Short Story: Sex Unfriendly

Short Story: Sex Unfriendly

He woke up that morning with the best of intentions. He felt strengthened and reinvigorated. How weird, for it was a Saturday morning and he pretty much didn’t remember what he’d done the night before. Well, let’s go a bit further back. He was home, reading, his friend Natasha called in. She brought a bottle with her. Some crazy blue thing. She said it to be an ancient liquor, designed to let free your most secreted secrets.

They were friends since college, the first encounter being at the university library where both looked for more on Anatomy II. They found it strange they never talked in class. Fact is they studied together that day and throughout the cold days of cerebellums, tendons and heart filaments, diabetes, strokes, simple melanomas and hardcore stomach aches they became close. Close enough to understand that joining fluids and friendship – sex – is never a good idea. If you have sex and then become friends is one thing. And, typically, until a divorce, a fight in a bar, some clothes and other belongings thrown out the window or a civilized we’re done and have a great life, it works. Not the other way around. So they never even thought of the possibility of anything between them happening, to the point where she would be naked in front of him for the only purpose of scientific research. Since friendship is a two-way highway, he would happily do the same for her. And so they studied each other’s bodies, meticulously. She knew when he was about to have an erection, he could foresee the moment she would start to breathe more heavily watching his member go stiff.

The point is they carried it that way and never really bothered to do something about it. She got married to a great scientist, a man of very good behavior. A lab person. Not a bit like him, a lazy doctor who, nowadays, didn’t even care to wash his hands sometimes, when the patient’s visit was just revision. Fuck, gross. Well, he was in his late thirties, never married, a single man who lived alone in a nice apartment, accompanied by great booze, food he liked to cook (go figure, lazy doctor, pristine around pans), some eventual girls, never girlfriends. Parents deceased, nothing to worry about. Two sisters living abroad. London, writer. Nicaragua, paramedic. Well, some things come with your cells. Mother, surgeon. Father, lawyer, that’s where the writer bit must have come.

His name is Frank and now he was staring at Natasha, sound asleep in his bed, his pajama bottoms and her own tank top. Did they sleep together? Not together-together, but together as in side by side. As in brother and sister sharing the mattress. Which would be weird anyway, because as a married person, she was supposed to be embracing someone else’s pillow. Or body part.

He slipped from the blankets – thank god he was wearing underwear – and went for his pack of cigarettes. Boy they’d smoked. Only three left. But she didn’t even smoke. Why bother? They got drunk and said things and laughed and smoked together, that was about it, probably. He lit one up and sucked it as only hangovers know how. Then he put it out in a mechanic gesture. How lame is this thing that you can’t smoke anywhere anymore. It makes you do things you don’t wanna do, like put out a cigarette, even if it can kill you. As if a plane crash couldn’t. Or diseases unrelated to ingestion of toxic smoke and the like. He, as a doctor, was pretty much used to diagnoses way far away from nicotine, or tobacco or one of the other thousand substances you take in with just one drag. He had a lot of non-smokers with serious heart problems. Anyway, he opened his fridge in search of something to replace the coffee, absent in the house since the morning before, when he failed to write himself a note and pass it on to his secretary who would, in her lunch break, go to a grocery store to buy him what he needed. Well, he found water. And beer. And stale ham. And aspirin. Finally something. Well, he liked cooking, not buying the ingredients.

He stood there smoking, drinking water, watching Natasha. Strange things, the feelings. How come you can know a person forever, be intimate in a way lovers sometimes can’t - for love is a completely different category of “feelings” - and all of a sudden, feel bizarrely embarrassed by the idea of your friend waking up in your bed and catching you in your underwear (something so banal and known). Well, that’s what happened that very moment. And with the same urge he had put out his cigarette a few moments ago just to light it up again, he caught himself putting on his jeans from last night.

Moving like a dog in the way dogs move when they wake up, she opened her eyes.

“Hey,” she said and covered her head with the pillow.

“Hey,” he answered almost blushing, as if she could know he felt strange just by looking at her with his pajama bottoms.

“Where you goin’ all dressed up?”

“All dressed up is the pants?”

“Yeah, if we’re talking absinthe hangover.”

“Right.”

“Any aspirin in the house?”

“Only aspirin in the house.”

“Give it to me.”

“That sounded a little…”

“Shut up.”

He shut up and gave her the pills. Two. And water. Natasha rolled and rolled in bed. He could do nothing but watch.

“I’m gonna take a shower,” he said, willing to leave the one and only, but big, room of the house. Modern life. Lofts. Nothing to remember a person of the word “privacy”. Unless, as modern times impose, you live alone. That’s why we live in lofts today, to have no possibility of sharing. No bedroom. Just the impersonal living room, where you can eventually sleep in a bed. Not really for couples intent on having a full life together.

“Listen, did I say something bad about Philip? Really, I mean, fuck, I”—

“Honestly? I don’t remember.”

“Did we…?”

“Honestly?”

“Fuck.”

He chuckled. “I don’t think so.”

She sighed and he thought he would like to have answered yes, even if it was a lie. Shaking the thought away, he walked to the bathroom. “Let’s go get something to eat.”

Natasha jumped from the bed and reached for the cellphone in her purse on the floor.

“Philip, it’s me. I know I said things… fuck. Call me, okay?”

She flipped off the phone and picked up a cigarette. She wasn’t a smoker, but what the hell, she wasn’t a liar and there she was, in her best friend’s apartment, pretending to her husband to be in Oklahoma. Why did she lie? Wouldn’t it be easier to tell him what was going on? Never. It’s never easier to do that. Human beings like their own interpretations of simple facts. You say you need a break, some time to think, it means you want out. Maybe it’s true and the one in need of the break is only “interpreting” their own wanting out. She’s been married three years and the fun part of it was over. Since month five. How could that be? She thought she loved that man, that smart, insightful lab guy. Fuck. Well, that’s where it started to go wrong. Not that it wasn’t good. Fucking with him. It’s just that it was boring.

Frank reappeared in the room, showered, wet hair, same jeans, no shirt. She stared at him.

“You think we should’ve…”

“What?”

“Nothing. Let’s go eat.”

She put on her skirt form last night, taking off his pajama bottoms from under it. He saw nothing. Not a piece of her thigh, nothing.

“Can I borrow your toothbrush?”

“Sure.”

***

Walking down Abbot Kinney Boulevard, in a Venice that’s not in Italy, nor has gondolas and romanticism, but is cool and beautiful in its graffiti way, with all the alleys and small houses, and different people and some kind of invisible badge that attests: we’re hip. They had walked down a few blocks now and passed by a few people on the way. But there was something strange happening, other than the creepy silence between them, which was per se something really extraordinary.

The streets were unusually empty for a Saturday morning, as was he, even if his head was full of uncontrolled, even unclassified thoughts. Here and there they saw someone, looking down as if ashamed. Not Venice style. He thought of using this as a topic for conversation, as if they needed that, as if the silence hasn’t always been comfortable between them. But he gave up, moved by some sort of embarrassment he was now, at this very moment, trying to understand.

Suddenly, they glanced at a couple making out. Really making out. She had her hair dyed blue. He, red. Typically, it would be the other way around. Anyway, they stopped short and looked at each other. Natasha laughed. A nervous giggle. He looked back at the couple. And they started taking their clothes off. What? Then he heard the girl saying something like “bollocks” and said out loud, “Brits”. They started walking again, turning their necks, unaccustomed to seeing tits and cocks in the open on a Saturday morning of the developed world.

A few steps ahead, another couple, this time actually going at it, this time not Brits. It was Sam and Coleen, people from the neighborhood, people he saw almost every day at the groceries, jogging on the beach, walking their Great Dane, Maritza. They were “having sex” to be polite, between Abbot Kinney and Garfield Ave, what are the odds?

“Is it just me, or you—“

“Wow, I was thinking it was the absinthe from last night.”

“Maybe it is.”

But Sam greeted him while thrusting his wife and he was forced to a “Hi, Sam. Hey, Colleen.”

She didn’t answer.

“Have we gone to bed in 2011 and woke up in, what, I don’t know, 3045?”

Natasha grimaced. “Fuck. Let’s just go eat and leave it at that.”

She ordered Le Cheval: open toasted sandwich with two fried eggs on top (a cheval) of ham and melted swiss with baby mixed greens. The choice of bread: baguette. Not very girlie. He went with the Norwegian Bagel, toasted with smoked salmon, cream cheese, onions, capers. And a beer. Talk about a hangover. Maybe it was for the best, for the day had already started high.

They ate in silence at a table outside The French Market Cafe. A couple two tables away finished their meal and lit up a cigarette. Which made him check his pack and see he had only one left. Natasha said: “Yeah, there must be something really weird goin’ on, I smoke one today. Not to mention the six or seven from last night.”

“Okay,” he said.

And then, the couple finished the cigarettes and started making out, a lead-in to a healthy Saturday morning sex, post breakfast and cigarettes, without the rush from workdays and tired nights.

“Seriously, what the fuck is goin’ on, Frank?”

“Why should I know? Cause it’s my friggin’ neighborhood?”

“Exactly.”

And he went silent, honestly dumbfounded by the course of events. The waiter came out to bring another table’s orders and Frank called him. The guy passed by the sexing couple in a mix of disgust and voyeurism, almost dropping his tray as he couldn’t stop looking at them, now semi naked in their lascivious ballet.

“Hey, Mike, what the fuck is happening here?”

“You sayin’ here here, or here the US?”

“Here… I don’t know. What do you mean?”

“Haven’t you heard, man? What? You out of the country or somethin? This thing has been going on awhile. Now it’s done.”

“What?”

“Man, don’t you read the papers, watch TV, live on planet earth?”

“Seriously, what are you talking about?”

The people waiting for their food waved and Mike rushed over.

“Sorry, gotta go, man. Just hope they don’t start doin’ it while they eat. People like a lot of weird stuff. I’ll be back.”

He stared at the couple fucking, then at Natasha, who looked at him as if saying “what? I have nothing to do with it.”

Mike came back with the LA Today and read: … as of March 27th, 2011, indoor sex is forbidden, not only in public venues as cigarettes, but also in the privacy of people’s homes. “There you go.”

“What? What is this? Really.”

“I don’t know, man. Maybe it’s just another way of controlling people’s lives. Tell me about it.”

And now he had something to deal with. He’d always thought sex to be the most natural thing in the human behavior. Just as eating, drinking water, defecating, urinating, breathing. But this… this he found disgusting. Not the sex itself, but the open sex, as if you should know it happens but don’t necessarily have to watch. It was not like porn. You pay for that. Or even free porn. It was live and everywhere. It was as the cigarettes before. Few choices for the non-smokers.

They walked back home in silence. She, looking around, interested in what happened in the streets. It was the Flower Power all over again. Which didn’t make any sense anymore. With facebook and text messages and video conferences and virtually shared files and databases, you can start a war from your very couch while watching whales on Discovery Channel. No more time for meetings and protests, you do it at home, with a few remotes at your disposal. He got his head down, feeling like a teenager, all ashamed by kisses and what they evolve to. It’s been so long he never stopped to think about anything. Anything at all. Life was a matter of working, having fun, eating and travelling and, yes, sex, of course, as much as possible, but always indoors and rarely with real meaning. As if we could really say it has a real meaning, other than procreation. Pleasure was one of the things he regarded as an important part of life, almost the reason we lived, but it came with everything else. One has to do this and that and have pleasure in life. Some people find it to be at the bottom of their list, some at the top. That’s it.

When they got to his door, he took her hand. But it was an unintentional move, like when people lose their limbs but their brains keep having these reflexes.

“What?” she asked.

“Nothing. I don’t know. I’m gonna buy some cigarettes. Here.” He gave her the keys. “Get in. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He walked away, in need of some time alone. What was happening in his world? He felt twenty years younger and not in a good way. All the things he’d gone through when he was seventeen, eighteen, nineteen. The embarrassment not only by themes related to sex, but everything that had to do with… life. He felt inappropriate, amateurish, unskilled for the simple fact of living. Then he found Medical School, and the contact with organs, the very matter of them, made him relax. It was all so palpable, that he had no reason to be afraid of what went inside his head. Nerves and circuits and connections. And he blanked everything he couldn’t touch or feel. With his hands, not with his heart. And now this. People fucking all around and it wasn’t an act of rebellion, it was just the contrary: following the law. What he read in the paper a few moments ago meant that maybe his house was wired. What if he tried to have sex in there? How would they know? They. Now he felt like a drug dealer, an adolescent on weed, a communist, from when such a thing had a meaning not so laughable. What if he proposed to Natasha a fake, a pretense sex, to see if he was right. Or to finally confirm something was really crazy and had been nothing but side effects of the absinthe. He bought three packs of Marlboro and ran home.

They spent the day in bed, as they did in college. Only then they read books on diseases and now they watched bad TV. At six twenty the husband called, he knows that for sure, cause he was the one to hand Natasha her cellphone and saw the digital clock right above Philip’s name. She thanked him and headed to the bathroom. When she came back, she said: “Gotta go.” And kissed his cheek and left.

The rest of the Saturday went like that, bad TV and unanswered phone calls. He didn’t want to talk to anybody. When he felt hungry, he ordered Chinese, not willing to go out and see people having real sex. He ate, drank half a bottle of whiskey and dozed off.

On Sunday he ordered food again. He didn’t even bother to open the windows. No sight of the outside world would be better. Same as yesterday, he stayed home, postponing his contact with society. The next day he would have appointments. Heart diseases, hypertension, clogged veins and arteries… wasn’t it funny that he was a cardiovascular physician? He said he liked treating hearts, because they pumped. It felt like music. And since he had no talent to playing guitar or drums or singing, he decided to be a different sort of king of beats.

But at night, he couldn’t resist. And was out of cigarettes again. He was smoking too much, nothing to put on the walls with his certificates in the office. Outside, he saw nothing. I mean, no fucking on the streets, no couples licking themselves, no more Planet of the Apes. Relieved, he decided it was safe enough to go for a walk and a beer, so he headed towards the beach, thinking pier, where he thought it would be more likely to see people doing strange things if that was the case and the whole deal hadn’t been a weird state of mind he was in. But no. It was a calm and typical Sunday night. People wouldn’t go for too much, tomorrow was Monday.

On Washington Boulevard, in a bar he never usually went to, frequented by people much younger than him, he felt home, domesticated, free. He drank and flirted. Talked to people unknown to his life, smoked on the terrace, and even kissed a girl in the open. For a moment he was afraid it would come to that kind of thing he saw the day before, but it was only the kissing. Her name was Patricia, Pat, and she asked him if he wanted to go some place else. He thought of asking about the new law, but gave up instead and kissed her as if his answer would be a yes. But he said “gotta go” and left. Drunk and with a healthy hard on.

At home, already in bed, he found his cellphone, forgotten under the pillow, as forgotten was his memory of Natasha and their weird hours together this time. There were three missed calls form her and a text message: “sorry ‘bout yesterday. Really had to go. Luv.” He answered: “Okay” and ripped off his clothes and wished to sleep quickly.

The next morning, he woke up as always, at seven. Fifty minutes sweating on the treadmill. Amazing that he was able to do that with all the smoke and alcohol still fresh in his body. No TV or iPod, for he didn’t wanna know what was going on out there. He would be out soon, so why bother and anticipate things? He took a shower, got ready, called the secretary to have a clue of how was supposed to be his day in the office, how many pre-dead he would have to deal with. How many post-dead, survivors in desperate recovery?

Out of his building, checking the corners, nothing seemed out of order. But then, when he was approaching his car, his heartbeat raced as he saw a male couple leaned against his beauty, the vehicle he cared about so much. They were finalizing their thing, moaning, one to the other’s back, the other facing the black paint of his Cayenne S Hybrid. Sixty-something-thousand-fucking dollars being thrust upon.

“Hey!” he screamed. And the one on the hood said, “Hey, man. Almost done here.” And the other banged him faster and faster and faster. And they were done. “Morning. Have a nice day.”

He felt disgusted, not because it was two guys fucking, but because it was two guys fucking not in, but against his car. What about the quiet and normal Sunday night he just experienced? Well, maybe Sunday was really God’s day off. He lit up a cigarette.