Unsoul'd Read online

  Kiki herself had graced many of my fantasies and gotten me through many tough nights. And Fi had held a starring role in my mind for months after our breakup, buoyed by my pre-existing intimate knowledge. This was the first time I'd ever combined the two of them, though, and I have to admit that when I beheld the stiffer- and taller-than-usual deportment of my cock, I wondered why I hadn't thought of this before. It clearly worked.

  The next thing I knew, Kiki Newman was writhing naked on my bed, her breasts -- glimpsed furtively in shadow for a moment in Time Doubt -- heaving as Fi went down on her with the enthusiasm of a life-long lesbian, not merely a collegiate dabbler. Fi's groans and slurping noises were a counterpoint to Kiki's gasps of lust, and I positioned myself behind Fi, slid into her slick and humid depths, grasped her buttocks and thrust and pulled and thrust and pulled, then -- a decision made -- withdrew and parted those same buttocks. She had told me before that she was done with "that," but it was my fantasy and in my fantasy she still wanted no more of sodomy, but would change her tune after a minute or two of my expert buggery.

  "Oh, God," I said. "Oh, Fi. Fiona. Fi. Fi!"

  I came in record time. You would have needed a stopwatch to measure it.

  With ejaculation came momentary elation, followed by guilt and annoyance. Annoyance at myself for falling off the No-Fantasies-About-Fi Wagon. Guilt at imagining Fi in such a way, when we were supposed to be no more than friends. And, I suppose, further guilt at using Kiki Newman for wank-fodder, too. She was no longer just a distant celebrity; I was one degree of separation from her. It wasn't inconceivable that I could someday meet her and shake her hand with the same hand I'd just used to squeeze out a fairly copious amount of wasted genetic material.

  I was a pretty lousy person, my soul notwithstanding.

  I cleaned myself up and padded around the apartment in socks and shirt. The open, empty Amazon box from the prior day still sat near the door and the sight of it suddenly raised my ire, its mere existence inflaming me, reminding me as it did of Fi's continued insertion into my life. I had tried to move on. I had tried to be the bigger person, to take the high road. And here was her fucking come-and-fuck-me dress box on my fucking floor!

  It was an injustice most monumental that any one person could be so hot, so successful, and just so fucking lucky all in one lifetime.

  Maybe Fi had sold her soul to the devil. Maybe that's why she'd been unable to love me when I had loved her so desperately.

  Or maybe she just couldn't bring herself to love a failure.

  Wherein I Desperately Need an Erection and Have None to Offer

  u still awake? the text message asked many hours later.

  Fortunately for my sanity, fantasizing threeways with my ex and a movie star was not the only way I could get my rocks off. There was also Manda.

  yeah, I texted back. why? As if I didn't know.

  I found the locution "booty call" ridiculous and childish. But the concept itself was just fine.

  To call Manda my girlfriend would probably be an overstatement. Shortly after Fi left, I was determined to win the race to be first back into the dating pool. I figured I was ready, and honestly I didn't expect to click with someone; I just wanted to be dating. So, Manda was a surprise. We'd been together for three or four months, so I thought of her as "a woman I'm currently seeing," which was just neutral enough to make me feel comfortable with the whole thing. Introduced by a mutual friend, we'd had two whole dates before we ended up in bed. For my part, I was horny as hell, as well as desperate to prove to myself that -- Fi-less -- I was still lovable and desirable. For her part... I have no idea. I'm sure she had her reasons, too.

  Since then, we've managed to find our ways into each other's beds at least once a week, a nice pressure valve release.

  Managing that neat trick of being funny and shy at the same time, Manda never seemed to take anything too seriously, or at least, not seriously enough for me stress about it. She was a web designer for mommytobeeyotch.com, a website for "women who don't want to stop being bitches just 'cause they're going to be moms," according to its header. The site features articles and blogs on how to be a "bad-ass mother" as well as endless photogalleries of pregnant women on motorcycles, with tattoos, and so on. Manda calls it "grrl power made gravid."

  Manda herself is the opposite of the mommytobeeyotch.com ethos. She is not pregnant nor does she ever wish to be. She has no tattoos and no exotic piercings. She's small -- five-one, maybe -- and slender enough that I worry about crushing her when on top, which is infrequent as she comes like a dynamo when riding me. Truly, I've never seen a woman orgasm so swiftly and explosively. In any other position, I could huff and puff and pound forever without a reaction, but when straddling me, she lasts perhaps sixty seconds post-penetration before digging her nails into my shoulders and shuddering out her breath.

  When the text came that night, I was long done with my day, lying on the sofa, a carton of ice cream nearby, the TV playing a rerun of a bad sitcom, while also surfing the internet for new reviews of my books, of which I could find none. I immediately turned off the TV and tucked the laptop under the sofa. The ice cream I dumped in the trash -- it was down to mostly-melted dregs anyway. My shirt was dirty, so I changed it.

  I wasn't trying to impress Manda -- I just didn't want her to think of me as the sort of guy who lounged around late at night, eating ice cream, watching bad TV, and ego-surfing the internet.

  When my buzzer sounded a little while later, I waited a moment or two -- don't want to appear too eager -- before buzzing her in. I pretended to be reading Infinite Jest when she got to the door.

  Manda was slim, lithe -- not quite boyish, but close. Not so close, though, that fucking her would make a straight man question his lifelong heterosexuality. Because it didn't and I didn't.

  "How are you?" she asked, pecking my lips.

  "Fine. You?"

  "Good. We had a work party over on Smith, so I thought I'd come by..."

  "Sure. Sure. Can I get you anything?"

  "No, I'm good." She regarded my choice of reading material. "You're still reading that?"

  I hefted the book. "Look how long it is. Look how fat it is." I paused. "Don't say 'That's what she said.'"

  She grinned. "You know me too well."

  I tossed the book aside; it landed with a satisfying clunk. Manda snuggled next to me on the sofa. "How was your day? Get a lot of writing done?"

  Thinking of the meager two hundred words, I shrugged. "Not much, but it was pretty decent stuff. How was your day? Pregnant bitches still pregnant? Still bitchy?"

  "Yep. I'm glad your stomach's feeling better." She patted my belly gently, then leaned in to plant a longer, more lingering kiss on my lips. I liked kissing her; she was enthusiastic about it -- nibbling, sucking my lower lip. Almost like she wanted to be sure to differentiate her kisses from the billions available in the world. She succeeded; if blindfolded, I bet I could pick out Manda from a line-up based on lipwork alone.

  We kissed and fooled around for a few minutes on the sofa. I soon had her shirt and bra off and she had my shirt unbuttoned and my belt unfastened. I kissed my way down her throat to the shallow valley between her small, pert breasts. She smelled faintly of strawberries and pomegranates. I inhaled and she moaned deep in her chest.

  We fumbled and stumbled our way into the bedroom and stripped off our remaining clothes. Manda reached into the nightstand drawer, but came up empty.

  "Where--"

  "I bought more," I said, finding the new box on the dresser. I pried it open and joined her in bed. I had a condom.

  What I didn't have was an erection.

  OK, well, it was late at night and we'd only been foreplaying for a few minutes. I left the condom securely wrapped and set it on the nightstand, then kissed her again, running my hand down her flank. I pulled her against me, though I made sure to angle my hips such that she would not brush against my not-so-excitable boy.

  I tried everything I could think
of to make myself hard. I probed every inch of Manda's delectable flesh with my fingers and tongue. I lingered at her nipples. I feasted at her moist cleft, basking in her hiccups of excitement, aware of the strength of her smooth thighs pressed to my ears, those same thighs I so enjoyed wrapped around my waist.

  Nothing.

  Nothing at all.

  Not even a little stir.

  I stalled as long as I could, but eventually Manda giggled and said, "Stop teasing me!" and reached for my shriveled, useless manhood.

  If it was possible, it got even smaller.

  "Oh," she said, and clearly wanted to say much, much more.

  "Let's..." she went on, drifting off, shifting so that she was eye-level with the uncooperative member. She took me in her mouth, humming a little (a touch -- literal and figurative -- I always appreciated) and did her level best to make my garden snake into a hissing cobra.

  All to no avail. I could feel her working away at me, but it was as though at a remove, as though her bobbing head were on a TV screen. I wanted a raging erection; I wanted to be rampant. But nothin' doin'. I remained flaccid and useless.

  "Maybe--" I broke off, guiding her -- gently! -- away from my AWOL unit, kissed her lightly, then trailed my lips down to her collarbone and further. She submitted, sighing and lying on her back, and I continued my ministrations between her legs until my tongue brought her to climax.

  Still nothing between my legs. I bit down on my lower lip to avoid verbalizing my disappointment. This had literally never happened to me before, as the cliché goes.

  I hauled myself parallel with her, on my back, and tried to breathe evenly, tried not to think of my dysfunctional equipment.

  "Are you all right?" she asked after a long-ish moment full of unspoken questions. "Is it me?"

  It was, I suspected, only her in the sense that she was not some amalgamation of Kiki Newman and Fi. I shook my head and tried to make myself sound lightly unconcerned with the whole turn of events.

  "I think it's just..." I cleared my throat. What did I think it was? "I think I'm just still getting over the food poisoning."

  "Oh. Oh, of course. Of course." She curled up against me. "I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking."

  "No, no, don't worry about it." It was easy to forgive when there was nothing to forgive. "Sometimes if you're not feeling well, the, you know..."

  I knew it wasn't the food poisoning -- I'd been up and at 'em earlier today when I'd fantasy three-way'd with Kiki Newman and Fi. Was I now suddenly a one-time-a-day guy? Or was it just that the fantasy of Kiki Newman and Fiona had been so intense that it had made actual sex positively un-erotic by comparison? How long would it last?

  "I totally understand," she said, and drifted off to sleep while I pondered the possibility of a sad, bonerless future.

  Wherein I Consult Tayvon for Advice

  "And this never happened before, bro?"

  I loved it when Tayvon called me "bro" or "brother." I harbored a secret and shameful hope that I was or would be or could be that white guy, the white guy that black guys thought was cool. And I knew deep down that it wasn't true, that I was perpetually nerdy and clueless as to the black experience and as terminally uncool as one could be without actually having a stick surgically implanted in one's rectal region, but every time Tayvon busted out a "brother" or attempted with me one of those complex, intertwining handshakes that black guys do so well, I felt a frisson of coolness pass between us.

  We were sitting outdoors at a coffee shop in Park Slope, not far from the yoga studio ("YOUga: A New Individualist Art for YOU!") where Tayvon usually spent his mornings and weekends teaching downward dog and crescent pose to the hipster chicks and young moms of hippest Brooklyn. Two months earlier, though, he'd broken his collarbone in a pick-up basketball game over in Carroll Gardens, sidelining himself from the yoga circuit for a while. I enjoyed teasing him about this: Tayvon was a Marine reservist who'd survived combat in Afghanistan, yet a bunch of clueless kids from Brooklyn had managed to do more damage than the Taliban and al-Qaeda combined.

  "No," I told him, sipping my iced tea, returning to the topic at hand. "Never. Not once. Never, ever." It was a hot July day -- hot as hell, I might have said a few days previous, but hell comparisons had lost their appeal -- and why we had opted to sit in the sweltering heat outside as opposed to the air-conditioned indoors, I couldn't say. Tayvon seemed to thrive on the heat -- he wasn't even sweating, whereas I had twin swamps gathering in my armpits.

  "Stress," he said with great and confident authority. "It's this damn book. This new one you're writing. The one without a title."

  It's not that the book lacked a title. It's that I -- in a rare spasm of superstition -- only ever titled my novels Untitled Manuscript while they were in progress. I'd done that with my first, Night/Light, purely because I couldn't come up with a title until it was finished. I'd sold that book and had decided thenceforth to call all of my works Untitled Manuscript until they were finished, even if I knew the title.

  As to the latest Untitled Manuscript, Tayvon and I had had this conversation many, many times. Usually, I refrained from discussing a work in progress with anyone, but I had made the mistake -- in a moment of weakness and high friendship -- of confiding in Tayvon the topic, theme, and overall plot of what would be my next book. He disapproved, and took every opportunity to tell me so.

  "It's not the book," I assured him. "I'm not stressed about it. Well, no more so than usual."

  "No good will come of it," he warned me.

  "You keep saying that, but it's not going to stop me. And seriously -- this has nothing to do with the book. I've been doing this long enough that I can tell when a book is messing with me."

  He shrugged. "I don't know... You still seeing that herbalist?"

  A while back, I had complained of a strange, intermittent twinge in my back -- not even actual pain, just an odd sensation. Tayvon, who swore by the multitude of Eastern philosophies and medicines, had sent me off to an herbalist in a Chinatown alleyway, where I had spent over a hundred dollars in cash for three small pill bottles and instructions for their usage.

  "Not for a little while," I told him. "My back's better now." And it was, though whether the Chinese pills had contributed to my recovery or not, I couldn't say. I felt vaguely ripped off, but couldn't prove anything one way or the other.

  "You should see Li again. He's good."

  I was beginning to regret confiding in Tayvon at all. I suppose I'd been hoping he would just chuckle, say, "It happens to all of us, bro," and move on. But he was taking this pretty seriously, which both annoyed me and freaked me out. I didn't want to make the trek to Chinatown again. I didn't want to shell out a hundred dollars or more for unregulated pills that may or may not help. It was like living a spam e-mail: Herbal Viagra! Herbal Cialis!

  Maybe if I had told him about the masturbation session earlier in the day, he could confirm for me that this was no big deal. But I hadn't mentioned it because...how do you tell someone you masturbated so powerfully that it rendered your penis inert?

  "I had a, you know, a boner when I woke up this morning. So, like, everything still works. It just didn't last night."

  "Well, that's good. Did you make use of it?"

  "She had to get up early for work."

  "Ah." He tapped a finger against his glass of sparkling water. He had exceptionally long fingers, so long that they seemed to need an extra joint. "I don't know, man. Is there something psychological going on? You worried about something?"

  "No more so than usual." Well, there was the small matter of the devil, but with each hour that passed without his presence, I became more and more convinced that I had imagined the whole thing, perhaps in a sort of feverish fugue state brought about by the poisoned bagel.

  "Is it the girl? You just not into her any more?"

  I didn't want to think that was the case. I liked Manda. I didn't know if I loved her -- partly because I just didn't know and partly because every time the t
hought hovered into view, I dodged it like a videogame missile -- but I liked her enormously. We had fun together, and not simply fun in the bedroom-romp sense. We liked the same movies and TV shows. We were similar enough to get along, but different enough that we didn't bore each other. Sexually, we were thus far unadventurous, but we'd only been sleeping together for a couple of months. There would be time to figure out who would get the sex swing installed in his or her bedroom.

  Metaphorically speaking.

  Unless Manda was into that. In which case, I suppose I'd give it a shot.

  "You should look into acupuncture," Tayvon said. "It helped my hip last year, remember?"

  I sighed. Yeah, I remembered. I also remembered that -- like Chinese herbalists -- acupuncturists weren't covered under my exceptionally shitty National Writers' Union health insurance plan. More out-of-pocket bucks for something that might or might not work.

  "Or maybe it's all in your head," he went on. "Maybe you're thinking of someone else instead. Like that chick from the gym you told me about...?"

  The gym... I checked my cell for the time. Shit! I was late. "I have to go," I told him, hopping up. I tossed a five on the table to cover my tea and tax and tip. "I gotta go."

  "See an acupuncturist!" he shouted after me as I rushed off.

  Wherein the Devil Returns at an Inopportune Moment

  I made it to Body by You and raced into the men's locker room to change. It's not that I had a class to attend (I hate exercising in general, but I reserve my most fervent ire for group exercise), but that I had my own particular schedule to adhere to.

  Which mirrored that of Gym Girl.

  I didn't know her real name. More accurately, I couldn't remember her real name. She told it to me the first time we spoke and I promptly forgot it and there had never been a convenient opportunity to say, Er, excuse me, but what's your name again? Because once you've discussed the things we've discussed -- my dating life, my nascent relationship with Manda, my writing; her boyfriend, her family -- it's nearly impossible to go back to introductions. Someday, I hoped, someone else at the gym would mention her name. In the meantime, I just thought of her as Gym Girl. Which was probably sexist, but given that I was already objectifying her from the ends of her sexy, flowing (though sweat-dampened) black hair down past the luxurious curve of her lower back and over the delicate hump of her rump to the feet at the end of her dainty ankles, I would say that a sexist nickname counts as the least of my sins.