The Birthing House Read online

  ‘Jo—’

  ‘That’s not what I meant. But this is a good thing. You know I never wanted to be the stay-at-home mommy. I have to do something. ’

  ‘Is that all this is about? Career fulfillment? Or is there something else going on?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Jo. Okay.’ He chose his next words like a man on a game show who’s just realized this one’s for the trip to Maui. ‘We never went into it. You might have thought I was avoiding it, or just too mad to deal. But I want you to know. I . . . I understand what happened.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ She wasn’t looking at him. Just whispering, but he could feel her tighten under his hand.

  ‘It means it happens. People who aren’t full seek sustenance elsewhere.’

  The minute that followed was a long, silent one.

  ‘Maybe this job is my way of filling myself up,’ she said.

  ‘Is it?’ Yes, maybe I am willing to allow you that much. For a little while. And by the way, what am I filling myself up with? ‘If you’re sure you want it, then you should go for it.’

  She pushed him on to his back and began kissing his neck, his chest, pushing his shirt up. ‘I’m not sure. I’m never sure about anything.’

  ‘You’re not?’

  ‘No one is.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘It is kind of scary, but exciting, too.’ She nibbled at his waist.

  ‘You don’t get scared.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  She was waiting for him to put her fears to rest, to explain what was eating him up. But he hadn’t been able to find the words, not when she was preparing to leave. She rested her head on his stomach. He was immediately aroused. She noticed and popped him free. The unexpected movement and sheer heat of her tongue made him groan. A minute into it, she’d paused and looked up, speaking in a voice as faint as a radio transmission from Iowa.

  ‘I need you to know something,’ she said.

  ‘Whuh?’

  ‘What you walked in on. It wasn’t what you thought. I admit it was very close, and wrong. But it wasn’t sex.’

  Amazing. A little three-letter word. Timed right, it was a sledgehammer.

  ‘Please, don’t,’ he said.

  Her grip remained firm but the stroking had ceased. Her eyebrows arched and she bored into him.

  ‘Look at me,’ she said. He sat up on his elbows. ‘I’ve never been unfaithful, Conrad.’

  He did not accept her words, but neither did he disbelieve them. They just hung there between them. He wanted to throw her off and throw her out. He wanted to roll her over and fuck her until she wept.

  He fell back and covered his eyes.

  She started to cry and he hated her for that. His balls were ready to explode and he hurt worse than that in worse places. But no, he wasn’t going to comfort her. That Fucker Jake had been there. Whatever had or had not happened in the house, Jo had fallen asleep in her panties and his Sebadoh and That Fucker Jake had been there.

  She pulled herself up and rested against his shoulder, releasing him when she felt him softening. Even if he wasn’t so sure about the past, he believed she was being faithful now. What were dropping bad habits and moving away to start a new life together if not faith that your marriage would work out?

  ‘I guess we’re both a little freaked out here,’ he said.

  ‘I’ll make it up to you next time, okay?’

  What if there is no next time? a nasty little voice shot back.

  ‘I just want you to want this as much as I do,’ he said. Meaning, in that male way, the sex and the love and the marriage and the house. They were inseparable to him.

  ‘I do.’

  It seemed a trade he’d failed to make - his comforting words for her sexual favor. A small thing, perhaps. A lost opportunity on both fronts.

  And so, 976-wife rejecting his person-to-person potty mouth, Conrad’s frustration deepened until he caved in and embarked on one last running attempt to get the job done by himself, if only to prove that he still could (and so that he might last more than thirty seconds when she returned). His tall and beautiful Jo was out of town, but there was a high-speed pipe and a portal of infinite titillation at his fingertips.

  The overture to the main event arrived courtesy of Visa and a mega site that humbly billed itself as ShavedPussyEmpire.com He searched in vain for something less Chesterish but the tamer domains like NiceYoungGirlsYourParentsWouldApproveOf.com and ArtfullyDepictedNakedLadies.com had been blown out of the water early in an Internet porn arms race toward mutually repulsed destruction.

  Knowing this, he hesitantly Googled ‘free sex movies’ and got the universe of porn, none of it free. Settling upon a site that appeared somewhat legit (ho ho), he linked around until he had eliminated the most ghastly fetishes and entered, ‘The World’s #1 Destination for Shaved Pussy!’ After failing to become aroused by the thirty-second free sample clips, he fumbled his credit card and tried to shoo the dogs out of the office, but the door wouldn’t stay latched. Luther kept nosing in, and there was simply no way he was going to perform an act of onanism with his dogs staring at him.

  He finally shouted loud enough to stop their scratching at the door and logged in, only to find himself staring at so many hairless girls in pigtails and academy plaid performing such unnatural acts of faked arousal, the ‘director’s’ distracting and often mean-spirited verbal cues lobbed at the coke-addled nubiles, that he was overwhelmed (okay, nudged) by guilt and couldn’t bring himself beyond a plumpie, let alone to climax.

  After five minutes of frustrated tugging, he angrily logged off, waddled to the bathroom (the door latched, hallelujah), his pants sliding down around his knees and launched into act two, standing over (no, not the sink, you filthy pig) the bathtub, eyes closed, visions of Jo riding him reverse cowgirl style with the lights on (she had done it once and only once, on the living-room couch, pretending not to remember when he’d made the request several times since, which only made it more precious) dancing in his brain.

  As he ramped up to the third act reveal, his mind performed a sort of miraculous shuffle function, a libido iPod playing every song in its pitiful six-soul library of ex-girlfriends, adding several Hustler Honey of the Months that had been burned into his memory from the teen years when you only had the one magazine and protected it like fire for the tribe, the iPenis playing them all at the same time at full volume, parading every girl and woman Conrad had ever bedded or seen naked before his mind’s lubricated eye like a carnival wheel, round and round she goes and where he comes nobody knows, all of the breasts and hips and hair and necks and asses and lips and moans and grunts shuffling again and again until Jo slew them all and claimed her rightful spot on his lap, the ultimate authority who knows what her man needs to finish the job, the Tarot card that read simply The Wife, riding him with such hip-flexing force and the gleaming crystal reality that can only come from memory, never fantasy, that for a minute he forgot he was bent over the tub and alone in this strange small town in this huge strange house, a man with a past he desperately wanted to forget, and he lost himself in the backs of her thighs and the dimples and fine black hairs above her ass above him, her wetness wetting the length of him and he felt huge, enormous yet fully enveloped, just so fucking owned by this animal called woman, this being called Joanna, this entity that was physically larger and infinitely more complex than he would ever be and he slipped out ready to burst and she grabbed him and planted him back inside without missing a single stroke, she was so tuned-in, and best of all he was giving her this moment too, sending her fears away by making her come and she slowed, crunching down on him, squeezing him in contractions, her voice heavy, almost male in its animal need until she came and he came with her, there inside her and here, now, in the bathroom, his fantasy and lonely reality coalescing so forcefully he felt her anger and weight clap into his body and her face - her face, the other face, the sepia woman in the photo staring at him from inside his head, her cro
oked smile exposing her sharp teeth - and he fought her back too late, crying out in repulsed terror as he began to ejaculate -

  And an invisible lead weight slammed into his neck, dropping him to his knees, stopping the blood flow to his brain and sounding an alarm of pain that stretched from his shoulder to his forehead.

  Pants around his knees, his orgasm interrupted but still surging, purging him of his life force, his seed, Conrad lost consciousness on the bathroom floor.

  HOLLY

  Once upon a time there was a boy, and this boy, he had something inside him. Hunger, curiosity, need. Older things without names. Things that got a hold of him at an age younger than most. Things that need to find a way out, things that need a home.

  She arrived in a pink sweater and blue jeans faded almost white. She had bad new wave hair, thirty bracelets on one arm, and she carried a purple Mad Balls lunchbox instead of a purse. She was a true child of the eighties. Her sweater, her cheeks, and her lippy smile (when she did smile) were all shades of pink. She was a drug called Girl. Just staring at her released endorphins and filled him with light.

  I know what you’re thinking. It’s not that. Girl was not his first sexual encounter. But she was his first love. She was the girl no one could get to, which is what made him try harder. But he could not win her attentions. He was too young, too plain.

  He studied her and made plans and two more years passed. Eventually she noticed him, the quiet kid who stared at her like she was made of golden candy. She knew who he was, of course. They had some classes together, but different circles of friends, and she was a circle of one. Holly Bauerman. There isn’t anything in a name. But she was Holy. This was the time in which he wore her down with one simple act of courtship: staring.

  He stared at Holly Bauerman in class, in the halls, and wherever he saw her around town, at parties and in the clothing store where she worked. She found him creepy at first, and then became curious. Once, on a Monday night, he spray-painted her name in ten-foot letters on the street in front of her house. No one knew it was him. But she knew.

  She resisted, but what else has the power to melt us than the adoring eyes of another? If you have ever been adored this way, and by adore I mean with the perfect mixture of fear and craving, then you know. It is not something one can give to oneself. Only another’s eyes have the power to show us how beautiful we can be. When his longing became obvious and overwhelming, her disgust turned to disinterest to a thing she missed when it was withheld, until finally the watching became a form of ego food she could no longer live without. She went to the Last Day of School Picnic alone and he was there.

  ‘Hello, Holly,’ he said. ‘Happy last day of school.’

  ‘What do you want from me?’ A kind of tough, quiet panic entered her voice. She stood there in her plaid shorts, her pink tee shirt and plastic bracelets, her lunchbox-purse swinging like a second grader.

  ‘If I don’t see you all summer,’ he said, ‘then what’s the point?’

  ‘There is no point. Point of what?’

  ‘The best days of my life have been the first day of school,’ he said. ‘I just wish I had more than four of them.’

  She didn’t have to think back to know that this was true.

  ‘So are you going to give me your summer, or should I get it over with and kill myself?’

  She laughed, but later confessed it was the most romantic thing anyone had said to her. They spent the summer together. Once they started talking, she relaxed. He became a clown, a little brother she could abuse, a friend to cheer her up, a reliable jester in her not-so-funny world. The world that had given her things like divorce, eating disorders, rival cliques, a dented and rusting Volkswagen Rabbit - this world he washed away. Puppy love brought them together, but what bound them was divorce. They had that brokenness in common and he thanked his parents for that much, for making him into something resembling her. His new wave girl morphing into a little prep-hippie before his eyes.

  The summer was slow and warm and full of nights sitting on the hood of her car at Flagstaff Mountain, looking over the town. They pretended they were in a 1950s movie and he bought her milkshakes. She showed him how to dip the fries in the shake. They stayed away from parties. It was better just to walk in the park, go to the movies, or stay at home and talk on the phone. One day they talked on the phone from ten in the morning until midnight.

  She made him take long hikes with her. She told him how she loved wild flowers, herbs, iced tea. She brewed her own special concoctions on the deck in glass gallon jars. She said it was a healing art, preparing this sun tea. She said that tea was purifying, good for the soul. He had never felt so clean as when he was with her. She collected herbs from the mountains and brewed special batches for him and he believed her. Later, when she grew bold toward the end of that endless summer, she leaned back in one of her mother’s chaises longues and poured iced tea down her chest and let him lap at her swimsuit. She filled her mouth and kissed him while he drank from her, a bird to her fountain statue.

  Then school came, and it was news. People did not agree that it was a good fit. He was too strange. Wasn’t he that kid who played with snakes? But they didn’t care. They were in their own world and they laughed at everything. At the teachers, other kids. At their parents. At policemen who pulled them over for speeding. At people who cared, at people who tried.

  Their physical courtship lasted six months and he was patient. They kissed for hours, sometimes all night. It became serious before the sex and after, deadly serious. They lost all shyness in bed and talked through every step of it. She taught him how to touch her and for how long until it worked better than it was supposed to work at age sixteen.

  In the last semester of their senior year they were seventeen and, though they did not know it, afraid. They had been together for nearly two years and become one of those inseparable couples that cause teachers to cluck their tongues and parents to lie awake wondering how can it possibly be so serious at this age, having forgotten in their middle age that love at seventeen is deadly serious because nothing else matters, it is the first and purest and . . . because it’s love at seventeen.

  So the boy set out to become a man, at precisely the time when his tribe was most unwilling to let the girl become a woman.

  10

  When he regained his senses he had no idea how much time had passed. Daylight had faded somewhat. His shoulder throbbed and the bathroom seemed to be tilting in every direction at once. He raised himself on shaking legs and began to pull his pants up. What just happened here? How much time had he lost? Minutes . . . or hours? The last thing he recalled was experiencing a too realistic vision of Jo and the first strand of a mighty orgasm.

  He patted the front of his boxer shorts and pants, then up higher to his tee shirt. He bent over, which made his headache sing, and scanned the floor, the tub, the sink. Where the hell did it go? He longed for an ultra-violet light, one of those scanners they used on CSI, the better to locate his discharged DNA.

  Conrad cupped his package, shifting things around. He was sore in the way that suggested he had, in fact, climaxed. He felt it in the muscles of his loins, the need to urinate. But his chafed, limp penis was clean and dry. He held his hands up in front of his face, turning them in the light. For a moment he caught the scent of lavender, of summer spices. But it was faint, and then gone.

  So, let’s get this straight. It was so good I blacked out, but didn’t come? Then why do my neck and shoulders feel like I’ve been playing catch with an anvil?

  Someone knocked him down, there was no other explanation. And not the dogs. Couldn’t have been the dogs. The door was still latched.

  Someone knocked me down . . . and cleaned me up? Or was I out so long it dried, becoming invisible?

  Hey, who knows, maybe the house swallowed it up!

  ‘Jesus Christ.’

  Swearing off masturbation for at least another week, Conrad undressed, climbed in the shower and let the cold water r
un. At age thirty, he was tired of his sex drive, frightened of where it was leading him.

  Conrad was walking the dogs when he saw the car come to a stop at the four-way intersection, and by then she was attempting to escape. The boyfriend - Teddy, Eddie, something always unsteady - braked hard. The passenger door swung all the way out and rebounded into her shin.

  ‘Ow, you asshole!’

  It was early in the afternoon, eighty-eight degrees, and no one came out when she started yelling. Eddie grabbed at her shirt to keep her from fleeing and Nadia’s palm cracked against her boyfriend’s cheek, causing him to blurt, ‘Aw, fuck!’

  ‘Aw, fuck, is right,’ Conrad said to the dogs, stepping off the curb. ‘Here we go.’

  There were two types of kids here, he’d noticed. The almost unbelievably plain second- and third-generation farm kids and do-gooders who’d yet to be exposed to even the imagined horrors of teen angst. Coming from what appeared to be a loving home and despite the company she kept, Nadia seemed like this type.

  The other type was Eddie’s type. They used to be called townies, but now . . . whatever they were called, Eddie’s car was not helping his case. It was one of those compact models Pontiac made for about three years. Teal-green with purple pinstriping down the side - just a little sexiness to make the buyer feel like this mass-produced hunk of shit would help him express something. The mortarboard tassel dangling from the rearview mirror suggested the best days of Eddie’s life were behind him, and the thumping bass emanating from the sub-panel in the back was a white trash-y, effete disco - uhn-tiss, uhn-tiss, uhn-tiss - that nearly drowned out the yowling hole that was the muffler. The entire package had to be violating at least three noise ordinances.

  At least until Eddie and his cruiser stalled out and began to roll down Heritage Street in reverse, when everything became quiet.

  Conrad cleared his throat. ‘Nadia?’

  ‘What?’ she said, tearing herself from Eddie’s clutches.