armpit and sweat sock mixed with a healthy dash of pool chlorine. Every time he’d been here, the same retarded man in his caricature’s costume (thick-rimmed drugstore specs, YMCA logo on his T-shirt, too-short shorts, high tops with black socks pulled up knee high) was vacuuming the premises. Were those the only clothes he owned? Was vacuuming all he had to do? “You missed a spot,” David told him, and pointed, and the man thanked him and obediently pushed his machine toward the phantom dirt. David cut through the men’s locker room, a place, he thought, only Dante could have dreamed up. It wasn’t that it was rank or befouled. In fact, it was quite clean and well-lit, the freshly laundered towels as warm as baked bread. By the sinks, combs stood submerged in canisters of Clubman cologne. But there were monsters here, of the human kind, men built of circles and blocks attached to each other who all seemed compelled to walk around naked, blissfully unaware, apparently, of their own deformities, as unselfconscious as children. Dripping with sweat from the steam room or sauna, their skin as red as cooked lobsters, they approached other men as casually as if they’d bumped into each other on the street. “Leland,” one said, “how the hell are you doing?” and the other replied, “Slim, how the hell have you been?” I’m not looking at your penis, David imagined was the subtitle followed by, I’m not looking at your penis either. But he looked. It was strictly an underworld fascination, exactly what Virgil was on to when he offered the tour: such a broad selection, such a wide range of shapes and sizes, you couldn’t help but look. Elephant penises, horse cocks, dog dicks, Jewish men’s shlongs, and donkey dongs. Penises with one nut descended, with one nut, with no nuts at all. Micros on giants, macros on midgets, and vice versa. Black men’s penises, the heads as pink as a dog’s tongue, in sizes confirming and debunking every stereotype; Oriental penises confirming and debunking same. Circumcised penises, the foreskin pulled as tight as a facelift, so little give as they hung flaccid that it looked like they’d hurt getting hard. Even pierced penises—Prince Alberts, they were called—with the hoop poked into the shaft and out the urethra like an ox’s nose ring. It was a panopticon of penises, a field of phalluses, and in the presence of so much dick all David could think of was how no laws seemed to govern the universe—no guaranteed gifts for the good or punishments for the bad, no fairness in what the Lord giveth or taketh away, except for the undeniable fact of corporeality, and thus one’s own death.
He spotted Alice in the weight room. She was on her back, balanced atop an enormous ball, her feet planted on the ground, another ball held in her hands above her substantial chest. Her face flushed, she moved the smaller ball back and forth across her torso while her trainer counted out reps.
He decided to tail her the next evening. He had an excuse to leave home before she did, Jack Stoney’s annual birthday bash. David had asked Alice to come but she declined.
“Let me guess,” he said. “You have a meeting.”
Her eyes flashed. It was the anger he didn’t understand. No, it was how long she could stay angry that baffled him.
She got out at the Unitarian Universalist church on 76th and Central Park West, where a group of men and women stood smoking outside.
He waited several minutes before entering, but it was easy enough to find her. He heard her voice down a long hallway lined with rooms full of support groups, AA meetings and Al-Anon and NA. Co-Dependents and Debtors Anonymous. He peeked in the door. Everyone inside was fat, men who had to sit off to the side of foldout chairs, women whose shoulders and bellies were so enormous that it seemed the purses they held in their laps measured the closest their hands could come to touching. She was telling a story—he couldn’t see her, but every word she spoke was clear, Alice interrupted now and again by calls of support, by yeas and amens.
“You know what I mean,” Alice said. “You know what it