as look at her the wrong way, these boots will crush your skull and stomp your eyes out.' Or he'll pick up a pool cue, point it at the guy, and say, ‘This is where I'll be aiming my Remington thirty-aught-six if you ever touch her. Hollow-point bullets. Big exit wound, oh yeah.' And it's not just the young guys; sometimes he puts on this same show for the old geezers who haven't had a boner in twenty years.”

The Stunner's father was one of the biggest in a town full of big men, but she always thought of him as a cuddly, overstuffed teddy bear; she knew he could put on an intimidating act when he needed to, but she had never imagined anything like this. She wasn't sure whether to be grateful for his protection, or angry that he'd meddled in her life this way.

She leaned on her elbows on the bar, and Eddie couldn't help stealing a look through the open collar of her blouse.

“How about tonight, Eddie?” she cooed. “It'll be your last chance, sweetie. I'm leaving for university tomorrow morning.”

“Aww, geez,” Eddie moaned, twisting from side to side on his bar stool. “I'd give my entire life's savings for just one night with you, I really would. Any man in the whole friggin' town would.” He gulped down the last dregs of his beer, his Adam's apple bobbing. “I'm not sure I'm ready to die for it, though.”

And with that said, Eddie Jansen emptied all the cash from his wallet onto the top of the bar, and slid from his stool, muttering, “Good luck at college, eh?” He slunk out of the Rockslide Pub with his hands jammed into the pockets of his work pants.

The Stunner's brain arranged and processed these new facts. She was a smart girl, by far the best student in the town's under-populated high school. She'd brought the average of her entire advanced mathematics class up to the provincial standard by earning 99 percent on her final exam (and she had cried over that lost 1 percent). She'd earned an entrance scholarship to the University of Toronto. So she was smart.

And she was attractive, too, much more so than she had imagined just a few moments earlier.

And her brain told her body what she needed to do next.

She undid a button on her blouse.

Her conscience cried out:
What if your father walks in?

She undid another button.

What if he does? Tomorrow I'll be gone.

Then she hiked her skirt up as high as it would go, exposing more of her tapered thighs than the patrons of the Rockslide Pub had ever seen before, or would ever see again.

“It's my last night in town, boys!” she hollered. “Everybody's next beer is on me!”

Of course none of the men let her pay for their drinks, and the next morning The Stunner stepped out of Red Brown's Piper Cub onto the runway in Thunder Bay with her purse full of cash tips almost equal to the copper mine's weekly payroll.

*

Since then, The Stunner has rarely ever paid for a restaurant meal or a drink in a bar. Some drooling, horny boy or desperate, greying mid-lifer will always cover her tab in exchange for a few hours of her attention. All she has to do is nod, smile, giggle occasionally, suggest vaguely that they might get to see her naked body later, and men will empty their wallets in exchange for anything she desires.

Two years earlier, her idea of a Big Night Out was a quarter-chicken dinner and a couple of bottles of Labatt Blue at the Swiss Chalet near the mine site, but since her father isn't around Toronto to point at his hunting boots and shake pool cues in men's faces, she's developed a connoisseur's appreciation for French wines, fine coffees, fresh oysters, and
fois gras
. All it takes is a high-hemmed skirt and a low-collared sweater.

And the blowjob! It has become the nuclear warhead in her arsenal; so easy to deploy, so massive in its impact. Giving head is as easy as enjoying a vanilla Popsicle, but it doesn't take nearly as long to finish. And afterward, the recipient is your slave for as long as you want him to be. Just promise him another. Soon! Very soon!

If she'd known about the blowjob when she was still in Northern Ontario, she could have been the richest ex-barmaid at the University of Toronto. Still, it is a skill that has served her well in the short time she's had to master it. And she enjoys doing it. She loves the feelings of power and control as they moan and spasm and twitch with every slight manoeuvre. It's a win-win situation for everyone involved.

*

So, the Stunner is magnetically attractive to men. It's like a superpower, and so far she's only used it in small doses. There are untapped reserves of Potential Energy crackling deep inside her, though, and as soon as she meets a truly Worthy Man, she will let herself go Kinetic on him.