Tampa by Alissa Nutting Read Free Book Online Page A

and beautiful with my pants down inside a Corvette, even if I was parked alone on the side of the road with a sex toy. Still, better to avoid it if possible.
    A sluggish couple walking a basset hound turned the corner to come down the road and circle back. They moved at a pace their bodies would have been unable to discern from rest. I felt like a child when I saw middle-aged partners and remembered they had sex together—there was still that initial sense of horror and denial. What aspect of either one of them could be pleasant to touch or to see, even in the darkest room? Sex struck me as a seafood with the shortest imaginable shelf life, needing to be peeled and eaten the moment the urge ripened. Even by sixteen, seventeen, it seemed that people became too comfortable with their desires to have any objectivity over their vulgar moments. They closed their eyes to avoid awkward orgasm faces, slipped lingerie made for models and mannequins onto wholly imperfect bodies. 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? I remember taking my shirt off for a friend’s younger brother in college. The way his eyes lit up like he was seeing snow for the first time.
    Suddenly a gray Buick pulled into Jack’s driveway and the garage opened to a jumbled arrangement of home-improvement tools and sporting gear. A man of banal stature emerged from the garage’s shadow; his belted dress pants sat slightly too high on his waist and his square plaid dress shirt, impervious to time, could’ve been from any one of the past three decades. He was an obvious multitasker. One hand held a phone to his ear; the other wheeled an oversized green trash bin behind him casually, like a suitcase—he could just as easily have been walking through the airport terminal. There was something repulsive (and revealing) about talking on a cell phone while handling garbage. Why did anyone pretend human relationships had value?
    Seconds after he parked the bin on the corner, I turned and spied two joggers, each one coming from an opposite direction in a way that seemed synchronized, round the corner and advance down the street. Moments later a third appeared. It was as though they were racing toward the garbage, had been waiting all day, raccoon-like , for it to be set out. For a moment I imagined the bin filled with nothing but weightless, wadded-up puffs of Kleenex: the week’s toll of Jack’s feverish masturbating. There could, I reasoned, actually be such a treasure inside the trash—one tied, recycled plastic shopping bag of waste from Jack’s bedroom: candy wrappers, pencil shavings, awkward starts to homework assignments that were crumpled up in frustration, and then, perhaps, a sweet ball of tissue or paper towel, crisped at the center, smelling of metallic salt. I’d happily have dug through rancid coffee grounds and tufts of middle-aged hair extracted from brushes in order to find it if the hour had been later, the street more isolated.
    Jack’s father walked back inside the garage, a trailing burst oflaughter seeming to activate the sprinklers on his lawn as the automatic door protectively lowered. One jogger, a thirtysomething woman whose exertions of breath were thundering, stomped by. 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. This expression contrasted sharply with her caffeinated ponytail, which was perched in the top center of her skull like a plume on the hat of a Napoleonic infantryman. There was no way for women, for