Anymore

"I don't think I even remember what sex feels like anymore." Pam said "I met this woman once who had a stroke and went blind. She told me that she slowly just started to forget what things had looked like. One day she woke up and she couldn't remember the color blue, she tried and tried but she couldn't come up with a mental image of blue. That's how I feel, for awhile I missed it but it's just gone now."

Pam and I were out on her back porch smoking. Pam smoked Virginia Slims, the woman's cigarette. I only smoked when I was with Pam. I kept a pack of Camels in my glove box but I only felt like smoking around Pam, something about the way she held the cigarettes between her long fingers made smoking seem like the best idea ever.

"Wait a minute," I said. "So, you and Gary haven't had sex for two years?"

"Yeah, we stopped during my pregnancy with Jack and we haven't done it since." Pam brought her cigarette to her lips slowly.

"Jesus Christ," I said. "Well, if it makes you feel any better I can never get off anymore. It's the antidepressants I'm taking, Mike and I could fuck all day long and I wouldn't cum. I can't even get myself off. I went and bought one of those vibrators, this big pink scary looking thing with horns and bumps on it and still I couldn't…"

Pam was staring off down the street, my voice trailed off. I'd been with four guys in the past year and not one of them had made me cum. I had always thought Pam had the better deal.

I threw my cigarette out into the wet yard. The screen door was propped open and from inside I could hear the burble of the TV and the syncopated hiccupy cries of the baby.

"It wouldn't be so bad if we were suffering through it together." Pam said. "For the longest time I thought we were. At first when he stopped wanting me, I thought it was just a phase. This will pass, I told myself. When it didn't pass I just dealt with it, I got used to it. Then last week when I was doing the laundry, I found an empty condom wrapper in his jeans."

"Motherfucker" I said "Who do you think he's fucking?"

Pam slid another cigarette out of her pack. "Tony" She lit her cigarette "This guy from his work."

"Guy? He's fucking a guy?"

Pam was looking down, her fingers fiddling with the buttons on her cardigan. I leaned against the railing and stared out into the back yard where the rain made little rivers of mud between the plastic toys.

"After I found the condom package I decided to follow him one night when he went out." Pam took the cigarette out of her mouth and there was a little coral colored ring around the end of it. "He drove over to his office in Chesterville and I thought, oh I'm not gonna catch him tonight, he must just be going back to work to pick up something he forgot, but when he got there I saw another car in the lot. I parked down the street and walked up to the building. When I looked in the window Gary was in there with Tony, the guy who works in the cubicle next to him, and they were having sex, right there in the office." She said.

I had to admit it was pretty funny, but I wasn't about to start laughing or anything. This whole conversation was so weird; Pam and I hadn't talked about sex in years. We used to talk about it all the time, in fact we used to go on double dates and fuck in the same car, she and her guy in the front seat, me and mine in the back. Pam had been shockingly sexy, propped up against the steering wheel in the vague half light, her long thin piano fingers buttoning her blouse closed. Ever since she got married we just kinda stopped talking about it.

"The weirdest thing" Pam said. "was that I couldn't stop watching. I was shocked, sure, but I couldn't look away. I watched them have sex, I watched them kiss and laugh. I watched as Tony helped Gary button up his shirt, the shirt I had ironed for him that morning. I watched them hold each other, I watched them leave. I stood there in the bushes outside the office for a long time and then I walked back to the car. When I got home Gary was watching TV, he wanted to know why I'd gone out and left the kids alone, he said Cora was awake and crying when he got home. He screamed at me for leaving but he never asked me where I'd gone."

"Motherfucker, you're gonna divorce him, right?" I said.

"I don't know. When he first stopped loving me I was so angry, but that's gone now. I just don't know if I have the energy to go through with a divorce and then a custody battle and then raising the kids by myself."

Pam stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray. Without the thin cigarette between her fingers her hands didn't look so elegant anymore, her cuticles were raw and chewed and her skin was blotchy, red and white and smelling of bleach and nicotine.

Mesha Maren-Hogan lives in Asheville NC where she studies history and creative writing at The University of North Carolina and works at an abortion clinic. She is currently working on the second draft of her first novel.

Email: Mesha Maren-Hogan

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