Seducing Michael Cera

I have lots of twisted sort-of sex dreams about unlikely characters. I woke up from this latest and wrote it right out. It's like it was pre-narrated on my brain. Weird, because I almost never remember dreams. After, I spent awhile browsing Google Image Search results for Michael Cera, asking myself: really?

He looked different than on TV. His hair was darker, his nose was arched. He looked like a real grown man. I remember how he first kissed me. Just my lip; he stretched it far back and sucked. I kissed him back, there was no rush. I stopped him:

“I have to pee.”

As soon as I left the room he yelled something down the hall. Something about it being dark, something about elbows; a “be careful,” maybe. I ran back to him and narrowed my eyes.

“Are you Jewish?”

“Oh, totally.”

“I could tell," I said, grinning. "I knew it when you yelled to me from across the house.”

I peed, checking myself to make sure I was in fact peeing in a toilet, that I wasn't so stoned I'd fallen asleep and started peeing in the bed: a pot-paranoid compulsion. We had smoked weed, hadn't we? I thought so, but I wasn't sure. I attempted a consciousness-check. As if focusing your eyes hard and cataloging your surroundings could provide some satisfying proof of real-life existence. In the darkness to my left I noticed a movement; it was a door, and not the one I had come through. It opened and I produced an “oh!”

“I didn't see there was another door here--” I started. A female head popped in and took a dry look at me, perched on the toilet and clutching toilet paper in my hand.

“Excuse me,” said the head, bored and annoyed. It withdrew.

When I got back to Michael he was sitting upright in the bathtub, his chest straight and long and pale. (His room had a tub, but no toilet.) He threw some fresh blueberries into the water with him. I liked the excess, and I got in and sat down. Stretching out my arm, I wet the necks of a small fat lizard and a miniature toad that were dozing on the vanity. They grumbled happily, wagging their heads, and I sampled a blueberry, which was sweet and soapy from my fingers. It reminded me of the lifesavers my mom would store in her purse along with her perfume samples.

Soon a disposable razor appeared in my hand, and I began to shave thick black mats of hair from the insides of my thighs. They looked like fake seventies sideburns, only much wider, like little black golf greens. I had never noticed them before; it must have been the lighting. In any case they were so ridiculous I wasn't distressed. The shaved-off fuzz disappeared in the water.

Michael and I sat in the tub together awhile before I asked him what I could do to make him want to sleep with me. He beamed like a teenager and said it could probably be arranged. He motioned for me to come with him, and I stood up, dropping the squished blueberry I'd been rolling between my thumb and middle finger. We wrapped ourselves in plush orange towels and ran wet-footed down the oak-paneled hall—to another bedroom?—but before we could make it we were drawn into the bustle of the sitting area.

All the overhead lights were on full-blast, and I squinted to make sense of the bright blur of activity before me. I didn't understand the frenzy of his sisters and father as they fussed over the state of the room. It was very late; too late, I was sure, to worry about housekeeping. Under cover of darkness you can make a mess with impunity; it's morning that demands order.

“Shut the blinds!” a female voice ordered the air around me.

I went to pull the shades down. They were fancy and I wasn't sure how they worked. I tugged and they slid down their tracks, but I had a hard time arranging all three of them so that the frills on the bottom aligned. The sisters would expect the shades to be perfectly straight. Who can't pull down shades properly? I felt woefully out of place.

Michael sensed my frustration.

“Who are these queens?” he asked playfully, apologetically.

I met his gaze and answered flatly: “your sisters.”

The loud wheeze of a vacuum cleaner had made me mostly deaf to conversation, but from the words I caught, Michael's father was unhappy about his having company. Now that the lights were on, the disarray of my stuff in the other room was uncomfortably conspicuous. Still wrapped in a towel, my cheeks flushed as I ran back to Michael's bed-and-bathroom where I bent to pick up my two pairs of shoes, my clothes, and my bag that had been thrown to the middle of the floor. I even cleaned the blueberry guts from the tub.

A creeping knowledge fogged my head with pressure. I did not belong here. I could not explain my presence; I had not even been introduced. I did not even know my own name. I longed for Michael to pull me back to his bed and suck on my lip, pick up where we had left off.

The doorbell rang and my face muscles tensed. The vacuum wound down to a squeal and died, and a male voice asked for Gwendolyn. That was me, I was sure of it. I felt suddenly mortified, as if the existence of my father, as if my own name confirmed that my presence there was a mistake. That I belonged to a chintzier, more literal world.

“Just a second,” I yelled from the other room, getting dressed.

When I reentered the living room my father's vague plaid flannel figure was already several paces ahead, and I hurried to follow it out the door and into the daylight, exquisitely disappointed and utterly relieved.

Michael Cera is not Jewish