She came to him on a Sunday. Bathed in yellow light, standing at the top of the Amtrak station, she paused for a minute when she saw him: Five-foot-six, balding, skinny but a gut like a cannonball. She looked at his cigarette, his stubble. She was in love.
Her features were fine. Fair skin, slender nose, slim, slightly pointed chin. Her hair created a pale frame around her face, fading into the clear sky. Anxious to take her home, he grabbed her suitcase from her hand and placed his other on the small of her back, setting the pace down the stairs and to the curb where a sedan idled smog into the cold.
She had arrived through a visa program called Operation Hooker Drop. The State Department had a formal name that appeared on all of the official documents that had matriculated into public record in the intervening years between its inception and the eventual pardoning of its whistleblowers but the arrangement worked like this: Slobanian women under the age of 40 would be permitted to seek refuge in the United States and several NATO allies, provided State and Defense were able to continue detonating the remaining men in the country. The operation was so nakedly audacious to everyone with an iPhone, no one even remembers the official name.
The rapid injection of psychologically and financially desperate women into a cultural ecosystem that could best be described as dynamic yielded an interesting cultural trend: Many Western men who were otherwise unsuccessful with domestic women found themselves in position to get pussy.
The first night in Connecticut, she gave him a choice: good girl outfit or bad girl? In truth, she was no hooker. In fact, both outfits were good girl outfits. She was imitating a caricature of someone less innocent than herself, which only made her look more innocent. Although she was already 23, she gave off the air of a child pretending to be an inveterate alcoholic. Option 1 was full-coverage white cotton panties with a pink bow a full two inches above the ass crack with absolutely no break in the fabric. Her bikini-line was totally clean but the hair she had left concealed was long enough that the cloth rose like clouds into the rafters of his house. Above, she wore a men’s size medium jersey for the Oakln Raider’s (sic), an artifact from a cousin back home. Option 2 was yellow bloomers that somehow pinched the tops of her thighs but ruffled loose enough on the pelvis that an arc of air lifted the fabric at odd angles if she shifted. With it she wore a babydoll with ducks embroidered onto it. One of them fell across her nipple diagonally, chafing her just underneath it.
“No outfit,” he said and she got undressed.
He pulled the cord for the pendant light, a single bulb above his burgundy La-Z-Boy. All the others, the overheads and the Tiffany from his grandmother, went out as he flicked their switches with the nail of his middle finger. He turned on some old samba and he looked as the hiss of the record sizzled soft and low. He gave her a cigarette and kissed the cherry of his to the end of hers until it bloomed.
She was five-foot-four to his five-foot-six and athletic-looking although she never worked out, while he, was in actuality, every bit as unathletic as he looked. Nothing on her was large. Her butt was petite, her breasts barely there, but she looked healthy, feminine, girlish.
She cleared two quarters with him. The family wanted to make sure she wasn’t mentally ill or a gold-digger, to give her time to reveal herself if that’s who she was and anyway, he was no prize either. He had earned every penny he had but he couldn’t check the mail, or pay his bills, or handle many of the banalities in life that require you to divert your attention away from your talents and toward the bureaucracies of the untalented. A schlubby chess-player with the mind of a criminal and the disposition of a crotchety housecat. Less qualified women had handled worse.
His family was cold but they were no dummies. She could show up on time, clean, and make blintzes from scratch. She was pretty and spoke enough English to handle his dry-cleaning but not enough to talk to them for more than ten minutes. She was in.
They had a small ceremony. Immediate family only: His parents, his brother and wife (who left their boys with the sitter), plus the rabbi who did it in the basement of a restaurant on a Wednesday. His mother turned to the bride and said, “Thank you.” Everyone took dessert to-go.
They honeymooned in Boca. Two nights at a now refurbished four-star hotel that combined the charm of Las Vegas with the market for early bird specials. In what would celebrate each person’s one and only marriage, they vacationed in the preferred meeting place for geriatric swingers and fair-weather prostitutes. After checking in, he called the desk and opted to downgrade to a room with two showers at no difference in cost. Claustrophobia dictated.
After they woke up the first morning at the hotel, they showered, ate breakfast, drank several coffees, and eventually made their way to the pool by 11:00. They sidled up to two lounge chairs and he set his tablet on the dome of his stomach, immediately engrossing himself in a genetic history of the Indo-Europeans.
The night before, over dinner, she confessed she had been feeling a little homesick. Now at the pool, her phone was ringing and she wanted to know if she could take it. He nodded yes and waved her away. He could focus on the steppe. A few feet over, she answered, “Privet!”
He waved–farther.
Several thousand words into his second genocide of the morning he looked up. A woman was separating her children. Three of them no more than four years apart were slapping each other, kicking, and splashing. One clasped his hands, connected his pointer-fingers as if making a gun and proceeded to ram them straight into the asshole of his older, darker brother’s bathing suit. She threw a tsunami of chlorine their way and said, “Chush! Chill!”
She was tall. From the side her profile looked like a Z. From the back, a classical guitar carved out of Brazilian rosewood, broad chest narrowing into a cinched waist and flowing back out into a hyperbola of brown hips. They shook when she spoke–a voice that sounded made-up, like Betty Boop’s or Jessica Rabbit’s but Spanish–all buoyancy, just a little bark.
She saw him and smiled, then cracked her son on the mandible. Over at the lounge chairs, he went back to the Bronze Age.
Back in the room his Slobanian bride stepped out of her swimsuit. She had taken to pilates reformer three times per week in the last six months and it showed. Her butt was no larger than it had been prior but was now higher, a rock upon which you could write checks. Her breasts, no larger or smaller, now sat more prominent than before, as her shoulders naturally parked themselves just behind the nape of her neck. Her stomach was flat, skin Ziploc-ed save for a little give around the navel.
He looked at her skin and compared it to the stretchmarks on the woman at the pool. Not to mention his wife’s straight hair against the other woman’s curls. She had looked so confident backhanding her son.
One day, while he was reading an account of the British settling Van Diemen’s Land, his bride came to him. She had received a targeted ad for community college while looking at TikTok accounts for various reality TV stars/musicians, who had recently been embroiled in a scandal over whose manager had sent racially insensitive texts to his side-twink. She was amazed at how the school’s administration knew she was interested in political science. She told him she had wanted to study it ever since seeing him read so many articles plus it would help her reduce the amount of men forced to headbutt remote controlled IED’s. It only made sense. She had come to The States knowing sympathy but it was in Connecticut where she led with flattery. He waved.
Now he had more free time to let his mind amble. After trying various instruments (piccolo, harmonica, accordion), he grew bored and figured he should try something else. He searched for artificial intelligence image-generators both out of boredom and out of genuine desire to never let himself complain about boredom. But, at some point, the inevitable happened. He uploaded photos he had taken of his wife when she first arrived. In the event that he would have to send her back to Slobania, the agency would naturally attempt to blame him and say he had damaged her. He knew: better to document.
He took the pictures at eight different angles: four “street-level” photographs (front, back, and sides); then each orientation from the “aerial” view (forwards, backwards, left, right). He hadn’t looked at them since he took them and felt nostalgic upon seeing them. She looked “better” now but something drew him to this other version of her.
In the beginning the changes were small. He gave her short hair. A different color, sometimes subtle, sometimes ashen, sometimes bold. He tried some with a single nipple piercing but then deleted them all the way to the recycling bin and beyond.
But as can happen with habits, one day he decided he was worrying too much about something that didn’t matter much anyway and he just accepted it, bookmarked the page and stopped sweating it so much. He was an eccentric and did odd, artistic things, and who paid for everything anyway?
A day, a night, another day, winter. The same time of year when she had moved to Connecticut and he was nostalgic for it again, this younger, more doe-eyed, less muscular version of her. But it was late afternoon and she was at school and he was drunk so he started futzing.
While it was nipple brass in the beginning, now it was FUPA’s. A smattering of cellulite across the digital Echaskech of saddlebags greeting his eyes. A flat tire. Patchy pubic hair. A pixelated avulsion scar on her left pec where the embroidered ducks had danced so recklessly.
He was still sleeping with her, his hooker wife, but between practice and competitions, his libido would wander.
A semester in, she came to him to brag about a grade. She tapped her phone. “A,” she said.
“In what?”
“Women in Sports.”
“What women in sports?”
She had been having mood swings. Headaches. She cried. She was sad but by now she was also more comfortable in the U.S. and was asking for more money. She wanted a maid. Maybe more vacations. Some help around the house. Why did he always want to read? Why didn’t he play sports? A friend taught her the word “abuser.”
The sports thing, he said, was a nonstarter, but the beach trips. The maid. He would think about it.
For a few weeks, a wave of cesareans took over his brain, causing a few close calls in competition and his first career stalemate. He agreed to lay off the interface for awhile but within another week, he graduated to labia. One set, purple, looked like it had been thrown onto a clay wheel as an afterthought, playdough sidewinding into a question mark that only begat further questions. The world was filled with such questions.
Now it was summer. He was trying to quit drinking and had hired a personal trainer for himself. The trainer knew little about the intricacies of biomechanics or energy systems and yet, showing up to have an otherwise gay-for-pay Eastern European man unintelligibly scream at him three times a week had paid off. Down fifteen pounds, his arms had begun to take on definition and under the glow of the pendant light, he cut a striking figure. From skinny-fat to skinny was still an improvement.
The doorbell rang. He put his shirt on and opened the door. A woman stood there, five-foot-ten in Chuck’s, with a red t-shirt, jeans with no pockets, and a Mickey Mouse Casio nestled into her arm hair. Her nose was wide and her eyes were the color of dark roast—another world from his, which were green with halos of sand coronating the edges, two pairs of planets on a collision course for danger. Nothing good could come from this.
They had decided not to call her a maid so he introduced his wife to the “woman who was going to help around the house.” He handed his wife an envelope filled with cash and she made her way out to her 10:00 am session. When he closed the door, he looked at the woman and said, “Hold still. I’m going to make art out of you.”
She looked at him over her shoulder and said, “Chush. Let’s eat first.”
This was unexpected
Where is the text from the thumbnail from?