Metaphoric Puppy Love
Not quite as if she'd seen a ghost—more as if Alice saw me screwing one. "Chas, you're giving the dog a hand job."
It's a black toy poodle. I look down. The tiniest red penis sticks out, and there I am absentmindedly stroking it. Frodo's tongue lolls to the side. He looks like a tiny fruit bat or gremlin, ears to the side, flopping.
"Well, stop, for God's sake."
Okay. Frodo turns over, stands up, yawns, flops back down next to me.
"No wonder he likes you best," Alice says. "Who can compete with that?" She sits in the corner of the couch. Frodo doesn't look up.
"I didn't give your dad a hand job. He likes me best."
"Well maybe you did. You disappear when he arrives, never call him. What else explains his love for you? That's why I'd never have kids with you."
"Because I would give them hand jobs?"
"Not real ones. Metaphoric ones."
Alice loses me then. I try to piece the image together. She has a point, somewhere, how everything becomes mine eventually. It has something to do with not desiring them, the way Alice does. The way she'll sit beside Frodo while he sleeps, pull him close to her, rest her head on his belly–and his rising, stretching, and then moving away's inevitable.
"Boundaries," Alice says. "Next week, you'll be going down on him."
"Well, we know you can't compete with that."
She winces. Perhaps I'll surprise Alice with a cat, suffocate it with attention, watch it scurry into her arms. Female. I think you'd know, with a girl cat, what boundaries you've crossed without thinking.
In the vet's waiting room, all the other guys pat their monstrous beasts. One of them says to me, "I guess we know who's the boss in your house." Two or three of them laugh at Frodo curled up into a tiny ball. I tell them, "Maybe I like little dogs." Yeah, they answer, and maybe the vet could glue your dog's balls to your own.
They have it all wrong, of course. "We can get rid of the dog, if you want," I say.
"But he's so much yours," she says.
I shrug.
"What you must think of me," she says. "I wouldn't get rid of the dog."
"I'll do it. Then you can be happy again."
"You're a monster," she says. She picks up the dog, pulls him to her chest, and within an instant of his release he will run to find me—for his hand job, I guess, metaphoric or otherwise.