Alissa Nutting - Tampa

“Thank you for letting me sit in,” I said to them afterward, beaming. “I think there’s been improvement from a few weeks ago?” During my first observation session, one of the students had successfully used an oversized safety pin to pierce his own septum but hadn’t counted on the prolific blood loss. He’d held the area and waited quietly until most of his hand and lower arm were covered, at which point he’d raised his other hand and asked, in a muffled voice, if he could please use the bathroom; the classroom had turned into an assault of screams and cell phone pictures when he walked from the room dripping a long trail of micro-splatter. As a result, Janet and Mrs. Pachenko had to fill out bloodborne pathogen exposure paperwork and hold classes in the auditorium for the rest of the day as a janitor scoured the boy’s desk and the classroom floor with bleach. Although I had to make brief mention of the incident, I tried to minimize references to leaked bodily fluids and spun the event as follows: Mrs. Feinlog fosters an environment of openness where students feel free to express themselves artistically .

While things at school continued running smoothly, in the first few weeks after my affair with Jack began, Ford seemed to sense my further mental departure. Desiring shared bonding, he insisted upon a weekend double date with Bill and Shelley, Ford’s partner and his wife, at the bowling alley. “You need to get out once in a while and have some fun,” Ford insisted. “Otherwise you’ll go stir-crazy.”

The evening was not a success. I found it hard to focus; the place was awash with teenagers. In the alley next to us, several young boys and girls wearing glow-stick necklaces began tossing lightweight balls granny-style through their legs. I couldn’t help but find watching them preferential to the stolid conversation my own party was having. Several times during the evening, I’d snap out of a fantasy—a pantsless Jack standing spread-eagle atop the lane’s gleaming wooden floors, repeatedly bending over and swinging the bowling ball between his knees, his testicles coming alive with motion when he finally stood and released the ball toward the pins—only to find that Ford and the others were waiting on me to comment. I hadn’t even heard the question.

Displeased, Ford drained pitcher after pitcher of beer. When the festivities reached their natural conclusion, he was drunk and clingy; he stank of stale adult sweat and kept trying to kiss me on the mouth, becoming increasingly irate each time I pushed him off. By the time we called it a night and got into the car he was ready to explode.

“What’s with you? You hardly even spoke to Shelley. You think you’re too good to hang out with normal-looking people or something?” By this I could only imagine that Ford was referring to Shelley’s unfortunate bulb-tipped nose.

“I have nothing in common with her. I wasn’t impolite.” Looking over at him, I kept having the disquieting thought that Jack had somehow been sitting in the passenger seat of my car waiting for me and Ford had just climbed in and sat right on top of him. I feared that Jack was now writhing unseen beneath Ford’s large back and limbs, being suffocated as we drove.

“You seemed like a stuck-up bitch,” he said. He spoke very slowly, as though the words were being sent to him through an earpiece and he was repeating what he’d heard on time delay. “You have to realize that’s what people will think of you if you don’t act friendlier.” His head rolled down and to the side and then raised again, recharged by its own kinetic movements. “And what do you mean you have nothing in common? She teaches high school for fuck’s sake.”

I then had the optimistic thought that perhaps Jack wasn’t trapped under Ford at all—maybe he was crouched down in the backseat with a generous length of taut piano wire in his hands, about to pop up and strangle the stocky trunk of Ford’s neck while I blew him a kiss and turned up the radio—what a delightful show of initiative that would demonstrate on Jack’s behalf. “Do you have something in common with every cop?” I asked him. “Every single one? The deadbeats? The thieves? The traitors?”

“Enough in common to talk to them over a beer,” he said. “I wasn’t asking you two to go on a road trip together.” I could feel his eyes train upon me at the stoplight, his demeanor softening as he admired my face in profile. “Hey,” he said, reaching his hand out toward my shoulder. But I wanted none of it.

“Come on,” I said, pushing his hand away. “I’m driving.”

“Yeah you’re driving,” he said, seething. “The fucking car I bought you. What, you can spend my money but I can’t touch you? You’re better than me, too?”

“You’re just drunk, Ford.”

“No,” he said, adamant. “This doesn’t just happen when I drink. This is why I drink.” With that his hand clamped down upon my upper arm. I tried to push it off but he was holding on with all his strength.

“Ford, you’re hurting me,” I warned him, my voice inflected with actual fear. It wasn’t so much the pain as the act of restraint itself that felt so awful, the knowledge that I wasn’t physically in control.

“Do you know how you make me feel all the time?” He was yelling, nearly weeping. I slowed down the car and began driving far below the speed limit. I didn’t want to arrive home with him like this. He’d never actually hit me, but he wasn’t opposed to using applied force—a gripping of the wrist when I wanted to leave the room and he wasn’t done talking, a too-firm squeezing of the thigh when I’d said no too many nights in a row. “You’re ice-cold for days, sometimes weeks , then suddenly I come home and you’re so hot for it that you’re greeting me with your ass in the air. Then the next morning it’s like I disgust you again. Do you know what a mind-fuck that is?” His eyes were trained on me, staring; he wanted me to turn and look at him, to see the expression accompanying his painful confession, but I refused. The rest of the drive continued in slow silence; eventually his grip loosened and he retracted his arm. “Fuck my life,” he mumbled.

When we got into the house, he opened a beer and sat in front of the television; I went directly to the bedroom. I was hardly into my pajamas when I heard his deep openmouthed snores begin. The next afternoon he showered and went to work with no discussion of the previous evening’s conversation; he asked about dinner and I told him I’d make pork chops and leave a plate for him in the refrigerator. He nodded, gave me a quick kiss that smelled too strongly of aftershave, and left. One thing I could always count on with Ford, despite his occasional outbursts, was his ability to suppress the uncomfortable—his breaking point was deep and not often reached, but whenever he got there I knew that as soon as the air cleared I’d have another long stretch of time where all his angst would stay buried.

Jack’s concerns were a bit more out in the open, and they included Ford. I hadn’t told Jack that my husband was a cop, though I wouldn’t have lied if Jack had asked. What worried Jack most was my physical relationship with Ford. The Wednesday after Ford’s outburst, Jack and I were having an extended hangout at his house, which had proven a wonderful arrangement. In fact, since our first completed tryst in the car, Jack’s house was the only place we’d met. His single bed was deliciously narrow, forcing us to either be fucking or otherwise pressed together simply to both fit on top of it. On Wednesdays Jack ordered pizza—we always laughed as I’d hide in the hallway when the deliveryman came to the door—then for the second course we’d eat chocolate pudding cups without spoons, dipping our tongues down into their cool centers and watching one another’s pink flesh skate around the cups’ plastic rims.