by Amy Sohn
At one point she rode a bicycle into a parking lot and ate Chip-wiches while watching A Streetcar Named Desire projected onto a white sheet. And then Piotr was gone and she was in a taxi somewhere in Brooklyn, she guessed by the low houses, or it could have been Queens, and she was dozing on Lulu’s shoulder. She fell asleep in a high queen bed under a blanket that looked like a theater curtain, her clothes still on, her arm strewn over the strange girl’s neck.
Marco
After Marco finally got both kids to bed, he lay on the couch, the phone nestled in his chest. He had bought a bottle of Absolut at a different liquor store than the one he used to go to on Seventh Avenue, because the people there knew him and knew he had stopped drinking. He drank from the glass of vodka, refilled it.
The past few days had been hellish. During the drive back to Brooklyn from Cape Cod, Enrique threw up twice, and on the Merritt Parkway, they saw a horrible accident, a car overturned. On the grass by the side of the road, there were children lying down. Marco was haunted by the image for the rest of the ride.
He returned the rental car to Avis on Atlantic Avenue and hailed a cab. Back in Park Slope, the cabbie couldn’t come down the block because some Comedy Central show was filming. Normally, Marco found the Park Slope movie shoots exciting, but not after a six-and-a-half-hour drive with two kids and a rental-car return. “I live here!” he said.
“We’ll be done in about an hour,” the production assistant said. It was like Tribeca after 9/11. He had to call his upstairs neighbor Gina, a never-married woman in her fifties, to help with all the bags. He took both kids up to the apartment while she watched the luggage, and then she came upstairs and he moved everything in himself.
Rosa had off for Labor Day, so he had been on his own with the boys all day Sunday and Monday. Today, her first day back, had been his start of teaching. He came home from work exhausted and then had to feed the kids and get them to sleep on his own. Todd was returning from Greenport in the morning. Jason’s colic had gotten worse. Rosa told him that Jason had cried most of the day, and her stressed-out look made him think she might quit.
A Yankees game was on the radio. Marco’s favorite thing to do on summer nights was listen to baseball on the radio. It reminded him of lying on the grass in Miami behind the house, listening to games with his brothers.
Marco took another swig and opened Grindr. He tapped “Uncut Stud,” a muscular twentysomething with a mirror in the background. “Looking 4 action.” The guy was tan and dark-haired, with improbably white teeth. He was holding one arm up to his head to show off his lats, the iPhone in the other hand, taking the picture.
Height: 6'3"
About me: I want to learn a lesson.
NEG
Age: 28
Weight: 210
Ethnicity: White
Location: 5 miles
A message popped up in a little blue square: “Uncut Stud would like to chat with you.” “You’re hot,” Uncut Stud wrote.
“So are you.”
“Now send me one of your cock.”
Marco stood against the wall and took a shot down to midthigh. He liked his cock the way some men liked their hair. It had served him well, and he was proud of his dimensions, seven by five and a half. “I’m getting hard just looking at that,” wrote Uncut Stud. “What are you doing tomorrow at noon?”
“How about four o’clock?” Marco wrote. After class.
“I’m working. Night?” Grindr let you find out who was close by, but that didn’t mean they or you were available to fuck that second. You couldn’t take the New York out of GPS. They went on, offering different time slots, until they were midway into the following week. The guy worked at a sports club in the West Village and didn’t have a lot of free time. Marco sent his phone number, but the guy went offline and never called.
Marco chatted with half a dozen other guys, made plans with a few for lunchtime hookups between classes, though he suspected not all would pan out. Soon he found a cute slender guy, just his type. Skinny, Irish-looking, preppy. The guy was six-one, 175 pounds, switch, two miles away. Lukas.
Lukas worked at a bar in Carroll Gardens and asked if Marco could “host” when he got off work at three. Marco swept every children’s item, bouncy chair, bib, onesie, and picture book into the other room, removed all the drawings from the fridge, and hid the baby bottles and nipples in the cupboards. At 3:35, Marco and Lukas were sitting on the couch. Lukas took out some coke and asked if Marco wanted to do a bump.
Marco had done coke only twice before, at Duke, when he was dating a girl who was into it. He hadn’t liked the comedown—you went from wild optimism to nihilism and swore you’d never do it again—but it felt so good that you did do it again. Then the same thing happened. He felt he had dodged a bullet not getting really into it. He and the girl had broken up, and he couldn’t get it anymore, he was too poor.
“Yeah, sure,” he heard himself say.
They did a few lines on the Room & Board coffee table. It was like a lot of cups of coffee, but happy cups of coffee! Everything looked promising and important! He wasn’t angry at Todd for going away anymore. This was what he needed! He was meant to be doing this, coked up, on the couch with Lukas the bartender! It was great that Todd had told him about Grindr!
Lukas wanted to top, but Marco said he didn’t bottom. Lukas had brought a condom, and Marco put it on but was only half hard, he wasn’t sure why. Coke was supposed to make you harder, not softer. He stroked himself without the condom and then tried to put it on again. “Hold on a second,” Marco said. He went into the bathroom and touched himself, closing his eyes to get hard, thinking of Lukas’s skinny back, Jason with his legs over his shoulders. He imagined Uncut Stud engorged in his mouth.
When he came back in the living room, naked and fully erect, he found Lukas putting on his clothes as Enrique watched from the center of the room. Normally, Enrique slept through the night. He was so consistent that Marco hadn’t even thought to lock the door. “Fucking married father,” Lukas mumbled, hopping into a sock.
“He said ‘fuck’!” Enrique said, and began to giggle hysterically.
“I’m not married. I’m gay. My partner’s away.”
“Fuck! Fucky! I have pussy!” Enrique cried.
“Go back in your room!” Marco said, too concerned about Lukas’s leaving to think about the fact that he was wearing no clothes.
“Fuck you, bitch!” said Enrique to Lukas.
“That’s messed up,” Lukas said. Just before the door slammed behind him, Marco heard him say, “I knew I shouldn’t have come to Park Slope.”
Melora
When Melora woke up she didn’t know where she was. There was a Blow-up poster on the wall opposite her. Every square inch of the floor was covered with clothing. Her head was throbbing. She tried to retrace the night but couldn’t remember much past Glassphemy! There was no one in the bed with her, and she was still dressed. An alarm clock next to the bed said ten-thirty. Rehearsal had started at ten. She turned her phone on. There were ten missed calls from Piotr and three from Ruthie, the stage manager. Teddy was going to be furious. Alessandro would delight in the fact that she had come late.
She stood up and moved her tongue in her mouth. It was dry and thick. A burgundy bra was hanging on the doorknob, not hers. She walked down the hallway. A door was open. She saw a bedroom with a Victorian dresser. A bed hung from the ceiling with nautical rope. The room had the feel of a sepia photo.
Down a narrow, uncarpeted flight of stairs, she emerged into a low-ceilinged room that reminded her of a Vermont log cabin. The smell of fresh coffee was overwhelming. Sitting at a handmade wooden dining table were Lulu and Ray Hiss, drinking from tin mugs. Ray was wearing what appeared to be an off-white muslin dress that went to his ankles.
“You’re a smart girl!” Ray was shouting. “You could be a gallery assistant or a paralegal! Why can’t you show some initiative? You and your brother are exactly the same.”
; “No, we’re not. I have creative ambition. He doesn’t.” They noticed her standing there. When Ray saw her, a smile crept up the sides of his cheeks.
“Melora, this is my dad, Ray.”
Melora was so stunned that she said what she was thinking: “How come you didn’t call me back?”
“I try to be as unavailable as possible,” he answered.
“You guys know each other?” Lulu asked.
“We sat next to each other on a plane,” he said, not enthusiastically.
“Did you guys join the mile-high club or something?”
“I joined in the eighties,” Melora said, surprised by her own bluntness.
“Wow. Who with?”
“Eric Roberts and Eric Stoltz. Not at the same time.”
Ray chuckled and asked if she wanted coffee. She nodded slowly, sat on a chair next to Lulu. There was an old fellow named Hiss / With fingers surprisingly brisk.
He brought it to her in a cup just like theirs, the kind you took along on hunting trips. With his beard, he reminded her of James Gandolfini in Get Shorty, the one where he played a stuntman. She had always liked men who resembled 1970s football players, but there weren’t many of them in Hollywood when she was coming up.
“Where are we?” Melora asked.
“Greenpoint,” Lulu said. She jumped up and put her hand on Melora’s shoulder. “Tell Piotr I’m really sorry about what Patti said to him.”
“Was it anti-Polish?”
“It’s best if we not rehash.”
“Where you going?” Ray asked Lulu as she grabbed her bag.
“I have a rehearsal for The Vegetable Hamlet,” she said.
“What’s that?”
“A ten-minute version of Hamlet using tomatoes, carrots, eggplant, and a few others. At the end, we juice the cast and drink it.” She scribbled something on a piece of paper and slipped it to Melora. “Let me know if you wanna hang again.” Then Lulu was gone, and Melora was alone with Ray Hiss.
She didn’t care about being late to rehearsal. She didn’t care if she missed it completely, even though this was their last week before tech week. All that mattered was Ray. “So why didn’t you call me back?” she repeated.
“I wasn’t sure I wanted to see you again.”
“Then why did you do what you did on that plane?”
“You mean get handsy?” She nodded. “Because you wanted me to. It’s broadcast all over your face. You want to be violated. You’re a walking Evite.”
She wondered whether he was right. Up close, she could see the flaws in his Semitic features. “I bought a book of your work,” she said. “I like your paintings.”
“Which one?”
“Ray Hiss: 1975–1995.” She noticed light streaming out of a door in the back of the room. “Is that your studio?”
“Yes.”
“Can I go inside?”
“What do I care?”
“I thought maybe you’d be proprietary about your work.”
“It’s just colored dirt.”
His studio was small, about the size of the Scooby Mansion bathroom. There were dozens of sketches taped to the walls—one was a topless woman in panty hose, on crutches. On a big easel was a pirate woman with ample cleavage, navigating a ship. She wore tight pants that revealed camel toe. On a canvas was a hearty, midwestern-looking woman in a plaid shirt chopping down a tree. The angle was from below, so the tree and the woman’s mons towered over the viewer. Pussy paintings.
Melora got an image of Ray painting her nude, then deciding that he didn’t like her implants. She thought of all the wild pubic hair she had seen in the book of his paintings. Her pubic hair, waxed in a style she and her aesthetician referred to as a Halfzilian instead of a Brazilian, was manicured on the front so that it formed a neat triangle, but completely bare beneath. Everything about her body that the world deemed attractive—her long, blond, straight hair, her pert designer C-cups, her wax—seemed not to exist in the paintings of Ray Hiss.
In the living room she sat next to him on the couch and asked, “What does it mean that the woman is a pirate? Do you feel that women are emotional looters?”
“It’s not something I can put into words. Can you describe color in words? Or pain?” She maneuvered herself into his lap, feeling heavy, though she wasn’t. She imagined lifting her skirt and Ray Hiss ejaculating inside her. She wanted to see his contorted face, whether his lower lip hung left or right.
“What are you wearing?” she asked, fingering the fabric of his nightshirt.
“It’s called a baja. It was made by a sewing circle in Peshawar by the wives of the mujahideen.”
It sounded like a come-on, so she leaned to kiss him. He turned his face away, and all she got was beard. Ray Hiss made her feel like the ugly one, even though he was the fat Jew. Until now she had never believed any man was capable of hating her as much as she hated herself. In the past they liked her too much, lost their minds over her, and this made her despise them. Even before she was famous, she was accustomed to men pounding at her door late at night or calling obsessively. She would scream and throw things, and they would come back for more.
She got on the floor and put her head in Ray’s lap. She could feel his flaccid penis under the muslin dress. She moved her cheek around, and he stiffened. She began to push his baja up his legs. He swatted her away.
“I’m a movie star,” she said, “and you won’t let me suck you off.” She had prided herself on her blow job skills since giving her first at fifteen to Corey Haim in his basement in Sherman Oaks.
“I’m not other men,” Ray said, and pressed his entire hand up against her face. “Now are you ready?”
“What do you mean?”
“I have work for you.”
He led her upstairs. Halfway down the hallway was a bathroom with a claw-foot tub. Expensive-looking Italian towels hung on copper racks. There were men’s shaving supplies on a shelf. A mop and broom leaned against the wall. A large bucket held Ajax, glass cleaner, Lysol, a Swiffer, a toilet brush, rough sponges, paper towels, Clorox, Murphy’s Oil Soap, and an old grizzled toothbrush. “Have you ever cleaned a bathroom?” he said.
“No.”
“I suspected as much. First you sweep the entire floor with this. Get behind the toilet and the sink. Dump the dust into the bathroom garbage can, which you will empty when you finish. Begin with the tub. You sprinkle Ajax around the middle and allow it to stay there until it turns from blue to green. Then go around the circle you’ve made with the scratchy side of this sponge, getting out all of the mildew. You will run the water as you do this. Go up and down from the ring until the porcelain is spotless. Do the bottom of the tub the same way. If you find any hairs, scoop them up with a Kleenex. For the faucet and handles, you’ll use the glass cleaner and the soft side of the sponge. Scrub until they are spotless. Make sure there aren’t any streaks. You can clean the walls with glass cleaner. Use paper towels. Go from the ceiling all the way down to the baseboard and work in small circles. For the sink, you will use the same method as the tub. Ajax in the middle and glass cleaner for the faucets. If you see mold in the grout, use the toothbrush and a little Clorox.
“Get the sides and bottom and the pedestal, too. Use Windex for the mirror. Don’t streak. Continue until the reflection is clear. Use the Ajax on the toilet. Allow it to sit there for a while until it starts to dribble down. Then swish the toilet brush around, removing any debris, flushing as many times as it takes. Sponge the bottom of the toilet, the floor around it, the lid, and the tank. Do not neglect the sides of the tank or the underside of the seat or seat cover. Remove hair and lint. Dust the baseboard around the entire room using this Swiffer. When you’ve done all that, you’ll fill this bucket with Murphy’s and mop the floor. Begin with the tub area and continue out of the room until you are in the hallway. Otherwise you will step in your work.”
He turned around and went down the stairs. Was he serious? Was there going to be some kind of reward at the
end? She had met insane men in Hollywood—she had met hundreds—but Ray was insane in a new way.
“Ray?” she called. He didn’t answer. She opened the medicine chest and saw an array of potions, shaving creams, and old-fashioned brushes. No medications. Was this a man who needed Viagra?
She looked at the broom and began to sweep. The job felt tedious. She was frustrated and confused and didn’t understand the purpose. She got up most of the dust and then saw a little spot that she had missed in a corner. She got that, too, dumped it, and began with the tub.
After forty minutes, she felt she had done a passable job. The toilet was the worst, there were pieces of shit in it, and she nearly gagged as she worked the underside of the lid. Her armpits were sweaty, her hands filthy from the grime. She washed them in his sink and cleaned the soap bar, knowing he would be upset if there were streaks on it. The floor was wet from her mopping. She took the bathroom garbage in her hand and then went downstairs in search of him. He was going to make love to her, and it would be worth it, worth the pain in her back and the headache from the hangover and the bathroom cleansers.
“Ray?” she called out in the living room.
He emerged from his studio. “Did you finish?”
“Yeah.”
“Let’s take a look.” He led her back upstairs. Silently he moved from the bathtub to the toilet. He leaned down above the baseboard and ran his finger over it. He held it up. It was gray with dust. “I told you to do the baseboards.”
“I forgot,” she said.
“This is a half-assed job. I told you what to do, and you didn’t listen. This would never fly in the Marines.”
“You were in the army?”
“The Marines, I said. You wouldn’t last one week. I’m very disappointed.”
“I was in here almost an hour.”
“It doesn’t matter how long it takes. It matters how well the job is done. Now please leave my house.”