Swallowing

Tiff was into hardware. That fact became clear the moment I saw her bedroom. There was what appeared to be the chopper handlebars from a girl's Schwinn, from the mid-Seventies, complete with bubblegum-pink handgrips and plastic streamers, mounted with industrial lag bolts to the wall, just above the headboard. Maybe that should have tipped me off. But the barbell through the clit, making its appearance about an hour after the handlebars, was a little more than I'd bargained for.

Then again, Tiff was a little more than I'd bargained for. She was tough and wild and perhaps crazier than anyone I'd had before--but fun and up for anything. Certainly more fun than Neva, the obsessive-compulsive 34-year-old I'd been floundering with the past three years. Stacked up against, for example, one of Josef Mengele's Nazi nurses, Neva would still tip out on the less-fun side. But perhaps that's not fair. Neva had her good points, though self-inflicted pain wasn't one of them. This was a woman who often took a Tylenol before brushing her hair. The idea of jamming a metal bar through her clitoris would have seemed, to Neva, like science fiction.

But this new girl, Tiff--she was different. That fact was written all over her. I wasn't exactly used to self-perforation, and it was a little disarming. The tattoos, I was prepared for--a chain of daisies ringing her pullet-like biceps; a kissing cousin to Bettie Page, winking coyly, probably cribbed from the Altoids ad; and gothic calligraphy, small of her back, that said Kyle (and, I suspected, I watch too much six feet under). I saw them when I asked her out, along with the initial piercings--the tongue was obvious in conversation and the belly button dangle, a pendulous gold A-bomb, finned, tumescent with payload, even through the scrim of her blouse.

The last piercing, though, was not as publicly advertised. Word first reached me only as I was nuzzling the peach-fuzz glory trail just below the belly button, gnawing at her hipbones and tugging at the Tootsie Pop--print panties and inhaling the mix of cotton and musk.

"I've got something on my clit," she announced suddenly, and though her tone was more statement than warning or apology--a mere point of trivia rather than alarm--I took her to mean she had some sort of STD. And I thought, perhaps a little crushed, Of course she does. How stupid would I be to expect otherwise? This is a person who walks up to strangers at work and bandies about the word pussy. And those Schwinn handlebars aren't mounted there just because she thought it would dress up the room.

Eventually, I understood she meant something other than a sore or lesion when she hooked her thumbs on either side of her panties and yanked them down, free and clear. She was shaved clean--I thought of spring roasters and Cornish game hens. Her fingers pushed ahead of me, spreading the hood to show me. It was a tiny silver barbell, straight through her clitoris, with two round ends no bigger than those little metallic cupcake decorations I loved as a kid though never understood why they were edible.

But cupcake wasn't my initial thought. I swear to God, the first thing that came to mind was an image--from TV medical shows, I guess--of foreign objects found inside the human body--pens and bobby pins, coins, condoms of muled cocaine and, of course, bullets--and that moment when the frowning ER doctor throws the X ray up on the screen and there it is. It must have shown on my face, or in my stunned reaction, my sluggishness in leaping to interact with this souped-up hot rod of a vagina. I must have backed away, bit my lip, registered the horror of a bug-eyed extra in an old haunted-house movie. Because she made a comment: "OK, then! Not something you're used to, I take it," and started to squirm back into her panties like she was closing up shop. "Maybe we should just--maybe it's too much for you," she said. Like I'm some Shriner, in danger of having my ticker poop out.

"No," I said, though of course it was absolutely too much for me. The shaving and tattoos and the other piercings would have been enough to throw me, but I wasn't going to say, No, you're too much for me; no, you're too wild. I wasn't about to say no.

"No," I said. "Really, Tiff. I want to go down on you--obviously--but----" The truth was, the thing gave me the heebie-jeebies. I admit it. Not really my thing. But let's say I could pull myself together enough to do my part--wouldn't it hurt her, having me flick away at it? Weren't there special instructions for handling? "I'm just wondering if there's any special way I need to----" But I didn't wait for directions. I made a tentative lunge, like some slob in a Halloween costume bobbing for apples. Any suavity in getting my head down there was now out the window. This was not going to be an elegant, circuitous arrival, a rolling-in-the-surf or candle wax--dripping Barry White moment, a ballet of serpentine nuzzling. This now fell into the category of scientific experimentation: I moved in with the awkward caution of a wary lab technician, gave it an exploratory flick of the tongue.

The taste of cold metal reminded me of the time I made a move to nibble Neva's earlobe, only she was wearing her grandmother's pearl earrings with very long posts and I guess one of them jabbed into her neck or something because she elbowed me hard and shoved me off her and I ended up using an old copy of Mirabella to quietly squeeze one off in the bathroom.

I'm normally pretty good at it, I think. But my tentativeness must have been showing. "It takes some getting used to," Tiff said before squirming out from under me and rolling me over on my back. She went straight for the nipples then continued on. Having no hardware obstructions myself, she inhaled me straightaway. She was good. It was no real surprise, I guess, but she was good to the degree of showing off, making a point, dusting off her résumé, and I knew that Kyle, whoever he was, had never once gotten squeamish.

"My turn," I said, cutting her off, pulling her away from my joint. "Let me try again----" She was a tiny thing and I wanted to show her I could be bold; I could be manly and in charge. I gripped her around that scrawny waist and pulled her on top of me, so she was straddling me. I scooted down flat, cupping her ass and drawing her closer, bringing that scary little pussy right up to my mouth. She let out a squeal that turned into a sigh as she began to ride my face. This time there was no escape from the weird taste of metal, but I was set on proving I was just as wild.

I opened my eyes, looking straight up. Since she was shaved, there was a clear line of sight: the underside of alert tits, her clenched jaw, pinched lids, half-slung mouth, the cockeyed wig and her hands as she pressed the wall, sliding upward with a shivery suspiration, her fingers wrapped around the grips of the handlebars.

Now she began to really grind. It was almost hurting my jaw, the torque she exerted. In an attempt to get more oxygen to my nose and to straighten my neck, crimped against the pillow, I began to thrash a little, finally managing to push the pillow aside and stretch my neck, get my head flat on the mattress. But thrashing only egged her on and she shifted into a full-tilt buckaroo cowgirl routine. And then I choked.

It wasn't a hair, it wasn't a bad swallow, a weird spasm. I couldn't breathe.

I thrashed more and so did she. I tried to scream, but it came out as an encouraging moan, a deep vibration, and her thighs clenched, trapping me. So I shoved. Hard. It must have been right at a moment that she no longer had a good grip on the handlebars. Or maybe in my panic I'd mustered superhuman strength. She seemed to take flight, losing her balance and tumbling off the bed, one foot hitting the floor with a hard clump.

I lurched upright, wheezing, slapping at my chest. There was a sharp pain there that I couldn't account for, though I suppose it could have been because I was pounding on it. I was vaguely aware of what was going on in that moment--including the foggy impression that Tiff was pissed off, cursing me and punching me in the leg.

I made what I felt at the time was the international sign for I think I swallowed your clit jewelry. It might have been more hand waggling and pointing at her general midsection, but I was getting through to her because the first nonviolent thing she said was, "You swallowed it? You're fucking kidding!"

She was standing up now and she checked herself, swinging around the pink fake-fur gooseneck lamp on her bedside table, bending it to her crotch. Hunching forward, with bowed legs, she spread her hood again, toward the light. I looked, too. I had the better view.

(continued on page 138)Swallowing(continued from page 88)

"Jesus Christ," she said. "It's gone!"

Stamping over to the wall switch, she threw on the lights and pawed around on the bedspread till she found the other end. "Wait! OK, here it is!" She had the barbell pinched between her fingers and she set it into her open palm and held it under the lamp. Then she turned back to the bedspread. "Where's the cap? The little ball that screws on the end?"

I showed her where, thumping my chest.

"How did you do that?" she asked. "What were you trying to do?"

I thought it was obvious what I had been trying to do, but apparently she was looking for an answer more complicated than Trying to give you an orgasm. What did she think I was trying to do? Defuse a bomb? She was spared the sarcastic comments, as I was still too busy banging my chest and gasping for air.

"I've never heard of this happening, OK? This is, like, not normal." I could see where this was going now. It was an interesting tack to take: Clearly it was all my fault. I was the old square boring guy who didn't know how to work a simple clitoris. At least not the late-model ones.

I could have pointed out that when you put a piece of metal jewelry through your genitalia, there can't really be anything remotely resembling normal. But I didn't. It was all I could do to rasp out, "Water----"

She understood, but hesitated, not immediately signing off on the plan. "Really? You want to swallow it farther? Maybe you ought to try puking it up." She got behind me on the bed and jammed her fist under my ribs, trying to Heimlich me. I was surprised how strong she was. The pain was sharp; much worse than before. Now I had two separate pains and the ball wasn't budging. I could've told her--if I could have told her--that the Heimlich wouldn't work. The obstruction was deeper than that. It wasn't caught in my throat, but farther down.

She went and got the water. "So you're planning on passing it, is that it?"

I didn't answer, as I was busy gulping from a plastic Snoopy drinking cup.

"You mind crapping into a colander or something? I kind of want it back."

The water didn't help. It hurt. I felt like there were small mechanical parts in my chest that had broken off. It put me in mind of that doomed rattle you get when you try to repair a VCR yourself.

She offered to get me some bread. This was so absurd, I tried ignoring it, concentrating instead on trying to swallow and breathe. Unsolicited, she launched into a long story about how her grandmother always gave her a slice of white bread when she was choking. I couldn't imagine a dumber proposal--even if I were actually choking and trying to push it down into my stomach, which I wasn't. "Lung----" I rasped, pointing to one side of my chest. "Stuck...." I then pointed to the center of my chest. "Na' here...."

She wasn't buying it. Rolling her eyes and sighing, she announced fine, she would go make a pot of coffee. "That ought to help get things moving." I snatched a copy of Bust and a lipstick from the floor, knocked off the dust bunnies and scribbled, over an Absolut ad on the back cover: I can't pass it. It's stuck in my lung or something!

She told me that I was being dramatic, made a sour face and marched into the kitchen, still nude, to brew the coffee. "I think I have some bran cereal," she said. "You should eat a couple handfuls of that. Get things moving."

So I drank the coffee. I ate the bran cereal. And I lay flat on the bed, waiting for things to stir. But only after getting dressed. Because I knew this wouldn't work and we'd eventually have to go to the hospital.

•

I didn't know Tiff very well. We'd only met earlier that week, while I was looking to rent a costume for my editor's "Come as Your Favorite Failed DotCom" party. Shooting for obscurity, I had settled on vetshrink.com, a little-known blip on the radar screen that attempted to provide online advice for animals. I was contemplating the dog suit, actually, which happened to be right next to a cat costume. I didn't even hear her slip up behind me.

"I see you're thinking about pussy, aren't you?"

She was so obviously the kind of girl I'd begun to doubt existed when I was with Neva.

Neva. God. This was a woman who refused to have any sort of sex outdoors--even when we were alone in a remote rental in Michigan for an entire week in early September, post-tourists, surrounded by nothing but pine trees, water and stars. Not even out on the deck--she'd made it clear the beach or anywhere on the ground was out of the running. There were Adirondack chairs, which she said would be too hard, so I drove into town and bought a cushioned chaise at Kmart. No good. Still too close to the ground: Nonspecific bugs would crawl up the chaise and enter her "hoo-haw." Believe me, I wanted to tell her, it's not that easy to enter your "hoo-haw." Then I suggested--foolish me--maybe standing against the railing, looking out at the twinkling lights on the distant peninsula. Or, if she required even more bug-height from the ground, with her sitting on the rail and me standing. But no, we'd have to put on repellent for the two or three geriatric mosquitoes still kicking beyond Labor Day and wouldn't we taste the repellent from kissing each other's neck?

She went back to reading Bridget Jones' Diary; I went skinny-dipping.

Neva tried. She tried to be bold and unencumbered. But she had her issues. With everything, but particularly with sex.

Particularly oral sex. Neva seemed to think the goal was the actual swallowing. The ingestion. Which is probably why she felt completely incapable of getting to that level. To someone for whom the idea of anything happening, ejaculationwise, was freaky and upsetting, the idea of then proceeding to gulp it all down probably seemed to her like a paraplegic hoping to not only walk one day but to walk on the moon. I was torn: On one hand I could tell her it wasn't the swallowing so much as just the riding it out--not switching gears and leaving me hanging out to dry, twisting in the wind. Lower the bar. Spit it into a potted plant.

Except I did sort of care. Because spitting makes you feel crummy and toxic, like you've just had a rattlesnake bite sucked clean by your "pardner," who, except for the danger of your dying of rattler venom, would not be doing this. I never spelled it out for Neva because I wanted more. I wanted down-the-hatch.

And I didn't want it to feel like bartering, like we were hammering out a labor negotiation. I wanted more than a muted sex life, one in which everything had become sanctioned and expected, rehearsed and preordained. Bottom line? I wanted dirty, I wanted wild, I wanted fun. So the one time, very near the end of our relationship, when Neva pointed out, pathetically, "Look. I got some," and indicated, without touching it, a drop of jizz glistening along her jawline, far from the target, I did not point out that it was only there because she had panicked, once again yanked me out of her mouth prematurely, that she was, at the time of my throbbing, midair orgasm, cowering against the pillow, twisted away from it as if from a botched chemistry experiment and muttering, "Sorry! Sorry!" eyes squeezed closed, hands up and shielding her face. Because I wanted more. I wanted the continued contact, true, but I also just wanted her to swallow.

So I was encouraging instead. I told her, "Good, honey," like we had accomplished something together, like we were starting to make progress. It was pathetic. On both sides.

And now here I was, lying next to exactly the type of wild young woman I'd wondered about, and she was naked and ready and now I was mainly just wondering if I was going to die. It was two hours after she'd removed the dress. She was clearly beginning to regret wasting something "dry clean only" on me.

"This sucks," she said. "I was so close to coming."

I chose to be gallant and said I was really sorry. I think she understood me.

"Seriously. I was. You should take that as a compliment. You weren't down there all that long."

I decided to lie there and not respond. She said she still wanted to, that if she were alone, she would probably finish herself off.

"'Da lemme st' ya ...," I mumbled. "Kna' y'seff ow...."

"You're here," she said. "I'd have to go do it in the bathroom or something."

The bathroom wasn't an option. I'd made two trips already and was about to make my third. And it wasn't pretty.

I elbowed her, lying there next to me. "G'head...."

But she wouldn't do it. "I'm shy," she said.

It was such a ridiculous claim that I wasn't about to expend any more breath trying to respond.

I made my fourth run to the bathroom somewhere around 1:15. The pain in my chest was growing worse and it was starting to scare me. I remember being on the toilet, thinking how this would be such a stupid way to die.

That's the last thing I remember.

•

I came to with an oxygen mask over my mouth. In the hospital. There was a guy in a white coat who looked like an actor, standing over me, scribbling on a clipboard; a curtain nearby keeping me from some scenario involving a wet sucking sound and a female voice that kept repeating, "Oh baby, oh baby, oh baby." Only not in a good way. And Tiff was there, not looking real thrilled, her mouth pursed in a little balloon knot. She was seated in the corner, out of the way, and she gave me a halfhearted wave when she saw I was conscious. She was back in the cocktail dress. She hadn't thrown on the nearest sweats or jeans but put it all back on. Including redoing the makeup and Jackie wig. I guess I found that odd.

The oxygen was helping. Or maybe it was calming to know I was finally getting some help. Either way, I found that if I pulled the mask away, I could speak more clearly, between gulps of air. "I swallowed this ... little metal ball. I think it's in my lung. Is that possible?"

"It's not in your lung," Tiff said, rolling her eyes. I have to say I was getting a little sick of that eye-rolling business.

The doctor asked how big. "Tiny," I said. "Like a BB. Smaller, probably."

"You swallowed a BB? Please don't tell me you put a BB gun in your mouth."

"It's not a BB." Tiff sounded really annoyed now. "It's the cap on my clit ring, OK? The little ball that screws onto the end."

The doctor swiveled on his stool now, all ears. She unfolded a wadded napkin and showed him the remaining part that we'd found in the bedspread. "Like this end, OK? Only it screws off?"

"I see," he said. "I think. Still----"

"It was an accident," I said.

He looked at me like I was a moron. "Of course. But are we certain you actually swallowed it? Perhaps the end piece came loose somewhere, and the pain you're feeling could just be anxiety."

I held up my hand, trying to put an end to this. "I swallowed it."

He looked to Tiff for confirmation. She nodded. "I'm pretty sure he swallowed it. I don't think it's in his lung."

"Couldn't you feel it was loose in your mouth before you swallowed it?"

Tiff jumped in to explain. "It fell, like, straight down? He's on his back and I'm on top and he's, you know, eating me."

"OK," the doctor said, getting the picture, then demonstrating with his hands, "so his head's tipped back, his mouth's open, and the epiglottis is relaxed and probably flopped open...."

Tiff shrugged. "I don't know if he was fiddling with my epigloppis or what. He was just eating me. It was normal, regular, plain old eating my pussy."

"I meant his epiglottis, not yours." He took a moment to consider, as if finally picturing it, and drew a deep breath, letting it out so evenly, with such control, I almost felt jealous. "Yeah, OK. Then I think we better get some shots of this. I guess it very well could be in your lung."

Hadn't I been saying that for the past four hours?

While we were waiting for me to get X-rayed, Tiff announced she was bored out of her skull. (Understandable, since nothing was lodged in her lung.) "I'm serious," she said. "If we're still here in five minutes, I may have to kill myself."

I muttered a suggestion that she go find a rest room and "finish herself off." You have to understand, I was scared and she wasn't really helping. But rather than taking offense, she seemed to be considering it. "I could do that again, I guess. But I already took care of it. Before."

I realized then we were talking about two entirely different ways of finishing oneself off. I asked her when she'd managed to do this.

"After you passed out. Before the ambulance arrived."

I couldn't believe what I was hearing.

"What?" she said. "I called first, OK? I didn't start diddling myself till after I called 911. So don't get all outraged."

•

Two hours later, Tiff had still not killed herself. We were looking at my X rays.

The doctor actually said, "There it is." This I felt was unnecessary. There were no other little round balls in my lung.

"Great." Tiff sounded extremely bored. "Now can you do something to make him cough it up? Or do you have to cut him open, or----"

I told her to shut up. I didn't mind the coughing-it-up idea, but not if it came paired with the other suggestion.

"No," he said. "That's a sterile area, the lungs. Or it's supposed to be. You get anything in there, we're looking at pneumonia. Now, normally, at your age, with modern medicine, that's not going to kill you. When it's dust, fluid, stuff like that. But what you've done here, that's not normal. There's no amount of penicillin that can destroy a metal ball." He took another long look at the X ray and said, "Man----"

I hated the way he said it. "So I'm dead. That's what you're saying."

"You're not dead," he told me, "we just have to do a little procedure. A bronchoscopy. Not a big deal."

He explained how it would work, how it wasn't, strictly speaking, surgery. They had a thing he called the FOB--the flexible fiber-optic bronchoscope--that he could insert down my throat with a tiny camera and alligator forceps and retrieve the ball without cutting me open. He went on to explain about the anesthesia, but I was still stuck on the idea that it wasn't a big deal. Maybe this is a guy thing, but anytime someone says he's going to stuff something down your throat, that is, by definition, a big deal.

When I came to, the nurse told me they'd successfully removed the foreign object but wanted to keep an eye on me.

Hours passed as I fell in and out of sleep, the waking moments finding me alone in the room. I wondered if she had gone off somewhere to masturbate. It had been about 12 hours since the time when she was waiting for the ambulance--she was probably due for a refresher. Finally, the nurse came in with my clothes and told me they were going to release me as soon as they found my friend. I got dressed and waited in the wheelchair, as instructed, feeling ditched. After a while, the nurse announced that they'd called my emergency contact. I've had the same insurance policy for years and had no memory who that even was. When the nurse came in again, she was followed by Neva. Brow knitted, just the way I remembered her.

Before I could get my drowsy brain around an alternate plan, she got behind the wheelchair and pushed me out to her car. She tsked as she negotiated the maze of parking lots and exit signs out to the main road. "I imagine this is from wolfing down steak. You never did chew your food properly. Didn't I always tell you--30 times for each piece?" I wasn't about to start reeling off the details, so I allowed her theory to stand undisputed: I'd choked on food.

She said she was taking me home and I nodded off and woke to see she meant her home. I'd never seen Neva's place, new since we split up. She'd never seen my apartment, either. This was probably the first long-term relationship I'd ever had that didn't end with a slow weaning of sex, a wind-down period. With Neva, it just ended, cold, any booty-call action out of the question.

Her bedroom looked a lot like our old bedroom would have looked if I hadn't been there to veto some of it. I tried to imagine walking in and seeing Schwinn handlebars mounted over the bed.

She told me she would stay home the rest of the day. She owns a little boutique called Scrappy's where she sells scrap-books and photo albums, though most of her income comes not in retail sales but from the consulting side. She helps clients design and organize their photo albums. For a while, she tried to get her friends to call her Scrappy, but that never really took. She's not exactly "scrappy," if that means, as I think it does, someone who's tough and feisty and resilient. Don't get me wrong--I still really love her in a lot of ways, but she's not some sort of pioneer woman fighting off the Sioux.

She doled out sedatives from a little manila envelope as I drifted through the rest of the afternoon, a misty parade of scornful TV judges in faux courtrooms. I vaguely recall her returning in the twilight blue, with two more pills and a glass of milk and her rubbing my back in a simple circle and her fingers stroking my hair, momlike.

Next morning, less drug-fuzzy, my tongue capable of Ps and Ts and having had enough time to get my story straight, I confirmed Neva's accusation of the day before: I'd choked eating steak. It had partly obstructed my windpipe. They had to get in there and yank it out. Part of me, the bravado part, felt the story was pretty chickenshit--the lousy windpipe?--but I kept my mouth shut and then she asked if it was a date. I told her it was.

"First date?"

I nodded.

She winced. "Ooh. Not a great first date, I imagine. And this happened at dinner? So probably no kiss, huh?"

Even though Neva wasn't my girlfriend anymore, I didn't like the idea of lying to her. So I didn't say anything either way.

"I'm sorry, sweetie. Was she all right about it?"

"No, not really," I murmured. "She definitely could have been much more--understanding."

"Maybe you two can start over," she said. "Just act like the next date is your first date."

I told her I didn't think there'd be a next date.

•

The third day, with the pain and sluggishness waning, I found forming complex sentences more manageable. When Neva came in with juice and to rewrap the ribs Tiff cracked, I thanked her for rescuing me and told her how embarrassed I was that I'd made things worse by struggling during the procedure. I said, "I guess I was being a real baby about it."

She dismissed that, saying it was nonsense. "Please. Who wouldn't be upset when they're jabbing some long poky thing down your throat?" She told me to relax, take all the time I needed. But I decided it was time to go home.

•

Of the dozen calls on my answering machine, only one was from Tiff. It was this: "Hey, it's me. Call or whatever." I didn't call anyone back. I took the painkillers. When she called again later, I expected some concern, some apologies, some explanation of her ditching me. But there wasn't any. All giggles and fun, she moved on to another topic: Was I up for company? I had to marvel at her ability to ask this without actually asking how I was doing.

I thought about how tender Neva had been with me, how she'd insisted that I take it easy. I told Tiff I thought I'd better pass on company.

"I'm not talking about the kind of company in the hospital, dum-dum--reading magazines and watching you lie there drugged out."

But I knew what kind of company she meant. It just no longer sounded like such a swell idea.

She said, "We've got some unfinished business, remember?"

I laughed rather weakly. It still hurt my throat. I told her, again, not tonight. I told her thanks, but I really had to pass. I was sure she'd heard me.

She was at my door 20 minutes later.

•

It's amazing how easy it is for a woman to barge in when she's kissing your neck and gripping a shopping bag that she claims contains a "special outfit." She just kept coming, shepherding me back into the living room, murmuring some pouty-lipped baby talk about how she'd been looking for me at the hospital and couldn't find me and then they said I had checked out and she just was so worried. It made no sense, of course, but there was this thing she was doing to my neck, grazing her lips down the length of it, and she did have my fly unbuttoned. Then she stopped as if she'd heard a noise and said, "Oh!" like she'd just remembered something and reached into the bag for what looked like a fax. "I probably ought to get this out of the way."

A "friend" (how she put it, though I smelled ex or sometime boyfriend), who was a law student, had drawn up a "silly little" disclaimer for me to sign, which stated that Tiff was not in any way liable for the "accident." She said she knew it was lame but this guy would really yell at her if she didn't cover her bases. I wasn't sure about all this. Not because I was contemplating suing her, but just where the hell had she been the past couple of days when I needed some comfort?

"Hurry up and sign it," she said, "so we can get that out of the way and I can put this on----" She flashed open the bag for an instant and I caught a glimpse of white cotton and that familiar Red Cross on the peak of a cap: a nurse's uniform. There was a downshift in her voice to husky vamp, "and we can play with your bronchoscope. I think I need you to perform a bronchoscopy on me with your big ... long ... bronchoscope. I think you better explore my throat, Doctor." The way she dragged it out, lingering over each word, made me squirm. I admit it. But not completely in a good way. A little more wince than squirm. It was dumb and embarrassingly cliché and transparently manipulative: Sign this and I'll dress up like a nurse and blow you. I mean, how obvious can you get?

Still, I signed. She went to the bathroom with her shopping bag and came out looking like a cartoon nurse straight out of a vintage pin-up calendar: clipboard, Red Cross cap, big thick shoes, her hemline far from AMA-approved. "I suppose you'll need to hear what my symptoms are first, won't you, Doctor?" I just sat there on the couch and watched. Not enough participation, I guess: She stood over me, eyebrows raised, and handed me the clipboard. "Come on. Ask me what my symptoms are." So I asked. She said, "My nipples are very hard and my pussy's very wet."

I really thought I'd be enjoying this, but the little speech was starting to feel like a telemarketing pitch, someone trying to convince me I'd won a free trip to the Florida Keys.

"It is," she insisted. "Check." She bent at the waist slightly, arching her back, the hem rising enough to prove that she wasn't wearing panties. As instructed, I slid my hand up her thigh and found she was right. It made me grin. Despite the clowning around, it wasn't all an act: I did something to her. It was corny, but I could get into this, play my part.

I said, "Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Nurse. I'll get right on it." She giggled. I moved up to her clit and yanked my hand away: metal.

"I can't believe this," I said. "You just go right out and get another one? You don't even care that----"

"I didn't go out and----"

"You're not even sensitive to the fact that----"

She frowned. "It's not another one. It's the old one." She leaned closer, into the pool of lamplight, lifted the white hem. I tipped the lampshade, caught the glint. She spread her hood and I peered closer. It was the old one. The original. I was very familiar with the original, believe me, and this was it.

"It's clean and all," she said. "Totally. It's fine." I just stared at it, not believing this was happening. Then she added, "Danny gave it to me."

It was a personal history I hadn't heard the other night, but I didn't really care. Danny, Kyle--the emotional value of the thing didn't enter into it. Not for me, at least. "Oh, so because it's some keepsake from an old boyfriend, I'm supposed to----"

"Some old boyfriend? What are you talking about? Your doctor Danny?"

She told me how, while I was still out cold, the doctor took her down to the cafeteria for lunch and they talked about local bands and nightclubs, and then he slipped it to her in a paper napkin. He told her they should go ballroom dancing sometime.

"I'm not going to do this," I told her. "There are certain things I'm just not doing, and this is one of them." I handed her the clipboard.

"This is so lame," she said. "You try to make it special for a guy...."

I tried to remember when I'd ever encountered any clitoris that made me think, Nope! Not special enough! It needs something. Her bag was over by the bathroom door. I got up off the couch to get it and hand it to her. She took the waiver out and gave it the once-over, as if making certain I'd signed.

"Why do you have to be such a baby?" She had disdain in her voice again. I was an old fogy, stodgy, an amateur. She rolled her eyes once more, but I didn't really care. I'm sure, to some, my life could be seen as boring and tame, but, hey, at least I'm breathing.

Besides, the phone was ringing, the answering machine was about to pick up, and I knew before hearing her small voice that it was Neva, just checking up on me.