Hoboken House of Pigeon Prostitution
When the rain wakes me, I see that Nancy has left the bed. Still, I reach out. Her side is cold. I look over the edge to the floor: our mutt, Eeyore, snores quietly. I look at the clock; it’s barely 9 a.m., early for a lazy Sunday.
Nancy and I both work at home, her perched on the couch in the living room; me sprawled in my Steelers jersey and sweats on the bed. We were salaried grownups with cubicles in the big city once. But since the fourth year of the Iraq war or so, I guess Oprah would say we haven’t been sending out the proper vibrations out to the Universe. Before our bedroom became my office, we used to fuck like smugly solvent bunnies. The refrigerator boasts a foot-long wish list of repairs we can’t afford.
In younger days, Nancy and I would sit on the terrace during rainy days like this, eating bagels, drinking coffee, fueling up before we fucked, but now the roof’s riddled with holes, and I doubt we’ll get that fixed before the next President takes the oath of office. Especially now, if Nancy gets the phone call from Dr. Pan we fear.
I look out the bedroom window to the terrace, to gauge the rain, to see if I’ll be able to convince Eeyore to fight his bladder until Nancy gets back from wherever she’s gone in this deluge. But then I see: Nancy is back. Sitting on the terrace, her narrow back to me, shoulders bunched, Nancy’s poised on a rusty fold-out chair. I can’t see her face, but I know from the hunch of her shoulder that she is looking at something and does not want to be disturbed. But this has been a weird week, and I don’t like the idea of my wife sitting alone at the edge of building. So I venture out and put my hand on her thin shoulder, damp with rain.
“Do you want some coffee to go with your water?”
Nancy holds up her hand, quiet, and then points. I see the backyard of our neighbor, their badly painted stucco wall, the intermittent rain.
“Give me a hint, Nancy,” I whisper.
“Watch the hole in the wall, Jack.”
I don’t want to. I want to go inside with my wife and go back about a week, and make her coffee, and somehow stop time so she never gets a badly Xeroxed form telling her to bring her lovely breasts back in for more testing. But I am a good guy, so far. So I have gone with my wife for her second set of tests on her “shady breast” (the right one), and now I wait in limbo with her. So I unfold a second chair and try to make out what she’s seeing. The rain pings on the terrace roof, and pools on the floor at our feet, but Nancy, who hates the wet, hates the cold, doesn’t seem to care now.
“What?”
“Carlotta’s back,” Nancy whispers. “The pigeon prostitute of Hoboken.”
“No. “
“Believe it.”
Two springs ago, Nancy and I spotted a pretty gray pigeon who liked to hover outside a drainpipe hole in our neighbor’s house until she attracted some gentleman callers. Then the pretty gray pigeon – we dubbed her Carlotta – would duck inside the hole for some hot, brief, pigeon-on-pigeon action. Sometimes there were even threesomes. Carlotta kept at it for about two weeks, entertaining man after man. Sometimes there were scuffles between her suitors. Nancy took a few pictures of Carlotta and her johns. I scanned them in, and we turned them into a mini-comic strip. We pitched it a couple of places, but nobody else seemed interested in our saga of the Hoboken House of Pigeon Prostitution.
Then Carlotta vanished. Last spring, we watched the wall for her return, without success.
But now she’s returned, so horny she fucks in the rain.
“Carlotta looks different.”
“I don’t remember her doing it in the rain,” Nancy says. We can barely see her, but then a second bird hovers, they disappear; we hear the faint bang, bang, bang of pigeon love. Then another. And another.
“She looks like she dinged her chest a little,” I say. “She’s flying a little funny.”
“The boys don’t seem to mind,” Nancy says, too sharply.
“No, they don’t.”
Bang, bang, bang. Drip, drip, drip. Nancy takes my hand. I am damp from the leaks. And hot from the crazy pigeon sex.
“Nance? Is it terrible that Carlotta’s getting me hot?”
Nancy laughs; it’s a sound I haven’t heard in a while.
I draw her hand to the bulge in my sweats. Nancy’s damp cheeks flush.
“I like both my boobs, Jack.”
“So do I, Nance.”
“I’m going to do everything I can to hold on to them.”
“I appreciate that.”
Nancy stands, her back to me. I yank down my sweats, push up her bathrobe, pull down her panties, and Nancy backs onto my cock. The rain makes us stick to each other.
If you looked at us in this moment, you wouldn’t see much unless you gawked – just a woman in a bathrobe rocking gently on her husband’s lap, both of them staring straight forward. Middle-aged bird watchers having a cuddle.
Carlotta’s clients zoom in and out of the hole as Nancy rides me, clenches my cock with her cunt. I finger her clit, just a little distracted by the banging birds. Nancy grinds into me, sticky, hot.
I reach out and hold both of Nancy’s breasts. The healthy one and the “shady” one. My cock clearly doesn’t care; it just wants more of Nancy.
I can’t see her face, but her moans tell me she is close, so I try to hold on. “She’s fine,” I chant in my mind.
The rain lets up, and Carlotta zooms out of her hole, followed by – three boys.
“Carlotta, you slut,” Nancy says. And Nancy and I come, laughing.
Copyright © 2008 by Martha Garvey. All rights reserved.
Martha Garvey’s work has appeared in Susie Bright’s Best American Erotica four times, in the anthologies Glamour Girls, Exhibitions, and Strange Pleasures 3, as well as the the New York Times. She is the author of two pet health books, My Fat Dog and My Fat Cat. Visit her on the web at It’s My Dog’s World, I Just Live in It. She is deeply grateful to her husband for noticing the pigeons.
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