The Limit as What Approaches Ka-ching

Sadie was relatively certain that she could calculate the length of any man's flaccid penis by the resonance his pissing made in her toilet bowl's water. It was a simple matter of trial and error on her part, not to mention being just freakishly good at math. Any man's stream of pee would have to be some sort of variation on a half-parabola, so it took her only a couple of hours using a plastic bottle and some baby calculus to figure out exactly what kind of gurgles were produced by what height of departure. And then it's only a hop, skip and a jump between average position (in meters) of genitals on any guy's body and knowing, within about a centimeter or two, what she's going to be dealing with. This skill comes in extra handy when she is encouraged by her bosses at work to take male clients out on the town and show them a good time, 'to further facilitate contractual easement' is what they say when they hand her the corporate American Express card that had this pleasing raised lettering on it, but also was this totally unplaceable color somewhere between platinum and dirt-brown, but which Sadie might as well thought was just the perfect color for disappointment.

'15.24 centimeters, so about 6 inches,' she said to herself as Scott Andrew Willey III pissed a pretty high-pitched solo into her lavender-capped toilet. 'I bet he won't even wash his hands before he comes out'. She was sitting on her leather couch with her legs tucked up underneath her, in a nightgown whose cleavage line went well south past the territory of revealing. Also bought (the nightgown, not the cleavage), on the convenience of the corporate card which had provided her and Scott a five-star dinner tonight, along with enough alcohol to fuel whatever secret ethanol engine drove them both.

"Christ, I had to piss like a racehorse," he said as he stepped out from the bathroom. He had definitely washed, but not dried his hands, which was somehow creepier, since they glistened. This man had spelled out his last name to Sadie at their introduction as such: "Double-you, I, double-ell-ee-why".

"I never understood that saying so well," Sadie said, stretching her legs back out until they touched the coffee table. She splayed her toes on the beveled edges. "Why especially do horses have to pee? Is that how the trainers make them run so fast during the derbies and everything, by force-quenching them with gallons of pressurized water?" Robert sat down on the couch next to her and undid his tie by pulling out the short tail first and then kind of disemboweling the rest of the knot.

"Sweetheart, I really don't know." He looked over at her and swung the tie limply over her legs, lassoing her kneecaps in a way. "I just know my Dad said it forever, and I guess just like this here," he patted his stomach and it made a noise like a fist in a catcher's mitt, "I inherited it from him."

Sadie knew there was, despite all her experience, still some awkwardness left in her ability to segue from post-dinner small talk into intimate bedroom invitations. In most cases, she balled up subtlety like a snotty Kleenex, and just hit the mark over the head with psychosexual cues that could only be misinterpreted by a eunuch. Or sometimes she wouldn't even have to prompt-- some of these guys were like priapic idiot-savants. Willey seemed like he was reasonably in control, so she decided to just roll with it.

"Oh, Scott, I don't think you should be so hard on yourself." She cooed over to him and wildly oscillated the aperture of her eyelids to emphasize, "I dig guys that have a little meat on them." She had a phosphorescent memory that made her realize she may or may not be reciting dialogue from the climactic scene in Mr. Mom. Hopefully he was too drunk to notice. She decided to press her luck: "Especially since more meat means more surface area that your sweat can evaporate from, which makes you cooler, which, baby," she curled her head up right into the cove of his neck, "makes me hotter." He looked down at her. If his eyes had been laser-pointers, her breasts would have had a sideways colon painted on them.

"Sweetheart, you are too good to be true." He slung his arms around her and leaned in to kiss her. Sadie thought he tasted less like anything they had eaten at dinner, and more like whatever exhaust his own personal brain must produce.

Her usual act in these situations is to maintain that she is too busy at work to have landed a boyfriend, and that is why she is still single, "but that you [client's name] pretty much captured my attention from minute, no, second one that you were within visual range. Practically arrested my heart and then restarted it with your pheremones." And so on and so on until the guy is safely cocooned in her down comforter with his clothes strewn in such a way that it looks like he exploded. There have only been one or two with whom she has actually enjoyed herself. The people at work actually paid for her to attend a series of workshops at a certain free-thinking consulting firm which taught her how to fake an orgasm. She was evaluated at the end of the seminar as a 'good panter and heaver', which secretly pleased her to no end.

Standard operating procedure for both pillow-talk and morning-after routines is to stick to a conversational buffet of reminiscing (or, in some cases for the more hungover, plot-synopsis) and carrot-dangling, as in, 'wow, you know it would be great if your company signed with us since that would provide not only cover for more and extended love-sessions, but also fantastic synergy and profit-servicing for Genero-dyne, Inc.' All of her lines were usually delivered while she was in the bathroom doing her makeup, to give the impression that this was a natural situation, and to assuage the fears of whatever executive was hurriedly gathering his wardrobe from the maroon carpet-sea that surrounded her bed.

When she was lying in bed that night, after having gone numerous rounds of sexing with Scott, she thought about what he had said, the last thing he had said that was not a grunt or a moan: that she was too good to be true. What would that mean-- that she had transcended everything-- that she no longer had to go to the bathroom? If you were too good to be true, did that mean you were false, and so your every gesture was lying, was fake? It seemed like a rather unfair conclusion to draw from what should have been a compliment. Little girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice, and so, Sadie thinks, when they become women, the portions are larger, more sugar and spice and more of everything nice. Does it ever grow stale? This pressed on her mind and made her twist her face into an unmentionable rotund ick of disgust. When she awoke in the morning, after dreaming of her mother standing over a row of gingerbread men, she realized, no, not at all. The perfect blackly miraculous way of getting around it occurred to her: it was why they always called beautiful older women well-preserved. It was so simple, even she could.

About the author:

Eliza Coolley says: don't fight phrases, baby. She lives in Pennsylvania where she nurtures her grudges with plant food and an north-eastern exposure.