It Feels So Good When I Stop Read Online Free Page B

walls was many shades brighter where a mirrored medicine cabinet had hung. It was a relief not to have to look at myself. I started to feel like a genuine gaping asshole, picturing Jocelyn levitating along Twenty-third Street back to our honeymoon suite, gripping a six-pack and some takeout: She swings the heavy, fireproof door open. I don’t tango naked out of the bathroom with a fresh rubber in my teeth. I don’t glide back from the ice machine with a bottle of champagne rising from the bucket like an emerald swan. Just as my getaway train lurches away from the platform, Jocelyn reads my note and falls off the bone like piping-hot Peking duck.
    I gathered some foul-tasting saliva to the front of my mouth, spat into the sink, and examined it for blood. During some of our breakups, I had seen Jocelyn do things like bite herself on the back of the hand while crying, pull out keepsake-sized tethers of hair, and defenestrate objects of varying worth from her fifth-floor apartment. I feared this time I might have killed her.
    It’s not your fucking fault. If she kills herself over this, she’s got bigger fucking problems than your leaving her. My conviction was wobbly, like I was the sounding board for a happened-upon old acquaintance who knew I knew he knew he’d always been half a prick in my book. But the dubious logic of my self-directed pep talk seemed to possess the power of temporary exoneration. And although I had neither studied nor pretended to have studied any Zen philosophy, I decided in that bathroom to begin living in the moment.
    I looked deeply “into” the place where the medicine cabinet had been and chanted, “Medi-cine cabi-net. Medi-cine cabi-net.”
    I opened both taps and let the water run from tan to clear, per James’s instructions. I started to wonder how much your average medicine cabinet goes for. Thirty bucks? Forty? Thirty bucks seemed reasonable for a medicine cabinet. I traced its absence many times. I passed my hand through its void. “Medi-cine cabi-net.” I started to wonder who got custody of the medicine cabinet that had once been there. And did they fight over it? The possibility of Pamela and James going to war over a thirty-dollar medicine cabinet made me feel like I had regained consciousness on the concourse of a dead midwestern shopping mall.
    Fuck the fucking Buddhists.
    I peeked under the sink for a razor left behind in the move. A shave might change my world completely. I ran the shower, giving the water time to get clean and hot. I weighed the chances of Jocelyn and me someday being friends. It was un-fucking-likely. She and I were strictly scorched earthlings. If we didn’t get back together this time, I was sure I’d never see her again. I stepped into the shower and brushed my teeth with my finger.
    “Motherfuck.” I clawed what was left of the soap from the soap-dish. It was like a dry sliver of Romano cheese. A small window in the shower wall promised to open on the backyard. When I tried to unlock it, the fixture broke free from the water-rotten sash and bounced around the tub.
    “Are you kidding me?”
    I tapped into the reserve strength in my legs to raise the paint-sealed window. I stuck my head out the window into the brisk sunlight, half expecting the guillotine’s blade to finish me off.
    On the far side of the clothes-dryer vent, against the toolshed, leaned the forlorn Huffy Sweet Thunder bicycle Pamela had gotten for her tenth birthday. I sized it up, encouraged by the legend of the great George Jones piloting a ride-on lawn mower miles into town to score booze. George Jones is a genius, and I am not. It was only fitting that I should have to pedal a child’s dilapidated toy.
    I got out of the shower and began drying myself with my dirty underwear, the only piece of clothing I could spare. When the pitiful trunks could drink no more, I swung them over the curtain rod. If I was going to be there for any length of time, me and Sweet Thunder were going to