by Amy Sohn
“Like what?” he asked, his eyes narrowing.
“Well, for one, it was a big mistake to have worn this dress tonight. I wish I’d worn my nurse dress instead.”
“Nurse dress?” His half boner was peeking out of the slightly open robe.
“Yeah. It’s so short it barely covers my ass.” He pulled his robe open and began to stroke, bending his head down so his ear was closer to my mouth. “I would’ve worn it with white stockings, a white garter belt, and no underwear.” He was steadily jerking off now with no shame. “You could have bent me right over, grabbed me by the hips, and plowed it into me standing up, just like you are now. I would have been so tight for you, Nick, so wet and ready and red. It really is a travesty—”
“Can I come on your dress?”
“No! It cost thirty-five dollars!”
“Then you should go.” He closed his robe, opened the door, and locked it behind me.
•
In the morning I called Sara. “I’m not surprised that’s how it ended,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“When we talked to him after the movie I had a feeling he was a narcissistic prick.”
“Why didn’t you tell me not to go?”
“Would you have listened?”
“No.”
“There’s your answer.”
“Thanks.”
“Listen, don’t work yourself up about it. Just look on the bright side. At least you didn’t go down on him. Then you would have felt really shitty about yourself.”
She had a point, but somehow I didn’t feel too consoled. I just felt like a moron for being dumb enough to think Nick would fall for me. He was a rock star. They were supposed to be dicks. It was part of the job description. I had an uncanny knack for getting worked up over guys who had asshole and scumbag written all over their foreheads, but I was always surprised when they proved themselves the jerks I should have known they were from the start. It was the dating version of that old joke “The food was horrible—and the portions were so small!” I couldn’t get enough of the most unsuitable men. Maybe I just hadn’t met the right one yet. If I could only find the right addicted, commitment-phobic, misogynist, misanthropic, tortured, narcissistic artist, I was certain I could make him marry me.
•
That night I convinced Sara to come with me to a bar in Cobble Hill I’d passed a few times, called BarOoklyn. I figured I might have an easier time meeting guys on Brooklyn turf than Manhattan. She picked me up at my apartment at nine, we ate at an Italian place on Smith Street, and then headed up the street toward the bar. When we were a few blocks away these two teenage black guys came out of nowhere. “Excuse me, miss. Do you have the time?” said one of them.
I looked at my watch and said, “Eleven-forty,” and as I said it, I thought, Boy, it’s late. We shouldn’t be out here this time of night.
We kept walking and they followed, and then we crossed the street and they did too. When we got to the other side, the first guy got in front of us, the other got behind us, and the front guy said, “This is a stickup. He has a gun. Take out all your money and give it to me.”
My money was in his hand in five seconds flat, but Sara had to fumble for a while to get hers because she had a cigarette in one hand and her wallet was lodged deep in her pocket for safekeeping. The front guy said, “You’re not moving fast enough, you’re not moving fast enough,” and for one brief moment I thought they were gonna pop us, but when he said, “Keep walking and don’t look back,” I knew we’d survive.
We walked as fast as we could down the block, making sure not to turn our heads around, and suddenly Sara started crying. It was weird. I’d never seen her cry before. Her cheeks got all blotchy and red and she looked like a little girl.
“It could have been worse,” I said, hugging her. “At least we’re not hurt. Let’s take a cab to the bar and forget this happened.”
“We can’t get a cab. We don’t have any money.”
She was right, and I felt like an idiot for forgetting the main event that had just taken place. We went to a cash machine on Atlantic and Court, and as my money was spewing out I thought, Gee, I’m lucky. All they got from me was twenty dollars, and I can go get twenty more right where the first twenty came from.
But when we got to the bar, everyone was laughing in such a carefree way that I felt like spitting in their drinks. Sara ordered two beers for us, and while we were waiting this guy came up to her and said, “I like your boots.” She was wearing knee-high black leather boots and a miniskirt.
The first thing I thought was, Why can’t a guy just for once notice me and not her? and the second thing I thought was, I bet she’s gonna tell him we were mugged, because she tells all strange guys the intimate details of her life. I started counting to five in my head, and at four she said, “I really don’t feel like talking right now. My friend and I just got mugged.”
“Oh my God, that sucks!” said the guy. “Are you OK? What happened?”
She started to tell him, but then our drinks came and I said, “I’m going to the back,” and she said, “I’ll come with you.” There was a pool table in the back room and only one name was on the chalkboard, so I scribbled mine down underneath. (Sara never played pool because she said she sucked at it.)
My opponent turned out to be a loose-cannon sleaze who introduced himself as Jimmy. After he broke, he sunk three in a row. On my first turn I made a decent shot, a bank off the side. “You’re not bad,” he said, giving me a smarmy smile. I rolled my eyes, feeling cocky, but on my next shot, an easy one, I missed. He sunk his next four in a row, then went for the eight ball. But it didn’t go in. Maybe I had a chance. I sunk one and another, but then I accidentally sunk the eight. “Damn!” I shouted.
“Good game,” snickered Jimmy.
Sara and I went back to the front of the bar with our beers, but all the bar stools were taken, so we had to sip our drinks in a little nook by the phone. Suddenly the pool sleaze came up to us and smiled. “Would you please leave us alone?” I said. “My friend and I are trying to have a conversation here.”
“I wanted to use the fucking phone!” he shouted drunkenly. “I wasn’t even thinking about talking to you! Who the fuck do you bitches think you are?”
We moved away, the guy still yelling after us, and I realized there’s no justice in the foul-smelling urinal of a city, because everybody will slice you one way or another.
“Let’s go home,” I said to Sara. We took a car service to my apartment. I lent her a T-shirt to sleep in, and we got in bed.
“Are you going to tell your parents about the mugging?” she said.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “They’d freak out.”
“So would mine,” she said.
We said good night and rolled over so we were back to back. Her body was warm and for a second I wanted to turn toward her so she could hold me and make everything OK. It wasn’t a sexual longing; I just wanted to be touched. But I had a feeling an impassioned bear hug in bed might not be the wisest move for our friendship, so I stayed put. She fell asleep a few minutes later. I lay awake a long time, listening to her snore.
•
On the train home from work Monday night I was overwhelmed by this piss stench. Now, smelling piss on the trains was nothing new, except usually the odor comes from a specific person, so once you figure out who it is you can just move away. This time, though, I couldn’t pinpoint its source. I looked around at the other passengers to see if any of them were smelling it too, but no one seemed to, so I told myself it was just paranoid, flighty white postmugging angst making me fabricate the stink.
I breathed through my mouth, leaned back in my seat, and thought, None of these small travails like getting mugged or smelling piss on the train would be so bad if I only had a boyfriend. And right as I was thinking this, a totally lovey-dovey, Park-Slope-written-all-over-their-faces couple across from me put down their paperbacks and nuzzled noses.
The only t
hing that gave me hope was the jug of Carlo Rossi I had waiting in my refrigerator. As soon as I got home I poured myself a glass, made spaghetti and marinara sauce (it’s the only thing I can cook), sat on the couch, and turned on the TV. Sleepless in Seattle was on. It was that scene where Tom Hanks finds his son in the Empire State Building observatory, hugs him passionately, and says, “We’re doing OK, aren’t we? I haven’t done anything really stupid, have I? Have I screwed it up for the both of us?” and his son shakes his head no and hugs him back. I always get busted up when I watch that part. The only thing that gets me blubbering harder is the final scene of Lucas.
I sat there watching the movie, tears rolling down my face, and then I took a deep breath and thought, What can I do to cheer myself up? I went to my bag, took out my address book, and flipped through the boys’ names in it. The first prospect I came across was Tim Berman, this performance artist a year ahead of me at Brown I’d always been vaguely attracted to. After he graduated he’d moved to the Lower East Side, and I’d heard a rumor that he was dating a girl from his year named Vanessa, but then someone told me they’d had a brutal breakup. I said to myself, I’m gonna call him and invite him to have a drink with me right now and he is going to be home and say yes, and my life is finally going to start picking up.
The phone rang four times before a machine clicked on. A woman’s voice said, “Vanessa and Tim aren’t home right now, but leave us a message and we’ll call you back.”
This is a rat race, I thought, and I am a crippled rat with a leg dragging behind me, smearing blood all along the little twisted maze. All those other rats have gotten their Havarti and are twitching their noses at me, laughing cruel, heartless little rat laughs.
The next name I found was Zeke Feder, a somewhat assholic yet highly entertaining egomaniac I slept with senior year of high school. We used to have long philosophical conversations about the differences between men and women and we would spar and joke and sometimes it was sort of fun.
“Hello?” he said.
“It’s Ariel Steiner,” I said. “How’ve you been?”
“Pretty good,” he said.
“I heard you dropped out of Vassar.”
“Yeah.”
“What have you been doing since then?”
“I just recorded a rap album. It’s coming out on Universal next month under my professional name, MC Ezekiel. What about you?”
“I’m a temp and I got mugged this weekend.”
“That sucks.”
“Do you want to get together sometime and catch up?”
“Sure.”
“We could meet in a diner and I could put my hand on your lap under the table so no one else could see. How does that sound? Would you like that?”
Suddenly the phone got staticky and I couldn’t hear anything, and then he said faintly, “Could you hold on a second?”
“What?”
“I have to change the channel on my phone. It’s a cordless.”
It went on like that for the next ten minutes. As I tried desperately to coo innuendo, he kept interrupting me to change the channel on the phone. I didn’t feel too good about myself, being put on hold in the middle of my own phone sex, so finally I gave up, hung up, and crawled into bed. I pulled the covers over my head and imagined I had a blow-up boyfriend to inflate on the nights I really needed a shoulder to cry on. He would have a very medium-sized penis I could play with if I wanted to, but nothing huge or uncircumcised. I would lie next to him and bury my head in his soft longish hair and he would kiss me softly and sweetly, without any excess saliva or beer breath. I would tell him the wretched story of the mugging and the piss and he would listen very quietly and then fuck me if I wanted him to but not if I didn’t, and in the morning I would wake up next to him and eat breakfast staring into his eyes. As soon as he started turning into a Real Boyfriend, though, with complex needs, concerns, neuroses, and complaints, I would just pull out the plug like he was a beach toy and he would very quickly, without any ceremony or complaint, deflate with a whiny hiss. Then I would fold him up carefully, squeeze out all the air bubbles, and put him under the pillow till the next shit-caked, piss-soaked weekend.
I lay in bed for a long time, thinking. I thought about my screwy love life, and how much I hated temping, and how I hadn’t gotten cast in anything since Lolita. I looked at my pictures of Joan and Bob and Bukowski and Cash, and then I looked at my computer. The last time I’d used it was when I wrote “Vanya in My Vulva.”
I slowly climbed out of bed and went toward it. I turned it on and typed the words “The Blow-Up Boyfriend.” And then I wrote a story about the mugging, the piss, my fantasy man, and the overall suck quotient of my summer in the city. When I was done, I printed it out and read it over to myself.
It was good—good enough to make me wonder if maybe I was banging my head against the wrong brick wall. If after three months in the city the only thing I could call my own was my misery, why not try to put it to use? I had always wanted to make it as an actress, but more important, I had wanted to make it. I was tired of being a failure at every single thing I tried. If I sent my story somewhere, I had nothing to lose. At worst, it would be rejected. At best, it would be published, I’d get some exposure and maybe it would lead to more opportunities.
I had to think of a good place to submit it, though. Someplace that would appreciate a depressing urban tale of loneliness and degradation. And then it hit me. The City Week. I knew that rag better than any in town. Its entire bent was depressing urban tales. “The Blow-Up Boyfriend” was right up their alley.
Who knew what the story might lead to? Maybe some bigwig publisher would catch wind of it and sign me up to write a memoir. I’d fly to Paris to find myself and some subject matter, and promptly fall in love with a French Jewish fireman who would become my muse, my Nin, my Toklas. I’d chronicle our intense, torrid affair in a juicy tell-all, Matieu and Me, and the book would become an international best-seller. But within months he’d grow so envious of my success that the next time his wagon got called to fight a fire, he’d distractedly aim the hose at the wrong house, and as a result seven innocent children would die. To save Matieu and the town I’d break off the relationship and hop on a train bound south.
I’d publish a book a year, all about my adventures as a broad abroad, chronicling my luscious affairs with half the male population of the continent, comparing NATO men to non-NATO, Eastern bloc to Western. The books would be prurient but heartfelt, hilarious and astute, naming truths no one else was brave enough to name, bringing tears and laughter to the hearts of the lonely, changing people’s minds, livening their spirits. I’d collect a Pulitzer, Nobel, and MacArthur along the way, but through it all I’d remain totally humble. I’d die single but happy, fulfilled by my work if not my men, proud to have been able to move people with the staggering power of my prose.
I stapled the story together and typed a cover letter—“Dear Mr. Jensen, I hope you like this. There’s more where it came from”—and went out to mail it.
3
ON THURSDAY MORNING I got this message on my machine: “Ariel, Bill Turner. Associate editor, City Week. We’d like to publish your story in ‘I-Level,’ our section for freelance pieces. Can you bring it in on a disk tomorrow?”
I called Sara to tell her the good news and she screamed so loud I had to hold the receiver away from my ear. I hung up and started to dial my dad, but then I remembered the part about the phone sex and decided against it.
•
That night, as I loaded “The Blow-Up Boyfriend” onto a disk, I got an idea. Why not put a second story on there too and ask Turner to take a look at it? He’d never know what else I had up my sleeve if I didn’t show him. When someone gives you an inch, you’ve got to take a mile.
I needed to come up with something good, though. Something better than the first one. Something powerful, and hot, and big . . . James. An hour and a half later I had a second story: “The Mammalian Come-Hither.”
•
The City Week offices were on two floors of a converted factory in SoHo, on the corner of Broadway and Broome. I took the elevator up to the fourth floor and walked down a long, winding hallway till I came to the entrance. To the left of the door were several huge stacks of the Week in metal holders. Straight ahead was a high forest green counter, and behind it was a girl in her late twenties with dyed white-blond hair.
“I’m Ariel Steiner,” I said. “I’m here to see Bill Turner.”
She looked me up and down and said, “Blow-up boyfriend, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“You should market that idea. I’m Corinne Riley, the senior editor.”
“Nice to meet you.”
She stood up, led me a few feet away to a small glass office, and pointed at a tall, thin guy in his late thirties who was sitting behind a computer. He had big bushy eyebrows and a widow’s peak.
“I’m Ariel Steiner,” I said.
He stood up, shook my hand, and said, “Nice grip.”
I had to think of a good comeback, something that would crystallize me in his mind as a fast-talking, clever, bad-assed chick—someone as hot as her stories. “It’s from all those hand jobs,” I said. He reddened and I thought, If I can make this guy blush that easily it’s gotta bode well for my future at this institution.
I took my disk out and handed it to him. “The document’s called ‘blowup,’ ” I said, “but there’s a second one on there I was hoping you’d look at as well.”
He arched a brow and said, “What’s it called?”
“ ‘Hither.’ ” He chuckled and loaded them both onto the computer.
•
The morning “The Blow-Up Boyfriend” ran, September 25, was also my twenty-second birthday. I woke up feeling revved, but the rest of the day was hell on wheels. When I arrived at my desk, the Corposhit was ringing me on the intercom. “Come into my office,” she huffed. “I have some papers I need you to fax to Jeff McCoyd at Erhard, Lieb.”
I walked in. “I want you to fax pages four and five only, with a cover sheet,” she said, handing me the pages. “Make sure you spell Lieb right on the fax.”