The Wangs vs. the World(45)
Saina closed her eyes. It was too much. For the first time in her life, she felt old, tired, like the effort that it took to fight for recognition was no longer worthwhile. It was true what they said—leaving New York made you soft.
二十
Phoenix, AZ
605 Miles
THERE WAS NOTHING grosser than a naked mattress, the quilted, satin surface of it all pilled and stained from more generations of Arizona State students than Andrew wanted to think about. He rubbed the palm of his hand against the rough little bumps raised all over the flowered beige surface and shivered. It tickled like riding a bike over a bumpy gravel road, but something about the sensation turned his body’s attention inward and he felt himself press up against the ridge of his pants. Damn skinny jeans. Andrew pulled down his zipper and wriggled them halfway down his legs as he looked around the room for a forgotten bottle of lotion, anything viscous, anything, but it had all been packed or given away.
He hated spit. The smell of his own saliva was never a turn-on. Why couldn’t he smell it when he was making out with someone?
He could feel himself getting hard and straining at the cotton confines of his briefs and put aside the unwanted urge to pee. Andrew reached a hand into his backpack. Laptop, cell phone, beanie, a few wrinkled envelopes, and the crumpled bag from yesterday’s egg sandwich.
Oh. That could work.
He thought of Emma, gorgeous Emma, who wanted nothing more than for him to let her have sex with him, Emma squirting ketchup on his dick like a hot dog and swallowing it down. He held that image in his mind as he rooted in the bag with one hand and tugged his briefs down with the other, closing his eyes and flicking over again to Emma, now jumping up on the volleyball court and arching her body back, back, back, one arm up, throat exposed, breasts pushed high, then pounding the ball across the net in an explosion of sweat and heat. With his teeth, he tore open a ketchup packet and emptied it into his palm, flicking again to Emma on her knees in front of him, reaching out for him as he reached down with his ketchup palm, sliding his hand around and up. He was lying down now and Emma was gone, replaced by a girl he saw once, Rollerblading across the Venice boardwalk, her dress billowing up with a gust of wind so that he caught just a glimpse of her naked bottom and the neat little strip of hair between her legs. He pushed himself into his hand, and for just a second, a half second, Professor Kalchefsky crept in, making him wonder whether copula and copulate had the same root, but Andrew banished him and brought in his most timeworn and reliable image, a flash of Cinemax he somehow saw as a kid, a few stolen minutes of a man and a woman spread out on the hood of a car, hips thrusting, boobs jiggling, the man angry with a bush of a mustache, the woman pleading for more, pleading for him to stop when, like a flicker on the screen, he saw his doorknob turn.
“Stop!” He choked on the word, tried shouting it again. “STOP!”
“Andrew?”
It was his dad. No, no, no, no, no. His heart stuttered and his lungs froze.
“Andrew?”
And his sister. And probably Barbra, too. Andrew stood up and staggered towards the door, throwing his weight against it.
“Just hold on,” he said. “Give me a minute.” He could hear them on the other side of the door, his dad asking what he’d said, Grace shushing him, Barbra saying nothing. He looked down. His right hand was a ketchupy mess. He closed his eyes, thinking of vomit, shit, his dead mother, until he hung limp, dark smears of condiment caught in the wrinkles of his shrunken penis. Still pressing his back to the door, Andrew pulled up his underwear and pants. Zip. Button. Oh god.
He wiped his hand on his jeans and opened the door, pretending to swallow.
“I was just . . . eating. But, I . . . I had to get dressed.”
“Why you don’t want us to see you eating? You were eating naked? You have girlfriend hiding in closet?” His father sounded hopeful.
Andrew half turned towards his closet, wishing that Emma really was in there, disheveled, beautiful. That would have been way less embarrassing. He’d always wanted the kind of father who would shoot hoops with him, but his dad was way more likely to introduce him to a couple of models than to buy him a baseball glove or attend a soccer match. He hated the wink that his father would give him whenever a woman’s name popped up on his cell phone. Once, late at night, he’d even seen his father waiting at a valet stand in downtown L.A., his arm around a surprisingly beautiful redhead who looked not much older than Saina. It was gross to think of the women who made themselves available, grosser to think of Barbra caring about sex at all, and grossest to know that if his dad cheated on Barbra, then it meant that he had probably done the same to Andrew’s beautiful mother. Maybe that was why Andrew was holding out for true love. Who knew rebellion would be so boring?
“No, Dad, no one else is here.”
Oh. He couldn’t hug them like this, hand still slick with ketchup and sweat, dick barely tucked back into his jeans.
“I have to go to the bathroom—it’ll just take a second.” He put a hand over his stomach. “Bad food.”
Backing into the hallway, he narrowly avoided bumping into the RA, spun around, and ran to the coed bathroom, praying that no one would be in there.
Coast clear. Andrew splashed water on a stack of brown paper towels and ducked into a stall. The ketchup was starting to burn. Nervous, quick, he scrubbed at himself roughly until the damp wodge of barky smelling towel started to shred down his pants. He plunked it in the toilet and flushed, but the mass wouldn’t go down. Whatever. He was leaving. He’d never use this toilet again. Let it be someone else’s problem.