Free Happy Baby by Stephen Elliott Page B

washing. Zahava also likes oral sex and sometimes I do that. I consider doing it now. I run the vibrator along the outside of her vagina and I feel her fingers tense in my hair. She knows I like it when she pulls my hair.
    Zahava takes her hand from my head and grips the sheets. She slides down and the vibrator sinks and disappears between her legs and then out. Her head presses into her pillow.
    Zahava lets out a low moan. I press my hand onto her stomach and spread my fingers over her bellybutton. She came here from Texas to attend law school. At the firm where she works, she puts in long hours but she doesn’t complain. I pull the blanket over my head; it’s dark and hot. Her legs are spread in shadow in front of me. I kiss my wife’s nipple and I watch the toy come in and out of her black pubic hair. We’ll both have to go to work in the morning.
    I board the train at Morse and head toward the loop. Sometimes I switch at Belmont to the purple line, which drops me closer to my office. Other times I don’t bother. I ride the old north-south through the city that I’ve always lived in, through Edgewater, Lakeview, Lincoln Park. I watch the streets get cleaner until Fullerton, where the train ducks underground. If I were to stay on the train, like I did when I was fifteen, then when the train rose back above ground I would see a switch. As the train reached Cermak the last white people would get off. At Thirty-fifth I’d be at the hard corners of Stateway Gardens. After that the streets are wider and the buildings are like broken teeth. At Fifty-fifth I would have gotten off the train and attempted to walk to my home, through the Vice Lords and the El Rukns. And sometimes I would make it and sometimes I wouldn’t.
    I stop in the cafeteria at the bottom of the building and buy a coffee and a bagel, and head upstairs. Jim Thompson, the former governor of Illinois, has an office in this building and one time I saw him in the elevator. He was six-and-a-half feet tall and wearing an olive green suit. He had a smooth fat face and thin red hair and looked like an angry child. I said hello.
    I put my bagel and coffee on the desk, turn on my computer, check for internal company memos. There have been layoffs recently. I wait for my name to come up. I figure they don’t pay me enough to fire me. I’m a senior file clerk and sometimes I joke with Zahava that I’m in charge of the alphabet. “Don’t misplace any letters,” she’ll say, laughing. “We need all of them.” But it’s more than just alphabetizing. Employees are ranked by skill set and necessity, factors that determine the color of their folders. The senior executives occupy entire cabinets along the top while admins and messengers are crammed into small drawers close to the floor. It would seem like a joke except that a couple of years ago when I tried to change the layout of the cabinets, placing a handful of janitors in the third tier and a vice president closer to the floor, I was reprimanded by my supervisor. There are thousands of green cabinets with thousands of records in each, documenting every employee that has ever worked here since the company was founded in 1933, during the Depression.
    I finger through the papers. Feel a tap on my shoulder. “Happy Friday, Theo.”
    Jim is my temp. He’s twenty-two years old. He just graduated from DePaul and we’re contracting him from Sally Girl. He may or may not stick around. “Jim,” I say. “I think today we should organize F.”
    For years I’ve been seeing a professional dominatrix. Her dungeon studio is on the second floor of an industrial building, near the Lake Street train. Next door is an Irish bar where first-time customers are expected to call in from the downstairs payphone. I remember the first day I came to see her, during the Gulf War. She wrapped me in Saran Wrap so I couldn’t even move my fingers. She slapped me lightly, then pulled a mask over my head. The mask had a long tube