Another Insane Devotion by Peter Trachtenberg Read Free Book Online

pretend they’re fascinated by everybody they interview, and maybe people who photograph rock stars have to keep up the impression that they’re aroused by everybody on a shoot, even extending the courtesy to writers. I could say that being present on a sex shoot had an effect opposite to that of looking at the resulting photographs. It was too much process. When I think back to what I saw through the photographer’s viewfinder, I recall the highlights on a man’s pecs, the inky Möbius of a twisted bra strap, the fraught synapse between an upright nipple and a suppliant tongue. How many angels might waltz in that gap. When I think back to what I saw in front of me, though, I remember the
photographer making her model friend sit up for a shot rather than lie back because if she lay back her tits would pancake to the side. The model was tired, and she complained, but I could see the photographer was right.
    She was right about taxis too. The whole way home, one after another skidded past me, stuffed with grateful passengers or with its “Off Duty” sign burning like a brand. I had to walk blocks before I found an empty one, and by then I was so wet I might as well have saved myself the ten bucks.
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    In both cats and humans, it’s mostly the male that roams in pursuit of sex. The rule, however, isn’t ironclad. Many years ago I had a friend whom a teenaged diving accident had left a paraplegic. He couldn’t get hard-ons. He once came to me upset because he’d learned that just before they got married, his wife had had sex with another man. She’d wanted to know if she could bear to go the rest of her life without fucking, and she knew of no way to be sure without actually doing it, as it turned out, with a neighbor in their apartment complex. She’d decided she could. Somebody else might have treated this as grounds for divorce. My friend stayed with his wife. A few years later, he was surgically outfitted with a penis pump that enabled him to have intercourse as often and as long as he wanted. He and his wife were happy for many years until he died from complications from his old injury.
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    â€œDo you want to know what I felt then?”
    â€œI’m not sure I want to know.”
    â€œI felt desire.”

    At some point on the night of September 29, I went into my office and tried Skyping F. at the residency, which was how we’d been talking. The phone, or I guess the computer, rang in that strange, wet way, as if each ring were a bubble rising through hundreds of feet of green-black water from the hold of a ship sunken on the sea floor. In my mind, the horizontal distance between us translated into a vertical distance. I was the one at the bottom. No one answered. Well, where F. was, it was long after midnight. She’d probably shut down her laptop for the night.
    Earlier in the day, she’d sent me an e-mail that ended with a question about the financial tidal wave that had begun sweeping the world a few weeks before, snatching up trillions of dollars in its rush. She wanted to know if we were going to lose our retirement savings. “Possibly yes,” I wrote back now. “I’ll tell you more yesterday. Bruno told me that Biscuit’s been gone for 2 days, and I’m sick with worry. I’m waiting to hear more from him—Sherri’s been helping him look for her—but I may fly up there this weekend to see if I have better luck.” I was already thinking of going up to New York to look for Biscuit myself.
    It’s only on rereading this message that I realize I typed “yesterday” when I meant “tomorrow.”

    A while after we had Biscuit spayed, I became conscious of a high-pitched whine that seemed to be coming from just outside my office. I thought it might be somebody doing construction
down the block or a disturbance in the phone lines. But I couldn’t figure out what kind of power tool would