One
The Phone Call
I'm sitting on the floor in the greeting card aisle of CVS reading through a stack of greeting cards; you know, the ones about loving families, beloved mothers and fathers, "to my brother with love," my sister, that sort of shit. I usually gather a bunch of cards, sit down in the aisle and read through, looking for something that'll give me fodder-a spark of an idea, something-for my next script. Oh, I write screenplays, movies, for the Hallmark Channel, about loving families at Christmas. Christmas movies. The type that, hopefully, make you cry.
The job wrings just about every last sloppy drop of creativity out of me, since I've got nothing from my life to draw on. So I usually come up with a schmaltzy idea from a greeting card or one of those saccharine posts on TikTok or Instagram. Children's books, embroidered throw pillows. The stories are all over the place if you look, but greeting cards are usually surefire. (Hence Home for Christmas last year and Christmas is for Family the year before that.) I first get some air-fairy cliché idea, twist it a bit, then write the first draft with utter and brutal sarcasm. A turn-your-stomach sort of familial love-conquers-all bullshit. Then I rewrite it, bring it down to something that fills the soul with overwhelming love and joy, tears, and aggressive hugging. But, seriously, in my mind, it starts as a joke, something I can make ass fun of.
So I'm sitting on the floor in CVS like a kid sorting baseball cards, when Becky trips over me. Chivalrous as I am, I get up to apologize and then notice she has teeth like a Pepsodent ad and ample breasts beneath medical scrubs. Her hair is dark chocolate, dipping down and curling up at her shoulder, gently brushing the divot above her clavicle. I have no idea why, but clavicles and their divots have always been sexy to me. Maybe I have a fetish, I don't know. I'll have to ask my doctor. Oh, and breasts, that's my other fetish. But that might be more common.
We chat a bit and I find out she's an ER nurse, which impresses me greatly. After all, ER nurses, nurses in general, deal, on a daily basis, with all sorts of bodily functions and disgusting fluids, and are therefore pragmatic, innovative, nasty.
What could be better, right?
Which is what I'm thinking. But I realize I'm wrong when I find out her particular type of nasty.
The next night, we go to dinner. Italian. A bottle of Nebbiolo. I order light-don't want to be groggy, you know, in case something happens-a radicchio salad with baby arugula, thin slices of Parmesan cheese and the white fish. She has the potato soup with chicken, and the gnocchi with duck ragout.
So, it starts well. But, by the end of the meal I've learned every last fucking minute tiny itty-bitty detail about the nursing and medical profession-a line of work with far too many nuances. So many, in fact, that despite her exemplary breasts and clavicles, I just want to go home. Which is what I say. But the sentence, "Well, I think I'll be heading home," is not nearly as definitive as it should be.
"Sure," she says. "That sounds great. I was gonna say my place, but your place would be fun."
"Oh, uh."
And then, just when I'm going to be courageous and superior, when I'm about to declare exactly what I mean-because I'm a man not bullied by the Power of the P-she adds this little tidbit: "You have a headboard, right?"
"I." my synapses are firing like a misplaced jumper cable, "a headboard? On my bed?"
"Of course, on your bed, silly." That's her.
She smiles and pulls a roll of surgical tape from her purse. "I want you to tape me to it."
I'm intensely casual with this next: "'Kay."
"And then I want you to smear warm oil on my breasts. My nipples. And I want you to suck my pussy," she says. "That sound okay?"
What I don't know-as I slam a credit card in the waiter's hand and rip our coats from the hanger beside the table-is this: her love of all things medical is not just professional or humanitarian or academic-it's sexual.
After dutifully taping her wrists to the headboard; because I am nothing if not accommodating, I have skillfully moved from her clavicular divot, down her body where I am working my lingual magic, and she is writhing like a windsock, expressing her appreciation with, "Oh God, Robert, yes! Yes!" Which is not the part I have a problem with. What starts to get on my nerves is how she includes details about her workaday world: ".and there were five of them," she says, still wind-socking, "coming in with the EMTs." Her back arching. "Oh yeah, it's so good, Robert... so good. uh-huh." More breathing, writhing. "All in bad shape. they need to be intubated. an eyeball. dangling from this guy's. uh-huh, right there, baby, good. it's so good. it's hanging. out of its socket. flopping around."
Me, I'm trying to concentrate on the work at hand and starting to wish she was a claims adjuster.
"Oh God, yes, right there, right there." Breathing, arching. "His arm. on ice. in the other room. Your tongue, amazing. amazing. and his intestines. roll out. on the floor. yes, yes, like that, yes. squish under my feet. his liver. it's slippery."
This is where I'm having trouble keeping the concentration I mentioned a moment ago. I've never been good with internal organs out of place. To my thinking, they are internal for a reason-no one wants to see them on floors and underfoot. So I am both nauseated and aroused, which, for me, is new. I'm oddly reminded of that joke about trying to think of baseball during sex, only I'm trying to think of sex during sex. I decide to take a break so that I don't, you know, throw up.
She, of course, notices right away. "What's the matter? I was so close."
It's a peculiar juxtaposition-the sex thing along with the other-and I am quietly praying that my psyche will just accept it, roll with it, embrace the image of sliding viscera. in a sexual way. I try to think of an open eye socket with a dangling eyeball in an arousing context. It doesn't work, so now I'm sitting on the side of the bed, my head between my legs. Breathing. "Nothing," I say to her what's-the-matter question, but mostly say it to my withering dick. Finally, I look over, ready to level with her because sometimes honesty can be an acceptable option with women.
But she beats me to the punch. "You don't like this?" she says, her eyes now bigger, greener, more ingenuous than I recall their being at CVS or the restaurant. She bites her lower lip, which is oddly both childlike and hot-she's good at these juxtapositions. "You don't like the tape?" she says, nodding to her wrists, "because I can't wait to do this to you. I can't wait to suck your cock."
A moment later, she is arching her back again, regaining lost ground, undulating with the movement of my tongue. "Ooooo yes, baby, yes." she says thrusting her pelvis at me like a court summons. "That's right, uh-huh."
I'm an artist, a virtuoso. I am the conductor of a great philharmonic orchestra, brilliantly guiding with my tongue a multitude of disparate musical instruments through The William Tell Overture toward a magnificent crescendo.
".it's sooooo good. so hot, so hot, sooooo warm, the intestines. running down my leg. oh yeah, baby. there's slime inside my shoe."
I am making every effort now to stanch the returning mental images of slithering guts... the missing arm, the eyeball still dangling. It is a hopeless cerebral game of whack-a-mole.
She notices again that I've withdrawn. Still breathing hard, she asks what's wrong.
"Nothing. I just."
She's staring at me.
"You know, Becky. as much fun as this has been with the tape and all." (hold on, hold on-the synapses are firing again), ".the tape, the tape is great, because I love the tape!" I grab it off the floor, tear off another piece, and paste it across her mouth.
This I am proud of. This is as near to genius as I will ever get. This is like discovering gold at Sutter's Mill (without all the shouting).
I wait though, study her face, see if it is going to work for me or against me. (You can never be sure when you've just taped a woman's mouth shut.) She is surprised, that much I can tell because her eyes are wide, intense. But as to whether she is smiling or frowning. well, I can't see her mouth anymore. Then I feel her torso press against me, her right breast drops delicately to the side as she pushes into me, and there is a moan.
I have done good.
In fact, she is moving on her own-she is a locomotive that I have hurled heaping shovels-full of coal into. I smile and edge back down her twisting, turning body, to return to my previous line of work. Once there, she is most receptive to my efforts, and I can tell she...
