Now Milo was feeling the same anxiety that had consumed him at the onset of their first dinner, and he wondered how he might deal with it this time. Calling his wife and asking her on a date seemed like both the easiest and most difficult thing that he could ever do, so in hopes of avoiding it for one more night, he chose to sit on his futon, watch tape number two, and look for clues as to Freckles’s identity instead.
The screen was black for about ten seconds, and when it resumed, her face filled it. The picture was wobbly, indicating that she was holding the camera this time, and her clothing had changed, though Milo realized that shouldn’t have been a surprise. A week or a month could have passed without him being able to tell.
It appeared that she was wearing blue and yellow flannel pajamas, the kind that always seemed uncomfortably warm to men but just right for a woman. She was sitting on a bed. Her bed, Milo guessed, based on appearances. White and yellow pillows were piled against a headboard behind her. She looked much better. Not as tired or worn out as she had previously.
Milo found surprising relief in her renewed appearance.
Hi. I know it’s been a few days, but I’ve been in a bit of a funk and haven’t had much to say. Actually, I don’t know how these people do it, recording their thoughts every day. I just don’t think I’m going to have enough ideas and stories to make this interesting. But today I saw something that I thought I should share. I was in the supermarket parking lot after work, pushing my carriage back to my car, and this man was getting out of his truck and coming toward me. He was wearing a black knit cap and a leather jacket and boots, with one of those ridiculous barb wire tattoos on his wrist, like some kind of mean-ass biker dude, except he was driving a pickup. Just as he passes me, another man, an old guy in a silver minivan, starts shouting at the biker.
“Hey! You’re parked in a handicapped spot!” the old guy says. But louder than that, and angrier. Really pissed off. His van is in the lane with its blinker flashing, waiting to pull into the space where the biker dude had parked. So Biker Dude flips the old guy off and just goes into the store. Doesn’t even bother to look back. Doesn’t even flinch. Then I watch as the old guy puts the van in park right in the middle of the lane, jumps out, goes to the back of the van, and opens the hatch. That’s when I see his wife in the passenger seat, or who I assume was his wife, just sitting there, waiting. An older lady with gray hair and the kind of fuzzy sweater that my grandmother used to wear. She’s just sitting there, not a worry in the world. We make eye contact for a second and she smiles at me, like what’s about to happen is completely normal. Then the old guy comes back around the van with a tire iron in his hand. He walks over to Biker Dude’s pickup and puts the tire iron right through the windshield. Bam! Just like that. Then he walks back over to his van, gets in, and drives away. Like nothing happened.
It was unbelievable.
Freckles stopped for a moment and shook her head, and in those few seconds, Milo knew that she was envisioning the scene all over again. Reliving it in her mind. The biker. The old man. The wife. The tire iron. He found himself doing the same. Visualizing the moment. Seeing it through Freckles’s eyes.
She was right. It was unbelievable.
The whole scene was surreal. I couldn’t believe what the old guy had done, but that asshole deserved it. I give the old guy a lot of credit. It’s one of those things that I wish I had the guts to do myself. God, that old guy had balls.
But you know what? It’s the old guy’s wife who I can’t stop thinking about. She just sat there, watching her husband bash in another guy’s windshield. The kind of guy who could’ve kicked her husband’s ass twice over. But she just sat there and didn’t say a word. Smiled at me, in fact. It wasn’t like she was afraid to say anything to her husband either. There wasn’t a drop of fear on her. And I think that if she had wanted to, she could’ve stopped the old guy right in his tracks. Convinced him to get back in the van and drive away. But she just sat there. Sat there and let her husband teach that asshole a lesson.
That old guy is one lucky man. I hope he knows it.
Milo thought that he understood the scene better than most. He knew that as people become older, many begin to feel a loss of control over their lives. Their mind and body begins to fail them and their families stop relying on them as they once did. In response, they try to find ways to reassert the control that they once possessed. It was entirely possible that taking a crowbar to Biker Dude’s pickup truck had been a way for that old guy to remind the world that he wasn’t in the grave just yet.
And Milo suspected that Freckles was right about the wife too. Understanding and supporting her husband in a moment like that was unusual. Special. The kind of relationship that few couples enjoyed. Milo suddenly found himself envious of this man whom he had never met.
The screen went black once again, and when Freckles returned, she was still on the bed, pillows piled in the same mountainous formation as before. Milo marveled at the number of decorative pillows that women seemed to require on a bed.
You know what? I think this needs to be for me. My visions of posting this diary online might have been a little crazy. I’ve been sitting here for the last fifteen minutes, thinking of all the things that I’d like to share on this video but can’t because I plan to let other people watch. Maybe that’s not what I should be doing. Maybe this should just be for me. At least for now. I can’t keep a diary that excludes all of my secrets, my own windshield-bashing moments that I don’t want the world to know about. It wouldn’t be worth my time. So I think that for now, this will be for my eyes only. Maybe someday, when I’m good and dead, someone can watch this.
Freckles paused for a moment, let out a deep sigh of relief, smiled, and then added:
You know what else? I suddenly have a lot to say.
Milo pressed the stop button on the camera and set it down on the coffee table. In a single moment, things had drastically changed. Prior to Freckles’s decision to start recording just for herself, Milo had justified his eavesdropping with the expectation that the videos were intended to be made public someday. But now the rules had changed. Who knew what Freckles would share next?
The color of her underwear (Milo couldn’t bring himself to use the word panties without feeling stupid)?
Her bra size (Milo guessed a 34B or C)?
Her voting record?
Bizarre bathroom rituals?
Secret sexual fantasies?
Incidents of undertipping waitresses?
The list of secrets that Milo kept from his closest friends and wife was long, and the idea that someone might come along and have access to all of them made him shudder. Could he now violate Freckles’s privacy in the same way?
Fortunately, in the midst of his thoughts, the phone rang. Milo picked it up and saw the phone number that had been his for more than three years. Christine was calling.
His decision on Freckles would have to wait.
chapter 9
Milo didn’t expect that his second first date with Christine would take place in his apartment, and neither did he expect it to end with sex against the kitchen wall. But his wife had requested the location for the date, apparently curious about how her husband was living, and before Milo had time to serve dinner, the two were half naked and trying desperately to stay upright while remaining effectively engaged in the task at hand. This was not Milo’s choice of position, to be sure. Had it been up to him, the two would have been in bed with the lights off, enjoying any of the more easily achieved positions that did not require the balance and agility that Milo was now mustering. Contrary to what was often displayed in movies, sex standing up was not at all simple. On the big screen, burly men lifted petite women with effortless grace, and, without so much as a drop of lubricant or a guiding hand, instantly connected penis and vagina in a mystical embrace. Several thrusts would ensue, typically followed by a simultaneous orgasm that would impress the finest of Olympic synchronized swimmers.
These fa
ntasy moments made no sense to Milo. Though they seemed delightfully spontaneous and blisteringly sexy on screen, the reality of the situation was that the human body was not designed to engage in upright sexual relations. The mere positioning of the penis and vagina on their respective owners made certain positions much simpler to accomplish, so why the upright version of sex was admired by so many was baffling to Milo.
Furthermore, this was not a position that anyone should attempt past the age of thirty, as one’s strength and agility diminished. Attempting it past that age would only serve to emphasize the debilitating effects of advancing years on the couple.
Milo should have known better and avoided this trap.
In addition, Milo doubted that he had any chance of achieving orgasm in this ridiculous position. The strength required to support his wife’s entire body, as well as the concentration and balance necessary to remain connected made any hope of orgasm seem pointless. Even in the standard missionary position, Milo found that it took him longer to achieve orgasm than it once did, and contrary to commonly held beliefs about men and women and sex, this did not always sit well with his wife. Though he took pride in his stamina, there were many nights when Christine wanted the action to end quickly, something that Milo found increasingly difficult to accomplish as he got older. It simply took longer to climax since he’d entered his thirties, and in Milo’s estimation, this was not a bad thing. Sex felt good, so the more time he spent doing it, the better. Yet many times Christine would encourage Milo to orgasm before he was good and ready (and even able), and this added pressure for speed, much like the pressure for speed that he had felt in the Arugula restroom, made it nearly impossible to accomplish something that he could once manage in twenty seconds or less as a teenager.
As a result, Milo frequently faked orgasms with his wife, which he intended to do this evening.
He often wondered if other men faked orgasms, but he could never bring himself to ask. In fact, Milo’s understanding of sex in general had come along slowly and at times painfully. The extent of his parents’ instruction on copulation came one night after Milo had moved in to a partially finished basement bedroom as a teenager.
“You can do whatever you’d like with girls down here,” his father had advised. “Just don’t get them pregnant.”
That was the first and last time that his parents spoke to him about the birds and the bees.
As a result, Milo’s initial understanding of sex was limited. Growing up in a small town prior to the advent of the Internet didn’t help, and his lack of knowledge occasionally caused problems. It wasn’t until a few years ago, for example, that Milo could say for certain that he was circumcised. He was aware of the two types of penis, had seen both varieties in the locker room at the gym, and knew that his penis did not resemble the ones that appeared to be wrapped like German sausages. But he did not know if his penis, the type which he was inclined to prefer, was circumcised or uncircumcised and was therefore never confident enough to declare his penile status until finally finding definitive photos of each online. Mistakes such as misidentifying his own penis were ones that Milo had tried desperately to avoid since childhood.
When he was thirteen, a bunch of older kids in his Boy Scout troop questioned Milo on his knowledge of sex on the way to a campfire jamboree. In the back of his scoutmaster’s van, bench seats and no seat belts in those days, Brian Dean, Eddy Lindo, and several other brutes had asked Milo if he knew what a rubber was. Milo was certain that the item was sexual in nature but had no idea what it looked like or what it even was. In a panic, he claimed to know the answer to their question but refused to give them the satisfaction of a definition, and so began an hour-long berating that would continue to resurface within his Boy Scout troop for years to come.
At the time, Milo suspected that he knew what a rubber was, but he didn’t want to risk being wrong, knowing it was better to feign knowledge than to confirm ignorance. Once, while retrieving a book for his mother from her nightstand, he had spotted a long, penis-shaped slab of silicone peeking out from underneath her pillow, and he guessed that this might have been a rubber. He envisioned a slit on the end in which the man would insert his penis, thus providing it with protection as well as increased length and girth.
Obviously, he had been mistaken.
But without understanding it completely, Milo was too afraid to venture a guess, so he allowed Brian Dean, whose older brother, Michael, would commit suicide later that year, to belittle him to the point of tears. Still, it was better than mistaking your mother’s dildo for a condom.
Milo often thought about Michael Dean, wondering what secrets this seemingly normal and well-liked boy had that caused him to blow his head off with his father’s hunting rifle. Milo had secrets, to be sure, and though they seemed exceedingly strange at times, none of them had been awful enough to cause him to contemplate suicide. Michael Dean’s secrets, Milo thought, must have been terrible.
So Milo found himself attempting to fornicate with his wife just a foot and a half from Skywalker’s (whose name had reverted to Puggles for the evening) water dish and the kitchen garbage can. Though Christine’s insistence on sex had been initially thrilling, the combination of the awkward position, the water dish, and the faint odor of garbage had quickly eliminated any hope for excitement.
In fact, if it had been Milo’s decision, he and Christine would not be having sex at all. He had something more pressing on his mind at the moment.
Breaking ice cubes from their plastic trays was one of those recurring demands by which Milo was occasionally plagued. Thankfully, this demand was easily met so long as there were filled trays in the freezer. This had meant talking Christine out of a refrigerator with an automatic ice maker, which hadn’t been easy, but the need to run a water line under the kitchen floor in order for the appliance to produce ice had convinced her that the convenience wouldn’t be worth the hassle. But when Milo had moved in to the apartment, he had failed to notice a lack of ice cube trays in the freezer. Why the previous tenant would take the ice cube trays when every freezer on the planet was already equipped with them was beyond Milo’s understanding, but when the need to crack the cubes from the trays arose less than two hours before his date with Christine, Milo made a mad dash for the supermarket, where he purchased the trays, along with five extra jars of grape jelly. Once home, he filled the trays with water, decreased the temperature inside the freezer to its lowest setting, and placed them inside.
Milo had actually been exceedingly pleased with the purchase. The trays were the type with an extra-tall ridge around the outer edge, allowing the user to fill the bucket-like containers for each cube as well as add a layer of water over all the cubes. Once frozen, this additional layer of water would form a sheet of ice across the top of the tray, making the cubes infinitely more satisfying to snap out.
However, Christine had arrived before the water had finished freezing, so now he found himself just five feet from the freezer, the water likely frozen, ready to go. Yet instead of popping the cubes from their frozen perches, Milo was forced to engage in a nearly impossible sexual position with his wife. Had they taken the passion to the bedroom, Milo might have been able to silence the demand for a time, but listening to the hum of the refrigerator’s compressor comingling with Christine’s whines and pants made the ice cubes an immediate necessity and an orgasm an absolute impossibility.
Milo found himself wishing that he could explain this predicament to his wife, and he thought that if he could, he might be able to save the marriage right there and then. The truth might destroy any hope of reconciliation, but perhaps there was the slimmest of chances that his honesty would open new doors for them.
But to bring it up for discussion would be like risking a guess at the definition of a rubber and confusing it with a dildo. If he didn’t get it right, there would be no turning back.
Milo waited until Christine achieved orgasm, a small miracle in Milo’s mind considering the circumstances,
before he began his feigned escalation of pants and grunts that would culminate in his own climax. Under normal circumstances, even when orgasm was possible, Milo attempted to time his release as close to Christine’s as possible, uncertain and doubtful of the degree of pleasure that a woman experienced when she continued having sex after achieving orgasm. So less than a minute after Christine’s shuddering climax, Milo followed with a faux orgasm of his own, thrusting deeply and forcefully and declaring his enthusiasm loud enough for the neighbors to hear.
In the world of fake orgasms, Milo thought that it was impossible to be over the top.
Another problem with upright sex was the awkwardness of the moments that immediately followed. Had the couple been in bed, Milo would have rolled off his wife and remained beside her for a time, allowing his heart rate to return to normal. The two might hold hands, or if chilly, they might embrace, Christine resting her head on his chest while they engaged in postcoital small talk. But from a standing position, there was nowhere that the couple could go. Milo stepped away from Christine’s body, feeling cold and sticky in the middle of the kitchen floor as his wife peeled her backside from the wall in a motion that was anything but sexy.
Moments like these were absent from the movies too, Milo noted.
“Do you mind if I use the bathroom first?” Christine asked, standing directly over the dog’s water dish, attempting to reposition her breasts inside her bra. During the first frenzied moments of the encounter, Milo had managed to remove his wife’s top but was unable to negotiate the fastener on the bra, opting to push it down to her belly rather than fighting to remove it.
“Of course,” he said, having hoped she would ask. “The bathroom is just around the corner.”