by Mary Monroe
Half an hour after my conversation with Joan at noon, Reed called me on my cell phone from his office. I happened to be in the employee restroom, sitting on the commode, but I answered his call right away.
“I thought you were having lunch with Joan,” he started, speaking in that annoying whiny voice I had come to hate. “She’s not answering her cell phone.”
“We did have lunch, but she couldn’t stay the whole hour,” I said evenly.
“So she should be on her way back home, huh?”
“That was her original plan. But one of our friends called while we were eating lunch. You remember Liza Mae Ford, don’t you?”
“The woman who is confined to a wheelchair? Joan keeps putting off introducing her to me, when she knows I like to be familiar with all of her close friends.”
“Uh, well, yeah. Anyway, Liza Mae asked Joan to pick up some beauty products for her from this beauty consultant in San Mateo and bring them to her.”
Reed remained quiet for a few moments. “I’m surprised that a woman who can’t even walk still cares about beauty products.”
“Well, this one does. Two months before that drunk driver hit her and paralyzed her for life, she won a beauty contest. She still likes to wear makeup and stuff. . . .”
“I see. Well, if you hear from Joan before I do, tell her to call me as soon as possible. I’d like to take her to dinner tonight. She’s been kind of down in the dumps lately and I’d like to try and cheer her up.” Reed paused and I heard him suck in some air. “I’m sure she’s told you, but things are really working out well for us. As a matter of fact, I’m planning to ask her over dinner tonight if she’s ready to have another child. I wish we had started working on it years ago so they’d be closer to Junior’s age. I want at least two more, and I’m going to make it clear to Joan that I want them to be only two or three years apart.”
I had to hold my breath to keep from gasping. “Hmmm. That’s nice to hear, Reed. Joan always said she wanted at least two or three children.” I couldn’t wait to talk to Joan again.
About three and a half hours after my conversation with Reed, I glanced at my watch. I had only a few minutes to go before I clocked out for the day.
“Lola, can you stay a little longer?” Mrs. Cottright asked with a pleading expression on her chipmunk-looking face as she finished ringing up a customer. She had been working the other cash register all day. “Tyrone just called and said he’s stuck in traffic. I knew I was going to have a problem with that oafish grandson of mine getting here from Oakland on time every day.” I hated working on the days when twenty-year-old Tyrone was supposed to come in. He was almost always twenty to thirty minutes late.
From the sweat on Mrs. Cottright’s face and the way her gnarled hands were shaking, I could see that she was pretty well-frazzled. I didn’t want to add to her distress, so I answered eagerly and without hesitation. “Yes, ma’am. I’d be glad to stay.”
“God bless you, Lola,” she said. Her cloudy black eyes lit up and a crooked smile appeared on her thin lips. She patted the side of her frizzy gray wig and smiled even harder. “I told that man of mine that we can always count on you. Before you leave, grab a few packages of them smoked turkey necks to take home and tell Bertha I said ‘hello.’”
I didn’t care how much longer I had to work on this particular day, I had no place to go except home, anyway. And I had something important on my mind: I was worried about Joan. She had promised to call me as soon as she ended her date, which should have been a couple of hours ago. She wasn’t answering her cell phone or her home phone.
Tyrone finally showed up around six P.M. I gathered my purse and Windbreaker and ran over to the meat counter. I plucked out two packages of turkey necks, then scurried to the time card area and punched out.
As soon as I got outside and started walking toward home, I dialed Joan’s home phone number from my cell phone again. I was surprised and happy when she picked up on the first ring.
“Where the hell have you been?” I hollered. “I was worried sick!”
“I was in heaven,” she cooed.
“This is not funny! What time did you leave that hotel?”
“Oh, I left when I said I would. We didn’t even need the whole two hours.” She began to talk in a low, sultry voice that I only heard her use when she was flirting with a hot dude. “Jeremy was wonderful.”
“Forget about Jeremy. Have you talked to your husband? He called and I told him that story about you going to pick up some beauty products for Liza Mae.”
“Pffft! Don’t worry about him. On my way home, I stopped off at his office. I waited until he finished performing a root canal on his last patient for the day. Then I lured him into the copy room, locked the door, leaned him up against the Xerox machine, and unzipped his pants. By the time I got through whipping some hot pussy on him, he was purring like a kitten.” Joan snickered. “Men are such fools when it comes to a piece of tail.” She snickered again. “I hate to rush, but I have to get ready for the dinner he’s taking me to tonight. You remember that pasta place downtown with the hot Italian waiter named Carlo?”
I purposely ignored Joan’s last question. The last thing I wanted to talk about was that “hot Italian waiter named Carlo.”
“Shut up and listen to me, with your slutty self. Reed told me he’s ready to have another baby.”
She guffawed. “Humph! It won’t be with me!”
“I know it’s none of my business, and I know you’re going to do whatever you want, but he sounds like he’s really trying to make the marriage work. Do you really think this dating site is something you ought to be involved with right now?”
“I’m seeing Jeremy again when he comes back out here next year. And next week I have a date with that football player I told you about. Does that answer your question?”
Chapter 39
Joan
IT HAD ALREADY BEEN A YEAR AND A HALF SINCE MY FIRST DATE WITH a fellow Discreet Encounters club member. Since then, I’d been with more than two dozen others, and I had had some unforgettable dates.
One Thursday afternoon last month, I hooked up with a forty-five-year-old oil executive from Dallas named Edgar Strickland. Just like his screen name—“BigNasty”—he was big and nasty. But he had a problem getting and keeping an erection. After fumbling around for over an hour, he asked me to give him a hand job. I eagerly agreed to that, but it only made the situation worse. I rubbed his penis so long that by the time he got hard, he was also sore. I was stunned when he started crying. It was a sight to see this big strapping multimillionaire—who ran a big company and supervised dozens of people—naked and crying like a baby. I wondered if he cried in front of his employees and business associates when he had work-related problems.
“I am so sorry,” I said as I rushed to get dressed.
“Not as sorry as I am,” he sobbed. “I’ve never had a problem like this. I . . . I think I drank too much!”
I left him sitting on the bed, crying and pleading with me to stay. I felt sorry for the man, but the date was over for me.
I was glad Reed was still at work when I dashed into the condo, took a quick shower, and fixed myself a strong drink. An hour later, BigNasty sent me a text: Can you come back ASAP? I’ve solved my problem.
I texted back right away: Not today. Let me know when you’ll be back in town.
My next unforgettable date was two weeks ago with Rabin Mahanta, a charming man in his late thirties from Bombay, India, who owned a chain of high-end restaurants there. His screen name was “Rockin’Rabin.” He had come to the States with his wife to spend two weeks celebrating their tenth wedding anniversary in San Francisco, where he had booked a suite for them at the Four Seasons.
On the third day of their visit, after sightseeing and riding the cable cars for several hours, he tucked his wife away in their hotel suite and told her to stay put so he could go out and do some networking with some local restaurant owners. After his last meeting, he hire
d a car service to transport him to the Hyatt in San Jose, where he had reserved a suite so he could do some “networking” with me too.
Within minutes after I showed up, he started bragging about his beautiful wife and their amazing three sons, and his mistress and their amazing two sons.
Rabin was very religious. He could not stop talking about how “blessed” he felt to know that a beautiful woman like me wanted to have sex with him. He was an intelligent, witty, very likeable man; and he was good-looking, with his jet-black hair, hazel eyes, and bronze-toned skin. But he was a midget. The top of his head barely touched the bottom of my waist.
Rabin had not listed his height in his profile and his picture was a head shot. After we had chatted for about half an hour, he glanced at his watch and jumped up off the bed, where we’d been sitting, sipping wine, and looking at snapshots he carried in his wallet of his family.
“We must hurry! My driver has to get me back to San Francisco in time to take my wife to dinner!” he hollered as he removed his hideous touristy flowered shirt and khakis.
I gasped when I saw his nude body. It didn’t bother me that he was plump, ashy, and hairy, but his penis looked like a big toe. Except on my son when he was an infant, I’d never seen such a tiny penis on a human being. I was devastated because I knew I was not going to have much fun on this date. But what he said next relieved me. “You will only masturbate me, and I will only give you oral sex. And I shall do you first. Lie on bed and spread your legs.”
I agreed to that; but once his head ducked between my thighs, I regretted it. He was very good with his tongue—so good that I got carried away and clamped my legs around his little body to hold him in place. I didn’t realize he was in trouble until he started moaning, writhing, and slapping my thighs. I had almost smothered the man!
As soon as I released him, he rolled off the bed, gasping for air. I was mortified and immediately started apologizing as I helped him up off the floor. But he took the whole incident in stride.
“Don’t worry. God is good. I still had a blessed time. You must go now,” he told me with a dismissive wave.
Since he was so anxious for me to leave, I didn’t hang around to take a shower. Five minutes after I’d put my clothes back on, he hugged me, puckered his thick lips, and kissed me.
When I got back to my car in the hotel parking lot, I sat there for a few minutes, thinking about what had just happened. I almost fainted when I realized I could have been responsible for Rabin being hauled out of the hotel in a body bag. From that day on, I asked my dates their height.
The date with Rabin had been such a disaster, I was anxious to hook up with somebody else as soon as possible. There were several messages in my club in-box, so I didn’t have any trouble lining up another quick date.
I spent several hours with a young computer executive from Hong Kong named Mr. Ting. He had come to the States to meet with a bunch of those Silicon Valley geeks to discuss new software. And he’d eagerly admitted to me, “To get some African-American pussy for the first time.”
It was a first for us both, because I had never been with a Chinese man. I had the time of my life. Not only was I getting laid properly and frequently these days, I was being exposed to different cultures and lifestyles. I replayed part of my conversation with Mr. Ting in my head for the rest of the week.
“Joan, you are the most exciting woman I have ever known,” he’d told me in his heavy Chinese accent as I lay in his arms. We’d spent the afternoon in his swank hotel room at the San Jose Marriott on Market Street. He had just told me some charming stories about his childhood. He had grown up in a mansion with nineteen siblings and his wealthy father, who had three wives. “You make a velly good mistress.” Before I could respond, Mr. Ting leaned over and kissed me on the lips. “If only you lived croser to me, I’d be a velly happy man. I never clum so good and hard in my life before today. I make you clum too?”
“Uh-huh, you sure did make me . . . clum,” I replied, hoping he didn’t think I was making fun of his accent by pronouncing “cum” the same way he had.
I still had a couple more hours of free time. (I had told Reed and everybody else I was going to drive to Sonoma with an old school friend to visit our favorite winery.) So Mr. Ting and I decided to watch an adult movie on the huge TV facing the king-size bed. Ten minutes into the movie, he got excited again and climbed back on top of me. Had he not been so sweet and nice, and a great lover, I would have declined the second session. After our tryst, he invited me to have dinner with him, but I declined that.
One thing I didn’t want to do was spend too much time with the same man. Some of the men I’d been with had gotten attached to me very quickly. That flattered and frightened me. But each time that happened, I recalled a few lines and scenes from the movie Fatal Attraction and Lola’s paranoid ramblings about online sex fiends and serial killers. That was enough for me to decline offers to stay a little longer on a particular date, or to “keep in touch,” the way some of the men suggested.
I had not set any solid ground rules yet, so there was a possibility that if things continued to go well, I’d see more of the same men more than once—I’d already done so with a couple. Until then, I planned to play it safe and rub all the fun I was having in Lola’s face.
“I wish you would stop bragging about the fantastic time you had the other day with Hop Sing, or whatever his name was,” Lola complained, rolling her eyes and moving her head like a bobble head figurine.
I had been talking about Mr. Ting for ten minutes straight over drinks at the Green Rose, one of our favorite bars. “Be nice now. His name was Wei Li Ting and he was one of the best lovers I’ve ever had.” I gulped half of my second glass of wine. “Pssst,” I said, leaning forward. “Ask me how long his tongue was?”
Lola gave me a mock look of disgust. “How long?”
“Long enough to make any woman very happy. The way he licked and slurped—”
“Enough already,” she hollered, holding up her hand in front of my face. “I get the picture.”
I spent the next five minutes talking about a couple of other dates. But by the time I got around to Nigel Bascomb, a gorgeous Nigerian banker who lived in London, who had come to San Jose to attend his godson’s wedding, Lola was drooling like a hungry baby.
“He had me screaming louder than I screamed when I was in labor!”
“Shhh!” Lola said, with a finger up to her lips. “You don’t have to get that explicit.”
“Then I guess you don’t want to hear about his tongue skills either, huh?”
She blinked and bit her bottom lip. “Well, since we’re in that territory already, anyhow, how was he in that department?”
“Honey, some men can’t even lick a lollipop or a stamp properly. But that man could lick like an anteater.”
Lola laughed. Then she gave me a peculiar look. She glanced around, then back at me. “Guess what? I joined Discreet Encounters.”
My breath caught in my throat and my jaw dropped. “You? When?”
“Last week.”
“‘Last week’? Bitch, how come you’re just now telling me?”
“I didn’t want to say anything until they’d done the background check on me, in case they didn’t let me join.”
“Yeah, right. There’s nothing in your background that would keep a sex club from not letting you become a member.”
“With all those doctors and lawyers, and other high-end men in the club, I was afraid they’d think nobody would be interested in going to bed with a grocery store cashier.”
“If those same men are interested in an ordinary housewife like me, they’ll be interested in a cashier. Especially a hottie like you. I keep telling you this is all about sex. As long as you’re not doing something illegal, this club doesn’t care what you do for a living. A lot of the members are waiters, valets, fry-cooks, cabdrivers and what-not. Day before yesterday, I heard from a high school janitor—an unemployed one at that. Men like that can
’t afford to show women a good time in a fancy hotel and treat them to a gourmet meal and fine wine. Unless you want to fool around with one in a Motel 6 who’ll buy you a Big Mac and a soda, I advise you to ignore them like I do. I received a request last night from a gorgeous part-time school bus driver in Ohio. He’s coming out here for his vacation in a few weeks.”
“Well, are you going to see this georgeous school bus driver? If he can afford to come to California from Ohio for his vacation, he can’t be too broke.”
“Puh-leeze! I stopped reading his message and deleted it as soon as I got to the part about him being a part-time school bus driver. He probably had to borrow or save his money for years just for his vacation. Stick to the men with money, honey.”
“Anyway, as soon as I got the green light, I created my password and a club user’s screen name, ‘BrownSugar.’ Then I posted my profile with a picture of me in that white string bikini I wore when we went to Stinson Beach last summer. Within an hour, eight men had logged in and contacted me.”
“BrownSugar? Couldn’t you come up with something more original?”
“You can’t talk! Do you think yours, ‘HotChocolate,’ is more original?”
Joan laughed. “I’m just kidding. It’s cute and it’s an appropriate screen name for you. Last night I chatted with a man whose screen name is ‘TrickyDick.’ And the night before, I received an e-mail from ‘LongJohn.’ I’m going to check the reviews on those two. If their screen names mean what I think, I’m going to have to line up a date with each one.”
“What’s Mr. Ting’s screen name?”
“You won’t believe it!” I threw my head back and snickered long and loud. I had tears in my eyes when I looked back to Lola. “Remember that old song ‘Wild Thing’ that they still play on the old-school radio stations?” I asked, wiping my eyes with my cocktail napkin.
“The only ‘Wild Thing’ song I remember was the one by Tone Loc. Daddy had it on a cassette tape and used to play it so much I’d hear it in my sleep.”