“Keep it in there,” he said, and walked out of the kitchen. I didn’t think it was very funny, but I played along. Back then, I interpreted Trevor’s sadism as a satire of actual sadism. His little games were so silly. So I just knelt there with the banana in my mouth, breathing through my nose. I could hear him on the phone making a reservation for two for dinner that night at Kurumazushi. After twenty minutes he came back in, took the banana out of my mouth. “My sister’s in town so you have to leave,” he said, and put his flaccid penis in my mouth. When he wasn’t hard after a few minutes, he got angry. “What are you even doing here? I don’t have time for this.” He ushered me out. “The doorman will hail you a cab,” he said to me, like I was some one-night stand, some cheap prostitute, like somebody he didn’t know at all.
Anal sex came up with Trevor only once. It was my idea. I told him I wanted to prove that I wasn’t uptight—a complaint he gave because at some point I’d hesitated to give him a blow job while he sat on the toilet. We tried once on a night we’d both had a lot to drink, but he lost his erection as he tried to wedge it in. Then all of a sudden he got up and went into the shower, saying nothing to me. Maybe I should have felt vindicated by his failure, but instead I just felt rejected. I followed him to the bathroom.
“Is it because I smell?” I asked him through the shower curtain. “What’s wrong? What did I do?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“You just left without saying anything.”
“There was shit all over my dick, okay?” he said angrily. But that was impossible. He hadn’t even penetrated me. I knew he was lying. But I still apologized.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “Are you mad?”
“I can’t have this conversation with you right now. I’m tired and I’m not in the mood to deal with your drama.” He was nearly yelling. “I just want to get some sleep. Jesus!”
I called him the next day and asked if he was free that weekend, but he said he’d already found a woman who wasn’t going to “pull pranks for attention.” A few nights later, I got drunk and called up Rite Aid and ordered a case of sexual lubricant to be delivered to him at his office the next morning. He sent me a note at the gallery by messenger in response. “Don’t ever do that again,” it said.
We got back together a few weeks later.
“Ma’am?” the pharmacist called out, snapping me out of my reverie. I put the DVD back on the rack and went to the pharmacy counter to get my pills.
The pharmacist’s nails made an annoying clicking sound as she tapped her computer screen. I thought she seemed smug; she sighed as she ran each stapled paper bag under the scanner, as though it exhausted her to deal with me and all my mental health issues. “Check that box to say you’re waiving the consultation.”
“But I haven’t waived it. You’re consulting me now, aren’t you?”
“Did you have a question about your medications, ma’am?”
She was judging me. I could feel it. She was modulating her voice a certain way so as not to sound patronizing.
“Of course I want a consultation,” I said. “I’m ill, and this is my medicine, and I want to know you’ve done your job correctly. Look at all these pills. They could be dangerous. Wouldn’t you want a consultation, if you were as sick as I am?” I pushed my sunglasses back down over my eyes. She unfolded the papers stapled to the bags and pointed out the potential side effects of each drug and the potential interactions with other medications I was taking.
“Don’t drink with this,” she said. “If you take this one and it doesn’t put you to sleep, you might throw up. You might get a migraine. If you start to feel hot, call an ambulance. You could have seizures or a stroke. If you get blisters all over your hands, stop taking it and go to the emergency room.” She wasn’t saying anything I hadn’t heard before. She tapped the paper packages with her long fingernails. “My advice, don’t drink a lot of water before bed. If you get up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, you could hurt yourself.”
“I’m not going to hurt myself,” I said.
“I’m just saying, be careful.”
I thanked her, complimented her on her gold nail polish, pressed the buttons on the payment pad, and left. There was a reason I preferred the pharmacy at Rite Aid over CVS and Duane Reade. The people who worked at Rite Aid didn’t take my moodiness to heart. I’d sometimes heard them cracking up behind the high shelves of pills, talking about their weekends, gossiping about their friends and coworkers, somebody’s bad breath, somebody’s stupid voice on the phone. I’d come in and bitch at them on a regular basis. I blamed them if a prescription was out of stock, cursed them when the line at the pickup window was more than two customers deep, complained that they hadn’t called my insurance company soon enough, were all morons, all uneducated, cruel, unfeeling thugs. Nothing seemed to provoke them to come back at me with anything more than a grin and an eye roll. They never confronted me about my attitude. “Don’t call me ma’am. It’s condescending,” I’d once said. Clearly the woman with the golden fingernails hadn’t gotten that memo. They were all so jovial and relaxed with one another, fraternal even. Maybe I was envious of that. They had lives—that was evident.