Eric nodded. I could tell he wasn’t interested, but Wendy didn’t jump in, and nervousness brings out my verbosity. I found myself lecturing on Em’s place in the pantheon, below Nas and Biggie, of course, but on par with Jay-Z? When pressed, Eric admitted to being a passive listener who didn’t pay attention to the words. I told him that, while beats were certainly important, lyrics were the genre’s defining characteristic. As an example, I put on Em’s masterpiece, The Marshall Mathers LP. In retrospect, it was the wrong choice.
We moved to the bedroom, and after some gentle coaxing from Eric and me, Wendy removed her robe to reveal a garter set I’d bought her and had never seen her wear. For a moment I was taken aback, jealous that she’d put on the lingerie for someone else after refusing to wear it for me for months. She’d said that when I asked her to dress up in that or any outfit, what I really wanted was another partner, someone confident and lascivious who shaved whimsical shapes into her pubic hair.
This was a debate we’d been having for years, but it had increased in frequency as we’d gotten older, Wendy growing more worried that she would no longer satisfy my base macho cravings. And though I’d explained that my wanting her to wear costumes and engage with me in light role-playing was no more emotionally adulterous than her own interest in being stimulated by a silicon phallus, I’d ultimately accepted the situation as a lost cause, one that had less to do with me than with Wendy’s own issues. That is, until I saw her pose for Eric Darving in the garter set and came to understand that the issue was not with Wendy at all, but with me; that her antipathy to role-playing was actually about her ultimate disappointment that no role-play could truly conjure another man.
Still, despite my jealousy, I was aroused by the sight of my wife in this outfit, the way the black lace popped against her pink skin. Eric kissed Wendy’s neck and shoulder, and she gave off soft moans, and Dido’s voice on “Stan” spun me back to senior year, smoking blunts in Ricky’s car when we were supposed to be in gym, that elegiac piano line seeming, in my hazy state, to echo the patter of rain on the windshield as Ricky stroked the peach fuzz at the nape of my neck and just that once I didn’t stop him.
“They don’t make beats like this anymore,” I said, but no one responded. Eric ran his hands down Wendy’s arms. She made figure eights around his abs and closed her eyes.
As they continued to kiss, I gave some background on the album, enlightening Eric on the rapper’s three personas—Slim Shady, Eminem, and Marshall Mathers; id, ego, and superego, respectively—who battle for dominance, but of course the id wins, the id always wins.
“But what makes it all work,” I hastened to add, as Eric’s finger toured the elastic rim of Wendy’s thong, “is that buried beneath Slim’s violent antics and homophobic epithets, there lies Marshall, a rare and fragile bird, cornered by predatory critics, protecting the nest where his baby bird sleeps.”
Wendy said, “There, right there.” Eric was wrist-deep in her panties.
I moved to the edge of the bed. Eric was still fully clothed, but Wendy was now being stripped, first of her stockings, then the garter. He kissed up her stomach, from navel to neck, before unclasping her bra and fitting his mouth around one of her breasts. When Eric slipped off Wendy’s panties her impulse was to clutch her knees together, but he pushed them apart and she didn’t resist. We’d arrived at the album’s horrorcore apex, a song called “Kim,” in which Marshall, or Slim, or whoever he is, slits his ex-wife’s throat in a jealous rage as she screams in protest and their daughter looks on.
“It’s a horrible song,” I said, eyes on the stranger going down on my wife, on the back of his head, as Em’s ex-wife Kim, or, to be more specific, a voice actress playing Kim, screamed in terror. “It’s painful to listen to, and harder to reconcile. And it’s not even the lyrics that create this effect, but Em’s very voice, the edges of his consonants, can you hear them, the sharpness on letters like t and q? And yet, isn’t it interesting that, for all of this album’s insular narcissism, what sticks with you, at the end of the day, is Kim’s screaming voice, her palpable fear?”
“Yes,” said Wendy at the edge of her breath.
I was impressed with Eric’s ability to nose breathe. I imagined he swam a formidable front crawl. He stood and removed his underwear. His penis was average, which was both a relief and a disappointment. I reached down to do the same, but found myself soft. Eric mounted Wendy and quickly built to a frenetic pace that I knew, from experience, she would not appreciate. She called my name.
“Mike,” she said.
“I’m here,” I said.
“Michael,” she said a little louder.
I said, “I’m here,” and placed a hand on Wendy’s foot. A thick layer of callus covered her sole. I squeezed.
Wendy cried out, either from pleasure or pain I couldn’t tell. Eric accelerated. The actress playing Kim continued to scream. I held Wendy’s leg, which was slipping away.
Eric shuddered to a standstill and dropped his weight on my wife. When he climbed off, I could see that Wendy was in
