Cherries In The Snow (10 page)

We walk over to the Angelika theater, me in my fancy dinner outfit carrying the carton of profiteroles. My black polka-dot dress with the sky-high red heels that are so comfortable, they are the official choice of every transsexual I have ever met, made slightly less chic by the nude fishnets that cause me to slip perilously as we try to make it to the movie. My white fake-fur coat sits boxy on top of the skirt, which billows up around it, and I have double reason to wish I was for once wearing tights instead of stockings. Tights and leggings and snow boots and a windbreaker.

‘Last time you were dressed down.' He sounds disappointed.

‘This is my superhero outfit.'

He holds my hand.

‘Motherfuck I'm cold.'

‘Creative. Why so freezing?'

You have made me cold with your warmth.

‘I'm wearing stockings.'

I say it so resentfully, with the wrong voice completely. It sucks all of the sexiness out of it, so planned. The look was a great idea: black arches, red lipstick. I had thought, as I applied it, that it was '50s pinup, but now I saw that my outfit had veered too close to Mexican gang girl. I've read they wear all that aging makeup because they're statistically unlikely to reach middle age. That's how I feel about romance, I who have played Lolita so long. That's what I want my memoir to be called.
I Who Have Played Lolita So Long
.

We sit near the front. I get very upset by the film in which a beautiful actress is made to look ugly. It seems somehow a terrible symbol for Grrrl, for what we are selling and what those poor little girls are buying in their quest to differentiate themselves from the crowd. At the end of the movie the actress is murdered. Of course she has to die. How else is she going to get cred? For a terrible moment I imagine it being the next stage in Holly's marketing strategy. ‘You wear the bruise collection. And then someone hits you on the head with a hammer. And when they print the crime scene photo in the paper I want to make sure Grrrl gets a prominent credit.'

I cry and cry. Afterward I run to the restroom. The red of my nose and eyes looks terrible with the red lipstick. I am a mess.

‘Let's clean you up, Sadie Steinberg.'

‘That's a pretty name,' says a woman behind me.

I wash my face with the bottle sample I save for just such an occasion from my soon-to-be-released Walk of Shame collection.

Then we hop a cab to my place.

I look out the window and he comes up behind me and starts to kiss my neck. I go to the bed and take off my dress. I don't think he is admiring my red-and-white polka-dot underwear properly, so I stop him and arch my back, turn over so that he can see the little gap at the back, the stockings ruined, ripped off as soon as we got back as if shaking an Etch A Sketch clean. I hate being half dressed. I just want to be undressed completely so that we can screw and get it over with and I can put my clothes back on.

I am about to unhook my bra when he says, ‘Let's sleep.'

‘Really?'

‘Really.'

It is the best sleep I've had in a long time. I try to wake up all pretty, but when I open my eyes Marley is leaning over me, cooing, ‘Mmm, you have dragon's breath.'

‘I'll brush my teeth,' I snap.

‘No, no, leave it. I like it. It's real.'

I'm hungry, but Marley is rubbing his hands all over me in a manner far more exploratory than the night before. He nuzzles my neck and scoops his hand between my legs, running his thumb over my polka dots. I lean into his ear as if I am about to talk dirty and whisper, ‘Feed me.'

I am thinking a slap-up breakfast – bacon, eggs, home fries, and coffee – but Marley drags me by the hand to the local
health-food store, where he orders berry smoothies. With soy. As we wait for the blender to empty its purple contents, he bites his nails. ‘Hey.' I slap them away and start kissing him. Once we start to kiss, neither of us can stop. After a full minute we are woken from our reverie by the angry voice of a middle-aged woman.

‘There is a time and a place and this is not the time or the place.' She has long gray dreadlocks and a Malcolm X T-shirt.

‘There's food here,' she adds, which seems odd. I think of her long dreadlocks grazing the salad bar.

‘I'm sorry,' I say, but as soon as we are outside, smoothies in hand, I hiss, ‘What a cow.'

‘No,' Marley says sadly, ‘she was right. It was very rude.'

The smoothie is too cold against my teeth. ‘Jesus, we were just kissing.'

‘No. I was doing more.'

He resumes biting his fingernails, a most unbecoming trait for a man, so girly and neurotic.

‘Why are you doing that?'

‘Because I want to put my fingers in your cunt. And I don't want to hurt you.'

Two grand mission statements. My cunt, as it has now been named, begins to blush. I hold myself against him, the heat radiating. Please take me home please take me home. I don't say it out loud.

‘Okay.'

I have said it out loud.

I down the smoothie and my tummy is instantly full, but I still feel light. Hand in bitten hand, we pass Saint Luke's, the redbrick wall along its gates tagged with ugly blue graffiti.

Marley is outraged. ‘That's just wrong. God, I'm glad I sold out and stopped.'

I squeeze his hand and he kisses the top of my head.

‘You should stand up taller, Sadie. There's at least two inches I could get out of you.'

‘What are you talking about?'

‘You have a beautiful body and lousy posture. You're not engaging your powerhouse. Basic Pilates. Very easy to incorporate into everyday life.'

‘You're into that?'

‘Oh, yeah, I've been practicing Pilates since I was seventeen.'

‘Which is a whole what, eleven years?'

‘Don't you think about getting older?'

‘No.' I have been wearing a bra to bed every night since I was fourteen so my breasts won't sag.

‘Montana does it too; so does my ex. We still do it together.'

‘You do it together?'

‘You know … We're close.'

‘So what happened?'

‘Um, she was older than me. She was my Pilates teacher.'

‘Ohhh.'

‘What does that mean?'

‘Well, of course, a boy … a man like you, had to have been taught by an older woman.'

‘I like to think I'm self-taught. That's what I like to think.'

I turn to him and press him against the graffitied wall of the church. ‘I like you very much for someone who does yoga and Pilates and uses the word
cunt
so often.'

He laughs. ‘What do you call it?'

‘Hoo hoo. My hoo hoo.'

‘My daughter calls it her noo noo. That's funny. I can't bring myself to call it your hoo hoo.'

‘So just don't call it at all.'

‘All right.'

‘We'll leave my vagina out of this.'

‘Okay, we'll have a relationship and we'll just leave your vagina out completely.'

‘Good.'

Then we go home and have sex and it changes everything. My vagina is very, very involved. I hate it when men go down on me, drippy and gooey and it's always all about them. But his tongue is soft and almost dry, like a cat's tongue. I am ugly and naked immediately and he makes me come so fast I forget to arch my back and twist and turn, all those things to signify I am enjoying it. Instead I just come. Muscles grab and grab at him, insane crazy woman, ‘Don't go don't leave me!' hysterical and sobbing, all those things we can't say out loud. My vagina is going to give me away. I feel a little shellshocked. He is the first man who has ever made me come. All those older men and then this little pisher. He holds me close, his arm around my waist. My belly used to be flat. Now it is round, all these little changes every day.

After we make love, he curls up beside me and I look, really look, at his cock. Not the flash of my father's penis, an accidental sighting, a penis swinging between a loose dressing gown, whereas Marley's is for fucking and is thus a cock. I look at the color and the shape, trying to figure out the workings of the man I love:

‘Can I touch there?'

‘Yep.'

‘It doesn't hurt?'

‘Nope.'

‘Which part is most sensitive?'

‘Here.'

It is a living, breathing
Cosmo
how-to article come to life. After I am finished investigating his penis, he makes me toast and tea. Then he hops back in bed, where I am arranged on the sheets thinking of the cherries in the snow, glad I have
my red-and-white polka-dot knickers, which are back in place.

‘What was that about last night, all the Bettie Page stuff?' he asks, snuggling next to me.

‘What do you mean?'

‘All those poses you were doing.'

My heart contracts like the evil twin of my orgasm. There is a release, but it is bile in my throat. I try not to cry.

‘Hey, hey. I'm sorry. I thought, Either this girl is very experienced or very naive.'

I try to hold it together. ‘Somewhere in between.'

‘It's no big deal. This morning was just so great, when you stopped acting.'

‘I acted for a long time,' I cry, and tell him about Isaac, about the others. My clothes are everywhere, like voyeurs, bums, drunks crashing a party. Dresses have thrown up socks. I hate my apartment. I hate it.

He moves his hands across my de-braed breasts.

‘I used to draw tits like that when I was a schoolboy.'

‘You say tits and cunt and cock.'

‘It is what it is.'

‘You don't think it sounds ugly?'

‘I was raised with ugliness. That's not it.'

‘Would you want Montana to say those things? Or hear those things?'

‘I just want her to be a good person. To be kind and generous. That's good enough.'

‘And to not eat sugar.'

‘And to not eat sugar.' He kisses me.

When he finally leaves, I whisper, ‘Can I come to your place next time?'

He strokes my hair. ‘Maybe.'

‘Mrs Maybe and her amazing baby,' I mock, which my
mother used to say to me. She'd also say ‘Oh, I was so proud I was crying like a turtle' and ‘Oh, that man is such a pompadom.'

At work the next day I tell the girls how amazing he was. Vicki is a little churlish, which I can't understand. I sit looking at my lipsticks and I just see the color of his cock. ‘You should do kind of a pinky-red with purple undertones,' I suggest.

‘Are you thinking about his cock?' snaps Holly.

‘Nooo! God, you're disgusting.'

‘I know you are, but what am I?'

I spit back as instinctively as I had when we were nine. ‘I know you are, but what am I?'

‘Infinity.'

Vicki looks up from her work. ‘What are you people, children?'

Vicki has her cat pom-pom socks on. I burst out laughing. I try to stop, but I can't, and then Holly does too, and I remember trying not to laugh in assembly and seeing the gym teacher's ugly feet squeezed into stilettos. Vicki storms to the bathroom. Ivy goes to comfort her. Holly, composing herself, looks at me.

‘Oh, I don't give a shit.'

My comeuppance is that as I do my work I start to feel ill. I have had, throughout my life, frequent bouts of cystitis. In England it's called cystitis, which sounds like the name of the girl who got kicked out of Destiny's Child. In America it's called a urinary tract infection, or UTI, which, like so many American things, sounds like you are being watched via covert homeland security cameras. The long and short of it is, when I get an attack I feel like I have to pee all the time and then nothing comes out and then when it finally does come, a torturous dribble, it hurts like hell. I get cystitis if I have sex, if I think about having sex, if I wear noncotton underwear, if I wear tights instead of stockings (accidental unsexiness from something supremely sexy). Because I have to go to the bathroom every few minutes, people who don't know me think I'm a cokehead.

Nausea spreads through my body like a Mexican wave. Cystitis. Big time. I go home at lunchtime. I still can't get used to Holly being my boss.

‘Uh, I don't feel so good.'

‘So go home.'

I don't have to pretend or sniffle like I did at my last job.

Marley has called and I call him back and tell him I'm not feeling too good and he offers to come over. He arrives wearing a raincoat and wet hair.

‘I feel really sick. I have a tummyache from hell,' I tell Marley. I do not want to tell him my problem on a second date, which technically we still are on. He has made me come and now he has made me sore and both are rather intimate. I am glad I am with a father.

‘Owwww!' I lie on the floor and cry. I do not want to have to tell him this so soon, that I can't do sex right, that I am not built for it. I want to be a sex goddess. I am a sex nymph. Ina of the slim ankles was my favorite goddess when we studied classics at school. I don't know what she did besides have slim ankles. That was good enough for Zeus. I could be her cousin, Sadie who reads
US Weekly
. Godly powers for unheroic acts.

As he makes me drink water and chamomile tea, Marley puts
Finding Nemo
in the DVD. All the water is making my cystitis feel diluted. I am feeling a little better. But then the sad story kicks in: you give a fish Albert Brooks's voice and I'm screwed. I miss my dad so bad that even though he's not a fish and I don't have a deformed fin and in further news I'm not a fish, I get upset and it all starts to hurt again.

‘Montana was bored by this,' says Marley as he brings me my tea. ‘She's not really used to watching TV, so a screen just confuses her. She always thinks she wants to watch a video and then she lasts about twenty minutes before she's bored.'

I think about his parenting skills compared to my father's. I imagine them being the same age (my father was only a few years older when he had me), talking at the playground as we play, me and Montana in the sandbox, everyone admiring the two handsome fathers. Then Jude Law comes up and everyone is a handsome young father together.