[Post-Coital Conversation #15]

I am repulsed by the sight of him laying on my bed, looking like a pube dried to a bar of soap. The longer he sits there, the more his body shrivels into a tangle, puckers into crooks of hairy flesh and Hanes tee, size smedium—a fit one wears when their baby biceps and chest call for a medium, but their six-five torso lets their belly sneak out like Oops I did it again, which is exactly what I always think around two full measures after we finish this business. Two counts of four and my brain clicks back on, fires up the furnace and says Nope, huh, really, this? What a flop of a man.

He’s sitting up against my headboard, propped up by two pillows that I’ll definitely be washing later because he’s went and made himself comfortable with them. One is still folded into the taco I made when my brain was turned off; having my back arched for too long sends shivers down my sciatica, but he thinks it’s sexy because he saw it online once and I only know that because he’s a sharer. He’s readjusted his ass onto it now and I vow, hand on my signed copy of Rumours, right there on Stevie’s holy penmanship, to never switch my brain off again.

On the yellow legal pad resting on his lap, his pen convulses. 

“This is the one,” he says. “There’s no way they shit on this one.” 

The they: his peers in the graduate workshop he’s taking, a posse armed so fierce they threaten to topple his literary dream of sixteen months. If that dream was our kid, I’d still be wiping its weepy little butt. He’s recently made himself believe that he feels mighty inspired and full of creative energies—I believe the word he used was ripe—after sex, and he has used his pleading to weasel that notebook into my space, and, by extension, the unending, Golgothian persecution of his workshop.

I’m raking through my vanity looking for my lighter when I hear him laugh. At himself, most likely. Everything he writes is so goddamn funny. 

“Listen to this,” he says. His voice fades out as I push whatever playlist is on hand between the folds of my brain: Nick Jonas, eh? That kid’s sexy as hell. His mouth continues to move, and every few seconds he gives himself another laugh. And I start snaking my way across the room, shaking my ass and swerving my half-shaven legs. Tell me about them chains, Nicky; I’d shave all the way up for you. Got that right.

“What do you think?” he says.

“Hilarious.”

“It’s actually a tragedy, how it turns at the end. You notice that?”

“Who knew Dickenson had such a hairy ass.”

I think about him but not really as I listen to the cars pass. They sound like an oscillating fan, swelling and fading to a steady rhythm—fixed, but unhurried. A wall of pine trees blocks them from my view, but I hear them the same. I hear them when I’m trying to teach a student to tune a cheap guitar. At night when I’m lying in bed. When I text him and tell him to come over. After we’re finished and I’m on the balcony smoking, the point in the cycle at which I am currently stationed. Before I drift off. When I see his stupid nature shots on Instagram, filtered to look like they were shot on Mars. It’s all a big fat fucking Tilt-A-Whirl I saw coming and leaned into. I listen to the cars and I know they’re either headed south to Slidell or not. 

Even if I complain, being on this ride isn’t so bad knowing I threw myself into it. A little bit of agency is all I need to keep from losing my breath. At the risk of sounding like him, the system—the man, man—knows just how many choices we require before we start to feel riotous. Six inches of length cut off my hair. A change from blond to brunette. This brand of toothpaste over that brand. A well of television shows that will never run dry. Thinking like this makes me tire of him all over again, him and his fat, poochy nipples. 

I have to bust this cycle, find me a man who doesn’t assume I like fingertips lightly brushed down my leg. Better yet, I just need to be a more thoughtful vibrator owner and remember to pick up batteries. He asked me last week if I’d fully considered the ethical ramifications of shopping at Walmart. 

After tossing the rest of my cigarette into the beer he left out earlier, I tie my hair up into a long, blond ponytail and squeeze my way through the sliding door.

I slide a hot chocolate capsule into the instant coffee maker and remember missing my hair appointment. I scroll through my call log but don’t find MANDA MAY—my stylist—until I’m well into August, which was when I called to see if she could fit me in; there’s no way I could’ve missed an appointment without her leaving me a scolding voicemail. I send her a text and reach up for my mug, in the bottom of which I find a sealed bottle of deep scarlet nail polish. 

The message sends with a sad ding. B flat.

“Come paint your fingernails next to me,” he says from the bedroom. “I sniff that shit for a while, these words’ll be flowing.”

Milky chocolate runs down my throat and begins to seep into my cracks. It’s a slow warmth, not unlike an extremely mild orgasm, which is the most I hope for on most nights with this underfed zoo animal. I feel myself starting to like him again. I answer back with my sweet voice: “Only if you’ll put your fucking pants back on.”

Sometimes when we’re lying on the bed, he pretends we’re in a movie, a real romance, sad and thunderous. He’d rather be writing screenplays, sweating it out on some New Orleans film set, ruining shots with his lanky shadow. His scripts are more painful than his fiction, though, and at least he’d be able to fall back on teaching. It brings me a great deal of shame that I know this much about this guy. I get lonely. Fuck off.

*

I jump off the bed, feel the sharp prod of a thumb tack’s dull end as I trip into the wall. The ache seems two thumbs deep; I can feel it purple instantly. With my feet dug into the carpet, I straighten my knees and push against the wall, forcing them outward as best I can, but in vain; expanding the borders of my room or else cave them in around us like Sampson. My fingers. My hair. My apartment. My thick, stinky air. It must all be reclaimed. Not just refurbished, but remade. Reworked. Reassembled and resealed. He can take the sheets, the folded pillow I had almost forgotten, the fucking pen, the fucking bed, the fucking kitchen sink. I’ll kill him if he even thinks about my Martin.

I survey the room for a weapon I can use to chop off his hand, assuming it comes out of his boxers at some point. His hand fiddles around underneath like he’s kneading a stress ball and I find myself feeling thankful: at least he hasn’t pulled it out. The notepad on his lap rises and falls slowly. Up and down, and I keep begging him to stop, but my words get lost or abducted or snared somewhere along the way. 

He, on the other hand, is having no trouble with his words. They spurt out like an oil tap: “I was almost finished,” he keeps saying. “Will you calm down?” he keeps asking. “I was almost finished. Will you calm down? I was almost finished. Iwasalmostfinishedwillyoucalmdown?” He goes on with these two sentences over and over, back to back in that order like they’re incantations written on the pages of an ancient book bound in some holy animal’s mangled skin.

“Listen,” I plead. “Just leave for now. Okay? I’ll call you tomorrow and we can have lunch or something. We can do Rizo’s.”

“Now that you mention it, I think you may be sick tomorrow. I haven’t decided if you’re going out in this next bit I’m working on. You’ll be the first to know.”

“What are you talk—”

In a split, my guts begin turning and churning, gears in some rusty, long-dormant clock. I think of blades and castor oil and my appointments that I never would have missed. The warmness I sometimes feel for him, the ember sparked from boredom, laziness, and a rare strand of self-abasement sits in my belly, crackling. I want to rip it out and brand his face with the last bit of feeling I had. Nausea, more determined than gravity, pulls me to the carpet, where the digging pain made by the tight coils of fabric on my knee caps is greeted with something like relief. 

Yes. In a moment of stellar intervention, my fingers graze across the handles of the wire cutters I use to trim guitar strings and clothes tags. I take hold of the tool and squeeze it tight to my palm. I straighten myself from my pained hunch, pull the cutters up to a fighting stance and ask: “What have you given me?”

“Quite a lot.”

“Laxative? Fucking mold? What?”

“I haven’t drugged you.”

“You son of a bitch.”

“It’s too late for that. I was almost there and then you screwed it up.”

“Put down the pen. Stop writ—”

“You know what you said just doesn’t sit with me right, Marlee Sandy. Suggesting I slipped you something. All I like is a little bit of rough talk, so why would I need to drug a woman? Doesn’t make any sense.”

“Sandy, this. Sandy, that,” I say as my thoughts and feelings fall into random patterns. “All I ever hear from you is ‘Sandy Sandy Sandy. Sandy, laugh at my jokes. Sandy, make fun of my dick. Sandy, don’t talk about other men. Sandy, color your nails like my cuck mommy. I made a mess. Wipe my bootyhole, Sandy. I swear if you put your hand back in your pants I’m going to cut your ear off.’”

“Hey.” My cool tone makes him pause, and he looks away from his notebook, at me. “What is your name?” 

Before he can open his mouth to answer, I clamp the jaws of the wire cutters around the edge of a scarlet fingernail and tear it off with a cracking twist of the wrist. The sound it makes, a dull, spongy pop, absorbs every other noise. I can feel my heart drumming against my spine, but I can’t hear it, just as I can’t hear the headboard bust a hole in the sheetrock when he springs to the floor, barrels over to me, rubs his thumb across the tip of my smooth, polished, scarlet finger. We both look at the deep-red scale between the teeth of my wire cutters, back to the new nail where, one would assume, a pulpy, bleeding wound would now be. The pain had been real, and immense, but it evaporated as quickly as it appeared, as real as it was imagined.

The look on his face is one of wonder and inspiration. I can practically see the synapses firing in his brain, commanding his muscles to find the pen and his notepad. Worlds are opening up to him, new spins on old ideas that will be proven unassailable to his bloodthirsty peers. They will say, I know we’re not supposed to call something finished, but . . . . They will sing huzzah huzzah, and next round’s on me, old friend. The one beautiful girl in the corner will laugh with all her teeth and he will be able to see right down her throat. That will not do. I grab my curling iron from my dresser and swing it like there’s someone to impress. The rod meets his ear and he’s thwack against the ground.

The nausea that had been humming in my stomach lets up, but in its place grows a deep yawn that slowly crawls its way up and out my open mouth. I step over his unconscious sack of a body and sit down on the bed, where the ruffled covers feel soft against the sensitive spots between my fingers. I contemplate closing my eyes for a moment, but instead empty the contents of my bedside trash can onto the floor. One by one, I rip the pages out of his notepad, flick my lighter, and carefully lay the burning pages into the bin. The fire erases the word sugar with a composed purpose that I find admirable, then Coated, then Fuck. I see something about vibrator batteries. My folded pillow. His smedium shirts.

The last page I come to is nothing but a list of names, barely legible through the markings scratching them out: Michelle Shannel Rachel Amber Monika Courtney Phoebe Victoria Melissa Megan Melissa TAYLOR Danielle Emily Olivia Ashlee JESSICA Sarah Brittany Sam Samantha Manda May Manda May Melanie Anne Claire Chelsea Jenna Steph June Sunday Ty Ryan Jen Courtney Nikki Sandy(?) Patty Cynthia Mary Linda Lydia SANDY(maybe) Chastity Hope