I told myself that Michael’s behavior was an appropriate response to the stress of the crash. The truth is that it had been a problem for some time. After our daughter’s death, I found myself reticent around Michael.
He’d suggested we begin to try again. I wasn’t ready. I was still in mourning. I think that Michael saw, in Nina’s death, the loss of a future, whereas I felt the loss of a person I’d known. For nine months she’d been my roommate, a tiny human sharing my body’s resources. Michael only knew her as a nebulous mass. A mass that occasionally kicked.
I worked long hours, and when I got home I took long baths. I didn’t want to talk or to be physically intimate. I told myself I was protecting Michael. Nina had come from my body, been destroyed by my body. Who could caress this killing thing? I felt I didn’t deserve to be loved.
A part of me was relieved when Michael began to go out after work. The other part was lonely.
That night, he seemed happy to see me. He may have been buzzed, but I couldn’t smell anything on him. I was tipsy myself. He asked about my evening. I recounted Lillian’s position that oral sex might have prevented the 9/11 attacks.
It was warm in our apartment. Michael took off his clothes and got on the air mattress in his underwear. His bites had faded more than mine because he was better at leaving them alone. I changed into a nightgown and got in beside him. He’d stopped at Bed Bath & Beyond and bought a new set of sheets. They were stiff but clean.
Michael had his laptop open and I watched as his cursor hovered, for an instant, over the shortcut to our E*Trade account. I didn’t think anything of it. He clicked on the CNN shortcut instead. The Florida neo-Nazis had occupied a Hillel at FSU, and were holding a rabbi and four students hostage. Michael scrolled down past articles on Hurricane Marie, sexual assault on an HBO set, and Shamerican protest art. He clicked into a piece on the proposed sale of C&S to Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group. We silently read. The gist was that the deal was stalled but not dead. Michael hovered over E*Trade again. He didn’t click. He closed his laptop.
“This world,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“Our world,” he said.
He pressed into his temples with his index fingers. He stared at the wall.
I was feeling fondly toward Michael. I was thinking of the previous week, when he’d cleaned and cooked, and rubbed my feet. The wine had made me tired and I’d fallen asleep. Now I was awake. I slipped a hand inside his boxer briefs and rested it there.
When he was ready, I rolled onto my stomach and raised the hem of my nightgown. Michael preferred being face to face. He liked to look into my eyes. I liked this too, but not always. Sometimes it felt like too much pressure, like being under observation. Michael leaned over and kissed the nape of my neck. He nibbled my shoulders. He ran his hands along my spine and held my hips. He asked if it felt good. I said that it did.
The sex was accompanied by word-like noises coming from Michael’s mouth. I’d never heard him make these noises before. It sounded like an infant’s strangled attempts to articulate beyond her linguistic capacity. I didn’t like the way my face felt against the pillow. The sheets were rough. They needed three or four wash cycles to be softened to my satisfaction. I imagined other couples testing the sheets in the store, tainting the fabric. I knew this was not possible. The sheets had come sealed in plastic casing. I tried to feel pleasure. I tried to will the convergence of our bodies into something ecstatic. I could feel the shrimp suspended in the aspic of my intestines.
Michael asked if I wanted to vibrate. This is something we did. He’d thrust from the rear while I ran a vibrator over my hood. Michael had said that my contractions, when I was on the cusp of orgasm, set off his own climb. I said I didn’t want to vibrate. It seemed unlikely I’d be able to climax.
When I began to get dry, Michael added lube to the outside of his condom. He wore condoms because I react adversely to birth control pills. The condoms, coupled with the side effects of his antidepressants, prolonged the plateau phase of intercourse. I often spent long minutes lying in wait.
Michael thrusted and made his noises. He kissed my hair. My phone buzzed. My phone had a special buzz for emails from Lillian. The buzz was accompanied by a bird’s chirp.
Michael said, “Leave it.”
I said, “Mike.”
Michael continued to thrust. The bird continued to chirp. I smelled cat pee. Michael grabbed tightly to my hips. His fingernails dug into my skin. I imagined them making small abrasions. I imaged the dirt from under Michael’s nails entering my bloodstream. I imagined the shrimp squirming back to life and swimming up my esophagus.
I tried to extract myself, but it must have felt, to him, as if I were erotically bucking. He increased the speed of his thrusts. He clutched me closer. I was able to unplug my phone from its charger. I managed to get the phone to my face. Michael whispered what sounded like “I love you.” He bit my ear. He ejaculated as I read Lillian’s email.
Michael
The coffee shops by Ricky’s apartment were Starbucks or Starbucksian: corporate, cleanish, out of toilet paper. In the case of the one that I entered, the bathroom was not out of toilet paper, but out of order. At least, this was the explanation offered by the handwritten sign on the door. The sign had been affixed with what looked to be an entire ream of Scotch tape. The tape tried too hard to convince. Here, I speculated, was a pristine bathroom, moated by sign and tape so as to banish the errant pissers who wreaked havoc each morning, forcing the store’s lone human employee to spend his lunch breaks scrubbing. The workforce was fighting back. I opened the door.
“Shit,” I said, because there was a lot of it on the floor.
The cafe brimmed with finance guys, men whose hands had palmed footballs in high school and in college had been body inspectors: tweaking nipples, forcing pinkies into tiny anal holes. After college they’d tied ties, tapped out lines, and touched money. Now they pecked touchscreens, checking the Dow, sending vaguely reassuring emails to investors.
I’d worked in the industry since college, when I interned with Ricky at Merrill Lynch. I was twenty-six when the housing bubble burst, but the nature of derivatives was such that vast degrees of separation existed between the families who’d taken out subprime loans and the guys like me who’d blindly traded CDO packages, each of which contained literally thousands of these mortgages. I’d been trained to imagine my market movements as purely hypothetical, a grand-scale sudoku that would increase my annuals without affecting the mechanics of American life. We weren’t Nazi soldiers following orders, but entrepreneurs following the rooted imperatives of our system, the promise that success comes at the expense of faceless others.
These others were out of sight, in Middle America, a place that mostly existed, for me, in midcentury novels by the Great White Males who’d been extinct for some time. And though I grew up an heir to financial depression, I still had trouble picturing the boarded-up houses and tent cities, the families ruined by debt. I couldn’t fathom the fallout from our actions, the factory closings and depleted pension funds. I couldn’t see how this recession would shape the next decade’s economy and lead to the current crisis. If I could see those things, I couldn’t connect them to what I was personally enacting.