The Cool Part of His Pillow

Chapter 1: Blue Roses-4

I awake to canine asshole. “Noel, get your twinkler outta here!” I scream.

Andy’s in his favorite cargo shorts with more pockets than anyone needs and his alma mater wife-beater. “But wouldn’t mankind be better off if we all did the Presentation of the Anus? Summit meetings of world leaders should be preceded by a Presentation of the Anus.”

“It would give new meaning to dirty politics,” I say, still pushing Noel away.

We chose pugs because of their compactness—neither weighs more than thirteen pounds—their curly tails, lustrous eyes, and their overall jauntiness. Both are the common fawn color. Today is Andy’s turn to take them for shampooing, something we let a groomer do because they’ve both caught colds when we did it. It’s something else common to the breed: chronic breathing problems and allergies.

Noel jumps down alongside Andy and Gertie.

“Speaking of ass, someone’s breath smells like butt.” Andy waves his hand.

“Says more about you than me,” I reply. “And don’t think last night counted as a f**k. That wasn’t much more than a warm, soapy bowl.” Warm, soapy bowl was our euphemism for let’s-just-do-this s*x. In 1940s wartime, a prostitute would carefully wash her john’s p***s in a warm, soapy bowl of water to ensure cleanliness and scope out visible disease. This often promptly brought off the excited soldier boy. This is another phrase we treasure: brought off. “And you didn’t even finish,” I also point out.

“‘Toot my birthday horn’ isn’t exactly a reciprocal love call.”

I wince. No one wants to be reminded of bossy s**t said in the throes.

“It was all about you, baby boy,” Andy says, laughing.

“Andy, take off their collars.” The pugs are wearing their matching lavender collars, studded with cubic zirconium. “The groomer will forget and then it’s a trip back.”

“The puppets are glammed for your birthday,” he dismisses me. “I’ll remember. The puppets have asked can they go in Mercy B.”

I roll over. “Daddy says sure if they’re on towels until their nails get clipped.” As Andy goes to get some from the master bathroom, I add, “Take the crappy ones!”

“They’re all crappy. Great Rooms! sells such plush ones. Are we poor?” Andy asks like a timid housewife.

I see red soaring down our driveway. It’s going to be a good day. I’m not even going to bathe, at least not yet. I put on the cast album of I Had A Ball, a 1962 musical vehicle for, go figure, Buddy Hackett. It’s Karen Morrow, belting the title showstopper like it’s a testicle she devoured, that I want to hear, my feel-good song. I put track number thirteen on repeat. I return to our bedroom and figure out a birthday suit that involves clothing. By the time I settle on a tee and pajama pants from the pine cupboard, the microwave coffee gone cold in a Dear Evan Hansen mug, it’s 10:22.

The telephone rings.

“What’s happenin’, Hot Stuff?”

And so begins the yearly ritual, an unidentified, disguised caller among our friends. I’m not even convinced it’s a male.

“That’s pretty good. Was that a real gong I heard?”

I hear the sound effect again, then, “His name is Long Duck Dong.”

“I don’t know him,” I reply.

“Fred, she’s gotten her boobies. Oh, and they are so perky!”

“I don’t know a single Fred, either,” I reply, per the annual script.

“Fred, leave her alone. You’ll make her tinkle.”

“I’ve already peed and Sixteen Candles is not a handbook for life.”

“I can’t believe it. They f*****g forgot my birthday,” my well-wisher drawls.

“No one forgot. I have another call. Good-bye.”

“Thanks for getting my undies back!” is the breathy coda.

The other call is my mother, Jeanine. Her telephone greeting is always the same: “It’s just me.”

“You always say that so apologetically. Do you have an inferiority complex, Mom?” I tease.

“Everything about me is complex. I just know how busy you pretend to be. Get my card?”

I go out the back door. “Yesterday.” My mother didn’t embrace my homosexuality. She swallowed it whole. I never receive cards with barefoot boys in straw hats on toadstools. I get filthy limericks and monster d***s. “You like that particular card aisle too much.”

I walk as far as a handmade teeter-totter, where I sit. This was Andy’s wish. I was never the type of kid who was interested in a tire swing, but we have one of those, too, again at Andy’s request. From here, all I see are landscaping missteps: massed coleus dwarfed by the feathery flowers of astilbe, bee balm invading the sedum and daylilies. Andy had given me Barbara Damrosch’s The Garden Primer, an encyclopedic manual, for my first birthday in this house. I didn’t heed the admonitions that establishing any garden is a three-year process; I dug every weekend until I spat soil out of my coffee mug, making no allowance for sprawl. It’s too much and now it looks stomped by last night’s storm.

“You had any rain there?” I ask. My mom is two states away and it’s been a nationwide summer of drought, but, hell, it’s conversation.

“Not a drop. You?”

“Poured all night long.”

“Quit bragging! I’m watering right now. This is miserable. I hate a hot September. And don’t start in on global warming again. It was ninety-one the day you were born, and that was without A/C.”

I know she’s training the hose on her geraniums, dismembering them, probably in a hat that would make Aunt Pittypat envious. Mom is, in actuality, a little Anna Madrigal and a lot Violet Venable.

Distant emergency sirens intersect like an air raid.

I make my way to our swimming pool. We’ve barely been in it this summer. In a climate that permits, at best, 120 days’ use, it’s an endless and losing battle with water pH. I skim out storm debris with the aluminum pole. A mallard splashes down and paddles.

“Where’s your buddy?” I ask.

“Who are you talking to?” Mom asks.

“A duck in the pool.” I watch it do a figure eight. “There’s usually two.”

“Our pond has a whole flock. That’s not counting the geese,” she boasts.

Mom’s lanai has become enough of a wildlife sanctuary that her condo board has expressed concern. Everything from birdfeeders with squirrel spoilers as big as garbage can lids to chopped lettuce on Melmac for rabbit colonies festoons her cement slab, plus a birdbath, windsock, chimes. Her grocery bill must be more suet and sunflower seed than actual food. When Andy drank a glass of what he assumed was cherry Kool-Aid from her refrigerator, she cried out, “That’s the nectar for my hummers!” (This is what she calls hummingbirds.) He paled, she consoled: “It’s just boiled sugar water and food coloring.”

Mom wishes me happy birthday. I promise to call her later.

What appears to be a medical evacuation helicopter dips overhead, then chop-chops out of sight over our house, which is larger than its roofline suggests.

I will not pretend that we want for much. We want for less. Almost ten thousand square feet on three different levels is too much. We were attracted by the hilliest part of the city in a state generally known for its flatness. The price was good, too, since it was one of the older houses in a cul-de-sac overbuilt by new money. Given what I do, I should be appreciative of their contributions to the economy, all these houses tricked out with security cameras and steam rooms, but I’m mostly made queasy by the gluttony, where every water feature shames Niagara Falls.

After neighbors admired our rustic fire pit, one couple commissioned a stonecutter for their own. We oohed and ahhed as we were led proudly back to Dante’s Inferno. “I hear the damned screaming,” Andy perspired at me. We heard the wife later speaking of how she had investigated manufacturing snow with several ski lodges during our last unseasonably warm Christmas because “it was all about the kids.” She’d forgotten they have none.

Another childless couple built a tree house costing $175 grand (they let this figure slip twelve times). Our lame teeter-totter was nothing when we saw the primitive bridge of rope, which swayed when we all crossed it. Andy asked if they charged a toll. No one laughed. They were all too dazzled by the moose heads and the hunting lodge chic which could provide shelter to the Swiss Family Robinson. From an outsider’s perspective, our life is probably chic and social, but we still feel like outsiders ourselves. We live well, even without a private plane or a philanthropic endeavor named after us; the house in Key West is our big indulgence. But we’re starting to feel like we’re living in the shadow of Camelot, and I wonder when we here at Green Acres will be expelled as unwelcome.

It’s one-twenty-three on the kitchen wall clock. I call Andy’s cell. “Where you be? It’s going straight to voice mail.”

I’m tracing among our kitschy refrigerator magnets for the groomer’s card when the phone rings.

My world detonates when I look at Caller ID.