Thumbsucker by Walter Kirn Read Free Book Online Page B

too.
    One night Mike and Audrey attended a seminar on marketing upscale vitamins and supplements and Joel and I stayed up late and watched a talk show. Johnson was a guest. Women shrieked as he strode onstage, his collar open, his trousers loose and flowing, and when he sat down beside the other guest—a female singer with a double chin and long false eyelashes that looked like bat wings—she hiked up her skirt and fiddled with her blouse buttons.
    “Do you always have this effect?” the host asked Johnson.
    Johnson shrugged. The actress clutched her heart. She rolled her eyes and pretended to be fainting.
    “Medic!” the host yelled. “We need a medic here!”
    As the waiting period went on, Audrey developed a certain swagger, as if merely mailing the essay had transformed her. She made pizza night a weekly ritual. Tasks that I knew she’d been putting off, she suddenly dove into, such as talking to Joel about sex. Instead of teaching him as she’d taught me—with the help of college nursing texts that made the sexual organs look like plants—she used the new
Penthouse
. I wondered where she’d bought it.
    I grew bluer and moodier by the day. Though I’d come to believe that Audrey would lose the contest, one scene that I’d imagined from her dream date seemed bound to haunt me always: Johnson filling glasses of champagne while Audrey applied mascara in a compact mirror. Whether this moment ever came to pass didn’t matter now that I knew the truth: Audrey’s life with us was a compromise, a sham.
    To ease her dissatisfaction, I pampered her. At night, when we watched TV, I rubbed her shoulders, digging into the muscles with my thumbs. I watered her plants and washed and waxed her car and plumped up the sofa cushions before she sat on them.
    One day she said, “You’re all over me. Get off.”
    “Your neck looks tight. I thought I’d rub it down.”
    “I can rub down my own neck. Get away.”
    I went to the kitchen, where Mike was cleaning walleyes. He’d been ice fishing on Elkhorn Lake. His thermal undershirt glittered with bloody scales as he poked a fillet knife into one fish’s throat, then pulled straight back. Dark guts came tumbling out.
    “You’re spilling blood on Audrey’s clean tile,” I said.
    Mike dropped a paper towel on the floor and wiped it around with his foot.
    “You’re making it worse.”
    Mike rinsed his bloody hands in the sink and dried them on a white dishcloth.
    “You’re going to lose her.”
    Mike hung the cloth on its hook and stared at me. “What’s going on?”
    “You’ve given up,” I said. “You talk about all these couples getting divorces and then you treat your own wife like she’s a cleaning lady.”
    I said nothing more, but Mike seemed to get my message. A few days later, for no special reason, he came home with flowers and a box of candy and took Audrey out to the Hund, a German restaurant with a strolling accordion player. They returned after midnight, which thrilled me. I’d waited up. I listened to their voices in the hallway.
    “Well, I think he’s cute.”
    “He’s a homo.”
    “Women love him.”
    “My mother loves Liberace, for God’s sake. If anything, that’s
proof
the guy’s a fruit.”
    I heard my parents’ bedroom door close and then, a few minutes later, it opened again. Mike appeared in my bedroom, shirtless, shaking. He stood at my footboard and glared, his hands in fists.
    “Get up,” he said. “I know what you’ve been up to.”
    “She asked for my help. I had no choice. You’re drunk.”
    “You bet I’m drunk. I have a right to be.”
    I shrunk back against the headboard as Mike sat down and slapped the edge of my mattress with one hand.
    “You’re right, I don’t deserve her. Never did.” He unraveled a thread from my blanket’s satin border and wound it around one finger like a tourniquet. “I played on her sympathy. She felt sorry for me. A linebacker with a limp. She ate it up. Then the limp went away