Kamikaze Lust Read Online Free PDF Page B

oafishly, convinced she could shed light on our “problem”: my inability to achieve orgasm with him. With anyone.
    Because I could come alone, if I concentrated hard enough, masturbation had always seemed a miscarriage of the act itself. Like the now-taunting gaze of my impotent microcassette and laptop, my solitary orgasms reminded me of what I could not otherwise do. Echoed the psychological peanut gallery (in accents of dreary German no less): But are you sexually frrrrus-tra-ted? Of course I was sexually frustrated, but I didn’t normally have time to think about it, just as I didn’t normally have time to deal with cavities.
    “You’re getting a little mushy above the bicuspid area,” Dr. Janis said after she’d finished drilling. She suggested I use a soft-bristle brush as we walked together to the front desk. “Take a couple of Advils if you feel any pounding,” she said.
    I nodded, my jaw liquid as a Salvador Dali clock. Camille ran my American Express card through the computer.
    “And call us if you want to talk to Phillip,” she said.
    I looked up. “Phillip?”
    “The cow guy.”
    “Oh sure, thanks,” I nodded, thinking, over my unemployed body. Cow Week? I’d rather stay in bed all day eating frozen pizza straight from the box.
    Camille handed me my credit card, and I was then let loose onto the crowded streets of midtown Manhattan on this too-sunny October day. Off to the picket line with the residue of Novocain palsying a side of my face.

    At home, my answering machine blinked a torpid two. I paced, listening to the tape scuttle back to the weary iambs of Aunt Lorraine’s voice: “Your Doctor Kaminsky was just on again. He is such a spunky fellow, and so good at his—” I jammed my finger on the fast-forwarded button. If only repression could always be this easy.
    There was another message; Ethan confirming dinner tonight. I’d canceled our last two appointments as I did often with ex-boyfriends of the married variety who after one drink became sloppy and nostalgic about how great the two of us would have been together now that he was conveniently affixed to somebody else. All right, this only happened with Ethan. But he did say he might have work for me, maybe a celebrity-stroking piece for the glossy fanzine he edited. I heard some of his writers were swimming in cash, and Ethan himself had all of the trappings of financial success—the TriBeCa loft and summer house in the Hamptons, the fast car and bland bandshell of a wife.
    Cordless pressed against my ear, I walked to the window, but instead of Ethan I called Shade. Dusk skipped down the street in a dervish of blues that sent the bright orange sun sinking into the Hudson. Cars honked, a child cried for her mother, and Shade wasn’t home.
    Trading the phone for a pair of 7 x 50 World War II binoculars I found a few weeks ago at a flea market, I spied people walking down Broadway, jackets tossed over their shoulders, some wheeling babies in strollers, others carrying flowers in paper wrapping. Sentimental fools lapping up these last stolen moments of summer. I wanted someone to get hit by a bus.
    And where was Ms. Teesha Marie Simpson on this evening oh-so-balmy? Off somewhere with Tina Motorcycle, no doubt. I tried to imagine it…Shade sitting in a dark bar, tilting her head back and laughing, her mouth open so wide you could see the silver fillings on her bottom molars—I loved that, the way she laughed as if nothing had ever felt so good. I thought about ringing her cell phone, but then I might appear too interested in her whereabouts, or simply psychotic, when she picked up and I didn’t have a single thing to tell her. I often worried about people thinking I was crazy.
    Instead, I called Ethan and said yes, we were still on.
    We met at a little bistro near his office. I ate a grilled chicken salad and drank two glasses of wine through our standard punctilio: small talk of careers—or lack thereof in my case, though I was