"I've gotta get out of here," I told Yule.
"We just got here."
"I am about to throw up in my mouth."
I turned to shoulder my way back out the front door. A blonde woman, and just about the only woman there my age, blocked my way and wasn't moving. Who knows what she might have looked like if she hadn't been so damn drunk, but as it was, all her facial muscles were so relaxed by alcohol that she looked as if she were melting.
"You are fine!"
"Excuse me?" My words served two purposes. I didn't understand what she had just said, and I wanted to get around her quickly.
"You are fine! I saw you as soon as you came in, and I said to myself, He is fine!"
I looked at her more closely this time. Was she just messing with me?
"Uh ... thank you. Wow. Thanks."
Circling each other, we traded places so I was now nearer the exit.
"Um. Bye."
As the cool and the quiet of the outside hit me, I cackled.
She called me fine! I am knocking on 40 and had never been called fine by anybody, not once in my life. Perhaps she was some sort of drunken angel, come to earth to help me through.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
In the first months after Carmen moved out, I of course was too emotionally gutted and too preoccupied with getting Ava to preschool and bribing her to poop in a potty, changing Chet, bathing both of them in the evenings and singing them to sleep at night to think about dating. The Playboy Channel was the closest thing I had to a lover. Satellite TV with benefits. I was fishing for sympathy about my plight with a wild friend when he suggested CyberSkin.
I thought he was talking about Internet porn, of which I was already familiar, until he explained that it was a space-age substance that was actually quite spongy and lifelike.
I told him that it sounded like something they should pass out in prisons.
"It will change your life, my friend, and save your wrist."
Though there was a sex shop just minutes away, for weeks I could not bring myself to enter it. Finally, however, I did, and I bought the floppy rubber thing from a woman behind the counter who weighed more than I do. I can't tell you what she looked like, because I pretended to be hypnotized by the dirty floor at my feet. I even feebly tried to disguise my voice when I said thank you and hurriedly scooped up my change. Anything to make it harder for her to recognize me in a lineup if the cops were ever looking to round up the neighborhood perverts, losers and freaks.
As soon as I got home, I buried the thing at the back of my dresser drawer. Now that it was safely secreted inside my home I was actually very excited about our date this evening, after putting the kids to bed.
Then I rushed off to yoga. Two hours later I was driving home singing to myself. A few of the yoginis in class had been especially flirty, maybe soon I wouldn't even need the thing that waited for me at home. And the class itself was an ass-kicker. Every part of me sweated. My eyeballs sweated. For the first time in weeks, my brain was pleasantly stewing in endorphins. I was persevering through what was so far the hardest test in a fairly hard life. I was proud of myself. Each day, I could almost feel the wound inside me closing just a little bit more.
I opened the door to my house and heard Ava and her playdate screaming happily, as Chet chased them. When I came in they all gathered around my knees like sheep. My ex Carmen was in the kitchen, my kitchen, chopping a hill of kale. She insisted that her little studio around the corner, right off the Venice boardwalk, was too tiny for playdates, so I gave her a key to the house my kids and I were renting. In fact, she explained to Ava that she had two homes, ours and hers. Her newest obsession was raw vegan cooking so she was using our kitchen to prepare food (I guess you can't call it cooking) for rich, raw foodies too lazy to chop up their own.
As had happened every time I saw her again ever since the night she left, as soon as our eyes met, my stomach lava lamped and I had to look away or fall over. It was all so fucking hard. How could I pretend she was dead when here she was, in my fucking kitchen five afternoons a week?
I hurried past to take a shower.
"Um. Trey," she began, speaking so quietly that at first I did not hear her. "The girls were playing in your room and they found your thing. I took it from them but..."
On the counter by the sink, far away from the chopped up kale and my soon-to-be-ex wife, lay my new, spongy, pink plastic pussy.
If it were only sharp and pointy instead of springy and soft I could have plunged it into my chest and instantly ended my humiliation.
"The girls were fighting with it," Carmen added helpfully.
A coherent verbal response eluded me. I marched the 40 bucks worth of silicon (or whatever the hell it's made of) out the back door to the trash, then took the back stairs up to my room. To begin our new lives apart Carmen had Doug, her white rasta guru boy. I had been willing to settle for a lousy rubbery cutlet.
About the writer
Trey Ellis is a novelist, screenwriter, blogger and assistant professor at Columbia University. His new memoir is "Bedtime Stories: Adventures in the Land of Single-Fatherhood," from which this is adapted.
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