Waking Beauty (22 page)

“Okay, so what, you have some kind of ugly-man sexual fetish, s’that it?”

“Boy, oh, boy. Self-esteem issues?”

“No, actually. In fact, most of the time I walk around harboring a secret superiority complex. You just happen to be testing its limits right now.”

I laughed. “Listen,” I said, “I’m attracted to you, okay?”

“Hmm.”

“I think you’re very cute—”

“Uch,” he bristled. “That word.”

“You know what I mean. And I feel as if I know you a bit, based on stuff Allison has told me….”

“Like what?”

“Well, you know…. That you’re great.”

He laughed. “I miss her,” he said.

“Me, too,” I said reflexively, but it was true, in a way. And I realized that this was the first time since the Change that I truly felt like her/me. The real me. Content at the core, just to be alone and quiet with Nathan. “Listen,” I said, pinching the rough flap of skin at his elbow, “why don’t we just watch the movie, then maybe in the next little while we could go out a few times and get to know each other better before we…you know.”

He chewed on a hangnail and thought it over. “Nah,” he said, breaking into a wonky smile. “Let’s just get undressed.”

We did. We did get undressed, and there was much touching, licking, kissing, and squeezing, and Nathan brushed his lips softly over the bruised area around my hip and said, “Poor you,” which I thought was very nice. Before long he was excusing himself to go fish out condoms from the bathroom medicine cabinet, and I thought, Well, this is it, after twenty-two and a quarter years it’s finally, finally going to happen. I ran my hand over the ugly sheets on the mattress in the corner on the floor; it didn’t seem like such a grand bed in which to lose one’s virginity. The crack whore’s music was still vibrating through the wall of the grim apartment, and when Nathan emerged from the bathroom, I saw that he was not as muscular as I’d imagined he would be. His body was pale and freckly, and he had a bit of a belly hanging soft and white. When he ripped the condom packet open with his slightly snaggled teeth and rolled the latex onto his birthmarked penis, I noticed that his balls sagged loose and lopsided, and I couldn’t help but reflect on how much better looking
George was, especially from that low angle. But just as I was thinking that about George, Nathan got down on the bed and positioned himself on top of me, and slowly, slowly we started to slide together and actually do the thing, and it hurt a bit but also felt stupidly good. And a cliché popped into my head, which made me smile and grip him a little bit tighter with my arms and legs:
It’s what’s inside that counts
.

I didn’t sleep well. The music from next door went on forever, sirens and drunken screams punctuated the night, and the mattress on the floor proved to be terribly lumpy. But when I awoke, I was tangled up in Nathan, a lovely way to start the morning, especially since it was crazy pouring outside and there was a breeze coming in, smelling fresh like ozone and wet cement, and the apartment was almost dark behind curtains in the gray day. Nathan gained consciousness a second after I did. He rolled slowly onto his side to face me. His eyes were puffy from sleep, and I was reminded of a tortoise, a friendly cartoon tortoise moving sluggish.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hi.”

A thunder rumble followed by silence awkward between us. Nathan was looking at me with a mirthless grin on his face. He appeared resigned, as if he was waiting for me to turn all cold, get briskly dressed, and hightail it out of there. I ended the moment by moving in for a kiss. After a bit of tentative smooching, I worked my tongue into his mouth and wrapped my hand around his cock.

“What time is it?” he said, propping himself up on an elbow and squinting blind at the digital clock on his desk.

“Ten twenty-eight.”

He laughed. “I’m supposed to be at work in…seventeen minutes.”

“Something tells me you’re not going to make it.”

“Something tells me you’re right.”

We had sex again. This time it hurt less and felt better. After, Nathan got up and took an absurdly long piss. I’d never heard anything like it; it went on and on. I lay in bed, listening to the wild weather and the hilariously endless urination, and I felt finer than I’d felt in a long time. The only thing that could have improved my mood would’ve been a cappuccino soak in a claw-footed tub like at George’s place, but it was not to be. Nathan’s bathroom was a disaster. All calcified faucets and cracked green tiles, bare lightbulb and murky medicine cabinet mirror. A shower-massage device with a broken-off head—essentially just a beige plastic hose—dangled down into the poorest excuse for a tub I’d ever seen. It was about three feet long and no more than nine inches tall, designed by sadists to do nothing more than catch shower water. Impossible for anyone other than a child, midget, or double amputee to bathe in. It really was a grotesque apartment, and the cockroach traps under the sink were creeping me out. I quickly emptied my bladder and, while the toilet was flushing, quietly squeezed out a few farts I’d been holding in since I woke up. Then I burrowed back into bed and watched Nathan prepare coffee and breakfast in the hideous kitchen.

“I just remembered my dream,” he said.

“Oh, yeah, what was it?”

“It was about you and Allison,” he said. “We were in a pool. I can’t remember exactly what was going on, just that we were all swimming together in a pool. I think we were at some actor’s house.”

“That’s weird.”

“Yeah. Actually, you remind me a bit of her.”

“I do?”

“Yeah, your mannerisms, your way of speaking. Your sense of humor.”

“Hmm. So you guys are pretty good friends, huh?”

“I guess.”

“What do you mean, ‘you guess’?”

“Well, we’re definitely friends, but we generally just see each other at work.”

“Why is that?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, you like her, right?”

“Yeah. I like her a lot.”

“So, did you ever think about dating her?”

“Dating? No. I mean, Allison’s great, there’s just no chemistry there.”

“Chemistry?”

“Right.”

“So, do we have chemistry?” I asked, miffed that Nathan had confused chemistry with physical appearance, but relieved that he hadn’t insulted the way I looked.

“Oh, man…we’re a regular Dow or DuPont. We’re Union Carbide.” Nathan unplugged the kettle and poured. “I like Allison, though. She’s sweet.”

“Sweet?
!”

He laughed. “Well, you know, she’s pretty cynical, but yeah, I think she’s sweet. She has the most amazing voice. But I guess you know that.”

“Yeah.” A stab of sadness for my lost lilt. I wanted it back. Not at the cost of “no chemistry,” but in addition to the new attributes.

Nathan carried in mugs of Nescafé lightened with non-dairy creamer, and small plastic bowls of instant oatmeal. Both substances looked gray and objectionable. I managed to gulp down most of the coffee but couldn’t get through the gummy porridge.

“Thanks.” I set the dishes down on the floor beside the bed.

“Sorry. If I’d known I was going to have company, I would’ve had eggs or something. At least milk and cream.”

“It’s okay,” I said, picking a bit of lint out of his navel, examining it, and tucking it into mine. “Next time.”

He liked that. He said, “You know what, I don’t feel like going to work today.”

“I think you should call in sick and hang out with me some more.”

“I think you’re right.”

We lay in bed for a long while, savoring the storm and the daytime darkness. It was conducive to asking questions personal and I posed ones that Old Allison would never have brought up during a brief patio confab. I managed to learn quite a bit about Nathan’s family. His parents were originally from the U.K. Father: a Scottish Jew from Glasgow. Mother: a Welsh Catholic from Cardiff. Both avowed atheists, but according to Nathan, each secretly in love with their own religion. He said they got along well but bickered constantly—mostly for sport and pleasure. His dad was a pharmacist who played and collected tubas. His pride and joy was a giant tuba that was eight feet tall and, ostensibly, forty-five feet in length if uncoiled. He told me that his mother was seven years older than his father, and was forty-one when she had her first child. Evidently, at the age of seventy-three she was still ridiculously spry—swam one hundred laps every morning at the local community center—but attributed her excellent health to the two ounces of Danzy Jones Whiskey Liqueur she enjoyed each evening before and after dinner. Nathan’s father didn’t drink or swim, ordered his corned beef with extra fat, and drove everywhere—even to the corner store. A former cigar smoker, he had been on the nicotine patch for six years running (much to the horror of his GP). I already knew that Nathan had a younger sister named Kate who had gone back to school to get her law degree and was now articling with a big firm in the city, but I hadn’t known that she had recently come out of the closet and was planning a wedding to her girlfriend, Gwen, a woman who designed children’s clothing for the Roots retail chain. Apparently, after the initial shock faded, Nathan’s folks were fine with the nuptial
news and actually seemed relieved that thirty-year-old Kate was finally getting hitched (although they were against her plan to wear a lavender tuxedo to the wedding).

As far as my own background went, I tried to deflect questions and keep things vague. I found that I could distract Nathan by steering the conversation toward cinema, a topic he was endlessly eager to discuss. I had the advantage of ten months of patio movie blab, and in order to compensate for my ditsiness at Art & Trash, I regurgitated many of Nathan’s cogent views on a number of films. He was obviously impressed with my intelligence and good taste, and when I told him that the original version of
The In-Laws
—a film I still hadn’t seen—was my favorite comedy, he fairly glowed with pleasure.

I did end up divulging a bit about my personal life. At some point I admitted to being adopted and feeling disconnected from my parents. It felt strange to discuss it openly with another human.

“So you don’t get along with either of them?”

“Well, it’s possible that I might get along with my adoptive dad, but I’ve never had the chance to find out. He split when I was a kid, and didn’t keep in touch. As for my mom, well…it’s like she’s been in an absolutely foul mood for about twenty years.” I laughed. “She’s hard to please.”

Nathan didn’t laugh. He said, “So you feel like you’re always trying to please her?”

“Um…maybe when I was little. Not anymore.”
Sometimes just the opposite
. It occurred to me then, in a moment of clarity, that perhaps my overeating had been a kind of weapon, that maybe I had fattened myself to antagonize the impossible-to-please Miss Beef and Barley.

“So what about your birth mother? Have you ever thought about trying to find her?”

“Oh, God, yeah. But I was always too afraid to go through with it.”

“Afraid of what you might find, I guess.”

“No. Not at all. Afraid of being a disappointment, you know.”

“What? That’s nuts. You’re lovely. Why on earth would she be disappointed?”

“I don’t know,” I said, turning away to hide the tears inexplicably welling in my eyes. Maybe she wouldn’t be…now.

“Well, anyway,” said Nathan, curling himself around me, spoon style, “if you’re ever feeling masochistic and craving a dose of family, you’re welcome to come with me to my folks’ for dinner.”

“Really?”

“Not that you’d want to. My mother would force you to consume Danzy Jones Whiskey Liqueur, and the first thing my father does when a new person comes to the house is take them down to the basement to show them the Majestic Monster Tuba.”

I said it sounded fine to me.

Eventually the rain subsided and the sun struggled to make an appearance. Valiant but veiled. Pale and hazy. Nathan suggested that it would be a good day to catch a matinee. As I was leaning over his shoulder, checking the local movie listings on the Internet, my gaze wandered to the far corner of his desk and settled on a yellowing manuscript covered in overlapping coffee rings. Through the Spirographic pattern of java circles I could make out the following laser-printed words:
An Honest Man, an original screenplay by Nathan Billyack
.

“Hey,” I said. “I thought you said you weren’t interested in writing movies.”

“I’m not,” he said. “But did I say that? I don’t remember telling you that.”

“Oh, um, I think Allison told me. So, what’s that?” I gestured to the stained script.

“That is a coaster.”

“No, seriously.”

“I am serious.” Nathan continued to scan the listings onscreen. “I use it to set my hot beverages on while I type. It reminds me not to be too harsh, particularly to screenwriters.”

“Can I read it?”

“God, no! Hey,” he said, “how about ‘Rivethead,’ the new Linklater film?”

“Oh, come on.” I spun his ugly swivel chair around to face me. “Cant I read it?”

“I don’t think s—”

“Please?” I settled lightly in his lap and tried a Virginie-style pout.

“Yes. All right,” he said. “If you want. But let me read it again first. Make sure there’s nothing too embarrassing in there.”

We bought popcorn, a jumbo container hot and buttered, and devoured every kernel, even the semi-popped at box bottom, before the conclusion of the coming attractions. Then Nathan held my golden topping-covered hand tight and greasy in his lap through the rest of the movie, and it seemed as if what was happening on-screen was the peripheral experience. Afterward he walked me to the subway. He kept hold of my hand on the way there, and I noticed people giving us the what’s-wrong-with-this-picture? look as they passed by. When we got to the station, Nathan walked me down the stairs, right up to the turnstiles.

“Well,” I said, “I guess I’ll see you at work tomorrow night.”

“Definitely.”

“Okay…See you.”

We stood there kissing until a stout woman came barreling by and shouted,
“Hello
!” right at our heads because we were semi-blocking one of the turnstile entrances. We laughed and moved out of the way.