Written for rentfichallenge #3.
Disclaimer: RENT is Jonathan Larson's.
You know what it's like to see your girlfriend looking at another man's penis.
Not on television. You don't mind a picture. Maureen had tapes. She had magazines. She had toys. That's one thing. You never considered that she might think about the pictures when she was with you, not how she tossed them aside casually, saying she just liked how it felt to have them.
It is altogether different to watch her ogle a flesh-and-blood uncut penis dangling between someone's legs while that someone walks across the apartment, naked and oblivious. He eats cereal. Milk drips on his chest. You sit on the couch not reading the newspaper, knowing her dark hair faces you and her big eyes face her.
You never mean to look. What you mean is to ask him to stop. You mean to offer, sarcastically, to lend him a pair of shorts. You see a body you're not ready for. His features fit together perfectly like a grade school art class cut-out collage. His eyelashes flutter. Flutter. Like a man. His strong fingers wipe milk off his chest and his chin. His mouth sucks the edge of his hand. His pink lips ring the base of his thumb. His belly, concave; his thighs, they're the color of raw fish.
And the thing dangling between them, longer than yours and sheathed with the flap you don't have, it makes you forget what you wanted to say. It makes you forget how to breathe.
"Nice, Roger," Maureen smirks. She means it. She admires it, like she never admires yours.
But yours is shorter. By a lot.
"Huh?" He glances down. "Aw, shit." He goes back into his/her bedroom, and you didn't need that whoop of appreciation from Maureen or the sight of a reddish-brown tattoo sun streaming on his lower back.
(It will be gone in two weeks.)
"Where's April?" he calls.
"She's in the bath," Maureen replies.
Roger emerges from his bedroom (T-shirt, leather jacket, blue jeans that used to belong to Maureen) and knocks on the bathroom door. He knocks with his knuckles. "April," he calls. "April!"
"What?" Then, "Fuck off. I'm shaving my crotch."
He chuckles and turns away. "Okay, babe."
You don't know how it happens. You have vague memories, recalling the same way you recall the dream from March of your senior year in high school where you and your sister had the same work-study occupation with Ann B. Davis as your boss. You asked him out. Guy talk. And then you were cramped into a seat at a sticky table with a Guinness Stout and a basket of fries.
"The Guinness is mine."
Roger swaps the smooth, dark liquid for a dark, bubbly one. You sip your Coke. He sips his Guinness.
"Uh. Roger. Listen, I wanted to talk to you."
"Yeah," he says. He sets down his glass and wipes his mouth on the back off his wrist. You're broiling. Roger hunkers in his jacket. He isn't asking. He's acknowledging. He knew that.
"Could you please not walk around the apartment naked?"
Roger snorted. "Sorry," he said. "Yeah." He rubs his face. "Sorry." And he seems to mean it. "Things okay with you and Maureen?"
"Yeah," you admit as though it couldn't matter less.
He nods. "I'm glad. You treat her good." He knows how to speak better. You know and he knows that his usual diction exceeds that of the average straight-A high school student. Is he depressed? Is he distracted?
"How's April?"
He shakes his head. He doesn't look at you. "Not so good."
"What's wrong?"
"She's too dramatic. Too much. Everything is important. Everything needs to be everything. She wants to know if this song is about her. She wants it to be, she… needs it to be about how great she is. She needs to be validated. But the thing is, she knows how great she is. She doesn't hate herself, she wants to hate herself."
"No one wants to hate himself." Freudian slip? You know he knows you mean you. You wonder if you know what you know.
Roger drinks. "April does. She's too submissive."
His eyes distance themselves. Roger seems to sink into himself while his vision finds a plane you can't see.
"You're unhappy."
He nods. "April would never leave me. She wouldn't think to. I could be the drunkest, most violent asshole in the world." No, he couldn't. He could never raise his hand to a woman, or a child, or Collins, or you. "She'd still stay. But last week she asked me, 'If you had to fight for me, would you?'"
I shrug. "She wants to know you love her."
"Too bad."
"Leave her." It's the right thing to do.
Roger shakes his head. "Don't think she could handle it."
You sip your Coke and eat a French fry and wonder aloud, "Would you?"
He turns to you. "What?" he asks, confused and distant.
"Fight for her."
Roger sighs. His eyes adopt that distant look again. You see he regrets what he is about to say. You see he knows the right answer, and the answer he should give, and he wrestles with his conscience before giving up the truth. Suddenly you don't care so much that your girlfriend looks at his penis.
"No."
end.