content warning: some explicit sexual scenes
Since childhood, Bobby Goldfarb had been cursed with the affliction of being very good at math. In the fifth grade, when he and the other gifted students started long-dividing, he began to wish he had been left behind in the normal math class, where the boys and girls were still being introduced to basic fractions. But because he wore glasses, and because he did not need to be called into the nurse’s office twice a day to take Adderall like some of his peers, he was given a VIP seat at the front of Mrs. Helting’s math class for advanced students. He sat next to Molly Fischer, who he had been in love with since the end of fourth grade, and who he had missed terribly all summer long. His love for her began at the age of nine, then went away at the age of twelve, then came back for ages fifteen through eighteen, and then after that it went away for a very long time, until she became so busy and wealthy that she needed an accountant and he became, for the first time, a little bit glad to be so good at math.
She looked very different than she had in the fifth grade, different even than how she looked senior year. Now thirty-two, her teeth finally seemed the right size for her head. She still wore her hair in two low pigtails, and Bobby looked at her from behind his desk, transfixed, traveling through time and space all the way back to Mrs. Helting’s class to that one day right after a bountiful Christmas break, when Molly had let him borrow her GameBoy as long as he didn’t save over her file. He had played beneath his desk for a few minutes before Mrs. Helting caught him and confiscated it, leaving Molly in tears, her big teeth biting down hard on her bottom lip until she left little red marks the shape of bunting.
But she was here now, and she carried in her arms a thick manila folder.
“Bobby?” she said. “You’re Robert Goldfarb?” Her mouth hung open in an astonished smile, and she dropped her folder onto the client chair. “When I saw your name on the website I thought: no fucking way. But wow.”
“Yeah,” he said. He scratched the back of his neck. She sat in the chair next to the one where she had put her folder and he was in love with her again, sure to last from the age of thirty-two and onward. “Had I known it was going to be you I would have set aside more time.” He did not actually have the authority to make his appointments any longer or shorter than allotted, but the thing about being an accountant was that no one who wasn’t an accountant really knew much about how it worked. He didn’t like lying to Molly, but he had done it in the past. Little lies, about having beaten video games or seen the Jersey Devil. “Uh.” He pointed with his pen at her bulging folder.
“Oh. Right.” She coughed and pulled the folder onto her lap, and Bobby regretted acting as though he wanted to get straight to business. He really wanted to ask: have you gotten married? Do you wish I’d kissed you on any or all of the following nights: the Eighth Grade graduation dance, the opening night of Bye Bye Birdie when you were wearing a pink poodle skirt, the closing night cast party of Bye Bye Birdie when you were still wearing all of your stage makeup, at the Anti-Prom party because I rolled a pretty good joint, or maybe even the evening before you left for college and we all went swimming? He asked none of these things, and instead opened her manila folder and leafed through the papers. Invoices with receipts stapled to them, inventory lists, and other things that had nothing to do with taxes but had somehow found their way into the folder regardless.
“This is,” Bobby said. “This is a menu for Emiliano’s Pizza.” He handed it back to her from across the desk. She laughed and hid her face behind the menu. “I take it that’s not the small business you started?”
“No,” she said, tucking the menu into her purse. “I own a store.”
“What kind?”
“Is that important for doing my taxes?”
Bobby blinked at her, confused as to why she might be hesitant to tell him. Maybe, whatever it was, the whole business was a front and she was really selling drugs or something. He decided that he would probably still help her even if that were the case. He took a closer look at one of the documents. The letterhead was written in a sort of bubble font, the red ink faded to the color of a tablecloth square. Molly’s Garden.
“You sell flowers?” he asked, looking up from the document. He imagined her surrounded by them, holding in her arms a huge bouquet. Wearing nothing but that. The petals fall away one by one and it’s just her, her limbs like stems.
“That’s what a lot of people think,” she said. “I get some customers who come in looking for gardening stuff, and, well.”
Bobby flipped the page.
“What do you–” There was a copy of a handwritten list of sales. It was Molly’s writing, still the sloppy but legible cursive-hybrid of their youth.
9/5/2021 Leather mask – $20.80
9/5/2021 Plaster penis cast kit $52.00
9/8/2021 Dissolving lube beads, blue $15.60
9/12/2021 DVD, Goo Girls II: Slimin’ Around, $26
Bobby shut the folder, feeling his ears get hot. He looked at Molly, who was holding her head between her spread fingers as if she had a migraine.
“I knew this was a mistake. I’ll just do it myself,” she mumbled.
“No! No, it’s okay,” Bobby said, opening the folder again. “Just unexpected.” She wouldn’t come out from behind her hands. “Not that you own a sex store. I’m just surprised that the going rate for DIY penis casting is so steep.”
She snorted.
“It’s actually a steal. Most places make you drop your pants and do it on site,” she said.
“Fascinating.”
“So. Yes. That’s where life has taken me. Bespoke fucking paraphernalia.”
“What did you major in again?”
“Fucking. And English.”
***
He made K-cups in the office kitchen as she tried to organize her receipts. She had come unprepared, having taken every document in her desk and put it into this single folder, thinking that it would be perfectly acceptable to leave this part to a professional. But now that she knew her accountant was Bobby Goldfarb, she felt as though she ought to pull her weight and try to help him.
Poor Bobby Goldfarb, whose limbs never seemed the right length for his body. Whose hairline was prematurely retreating. Who she had liked, even like-liked, but had seemed to envision him in their future as boring and balding, and this premonition had kept her from admitting how she felt. It was true that his forehead had grown somewhat, highlighting the sharpness of his widow’s peak, and that he had what Molly assumed was the most boring job in the world. But it was also true that his voice still had the same raspy sweetness it had when they were younger, and his eyes were still gray-blue. And now he wore suits and had a desk.
She had the documents spread out on the floor of his office in ascending order of month. It was essentially a timeline of her success, starting with that first slow, destitute September last and ending with the most recent August. By June she had been bringing in more than enough money to pay her rent, her bills, her cable, her internet, her lazy takeout habit, her haircuts, her manicures, her cocktails, her shopping trips. And some left over. Enough to pay an accountant to figure it all out for her. She was a shrewd businesswoman in enough ways to make herself rich, but not very good at the kind of math it took to do taxes. Too long of an algebraic calculation. Months and months and months of numbers. Bobby was smart. Bobby’s ears had turned red when he realized what she did for a living. She thought about the plaster penis cast. Maybe she could give him a discount.
Bobby brought back two steaming cups of terrible coffee and sat on the floor across from Molly. He put the coffee between them, and she saw how the Styrofoam cups sat tenuously on the carpet. She took hers in hand, careful not to spill it on her papers.
He looked over the display she’d laid out. She watched as his eyes halted on one of her monthly supply lists.
“Yarn, thread, zippers, yards of fabric,” he said. “You make the stuff yourself?”
“Some of it. Masks and costumes.”
“Wow.”
She’d made many costumes in high school, for drama club. The easiest had been the poodle skirt, which was nothing but a big circle with a waistband.
“Do I spend too much on materials?”
“Not at all. It’s good, actually. We can write all of that off.” He dragged a hand across the paper, spreading receipts like playing cards. “Looks like you got yourself lunch that day. We can write that off, too.”
“Creative,” she said. She tried a sip of her coffee and it tasted like plastic, but she drank it, because Bobby was cute and he was willing to do a lot of math for her. “That’s not illegal?”
“I’ve never had a client get audited,” he said. “And IRS agents are infamous prudes. They’ll leave you alone just to avoid asking you about what you do for a living.”
“Really?”
“Maybe not. I dated one, once.”
“And she was a prude?”
“With me. Just not with my boss.”
She frowned. Poor Bobby Goldfarb.
***
They had been down on the floor for about two hours, although the amount of time it actually took Bobby to work was closer to thirty minutes. The rest of the time they had spent chatting but ultimately avoiding the topic of their mutual attraction, something that had flared wildly at the end of high school. Looking back, Bobby realized just how obscene the whole ordeal had been. Talking behind open lockers, pelting one another with kickballs to the point of leaving round, red marks. Dancing together in front of the balsawood stern of an ocean liner in the senior production of Anything Goes. Seeing her underwear in chemistry class when he bent down to pick up a textbook that had fallen at her feet, and how she didn’t do anything to hide it. One night he’d driven her home. They sat talking in his car for a long time. They were both going away soon, to different schools, but equally undeclared.
“You should do something with math,” she’d told him. “You’re so good at it, and no one else is. No one likes it, so you should go make a lot of money.”
“What about you?” he’d asked her.
“I just want to go away,” she had said, looking out the passenger’s side window. “I want to figure out who I would be in another place.”
***
The coffee, though unforgivable as far as coffees go, woke them up. It motivated them, but not to finish Molly’s taxes.
“You should come see the shop,” she said. “See what you’re dealing with. Or is that against your code?”
“‘Code,’” he said. “I think the council of elders will make an exception for me. They’re very sex-positive.”
And so they went. Arm-in-arm, like they were dance partners again, and at any moment the piano would strike and the lights would dim and Molly would sing in her mousy alto-soprano voice.
The shop was small and had a sandwich-board sign outside, unearthly delights inside written on it in chalk. Bobby looked up at the awning, above which the same logo as the letterhead shone in pink neon. Her name blinked M O L L Y. Molly! Molly! Molly!
“Shit,” she said, hurrying to unlock the door. “I didn’t turn the sign off. Fuck.”
She got the door open and ushered Bobby inside while reaching for the big light switch that turned off the neon. The shop was quiet without the buzzing of the neon. She locked the door behind them.
He wasn’t sure exactly what he had imagined the inside of a sex boutique to look like, but Molly’s Garden subverted all of his vague guesses. There were woven rugs all over the floor, toys displayed on shiny little pillows, outfits and masks and whips hanging from wooden spokes in the walls. How could he do her taxes when it seemed like the sort of place that relied on the barter system? On the pink walls there were framed erotic portraits, mostly Japanese woodblock prints of lovers in various poses.
“Wow,” he said.
“Good wow?” she asked. She stood by one of the display counters, nervously repositioning a fluorescent dildo. The price tag hung from a string tied around the shaft. Forty-five dollars. “Or bad wow?”
He looked at her hand on the gleaming rubber. In her fingers the absurdly massive toy looked more like a sculpture.
“Good.”
“I wanted it to feel like being inside a body.”
Bobby looked up at the vaulted ceiling, vaginal in its narrowness. Maybe she modeled it after her own. He imagined it sleek, angular, painted by a team of professionals.
“Look around if you want,” Molly said. “I have to go upstairs.”
“You live above this place?” he asked, looking up as if he could see through the ceiling
into her apartment.
“Yeah. Two-for-one deal. Does that change things? Taxwise?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Oh yeah.”
She grinned and gripped the banister.
“Check out the movies,” she said.
He always did what she told him. When they were little, she always picked the game. In middle and high school, she picked the movie or the destination. The places they would drive just to be away from their houses, spending no money and eating no food, just moving throughout the little world of the county in one-another’s second hand cars. She would say: Bobby, let’s play Detective, but you have to be the killer. And she would say: Bobby, drive me to the lake. And he would be the killer, and he would go to the lake. And now, because she wanted him to, he was looking at movies.
They were located in one of those fabled back-rooms, separated from the rest of the store by a curtain he assumed she had made herself from the contents of the discount fabric bin of JoAnne. The walls of this room were less refined, painted a discreet gray and plastered with images of pulp novel covers. Bobby found himself surrounded by a splendid array of painted boobs barely contained by ripped blouses.
Most of the titles seemed pretty standard. Cheerleaders, repairmen, delivery boys, delivery girls, monster men and pretty, helpless damsels. He liked all that stuff, of course, but what really caught his eye was a box set of DVDs, three-wide, with no discernable title. Just black labels with an embossed x printed on the spine of each case. He assumed at first that the subtle packaging connoted something like torture porn or good old-fashioned snuff, which meant he probably shouldn’t slip the box out from the tightly-packed shelf and inquire further. But Molly had told him to check out the movies, and had not warned him against any specific one. There was no price tag on it. It looked new, but not all the way. It had definitely been opened before, judging by the wear on the plastic snaps that kept the DVDs enclosed. He popped one of the cases open and was surprised to find that the disc was labeled only with a black marker. It said G-1.
Suddenly he felt as if he was holding something no one was supposed to touch. But if that was the case, why then, would Molly have left it in a place where anyone could find it? He pressed the plastic in the center of the case, and the DVD came loose from the package. Holding it with one finger through the middle, his thumb delicately touching the sharp edge of the disc, he took a look around the room. Having been compelled to open the movie, to touch it, he now realized that there was usually another step involved.
Next to the shelves there was a little TV stand and a little TV. It looked old beneath the shiny silver DVD player Molly had put there. Its screen was bulbous and seemed to radiate an ancient electricity. The same static of the televisions of their youth. There was a piece of paper taped to the corner: Previews only. Home is where the hard-on is. In front of the TV there was a small pillow, softened and indented from months of customers sitting on it during porno trial-runs.
He sat on the pillow, still holding the disc in his hand. He looked at the staircase, waiting for Molly to emerge from her apartment, waiting for her to rush over to him in a panic and snatch the disc out of his hand. He waited for a few minutes, listening for her footsteps, hearing nothing but the subtle buzz of the old television drawing power.
He rose onto his knees and reached for the DVD player, pressing the Open button with a trembling, outstretched finger. The tray slid out slowly, its plastic gears groaning until it clicked into place. Holding the disc between the frame of his spread hands, he gently settled it into the tray, and it fell perfectly into the round groove. The tray retracted more quickly than it had appeared, as if in a hurry to eat the disc.
There was no menu, and it occurred then to Bobby that maybe pornos never had menus. He wouldn’t know, as he had never before rented one. He was thankful that, in this age, everything he could possibly want to jerk off to was available online. But he admired the old-fashionedness of Molly’s arrangement. Holding the DVD case in one’s hand, taking it home, slipping one’s finger through the center hole. If it was a rental, wondering how many eyes had seen the movie before, if their orgasms were good, if they had watched it alone or with friends.
The title card appeared, a plain and shivering white font against a black background, as if it was the opening of a very old film. Bobby imagined a steam train chugging toward him. The name of the film was “Everybody Comes to Georgette’s.”
It starred a bunch of man-names he didn’t recognize and one woman-name that he did. Molly Fischer appeared in the same font as the title card, but smaller. And introducing: Molly Fischer. Her first film, apparently.
He was immediately hard, of course, just in the expectation of what he might see. He heard footsteps creaking above him and thought about her perfect feet. He was thrilled by the possibility that this, him seeing her in the porno, had been her intention. That the culmination of all of their scattered years of love should happen here, now, watching as the masked group of men undressed her, how she didn’t seem to mind, but minded just enough. Squirming a little, but smiling. Opening her mouth for their fingers. The camera zoomed in on the spit that dripped from the corners of her lips as they pressed onto her tongue, teasing out the saliva that she was now unable to swallow.
Molly, or Georgette, gaped as they tied her wrists to the bedposts. The kind of open-mouthed anticipation, her brow curling in happy disbelief. Bobby heard footsteps behind him. One of the men kissed her on the mouth.
“They paid me in cash for that,” Molly said, as if narrating a museum tour. “Completely under-the-table.”
“Good,” Bobby said. He reached out and pressed the pause button and the movie froze, the frame twitching, a still but shivering image of Molly with her head tilted back, hair knotting beneath her on the rumpled bed sheets.
Bobby turned around. Molly was holding something close to her chest, a small grayish box he then realized was a camcorder. She walked past him, setting the thing down on top of the television. She turned it on and it emitted a timid squeak. She groped at the wall, her fingers hooking into the eye hole of a mask on display, one he could tell she had sewn herself. She pulled it from its hook and turned to face him. She seemed to descend upon him all at once, like a sudden downpour. Her knees on either side of him, her hands behind his head, tying the mask on. The leather smelled real, and the slightly frayed edges obstructed his vision some. But he could still see her, pulling her shirt off, could still see the little glowing light on the camcorder and the frozen image of her ecstatic face on the television.
He saw her multiplied in pleasure. He tried not to look directly at the camera. He was in her and she was in him and he was being watched. He had imagined it countless times, being with her, but was shocked to learn that sex with Molly was just like regular sex, but with Molly. Her body was no more spectacular than anyone else’s, and their skin made the same horrible, wet, smacking sound as every other instance of coitus in the entire history of man. But it was good, and it was weird, and his mask fell off halfway through. She had surrounded his face with her hands as if there needed to be some barrier between them, still.
After, the camera recorded the statue of them, her body curled around his as he sat on the now-dirty pillow, his arms around her naked back. The pulse of the room. He felt that they had joined the library of films, that he had become part of the pornographic canon.
***
She left him lying there on the scratchy floor of the movie room and grabbed a sheer pink robe with fuzzy trim from off of one of the clothing racks. She made her way to the front of the store, barefoot, walking carefully as if there was someone she might wake. She grabbed a paper bag from beneath the register and began to tour the shop, stopping at every display, picking up some items and inspecting them. Those she thought Bobby might appreciate she dropped into the bag for him to take home. She wasn’t sure how else to thank him, other than paying him what she owed for his accounting services. She chose to also pay him in a curated collection of her finest products. She picked out a small novelty hourglass that, once the sand began to drain, revealed a drawing of a helpless, naked young woman trapped inside of the glass. Molly also chose a silk blindfold and padded handcuffs, as well as a glass butt plug of which she was particularly fond. She also threw in some coupons.
She loved poor Bobby Goldfarb. Now that he’d fucked her maybe he wasn’t so poor after all, and maybe it had been an act of pity, at least in part. But she saw no reason as to why pity couldn’t be an erotic emotion. He had looked so grateful underneath that mask, so uplifted by her generosity.
Her final gift was the proof. She popped the small cassette out of the aging camcorder and put it in the paper bag.
“You don’t want to keep it?” he asked. She pushed some of his hair back from his expanding forehead.
“It won’t sell,” she said. “No one wants to watch people have sex from that angle. Or when it’s just nice and not nasty and they’re not acting.”
“So why’d you film it?”
“I wanted you to know it was something I wanted to do, for sure” she said. “Also, I like to fuck on camera, Bobby. Even if no one will ever see it.”
But that night, she replayed it in her head. Their soft bellies pressed against one another, the hair on his chest chafing her skin. With Bobby it seemed like all of the usual ugliness of sex was forgivable. The smells, the sounds, how not everything they did felt like heaven. Together they were permitted to be two human bodies wound together in their imperfectness. Flaw to flaw like a hideous puzzle.
She remembered math class. That was the first time she loved him, because he was so smart but didn’t seem to like it. Any praise he got made him tuck his chin to his chest and look as though he might disappear or disintegrate. He would always splay his fingers over the grades on his tests, as if ashamed of having done everything right. How did it feel now? To have done her and her taxes? To have finally closed the circle of the two of them after all these years, in a musty little back room in a building she rented at a modest price, together, raw, and quiet?
***
When he brought her finalized paperwork, he came over with flowers. Roses that had not yet bloomed in full, swollen red buds with fledgling petals pursed like lips. She put them in some water, in a vase in the shape of a headless, naked man. She set the vase on the high window of the shop and displayed the accompanying card like a place setting. From Bobby. He smiled up at his own writing, certain now that anyone who came into Molly’s Garden would see his name, and the flowers, and know that the shop’s proprietor had a very thoughtful suitor.
In the movie room they watched Everybody Comes to Georgette’s: Part Two, a thrilling sequel that managed, in Bobby’s opinion, to outdo its predecessor by introducing some sapphic elements to the plot. To celebrate her maximum refund, they opened a bottle of prosecco and drank it out of pink plastic novelty flutes, the kind of thing used at Bachelorette parties that Molly sold in bulk.
She leaned her head on his shoulder and watched the fuzzy screen, looking thoughtfully at her own splayed body.
“Maybe you should be in a real one. Starring Robert Goldfarb, CPA. A man of many talents,” she said. “Together we’ll take the industry by storm.”
“A sort of lewd Fred and Ginger,” Bobby said. “Do everything backwards and in heels.”
“Or Johnny and June, maybe.”
In the film, an impish blonde woman knelt between Molly’s shaking knees. As if out of respect for the act, the men stood aside, watching in study, leaving it up to an expert. Bobby swallowed thickly, wanting very badly to fuck. She had promised to take him upstairs tonight, into the apartment. He couldn’t get the image out of his head that her living space would look very much like her childhood bedroom had, down to the boy band posters and the malfunctioning drinky-bird toy her grandfather had given her. He imagined that her bed was still a twin and that in order to go into the kitchen they would have to tiptoe around and then clean their messes so well it would look as though no one had ever been there. That or he would be walking into a leather-filled dungeon of sin.
In reality her apartment was as shockingly regular as their lovemaking. Lived-in, but not messy. Trendy, but not quite up to the minimalist standards of their peers. She pushed him onto her normal couch under the normal ceiling light on the normal evening. The street outside made its same nightly noises. They had the satisfactory orgasms of people who could one day get married or at least live happily in the same house. They went to bed not drunk but not sober, and in the morning the room was too hot and the sheets smelled like stale sweat. He didn’t want to go to work; she was snoring in the bright morning light that seared between the curtains and nothing had ever been quite so spectacular as this.