I listen to her voice echoing on my machine. She's considering it. I enjoy the silence, the possibilities. Unconsciously, I'm back caressing my leg, like someone who raises bunnies for meat, strokes the animal before slaughtering it.
"Are you serious?" I ask.
I ejaculate all over the bed before she answers.
The night before my procedure, I feel I should be doing something to memorialize the moment, to mark my last night as a biped. I have dinner with Annette. She's begun a new diet — her second this month, by my count — and she grazes miserably on a green salad with broccoli sprouts and chick peas and pasty-white cubes of bean curd. I almost feel a sense of remorse when the waiter brings my medium-well London Broil and sets it in front of me, still sizzling.
"It's quite a lean cut," I say, offering her a section. But she declines, convinced that if she can just hang in there for a week, she will suddenly forget the cathartic pleasure of charred animal flesh and instead adopt a vegetarian diet for life.
We don't talk about the procedure, but it's there, looming over us like a rain cloud, or like the proverbial 800 pound gorilla, or an uninvited guest — or any other exhausted cliché that you want to plug in here.
"Good salad?" I ask.
She smiles and a bit of radicchio is blotting out one of her front teeth. "Best salad I ever had."
I often wonder why I couldn't just be happy with her. Yes, she battles with her weight. Yes, she can be on the mouthy side. The answer is certainly obvious. Have I so completely been consumed by my fetish that it has blinded me? A man's certainly entitled to his preferences — some like blondes, some brunettes. Some blokes are tit men, and some prefer the ass. I could forgive Annette's tendency to over-eat, could certainly overlook her generous bottom, her doughy belly. But I could never be satisfied with her, she would always seem half-finished to me.
I share none of my thoughts with her, though she knows me well enough to know where I stand. My worst-case scenario is that she one day sticks to one of her diets, slims down to a respectable weight, and then loses her leg — never mind how. By that time, she is with another man, one who loves her no doubt better than I, but who lacks my technical appreciation for the legless, the gimpy — the cripple.
I make one last attempt at Carly that night, one final effort to separate her from her prosthetic, to fuck her with that stump pointing upward, firing off like a shotgun in the air.
I let Annette off in front of her building, see the red ember of her cigarette bobbing as she walks to her door.
I drop by Carly's place unexpectedly, hoping to find her sans the prosthetic. My heart leaps as she greets me at the door in her bathrobe, but my hopes are dashed when I see the prosthetic holding up the right side of her like a car jack. She looks genuinely surprised by my visit.
"I had to see you," I say as she invites me in.
"Good," she says, "good."
She'd already prepared a pot of tea before my coming, and she offers me some. Chamomile. I hate chamomile, but I drink it anyway.
She asks me if I'm nervous, I tell her I'm not. She tells me it's not the end of the world, losing a leg. I don't tell her it's my beginning. I doubt she would understand, seeing she's never really accepted it. She says there are some tricks to walking with a prosthetic, she'll show me how. I secretly laugh at the notion she could teach me anything, since I'd been an amputee since fourteen — if only in the psychic sense.
I make my move. I know she won't stop me. Even if she really didn't want to, I'm at least owed a pity-fuck. She's got only a pair of granny-panties under the robe, a light blue pair of silky bloomers that sag in the seat. They're a bucket of ice water to the crotch, but they come off easy enough. We fall backwards onto the sofa.
My hands make the obligatory rounds as we kiss, spending the minimal amounts of time in the universally acknowledged zones. When I have her mesmerized like a snake charmer, oozing with anticipation, I go in. My fingers fumble with the fucking leg and I suddenly realize I have no idea how to unhook the thing.
Wait, she says.
I extinguish her protest with a kiss. I run my forefinger around the perimeter of the prosthetic, but there's no opening, no break to slip my finger in. It's as if the false leg has fused with the living tissue.
Wait, she says again, turning away from my mouth. I go all in, now, calling up my other hand that had been doing a bang-up job of mauling a breast. With both hands, I try ripping the prosthetic off.
Why — won't — this — fucking — leg — come — off —
Stop, she says, her hands atop mine, her fingers clawing my wrists, stop —
She tries to crawl away from me, but I've got both arms wrapped around the prosthetic, I'm hanging onto it like a buoy.
You're hurting me, she says. Please, you're hurting me —
For the first time, I realize she's crying. I stop. I'm no rapist or anything. "I just wanted to see it."
She holds her robe to her torso, hiding her body from me. Leave —
So, I go.
In the morning, Annette swings by with Starbucks. It's a caramel macchiato for me; hers is a skinny. She tells me she's smoked her last cigarette this morning, has thrown out the pack. I'm probably just imagining it, but she's got a healthier glow about her. We pass the morning watching talk shows and infomercials — the new Price Is Right. We're waiting for the call. It comes during the middle of the first showcase showdown. I scratch down the address on a pad. I'm not familiar with the street.
We punch it into Annette's cell, let the GPS do the work for us. 2.3 miles; twenty minutes in traffic. With much trepidation, Annette slips into her jacket, her white belly hanging out of her shirt.
She would rather not come, I know, but she's needed for much more than moral support. There's no recovery room. After the surgery's performed, everything must be packed up and the premises promptly vacated. I'll be in no position to drive. Annette has agreed to play nursemaid for the next several days.
We don't talk in the car, the only sound is the digitized voice of the GPS ordering us to turn right on Federal Way, but mispronouncing it miserably. We pull up to the place. It's an old warehouse.
"I don't like the looks of this," she says.
I don't, either. "It'll be fine," I say. For the first time, I begin to worry.
"What if I just pull away now?" she says. "What if I just drive away, keep driving?"
"I'd just find someone else to do it," I tell her. I know it's not normal — by normal, I mean accepted by the majority — but I know the urge, the feeling, won't go away. If it was that easy, I'd be in a healthy relationship by now, wouldn't regard every biped I meet as somehow unfinished.
She's crying — the second woman I've made cry in the last twenty-four. I use my thumb to wipe a tear from her cheek. It's a gesture approaching something almost human. I know when it is over, when it is gone and I can be who I am supposed to be, I'll be capable of more.
I kiss her, like a man kisses a lover, and I tell her I love her without being prompted. It's already gone to me, and when it's rotting somewhere atop a pile of refuse, I'll find the decency that has long eluded me.
I walk up to the doors, imagining it is already finished and the leg is my new prosthetic. I limp a little as I walk. When I reach the door, I turn back to Annette and smile.
She waves back, like someone waving from the portal of a ship.