Breakfast in Stilettos (2 page)

According to the Ontario Science Center, scientists have now discovered which smells turn us on sexually. For men it’s a combination of pumpkin pie and lavender. For women, it’s a combination of cucumber and licorice-flavored Good & Plenty candies
.

As I scribbled the reference onto a pink sticky note and slapped it on the edge of my Mac screen, I made a mental note to buy a variety of cucumbers for a little scratch and sniff test later on. Then I forced my attention back to the article at hand—the one with the looming deadline.

As the
Lifestyle Editor
for
The
Seattle
Sun
Times
, it was my task to write about the strange and unusual. My monitor was haloed with a patchwork of brightly colored sticky notes, each containing a peculiar news bits that I’d found surfing. All fodder for future articles.

Today’s article, due in exactly forty-seven minutes, was about a group of Japanese researchers developing a technology that allowed the human body to be used as a data transfer device.
“Imagine being able to transfer music from the MP3 player in your pocket through your skin to your headphones without any wires.”

Bizarre
images kept surfacing in my overactive imagination. Nefarious thugs exchanging black market pornography through quick, slimy handshakes. Computer viruses transferred by sex workers in dingy hotel rooms.

But no. This had to be an
upbeat
article about the promises of pop technology. Nothing dark. I stuck to the perky straight and narrow that kept food on my table.

Re-reading the article for the sixth time, I could see no errors that jumped out at me—no obvious typos, anyway. It read as though it should appear in the pop section of the
Seattle
Sun
Times
. It was as good as I was going to make it, at least until I received the invariable
(
and not unworthy edits
)
that the Chief Editor would certainly offer up.

So I
sucked in the customary final breath as I
clicked “Send” with a passing thought that someday, maybe, I could hand in my assignments with a simple, “Hey boss, pull my finger.”

I sat for a moment, allowing myself that feeling of contentment for a job well done. I liked my job. I got paid to write about all sorts of silly things, received invitations to attend strange and unusual events, and thoroughly liked my boss. Granted, more money would be nice. Oh, and a view of something nicer than the four gray cloth-covered half-walls that surrounded my workspace.

I looked out of my cubicle into the office. The room was a sea of cubes with a few glass-walled offices on the perimeter—one of them the quiet sanctuary of my boss, the Arts and Entertainment Editor. Phones were ringing, low-toned interviews were going on here and there, and the ever-present tippity-tap of the keyboard drummed along as my fellow co-workers began to return from lunch.

I wasn’t much for socializing at work. Though I would make an exception for free food Fridays and the periodic birthday huzzah. I wasn’t exactly a loner, but I liked my privacy at work. One person at a time was great. You could get to know them—have in-depth conversations. The more people who were added, the shallower the conversations became. I was best at deep-sea dishing.

I turned my attention back to the computer monitor to contemplate the list of other articles I could pursue. I nearly jumped out of my chair when someone tapped the top of my cubicle as he strode by. A perky voice announced, “Good Afternoon, Emily.” Jason, the Food Editor and my cube neighbor to the north, had returned from lunch.

“Hey, Jason.” I gave a short over-the-cubical-wall wave to the older, oh-so-gay man with a penchant for exotic condiments and celebrity chefs, or some combination of the two.

His chair creaked as he sat and then wheeled up to his computer.
“Anything strange and unusual since lunch?”

I ignored him. This wouldn’t be the first day he’d asked me that little gem of a question.

My desire to be productive suddenly waned, and I decided to do some exploration instead. I opened a new
browser
window. My adage is, “When all else fails, Google something.” There is always a potential “strange and unusual” lurking in the results returned.

I stared at the empty search field on Google’s home page for a moment and realized with mild annoyance that I was
feeling a bit empty myself in the search department. The search for a new guy, that is.

I hadn’t been with anybody since my last dating
calamité
with Frank. The glorious Frank Trager. I felt as though he had infected me with some sort of virus that kept rebooting me whenever I met someone new, cycling through a never-ending RESTART sequence of Frank and Emily.

I was still angry with him for breaking up with me—four and a half months ago, but who’s counting. Luckily he didn’t work at the paper, but he was a fellow writer and I had a sick fascination for the latest story he was working on. His pieces were usually art or theater reviews with such blunt
appraisals
as “
It was suckier than suck.” Appropriate for laud at the local alternative rag, the
Seattle
Zealot
,
but earning immediate dismissal at the
Sun Times
. His articles made me hate him a little less if I smiled, which I had done often when we first met. Frank could be funny.

An old compulsion prompted me to
type in “Frank Trager” in the Google search box.

I ignored the standard “Search” button and instead clicked “I’m feeling lucky.” I liked to invoke the random Google god. There was something mystical about getting back precisely one return from all the possible links in the world.

I was a little surprised at the Web page this search returned.
OK
,
shocked
.

“Mistress Maven Whips
Up
Seattle
,
by Frank Trager.” I read the first few lines. He had interviewed a Dominatrix about her chosen profession.
This
was a far cry from suckier theater reviews. I read on.

Mistress Maven adjusted the leather restraints on a
sinister
throne-like chair, one with a pulley system overhead and a split seat allowing her to manipulate her patron’s thighs individually. “As a child I used to tie up my Barbie doll. Lucky for me, in my late teens, I realized there was a name for people like me.”

I stopped reading. The hair on the back of my neck prickled. I’d tied up dolls as a kid. Didn’t everyone? At least I didn’t strap firecrackers to them and blow them apart like my
cousin
Ernie. But I wondered, suddenly, if that made me some kind of repressed Dominatrix.

I thought not.

I scanned the rest of the story, intrigued not only by the topic, but that Frank had written it. He wasn’t a prude. Quite the opposite. He would write about anything for money. But I hadn’t thought he knew anyone
that
interesting.

“Mistress Maven Whips
Up
Seattle
?”

I jumped at Kenner’s deep voice.

“Jeez, you scared me.” I swiveled in my chair and looked up into the craggy face of my Senior Editor, Lawrence Wilhelm Kenner. Everyone called him Kenner. Not Lawrence or Larry, and definitely not L.W. With shoulders like an offensive lineman, he looked more like a former Seahawk than an Arts and Entertainment Editor. I called him The Kennerator. Sometimes even to his face. He’d respond with some appropriate passage from Shakespeare, such as “She is winding the watch of her wit; by and by it will strike!” Sometimes I actually got it.

Kenner towered over me, smelling of cinnamon Altoids, as he leaned in to read the article. “Researching a new story or just taking a trip through browser-land?”

I almost choked on a laugh. “Uh, that would be the latter. One of Frank’s stories.”

He shook his head. “I thought you two were over.”

“As in over and over and over again.” I didn’t meet his
eyes
, which I knew would reflect his pointed censure. He had heard me whine about Frank far too often. “I know. I know. I’m sick and need psychological counseling. I can’t afford it, so, how about a raise?”

Ignoring me, he pointed to the monitor. “Is it any good?”

“The story? Sure. Different.” Just like Frank. As much as I hated to admit it, I liked him in part because he was different. I mean a woman who writes about the strange and unusual can’t date a normal Joe.

I glanced at the closing lines, wondering how it ended. “I haven’t finished reading.” And it struck me how that summed up my feelings about Frank. Something remained undone. I had the unsettling sense that was about to change.

Kenner grunted as he stood into his full 6’4” frame. “As it turns out, I have an assignment that appears to coincide with your friend’s story. Look up this URL.” He handed me a Post-it.

I typed in the URL and gawked at the faint sketch of a woman’s naked torso that backed the text in the window. “Uh, boss, those are breasts. Isn’t that against company policy?”

“They are artistic breasts. Now be quiet and read.”

The website was for a place called
The Slutterati Salon
. I read out loud. “For an evening of beauty, art and the erotic.” I looked up at him. “Does the
Sun
even allow the word ‘erotic’ to appear within its hallowed folds?”

He ignored me.
“It’s supposed to be some
literary
place where artists go to get a thrill.
”

“
‘
Slutterati
’
?
As in
lit
erati
with a twist?”

“
They
consider themselves
an eccentric group of well-educated liberals who have a taste for
highbrow
smut. Or so they claim.
They’re
getting
some press elsewhere. I thought you might want to check it out. See if there’s a story in it for us.”

I noticed that the thrilling ticket price was printed at the very top. A whopping $40 for singles. “Is there a budget?”

“Standard deal: ticket, food and fuel. If you do your homework, you can make Saturday’s show and have a piece written up by early next week.”

This was a Saturday-only place, 9:00 p.m. to 1 a.m. I wondered how they made a living with one show a week. “All right. I’ll see what I can do.”

A
single’s
price meant that there might be single people there. A definite plus. As long as I wasn’t going to end up naked by the end of the night. At least not publicly naked. There were some things a girl just didn’t do.

Kenner turned to leave and gave my cubicle one backward glance. “And Emily, try to enjoy yourself.”

What, no Shakespeare? But even as I thought it, he had proclaimed, “Now go we, in content to liberty, and not to banishment.”

“Doh!” For every Shakespeare, there should be an equal and opposite Homer Simpson. I turned back to the Web page in front of me.