Men, Women & Children: A Novel Page 4

  Don said, “It will be.”

  “I mean really quick.”

  “Okay.”

  As Don inserted his penis into his wife’s vagina, all he could think about were the images of the porn star Stoya. Since discovering her on his son’s computer he had become mildly obsessed and had purchased memberships to several websites that featured her movies. It wasn’t just that she was incredibly beautiful that aroused Don, it was that she genuinely seemed to enjoy having sex—something Rachel hadn’t seemed to do in a very long time.

  Don looked down at his wife’s uninterested face and felt his erection softening inside her. Not wanting to waste what he assumed would be his only chance to have sex for at least the next month or two, he said, “Roll over.”

  Rachel said, “Why?”

  “You know, for doggy style.”

  “Why? Just finish like this.”

  Don felt his erection dissipating a little more with each passing second that the negotiation continued. He said, “Please.”

  Rachel said, “Fine,” and rolled over onto her stomach, propping herself up on all fours. Don stroked his penis a few times with his eyes closed, thinking of Stoya and what her face looked like when she was being entered from behind. To Don, she looked happy—and, more than her perfect body, her willingness to engage in any sexual position or to accept a penis in any orifice, Don found her happiness to be her most appealing trait. It was that image of Stoya, smiling and then biting her bottom lip as she was penetrated from behind, that Don kept in his mind as he gripped his wife’s hips and slid his penis into her, imagining the same expression on her face that Stoya had in the countless videos he had seen.

  Rachel closed her eyes and tried to imagine anything that would help her enjoy this. She wanted to feel attracted to her husband again. She wanted to feel desire for him. But it seemed that time in their relationship might have passed for her. As he thrust into her and grunted, she thought of their wedding night. She tried to remember how happy she was then, but couldn’t conjure the emotion she used to associate with the memory of that day. Then she felt Don ejaculate in her vagina and slide his quickly shrinking penis out of her.

  She said, “I’m going to the bathroom.”

  Don said, “Okay,” and lay back in their bed, wondering if he would ever again have sex with a woman who enjoyed it.

  A few feet down the hall, Chris wasn’t studying for his science test. The test never existed. Instead he was downloading from a variety of torrent websites various collections of pornography depicting women over the age of fifty. While he waited for these videos to download he masturbated to a three minute and forty-two second video of a transsexual receiving a prostate massage from a man, which resulted in a massive ejaculation. This was the first time he had masturbated to transsexual pornography.

  A few miles away, Allison Doss walked through her front door, dropped her book bag, and entered her family’s kitchen, where her mother, Liz, her father, Neal, and her younger brother, Myron, were all eating. She had always considered her family to be overweight, and they were. She, too, had been overweight, until halfway through her seventh-grade year. On the first day of school that year, an eighth-grade boy named Gordon Hinks had given Allison the nickname “Muffin Top.” She was surprised at how quickly she became accustomed to the emotional pain and torment she suffered. Her daily ritual involved crying in the girls’ locker room for a few minutes before the start of school every day. She made no attempt to remedy the situation until a boy she was mildly obsessed with, another eighth grader and friend of Gordon named Brandon Lender, said exactly this to her: “I’d fuck you if I could find the hole.”

  The statement itself, combined with the importance it carried for Allison, coming as it did from her first romantic interest—a boy she drew pictures of in her notebook, whose last name she fantasized about having as her own, with whom she countless times imagined sharing her first kiss—led her to go home that night and skip eating dinner. Instead she retreated to her room and sought dieting advice on the Internet. She came across a posting on the website Everything2.com called “How to Become a Better Anorexic.” The article outlined various dieting strategies to curb hunger pains, such as eating as much celery as possible because it contains no calories but causes your body to burn them as it is digested, or making sure the water you drink is as cold as possible so your body has to expend a few extra calories heating it. As well, this posting listed several links to pro-anorexia websites like Ana’s Underground Grotto, which encouraged girls to become anorexic by allowing other girls to post photos of themselves that highlighted their hipbones, ribcages, and, in some cases, spines. These photos were commonly referred to within the pro-anorexia community as “thinspiration.”

  Allison found that the physical pain caused by hunger was just as easy to accept as a constant in her life as the emotional pain that came with being overweight was before. Over the next six months she created her own account on the Angels of Ana website and frequented sites like the Art of Reduction, Thin2be’s Diary, and Hungry for Perfection. Although she had never met any of the people she communicated with on these sites, she felt they were her friends and she valued their advice and interaction far more than she did the guidance of her own family, who knew nothing about her treatment of food and eating.

  Allison’s mother, Liz, worked at Marie Callender’s and always brought home pies. As Allison walked through the kitchen, Liz said, “Honey, I got a peach cobbler,” which was Allison’s favorite. The smell of the cobbler was almost more than she could deal with as she walked through the kitchen. She could feel herself begin to salivate and a slight tingling sensation in the back of her mouth became apparent.

  Allison said, “Thanks, Mom, just leave it in the fridge and I’ll get some later. I have to go get started on some homework.”

  Allison’s father and brother said nothing as she went upstairs and logged on to Angels of Ana to look at pictures of girls who were thinner than she was and read postings about how to ignore cravings of favorite foods.

  A few blocks away, Brandy Beltmeyer stood behind her mother, Patricia, who sat in her room at her computer doing what she called her “weekly check.” This check consisted of Brandy being forced to give her mother the passwords to every website on which she had an account. Patricia would then log in to each of these sites, including her daughter’s Gmail account, Myspace page, Facebook page, and her user account on Syfy.com. Patricia would read through every interaction her daughter was engaged in on each of these sites and question her if she found anything that seemed out of the ordinary. This was all done to protect her daughter from Internet predators.

  As Patricia scrolled through the comments on her daughter’s Myspace page, she came to one, posted by a male user named DILF whose age was listed as twenty-eight, that read, “U R HAWT.”

  Patricia said, “Who is this DILF guy?”

  Brandy said, “I don’t know, just some guy. I can’t help it if some random guy finds my picture and thinks I’m cute.”

  Patricia said, “Well, I can,” as she deleted DILF’s comment. This garnered an eye-roll and sigh from her daughter. Patricia stood from her daughter’s computer chair and said, “You know this is to make sure you’re safe.”

  Brandy said, “I know.”

  Patricia said, “I love you.”

  Brandy said, “I love you, too.”

  Patricia left her daughter’s room and went downstairs, where her husband, Ray, said, “You clean up her Internet or whatever?” Since he was in high school, Ray had worked in a local sporting goods store that was originally owned by his grandfather. His older brother now owned the shop, and Ray was next in line in the event that his brother wanted to retire. They used the same bookkeeping methods that were popular with their grandfather. There had never been a computer in the store. Ray still felt computers were unnecessary on many levels and refused to even create an e-mail account for himself.

  Patricia laughed and said, “Yes, honey,
I cleaned up her Internet.” Then they settled in to watch a syndicated episode of According to Jim, which was their favorite show.

  Upstairs, Brandy logged on to a Myspace account that she kept secret from her mother. Her username and identity on this account was Freyja. She decided on the name after doing a search on the Internet for “sexy goddess.” She was directed to a page devoted to Freyja, the Norse goddess of love and sex. Freyja was believed to have been pulled in a golden chariot by a pack of wild cats. Brandy liked cats. Brandy donned gothic makeup and took pictures of herself in her bra and underwear with her phone and then uploaded them to this account, erasing the photos from her phone immediately after uploading. She gave incorrect information about her age and location and, despite the fact that she had yet to experience her first kiss, filled the blog section of her Freyja account with fictitious descriptions of sexual encounters and sexual preferences that she assumed men would want her to have, including bisexuality, a predilection for anal sex, and the need to be choked or spit on.

  She communicated daily with her 5,689 friends and regularly made new ones. There were a few whom she communicated with more frequently than others. Dungeonmax, GothGod1337, and LovelyPallor were among them. They talked about a wide variety of subjects, mainly sexual, most of which Brandy knew nothing about, but could quickly research with a rudimentary Google search and then regurgitate, in some cases copying and pasting various bits and pieces of other blogs she would come across directly into instant messaging conversations. She was not overly interested in losing her virginity or performing any kind of sexual act at her age, but she found it an easy way to get the interest of moderate to large numbers of people who would engage in instant message conversations with her about a wide variety of subjects.

  Brandy had invented her Freyja identity in the seventh grade, when her mother and father moved to a school district that forced her to go to Goodrich instead of the junior high school her grade school friends attended. As an alternative to making new friends at Goodrich, Brandy found it easier to find meaningful and entertaining interactions with people online. She still maintained a friendship with her best friend, Lauren Martin, and saw her on most weekends.

  She worked very hard at keeping this secret from her mother, resetting her browser’s history, cookies, and caches every fifteen minutes or so just in case her mother should come in and demand a surprise check of her computer, which she had done in the past. She also kept this Myspace page a secret from her classmates, assuming that knowledge of its existence would find its way back to her mother if any of her peers found out about it.

  Freyja had eighteen new messages, many innocuous, two requesting nude pictures, and one from an obese married woman in gothic makeup from Tucson, Arizona, calling herself Lady Fenris and offering a ménage à trois with herself and her husband, who were both disease and drug-free.

  A few blocks away, Tim Mooney finished eating a twelve-pack of nuggets from Chick-fil-A that his father, Kent, brought him home for dinner, along with one for himself. As Tim stood from the table taking his trash with him to the kitchen, Kent said, “Want to toss the ball for a while?”

  Kent and Tim would frequently play catch with a football after dinner. It was something they did even before Tim’s mother and Kent’s wife, Lydia, left to live with this man named Greg Cherry in California who was in marketing. But since she left, Kent felt that tossing the ball brought them closer together as a father and son. It was something that solidified their bond as two men who were abandoned. Tim recognized this as well. He thought about agreeing to play catch with his father, and not telling him that he’d quit the football team a few hours earlier, but was unable to. He didn’t want to lie to his father or to participate in any form of charade with his father. He had respect for his father and that respect, he thought, deserved the truth. He said, “Dad, I, uh . . . I quit the football team today.”

  The words were difficult for Kent to hear coming from his son’s mouth, but he wasn’t surprised. Since Lydia left, Kent had sensed his son pulling away, becoming more introverted, losing interest in the things that had always held his attention. Kent’s normal reaction to his son’s news would have been anger. Kent would have screamed at his son and threatened punishment unless his son rejoined the football team. But, like his son, since his wife had left, he found it more and more difficult to feel anything other than a certain hollow sadness. Kent said, “Oh. I see. Are you sure?”

  Tim said, “Yeah. I just . . . Yeah. I’m sure, Dad.”

  Kent said, “Well, I’m obviously not going to force you to play. I mean, I can’t force you to, but I think you should think about it. And I don’t want this to be because of— Just think about it.”

  Tim said, “I already quit.”

  Kent said, “I know, but, just think about it. You can go back, I’m sure.”

  Tim said, “Okay.”

  Tim passed his father on his way to the kitchen, where he threw his empty nugget box in the trash and went to his room without saying another word. Kent threw away his own trash, opened the first of what would be seven Bud Lights that night, and sat in for a night of watching the World Series of Poker and, at several specific moments, wondering what his wife was doing in California, which resulted in him imagining her having sex with Greg Cherry, a man Kent had never met or even seen. He pictured him as being small and intellectual, physically weak, probably wearing glasses and appearing slightly effeminate—the opposite of Kent. Kent had difficulty imagining that his wife would leave him for a man who was similar to him in any way. He could only reconcile her decision to abandon her family by assuming she had realized that she wanted something completely different, at least for the time being.

  Kent turned his thoughts to his son. He recognized that Tim had become more introverted and moody and rationalized that all kids his age must go through similar periods and that his mother’s absence probably wasn’t helping the situation. He held on to some hope that, after Tim emerged from whatever he was going through, he would return to football. Beyond directly illustrating the benefits of playing football, Kent assumed he could say nothing else to his son to speed this process up, so he decided to leave him alone to work things out on his own. Kent found that dwelling on how badly he wanted his son to rejoin the team left him with less time to think about his soon-to-be ex-wife, Lydia, living in California with Greg Cherry who was in marketing.

  Tim sat down at his computer and logged on to World of Warcraft, the Shattered Hand server, five minutes before his guild was scheduled to raid Ulduar, the highest-level end-game dungeon in the game at the time. Tim’s main character was a frostfire specced mage named Firehands who regularly had the highest damage-per-second in guild raids. He was a valuable member to his guild, which required his damage output to defeat all of the bosses in Ulduar.

  As soon as he logged on, he was greeted in guild chat by other members who would be joining in the raid. At the bottom left of Tim’s screen in the green guild-chat text a series of phrases appeared: “I thought your mom sucked my dick last night but when I reached down and felt stubble, I realized it was your dad. My mistake.” “What’s up, nigger?” “You fuck any junior high pussy yet?” “I wish I was in junior high again, I’d fuck every piece of 7th grade ass I could, even the niggers.”

  Tim had become used to the tone and content of his guild’s chat. He believed that none of these people were actual pedophiles, homophobes, or racists, and he found humor in their explicit chat messages, understanding that most massively multiplayer online games had evolved a similar style and tone of communication within their player bases due to the fact that a large number of the players had spent so much time digesting the Internet’s most base content that they were now desensitized to nearly everything most people would consider offensive. Even though Tim had never known the real names of his guildmates, he considered them his friends based on the frequency of their interaction, which was daily. He had no conversations of substance with these people and thei
r exchanges involved little beyond World of Warcraft, racial humor, and explicitly sexual anecdotes that were rarely true. He had told none of them about his mother moving or about his decision to quit playing football, which were the two most important events of his life thus far. Tim enjoyed the surface-level communication he had with his guildmates. He didn’t want anything more.

  He knew Chucker only as the protection-specced paladin who was the greatest purveyor of fake racial hatred in the guild. He would never know that the person on the other end of the computer was a twenty-eight-year-old loan officer in Annapolis, Maryland, who had to beg his fiancée to let him play World of Warcraft virtually every night and more often than not waited until she fell asleep so he could sneak off to the computer in their office and play the game.

  He knew Baratheon only as the dwarven shadow priest who would respec to holy before every raid and then fail to properly heal the tank on at least one boss per instance, causing a wipe. He would never know that the person playing Baratheon was a six-foot-five, three-hundred-twenty-pound half-Korean, half-French Canadian college student studying engineering and accounting in order to make his parents happy even though he really wanted to play football.

  He knew Selkis only as the night elf rogue who could out-damage most of the mages in their guild. He would never know that the person playing Selkis was a twenty-six-year-old perpetual college student who had no intention of ever graduating, ate a Wendy’s Baconator at least once a day, and lived with his parents and their five cats.

  At a chat command from the guild leader to “Get on Vent,” Tim logged on to the guild’s Ventrillo server, a third-party program that allowed the members of the guild to actually talk to one another using microphones; he put on his headphones; and they all entered the instance. Tim was happy not to think about his mother in California with Greg Cherry or his father sitting silently in the living room wishing he would play football again or the pointlessness of any of it for the next four hours.