By Autumn Fourkiller
Of all the women I fucked the year the federal government fired me, the widow is the one I remember best.
The year before, I had worked for the state government’s retirement system, a job that constantly reminded me of the financial precarity of the world that I lived in, though I was making more money than I ever had before. Every last working day of the month, four thousand dollars and a few cents would be deposited into my bank account, which I spent mostly on books I didn’t need and copious amounts of delivery food, among other previously unknown conveniences. My single coworker in the education department, a forty-five-year-old woman whose shoelaces I tied before seminars, loved to remind me that one day I would be constantly, achingly horny.
Say more, I’d say.
You wouldn’t understand, she’d say, turning away from me, her wig just on this side of askew.
*
For the federal government I performed menial, yet horrific tasks. I was the assistant to the head of contracting activity for the entire agency of which “Indian” was in the title. Occasionally, someone would ask me if I was Native American, and where I was based – I had taken a large cut, both to my pay and dignity, in order to work fully remotely – and I would say no (a lie) and Oklahoma (the truth). Generally, however, no one asked me any questions unless they needed my help attaching something to an email, or centering something inside a PowerPoint.
It was better that way – the people I worked with were all older than me, and that in itself made them consider themselves too good for any of my limited expertise, though I was often called on to write emails, releases, FAQ guides, newsletters, and the like. My two oldest coworkers were also the only other Indian members of our Division. I never spoke to them, and they never spoke to me, but I sometimes thought it was odd that they were both as dark as my father had been, though the three of them, I knew, were from different tribes. Then I’d stop looking at them and instead stare at myself on screen. I’ve had sad and tired eyes my whole life. Puppyish, almost, in a hangdog way.
That year, the circles under them were almost black.
*
During my tenure with the state, I had three standing relationships, though perhaps relationships is a misnomer. First, there was the woman born to the family of jockeys – small, who wore Spanx even though her body was technically and practically perfect. Twenty-four years my senior and with her own real estate contracting business, it was she who led me through a series of sequences in cars and in the second bedroom of the duplex I shared with a variety of shifting and strange neighbors. What she saw in me, I couldn’t tell you—but she seemed to enjoy herself.
I like to talk dirty, she told me the first time we lay in bed together. Tell me if it’s too much.
Alright, I said, having no plans to. What I liked most about sex was the floating sensation I got when things progressed past the middle, no matter who I was with. It was almost like being high or drunk, two things I had given up for a variety of reasons, chiefly among them that while I was inebriated I knew that there was no better way to move through the world, and also, though I had resolved not to talk about it anymore, my father had been both when he died, and I could not bear to look so ugly in my own casket, jaw bulging from where it had cracked, and then snapped, on the bathroom counter.
*
The jockey’s version of talking dirty consisted mostly of the phrases oh yeah and take it, said in exactly that order, though sometimes she surprised me and said oh wow, you’re amazing. I wasn’t sure how to feel about the surprise in her tone, but it all faded eventually, relegated to a stupor not even tequila or red wine could produce. After—once she had left and I had rinsed my mouth and taken a cold shower, I would lie in the dark and crave a cigarette, a menthol, so badly I imagined what I was feeling was the sensation of heartbreak those poets wrote so vividly about. With the hunger pangs came the image of his brother’s face, too beautiful to be described in any piece of writing I had ever produced. The pangs again, worse than before. Almost nauseating.
Another person might have called it love.
Things aren’t great, I said, when the jockey asked about work. She’d finished, thrice, and dressed. Left a handful of money on the plastic tub I used as a dresser for “lunch” the next day. I looked at her in the gauzy light and felt nothing except exhaustion. I knew, from her monologues, that her parents had raised her to be an old school Southern Democrat, the kind of which no longer meaningfully existed. She hated the president, and she hated his department of efficiency.
It’s ridiculous, she said. Someone ought to do something.
I swallowed a laugh. I wished I was dead. Hm, I said. My voice came out in a strange warble. And what do you propose?
She turned to look at me, buttoned up business casual. Said nothing for a moment, and then: Are you doing okay, honey?
Then I did laugh. Something passed over me, sudden and true. Tell me honestly, I said. What the fuck do you think?
*
My second standing lovers were a suburban married couple with the exact same initials, something that disgusted and delighted me in equal measure. With them, I was to play the young, untouched ingenue, straight from the cornfields, ready to be debauched. Never mind that I had grown up in the most beautifully mountainous part of a mostly flat state, nor that I hadn’t been untouched, by myself or others, in long enough I couldn’t pinpoint when exactly, or why. It was the performance of the thing, and I loved to perform, at least to a certain extent – I was so easily bored of my own pleasure, and could put up with a great many things if only they were interesting.
For a while, at least, this couple served my most selfish impulses – I enjoyed listening to their conversations, which rarely needed, solicited, or warranted my input, and imagining what Carl Jung, were he right beside me, would say about their behavior. Far be it for me, or my pseudo-Jung, to diagnose – instead he and I would volley our opinions back and forth, seduction style, leaning closer and closer together until, suddenly, the husband would place his heavy calloused hand on my knee, returning me to the present, however unwillingly.
Should we move this to the bedroom? he’d ask.
Are you tired? I’d say back. Two slow blinks to confirm my innocence.
*
The couple, despite being less communicative than any set of people I’d ever had sex with, weren’t terribly bad bedfellows. I’d chosen them, almost at random, from an app, and our dalliances always led to me lying on my side while they had their moment, though not before the husband would wrench my thighs upward and eat me out, moaning. Each time he did, the scratch of his beard was the sensation I could feel most – his mouth on my clitoris just a whisper. The dampness this act produced reminded me of the hand of Madame La Cometesse Natalie de Mannerville in Balzac’s Lily of the Valley when Felix grips it. Of the hundred ways to fake orgasm, the tremble was the one I was best at, and I employed it diligently, over and over again.
One night, sated, the husband spooned me while the wife lay under her heated throw and snored. He kept his fingers pressed snug and tight to the meat of my hip for the entirety of their shared and short slumber. Their dreams bubbled up frothy and easy and uninteresting – had I wanted to, I could have slipped into them like a hot knife through butter, but some things are better left unexplored, or rather, not worth the energy, nominal though it may be. Besides, I was in a season of spiritual drought – impossible for me to beg the spirits for anything when I was veritably dripping the blood of thousands, the facts and figures I entered into my daily spreadsheet a reminder that, no matter how far afield I ran, I could not escape the call of the worst of that place we might call the beyond, its smoky tendrils, the way it had spoken to me from cracked windows and open closets since I first knew speech. The way something under their bed whispered to me even then.
You can see why I said nothing of this to the couple – thrown and unmoored by the husband’s tenderness, I escaped at dawn to my frosty car, where the specter of Jung was waiting.
Look at the mother complex on that guy, he said.
You’re telling me, I said, backing out, though my windows remained opaque with ice.
*
At work the morning after I left the couple’s yuppie-style home for the last time, I realized with a swift and inescapable grief that I had left my vintage Phillies sweatshirt, an artifact of their 2008 World Series win, on the floor of their bedroom. It was not the first time I would turn off my Microsoft Teams video feed – the fed only used Windows – to weep, nor would it be the last. This time, though, instead of thinking of say, the Indian youth in the desert, whom would no longer be provided notebooks to record their private and intimate thoughts due to budget cuts, I instead thought of a summer dusk on the dock outside the lake house. What was I reading then? It must have been Anna Karenina, and I was so absorbed in it I loathed any interruption to what was being transmuted to me through Tolstoy’s language, even translated through as prism as it was. I, too, fancied myself a writer, though I had no idea what it was that I was writing. Stories, I suppose, though at the time I had no strong literary basis for what forms were, or how they fit inside the canon. I was just then immersing myself in it all, you must remember.
I didn’t care if the overwhelm sunk me like a stone.
*
Though I was to learn a lot that summer dusk on the dock—not only about literature, but also about life. That sounds cliché to you, I’m sure, but can’t you picture it? I knew nothing. I was nothing. Ready to be molded. Oh, the games we played.
*
Later, someone will ask me – Are these essays? Or are they short stories?
What’s the difference, I’ll say, puzzled.
*
The final lover is perhaps more along the lines of what you would expect from a person such as myself, in a world such as this one. We can call him the man with the pool, though our relationship, mostly composed of skinny dipping, took on an almost courtly tenor. I had never cried as much as I did in that final month of my employment with the fed, not in my entire life. How lucky for the man with the pool, then, that this coincided with our affair.
Was he married? I didn’t think so. His house had none of those “feminine touches” that men like him prize, though can never articulate or recognize. My mother and grandmother often bemoaned my lack of interest in housekeeping or decoration. Still, I kept a fairly tidy house, all things considered. That I never touched the kitchen counters in the man with the pool’s home was evidence enough that their teaching hadn’t been for naught. As a child, walking by an open and crisply kept mausoleum, I had recognized something of my upbringing inside, though the strange eyes that peered at me from behind a set-in marble vase soon eclipsed any other thought about this I might have had.
*
The man with the pool watched me float despondently from a chaise longue on the side – he still hadn’t been allowed to touch me and was perhaps finally realizing that he would never be able to, at least with my willingness. I wasn’t much to look at, but to a man like him, I was a better prospect than most. Lying there on my back, I let the tears fall, warm, one by one into the water. I had been accused, more than once, of being emotionless – and I think to a degree those who said it were correct. I had never had a normal relationship with showcasing my feelings. My mother abhorred the crying of others, and I was weaned early to this fact. For every break-up I’ve initiated, which is to say, all of them, I have been the one sitting awkwardly with a flat expression while the other person, if not weeping terrible and awful tears, said things like – I wish I’d never met you, and if you would just cry I would know you actually cared.
No one I’ve ever known has called me an empath, in jest or otherwise, nor should they. Still, I knew that if I started crying, if I allowed myself to, then I may never be able to stop.
*
It was warm the afternoon the Director above the Director I served, halfheartedly, but nonetheless, got the entire Agency on a call and said, haltingly and through a thick sheaf of phlegm, that some eight hundred of us would be immediately terminated, and we ought to expect our official letters from the Department by day’s close.
I’m so sorry, he said, and shuddered. Then, the connection cut out. No questions allowed.
I sat with my laptop in front of me, numbly, though I was getting a flurry of direct messages from coworkers who either had or hadn’t been in the meeting. I laughed out loud at the thought that I might have still been expected to take notes during a five-minute meeting wherein the bureaucracy declared my execution. Though this wasn’t an execution, not even in the slightest bit – had this happened to me at any other point in my adulthood I would have been unable to do anything but panic, or vomit, or both. Things standing as they were, I simply stared into the middle distance, and considered that if I really had to, I could very well move into the trailer I had grown up in, half-standing as it was, though this conceit might finally be the thing that convinced me to end it all. If you thought about it, thematically at least, it made perfect sense – unemployed, my only option for healthcare the very clinics that the agency I had once worked for funded. And, with that funding depleted, especially in concerns to mental health, it would be no small wonder that I, and many others, would take this as explicit permission to vet the impulses that lay inside us. Buffer and windbreak gone, there was only the mercy of the elements, who had long lost their sense of gentleness.
Further, didn’t the hand that plugged in the data to swallow these programs whole deserve exactly what came to them?
*
I logged out without responding to any of the messages still blinking in their folders and attempted to take stock. My head spun – I hadn’t eaten that day, a habit of mine while working, and so I closed my eyes to reduce the chances of an impending migraine. My blue light glasses pressed inward, biting into my temples. I only bought cheap pairs because I constantly forgot where I had placed them, or otherwise the cats carried them off as prizes, never to be seen again. Because of this, or perhaps because my head was just too large, none of them ever fit properly. I whipped the pair I was wearing off my head and flung them as hard as I could against the opposite wall, a passing pique that embarrassed me. My own strength continually surprised me. My mother’s family was a bird-boned people, slim and delicate. All of them, except, of course, for me. I was the cuckoo in the meadow pipit nest. Until I was born, no one in that remembered family line ever had brown eyes. I can imagine without stretching too far that when they finally settled in my head, everyone had been disappointed.
*
Darla, aged 43, five miles away. Negligible bio. No indication of a face, but instead a spray of flowers, white carnations. I make it a habit never to match with anyone without at least a passable selfie, but her age intrigued me. It is not often women of such an age present herself to you without her husband’s oppressive presence. I swiped right, an instant match.
Let’s exchange numbers, she said. And I’ll show you who you’re talking to.
I sent her the artificially generated number I had on hand for such purposes and then looked at the time. It had been an hour since my lot had been drawn. Worse, I had known it was going to happen – the night before I’d had a dream so piercing in its clarity when I woke, breath shuddering, I had resolved to no longer be the kind of person who believed in such things. Unlike other promises I had made to myself; this was one I broke frequently.
*
What lessons did I learn aside from an appreciation of Russian literature that would never leave me, on that dock, in that humid Arkansan summer? Who Annie Ernaux was, the joy of placing an old record on an older player, the whole corridor gone haunted with jazz. How to smoke a cigarette and barely cough, Kurosawa films, the taste of gin. Two fingers in one hole, then three. Loose linen shirts. The way boys treated other boys when the only sounds were the din of the evening and my own dancing heartbeat. Horrible dry wine that was still drunk. Melty brie and fruit jam on bread. Being easy with money. The terrifying rowboat, the ghostly fisherman. Ambient music, using my tongue, Thomas Mann and Proust. Other things not even the dead can speak aloud.
*
I drove to her house at eleven thirty in the evening. The city had recently changed its streetlights, or so I thought, and they went streaky under my gaze. I turned my attention forward instead of up. There was barely any traffic, and what remained was more annoying than harrowing. According to the pictures she had sent me, what was to await me at the end of this jaunt was an average looking woman, shoulder length hair, generous curves. Shorter than me, but most people were. I can’t say that my attraction to her burned in me, or that anything beyond the bare surface level even registered, but my interest was piqued. She had, she told me, as if in confidence, been a widow for nay two months.
Does that make u uncomfortable? she asked.
Not at all,I replied, which was true. To judge anyone for their myriad losses would have been too hypocritical, even for me.
*
The widow’s house was bigger than I expected. Something upgraded from a ranch style, with a strange little courtyard in the center. Did both buildings belong to her, or neither? I wondered but knew I could not ask. For a moment, nerves overtook me, but I reasoned that I had nothing to lose – she had been oddly forthcoming in her messages, not only with her address, but with her profession. She was a beautician leader at a local community college’s technical program. I, in turn, had revealed next to nothing, as I was wont to do. The air felt odd, stilted. Climate change or something else, too late to turn back. Yes, it always had been.
*
At age nine, my mother had demanded of me the truth – did I want to be a boy? It was a trick question, and I knew better, even then, to answer honestly. I reacted in anger, I’m sure, and disbelief that she would ask me such a thing. The truth was harder to explain, as most truths are. I wanted to be a boy, yes, in that I wanted to be my father’s son, and I wanted everyone to look at my body as a flat object, absolved from history and lust. It seemed like a punishment I deserved that I grew in a body to gawk at. With them, though, those brothers, I felt the holy thrum of clear vision. What the saints told me I ought to feel in the sanctuary, when I pulled the correct verse or hymn from the ether. Even the preacher looked at me like I ought to be feared, and maybe I should have. I saw things no child should see. I knew more than that stupid man. I knew my mother was deserving of every love God had to give. I knew that I was doomed for worse. Born wicked, born under the wrong star, how else to cleanse me but with violence?
When he hit me, and when his brother wrestled me into submission, I felt angelic, pure, more myself than I ever had. Pharoah had hardened his heart, but I was unable to. I was a vessel, a leaky jug, until I wasn’t. What had happened to me, between then and now? I could not explain it without betraying myself. I could not delineate the cause without making a fool of all of us.
*
She had three little dogs and her house stank of them. Like corn chips, something danker, though all the areas I could see were spotless. On a tiny table near her keys was a bong, a pack of cigarettes. In the kitchen – a mostly drunk bottle of vodka. She had opened the door in a pink negligee, something that at my height gave me a full view of her breasts and pointed nipples. Like in the lewds she had sent, her figure was full, with hills and valleys. She seemed suddenly uncomfortable with my presence, so I gave her my best smile and kicked off my sandals. You have a lovely home, I said, and it wasn’t quite a lie. It was something I might say to a Sunday School teacher, or to one of the other older women of my youth. They liked me because I was no competition, they liked me because, from behind, my large shoulders gone boxy, I could have been any one of their son’s friends.
Thank you, she said, in a mumble, and grabbed my hand to lead me to the couch.
Her television, which took up most of the wall, blared a reality show I wasn’t familiar with, though the women all wore bikinis and the men tight little swim shorts. It didn’t hold my attention for long, and I tried to surreptitiously survey the rest of the room, the artifacts of her widowhood fully on display. Pictures of her husband, a lone hat hanging from a hook, a separate set of keys on a carabiner. Something pulsated, perhaps my head, and I wished I had taken her up on the offer of a drink. When I slid my gaze back to her, her mouth hung slightly open, and her bottom teeth, yellowed, jagged, stood out from the dark red of her mouth. She kissed me, the whole of her tongue against the inside of my cheek, I tasted the harsh fragrance of alcohol, the acrid and stale bite of tar. When she pulled away, I resisted the urge to wipe my mouth.
*
A bedroom of a couple, no doubt, well attuned in their domesticity. Two lamps, two bedside tables, an alarm clock on either side. A peek into the closet showed a chore coat of a style I favored, but I had no time to make out more. She wanted us to begin on our knees, facing each other, like in porn. My whole body felt wooden and mechanical, and I wrenched myself backward in what I hoped looked like a fit of passion. Something red, a dot, glowed in the distance, and I worried for a moment that the entirety of our interaction was being recorded, though the pressure this produced made me more graceful, or so I hoped.
Sit on my face, I said, which was my general line in these situations. She was not drunk, but she had the air of a hard drinker when she moaned at my words and then swung herself over my face, her head somewhere near my crotch, her ass pointed in the air. It wasn’t quite what I had meant, but in any case, it would do.
*
She was waxed perfectly, not a hair in place, which, a little ashamed, I thought was an odd counterpoint to her otherwise sloppy demeanor. I felt her fumbling below, what might have been a finger or a tongue, and pressed my legs together subtly, forgetting to make noise. The inside of her body was hot and slick, and I applied myself with a detached vigor to the task before me, while she made noises and hiccups that sounded like she, too, might soon join her husband, wherever he was. I felt an odd sensation that someone was in the house with us, aside from the yapping little white dogs with tear stains – had she been lying? Was I simply a facet of a fantasy fulfilled? Was that deceased spouse a creation, a ploy? Was he soon to come into the room and, seeing me there, his wife dripping wetness from her cunt and her mouth, drooling on my thigh –
Sometimes my thoughts got the best of me. I could not stop them; they looped and looped. Lost in their cycle, I missed the widow’s first orgasm, and her second. Like the jockey, she said: You’re amazing, this is amazing, oh my God, but I barely heard her. I was still thinking of her husband, dead or alive, stumbling into the room and dropping trou, whether I wanted him to or not.
*
The pleasure had wrung her out, and I flipped her easily onto her back, her head hanging slightly off the side of the bed, though she made no move to right herself. I laid on my stomach, happier, then, to be in a position where she wouldn’t rub a mat into my pubic hair in search of something. I placed two fingers back inside of her, rubbing slightly at the spongy material there that every guide to doing so called a ‘come hither’ motion, but to me felt more like keeping time, one, two.
Hold yourself open, I said, and when she did, and when I leaned my head down to suck, she let out a scream so awful, so consuming, I am not sure I will ever be able to forget it.
After, she continued to lay on her back and said nothing. I knotted my fingers in the silken sheets to clean them and sat up, the room unlit sans the artificial glow of the clocks. Still saying nothing, she stood up and walked out of the room, the pitter patter of one of the dogs’ nails on the laminate flooring the only sound in the house, aside from the still blasting television, that I could decipher. I sat alone in the cold, dark space for a moment and shivered a little, my eyes dry.
Yes, it seemed like she had the right idea – there was nothing more to say. I pulled my underwear and pants back on and asked if I could use the bathroom. From her place on the couch, she nodded, not looking at me, and in the mirror, the outside patterned like a seashell, I watched the person that everyone said was me rub at their gums while the tap ran full and lush without spitting.
*
Have a good rest of your night, I said, when I had walked past her to the door, my hand on the knob. She said something, but I resolved to forget it. The door slammed shut behind me with more force than I thought it should. As I walked through the iron gate, something touched me, or I imagined it did, a heavy push, but I didn’t falter.
I was already on my way.
*
I blocked the widow’s number. A week had passed in which I had done very little besides haul my equipment, and my badge, and all other of that bureaucratic accoutrement to FedEx, where the mousy associate asked me if I’d like the boxes marked fragile, which would cost extra.
I shook my head no with the lazy cadence of someone on opiates. I’ll be honest with you, I said. As long as I have those receipts, this could be one of those packages you throw into a ravine, for all I care.
The mouse grimaced. I smiled with all my teeth. Behind us, a clatter, and the sharp reek of alcohol. A man almost as large as my father stood too close. I refused to move. You’re a piece of shit, he slurred into his phone. You’re such a fucking Indian giver.