The Polyamorist

women keep leaving tod the rod the pod. one day he decides he doesn't care. what a turn-on

At this desk, the LAN terminal switched on, Rod the Pod Porcellian put his eyes to his palms and promptly switched off. He was the acclaimed sales wonk for all the dying dotcoms of Miltown, forever possessed of a childhood-derived nickname taken straight from Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He had made it safely to work at Netwonks, a scrambling, ever-mutating Internet company that had yet to find a niche amid a multitude of markets. He was suffering the effects of a long night out at a snappy, well-written-up and suspiciously forgiving little retro joint aptly named the Bolt 'n' Screw, downtown in old industrial Coketown. Why he wound up there was because of a midair breakup with a gorgeous model.

Rod had spent all of last night tossing them down with the very best friend money and free drinks could buy on short notice: Roger Ramjet Ourabouros.

He had been tossing them down hard and fast, just as he had been tossed down.

His head ached with remembered resonance:

"You're not dying, buddy!" Roger remonstrated. "You're living!"

"I be dog!" said Rod in agreement.

Chubby, hale, Armani-suited Roger was the guy from his company who'd strip dying dotcoms bare and sell off bits of carcass before they had expired: the servers, the software, any remnant product, lists of addresses--both e-mail and snail--all for pennies on the dollar. Roger had found his calling, that of professional vulture, which was more than Rod the Pod could say about himself at the moment.

Standard story:

She was irrevocably gone. His girlfriend, his fiancée, his intended, his--

Oh, yes.

"Your significant mother," Roger had said. Cute.

Cheers.

Yes, yes, another round, of course--over here!

Now they were playing As Time Goes By.

"Stop waving at me, you fucking idiot!" thought Rod, calling out to memory, which called back all the louder.

The drunken fog that Rod had yet to totally lose himself in rippled with visible aggression like a traffic accident seen through car exhaust on a sweltering summer's day. He made for the preserved vintage Rock-Ola jukebox squatting in the corner with all its quaintly dizzying lights.

No big deal.

The loss of his latest and greatest girlfriend ever, a knockout runway model, a catalog favorite who had changed her name to Minot (pronounced "Me?-no!") from the more wholesome and bouncy--and Rod remembered her as being particularly wholesome as well as bouncy in bed--Holly Hominy.

"Homina Hominy!" Roger once joked in badly (continued on page 134)Polyamorist(continued from page 104) imitated Ralph Cramden Honeymooners befuddlement.

That was then and now was nothing.

Rod successfully navigated back to his seat from the Rock-Ola after splashing a salvo of quarters into its narrow little mouth. He realized that her scent was still with him, penetrating alcohol fumes, which made him dizzy if not ill.

"Holly was an exquisite cunt." Roger clinked the edge of Rod's whiskey glass merrily. "Without a doubt, a bitch's bitch."

"Minot," corrected Rod the Pod in a near-guttural belch. "Me?" He thumbed his chest. "No!" He shook his head sadly.

"She was a harpy from hell--took you for how much?"

"She was all those things and more, as usual. Don't worry, though. One day I'm sure she'll send me a check. Otherwise I might have a reason to see her again. We can't have that!"

"Heartless and conniving?" Roger gestured for another round.

"Aren't we all?" Rod droned, overturning his empty glass on the bar. "She wept and wailed like an unchanged baby breaking the news to me on her flight to Lisbon."

"With whatsisname?"

The bar was just as blue as Rod was, that blue and no bluer.

"Yeah," Rod said. "There's always a whatsisname. I got the call just before five--right off the flight. Transatlantic phone dump!"

"Now, that's cold," replied Roger with idle sympathy.

"You could say I'm lucky that my breaking-up call was mostly breaking up. I could barely hear anything." Ha! I can still barely hear anything! he thought.

Then he heard something.

A song, as distant in his ears as banished memory hailing him in vain:

The Ink Spots swinging their most famous number in a dulcet, oozing croon: If I Didn't Care.

"Fuck me!" said Rod incredulously, his eyes bolt open as he went both pale and rigid next to Roger, who then lurched away as if he had been touched by a hot poker or was avoiding a serious spill on his Armani jacket. Perhaps Rod was about to vomit on him. He wasn't taking any chances.

"Fuck me!" slurred Rod loudly. "That's it! That's fucking it!"

Sweet misery and inner self-mutilation poured forth from the PA in four-part harmony over the tumult and hubbub of the Bolt 'n' Screw.

•

He looked up from the blackness of his clammy palms and shuddered.

The machine was beeping.

As the e-mails and java script console updates clotted up his screen after he had removed his face from his hands, he was absolutely certain that if he could just make it through this day, this one, measly, agonizing day, all other days remaining would fall neatly into place.

Flooding himself at the watercooler, hiding from the daylight, skirting the issue of work, ducking supervisors, he set himself to doing precisely that.

•

Prim, brazenly made-up, plump and even more brazenly curvaceous, his colleague Dotty Pike wasn't to be the first, but she was somewhere on the list.

What list?

Why, the targeted list of indifference, of course.

The list of those to be taken, used, discarded.

The list to be kissed.

Easier said than done, you might say. You might also justifiably add, perhaps in a halfhearted search for a portion of lurid experience: Just how do you get them to so easily take you? Simplicity itself: No longer take them at all.

No longer want them, or need them.

Tease them. Snub them. Turn on your heels and walk (don't run) away from them. Let them see the usual chance in your eyes, then, just as they see it, readily take it away. Rudely snatch it back.

This wasn't playing hard to get.

This was method acting hard to get.

It wasn't being hard to get--it was the being and nothingness of hard to get.

It was its own phenomenology of mind that intuitive, incisive Rod the Pod both got and elaborated upon.

Someone once said that when the heart is betrayed, it must in turn betray itself, to effectively betray others in kind. That was Rod the Pod talking, but he would never have allowed himself to be quoted this way. He would never have admitted it.

•

Why put prim little Dotty Pike on the list at all, you might ask?

For Rod, it was a mild gesture of revenge, a nod to the community of Netwonks at large. Dotty was, after all, reigning office tease, a human bauble dangled about as a prize, an intimation of what might be won if you could only keep reinventing yourself and your job fast enough to remain employed. She was the unobtainable company Kewpie doll, universally lusted for and therefore universally untouchable.

Freezing out Dotty Pike would be a blow against permutation for its own sake, against Minot and Internet plasticity all-around.

Though this may have achieved another rung toward the nirvana of indifference, Dotty Pike had far more urgent considerations in this than did Rod.

Her power base was somehow waning.

Dotty Pike had grown used to wielding power over men in the office, power that overtly attractive women with a self-assured sense of sexuality always have over sensitive, susceptible men--to put it bluntly, the geeks--who cannot hope to keep pace. Though the Netwonks (or Netwanks, as she often joked) were not always less than attractive, they were certainly far less than sexually self-assured. She easily exerted her subtextual sexual power over them. Under the stress of formality, and the need to rule responsibly, they fell all over themselves just to fulfill her slightest oddball whim while at the same time perpetuating a well-seen-through lie of dignity.

All except Rod the Pod.

Rod, who, on the decisive morning after, had physically bumped into Dotty in the hall, had indeed fallen all over her like everybody else but recoiled, then withdrew, from this lurid opportunity, strangely unaffected.

No, not like the other Netwonks at all.

To counter that, Dotty immediately turned on her flirtatious charm to evoke the routine, reliable responses, the assured babbling foolishness of sexual unease. But none came. She even managed to brush against his worsted crotch, ever so slightly.

No change.

Nothing.

No perceptible sweats, no quickened pulse, no reflexive incipient hardness.

Nothing!

It was just--well--wrong.

A headline bulletin ran in a band of luminous red letters about her brain:

Rod the pod porcellian is no longer interested in fucking you.

She gulped dryly.

Rod had merely brushed himself off and excused himself officiously, without the slightest hint of interest or awkwardness. Then he turned his back on her!

Watching him walk down the corridor to his office without giving her so much as half a backward glance, it hit her in the pit of her stomach like a cramp.

That fucker! He knew what he was doing!

It burned her to the core of her soul to know that she had just been brushed off.

•

While Dotty fumed, seeming now to be slumped somehow, Rod inwardly delighted. She could wait. Somewhat smugly, he set himself to the task at hand.

The first on Rod's particular list was a local rock star with magenta cellophaned hair and a hard figure in black lingerie worn outside a tight unitard. She was dark, gothic, mannered and cool. She was not so cool as to forget to work the room, however.

When Rod walked in she was already assuredly and incandescently on.

So Rod, blowing smoke in her face and immediately ignoring her in favor of anyone (or anything) else, simply out-cooled her with disturbing finality.

"This is Chemise N'Oblige," Roger said. "She's this year's winner of the Battle of the Bands." Her limp and clammy hand was as icy as death.

"Bandwidth Blowout," she corrected distantly, tousling Louise Brooks bangs.

Rod held her wrist as if checking for a pulse, patted it gently, then let it drop as if it didn't matter.

He made an impression on her by infuriating her, and he infuriated her by responding blandly to all her excitement, her deadpan, drop-dead glamour. No, he was not gay, he caught in a sidelong whisper. Yes, he was single.

Rod was yawning. Rod was bored. Rod left early.

Deep inside Rod's mind, however, the clock was running.

He got the call from Chemise later on that night, then soon enough removed the unitard in the VIP room of Active Transport, a new chic downtown club. They fucked upright, backstage while Torch Song beat out a staccato dirge blowing out monitors to accompany the pleasured grunts of their rutting.

They did it on ecstasy, coke and some strange brain-and-colon laxative that made them lunge madly through the act.

They did it at the swing club Trapeze in New York--for a lark.

For a week and a half or so, Rod the Pod was "Rockin' Rod the Goth Scene God," unlikely fave-rave of all the technos, the thrashers and trashers, remade in appearance while occupying the envied position of being the chosen one to boff and squire their queen. He found he'd made the de facto guest list for the closed, celebrity event, the all-night party and its exclusive after-event of sloppy hedonistic lying around.

One night, not unexpectedly, he ended it all with the quiet decorum and stately click of his cell phone while in a taxi on his way somewhere else.

Chemise knew he was on his way to see some vanilla office chick, some undead yuppie scum in a clingy off-the-rack tweed suit with unintentionally laddered hose. Her blood was boiling!

Rod was, in actuality, on his way to return several overdue DVDs, grateful to come home to his condo to loll about unclad on the uncluttered sofa, alone.

Chemise N'Oblige put scratches on his face next morning, as he left for work, caroming into him in the hall and then disappearing. She put scratches into the side of his car with a key. And that wasn't the end of it. Chemise tracked him down doggedly every other day at lunch at various outdoor cafes, spilling everything from decaf latté to brimming mimosas on Rod, culminating with the smashing of a strawberry chiffon New York--style cheesecake directly into his deadpan expression.

Later, Chemise performed a song titled The Pod's Passion Play, punctuated by the mock castration of her bassist onstage. That was the last Rod's still-ringing ears ever heard from her.

Then there was Margit Ergot, called (with misleading simplicity) Maggie.

A dwarfish performance artist possessed of the aspect of a mini Jayne Mansfield, captured in blush-colored tights, a tartan skirt and obligatory fuck-me pumps, Maggie slam-danced her way across Rod's typically skewed vision at an opening he attended. Spark plug--fireplug Maggie capered and caroused about the loft, writhing her compact body and shaking her postpunk peroxide mane to great effect, ignored and apparently dismissed by Rod. He was the first to entirely ignore her and so, true to his method, the last to leave with her.

Their torrid chemistry was bound by one constant factor: a contest to see whose indifference could surpass the other's. To bring a greater stake to the contest, there simply had to be a component of heartbreakingly urgent physical need, shaped by bodily craving and honed by mental oblivion.

Her body was a desperate knot of muscle perpetually beating Rod to a sexual pulp just as her mind was a splendid mimic of his every diffident gesture of surpassing indifference.

Yet none of this reached Rod past making Maggie his first regular, scheduled for weekends only. Rod was blunt and up front about his desire to keep other days open. His commitment to her extended solely to those days, as did her commitment to him. Beyond that, they both could do as they pleased.

Protected, of course.

Maggie agreed with his lack of enthusiasm and became Rod's recurring tryst of competitive and often marathon exchanges of bored contempt and petty one-upmanship ending in brutish sex. They might as well have been set against each other in an arena with punji sticks or quarterstaffs, as they bit, scratched and tormented each other to the brink. They might as well have been boxing.

Yet it was the continuum of losses and draws that kept her coming back for more and kept Rod taking her on. All resultant lacerations, contusions and even the disturbingly purple hematoma became a standard offhand office joke at the beginning of each week.

It wasn't what Rod would do next but whom.

The next regular installed from Rod's roundelay of bored bed-hopping was Melpomene Musset, or Melly, who claimed direct descent from poet Alfred.

Melly got through to Rod right away by inviting him up, then stringing him from the ceiling of her dungeon, where she also practiced her day gig as a professional dominatrix. Melly was soft and downy, large-eyed, full-chested, as rounded, smoothed and creamy as Margit was knotted and hard-edged. Tall and willowy as opposed to solid and compact. Like Rock Icon Nico, she went against her original-seeming type as docile, busty sex cow and became a punked-out Bambi with a whip.

Rod learned she was a secret superstar participant in a not-so-secret amateur S&M scene that trumpeted its existence in pseudopolitical play party groups, web rings and rock clubs--unobtainable to any but the paying gray-templed accountants and attorneys who were willing to act as uniformed housemaid, toilet slave or personal ashtray.

Where most men would have quailed, titillated, to be sure, but marking on secure hulls that would have been out of their depth, Rod plunged in deeply without apologies, regrets or, for that matter, a suit.

Melpomene gracefully filled out Wednesday through Friday. The list had become an itinerary. And, as if that weren't enough, there was Freja Frisson on Mondays.

Freja was the wholesome blonde from out of the Midwestern forest, an icy Piscean type from out of the fjords. She was a tall, cold, delicious drink that would freeze your fillings till they shattered, whose languid kisses gave the kind of ice-cream headache that kept on giving--the kind that would have you licking despite the pain, if you only could. Rod certainly could, and did.

He matched her, icicle for icicle, lick for lick.

Freja was in accounting and had no discretion in the office about waylaying and entangling Rod in the Screaming Media office corridor, dressed in the snug informality that was worn daily both to tease receptive men (and women) and to permeate Rod the Pod's stubbornly icy core. The fiery display they made each day was enough to melt the hearts of onlookers and keep all comment to an exchange of low whispers. Rumors of threesomes and envy.

Rumors based in giggling fact.

Sweet Swedish Freja, idyllic Anita Ekberg--Ursula Andress voluptuous Freja, the great heat sink of all fucks, the Iditarod of organized coital abandon. Yet it was enough for Rod, and if it was not enough for her, he could hardly tell from her glazed, fixed expression, her busied fingers, her chin resting on the thigh of their rotating third party or other woman.

Rod met every waking Monday with a thoroughness and industriousness that prompted ridicule and disgust from fellow marketing developers and that caused a miserable chain reaction of intense intercubicle rivalry. Results of this rivalry reached a boom the day Freja detected the unwashed essence of Margit Ergot on his lips and chin during an impromptu hallway kiss and lapped him exhaustively clean, catlike and fairly devouring his face, lips and tongue.

Rod was in fact the object to be conquered--the one whose detachment was to be penetrated. Then Freja could retreat and bask in the glow of appetite unfulfilled, lust unrequited--and perhaps run off with her other object of passion, Margit Ergot.

But so far--since the day of Minot's transatlantic telephonic dump-off--this had yet to happen, which meant that the cycle would be repeated until Rod showed some sign of wearing down.

And he was in truth quite worn down, gratefully collapsing into an empty bed on as many nights past midnight as he could arrange for one, both for the reason and the respite, the flesh and need repeated, repealed and replaced by the joy of indulged fatigue.

All of this disgusted Dotty Pike, who had hardly gotten even a cursory glance from Rod anymore, much less his befuddled, hormonally overwhelmed numb-fumbling. It disturbed her enough to be come a source of brooding when alone in her cubicle. Struggling to work, it occurred to her that Rod was upsetting the natural order of things--men were supposed to be led and manipulated by the heat of their genitals and not manipulate and lead women with the coolness of their emotional disinterest. He was putting an entire social order out of whack by eliminating, somehow, the effect of one in favor of the noisome other.

He had to be stopped.

Yet, in his ironclad schedule, he was unstoppable.

Meanwhile, Rod's life was divided between the jealousies of overlooked clients and of overly looked-at sex partners who wanted more, railing in frustration that Rod lacked the depth he in fact at the outset had claimed to lack.

Rod stuck to his schedule without budging, so each felt she had in some way been cheated. He placated, argued, negotiated, procrastinated, sold his heart out to clients and girlfriends alike.

He began to look dangerously haunted, sleepless and unconcerned.

Thus, Dotty Pike wooed him.

With laser-like precision she homed in on his fatigue and narrowed herself upon it like a ray of sunshine through a magnifying glass upon an unsuspecting insect.

Now, if a woman wants to make a man fall in love with her--an attractive woman, a stylish woman--to the exclusion of all else, it can easily be done. All it takes is persistent attentiveness, the read and echo of the man's habits and tics and if not longing, at least appetite. Dotty knew all of this. As if preparing for mortal combat, she applied it with pointed aggression.

After the first suggestive kiss, Rod announced: "I'll see you, but I'm into polyamory, just so you know."

Dotty shrugged and coyly countered:

"I'm not exactly a monomaniac."

Not exactly.

Dotty had in fact anticipated Rod's taste in women, observing him--but not stalking! No, we won't call it that!--on different occasions with Maggie, Melly and the gelid, statuesque Freja.

She averaged their dress and appearance and adopted it, flirting with Rod to the quizzical joy of Freja, who flirted back with her while Rod assessed her in a state of shocked quietude.

By way of a clotted threesome with Rod and Freja, she gyrated her way into Rod's schedule with an adventurousness and enthusiasm that edged the others slowly out.

Dotty intrigued against them, playing for more of Rod's time, dating Freja and discovering unlovely secrets as to her past, which she discretely dropped to Rod, fomenting rivalry between Maggie and Melly--an anxious spark between them, which she fanned relentlessly into a positive bonfire. She amplified and tightened Rod's sexual distaste of Freja by reminding him of her less-than-sanitary and possibly less-than-safe penetrative predilections.

While Rod vainly tried keeping his list and sexual itinerary functional, Dotty made the lethal move no man can resist: the application of care.

Often mistaken for mothering, care beguiles and speaks to the need in every man for reverence, appreciation and service--to feel secure in the fiction that he is running the show while in fact he is being run by a clever, hard-working and demonically detail-oriented woman.

Doting on Rod, Dotty was slowly winning the game.

Then came the fatal night--the one that all lovers reach, a night of peeling away layers to get to the center. But sometimes penetrating layers only gets you to more convincing disguises.

Dotty tried to break through.

Rod reciprocated.

On the morning after the oath, the declaration, the--for lack of a better word, or, for that matter, thought--commitment, Dotty dialed the long number for Rod's ex, Minot, in Cannes to break the news.

Why, you may ask?

Had they been in contact before? Had they established some rapport? Were they in cahoots?

Well, Dotty was nothing if not thorough. Let's just say, as a professional in the field, she did her research.

•

And in saying that, let's cut to a lovely, fragrant spring day, the kind when boulevardiers are at their very best at the sidewalk cafes on the finest chic avenues of the downtown taking long, if not well-deserved, lunches. There's Rod seated at an outside table under an awning, sipping espresso in the cool, blossom-flecked breeze with Armani-suited Roger and announcing his impending wedding to Dotty Pike.

Roger smiled with a hint of a leer. "She's a wild one," he said in passing. "An improvement on our Holly of yore."

"You mean Minot," Rod said.

Roger whispered with a lascivious, somewhat smug laugh: "I mean she's a freaking minx!"

"How would you know that?" Rod drawled, hardly paying attention, watching a swallow swoop and dive.

"How wouldn't I know?"

That got Rod's attention.

"Do you mean to tell me--"

"Hey!" Roger said, slamming down his empty Cool Cocaccino mug on the fiberglass table. "Don't get tense, man. You know, you were nailing just about anything that moved there for a while. It's not like we're virgins, you know. Besides, turnabout is foreplay, I hear." He winked.

"That's fair play."

Roger arched both eyebrows. "Really? In this case?"

Rod leaned toward him, red-faced.

"Are you telling me you did--?"

"I don't mean to tell you I didn't," Roger interrupted with a smirk. "But this is no surprise--Dotty tells anyone who'll listen that she's watchmacallit."

"Polyamorous?"

"That's it! Now that means--"

"I know what that means. She flicking got the term from me!"

Roger raised his palms: "Hey, you're both that way, right? No harm, no foul!"

"That ended with the engagement."

"Maybe it did for you, boychick, but somebody ought to tell her that sometime, now oughtn't they?" His eyes were wide in suppression of nonplussed mirth.

"Guess what? She already knows."

"OK--so she knows. I just don't know, and a few other guys I could mention also don't know. I'm sure you can work it out." Sensing a confrontation, Roger hurriedly and abruptly gathered his Armani jacket, left money on the table to pay the check and rocketed off, lending insight into the origin of his nickname "Ramjet."

Rod sat there staring in glum wonder. Thoughts came jogging along.

OK. Salvageable. He would have to talk to Dotty, ask her some questions, get things straight with her.

It occurred to him that swing tunes were playing over the PA of the coffee shop.

Rod recognized the song.

It was soft at first--just a hint of melody--and then out of nowhere became deafening in his head. It was the same song that had played so resonantly in memory just after the debacle of the transatlantic dump-off.

He had a cold, sinking feeling.

Rod wandered back to the office much later than he wanted to, having spent far too much time sitting there at a table outside StarStruck's wondering if life would be in any way just as manageable.

If she didn't care.

Their torrid chemistry was a contest to see whose indifference could surpass the other's.