by Carole Hart
Then he pulled off the executioner’s hood, realizing as the cool air chilled his face that it had been stifling in there, and she turned back to him with a look of languid, postorgasmic surrender. Her eyes widened, and she said, “Fred! It’s you!”
The rest of the scene went off without a hitch, while the aroma of the cooking pizza drifted through the room. As he cradled Regina in his arms, mumbling sweet marital nothings to her, the relaxation of having come and the warm feeling of community that filled the whole group gave him a sense of sunny well-being. The scene ended; applause and hooting broke out in the room. Precious was making the boa nod encouragingly. In her own voice, she called out, “Genius! Champagne for everyone! You’re both heroes!” Jared and Regina were grinning and even laughing at nothing in particular as they wandered off to find their street clothes.
But as he pulled on his jeans, he looked up and saw Amanda watching from the kitchen. She had her arms crossed and was shaking her head at a girl who was offering her a cupcake. Her face was set in what looked, at this distance, like misery. He hurried over to her, zipping his jeans as he went, still grinning with the momentum of good feeling. “Amanda! Baby! How long have you been here?”
The misery cleared from her face, replaced by an expression of uncertainty. She said softly, looking around nervously to make sure nobody else could hear her, “That was so strange.”
He shrugged, immediately feeling uncomfortable. “Yeah, you know . . . it is kind of fake, but . . .”
“Fake. I guess. So you don’t enjoy it?”
He tried to explain to her, while the laughing and pouring of champagne went on all around them, how it was enjoyable on the one hand, but really a job on the other hand. How it was sex, but still wasn’t exactly like other sex. How. . . . But all the while, he was faintly embarrassed about having a relationship talk in the midst of his happy, decadent friends. And, disturbingly, he was looking at Amanda’s lovely, disapproving face and feeling—nothing. He couldn’t remember why he’d thought he loved her. Now all he felt for her was a distinct, weary longing that she would just lighten up. Or better still, leave him alone.
“Oh, wow!” said Zaza. And then . . .”
“I went away for the weekend with her,” Jared said grimly. “But I didn’t ask her to marry me, of course. And we carried on for a while, but it was never the same. And the whole time, I felt so guilty. Even when she left me, I felt guilty.”
Zaza thought about this, her hand still absently stroking his chest. She was fighting an irrational surge of jealousy of all these girls Jared had fucked. He had fucked them and not her—not fair! She pushed the thought away and said, “But wasn’t that, kind of, because she didn’t get the porn world?”
Jared shrugged. “Not really. The problem was that I didn’t know her. I’d fallen in love with her, supposedly. I almost got engaged to her, which would have been a real disaster. But it was like I was in love with her because I didn’t know her.”
“Oh.” Zaza frowned. “So you’re saying when you know a girl, you stop caring about her?”
“I don’t know. I hope not. But that’s what I’m afraid of.”
Zaza considered this, stroking his chest with her hand absently. At last, she said, “But fucking them didn’t make the difference, did it?”
“What are you saying?” Jared narrowed his eyes at her.
“Well, even if you hadn’t had sex with them . . .”
“Zaza,” he said, shaking his head. “Don’t worry so much. Look, I promise you I’ll have sex with you someday, if you still want to when the time comes. But I want to know what kind of sex it is when it happens. I think if we do it now, I’ll be swept up in some romantic dream. . . .”
“Oh, but that sounds so wonderful!”
“Trust me,” he said flatly, “it isn’t so wonderful when it turns out to be fake.”
Zaza looked speculatively at his handsome face, still a little drunk just on his proximity. His eyes were hazel, fringed with thick black eyelashes. He had faint purplish dark circles under his eyes that were possibly the sexiest things she had ever seen. “It’s actually really cool that you want to get to know me,” she said. “It means that you want to spend time with me, except I’m worried that you won’t even want to sleep with me for fun then.”
He was smiling at her in a way that made her heart do flips. He said, “Don’t worry about that. Unless I get hit by a truck, there is no way I’m not going to want to sleep with you.”
“And you won’t get hit by a truck?”
“I won’t get hit by a truck until we sleep together. I promise.”
“You’ll look both ways.”
“Promise.”
Zaza leaned forward and kissed him again, her eyes closing by themselves. She had meant it to be brisk and affectionate, but when her lips touched his, a wave of heat swept through her and five minutes passed before she sat up again, flushed and breathless. She said, “Oh, God. Can we just spend every minute together until we’re ready? How long do you think it will take?”
He smiled at her, looking as lovelorn as she felt. “If we spent every minute together, I don’t know how I could keep my resolve.”
“God.” She sighed. “I never waited for anyone before. But I’d be happy doing anything with you. Even waiting, when I’m absolutely dying to sleep with you, and I can’t wait.”
They were smiling at each other again. He said, “So, do you want to start getting to know each other?”
“Oh, of course. You mean, we can go on a date?”
“I think that’s what people do.”
Zaza’s mind was a jumble of half-baked thoughts and overheated feelings. She felt like she wanted to get to know him every day for the rest of her life. She said, “That’s about the best idea I ever heard.”
THIRTEEN
Ralph walked into the lobby of the Hotel Belvedere with a feeling of foreboding. He had been trying all week—in between seemingly a thousand meetings and lunches—to figure out what was going on in his life and what he could do about it. For long stretches, he’d even thought that he was experiencing an outbreak of insanity.
A man spends too many years alone. He has no serious relationships with women, he works sixteen-hour days, and his only friends are business colleagues. Then one day the man reads an interview with a porn star in a glossy magazine. He becomes transfixed by her picture. He reads the interview again. He goes to the computer and reads another five or six interviews with her before picking up the original magazine and spending two hours staring at the woman’s photograph.
It was a photo of Emily sitting cross-legged on a sheepskin rug in front of an empty and scrubbed-clean fireplace. She was wearing a T-shirt and underpants and her black hair hung in a long braid over one shoulder. She was smiling with a charming reticence. The caption of the photo was: I’D STILL RATHER BE A VETERINARIAN. And for some reason, the girl in the picture was obviously the sweetest, most desirable person in the world.
But she really is the sweetest person in the world, he told himself. Even if my reasons for believing it were crazy, I was right.
As he approached the bank of elevators, he steeled himself. Today he was meeting the least sweet person in the world, Valerie LeBlanc. He couldn’t be distracted and dreamy for this meeting, above all meetings. It was alarming enough that, just as he was planning to call her and ask to meet, she called him and asked to meet. More terrifying still was what she had said on the phone: “Ralph, I think it’s time for us to get closer again.”
When he’d asked what she meant, she had repeated the directions to the hotel and said good-bye. As often happened, at the last moment, her imperious, angry voice seemed awkward and shy. He always imagined her sitting at the phone afterward, cursing herself for all the rotten things she’d said. It was what she’d been like as a teenager: furious at him one minute, furious at herself the next.
The elevator was glass, and shot up the side of the building so that he could see the whole East Sid
e spread out beneath him. As he often did to amuse himself, he looked out at the city and thought, Someday, all this will be yours, Ralph Anderman. Every year, more of it was his, and the joke acquired a stronger flavor of irony. It reminded him that he, like most people, had never expected his dreams to really come true. If he had, he would have had better dreams—or so he liked to think.
Now he stepped out into the corridor of the twenty-second floor and followed the signs to room 2215, where Valerie had said to meet her. Up till now they’d always met at her apartment—the apartment he’d bought for her and Ilana years ago, where he’d spent weekends at fi rst with his daughter, playing little-kid video games with her that featured cartoon puppies and raccoons faced with charmingly simple tasks. He would pretend to get everything wrong so Ilana could scream delightedly, “Daddy! You’re not ta-rying!”
A wave of anger came over him, and he paused in front of the hotel room door and took three deep breaths. Still, he kept remembering Valerie’s coded threats to him over the past few weeks. The first came when he got the invitation to be on In Depth. He had been sitting staring at the letter, wondering if there was any way the producers could have known about the three-month-old magazine that he still kept on his coffee table, the late-night fantasies and Internet searches. Of course there wasn’t, and he fleetingly considered doing it, his mind racing through the consequences and the dizzying idea of Emily, when the phone rang. It had been Valerie, saying, “Ralph, I heard something that disturbed me at work today. . . .” She told him that the idea of him coming so close to her work life—which she had sacrificed everything to maintain—made her very uncomfortable. Of course, he had to agree that it would be bad for his career, as well.
Nonetheless, he went through three meetings with the In Depth team, including two at which he met Emily herself. At all of them, he expressed polite skepticism about participating, but not enough to end the process. Emily in person was exactly as he’d imagined her. Her effect on him was strange; it was like meeting a person from a dream he couldn’t clearly remember. When she spoke, he was thinking, Yes, she’s exactly like that; that’s exactly right. And he felt strangely comforted and excited at the same time. At that point he got an e-mail from Valerie.
It read, “I can see no reason for your pursuing a relationship with Emily Lister, unless it is to get at me. There is no point in arguing about this further. I will use every means at my disposal to put a stop to this, including making public our previous relationship. I hope the prospect of being publicly exposed as a man who raped and impregnated a fifteen-year-old girl will help you to see sense.”
On a couple of previous occasions, Valerie had used the word “rape” to describe what had happened between them, but never so baldly. On those occasions, when challenged, she had said that of course she meant statutory rape. This time, it was clear to Ralph that she was threatening to spread a version of the story in which he assaulted her. It was unclear how seriously he should take that threat. He didn’t want to let Valerie dictate his life, but he had to admit to himself that his infatuation was probably a symptom of loneliness rather than a real attachment. He should give it up, find someone who wasn’t connected to Valerie so closely, and carry on with his life.
But he’d found himself at XTV one more time, asking Emily out to lunch—as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He took her home; had incredible, amazing, wonderful, perfect sex with her; fell squarely and hopelessly in love; said good-bye to her . . . and couldn’t say good-bye to her.
Now he had been standing in the hotel corridor for five minutes taking deep breaths—angry, hard, deep breaths. I’ll explain it to Valerie. I’ll tell her it’s too late. Threats are one thing, but she won’t pull the roof down on her own head. She’s too much of a survivor for that.
In a last-ditch bid to calm down, he made himself picture Valerie as a pregnant fifteen-year-old, puffy-faced and perpetually frightened. She had always seemed frantic in those days, as if she was scrabbling for some purchase on life, anything to hold on to. It had just been her bad luck that he was the thing that presented itself. He’d had no idea how to be responsible for another person at that age. . . . She really hadn’t changed. Her facade was more developed—that was all.
By the time he knocked on the door, he had himself back under control again. Whatever happened, he would be kind to Valerie, as he’d always tried to be. On some level, none of this was her fault.
When she opened the door, he was startled by her resemblance to his mental picture of her teenage self. She was wearing running pants and a T-shirt, and her face was flushed and a little drawn, as if she’d been having trouble sleeping. “Ralph,” she said. “You’re late.”
“Hi, Valerie,” he said. He followed her into the hotel room, which was small but grandly furnished, with a four-poster bed, a mammoth teak bureau, and a matching red leather sofa and armchair by the window. The curtains were striped red and white, and gathered in various complicated ways around a large picture window—the sort of curtain that always reminded Ralph of Renaissance clothing. He went to sit in the armchair. Valerie sat opposite on the sofa, looking preoccupied.
She said, in a quiet and grave voice that was utterly unlike her usual steely manner, “I have to ask you for a favor.”
He was oddly touched. It was so long since Valerie had shown any human side to him. Perhaps she was finally coming out of her trance of rage at the world. He said, “Of course. I’d like to do anything for you that I can. You know that.”
Oddly to him, she blushed. “I was thinking about that,” she said. “I guess I never gave you credit for all the help you’ve given me.”
“It was the least I could do.”
She looked at him, seeming to weigh something in her mind. At last she said, “I guess there’s no point apologizing. What happened happened.”
He shrugged. “I constantly apologize. I think it helps.”
“I can’t apologize,” she said shortly. Then the blush returned, and she looked away out the window. He was studying her face, trying to imagine what the favor could be. Was she going to ask him to give up Emily as a favor now?
Then she turned to him and said, in a voice so faint it was almost a whisper, “I’m sorry.” Her face was tense and pale, and her arms were crossed tightly over her chest, as if she was freezing cold.
He said softly, “Apology accepted.”
Then her eyes welled up with tears. It was the last thing he’d expected, coming here. Instinctively, he moved over to the sofa and put his arms around her. She was sobbing on his shoulder, with her arms still crossed, shutting her body away from him. It was eerily like a scene from thirteen years before, when she used to have crying fits and threaten to kill herself. He found himself stroking her head and mumbling, “It’s all right. It’s all right . . .” although he had no idea what “it” was, never mind whether it was all right.
Gradually, she calmed down. The sobs subsided. She uncrossed her arms and put them around him cautiously. Feeling her hold him so shyly, he squeezed her and said, “I’m here for you, Valerie. What’s the favor? Is that what’s wrong?”
She nodded against his chest. “I don’t know if I can ask you.”
“Please just tell me. I’m sure it can’t be that bad.”
For a minute she was silent. In his arms, she was surprisingly tiny. He was surprised to feel a wave of love for her. He had known her for so long, and in some ways she was closer to him than anyone else in the world. There was even a way in which her loneliness was his loneliness; the same event had isolated them both. Ralph at least had Ilana, and he could never entirely regret her birth. But Valerie had started out too alienated, too broken, to ever be a mother to her own daughter. Ilana only reminded her of her inadequacies as a human being.
Valerie suddenly shifted, moving to look him in the eyes. She said, “I wanted to ask you to sleep with me.”
He froze. As she said it, he realized his body had been responding to her. She w
as an attractive young woman in his arms, and he had been faintly aware of her breasts pressed against him, the softness of her hair. He said uncomfortably, “Why would you want that?”
Her eyes seemed to lose all their courage. She was actually trembling as she said, “What happened with us . . . I thought if we tried again, it might help somehow.”
“You want to go out with me?”
“No! No, I wasn’t thinking of that. . . .” She looked away, obviously embarrassed and frustrated.
He tried desperately to think. Valerie had publicly been a virgin for all these years, but he’d never really taken it that seriously. He’d assumed it was an empty publicity stunt, the way a gay actor marries a starlet for the benefit of the public. Somehow he’d assumed that she had clandestine affairs that were like his—casual things that lasted for two or three weeks. Now he suddenly realized that she couldn’t have done that consistently all these years. It would have leaked out; everyone would know she wasn’t really a virgin by now.
“Valerie, are you trying to tell me you haven’t slept with anyone since then?”
“I can’t! Don’t you understand? I’m scared.”
“You wouldn’t get pregnant again. I mean, you know better than that now.” He shook his head. “Valerie—”
“I don’t know why. You don’t understand.” She was trembling again, her face turned away from him. “I thought . . . you’re really the only person I know.”
The full tragedy of that statement hit him with a force he hadn’t anticipated. Valerie, the bane of his existence, the woman who spoke to him mainly in threats and demands—had no one else. He held her close, trying to think what to do. Would sleeping with her be a betrayal of Emily? But Emily was a porn star; she would be sleeping with another man next Wednesday. Furthermore, her infidelity would be broadcast to millions of homes. Under those circumstances, it was hard to know what the rules were.