A Brilliant Novel in the Works (15 page)

Ezra and I were biking through the woods to the creek
behind my house when I was explaining to him about the porn film I had just
seen—my first one. It was at Adam Silver’s spend-the-night party, and Adam
had just recently found his father’s porn collection. We were eleven at the
time and the porn was called Secretarial Duties.

One thing I possessed even at that age was an awe about the way people
behaved. Even in situations that scared me, even when I didn’t understand
what was going on, even when I was being betrayed. While my friends were fixated
on using however many weeks’ allowance to buy Pac-Man or Combat or Jungle
Hunt for their Atari 2600, I was more interested in the way the cashier was
staring at my friend’s mother.

The scene I was recounting to Ezra went like this: the boss walks up
to his secretary and stands silently in front of her. With a look of annoyance,
the secretary says, “Can I help you?” The boss barely makes a nod, but it’s
enough for her to know to pull up her skirt and show him her vagina. The man
does not say anything. He doesn’t even touch this woman. But he drops his
pants and ejaculates right on her face. She still has an unmoved expression
when she says, “Let me know if you need anything else,” and she wipes her
face with a tissue.

On top of the eeriness of this scene and the other scenes, my main confusion
stemmed from the fact that I had no idea what semen looked like. My parents’
technique for teaching me about most any subject was by way of giving me a
book about it, which was fine by me and often did the trick, but even though
I read The Origin of Johnny through and through and I knew that sperm fertilized
the egg, I somehow missed the messiness of the act, particularly when it came
to sexual acts that had nothing at all to do with the origin of Johnny.

“It kind of looked like he was peeing,” I told Ezra, “but it was just
a few squirts. And it was white. And it stuck to her cheek.”

Ezra and I made it to our usual spot against the bank of the creek and
dropped our bikes in the dirt. We started skipping rocks on the water.

“Are you sure it wasn’t cum?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It seemed like it was pee.”

“Do you know what cum is?” Ezra asked me, and he threw a rock high up
in the air so that it made a loud plop in the water when it fell in. And then
Ezra explained it to me in such great detail I wanted to ask him how he learned
it so completely.

“Oh,” is all I said to Ezra. And we were silent for a few minutes. Me,
because I had just learned one of the most fascinating things about the male
body I had ever heard. And Ezra, because he was deciding whether or not to
tell me what else was on his mind.

A few rocks later, I found out. At age eleven, Ezra Roth was so obsessed
with masturbating that he was doing it five or six times a day minimum. At
first, he just did it at night in his bed. But then he started doing it in
the shower every morning. (And why not?) He started setting his alarm twenty
minutes early so he could do it once in his bed and then once again in the
shower. When his folks went out—for dinner or to the grocery store or even
just outside to do yard work—he’d do it on their bed, though I didn’t quite
understand why. He loved almost getting caught, though he was still careful
enough not to get caught. Soon he noticed that his cum went from clear and
watery to white and sticky, but it didn’t bother him, it just required a little
more cleanup work, a small price to pay, and so he began carrying a wad of
paper towels in his pocket just in case. He did it in the school bathroom,
in the woods during recess, once he did it in the back seat while his mother
drove him home from a piano lesson. He named the socks and towels and pairs
of underwear he enjoyed humping the most. It was sooooooo addictive, he told
me, the best feeling in the world.

By the time he spilled out this story to me, he was nearly hyperventilating,
and he was squeezing a rock so hard his hand trembled.

The thing about Ezra is that he felt no shame at all in his obsession.
It was a very un-Jewish trait—just like his love of fishing. He masturbated
like it was allowed. As a Jewish boy, you should not only fear God, who is,
of course, absolutely displeased with you, but you must also fear the far
bigger dilemma of disappointing your parents. Ezra was concerned with neither.

As Ezra finished his confession, I could tell he was hard through his
jeans. And he held that rock in his hand and he was trembling and I took a
step back, not knowing what would happen next. I was scared of Ezra just like
the man in the porn scared me. But I also was dying to find out what he would
say or do next.

Ezra took a deep breath, handed me the rock, and then said, “Look away
for a second.”

I nodded at him and put the rock in my pocket and kept one hand on it
like it was fifteen weeks’ allowance, but I did not look away. And he didn’t
mind. I watched him take off his shirt, unbutton his pants, and in just his
underwear he stepped into the creek. He swam to one of the deeper eddies and
his head dropped under the surface as he masturbated in that creek, only needing
to come up for air once.

When I think about Ezra telling me his confession and then watching him
ejaculate in a creek (that is now plowed over by the Tamarisk Creek subdivision),
I think that I’ve never heard anyone more excited to tell me any kind of story.
His confession was even more amazing to me than the act itself. I didn’t actually
think about writing it down at the time, but I did think about what it would
take to get to hear more stories like the one Ezra had just told me. How many
times do you get to see a storyteller hyperventilate?

When Ezra came out of the creek, he howled up at the sky— something that
seems silly when I put it on paper, but Ezra in the woods often involved some
kind of howl or cry. His voice was just beginning to change, far earlier than
any of the other boys. This wouldn’t be the last time Ezra was scouting out
the world years ahead of the rest of us.

Ezra shook off the creek water and put his clothes back on, and we biked
home in silence. There wasn’t anything more to say that afternoon. I kept
that rock in my pocket like it was an essential part of the story. And unfortunately,
it was also an essential part of why our dryer broke that afternoon while
my mom was cleaning my dirty clothes.

Just before Ezra put on his clothes, while he was still wet from that
creek water, I remember hearing him whisper (more to himself than to me),
“Nothing in the world gets any better than this.”

The missionary position is an awfully crazy position when you’re
completely naked and you’re not tied up and you’re not being
spanked and you’re actually touching another human being rather
than jamming your face into a pillow while imagining yourself
being ridiculed by a gorgeous woman who loves to see you suffer.

I’m in this position because Julia has told me to be in this
position. I’m naked because she told me to be naked. She is
naked too and I’m on top of her, because that was her request.

But I’m not inside her. I’m just lying on top of her. And
I’m so flaccid it feels like six Grand Canyons’ worth of Viagra
couldn’t save me.

I see she has a condom on the nightstand and it worries
me. “I love you, Julia,” I say to her, “but what now? Is this
where the virile gentile man steps in?”

She puts her hands on both sides of my head. “It’ll be okay,”
she says, except with her hands there I can’t hear a thing. But
I can read lips.

“Julia?” I say with my voice echoing inside my head. “Did
your gentile use a condom?”

She lets go of my head and closes her eyes. I can see she is
trying not to cry. “Yes,” she says. “It happened one time. We
used a condom. But…” A few tears drop down her face fast
enough that I’m not sure if I’m seeing things.

“I know,” I say, even though I don’t quite know what I
know. So I wipe the wetness off her cheek and I try not to
think about her gentile man.

“Are you still willing to be with me?” she asks, in a way that
sounds like she doesn’t believe she deserves me. It takes me
some time to imagine that this is possible: that she could feel
not good enough for someone like me.

I’m not positive whether she’s asking about being with her
for the rest of our lives or about me being on top of her right
this second. So I say, “Yes.”

And she nods. She takes a deep breath. She asks me to take
a deep breath. And I do. And then she begins moving her
body a little bit—how those hips of hers can move—as if we
were planning to have sex.

And so I start getting nervous. I want to make it all
good for us but the more I want to make it all good the less
possible it seems to make it all good. It’s like I’m giving a
presentation to ten thousand people about my failings. And
my vicious impotence. Vimpotence is what I would call it in
my presentation.

And then there are other thoughts: of my father, how he
became impotent after the prostate surgery and how I cared
for him during those weeks while he was healing, counting
in milliliters all the urine that came through his catheter;
and I think of Shmen, who I still worry so much about; and
I think about Yousef and his dead father; and I think of Ally
and her hats, and the horse that I came on; and I think of all
those times I masturbated while thinking I would never in my
life have (or be capable of having) a lover. With Shmen, Dad,
Yousef, Ally, Fatty Lumpkin, and intimacy problems all in the
same room, I just don’t know how I’m going to make space for
intercourse and Julia tonight.

Julia puts her arms around me and brings my head down
so she can whisper in my ear. “Tell me,” she whispers, “some
of them.” The heat of her voice goes through my ear and across
my neck. “Your kinky fantasies.”

I pull my head back, so I can see the look on her face. “Are
you sure?” I’m starting to sweat in the wrong places: behind
my ears, on the neck, at the crown of my head. “Kinky is a
polite word for it,” I say. “Some are just idiotic stories of you
getting mad at me for being a pervert. They’re anti-fantasies.
They’re shame stories. I basically have a million shame stories
in my head.”

“Tell them to me anyway,” she says. “Give it all the kink and
shame and idiotic you want. But stay there,” and she adjusts me
on top of her just right, like I might slip off otherwise, which
I could easily do, without anything really fastening me to her.

“Well,” I say. “I guess I could tell you a little bit.” But they’re
not the kind of stories that would be fun to tell. If I tell them
to her, they’ll be all shamitude and no sexitude. She’ll be
horrified and I’ll be even more horrified than her.

“Yuvi?” she says, and she says my name so patiently and
so sweetly that I’m totally not expecting the impatience and
frustration that comes next: “Tell me your fucking story
already.” She flexes her legs underneath me a little like she’s
going to push me off the bed if I don’t hurry up.

But there’s some play in there. It’s a game, maybe. But
it’s also not a game, because I feel under pressure to tell her
something. I don’t want her to leave. Again. And so I start.

“Well,” I say, “I like to imagine you catching me doing
something embarrassing. I like it when you’re angry at me. At
least in my fantasies. Does this make any sense?”

“No,” she says. “Of course it doesn’t make sense.” She blows into my face.
I smell cigarette smoke coming from inside her.

I’m convinced that this is a bad idea. There is something
so risky about right now. With her. Totally wrong time for
this experiment. But she grabs my hips with some force. She
centers me on top of her like I’m a piece of furniture. And I
start to get hard.

“Are you going to tell me your pathetic story already? Because I have better
things to do.”

There are two ways for your wife to find out the strange
little details about who you are. There’s “showing” and there’s “telling.”
Telling is where you sit her down and say, “Honey, there’s something I’d like
to talk to you about.”

This is the preferred way. For one, it lets her know that you’re communicative.
You are expressing yourself in a rational and thoughtful way and this can
get you some sympathy—even if your little quirk is unusual.

But there’s another way for your wife to find things out about you. It
can happen when your wife unexpectedly comes home during lunch to find you
naked on the floor, watching a porn, with your feet tied together using her
best leather belt, your hand on your cock, Bengay burning all over your body.
And with an empty bottle of root beer halfway up your asshole. That way is
called showing.

When someone sees something that defies everything they
thought they understood about the planet Earth, it’s a pretty amazing thing
to witness. The first expression on my wife’s face was joy. It was short-lived,
sure, but it was there. It was the “Oh, honey, what a nice surprise!” moment
and it lasted about as long as it takes for the light to go on after you flick
the switch.

After joy, we quickly moved on to shock. This is the sensation one feels
when the world is turned upside down. It can happen when you come home to
find your house has been crushed by a flaming meteor, for example. The shock
occurs before there is any kind of personal connection to the situation—it
is just a confused feeling, as if your inner compass has malfunctioned. I
had about two seconds to sit tight in this phase before things got worse.

Then we moved on to anger. This is the “Holy Christ! My husband is a
sick, disgusting, despicable, shameless, shameful pervert and I wish his parents
never had intercourse and never introduced something like him into our species”
moment and it isn’t a fun thing to witness. Particularly if you’re the pervert
in question.

My wife dropped her purse. Her hand went over her mouth, except it missed
her mouth completely and smacked her nose.

Now you should know right away that I felt horrible about this whole
situation. I was ashamed of my predicament. I felt terrible for the discomfort
that I caused my wife. I had utter affection for my wife. I loved the way
she squeezed me tight when she came home from work; I loved the way she could
imitate my father’s Southern accent and my mother’s Israeli accent perfectly
even though she was from Iowa; I loved the way she bought me popsicles from
the ice cream man when he went down our street.

There are just certain things that can’t be digested properly. Things
a human body cannot take in. My wife’s brother doesn’t have a large intestine
and he must watch what he eats. If he eats cabbage, for example, his body
doesn’t know what to do with it, and it’ll come out of his system undigested.

So there was my wife, frozen in time, looking at me, and here is what
I said to my beloved: “Honey, there’s something I’d like to talk to you about.”

And on that note, my dear and patient and peaceful wife kicked me in
the face and left the room. She kicked me awfully hard. I was lying with my
face on the floor, still tied up with her belt. It was the kind of feeling
where it hurts so much you can’t even tell what kind of damage has been done,
but you know for sure it isn’t the place that is bleeding you have to worry
about
.