by Amy Sohn
I was in a predicament I could not have anticipated: James was turning out to be more interested in my talent than my talent. Suddenly, someone turned on the jukebox. Loud Sinatra came on. “Let’s go somewhere quieter,” said James. I was relieved. Maybe the change of pace would make him forget about the stories.
We went to a Greek diner and sat down in a booth, side by side. When the waiter came I ordered a coffee and James ordered a grapefruit. That made me slightly uncomfortable. I’d never met a man who ordered grapefruit. He spooned out a wedge, munched it, and said, “Please read.”
“I don’t want to anymore,” I said.
“I think you should.”
“Why?”
“It’s good for you.”
“No, it’s not. I know what’s good for me and I can tell you that’s not it. What would be good would be if you took me home with you.”
“But you have so much tension inside you right now. That tense energy is exactly what I want to put onstage. It’s what makes you so sexy—that desire, that fervor. I want you to play with what it feels like not to have any release.”
“I want release!”
He spooned out another wedge, chewed it slowly, sighed, and said, “All right. Let me help you with your coat.”
•
He had his own place on Christopher, with a loft bed. There was a brown leather couch, a TV across from it, and an armchair in the far corner, by the window. To the left of the front door was a kitchen with a butcher-block island. “What do you do for a living?” I asked.
“I’m a carpenter.” Boy oh boy. He worked with his hands. I wanted to jump him, but I had to play it cool.
He went into the kitchen, poured himself some whiskey, and offered me a glass. I took a sip. It burned my throat but I tried not to wince. He sat on the couch. I put down the drink and started to climb up the ladder to the bed, hoping he would follow. But he tugged on my leg and said sternly, “You can’t go up there. It’s private.”
I wished he’d put it more politely, but politeness is so overrated. I sat down next to him and leaned in to kiss him. He kissed back a little, but his tongue was fat and lazy and he didn’t seem to take any pleasure in the contact. Then he pulled away, stood up, and crossed over to the armchair.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“My primary interest is in watching men watch you. That’s why I wanted to meet you in a bar. Did you notice how all the men looked at you when you took off your coat?”
“Sort of.”
“That’s because you have something very special. You exude sex. And men can smell that. You will walk down the streets and they will sniff it in you. You should stare into the eyes of men on the streets and enjoy how much they will want you.”
I wanted to believe I had that much power. I wanted to believe I was the kind of girl who made men crazy, even if I was too fat to be an ingenue, even if this was my first date since I’d come to the city.
He kept talking, and I stuck my hand down my stockings. Between his dirty talk and the buildup from the diner, it only took me about ten minutes.
“I came,” I said after. (I don’t make any loud noises. I never do.)
“I’m glad,” he said.
I thought about leaving but I didn’t feel ready. I wanted to arouse him, and since he wouldn’t let me touch him, I decided to try another way. I stood up by the couch and slowly unzipped the front of my nurse dress. I slid it off my shoulders and threw it on the floor, till I was standing in front of him in just my panty hose and Minimizer bra. I unsnapped my bra slowly, dropped it on the floor too, and ran my fingers up and down my breasts, like a stripper in a movie.
He opened his mouth and watched me, and then he unzipped his pants, took it out, and began to stroke it. I kept moving around, pretending “Fever” was playing in the background, and from time to time I would reach my hand up and flip the wig like it was real. His blinds were up and it was dark outside, so I could see my reflection in the window. In that black wig, with my bra off, in my stockings and platform heels, I was a glam queen. I was beautiful.
After several minutes he leaned his head back hard and fast against the chair with a thump and shot it out all over his hand and pants. I went to the bathroom and got a Kleenex. As I handed it to him he looked up at me with sad, round eyes and whispered, “You found my weakness.” I put my dress back on and he walked me to a cab, but when I tried to kiss him good night, he turned his face away again.
•
On the ride home I thought about what I had done. I didn’t like how he’d refused to kiss me or let me in his bed, but I really liked that line about me finding his weakness. That meant I’d made him vulnerable. That meant he was into me.
When I got back to the apartment it was one in the morning and the house was quiet. I tiptoed past my parents’ bedroom toward mine. “Did you have a good time?” my mom called out.
I felt a pang of guilt that she’d been awake worrying about me and that I’d been such a bitch on my way out the door. “Yes,” I said. “Really good.”
I went into the bathroom and took off the wig. I looked in the mirror and my real hair looked strange framing my face.
2
WHEN I CAME INTO WORK the next morning, the Corposhit was waiting with a stack of papers for me to copy. It was rare for her to be giving me stuff to do. That’s the irony of temping: they never give you enough work but they can’t stand to see you doing nothing, so your main responsibility is pretending to be busy. It wouldn’t be so bad if you sat down at your desk and your boss said, “Hi. I’ve got nothing for you to do today. Absolutely nothing. Feel free to paint your nails, masturbate, or pick your ass.” But it doesn’t happen that way. If your boss notices that you’re not doing anything, then her lack of responsibility becomes so glaringly obvious that she gets pissed—and blames you for her own inability to move up the corporate ladder.
Each day I would occupy myself with the various fake-busy tasks: surfing the Internet, playing computer solitaire, calling in for messages, taking frequent bathroom trips to stare in the mirror at my steadily sagging rear, and reading magazines and newspapers under the desk. Usually I read the Times, but today I had been planning to read the City Week.
The Week was the Village Voice’s main competitor and it was distributed free on Wednesdays in green metal boxes on every corner in downtown Manhattan. My dad had introduced me to it when I was fourteen. He came home from work one night and plopped down a copy on my floor, open to a syndicated question-and-answer column called “The Skinny Puppy,” by a guy named Simon LeGros. Readers sent in questions about anything they didn’t understand (“What is the function of male nipples?” or “How did the flipping-the-bird gesture originate?”), and he gave long, fascinating answers. When I finished reading the column I turned to the film reviews, and then I looked up my horoscope and glanced at a few of the comics. The entire paper was quirky but endearing, and I felt like I was discovering a well-kept city secret. From then on I started picking it up myself on the way home from school. When I went to Brown, my dad would mail me clippings from time to time, and now that I was back in the city I read it every week.
Like the Voice, it had lots of X-rated ads and a Personals section, but unlike the Voice, its political bent was just to the right of Mussolini. The editor in chief, Steve Jensen, in his column, “Knee-Jerk Asshole,” wrote diatribes against Bill Clinton interspersed with two-sentence reviews of tony Tribeca restaurants, and tons of readers wrote in regularly to call him a fascist neocon. In addition to Jensen, there were three autobiographical columnists: Len Hyman, a neurotic suburban dad (“The Nebbish”), Dave Nadick, a depressed suicidal with a degenerative nerve disease (“Wasted”), and Stu Pfeffer, a young punk rocker (“The Mosh Pit”). Each week they would regale readers with their latest sagas—Hyman taking his daughter to her first day of kindergarten, Nadick throwing himself in front of a car, Pfeffer squeezing some girl’s tits at a CBGB show. I loved tuning in to the different pathetic lives each
week. It made me feel like I wasn’t doing so badly.
I put down my bag, took the papers from the Corposhit, and headed to the copy room very slowly so I could keep her waiting if she had something else for me to do. When I got there I stuck the papers in the copying tray, but after only one copy the machine jammed. I opened every single door in the machine, searching for the offending paper, but I couldn’t find it. Just as I was about to smash my fist into the glass I heard someone say, “Do you need some help?” I turned around. A thin, tall girl with shoulder-length black hair, burgundy lipstick, and a small tattoo on her left hand was standing behind me.
“I think I do,” I said.
She strode over to the machine, opened a door on the side I hadn’t noticed, violently ripped out a piece of paper, and slammed the door shut. “Sometimes you just have to be brutal with it.”
“I wouldn’t want to be on your shit list,” I said.
“No, you wouldn’t,” she said.
“Are you a temp?”
“Yeah. How’d you guess?”
“The tattoo. I’m a temp too. Ariel Steiner.”
“Sara Green.” We shook hands. “What do you think of this place?”
“I hate it. I hate doing nothing and I hate doing work, because both drive me crazy.”
“Me too. I was in the International Socialist Organization in college, and now I’m licking the asshole of corporate America.”
“I was in the ISO too! Where’d you go to school?”
“Columbia. You?”
“Brown.”
“What are you—actress, opera singer, or musician?”
“Actress. What about you?”
“I’m a rock star in training. I’m studying accordion and writing my own songs. You want to see my cubicle?”
“OK.”
Hers was one floor down. She’d been using our copy machine because hers was broken. On her bulletin board, she had Clash, Sex Pistols, and Replacements stickers, and there were headphones plugged into her CD-ROM. “Does your boss mind when you listen to music?” I asked.
“He doesn’t know. I only do it when his door’s closed, and only in one ear so I can hear if he’s coming.”
I noticed a pink message slip on the desk with some typewritten words on it. “You type your boss’s messages?” I asked incredulously.
“No,” she said and handed me the slip. Under the words While you were out she had typed, in neat bold caps, I THOUGHT ABOUT WAYS TO KILL YOU. I asked if she wanted to come to lunch.
•
I always ate my lunch in the Met Life building because they had performances on a stage in the mezzanine each day between twelve and one—big bands, ballroom dancing, and barbershop quartets. When Sara and I got there, a gorgeous svelte couple from a midtown dance center was demonstrating the tango. We found a seat on the bleachers and then Sara took out a Yoo-Hoo and a tuna sandwich on Wonder bread, and I took out a yogurt and a rice cake.
“I wish I were that woman,” I said, staring out at the dancers. “A cruel, vicious chick who won’t take no for an answer.”
“Me too,” said Sara. “But my love life sucks a horse’s penis. A couple weeks ago, my friend Liz set me up with this sculptor she knew. I met him for drinks at BarCode, and twenty minutes later we were sixty-nining on his mattress. We had the most sensuous and electrifying three-week affair, but one morning he called to say his ex-girlfriend had come back into town from Prague and he’d decided to get back together with her.”
“That’s awful.”
“Not really. Because a couple days later, I was sitting in this café on Avenue A by my apartment, writing lyrics, when this très Keith Richardsesque rocker in a polyester button-down started making eyes at me. Twenty minutes later we were sixty-nining on his mattress. But a few nights later we were fooling around, and when I asked if I could tie him to the headboard, he jumped out of bed and started pacing up and down the room, saying that was just a little too weird to be believed, was I some kind of pervert or something? I was like, ‘Someone’s a closet submissive.’ ”
“You said that?”
“No. Thought it. I just watched him pace around for a while, and then I was like, ‘Are you gonna get back in bed so we can talk about this, or are you comfortable just being a raging asshole?’ ”
“You said that?”
“No. Thought it. I didn’t say anything. I got up, put on my clothes, and went to my ex-boyfriend Jon’s apartment in Hell’s Kitchen. We’ve been having a really jagged breakup.”
“When did you break up?”
“Six years ago. We were high school sweethearts in Paramus, where I’m from, but he went to NYU, so we kept seeing each other on and off throughout college. We’re trying to stop fucking, but it’s not easy. You know. The ties that bind.”
“Yeah,” I said. “My boyfriend at Brown—Will—and I kept having sex for four months after he dumped me.”
“Why’d he dump you?”
“I cheated on him with Bo Rodriguez, the president of Students Against Classist Oppression.”
“And your boyfriend walked in on you?”
“No. I hooked up with Bo at a party, fall of freshman year, right after Will and I started going out, but I didn’t tell Will till the end of the semester. The guilt just got to be too much and I confessed, one morning in his bed. He pushed me off onto the floor and said he felt like he could never trust me again. But he didn’t break up with me either. We went out for another year and had this really mutually abusive relationship where all we did was fight and fuck. He finally dumped me January of sophomore year, claiming he couldn’t trust me anymore, but we slept together on and off till May.”
“Guys are weird about their girlfriends sleeping with other guys.”
“I didn’t sleep with Bo. We only went to second.”
“That’s ridiculous. Your boyfriend freaked because of a make-out?”
“His father left his mother for another woman, so his views on fidelity were kind of loaded.”
She nodded understandingly. I was spilling my guts, but it didn’t feel strange. Sara made me feel like I could never one-up her in the dysfunction department. By the time we were on our way back to work, she had informed me that at different points in her life she’d been suicidal, bulimic, on Prozac, president of her temple youth group, knocked up, doped up, coked up, institutionalized, and a member of NA, OA, AA, and Phi Beta Kappa. In light of her past, I decided she wouldn’t be too weirded out if I told her about James.
“It sounds like he’s bad news,” she said. “I think he’s a provocateur.”
“What’s that?”
“Someone who walks into a bar, sees two guys in a brawl, hands one of them a gun, then leaves.”
“Am I the guy he hands the gun to, or the guy about to get shot?”
“It’s not an exact metaphor. I’m just saying, he likes to push buttons. If you want your buttons pushed, then go for it. But if you’re looking for a boyfriend, you’re probably gonna need to find a guy who doesn’t have serious issues about letting you in his bed.”
•
James did turn out to be bad news. That night at rehearsal he didn’t say a word to me, and whenever he caught me looking at him, he looked away. I had thought my finding his weakness would make him like me more, not less. It didn’t make any sense. I didn’t understand how his intrigue could turn so quickly to disgust.
When he was on his way out the door, I ran up to him and said, “Can we talk for a second?”
“No,” he said and rushed out. I called him when I got home, but the machine picked up, so I left a message. He never called back.
I left half a dozen more messages over the next few weeks, but he didn’t return any of them. He would pretend to act normal when we were rehearsing, but he never spoke to me during any of the breaks. I tried to forget about him and pour myself into the role. Sometimes it worked. I would be running a scene with Gene and get so involved in it that I’d forget James was watching. But th
ere were other times when I would catch James’s eye in the audience, lose focus, and have to call for my line.
One night about a week before the show was set to open, the phone rang at twelve-forty-five. My parents and Zach had already gone to sleep and I was just drifting off myself. I raced into the living room and picked up the cordless.
“Hello?” I said.
“Listen,” he said, “someone’s been calling me around one in the morning the past couple nights, then hanging up when I answer. Was it you?”
I didn’t know which pissed me off more, the fact that he was presumptuous enough to call and ask if I’d been harassing him or the fact that he had no idea how presumptuous he was. I knew hating him wasn’t much better for my mental health than pining after him, but it felt like a step in the right direction.
“I’m sorry to disappoint you, James,” I said as haughtily as I could, “but it wasn’t me.” And I hung up quickly, before he could say anything back.
•
Despite James, Lolita: Rock On was a huge success. We ran the first two weekends of August and were sold out almost every night. I got to dance and sing and play my clarinet, my car scene with Gene was the highlight of the evening, and most of the dialogue from “Vanya in My Vulva” made it into the final script. We served the audience free beer and wine at the door and deliberately started each performance half an hour late so they all had time to get happy.
Gene had instructed me, whenever I wasn’t onstage, to go around the audience and interact with people. That was my favorite part of doing the show. I’d sit on a hot guy’s lap, put my arms around his neck, and whisper, “I really like you,” into his ear until his girlfriend started to give me dirty looks, and then I’d move on to the next guy.
Because of the lap sitting and the “Vanya” story, I was a little nervous about inviting my parents. The day before we opened I sat them down at the dinner table and said, “Some of the material in the show might make you uncomfortable. If you don’t want to come, I won’t feel offended.” So they didn’t. And I was offended, but I didn’t give them a hard time because I didn’t know how to explain that even though I had told them not to feel obligated, they should have felt obligated anyway.