I Want to Show You More (9780802193742) Read Free Page B

exposed, the carcass will be referred to as partially skeletonized.
    While your family sleeps, you cut the ribbon and unroll the plaid quilt. You will wash it and fill it with toys. You will let the children open it as soon as you’re finished.
    You go into the basement and find the two-person sleeping bag your husband bought for your first camping trip together. You bring the sleeping bag upstairs, pull it around the man like a pillowcase, zip it closed. You drag the man into the basement and fit the body—which you can tell has shrunk—into a broken playpen. You push the playpen into the corner with no windows, then cover the body with folding camp chairs, extension cords, leftover buckets of paint.
    You arrange things in front of the playpen: a bicycle, an old armchair.
    When you finish, you notice that part of the sleeping bag is still bulging through the playpen’s mesh side. You kneel and run your hand lightly over the bulge, which is sharp and angular—knee, elbow.
    You kiss the bulge. Lean your forehead against it. Close your eyes and imagine it’s a cheekbone. You remember how the man wanted you to call him by his childhood nickname; how he said making love—real sex, if the two of you could have it—would feel like coming home.
    You remember a recorded sigh, the sound of saliva on his tongue.
    Your running shorts begin to sag around your hips. You pluck single gray eyebrows. You don’t have the money for the microderma­brasion, dark circle treatment cream, $150 foil highlights. You buy them anyhow. You bring home wispy dresses from local boutiques; they hang in your closet, price tags dangling from sleeves.
    You tell your husband you took the body to the dump and he holds you, says he’s ready to make love again, undresses you slowly. He is patient with you and generous with himself. You’re blessed to be with a man like this. Want him, you think. Want him .
    You are terrified and certain that the ability to lubricate is connected to the man in the basement.
    You grow desperate, watch Asian breast massage how-to videos on YouTube with links to girl-on-girl porn. You watch the porn, then call your husband and beg him to come home right now, telling yourself the sin of fantasy is less destructive than the sin of depriving him.
    One day you click on the pop-up ads for the Jackrabbit, Silver Bullet, Astroglide for Beginners, Butterfly Kiss.
    The next day you order the Classix G Natural, which arrives overnight in an unmarked box. You carry the box into your bedroom, take off the bubble wrap, and set the Classix in the center of your mattress. It arches away from you, veined and purple, suction cup at its base—a wicked, unlovely, purely useful thing.
    You sit on the bed beside the Classix and whisper the dead man’s name. Then you shove it back into the box and bury it deep in the communal dumpster at the end of your alley.
    Come with me, you say to your husband that night. I have to show you something.
    Your husband follows you down to the basement. You move the bike and armchair in the corner, then kneel, wrap your arms around the playpen, and shake it.
    Listen, you say to the man. I need you to say something. Anything.
    From inside the sleeping bag you hear a crackling noise, like pine straw thrown onto a fire.
    Something stinks, your husband says.
    Just one word, you say to the man. One of our words. So my husband can hear.
    Whore, the man says, his voice muffled.
    You sit back on your heels.
    What the hell? your husband says.
    Adulteress , the man says. Bathsheba, Rahab .
    Your fault your fault your fault, he says.
    What the hell, your husband says again.
    Addict . Abuser .
    He’s not remembering things right, you say to your husband.
    My God, your husband says, staring at the playpen. Is that him?
    It’s not his fault, you say. I think I just killed him too quickly.
    Femme fatale .
    He didn’t know you, your husband says.
    He puts his arm around