The Nakeds Read Free

friends and it took effort describing cities he’d never seen. He’d told Nina and Hannah about Monterey and Sacramento and San Clemente, researching landmarks and restaurants, bringing home souvenirs, silly trinkets purchased from the pharmacy around the corner.
    And more, he loved Christy and wanted to marry her—he wanted to spend days with her on the beach and improve his surfing, he wanted to keep the surfboard he’d been hiding in Christy’s garage in his own garage, right there next to the washer and dryer, and he wanted to wax the board on weekends or whenever he felt like it, and he wanted to wear a Hawaiian shirt out to a restaurant with a woman who wouldn’t ridicule his taste, but share it.
    He wanted to switch gods, goddamn it, and move to Orange County.

3
    NINA TELLER was a woman who had known, on some level, that her husband had been stepping out on her from the beginning, but had been able to deny it—to her friends back East, who said they had a feeling; to her brother, who said he had a feeling too, repeatedly harping that Asher’s many business trips didn’t add up; to her mother, who had also said she had a feeling, and echoed Nina’s brother, saying, What dentist travels so much? Don’t people come to him? Don’t they bring their mouths and sit in a chair? Where does a man like that have to go? And Nina had denied it to all of them, especially her mother, who never liked Asher despite the fact that he was a Jewish boy from a good Jewish home.
    Nina herself had all sorts of feelings but had been able to stuff them down inside of her until they were barely recognizable as feelings and surfaced instead as unjustified, irrational bad moods or minor physical ailments: headaches for which she swallowed double the recommended dosage of aspirin, stomachaches for which she sipped hot tea and nibbled on dry toast. There were long naps that she needed after teaching high school English all day, so that by the time she woke up from one of them, dusk would be making its way through the curtains and it was almost time to say a real good night.
    The obvious clues had been warnings from women’s magazines and The Phil Donahue Show, the most common being a lack of interest in sex with one’s spouse combined with a new attention to grooming or getting in shape. With Asher, who’d always been in shape, there was the unexplained tan, manicured nails, and the many nights he yawned dramatically, loud and obvious, before turning off the light. The way he said I’m beat or Sleep well before Nina had a chance to even kiss his cheek.
    Asher had been acquiring new clothes for years, but what struck her lately was a whole immature style, which had been evolving since Hannah’s birth, that Nina had mistakenly attributed to ambivalence about fatherhood or fear of aging. On his side of the closet was a mound of flip-flops on the floor that especially irked her, a rainbow mountain of rubber shoes. Hanging up, a ridiculous assortment of juvenile T-shirts with band names printed across the front and Hawaiian shirts—garish, bright-colored fabrics with flowers and palm trees and coconuts and hula girls in grass skirts that insulted her own sense of style.
    One morning she’d found him at the closet taking his Beach Boys T-shirt from a hanger. “Maybe that shirt’s a little young,” she’d said.
    “I’m thirty-four—I’m not ninety.” He scowled at her, pulled the shirt over his head. He popped his hands and arms through the short sleeves, smoothed the sides down with more force than was necessary, and avoided her eyes.
    Occasionally she’d find a Surfer magazine on his nightstand or on the bathroom counter.
    “Do you want new hobbies? Is that what this is about? I’ll go to the beach with you. Hannah and I will both go,” she said.
    “I’m not going to the beach,” he said. “Who’s going to the beach?”
    “You’re tan, Asher. How come you’re so tan?”
    “This is California,” he said. “I sit