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The Pickup

HE’S LYING ON A BED in the living room, naked, while his girlfriend, who also is naked, naked but for her socks, goes down on him, lowering and raising her head with a voluptuous, almost absentminded languor.

A sound comes from the kitchen. It’s a sound he’s heard hundreds of times before, a sound he’d normally recognize in an instant, however in this moment, in this circumstance, he fails to hear it, it never registers. It registers, though, with his girlfriend, and her reaction is immediate. She jerks her head to the side, leaving his penis to spring unencumbered to its customary erect angle. It’s an experience, for him, of no little trauma, given the near violence of her action. Stunned, he tries to say something, but before he can form a word, she leaps from the fold-out bed and runs toward the kitchen. A panicked moment ensues in which he’s left to imagine that something terrible has happened, something so terrible that he has lost her, all in an instant, when previously, right up to this moment, he believed he had never possessed her to this degree, being her possession. The thought lasts only a moment, and then he hears the front door open and realizes what has happened, what is happening. It is their roommate, her sister, the same sister who said she would not be back until late, the same sister who has now taken perhaps two or three strides into the kitchen and who is now no more than four strides from seeing him on the bed in the living room (or on the couch, actually; the couch serving as a bed when opened), his arms and legs bound with straps to the four legs of the bed slash couch.

The thoughts one thinks. He thinks that of everything, it is crucial that the sister not see his erection, that he could live with the ropes, the spread-eagled frankness of the tableau, but that his erection must remain hidden. It is irrational. After all, he knows she knows he has a penis, a penis that no doubt becomes erect now and then, particularly in the company of his girlfriend. It would be unnatural if she did not think this; or more to the point, if she ever thought otherwise. More than once he has imagined certain equivalent things about her, she being a woman who is not only attractive to him, but attractive in way that echoes the attractiveness of her sister. Of course given the choice between the two women, he would chose his girlfriend, there’s no question of this. And yet it’s true that he once constructed an elaborate and explicit fantasy involving the sister. In this fantasy his girlfriend becomes psychotic and needs to be institutionalized, so he and the sister drive her to the institution, which in the country, and then, on the way home from the institution, they have sex. That’s his fantasy: he has sex with his psychotic girlfriend’s sister in a car parked in a parking lot behind a Friendly’s. As might be expected, sex with the sister is far better than with his girlfriend, and better for her as well, better than with anyone, which leaves them in the, to say the least, awkward position of not wanting her sister, his actual girlfriend, their mutual roommate, to regain her sanity.

Of course all of this, as he himself has often reminded himself, is perfectly normal. It is perfectly normal to construct such fantasies, never intending or wanting to act on them. However this particular fantasy wasn’t merely a one-time thing. Instead it’s been something he has returned to and elaborated on, particularly the scene in the car, or rather, in the pickup, for that’s what the sister drives in the fantasy, a pickup. And this pickup has a hood-like attachment that encloses the back part of the pickup, so that one can sleep back there, or have sex back there, which is what happens in the fantasy, they decide to have sex in the back of the pickup. How in particular they decide this he has never determined; it is the one part of the fantasy that has always eluded him. And so the fantasy jumps from a lighthearted scene in the Friendly’s, a scene in which they search the menu for the least disgusting thing to order, to a scene in the back of the pickup in which they’re already having sex and he’s trying to figure out a way to position himself so that the slats in the floor of the pickup don’t hurt his knees. The way he thinks of it, the transition from reading the Friendly’s menu to having sex in the back of the pickup has to happen without either party actively making it happen; it has to be something that neither can feel, in retrospect, fully responsible for, which is to say, guilty about. It must be something like the sort of experiences he’s had a few times with Ouiji boards, experiences in which the other person swears that he or she is not moving the pointer, and of course he knows that he’s not moving the pointer, and yet the pointer is not only moving but spelling out words. Granted, even if neither party actively moved them toward the back of the pickup, they would each still bear responsibility for having gone there and for having done what he imagines them doing. Moreover this would not be the usual business of a person leaving a person for another person, but would be a case in which the third person would be the sister of the second, making it a betrayal of enormous proportions, although no doubt it happens all the time, if only because of the number of sisters there are.

Ironically there’ve been times when he has wanted an erection but could not manage it, whereas now he has one but wishes he didn’t. In fact he briefly tries, forgetting himself, to put his hand over it to push it down. This effort lasts but a second, which is how long it takes him to re-discover that he truly cannot move either arm, that his arms are bound to the bed slash couch in such a way that there’s simply no possibility of him moving more than two or three inches in either direction. Somehow this slipped his mind—an odd thing, really, given his reaction, not a half hour earlier, when his girlfriend tied the last knot on the last strap. What he’d felt at that moment was astonishment. She’d done a far better job than he had imagined; a better job, if the truth be known, than he ever did; a job so thorough that it struck him that he hadn’t really known her until then. In his innocence he had imagined that she would do no more than the minimum, just enough to make him appear tied up, but to not actually, technically, restrain him. After all, the point wasn’t to scare him but to arouse him, and to arouse herself in the process—her via him, or via his arousal—this being how arousal works, the one feeding the other in a loop. Instead she tied the straps quite tight, perhaps too tight even, particularly the strap that binds his right wrist. At the time he considered asking her to loosen that one, but then thought no, that to say something would be a mistake, an admission of weakness and, yes, vulnerability. What if she refused? If she refused, he’d be left in the position of having asked for something he couldn’t possibly do for himself, thereby making explicit and in a sense real what was then only implicit and in a sense threatened. On the other hand it would be extraordinary if she refused him, extraordinary in the sense of powerful, and so he wanted to give her the chance to do this, although at the same time he was afraid she might agree to his request and then over-do the loosening, which would undermine and even negate what she had to that point achieved.

In the end he said nothing—a decision he now regrets. Had he had mentioned the strap to her, she may have loosen it to the point where he could now slip his wrist through. Although on other hand, who’s to say what would or would not have happened if he did or didn’t do what he did? One can spend one’s life in thoughts such as these, spinning out conjectures, but to what end? He is tied to the bed and cannot move. He has an erection he dearly wishes didn’t have. And that as they say is that. If has any choice in the matter, it is to accept this and to await his fate with a measure of equanimity.

Or that’s what he tells himself. And then in the next moment he begins to wonder if perhaps his girlfriend’s sister has come home to fuck him. This would be a deal, he imagines, between the sisters. First his girlfriend ties him up, then her sister comes home and fucks him. Earlier, while his girlfriend was tying him up, he imagined that she was planning to hurt him, or even possibly kill him—this being the sort of thing one imagines for an instant and then immediately talks oneself out of imagining. In the present case, however, he is not so quick to move on. Specifically he wonders what might happen after the sister fucks him, the fallout of that act. Because it might not turn out so well, he thinks, in the end. He might lose his girlfriend, or the household might break apart. Anything number of bad things could happen. Which means that it might be better if the sisters never made such a deal. You make such a deal, he thinks, and people get hurt.

But then he sees a solution. The solution is to go back several steps. The sister comes in wearing a mask, a papier mache mask of his girlfriend's face captured in a moment of intense pleasure. Previously his girlfriend was wearing this same mask. So the way it goes is this: In the middle of going down on him, his girlfriend suddenly gets up and goes to the kitchen, where she gives the mask to her sister, who is waiting there for it, naked. This is the deal they struck. First his girlfriend ties him up and then her sister comes in, wearing a mask of his girlfriend’s face, and fucks him. Or doesn’t fuck him. Maybe she just looks at him and laughs. There are a lot of possibilities, he thinks. While considering what these possibilities may be, he suddenly hears his girlfriend say in a loud voice—not a shouting voice but a loud one—”Wait! Stop! No!”

Hearing this, he thinks that perhaps he should try to turn his head to see if the sister has reached the living room, but unfortunately his position on the couch is such that this would necessitate arching his back as far as possible so that the top of his head were nearly flat on the bed and he were looking backwards by looking upside-down. Were there any chance of him trying this, he would have given up the moment he realized that it gave the appearance that he not only wanted the sister to see his erection but was terrified she would miss it.

Again his girlfriend’s voice comes from somewhere behind him. “Five minutes,” she says. “Just give us five minutes.”

He hears some mumbling, following by the sound of the front door opening and closing, and then suddenly his girlfriend is at his side. Without a word, she begins to untie him, beginning with the strap on one of his legs.

“My arm,” he says. “If you do my arm, I can help.”

She switches to his right arm, and has some difficulty but finally manages it.

Once the straps are removed, he tosses them in her room, on top of her loft bed. Then, moving quickly, they dress, fold up the couch, and put away their little bag of sex accessories—oils and condoms and whatnot.

They say little during this. Just an occasional word or two to facilitate the process: “Here.” “I’ll get that.” “Help me with this.”

When it’s over they sit on the couch waiting for her sister. As they wait, his girlfriend shows him her hand, which is shaking, so he shows her his, which is shaking even more.

Later that night they have sex—in her room this time, on her bed—and there’s this odd moment when he’s on top of her—or in front of her, actually, kneeling in front of her—and it occurs to him that a bed is a vastly better place to have sex than the back of a pickup, if only because there are no slats between the springs. He thinks for a moment of telling her this, for he considers it funny, but then realizes he can’t. She doesn’t know about the pickup. Most likely she will never know about the pickup. Among other things, other thoughts, of which she will never know.

It’s a sad, distancing thought. To push it away, he looks at her and sees that she’s smiling that same smile of pleasure he imagined on her imaginary mask. But this isn’t a mask; it’s her face, a face so dear to him. Steadying himself with his arms, he bends at the waist and leans forward to kiss it.