by Julie Hilden
‘You’ve never come that way before,’ Ilan says.
‘I didn’t want to,’ I admit.
‘But you liked it?’
‘It was very . . . intense.’
‘That’s the way I like it. It’s something that’s taken from you, you don’t give it. It’s going to happen whether you like it or not.’
‘It was so surreal. That feeling, having it for the first time, the feeling that I couldn’t control it, and having it with her – and then she leaves, we never see each other again.’
‘That was the idea.’
Yet I know, afterward, that I will not be able to separate this from my life as easily as he can. There will never be a clear blue day for me, once I decide that I like this, that I really can do it; I know that.
But who said I wanted a clear blue day? Instead perhaps I want a throatful of tears. Perhaps I want to take coming as Ilan takes it, almost without pleasure – like a straight shot of alcohol tossed back without taste, yet with a greater, quicker effect for all that.
After the night with Rebecca, I move uneasily but giddily into my new life. A strange mixture of relief and danger elates me. My marriage will last, I know that now, and so I am safe in at least that respect. But how will it evolve?
I cannot predict where we will go from here. All I have read is the first chapter of the story; all I know is that the story will continue, it will take us – in a reverie, inexorably – somewhere else.
Ilan sets himself the task of finding the second woman, and he is avid. Meanwhile, I work on both his writing and my own. Ilan tries to do the articles himself sometimes, but gives up in disgust.
‘I don’t know why the writing is so hard for me, but it is,’ he complains.
‘Don’t worry, it’s the reportage that matters,’ I assure him. ‘Without that there’d be no story. The writing is just translation, organization,’ Secretly, though, I believe it is much more. I feel sometimes that it is the only valuable thing inside me; the only thing I have for myself alone, as myself alone. Everything else I have, I have because of Ilan.
Ilan’s father continues to praise him for everything I submit – commenting several times on how much his writing has improved. His remarks are painful to Ilan, but he craves his father’s approval enough to want simply to please him, without especially caring how it happens. And so, increasingly, Ilan makes the phone calls, visits the subjects, and then hands me his scribbled notes. We never even talk about it anymore.
Much of Ilan’s time now is spent reading our ad responses. There are surprisingly many, for he has renewed the ad in the Voice, and placed it elsewhere, too: on the Nerve Web site, and in other newspapers. Soon he spends many of his days focusing only on this – on reading the women’s letters, looking at their photos, choosing the ones to whom he will respond.
With the second woman, Cara, Ilan asks me to greet her and take her into the writing room. It is January now, about a month after our first assignation, with Rebecca.
‘My husband is going to join us later,’ I tell Cara.
She is a milky-skinned redhead whose freckles are muted, as if underlaid below her pale skin. I had not remembered how lovely it looked, this partial concealment.
I take Cara’s coat, slipping it from her narrow shoulders: another action I have never done, I realize. I have never stood behind a woman as she shrugs off her coat, trusting me to hold what has just enveloped her. For a second, the casual eroticism of the gesture overwhelms me. She has uncloaked herself and I hold the cloak. I will choose, later, whether and when to return it to her.
I suddenly have the impulse to go further, to strip her further, but for now I refrain. I would never have thought I would be the one who wanted it faster, wanted it now; but I am, I do. With Rebecca, I feared what would happen. Now it is myself, my desire, that scares me: mine, and Ilan’s, and how they will combine.
I have what I want soon enough, and I do not even have to ask. Again I have the strange feeling of being in a dream – but this time it is a dream in which I see my own desire spread out before me, made real. In the writing room, Cara slips off her beaded top. Falling, it clicks on the floor.
Then she slips her breasts out of their bra cups and I take them in my hands, cupping them as I touch her nipples with my thumbs. Reaching behind her back, I unhook her bra and slip it off. Bared, slipping downward slightly, her breasts tremble.
Her bare feet pad on our bare floor as I walk her backward, like a dancer leading, toward the bed. She breaks away from me for a moment, but only so she can slip her skirt and panties off in a single motion, hooking them with a thumb. As she steps out of them with a graceful hop, I see that her pubic hair is also red.
Ilan watches us through a crack of the closet door – hung up there on his own desire, in stillness; watching us as if we were alone. He lets us stay awhile on the bed by ourselves, until we are used to being with each other, until I can almost forget he is there.
Then he opens the closet door slowly, so that it creaks. Cara tenses beneath me. ‘It’s my husband,’ I reassure her.
Ilan has chosen, today, to wear a dark suit. He tells us to undress him and together we do. I slip my finger into the full knot of his tie to loosen it, its silk soft as skin. Cara wrenches his belt buckle to the side and slips his belt off in an instant. He steps out of his loafers, peels off his socks. I see the vanity, the debauchery in the scenario, but it does not stop me from wanting him, from wanting him naked as we are naked.
Soon Cara opens Ilan’s shirt meticulously, button by button, and there, as always, is the chain, and she, like every fascinated woman, must touch it. She holds the tiny silver hand in her palm, then in her mouth. I begin to tear up, then, for I too have taken the metal hand into my mouth, imagining I was taking part of him that way. I did not know I would have to give up even this.
Finally she lets the chain fall from her mouth, and Ilan begins to kiss her. I slip to the corner of the bed, perching tenously there, as Ilan and Cara spread out.
He strokes her nipples. She doesn’t touch him, but the way she arches her back shows she longs for this.
He moves fast with her, and soon he is inside her. Her skin is so light, it makes his look darker. And she is so ethereal, she makes him look stronger than he is. He cannot help but look as if he is overcoming her.
He hikes her legs above his shoulders to find the angle he wants, bending her into a sculpture of submission. He stretches her as far as she goes, penetrating her slowly, over and over. As he moves inside her, her cries are both loud and curt, as if they are being forced out of her.
She tells him over and over to stop, but he only tells her confidently, ‘You don’t really want me to.’ It is a long time before he speeds his motion to bring her to climax, and when he does, she looks at him, almost astonished, as she finally loses control.
When Ilan releases her, she stands up and starts to massage her muscles, calming the backs of her thighs to keep them from shaking.
‘I’m so sore,’ she says to Ilan softly. ‘I usually can’t come during sex. Thank you.’
Ilan smiles. Then he slides over to me; I am still on the bed, frozen, watching. He kisses me and I kiss him back, and then he enters me, copying exactly the positions he used with Cara, in a way that feels almost mocking. My legs, too, dangle over his shoulders. I too am forced, through slow repetition, into pleasure.
Cara watches us together, watches Ilan make me violently come, and touches herself as she watches. Then she leaves.
Ilan and I are always alone together, at the end. There is always the sound of the door shutting. And there is always a woman who leaves us behind forever and returns to her life. I always imagine her emerging onto the street below us, into the dark, free night. And I always envy her a little, the woman leaving – while at the same time understanding that I am not the type of woman who leaves.
It hurts me, of course it does, to have seen Ilan with Cara; to have seen him enter her; to have watched him brin
g her all the way there, to the point where she was at his will, acting at his pleasure. But the pain is like a small knife, I learn: I can choose to take it out to cut myself, or to leave it in its drawer.
I can cut myself hard with this knife, by focusing on my image of Ilan and Cara. Or by calling up their image for just a second or two, I can cut myself just a little and gradually – as if I were peeling an apple delicately to separate its flesh from a continuous spiral of skin.
Later I even enjoy taking this imagined knife out sometimes; I enjoy thinking about, and even seeing, Ilan with another woman. Shall I be honest? It drives me to distraction.
The key is that he is between my legs, not hers, at the end. When it is all over, he chooses me and she is banished. In this way, it is almost reassuring: I have seen my worst fear, and in the end it is not real; he is still with me, still mine.
I know it is a sickness to feel this way. But there is this: I can’t feel it as a sickness – not in a way that could convince me to leave, anyway. What I feel is only that I want Ilan, and I always, always have. I always have and I never stopped, and I never even wanted to – not until the very end, and by then it was too late.
After Rebecca and Cara, there are a few more women – all different, all the same. Redheads all in a row – reminding me oddly of my bridesmaids, that row of blondes. Women whom he is inside, while they are here. Women who stay inside me, once they leave.
As winter continues, Ilan and I fall into a routine. He will work obsessively on the reporting for one of his articles, and at the same time he will interview a few possible women, with me looking on. As he narrows the choice of women down, he will turn his notes for the article over to me so that I can ‘write them up.’ Then he will schedule a session with his favorite, to take place soon after his article is due, as a sort of reward.
Because Ilan’s articles are often exposés, the assignations with the women usually celebrate someone else’s downfall as much as they do Ilan’s own success. Sometimes his joy in his subjects’ defeats seems to me the worst part of him – worse than what he has me do in bed, because it is crueler.
But I wonder, sometimes, if the cruelty is all his. After all, I am his writer, his finisher, his fixer: the one who completes the assassination, who twists the knife. I am the one who chooses the phrase that captures, that hurts.
If I too feel anger, though, I never let myself know it. I tell myself I am only maintaining our life together – saving Ilan from the misery that writing is for him, allowing him to succeed. I tell myself, too, that since it is as if we are one person, it does not matter who writes the stories, in the end.
But I also realize I would never allow him to write for me, even if he offered to. I would keep back that last thing, my one talent.
It is that February, strangely, that I begin to succeed, with a series of celebrity interviews – to succeed more than I would ever have thought possible, especially since I am doing two jobs at once, fulfilling both Ilan’s contract and my own. Perhaps the pressure focuses me; perhaps I am simply lucky.
It all begins when I take a risk, speculating that an actress, though single, is pregnant. I see it in what she eats and the care with which she chooses it; in her sudden success in breaking the chain-smoking habit that was so evident, in photographs of her, only months ago.
Later I find confirmation of my suspicions in the second-floor room in her house that is partially cleared, as if to be redecorated. When we walk past the room, she smiles a secret smile, and I feel in her a serene happiness, a feeling so alien to me that I cannot help recognizing it. She is like the self I imagine I could be if I were happy.
When I claim in print that the actress is pregnant, she at first issues a lukewarm denial. But a few weeks later, she replaces it with a happy announcement, explaining that she did not want the pregnancy known earlier, in case of miscarriage.
It is then that the phone starts ringing with offers for me to write for other magazines – the first I have received. I am surprised at how upset Ilan seems to be when he hears of the calls – though I assure him I would never leave his father’s magazine.
He ascribes it all to a lucky guess, but I know it was more. It was the vision of a real future into which the actress was moving, one that her face betrayed.
Ilan begins to find fault with my writing then, asking for more and more rewrites on his pieces. As with the very first piece I worked on for him, he’ll often erase my additions, but then later allow me to replace them word for word. I begin secretly to save different versions to delete and to revive.
One day, he says to me, ‘I’ll just have to start doing my own rewrites again.’
‘Fine,’ I tell him. But the next day, while he is out, his laptop is left open on his desk for hours, its screen glowing, and I know what that means. I take a seat, and I begin to type.
The exposé I write for him turns out to be famously nasty, for I begin the piece with an assault: all the most brutal quotes in a row. By the time one has read them, it is too late for the subject, who has been thoroughly eviscerated. Nothing the reader learns in the rest of the article could ever compensate for the damage – any more than the dead, once dead, can ever live again.
The style of the piece is so notorious that it becomes Ilan’s – or, really, my – modus operandi, and he, too, begins to have some success, to garner some note in the small world of New York journalism. He, too, begins to be talked about under the gossips’ breaths, at the few parties we attend. He is discreetly pointed at, and so am I.
We begin to have an image as a couple then – an image so real, it is as if each of us had a second body; as if a man and a woman who looked like us, but were not us, had somehow been born.
I have seen photographs of these new people. They are beautiful, wealthy, talented, lucky. Above all, they are happy – so happy, and so in love. He is the only one for her, she for him; as if they were made for each other.
The images’ divergence from reality is so extreme, it hurts my heart.
Meanwhile, our appointments with the women continue – and with each, I am more aroused and at the same time, more disturbed.
Each evening we are to meet with one of them, Ilan puts out champagne, perhaps because it is a light drink he believes we won’t regret in the morning, an evanescent one that will not leave a trace. For my part, I put our framed photographs away in a drawer, stash away our medications, and scan the apartment for anything else, however small, that might reveal us.
One night, as I take a bottle of anxiety medication out of our medicine cabinet and hide it away, I realize I am stripping from our apartment the very type of information that helps me to understand – to see inside – the celebrities I interview. The diagnostic, the characterizing information. The medication, for instance, speaks of a looming fear, a constant discomfort that only a drug can vanquish, and raises the question of what the fear’s origin might be – a question I would rather ignore.
Here, in our bare loft, we are immortal, impersonal and perfect. In life we are far from so: we are fraying; I am in pain; Ilan senses it and does nothing.
Imagining that we are on the dream platform is the only way I can tolerate the women now – endure watching their pleasure as Ilan, inside them, presses so hard that it seems as if he wants to seal his flesh to theirs.
It is the only way I can watch their closed eyes, their open mouths, as I look on with my closed mouth, my open eyes. It is the only way I can allow myself to shake with their arousal, to lose myself to this despite its dangers.
* * *
Soon a rising actor – already famous, about to become more so – calls the magazine and asks that I be the one to interview him. Mr Resnick is only too happy to oblige, for the actor promises an exclusive, and since his new movie comes out this month, it is an unusual coup. Ordinarily the actor would have spoken to as many magazines as possible, scored as many covers as he could.
I arrive at the actor’s house, and when he ushers me in,
I find we are alone. There is no publicist to accompany him and no personal assistant, and he has asked beforehand that the photographer from the magazine arrive separately, on another day. He brings coffee for both of us, and as I pour the milk that lightens mine, I begin my questioning.
‘Why did you ask for me?’ I begin.
‘I liked your article about Marianne’s pregnancy, but I hated how perceptive you were. It made me think eventually you’d find me out too.’
‘Find out what?’
I’m gay,’ he tells me curtly. ‘Didn’t you know?’
‘Not for certain.’
‘Oh, you knew,’ he accuses me. ‘Everyone knows, don’t they? They just won’t say it to my face.’
‘I’d heard rumors.’ I dare to lie to draw him in further.
‘Well, they’re true,’ he tells me. ‘Look, you can write it, okay? But write it as a trial balloon. I’m tired of hiding, but I don’t want to lose my career over it. If people are appalled, I’ll just say my private life is private, like I always do. Otherwise I’ll applaud you for outing me.’
And so I make a another dubious bargain, and make my name at the same time – for the story is printed, Hollywood is accepting, and the star allows me a follow-up interview, which becomes my third cover in as many months. In the follow-up interview, he talks about his lover – a younger, also semifamous actor – and the issue sells out in less than a day, then goes into a second print run.
The calls from editors come in again – offering me more money, a high title, guaranteed covers, if I will only leave. They send me flowers, ask me to lunches that I do not always decline – in a few instances I go, but keep it secret from Ilan.
I fear telling him about the lunches, since I know he will be angry that I am being courted by others. Besides, I am not seriously considering leaving the magazine. And yet it cannot be denied now: I am no longer the princess in her lonely prison tower, and he is no longer my single, saving prince.