Woke Up Lonely A Novel - By Fiona Maazel Page 0,45

later in therapy, hold these notes responsible for some of his blues.

Bruce looked at his reflection in the toilet bowl. His throat burned; his nose ran. He wrung a tube of Aquafresh, rubbed the paste on his teeth, and made for the couch. As part of the downsizing of their lives from comfortable to poor, they had disconnected their cable service. This meant, in general, two things: One, in the hour it would take Bruce to stream thirty seconds of porn using dial-up, the urge to touch himself would have long since passed, so that he had not experienced anything close to pleasure in this department for nearly five months. Two: since what cable they did have was pirated, you never knew what channels were going to come in, which taxied Bruce into new areas of entertainment, among them, City Drive Live, which aired a traffic feed from locations all over D.C. During the day: blah. But at night: my God. A camera trained on the GW Parkway southbound, the footage gritty and dark, the cars speeding by, but staggered, because how many cars sped down the GW at 2 a.m.? Watching this stuff was like pawning the feel and hue and smell of your life for scenes of the forlorn. Bruce loved it.

From the bedroom, his wife was calling. He had his thoughts. Was an alcoholic blackout advisable under the circumstances? You couldn’t be blamed for negligence if you were blacked out. He draped a blanket over his shoulders. It was possible Rita had stopped paying the heating bill.

“What is it, honey?” He stood inside the doorway to their room. The longer he slept on the couch, the more he felt the trespass of his return.

“Just thinking,” she said. “Couldn’t sleep.”

He approached the bed slowly. Among the blankets and throw pillows, hers was still the most prominent stuffing there.

“You been sick?” she said.

He nodded, though she still faced the wall. This gave him the chance to step in further. Closer, one toe at a time. Could he really see his own breath? He shivered and looked at his wife, could almost feel her breasts and stomach, the pack of her thighs. Under those covers was a pound of flesh. And so, though the timing was awful, his blood began to jazz like seltzer. Neurons firing, he came to life.

He sidled along the wall undetected. The flap of his pajama bottoms turned him loose. He closed in on the edge of the bed but stepped on a comb that skidded across the carpet. He froze, heart stopped. She lifted her head, nose in the air. The draft in the apartment put him at a disadvantage, upwind. Desire has a whiff; if she caught on, forget it. She lowered her head. Snuggled.

He scanned the terrain of blankets for a point of entry and settled on a tiered approach, peeling back one layer of blanket at a time.

“Get me my lotion?” Rita said, and he all but reared as the nape of the duvet fell from his hand. Lotion? She said lotion! And like that, he was fifteen years old. Wanting to get over on his wife and wresting from language in one context arousal in another. Could he assist in the application of this slippery, thick, jerk-off lotion?

He watched her cream her palms and forearms, and he waited. She might say: I can’t reach this spot, can you help? Or: I need some here and here. And if in the process he dragged the tip of his penis down her spine—an accident, he’d swear—it would be enough to get him off later, dial-up be damned.

He waited and watched, but still no orders, and so he was all but resigned when she said, “Baby, come here,” followed by the unthinkable gesture of her turning over to look at him. He was backlit; there was no way she wouldn’t see his condition, and yet he still tried to hide it. She patted the mattress. What were the odds? So, no, he would not be stupid about this. Would not mistake come hither for meow, would instead sit on the bed and regard the impudence of his erection with pity.

She touched his hand and said, “You’re freezing!”

He got under the covers, actively trying to leach the excitement from his body. He knew Rita; she’d be appalled. She was pregnant and bedridden and no part of her was unfurling to accommodate his needs. Not tonight, not any night soon, not even for weeks or months