The Cloaca Read Online Free PDF Page B

him. Months now, and she has not exactly gotten over the certainty that they make fun of her behind her back and that a split with her boyfriend will mean a split from everyone.
    â€œIt’s hilarious because it’s Jonathan Brandis, I guess.”
    â€œBut you loved him.”
    â€œMaybe not like you did.”
    â€œYou said ‘love.’”
    â€œPuppy love.”
    This woman chews on it, watches a soiled man with a green beard stagger past the window, his eyes wide and amazed. She hasn’t been in the city long enough to look past the homeless. She has no urge to help, just can’t help but ogle them.
    â€œAnd the way you love now is different,” she comes around to say.
    â€œI’ve grown up,” the friend says.
    â€œAnd you’ll keep on doing that.”
    â€œLike how?”
    â€œLike laughing at the way you were kind of says that you’re, you know, above that now, right?”
    Her friend tucks a curl of hair behind her ear and picks at her plate. “Fine.”
    â€œSo someday you’ll move on to laugh at everything that means the world to you at this instant. Everything you love.”
    â€œThis Jonathan Brandis killing himself thing really got to you, huh?”
    â€œYou know my father committed suicide,” this woman says.
    Cheek puffed out with empanada, her friend pauses, this hollow look of horror in her eyes.
    â€œJesus,” she says, the wet mess of her meal gawking out of her mouth. “Fuck. I’m sorry, Emma. I didn’t know.”
    Of course this woman’s father never killed himself and she suspects that this friend of hers was the one with the cat head, the one with the appendectomy scar, the painting fawned over by every viewer the night of his show. The number her boyfriend will sometimes call from her place.
    â€œHelp me help you,” she whispers in the dark, attempting to somehow sound sexy in this desperate position, holding him uncertainly, with a mannequin’s grip.
    â€œDon’t worry about me,” he says, reaching again between her legs as if for a bowling ball. “Getting you off gets me off.”
    Maybe her boyfriend is a little too good at all this sex stuff. He flips over her cover page with the aplomb of a student who can’t wait to ace a test, whereas this woman hasn’t got a clue what she’s doing, stares dreadfully at the questions put before her.
    Working away at her, he moans more than she does, is more out of breath than this woman is after she has come. Though his is a different sort of pleasure, she is sure.
    She wakes up later that night having to piss. Already his rambunctiousness has given her two urinary tract infections. His side of the bed is empty and the ensuite bathroom glows at its cracks. With an ear to the door this woman hears the sound of one hand clapping. She climbs back into bed, still having to pee.
    Having sex with JB never crossed her mind. As a girl, she dreamt of going to dinner and a movie with him, of having her mom drive her to the mall and drop her off there, where she would meet with JB by the fountain. And then marriage, eventually. There wasn’t one salty drop of prurience to that attraction. This woman never thought about having JB sweat on her, or having him scrape her calf with a toenail, or having him wake her up in the mornings with a harmless erection jabbing her in the hip. She never imagined having conversations with JB. What would they have talked about? JB had been no different than a baby doll that wets itself, something girls coddle and care for to prepare themselves for the real thing. He had been a tool, an aid: light, stiff, plastic and unkillable.
    When her boyfriend returns to bed, she rolls into him, thinking to broach the problem, only he reads this as her asking, and so graciously lays once more into her. Lord only knows how many minutes later, this woman is exhausted, doesn’t know what’s what and has to pee