But that’s not the only thing I’m talking about. Also I’m talking about his eyes. Twin mirrors reflecting me back at myself. What I’ve found extra beautiful these past months is when I can see myself in his eyes and then he blinks his lashless lids (every four seconds, programmed for verisimilitude) and I can’t see myself and then he opens his eyes and I can see myself again.
And his arms. I’m talking about his arms. His hands. The sculpted plastic musculature, right down to the thick, visible veins running up his forearms. This plastic — it’s not plastic as I’ve ever known it — there’s something soft about it — so terrifically smooth — better than skin.
Afterward he holds me from behind, my bum pressed against the cool washboard of his stomach, and then if it happens to me again I can simply slide right back onto his cock. Let me just say: They must have interviewed hundreds of focus groups. They must have had teams of biologists. They got it so, so, so right. Down to the conversation. There’s even something delightful about washing his penis with a sponge.
“Do you love fucking me?” I might say.
“I love fucking you,” he’s programmed to reply in his low, flat voice.
“Do you want to come over here?” I’ll say.
“I want to come over here,” he’ll reply.
“I’m not tired,” I’ll say.
“You are not tired?” he’ll ask.
“Let me take a shower first,” I’ll say.
“Let you take a shower first?” he’ll ask.
MyMan is first generation (yes, I paid an arm and a leg, but I got two arms and two legs, as I like to say to my friends). Things will surely change, and improve, in later generations, and I can’t deny that I’ll probably be first in line to upgrade to a newer, better MyMan.
However: there’s something about my MyMan. A few days ago, a malfunction surfaced; if I said “Do you love fucking me?” he’d reply, “You have to go to the bathroom?” still reacting to my previous statement. After I recovered from the shock and the uncanniness, I was touched. I didn’t even pull out the owner’s manual.
“I’m going to have breakfast now,” I might say, and he’d say, “Let’s go to sleep,” and then at night, when I told him, “I had such a tiring day at work,” he’d ask, “You are going to have breakfast now?”
The result was that I began to perceive a sense of will pulsing through his statements. I went out to buy him some clothes, designer jeans and cashmere, but MyMan is not proportioned for human clothing — is decidedly not suited to wearing anything at all. The jeans ended short on his long legs, his biceps strained the cashmere sweater’s seams, not to mention certain insurmountable problems at the fly, which of course had to remain unzipped.
I laughed at him.
“This isn’t really working, is it?” I said.
“You got me some clothes?” he said, stuck a few responses back.
“You’re too handsome for clothes!” I told him, and it’s true. His head bald, perfect, above flawless features, Yul Brynner times a hundred.
“I would like to try them on,” he said.
“You crack me up, really you do,” I told him, already imagining the statements being reflected back at me sometime soon. I am too handsome for clothes? I crack you up, really I do?
“The cashmere first?” he inquired.
Sitting him down on the bed, yanking the jeans off him, I reminded myself that I don’t need what others need: I don’t need to stroll down a street or beach holding hands, making strangers envious of what a happy handsome well-matched couple I’m half of. I’ve done all that already, folks. Live with someone long enough and you’ll start to hate yourself. I loved every man I ever divorced. It’s just too hard to be good all the time, to keep up with someone else’s moods and dysfunctions.
But you know what was easy, super easy? Giving MyMan a second or two of a blow job when he was lying there, naked again. He’d never grab the back of my head and shove it deeper onto his dick. He’d never groan when I stopped.
You’re kind of … obsessed, my friends like to say, pressing their molars together in that ungenerous way, slurping flaxseed and pineapple smoothies, clutching their big maroon leather purses. You could do so much better, they tell me. You’re so skinny, your skin is practically golden, no one would ever guess you’re over forty, you make a shitload of money and everyone wants a piece of you, plus you look like a fucking million bucks in that neon bikini. You’re wasting your glamour years on that MyMan.
Often when they think I’m laughing with them, I’m actually laughing at them. Someday maybe they’ll find their own solutions. Or, more likely, maybe not.
What I need: a blue man, a white apartment, a row of palm trees, meditation in the morning and evening preceded and followed and preceded and followed by orgasm.
But anyway. All of the above is just to say that right now I’m stuck in a preposterous moment: Some minutes ago I awoke from a sensual dream (the devil licked liquor from the impression between my breasts while on the sand slowly moving sphinxes circled a syringe), ready yet again for MyMan, reaching over to turn him on (pun intended), only to discover that his smooth plastic form was no longer there cupping me from behind. Worried, inordinately worried, about him, about my investment in him, I rushed out of bed, naked and panicking, ran down the long white hallway; there he was, sitting on one of the high white stools at the glossy white kitchen counter, emitting from somewhere deep inside the soft whir of malfunction, elbows on the counter, head drooping downward in this defeated way, looking for all the world like a tired husband.
So here we are — but am I going, hey, where’s the box, can this MyMan be returned, where the hell did I put the receipt? Am I righteous with indignation that the verbal mishaps were indeed indicative of deeper problems with this particular MyMan? Do I feel as though I’ve been saddled with a lemon?
Poor creature. He can’t deliver any line I haven’t fed him.
“Are you sad?” I can’t resist saying, though I know how he’ll respond to that, just as I know how he’ll respond when I say, “Are you okay?” “Is something wrong?” “Don’t worry.”
I should return him, I know I should, and I bet I will; I’ve always stood up for myself as a consumer.
Yet here we are, side by side on sleek stools in the night. Slowly, wearily, he raises his head (most human of gestures, I’m suddenly realizing), and it strikes me that all along his slight mysterious smile has in fact been a grimace, and when I look at his eyes I’m surprised to see that (due, I suppose, to the darkness of the night) they no longer appear to be mirrors reflecting me; instead, they’re black walls blocking me from his interior.
“I am coming,” he says eventually, “I am sad. I am okay.”
Then he does something that’s outside of any setting I read about in the owner’s manuaclass="underline" he lets the lower part of his right arm fall down across the cool countertop, his palm upward and his fingers splayed.
“Something is wrong,” he says. “Don’t worry?”
And what I think to myself is: Sheesh. What I think to myself is: Here we go again. Even things with perfect cocks have terrible problems. Even nuns fall in love.
The Courage Solution
When my husband joins me in bed at two in the morning — after I’ve spent the evening alone, mashing potatoes, glazing carrots, flipping through books about how to improve chances of conception (avoid everything that helps you have fun in this life) — I pretend I’m still asleep as he tells the story of the beautiful young drunk woman who was sitting across from him on the subway, how she first complimented his shoelaces and second told him he was cute and third stood up and fourth pushed his head hard against the plastic wall and fifth kissed him on the mouth and sixth wrote something on the back of a receipt and seventh crumpled it up and eighth threw it at him: I love you. M. XXX–XXX–XXXX.