2 March 2004 | Vol. 4, No. 1

Tits

by ANNA HAVENS

It's 6:30 Sunday morning, and I'm sitting on the couch Laura bought, listening to some televangelist while I look at a girlie magazine. No, I'm not some kind of pervert, nor do I get up early every Sunday to watch TV preachers. To explain further, I haven't been asleep yet. Lately, I have a lot of trouble sleeping. As for the preacher, well, he's just a voice in a house that gets more lonesome towards morning. It helps.

I don't even know which magazine it is I'm looking at. I have stacks of them, and I still prefer them to the online stuff. Watching a couple of girls get off on a computer screen has its good points, but I want to hold something besides myself in my hands sometimes, even if the only option is an old glossy like this one. I think the one I've been looking at is a Penthouse—I got pretty attached to some of the regulars, so I've kept almost all my back issues. I must have more of those now than any other, and maybe now that a lot of magazines are going out of business or online, they might be worth something. I really like those androgynous women in the back. I've always been open-minded about lesbians. The small breasts with big nipples on the one I'm looking at now remind me of Laura. That is, before her operation.

Too many things still remind me of Laura, even though nearly a year has gone by. It's fall here, and a few days ago I pulled a sweater out of the duffle bag I keep my winter clothes in, and there was a long blonde hair on it. It was a little too much, and I'd been having a good day up till then. If I had any sense, I'd move, but I'd still be reminded once a month when I got the surgeon's bill. Still, there've been a lot of signs that I should move. Like the last date I had, I invited the girl over, and when I went into the kitchen to get us a beer I guess she was looking around. She saw the plaque Laura bought when we moved in that said "Home Sweet Home" with that Bible verse on it about me and my house serving the Lord. Under that there's that American Gothic couple, (Laura said they were Amish), and mine and Laura's names under that. Not long after Laura left, I took a lighter and burned over most of her name. I actually meant it as sort of black humor, but I guess it was lost on this girl. When I came out of the kitchen, she looked at me strangely and said, "You really ought to take that plaque off your wall. It makes you look a little psycho."

The evening went badly after that, and I knew when she left she wouldn't be back. I still haven't taken it down. I suppose that has some kind of Freudian connotations, but I'm not sure. I only had one psychology class in college.

One thing I learned in that class is that I'm stuck in Freud's oral stage. My mom was pretty old when I was born, and she had to quit nursing me when she kept getting mastitis, an infection where a woman's milk gets all hard and her breasts burn and hurt. It sounds pretty bad to me, and I understand now, but I guess I didn't when I was a few weeks old and she had to quit nursing me before I was ready. Anyway, even though I say I understand, I guess I really never got over it. I still get off on hand-to-mouth stuff. I mean, I hardly ever smoke regular cigarettes, but I always have a few joints rolled up and ready. And I also dip snuff. I actually started doing that about the same time I started dating Laura, but then it was chewing tobacco. Most of the guys in my dorm played intramural baseball, and most of them chewed. It looked fun as hell, so I took a few chews off my roommate and liked it. Later on, I got turned on to dipping tobaccos, and I like that they're not as messy because there's less spit. But Laura never liked any of it, and when we first moved in together I tried to quit. But I guess it was too late by then, and it had already become a lifelong habit. Plus, I know I was a real son of a bitch while I was going through withdrawal—I mean, I heard my chemistry professor say that nicotine is as addictive as heroin. But I did my best for a while, until Laura told me she'd almost rather have my spit cans sitting around as deal with my hatefulness. So I went back to using, and she never got over despising the habit. And instead of things getting better when I quit spitting in cans, they got worse. We bought a dishwasher and I started using glasses for spit cups since I figured the super hot water would sterilize them. And I was always good about dumping the glasses out myself and putting them in the dishwasher. But Laura said no amount of sterilization could make her drink out of something that had my saliva in it. I didn't remind her how much she had once liked my French kissing. I guess it would have been just one more thing to fight about.

There were a lot of my habits Laura despised before it was all over, but by that point in our relationship, she had a few that I hated, too. Like, she always cut herself down so you'd have to build her back up. When we were first going out she even did it then, but I always tried to say what she wanted. It was almost always something about her breasts, or the fact that she didn't have any. Flat chests never bothered me. I mean, it seemed like I was usually attracted to girls without tits. It probably had something to do with my mom taking away the breast too early. But anyway, Laura always had some kind of derogatory remark to make about hers. After a while, it seemed like I couldn't say enough to reassure her—I guess if I was a girl in this culture, I might be the same way. But I did try. I remember telling her once, "For God's sake, you're the Homecoming Queen for Pembroke College, Laura. Don't you know every guy on campus would give his right nut to sleep with you?" And she just teared up. At some point, I quit saying anything. I figured if she really had that skewed a view of herself, nothing I said could make much difference.

Sometimes we went camping, and I thought it was one of those things we'd always do, especially after we had kids and grandkids. That was the way I thought—I mean, I'm really family oriented. Sometimes after we'd make love when we were camping I liked to think about us down the road, the two of us sending our kids to bed in the tent and then, when we could hear the steady breathing that told us they were asleep, grinning at each other like fools, throwing a sleeping bag on a rock still warm from the sun, then going for broke. Sometimes thinking about this would get me all horny again. But I figured it wasn't smart to tell Laura when we'd fuck more than once that it was her future forty-year-old self that had turned me on. She didn't like the way she looked now, and she really hated to think of herself with stretch marks and spider veins.

I remember the first time we went camping together. It was also the first time we stayed a whole night together. I was trying to get my old camp stove to work the next morning, and I looked over on the flat boulder where we'd had some good sex the night before. Laura was doing some kind of exercise that involved holding her arms above her head with her elbows bent and her hands clasped together. She looked really focused, and a little strained, and she kept repeating the same movement.

I asked her, "What are you doing?"

"Breast exercises," she grunted.

I had noticed before that her arms were muscular, and I found out she'd been doing this routine every day since she was thirteen. The results were these sexy, toned arms, but not much improvement in the breasts area.

There were so many times that I tried to talk her out of how she felt about herself. I'd try to appeal to her common sense by saying, "Why would you even want to have two big mounds of fat on your chest?" But she'd counter with something like, "If you like my chest so much, why do you have to look at girlie magazines full of women with big tits?" And it didn't even help when I'd mention the boyish-looking lesbians in the back. She always responded that I wanted to see two girls getting it on.

One thing that I still remember with a lot of guilt is what I said to Laura once after we'd moved in together. We were canoeing on Lake Norman, I remember, and we were arguing. She thought I should cut back on smoking pot. She said it took away people's ambitions, and if we ever had babies, they might be little mutants. To me it felt like she was always on me about something, so when she finally said, "If I ever leave you, it will be because I got tired of living with a brain-dead stoner who's going nowhere," I really lost my temper. Maybe it was the heat, too, and the shrill tone her voice always took on at a certain point in our fights. Either way, even though I guess you could say she deserved a little cruelty in return for what she'd said to me, she never got over my reply.

"Oh yeah? Well if I ever leave you, it will be because I got sick of living with a woman with miniature tits."

Pretty ugly, huh? Especially when you consider how insecure she was anyway. She cried so hard, like a little kid. Even after she quit, she was still sort of jerking and breathing funny. I felt terrible. I still feel terrible. But I did try to apologize, and I kept trying for a long time. She never would let me, and she never let me forget what I'd said. Even after her surgery, she'd still remind me of it any time she wanted me to feel like a jerk.

So you'd think we wouldn't have gotten married if we hadn't solved this problem. But we did. And right after our wedding, I mean before we even got in the car, we were already fighting about the same old thing. There we were, packed up and ready to head for the beach, but when I opened the car door and reached to help her in, she jerked her hand away.

"I saw you staring at Paula's boobs. You've ruined everything."

The tenderness I'd felt when I opened the door went away then and there, and even though I told her I didn't know what she was talking about (and I swear to God I didn't), and even told her I didn't know who Paula was, she wasn't listening to reason. Nothing calmed her down on the long drive to Fort Lauderdale, and all I could do was sit there and dread five days of bikinis and thongs and cleavage. I wouldn't even be able to wear sunglasses, or Laura would be accusing me of eyeballing every set of racks that walked by. I thought maybe, just maybe, if I lay on my stomach with my face in the sand the whole time, it might be a bearable honeymoon. That's how my thoughts ran. By the time we got there, we both had headaches, and her eyes were swollen almost shut from crying. I guess I don't need to say there were no fireworks in our honeymoon suite that night.

After we came back, I went to work for my uncle, who'd been doing real well selling modular homes. I could see a good future in it, and I thought maybe me and Laura could begin to save some money. Laura's good looks got her a job at the R.J. Reynolds racetrack. I'm not sure what you'd call her position—she answered the phone, did publicity stuff at shopping malls and car lots, and gave the winning drivers their trophy and a big kiss. I've never been jealous, and for some reason even that didn't bother me. At least not then.

One evening when I came home, Laura was waiting for me in the carport. I remember it was raining, and she looked beautiful in the light coming out of the kitchen. She was pretty excited about something.

"Take a look at this."

She shoved a cut out piece of newspaper at me. It was an article on breast augmentation, or, more specifically, implants.

"I've already called the plastic surgeon they mention in the article. He's in Greensboro, and he told me he'd set up a consultation as soon as I talked it over with my husband."

"God, slow down, Laura. You don't need these—and I doubt we could afford them. I mean, how much would they cost?"

"The consultation is around two hundred, and the implants are thirty-seven hundred—but that includes everything, including complications. And I checked with their finance office, and we can get a loan for under five thousand without having to wait."

And so there it was. She had everything set up before I could argue against it. But even that night, when we had better sex than we'd had in a while, I told her she was beautiful and that big tits would just be icing on the cake, and she replied, "But everybody likes it better with icing."

A week later we were in the plastic surgeon's office. A few days later, I made the initial down payment and signed the contract saying I was the responsible party. And then Laura was in surgery, and while she was having that done, I went to a lingerie store in the mall and bought her this sexy nightgown with a plunging neckline. The surgery took about two hours. I went to see her in the recovery room, all excited about giving her something I thought she'd love, knowing that finally our marital problems were at an end. It was hard to wait, but the nurse told me I needed to allow Laura time to recover from the anesthesia before exciting her in any way. She was lying on her side in a hospital gown, and I could see a little of the bandage where the gown had pulled away. There was some dried blood on it, and it made me kind of queasy. While I waited for her to wake up, I realized how much somebody would have to hate themselves to have this done, and that made me even sicker. But I reminded myself that she would feel differently now, that everything was going to be better, and so I just watched her face, and even though she was a little puffy from the drugs, I still thought she was a knockout. When she finally did seem totally conscious, I told her so, and I gave her the package. I waited again while she tore open the paper and unwrapped the tissue paper. I looked at her face to see her surprise, but I was the one who got the surprise. She had tears in her eyes, and when I asked her why, she broke down.

"I always knew you didn't like my body. You never bought me anything like this before."

And looking back, I knew there was not a thing I could have said that would have helped.

When we got home, Laura couldn't lift anything above her head for a few days, because she might open up the stitches that closed the incision under her C-cup breasts. The surgeon stressed that she needed to massage her breasts every night after the bandages came off— and that was a chore I happily took upon myself. For about three months, our sex life was incredible. I'd get harder than I ever had during her massage, and she'd get so aroused that sometimes she'd come before I was even close to finished. Sometimes we'd meet somewhere for lunch, even on workdays, and we'd throw in an extra massage just for good measure.

So it wasn't a big deal that I had to work a few extra hours to make the payments, because I was beginning to think that Laura's breasts were the best investment I'd ever made. They even seemed to make a difference for her at work. She was asked to travel to Daytona with one of the racing teams, and I sent her with my blessing. It was so nice to finally see Laura with confidence, and I was so smug in the newfound bliss of our sex life, that I couldn't foresee anything changing.

When Laura came back from Daytona a week later, she had definitely developed a cooler attitude toward me. The first night she was back, she said she was just too tired to have sex, although she did let me give her the massage and jerk off. The next evening I worked late, and I drank a couple of beers on the drive home. It had been over a week since we'd had sex, and I guess you could say I was in the mood for romance. When I came in, Laura was in the kitchen laying out a couple of steaks. I thought that looked like a good sign, so I came up behind her, put my arms around her shoulders, nibbled on her ear and whispered hotly, "Ready for your massage?"

"I did it myself in the shower."

At first her reply stunned me, but then I thought she might be tired of the same old routine. "Well, let's just go make love," I suggested.

"I really don't feel like it."

I still remember the cold way she said it. That was what made me mad. That, and the two beers on an empty stomach, I guess. Anyway, I wasn't very calm.

"Goddamn it, Laura, I haven't fucked you for a week. I'm working overtime to pay for your tits, and the least you could do is let me enjoy them."

I probably don't even need to say we didn't talk for the rest of the evening. And after that, things went from bad to worse. She never let me do the massage again, and the few times we had sex, there was no enthusiasm on her part. The last time, before we quit altogether, I felt like an animal, humping away, instead of a man making love to a woman.

Then things came to a head. She told me she was flying out to Colorado with the team for a few days.

"Okay," I told her," the separation will do us good."

But I should have known. And when she came back, she said she didn't want to lie anymore. She hadn't really gone out there with the whole team. She had gone with one of the drivers, and he thought he was in love with her. Looking back, I can't believe how calm I was. I asked her if she was in love with him.

"I don't love him, " she told me, "but I want to date again. I need my freedom."

I didn't know what to do. I think now that I must've been in some kind of shock, although I should've guessed long before that things weren't what they should have been. I slept on the couch that night, and a few days later I drove with Laura into Rockingham and helped her look at apartments. We were getting along better than we had in a long time. I don't know why I wasn't that angry. Maybe some part of me felt responsible, or guilty, or like maybe I was part of the whole thing that made women like Laura hate themselves. Or maybe, like I said, I was just in shock. But the anger did come, although it was a lot later, after I'd helped her move everything out and she was settled down in a new life that will never include me.

Since then, I haven't really seen her. Once, when I was driving to a work site in one of my uncle's company trucks, somebody who looked like Laura passed me, driving really fast, in a Porsche, a beautiful old 911. It was probably her, though she didn't slow down or wave if she recognized me. But I have talked to her. She called me a few weeks ago to tell me she'd filed for divorce. She had her lawyer send the papers, and they're lying on the coffee table right now, under three months worth of plastic surgeon's bills, and a letter from a credit agency, waiting for my signature. I don't know why I keep putting it all off.

It's almost daylight now, and the TV preacher I was watching finished his sermon, did an altar call, and cried a little while all the sinners were down on their knees. The one on the screen now is smiling and leading his congregation in a song about always finding the bright side. He's a real Norman Vincent Peale. I think about turning the set off, but the remote is across the room and I decide it's not worth the effort to get up. I try to think of the bright side of the divorce papers and the surgeon's bill. I mean, I have made some successful tries at getting women's attention in bars with the line, "You know, I'm still paying for my wife's breasts, and I can't even enjoy them." I decide it's not that bright, so I pick up a magazine and lose myself in the image in front of me: wet red lips and tongue against a swollen pink nipple. I wonder who's doing Laura's massage now.