The Remote Island by Bryan Christian Today on Nerve's TV blog: We got an idea for the L Word spinoff! Plus: Who Would You Rather? The Closer or Saving Grace?
I shaved my balls a day after Claire left. A few weeks later, the bottom of the shaft. By the time her mail stopped coming and the telemarketers had finally deleted my number from their database, I was bare as a coffee cup.
We had grown apart since sometime around when the dog died. I took it hard. I quit my job, cashed out my 401k, started listening to Pink Floyd again, asked myself big dark questions I couldn't answer. I was thirty.
Claire arranged for the cremation and then tucked the box away in the attic. She got a promotion, senior vice president in charge of motivational corporate wall communications. She was the youngest vice president in the history of Motivate Inc. She started coming home late, leaving early, using words like "results-based" and "value proposition." She put motivational posters up around the house, started leaving lists of things for me to do while she was at work, left Smart Company magazine open to articles about "Getting Back to Business" and "Four Steps to Spotless Credit."
promotion
She was making money. She bought a new XTerra and a living-room suite. She put the old couch on the back patio. I sat out there and tried to turn my dark thoughts into dark novels. The couch still smelled like the dog.
By the time she sat down with that look in her eye, concerned and resolved and looking forward to getting it all over with, whatever had happened between us had been happening for a long time, gathering mass, each little thing curling around itself, becoming part of the big thing, the morass of history and now that was our relationship.
I was sitting outside on the couch. She put a towel over a cushion and sat down. "We have to talk," she said. She sat up, pushed out her boobs. This was her professional pose. "I don't think we want the same things anymore," she said.
I poked at the cuticle of my big toe.
"I want an exciting life with a good-looking group of successful friends. I want a faster, quieter car. I want vacations on white-sand beaches. You just want to sit on the patio and write the first sentences to novels you'll never finish."
I looked up and even Claire could tell she'd crossed some sort of line.
"You just leave them there in that stupid yellow notebook," she said.
I picked something that felt and smelled like a tiny piece of cheese out of my toenail, flicked it out into the yard.
"And that about wraps it up," she said.
I sat on the patio and drank a bottle of wine, smoked a half-pack of Marlboro Reds while Claire and her sister, the sister's boyfriend and a suspiciously familiar guy in Dockers and hair product worked through the house. They whispered over whose books were whose, picked through the plates and
My penis looked like a lost thing, like a hand reaching out of quicksand.
bowls, cups, mugs, wine glasses, and silverware, examined the George Foreman grill and the fajita machine and the smoothie dispenser. They took down the motivational posters. The sister's boyfriend yanked "If you're not riding the wave of change . . . you'll find yourself beneath it" off the mantle and leaned it next to "Adversity does not build character . . . it reveals it."
Every now and then the sister or her boyfriend would stick their head out, slowly, with a careful knock on the screen door. "Is this yours?" they'd say, holding up a Dave Matthews CD or an Old Navy fleece.
"No," I'd answer, without looking, taking another drag on my smoke and staring at the back of the strip mall across the highway. "It's yours. It's all yours."
It wasn't a decision so much as a thing I just did. A day after Claire left, I was standing in the bathroom shaving my beard with the electric razor, naked and ready for my shower. I looked down. Suddenly, it all looked so messy — a hornet's nest of thick, bristly hair. There were random gray ones in there, brittle and ugly, sticking out at bad angles. My penis looked like a lost thing, like a hand reaching out of quicksand — desperate, small, and doomed.
I pulled the razor off my chin and drew a delicate line along the bottom of my scrotum. Buzzing on my balls, a thin, almost electric prick. Black squiggles on the white tub.
I ran a finger along the skin. Smooth. I tugged on the loose sack, examined my work. It was bald, coated with innocent stubble like a baby chicken.
I lowered the setting and went back in.
