David Wallace - Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

This immature, inexperienced, emotionally labile young wife lay alone in their bed very late on the night of their third wedding anniversary. The husband, whose career was high-stress and caused insomnia and frequent awakenings, had arisen and gone into the master bathroom and then downstairs to his study, then later she had heard the sound of his car. The Dildo, which she kept hidden at the bottom of her sachet drawer, was so inhuman and impersonal and tasted so horrid that she had to all but force herself to practice with it. Sometimes he drove to his office in the middle of the night to check the overseas markets in more depth — trade never ceased somewhere in the world’s many currencies. More and more often she lay awake in bed and worried. She had become woozy at their special anniversary dinner and had nearly spoiled their evening together. Sometimes, when she had him in her mouth, she became almost overwhelmed with fear that the husband wasn’t enjoying it, and would have an over-whelming desire to bring him to his sexual climax A.S.A.P. in order to have some kind of selfish ‘proof’ that he enjoyed being in her mouth, and would sometimes forget herself and the techniques she had practiced and begin bobbing her head almost frantically and moving her fist frantically up and down his thingie, sometimes actually sucking at his thingie’s little hole, exerting actual suction, and she worried that she chafed or bent or hurt him when she did this. She worried that the husband could unconsciously sense her anxiety about whether he enjoyed having his thingie in her mouth and that it actually was this that prevented him from enjoying oral sex together as much as she enjoyed it. Sometimes she berated herself for her insecurities — the husband was under enough stress already, due to his career. She felt that her fear was selfish, and worried that the husband could sense her fear and selfishness and that this drove a wedge into their intimacy together. There was also the riyal to be checked at night, the dirham, the Burmese kyat. Australia used the dollar but it was a different dollar and had to be monitored. Taiwan, Singapore, Zimbabwe, Liberia, New Zealand: all deployed dollars of fluctuant value. The determinants of the ever-changing status of the yen were very complex. The husband’s promotion had resulted in the new career title Stochastic Currency Analyst; his business cards and stationery all included the title. There were complex equations. The husband’s mastery of the computer’s financial programs and currency software were already legendary at the firm, a colleague had told her during a party while the husband was using the bathroom again.

She worried that whatever the problem with her was, it felt impossible to sort out rationally in her mind to any true degree. There was no way to talk about it with him — there was no way the wife could think of to even start such a conversation. She would sometimes clear her throat in the special way that meant she had something on her mind, but then her mind froze. If she asked him whether there was anything wrong with her, he would believe she was asking for reassurance and instantly would reassure her — she knew him. His professional specialty was the yen, but other currencies impacted the yen and had to be continually analyzed. Hong Kong’s dollar was also different and impacted the status of the yen. Sometimes at night she worried she might be crazy. She had ruined a previous intimate relationship with irrational feelings and fears, she knew. Almost in spite of herself, she later returned to the same Adult World store and bought an X-rated videotape, storing it in its retail box in the same hiding place as the Dildo, determined to study and compare the sex techniques of the women in the video. Sometimes, when he was asleep on his side at night, the wife would arise and walk around to the other side of the bed and kneel on the floor and watch the husband in the dim glow of their nightlight, study his sleeping face, as if hoping to discover there some unspoken thing that would help her stop worrying and feel more sure that their sexlife together pleased him as much as it pleased her. The X-rated videotape had explicit color photos of women giving their partners oral sex right there on the box. Stochastic meant random or conjectural or containing numerous variables that all had to be monitored closely; the husband joked sometimes that it really meant getting paid to drive yourself crazy.

Adult World, which had one side of marital aids and three sides of X-rated features, as well as a small dark hall leading to something else in the rear and a monitor playing an explicit X-rated scene right there above the cash register, smelled horrid in a way that reminded the wife of absolutely nothing else in her life experience. She later wrapped the Dildo in several plastic bags and put it out in the trash on the night before Trash Day. The only significant thing she felt she learned from studying the videotape was that the men often seemed to like to look down at the women when the women had them in their mouth and see their thingie going in and out of the woman’s mouth. She believed that this might very well explain the husband’s abdominal muscles tensing when she took him in her mouth — it could be him straining to raise up slightly to see it — and she began to debate with herself whether her hair might be too long to allow him to see his thingie go in and out of her mouth during oral sex, and began to debate whether or not to get her hair cut short. She was relieved that she had no worries about being less attractive or sexual than the actresses in the X-rated videotape: these women had gross measurements and obvious implants (as well as their own share of slight asymmetries, she noted), as well as dyed, bleached, and badly damaged hair that didn’t look touchable or strokable at all. Most notably, the women’s eyes were empty and hard — you could just tell they weren’t experiencing any intimacy or pleasure and didn’t care if their partners were pleased.

Sometimes the husband would arise at night and use the master bathroom and then go out to his workshop off the garage and try to unwind for an hour or two with his hobby of furniture refinishing.

Adult World was all the way out on the other side of town, in a tacky district of fast food and auto dealerships off the expressway; neither time she had hurried out of the parking lot did the young wife see any cars she ever recognized. The husband had explained before their wedding that he had slept in clean briefs and a T-shirt ever since he was a child — he was simply not comfortable sleeping in the nude. She had recurring bad dreams, and he would hold her and speak reassuringly until she was able to get back to sleep. The stakes of the Foreign Currency Game were high, and his study downstairs remained locked when not in use. She began to consider psychotherapy.

Insomnia actually referred not to difficulty falling asleep but to early and irrevocable awakening, he had explained.

Not once in the first three-and-a-half years of their marriage together did she ask the husband why his thingie was hurt or sore, or what she might do differently, or what the cause was. It simply felt impossible to do this. (The memory of this paralyzed feeling would astound her later in life, when she was a very different person.) Asleep, her husband sometimes looked to her like a child on its side sleeping, curled all tightly into itself, a fist to its face, the face flushed and its expression so concentrated it looked almost angry. She would kneel next to the bed at a slight angle to the husband so that the weak light of the baseboard’s nightlight fell onto his face and watch his face and worry about why, irrationally, it felt impossible to simply ask him. She had no idea why he put up with her or what he saw in her. She loved him very much.