Quickly, I thought this through. He braced himself for my answer.
“But we already have it on video,” I said slowly as if answering a trick question.
“Yeah, but the DVD has extras and—”
“Of what? Keanu—”
“Bret,” Jayne said loudly, interrupting her discussion of Sarah’s ballet schedule with Marta, then turned on Robby. “Why are you wearing that T-shirt?” she suddenly asked him.
“What’s wrong with it?” I interjected, trying to save myself.
“We can’t wear costumes to school, remember?” Robby darkly muttered. “Remember?” he asked accusingly.
He was referring to the e-mail sent out to parents about Halloween this year. Even though there would be parties in the afternoon, the school was warning against costumes, preferring that the kids come as “themselves.” The school originally had okayed “appropriate” costumes while actively discouraging anything inappropriate (nothing “violent” or “scary” or “with weapons”), but predictably, the children, even on all their meds, started to freak out en masse, so costumes were simply banned (exhausted parents pleaded for a compromise—“Nominally frightening?”—which was rejected). This disappointed Robby gravely, so while Jayne was inspecting glasses that had just been in the dishwasher, I tried to console my son. In a fatherly way I assured him that going without a costume was probably in everyone’s best interest, offering as a cautionary tale my own seventh grade Halloween when I’d gone to school as the Bloody Vampire and wasn’t allowed to march in the annual parade for the elementary students because I had slathered so much Fun Blood on my mouth and chin and cheeks that it was certain to frighten them, according to the principal. This had been so deeply embarrassing—a pivotal moment, really—that it was the last time I ever wore a costume. It was that shameful. The memory of sitting alone on a bench while my classmates marched in front of the delighted elementary students still burned. I suddenly expected Robby to find me far more interesting than he previously had.
An awkward silence filled the kitchen. People had been listening to my story. Jayne was holding a cracked margarita glass and staring at me strangely. I slowly noticed that everyone else—Sarah, Marta, Robby, even Victor—was also staring at me strangely.
Robby, looking completely confused, finally spoke, quietly and with as much dignity as he could muster. “Who said I wanted to go as . . . the Bloody Vampire?” He paused. “I wanted to go as Eminem, Bret.”
“Just because your father was a total freak at your age doesn’t mean you are, honey,” Jayne said.
“The Bloody Vampire?” Robby stared at me, aghast.
I looked helplessly at Jayne, whose face now suddenly relaxed. She studied me for a longish moment, trying to figure something out.
“Yeah?” I asked her, as I slowly handed Robby a fifty-dollar bill.
“I just realized something I wanted to ask you,” Jayne said.
“What is it?”
The dog became interested in my answer. It gave me a quick sideways glance.
“Have you ever had to empty a dishwasher? I’m just curious.”
“Um, Jayne . . .” The dishwasher line sounded like another in a long series of loaded insinuations. The strange guilt I felt—the sense of having done something wrong—never left me in that house. I tried to appear quiet and thoughtful, instead of my only other option: fainting in pain and defeat.
“Well?” She was still waiting for an answer.
“No, but I am seeing Dr. Kim today.”
I imagined relief filling the kitchen in a great oceanic wave. I wanted badly for breakfast to end—I closed my eyes and wished it—and for everyone in the house to slip quietly away. And then they did.
4. the novel
I had started the outline for Teenage Pussy over the summer and a lot had been accomplished despite the hours playing Tetris on my Gateway and constantly checking e-mails and rearranging the endless shelves of foreign editions that lined the walls of my office. Today’s interference: I needed to come up with a quote for a banal and harmless book written by an acquaintance of mine in New York, yet another mediocre, polite novel (The Millipede’s Lament) that was bound to get a spate of respectful reviews and then be totally forgotten. The quote I ultimately devised was glib and evasive, a string of words so nonspecific that they could have applied to just about anything: “I don’t think I’ve probably come upon a work so resolutely about itself in years.” And then I turned to a short story by one of my students from the writing class and quickly went through it. In the margins I wrote question marks, I circled words, I underlined sentences, I corrected grammar. I felt I made some balanced decisions.
Before resuming work on Teenage Pussy I went through my e-mails. There were only two. One was from Buckley: something about a parent/ teacher night next week, with a pointed P.S. from the principal noting that Jayne and I had failed to make the one in early September. And then I sighed when I saw where the other e-mail came from (the Sherman Oaks branch of the Bank of America) and when it was sent (2:40 a.m.). I sighed again and clicked on it, and as usual was faced with a blank screen. I’d been receiving these e-mails since the beginning of October, unaccompanied by any explanation or demand. I had called the bank several times since I had an account at that branch (where my father’s ashes were still stored in a safe-deposit box) but the bank had no record of these sent e-mails and patiently explained that no one could possibly be working at that hour (i.e., the middle of the night). Frustrated, I let it go. And the e-mails kept coming, with a frequency that I simply became used to. But today I scrolled through my filing cabinet until I found the first one. October 3 at 2:40 a.m. The date seemed familiar, as did the time, but I couldn’t figure out why. Annoyed at my inability to piece this together, I clicked off AOL and eagerly went to the Teenage Pussy file.
The original title of Teenage Pussy had been Holy Shit! but Knopf (who’d shelled out close to a million dollars for the North American rights alone) assured me that Teenage Pussy was the more commercial title. (Outrageous Mike was considered briefly but finally deemed “noncontroversial.”) Knopf was going to call it a “pornographic thriller” in their catalogue, which excited me immensely, and told me privately that Alfred and Blanche Knopf would be rolling over in their graves when the thing was published. Since I realized I was creating an entirely new genre, my bout of writer’s block had vanished and I was working on the book daily, even though it was still only in the outline stage. The book was the story of Michael Graves and this young, hip Manhattan bachelor’s erotic life—a “guy who loves to give love and loves to get loved back” is what I promised my publishers—and I had envisioned a narrative that was elegantly hard-core and interspersed with jaunty bouts of my trademark laconic humor. It was going to contain at least a hundred sex scenes (“I mean, Jesus, why not?” I guffawed to my editor over lunch in the bar at Patroon while he idly checked his blood sugar) and you could read the novel as either a satire on “the new sexual obnoxiousness” or as the simple story of an average guy who enjoys defiling women with his lust. I was going to turn people on and make them think and laugh. That was the combo. Scatological humor intended and achieved. That was the plan. It seemed like a good one.
Teenage Pussy would contain endless episodes of girls storming out of rooms in high-rise condos and the transcripts of cell phone conversations fraught with tension and camera crews following the main characters around as well as six or seven overdoses (attempts on the girls’ part to win our lothario’s attention). There would be thousands of cosmopolitans ordered and characters camcording each other having anal sex and real-life porn stars making guest appearances. It was going to make Sodomania look like A Bug’s Life. Chapters were titled “The Facial,” “The Silicone Queen,” “The Porta-John,” “The Intrepid Threesome,” “Her Boobage,” “The Cliterati,” “The Getaway,” “Hairy Pinkish Tacos,” “Am I Too Big for You?,” “You Know, I Really Don’t Want a Girlfriend Right Now,” “Look, I Have to Catch an Early Flight, Okay?,” “Hey—Did You Get a Chance to Pick Up My Dry Cleaning?,” “I Am Probably Going to Be Quite Distant Now” and “Do You Mind If I Just Jack Off?”
Our hero, who calls himself the Sexpert, dates only models and carries around a large bag filled with various lubricants, ben-wa balls, vibrating clitoral stimulators and about a dozen strings of anal beads. Every girl he meets he makes wet with excitement. He has the cute habit of licking their faces in public and fingering them beneath tables at Balthazar while drugging their gimlets with OxyContin. He fucks one girl so hard that he breaks her pelvic bone. He fucks a semifamous TV actress in the greenroom minutes before she’s supposed to appear on
