Insatiable (26 page)

“Why don’t we go to your place?” I said.

“I didn’t have a chance to clean,” he warned as he led me upstairs to his second-story apartment.

I gasped and stumbled as he pushed the door open, stung by the chaos.

He saw my reaction. “I like it this way. It feels cozy to me.”

I took care to avoid sliding on the scattered girlie magazines and underwear. There was a home-movie projector next to the unmade bed, clothes draped and dropped everywhere, a half-eaten baguette, turned to wood now, handcuffs and dildos and lacy panties, a riding crop, a black stocking draped over the bathroom mirror, open jars of strawberry jam and dregs of wine in bottles sitting amid the fan mail on the kitchen table, unwashed plates piled into the sink. A cockroach I pretended not to see skittered away. I wondered how he could dress at night and emerge so pressed and clean from this chaos. It must have some special meaning to him, I thought.

He ignored me, settling into an armchair with the
Times,
an unlit pipe in his mouth. Above him hung a blowup of himself in black leather, a still shot from
Misty Beethoven.

I stood there in my coat, disgusted, thinking I might leave. I could catch something in the bathroom, I thought. My fur might pick up a cockroach. I was a woman who had amorous adventures in marble bathtubs in five-star hotels. I used lavender soap from Provence and olive oil bars from Les Baux. What was I doing here? I walked to the door. He said nothing. I decided I would stay and not let myself think about it, not let the mess creep me out, not brood about germs or crawly things. I found a hanger for my gown and a couple of wire hangers that would support my coat. In the bathroom, I touched up my makeup and took off the bra and panties I was wearing under a lacy black satin teddy. I liked myself in his mirror, breasts billowing immodestly in the deep décolletage, thighs and legs looking very long in high heels and the lace-edged slit of the panties. I walked into the bedroom, kicking aside a high-heeled pump lying on a magazine, and stood there.

Jamey got up from his chair, turned out the lights, lighted the stub of a candle next to the bed with a cigarette lighter. The window shade was up and I could see the marquee of the Martin Beck Theater across the street, visible in the streetlight. Jamey settled the pillows under his head. I caught myself wondering how many times a year he changed his sheets, then shook my head to banish the thought.

I dropped to the bed on all fours and purred. He closed his eyes.

I was in my own porn movie.

36

S
KIN
F
LICK

I
NEVER FOR A MINUTE THOUGHT I COULD POSSIBLY FALL IN LOVE WITH THE
Prince of Porn. Surely he would be the ultimate unattainable man. I was too smart for that trap. For me, it was only about sex. I wanted to feel every nerve ending. I wanted to know everything, to experience all the variations, to taste it all. And so did he. He was eager to bite into birds he’d never known existed, to fathom the mystery of truffles, to guzzle Armagnac for the first time. He seemed not to know he was embarrassing me by picking up a rib eye in a fancy restaurant and eating from the bone. I tried to pretend I found that charming. Finally, I got the courage to suggest it was not good manners to pick up a dinner roll and gnaw it in the middle. And good manners, silly as they might be, counted in the places we went. “I hope you don’t mind my sharing a little etiquette from Emily Post,” I said. “My mom was big on Emily Post.”

“Is that the one who committed suicide?” he asked.

I didn’t say he wasn’t smart. “Oh, you mean Amy Vanderbilt.” I was taking him into my world and I let him know I expected him to show me his. “For the book,” I reminded him. Our tastes were often quite similar. Sorbets could never be too tart for him. We could agree on that. Meat must be rare. Wine was red, except for dessert wine. He quickly developed a passion for Château d’Yquem. Our alliance was not merely sybaritic; it was symbiotic in its pursuit of sensuous feasts.

So it was becoming more complex than just hot sex. Of course, most everyone close to me—and I suppose anyone who cared to think about us, across the table or a dance floor, alerted by an item in Liz Smith’s column or a sighting in the
Post
’s Page Six—assumed it was all about bodice-ripping, uninhibited, beyond-fantasy sex. Porn fans and Jamie Gillis fans probably imagined black-leather moments and playful threesomes. But I was in bed with Jamey, not Jamie, and prize movie stud though he was—he could always get himself into the mood and bring me along to a grand finale and many curtain calls—he had exasperating taboos.

“Why do all women just want to be dominated?” It was so exhausting, he complained. He adored the woman who led him around town with a string on his cock and tugged it at dinner. Yet he would focus on some woman nearby giving him the eye, or, even more tantalizing, pretending to ignore him. “She’s asking for it,” he would say. “I would tie her up and make her beg.”

“Yes. Yes,” I said. “You can tie me up and dominate me—nothing really serious, of course. I’m not into pain.”

He refused. “I just don’t think of you that way.”

Jamey was not a country person, he told me, but I lured him to the little church in Woodstock by promising to cook a feast for us—quail, an aged entrecôte that I would pan-sauté, chicken livers, rare, the way we both loved them, and whatever bottle he might choose from the generous stash Don had left in the cellar. Jean-Louis, though wary of Jamey, didn’t seem to mind loaning me his huge van, fitted out for hunting deer, carpeted with fake fur, guns and knives tucked in the rear.

I’m not sure how it happened. We were almost to Kingston on the thruway, when suddenly I lost control of the van. It veered off the highway and started turning over. How many times? Over and over, down an incline. So slowly, I had time to think about what was happening. This is it. We’re never getting out of this alive . . . can’t possibly not be smashed, maimed, scarred. I waited for the roof of the car to crush us. Jamey was flying through the van. It stopped on its side. He was lying in the debris of Jean-Louis’s cooking gear in the rear. I was hanging upside down from my seat belt, shouting again and again, “Jamey. Are you all right? Are you all right, Jamey?”

He crawled toward me. “I think I’m all right.” He looked dazed, as if shocked to be alive. People were crawling all over the van. Someone opened the driver’s seat door and pulled me up. Someone else unlocked the belt. Jamey handed me my purse. Someone pulled him out. I watched him stretch, testing his bones to see if anything was broken, hopping on one foot and then the other. There was a tiny cut on his rib cage, shaped like a tear. He dabbed at it, standing there looking slight in his navy blue T-shirt.

“I’m a nurse,” a woman said. “Everyone get away from the car,” a man commanded. “It might explode.” We moved toward the road. The two of us collapsed, seated on the gravel and broken asphalt of the thruway shoulder.

“Shall I call an ambulance?” a cop asked.

I had just returned from two weeks in Chicago, where my brother, Jim, a doctor of emergency medicine, had arranged for me to observe emergency technique, research for my new novel,
Doctor Love.
I knew too much about emergency rooms.

“Unless there’s something seriously wrong, we’ll be stuck there for hours,” I whispered to Jamey. I made him tug on my hands to see if one side was stronger. I looked into his pupils for signs of a concussion. The crowd was thinning. Miraculously, the van had not exploded. But they said it was probably totaled. Someone handed me my wallet. A biker helped Jamey pick up all our stuff from the field. “I’ve got to find the quail,” Jamey said.

A friend from Kingston came to take us to my house. “Is it safe to leave you?” he asked. “You’re sure you are both really all right?” Once he was gone, I started to shake. If I were with any other man, I would be hysterical now, I thought. But I have to be calm because it’s Jamey and he is fragile. I have committed myself to taking care of him. He was so quiet, watchful, staring at me. I could see he was shaken.

“What happened?” He backed me up against the refrigerator. “Try to remember what happened.” He pressed the side of his face against mine.

“It must have been a rut in the highway.” The pressure of his body gave me a sense the world was not spinning off its axis. I let it be enough. “Here. Help me unwrap the steak.”

I ran water for his bath, spilled in bubbles. While he was soaking and trying to calm down, I fetched a bottle of Lafite from the cellar and set it on the counter. I put bacitracin and a Band-Aid on the sink.

“The sour cream disappeared,” he said, coming up behind me. “Will the chicken livers be all right without sour cream?”

“But look, the brownies survived.”

“You didn’t do it just for the book?” he asked.

I convinced him I did not, would not.

“We are the kind of people who think first about the quail.” He was coming around. “Good Jamey.” He patted himself on the back. “I like to do that when I’ve been good,” he told me.

We carried dinner trays to the steps of what had been the church’s altar, sitting in front of the fire I got roaring (after Don’s tutorials), sipping the luscious Lafite, which was slightly warmed from its time in the kitchen.

“It’s thrilling to eat something as tiny as a quail,” he remarked. “I’m not overwhelmed by being taken care of, because I know I control you sexually.”

By the time I washed up and put everything away, he was asleep in the bedroom. I lay awake next to him, remembering a series of auto accidents I’d had in my dad’s car the year I got my license. Mom, in diplomatic mode, persuaded my father not to tear up the license. I thought of how pleased my father was when Don and I called to say we’d bought a house upstate, though he couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live in a church. He died of a stroke at fifty-six and never got to see our home or my dream kitchen, gutted and stripped and polished. Like Jamey, he never understood weekends in the country. I lay there weeping silently. Jamey turned and snuggled close, making a few snuffly sleeping sounds, then making love to me lazily, gently, as if not quite awake.

“Isn’t it time to go?” Jamey asked the next day after a short walk in the cemetery that bounded our—I say our, but it was mine now, since the divorce—tiny acreage on the hill outside Woodstock.

“We need more time to recover,” I protested.

He looked at his watch again.

“You bitch. Come here.” He slouched in the tall covered bishop’s chair, legs wide apart. He took off his belt and bound my wrists . . . pushed me down onto the thick fur of the rug, ripped at my panties. He unzipped his jeans . . . he was naked, as always, underneath—and filled me up. He slapped me lightly with the end of the belt. I couldn’t help it. I felt so silly. I started to laugh. After all, I’d begged for this. He slapped me again. I gave in to the pleasure.

Afterward, the girl reporter in me couldn’t shut up: “Was I supposed to struggle?” I asked.

“You’re not
supposed
to do anything but what you feel,” he snapped.

“I’m just trying to understand the game.”

“It’s not a game.” He was annoyed, began zipping up, then turned away.

“But it’s a fantasy, and I’m just trying to understand. Maybe it’s a question of semantics.”

He picked up his overnight bag, a brown paper sack. “I like them to struggle a little.”

I bit my tongue, trying not to laugh, and went off to pack up the leftovers. “Want the last brownie?” I asked.

He pulled me into a hug. “It’s okay,” he said. “I tasted arugula and VSOP and I didn’t die. I think that means something.”

For the first time, I felt the enormity of how close we had been to death. Miracles—that the van didn’t crush us, that the engine didn’t burst into flames, that Jamey didn’t land on Jean-Louis’s free-flying kitchen knife. Oh God. What could I say to poor Jean-Louis?

“We lived a lot,” I agreed, “considering it was just half a weekend.”

I felt I was beginning to touch Jamey, opening him up to the world’s possibilities. I felt challenged by his strangeness. How different he was from anyone I’d ever known. Who would play me in the movie? What would we call our book?
When Narcissists Collide
?

Jamey decided to go to France with me on my spring tasting swing for the magazine. I thought he was the dream candidate for the trip. We seemed to love all the essentials—sex, dinner, and dancing. He had two perfectly acceptable suits and a tie. No wife and no nagging job obligations. Alas, he was afraid to fly. Why couldn’t I go by boat? he wondered. Wouldn’t a boat trip be the perfect time for our collaboration on the book?

“I don’t have that much time, baby.”

He brooded. “Maybe we could take the
Concorde.
It’s new, and they’re still trying to make a good impression. They wouldn’t let it crash.” Once he’d been forced to fly to Britain, he told me. “I couldn’t decide if I should go BOAC, with a pilot who did it a million times and knew everything, or on Japan Air Lines, where they might not be so nonchalant.” He had finally chosen JAL because they served sushi.

Jamey called an astrologer to ask for dates that might be good to fly. The response agitated him. “The astrologer said, ‘Do
not
fly. There’s a bad sequence of Uranus in Saturn.’” He weighed cashing in his small cache of stock, everything he owned, to pay for overseas passage by boat. But that would add two weeks to his time away. “When do you plan to arrive?” he asked me.

“Friday the thirteenth.”

“I’d consider another date.”

“Well, Jamey, maybe you should just forget it, let it go. Now you’ve got me spooked. I’m not getting on any plane with you.” I offered to find him a more professional astrologer. Often, I amazed myself with my patience. I hadn’t the tiniest faith in astrology and yet I was financing the hiring of some charlatan to draw up his chart.

We were at dinner. He took my hand. “Tell me again, sweetie. Tell me again what we’re gonna do in Paris? Will we go to the Bois de Boulogne at night and fuck in the car while people watch?”

“Yes. Yes. Yes. We’ll do it all. We’ll do everything.” Why not?

“If I fly, I could save twelve hundred dollars. For twelve hours of torture, that’s one hundred dollars an hour I’d be saving. Good money. Not even your therapist gets that much.”

We were at the Brussels Restaurant, his choice, in honor of his birthday. He found our captain impressive. “I should hire him one day for my staff.” He was playing with the idea of getting rich from the acting jobs my connections would bring him. I’d sent him to an agent, who seemed more taken with my interest in him than in his acting career. “It is Circe’s fate to live with swine,” she said. I thought that rude. But she promised to send him on casting calls.

The appetizer of brains, sweetbreads, truffle, and bean sprouts in a heavy vinaigrette on red leaf lettuce seemed to knock him out. “It reminds me of the French director Artaud,” he said. “He wanted to put the audience in the middle and surround them with the actors. A dizzying immersion in spectacle.”

He was full of little gifts like that.

Another evening at dinner, Jamey apologized for dragging me into his romantic problems, but he said he needed to let me know that his girlfriend Andrea was unhappy about his going, especially about the money and time wasted on the boat, which would leave no time or money for their planned vacation in June. “She says I want to have my cake and eat it, too. She says she won’t be waiting when I come back.” I thought it was his backward way of showing how much he was willing to sacrifice to be with me.