The Nakeds Read online

  “I didn’t think you’d want to do this yet. I knew you weren’t ready.”

  “Ready? Do you realize how patronizing that sounds?”

  “I knew you wouldn’t want to open your marriage, Nina. At least not without reading the book. The O’Neills give some very interesting points.”

  Nina, angrily reorganizing the students’ folders in her lap, corrected him. “Make points. They make points.” She inched away from him, so that part of her leg and hip and shoulder were just off the bed. She looked at Azeem, thinking about the many ways they might break apart, him moving to his cousin Siad’s apartment in downtown Los Angeles, she and Hannah settling back into their tiny family of two. She’d miss him. Despite this latest idea of his, she’d miss him. And Hannah would miss him too, perhaps even more than Nina would. She held on to the folders tightly so they wouldn’t fall again.

  “I thought that maybe it was something you could think about. You know my friend Bernie from school? He’s from New Jersey—a city called Nutley. You remember Bernie?”

  She nodded.

  “Anyway, he told a group of us at lunch about living in the suburbs and a game the neighbors used to play. These are middle-class people in a middle-class neighborhood. With kids and cars and two-story houses. All that stuff. And on the weekends, they have parties and everyone brings a dish.”

  “I know where this is going,” she said.

  “Wait, wait,” he said, insisting. “These married couples from Nutley get together and share food. They have a potluck, then they toss their business cards into a bowl, and at the end of the night, they reach into the bowl and pull out a business card.”

  She looked at him, irritated.

  “That decides who they sleep with. There are winners and losers, of course,” he said.

  Nina thought about winners and losers. She thought about board games from her childhood: Operation and Sorry and Monopoly. She thought about rules and instructions and wanting to win. She thought about losing, about making the wrong decisions, clumsily lifting out the wishbone and the horrible buzz that followed, informing you that you killed your imaginary patient; she thought of buying too much property or not enough, running out of those little sheets of colored money. “Makes me sick just to think about it,” she said. “The randomness. The running into whatever jackass you slept with the night before while getting your mail or pulling out of the driveway.”

  “If we did something like that—I’m saying if—I’d want us to like the people we slept with, to have more in common with them than living on the same street.” He was quiet a minute, thinking, and then said, “We go to The Elysium. We take off our clothes with strangers. I wonder what it would be like if they weren’t strangers to us—if we got to know them.”

  “We are getting to know them.”

  “It’s not intimate. It’s, how you say?” he paused, looking around the room for the word, rubbing his fingers together, searching. Then, finally: “Surface. We’re on the surface with them.”

  “It’s plenty intimate to me.”

  “All I ask is that you read the book, then.” He held the paperback out to her, an offering.

  “Azeem.”

  “It’s short—you’ll buzz right through it.”

  She hesitated.

  “Please. For me?”

  She looked at him and weighed her options. “I’ll read it,” she said. “But don’t expect me to change my mind.”

  “We’re nakeds,” he said, as if being a member of The Elysium were an obvious precursor to swinging.

  “Nudists,” she corrected him. “We’re nudists, Azeem, not nakeds. There’s no such thing as a naked.”

  5

  MARTIN HAD been in Las Vegas for more than seven years and he hadn’t studied restaurant science or business management like he’d planned to because all he really needed to know was how to hold shit above his head and serve people, how to say hello, introduce himself, and listen up. He didn’t need college to teach him how to read body language and understand people. He knew how to make a customer feel like a bigger man or a more attractive woman, and he knew when to stop with the pleasantries and move away from the table with their orders memorized. He had methods, connections he made with a face or body: The fat one wants the trout steamed, the thin one wants lobster slathered in butter, the old married couple wants their coffee black with extra sugar.

  “Customers aren’t your friends,” his dad used to say. Flattery was fine, even necessary, he’d tell Martin, but knowing when enough was enough was just as important as getting their soup out quickly.

  Martin had left Manhattan Beach, his studio above the garage, his job, his surprised parents, sister, and Penny, who he probably loved; he gave his car to a grateful Tony and bought a bus ticket east. He’d intended to make it to New York City or at least New Jersey, but he hadn’t even made it past Nevada.

  It wasn’t that he liked Las Vegas, but early on, the city liked him and those first months all he did was win. Poker, craps, blackjack, and the nickel machines: He went between them, and always, at the end of the night or the beginning of a morning, a man in a white vest would be counting bills into Martin’s palm or the machines would spit out so many heavy coins that he’d need a bucket to collect them. The stickmen and the boxmen knew him by name, and even the pit bosses at Harrah’s and Caesars Palace patted him on the back or shook his hand hello. He felt important, like a big man, and by the end of the first month, up a couple thousand dollars, he moved into a two-bedroom apartment, bought a waterbed and a corduroy couch that wrapped around the living room. He bought pots and pans, a coffeemaker, a broom and a mop. He bought a clock radio and a color television. He adopted a four-year-old cat from the animal shelter downtown that he named Sadie.

  When the two thousand dollars was down to eight hundred, Martin got a job waiting tables at one of the best restaurants in town, right in the center of the strip. He wore a dark blue uniform and kept his shoes shiny and his face clean-shaven. He was polite, reserved even, and didn’t joke around at the tables too much, which was usually fine. Once in a while, though, he’d get scolded for his moodiness and he’d miss his secure position back home, the restaurants his parents owned, where he could have an off day without worrying about losing his job.

  He told his mom and dad that he was getting a kind of experience he couldn’t get with them, a fair and tough experience, no special treatment, and that he’d return to California one day a better man, ready to work hard and manage their restaurants, if they still wanted him to do so.

  Initially his parents were angry that he’d missed the grand opening of their third restaurant, but eventually they got over it. Now that he was living in another state, they seemed to like him more. Even his sister had matured and seemed to like him.

  On the phone, he told Sandy about his cat. “Four years old?” she said, sweet and concerned. “She must have been abandoned. You know you saved her life?”

  He told his mom about his couch and apartment, described them in detail, which was what she wanted. He told her what he saw when he looked out the window: big hotels, orange and yellow lights, a movie theater marquee, and a liquor store.

  He told his dad how good he was at blackjack and poker, how even the machines loved him, and he could almost see the pride on his father’s face.

  “Lucky, like me,” he said. “Did I ever tell you about the time I won a hundred bucks in Atlantic City?”

  “Yeah.”

  “A hundred bucks was a lot of money back then.”

  “I’m sure it was.”

  “Could have paid your rent and car payment.” His dad paused. “You don’t need a car there Marty? I hear you don’t need a car in Vegas,” he said, answering his own question. “You know you’ll need one when you come back home. You will come back home someday, won’t you?”

  6

  NINA AND Azeem were on their way to the grocery store and she knew there were things he wanted at the store, yes, but there was al
so the thing that didn’t cost money but was still very expensive. She was certain it would break them. He was driving and she was staring at his profile, his strong nose and good chin, and she felt his request in the car with them, to open her marriage. It was with them wherever they went, gas station and mall and dinner table. It was there when Nina sat on a beach chair in the backyard, getting some sun, while Azeem watered the lawn. It would be with them at the market, where he’d look at various women, and then at Nina with a dumb pathetic plea on his face, a plea she’d return with a shaking head. It made her feel like a strict, unyielding mother keeping her little boy from the sugar cereal.

  If Nina so much as glanced at another man, Azeem nudged her and winked, conspiratorially, as if they were in this big wide world together with their secrets and every stranger was some ripe opportunity. Sometimes it was almost funny, but mostly it was irritating. “Enough,” she’d usually snap. And what was especially not funny was how openly he looked at other women now, in front of her, like she was one of the boys.

  He called this gawking appreciation, and he thought he was sly and discreet, which he wasn’t. And he thought it was OK, legal, and playful, since he’d sworn repeatedly to Nina that swinging was something he would not do, could not do, would never ever do, without her permission and, more importantly, her participation. He didn’t want to cheat. He wouldn’t be like her first husband and do things behind her back. He knew how much that had hurt her and it wasn’t his intent. He promised. “If, at some point, we both decide to try it out, fine,” he said.

  “There’s a revolution going on,” he kept reminding her. “Let’s join in. Why starve?” he’d say.

  “Who’s starving? We’re certainly not starving, Azeem.” And she’d think about all the sex they had, how they seemed to have even more of it since his request, which she didn’t understand. She thought she should be physically pulling away from him, but her body disagreed and seemed to insist on holding on. That part of their life together seemed healthier and more exciting than even the active couples she read about in those books he gave her.

  She carried Open Marriage around in her purse, but hadn’t started reading it. Every time she opened it, she changed her mind and slapped the book shut. Maybe he was right, that she’d surprise herself and agree with the O’Neills. Maybe she was afraid. She looked at him now in the car and thought about gluttony, about having too much of anything, a horrible abundance. “I give you enough,” she said.

  • • •

  Nina thought Azeem was wrong when he doubted her open-mindedness. When he first asked her to visit the nudist camp with him, she didn’t hesitate. She wasn’t shy and had no trouble taking off her clothes. That first day, before they left the house, she hummed in the kitchen, packing falafel sandwiches with sprouts and hummus, homemade tabbouleh, and purple grapes. She spent time with the sex scholars who were Azeem’s teachers at the university, and didn’t flinch when one of their more unusual dinner guests showed up wearing a black T-shirt that said Fuck in tiny red letters on her chest and You on the back. She did have to agree with Hannah the next morning, though, that the T-shirt was off-putting and more than a little bit unfriendly.

  She went to see the movie Deep Throat with Azeem and had even tried out the technique she’d seen on screen when they got home. She read Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying and loved it. She went with Azeem to seminars on female ejaculation, male impotence, and the phases of sexual response. She learned about the orgasmic phase, the resolution phase. She learned about the sex flush and myotonia, which had to do with muscle contraction. She was particularly fascinated by the carpopedal spasm, the spastic contraction of the hands and feet during orgasm. She’d often wondered about all that clutching. It meant something to her finally when she thought about why she didn’t want to sleep with other men and was her private answer to Azeem’s persistent question. Something about sex and love, she thought, something about marriage, was about clutching itself, it was about the opposite of release. It was about grasping, holding dear. Azeem might be studying the sex act, the mechanics, the way things worked, but it was a pity, a shame, that he didn’t understand the very basic need to hold on.

  In addition to Nina opening her marriage, Azeem had been talking about his family back home lately, especially his younger brother, Mustafa, who was sixteen and an epileptic. Azeem thought that if Mustafa came out to Los Angeles for an extended visit, doctors here could cure him. He wanted to send his brother home a new boy, a boy without epilepsy, and so he’d been trying to talk Nina into buying Mustafa a plane ticket. It wasn’t the money, or maybe it was—things were stressful since Azeem had quit his job to study full-time—but it was also the idea of a new person in the house, a stranger, someone who she’d have to put effort into getting to know, and mostly it was the secret she’d have to keep while getting to know him: that Azeem and she were married, and together with Hannah, they were a family. Azeem had said he didn’t want his father and mother to know the truth, not yet, too soon, they’re not ready, and when she pushed him, he admitted that they had a girl, a neighbor, just nineteen, all picked out for him. It was bad enough that he intended to stay in the States forever; how could he admit that he wouldn’t accept the bride they offered? He wanted his brother to come visit and he wanted Nina to pay for the plane ticket then pay for the doctors’ visits then pay in a personal way by pretending they were, what, very good friends? What would the boy think when they went to sleep in the same bedroom? she’d asked him. And he said he’d deal with it. He said it wouldn’t be hard for him to pretend, it was something he was willing to do for his brother’s health. Didn’t she care about his little brother’s health?

  He called Mustafa his little brother, but there was nothing little about him. He was obese. When Azeem showed Nina and Hannah pictures of his family, he’d skate right over Mustafa’s image with a huff of shame. Nina would glimpse at a dark-haired boy in a big pair of jeans, but was unable to make out the details because Azeem shuffled along quickly, one picture behind another picture, his tall and pretty sisters behind his smiling parents behind his handsome cousin Ali, on whose head shot he paused, willing Nina or Hannah to comment on the young man’s shiny dark hair, intense black eyes, while poor, fat Mustafa was on the bottom of the pile, the whole attractive family on top of him.

  When she asked Azeem about Mustafa’s weight, he made excuses. “It’s the medicine,” he said. “He holds water.”

  “Retains water,” she corrected.

  “Holds water makes sense too,” Hannah said, defending him.

  That’s a lot of water, she wanted to say, but didn’t. That’s a lake or an ocean, she was thinking, but Nina stayed quiet because that kind of familial shame had a way of shaming everyone who witnessed it.

  When Nina was alone in the house, she had searched Azeem’s desk for the blue airmail envelope, thick with photographs, and found it sandwiched between a couple of his textbooks. She was careful not to disturb his mother’s letter when she lifted out the pictures. She knew what the letter was about because Azeem had already told her about the girl he’d never met who was waiting for him to return, the neighbor with very good teeth and straight black hair—a girl named Raina who his whole family was anxious he marry.

  “Like Fiddler on the Roof,” she had said.

  “Like what?”

  “Never mind.”

  Nina knew that Azeem hadn’t told his mother that he was already married to an older Jewish woman with a teenage daughter, that he was a nudist, that he wanted to open that marriage and invite others in, that he was attracted to almost everyone, and that what he was studying wasn’t just psychology but sexuality, and that he had no intention of ever going home.

  “Will you ever tell her about me?” she asked Azeem early on.

  “I haven’t told her about me,” he’d said.

  Mustafa’s photograph was at the bottom of the pile. There he was with his legs like short trees and an enormous belly that spilled over his slack
s. There he was between his mother and a washing machine, a clothesline suspended across whatever room they were in, going right over the woman’s head and across the boy’s fat neck. His girth dwarfed everything: little washing machine, little mom, little couch in the corner, tiny lamp, tiny cat, little newspaper or notebook.

  Now, Azeem turned in to the parking lot, pulled into a space farther away from the grocery store than was necessary. “It’ll be nice to walk,” he said. He turned off the car and they got out. He put his arm around Nina’s waist and pulled her close. “You smell good,” he said, inhaling her hair, her neck.

  In the vegetable aisle he suggested she open her marriage without opening his mouth or moving his lips. They were deciding between white and yellow onions. “It’s good to have variety,” he said, pulling a plastic bag from the roller. He licked his fingers and used them to separate the thin sheets of plastic. He shook the bag out, picked up an onion from each bin. He held them in his palm the way another man might have held a set of pool balls, solids or stripes. “White Bermuda or Vidalia?” he asked her. And then, pointing with his chin at a bin across the aisle, “The red ones are good too.”

  “Depends on what we’re making,” she said. “I like the yellow ones for soup.”

  “What about for cucumber salad? I was going to make falafel and tahini this week.”

  “Hannah’s been complaining about a sore throat. I was going to make chicken soup.”

  Azeem looked from one onion to the other, uncertain. He looked at the red ones across the way. “We could get a few of both.”

  A young woman came up from behind, her arm reaching between them. “Just real quick,” the woman said. “Can I grab a couple of those?” She smiled at Nina, who backed up and smiled too, giving the woman space.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” Nina said.

  Azeem looked at the woman.

  Nina looked at Azeem looking at the woman.

  “My boyfriend loves these,” the woman said. She was chatty and pretty, with big brown eyes and a ponytail of blond hair that bounced behind her. She wore a red T-shirt and denim cutoffs. Her legs were tan and long. “Eats them raw. It’s the strangest thing,” she continued, talking fast, looking only at Nina. “But it’s not that great to kiss him after a couple of raw onions.”