The Big "O": A Romantic Comedy (17 page)

“If we can't sell the old book, how are we doing to sell the new one?” Max snarled.

“Stop changing the subject! This is about you and your,” she made the quotes sign, “'research.' You tired of me, Max? Cause I'm getting pretty tired of your behavior.”

Max finally realized where she was going with this.

Was it possible that Emily thought that he was cheating on her? He was shocked.

She was the one who was never interested in sex anymore. She was the one who would rather eat chocolates than give him kisses.

It pissed him off. In fact, she was the one who had let herself go and get fat and always ran around looking slovenly and, for the most part, unkissable. Her with her shrugging him off and her, 'Not now,' attitude, ever since little Max had come on the scene.

He stared at her now.

Her eyes were shining and she was just so beautiful.

He remembered the way that she had looked in their first position as MBAs, competing for the same VP of Marketing position.

It pissed him off that she was just as beautiful now as she was then. He wanted to be angry at her for being so bitchy and accusing him but she was so pretty. What?

He looked her up and down. She was pretty. She was almost her normal size, maybe already there and getting leaner. She had on lipstick, makeup, and her hair was freshly done. He looked her up and down and his eyes narrowed.

Where was she going when he arrived? Who was she going to see? If Isis was going to sit for little Max, then Emily had been about to go out.

Was this a case of the pot calling the kettle black? Max felt sick at the idea of some other man touching his wife, much less kissing her, or something even more intimate.

He felt a burst of rage that almost blocked his vision.

He would kill her, not literally, but he would absolutely let her have it, if she were cheating on him.

They glared at each other.

Her nostrils flared and her eyes flashed and then, to his complete and utter shock, a tear slid from her eyes.

He realized then that her earlier question had been entirely sincere.

“I'm happy! I love you, Emily. There is no way that I'll ever get tired of you,” he said desperately.

She looked both hopeful and doubtful at the same time and Max felt like his marriage, and emotional relationship with Emily, was just one more area that he couldn't quite get a grip on.

I'm a moron, he decided. I am a complete moron. He felt deep, black despair, mixed with rage and frustration, over his inability to communicate his love to his wife.

“I'm going to work out,” Emily finally replied, wiping away a tear. He looked her up and down.

“You aren't dressed for it,” he said suspiciously.

“I'll change at the gym and shower after, just like you do,” Emily said smartly.

Then Max realized that she knew that he'd been lying to her about going to the gym, and elsewhere, when he'd really been meeting Dr. Charles.

He'd have to figure out how and when to tell her that he was in therapy but it wasn't going to happen right then. Not when he was feeling like such a screw up.

He could imagine the pure horror of that conversation.

Hey, honey, you're unhappy? Well don't worry, it's because I'm officially screwed up. I might be clinically depressed, am for sure an under-earner, as you already know, and I have low self-esteem but I'm working on it... I swear. God help him, his therapist had raised the issue of low self-esteem, and subconscious lack of self worth, in their last session, and he'd been obsessing about the phrases ever since.

He hadn't even known what she meant. Self-esteem: wasn't that a hippy-dippy feel-good word? Except that it wasn't.

Turned out that self-esteem was related to self-confidence and feeling self worth, feeling valuable, and believing in yourself and he was all fucking out of both of those things.

He could imagine both the rest of his admissions and the disgust that it would elicit in Emily.

Honey, on top of all of that, I'm for certain less intelligent than our child, and probably you, too, so you should get out and find a proper husband while you can. He tried telling himself that he was projecting, that Emily wouldn't think those things about him, but he didn't entirely believe it. No, thank you. He was not facing that conversation today.

So, he didn't acknowledge the elephant in the room, her subtle dig about his recent lies about where he was going, and did the only thing he could think of... the thing that she absolutely hated and had already mentioned in this exact convo.

He changed the subject.

“What about dinner?” Max said plaintively.

His wife stared at him a long moment. Was he really changing the subject? How were they every going to resolve anything? Whatever. She had places to go and people to see.

“Show Mr. Phan some love and I'm sure he'll give it back to you in spades,” Emily said, indicating that he should order out, then she turned on her heel and left the room.

Emily worked out hard on the treadmill listening to music through her headphones. It was amazing how fantastic it felt to seriously move her body. The running and floor exercises that she'd been doing at home were great, yet it felt really good to have all of the gym equipment and machines available.

When she was done with cardio she did free weights and various upper body weight machines. The entire time she thought about a day job. Should she get one? She didn't really want to but she felt that, as a responsible mother who might soon be a single parent, she should consider it.

Still, she knew that a scattered focus brought scattered results.

If she updated her resume, which she didn't think would be enhanced by self-employment, employers notoriously didn't want to hire people who'd been working in their own business, could she even get a job? On the other hand, say she got interest from corporations, could she could gracefully decline offers if she decided that she didn't want to go back into the corporate world? Part of her wondered if she shouldn't consider it though.

She felt a blank panic about the idea of divorce. What if she had to pay for everything herself? She could move in with her parents but they were aging and had down-sized and little Max was a lot to handle. Plus, the thought of being a failure-to-launch, returning-to-the-nest, statistic made her feel sick.

She had to figure out her money and handle it fast.

Despite her desire to think about her business, her thoughts circled around to a day job again. If she was going to be a single parent to her little guy would she be able to afford to be self-employed? Would she be able to afford her values? Sometimes she wondered if she should find another field altogether. Anything to do with finance always seemed to attract people obsessed with money and power.

She was still young enough to go back to school and get another degree.

If she had a teaching degree she could be a teacher and be off all summer with little Max. Part of what she loved about self-employment was her ability to arrange her schedule around her child's schedule.

E
MILY FORCED HERSELF to forget about work and feel her body moving and sweating as she listened to the up-beat music. Getting stressed out wasn't going to fix anything or help her make good decisions.

After her workout, feeling better than she had in months, she sat in the sauna. She soaked in the fabulous heat and came up with a mental list of good options to help her decide about whether to remain self-employed or seek a real job. She knew that everything was speculative. It kind of depended upon whether or not her husband and she were getting divorced.

On the drive home, Emily felt stronger. She realized that divorce was a fact of life. She'd tried, was trying, to be a good wife. She would keep doing her best and, yet, be prepared for the worst.

Emily entered the house. She was dressed even more carefully, made up and beautifully groomed, as before. Radiant, she dropped her gym bag on the floor.

To her surprise, baby Max and his father were watching a scene with Yoda in "Star Wars" on the flat screen TV.

“It's past his bedtime,” Emily said by way of a greeting to her husband. He grunted in response.

“We were waiting for you,” Max said when she stared down at him, waiting for a proper answer.

Emily shook her head as if that were the dumbest thing in the world.

Why didn't I just put the kid to bed, Max asked himself. Truth be told, he realized, he had been lazy. Realizing just how often he was lazy, and a liar, made him shrink a little.

I'm a shitty husband and father, he decided. I could have put the kid down, he thought, but then I always feel a little stupid because he seems so smart and full of potential and I feel like I'm old and dumber.

He watched Emily swoop down and scoop up the baby. Then she headed straight for the kid's bedroom without saying another word.

Max stared after her, grateful that she hadn't said the obvious: that he was lazy, rude, and inconsiderate.

Emily sat in the rocking chair and did sign language with baby Max.

“Art,” she said, signing "art."

The cute little boy mimicked her, using his pinky like a paint brush to form the word in sign language.

“Art,” said the child and signed "art" at the same time.

Emily laughed and kissed little Max's neck and made him giggle and laugh.

Emily and the child were entirely happy and giggling when Max entered. He stood and watched the two of them from the doorway and felt a little burst of jealousy.

“We were doing something,” Max said. Emily wouldn't look at him.

“Now we're doing something,” Emily finally said.

Max left the room. He felt frustrated with himself and Emily. Sure the kid had seen 'Star Wars' about a jazillion times, but he love it. Max tried to think what Dr. Charles would tell him right then, probably something about identifying what he was feeling, thinking, and experiencing, and then examining his reality and seeing if his viewpoint was logical and rational. Was it possible that he was projecting again?

After glancing around his apartment, Edwin lay on his leather sofa and called Isis.

The phone rang and rang. It really surprised him that she didn't pick up. It was a Tuesday night. By now she'd be home from work and would have eaten. He scanned the texts that had gone back and forth between them earlier. They seemed fine. Nothing out of the ordinary. She hadn't mentioned plans to go out or for an early night.

He tried to remember when they had last gone out together. They'd had that brief albeit enchanting unplanned dinner, fairly recently, but then she'd cut it short to baby-sit.

It wasn't like it was her fault, he realized. He'd had an urgent work thing going on for a couple of weeks, that had taken a great deal of overtime.

What was most disturbing was that she didn't seem to mind.

He frowned then dialed her number again and got her voice mail.

He hung up without leaving a message. He realized that this was new.

Edwin thought about how things used to be. He would get sweet little love texts off and on, throughout the day, and sometimes a call. Often he couldn't take her call but he liked to listen to the throaty, sexy, flirty voice mails that Isis left for him.

He scrolled back through recent text messages.

They were, in fact, he realized belatedly, out of the ordinary.

The cute little sexy invitations to come and see her, to make plans, and what have you, were entirely absent. All of her texts were responses to his own.

In fact, he realized, thinking over the last few weeks, Isis no longer called or texted him first. He felt a wave of shock and a bit of fear.

He scanned through the texts again, to be sure. Yes, she rarely, if ever, called or texted him anymore.

He'd never been one of those suave playboys. Sure, girls liked him okay.

He was a good person and a nice man. He'd been a later bloomer and finally had sex in his very late teens. It had been a fumbling, sweaty, awkward endeavor, and he'd known that it wasn't good for the girl or even really for him.

He'd always felt more comfortable with books, tennis, horses, and family, than women and dating.

Later, during and after university, it had gotten better but he hadn't felt a real, earthy ease with sex, or felt all that desirable to a woman, until he met Isis.

Isis was naturally physical, sensual, and sexual. She really, really seemed to like him and to have sex with him as frequently as possible. She was always so naturally flirty and pouty and it made him feel extremely manly.

He'd always been extremely turned on by her. They'd been more adventurous together, and had really fit well, unlike the more horsey type of girls that he'd attracted previously.

He didn't know what was wrong. They hadn't had a fight.

Was she angry with him? he wondered. It didn't seem like it. She always returned his texts and calls.

Yet, she, or something, was different. Edwin felt very sad. He got up from the leather couch, where he'd been lying down and went to a window and looked out at the view.

The sparkling view of Los Angeles below him didn't seem beautiful; the lights glittered too brightly against the darkness and made him feel lonely.

The pleasure that he'd felt moments ago, in contemplating all of his recent activities and accomplishments, in getting things done, had dissipated.

Had Isis had met someone else? The thought made him feel sick.

A fragment of a popular song lyric popped into his head and made him feel even more ill. Should have put a ring on it. Victor had been right. Isis was an amazing woman and if he didn't marry her, and soon, someone else would spend their life with the woman that he loved.

Victor watched Juliette revising her thesis.

“How's it going, babe?” he asked. Juliette looked up and she was less tense than she'd seemed in weeks. She smiled. He smiled back. He looked at her short blonde hair and her geeky glasses, with the thick frames, on top of her head and felt a pang of love.

“I think we're going to make it, honey,” she said.

Victor felt a wave of warmth that she included him in this, the single most important accomplishment of her life.

He knew that she thought of them as a team. She'd told him that repeatedly over the years. It always made him feel grownup and part of something really great.

“How's the day trading going?” she asked.

“It's going,” Victor said without going into it. He always shared the details with her when they had their monthly household finance meeting. Truth be told, he might be shit in the bedroom, though the jury was still out on the one, but he was damn good with finagling money.

He'd left his last job, deciding to work from home as an investor, and had begun with daytrading.

He'd taken his 401K and Juliette's money from her inheritance and had begun investing.

He was obsessive about trading in the way that he used to be obsessive about gaming while in college. He could lose himself for hours in watching the markets, analyzing trends, reading financials, analyzing and interpreting quarterly reports and such. He'd set himself the goal of earning $400-500 a day.

He generally made his goal and, aside from the periodic horrifying several thousand dollar loss, when he had an off day, made a mistake, misjudged the market, hit the wrong key, or what have you, was really, really happy with his results.

He and Juliette had made an agreement that he could day trade from home, as long as the endeavor was as profitable as his old job. So far, it had been much more so.

“I got you something,” Juliette said, “on the way home from the lab.”

“You did?” Victor said and wondered what it was.

Somebody around here has his choice of
several
fucking cereals,” Juliette replied. He grinned and raced to the kitch.

To his utter joy, he discovered that Juliette had bought ten large boxes of his favorite sugary cereals.

He could tell that she'd spent time choosing carefully, because he loved every brand and many of the boxes included a special toy surprise or some other incentive. He knew that she knew how much he loved such kiddo gizmos. He hurried back to the living room.

“Well, aren't you going to thank me?” she asked, tracking his reaction even though she was back to typing. Victor approached her and leaned down to kiss her on the head. He breathed in the scent of her inexpensive fruity shampoo; she was an utter tightwad no matter how much he tried to get her to splurge. The scent of her hair took his breath away. His love for her was visceral.

Pressing his lips against her head, Victor felt re-energized. He whispered to her how much he loved her and told her that he couldn't live without her. She grabbed his head and pulled it down, looking up from her work, and kissed him hard. His heart melted.

Goddammit, he was going to figure out the fucking Big “O” if it took him until he was a decrepit old man. But first, he was eating a huge bowl of cereal. Victor headed to the kitchen. Juliette looked after him and grinned.

Inside of the kitchen, Victor found the biggest plastic bowl that he could and filled it with a combination of cereals.

Juliette knew how much his cereal meant to him and she didn't try to bait-and-switch his favorites for organic or healthful versions. She bought him exactly what he loved and so he really didn't mind that his wife insisted that they drink almond milk.

As a matter of fact, though he hadn't actually tested it, it seemed to him that the cow's milk, as well as upsetting his stomach, made the cereal much soggier, much more quickly, than did the almond milk. He poured his almond milk on top of his huge bowl of cereal and chowed down.

One thing that he loved about his wife was that she didn't go on and on about how humans weren't supposed to suck off the tit of a cow, that no other mammals drank the nasty-ass milk of other mammals. She simply said, “No, we're not drinking that.”

Victor sat crunching happily, using a large tablespoon, to eat his cereal. As he ate, he closed his eyes to both savor the cereal, and the bits of special sweetness that certain of the flavors or cereal ingredients had, and thought of his next endeavor.

He was going to do exactly what Max had suggested.

He would commit to making a more formal in-depth study of pleasuring his wife. He'd take some classes or something and, for sure, significantly up his research game. He'd really been dipping his toe in, up until this point, Vic admitted to himself. The whole damn thing had seemed so awkward and weird. He hadn't even opened or tried most of the research materials that he'd purchased, including the blow up doll.

Once he was finished eating, feeling more satiated and positive, than he had in weeks, Victor ambled down to his mancave in the basement. There he gathered up his secret stash, an arsenal of pleasure tools and toys.

He set up some books, a rubber life-size model of a vagina, and other sex toys on the old coffee table, and thanked his lucky stars that Juliette never came down there. Then he sat down and stared at it all. The female genitalia seemed to stare at him, even though it was eyeless. Where the fuck to begin? What the fuck to do first?

Overwhelmed by the stuff before him, particularly the model of the vagina, which had a weird rubber smell and was oddly brightly colored, in pinks, purples, reds, Victor decided that research and theory were the place to begin. Practice could follow, later.

Victor lay on the old couch and read
Power Lick: The Ultimate Cunnilingus Guide
.

Anytime that he felt confused, or found himself skimming because he was bored, he forced himself to reread that section. He made it through a third of the book, it took hours, and he felt like he had run a marathon. Deciding he couldn't read another work, he put the book aside.

With much obvious trepidation, Victor sat on the floor by the old coffee table and touched the rubber vagina model. It fell apart unexpectedly and he leapt back and banged his head on the edge of the end table.

His eyes watered at the pain as he struggled to figure out how to put it together again.

Like a man on a mission, he forced himself to go in again. His face was scrunched up the entire time as he practiced gently stroking the clitoris of the rubber vagina model. The texture and smell of the thing was almost too much to bear.

He briefly thought about practicing oral sex on the brightly colored rubbery thing. He grabbed Power Lick: The Ultimate Cunnilingus Guide and arranged it open on the coffee table. He heard a thump from upstairs and was grateful that Juliette would never, ever, come down into the basement. He looked at the book and looked at the rubber vagina.