Christmas Cake

“This is wrong. I can’t do it anymore.”

She sent it to him in an email--didn't say it with Facetime or Skype, didn't send a text or WhatsApp message. An email. She felt guilty, she said, about his wife, his child. She wrote it in a way to suggest that he felt no guilt himself. Seven thousand miles away, and now she feels guilty. A snide grunt lodged in his nose. She didn’t feel too guilty when he was fucking her in the guest bedroom he and his wife had turned into an oasis for the international students they hosted. It was the best sex he’d had in a decade, second only to the kind he used to have with his wife when she was in her prime. Her tits were small and firm with nipples so long he felt like he was sucking on a baby’s bottle. Her pussy was dripping wet and slick, and when he went in deep it made a sound that evoked feelings like he had accomplished something, like he had built a tool shed or composted the garden. When she pulled him out of his pants her eyes widened and she told him he was big, something he relished until he figured she was comparing him to her countrymen.

When it came time for him to come, he was so enthralled that he forgot to pull out as he had promised her. He came inside her with shouts to his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ into the pillow next to her ear. When she realized what he had done, she threw him off, momentarily gaining the strength of ten men, well beyond what her one hundred pound frame could summon. He had tried to explain to her beforehand that he had had a vasectomy, that there was no chance of pregnancy--and that he had no STDs besides, as far as he knew--but something had been lost in google translation. She went on and on about her parents and how they’d cut her off if she got pregnant. She was an entitled brat, the daughter of two doctors who sent her to the States to learn English because they didn’t like her boyfriend. Her boyfriend was a teacher who cared nothing about wealth or social standing, and although her mother didn’t want her to turn into Christmas Cake--a term used to describe Japanese women who aren’t married by age twenty-five--the teacher wasn’t good enough for her because he didn’t make enough money.

When he grew tired of explaining what a vasectomy was in English, he dressed, washed his hands, and joined his wife and son downstairs where they were watching cartoons. Now here she was, breaking up with him over Gmail in perfect written English. What a cunt.

He had been squirreling away money to fly her back to the US in one years’ time. He figured it’d cost $2,800 for the flight from Tokyo to Philadelphia, $1,400 for a hotel for the week, and $800 for other expenses. He had saved almost $5,000 for a rendezvous that now had as much chance of happening as him pulling a rabbit out of his asshole. That was a lot of bread. Fuck if he knew what to do with it now.

He couldn’t put it back. His wife hadn’t noticed the missing money because he had withdrawn $60 per week; but if five grand suddenly appeared in the account, she might start asking the wrong kinds of questions. It appeared that he had masterminded the perfect affair, complete with getting dumped by the woman, thus eliminating the “mistress going psycho” ending, but he was not a very good actor and slow with lies. This was his first affair and he did not want it to cost him his family. What a prince. The problem was he had made a terrible mistake. He had fallen in love with her, and now she had just dumped him for some phony baloney reason, and he forgot how much it stung. He thought he’d never have to experience it again, the awful feeling of being discarded like trash. He should never have ever felt it again, but he had because he was a fucking asshole, a cheating bastard. He had broken his vows and for what: a coquettish, manipulative bitch with the face of a doll and an ass that renewed his faith in God. She had met somebody else in the three months since she arrived back home, he was sure of it. Her folks were in a hurry to get her married off to a doctor, any doctor, someone with a penis and a medical degree. The doctor was undoubtedly rich and Japanese. She said she didn’t want to cheat anymore, and she suddenly objected to showing him her tits over Skype. She didn’t care about his family, he knew this. She didn't care about him either. She didn't care if she loved her future husband--she had told him--so long as she never had to work again. He loved that crazy broad. She was the most honest person he had ever known, and now it was over because she didn’t want to cheat on her new boyfriend the way he had cheated on his wife. Ain't that a bitch.

A smart man would have recognized the situation as the best possible outcome. His little Japanese Christmas Cake lived in Osaka, thirteen time zones away. Did he really think they would meet every year to fuck and eat at the Hibachi restaurant next to the Acme in Jenkintown? No, this was a gift, it was cake that should be eaten on Christmas, devoured in one bite. He had carried off the perfect affair. He could write a book to explain to all the other lying sacks of shit like him exactly how to do it. All he had to do was be cool, chill out, and not tell anybody or do anything stupid.

As weeks became months, he tried not to think about her life in Japan. Still, he imagined her with other men. He imagined that wonderful sound coming from her pussy, this time made by someone else. He heard it in his sleep.

He decided the safest thing to do was to spend the money on booze, but he suspected it wouldn’t work, just as Mick Jagger warned: I just can’t seem to drink you off my mind.

He went on that way for some time until his anxiety coagulated into a gigantic clot that stopped his heart blew out his brain. He wasn’t sure what had happened. He had gone out alone one night and gotten repulsively drunk. David Carr drunk. Hunter S. Thompson drunk. The kind of drunk that gives you a stutter that lasts for two days. He clung to the bottle as if he would die if he let it go. There was nothing in the universe but the liquid in his glass, and it would never run dry. But then it did, and he felt true despair. He may have been cut off by the bartender, the bar may have closed, or maybe it had burned down. All three were possible within the black hole of his memory.

He staggered to the curb outside the bar as a light rain began to fall. A car honked at him. He focused his glassy eyes on a cab with its roof lights off because they’re always off because no fucking cab in that town obeyed basic communication rules. He got in even though his car was parked nearby. The driver asked him for the address and he grunted. Then the driver asked, “Want some ladies, mon?” He grunted again. “Want to get laid?” Yes, he thought. Yes. He did want to get laid.

He watched as side streets flashed before him. The cab was flying, or at least seemed to be. It stopped abruptly in front of a row home with no street numbers or street light. He handed the driver a twenty and exited the cab, not knowing where he was. He turned to ask the driver, but he was gone, leaving little evidence he had existed other than the faint smells of his exhaust. He grasped the railing to the house and pulled himself up the marble steps. His knock rang hollow against the door, and after a minute, it opened, still held fast by a chain. A middle-aged Chinese woman’s face filled the gap; she regarded him suspiciously at first, and then opened the door, having been satisfied by whatever she saw in his eyes. He entered and she motioned to him to sit on the couch that was in dire need of repair. A man of about sixty sat opposite him and never make eye contact. An emotion decorated the room with its subdued lighting, sweet smells of leather, whiskey, and promises of a short-lived thrill that mixed poorly with the faint classical music emanating from somewhere else. The emotion hung over the other man, and had Our Hero been sober he would’ve recognized it as shame.

The madam returned and motioned to him to rise and walk into the hall. A door opened on the other side and six young Asian women dressed in pastel nighties formed a row in front of him. No two wore the same color.

“Pick,” she said.

He scanned the row of women--girls, really--and found they all looked the same. Then a seventh joined the others, and with her entrance he felt his insides go into freefall and nearly slide out his asshole. There she was. It was his little piece of Christmas Cake looking more wanton and lovely than before. She hadn’t gone to Japan. She had been right here all along. His chest swelled with what many people would have identified as feelings of being reunited with a lost and beloved object: a gold watch, a passport, car keys, a grail.

He grabbed her by the hand and pulled her out of line. She stopped, took him by the hand, and walked him up the stairs as he stumbled behind her, his gaze focused on her ass as her hips swayed side to side with the climb, and then her young calf muscles tightening and relaxing, tightening and relaxing.

She led him to a room and motioned to him to disrobe. “Why don’t you write back?” he asked. The desperation in his voice transcended language with its beast-like need. She smiled and shook her head. “Why?” he asked again. She tried to take off his shirt, but he stopped her. “Why don’t you want to be with me anymore?” She backed away; the smile vanished from her face like some real Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner shit. “I fucking love you,” he cried. “Do you understand? Do you understand that?” She tried to leave, but he held the door closed with his foot. “Why won’t you talk to me? Say something! Don’t pretend like you don’t understand me! I taught you! I taught you everything!” He became more and more agitated until he was screaming at her, his voice raw and choking. He grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her, and her high-pitched screams and nonsensical blathering mixed with his cacophony of whys.

He felt hands on him, multiple pairs. Then someone tried to push his face through the wall while a blunt object was shoved into the small of his back. Then he was in his bed at his upper middle-class suburban McMansion. His body ached like he had been thrown into a garbage truck and run through the trash compactor. When he went to the bathroom and saw himself in the mirror he understood why. There were bruises all over his arms and ribs. His right hip felt out of joint and he limped when he walked. He looked out the window and saw his car, perfectly parked in front of his manicured lawn. He could smell coffee brewing downstairs. He went back into the bathroom and looked at himself again. He told himself it was time to make a change, that he had work to do in order to find out what the fucked happened, how he had become this way. He would stop drinking immediately. He told himself there was shit he had to sort out, that he couldn’t go on like this. He barely made it to toilet two feet away before everything from the night before gushed out of his mouth. When it was over, he was as empty as a tube of toothpaste someone had run over with a car.

He went to his phone and checked his email. It was there, unexpectedly, an email from her. Finally! But it was not good news. She had attached a picture of her and another man arm in arm, and in the body of the message she wrote, “Please stop contacting me. I am getting married.”

He felt the anger start in in his lower back and streak upwards across his scalp and down his face that become flush with blood. Who was she to tell him to stop or when he should stop? After all he risked for her? She left him with bitterness, and now she's going to tell him how he should handle it?

Maybe he'd stop drinking the day after tomorrow. He would need to drink for a little hair of the dog today. And maybe he'd go down to that brothel and apologize to the poor girl. The memories were coming back fiercely. Yes, that’s what he would do. He would pay the young Christmas Cake a visit. But first, there was probably a nice breakfast his wife had made for him, and he was hungry.