Consumption Read Online Free

he’ll say yes to whatever we ask him, including the verb.
Capiche?
”
    “That’s ridiculous.”
    “That’s the transference of desire,” said Simmy.
    “How could you ever prove it?”
    “Oh, we didn’t tell you? We fuck all the ones who say yes.” Erma grinned at him, and it took John a few seconds to see that she was joking.
    “Ask me again.”
    “What?” said Simmy, her sweet face crumpling in confusion.
    “Not you, her. You,” said John, turning to Erma. “Ask me again.”
    “All right,” said Erma, turning to him and not hesitating a second. “Would you fuck her?”
    “In a heartbeat,” said John. He could smell her, this close, a smell that still surprised him, made him aroused unexpectedly, even after six years of marriage—grass and something sharp, like ginger or lemongrass.
    “Tell you what,” said Erma, grabbing his arm. “Buy me a drink. We’ll try another experiment about the transference of desire, this time using me and the Manhattan you’re going to buy me as subjects.”
    “You like Manhattans?”
    “I adore them.”
    “Then let’s head to Dot’s and see how many I can pump into you before the barkeep shuts us down.”
    They didn’t go to bed together that night, knowing that they were going to spend the rest of their lives together, but it didn’t take much longer than that. They went to Erma’s apartment after the bar, a place she shared with Simmy, and which they would later share when Simmy moved out and back to her native Oklahoma. They were both drunk when they got home, but it didn’t make the “everything but sex” any less tender, any less spectacular.
    Nevertheless, when John woke the next morning and Erma’s side of the bed was empty, he felt an instant relief. He sat up, thinking he could chalk this up to a nice experience and go on with his life, not worrying about any undue attachments. Reaching over to the other side of the bed to search for his jeans, he saw the picture taped to the pillow. It had been cut neatly from the yearbook and then blown up in a copy the size of a real face. It was a picture of their professor, and Erma had colored the mouth a bright red.
    John stopped where he was and picked up the life-size face of snaggletooth Jonesy, planting a big one right onto her paper lips. “You just get prettier by the day, Jonesy,” he said, folding the face and sticking it in his back pocket. And he knew right then and there, he didn’t want to leave, didn’t want to escape this girl with her strange sense of humor and pretty freckled nose. And so, kicking his jeans on, he’d stumbled into the kitchen to find Erma.
    The picture was in his wallet now, folded over itself many times. Being so large, a corner peeped out the top, and it was John’s habit to feel for it through the outer fabric of his pocket—a nervous tic of his of which he was only dimly aware.
    He’d been touching it the last ten miles.
    “Dammit!” The yell came from somewhere deep inside him. He realized he had started thinking about things best left unthought. He pounded his fist against the wheel, and Maxie slunk back down to the floor.
    Everything was falling apart.
    Everything had gone from bad to worse in a matter of months. First, John had lost his job. There’d been cutbacks at the college and, since John didn’t have tenure, his was one of the first positions to go. Erma had hung on to hers a little while longer, but then the government cut funding to the nonprofit where she worked, and that was that. They hadn’t been able to piece things back together. The fights. The bills. Oh my God, the bills. Who knew that going to a hospital to have a doctor wipe up the bloody leftovers would cost so much.
    Then the call from his uncle Frank in Maine. The offer of a job; it wasn’t much, just a job on the docks with him, but it was union, and would John maybe like it?
    And so, in some half-assed attempt to salvage things, to make it all right, they’d set off across