“I’m telling my mother how fat I look in my dress.” I gargled with the complimentary mouthwash and went back out. Phylida lay naked, propped on the bed and put her hand over the receiver.

“My mother said the problem is in your mind and you have nothing to worry about.” Ha! Good one! She switched from me back to the phone to me again and said, “She said I should get you some of those pills and you’ll be fine.” I thought she was kidding. She said good-bye.

“Was there really somebody on the other end?”

“Relax,” she said. “Anyway, that medication’s not what it’s cracked up to be.”

“Is that what you told your mother?”

“It’s a joke. Lighten up. We’re on vacation.” She said something about absorption problems inhibiting blood flow. “Worse-case scenario, science can do things for this now.” She looked at me with her earnest bullshit doctor face. She started dialing another number.

“Hang up the phone.”

“I have to check my messages.” She rested the phone on her pubic bone. “There’s a procedure; they make a two-millimeter incision at the base of the phallus and slide a lubricated sterile tube inside. It explodes and stiffens when you activate the prosthetic device.” Phylida was in the surgery unit in her residency and showed real talent for it and liked the ability to both scalpel living people and pretend to be saving them.

“You don’t mean explode,” I said. “That word would be expand.” I didn’t want anyone exploding my dick.

“They implant a piece of polyethylene, it’s an outpatient procedure—and it can be filled with either sterile salt water or air, I believe.”

“Are you dialing direct?”

“Why?”

“Because hotels rip you off.”

“You’re not the boss of my money.” She sat there, now sadly looking at the neatly spiraled phone cord lying along her small flat belly, the phone covering her nice vagina.

PHYLIDA PLACED HER makeup bag on the bed, ready to go. She looked like a suffocating powdered mannequin. I felt the same but looked worse. Sebastian knocked and came in and stood by the television cabinet. She’d somehow found a greenish eye shadow to match her dress, and the added touches of it along her cheekbones made her face look skinless. With the acne and veins visible on her arms, she radiated pulsing green blood. On closer inspection she smelled of sour panic sweat. I smiled at her and she touched her jaw.