Esme closed his file. She had known Kay was about to split for the Helix but could not have known it would happen this fast. Perfect timing. She looked at a map of Helix communities and confirmed that Pack 7, Richmond, was the closest to his house. Kay was probably there by now. So, would Olgo go out to Cincinnati and do whatever it took to shut down the Helix? Absolutely. Would he bother questioning why him and not some Navy Seal trained for this purpose? Not at all.
It was after one in the morning, and Esme was spent. She nearly called it a day, because why bother with Bruce? He was proving the easiest of the four. Still, she got in bed and watched him from there.
She wrote: All quiet on the surveillance front except for Bruce Bollinger, who by 0149 hrs had vomited so many times, there was a crescent dented into his forehead from the toilet seat. He sat on the tile, legs splayed, wearing pajama bottoms and a T-shirt. He said: Benny, Jack, Lothar, Nick. They had not settled on a name for his son, their son, though earlier today Rita had said, Che, how about Che? to which Bruce had said, Yeah? How about Santa. It’ll give him a leg up come winter. And so another fight, more tears, and a foreboding sense that already they were bad parents because probably the baby could hear them, was being exposed early to this soundtrack of wrath, and would, years later in therapy, hold these notes responsible for some of his blues.
Bruce looked at his reflection in the toilet bowl. His throat burned; his nose ran. He wrung a tube of Aquafresh, rubbed the paste on his teeth, and made for the couch. As part of the downsizing of their lives from comfortable to poor, they had disconnected their cable service. This meant, in general, two things: One, in the hour it would take Bruce to stream thirty seconds of porn using dial-up, the urge to touch himself would have long since passed, so that he had not experienced anything close to pleasure in this department for nearly five months. Two: since what cable they did have was pirated, you never knew what channels were going to come in, which taxied Bruce into new areas of entertainment, among them, City Drive Live, which aired a traffic feed from locations all over D.C. During the day: blah. But at night: my God. A camera trained on the GW Parkway southbound, the footage gritty and dark, the cars speeding by, but staggered, because how many cars sped down the GW at 2 a.m.? Watching this stuff was like pawning the feel and hue and smell of your life for scenes of the forlorn. Bruce loved it.
From the bedroom, his wife was calling. He had his thoughts. Was an alcoholic blackout advisable under the circumstances? You couldn’t be blamed for negligence if you were blacked out. He draped a blanket over his shoulders. It was possible Rita had stopped paying the heating bill.
“What is it, honey?” He stood inside the doorway to their room. The longer he slept on the couch, the more he felt the trespass of his return.
“Just thinking,” she said. “Couldn’t sleep.”
He approached the bed slowly. Among the blankets and throw pillows, hers was still the most prominent stuffing there.
“You been sick?” she said.
He nodded, though she still faced the wall. This gave him the chance to step in further. Closer, one toe at a time. Could he really see his own breath? He shivered and looked at his wife, could almost feel her breasts and stomach, the pack of her thighs. Under those covers was a pound of flesh. And so, though the timing was awful, his blood began to jazz like seltzer. Neurons firing, he came to life.
He sidled along the wall undetected. The flap of his pajama bottoms turned him loose. He closed in on the edge of the bed but stepped on a comb that skidded across the carpet. He froze, heart stopped. She lifted her head, nose in the air. The draft in the apartment put him at a disadvantage, upwind. Desire has a whiff; if she caught on, forget it. She lowered her head. Snuggled.
He scanned the terrain of blankets for a point of entry and settled on a tiered approach, peeling back one layer of blanket at a time.
“Get me my lotion?” Rita said, and he all but reared as the nape of the duvet fell from his hand. Lotion? She said lotion! And like that, he was fifteen years old. Wanting to get over on his wife and wresting from language in one context arousal in another. Could he assist in the application of this slippery, thick, jerk-off lotion?
He watched her cream her palms and forearms, and he waited. She might say: I can’t reach this spot, can you help? Or: I need some here and here. And if in the process he dragged the tip of his penis down her spine — an accident, he’d swear — it would be enough to get him off later, dial-up be damned.
He waited and watched, but still no orders, and so he was all but resigned when she said, “Baby, come here,” followed by the unthinkable gesture of her turning over to look at him. He was backlit; there was no way she wouldn’t see his condition, and yet he still tried to hide it. She patted the mattress. What were the odds? So, no, he would not be stupid about this. Would not mistake come hither for meow, would instead sit on the bed and regard the impudence of his erection with pity.
She touched his hand and said, “You’re freezing!”
He got under the covers, actively trying to leach the excitement from his body. He knew Rita; she’d be appalled. She was pregnant and bedridden and no part of her was unfurling to accommodate his needs. Not tonight, not any night soon, not even for weeks or months after the baby was born. And anyone who thought otherwise was not just insensitive but sadistic, because this arousal did not affirm his wife’s hotness blazed through the more immediate evidence that she’d lost her sex appeal so much as furnish her sense — her fear — that she’d married an asshole.
He stared at the rice-paper shade overhead and considered what disposable savings he and Rita would need to justify purchase of a replacement shade, something stained glass or Tiffany-like, and how they might never accede to this position of wealth, and where normally such thoughts deflated his courage to live, never mind a hard-on, tonight they roused him up the gallows. He was on his back with his arms fastened to his side. Entombed. Safe. Do. Not. Move.
“Honey,” she said, and she scooted for him so that her kneecaps pressed into his upper thigh and her hand fell atop his chest. “Honey, I was thinking—”
Oh, to hell with it: he reverted to strategies that had groped at him through high school. He sat up to scratch his foot so that her hand rappelled down his chest and landed in the flesh well between his hip and navel. Maybe the landscaping of their bodies would give her ideas where before she had none.
She laughed. “Feels like a war in your belly,” she said, and she pinched the mini-donuts tubed about his waist.
“Thanks,” he said, but thought: A little to the left. Just a little!
“So, anyway, I was thinking,” she said. “About the baby? What if we named him after someone I kind of admire?”
She was breathing on his shoulder, and the heat collected in his armpits. Her finger traced a halo around his belly button. “Someone he can be proud of his whole life.”
Bruce tried not to move — his fists were tight — and yet there it was, his pelvis thrusting for her, gently and without commitment, but thrusting all the same while he watched in horror and waited for the tirade that was, instead, his wife vouchsafing her thighs, lathered in cream. He fit himself between them and smiled like an ape.
“Are you listening?” she said.
He was, he was! He was even going to climax with this name on her lips, their boy’s name, Bruce Jr., because all his life, secretly, he’d wanted to have his own father’s name — Henry — and felt this keenly and always in the presence of his younger brother, the doctor brother, the most renowned hematologist in the country brother, Dr. Henry Bollinger II. And Rita knew this — in the courtship phase of releasing secrets you’d never told anyone else, he had told her — and now, suddenly, his beloved wife was making good on what she knew. Bruce Jr.! His baby boy. And this despite everything he had done. She was a marvel, he was a cad, and from this incoherence grew the tension that stormed out of his body and all over her legs, the sheets, and the duvet.