Wrecked (9 page)

He smiles. It calms me down.

He says, “I have a plan. Do you want to hear it?”

“Sure.”

I thought we were going to plan it together. But of course he’s already come up with a plan. It’s fun for him to think about, whereas it just gets me worried. And if I’m feeling sufficiently confident and relaxed and free that it doesn’t make me worry, then it makes me anxious instead. And I hate to be anxious. You just can’t win either way with me. I wouldn’t like to have to be with me—or married to me. How horrible!

“We can go for a late breakfast at the place next door, Café Fleur. They have Wi-Fi—I already called to check. We’ll take the laptop with us. I’ll go alone to the sex shop and see which women are there. Then I’ll come back and we can look at them together online.”

We’ve done this many times before and we know from experience that the brothels are packed during the day and not, as a layman might expect, in the evening or late at night. The busiest time for upscale brothels is during lunch hour, when men pay a quick visit from their offices. Nights and weekends the places are closed because all their clients are with their families and can’t disappear without arousing suspicion.

In most brothels they don’t like it if I, as a woman, show up out of the blue. My husband goes in by himself first. Totally normal, like any other customer, looking around. In the price category we operate in, discretion is taken very seriously. Georg is usually taken into a private room without any other customers seeing him. Then the women come in individually, spin around
once, and say their name. They usually come off bored because there’s no money changing hands at this point, and they don’t know until later just how much they’re going to earn from us. They sometimes misidentify Georg as a con man, thinking he’s just having a look before he goes home and jerks off for free. When he explains that he would like to bring his wife and asks whether that would be all right, they smile sympathetically at him and think to themselves,
Yeah, you poor thing, you idiot, a lot of husbands would
like
to bring their wives
. They’ve heard it many times before: “I’ll bring my wife with me next time.” Nobody does. He has to ask each one whether she’s willing to sleep with a couple. Some are willing, some aren’t. I don’t know why, or what they would have against it. Doesn’t matter, that’s just the way it is.

My husband looks at their bodies. He doesn’t like bigger girls with thick waists or big stomachs. For me a fat girl wouldn’t be a problem. And he doesn’t like women who have had plastic surgery. With his practiced eye he tries to figure it out during the brief introductory meetings. Aside from paying attention to their bodies, he also looks for friendliness and a good sense of humor.

At this point, things start to get interesting. He has to choose someone his wife will find sympathetic. She can’t have giant breasts. He knows his wife has a breast complex. Until I got to know him, I never really thought about the size of my breasts. I thought everything about me was normal tending toward nice. This man was the first one I ever worried about losing. And as a result I’ve gotten myself into some impossible situations. Occasionally when he was out for an evening I would try to find out more about his past. Once I worked up
my courage by drinking and then rifled through his old boxes of photos while cross-eyed drunk. I found a lot of photos of old girlfriends. They went back to when he was eighteen. He’s fifty now, almost as old as my father.

My parents split up when I was five. Unfortunately my father quickly found a new wife. A bad one, at least for us kids. She ruined every moment we had with our father. I missed my father so much, even when I was with him. For me, he represented protection, security, everything. I loved him so much, with his red sports car that my mom always criticized. I loved the fact that he was rich, smart, manly; I loved that he wore socks and sandals and shorts, that he had hair on his back. That’s my image of male beauty. Varicose veins and spider veins and red splotches on the bum. Sometimes I read about those conditions and their causes and whatnot. I find things online. Not with Google. With the green search engine Ecosia—for the environment.

My therapist says I have a bona fide father complex. A lot of older men have benefited from it over the years. My father’s absence during my childhood ensured that my body has provided a steady supply of young flesh to old men. I’m not interested at all in younger men or men my age. Only old, old, old. The older the better. They make me feel secure and desired. And all the old men have my father to thank. But both sides benefit. A lot. Whenever I go to my therapist, my husband always says, “You guys can work on anything, just tell her not to get rid of your father complex. Otherwise you’ll leave me!”

It’s the running gag of our relationship. He’s right. As soon as I’m over my father complex, I won’t need my husband anymore. So the complex can happily accompany me to my death.
I want to take it to the grave. You can say that even if—like me—you’d never want to be buried in a grave. I will definitely not be put into the ground in a Christian cemetery. Over my dead body. In my will I wrote that whoever has to handle it must make sure that I am cremated and then that the ashes are put out with the household garbage on the regular pickup day. Right now that’s Wednesday. There is no way I’m going to fall for buying and maintaining a grave site, letting my corpse leach into the groundwater and all that.

There are a lot of things I’ve completely changed since getting together with my husband. I question myself, my mind, my body, everything. Not sure, though, if it’s because of my husband or not; maybe much more to do with the accident and the resultant therapy.

I regularly wear myself out, though my therapist is trying to train me out of doing that. In going through his private crate of photos, for instance, I had the shattering realization that Georg actually seemed to be into large breasts. And afterward I kept accusing him of this, taking him to task for it. I just can’t keep my mouth shut when I’m in such a crazed state: he should just admit it! I knew it all along! No matter what he said to try to rebuild my confidence, I wouldn’t believe him.

That’s one of the landmines in our relationship—one that I buried in the ground beneath us and can’t dig up and get rid of. There’s no going back at this point. No way to undo it. My tantrums over it were horrible. Especially for him. He was at a total loss. What was I on about, what was wrong with me? He kept asking me, “Why are you trying to prove to me that I can’t find you attractive? That I don’t find you sexy? That I don’t love you? Stop it!” I tried with all my might to turn a good relationship
bad. Always looking for reasons why he didn’t love me instead of listening to him or judging him by his actions—which were always the opposite of the things I told myself I feared.

He has to take all of that into account when he chooses a woman for me. The breasts can’t be too small because it would be too obvious. But definitely not too big, either, so he doesn’t ever fall under suspicion of relapsing. And we don’t just want to sleep with the prostitute. We also want to talk and have a fun time. Meaning we’re very demanding customers. Sometimes Georg comes across a prostitute he finds so nice and funny that it doesn’t matter that she’s not so good-looking or that she does have big breasts or has had plastic surgery. We always try to leave each new brothel as the friendliest couple ever to visit. Fair trade and organic, and a healthy gratuity to boot.

That’s our plan for the next day. When we plan such an exciting outing, my mother always pops into my head and says, “Don’t do it! Why do you put yourself out for your husband? Just admit that’s not for you.” But I can see how happy my husband is. And he thanks me nonstop. And I think to myself,
Wow, I am so easygoing. My mother can’t tell me a thing
. And at some point I get turned on about the plan, too. I would never admit that, though. That’s something my husband just has to pick up on and figure out on his own. It’s the same with him, except that he can say it.

I would like to get past the uptightness that keeps me from being able to articulate my sexual desires. I can’t say what I want. He asks me all the time—he would like to know. In bed. It would be cool for me, too, if I could just ask for whatever I felt like. But I can’t. I’m mute on that topic. I just do whatever he wants to do. And I’m always turned on by whatever he does.
But there’s nothing of my own in there. It’s almost as if I can get turned on only by seeing how much my body and I turn him on. In therapeutic terms that’s called mirroring. I get horny only when I reflect his horniness.

But I’m going to make sure we don’t have sex tonight. We already did it this afternoon. I don’t like to be excessive about it. We’re not twenty anymore. Besides, we need to conserve energy for tomorrow—like an athlete before a big match. And besides, I don’t really like having sex when the kid is home. And besides, and besides, and besides. I always find plenty of arguments against sex and few in favor. A child should never catch his or her parents having sex. Children and sexuality must be strictly divided so as not to overwhelm the child. It’s not like we’re Catholic priests! The child has been on the planet for seven years now, and so far we’ve managed to avoid her catching us at it. Not in our bed, not on the couch, not at night, not during the day. We’re very proud of that. I know people who are traumatized from having accidentally seen their parents having sex. I’d like to spare my daughter that.

As we’re sitting there talking about our brothel visit, I suddenly notice an intense tingling and itching on my butt hole. Is it horniness? Can’t be. I’ve never felt it that way before. Hello, illness. Immediately I think,
Thank you, dear nonexistent God
. And:
Thank you, Mother, for saving me before tomorrow’s outing
. I immediately have a suspicion about what it could be. But only a suspicion, because it’s something I’ve never had as an adult. I take my husband’s laptop—he’s on the brothel’s website, looking at the women who are online, which is pointless, since prostitutes do what they want to. Just because they’re online, in a photo, doesn’t mean they actually work there or that they’ll
be there tomorrow. You have to show up in person and look them in the eyes, no matter how uncomfortable it is. Looking anonymously on the computer is nothing. You just have to keep your eyes open and get through it in person.

I turn the laptop screen toward me so Georg can no longer see the screen. I change the privacy setting on the browser. Then I type “worms in children” into Wikipedia. Just a suspicion. I scan the entire informative entry until I get to the point where a quick test is described: you press the sticky side of a piece of tape to your butt hole and look to see if any tiny, thin, white, squirming worms are stuck to it. Oh God, like a horror film. Please don’t let it be true. I go back to the brothel’s page and click the privacy settings back to normal. Then I put the laptop down on the couch and hop up. We have a drawer in the kitchen where we keep tape, rubber bands, and glue. I go in and grab a roll of clear tape, but somehow I already know what the result is going to be. With this itching, there’s nothing else it can be. I lock myself in the guest bathroom. We painted over all the ugly 1980s tiling in bright yellow, which looks very nice. I particularly like the way it looks where we painted over the grout. Like our relationship, this room will always stay the same—like everything we’ve done in the apartment, in fact. Frau Drescher says that love and relationships must always evolve or else they will wither. That may be true, in which case I’ll change for the sake of the relationship—but I’ll still never change anything in the apartment.

Since the accident I’m rigidly opposed to change. Most people change things because they get tired of them. That’s why they watch cop shows, too. But as a result of what happened to our family, I feel old and troubled, and I just want peace and
quiet—and no change. Except maybe having sex with someone new. But otherwise everything can stay just as it is. Our apartment and our relationship are set up for eternity—or at least for life.

I sit on the toilet and pee first. Ever since I’ve been conscious of peeing, I pee as loudly as possible. I don’t like women who try to pee quietly. I read a book once as a kid where a man described how much it turned him on when he overheard the loud splashing and tinkling of his sweetheart peeing. It’s possible that my husband feels the same way. Though I’d never talk to him about it, because then the spell would be broken. Piss as loudly as possible, crap as quietly as possible. Run the water so he can’t hear anything when I’m crapping. And air the place out afterward so he doesn’t smell anything. Which means I never really live here. I always think of how I can be appealing to Georg. I want to be with him forever. Which means there’s never a chance to let down my guard and feel comfortable at home. That would be the ugliest form of letting myself go.

I’m quickly finished with my loud pee—because I didn’t really have to go—and pat myself dry. I used to often hurt my labia because I wiped too hard. I don’t do that these days. In part because I learned in therapy to be nicer to myself—and also to my labia. But I haven’t mastered it in all areas of life.

After I’ve nicely wiped, it’s time for the tape test. I wrap a strip of tape three times around my fingers, with the sticky side facing out, rip it partway through with my teeth, and then rip it free from the dispenser with my fingers. I learned this move from my mother. As a child, I saw her do it often. She did a lot of things with her mouth. It made a big impression on me as a child. I often saw her with a mouthful of thumbtacks, or up
a ladder with a mouthful of nails. And I would think,
I want to be like that, too
. And it worked. Unfortunately I became too much like my mother. It’s horrible being like her. She’s a very unhappy, aggressive woman, and now, so am I. Bad genes and a bad role model.

When I had to tell my family that I never wanted to see my father or mother again, they were all shocked. Which is normal. Particularly those on my mother’s side—they lectured me about how I should think it over again. I told them that I had already thought about it a lot and always came to the same conclusion: my life would be better without my parents. They needed to be punished for their conduct—forever. They didn’t deserve children. First and foremost they didn’t deserve to have my dead brother as their child. The poor kid—all that he had to go through! He missed his father so much, far more than I did. And because my dear brother is dead, the case against my parents is intolerably strong. For his sake I must keep the flame burning.