Free At the Bottom of Everything by Ben Dolnick Page A

possibly be a problem, “What was that Max guy’s last name again?”
    “Is
that
what this is about?”
    “What?”
    “The way you’re being. You’re one of those jealous people! I told you!”
    “One of what jealous people? I just couldn’t remember if—”
    “Jesus Christ, this is idiotic.” She wrapped herself in a towel and left me lying on the floor, looking at the underside of the sink, my back stuck to cold porcelain, surrounded by the smell of blown-out candles.
    We had one of our only bad fights that afternoon, storming around the house in our towels, unable to wave our arms. She said that if I was calling her a slut then I should just go ahead and say it, and I said that if she was looking for somedumb Texan fuck buddy then she should find somebody else, because that wasn’t who—
    “How do you know he’s Texan?”
    “You said.”
    “No, I didn’t.”
    On most days my strategy was less direct, if not any more successful. I’d started doing push-ups (which required clearing a space on the floor of my room and waiting for Joel to leave for work in the morning, so he wouldn’t ask me what I was doing). Whenever I sat around I squeezed a tennis ball, switching hands every couple of minutes. I tried, when Anna and I were together, to cultivate an air of … mysterious masculinity. Sensitive cowboy-hood. I let stubble grow on my cheeks. I carried her up the stairs and laid her on the bed as gently as if I were launching a raft. I let her know that I was thinking of spending a month this summer driving across the country alone.
    I should never have tried. My appeal, what appeal I had, was of a different type—tousled and sandy haired and slightly soft around the edges. Women wanted to mother me, not be ravaged by me. I’d known that at various points, but in my state that spring I’d forgotten it. And so I was on a campaign to ravage; like a caveman assailant I dragged her to the floor in that gloomy front room. I lifted her up onto the workbench in the basement. And on the hot night in May when everything ended, I led her, kissing and shedding clothes and stumbling, directly from the front door where she met me to the kitchen in the back of the house, where, in only my socks, I swept aside a bagful of junk mail and laid her on the same small table where we’d sat drinking tea four months earlier.
    In my defense, it was a Sunday, which was one of the nights that Peter had the boys, and it was eight o’clock, which meant that it was too dark outside for neighbors to see in. I’d thought about these things, which is probably an argumentagainst my being the sort of person who should have his way with people on kitchen tables.
    Anyway:
 … yes … yes … oh my God, you’re so … Oh my God, there … yes …
    There was often a point, when I was a teenager masturbating in my room, when I would think:
If someone were to walk in right this second I don’t think I could stop
. The orgasm gravity was such that all considerations, even ones about not masturbating in front of my mom or Frank, were out the window. At the time I’d never had occasion to find out if this was really true.
    It turns out it’s never too late to stop, really. Gravity can be reversed in the time it takes to snap your fingers. Or in the time it takes to hear someone rap his knuckles against the glass in the kitchen door.
    It was strange, in retrospect, how immediately I knew that the sound wasn’t made by a squirrel or a branch or by anything other than someone watching us. Peter’s face was about a quarter inch from the window (he had to hunch slightly to look in, and he held one hand like a visor to his forehead). Beside and behind him were the tops of two little brown-blond heads. Thomas used to think it was funny, when I fell asleep watching a movie, to wake me up by putting his face as close to mine as he could and waiting. This felt like that, if instead of Thomas’s face waiting when I opened my eyes I found a