Pictures of Houses with Water Damage: Stories (7 page)

She asked if I’d meet her at the park.

When I saw her, I embraced her, kissed her as if one of us had been on a tour of duty and now returned. She was distant, as if she didn’t want me to be close. I couldn’t blame her. She looked good, in a long skirt and blazer; thin now, with no baby in her stomach.

The baby, a boy, was in a carriage, asleep. I sat down with the mother and her child on a park bench.

“I’m sorry I didn’t keep in touch,” she said.

“It's okay.”

“Things,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

She asked how I’d been and I gave her a smile. I couldn’t help myself, I reached to kiss her, but I kissed her cheek, and ran my tongue to her neck, then moved away.

“That's nice,” she said. “I like that.”

I asked how things were going with her husband.

“Same as always,” she said, “but now we’re parents.”

“Does he still hit you?” I asked.

“Not as much,” she said, “but sometimes I wish he would.”

“Why?”

“I like it,” she told me, looking at me with her blue eyes. “I like it because I like to feel alive.”

“We’re alive,” I said, looking at the carriage.

“Sometimes I don’t feel like it,” she said. “That's why I have affairs. But it's not so easy now because I have this baby to look after. You were the only one who liked me when I was pregnant, so I didn’t think you’d mind.”

I took her hand and said I still wanted her and would always want her.

She looked at the sky and said, “Oh my, oh.”

I peered in on her baby boy and asked, “Does he resemble his father?”

She said, “No.”

She added, “I’ve been wondering if this is really my husband's kid.”

I looked at her.

She said, “It could be one of several others. I told you that you weren’t the only affair. I’m not so sure who—”

I asked, “How many?”

She said, “Does it matter?”

I leaned back on the bench.

She said, “Now you don’t want me.”

“Maybe the baby is mine,” I said.

“Impossible,” she said. “We didn’t know each other until—”

“It should be mine,” I said.

“He, he's a he.”

“He should be mine,” I said. “I would like that.”

“I’d like that, too,” she said.

We listened to kids playing in the park, cars driving by.

She said, “Four.”

I said, “What?”

She said, “I had brief affairs with four other men around the same time, so any of them could be the father, but maybe he's my husband's baby after all. I don’t know.”

I said, “Helen.”

I moved close to her.

“Take me home with you,” she said.

“With the baby?”

“Do you mind?”

“No,” I said.

“I can only stay awhile,” she said.

I held her. There were tears on my chest.

“I’m not bad,” she murmured. I just can’t help myself. I find men attractive and I like sex so much and I can’t help the things I feel, the things I do.”

I told her it was okay.

“The fruit,” she whispered, “the tree—”

“What?” I said.

“The garden,” she said.

The night my daughter is born, I spend it with a hooker and her deranged ex-boyfriend.

In the delivery room: I see it happen, I see my daughter come out of my wife and it is the most beautiful, smelly, disgusting, strange, wonderful, perverse thing I have ever been witness to. I’m not sure what smells or looks queerer: my purple bloody infant or the afterbirth that follows, which seems like something out of a science-fiction movie.

My wife sleeps. I pace. Don’t know what to do.

Look in on my baby girl in the newborn nursery. Don’t know what to do. She looks like a stranger to me.

Go out for a drive. My body: it shakes. Have no friends. We have just moved into this town where I have a new job at the university as a lecturer in 19
^th
century British literature. So I have no one to celebrate with. A new father should be passing out cigars, having drinks with his guy friends. Feel like something is missing in my life.

I drive past a stripper bar.

You will not believe what happens to me, but does it matter? It only matters that I know what happens.

Arrive at 11 P.M. A slow night. There are more dancers than customers—ten of them, six of us. Men come and go and I know this is a business that operates in waves.

A young woman with dark hair and brown skin, early 20s, immediately sits next to me. She asks if I would be kind enough to buy her a drink. I say sure. She says, “Can I have a double?” Why not. It costs $10. My beer: $5.

“You’re good looking,” she says.

“Thanks. You tell that to all the guys.”

“I mean it. Honestly, we don’t get many good-looking men in here. Take a look.”

I look at all the other men—one in a wheelchair, the others in their 50s-60s, one in a plumber’s shirt, all overweight. Two of them, however, sit in a booth with five dancers. They are all drinking.

“You look like trouble,” my dancer says.

“I’m not.”

“I mean, like you could get me into trouble.”

“I won’t.”

“My name is Angelfood. Would you like a couch dance?”

“Not yet.”

She says couch dances range $20-40 per song, depending on the “quality” of the dance.

“The sign out front says ‘do not touch the dancers.’”

She grabs my hand and puts it on her left breast. “Yeah, well, that doesn’t mean we can’t touch you.”

Physically, I am not attracted to Angelfood; she is too top heavy for my personal preference, but I do like her youth and innocence, faked or real. I buy a couch dance from her. She asks for the $20 upfront. She is indeed new; she is not very good at this act—or not as good as I am used to, as I expect. Here is a case where I apply symbolic interaction to a couch dance: the meaning it has for me, how I interpret her dancing and react to it. Angelfood goes through three positions of dancing: in my lap, her back facing me; straddling me, allowing my face between her breasts; standing up, her back to me, her rear end close to my face. She goes through these motions several times, mechanically, and I do not respond in a positive way. When the song is over, she asks if I want another. I shake my head. She asks for a tip. I give her $5. She asks if she can sit with me, if I would buy her another drink. “I won’t be offended if you say no or want to sit with someone else,” she says. I tell her I want to mingle.

Avoid other dancers sitting by moving from table to table, watching the stage show. There are always two women on at the same time, each at either end of the stage, by the pole.

A large group of young women, all blonde, walk in. They are from a bachelorette party, or a sorority. They are slumming. They look at the dancers and turn up their noses.

A dancer on stage interests me. She has the body type I’m attracted to; her hair wildly sticks out, and she looks angry. Go to the edge of the stage and hold out three $1 bills. She allows me to place them in the front of her g-string, allows me to touch what little pubic hair she has. She presses her breasts into my face and goes, “Oops.” She grabs one of my hands and puts it on her rear end. “How about a dance later?” she says.

She joins me. Buy her a double drink—vodka and Red Bull. Says her name is Brianna, “but my real name is Cheryl,” she lies. I know how dancers use the “this is my real name” tactic as manufactured intimacy, to make a customer “feel” as if he is getting something special, a sneak peak into her secret life. I don’t tell her I know all the tricks because I have dated exotic dancers, lived with one for nine months and another for three.

She says she is a single mother, has two sons—one is seven months, the other is three years old. “My little men,” she says proudly.

“You look pretty good for having given birth seven months ago,” I say.

She seems to blush. “Thanks. I work out.”

Both her children have different fathers. She is twenty-three. Like Anglefood, she wants to go to college in the near future. “This is a college town,” I say.

“I’ll go to IVT first,” she says, which is Indiana Valley Tech, “then transfer to IU or Purdue—or as I call it, Purdon’t.”

I gesture to the group of sorority girls. “What’s their story?”

She shrugs. “Who knows, who cares. College bitches, lesbians, anthropologists.”

“Really?”

“We get people who come in here and study us from the school.”

The father of her youngest is in jail. “I hope he stays there,” she says, “he’s bad news. He was on meth. Always stole money from me. He wanted to knock me up to keep me, so I could make money for him here. Then he got busted. It’s for the best.”

I don’t ask her why she stayed with a man who took her money.

Brianna yells at the group of blonde girls, “Hey, why don’t some of you cuties get up and show us what you got. C’mon, get on stage.”

“Gross,” one of them says.

They just stare at Brianna like they can’t believe she’s real.

“Cunts,” she says, and to me: “Let’s go to the couches. I promise you it will be good, better than you expect. I want to give these bitches a real show.”

Her couch dance is a world of difference than Angelfood’s. Brianna lets me touch her anywhere I want, lets me fondle and caress her small breasts. She kisses me on the lips. She puts her hand between her legs and tells me to rub. She stands on the couch and puts my face into her crotch. She gets on her knees, touches me between the legs. “No underwear!” she says.

“Not tonight.”

“Going commando,” she says. She has my penis in her hand; my khaki pants the only thing between our flesh. She puts it in her mouth, licking my pants. I have never had a dancer in the states do this; dancers in Tijuana do it all the time, but they all double as prostitutes as well.

Another dancer sees Brianna do this and says, “Oh, you naughty thing!”

“Hey,” says Brianna, “at least I don’t take it out and suck it like some do.”

“Guilty!”

“Really?” I say.

“You can get a blowjob if you want,” she says quietly, and then in my ear: “Not here, but in the back, if you want.”

Her car is in back; a small, beat-up car. We sit in it. I hand Brianna two $20 bills.

You have to understand something—my wife used to give me great blowjobs when we were dating but has not put my penis in her mouth in four years. I forgot how wonderful blowjobs are until Brianna put my penis in her mouth and I realized what I had been missing these past four years.

Stay in the club and watch Brianna and the other women until it is closing time. Take some money out of the convenient on-site ATM machine. Brianna gives me two more couch dances. She asks what I am doing for the rest of the night—or morning. “Nothing.”

“Wanna come to my place and…”

I ask how much.

“$200 an hour,” she says.

Follow Brianna’s car to her apartment, three miles away. She takes my hand as we go inside.

Her boyfriend is waiting inside. He smokes crack from a crack pipe.

“It’s about time,” he says.

“What are you doing,” she says, “you’re not supposed to be here.”

“I’m home,” he says.

“This is not your home,” she says.

Start to back away. I want out.

“Who is this?” he says, looking at me, exhaling crack. “No one,” she says; “a friend.”

“A friendly friend,” he says; “more like a trick. A trick.”

“None of your,” she starts to say.

“You like fucking whores?” he asks me.

She screams. She jumps toward him and attacks him. She scratches his face. He punches her in the stomach. There is blood.

Start to leave and then they both attack me and hold me down on the floor. The boyfriend is on my back.

“Where do you think you’re going, John?” the boyfriend says to me.

Brianna smokes some crack. “Trick,” she says, “trick with a little dick.”

“She’s spoiled,” the boyfriend goes, “I’m a thick 11 inches.”

They take all the money from my wallet, demand the PIN for my ATM. At first I am not going to give them that, until the boyfriend holds a knife to my neck. Give him the wrong PIN. Fuck these two.

There is something else I have to endure with a knife to my neck. The boyfriend goes, “So you came here to get laid, I don’t want you to leave unlaid and unhappy,” and pulls my pants down and sodomizes me.

Brianna cheers him on as he does this, smoking crack; she sits there smoking and watches her boyfriend fuck me in the ass.

They take my car keys, say I have to walk. Walk funny; a man raped me with an 11-inch penis, anyone would walk funny.

Stumbled into the street and get hit by an oncoming truck.

The next thing I know, I’m in the hospital ICU, the same hospital where my wife and new daughter are on another floor.

Everything I just told you is a lie. None of it happened. It’s a fantasy I have when I drive by the stripper bar. When I take a U-turn to go to that bar, I slam into a speeding truck. It’s a bad accident. The next thing I know, I am in the hospital ICU, the same hospital where my wife and new daughter are on another floor.

That story is also a lie. It sounds good, though. Both stories have a moral base—you’re a family man, you have no business in a stripper bar, only bad things will happen to men who cheat.

I’m not sure this newborn baby girl is mine. I look at her from the other side of the glass partition and she does not look like me. I have thought for some time that my wife was cheating, with more than one man, maybe with a friend. This is some other man’s child.