A man. A full head of gray hair on top of a slim, WASPy face. He had a decent body for his middle age. Flat tummy, long legs, with a flaccid (but long) cock and a puckered scrotum. He yelped first, then collected himself enough (but couldn’t cover himself) to say, “Excuse me, madam, would you mind closing the door?” But Stacy couldn’t move, her mind still processing the information. His arms were raised over his head, his wrists bound to the showerhead with a white scarf.
Stacy, now secure in the belief that Janice wasn’t going to off herself anytime soon, shut the shower door. Mutely, she walked out of the bathroom and into Janice’s assault-of-toile bedroom. Her sous-boss was sitting on the edge of her bed, smiling (proudly? coyly?) and patting the spot next to her.
Taking the seat, Stacy said, “He called me ‘madam.’ ”
“He’s very formal,” said Janice.
“Yes, I could see that,” said Stacy. “If I start apologizing now, is there a chance you’ll forgive me by two thousand four?”
Janice giggled (giggled!). “Isn’t he adorable?”
From the bathroom, a voice warbled into the bedroom. “Janice?”
“One minute, Jeffrey.” To Stacy, Janice added, “Not Jeff. He doesn’t like Jeff.”
“He doesn’t look like a Jeff.”
“No.”
The confusion wearing off, Stacy had to grin. “The earrings look fabulous.”
“Thank you, Stacy. Everything feels fabulous today. I’m at peace, all is right with the world. It took fifty years, but I’ve finally found the man I’ve been searching for.”
“And you know that after the first date because…”
Janice said, “Because I’ve had a million first dates, and none of them have felt like this. He’s fantastic, Stacy. The second I saw him — it’s a moment I won’t forget. Just completely satisfying. With Internet dating, you can never really tell with photos. People lie about themselves.”
Tell me about it, thought Stacy. Janice continued, “But Jeffrey looked just like his photo. I thought I’d have a hard time recognizing him, but there he was, exactly as he is. We felt comfortable together instantly. Like I’m my real self with him. No invention. No pretending. We had a few drinks in the library room at the Hudson Hotel, and then we went for a walk around the Village. Stacy, he dragged me into an alley, and we made out for two hours.”
“Just made out?” Kissing for two hours seemed lovely actually. Stacy had never just kissed for that long.
“Well, no,” Janice admitted. “Not when I learned that he had an enormous elephant cock. Without Viagra. You’d be surprised how many men over forty-five rely on Viagra. But not Jeffrey. He’s all natural.”
What was that? Enormous elephant cock? All evidence to the contrary, thought Stacy, but then again, she’d seen him soft and embarrassed and — from the shower water — in a state of shrinkage.
“And then,” continued Janice. “We came back here and haven’t left or stopped since. I am elated! I want him; he wants me. This is what life is about. The innocent, sheer joy of sex.”
“I can see you’ve already moved to the advanced pages,” said Stacy, fingering the silk scarves around Janice’s wrists. “Don’t you want to save something for later?”
“Why?” asked her boss, blue eyes wide.
“What if he leaves you tomorrow?” Perhaps that was why Janice had tied him up, thought Stacy.
Her boss pondered the possibility. “I’ll be sad, but I’ve been left before. I’d rather not imagine it. Right now, on this day, my life is fun. Just plain old fun. And if I can maintain it for a few months or years or decades, that’s what I’ll do. If not, I’m perilously close to menopause anyway. And I’ll have my memories.”
“Until the Alzheimer’s sets in,” said Stacy.
From the bathroom, another warble, “Janice, dear, my wrists.”
“One minute, darling!”
“I should go,” said Stacy.
Janice put her hand on Stacy’s shoulder. “Not yet. I need to warn you. Fiona is planning something. I’m not sure what; I am out of the loop. But I know her so well, and I’ve seen her make plans before.”
“Any guesses?” Surely, Janice’s theory had something to do with what Fiona had alluded to early, about “a biggie.”
Janice shook her head. “I’m afraid to imagine. But when all the dust settles, Fiona will come out richer and more powerful. As for the staff, I doubt there will be much left to pick over.”
“What about you?” asked Stacy.
“I’ll be relieved to get out,” said Janice. “One door closes, another always opens. It’s amazing how that works.”
“I’m not sure that’s how it works for me,” said Stacy, sounding far more self-pitying than she wanted to. “Fiona made me some promises this morning. She implied that she’d protect me.”
From the bathroom: “Janice, angel, my hands are turning blue.”
Stacy stood. “Will I see you later?”
Janice blushed charmingly. “How much later?”
“You’ll say good-bye to Jeffrey for me?”
Janice nodded and then gave Stacy a tight squeeze. “I know Tom had nothing to do with these earrings.”
Stacy squeezed back, fearing that she’d snap Janice like a twig. “Will you hate me if I stick with Fiona?” she had to ask.
“I wouldn’t blame you,” said Janice.
That was the best answer she’d get, and Stacy accepted it. She took the elevator down to the lobby. The old, wizened doorman was now sharing the desk with a much younger (and cuter) man, also in uniform with the ridiculous gold tasseled epaulets. Stacy smiled at him and he winked at her, which she found cheeky and a bit too forward for his post.
The older man said, “Follow me,” to the younger man, and “Do as I do.” The two of them, a matched set with their white caps and gloves, marched to the lobby’s deco double doors, each swinging one wide open by the handle, removing his cap and bowing slightly. Stacy only had to decide which door to walk through.
Chapter Seventeen
Saturday night
Stacy lugged the portable Hibachi, a bag of charcoal, a tin of lighter fluid, a package of hot dogs and some buns to the roof of her SoHo apartment building. She cursed herself for suggesting an evening barbecue. Too much prep work needed. But the weather would be perfect. She should be so lucky.
After leaving Janice’s love nest earlier in the day, Stacy’s head started hurting, and hadn’t stopped yet. The thoughts that used to keep her awake all night had resurfaced (What Will Become of Me? Where Am I Going? etc.), uncomfortably, in the daylight hours. She’d returned to thongs.com with every intention of marching into Fiona’s office and demanding the truth. What were her plans? Did she really think that Stacy was just like her?
Stacy might, actually, be like Janice. Her life a search for the love that would make everything all right. A love that would make everything all right? What kind of ridiculous, naïve bull feces was that? asked her inner Fiona. Imagine the years and decades of longing and never finding…Stacy was sure her mother would advise her to go get a manicure or shop for a new purse or put on some lipstick. She’d feel much better.
Both Fiona and Janice believed that sex equaled happiness. But their means and intentions couldn’t be more different. Stacy was at a crossroads, but stepping in either direction would be a risk. One direction would be an elective heart-removal operation. The other guaranteed the repeated bashing of the heart she left inside.
Stacy sat at her desk for three hours, staring at the embossed gold lettering on the card she’d taken from gorgeous Jorge. She should just call him. In one fell schtoop, she could rid herself of her revirginity and declare her loyalty to Fiona. Heart removal would hurt at first. But then the pain — all pain, as well as all love — would be gone forever. Plus, she’d get some expert and much-needed male attention in the process — FOR FREE!
In the late afternoon on that Saturday, Fiona poked her black raven helmet head into Stacy
’s office and found her with Jorge’s card in one hand, her phone in the other.
“You’re doing the right thing,” said Fiona. “Take the rest of the day off” — it was already five — “and let me know everything tomorrow. Call me at home. I don’t care how early. And then we’ll talk about your future.”
Stacy left the office. She still hadn’t placed the call, and, in her anxious state, had plum forgotten about her date with the mysterious Vampire Boy neighbor. When she got inside her apartment, she found a note from him that read:
Stacy,
I’ll be a few minutes late. I’m really sorry about that. I have an appointment that couldn’t be postponed. I’ll be thinking about our date the entire time, and I’m looking forward to meeting you officially at 7:40 on the roof.
Oliver, 4C
Oliver. His name was Englishy. She liked that. Stacy held the note in her hand, and dared to hope. But no time for that. She had a little over an hour. She had to get to the supermarket, shower, dress, accessorize. She realized with a start that this was her final night as a non-revirgin. Oliver was her last chance to seduce a man the normal way. If she failed there, if it turned out to be a dismal failure, too, well, maybe that was a sign that she should call Jorge, climb aboard the Fiona train and give in to her morally unhinged impulses. She’d become Fiona Junior. A girl could do worse.
A girl could do better, too. Stacy would muster whatever impulses she had left and make a serious go of it with Oliver. He was awkward and mysterious, but he had a pulse (she had to assume). He thought they had a connection. Maybe her social ineptitude would mesh well with his anti-human tendencies. They could be the anti-couple, avoiding all other people, living in the dark — their shadow life of notes under the door and beer on the roof. It could work.
Stacy knew Oliver was shy, so she’d have to play it soft and subtle with him. No wild lunges (as with Charlie), no declarations of horniness (as with Brian), no invitations into her apartment and pants (Jason), no cash transactions (Jorge), no silent humping (Schlomo) and no pornographic recitals (Stanley). She’d have to seduce Oliver with…She wasn’t sure what it would take. Passive, shy men were not in Stacy’s wheelhouse. But, as she’d discovered in the last five and a half days of staving off the stigma of revirginization, desperation is the mother of self-invention.
She’d brought up the last of the supplies when the roof door creaked open. Oliver flinched at the sun, still bright in the sky at 7:45 in July. He looked nice in jeans and a Black Dog T-shirt. They smiled at each other. Then looked away. The discomfort and full-frontal daylight made her queasy (she could only imagine what it did to Oliver; he might turn into a pile of powdered dust). Several polite and flirtatious notes did not make a relationship. She wondered if her five trips up and down the dark and dank roof stairs would be for naught.
Stacy smoothed her gingham skort and said, “I never know how much lighter fluid to use.” She wanted to relax him (and herself) and she knew from experience that offering a pint of lighter fluid to a man was like giving bourbon to a Kennedy.
He said, “Me neither.”
Oliver hadn’t seemed like an outdoorsman. He fidgeted anxiously. She’d embarrassed him. “Are you thirsty?” she asked, pointing at her makeshift picnic area. A light blanket and a cooler with a dozen Sierra Nevadas.
He grabbed a beer but chose to stand, one hand in his jeans pocket. Stacy doused the charcoals. If she told him she liked him, he might be more at ease. “I wasn’t sure you were going to come up,” she said. “It’s nice to hear your voice. I’d been wondering about that.”
“I’ve heard your voice before,” he said. “It sounds different in person, though.”
What could he mean by that? Had he heard her through the walls? Unlikely. She would have to ask about that later. Instead, she said, “I’ve been enjoying the notes.”
“Yeah,” he said. He drew on the open mouth of the bottle. “I’m kind of embarrassed about the one I left up here last night.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “I liked it.”
“All that stuff about feeling a connection. And that you might not really exist.”
“Why would you think I don’t really exist? You’ve seen me.”
“It’s more like, does the connection really exist,” he said. “We’ve never even had a conversation.”
She smiled. “We’re having one now.”
“Want a beer?” he asked. She nodded and he brought a bottle to her. They stood a foot apart. He smelled like Ivory soap and hops. “I’ve only lived in New York City for a year. Is this how people usually meet each other?”
She took a sip. The cold wetness cleansed her throat. “People usually meet in bars.”
“I’ve been to a lot of bars,” he said.
“When’s the last time you were in love?” she couldn’t believe she asked. She knew her next question should have been, “Where did you live before you came to New York?” but she was so not interested. Might as well focus the talk on what mattered. His emotional past mattered. She hoped he wouldn’t ask about hers.
He said, “When I was twenty-two.”
“So it’s been how long?” she asked.
“Five years.” He was only twenty-seven. A younger man. He said, “Since then, I’ve had a few girlfriends, but I wasn’t preoccupied by any of them.”
“Is that how you know you’re in love?” she asked. Stacy had never sat down and made a concrete list of ways you know you’re in love. Being preoccupied by a man: Stacy had no memory of that. In college, she’d fixated on her various seductions. With Brian, she had spent a lot of time wondering why she was with him.
Oliver said, “Thinking about her all the time, imagining her reactions, trying to figure out what she’d think of things or what she’d say. Wanting her input on mundane shit, like prices at the supermarket, or commercials on TV. That’s love. That’s the nature of love. When you’re not with the person, you think about her. And when you are with her, you look at her and can’t believe how lucky you are.”
Stacy and Oliver each took a sip of beer and looked at each other over the bottoms of the brown bottles. Was he pondering his good fortune to be on the roof with her right now? Stacy wondered. Had he been wondering what she thought of commercials on TV? She can’t say she’d been doing that about him. But, then, she’d been busy.
“I’m jealous,” she said finally. “I don’t have a working definition of what it means to be in love.”
“You can use mine,” he said. “To notice the signs.”
Sign posting. Stacy was in need of that, having been cruising without direction on the superhighway for over a year. “I will,” she said. “And as a gesture of gratitude, I’ll cook.”
She struck a match and threw it on the coals.
The plume of fire rose six feet. Stacy reeled back. She knew that smell, that scent of singed hair (once she’d had her leg stubble removed via laser). Frantically, she felt her head. No apparent damage. Oliver walked over, never removing his hand from his jeans pocket, and coolly emptied his beer on the grill.
He asked, “Are you okay? Your eyebrows are smoking.”
Stacy’s fingers flew to her eyebrows. She didn’t like the feel of them. Stacy picked up the metal spatula and checked her reflection. Her eyebrows, for the most part, remained. But the hairs were oddly curled and dark, very bizarre with her ivory complexion and red hair.
Stacy must have groaned. Oliver said, “Let me see.”
She held her face up to him. He leaned in closely. Stacy, in partial shock, could still appreciate his unruly black hair, ice blue eyes and creamy, poreless skin. His fingers — slender and long — reached to touch her singed eyebrows. The toes of his sneakers were inches from her sandals. “You look fine,” he said. “I can’t say the same for the grill.”
Stacy turned toward the grill. The coals swam in a pool of still bubbling beer. “I’m cursed,” she announced. “This is just the final kick in the ego after a whole week of disaster. You
should have stood me up.”
“I almost did,” he said. “Nerves.”
She’d been expecting an arduous protest along the lines of “only death could have kept me from your side.”
“If that’s how you feel,” she said indignantly — for this she’d risked disfigurement? — “let’s just skip it. I’m going downstairs to nurse my eyebrows.”
She grabbed her blanket and cooler and banged through the roof door. Oliver followed her, relieved, she assumed, to get out of direct sunlight.
Once they reached their hallway, Oliver put his hand on her elbow, stopping her. “I’m so far beneath you on any measurable scale,” he said. “Why would you want to spend time with me?”
“You don’t even know me,” she said, shaking her elbow loose. Using insecurity as a means to reject her — that was so tired.
“I know that you have a lot of experience. That’s intimidating. I’ve only been with seven women in my life and…”
She held up her hand. “The walls are thin, but the sound of me having sex can’t possibly have passed from my apartment, through the Rothenbergs’ kitchen, and into your living room. Not that I’ve had any recently.” Was he referring to her hallway come-on to Jason? “What are you talking about?” she demanded.
“I’m talking about the web site,” he said, looking confused and, suddenly, younger than 27.
How could she have invested the final night of her sex quest in this befuddled boy? She liked him better as the mysterious masher. “Do you think selling underwear for thongs.com makes me a slut?” she asked.
“Not that. The other web site,” he said back.
“I have no idea…”
“Smut.com,” he said, avoiding her eyes.
The Accidental Virgin Page 17