“You’re doing that again,” said Carol.
Jackson raised his voice over the splash of his urine; the choked stream shot in uneven bursts, and it stung. “Doing what?”
“Closing the door while you pee. You’ve done that for weeks. Since when are you so shy? I’ve seen you pee several thousand times.”
Last week Carol had tried just walking in, and found the bathroom door locked. That hadn’t gone down well—she thought he’d lost his mind—and he’d concocted some cockamamie explanation about how he was used to locking the bathroom door at work and just wasn’t thinking; thankfully she’d not called him on the fact that urinals had no doors, nor questioned why he would now routinely take a leak in the men’s room at Knack in the privacy of its single stall. Nevertheless, locking the bathroom door thereafter would have raised more suspicions than the extra security was worth. So tonight she was able to poke her head in unannounced. “Come on,” she said teasingly. “You know I kind of like it.”
Cutting the exercise short, he stuffed himself back into his pants before he could completely squeeze off, and dribbled inside the fly. “Too late! Thrill’s going to have to wait for another night.”
More than one thrill had waited for another night for some time. “I can think of a way you can make it up to me.” Carol put her arms around him from behind, her bare breasts warm against his back. Christ, this was far later than he’d planned to schedule the unveiling, and the “contagious skin condition” was approaching its sell-by date; pretty soon, Carol wouldn’t buy it.
Still, he figured he could eke it through one more evening or so, the way you can sometimes coax a surprising number of extra brushings from a toothpaste tube to all appearances shot. “I’d love to make it up to you, sunshine,” he said, fumbling to fasten the safety pin on his boxers. “But you know what the doctor said about the skin thing. I guarantee you don’t want this crud.”
Carol stiffened, and dropped her arms. Grazing past her to the bedroom, Jackson’s gut clenched. There did come a time when you had to concede that the Colgate was kaput.
“Skin conditions aren’t usually contagious.”
“Well, this one is. Like athlete’s foot.” He was a little insulted, as if he wouldn’t have thought his pretext through.
“I Googled the name of this ailment of yours. No match.”
“I told you,” he took off his watch with his back to his wife, “it’s very rare.”
“It’s virtually impossible that a medical problem you share with as few as five people isn’t cited somewhere.”
“Maybe you spelled it wrong.”
“Genital cortamachriasis, right?” (Granted, the name of his apocryphal scrofula sounded uncomfortably close to Heather’s cortomalaphrine, but he’d had to invent it under duress.) “There are only so many plausible ways to spell it. I tried them all.”
“Sounds like IBM ain’t getting its money’s worth!”
She would not be jollied. “None of this explains why I can’t see it. The rash can’t be that bad. And if it is that bad, then I really need to see it. That part of your body is part mine.”
“A man has his pride.” Jackson slipped off his slacks, careful not to tug the boxers along with. They were at the tail end of the laundry cycle, and the elastic on these last-generation boxers was weak. “The cream seems to be working, but it’s taking longer than I’d hoped.”
“What cream?”
“The cream! Jesus, why this third degree when I’m only thinking of you?” Reasoning that the best defense was a good taking-offense—a meeting of consternation with umbrage in return—Jackson flailed his arms for effect. “I don’t like sleeping beside your naked body in my underwear. I don’t like going without sex. I’m just trying to protect your health, at some sacrifice to myself, too—”
The flailing came at a price. With his arms outstretched, Carol reached swiftly for both side seams of his boxers and yanked them to his knees. She reeled back a step, and then she screamed.
Carol was not a squeamish person; as for poking about an unfinished basement with a flashlight looking for a rotting raccoon, Carol’s level-headed temperament suited her far better than her husband for the job. The truth was, he may never have heard her scream before. It frightened him. If nothing else, the horror on her face enabled him to see his penis with nauseous objectivity for the first time.
It was the wrong color. Red, but not the cheerful cherry red that it had sometimes turned in its athletic adolescence. It had the purplish undertone of raw liver.
The sutures above his balls were binding. The flesh bulged from their constraint. A glistening yellow ooze seeped from between the threads. Liberated from the swaddling of his boxers, the smell rose more sharply. Though the effluents of one’s own body are generally less noxious than other people’s, this stench made even Jackson a little woozy. The animal from the basement had crawled upstairs.
But worst of all was the shape. It did not look like a dick.
In truth, he had never been entirely won over to the phallic worship of his peers. When he was eight or so, a little girl at the playground had intruded on him peeing in the bushes, and had screamed in much the same spirit of reflexive horror as Carol had a moment ago. Presumably the girl had never seen a penis before, and she was unimpressed. “Oooh, gross, what is that thing, it’s disgusting!” she’d cried as she ran away. And then there was the other time, in gym in junior high. He’d barely entered puberty; still wet from the showers, he’d been cold. Nevertheless, the jibe from a much bigger kid had smarted: looks like you’re packing a baby carrot and a couple of lima beans. Thereafter, the boys had tagged him “the vegetarian,” a term whose innocence to his teachers’ ears protected his classmates from punishment for bullying. For that matter, the very word penis had always sounded like something silly, trivial, and measly. Ever since Jackson could remember, his fifth appendage had seemed subtly alien to him, apart, and capable of betrayal. It was this very sense of the extrusion being not quite a part of his body that may have enabled him to experiment with it.
The experiment had failed. He may never have quite fathomed why women would find a penis attractive—with its shriveled, too-thin skin, the blobby, drooping testicles with straggles of hair, the little mushroom cap at the end somehow not a form that human flesh should assume. At rest it looked frightened and depressed; when alert, impertinent yet insecure, waving about and trying to attract attention like a loudmouth acting out. He’d never entirely trusted Carol’s enthusiasm for the thing; her natural kindness made her unreliable. Yet there were limits to Carol’s altruism, since she was currently making no effort to disguise her revulsion, as there were also limits to his own disaffection with the phallus of conventional proportions. The unimproved version had still been preferable to this.
The lumpy tuber between his legs now looked like one of those balloon animals that children’s entertainers twisted hastily together at birthday parties. Where before the shaft was thicker at the base, now it was narrowest there, for the collagen used for thickening had slurped downward, bulging over the rim to partially bury the head. His dick had love handles. The filler tissue had migrated asymmetrically, too, and the bulge was larger on the right. Overwhelmed by what now hung more like a third testicle, the head appeared smaller and pokier, no better than a gumdrop. And the shaft emerged from too low down. The snipping of the suspensory ligaments was supposed to have released a full inch of length otherwise wastefully tucked inside his pelvis; now his prick seemed to be growing out of the balls themselves. The descended derivation jarred the eye, like a dirty scrawl on a men’s room wall by a kid who couldn’t draw. Inflamed, bloated, and seeping, this was the kind of fatally festering extremity that battlefield medics in the Civil War sawed off on the spot.
“What have you done?” Carol said when she had caught her breath.
“Mom?” peeped from behind the bedroom door. “What’s wrong?”
“Heather, sweetie, go back to bed. Mom—saw somethin
g that scared her, that’s all. A mouse.”
“But I’m afraid of mouses! It’ll come and get me in my bed!”
“No, honey, this mouse isn’t getting anybody, not you, and definitely not your mother. It wasn’t even a mouse, it turns out. A sock. A balled-up, smelly sock that can’t do anything, not anything at all. I’m sorry I frightened you. Go back to sleep.”
The boxers around his knees had intensified his humiliation, so Jackson had taken advantage of Heather’s knock to kick them off. He sat slump-shouldered on the side of the bed, hands folded across his crotch.
“I don’t want to wake the kids again,” Carol said in a strained whisper. “But I want you to understand that no matter how softly I say anything else tonight, I am still screaming.”
When she grabbed her robe and belted it with a double knot, Jackson realized that he should have pulled the boxers back on when he had the chance. Now he was stuck with the disadvantage. He was fated to have this conversation stark naked, because she had found him out, and putting his clothes on would seem like hiding the evidence—like putting the candy bar back in your pocket when you’d already been caught red-handed for shoplifting. He couldn’t remember the last time he felt this intensely like a little boy.
“I am correctly surmising that you did this to yourself? Had this done? That you did not have your penis caught in a mangle at work and fail to mention the accident.”
Her word choice was icy: surmising. She would never in the past have called it a penis. She wasn’t a prude, and liked the sound of cock and dick, their hard consonants, their monosyllabic thrust. But that’s what he now had between his legs, a penis—with its peevish whine, its soft, low-lying n, its cringing, retracted hiss. “I thought—”
“You had one of those stupid surgeries, didn’t you?”
“We get all this email spam, and …”
“Penis enlargement ads are why God invented the Delete key. You’re not telling me you found some hack on the Internet?”
“No! I got a referral. Still, I figured they wouldn’t send out so many ads if there weren’t … Well, obviously lots of people do it.”
“Lots of people get addicted to heroin. Lots of people commit suicide. Lots of people drive over the speed limit and run headlong into cement barriers. That doesn’t mean you have to, too.”
“Carol, if we’re going to talk about this, it really doesn’t help for you to go all Mommy on me. Obviously the surgery didn’t go very well.”
“That’s the understatement of the century. How could you possibly have done such a thing without discussing it with me first?”
“I wanted to surprise you,” he said miserably.
“Congratulations, then. I’m surprised. In fact, I am dumbfounded. You cast yourself as such a maverick. Your own man, so outspoken, not duped by impositions like government that the rest of us ‘Mugs’ take for granted. How could you be so … trite?”
“I didn’t get this surgery because I thought it was original. Just because I have strong political views doesn’t mean that I don’t want to measure up as a man—literally.” Tonight, being one of the handful of Americans who used the adverb correctly failed to flush him with the usual self-congratulation.
“Doesn’t anything you do down there have implications for me?”
“Yeah, sure, I guess. But you’d have said no. You don’t call it a discussion when it’s just a veto. And you may say that my dick is ‘part yours,’ which is sort of sweet, but it isn’t yours. I lend it out, and I love lending it out. But it’s still fundamentally my dick.”
“Oh, it is now! One hundred percent. Welcome to it.”
“I thought you’d like it, even if you wouldn’t necessarily think you’d like it before you saw the results. And you know, we used to get it on all the time … until Flicka.”
“With my doing the one a.m. feeding, and you the four o’clock, every single night? It’s just been a matter of exhaustion, not lack of appetite.”
“Yeah, but when Flick started doing the feedings herself this last year, we didn’t … The frequency didn’t pick up, right? Not really.”
“Sex is a habit, like anything else. A habit you can get out of. And not that much has changed; if it’s not the feedings, it’s something else, and we’re still exhausted. But that’s not the point. If you wanted to have sex more often, all you had to do was say so.”
“I just figured I could give us a jump-start. I thought it would give you a kick—the way it looked. And it would feel better. For you.”
“You did this for me? I don’t believe that for a New York minute.”
“Okay, sure, I thought I’d feel better, too. It’s always seemed, you know—a little small, that’s all. In comparison. I don’t think women understand. It’s like me not being able to understand your feeling fat around your period, when I can’t see anything different.”
She forced him to meet her eyes. “Small in comparison to whom?”
He glared. “Just—other people!”
“Uh-huh.” She stared him down until he looked away, and by dropping his glance, he appeared to admit something. “Tell me,” she hounded, “have I ever complained?”
“No, but you wouldn’t. You’re terminally nice.”
“I wouldn’t complain because I didn’t have a problem. But we have one now.”
“I’ll get it fixed,” he said staunchly, although the assertion had a familiar ring of improbability; like so many of the handymen at Knack, he got around to repairing jammed pull switches and dangling towel racks in his own home last of all, if ever.
“You know that’s going to require plastic surgery, which isn’t covered by our insurance. When we have a hard enough time covering deductibles and co-pays already, and we’re out a thousand a month for Flicka’s Compleat alone!”
“I’ll find the money somewhere,” he said morosely. “I can always grab jobs that come in at Knack and moonlight on the side.”
“That’s cheating Shep.”
“No, it would be cheating Pogatchnik. I never skimmed jobs from Shep. Eating into Pogatchnik’s bottom line would be a pleasure.”
“But come to think of it, our insurance doesn’t cover self-mutilation, either. How much did this cost?” He shrugged. “A few grand.”
“How much?”
Carol could always track down the going rate online, and if he lied that’s exactly what she’d do, too. If she started nosing about, she’d also find out that you weren’t really supposed to do length and girth at the same time; determined to have the surgeries done quickly in secret, he’d insisted on the whole schmear at once. Maybe he should have been suspicious when the doctor relented for a price. “Mmm … seven or eight.”
“Eight thousand dollars! My God, where did you get the money?”
Normal men, real men, controlled their families’ purse strings—which they didn’t call purse strings—but in the Burdina household, Carol controlled every dime. Was it any wonder that he’d wanted a bigger dick? “The dogs,” he said meekly.
“You promised me you’d stop gambling!”
“Look, the odds against that stinking gene making it through both our families’ distal long arm of chromosome nine for every generation to Flicka must have been ten thousand to one! Might as well cash in on a natural talent for winning long shots.”
“I can’t believe I owe this calamity to some sorry greyhound feeling frisky. If I could turn back the clock, I’d brain the stupid animal with a two-by-four.”
“I haven’t placed a bet since. On my life.”
Of course, this version of events was crap, but the dogs story was also admission against interest, which is why she believed it. The truth was that he’d finally set up his own checking account—was that so outrageous, that a forty-four-year-old man would have his own bank account?—where Jackson deposited cash tips and the proceeds from the far-better-than-hypothetical jobs he’d been skimming from Pogatchnik for years. He hadn’t amassed enough funds on the side to pay more
than the monthly minimums on the credit cards that Carol also didn’t know about, like the Visa to which he’d actually charged that $8,700 bill for ruining his life. But she was a worrier, already uneasy about the negative balance on the cards she did know about, and anxious to pay off the home equity loan they’d taken out to pay for the extras around Flicka’s scoliosis surgery. He took no pleasure in the fiscal secrecy, but regarded himself as nobly sacrificing to protect what little peace of mind his wife had left.
Eyes closed, Carol rubbed her face and breathed into her hands. As she collected herself, he wondered if he could now infer that she was no longer screaming.
“Does it hurt?” she asked at last. “It looks like it hurts.”
“Yeah, it hurts.”
“A lot?”
“A lot.”
“You’d better let me look at it.” She touched his thigh, and in the gentler cast of her face he concluded it was safe. He withdrew his hands and canted his knees. She crouched before his dick and reached cautiously for the shaft, as if trying to befriend a skittish stray in the pound whose previous owner had beaten the shit out of it. As she moved it to one side and then the other, he winced. “What kind of butcher did this?”
“I got his name from my cousin Larry when we had beers last summer. Larry said the doc was ‘a real artist’ and his girlfriend went wild for the results. Made him a lot bigger—or ‘even bigger,’ as he put it. Hell, Larry wasn’t even sheepish about it, like it wasn’t even a hush-hush secret. Said you ‘owe it to yourself.’ He was so keen on the guy that he was planning to go back, get the next size up.”
She rolled her eyes. “As if you can order a penis like a pair of shoes. Did you ever see what his surgery looked like?”
“Of course not! You don’t ask a guy to whip out his dick in a bar. It wasn’t that sort of bar.”
Carol placed her palm gingerly over the sutures. “It feels hot. Does it still work?”