Excuse Me for Living

by Ric Klass

  “Hmm,” not quite buying the offhand explanation. “And do you really believe Coco betrayed you?”

  “I don’t know what to think. I haven’t seen her since I told her to go out for a drive with your Ronnie last week. Came in while I was out, got some of her clothes and makeup, and left a message on the answering machine saying she’s finally going to get her own apartment.”

  “Strange. I haven’t heard from Ronnie either in a few days.” The two women look up at each other waiting for the other to say something. Neither wants to commit to expressing the same possibility on their minds. Moving on, “But I’ll hear from him. I’m so glad that when we set up a fund for Ronnie, we kept ourselves as trustees until he’s forty. It keeps the return phone calls coming.”

  “I’m furious at Albert and our estate attorney. Al and I still haven’t gotten around to a will. But, no, that can go on unattended to. Years ago they agreed that we must endow a trust for the children and let them have control at twenty-one.” Nearly crying, “Now they’re both independent big shots and I can never get a straight answer from either of them.”

  Dolores sympathetically takes Harriet’s hand. “Children are so selfish.”

  “Just Awful News,

  my dear Harriet,” consoles Dr. Florenz Castillia, chairman of the Art Department at Columbia University. “I’m terribly sorry that it’s come to this between you and Albert.” And he means it, too. His loaded patron just informed him of her intent to finally dispose of her cheating husband.

  “Very confidential. I’m sure you’ll keep this entre nous. And perhaps we shouldn’t take that trip to India until after the divorce. But then, Florenz, perhaps we could spend much more time together,” intimating more than she said and more than the professor wants to hear. He’s the second confidant to know her plans after Harriet earlier spilled the beans to her best friend, Dolores.

  “Damn it,” he says to Billy, a 27-year-old art department grad student lying next to him.

  “What’s up, Professor?”

  Ignoring Billy, Florenz jumps out of bed wearing only his zebra-skin jock strap and speaks to the classic Faun in Repose male nude statue as he hangs up. Gazing at the statue’s privates as if posing the question to them, Could there have been some sous-entendu intended when she said “keep this between us”? No. Of course not. Not like Harriet to be witty – or even subtle for that matter. Christ! I’m getting so paranoid around her.

  “Any trouble with my getting an A in your course?” the young man nervously asks.

  Florenz examines closely the paintings in the living room of his well-appointed lodgings just off Christopher Street in the Village. He and Billy had just returned them to their rightful positions on the walls from the closet after Harriet’s recent visit there. Nary a scratch on my beauties, he determines. What a pain in the butt for her to come here, he laughs at the unintended pun. I should have told her years ago. It’s an open secret in the department after all.

  The professor has enjoyed her company on many an excursion to exotic destinations where he’s given impromptu discourses on the native art. That the Topler Foundation pays for these junkets more than makes up for the fact that, considering the long days and nights they have spent together, the time would have been far more enjoyable had she been of the right gender. Trouble between them was brewing anyway. Although Harriet Topler’s quite the proper lady of good breeding, Florenz senses that the still attractive woman is becoming increasingly upset that he’s never made a pass at her. More an insult to her feminine pride than an expression of lust for the slight, sixty-five-year-old man with thinning black hair.

  By this time she should have guessed that my solo overnight shore expeditions weren’t primitive artifact explorations. And I’m damned tired of hiding this favorite sculpture of mine and replacing my nude pictures with art that won’t offend her when she visits my pad, the last word reflecting his sadly outdated sixties’ flower-child vocab.

  At this point he’s a little indignant at her naiveté. In his opinion, an educated women of her social status should prefer a gay traveling companion who allows her to dally with a handsome stranger if she were beautiful or rich enough. And Harriet’s both. They first met when she attended his lecture on Hindu art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He could tell she was swept away by his descriptions and the sight of the erotic imagery of the Hindu artifacts there. She nearly fainted from the longing thrill of seeing the 13th-century Loving Couple statue depicting a full-blown maithuna – a sexual union, as it’s called in Sanskrit. Since then he can scarcely keep Harriet off the topic. It’s always tantric sex this, tantric sex that with her. As if the sexual rites of generating transformative bodily fluids encapsulate the complex, rich spectrum of Indian art. No doubt a fallout of her failing marriage, Florenz concluded some time ago. Now he feels that a mention of his engaging in any alternative to heterosexual love might be terrifying for her.

  Florenz lovingly fondles his favorite work of art in his chambers as he considers possible strategies with his patron. Perhaps I should seize this opportunity to tell her the truth about me and the hopelessness of anything but a platonic relationship between us. Then we could go ahead with the trip to the Ganges we’ve been planning forever. We’ll be free to explore substitute partners for the nights. A pause in his thoughts, then facing reality. No. Not Harriet. And she might yank future funding for the department chair she’s promised. Maybe there’s some other way to prevent the impending disaster of divorce.

  A somewhat sordid idea that makes the Art Department chairman simultaneously strangely recoil and gaily burble comes to him that June afternoon. He places a call to an odd fellow introduced to him just the other day at the Russian and Turkish Baths enterprise on East Tenth Street. Only in New York can you meet a man dressed in a threadbare tuxedo at such a place.

  I Make More Stripping

  by the hour than I will as an attorney, the svelte but well-stacked Karen Bladner thinks as she twirls naked and upside-down around the vertical dance pole at the Kit Kat Club along the West Side Highway. It’s late afternoon, and for a Monday already unusually packed with hungry eyes. Her long auburn hair and sensational, albeit somewhat asymmetrical, body has guaranteed her another prosperous summer job while she completes her law degree at Harvard. After an ex-college boyfriend happened to spot her dancing at one of the few remaining clubs near Boston’s former Combat Zone, she decided New York was a safer venue, career-wise.

  The monotonous rhythmic music stops and the high school gymnast and varsity college squash player known professionally as Carrie Blade gracefully steps down from the small circular stage and begins working the crowd. Some girls slip on a waist-long gossamer blouse first, but it hurts tips she’s discovered. She slithers between the closely packed tables, smiling at the naughty boys enjoying a night out on their expense accounts.

  As Carrie approaches the customers, they cease to chug their watered-down mixed drinks. Face-to-face with their sexual fantasy on display, they’re too embarrassed to leer directly at the normally hidden parts of a woman’s body that interest them most, and gaze into her eyes instead. The suits in this upscale gentlemen’s club who boisterously whistled at her a minute ago now meekly stuff fives, tens, and even a few twenties into her glittery, cubic zirconium-encrusted garter belt. She pulls the strap just a tad from her gam. The narrow gap gives the vein-bursting males a chance to place the bills between the fabric and her stunning leg and ever so slightly glance her perfect skin with their sweaty hands.

  Karen smiles invitingly – she’s thinking about the thirty-percent-off sale on designer Coach leather goods at Blooming-dale’s tomorrow. This well-paying job permits her to indulge herself in her own mania – she’s a confirmed bag-o-holic. Meanwhile, chills ripple through the Wall Street brokers and lawyers and their out-of-town clients at this forbidden touch. Two bull-necked bouncers – judging from their bulk, probably former wrestling pros – serve as shamuses. Their passive expressions and searching gaze s
erve as a warning to see-and-not-touch the tempting merchandise.

  Not too shabby, Karen aka Carrie decides as she counts the performance take and returns to the spare, shared dressing room in the back of the club. She answers her ringing cell phone, “You want me to go to a castle in Florence next week?” The caller corrects her. He was saying the man’s name. “He’s a confessor? Oh, a professor.” Whew. What if I ran into one of my old parochial high school teachers by some bad luck?

  She writes down the time and address. Pirot’s combination of a slight sibilant and foreign accent always makes it a little difficult for her to understand him. He’s calling from a boisterous party and she can scarcely understand him between the din of the bash and the ambient noise from the Kit Kat-ers out front. Consequently, one can hardly criticize her for thinking she heard Pirot say, “Tie him up and just whip him,” when Pirot in fact said, “Can’t talk now. I’m tied up. Just kiss him.”

  Pirot introduced himself to her a few weeks ago at the club and since then has provided Karen with even more lucrative bookings on her days off. Mostly to tantalize business clients. All strictly watching, voyeurism with a little S&M thrown in for good measure. She was brought up as too much of a liberal to criticize others’ peccadilloes. But no physical sex. She’s a nice girl, after all – just needs a little money to get by and pay for the outrageous tuition, her fashion fetish, and an occasional latte at her favorite Barnes & Noble café uptown.

  “Should I Have

  Asked for Her Number?”

  The Chipster asks his professional household manager – he prefers this moniker to butler – in his spacious new flat at the Time Warner Towers. He was so breathless watching Laura take off her blouse at Brucie’s he nearly followed her and Brucie out of the mansion.

  “I don’t see how you could have, Sir,” Frederick replies. “It seems as though she had her mind set on the Topler gentleman.” He can’t bring himself to call the boy Chipster.

  Charles R. Siegel III inherited – so to speak – the imposing six-foot-two-inch, beagle-faced Frederick, along with a black-stretch classic Bentley landau limousine and an embarrassingly Baroque, gold-flocked wall-papered, six-bedroom, five-bath, expansive dining and living rooms, study, and billiards room plus ballroom co-op on Park Avenue. The assorted authentic Jean Ingres and Piero di Cosimo paintings, et. al., therein never suited his taste, but he bore his late Great Aunt Lizzie’s art treasures too in good humor.

  Fifty million dollars in cash and negotiable securities also rode along to The Chipster in the bequest from the nonagenarian maiden great aunt. When the family’s attorney and executor read her will and testament to the astonishment and outrage of other equally, if not more closely-related, relatives assembled in the stately quarters, he pointed out that it wouldn’t have been any skin off their collective noses to have paid the old biddy a visit now and then – like her favorite great nephew did.

  Good old Auntie Lizzie was the only child of one of the cofounders of the Maribyrnong Defense Explosives Factory built in 1909, safely hidden away in the western suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. Down Below, as the munitions plant was called, supplied both badly needed explosives for the free world in two world wars and immense wealth for future generations of Siegels – the latest beneficiary being The Chipster. And he genuinely looked forward to calling on his aunt. The loquacious lady loved to tell him stories of buying black market jewels from waiters in Spain just before WWII, and her childhood rides on her father’s private train from DowBel, their mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, next to the Breakers, the Vanderbilt summer cottage, to his office near Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan. And oh the parties she attended as a young debutante there. Chip never really filled her in with details on the parties he went to. He knew she wouldn’t have approved. Different generations never really understand each other, for the woman could have easily one-upped him with her own dalliances. The worldly woman often thought, but never said, that from all appearances her great nephew should get laid more.

  Chip certainly couldn’t invite his friends to the gaudy Park Avenue museum his aunt called home, so he sold her co-op and moved to more contemporary quarters with an impressive view near the top of the tower looming over Columbus Circle, from his not-exactly-a-dump-either apartment on the Upper East Side. When he moved, Chip felt obligated to bring along Auntie Lizzie’s aging butler as well.

  For Frederick’s part, although the English butler and chauffeur wasn’t precisely wishing for the old lady’s demise, he’s happy to enjoy the company of the tender young man who’s not nearly so demanding. Boiling hot lapsang souchong tea – imported from the Fujian province of China from her contacts in the Far East – no lemon and certainly no milk, the withered hen demanded. Furthermore, the stipulation her refreshment be served to her at precisely three o’clock in the library every day had begun to take an irritating toll on the not-a-kid-anymore servant.

  Boring work as well. No one much came to see his former employer for some years except her great nephew. And if he had to hear one more time about her splendid trip to Austria where she slept in the Schönbrunn Palace as a teenager, he might have murdered Elizabeth Siegel himself.

  In fact, Frederick expected the dowager to outlive him. Never a cold; no trace of rheumatism, arthritis, fever, heart congestion, or any other damned infirmity; his employer enjoyed perfect health – at least for a very old lady.

  On a cold day in October, Elizabeth Siegel – “Ma’am” Frederick invariably called her – decided of all things to buy a diamond-encrusted platinum happy face she saw in a Times Tiffany ad. For the first time, Frederick thought the canny woman had at last lost it. From the vantage point of the limo, he and The Chipster, who had been invited to lunch after the purchase, watched her march across Fifth Avenue at 57th on her way to the famed jeweler.

  “What an Amazon your aunt is, Sir,” Frederick said with a smile to Chip.

  “Only a meteorite falling on her could do her in.” Frederick happened to glance upwards. “ . . . or a piano.”

  The Steinway grand being hoisted by a crane to a penthouse co-op snapped the cable – proved defective in the finally settled lawsuit two years later – flattening the otherwise hardy senior citizen, legs sticking out à la the Wicked Witch Of The East’s from Dorothy’s house. To Chip’s credit, the additional one cool mil he collected did not assuage his loss. In many ways she’d been practically a mother to the boy who had lost his own when only a teen.

  These days, Frederick considers that if he can ever learn how to use one of those computers his new employer’s always toying with, he’ll ask one of his cronies what a “professional household manager” exactly is, as Charles likes to introduce him to his friends.

  For Chip, now that The Dandy Man’s incarcerated for the most part on Long Island, and Brucie and Ronnie are so wrapped up in their jobs, he doesn’t have any guys to shoot the bull with anymore. No one for a game of squash at the club, to putter around with at a Matisse exhibit at the Met, or take in a late afternoon stroll in Central Park. Last night wasn’t a disappointment only due to his watery plunge. Although she seemed a bit too keen on sniffing dope – he only pretends to take any of it himself – Laura Bernstein’s just the kind of girl he’s hankering for: comely, educated, and apparently romantically willing but not so much so that’s she some kind of tramp. In all, what every man secretly desires – an intelligent, eye-candy, sexually experienced virgin. Although she would be considered the wrong persuasion for him as far as his Methodist family’s concerned, Danny Boy – that lucky son of a gun, he thinks.

  Even though The Chipster’s a bit tightfisted, he’s sprung for a noted interior designer to decorate his lodgings with élan. He’s a shy man lusting for the right girl. Chip seeks a woman who only after he’s convinced that she likes him for who he is – a decent young chap not encumbered with a boring job – he can properly regale in style. Most women Chip meets nowadays want a trophy beau – some kind of captain of industry. He can’t see
why really. His business courses at Babson College proved frightfully boring, though useful at times. He did learn to use his pc to find quotes for his fixed income securities on Bloomberg dot com.

  As for the other women he usually meets. . . . They’re gold diggers. Chip certainly wouldn’t want to show off his handsome co-op to a date in this category. Mom, thankfully, had warned him against this odious breed (his dear mother – a former waitress – met his father in the Times Square Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs where he was slumming after a formal bash. She tripped – she swore – and spilled mustard on dad’s tux). Or some rich blithering tanorexic idiot who’s mostly interested in her next boob implant and trendy basement bar dives. Such a vulgarian would want to transform his comfortable living quarters with gold-plated faucets and glittering déclassé froufrou. The kind one might see in a tour of a rich and famous real estate tycoon’s home.

  Chip feels that the hour or so a day he spends reading the Financial Times and monitoring his bond portfolio should suffice to prove to any potential conquest the serious and business-minded side of his nature. I’m hardly some sort of fussbudget coupon clipper, he snorts. A few times he used the line, “I’m a professional investor,” to keep a girl interested. Their eyes would open wide at the conversational gamesmanship possibilities. They imagined gossiping with their frivolous girlfriends that their beau’s a hedge fund manager. But invariably they’d ask specifics or on occasion recommendations about a particular stock they’re considering adding to their IRAs. Then the jig’s up. How should I know? I’m not some Ernst & Young bean counter.

  Frederick helps him pick out just the right slacks, from one of the three cavernous cedar-lined walk-in-closets, for this sort of hot weather. A subtle greyhound gray color. Ah, the wood scent. It really gets the blood boiling.

  “You know, Frederick, I want a woman who wants me for what I am.”