The Statistician reassures himself: It is okay for me to do this. It’s justified.
He follows her up the creaky, round-edged stairs, watching her muscular buttocks flex beneath her clingy red miniskirt. She’s got an altogether different type of ass than his wife’s, a smaller waist-to-hip ratio to be sure, a bit less cushion perhaps, rounder, firmer. Equally nice, though; another ninetieth-percentile butt. The Statistician’s heart rate increases from 80 to 130 beats per minute, and it isn’t just from climbing to the top of the stairs.
It’s okay for me to do this.
The Protégée pushes open the door to her cluttered, claustrophobic bachelor apartment, which was likely nothing more than a walk-in closet during the building’s previous life as a single-family home. Inside, they sit down together on the lone piece of furniture, a rumpled futon bed. Between her slightly parted knees, he glimpses her stoplight-yellow panties. Proceed with Caution. Prepare to Stop.
It’s justified, he tells himself again.
“So,” The Protégée says, opening a notebook filled with complex arithmetical scribbling, “like I mentioned in your office, I’ve really been having some difficulty making sense of these numbers.”
Her fingers brush his forearm as she flips the next page of her calculations open before him. Her thigh presses against his. She looks at him with big liquid eyes, her head titled slightly to one side, her lashes gently dropping at regular intervals. It’s the same way his wife used to look at him around the time they got engaged. Before she cut her hair. Before the book club. Before Pedro the Esthetician. Before she started sleeping with her back to him. Before the numbers tapered off to seven times a year.
“The numbers never lie,” says The Statistician to The Protégée.
5
TIME BOMB
“You mean to tell me you’ve been married to her for fifteen years? And they call me Superman!”
— Superman, to Ricky Ricardo, from the
TV series I Love Lucy, 1951–1957
Time Bomb reaches out and slaps the Snooze button on the digital alarm clock beside their bed for the fourth time.
“Ten more minutes,” she moans, turning over on her side.
Beside her, The Statistician stirs. He sidles over to her, puts one arm around her waist. Soon she feels his erection poking into the softness of her behind, like she’s hiding in a utility closet and has backed into a broom handle. How romantic.
“Aw, honey,” she sighs, “not this morning, okay?”
The same response as yesterday, thinks The Statistician. And the day before that. And the fifty-six days before that. One more day, and we will have set a new personal record for marital abstinence.
He slips out from under the duvet and plods into the en suite, his erection bobbing before him like the prow of a sailing vessel. When he closes the door behind him, she knows he’s going in there to jerk off into the bathroom sink. He leaves the door wide open when he’s brushing his teeth, showering, or using the toilet, but masturbation is still private business for The Statistician.
This is okay with Time Bomb; it means she has a few minutes to herself. She rolls over onto her back, spreads her legs wide, and begins turning slow circles with her middle finger. As her finger spins faster, pushes down harder, she is not thinking about The Statistician. Just like when he goes down on her, she is thinking about someone else.
Before the clamshell-shaped masturbation altar in the en suite, The Statistician is also thinking about someone else. Until a few days ago, he had never fantasized that his lotion-lubricated fist was another woman; he had been faithful to his wife even in his fantasy life. But now he is imagining the slick, rubbery lips of The Protégée sliding up and down on him.
Actually, he isn’t imagining so much as remembering.
The Statistician can’t prevent himself from moaning with both satisfaction and regret as he blasts into the sink. He masks the noise with a few fake coughs, but it doesn’t matter anyway, because Time Bomb doesn’t hear anything. On the other side of the wall, she is hovering on the edge of an explosion. Her face is flushed, her back is arched, her legs twitch and kick, and she pants like she’s running a hundred-yard-dash. At the moment, she wouldn’t hear the sound of a bomb falling on their Forest Hill mansion.
The Statistician ambles back into the bedroom, and Time Bomb rolls onto her side, curls up into a fetal-position ball. So close, she laments. So close.
“Come on, lazybones,” The Statistician says, reaching over to pat her bottom. “You’ll have to get up if we’re going to make it to Mr. Nice Guy’s cottage by this afternoon.”
“It’s Saturday,” Time Bomb moans. “I want to sleep in.”
“You sleep in every day,” The Statistician says.
“Why don’t you just go alone?” Time Bomb says, burying her face in her pillow, imagining a whole long weekend to herself.
“Aw, come on, honey,” he sighs, “I don’t want to go without you.”
“Why not? All of them want to see you. None of them want to see me.”
The Statistician suspects that this statement is true.
“You know that’s not true,” he says.
“None of them ever talk to me. They couldn’t care less about me.”
“SuperBarbie talks to you all the time.”
“She’s the only one. And the last time, Hippie Avenger tried to kill me!”
“Hey, she felt terrible about that. She grew those flowers herself. She couldn’t have known you would react like that.”
“She could have asked.”
Time Bomb suffers from “respiratory and dermatological sensitivities.” Her skin sunburns easily, and she suffers rashes from natural cloth fibres and most grasses. She also has sneezing fits when exposed to cat dander, certain kinds of dust, and most plant pollens. On their last trip to The Hall of Indifference, Hippie Avenger’s all-natural flower-oil moisturizing lotion caused Time Bomb a fit of sneezing that forced her to retreat to their bedroom upstairs for the remainder of the night.
Also, Mr. Nice Guy’s cologne gave Time Bomb a migraine. She also complains of migraines when it is too hot, too cold, too humid, too dry, too bright, or too noisy.
“You’ve got a long list of sensitivities, honey,” The Statistician says. “It’s easy to forget one of them.”
“Well, everyone knows that I react to ground pepper, and yet the so-called Mr. Nice Guy had to grind pepper all over everything he cooked. I didn’t have anything for dinner last time but a banana and a cucumber.”
The Statistician specifically remembers the banana and the cucumber.
“We’ll bring a cooler full of food just for you, okay? Some of your tofu burgers, some rye buns, and some raw vegetables. You’ll be fine.”
Undercooked beef is another of Time Bomb’s “migraine triggers,” and sometimes commercial wheat buns are brushed with white flour, which makes her sneeze.