Tampa

chapter two

Jack Patrick. Something in his chin-length blond hair, in the diminutive leanness of his chest, refined for me just what it was about the particular subset of this age group that I found entrancing. He was at the very last link of androgyny that puberty would permit him: undeniably male but not man. I loved the lanky-limbed smoothness, the plasticity of his limbs, the way his frame shunned both fat and muscle. It had not yet been wrestled into a fixed shape.

The youth of Jefferson were definitely noticing me. “There’s lewd graffiti about you on the stalls of the boys’ bathroom,” Janet reported in a bored monotone. “The janitor’s painting over it as we speak but it’ll be up again in no time. Calls you a hot bitch. I don’t think they’ve broken out the p-word yet. But give them a few months.” Janet’s permanently half-open eyes had a way of looking past my face when she spoke; she appeared to be gazing out into the near future and seeing tomorrow’s disappointments.

“Boys will be boys,” I declared, shaking my head in mock disapproval. Public displays of flattery didn’t appeal to me in the least—these students weren’t my target audience. Someone bold enough to deface school property certainly wouldn’t be able to keep any secrets, though he’d be fantastically easy to seduce. The opposite was also true. From student teaching, I’d learned that the very boys who likely wouldn’t kiss and tell were the hardest to kiss in the first place.

My time as a student teacher had been a wake-up call for how complicated my needs actually were. Initially I’d hoped that just being around them would be enough—that like coral among anemones, I could glean all needed vitality through their swirling hordes moving past my body in the hallways. Within a week, I knew this to be a lie.

In a matter of days at my first institution I’d developed a heady crush on a young man named Steven—an unfortunately moral boy. He was president of that school’s Fellowship of Christian Athletes and wore a small gold cross upon a necklace; I couldn’t help but imagine him naked wearing only this sacred object against his thin flesh. When he’d raise his hand I’d make sure my fragrant hair fell down against his arm as I leaned over to address his question; I frequently gave his back and shoulders a reassuring touch when passing by his desk. After he missed a test I volunteered to stay after and proctor a makeup: finally, it was just the two of us alone in the classroom. When he finished I asked if I could give him a ride home and suggestively leaned across my desk.

His eyes froze with appalled disbelief. Perhaps it was a rush to judgment, but my first inclination was to blame his faith. He was suddenly looking at me as though he’d seen a demon appear on my shoulder or watched hidden expletives carved into my forehead become visible. I wanted to remind him that desire was only human but figured that was probably just what he’d expect the devil to say. “M-Mrs. Price,” he’d stuttered, the tone of his porcelain voice shivering with eggshell cracks, “I think we should pray together.”

“Yes!” I’d exclaimed, my enthusiasm surprising him. I’d jumped up from the desk and walked toward him, palms outstretched. “Let us join hands.” I smiled.

He’d stepped backward with one foot, and then another. The incredulous look on his face told me I’d already lost him—somehow he’d seen through me, or perhaps he was skilled at foreshadowing. I’d imagine a pious avoidance of sin requires that. “When you play football, do you prefer offense?” I asked.

“I should go,” he finally managed to say.

“Before we pray?” I’d licked my lips and twirled a long stretch of blond hair around two of my fingers.

He’d kept glancing back at the closed door, perhaps hoping someone else would enter. “I’ll pray at home.” He’d nodded solemnly. “For both of us.”

“You’re such a good boy, Steven.” I began appealing to his sense of propriety. “I love that about you. You’re different, you know. From the others.” I’d stepped out of my high heels, placing my bare feet onto the tile so that the top of his head was level with my eyes. When I followed his eyes to the ground I realized that he was looking at my painted toenails. “So do I get a good-bye hug for staying late so you could make up your quiz?” Pretending that my request for permission had been granted, I’d leaned into his body before he’d answered, pressing myself hard against the length of him. Next I’d placed my hand over the back of his head, holding him close, then ran my lips against the hot skin of his neck when I pulled away. I didn’t look back at him, didn’t confirm or deny that anything had happened; I just walked back to the desk to pick up the papers, and when I turned around again he’d left.

I knew he’d never let me be alone with him again. I’d immediately pushed a student desk up against the door, sat down and began to finger myself while my tongue ran a slow clockwork pattern around his faint taste on my top and bottom lip—he had an earthy scent: a little grass, a bit of unsweetened tea, some salt. After I came I cried in mourning; I’d fallen for the wrong boy, an inaccessible one, and my time at that school was drawing to a close. For the three remaining weeks, he sat near the back of the class with friends and never raised his hand. Only once did he look at me as he was leaving, a glance of pained confusion that I encouraged by not giving him a smile.

On my last day, the froggish male mentor teacher I’d worked with had all the students sign a card for me. He’d included a bullshit note on ruled paper that tried too hard to play it cool and included his cell phone number, which I made a point of keeping in my purse until my next bowel movement. This happened to be at a midprice Chinese chain restaurant where Ford had insisted we meet for a celebratory dinner. “Excuse me for a moment,” I’d said, “while I go use the powder room.” Before grabbing any toilet paper, I made an initial swipe with the note, making sure the side bearing the teacher’s handwriting was facing upward. Then I looked again at the card. While most students had left mild phrases of encouragement peppered with misspellings, Steven had written only his signature. I stood, feeling my underwear drop to my ankles, and tore down the card to his name, ripping it out in isolation, then stared at the tab of paper sitting on my finger like a square of acid. I let my head hit the side of the bathroom stall as I shoved his name as far up inside me as I could. This alone gave me the strength to walk back out to the table and greet Ford, who was drinking yet another blue cocktail overflowing with flora garnish.

“Honey,” he’d called from a distance, seeing me headed back toward him. “They call this drink a Tall Blue Balls!” I’d given him an appreciative smile, as if to say, How appropriate; you are foul to me and I just wallpapered my cervix with the name of a teenage boy.

Jack had already passed the test of not having any outward affinity to Christianity, so I began assigning personal essays and in-class writings designed to give me more personal details about him.

“For today’s journal,” I announced, “I want you to take ten minutes and write about the celebrity you find most attractive. Harness the power of description—pretend I’ve never seen him or her before.”

Most of the male responses revolved around a reality star’s ample buttocks, but Jack was noncommittal. I don’t really have a favorite celebrity, he wrote. Usually if there’s a good movie I like then I will also like the main woman in it, or if there’s a singer and I like the song and the video and she’s also pretty. Friday of the first week, I decided to keep him after class to ask about the lack of detail. I planned to go shopping over the weekend and cater to his proclivities.

When I called him up, he waved good-bye to his friends—a nice gesture, I thought, making sure they wouldn’t wait outside for him. Then he slowly walked up to my desk. His hands were clutched to the straps of his backpack, holding it tightly as though it were a parachute.

“I’d like to chat for a bit about your writing—do you mind missing a little of your lunch?”

He looked at the ground, his sneaker tracing a line across the tile, and shook his head no. The puffy styling of his athletic shoes made his legs seem even thinner—there didn’t seem to be one ounce to his body that wasn’t essential. I loved the precarious way his cargo shorts drooped on the elongated hanger of his pelvic bones, the way they’d likely fall down at the slightest tug. His kneecaps, barely sticking out from the bottom of his shorts’ hem, would make perfect, nearly circular imprints if he knelt down in the sand.

“So how’s your year going? What other classes do you have?” More important, I wanted to add, when did you last touch yourself?

Shrugging, he finally looked up at me. “The usual I guess. Biology, World History…”

“Mrs. Feinlog?” I laughed. “Dear God, I’m sorry.”

He smiled. “Yeah.” He started scratching his arm, then began looking at me intently while he continued, as though he was vicariously relieving an itch on my body.

“So I wanted to talk about this journal you wrote.” My oversized desk was a large gulf between us, so I rose from my chair and motioned for us to head out to the student desks. “Here, let’s have a chat for a minute.” When he sat, I scooted another desk directly next to his so we could each stare at his notebook at the same time.

Suddenly I was closer to him than I’d ever been before. I could smell the faint sporty body wash and deodorant he used. It was nearly cruel, the apathetic way his cotton T-shirt fell on his body, not seeming to care where it clung and where it sat loose. His clothing in general had a very inconsequential feel to it, like an afterthought, as though he’d been walking out the door to go to school in his underwear but then his mother had said, Wait, get dressed first, and he’d shrugged and obeyed.

“So I think you took the easy way out here,” I chided. “I don’t know that you used one single specific adjective.” I put my hand on top of his just for a moment, a reach of understanding and sympathy, then realized an opportunity to linger. “Look,” I said. “Hold out your hand. I think our hands are the same size.” He stretched out his palm and fingers, then gave a wide grin when mine, placed directly overtop, were indeed an exact match in length. It seemed like we’d just found a key that unlocked something.

I smiled as our hands pressed against one another in midair, as though we were pretending to touch through invisible glass. We managed a long stare before Jack finally blushed, retracting his hands. “How old are you, Jack Patrick?”

“I turned fourteen this summer,” he said. I gave an impressed nod, indicating this was no small accomplishment.

“Well you’re certainly old enough to know what you like.” Principal Deegan’s first-day speech came back to mind; I had to bite my lip not to jokingly add in, Am I right? “Here, let me give you some examples. Do you like it when girls wear lipstick?”

He blushed and nodded. “Yeah.” His voice had an embarrassed tone, like he’d just made a vile confession.

“Good—do you like lighter lipstick? Darker lipstick? Red?” I wanted to grab his hand again. It took every ounce of self-control I had not to slide my fingers beneath the desk and touch the bare skin of his leg.

“Um,” he said. His hand began to scratch at his scalp.

“Wait,” I said. “I have an idea.” I walked up to my desk and grabbed my purse and a box of Kleenex. “So what I’m wearing now is called fuchsia. Kind of a bright pink.” I sat and wiped it off, then took the fuchsia tube of lipstick out of my purse along with two others. “Okay, ready?” He nodded with sudden animation—we were about to play a game.

I locked eyes with him. “Watch my lips,” I instructed. I applied the red and rubbed my lips together. His hands left the desk and folded in his lap. “Do you like this more or less than the one I had on?”

He smiled and gave a small shrug. “I like them both.”

“Let’s try option three, then.” I winked at him and cleaned the red lipstick off with exaggerated strokes, using far more Kleenex than necessary, as though I’d just eaten a very sloppy meal. I loved having his full attention. “This last one is coral.” I applied it then rubbed my lips together and parted them with a playful smack. “Which one’s your favorite?”

“They all look good.” His stare didn’t break from my mouth; he spoke in a hypnotized monotone.

“Jack,” I said, leaning toward him, “you can’t go through life being shy with your opinion. Say that right now, you were making the decision as to whether I had to wear red lipstick every day of my life, or fuchsia, or coral. It’s your decision and you have to choose. Which one?”

He swallowed. “The red is pretty.”

“Perfect.” I smiled and grabbed the other two tubes of lipstick, then walked over to the trash and threw them in loudly, one at a time. “I value what you think.” I looked up and saw his lips parted, muted around the space of something unspeakable and subconscious lodged between his teeth. The lunch period bell rang in the distance. “Here,” I offered. “Let me write you a note for the cafeteria monitor.”

I sat back down behind my desk and scribbled onto a piece of paper, then pursed my lips and blew on the paper while fanning it back and forth to dry the ink. “Here you are,” I said. As he walked up to get it, each step of his sneaker was a magnified sound in the quiet classroom. I looked at him in a shameless way as he approached, wondering if he would turn his eyes or look away. He didn’t.

Before giving him the slip of paper, I held up my palm in the air again. “High-five, friend.” He placed his hand on top of mine once more. This time I pushed his fingers slightly apart with mine and slid them forward, entwined and clasping. His eyes wouldn’t stop questioning but he didn’t speak or pull away. “Have a good weekend,” I finally said. Then I gave a small squeeze and temporarily let him go.

Ford’s poker night provided a perfect cover for my first stakeout. Every Wednesday after work several of his fellow officers would come over to the house for cards. Even though this was now routine, returning home to the sight of eight squad cars parked in our driveway still caused me to feel an instant and roiling vertigo; a few months ago I’d nearly swerved off the road and clipped a fire hydrant when I saw them all there. My immediate thought was always that my Internet search history had been discovered, or a latent report had been filed—perhaps about one of the indiscreet hallway gropes I’d tried to pass off as accidental clumsiness during my student-teaching days. There was even the illogical panic that the police had somehow managed to read my mind.

The cigar smoke was reason enough to make myself scarce during the gathering. Through the sliding glass door, its grayish cloud nearly looked like a second mesh screen. Ford liked to joke that cigars keep away mosquitoes. I found the smell vulgar and fetid. It just made Ford seem even more ancient, as though he was smoking his very own future cremains. How opposite to the bouquet of smells on the mouths of adolescent boys, which is an honest mixture of good and bad: bubble gum, Red Hots, cola syrup, stale sleep, rubber bands for braces, the occasional cigarette that leaves a taste less like tobacco than something very damp and mossish.

I slid the patio door open theatrically, dressed to the nines in exercise gear. The more I did for Ford’s ego publicly, I’d found, the less I had to do to satisfy him privately. “Hello, boys,” I called. They all looked up with too-large approving smiles, the alcohol having given their facial muscles an increased range of movement. “I’m gonna hit the gym for a bit, Fordsie.”

“Take my wife with you, will ya?” Ford’s partner Bill called. At last year’s police fund-raiser he’d gotten blackout drunk and put his hand on my ass shortly before vomiting behind the DJ table. “Her idea of working out is putting new batteries in the remote control.” The men chuckled into their beers, the guns strapped around their waists and chests gleaming in the setting sun. “Get her working on that ab machine thing,” he specified. I shut the door and waved good-bye at Ford, who made a show of watching my ass as I walked away. This was the reason Ford married me, and why I could make the argument that I was a better wife for him than a woman who was actually smitten: love makes people feel accepted, and like Bill’s wife they then begin to break the rules. I had a far clearer picture of our marriage contract’s unspoken line items than most women: Ford wanted me to stay in shape, look good in front of his friends, and make him look good in return.

Outside I passed our neighbor Mr. Jeffries watering his plants, holding the hose flush with his groin like a bad practical joke. I waved and he looked up at me for a too-long ogle that resulted in the hose turning on the crotch of his pants and wetting his entire front. He pretended not to notice. “If you need any fire ant poison, I bought enough to send every one of those damn biters straight to hell,” he offered.

“There are actually a few fire ant questions in the natural science section of the eighth-grade state proficiency exams,” I replied. Mr. Jeffries’s eyes squinted up as though I was a sign he was struggling to read. “Their queen lives for six or seven years,” I continued, “but the male drones only live four to five days. Their sole purpose in life is to mate with her and then die.” I couldn’t help but imagine an equally preferential scenario played out by several fourteen-year-old boys and myself. I wondered what percentage of the Jefferson Junior High students—if I came to them in the middle of the night, naked—would agree to have sex with me even if it meant they’d die forty-eight hours later. I guessed there would be at least a small few.

Mr. Jeffries bit the inside of his cheek and turned the hose pressure down to a low, impotent trickle. Despite his fervent watering of the plant bed, the three shepherding garden gnomes at its centerpiece remained covered in bird shit. “That is an unholy arrangement,” he declared.

I’d memorized the directions to Jack’s house; an old online listing divulged it was a one-story five-bedroom home with vaulted ceilings. The upper-middle-class purchase price from a few years ago was encouraging: I hoped for a set of working parents who didn’t have time to decode lies or do micromanagement parenting. An online map reported a 5.3-mile drive. Before starting my car, I was sure to reset the odometer to double-check the distance. Any fact or statistic related to Jack felt like progress.

Due to a series of overprotective stoplights and explosive suburban growth, the short drive took fourteen minutes, which felt both too convenient and painfully distant all at once. I was able to park just across the street from Jack’s house at an angle that allowed a view of the sliver of backyard between his home and their sole abutting neighbor. My car and the AC had been off for no more than a minute when my skin began to slicken. But each bead of sweat that grew on my lip was a pleasant sensory experience; in high school, as I had to date increasingly awful boys for social reasons, I often preferred sex in a hot car for the ways the hermetic steam made me light-headed and added a pleasant shade of autoerotic asphyxiation to an otherwise lacking encounter. Tonight I’d wanted to drive to his house after dark so the heat wouldn’t be so violent, but I hadn’t been patient enough to wait. Close, though. The sun had dropped low in the sky; through the tinted windows it seemed formed of brass. I imagined Jack’s body made gigantic standing before me, the sun in the sky becoming the hot metal button of his jeans. If his enormous fingers reached down from the clouds and unbuttoned it, if his horizon-colored pants began to bunch and fall and his teenage sex of skyscraper proportions was freed, I would drive my car into his toe so he would kneel down to investigate and accidentally kill me when the sequoia-sized head of his penis came crashing through my windshield, all in the hopes that the last image seen before death is the backdrop to our eternity.

Drips of perspiration soon covered my body; as they began to independently crawl across my skin I had the uncomfortable sensation of being covered in ants. Here I am, Jack, I thought, sitting through the heat of hell for you. I gazed longingly at the fence protecting the home’s backyard, complete with a screened-in pool. My stomach dropped with the familiar memory of how unfair life is: I couldn’t simply wait in the car until nighttime, then sneak into his backyard, go for a swim in a white bra and panties and then appear at his window, knocking on the glass gently until he woke from an erection-inducing dream and peeked through the blinds to see me there, soaked and dripping, and let me in. Wasn’t that exactly what every straight teenage boy wanted? It struck me as particularly selfish, the way the world was ignoring Jack’s need for pantied women to knock on his window at night. Restless, I reached for the gym bag I’d used to conceal my supplies: binoculars, a vibrator, a Polaroid camera, a towel and a water bottle.

Focusing the binoculars, I gleaned what I could through windows. Many of the blinds were closed, but the square of frosted glass on the home’s left side told me the location of a downstairs bathroom. The living room’s light was on, though its couch appeared unoccupied—perhaps Jack was home alone? I didn’t know him well enough yet to risk knocking on the door and saying hello; if he reacted badly or questions were raised the wrong way, it would blow everything—although he was the clear standout of his classmates, I reminded myself that he could still prove to be a dead end. It wasn’t worth it to do anything risky. There was a flash of light in one of the back windows and I focused in further, suddenly letting out a long sigh of gratitude at my luck: there he was sitting in front of a television, low to the ground in a beanbag chair—another bright flash confirmed it was him. His alert posture and proximity to the TV suggested he was playing a video game rather than watching a program. I tried to zoom in further, but the lenses were already at maximum view.

Although a passerby would have had to press his nose fully against my car’s tinted window in order to see inside, masturbating in public with no cover seemed inelegant. I grabbed the towel, unfolding it across my lap as though I were about to eat a personal picnic, then slid down my running shorts beneath it. Unsticking my legs from the seat, I expertly opened them into position—since they would immediately bond with the hot leather of the car’s seat and fix themselves in place, it was important that my orgasm wouldn’t require any thigh movement. It took me just a moment to perfectly balance the binoculars in my left hand and steady the vibrator in my right. But just as I was about to begin, I heard voices; looking up from the binoculars I saw two power-walking women turn the corner, swinging hand weights.

I looked back into the binoculars and waited for the women to pass Jack’s house, the blurry, magnified jersey fabric of their clothing momentarily eclipsing each lens. Once their footsteps faded, I turned on the vibrator and began.

Occasionally Jack would lift the game controller up from his lap for a few seconds and I could see his clenched hands. He was wearing an undershirt, but I couldn’t make out the bottom half of his body. Perhaps that could be a treat for him sometime—I could have him play a video game in the beanbag chair while I removed his pants and lay prostrate on the carpet fellating him.

Although I could hear the voices of the female walkers rounding the cul-de-sac and coming back closer toward the opposite side of my car, the thought of Jack’s engorged penis in my mouth made my tongue quicken across my lips. Even in the oven of my closed convertible, I thought of his sex organs in terms of heat. I didn’t doubt that some strain of magical thinking on my part would actually render this true when the time came—the flesh between his legs would likely feel warmer against my lips than anything I’d ever felt before.

I still remembered the pleasant tactile aspect of my first teenage blow jobs, before they became a forced chore: the slickness it all took on after a few minutes always made me feel weightless—it seemed like my mouth produced a different saliva that seemed to shirk density and made my bones as hollow as a bird’s. When I thought of the bitter taste that would descend as Jack got closer to climax, the unmistakable earthy harbinger not so different from the air just before a rainstorm, my leg started to kick as though I was having my reflexes tested.

“I swear,” a woman’s voice protested, “I made the whole thing in my Crock-Pot!” I flipped my vibrator off as the power-walkers neared the back of my car. I noted how the breadth of their thighs stretched the athletic logos on their spandex shorts out into fun-house-mirror enlargements. Their silhouettes eclipsed my binocular view and I looked up to watch them saunter off, elbows out, rowing through the air like impotent wings. Were there souls left inside these women? It seemed doubtful. The soul had always struck me as being a tricky thing to keep with the body: an easily bored aristocrat with the means to leave whenever it wished. What temptations, what vistas were their lives of folding socks and online diet-plan message boards offering? The goosey flesh of their limbs was not in rhythm. What facile cages for a spirit hell-bent on sneaking out, the bodies of these women.

I resumed my view. Jack had entered a segment of greater difficulty—his brow had creased with focus; two strong, white teeth now pinned down his lower lip. This detail of self-domination made me come easily, far more quickly than I wanted. To reset my thoughts, I tried beating my head against the steering wheel a few times before halfheartedly starting to masturbate again, but soon sweat from the binoculars’ seal began to rub into my eyes and made them sting. Taking my hand off the vibrator, I let it buzz numbly in place as I wiped my face off with the lap towel. The pitch of heat in the car suddenly seemed dangerous. I turned the car on so the air-conditioning could blow its well-intentioned breaths that wouldn’t be truly cold for several more minutes, but I didn’t like to stay too long inside a vehicle with its engine on if I wasn’t driving. I’d heard—probably urban legends, but frightening ones—about people who’d died of carbon monoxide poisoning even though their car was out in the open air; it was some unlucky accident eventually blamed on a mechanical error laypersons couldn’t understand. I realized that it wouldn’t be the worst exit ever to die young and beautiful with my pants down inside a Corvette, even if I was parked alone on the side of the road with a sex toy. Still, better to avoid it if possible.

A sluggish couple walking a basset hound turned the corner to come down the road and circle back. They moved at a pace their bodies would have been unable to discern from rest. I felt like a child when I saw middle-aged partners and remembered they had sex together—there was still that initial sense of horror and denial. What aspect of either one of them could be pleasant to touch or to see, even in the darkest room? Sex struck me as a seafood with the shortest imaginable shelf life, needing to be peeled and eaten the moment the urge ripened. Even by sixteen, seventeen, it seemed that people became too comfortable with their desires to have any objectivity over their vulgar moments. They closed their eyes to avoid awkward orgasm faces, slipped lingerie made for models and mannequins onto wholly imperfect bodies. Who was that queen who tried to keep her youth by bathing in the blood of virgins? She should’ve had sex with them instead, or at least had sex with them before killing them. Many might label this a contradiction, but I felt it to be a simple irony: in my view, having sex with teenagers was the only way to keep the act wholesome. They’re observant; they catalog every detail to obsess upon. They’re obsessive by nature. Should there be any other way to experience sex? I remember taking my shirt off for a friend’s younger brother in college. The way his eyes lit up like he was seeing snow for the first time.

Suddenly a gray Buick pulled into Jack’s driveway and the garage opened to a jumbled arrangement of home-improvement tools and sporting gear. A man of banal stature emerged from the garage’s shadow; his belted dress pants sat slightly too high on his waist and his square plaid dress shirt, impervious to time, could’ve been from any one of the past three decades. He was an obvious multitasker. One hand held a phone to his ear; the other wheeled an oversized green trash bin behind him casually, like a suitcase—he could just as easily have been walking through the airport terminal. There was something repulsive (and revealing) about talking on a cell phone while handling garbage. Why did anyone pretend human relationships had value?

Seconds after he parked the bin on the corner, I turned and spied two joggers, each one coming from an opposite direction in a way that seemed synchronized, round the corner and advance down the street. Moments later a third appeared. It was as though they were racing toward the garbage, had been waiting all day, raccoon-like, for it to be set out. For a moment I imagined the bin filled with nothing but weightless, wadded-up puffs of Kleenex: the week’s toll of Jack’s feverish masturbating. There could, I reasoned, actually be such a treasure inside the trash—one tied, recycled plastic shopping bag of waste from Jack’s bedroom: candy wrappers, pencil shavings, awkward starts to homework assignments that were crumpled up in frustration, and then, perhaps, a sweet ball of tissue or paper towel, crisped at the center, smelling of metallic salt. I’d happily have dug through rancid coffee grounds and tufts of middle-aged hair extracted from brushes in order to find it if the hour had been later, the street more isolated.

Jack’s father walked back inside the garage, a trailing burst of laughter seeming to activate the sprinklers on his lawn as the automatic door protectively lowered. One jogger, a thirtysomething woman whose exertions of breath were thundering, stomped by. She had the haunted look of someone who’d come from a dire place and was on her way to an even worse destination to deliver awful news. This expression contrasted sharply with her caffeinated ponytail, which was perched in the top center of her skull like a plume on the hat of a Napoleonic infantryman. There was no way for women, for anyone, to gracefully age. After a certain point, any detail, like the woman’s cheerleader hairstyle, that implied youth simply looked ridiculous. Despite her athletic prowess, the jogger’s cratered thighs seemed more like something that would die one day than something that would not. I didn’t know how long I had before this window slammed down on my fingers as well—with diligence, and avoiding children, perhaps a decade. The older I became, the harder it would be to get what I wanted, but that was probably true of everyone with everything.

Another jogger lapped my convertible, his face the color of sunburned meat. His chest was sweating the way a fatally wounded stab victim might bleed. A wave of desperation coursed through me that nearly made me jump from the car and run—shorts still around my ankles, buzzing vibrator dropping onto the asphalt from between my legs—to Jack’s window, to rap on it loudly with my fist, then press my buttocks against the glass and turn behind to look at him with one panicked fish eye on the side of my face and offer no command or explanation beyond, Take me right now, through this window. You’re too young to realize we don’t have much time.

I stared back into the binoculars, but Jack was no longer in the room—summoned by Father, apparently. I scanned all the front rooms I could see into for activity, but Jack wasn’t visible. With a sigh I removed the vibrator, placed it into the car’s center cup holder and let its droning buzz fill the vehicle. It was time to flip down the driver’s-side visor and perform a quick check in the mirror. I looked deceptively satisfied—sweating, flushed, rosy-cheeked. “Patience,” I said out loud, “is a virtue.” It was so funny I started cackling. A very unattractive, near-snort of a laugh, to be honest. I found that sometimes it was a relief to do something unattractive in private, to confirm that I’m deeply flawed when so many others imagine me to be perfect. People are often startled by my handwriting; because I’m pretty, they assume everything I do is pretty. It’s odd to them that I write like I have a hook for an arm, just as Ford would be startled to learn I have a hook for a heart. Shitting is good this way as well. Occasionally in college, my roommate would enter the bathroom right after I’d done some business and scream out at the lingering smell with a sense of shock that left me deeply gratified. With her square, Germanic jaw and wide-set shoulders, it was easy for me to picture her hearty dumps—I pictured them to be somewhat orthogonal, favoring the rectangular. But I had a face that denied excretion.

“Good-bye for now, Jack,” I called. One good thing about returning to the house in sweaty aerobic gear was that Ford had to believe me when I claimed to be too tired. The concession was always that I’d lie down on my side for him and he’d get to lower my spandex shorts to reveal my buttocks, pull down my sports bra so a profile of nipple was showing as well, and masturbate standing above me while I closed my eyes and pretended to have fallen asleep.