Johnson Peters had been badly named. Granted, his first name had been his mother’s last name, and his last name was that of his father, but ever since he’d been old enough to learn even a handful of phallic euphemisms and some good verbs, Johnson had fretted that a dismal erotic fate awaited him somewhere down the line.

Perhaps it was for this reason that Johnson took great care to become an excellent lovemaker, attentive and discerning and working constantly to improve both his skills and stamina. He worked out six days a week; he read books on cunnilingus and dirty talk. In fact, ironically, Johnson became well-regarded in the minds of his many partners as a world-class lover, for many of them the very best. This, paired with his occupation as a successful cartoonist, made Johnson Peters quite a catch.

Indeed, he suffered no problems in the arena of whoopee-making until the second winter of his marriage to his wife, a Portuguese woman named Marguerite. It was Marguerite’s birthday. Johnson had hand-drawn a card for her featuring a cartoon version of himself lying seductively atop a three-tiered cake and the words “Happy Annibirthary” lettered in gold ink all around. They had a nice dinner and cake and champagne. When he made love to her that night, Johnson looked down at her below him, screaming wildly as if in agony, and he realized that he hadn’t experienced that level of ecstasy since before he’d proposed to her. 

Afterward, he lay beside her and asked, as he always did, “How was it for you?” 

“Hmm… like the very best sneeze I ever had,” Marguerite smiled. “And you?” 

Johnson thought about it. “It was like… like being eaten by a pack of wolves, but in a good way,” he said. It wasn’t completely true, but he didn’t want to admit it, perhaps even less to himself than to Marguerite. Instead, he stroked her olive skin and joked that she’d been created by a tiny army of silkworms. “They carried you over very carefully from Portugal, where you were originally woven,” he explained. “And I hate to tell you this, honey, but it’s getting to be quite expensive to have you dry-cleaned all the time.”

Marguerite laughed and kissed Johnson’s neck. Cherishing her giggle, Johnson felt the itch of worry. He did not think, as anyone else might, that perhaps his lack of satisfactory climax was normal, due to age or stress or simply being with the same person for awhile. Rather, he felt the dark cloud of fate encroaching on his sky and he thought, with no small amount of dread in each stroke of his fingertip to Marguerite’s skin, This is it. This is the beginning of the end.

***

“It’s totally normal,” Johnson’s doctor said as he invited him to turn his head and cough.

“But it used to be so much better,” Johnson said. “I’m afraid it’s all fizzling out. Now I just…” He shrugged. “Come.”

“You’re, what, forty?”

 “Thirty-nine.”

Dr. Franks nodded, shrugged. “This is just what happens as we age, and it’s only going to get worse. Try thinking of someone at the office.” The doctor’s eyebrows ticked up.

“I work from home.”

“Oh.” Dr. Franks frowned. “Well, look, I can give you Viagara. Or I can give you samples of something else. It’s still pretty new, though, and the manufacturer wants testimonials, so if you’ll report your experience and sign a waiver, it’s free.”

Johnson scanned several pages of the waiver before asking, “It won’t kill me, will it?”

“Nah,” the doctor assured him. “But what a way to go.”

***

Johnson watched Marguerite getting ready for bed that night. She peeled off her shirt and pants and rubbed sweet almond lotion into her elbows. A little nightgown went over her little butt. He loved her butt, and he loved how she sang along to Joni Mitchell songs while she cooked, and he loved the weird alpaca ponchos she wore in the winter and fall. She had an overscrubbed look to her face, ruddy and strong. Johnson felt the urgent need to never fall out of love with her, to never be bored of or used to her, to the feel of her silkworm-army skin. He unwrapped one of the tiny red pills he’d gotten from Dr. Franks, put it on his tongue, and drank it down.

“Well, aren’t you a tall drink of water?” Marguerite said in a faux sexy voice. Her soft- tongued accent made her actually sexy. Johnson set his glass on the nightstand and Marguerite bent past him to talk to the glass. “I just wanna pour you right down my throat.”

“Hey!” Johnson playfully spanked her.

Marguerite feigned ignorance. “Oh, did you think I was talking to you?” She laughed as Johnson threw her to the bed.

They made love as usual: Position A, Position B, Position C, Position D. Occasionally they mixed it up and switched A and B, or swapped in Positions E, F, and even G when they were drunk, but not tonight. At first, Johnson didn’t feel anything different. It wasn’t like with Ecstasy, where every touch felt nauseating and miraculous. It was just regular sex until they neared the end of position D, when Johnson noticed that the softness of Marguerite’s skin was so potent that it had seeped beneath his own skin. He had been made velvet. But then his whole being went rigid, inexplicably and irreparably sharp, as though he were made of glass shards and his extremities were swords, and it was painful and terrifying and he worried about Marguerite until it all transformed into molten wax, his entire body a melted candle, hot and soft and thick and he was poured into a jar shaped like his wife.

He felt inescapable, liquid. Bolts of lightning, small and large, tore through every muscle and his blood was replaced with electricity. His heart pounded with light and heat. He smelled snow and sea air. The very core of Johnson’s soul, his child self and future self and the self that had existed before the universe exploded into being, vibrated and sang and he could actually hear it echoed on the quivering ends of his hair. He felt it bursting in him like a strawberry breaking between the teeth. He fell through a hundred oceans before collapsing, defeated, onto Marguerite.

“How was it for you?” she asked, her voice muffled beneath the weight of him. 

“Pretty good,” he managed to reply.

***

Johnson and Marguerite couldn’t get enough of each other that weekend, and each time was better than the last. Marguerite had never felt anything had been lacking, but this weekend Johnson looked at her like he’d just met her, with a hunger and curiosity she hadn’t realized had recently faded into simple familiarity and affection. For Johnson, something had been replenished inside that he hadn’t experienced since he was a teenager. Yet it was amplified, like a high school a capella quartet had grown into a Handel choir performing in the Grand Canyon.

Each climax was an out-of-body/multisensory event. Johnson smelled flowers and licked sugar from a live flame while dancing on the moon. He snorted whiskey dust and tasted Camembert while being massaged by sunlight. He sang by way of sweating, each droplet its own song, and smelled cinnamon and let his hair be pulled by blizzard winds. Johnson wore out his wife, as lustful men are wont to do, and on Sunday evening, after their seventeenth round that weekend, Marguerite suggested a break. “Let’s just watch some TV for awhile,” she said. “I’ll warm up some brownies.”

Johnson flipped through the channels as she put a plate in front of them. She touched his arm as he passed their favorite sitcom. “Wait, wait, I love this one,” she said, snuggling up against him. Johnson wrapped a blanket around them as the main character made a heroic speech regarding fried foods.

“They may take our lives… but they will never take… our bacon!” 

Marguerite chuckled in Johnson’s arms. Johnson nodded.

“Oh, come on, you always laugh at that one,” Marguerite said, a verbal elbow in the rib. “You don’t find it funny anymore?”

Johnson considered. “It just seems… silly.” 

“Of course it’s silly, it’s a bacon joke.” 

“I just can’t believe they’d compare it to the First War of Scottish Independence.” 

Marguerite blinked. “But you love bacon.” 

“Not that much.” 

Marguerite wriggled out from under his arm. “Are you telling me that if an army invaded the United States and threatened to take away your bacon, you would not fight?”

“That wouldn’t happen.” 

“Yes, but theoretically.” 

“Theoretically, that wouldn’t happen.” 

Marguerite rolled her eyes and leaned into him again. “Well, you used to find it funny.”

Johnson nodded again as he chewed on one of Marguerite’s famous Grandma brownies. They were very good. Not dancing-on-the-moon good, but good.

***

The next day, Johnson sat at his drafting desk, sketching out cartoons for his weekly column and brainstorming captions for them. Marguerite was spending the day at her sculpture studio, and the apartment was filled with silence and the utter lack of sex. Johnson didn’t know how he’d ever gotten anything done in his life. His focus was broken constantly – a siren whined outside, the clock ticked in the kitchen, a winter sunbeam blazed light onto a plant on the windowsill. Johnson shut the closet door to avoid thinking of Marguerite’s underwear in the hamper.

Johnson tapped his pencil on the desk and commanded himself to come up with at least ten possible captions for the scene before him. He thought he’d had an inkling of a good one when he’d first drawn it last week, but now he couldn’t remember. It was the aftermath of a clown car crash, and spilling haphazardly out of the windows were horns, balloon animals, giant- shoed feet, polka-dotted shirts, flowers squirting water. One clown had his mouth open, talking to the other one.

Johnson furrowed his brow. Something about… something silly, he thought, staring at the page. Nothing came to him, so he adjusted his goal to just five captions. Accident, he thought. Clown accident. Clown car pileup. Silly scene. Bad luck. Bad timing.

After an hour, Johnson wrote down the only caption he could think of.

One clown says to the other, “Oops!”

Johnson shook his head in frustration, tugging at his hair. He would much rather be thinking of sex, or better yet, having it, or better still, cutting right to the end. But instead of daydreaming of Marguerite’s strong thighs or the red flush of her periclimactic face, all Johnson could imagine was the roar of hot volcanic rock on his hands, the juicy tartness of neon lights kaleidoscoping in his eyes, the embrace of a hundred screams on his skin as he came for, like, ten years.

He was texting Marguerite, begging her to come home early, when a message from his friend Marcus cut in.

Yo, free tix to Laff Along 2nite U & Marg wanna come?

Johnson chewed his lip and bobbed the ball of his foot. A night out would interfere with his sex time with Marguerite. Then again, maybe this was just what he needed. The clowns mocked Johnson from the page; he rolled his eyes and typed Hell yeah! to Marcus. Maybe some comedy would help clear his brain of the creative block that kept him from coming up with any caption funnier than “What a mess!” Johnson looked down at the text he’d been drafting to Marguerite and wondered if it was too much. He sent it anyway.

***

“I know, honey, and I’m very pleased that you want so badly to make love to me,” Marguerite was saying as they walked from the subway to the Laff Along Comedy Club, their boots crunching in the snow. Johnson held her hand as she plodded over a precariously tall mound of ice. “But I cannot just drop whatever I’m doing to come home and blow you.” Marguerite’s accent wrapped around such a practical sentence made Johnson’s spine tingle. He longed for the fifty tongues that licked the walls of his ear canals when Marguerite’s voice punctured his own pleasure. He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek.

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I mean, I want to,” she said, her chin high and shoulders shrugging. “But I have my own things I need to do, too.”

At the comedy show, Johnson had three gin-and-tonics and, pleasantly numb, basked in the happy laughter of everyone around him. But, oddly, he could not force even the jolt of a giggle from his own stomach. He got the jokes, even enjoyed them, but no more than one enjoys a clever tagline on a yogurt label. 

Instead, Johnson found himself distracted by the darkness that bathed him, Marguerite, and the rest of the crowd, and the beams of light that hugged the performers. He picked out different kinds of laughter tapping at his ears: Marguerite’s joyous, throaty laugh; Marcus’ booming roar; Marcus’ girlfriend’s silly, high-pitched titter. Someone in the way back snorted, which made the comedian onstage tease her, which made the person snort harder, which made the whole crowd laugh uproariously. Everyone but Johnson. Johnson could only smile.

After the show, Johnson locked himself in the bathroom and frowned at the mirror. Comedy shows were one of his favorite pastimes. He’d never been to one and left without a single laugh. The performers were funny, he knew it. Not only had everyone else laughed uncontrollably, but Johnson himself had found them funny. It just didn’t have any effect on him. The pit of his stomach, from which thirty-nine years of laughter had sprung, felt as still and empty as an abandoned well.

Johnson inspected himself in the groovy red light of the bathroom, pulled the corners of his lips up, his teeth apart, and whispered, “Ha.” He let his face go slack and there he was again, looking like a robot in resting mode.

“Ha,” he said a little louder. “Ha!” It sounded more like an angry shout than anything. 

“Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!” He felt the rhythm of amusement in his diaphragm, his abdominals, but not the magic that caused it, and Johnson knew he sounded like a fucking weirdo so he left the bathroom and went to smile and nod through a late dinner with his friends.

***

“Darling,” Marguerite said that night as Johnson sat on the bed and swallowed a throatful of water that carried the pill to his stomach.

 “Yes, darling?” Johnson answered. Marguerite was standing by the bed, wearing only her favorite Bowie t-shirt. He went to lift it from her body, but Marguerite stopped his hands.

“Are you okay tonight?” she asked. “All night you seem, I don’t know how to say it, maybe melancholy?” Marguerite was proud of her mastery of multisyllabic, emotionally complex words like that.

“No, I don’t feel melancholy,” Johnson assured her. His hand circumvented the hem of her shirt to caress her hip bone.

“But you didn’t laugh at all, all night,” she said. “It’s not like you; you aren’t sad?” She ran her hand through his hair as she stood over him. She tucked a strand behind his ear. 

“Nah, I don’t know, I’m just in a funk,” Johnson shrugged. He reached between Marguerite’s thighs but she tsked and stepped back. 

“Stop trying to fuck me and talk to me,” she said. “This has been several days and I am worried. People in a funk don’t want to have sex. There is no such thing as funky sex.” 

“Sure there is,” Johnson said, rising from the bed and taking a step toward her. 

Marguerite’s face contracted with worry. “See?” she said. “You should have laughed at that. Or maybe made a counter-joke.” 

Johnson scoffed. “There’s nothing wrong. Come lie with me; that will make me feel better.” He briefly wondered how long the pill’s effect would linger in his body. 

“Wait!” Marguerite stepped back, then was quiet in thought. “Okay! Hey, what do you call it when you have sex with twins?” she asked urgently. 

“I don’t know, what?”

“A doppelgang-bang.” 

Johnson nodded. “That’s pretty good.”

Marguerite made her little sound of indignation. “Okay… okay, what did the farmer say when he lost his tractor?”

Johnson shrugged.

“‘Where’s my tractor, where’s my tractor?!’” Marguerite burst into laughter even through her furrowed brow.

Johnson shook his head and smiled. “What does that even mean?”

“I don’t know, it’s just silly.” Johnson took another step toward Marguerite but she held her hands out. “Wait.”

She kept her hands in front of her but wore a look of concerted focus. Her face slowly contorted. Her eyebrows scrunched up and her lips pressed earnestly together. A tiny grunt of exertion escaped her.

“What are you doing?” Johnson asked.

Marguerite squeezed her eyes and held her breath and closed her hands into two fists until the tiny squeal of an adorable little poot squeaked out from under her t-shirt. She opened her eyes and nodded with a self-satisfied, devilishly charming grin.

But, to her dismay, Johnson just nodded and caressed her arms. “That was cute,” he said with such apathy that her stomach dropped.

“It was not cute, it was funny,” she said sadly. “There is something wrong; are you depressed? Is there another woman? Is it me, are you tired of me already?” Marguerite’s face quivered on the brink of collapse.

“No!” Johnson said, his voice quick with exasperation. “I’m fine, you’re fine, now let’s just stop talking and go to bed. Hey!” he said as though he’d just come up with a marvelous idea. “Let’s make a baby!”

But tears were already running fat down Marguerite’s cheeks, which was almost a sure sign that she wouldn’t want to have sex. “No,” she sobbed, “I only screw my husband, and you are somebody different. I will sleep on the couch tonight.” She reached past him for a pillow.

“Don’t bother,” Johnson muttered, then grabbed his coat, boots, and bag, and left the apartment, slamming the door behind him.

***

Johnson went to a hotel near Brighton Beach, where he holed up and masturbated for days while the gray sky outside littered the Atlantic with snow. He scarcely left the bed as he brought upon himself wave after wave of psychedelic stupor. Days turned into nights into days into nights as Johnson ran through every fantasy he’d ever had, sometimes four or five times each, recalled memories of sexual encounters, and eventually moved into the bottomless depths of internet porn, though it yielded less powerful episodes than the creative powerhouse of good old imagination.

After the first several dozen rounds, Johnson became quite adept at controlling his climactic events, and could, for example, focus on a theme such as “blue” and his hallucination would include the wet gush of a ripe blueberry bursting from its skin while the cathartic melodies of Stevie Ray Vaughn trembled through his veins and ocean waves flooded and tumbled around in his eyes. Or “animal print,” where, at his highest moment, Johnson was making love to Brigitte Bardot in a Tarzan bikini, but she was somehow at the same time riding a tiger, then Johnson himself became the tiger, and all around he heard the guttural echoes of panthers growling and bears roaring and everything smelled kind of sweaty.

Johnson’s refractory period was not long enough to bring him back to reason, and really only lasted the time it took to doodle a cock-and-balls on the hotel stationery. Therefore, after half a week of near-constant self-abuse and surrounded by a sea of empty jumbo bottles of lubricant, Johnson Peters had not run out of stamina, semen, or enthusiasm, but he did lose the function of both of his hands. He’d realized early on that he’d have to alternate, which had indeed extended his impromptu vacation, but, by the fourth day, his hands had knotted up in painful cramps, ending as nothing but a pair of fleshy, paralyzed claws that curled in on themselves.

Johnson painstakingly Googled with his knuckles. As he browsed an escort website, he noticed one girl, Lola, who looked sort of similar to Marguerite, though with straighter hair and duller eyes. He felt a pang in his chest, and all in a rush he missed Marguerite’s tenderness, her dancing to TV jingles, the way she looked across the room at a party, and he regretted everything he’d done to end up alone in this room. Nevertheless, he clicked on Lola’s profile and knuckled in the address of the hotel.

***

Marguerite trudged through the snow from the subway to the Brighton Hotel and stood looking at it from the outside. A easy-looking girl walked in past her, and Marguerite wondered how a person could survive in this weather wearing those tights with the holes in them. She peered up at the windows, wondering which one held her husband. He could only be here; she’d called all of their friends already, and this was where they always went on staycation. Johnson loved their little soaps.

After Johnson had left the apartment, Marguerite had done what she always did in times of crisis: she cleaned the place from floor to ceiling. She’d angrily vacuumed and sadly scrubbed and came upon wrapper after wrapper of something called Gasmacil. Each little packet was red with a shiny silver lining and bore the slogan, “Gasmacil: Come to Your Senses.” When she looked it up online, Marguerite was sad all over again and tried to call Johnson. She called him over and over each day, then thought that maybe she should give him space to come back to her. That’s what her mother would have advised. “A dog doesn’t run to the handle of its leash,” she’d once told Marguerite.

So Marguerite had spent a few days alone in the empty apartment. She got a lot of work done. She reorganized the kitchen. And she missed Johnson into the middle of her bones.

Now, she had had enough. Marguerite had declared to the empty apartment, “Fuck this shit!,” punching the air with her favorite American phrase. Johnson was her husband, her ultimate love, and she had waited too long for him to give up now. She had watched all of her friends and sisters and cousins get married before her, had even almost married Paolo Alterio, before she’d met Johnson. With Johnson, she’d known on the first date: he was funny. Paolo Alterio wasn’t funny.

Johnson was so funny he made Marguerite’s stomach hurt; he was so funny he made her look younger. Marguerite wiped the tears from her eyes and went into the hotel. She loved that motherfucker, and she was going to get him back.

***

Lola covered her nose with a couple of fingers, not very discreetly, as she kicked empty bottles out of her way to clear a path to the bed.

“What’s the matter?” Johnson asked.

 “Smells like an orgy-orgy in here.” Her voice was flattened by a heavy Brooklyn accent. 

“An orgy-orgy?” 

“Yeah, like all your orgies had an orgy.” 

“Oh. Sorry.” Johnson looked up into Lola’s unfazable eyes. He’d never felt so pathetic. “Can you…” he nodded to his boxers, “… for me?” 

“Sure. What happened to your hands?” Lola asked as she knelt. 

Johnson blushed. “Um… carpal tunnel syndrome.” 

Lola stopped short at the sight of Johnson pantsless. He was rubbed raw, his skin bright red and blistered and broken in places. 

“Uh… I think you should get this checked out,” she said, taking him gingerly between two fingers and inspecting the underside like it was a rotten carrot. 

“I don’t have any diseases, I promise,” Johnson insisted. But Lola was already on her feet.

“Sorry, I don’t mess with that kind of shit,” she said. 

“Please, I just need –” 

Johnson was interrupted by a knock at the door. Lola opened it to Marguerite, who, shocked by Lola, instinctively slapped her. 

“What the fuck?” Lola shouted.

“I’m so sorry, I was just surprised,” Marguerite said, reaching her hand to Lola’s shoulder like she was a sister of some kind. She looked to Johnson on the bed as he covered himself up, and her heart was filled with melancholy. She looked back to Lola. “Did you just screw my husband?”

Lola snorted. “How could I? Have you even seen his pecker?”

Johnson bowed his head as Marguerite swallowed her anger and embarrassment. “Get out,” she said.

“My pleasure,” said Lola, gone in a flash.

Marguerite Peters sat on the bed beside her husband and found the page saved on her phone. “I need to read this to you,” she said. She began, “‘Some evidence has indicated possibility of addiction. Many cases have reported headache, fatigue, dizziness, numbness, irregular heartbeat, depression –’”

“What is that?” Johnson asked.

“It’s the side effects from your stupid jizz pills,” Marguerite said. Johnson hung his head. “Yeah, I found them. I’m your wife. So, ‘irregular heartbeat, depression, suicidal eedee-’”

“Ideation.”

“‘Suicidal ideation, aggression, increased libido, loss of libido, loss of memory, loss of appetite, loss of impulse control, loss of humor.’” Marguerite looked up. “Did you even read this?”

“I’m so sorry,” Johnson said. “It wasn’t anything because of you –” 

“I don’t care why,” Marguerite interrupted. “But you cannot take them again.” 

“Never?” her husband’s voice trembled. “No – Marg – you don’t understand. It’s like nothing you can imagine. Here, we’ll have you try one – ” 

“No, my love.” Marguerite looked pleadingly into his eyes and took one of his claws in her hands. “I miss you. I miss your laughter in the flat and I miss your silly little drawings in the mirror steam. I miss your goofyball voices and when you narrate ‘The Bachelor’ like it’s a nature show. I don’t want to be the only funny one,” she said, a tear sliding down her curvaceous cheek. “It’s like a tree falling in the forest: if I make a joke and you don’t laugh at it, it just disappears.”

Johnson smiled. “I don’t think that’s how the metaphor goes.” 

“I don’t care how it goes,” Marguerite sniffled. “Just come home and stop being an idiot.”

Johnson sighed and looked to the floor, littered with wadded-up tissues and shiny pill wrappers, said “okay,” and kissed his wife’s cheek. He lingered close, relishing the taste of wet salt on her skin.

As Marguerite tenderly helped him back into his clothes, Johnson Peters felt a heavy mixture of both relief and sorrow that he’d never again have the dazzling, profound Gasmacil experience. He bid a sad see-ya-later to his child self, his future self, and the self that existed before the universe. He leaned on Marguerite as they ventured out into the snow, rough and raw in the cold night air. They went home and had a long and happy life full of mediocre sex, just like everybody else.

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