Tampa

by Alissa Nutting

But thirty-one is roughly seventeen years past my window of sexual interest.

Just weeks after our wedding, I could feel my screaming libido clawing at the ornately papered walls of our gated suburban home.

I knew I’d find it hard to cut the girls in my classes any slack at all, knowing the great generosity life had already gifted them.

I shut the door and waved good-bye at Ford, who made a show of watching my ass as I walked away. This was the reason Ford married me, and why I could make the argument that I was a better wife for him than a woman who was actually smitten: love makes people feel accepted, and like Bill’s wife they then begin to break the rules.

The soul had always struck me as being a tricky thing to keep with the body: an easily bored aristocrat with the means to leave whenever it wished.

Sex struck me as a seafood with the shortest imaginable shelf life, needing to be peeled and eaten the moment the urge ripened.

Who was that queen who tried to keep her youth by bathing in the blood of virgins? She should’ve had sex with them instead, or at least had sex with them before killing them. Many might label this a contradiction, but I felt it to be a simple irony: in my view, having sex with teenagers was the only way to keep the act wholesome. They’re observant; they catalog every detail to obsess upon. They’re obsessive by nature. Should there be any other way to experience sex?

There was something repulsive (and revealing) about talking on a cell phone while handling garbage. Why did anyone pretend human relationships had value?

She had the haunted look of someone who’d come from a dire place and was on her way to an even worse destination to deliver awful news.

There was no way for women, for anyone, to gracefully age. After a certain point, any detail, like the woman’s cheerleader hairstyle, that implied youth simply looked ridiculous.

The older I became, the harder it would be to get what I wanted, but that was probably true of everyone with everything.

I found that sometimes it was a relief to do something unattractive in private, to confirm that I’m deeply flawed when so many others imagine me to be perfect. People are often startled by my handwriting; because I’m pretty, they assume everything I do is pretty. It’s odd to them that I write like I have a hook for an arm, just as Ford would be startled to learn I have a hook for a heart.

“Because everyone acts disingenuous,” I said. “And then they all die.”

There had been a time in college when I’d told myself, as a cardinal rule, that I’d never have sex with any guy who was wearing a man ring. Ford had plenty—high school, college, fraternity, police academy, gemstone. It was a purely adult form of male sleaze and I abhorred it.

I’d coo, leaning down as close to him as I could manage—that horrible adult male sourness exuded from him most in the mornings—and kiss his temple.

Monday morning the sky was pouring rain to opacity.

I’d be the sexual yardstick for his whole life: Jack would spend the rest of his days trying but failing to relive the experience of being given everything at a time when he knew nothing. Like a tollbooth in his memory, every partner he’d have afterward would have to pass through the gate of my comparison, and it would be a losing equation. The numbers could never be as favorable as they were right now, when his naïveté would be subtracted from my expertise to produce the largest sum of astonishment possible.

“Aren’t people revolting in general?” I complained.

sighed—Jack and I needed a highway all our own, devoid of reminders about life’s daily vulgarities.

Not once did Jack ask me where we were going. He had a perfect sense of what wasn’t important.

The next morning I woke up sore with the raging thirst that follows a night of obliteration, but with very few painful memories. That erasure was the gift I gave myself.

“None of that stuff would’ve happened on an island of girls. Spearing a pig in the . . . butthole?” She made a visceral “no thank you” face, as though the act were a party game we were actually playing and she was refusing her turn. “Yeah right,” said Lambert. He was a dorky kid who wrote long diatribes in his journals about how girls say they want a nice guy but he knew this to be patently false: I am one such fellow, he wrote, and my female peers will not come near me unless they’re trying to copy my homework. “If it were an island of girls they would’ve cannibalized each other in days.”

He seemed to understand that resolution didn’t need to have anything to do with truth, and to choose a sense of harmony over insight every time.

That mid-October in central Florida held on to the distant heat of a diluted summer. Dusk began its onset preternaturally early, blackening the windows with menacing speed each evening.

Yelling and shaking signs, they became workers in a protest economy whose currency was appreciative car honks; any time they received the blaring horn-tap of a supporter, the women’s beefy arms would raise up and they’d high-five one another.

The force’s weight was always greater than expected;

It was a type of torture, only having myself for sexual stimulation: I could predict everything I was about to do.

His pain seemed like such an internal, private thing, no different from excrement—something to be dealt with in private. But here he was, putting it before me and making me smell it.

Jack conveying to me his new understanding that the world could be a terrible place. His eyes said that no one at all was looking out for him or able to fix this essential flaw in life’s fabric; my eyes stared back and told him that he was right.