Woke Up Lonely A Novel - By Fiona Maazel Page 0,46
after the baby was born. And anyone who thought otherwise was not just insensitive but sadistic, because this arousal did not affirm his wife’s hotness blazed through the more immediate evidence that she’d lost her sex appeal so much as furnish her sense—her fear—that she’d married an asshole.
He stared at the rice-paper shade overhead and considered what disposable savings he and Rita would need to justify purchase of a replacement shade, something stained glass or Tiffany-like, and how they might never accede to this position of wealth, and where normally such thoughts deflated his courage to live, never mind a hard-on, tonight they roused him up the gallows. He was on his back with his arms fastened to his side. Entombed. Safe. Do. Not. Move.
“Honey,” she said, and she scooted for him so that her kneecaps pressed into his upper thigh and her hand fell atop his chest. “Honey, I was thinking—”
Oh, to hell with it: he reverted to strategies that had groped at him through high school. He sat up to scratch his foot so that her hand rappelled down his chest and landed in the flesh well between his hip and navel. Maybe the landscaping of their bodies would give her ideas where before she had none.
She laughed. “Feels like a war in your belly,” she said, and she pinched the mini-donuts tubed about his waist.
“Thanks,” he said, but thought: A little to the left. Just a little!
“So, anyway, I was thinking,” she said. “About the baby? What if we named him after someone I kind of admire?”
She was breathing on his shoulder, and the heat collected in his armpits. Her finger traced a halo around his belly button. “Someone he can be proud of his whole life.”
Bruce tried not to move—his fists were tight—and yet there it was, his pelvis thrusting for her, gently and without commitment, but thrusting all the same while he watched in horror and waited for the tirade that was, instead, his wife vouchsafing her thighs, lathered in cream. He fit himself between them and smiled like an ape.
“Are you listening?” she said.
He was, he was! He was even going to climax with this name on her lips, their boy’s name, Bruce Jr., because all his life, secretly, he’d wanted to have his own father’s name—Henry—and felt this keenly and always in the presence of his younger brother, the doctor brother, the most renowned hematologist in the country brother, Dr. Henry Bollinger II. And Rita knew this—in the courtship phase of releasing secrets you’d never told anyone else, he had told her—and now, suddenly, his beloved wife was making good on what she knew. Bruce Jr.! His baby boy. And this despite everything he had done. She was a marvel, he was a cad, and from this incoherence grew the tension that stormed out of his body and all over her legs, the sheets, and the duvet.
He was panting so loud, he didn’t hear her at first. “The Helix,” she said. “They’re amazing. And the guy who started it?” She reached for a tissue and plucked the semen off her quad. “He’s a genius. So that’s what I want. They say he’s nicknamed Lo. I think it’s cute. So it’s settled, okay?”
“What?” Bruce said, though he was laughing. “Are you kidding?” And he laughed harder. “The Helix?”
“Stop laughing!” she said.
“What? I can’t hear you.” He was laughing so hard, the piss romped through his pipes and the brandy lees down his colon, so that unless he got to the bathroom now, the rain of his ejaculate would be but prelude to something much worse. And so he got up not having said yea or nay, so that Rita began to holler after him: “Thurlow! I want to name the baby after THURLOW DAN!” at which point, Esme, who had fallen asleep on the job, woke up with a start, certain she’d been wandering the world in dream and calling his name. Thurlow, where are you? Thurlow, I miss you. Wait for me, I’m trying.
Team ARDOR: Ready, willing, able.
A municipal building two miles from the Capitol. A conference room with window, wall, and two-way mirror. Around a table, four Department of the Interior employees who’d been summoned from their place of work and given roast beef sandwiches with extra mayo. Standing up: some guy who seemed distantly familiar to Ned and Bruce, but not enough to distract from the oddity and thrill of what he was offering, which was, in the main: hope.