Always Happy Hour: Stories(32)
“I can get you some real medicine,” he says, brushing the hair out of my face.
“Okay,” I say.
“I’ll probably smoke my joint first and then go get it.”
“Okay,” I say again, though I don’t like this plan. He’ll end up at the dance club talking to girls who take shots out of each other’s belly buttons. Girls he calls whores. I turn on the TV and he leaves. It’s still the same movie, twenty-four hours of it, but soon another one will start. I check the schedule to see what it is: Iron Man. Then I turn off the TV and pick up a book from the table. I bought a whole stack of magazines and two paperbacks at the airport. I bought sushi and expensive coffee and a bag of almonds and now I probably won’t have enough money to get me through the rest of the month. I turn on the lamp and try to read but I’ve had too much to drink, the words blurring on the page. I wonder if I should stick my finger down my throat but I’d probably still feel sick. The upside is that it would get rid of some of the calories I consumed at dinner: four courses ending in a chocolate dish with a crispy top and a warm melty inside. We each had one, scraping our bowls.
I close my eyes and think about the boat on the ocean, black waves and black sky and a sliver of moon, and I like the idea of it—how lonely it looks—but next time I’ll just fly wherever I want to go. I’ll step out of the airplane onto solid ground.
An hour later, he lets himself in, his eyes bloodshot. They will stay this way for about an hour. He hands me two pills and a cup of water and I sit up and swallow them.
He kisses me, pushes his tongue in my mouth. “My parents are at a show until ten,” he says, squeezing my breast. He puts my hand on his dick.
“Baby,” I say, “I’m not feeling very well.”
“We didn’t have sex yesterday or today,” he says, “and now we have an opportunity.”
I take my hand off him. He likes to have sex twice a day and we’ve settled on once—a compromise he has made for me. Sometimes he films me and I let him, only my face on camera. On the occasions I refuse to have sex with him, he gets angry and asks me questions that seem to support his position: Am I physically hurting you? Do you enjoy it?
He goes to the bathroom and pees and then tells me he’s going to the casino.
“I wish you’d stay with me,” I say. “Iron Man’s about to start.”
“We only have two more nights and I’d like to enjoy them,” he says.
“Being with me isn’t enjoyable?”
“I didn’t say that,” he says. “I’ve seen that movie four times already.”
“Stay with me for just a minute.”
He sits on the bed and I put my hand on his thigh and then move it to his crotch. He’s hard so I stroke him, and then I unzip his shorts and take him in my mouth. He chokes me with it, pushing it to the back of my throat, and I take off my panties because it’s easier to just let him fuck me.
I wake up wearing only the wristband and my Carnival tank top. I look around for my panties and find them on the floor: my prettiest pair, lace and bows. He’s snoring lightly with his mouth open, his hair so long it has begun to curl itself into loose ringlets. I press myself against him. He doesn’t mind if I lie as close as possible, practically on top of him—he says I am a little oven, that I am good in the winter. I wonder why he doesn’t love me anymore, if it’s because I’m too strong or too weak. At this point, things have become so muddled that everything feels like an inversion. I say one thing, sure I believe it, and he says the opposite and it sounds right, too, more right than the thing of which I was certain.
I get out of bed and dig through my bag for a pair of shorts, socks, a sports bra. I dress and put a key in my pocket and let myself out, stopping in front of his parents’ room to listen: his father coughs; the TV is turned to the news.
I take the stairs up.
The treadmills line the windows so you can look out and see the nose of the boat cutting through the water, dividing it. I stretch and step on, starting slowly and working my way up to a jog. I do it because I like how I look afterwards—cheeks flushed and eyes bright—a look that can’t be replicated with makeup. I’m hungover, though, and the water makes me dizzy. I imagine falling off, my body in a heap on the floor, and lose my rhythm.
I run for ten minutes and walk for twenty and take the elevator back down. He’s watching Iron Man when I come in. “Where’d you go?”
“The gym.”
“You weren’t gone for very long,” he says. “You coming to breakfast?”
People want a good hot breakfast. They want omelets and waffles and eggs and biscuits. They want bacon and sausage. We’re seated at a table with a family of seven. There are five kids, all ugly, of various ages and ethnicities. Each of them is holding something, a shabby animal or a plastic muscle man. I talk to the little girl next to me, a skinny blond with big knees and glasses who has a stuffed kangaroo in her lap. I touch its tail and ask her what his name is.
“Her name,” she says.
“Okay, her name?”
“Jessica.”
“Ah,” I say, “Jessica.” It looks like a dog toy. I unroll the silverware from my napkin and look around for the waiter.
My boyfriend plays his city-councilman role with the father, leaning forward to show interest, looking him directly in the eye. He reads books about this sort of thing. Otherwise, he doesn’t read at all. He says he got his master’s degree in education without ever reading anything; he just listened and rephrased what others were saying in class. He made all A’s doing this.