The Sexiest Man Alive (3 page)

Mazie laughed out loud. What a crock! The extent of Labeck’s culinary ability was poking holes in the plastic covers on microwave dinners.

“Now for the question you’re all dying to ask.” Apricot lowered her voice. “Is the charismatic Canuck available?
Mais oui!
Bonaparte is a hunk-about-town, known to hang out at
Flanagan’s in the Brady neighborhood, the Bling Bling downtown, and the Guinness Club near Marquette U. There is currently no main squeeze in his life, and reliable sources tell us that Mr. Sexiest is looking for Ms. Right! Coming up next: thirty-one ways to turn those moldy leftovers into beauty products. Stay tuned!”

Sexiest Man Alive
. What a load of crapola. Ben Labeck slammed his gear bag into his trunk. Women always accused men of judging them solely on physical appearance, but women were just as guilty. No—they were worse. Look at the covers of those romance novels his sisters were always reading. Naked guy torsos with impossibly ripped delts, pecs, and abs. Most of the photos didn’t even bother to include the man’s head, as though his brain wasn’t important, just his equipment.

Why the women on that program had picked him as their—he winced
—sexiest man
—was a mystery. There was nothing special about him. A lucky combination of genetics had given him non-scary facial features. As for his body, he lifted weights a couple times a week, but his built-up core muscles were simply a result of years of skating, starting when he was two years old. There were thousands of guys with better bodies. By the time he hit forty, he’d probably look like the Pillsbury Doughboy because he hated exercise. Give him a ball of any shape and a little competition and he’d play sunup to sundown, but sitting in front of a weight machine and pulling levers—too boring to contemplate.

The Sexiest Man Alive
. What he wouldn’t have given for that title when he was a gawky seventeen-year-old, a one-hundred-forty-pound skeleton with big ears and a face that hadn’t yet grown into his nose. Homecoming week of senior year stuck out in his memory as particularly painful. Ben attended an all-boys high school in his hometown. Ben’s buddy Nick was dating a girl from the nearby public high school named Kate, who’d set up a double date with her girlfriend for their school’s homecoming dance. Ben’s date turned out to be a sixteen-year-old named Elena.

Who was very pretty. And who didn’t seem at all thrilled to be his date. Ben was wearing a white shirt and one of his dad’s ties, a sport jacket that left two inches of bony wrist exposed, and pants that had fit before he’d had his latest growth spurt. An attempt to tame his snarly hair—an infuriating combination of straight and wavy—by a self-administered haircut had ended disastrously, leaving him looking as though he’d been scalped. His nose had been broken that afternoon at hockey practice—one of his genius teammates had decided to take a whack at a
puck after everyone had removed their helmets and were skating off the ice. Ben had wadding in his nostrils, an enormous bandage across his nose, and a half-moon black eye. The nose packing made him talk like Daffy Duck.

His hands were shaking as he’d attempted to pin the corsage onto Elena’s dress. Finally she’d snatched it away and pinned it on herself.

Things had pretty much gone downhill from that point.

“Être maison avant minuit,”
Elena’s mother had ordered.
Be home by midnight
.

They’d been home by ten thirty. Elena bestowed a peck on Ben’s cheek before scurrying into her house. Probably couldn’t wait to get on the phone and report to her girlfriend about her dud of a date.

Ben’s nose healed. His feelings didn’t. Luckily, going to an all-guys high school, he didn’t encounter girls every day, except for his sisters, who didn’t count. He knew he wasn’t the type girls swooned over. He was a straight-A student with a geeky interest in photography. The fact that he was an outstanding hockey player didn’t impress anyone—this was Canada, after all, and most guys played hockey at a semipro level.

Everything changed when he went to college. His grade point, his Provincial Achievement Tests, and his hockey prowess sufficiently impressed scouts from the University of Wisconsin that they’d offered him a full four-year scholarship. He’d jumped at the chance and signed the papers before they changed their minds. Then he’d left for the United States.

Ben had believed he was Americanized; French was his first language, but he’d learned English in school and exposure to American TV and movies made him familiar with the slang. Still, Madison had been a major culture shock. Everything was somehow noisier and larger in the States. He hadn’t known that Americans dug hockey, but in Madison, hockey was huge. Hockey matches weren’t just games; they were Super Bowl–style extravaganzas, complete with the Badger marching band, cheerleaders, Jumbotron scoreboards that produced pyrotechnics, gymnasts and hula hoopers and mariachi bands and ten thousand bloodthirsty students chanting, “Kill, maim, pillage, burn!”

To his shock, Ben discovered as a mere freshman that people on campus knew who he was and said hi to him. No Canadian reticence here; Americans were outgoing and friendly, and for the first time in his life, Ben was popular. He didn’t care that it was only because he’d made the hockey team; he just cashed in on his fleeting moment of fame because he was convinced it
would end any minute. He went to parties where the booze flowed freely and the bongs passed from hand to hand and the music was so loud, it made the hairs in his ears shrivel up. At home, Ben, like most other Quebecois, had grown up having wine with every dinner, but drinking on campus was a very big deal and getting drunk until you passed out was a guy rite of passage. Ben said no to the booze and the drugs because the competition for slots on the ice was so brutal that he needed every functioning brain cell. But he didn’t pass on the girls.

Oh, the college girls …

Twelve years later the thought still made him smile. The Madison girls. Beautiful, bold, and available. He discovered he had a type. Tall and blonde, brains optional. To Ben’s amazement, American women considered him handsome. Somewhere along the line his face had grown into his nose and ears. The fact that he was French-Canadian, with Ojibwa ancestry, lent him an air of the exotic. His accent, which he worked strenuously to lose, only seemed to increase his appeal.

He’d done well academically in college, majoring in business, because that was what his dad had advised, but his heart had been in photography and he’d finagled a part-time job with the college’s television station. When he’d graduated Ben had been drafted in the third round by the Columbus Blue Jackets, a pro team. He’d played for them two seasons before a shoulder injury had ended his professional career. One of his college buddies, who worked at a TV station, had tipped him off that a Milwaukee cable station was looking for a cameraman. He’d gotten the job, spent the next couple of years learning the ropes, then had been recruited by WPAK, the local ABC affiliate.

The job was laughably described as forty hours per week. Some of it was in the studio, filming the morning news program, but Ben found that he preferred being out on assignment. When there was an after-hours story to film, the station called Ben first rather than the guys who had families, and there were days when he worked twenty-four hours straight.

But Ben didn’t intend to be a camera jockey all his life. He wanted to do documentaries. He’d already made one, a film on meth addiction among the Chippewa tribes in northern Wisconsin. A local cable station had picked it up and it had been nominated for an award. Currently he was working on a series of interviews with World War II veterans. He was doing everything himself, from writing the interview questions to editing and production, and he loved the freedom it afforded him.

The trouble was, it took up so much time. Between the Snowplows—the amateur team he played for—and his job, he had little time for anything else. This “Sexiest Man” thing was only going to make things worse. Already it’d made his life on the team hell. His teammates had almost wet their jock straps with glee when they’d heard the news, handling it with all the sensitivity and understanding one might expect of a group of sex-obsessed, dirty joke–swapping, beer-guzzling, aging athletes. In a word: unmerciful.

They’d stacked his locker so that when Ben opened it he’d been showered with condoms. They’d scrawled stuff in lipstick all over the locker room mirrors, the mildest of which was
I WANT TO FUCK YOU, SEXY MAN!
Someone had shoved a blow-up toy called Passionate Patti into the shower with him. The guys were having a blast at his expense. Making fun of the sexiest man alive was the most fun they’d had since Manny Garcia’s wife, convinced he’d been screwing around on her, had shown up in the locker room and chased Manny around with a bread knife.

Not a single guy on the team, including Ben himself, had jumped in to restrain Mrs. Garcia; instead, they’d all stood around grinning, watching the show, until Manny had jumped out the window of the men’s john, even though it was on the second floor.

But that was guys for you, and Ben didn’t harbor hard feelings toward them. If they were insulting you, you knew they thought you were okay.

Women, on the other hand … It suddenly occurred to him that Mazie might have seen the program. But she wouldn’t have taken it seriously, would she? Nah, she was too smart for that; she would have just laughed it off. Still … maybe he ought to call her.

She picked up right away.

“Mazie? Did you … uh …”

“I saw it. Sexiest Man Alive.”

He loved her voice. It was low-pitched, but with a kind of musical resonance he couldn’t describe in any other way than that it was sexy as hell. Which was basically the way he described everything about Mazie to himself.

Was it his imagination, or was her voice a little on the chilly side right now? “You didn’t believe any of that stuff, did you?” he asked.

“Like about the crepes Suzette? You seem to have been hiding your culinary talents.”

He laughed. “Speaking of food. The one good thing about this whole circus is that the producers of the program gave me a dinner-for-two certificate at that new restaurant downtown.
It’s Moroccan—Shiraz, Sirocco, something like that. I thought we could try it tomorrow night.”

“I can’t. Juju and I are going to a passion party.”

Ben looked at his phone, wondering if he’d heard right. “Passion party? Does this involve full frontal nudity?”

“Yes, it does, Ben. It’s an orgy.”

He smiled. “How about a post-orgy dinner? All that activity should leave your famished. Nine o’clock?”

“Deal.” The smile was back in her voice.

“It’s supposed to rain. Better bring an umbrella.”

The passion party was being held at a ranch house in the wilds of suburban Brookwood—not exactly the chateau in
The Story of O
—but you never knew what went on behind those JCPenney blinds, Mazie thought, extricating herself from Juju’s car, a yellow MINI Coop not much bigger than a Matchbox car.

The hostess greeted them at the door, introduced herself as Sadie, and led them into her dining room. “Go ahead and fill out your name tags,” she chirped, handing Mazie and Juju pens and heart-shaped stick-on labels. “And help yourselves to the snacks.”

So far this resembled the Tupperware parties Mazie’s mom had dragged her to when she was a kid, except that instead of burpable bowls and melon crispers displayed next to the seven-layer bars and the cheese balls, there were nipple clamps, vibrators, massage oils, blindfolds, and other items that looked more like instruments of torture than sex toys.

She picked up what seemed to be a short, tapered white candle shaped sort of like a Christmas tree bulb. It was only fourteen dollars and was probably the only thing in her price range, so she mentally earmarked it. Oh—here was another of the candles, only this one was blue and larger—and just over there, a red candle that looked like it would last half a year.

“I like this candle,” she said to Juju. “But where’s the wick?”

Juju choked back a laugh. “That’s a butt plug.”

Eww! Mazie dropped the thing, and it knocked over the bowl of Chex Mix. Forget the Chex Mix—forget any food within ten yards of those things!

Juju shook her head. “You’re such a child. You need to experiment a little—find your wild side!”

“Hah! I have a wild side a mile wide! I don’t need sexual appliances to express my wild side.”

A fib. Mazie was a seething mass of insecurities and wondered whether Ben found her boring in bed. Not that he’d ever complained. But was he secretly longing for more spice?

Juju ladled punch for both of them. Grapefruit, cherry juice, lemon slices, and vodka, Mazie decided, sipping. Whatever it was, it had a sting. First rule of home product parties: get
your customers lubricated.

The woman next to Mazie, who was nibbling spinach dip on taco chips, picked up a lime green vibrator about the size of a supermarket cucumber.

“Oh, the Harry Balzac model—that’s a nice one,” commented a white-haired woman who was dipping into the punch. “But its battery runs down too quick. All of a sudden the thing stops and it’s like those times when—you know—your hubby turns to boneless pork.”

“Yeah,” said the first woman, “I hate when that happens.”

While Juju checked out the dominatrix section, focusing on the Mean Teacher paddles and the Nurse Nasty white stockings, Mazie scoped out the crowd. All female, they ranged in age from giggling teenagers to gray-haired grannies, but most appeared to be in their thirties and forties, looking to spice up their marital salsa with a little hot pepper.

Finally it was time for the sales pitch. The guests drifted into Sadie’s living room. Juju and Mazie claimed folding chairs next to a display of the Hurts So Good floggers. Sadie should have started sooner, Mazie thought, because the punch bowl had been drained and the overall mood had advanced from smiley to sloshed. Faces were red, voices were loud, and laughter was high-pitched. The loudest, most obnoxious of the laughers was a brassy-haired woman named Lottie, who was telling racist jokes and puffing on an electronic cigarette.