Tampa (4 page)

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.