The Last Magazine: A Novel (16 page)

Marcel starts to hunt around the room, moving from one wastebasket to the other, before going into the bathroom.

“Aha!” he yells.

He jumps back into the living room, holding two spent condoms in his hand.

“This is all, two hours I am gone and the man has only filled up two of these? This is not our money’s worth,” Marcel says, throwing the condoms back into the wastebasket.

The woman, whom Marcel introduces as Valerie, sits up from her languorous film noir pose and looks at Peoria.

“You have arrived just in time. I was about to fall asleep,” she says.

Marcel has disappeared inside the bathroom, keeping the door open but turning the water on in the shower, behind a plate-glass see-through stall. The steam starts to fill up the stall, and as Marcel gets naked and steps in the shower, Peoria loses sight of him.

Peoria goes to the minibar and takes out three small bottles and drinks them. He has reached a point of what might be called a moment of clarity—in the span of two hours he has had oral sex with a transvestite, taken a mild hallucinogen with an obvious non-mild amphetamine base, and broken up a shouting match on the street with an Arab. He is taking stock of the evening. It has been a clear case of one thing leading to another. Now he is in Marcel’s hotel room and he doesn’t quite know what to make of it all and is staring at a woman who he assumes is Marcel’s wife. Marcel’s wife, Valerie, has already thrown her bathrobe off, just a little bit more, and is
massaging her pussy with a half-smile, seemingly enjoying watching the American’s uncomfortableness.

It’s all very French, Peoria thinks.

His response is instinctual—it’s either fuck or flight, either slip out the door, following the Thai male prostitute, who, as the evidence in the wastebasket makes clear, had already made love (is that an appropriate expression here?) to Valerie at least twice, not really knowing what other sexual acts they might have engaged in.

Peoria, as a modern American male, had been exposed to these kinds of fantasies via the Internet from a very early age. Even before the speed of the Internet allowed users to download highly graphic pixel images and video clips of every debased act there was a market for, he’d been reading erotic stories on what was the most extensive erotic database of stories in English that he’d ever seen. It was quite a collection of stories, this particular website, and it opened his eyes to all manner of perversions by category: teen, bondage and sadomasochism, big beautiful white, groping, bisexual, lesbianism, glory holes, homosexuality, bestiality, pedophilia, gang bangs, orgies, rapes, violence, snuff, kidnappings, granny porn, MILFs (moms I’d like to fuck), GILFAs (grandmothers I’d like to fuck anally), celebrity fantasies, mind control, incest, interracial, Asian, swingers, nonconsensual, military, extra hair, no hair, smoke. In fact, with all of these stories in such a public and easily accessible venue and seemingly legal—words can say whatever words want to say—he had in his later years wondered if there were any taboos left that he hadn’t seen or read about. He came up with a resounding no: other things, like vomit porn, water sports, scatological porn, fuzzies, plushies (where people like to have sex with stuffed animals or people dressed in animal costumes), had all, at various points, made their way into popular culture, usually in gross-out comedies, and he wasn’t even getting into the hours of Japanese anime he’d watched, with cartoon demons
and monsters from other dimensions manhandling and raping unsuspecting Japanese teenagers and children. By the time the Internet caught up to the videos, what he could now watch online didn’t surprise him at all. He had examined, on occasion, the moral implications of this new industry—whether he was some kind of degenerate for consuming the product, and what the effects were on his sex life. Did they give him a false sense of what sex was? And after masturbating to what, if admitted publicly, would seem particularly heinous, he often felt like he’d just eaten a Big Mac and pre–trans fat fries in secret—instant gratification wasn’t very good to the soul. But who believed in souls anymore anyway? Certainly, this trip to Bangkok would suggest a negative correlation with his sexual habits.

There was another category that he was drawn to that he would probably never admit to any of the women he dated. It was a subcategory of general male-on-female porn called “Fuck my wife,” academically known as cuckolding. Cuckolding had been getting readers turned on and intrigued since Jesus’ time—Joseph was cuckolded by God himself—and in more obvious ways over the next two thousand years, in
The Canterbury Tales
, throughout Shakespeare plays and other Elizabethan literature, and the like, the cuckold held particular fascination to readers. In the past decade of easily produced and distributed pornography, the cuckolding genre had taken a more explicit turn. If cuckolding was a subcategory of straight male-female sex, a subcategory of the subcategory was something called a cream pie.

It took a lot of work to be innocent, and Peoria didn’t seem biologically inclined toward innocence.

“And so?” Valerie says.

Peoria readjusts his gauge of Valerie’s age. Early forties. Under the high-definition glow of the 1080 pixels of Korean-manufactured
Samsung color, the Mandarin Oriental’s courtesy bathrobe open to the hotel’s air conditioner, he got a good look at her breasts. They sagged a bit under the weight of two decades’ worth of topless sunbathing. Nude beaches in the Riviera, cigarette butts stubbed out in a pile of sand next to her beach towel. Without a bikini top, she had a body that American men would look at as they walked past on the shore, partially intrigued by the woman’s attractiveness, partially by her comfort in exposing a pair of naked breasts. If she was so casual about allowing gazes to come her way, in view of running toddlers, German beer guts, Swedish Speedos, local teens hawking bottles of Coke and
croque-monsieurs
, one could only imagine what she would do behind closed doors; there was an openness to her sensuality, an openness that with a few bottles of wine might be persuaded to try anything.

Valerie slides her panties down, feet coming out carefully, sure of her balance. She hangs the panties on the tip of her finger. She motions, with that same finger, for Peoria to approach her, the panties swaying as if they were resting on a clothesline.

Peoria steps next to her. She pushes her panties to his face, her finger in his mouth. He starts to suck on her finger, mild saltiness.

Valerie touches his groin with her other hand and starts to rub his penis. He leans forward and kisses her, keeping her finger in his mouth, off to the side, like a hooked fish, lips making contact around the crumpled edges of the silk.

She takes her finger from his mouth and the panties stay in between their lips. He unbuttons his pants and unzips them and steps back and her panties fall to the floor. He pulls down his boxers and he can feel the crust from his own sperm, the stains of sexual moisture that the tissues in the brothels didn’t wipe up. She kneels down and takes his penis in her mouth. Peoria closes his eyes and wishes that he will
get hard, because there are a few seconds when he wonders if he has enough blood left in him to fill up.

He opens his eyes and Marcel is out of the shower, standing at the bathroom door, smiling.

Peoria feels a mild shock. His penis, which was becoming harder, becomes temporarily less so. How do I feel that he is watching me? Can I let go in this setting, this hotel room? It’s not the intimate professionalism of a whorehouse, where if a friend was watching him get a blow job, it would seem okay, part of the atmosphere and ambience . . .

Valerie is squatting, mouth on his cock, with two hands free, she shakes off the Mandarin Oriental’s courtesy bathrobe and places one hand back under her for balance, then with her other hand begins to finger herself.

“Look at me, look at me,” she says.

Peoria looks down and her eyes are rolled back up staring at him. He moves his eyes from Valerie, at his knees, to Marcel, still standing in the shower door.

“Do not let him come yet,” Marcel says, and goes into the other room, the bedroom.

Valerie gets up from her knees and takes Peoria’s hand and leads him into the bedroom.

The bed is well used, the one-thousand-thread sheets pushed to the bottom of the king-size mattress, the decorative pillows tossed off on the bedside tables. It’s a bed that has not been available for a turn-down service and a mint on the pillow in days.

Marcel is lying on his back, towel still on. He hangs his head down over the side of the bed, looking at the world upside down.

Valerie walks over to Marcel. The bed is four feet off the ground. She climbs onto the mattress and then puts one leg on one side of Marcel’s head and her other leg outside of his shoulder, knees
straddling his face. With her teeth, she undoes Marcel’s towel and uncovers the Frenchman’s erection. She turns around to look at Peoria.

“Doggy style, yes?”

Peoria moves up behind her and feels another hand on his cock, from below. Marcel opens Valerie’s pussy for him and directs his cock in.

Peoria is not tall enough to be having standing-up sex while Valerie is on the bed and his feet are planted to the ground. He gets up on his tiptoes and holds on to her waist for balance.

He starts to move in and out of her, Valerie ducking her head down every fourth insertion to lick Marcel’s cock, and Peoria can feel a kind of tingling on his alcohol-constricted testicles, the sandpaper of another tongue, and he remembers a line he’d read in a prison memoir, a mouth is a mouth and a tongue is a tongue, one brand of sandpaper the same as any other, and he lets himself go with the groans and the groans coming from Valerie’s mouth ahead of him. He sees the digital clock that says 2:15 a.m. and he spaces out. He has a flight to catch tomorrow. Distracted, he slips out of her, and before he can get back in, he feels another mouth on his penis.

“I’m cleaning you off,” says Marcel.

He can see Marcel, buried underneath her ass and pussy, in glimpses when she rises up off his face, and he can see Marcel’s tongue flutter into her asshole and out of her asshole. She climbs off her husband and tells Peoria to join her on the bed.

She rolls to one side and Peoria moves in behind her. He starts fucking her ass quite hard, and he feels that he is going to come.

“Put it in my pussy, you want to put it in my pussy?”

Marcel is jerking off, lying next to them on the bed.

“My head is full of blood from being upside down,” he says. “I am dizzy.”

He holds Valerie’s hand. What tenderness.

Peoria takes his cock out of her ass and finds her pussy.

There is an anticlimax before the climax because he has to ready himself again, to get to the point where he can come. He starts thinking even dirtier thoughts than what he is doing—he starts piling on the dirt, splashing the dirt in his head in scenarios that he plays out in his mind’s eye, outrageous thoughts, more outrageous than fucking the wife while her husband jerks off and watches and holds her hand on the same hotel bed. He starts thinking: strange to have to imagine a fantasy when you have such a real-life fantasy right here. Odd, but he must focus if he wants to come. He focuses. He starts thinking: all the cocks that have ever been where he is fucking her now, and he sees them all, lined up in a row, Valerie, on a beach, on that beach in the Riviera, under a lifeguard chair—there are no lifeguard tents in the Mediterranean—no, he sees her between a sand dune and he imagines the line of men coming to take their turn with her, one after the other, stretching back into the waterfront restaurants, the jism dripping from her ass and her pussy and her mouth and her sunburned breasts, and then he comes . . .

Peoria falls over onto the bed. Valerie rolls to her back. Marcel gets to his knees, and starting at his wife’s breasts, licks and caresses her body, moving toward her belly button, moving toward her pussy. Valerie puts her hand on his head and pushes lightly, her fingers tangled in her husband’s thinning hair. Valerie puts her left hand on the top of her pussy, and in a move that Peoria has seen only on a computer monitor and television screen, she squeezes and a dollop of his sperm pops up.

Clams, seashells, mollusks, mussels, oysters. White discharge. Membranes and inverse epidermal layers. Pink jowls, a string of soy milk drool. A raw baked good, doughy, whipped egg-white batter uncooked.

Pushing himself up on his elbows, Peoria sees for the first time—in the dimming lights of the HDTV and the digital clock and the faint city lights cutting through the open drapes—what a cream pie looks like.

The sight is too organic and messy for him to find beauty in it. . . .

Peoria wakes up twelve hours later. He has a flight to
catch.

U
nbundling, I sit down in my cubicle.

It’s either the coldest January in New York on record, or I’m getting old. I’ve lived most of my life in the Northeast, and Manhattan is the farthest south I’d ever called home. But this is my fourth year in the city, and my tolerance for zero degrees Fahrenheit has disappeared. A coldness without the warm feelings of FAO Schwarz and Radio City Music Hall and Macy’s window-shopping. A dead month, January is, another New Year’s without a terrorist attack on Times Square, and I, perhaps stupidly, blame the weather for how everyone acts.

Seasonal affective disorder. It’s a real phenomenon. The medical explanation, not enough sunlight. Depression and listlessness are the two well-known side effects, but there’s another one: paranoia. Self-preservation instincts, from the sidewalk to the corner office. If the sun isn’t hitting me, it’s got to be hitting someone else, much to my disadvantage. The bitterness of Fifth Avenue winds, from apartment door to subway, melted slush and running noses—the lack of eye contact noticeable. It’s like just looking someone in the eye lets a few degrees of heat escape from my eye sockets.

It’s the worst month for office intrigue.

My computer whines and sputters on. Other bundled figures limp by, fifteen minutes or so behind the usual schedule. Everyone is feeling the cold.

My Outlook program comes to life, closing a series of warnings and updates and pop-ups. The server searches something, whatever a server searches, and downloads the crate of electronic mail that has entered my address and domain overnight.

An email from Judy Givens, subject: On behalf of Henry the EIC.

Dear Staff:

After thirty-three years at the magazine, I’m announcing today that I will retire my position as editor in chief, effective January 2006 . . .

Before I get to the two remaining paragraphs of the thank-yous and the memories, Gary’s head appears over my cubicle wall.

“Did you see the email,” he says.

“Reading it right now.”

“Announcing so far in advance that he’s leaving. Don’t you find that strange?”

“Maybe he wants to do a farewell tour.”

“Maybe, but the big news is what’s not in the email. He didn’t name a replacement.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, and he says that a search for the replacement will start ASAP, once various factors are considered and weighed and everything.”

“The race is on, I guess.”

My computer beeps, another staff-wide email.

It’s a reminder. This afternoon, at four p.m., there’s a homecoming
party at the Top of the Mag for the staff who have returned from covering the war. It gives the list of attendees, including A.E. Peoria, Townsend, Charles, and Lee.

Please join us to welcome and celebrate the work of our brave and courageous correspondents who are back after giving the magazine incredible coverage of our nation’s most important story.

“You going to this?” I ask.

“Yeah, why not. Should be interesting—Nishant and Sanders and Henry will probably be there. Good time to do some body-language reading.”

I hear the glass doors open at the end of the hallway, and rushing past in a blur is A.E. Peoria. It is his first day back in the office. I don’t get a look at his face, only the top of his head as he blows by my cubicle.

I want to say hello, but I don’t want to be too aggressive. I’ll let him unbundle, de-thaw, and fire up his Dell before I go greet him.

“Hastings?” I hear the singsong voice of Nishant Patel.

I jump.

“Hi, Nishant, how’s it going?”

“Fine. I’m giving a speech at the American Enterprise Institute in honor of the economist Milton Friedman. Could you write up about nine pages or so of research on him for the acceptance speech?”

“Sure, Milton Friedman award, no problem at all. Who’s getting it?”

“Hernando de Soto—you’ve heard of him?”

“The explorer or the economist?”

“The economist.”

“Yep, sure, I’m on it.”

I always try to slip a few notes of humanity into these conversations to build my bond with Nishant.

“Are you going to the homecoming party tonight?”

“Hm?”

“For the correspondents coming back from the war.”

“I don’t know if that’s in my schedule. Patricia, Lucy, have you scheduled me to go to the homecoming event?”

A furious exchange of recriminations and accusations.

“Henry the EIC is going to be there, I think,” I say.

“Henry is going to be there,” he says, his thoughts taking over, and he heads back into his office, followed by Patricia and Lucy.

I walk down the hallway to Peoria’s office. The lights are off and he’s sprawled in his swivel chair, eyes closed.

“My girlfriend broke up with me, bro,” he says as I walk in the door.

“Hey, man, great to see that you’re back.”

“She broke up with me.”

“That sucks—the six-orgasms girl?”

“I should never have told her about the spot, the questions just kept coming after that.”

“The spot?”

“You want a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke, but I’ll go outside with you.”

From the elevator ride to the street, he recounts the conversation with his girlfriend.

“I got back and we went out to dinner and she asked me if something was wrong and I was, like, no, nothing is wrong,” he says. “But she kept asking and asking and asking, and so finally I told her about the spot.”

The spot. He’d been back in New York four days when he’d noticed, above his pubic hair, a red dot. Then, after foraging and
brushing aside in front of a full-length mirror for self-examination, he noticed two red spots. He freaked out. He first called his doctor friend, who’d given him the odds on getting HIV after the trip to Mexico. His doctor friend recommended going to a walk-in clinic to get it checked out. Peoria did that, finding himself in a doctor’s office out of the Third World, a doctor’s office that smelled of rotting tobacco.

“Rotting tobacco. It’s fucking cold out here,” Peoria says. “Let’s go back inside.”

We go back inside and he gets to the point. The doctor, asking a series of invasive and highly personal questions, after drawing his blood and getting him tested, brought out a medical textbook and flipped it to the page with a large M in the corner.

“Molluscum contagiosum,” Peoria says. “That’s what I have. Molluscum contagiosum. I’d never heard of it. Toddlers get it—it’s like the chicken pox. Toddlers and sexually active adults, you know. But it’s not really an STD—it’s, like, not really one. It’s benign, you know, it doesn’t do anything. It’s just a spot, and there’s a pretty easy procedure where they pluck it out.”

“That sucks, that sucks,” I say.

“Have you ever had a bandage on your dick?” he asks me.

“Not that I can remember,” I say.

“I have a bandage on my dick right now.”

I had thought, on some level, I was immune to conversational surprises, especially when sex was concerned. That over my approximately twenty-five years I had been told such a massive amount of personal information and sexual detail that very little would catch me off guard. I’m from the first totally coed generation. By the third grade we had textbook, graphic descriptions of sex. By middle school, survivors of herpes and genital warts and even HIV spoke as guest lecturers. I know sex is a beautiful living act between two adults; sex is something to discuss with your partner, in detail, before, after, and
perhaps during. But I’ve never been confronted with a friend who has a bandage on his dick.

“I had to lie down on the table, and the doctor, a schlubby doctor too, the kind of guy you’d meet in AA, pulled down my pants, and he swabbed the two dots. And he found even more dots, he found five more, on the underside of my dick, and took a needle. He popped the head. They’re like zits, I guess, that they have a head, and you need to remove the head so they stop spreading. There was a little blood. He put a patch of white bandages around my dick and then he snipped away my pubic hair. If you shave, apparently it can spread, and I guess that’s why on gay guys it can spread, because they shave their pubic regions. Then he picked them out with a needle.”

“Sounds pretty shitty,” I say.

“Very vulnerable,” he says. “After the procedure, he asked me if I took drugs and if I was depressed. I told him that I had been taking a lot of pills and drinking a lot since I left Baghdad. He thought I had some kind of post-traumatic stress. Had I taken pills recently? I had four Percocet and two Xanax that I got from my girlfriend that morning, and he wondered if it was an unhealthy relationship for me to be in. With her giving me pills and everything. If I was self-medicating.”

We’re back in his office. He tells me to shut the door and then he sits down.

“So I went out to dinner that night with her and she asked if something was wrong, and I said, yes, I have this spot, because the doctor recommended me to tell my sexual partners about it. That was a fucking mistake. Herpes or syphilis or chlamydia or something, I should have told her. But you know this molluscum contagiosum is benign. Most girls are pretty good about getting checked out regularly, so she would have found it eventually if she had it. Then she asked if I’d been, you know, unfaithful.”

“Had you?”

“Not emotionally, you know, but I had a couple of run-ins.”

Though I never could say that Peoria looked like a particularly healthy person, he looks particularly ill this morning. I picture him naked, bandaged dick, his cheeks not quite red enough from the frostbite temperatures. He looks like his stomach hurts, like coffee and a half quart of stale wine are swirling in his gut. He keeps talking, not stopping. He takes sharp, wheezy inhales, a two-pack-a-day cigarette habit. His teeth have a dull yellow sheen of moss. He looks like he has bad breath. He looks like he might never get up from his swivel chair again. He looks like he hasn’t showered (he has, he tells me, but not completely because he didn’t want to get the bandages wet).

And he details to me what he had the previous evening detailed to his girlfriend (leaving out a few things both to me and to Six Orgasms, as I will learn later): a sexual encounter poolside near the patio (Brennan Toddly was hitting on her too, and that motherfucker is married), and he refers vaguely to a number of unpaid sexual encounters in Thailand (though it isn’t until a year later that I learn about the ladyboy). No, Peoria does not look very fit for the homecoming party this afternoon.

“She called me a rat,” he says. “Do you think I’m a rat?”

A buzzing. His cell phone frog-crawls across his desk.

“It’s her. I better take this.”

He answers. He hits the mute button.

“Hastings, the thing is, I think I’m self-destructive, you know. Because I don’t really want to be dating her, you know, because I don’t love her. Anyway. Talk to you later.”

He hits the unmute button.

I get up, close the door to his office, and go back to my cubicle.