Michael Czyzniejewski
The day I turned twenty-nine, it hit me: I should be with Freytag. I should spend the whole night with Freytag. I should maybe even get serious about Freytag. Definitely, though, any sex I would have should be had with Freytag.
I was getting too smart to be sleeping with anonymous weirdos, and too old to come down with herpes or VD or an unwanted kid. I was also way too needy to face my thirties alone. Freytag, who’d been in my life since kindergarten, was reliable and steady. Twenty-two-year-old me would have considered him classic settling, marrying the first guy who asked me. Twenty-nine-year-old me recognized him as modern settling: someone who wouldn’t beat me up or cheat on me with my hotter cousin—both of which had happened, more than once, with multiple guys.
Freytag flipped for beef bulgogi for my birthday, slogging it to my apartment with a grocery-store Bundt cake. This is how we spent most of our nights in our late twenties, only we usually went Dutch, and no Bundt cake. Freytag and I sprawled on the couch, licking frosting from our fingers, watching some cop procedural. This seemed as good a time as any to broach the subject. I asked him if he wanted to stay over.
“It is getting late,” he said. Cake crumbs fell from his mouth, camping on his chest. He was already nodding off.
I informed Freytag that a sleepover wasn’t what I’d meant, him on the couch while I went to my bedroom and closed the door. I described how we should have sex instead of not having sex. We’d been not-sexing for almost twenty-five years and there was no reason for that to continue.
“Oh,” he said.
I felt stupid as soon as I’d asked, especially since at the exact moment I put it out there, the TV detectives found a woman in an alley who’d been murdered and raped, maybe in that order—it looked as if I’d seen the dead lady and got horny. I’d also ended the proposal with an Eh?
To my surprise, Freytag was game. “I thought you’d never ask,” he said. He stood up, put the TV on mute, and got naked.
I sat, somewhat shocked, still holding my cake. Freytag had taken all of a second to lose his T-shirt and running shorts, no underwear to be seen. He was hairier and paler than I’d imagined (or preferred), a skinny guy without fat but also devoid of muscle. He had an unfortunate mole in the middle of his chest that made it look like he had three evenly spaced nipples. His penis was pointing up at a forty-five-degree angle; it wasn’t big, but it did appear absent of disease. His readiness made me consider how interested he himself had been in that murder-then-rape scene.
I was the one who started this, I reminded myself, and stripped down to just my panties without standing up. I stopped there and asked Freytag if he had any protection. I didn’t want STDs or babies from Freytag any more than I wanted them from some fauxhawked shitbag.
“Got it,” Freytag said.
If Freytag had shown up that night in just that shirt and shorts, where was he keeping prophylactics? He reached into his shorts’ pocket and pulled out a circular wooden box, a bit larger than a hockey puck. It was some kind of mahogany, sporting a shiny varnish finish. A circle of pearls bedazzled the lid.
“You had that in your pants?”
Freytag nodded.
“You carry it around with you?”
“Everywhere I go.”
I still didn’t know what was in the box. Rubbers? Some sort of man-pill? I hadn’t known Freytag to be so sexually active that he carried protection, let alone in a decorative box, his personal tabernacle. Part of the attraction of Freytag had been the assumption he was clean—for all I knew, Freytag was still a virgin.
Freytag flipped open the box and held it out to me, offering it for inspection. He smiled, awaiting my approval.
“Is that what I think it is?” I asked.
Inside, the box was lined with a rich sapphire velvet, all of which surrounded a cream-colored rubbery dome.
“I don’t know what you think it is,” Freytag said. He pulled the dome out of the velvet, holding up and out to me, on its edges, as if it were a photo he didn’t want me to smudge.
I recoiled back into the sofa, covering my breasts with my crossed arms. I confidently shook my head NO.
Freytag announced, “I present to you, fair Lilith, my Great-Great-Grandfather Güntar Freytag’s diaphragm.”
***
Freytag and I met when we were kids. We were library rats, addicted to books, to where a story could take us. He and I attended all the same schools, took the same buses, bought candy at the same corner store. Freytag hadn’t started out as my best friend, but he was always lurking. I saw him more than I saw my mom, with whom I shared a bedroom. By the time we finished high school, Freytag and I were like brother and sister, albeit the kind no one believes are related because of how different we acted. I went from the loudest little girl in every grade to the wild child by junior high. Senior year, I got expelled, too many suspensions, the other girls hating me for sleeping with their boyfriends. Freytag never left the library, always quiet, always studious, on the path to college, gainful employment, and respectability. When we grew up, he started hanging around my apartment because no one else was left for either of us. He served as the familiar and steady presence I desperately needed. I liked to think I served the same purpose for him, only opposite, giving him street cred, a taste of danger to offset all his books. We’d do our TV nights, but mostly, we’d just pore over books—after all, that’s how we met.
Freytag and I hadn’t ever done the deed, let alone kissed, despite all the opportunities. We were like an old married couple, but without the history of having had sex then falling away from it. Freytag would push stray hairs back behind my ears, letting his fingers linger, stroke the side of my head. I’d rest my hand on his knee, sometimes higher, relax like that for an hour without a twitch. To an outsider, we might have been lovers, but we just weren’t. I dated a revolving door of men, criminal-types, guys with neck tattoos, motorcycles, and parole officers. They were beautiful men who made more bad choices than I did—that’s how I challenged myself, finding someone who scared me. If the guy started to act nice, I’d find someone who’d be even worse—this wasn’t hard. I called these men my experiments. I wanted to see just how far away from happiness I’d wander.
Turns out, it was pretty far.
***
I didn’t have sex with Freytag on my twenty-ninth birthday. Or let him stay the night. Or start a loving life together. I wasn’t keen on using a fresh diaphragm, so there was no way I was shoving anything that old—or used—up inside me.
I had more questions than needs: Why did Freytag’s great-great-grandfather have a diaphragm? Would I have felt differently if it were his great-great-grandmother’s? Why didn’t they just throw it out when she died? Most important, who’d worn it since? There was no end to the mystery surrounding Freytag’s diaphragm.
Things between Freytag and me chilled after that. When I’d informed him we weren’t having sex, that his great-great-whatever’s diaphragm was freaking me out, he said OK and shrugged his shoulders. He restored the diaphragm to its lush case and got dressed. Despite everything that had happened, he stayed and watched the rest of that cop show—the woman’s little brother was the culprit—and then Freytag went home. That was the last I’d see of him for weeks.
***
The next time I ran into Freytag was on a date: him with another woman, me out alone. I was walking downtown and spied Freytag through the window of an Italian restaurant, one from which we’d ordered a hundred times. I wanted to tap on the glass and say hello, then remembered the last time we spoke, both of us putting clothes on after he pulled out that antique prophylactic.
Freytag’s date had pink highlights in her blond hair—at least the parts that weren’t shaved, exposing most of a long, wicked python tattoo curling around her skull. She was a me-type, only two or three years earlier, still wide-eyed and unpredictable, thinking thirty was a million years away.
I snuck across the street to a coffee shop, got myself a latte, and sat at a table out on the sidewalk. I started reading a novel I picked up from a pile of used books. It was about this guy who was using a pocketknife to cut down the California redwood tree growing in his back yard because it was blocking his satellite feed. I spent more time watching the Italian restaurant than reading, wondering how long Freytag would wine and dine the python lady. In all our years of friendship, we never once ate in a restaurant—always carryout or delivery. Maybe the python lady was someone he really liked. Maybe he’d changed since he left my apartment that night. Maybe I shouldn’t have sprung sex on him then changed my mind.
After an hour and a lot of tedious sawing with that pocketknife, Freytag and his special lady friend emerged. Freytag looked like he ordered a car on his phone, then he and the python lady kissed. At first, it was a peck, like maybe they were just friends. From there, the plot really took off. Their arms and legs were all over each other, intertwined, a two-headed octopus stretching for a run. Their faces looking like they were trying to eat through to the back of each other’s head. I thought I’d see Freytag rip his clothes off right there, like he had in my living room, that the patrons Bendinelli’s Bistro were in for a show.
What happened instead was this: Freytag whispered something into the python lady’s ear. The python lady nodded. She began sucking on his neck, major hickey time. Meanwhile, Freytag reached into his pocket and pulled something out: It was that fucking mahogany box! He flipped it open, held the dome out for the python lady to see. That’s when the python lady stopped consuming his neck and slapped him across the face. She took off down the sidewalk and yelled back, ordering Freytag not to follow her.
I wanted to call out to Freytag, to comfort my old friend. Before I could do anything, his car pulled up and he hopped in, speeding away in the opposite direction of the python woman.
I walked halfway home—over a mile—before I realized I’d left the tree novel on the table. I thought about going back, but didn’t. Really, where was that going?
***
After seeing Freytag rejected over the heirloom diaphragm, I felt bad for him, but also vindicated: It wasn’t just me. After he’d left my apartment that night, I felt bad, like I’d hurt his feelings. Maybe I’d insulted his family, his ancestors. I’d think that for a bit, then an hour later I’d be like No way! This wasn’t his family’s pearls or some hand-sewn quilt. This was a birth control device older than the invention of the goddamn automobile. The fact he wanted me to use it was only slightly more fucked up than how he’d had it with him, on his person, every time we’d hung out. How had I never noticed that bulge in his pants?
From there, I regressed in my quest for self-improvement. Without Freytag to pal around with, I went to clubs again, by myself, leaving not by myself. The first few times, I snagged the typical bad boys, guys with more tats and piercings than an NBA power forward. Guys who talked to me like garbage, guys who pretended to bump into me on the dance floor but were really feeling me up. I’d call those guys on their bluff, drag them into the alley. Once I did that with three guys in one night, outside three different clubs. Somehow they were all named Ryan.
When I got sick of assholes, I went stranger. I took home guys who had no game, zero chance of picking up anyone. They were geeks and losers, dorks in plaid button-downs and khaki slacks who watched from tables as their smoother friends went to work. I hunted guys who were too old to have a shot, guys who lived with their moms, guys who wore yellowing tighty-whities because they never dreamed a woman would be undressing them later that night. Guys who told me they loved me as soon as I put them in my mouth. Guys who cried. Guys who told the truth.
When those guys got too sad to deal with, I left the clubs. Instead I picked up men in restaurants, some sad bastard eating meatloaf at the counter and reading the paper. I went to a laundromat and made a guy leave all his clothes behind. I found a barber shop, the kind with the red, white, and blue swirling pole, and mounted the barber in his chair. He cried, not because he loved me, but because he’d been married for forty-two years. He said he knew he’d tell his wife as soon as he got home. I gave the barber my panties and told him to give those to her so she’d believe him. He told me to get out and never to come back. He kept the panties.
Then I discovered my limit. I stopped at a busy intersection outside a Walmart and picked up a homeless guy. He had a cardboard sign that read VETERAN NEED $$ FEED 5 CHILDRAN. I called him over to my car, baiting him with a dollar, then told him to get in. He looked back at his sign and overloaded backpack sitting on the median. I yelled at him to get in—the light changed—to just leave his shit. He got in when I pulled out a twenty. I drove him toward the highway, to the strip of seedy motels down Frontage Road. We pulled into the one of the nastier-looking joints and he asked me if he could just have the dollar and go. I told him he could have the twenty, but he had to get a room with me first. He said he didn’t want to, that I could keep my twenty. I auto-locked the door before he could leave and ordered him to climb into the back seat. When he said no, I unbuttoned my blouse and reached over to his crotch. He pulled out a flip phone and said he was going to call the police if I didn’t let him go. I sighed and unlocked the door. He ran, full speed, away. I still had the dollar and the twenty.
Driving home, it struck me that I’d gone too far. What I was doing wasn’t experimenting. Not anymore. At best, it was experimenting for experimentation’s sake. I wasn’t getting anything out of it, nothing of any substance. These were terrible ideas disguising themselves as choices. It wasn’t who I wanted to be, at least not anymore. And it was going to get me pregnant or diseased or murdered, probably all three. Maybe not even in that order.
***
Freytag called me up a month after the Italian restaurant incident and asked if I was watching the season premiere of a show we used to follow together. I told him I was, though I’d been invited to a couple of viewing parties (I hadn’t). He said that sounded like fun and was going to hang up, but I stopped him. I told him I was probably just going to stay home, order something in. When he said that sounded fun, I told him he could stop by if he wanted.
“Watch it together?” he said.
“Watch it together,” I said.
Freytag asked what we should eat and I told him Thai. He said he’d pick up our favorites, be there fifteen minutes early so we could log onto the live fan sites and laugh at other people’s theories.
During the first commercial break, Freytag got naked again, erect, and digging for his diaphragm in his pants pocket. I hadn’t even suggested sex. As he stripped—this time, he had on a pair of Jockeys—he made small talk about the cold opening of our show, how it picked up seconds after the previous season’s finale finished. The show’s main character, Lucy, had just been told by her boyfriend, Tommy, that he was breaking up with her, mere moments before she was going to tell him she was pregnant. After Tommy gave up her news, she decided not to tell Tommy about the baby. As soon as Tommy left her apartment, Lucy went over to the kitchen counter, looked down at the positive pregnancy test, and said, “I guess it’s just me and you, kiddo.”
That’s when a commercial for Toyotas came on and Freytag stripped. I actually had gone to the fridge to put away my massaman curry, only to turn around and find Freytag in a state of undress and arousal.
“I think I know what you want,” Freytag said.
“You do?” I kept my eye on the mole, that middle nipple
“Yes, ma’am.” Freytag put the diaphragm back in its case, snapped it shut, and tossed it on his small pile of discarded clothes. He came over to me on the couch, put his arms on my shoulders, looked me in the eyes.
“Let’s make a baby.”
I pulled away from Freytag, standing up and perching myself on the other side of the room. “No, Freytag. That’s not what I want!”
Freytag, whose erection had plummeted from pointing forty-five-degrees upward to pointing forty-five degrees down, appeared confused, even baffled.
“What don’t you understand?”
“All this,” he said. “You don’t want to wear my great-great-grandfather’s diaphragm for sex, but you don’t want a baby, either? Why are you being like this?”
“Those aren’t the only two choices,” I told him.
“You just want to go without?” he said.
“No. That’s the same as making a baby.”
“You want to do oral for a bit?”
“No… yes, but we have to talk first.”
“Handies?”
“No!” I couldn’t believe it was this hard to get through to him. “Freytag, why don’t we use protection that’s not your diaphragm? That’s what I want.”
Freytag stumbled backward, falling into my recliner. I wasn’t super-thrilled that his bare ass was rubbing all over my upholstery, but then again, I’d done worse things in that chair. Freytag’s face was what really worried me, as it seemed as if it lost all the color it had ever had. His mouth also curled into shapes I didn’t think possible, as if it were made of Play-Doh and some kid had stepped on him. His eyes, dead, stared straight across the room.
“Are you OK, Freytag?” I asked.
Freytag stood, gathered his clothes and shoes, tucked them under his arm, and walked out of my apartment. He was naked. I ran to the spyhole to see him walking down the path past the gazebo, toward his car. Mrs. Mulhaney, my across-the-hall neighbor, was standing in the courtyard with her dog. Her face looked a lot like Freytag’s had just before he left, her eyes following him until he drove away. Her beagle, Butterscotch, peed on three trees in that time.
***
I didn’t see Freytag for a month after that. I tried calling him, emailing him, and texting him, and when none of that worked, I went to his apartment. It terrified me to find he didn’t live where I thought he’d lived: When I asked the person who opened his supposed door, she said she’d lived there for over a year, took the place over from a student from Jamaica (Freytag was the opposite of Jamaican, I’d say). She didn’t know anything about any Freytag. It was so strange. The woman asked me if I was OK and I told her I probably had the wrong place. She offered to let me come in, but I was already on my way to the elevator, more than a little spooked.
I stopped at the library on my way home, the branch near the apartment I lived in as a kid. I wanted to get something to read over the weekend, something light. On my way to the paperbacks room, I saw a large figure fit into one of the tiny chairs at one of the tiny tables in the children’s room. It was Freytag. He was reading a picture book, balancing it on his knees.
“What are you doing here, Freytag?” I’d entered the room and sat down in one of the little chairs across from him. We were alone.
Freytag looked up at me and smiled, then shifted his eyes back to the book, something about a caterpillar in the Olympics. He flipped the page, took in the pictures, read the text, and flipped again. This was the last page. He shut the book and placed it on the table.
“I knew you’d come here,” he said. “There’s always books with this library’s stamp on them on your coffee table.”
“Old habits,” I said.
“The first time I ever saw you was in this room,” Freytag said. “This is our background story.”
“I think about that every time I’m here.”
I was going to say something else, apologize to him, but Freytag interrupted.
“When my father was on his deathbed,” he began, “he told everyone in the room to leave except for me. Even my mom left, saying good-bye to him as if she wasn’t going to see him alive again, which she wouldn’t. As soon as everyone was gone and the door was shut, my father directed me to put his desk chair under a certain ceiling panel in the corner of the room, three to the left and four over. Above that panel was a box, the size of a birthday cake. It was one of those Chinese puzzle boxes, the kind that you had to move the secret panels around, a fraction of an inch at a time, until you figured it out. Inside that was another box, a plain metal cash box, that needed a key. My father called me over, held up his hand, and told me to unscrew the large diamond in the center of a ring he’d worn my whole life. Inside was a tiny key, the key to the cash box. Inside that, wrapped in black wrapping paper with a white ribbon, was this mahogany box.”
Freytag pulled out the diaphragm box. Of course he had it with him.
“My father explained to me that his father passed this on to him on his deathbed, and that my great-grandfather passed it on to my grandfather in the same way. And so on and so on.”
Freytag’s eyes seemed to look past my eyes as he told this story, as if were looking inside me, searching for a deeper, more considerate me.
Freytag placed the box on the table, opening it in my direction. I admired the box’s design, which was stunningly beautiful, craftmanship fit for a special purpose. Inside, however, sat a regular diaphragm, the typically off-white/yellow piece of latex, formed into a ridged dome. I’d seen one in health class before and knew my mother and aunts had used them back before they were married. But those were clean, brand-new diaphragms, fit precisely for them by a licensed gynecologist. Freytag’s was a relic, probably corroded from age, already inside a dozen women, if not a hundred. Putting it inside me would be like eating bloody chicken, or walking out onto the ice on a warm day.
That’s when it hit me: Freytag’s diaphragm was the ultimate bad idea. Considering all I’d done, how many chances I’d taken, why was I afraid of this little piece of latex the size of a pot pie?
“Can I wash it off first?” I asked Freytag.
“Of course,” he said. “Did you not think we’d do that?”
“All right then,” I said. I stood, barricaded the door, and pulled down the shade. I untied my dress, letting it pool on the floor. I was naked in the library, Clifford, Encyclopedia Brown, and Nancy Drew looking on.
“Here?” he said.
“Right here, right now.”
Freytag removed his suit, starting with his jacket, then his tie, and so on, carefully placing each piece over the back of his tiny chair.
I took Freytag’s diaphragm to the drinking fountain by the puzzle shelf. The water was cold. I used a handkerchief from my purse to scrub it clean. Then I met Freytag back at the little table, putting my left leg up on the chair. I folded the diaphragm in half, pushed it up, and just like that, I was wearing Freytag’s diaphragm. For the first time in the twenty-five years I’d known him, he leaned forward and kissed me on the lips. I knew then it was time for our story to begin.
#
Michael Czyzniejewski is the author of four collections of stories, most recently The Amnesiac in the Maze (Braddock Avenue Books, 2023). He serves as Editor-in-Chief of Moon City Press and Moon City Review, as well as Interviews Editor of SmokeLong Quarterly. He has had work anthologized in the Best Small Fiction series and 40 Stories: A Portable Anthology, and has received a fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and two Pushcart Prizes.