Tuesday Erotica Club

by Lisa Beth Kovetz

  Lux quickly tore the page out of the notebook, got up from her desk and marched right into her boss’s office.

  “What are you doing?” Mr. Warwick asked.

  “Shredder.”

  Lux fed her first truthful writing into Mr. Warwick’s shredder and felt greatly relieved to see it come out on the other side as strings of confetti.

  Worse than laughing, her old friends had congratulated her when they found out she’d scored a bed in a Manhattan apartment with an old guy who bought her things.

  “Oh baby, you got yourself a sugar daddy,” her friend Jonella had crowed loud enough to wake the baby in her arms.

  “Suckin’ old cock to make da rent!” laughed Carlos, once her true love, now Jonella’s baby’s daddy.

  “Fuck you both,” Lux said, laughing along with them. “It ain’t like that.”

  “You screwing him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Screwing him good?”

  “‘Think so.”

  “You living in his house?”

  “Mostly.”

  “You paying him rent?”

  “No.”

  “He buy you things?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then it’s like that.”

  Lux’s mother had given her an earful about Trevor.

  “Get it girl, you get it and grab hold as tight as you can,” Lux’s mother had whispered to her, urging her to get some kind of commitment out of Trevor, something that would hold up in court.

  “Get yourself pregnant, fast,” her mother hissed at her.

  “It’s not like that, Mom,” Lux insisted.

  Lux’s mother smiled like they had a secret together, a secret that boiled down to her mother telling her you’re not worth shit but you got lucky with some fool who’s better than you. Lux tried to weigh her mother’s opinion against what Auntie Who-ah might say.

  Ride it till it don’t please you no more.

  “Hey, Lux! You here today or still at home?” her boss asked, standing over her desk and holding a stack of papers.

  “Here,” Lux chirped. She slammed her notebook shut and hid away her thoughts.

  “I need these filed. First pull the bills and alphabetize them for accounting, then make a copy and see that they go into the client’s files. When you’re done, come see me. I’ll be finished with my correspondence by then, and I’d like you to print and get them out into the mail, except for the ones that go by FedEx, which I have noted in the address. Oh, and some go out by fax, you’ll just have to ask me which ones are faxed. Lux?”

  “Yeah, I got it. File, then mail, then FedEx, then fax. Not a problem at all.”

  “And make reservations for six people for lunch, ok?”

  “Done.”

  “I haven’t told you where or what time.”

  “Ok, where and what time.”

  “Tomorrow at one o’clock at someplace with a sushi bar. Got that.”

  “Yep.”

  “Can you say it back to me just so I’m sure you’ve got it?”

  “Tomorrow at one at someplace with a sushi bar.”

  “Good. Thanks. Come see me when the filing is done.”

  “Right.”

  Like a relief from pain, sensation spreads across his body and into mine.

  Lux said the phrase over again to herself as she alphabetized the bills and thought about the way Trevor’s orgasm had kicked off one last spasm of pleasure in her. The phrase danced around in her head, and Lux groped around her desk for her notebook. She couldn’t find it quickly enough and ended up grabbing a Post-it Note and scribbling the sentence on its sticky yellowness so she could read it again later and give it some thought from a distance. As she was pasting the Post-it into her notebook she got a sudden urge to call Aimee.

  “Aimee,” Lux said into the phone. “Can um…”

  Suddenly it seemed so stupid. Aimee hated her.

  “Who is this?” Aimee asked on the other end of the line just before Lux hung up.

  Lux picked up her notebook, put down her alphabetizing and went for a walk that just happened to pass by Aimee’s desk.

  “Hiiiiiiiiiiiii,” she said with one hand on Aimee’s doorway trying to pretend her existence was wholly accidental.

  “What?” Aimee asked.

  “I guess I want to thank you for letting me into your book club.”

  “Writers’ group.”

  “Whatever.”

  “In a book club you read published works. A writers’ group brings writers together to read each other’s work.”

  “Right.”

  “And…”

  “And I’m really enjoying it.”

  “I’m so pleased,” Aimee said without looking up from the papers on her desk.

  There was more to say. Lux wanted to whip out her notebook and show Aimee her sentence, her first good sentence. A sentence she had written all by herself. A sentence that pleased her because it said something real and yet did not embarrass her. I wrote a good sentence, Lux thought and longed to say. Can you believe it? Because I never thought I ever could but here it is, a good sentence and ok, it’s only a short sentence, but it’s my first real sentence and I want to show it to someone who knows something about sentences.

  “Is there something you need?” Aimee asked, unaware of what was bubbling up in Lux. All she saw was an annoyingly young woman in blue high heals and loud purple stockings jumping from foot to foot in the doorway of her office.

  “No, I just wanted to say, like, ah, I guess, thanks.”

  “Right. I gotta make a call,” Aimee said as a way of saying get the hell out of my office. Lux understood the full meaning and backed out of Aimee’s doorway. She hurried back to her desk to finish the filing and faxing and make the reservations for someone else’s lunch. Sushi, she reminded herself. He wants sushi.

  5. Gossip

  AIMEE AND BROOKE ALWAYS wore black. Occasionally they threw in a little white or, on festival days, a red handbag or gloves would finish off an outfit. And so it was that when the two of them sat together on Aimee’s white couch it was hard to tell where Aimee ended and Brooke began. Margot, sitting across from them, wore a peach silk pantsuit by Chanel and rather demure 8mm pearl earrings. Underneath her black smock, Aimee had outgrown her DD-cup bra and was wearing an absurdly large white cotton bra that unhooked over each breast to reveal the nipple: a nursing bra. Brooke wore a large pair of hollow, hammered silver bangles that sounded like giggles when they clinked against each other. At that moment, Brooke’s bracelets and all the girls were laughing.

  “…and then, ok, like and then he said, like ok.”

  Brooke was falling off her chair with the hilarity of it all.

  “She doesn’t even have a name! She’s got an adjective!”

  “Oh, Aimee, she has got to go,” Margot said laughing too.

  “No!” roared Brooke, “She’s priceless! We have to keep her!”

  “I’m sure she’ll drop out,” Aimee said, trying to control her laughter not for the sake of Lux but because it hurt her belly.

  “Should we stay on the erotica or try something different?” Margot asked, pleased to be part of the group and yet slightly uncomfortable. Margot hadn’t had any girls as friends since seventh grade. She was afraid of girls.

  “I was Queen Bee of my seventh grade clique,” Margot told her first shrink, “and was instrumental in driving a sniveling little girl named Juliet so low on the social totem pole that she just dropped off the ladder and out of school. Not a major tragedy. I mean, this girl Juliet, she favored knee socks and plaid skirts anyway. She enrolled in the local Catholic school and was just fine. With no one to pick on, however, the popular girls suddenly turned on me the way a wildfire can suddenly turn. Oh how they turned on me! On me! Their leader!”

  Since he had nothing in his own background to compare it to, Margot’s shrink sat quietly in his chair trying to imagine what it might be like to have one’s own prescription for demoralizing another chi
ld shoved down one’s own throat. The guilt on top of the pain had ruined the taste of “girlfriend” for Margot forever. She didn’t trust girls, and she didn’t trust herself.

  “Oh no, let’s stay on erotica,” Brooke said.

  “Let’s try poetry. That should scare Lux away,” Aimee said.

  “Poetry?” Margot shivered. “That’d scare me away!”

  “What if we spent a few sessions writing about something she doesn’t know anything about?”

  “Debutante balls?” suggested Brooke.

  “You’re the only one of us who’s been to a debutante ball,” Aimee guffawed.

  “The closest I ever came to coming out is when I had sex on the front porch,” Margot admitted.

  More vicious giggles rocked Aimee’s abdomen and some pee leaked out into her underwear.

  “No stop! No more laughing! You’re killing me!”

  Aimee struggled up off the couch and waddled into her bedroom to change her underwear, blaming Lux for making her wet her pants.

  “What are you doing in there?” Margot called.

  “None of your business,” Aimee called back to her. The choice of underwear was painful to Aimee. Pre-pregnancy she preferred the thong for a variety of reasons that went way beyond questions of panty lines. Now her large collection of racy, lacy undies lay unloved in the back of the drawer beneath the newly purchased cotton crotch nylon jobs that washed well but looked like something her granny would recommend for comfort and durability.

  The window in her bedroom was open. Someone, somewhere in the city had done something disgusting which sent an unknown horrible smell up through Aimee’s bedroom window and into her nose.

  “Hkak! Hkak!” A gurgle rose from Aimee’s throat as she raced for the toilet. On her way to the bathroom she began to puke. Moving forward, Aimee was running into the puke that was spilling out of her mouth. She had a choice: either stop running and puke on the floor or continue racing towards the bathroom in an effort to get a percentage of puke into the toilet with the rest falling onto her clothes. Neither one was an acceptable alternative for the other, but it was all she had to choose from. Aimee stopped and puked on the floor.

  “Hey!” Brooke called from the couch. “You ok?”

  “Fine.”

  “You don’t sound fine.”

  “I am though.”

  Aimee took a great wad of toilet paper out of the bathroom and wiped up the puke. There was too much and in the end she had to use a towel. Aimee wrapped the contents of her too-delicate stomach up in a fluffy white towel. She gritted her teeth and tossed the once-lovely towel into the trashcan rather than risk puking again when she washed it.

  He should be here to wipe up my puke and wash the towels, Aimee thought, but that thought lead to other more dangerous thoughts. Those kinds of thoughts had to go out of her mind, or she would go out of her mind. It was all a symptom of the way her life ended as soon as she got pregnant.

  Aimee brushed her teeth and put on clean granny underwear. Her pregnancy was unfolding like a cross between some horrific, destructive hurricane and kidney stones, but in the end she would have a baby and that thought made it bearable.

  “Aimee, this is a great apartment,” Margot was saying as Aimee returned to the living room.

  “Thanks.”

  “What do you pay?” Margot enquired.

  Such questions are considered rude everywhere in the world except their city where affordable housing was a problem for even a rich girl like Margot.

  “Four thousand.”

  “Mortgage and maintenance?”

  “Rent.”

  “Can you buy it?”

  “When it was a reasonable price we didn’t have the cash.”

  “Wow, yep, me too. I’ve got a great two-bedroom that I should have bought back in the early nineties. I had the cash, but it just didn’t seem worth it back then.”

  “Listen, thanks for the beer,” Brooke said as she gathered up her coat and bag, “but I gotta catch a bus.”

  “You should move into the city,” Aimee said.

  “Yeah, I should,” said Brooke in a noncommittal way that did not reveal how lazy Brooke had become or how she could not imagine that a life that had been so wild in the city at twenty would end up so quiet in the suburbs by forty.

  “Margot, how about a movie?” Aimee asked.

  “I’m a gym rat every other night for at least two hours,” Margot said. “It keeps me sane and thin. If you can wait until the ten o’clock show, though, I’ll see anything. I’m an entertainment slut, any movie, anytime, anywhere.”

  “Ten’s a little late for me to get started. I’ve been conking out by eleven every night,” Aimee admitted.

  “Another time, then,’ Margot said. “What kind of movies do you like?”

  “Sci-fi, action adventures,” Aimee said, and the other women laughed at the absurdity of her answer.

  The chitchat continued as the women walked to the door and rang for the elevator. There were quick hugs and promises to go to the theater together. On the way down Margot and Brooke discussed throwing a baby shower for Aimee. Margot thought a luncheon at a local restaurant would be pleasant and appropriate.

  “What’s her husband like?” Margot asked Brooke as they reached the street.

  “He’s a good guy. Obsessed with his work. Handsome, tall. Used to drink too much but stopped. Actually I haven’t seen him since, gee, for a while. Gets a lot of work shooting rock bands in Tokyo.”

  “He’s a photographer?”

  “No, Margot, he’s an assassin. Duh! Of course he’s a photographer.”

  Brooke gave Margot’s arm a quick shove at the shoulder. They laughed and hugged and promised each other another evening of giggles and beer. Margot walked away feeling good about her new friends.

  Alone in the apartment, Aimee dialed his cell phone. It rang and rang. “Listen, don’t come home, ok,” Aimee said out loud to the ringing phone. “Why are you hanging me up like this? Just tell me that we’re done and I’ll move on and…oh!”

  His phone picked up and asked her to leave a message.

  “…ah, hi. It’s me, babe. Bunch of checks came yesterday. I deposited them. That account’s getting kind of full. Maybe when you come home we should clean it out and buy an island. And, ah, I love you. Bye.”

  It was clearly a Lord of the Rings night. There was a small theater that Aimee could walk to and catch a cab back. It had been showing all three parts of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, back-to-back, twenty-four hours a day for almost two years straight. Aimee and her husband started going last summer just to get out of the heat. Now that she was alone, Aimee would go too often and escape into Middle Earth.

  She loved the enemies the best for they were so clearly evil. The evil in Aimee’s life was like cancerous tumors that couldn’t be killed without destroying some of her own flesh too. She loved the glory of the battles; the way the actors threw their full selves into smashing and hacking at evil until major body parts were severed from the whole. So much easier to hack and destroy than to save or change. And so she went repeatedly and sat in a dark theater for the vicarious thrill of watching unquestionable good destroy undeniable evil. She loved the heroism of the characters and the great hunky actors. She lamented that in the whole of the trilogy, only Frodo removed his shirt.

  I’m a geek, Aimee told herself as she always did when she walked this familiar path into a funkier neighborhood where the theater stood. I don’t know why I fixate on these heroic boy-stories when the only person who ever flew in to save me when I was in distress was my mother. Passing a local bar, Aimee glanced through the plate glass window. She was nauseated by the sight of two happy patrons inside the bar making out like a couple of teenagers.

  The woman, to Aimee’s suddenly prudish eye, was practically licking the guy’s face. Aimee scowled at them and then returned to the scolding of her inner critic: I should be celebrated by my society as a creator of life not shuttling off to movies by my
self. I should be home cataloging something, reading one of the arts journals that come to the…Christ! Oh my god! What was that?

  Aimee turned on her heel and walked back to the plate glass window in front of the bar. She would recognize those purple stockings and blue pumps anywhere. She traveled up the entwined bodies, mentally separating the parts into his and hers, and sure enough, home-dyed auburn hair bobbled on top, tangling itself into some poor old fucker’s thick head of gray hair. When’s she gonna come up for air, Aimee wondered. Girls in their twenties must just need less oxygen than normal women. They probably store the extra air in the uplift of their pert bosoms the same way a camel stores water in its…Christ! Is that Trevor?

  She looked closely. It couldn’t be Trevor. Aimee took a step forward. She’d worked with Trevor on several problematic briefs. He was low-key and kind of boring as far as Aimee was concerned. The kissers were coming up for a breath and a sip of their drinks. Aimee leaned in. The guy’s hair was messed up like he’d just dragged himself out of bed. The Trevor Aimee knew always appeared well pressed and prepared for work. This guy’s lips looked a tad raw and swollen from having so much spit and lipstick rubbed across them. As the man looked over and smiled at the girl who was probably Lux, Aimee had to admit, this was definitely Trevor.

  “Ew!” Aimee said out loud. “Trevor and Lux? Gross.”

  Aimee turned on her heel and scurried all the way to the movie theater. She paid for her ticket and raced to the bathroom where she washed her face like someone whose eyes were on fire. She tried to put Lux’s troubles out of her mind. It was none of her business if the girl wanted to ruin her life. Aimee made sure she emptied every drop of liquid from her poor cramped bladder, shoved as it was into the shrinking space between the growing uterus and her spine.

  Sitting on the toilet, Aimee laughed at Lux. Trevor was at least fifty years old, not to mention a middle-level cog who was never going to make partner.

  “Stupid girl,” Aimee said out loud as she wiped and wondered if they’d had sex.

  Aimee left the bathroom and felt the full blast of the theater’s excellent air-conditioning. The cool air was saturated with the smell of cheap hot dogs and buttery popcorn. She swayed for a moment at the bathroom door. She desperately craved a pop culture opiate, something to wash away the day, but suddenly could not will herself to enter the lovely old theater lobby. I’ve already got my ticket, she coached herself. I just have to walk through the lobby. After the lobby it’s a free fall and I’ve escaped my life until I have to show up for work tomorrow at ten. I already have the damn ticket! If I can just walk through the lobby, I won’t have to think about anything until tomorrow morning. I could burn through a lot of time.