Dirty Pictures

I was forty-two and in decent physical shape when I finally spent all my love.

Every morning during that miserably humid Tennessee summer, I’d stand naked before the bathroom mirror and stare at Old Winston dozing between my legs. In my twenties, the prickle of fresh air quickly roused the eager fellow, but that July, he seemed like a sick dog, barely raising his head when I reached down to scratch his wrinkles.

“Stop playing with yourself like that,” Pam would say if she caught me in the bathroom.

“I’m not playing,” I’d remind her. “I’m trying to resurrect the dead.”

This was back in 2015, when I worked as a copy writer for a PR firm while Pam finished her master’s degree in speculative history. We rented a one-story bungalow across from the college so she could stay late on campus, writing her thesis about a world without Velcro. An unwieldy, twenty-foot poplar blocked most of the house, limiting the amount of natural light that passed through our windows. The home’s previous tenant, a 70-year-old emeritus professor of photography, apparently enjoyed this cavernous feel because he left blackout curtains that, when closed, turned the day into night. Our landlord said the professor had moved in with a 25-year-old former student he’d impregnated, and the story of the septuagenarian’s vigor caused Old Winston to slump even further into his malaise.

My sister, who’d just married a woman from her law firm, tried to comfort me. We talked on the phone once a week, telling each other personal things siblings usually avoided.

“Penetration isn’t the only way to have sex,” she said. “You should spend a night only touching each other, not bothering with that other stuff. I bet Pam would love it.”

“I doubt Pam’s even noticed.”

“How long’s it been?” my sister asked.

“Five months.”

The line was quiet for a minute. “Jesus. What about Viagra?” 

“What’s the point?” I said. “If I took one, I’d just end up watching Old Winston flex in the mirror instead of putting him to work.”

Most nights after Pam returned from campus, we’d walk quietly along the town’s crumbling asphalt streets and then duck into the cool, fried food smelling air of Las Maracas for chips and salsa and a cerveza. The television above the bar showed soccer games, with commentators yelling in Spanish, and while my wife organized sweetener and sugar packets by color, she’d explain how Velcro helped America win the cold war. After two or three beers, we’d head home in the dark, holding hands with a bond much looser than those tiny hook and loop fasteners that were now her obsession.

We’d been married five years, and I still remembered a time when a few drinks and a nighttime stroll would have had us clinging to each other, eager to peal off the other’s clothes. Now, Pam went straight to bed; she wore herself down researching her thesis and working part-time for the college archives. We’d kiss goodnight, like siblings, and then she’d collapse on the bed, not bothering to change out of her clothes.

While she slept, I’d stretch out on the couch and scroll on my phone through Googled images of naked women, hoping their bare breasts and the artificial hunger on their open-mouthed faces would entice Old Winston back into the world. My mother, after discovering yellow stains in my underwear when I was a boy, warned there were a finite number of orgasms in a man’s life, and if I wasn’t careful I’d spend all my love before reaching adulthood. While she lectured me, my father snored from his familiar spot on the living room recliner, and it took me twenty years to realize their physical love had already dried up. Was it hereditary? The thought of some sluggish, tired gene passing through generations of unfulfilled Russell men sent me roaming through the house, and I’d usually end up staring out the window at that giant poplar blocking the glowing, Xanadu-like sight of campus.

Back in February, shortly after the fourth miscarriage, I came home late from my PR job and found Pam shivering in the bathtub. She’d filled it with hot water that afternoon, but something kept her in there as it cooled, turning her skin a pale blue. Part of me wanted to strip off my clothes and join her, reclining with Pam in my arms until our mouths and noses slid below the waterline. The first couple of miscarriages had come as a relief, though I never said a word to her about my feelings. My boss, Mr. Weakley, rarely seemed happy with my copy – too morose for PR, he said – so I spent those brief pregnancies worried about losing my job just as I became a father. But the third time she handed me the plastic stick with the “plus” sign on it, I’d come around. Pam and I never talked about the fetuses inside her, but walking home from work, I’d sometimes peer into the children’s clothing boutique across from the courthouse. The small, dead-eyed mannequins, dressed in madras or seersucker, stared out from the shadows of the closed store, as if waiting for me to lift them in the air so they could laugh and hug me.

When the fourth pregnancy also ended, both of us faked that we were unmoved.

“Fourth time wasn’t a charm, I guess,” I said that night.

Pam forced a laugh. “At least I can drink again. Let’s go get drunk.”

Later, after the bathtub incident, she pushed herself twice as hard to learn about the strong bonds made by Velcro. I stayed on the couch, pretending to sleep, while she dressed for school each morning, and I no longer stopped by her library carrel at lunch, preferring to walk home instead and sit with the blackout curtains drawn.

***

One night in late July, a violent summer storm kept me awake. There were tornado sirens and my cell phone beeped with an alert, but I didn’t bother looking for a safe place, didn’t fear a funnel cloud chewing through the house’s aluminum siding, its strips of insulation, or the brown painted drywall that protected us.

While I reclined on the couch, staring at the shadows of trees wavering across the ceiling, Pam appeared at my side and asked if there was anything on television. We ended up watching a home renovation show, but just before the big reveal, the windows flashed from a nearby lightning strike, followed by the lights and the television going out.

The TV must have been up too loud, because in this new dark I heard the rain outside, along with the soft, tragic sound of my wife crying. Instead of comforting her, I rummaged through closets and kitchen drawers, looking for a flashlight or maybe some candles. When I peeked under the sink in the guest bathroom, beneath the grimy green pipes, I found a strange black cube with tubes running to a plastic bottle. I asked Pam if she could make out what it was. She rubbed the cube like a blind person and then, while wiping her nose and eyes, told me it was a breast pump for nursing mothers.

“Fucking hell.” I went to grab it, but she pulled away, saying she needed to examine the padded cover’s Velcro straps. The sight of her cradling that small machine bothered some sensitive, unhealed abrasion deep in my chest, so I hurried into the garage, hoping to find a source of light somewhere along the room’s oil-stained, concrete floors. A few minutes later, I returned with a damp cardboard box.

“Don’t bring that in here,” Pam said. “It smells like mildew. What is it?”

Her pajama blouse was unbuttoned, and the pump’s suction cup was affixed to her right breast. My heart itched. When I didn’t speak for several minutes, she asked if we had any batteries.

“Maybe there’s some in here. This was in the crawl space.” I pulled back the box’s lid just in time for the power to come back on. The kitchen’s florescent light shimmered across a glossy, 8X10 photograph. I picked up the image, brushed away dirt crumbs, and saw a naked, elderly man inserting his finger into a younger woman.

“Damn.” I laughed. “We hit the jackpot, I think.”

Pam took the photo while I flipped through others hidden beneath it. The next image showed the old man standing alone, his hands on his hips in a triumphant pose. Everything about him, from the few white hairs at the edge of his skull to the skin covering his chest and stomach, appeared to be sliding its way south, while the old man’s pecker headed north, like a clinched fist raised in a victory salute.

I know a little about photography from my work in public relations, and I could tell these were exceptional compositions. The soft light on the cock kept it clean of shadows, making the shaft appear smooth and youthful, almost juvenile in its recklessness. Pam didn’t listen to my words of praise. She remained focused on that first photograph.

“I wish I could be ugly like that.”

In the five months since the bathtub incident, she’d embraced the gray overtaking her long, russet hair, and her once round face had been hallowed out from months of birdlike meals, but her beauty was too stubborn to simply fade away.

I tried to console her as she gazed at the photo. “I think you’re hideous. And you smell a little gamey, too.”

Pam rubbed her thumb over the woman’s stomach, round and taut with the first signs of a child inside. Clusters of pimples gathered along the stranger’s chin, like red-peaked mountains on an elementary school’s relief map. And a large brown mole, just south of her left nostril, seemed to challenge anyone foolish enough to call it a beauty mark.

“I bet she got last place in every beauty pageant she ever entered,” Pam said.

“She’d probably have a better chance at the Westminster Dog Show.”

“She’d get Best in Show.”

We bonded over the nasty things we said. At one point, I laughed so hard at our cruelty, my eyes watered. Pam wife kissed away the tears. The feeling of her lips against this tender skin startled me, and for a moment, I thought I’d start crying for a completely different reason. 

The next evening, instead of walking to Las Maracas, Pam and I sat at the kitchen table, eating cold sandwiches and struggling to talk about anything other than the box of dirty pictures in our living room. It embarrassed both of us how much we wanted to go pilfer through all those images, so we lingered at the table, boring each other with tales of our uninspired days.

Finally, around eight, Pam pushed herself into a standing position and said,

“All rightly. Let’s go see what our friends are doing.”

She’d always been stronger than me, the one to make important decisions regarding our lives together. I never would have had the strength to sit in a cold bath tub for hours, and part of me admired her decisiveness on that sad winter afternoon. After I pulled her out of the tub and toweled her off, she told me that, dead or alive, she just had to get away, so I fixed her coffee, helped her pack a bag, and then drove her to the Vanderbilt Psychiatric Center in Nashville.

Now, I was following Pam as she half-skipped into the living room. We sat on the floor with our legs crossed, giggling as we passed the dirty pics back and forth. In one, the woman’s long, dark hair fell across her chest, covering her breasts. Her petite hands gripped her pregnant belly, and something about her melancholy expression, along with the old man’s neatly trimmed beard, inspired us to name them Joseph and Mary.

“What’s the opposite of an immaculate conception?” Pam asked.

I held up a photo. “Anal.”

My wife smiled, and while I admired the warmth of her white teeth, she leaned forward and kissed me. This was no kiss between siblings; our mouths parted and from somewhere deep in her throat, the pleasurable vibrations of a moan sent an electric current through my body.

When the kiss ended, a thin string of saliva connected our lips. Pam licked it away, and then whispered, “Go slow with me.”

I smiled. “Slow is the only speed I know.”

We kissed again, and as my mouth reacquainted itself with the forgotten contours of her body, pieces of clothing were dispatched to the farthest regions of the living room. Eventually, we were both naked except for the pair of dark blue boxer briefs that concealed Old Winston. When Pam wiggled her hand into my underwear, where that organ remained stubbornly asleep, I pulled away like a child thief desperate to hide the candy he stole.

“I’m sorry.” The words, mere strings of sound because of my humiliation, made me want to cry, and I marveled at how fast passion hardens into shame. “I can’t do it. I don’t know why, but he won’t listen to me.”

Pam watched me, her eyes moving from my face to my crotch and then back to my face again. “Thank Jesus.” Her arms slid around me like water. “I’m not ready for that little imp, anyway.”

That night, we made something like love, with fingers and hands and lips mimicking the sprightly moves that felt so foreign and undignified to the grumpy member between my legs.

Slowly, over the course of a week, we moved the cardboard box into the guest room, and in the fading daylight hours, we papered the walls with our favorite images. When we returned home each night, Pam and I would find ourselves back in this bedroom, fiddling with each other on the gray carpet while making up lies about the pictures tacked to the wall. Old Winston remained obstinate in his laziness, but that didn’t stop Pam from trying to resurrect him. She seemed strangely satisfied when all her pulling and massaging failed to wake him, and in the end, we’d lie together naked, catching our breath while she squeezed her throbbing hand. Sometimes, while she slept, I placed little kisses on her shoulder and along the curve of her neck, trying to convince myself this was just as fun as old-fashioned intercourse, but as the days wore on, I suspected these nightly games were actually driving Old Winston farther into isolation.

That Monday, I called my sister to talk about my troubles. It was her idea to play this non-penetration game, and I half wondered if it was some kind of practical joke. When she heard my shaking voice confess that we still hadn’t made love, my sister told me drugs like Viagra were the way to go.

“It won’t make a difference to her,” she said. “You just keep doing what you’re doing, but I’ll bet an erection might just give you the confidence to realize you don’t need a goddamned erection, especially if…” She stopped herself. “It’ll make you feel better is what I’m saying. So just do it.”

On Tuesday night, about an hour after swallowing a chalky blue pill, Old Winston finally decided to reassert himself, puffing his chest and flaring his head so much I worried he might pop a seam. Pam was in the guest room, shouting for me to come visit our ugly lovers, but I lingered before that mirror, whispering tearful prayers of thanksgiving.

“Were you playing with yourself again?” she asked.

“Honey, Old Winston’s gone.” I stood naked in the doorway. “Meet Brother Lazarus.”

Pam turned, and when she saw my arrogant organ leering at her, her face twitched with something like terror or disgust. Her expression surprised me, and if it weren’t for the drugs, I’m sure my pecker would have softened. But it continued in defiance, even while I apologized for frightening her.

“Do we have any condoms,” she finally said.

“I’m sorry.” I crossed my arms over myself. “We don’t have to do anything.”

“You surprised me, that’s all.” Pam stood, regarded Old Winston for a minute or two, then patted him softly on his head. “I’ll go check if we have any condoms. I have to pee anyway.”

Alone in that room of wild, two-dimensional love, I examined the pictures on the wall, wondering what position we should use for our reunification. As the minutes passed, the urge to touch myself became almost unbearable, forcing me to keep my fingers laced firmly behind my back. I paced the room in this Napoleonic stance while my thoughts went back to the sixth grade, when I’d spent entire class periods engorged with dreams of sex marathons and orgies. Back then, I believed in the inexhaustibility of love, not realizing how easily it tired out.

Several more minutes passed before I went to our bathroom and knocked on the door. Pam didn’t answer.

“Babes?”

“I couldn’t find a condom,” she said.

I stood close with Old Winston pressed against the smooth wood, and the tingling pleasure this caused delayed my noticing the wetness slowly enveloping my toes. When the realization finally came that blood was spilling from under the door, I kicked it open and found Pam sitting on the floor. Her forearms, spread out before her, were covered in bloody hack marks. My shaving razor sat in a red pool by her thigh, surrounded by the congealed bits of hair and dried foam that once clogged the multiple blades.

“Christ!” I grabbed the damp towels from where they were drying on the bar. “What’d you do?”

She blinked at me. “We have to use a condom, but we’re out.”

Hours later, while Pam slept in a quiet hospital room, I sat in a chair by her bed and wondered, as Old Winston curled back to sleep, if he was taking the last of my love with him. Then, I leaned forward and whispered to my sleeping wife that there was no such thing as Velcro, that man had not yet figured out how to adhere anything together so easily, and that we lived in a world where everything loosened and fell away.

Charles Booth won the 2017 Alligator Juniper National Fiction Contest, earned second place in the 2014 Playboy College Fiction Contest, and received third place honors in the 2018 Larry Brown Short Story Award contest (Pithead Chapel). He received his MFA from Murray State University, and his fiction has appeared in Alligator Juniper, The Greensboro Review, The Minnesota review, The Southampton Review, StorySouth, The Pinch, The Roanoke Review, Booth, and SLAB. He lives in Clarksville, Tennessee, with his wife, Danica; his son, Reynolds; and the family mutt, Batdog.