44 Chapters About 4 Men (30 page)

After being chased and generally terrorized by the T-800 for at least ninety minutes of screen time, Sarah Connor finally manages to lure the evil cyborg into a hydraulic press in an abandoned factory. Exhausted, injured, and suffering from shock, Sarah watches in disbelief as machine crushes machine. Just when she thinks the steely predator is going to get up again and continue its pursuit, like it has a dozen times already, the piercing red orb of light burning from behind the T-800’s metallic eye socket slowly fades to black. Sarah can only stare back in disbelief at the motionless exoskeleton of that digital demon, gasping for breath and grasping to accept the fact that she is finally safe.

As I gazed into that casket, I knew exactly how Sarah Connor felt. Knight had been my own personal Terminator—obsessed, unrelenting, literally programmed to kill. To see him lying there, motionless, the flame-blue light in his eyes blinked out for good, was surreal.

And like Sarah, I was also carrying a very special little boy in my belly.

That little boy is now four years old, and he is all me. All mine. He’s a lover, a rebel, an artist, and a very old soul. He’s the kind of man I wish the world had more of, and I’m pretty sure the universe sent him here to keep me from killing my husband.

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, ASSHOLE

Eight years of marriage and you still don’t compliment me

Or say anything particularly romantic

Or appear to have any emotions at all.

But you gave me the love of a little boy who tells me I’m beautiful every day,

That I’m the “best woman in the whole world,”

Who won’t go to sleep until he’s hugged and kissed me—

Properly.

A little boy who looks an awful lot

Like you,

So much so that when his little Ken face tells me he loves me, I know he’s speaking for you

Both.

FOR KEN

ON OUR NINTH ANNIVERSARY

You make me want to dance

Like a girl on a pole.

But instead, I watch other people dancing

Gracefully inside the black frame of our TV,

And I shove my lingerie a little deeper in the drawer.

You make me want to paint, create,

But all I’ve created are some babies,

Which took a lot of time.

And take a lot of time

And leave me with just enough time

To think.

So, I tap out my thoughts,

One-handed in the dark,

Our baby asnooze in my arms,

Because words are all I can produce these days—

Besides people

And milk.

But know that, if given the choice

Between pas de deuxs and oil pastels

Or caring for cherubs

Who look like you and act like me,

Who love to dance and draw on floors,

I’d watch them paint and pirouette instead.

Dear Journal,

I guess Ken appreciated that I finally wrote him a poem without the word
asshole
in it because he surprised me on our anniversary with an invitation to have sex…with him…on the beach!

How did I not know that nine years was the sex-on-the-beach year?? I thought nine years was the wood anniversary! Or maybe it still is…

Hey-oh!

My birthday, Ken’s birthday, and our anniversary all fall in the same week, single-handedly disproving the entire zodiac theory. (There is no fucking way that Ken and I are the same astrological sign. We’re barely the same species.) So every year we just take that week off and go on vacation. This particular year we (I) decided to rent a little house on an island near Charleston. Only, who the fuck wants to spend a week at the beach with two little kids? So, we invited Ken’s parents to come along and
help out
(keep our children alive) so that we might be able
go on a date
(get drunk and avoid all parental responsibilities) for our anniversary.

Things were going well. We’d figured out a new little beach routine where Ken and I would put the kids down for a nap every afternoon, give his parents the old two-finger salute, and take a long walk up and down the beach together, meaning that I would walk five or ten feet, stop to take pictures, then walk five or ten more feet, and Ken would putter along behind pecking at his phone, trying to find out the property value of every interesting-looking beach house we passed.

This one is my favorite…for obvious reasons.

Only, on this particular day, just as we made it back to our little turd of a beach cottage, Ken took a jackhammer to our comfortable silence.

“So, I was thinking about fucking you on this beach tonight for our anniversary.”

Record scratch.

Wha—

Whipping my head around, I immediately began analyzing Ken’s facial features for any sign of humor, some tell that he was just fucking with me. There were none. His eyes were masked behind dark sunglasses, and his mouth was set in a determined line with just a whisper of an upturn on one side. When I replayed his sexy words in my head, Ken’s voice sounded husky—not playful, not even close.

Not only was Ken serious, I think he was actually daring me.

A heat blossomed in my belly that had nothing to do with the sun beating down on us, and my face erupted into a supernova of enthusiasm. Drunk with glee, all I could do in response was nod and smile and clap vigorously.

It reminded me of how the Little Mermaid, rendered mute by Ursula the Sea Witch in exchange
for a pair of human legs, reacted when Prince Eric finally guessed her name. As a child, I always identified with the Little Mermaid because we were both rebellious redheads who liked to sing and collect shiny objects, but now, I find myself identifying with her on a whole new level. I, too, am on a quest to make a certain square-jawed, blue-eyed prince love me back. And like Ariel, I tend to become ridiculously excited whenever he pays me even the slightest amount of romantic attention.

I couldn’t believe the acuity of Ken’s sexual intuition.

Seriously, who is this man?

I’d
always
wanted to have sex on the beach, but had never dared to bring it up to Ken because I knew he would just shoot it down as being impractical and exhibitionistic and illegal. Which would have left me with no choice but to give him a purple nurple to mask my hurt feelings, which would have, in turn, emboldened him to give me a retaliatory purple nurple. Only, that would have ended disastrously because
my
nipples would have been full of milk, and then I’d be all like,
Who the fuck is going to clean up all this breast milk, asshole?
And there, now I’ve managed to call Ken an asshole on our anniversary
again
, and now no one is getting beach sex or regular sex, for that matter. And also, the owners of this dilapidated death trap are probably going to keep our deposit because they can’t get the putrid sour milk smell out of their carpet.

But happily, none of that had to transpire because Ken is evidently a goddamn mind reader now!

I figured Ken, being the Blah, Blah Financial Money-Stuff Person that he is, would’ve had some kind of logistical plan formulated already, but when I regained the use of my larynx and asked him where, exactly, he thought we should do the deed, he just shrugged and waved a hand in the direction of the vast sandy expanse between us and the ocean.

Out there??

No, no, no, no, no.

I couldn’t have sex out there. I’d never climax in a million years if I were that exposed and vulnerable.

Now, I have to admit, a little bit of danger is fun, and when I was eighteen, I probably wouldn’t have batted an eye, but if you’re fucking out in the open on a residential beach at the age of thirty-two, you’re basically saying,
You know what? This whole responsible adult thing just isn’t for me. I’d really appreciate it if someone would kindly ask the Department of Child and Family Services to come relieve me of my children
.

No, no, no.

We needed a plan. Dragging Ken away from our rape shack on stilts and back onto the beach, I started scouting locations.

My first suggestion was here: