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"What about pepperoni?"

"Is that torn flesh?"

"Yeah, there must be some tearing involved. There's definitely some grinding of flesh, not to mention slicing. But I'm sure there's some tearing."

"Are there eyeballs in it?"

"Do you want eyeballs in it?"

"I do."

"Then eyeballs it is."

"Raw eyeballs?"

"Absolutely."

"Thanks, Daddy."

"Hey," I said, remembering now a tip from one of the parenting manuals Maura and I had read a few months ago. "I really liked how you just said 'Thanks, Daddy.' That was wonderful."

"Pansy," said Bernie.

Fourteen

Bernie fed, bathed screamlessly (perhaps for fear of Sioux pain), read to, sung to, and tucked in, I poured a glass of Old Overholt, turned on the TV. It was not often I had the run of the remote this early in the evening, but after a few moments I stopped clicking and settled in with a romantic comedy from the late nineties, the rare thing Maura would have maybe lingered on, caught up in some memory of watching this movie with old friends. It was strange to sit here and watch it alone. A few years, or even months ago, I would have scoffed, begged Maura to pop up the dial for some punditry or playoff scores or a breakdown of cavalry tactics in the Crimean War.

This wasn't just some macho reflex. Stuff me in a tutu and let's screen experimental videos all day, I always said, because I believed in Art (I harbored a secret capital, like a secret Capitol), but don't ask me to endure the corporate weeps. When it came to cinema, I sold out my aesthetic principles only for zombie flicks, monster mashes, jelly-tentacled beasts who lived in toilets, slurped out our kidneys the hard way (watching Bernie get born, that angry purple mango plunging out of Maura, only further lubed my oozing worldview, my drippy grid), or else those special-ops terror soaps, the nutter mullahs and Glock minuets.

I'd never conceded to the rom-com pone, the coffee bars and turtlenecks, all that greeting card ontology. We were all garbage eaters, but there were too many varieties heaped. The idea was to limit yourself to one or two, or else you'd become an American.

But just like one, I'd cheated, changed. Or maybe it was just the way of things, in line with the theory that the older men get, the more they become old women. Now I preferred the feces the wardens of our souls dolloped on the fem trays. Just a little more texture. I couldn't remember if I'd seen Caller I Do in a theater, but I'd watched it piecemeal over the years. B.B., Before Bernie, Maura and I spent frequent Sundays on the sofa, shades drawn, soaking ourselves in the healing springs of bad television.

This particular movie took place in Hollywood's New York, a wonderland of pensive latte-sipping and meaningful strolls through Central Park. The city looked crisp, exquisite. The citizens lived like simple millionaires. Our principals were a lonely man and a lonely woman, each with a buffoonish, homely sidekick who would have been thought attractive in real life, and a fascinating, but finally unfulfilling-because there was nobody to "share it all with"-career. They sought each other, missed each other, at cocktail parties, in train terminals, at flower shops, their fin de siecle Nokias gaining symbolic power with each scene. Sucked into the vortex of high formula, a slow sob rose in my body. Just like porn or bang-bang, this was the pure stuff, concocted for the baser circuits, the lizard board.

Now the climax arrived, the charmingly improbable half-nude chase through the gallery district of Dumbo, the couple finally reunited in embarrassed ecstasy as pretentious art aficionados punctured their skeins of cynicism and cheered (had they just exited the latest Billy Raskov exhibit?). The sob rippled up, burst in my throat. Maura and I had already found each other. The desperate, emboldening quest for love, the beautiful, electrifying unknowingness of it all, was forever gone. (Unless we divorced, started over, which would surely be disastrous. She'd find happiness with some curt, sporty banker. I'd live in the laminated basement of a Cypriot retiree near the airport, never talk to a woman under seventy-five again.)

"Fucking pussy," I wept, sipped my drink. "Fucking pussy-hurt pussy."

They sped the credits but I did catch a name. The governor's daughter. An early producing gig. Maybe a favor from one of her father's liberal Hollywood foes? She'd gone on to become an important person in the business. Once, I'd watched her hold up a statue, make a speech on television about film and justice. I thought she might apologize to the nation for stealing my Spanish knife.

Good old Constance, she had hid behind the others that night the governor's daughter claimed her nine-tenths of the law. Her black pigtails doubted me, indicted. Constance knew it was my knife. I'd shown it to her in my room, under the blue light. But that night at the party she made no sign she remembered. She just stood there in her tank top, pink with tequila and summer, watched me squirm. Maybe she believed I had it coming.

Maybe I did. The previous spring I'd been briefly inhabited by the ghost of Roger Burke, sneaked around the whole semester, cheated on Constance every chance I got. The hate in me was huge, but I had always wanted happiness for Constance, still did, years later, when a thick cream envelope arrived in the mail, the names of her mother and father in fancy ink in the corner. Maybe getting hitched wasn't the most Marxist thing to do, but she had found somebody she loved enough to hire a calligrapher. I tossed out the envelope unopened, didn't need to know, for example, the name of the groom, or the wedding site. I had no intention of seeing these people again until I could boast of an accomplishment beyond my failed attempt to sell wallet-ready oil portraits of people's children online. Yes, this had been my home business.

Everything went off, went bad, or so I told myself, though I knew my crucial role in the spoilage. I had skipped my last meeting with Sayuri Kuroki behind Scissor Kicks. Even then I could feel myself doing the dumb thing, as though I wanted to guarantee I had memories to haunt me, feared I might lack a good reason to wince. I should never have worried. I could still picture Sayuri standing there near the Dumpster in her denim jacket, fiddling with the scrunchies on her wrist, maybe worried I'd been knocked off my BMX by a lumber truck. Though maybe she never reached the rendezvous, either.

Constance, I'd just turned abruptly away from her, seeing something better in whatever Lena's adulterous hunger could deliver. I'd almost let Maura drift off a few times, too, before Bernie reversed the inertia. We'd been together off and on for ten years, Maura and I, had tried very hard not to be the love of each other's life. It was like the stupid movie, without the cute bits.

Not one of the cute bits, for instance, was the night we had a foursome with that lascivious couple whose Greenpoint loft, perhaps because of the hillocks of cocaine on the coffee table, we found ourselves the last to leave. After some preliminary dialogue that wanted so much to parody the clunky verbal vamping of vintage porn, but had veered into grim, jaw-grinding consequentiality, Maura and the other woman had stripped and entangled themselves on the bed, all pinches and strokes and theatrical licks. Even through the fog of powders and booze, the sight of them aroused me and I turned to grin at the other guy. He smiled back, held up a palm for a louche, almost Wonderlandish high five. I shoved my tongue in his mouth. Really, I just meant to be friendly, to complement the writhings beneath us, complete the servicing circuit, but suddenly it seemed I'd broken the sacred swinger's code.

"What the fuck," the guy said. He pulled away, wiped his lips. Then he stuck himself in my wife, glared as he pumped.