Tuesday Erotica Club

by Lisa Beth Kovetz

  “Thomas Jefferson. Also.”

  “And Kerchew?” continued Bill in his grandmother’s politeness. “Is that a family name?”

  “It’s the sound of a sneeze,” Lux said absently, her eyes drifting across the other paintings and onto the books that lined the walls of the next room. Bill, smitten, followed her into the living room offering comfy slippers, a bathrobe, and some really good skin cream to stop the chafing of cheap tissues and tears.

  They settled into the kitchen and the story poured out. Lux started in reverse chronological order, with getting dumped followed by bad sex and then legal papers. The timeline got messed up when Lux told Brooke and Bill about Carlos, Jonella, and Auntie Who-ah’s real estate holdings. Bill gasped when Lux showed her still-mangled pinky finger. Brooke held her hand and agreed that Trevor had been an absolute pig to her and did not mention that she understood Trevor’s side as well.

  “You can find another crappy job,” Bill said as he loaded a cracker with some softened Brie and handed it to Lux. “But you’ve got to think beyond that, too. You should look into getting a full bachelor’s degree. Education is very important if you want to maintain your money. And you might want to diversify your portfolio. I mean real estate is good, but if that ship sinks, all your cargo is on it.”

  “Oh my God, you’re so right,” Lux said. “Ok, but like say you wanted to buy something like stock, right? How do you, you know, do it? I mean like, how do you pick one? And then like, ok, who takes your money and how do you get it to them?”

  Every Cinderella needs a fairy godfather, Brooke thought as Bill zipped through the basics of creating a relationship with a brokerage firm. Well, not “fairy” she corrected herself. And then she worried about why she would feel the need to correct herself for that perfectly reasonable cultural allusion. Brooke listened as Bill began to tell Lux about the huge penthouse he had inherited from his grandmother, the origins of the woodwork and the imported tiles and the English furniture in the library. Brooke was surprised to hear him tell Lux how the rooms depressed him, how he longed to live somewhere without a doorman who noted all comings and goings. Brooke tried to concentrate on Bill and Lux in the present tense, but her brain was replaying and reexamining every erotic thing that Bill had ever said or done.

  “Yeah, I’ve seen some of those lofts downtown. They’re nice, but they’re way out of my reach,” Lux was telling Bill. “I’m focusing on like small condos in good neighborhoods that need work. Cuz I can make the work happen, but I’m afraid of getting caught with a huge mortgage if a tenant you know, totally flakes out on me. My lawyer says I should be bold cuz I can, you know, borrow from my own equity, but I dunno, that seems too risky. You know what I mean? Like some pyramid that could fall in ah, you know, a heartbeat.”

  “I think when you have three or four places under your belt, rented to good long-term tenants, you will feel more comfortable extending your capital to other…”

  “What’s my capital?” Lux interrupted him.

  “Your cash,” Brooke interjected as she offered the loaf of pâté to Lux.

  “What is it?” Lux asked, eyeing the brownish gray lump.

  “Pâté,” said Bill.

  “No shit?” Lux said shoving a knife into it and then directly into her mouth. She pushed it around with her tongue, flattening it against the roof of her mouth, then suddenly stopped mid push.

  “You don’t like it? Did it spoil? Not good?” Bill asked, sniffing the lump.

  “The way everyone got excited about it, I just thought it would be sweet,” Lux said as she tried to get the unruly liver paste under control in her mouth. “It tastes like liver.”

  “It is liver.”

  “Oh? Yuck!”

  Bill handed her a linen napkin embroidered with his family’s coat of arms. Lux spat the liver into the napkin and tossed it into the trash. Bill smiled. They ate and talked about Brooke’s newest painting, about whom Lux should speak to about getting another job, about Bill’s new drapes in the study, about where Lux should take classes, what Lux should do with her capital, do with her hair, what Lux should do with her beautiful life. The talking was good. And as they spoke, the long night of sex and rejection started taking its toll on Lux’s neck muscles. When she found she could not hold her head up for another minute Bill urged her to pick a bedroom and go to sleep. Lux chose the lavender room. In the morning she would lie in the lavender sheets and consider the matching lavender walls, marveling that her beloved purple could be so whispery and tasteful.

  Brooke said goodnight to Lux and closed the door. She walked back to the center of the apartment and found Bill in the foyer, standing in front of the painting he had purchased from her so many years ago. Brooke put her arms around Bill’s smooth back and giggled in his ear.

  “Can we keep her, Daddy? Can we keep her, huh, huh?”

  “She is something,” Bill agreed still staring at the painting.

  “Can we adopt her?”

  “Mmmmmmmm,” Bill said, his mind elsewhere.

  “What are you thinking about?” Brooke asked.

  “What it’s like to lead a life void of expectations,” Bill said. “What would it be like if no one believed you had anything to offer? There would be no responsibility. And then, say you get even one or two places farther than zero. Say for instance, one day you manage to actually open a brokerage account. Would that be a huge celebration? What would it be like to have no one invested in you? No one watching you for signs of happiness?”

  “Free, fun, sad, scary. What’s the difference? It’s not us.”

  “I think I would have made an excellent president,” Bill said apropos of nothing.

  “President of what?” Brooke asked as she slid her arms around and held him from behind.

  “The United States of America.”

  Brooke, who laughed at everything, did not laugh.

  “Did you paint this for me?” Bill asked indicating the image of two gentlemen on opposite ends of the sofa. “Did you intend to depict two gay men, lovers, sitting in public, not showing any affection for each other?”

  “No,” Brooke said suddenly feeling quite cold. “Is that what you see in it?”

  “No, no, no. But that girl, she saw it in just a second. Does anyone else see it? Brooke? Do you see it?”

  Panic had constricted his throat and the last questions came out in a higher pitch than Bill’s normal baritone.

  “What are you talking about?” Brooke asked. The sound of his voice frightened her.

  Bill took Brooke’s hand and held it to his lips for a long time before he kissed the palm. He didn’t want to lose her. She had been his wife in all things except sex, fidelity, and cohabitation for more than twenty years. He had done something both foolish and special for her tonight when he tried to change himself to make her happy.

  “What I did tonight, I did because I love you. I feel like we’ve sifted the water of sexual experimentation and found that thing that sometimes remains when passion and romance dies.”

  “I don’t understand,” Brooke asked again, although in her heart she knew.

  “Nothing,” he said, “I’m, I, I guess I’m trying to tell you that I love you.”

  “Is that all you wanted to tell me?” Brooke asked.

  Following a large and expensive party, Bill’s paternal grandfather had shot himself in the head on his fiftieth birthday. Bill’s father, in spite of knowing some of the very best oncologists in the city, had not sought treatment for his simple cancer until it had become so complex and invasive that death soon followed diagnosis.

  No one spoke to Bill of the sufferings of these beautiful, unhappy, homosexual men, tortured by sex, but his mother and grandmother had watched him grow up like a pair of lionesses protecting the last living cub. They watched him too closely, anxiously awaited the appearance of his impending sexuality. Their terror rubbed off on him.

  The arrival of nubile, teenaged Brooke put everyone’s mind at ease for many years.
In the foreplay days of their sex life, the thrill of being naked and alone together overwhelmed any details of the desires they may have had inside them. It was all new and all good. In college they both experimented, sometimes together. As time went on, Brooke lost the taste for many of the things that had appealed to her in her youth such as threesomes, rum with coke, and girls. Bill’s tastes changed in a very similar fashion.

  When Bill was young and carefree and still drinking a lot, he would put his penis into just about anything, as is the nature of young, carefree boys who drink a lot. By twenty-five his love for Brooke was stronger but his passion for her body was beginning its slow fade. Other desires started to demand exercise. He pushed them away, clinging to Brooke and his denial. The lie festered and he could not stop the resulting ooze as it seeped into his most significant relationships like some unnamed poison. By thirty-seven, after visiting many urologists, Bill still refused to admit, even to himself, that he was a horny homosexual. He preferred to be an impotent heterosexual. That year Brooke designed her first tattoo.

  The line of homosexuality running through his body was quite thin and simple. Bill wanted hard, rigid bodies, not soft, wet openings. He continued to have sex with Brooke as often as he could manage it because he was afraid of losing her. Sexually, he performed extremely well because it helped him believe the lie he told himself about his desires. He played the role of Brooke’s lover with grand flare, almost as if his life depended on convincing her that his passion for her body was real.

  But pretending took a great deal of energy and over the years it wore him down. By the time he was thirtynine, Bill’s mother, Eleanor, began to worry about him in a new way. When she saw the depression that had plagued her husband flare up in her son, Eleanor decided that she was ready to accept his gayness, but by then she could not reverse the fear and self-loathing she had silently instilled in her big, blond cub.

  When his grandmother died and Bill inherited her vast amounts of money and real estate, Eleanor had taken him aside after the funeral. In the heat of a Palm Beach August she took him down to the beach, away from the house where no one could hear but the surf and told him that she thought it was ok to be a homosexual.

  “Why would you say that, Mother?”

  “Because your father and Miles Randolph never played a stroke of golf in their whole lives.”

  “Mr. Randolph?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh my God, at the funeral he was weeping so loudly!”

  “Right.”

  “Wow.”

  “Miles Randolph loved your father. And so did I.”

  Bill’s mother reached out and took her son’s pale hand. She reached up and pushed the blond hair out of his green eyes and said to her boy, “Billy, I just want you to be happy.”

  And so he tried. He went to Mexico and tried. He went to Bangkok and tried really hard. He spent a lot of time in Paris, trying to be happy, and sometimes he was; but every time he got back to his home he found the weight of mahogany and family connections and the eyes of his colleagues would quickly squish happiness to bits. Even within the inviting world of his gay friends he felt he had to hide his desire for the beautiful men lounging poolside. Maybe it was all those years living under the watchful eyes of lionesses looking for a sign of danger that made him fear stepping out of his closet. Still, he was a passionate man who needed sex.

  When he needed love, he called Brooke. She saw that his erection would soften when she removed her brassiere. She wondered why he was spending so much of his vacation time playing around in France. It had not occurred to her that he was pitching in a different league, until Lux gave it a name.

  “I know you love me, Bill, but is there something else you want to tell me?” Brooke asked, not ready to believe that the man who had just made love to her three times in a night was not really attracted to women. She allowed herself to skip over the fact that he’d used a chemically enhanced penis to make it happen for her, and that he had not come at all.

  “Brooke, I love you,” Bill sputtered.

  “Already established,” she said.

  “And I am…,” Bill said and then stopped. He refused to commit to any specific adjective.

  Brooke waited. The silence grew until Bill felt he had to fill it.

  “It’s just that upon occasion I find myself staring at beautiful men,” Bill said as if it were nothing more than a very fine point of a specific rule of law. “Tom McKenna, for example, the pro at the golf club. He is a very handsome man and I ah, I don’t think it’s an unnatural attraction. And it ends there.”

  Brooke’s bullshit meter flared up suddenly, registering a high percentage of crap to truth in Bill’s statement. She could have been angry with him except that he was obviously in such terrible pain.

  “How long have you had this attraction?” Brooke asked and at the same time wondered how long she had known it was there. When Lux called it by name, an information virus had begun to work through Brooke’s memories, highlighting a particular moment, a look, a gesture. How long had it been there?

  “Since Jack Berenbott,” Bill said.

  Jack was an old school chum they’d run into while vacationing in St. Kit. He flirted with Brooke and Brooke flirted back. When Jack suggested a threesome, Bill agreed, thinking he wanted to see Brooke thoroughly pleasured. After it was over he tried to tell himself that he’d done it for her, but really he’d done it to see Jack.

  “That long?” Brooke gasped, feeling like an idiot.

  “I though I could outrun it,” Bill said.

  “Outrun it!” Brooke said. “It’s not a pony, Bill.”

  “I am not totally gay, Brooke,” Bill said. “Not really gay at all. I mean, if you were to graph it in a bell curve you’d see I have many, many more points in the straight portion of the curve than the gay.”

  “Except that you want to have sex with men,” Brooke said.

  “No. I’ve done some experimenting. That’s all,” Bill waffled, “my heart is with you.”

  “But your dick is with Jack Berenbott.”

  Bill was quiet for a very long time.

  “I can cut it off,” he said very seriously.

  “Your dick?” Brooke asked.

  “No! This gay thing. It’s not a big part of me. Really. I love you. I have loved you since that very first hangover we shared at your grandmother’s apartment. I can change for you.”

  Brooke didn’t answer.

  She turned to stare at her painting of lovers who would not touch. She wanted to pretend that Lux was very wrong. Lux had walked into Bill’s apartment and said hello to the two thousand pound gorilla in a tutu that had been quietly living there for years. Now that the gorilla had been given a name, it was not going to shrink back into the shadows.

  “There’s only been a couple of men,” Bill said sincerely. And, since he figured all the sex he’d had outside of the United States didn’t really count, he honestly believed it was true. “And I haven’t had sex with anyone but you for at least five years. I want to be with you more than anything else in the world. You are the best thing in my life.”

  Brooke tried to process the information. She thought about all the times she’d had sex with Bill. Lux had to be wrong. Crazy girl from Queens. What did she know?

  Brooke stood in the foyer of Bill’s apartment. Suddenly all she could see was that night in St. Kit that they had made love to Jack Berenbott. She picked over the evening, but couldn’t find a single clue. They’d had a good time with Jack, then returned to their room and done it again just the two of them. There had been years of good sex between then and now. That had to count for something.

  Then she weighed past great sex against his present impotence. Maybe they just needed a break. Maybe he could control it. But did she want him to control it? Did she want to be involved with someone who was always holding his breath? Her head started to hurt. It was too big. She was standing at the end of the continental shelf. Everything in front of her was suddenly
ocean.

  “I’m going to go home now,” Brooke said. “Would you please call up my car.”

  24. Winning

  MARGOT LAY IN BED, thinking about masturbation. The Saturday sun was flitting through her blinds and nothing was on her agenda. She could, if she wanted to, dedicate the whole morning in bed to the most consistent and reliable lover she ever had. Thinking about herself, she slid out of her T-shirt and sweatpants and began to rotate her pelvis in a delightful figure eight, rubbing her naked thighs against the softness of her sheets.

  She considered treating herself to a long, lovely bath. Margot started planning her morning. She would fill the deep bathtub with hot water only up to the point where it would lap at the bottom of her open vagina while her fingers massaged the top. Then, just before she came, she would lift her body up and throw it back into her bed where she would bring herself to a perfect orgasm, the kind that made her scratch at the pillows and shout to the ceiling. Then, Margot planned, she would take herself out to a fine breakfast.

  As she was getting out of bed and heading towards the bathtub, Margot’s buzzer rang. Someone was at the front door. Margot guessed it was the newspaper delivery, unable to get into the lobby. She and her body would probably want the newspaper later, after, so Margot strode across her living room and hit the front door buzzer.

  “Who is it?” Margot asked.

  If he had called first, she would have told him to stay home. But Trevor was standing outside her building, ringing her buzzer unexpected and unannounced. He said he was out jogging and just happened to be passing her house. Could he come up for a quick coffee?

  “Ahhhhh,” Margot intoned into the intercom as she looked down at her waiting, naked body.

  Through the squawk of Margot’s intercom, her hesitant “ahhhhh” sounded like a groan and Trevor wished for a moment that he had not rung her bell. She was going to laugh at him or worse, lecture him about office policies again. But his family-sized apartment had seemed so empty that morning. He left the house with the intention of going for a good run, alone. He would stop on the way back for coffee and a bagel, alone. He would pick up the paper and return to his apartment, alone. When he found himself running down Margot’s block, he suddenly could not bear the whole “alone” component of his day a moment longer and so he rang her buzzer. He was about to apologize for interrupting her Saturday and return home when she told him she was sending down the middle elevator. She gave him instructions to get on and turn the key in her private lock. That would send the elevator straight to her apartment.