Because They Wanted To: Stories (25 page)

Still, he walked with her to her apartment for “tea.” This meant roughly fifteen minutes of conversation, after which they rolled around, poking each other’s faces with their tongues. It was fun, but he had not recovered from the sense of remove her dinner chatter had caused him, and besides, at this moment he didn’t want to fuck Nicki. He wanted to find the vibrant girl he’d seen running around at work, but she didn’t seem
to
be present in the body of this agreeable but somehow inaccessible person who was pulling off his pants. Watching her, he felt that he could chain her to the radiator and per-form on her every obscene act possible and still not possess her.

Naturally, this made him feel he must possess her. Firmly he turned her around, pressing himself against her back and her round, dumb ass. Her body stiffened; her butt nudged him in greeting. He embraced her about the waist. Her hands splayed, her elbows poked out, he saw her crumpled, side-turned face from behind her fore-grounded haunches.

Afterward, there was a miasmic moment of separate breathing, and then, tenderly, she turned her head and kissed his hand, first with her lips, then with her hot, dry tongue. A gasp of happiness escaped him. He held her all the next morning, while the radio muttered about congressional scandal and she slept fitfully, discharging an innocent odor of sweat amid the musty sheets with every slight movement.

The third time was a drunken riot in the King Farouk Room, during which she ground astride him backward, showing him the rindy fat of her bunched ass—the unsuspected ugliness of which inflamed him all the more.

It was after this strenuousness that, as they lay sharing a smoke on the mattress, she told him she had been sexually molested as a child. He was so startled by this information that afterward he couldn’t remember how or why it had come up; suddenly it was just there.

“It was my uncle,” she said. “He and my aunt lived near us when I was nine and ten. Then they moved, and then he killed himself.” She drew on her cigarette, and for an instant her lips formed an expression he had seen on other women but never on Nicki: a tight down-ward sneer that was cynical and tough, yet weak and repellently vulnerable.

He felt bad for her. He wondered if this meant she was an emotional wreck. “Do you think it had a terrible effect on you?”

She looked thoughtful. “For a long time I tried to deny it had any impact at all. But I think it formed my sexuality a lot.”

He started to ask how, then put his arms around her instead.

A week after this discussion, they had the terminating conversation. He said he hoped they could still be friends. She said of course she cared for him as a friend, and they hung up. He felt dazed, as if he had suddenly found himself in a commercial for a love movie in which he had rapidly performed scenes of seduction, passion, emotional
bonding—and then the commercial was over. He lay down and wondered if this development had anything to do with her story about her uncle.

Then their long, arduous friendship ground into being. They saw each other mostly at work, swimming through the slow, silly conversations of people doing jobs they don’t like. At first he didn’t long for her, although her abrupt ending of the affair hurt him. He wasn’t sure how he felt about her, and at times he thought there was some-thing wrong with her. His ambivalence made him receptive to her, and his receptivity gradually made him feel her charm and beauty even more potently than before. He would look at her and it would seem, even in the black anonymity of her waitress wear, even at the squalor of the break table, as if she were lounging at a casino on the deck of an ocean liner. He could not recall if she had looked that way to him before he’d fucked her, and he perplexed himself with the question of whether his perception had changed after the act to render her queenly or if she had actually become so.

Then one day he opened the door to the cold, cardboard-box-filled changing room and saw Nicki and a large blond waitress named Deirdre looking at themselves in a shard of mirror propped against the wall. Deirdre was seated, gazing dreamily at her own rosy face. Nicki stood behind her, tenderly combing the other girl’s long, pale hair. Deirdre said hi to him in the mirror. Nicki turned, dropped the comb, and looked at him, her eyes so startled and fraught that his heart filled with echoes of illicit intimacy. Suddenly he felt her touch, her breath against his chest, the lithe, muscular energy of her body beneath his hands. He wanted to have her, and he couldn’t.

“Deirdre is so beautiful,” said Nicki later. “If I looked like her, I’d be a movie star by now.”

“If I was a casting director, Deirdre wouldn’t stand a chance against you,” he said. “She’s just another pretty blonde. You’re beautiful.”

She blushed and touched his hand with her cold fingers. “Thanks, Lesly,” she said.

They had coffee, then began to go to dinner and the occasional movie together. He felt her slowly opening to him in a way that seemed more genuine and incrementally deeper than during their
previous hectic dates—and he felt himself opening to her. He remembered their lovemaking with a poignant shudder; its brief, superficial nature seemed to have been an exquisite distillation of what he imagined could happen between them. When he looked into her beautiful, caffeine-shadowed eyes, it seemed to him that she was thinking these things too. The afternoons spent with her in coffee shops radiated a muted glow that permeated the entire week, leaking over into the next week, until every week was saturated with her presence. He saw other women occasionally, but the sight of them naked in his bed could not arouse him as Nicki did sitting fully clothed in a café window, sunlight baring the meeting of age and youth in her thirty-two-year-old face. He thought: It’s only a matter of time.

This thought was nurtured by the incredible fact that, in the lengthening time since their affair, she hadn’t become involved with anyone else. An expression in her eyes or a slight movement of her body toward him could make the hairs on his neck rise; he’d move forward to meet the embrace he saw coming—then she’d lean back in her chair and dive into conversation again. Still, he dreamed of her.

Then one afternoon, as he was fighting his way out of an alcoholic sleep, the Cerberus of his answering machine clicked in warning and her voice fluttered forth. “Lesly,” she said, “it finally happened! I auditioned for Brian Slossman and I got it! It’s going to be a real movie and he—he—he loved me!”

He lay back in his bed and croaked, “Oh, my God.”

When she left for L.A. he thought she was gone forever, but she wasn’t. She returned to New York often, and they would sometimes have dinner together. She would describe for him the mysterious artificial world of the movie set, with its harsh aurora borealis of lights and sounds that, by twinkling transmutation, became the magic glass that humans stepped into and mythic beings stepped out of. He liked to picture her on the set, her face covered with the sugar dust of cosmetic powder, her eyes laden with cosmetic jewels, surrounded by and bathed in lights that were like giant technological flowers.

He kept expecting her—encouraging her, even—to display the deluded self-importance he assumed all successful people harbored, and when she didn’t he felt disbelief, disappointment, and respect.
He almost felt as if he were experiencing the excitement of her new life with her. He nursed the fantasy that it was still he for whom she felt the deepest affinity, that he was the one she could turn to at her most confused, when she needed to tell the truth about those Holly-wood phonies. He would always be there for her—when she lost her looks, when her pictures flopped, when the tabloids went after her.

It was hard to identify the moment when talking to her began to make his life seem like a crushed ball of aluminum in an empty can. But there was a point at which he noticed her expression become vacant and polite when he laid before her even the juiciest gossip about the restaurant. Then there was the subtle change in the way she described her experiences with the director and the other actors; instead of tremulously setting out her stories like new toys she wanted to share, she now displayed them so he could see but not touch them. There would be a sudden smugness in the way she held herself aright and puffed her cigarette, but then she would turn and face him with her candid eyes and he’d shudder inwardly with the memory of her tongue licking his fingers.

When the film was over and she returned to New York, she became yet more distant. Although
Queen of Night
was not due to be released for some months, Nicki was already “hot” in Hollywood. She had an agent, who fielded film offers and laid piles of scripts at her feet. She sarcastically denounced the snotty clique of New York-based actors who wouldn’t countenance talented newcomers, and then she went to their parties. She met a famous actor there—“A pig,” she said—who had come on to her rudely and arrogantly. It was at this point that Lesly was startled to realize that if this famous actor had fancied her, others would too, and that not all of them would be pigs. He hurled himself at the vast emptiness of his screenplay with unprecedented ferocity.

She was visibly pleased when he told her about it. “I’d love to see it when you’re done,” she said. “I’ll bet it’s really good.” But it wasn’t, and he shredded it on the tenth page. After a relaxing three-day drunk, he started another script. He didn’t like that one, either, but when he tore it up he didn’t go on another bender. With the novel sensation that he knew what he was doing, he started another draft. He wasn’t sure this one was good either, but it was fun, and he surprised
himself by staying in to work on it during his nights off instead of conducting his usual drinking man’s tour of lower Manhattan.

Then Nicki did the Rude Thing. He had gotten tickets for them to see a dance company she loved. On the evening they were to go, a few hours before he was to pick her up, she canceled. “A friend,” she said, had phoned at the last minute; she was coming in from L. A. and Nicki had to have dinner with her. He didn’t understand until she stammeringly explained. “She isn’t just a friend. She’s my girlfriend. I got involved with her during the shoot—she’s a camerawoman—and I haven’t seen her for weeks.”

“You never said anything about her before,” he said stiffly.

“Well, yeah, I know. It was because—I know it’s silly—but I thought you might be jealous.”

He snorted violently. “No, not quite. It’s your business, and it’s not like you and I were ever really involved anyway. I just don’t like being stood up at the last minute. What am I supposed to do with your ticket?”

For several seconds after they said goodbye, he stood with the buzzing receiver in his hand, staring at the dresser that looked as if it had been made to hide dismembered bodies.

The following week they were in a bar, eating salty peanuts, drinking tequila, and being assaulted by heartlessly fashionable music. “I’m sorry you had to find out about Lana that way,” she said. “I hope you don’t hold it against her; it was my fault, really. But I’m glad I finally told you. I don’t know why I held back. I should’ve known you wouldn’t mind.”

Grimly, he drank. He tried to comfort himself with the thought that if she was a lesbian, it could hardly be his fault that she’d dumped him, but it didn’t work. Nicki began to describe Lana’s subtle and dashing personal style, her strength, her tenderness, her wit. Nicki really couldn’t be a lesbian, he thought. This was yet another irritating affectation, or else a symptom of her deep distrust of men, which he alone had overcome. Then Nicki started in on Lana’s sexual prowess.

“Oh, really,” he said.

“What?”

“I mean, I’m not one of those idiots who can’t picture what two women could do together. I know there’s a lot of things. I picture
lots of slow, languorous. . . you know. But still, there’s a limit to what—I mean, to what any two people can do.”

“Well, we haven’t reached ours,” said Nicki. “We do everything. Even corny stuff, like she wears a suit and I wear a garter belt and stockings—”

“Excuse me,” he said. “I need to use the men’s room.”

He stalked to the John, taunted by visions of the formidable dyke fucking garter-belt-clad Nicki. He tried seeing it as beat-off material, but he was too irked.

When he got back to the table, her face recoiled slightly.

“Lesly, are you upset?”

Of course he wasn’t.

She began to talk about her anxiety about the reviews
Queen
would get. He could tell from the artificial quality of her voice that she knew something was wrong. He felt she was trying to charm him out of being upset with a display of modesty and vulnerability, and that made him even madder. He tried to tell himself he had no right to be mad, but it didn’t help. The professional jealousy he had staunchly suppressed in the name of friendship rose and joined forces with romantic jealousy. While his head nodded agreement and tilted at polite angles, Nicki’s conversation raced ahead, trailing a bright streamer of self-involvement. He remembered her on her knees in his bed, moaning into the sheets. He remembered another girl from the past whom he had broken up with, remembered specifically how, long after their affair had ended, he could make her blush merely by looking intensely into her eyes the way he had when he’d fucked her. If he looked at Nicki that way, he thought, she wouldn’t even notice. He looked at the tense, delicate face before him, fixating on one bright, jiggling earring; a black tunnel opened before him, spanning days, maybe weeks, a tunnel filled with shadowy forms of pain and deprivation.

“And so,” said Nicki, dramatically ending a story he’d heard before, “there’s nothing he won’t do to have me in the part. Plus he’d like to screw me, so I know he’s gonna be totally nice about the script. It’s pretty much up to me at this point.”

“That’s a little self-aggrandizing, wouldn’t you say?”

She tipped back her head to release a throatful of smoke and then
coolly faced him. “Yeah,” she said. “It also happens to be true.” There was no false vulnerability in her voice.

“Does he know you’re a lesbian?”