The Cloaca Read Online Free PDF Page A

redheaded tutelage of Chuck Norris.
    Pausing the movie, squatting before the TV, she searches his angular, adorable face for some explanation. This woman can’t get over how girly JB was, how beautiful. His dirty blonde hair, his popsicle-stained lips, a blush to his cheeks like he has just come in from the cold. This isn’t attraction, only the memory of attraction, which, in itself, is stirring.
    As she did not that long ago with pictures torn carefully from her teenybopper magazines, this woman plants one on the frozen frame.
    How bad could things have gotten?
    In the dust on the screen, the blotch of her smooch is not at all in the shape of her lips.
    On the internet she finds a quote from Schopenhauer. “It will generally be found,” he said, “that where the terrors of life come to outweigh the terrors of death a man will put an end to his life.”
    â€œYou have a fine body,” he says over breakfast. All morning her boyfriend has been goading her into being naked with him. The muggy day is on his side. “What’s the big stink?”
    On most Sundays, when he stays for the morning, he won’t dress at all. Naked when he makes breakfast, naked when he reads The Star on the couch, naked when he does the dishes. She wears underwear to weigh herself even is the sort of woman this woman is.
    She has seen old pictures and for his whole life he has been attractive, whereas her features are something she had to grow into, make the best of, and will eventually grow out of. That airy gap between her front teeth, that pike of a neck, those lucent eyebrows, those papercut lips. Bangs were a revelation, curtains she could draw over a pimpled forehead that some girls in her high school had called an eighthead. But in bed with him, when he’s astride her, those bangs can’t help but fall to the side, which wouldn’t be a problem if he didn’t always have his eyes wide open as he fucks her. In a perfect world, she would be on top and her hair would cover her face, except this woman has trouble moving up there, can only really shift around like in an uncomfortable easy chair, and also hates the way her breasts dangle and the way her stomach bunches. In a perfect world he would be blindfolded, or they would do it with a sheet between them, or she would just feel good about herself. In a perfect world JB would not be dead.
    â€œYou have it better than most people,” she says.
    â€œBetter how?” Wet cereal falls from his mouth and into his naked lap, and even this doesn’t strike her as at all slovenly.
    â€œYou’ve never been ugly,” she says.
    â€œThat’s not fair to say.”
    Months ago—nearly seven of them—he approached her as if she was put there for him to take is how they got together. It matters very much that he chose her at his vernissage, that his work was what was being held up to where the light could get at it that night. She still hasn’t asked him about the women in the show’s paintings, their bared bodies all perfect in their specificity, or at least perfect in his renderings. She worries about being seen as a worrier. One body was hulkingly obese, another delicately emaciated, the next scarred by an appendectomy, still another so pregnant that the belly hung over her crotch so that it appeared to have an evil goatee. Whoever those women were, or had been, it was only their bodies, after all. Her boyfriend had replaced their heads with a cat head, an elephant head, a chimp head, a dolphin head, to roaring success. All the women at the show agreed.
    It matters very much that he was being followed that night by all the other young first-year, moody-looking artist girls, with their bangs like hers, and their glasses like hers, and their layers of sweaters like hers, who were saying vernissage for the first time in their lives too, and who had also helped themselves to a few too many second glasses of the complimentary