Fiona Maazel - Woke Up Lonely

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.

He was panting so loud, he didn’t hear her at first. “The Helix,” she said. “They’re amazing. And the guy who started it?” She reached for a tissue and plucked the semen off her quad. “He’s a genius. So that’s what I want. They say he’s nicknamed Lo. I think it’s cute. So it’s settled, okay?”

“What?” Bruce said, though he was laughing. “Are you kidding?” And he laughed harder. “The Helix? ”

“Stop laughing!” she said.

“What? I can’t hear you.” He was laughing so hard, the piss romped through his pipes and the brandy lees down his colon, so that unless he got to the bathroom now, the rain of his ejaculate would be but prelude to something much worse. And so he got up not having said yea or nay, so that Rita began to holler after him: “Thurlow! I want to name the baby after THURLOW DAN!” at which point, Esme, who had fallen asleep on the job, woke up with a start, certain she’d been wandering the world in dream and calling his name. Thurlow, where are you? Thurlow, I miss you. Wait for me, I’m trying.

Team ARDOR: Ready, willing, able.

A municipal building two miles from the Capitol. A conference room with window, wall, and two-way mirror. Around a table, four Department of the Interior employees who’d been summoned from their place of work and given roast beef sandwiches with extra mayo. Standing up: some guy who seemed distantly familiar to Ned and Bruce, but not enough to distract from the oddity and thrill of what he was offering, which was, in the main: hope.

Ned stared out the window, looked up at the sky. In 1986, the USSR seeded the clouds above Chernobyl so that they would deposit their radioactive load on the peasants of Belarus instead of on the cognoscenti of Moscow. And it worked. The Soviets had engineered the weather to kill people. The Chinese, too, were obsessed with the weather. With rainmaking to forfend drought. But in all cases, for good or evil, these people were frosting the sky and changing the world. It was science at its most heretical. Do it right, and you could conjure a storm that was godlike in its rage, steeped in the punitive grammar of the Bible. Do it right, and you could show the heavens who was boss. And this mattered to Ned, since his fear of powerlessness had always aspirated whatever went sloshing about his heart, so that he couldn’t date the same woman more than a few weeks, couldn’t acquire any real friends, couldn’t lock down a single feeling and make it last. But not for long. Cloud seeding and weather modification. It was why he’d been hired, or so he’d been told, and though studying cloud cover in Cincinnati seemed like a dubious application of his talent, it was still a chance to prove he could impose his will on the big things. Find his sister and be happy. Cincinnati, tallyho.