Notes from the Upper West Side. A novel by Dan Wrench. Chapter 9. My Wife Works Forehead.
That day in March, the day right after St. Patrick's Day when I met Parp and he told me about Little Round Jewish Hat, I got back to my apartment around 530. It was my day off from work-tending bar, so I got to come home at a regular time. Dinner time.
Or as close to a regular dinner time as we ever get in my house. Somebody wash me, I shouted when I walked through the door of my apartment. I've been hanging with the human turd. I wanted to be solicited and consoled by the wife who I couldn't see at first but who I knew was lurking someplace.
There's this really short hallway in my apartment, so standing at the front door, I could only see about a third of the living room. The place smelled like bleach. More importantly, it didn't smell like food. So right away I knew we'd be ordering in that night.
Are you talking about Tony? It was Sam. A stoop for 5 years old. He popped his head up from behind the arm of the sofa he was lying on.
Yup, I said. But you remember our plan, don't you Sammy? It's not our plan, it's our policy. He grinned.
Such a learner. Oh yeah, our policy. It's our policy? Never tell Tony he's the human turd.
Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding ding. I said. He did one of those squeals he does like when I'm tickling him. Where's Mommy?
I asked. She's here. He grinned. She's right.
There. He pointed to a part of the living room I couldn't see yet and looked in my eyes. Deep. Like he never heard of not trusting people.
My boys and I are a team. I call us the Man Squad. So what's part complaining about now? Junior asked.
I rounded the corner to catch her sitting at the computer on the desk in front of the exposed brick in the cul-de-sac of our living room. She was still wearing her black suit from the day job. All of Junior's day job suits feature nice cleavage exposure and Junior definitely has the tits for it. You may as well get all the advantage you can in the dog sniff dog world of Manhattan day jobs.
And hey, we all know that everything else being equal. No man will want to make an enemy of a woman with suckable knobs. Parp's in the basement mixing up the medicine. I said.
I bent over and kissed her cheek. Oh look. She's writing an email. Who are you writing to?
I asked. Head. She said. I got in a discussion with him about the spelling of burger and I have to send him a link.
I went over to get something commestable from the fridge to hold me until we ordered in whatever it was we were going to order in. Holy crap. I said, will you let it go? She sighed.
I know. She whimpered. I found a bag of walnuts near the back of the fridge and fished it out. Junior had come to New York 20 years earlier to be an actress.
But last March when we were having this conversation, she was managing the wait staff in the restaurant at the Museum of the Humanities on 55th Street. Her boss at Moheum was a guy named Ed Borgen. Ed had a mushy round body with a skull so massive that it still managed to look disproportionately huge on him. All of his employees called him head.
He looked like a bobblehead of Karl Marx with glasses and an unwashed beard. It'll just take a sec but if I don't do it I'll be thinking about head smug smirk all night. Junior said head wants to draw mommy deep. Sam volunteered.
Junior and I froze and then turned to him in unison. No shit. It was like we were synchronized swimmers. Sammy giggled.
Junior looked at me crestfallen. Such a sad defeated look on her face. Oh god. I said it on the phone.
She moaned. I just stared at her. So she'd said something naughty in front of the boy. Maybe in front of both boys.
It was exactly the sort of bad behavior she was constantly giving me shit for. I just stared at her without smiling and ate walnuts from the bag and let her think about it. I went into the bathroom and closed the door for that conversation. She said like she was throwing herself on the mercy of the court.
But it's a small apartment. I get it. I said extenuating circumstances. She looked at me and grinned at this big grin and bad at her eyes.
Please. She said. God. If only she'd had someone else's cunt I could have so fucked her right then.
Well, I said I think it just means we need to have a new policy right Sammy? What? Our new policy is we never ever say that drilling thing in front of Mr. Borrigan.
Okay? Okay. He said and giggled. What a kid.
I turned to the wife. Sammy's never going to meet head anyway. I said she sort of smiled I think. I'm not sure because she wasn't even looking at me anymore.
She was looking at the damn computer screen. Me chomping walnuts behind the counter that separated the kitchen area from the living room area. Sammy lying on the sofa. The wife polishing off an email.
It was quite a family portrait except that Harry wasn't there. I stared at the wife's rack and profile for a while. She didn't notice. No wonderhead wants to fuck her.
I thought. I was part of me the kind of suspected he was fucking her. I mean why not? After all, she is a ball sucking adult for us as I now know for sure.
In fact, the only reason I was pretty sure she wasn't fucking head was that he was a greasy fat boy who looked like he had on a t-shirt with a marinerosnade even when he was wearing a business suit. On our refrigerator door tacked on with magnets in the shape of little red devils we have this list. Top 10 cholesterol fighting foods. You might have a list like that on your refrigerator door.
Top 10 belly flattening foods or top 10 things to do this week. On heads refrigerator door I'm pretty sure he has top 10 excuses for farting in a public place. So yeah, I was pretty sure junior wasn't fucking head. Which kind of begged the question, where and how is junior getting her cunt filled?
I didn't know what the wife's theory was about my not wanting to fill her cunt myself. I guess she had some prefab explanation from a magazine or a blog. But I was also pretty sure she knew more about my gothic chasm aversion than she let on. She never said a damn thing about it directly but she had… intuitions.
I'm sure I tipped her off unconsciously. And she must have also known that I was ready to ball anyone who showed the right kind of interest in me. I mean, maybe she thought I'd changed, but for crying out loud I was with someone that I met junior and ended up fucking her in the bathroom stall in Freddy's in Brooklyn. And the person I was with was my fiancé Jainy who had superior snatch muscles but a mouth like an egg beater.
So junior knew there were definite limits on my regard for the virtue of fidelity. She knew me better than to believe me when I swore to god I'd changed. See hon, I have kids now. Your kids, our kids, I could never risk all of you, all of this for a fucking bathroom stall.
What makes you think she reads you like that? Jessica asked me once. She just broke out crying yesterday and said, Paul, I had this very vivid dream last night and in it you were fucking that slut Lucille. Lucille was this coworker of mine who used to spend 45 minutes a day just working out her ass muscles.
Hmm, Jessica said, well you never know, you could be giving off a vibe. A vibe. That will be $150 please, or whatever the insurance company is paying. Where's Harry?
I asked the wife after she clicked send and came back to the world of solids. He's over at Foxes tonight. She said, they've had bedems planned for three weeks. A bedems?
Some character on one of those programs has sleepovers with gorillas and pixies. All other girls and boys of course, and they call them bedems. Sounds vaguely effeminate, I said. The wife stood up and stretched and said, only vaguely.
And she gave me this big grin that I didn't really understand but which in retrospect I can see was definitely of the shit eating variety. So who knows? Maybe she was fucking hit. Sam laughed.
Mommy's funny, he said. Notes from the Upper West Side is a work of fiction. The people depicted in this work do not exist. Notes from the Upper West Side copyright 2013 to 2014 by Dan Ratch.