Marble-Head

by Lisa Martens

Wong and Jon were going out tonight. Maybe I’d have an electrocution party while they were gone. I knew where they hid the batteries. I’d have some fun. I’d put my neck in a tiny brace to keep it still. I’d think of being a mistress, all those months ago. It’d be a good way to remember myself—as young, sexy, and in my fantasies I’d be looking down at myself, and I wouldn’t hear the rattling inside my own head. It’d be like watching a movie, everything is seamless, there are no kinks in the knees.

I remember thinking it wasn’t anything he was doing wrong. I just wasn’t going to climax, even though I was supposed to. I was the mistress, you know, and mistresses are supposed to orgasm every time. Really, the guilt belonged to an injury from my youth, some loose cartilage in my neck that kept cracking back and forth.

My neck cracks every time I move. It’s like there’s a marble in my brain, and when I move too much to one side, that marble builds up enough momentum to swing to the other side of my skull, and it lands on the bone with a click. Back and forth, the rolling marble inside my head.

Whenever I hear it, I think of the marble. The marble is a deep sea blue. The marble is large, like an abnormal pearl. It’s rhythmic. And it kind of hypnotizes me, puts me in a trance, and so I never orgasm during sex. Just during masturbation, when I can keep my head still enough to prevent the marble from captivating me. Not that I’ll ever tell any lovers that.

He was frustrated, and after a while, I made him stop, even though he was so good and determined. Everything felt nice. But it was going to go around and around. The more excited I got, the more the marble would roll, and then I’d go back to not being excited, and over and over. So I pulled him out and pulled myself up and we cuddled. We didn’t say sweet things, but I kissed him a lot. Kissing counts as pillow talk.

I went the next two months without sex or masturbation. Maybe that sounds impossible or irrational. But that’s what happened. I missed the fun of being a mistress, but really, I’d had enough. I didn’t want to fake any orgasms. I didn’t want to spend the frustrating time getting myself off. I didn’t want to get new batteries for my sex toy or new batteries for those tiny self-electrocution nodes I attach to my head or get my curvy pillow out of the top of the closet.

Weird things get me off.

At about the two-month mark, I broke my celibacy with myself. I was watching a documentary of Hitler assassination attempts as my landlady told me about her daughter, Angel. My landlady is somewhere between a prostitute and a countess. I’m not sure how she got with my landlord, Jon, but I smell something illegal and money-related about the whole thing. Angel is not Jon’s daughter, but is my landlady’s daughter from a previous marriage. My landlady is Wong. She’s from China.

“They have relationship,” she said while rubbing her fingers together and raising her eyebrows. “He’s white guy. Has money. Very high up. More than ten years they have relationship. He buys her things. Bought her the car. Mercedes car. But my daughter, she’s bad. She tries to be friends with his stepmother, she’s more rich. But what’s this woman going to do to her? If she gets divorce, who cares? She comes to me. Problem is, I give to her too much. Her birthday’s in June, and she already wants birthday money, ten thousand dollars.” Her daughter’s birthday was in June. She wanted an advance on her present. I looked at my phone for the date. December seventh.

I wish I could ask my mom for a ten thousand dollar advance on my birthday present. Then she called Jon crazy since he takes acting classes.

Her, “He’s crazy. He’s not going be famous. I say to him, give up, you’ve tried for twenty years, give up. Like right now he wasting time.”

Me, “But he likes it a lot. And it’s Sunday. It’s his day off.”

Her, “Yeah. But I don’t like it.”

I tried to swallow my laughter and kept watching the near-miss assassination attempts of Adolf, including one where a bomb on the podium went off a mere thirteen minutes after the Fuehrer had finished his speech.

I sweetly missed that delicious sex, in the same way I missed Costa Rican fruit and that yo-yo from third grade. Sex had become something of the past. I’m sure if I ripped off my pants at that point, I’d have the genitalia of a Barbie doll. Plastic, straight-toothed smile, no hair except on the head, drawn eyebrows, no gut, and a straight seal where a pleasure hole should be. That was me. And here I was, listening to Wong flaunt the wealth of selling sex, of moseying up to rich dicks . . . literally.

Wong called Jon twice. His class had ended at one, and here it was, half past three, and he still wasn’t home. Where was he? What was he doing? What was taking him so long? He should come right home after.

I found these people on the Internet. They were nice enough to let me live in their spare bedroom for only six hundred dollars a month. After five months, I was just now realizing how psychotic these people were. I was sure they wouldn’t rob me . . . because Wong had tens of thousands of dollars somehow readily at her disposal . . . and Jon was a baby-boomer, very immaterialist compared to his common-law wife. Wong would hit Jon with keys, threatened to call the cops if he shielded his face, and talked about random men who “paid” her for undefined services. Jon just forgot absolutely everything I told him. He forgot that my mother lived in Texas, that I had a ten-year old uncle, my hair color, and if I’d paid rent. The last one was always in my favor; he assumed I’d paid when I hadn’t. That was nice.

Sex evaporated. The batteries in my vibrator were dead. I wasn’t doing a great job of making money or having orgasms. I couldn’t even remember the exact details of any of the assassination attempts on Hitler, except the explosives used in the documentary looked like purple play-doh.

My stupid damn neck. All the chiropractors had made it better. The pain went away. The ache. But they couldn’t get rid of that rolling ball in my brick brain, the one that made me retarded. Even when my lover, in a candle-lit room with the rain outside, picked me up by the backs of my legs and placed me gently on his countertop and rocked in and out of me, I couldn’t be in the moment enough to climax. There we were, in my mother’s empty apartment in Texas, the apartment she’d ditched to sleep on her office floor because we’d gotten into another fight over my dad. I was filled with rage that should have turned to passion if the marble didn’t fizzle absolutely everything.

My lover with delicate hands, hands that didn’t do physical work, so they were nice and gentle for skin-touching. This was good.

That night, I might pull out my electrocution machine. It was meant for the muscles in my back, for the large muscles. I wasn’t supposed to put it on my ass or on my temples. I pretended to give myself electroshock therapy and whimpered and held in screams.