The Not So Invisible Woman

by Suzanne Portnoy

  'That was nice, but I'm exhausted now,' he said. 'I wish we both didn't have to go.'

  'Me, too,' I said, standing up. 'But we do have to go. Shall we?'

  I grabbed my clothes off the floor, dressed, then suddenly realising we hadn't bothered to get under the covers, I adjusted the bedspread. One less room for the housekeeper to clean. It gave me a little thrill to think about what we'd done without leaving any evidence. It was like trespassing or having a secret.

  John pulled up in front of the departures area, kissed me on the lips, then got out of the Rover and put my suitcases on the pavement, ever the full-service taxi driver.

  'Thanks. Don't be a stranger, John.'

  'I won't,' he promised. 'Let's get together when you're back.'

  I walked through the revolving door and into Terminal 3 feeling both light-headed and damp between my legs, a sensation that only happens when I've been properly fucked. I was already flying.

  11. THREE IS NOT A CROWD

  I never wanted to be famous. Given the drawbacks, fame just did not seem worth it.

  Working with celebrities in my job with an entertainment company, I knew the price they paid just for existing. Sure, their lifestyle seemed glam: massive money and multiple houses, first-class travel and expensive designer sunglasses. Their fame attracted as many flashbulbs as invitations to yachts in Monte Carlo, villas on Lake Como or ski lodges in Gstaad and Aspen. It meant non-stop interruptions, whether it be calls from agents and personal assistants or requests for endorsements and autographs. It meant never being alone. Paparazzi stalked, hangers-on hovered, pimps and dealers procured, and most human interactions meant being recognised and treated like an object. I'd stumbled drunk out of nightclubs plenty of times in my life, but never had to face seeing my picture in the tabloids the next morning, documenting the experience.

  As far as I could tell, the only good part about being a celeb, other than the wealth and the luxury, was the endless freebies. No designer gives free couture, cars and carats to an anonymous author, alas. But when I published my first book a few nice things came my way.

  I got offers of one-handed massages from more than one guy who envisioned rubbing me down with one greasy hand while stroking his cock with the other. I got invitations to lunches at the Great Eastern Room and Oxo Tower from guys who wanted a private dessert at a handy hotel afterwards. I got calls from journalists who offered column inches in their newspapers and precious minutes on their shows. A middle-aged mother who went to sex clubs and orgies, had one-night stands and powder-room quickies with strangers, I was, if not exactly a celebrity, infamous, even under a pseudonym. If people didn't want my ass, then they wanted my time.

  A trip to New York to promote my book showed me the upside of notoriety.

  I hadn't lived there since I was thirteen, nor spent any time there alone since breaking off my long-distance relationship with Frank five years earlier. After we stopped seeing each other, there wasn't much reason to go back. I no longer had family in the city, and friends I wanted to see preferred visiting me in London. To my mind, New York had lost its edge anyway, since Mayor Rudy Giuliani had shut down the sex shops and backroom bars starting in the mid-1990s, and 'redeveloped' Times Square by plunking glass office towers where strip clubs had once been. It had become a family destination, replete with Disney Stores and Madame Tussaud's. New York no longer seemed the place to swing.

  But when the Howard Stern Show came calling, I took the opportunity to give the city another chance. Stern wanted to talk – about my colourful sex life and, secondarily, my book – so I booked a flight and began planning my trip, as well as some saucy outfits.

  Stepping out of JFK, I was immediately assaulted by a blast of freezing air. Suddenly, I appreciated the hideous down coat that Karume had given me the previous spring. It was a present that showed up the day after my birthday, which is to say, one day after I'd grumbled about not receiving a present from him. Normally, I don't care about gifts, but it pissed me off to have been forgotten by someone I'd supported the previous twelve months. Though no longer even boyfriend and girlfriend at that point, we slept together from time to time, while I continued to pay for his wardrobe, dinners and vacations full-time.

  He'd given me a black bomber puffa jacket, something I was unlikely ever to wear, except in a pinch, as when travelling into tit-crunching sub-zero temps. An unlikely thing for me to wear, all right, as Karume no doubt knew. I favoured slimline clothing – tailored coats, pencil skirts – and never dressed all wrapped up, layer over layer, like a piece of baklava.

  I assumed Karume had nicked the jacket, either from the wardrobe of one of his secret girlfriends, or from a clearance rack somewhere, as opposed to actually buying the thing. He never had any money.

  'This is an interesting present,' I'd said, hoping for a clue.

  'I thought it would keep you warm.'

  I never did find out where it came from, but had to admit he'd been right. It was warm.

  It also made me feel safe, I quickly discovered. On the SuperShuttle ride from the airport to my Greenwich Village guest house, I got tossed around in the passenger seat as soon as we picked up speed on the expressway. Not the kind of action I preferred in a vehicle. WTF? I looked over at the driver and noticed the guy was barely looking at the road. Instead, he kept looking down at the clipboard on his lap. Not the usual aggressive New York driver, a dime-a-dozen horn-honking road pest, this guy was a burly Eastern European lug who either didn't know how to drive well or couldn't be bothered to follow the rules. He kept looking down at the clipboard, scribbling notes no matter the traffic or speed, while careening from one lane to the next, over icy roads, never signalling, refusing to take the pen out of his hand or his eyes off his clipboard.

  Clearly, the guy was nuts. I gripped the handle on the door, both to calm my nerves and to prevent myself from getting tossed out of my seat. After a while, I'd had enough.

  'Excuse me,' I said, 'but is it necessary for you to take notes while you're driving?'

  'Yes, is necessary,' he said. Firmly. Not looking up. End of enquiry.

  That shut me up. I felt slight comfort knowing the big ugly puffa jacket provided a lot of padding, putting a few layers between my body and whatever it seemed destined to crash into.

  The next day promised a soothing antidote to the terror ride of the night before. I was invited to high tea on the elegant Upper East Side.

  A woman named Viviane had proposed a tea party in my honour. She called it the Perverts' Saloon Tea Party, a monthly gathering of sex bloggers and writers. My timing was perfect.

  'My out-of-town guest is Suzanne Portnoy, who will be making several appearances in connection with her book, The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick Maker,' said her invite. 'We are also honoured because Sissy Maid Stephanie will again be serving us.' I didn't get that last reference, but appreciated the plug and looked forward to an event that promised fun with some fellow travellers.

  I'd met Viviane online a few months earlier, around the time my book came out in the UK, when I was researching the swinging scene in America and wondering if anyone there would buy a dirty little book like mine. I'd been told that Americans didn't read erotic memoirs, that the country's puritan streak ran straight across the map, as it were, from coast to coast. I was dubious. I'd met pervs from San Francisco to Boston, Chicago to New Orleans, covering all points on the compass, so figured that, despite George Bush's sex-negative laws and prissy Oval Office proclamations, a sexual underground had to be burbling just under the asphalt of Main Street, USA. Every action has a reaction; nothing like repression to start a scene where there wasn't one before. I'd been taught my Newton in college, but had also learned firsthand while there, in that small New England town, that drugs and three-ways, orgies and tea-room blowjobs all existed. They just weren't pictured on the postcard.

  Viviane was a major mentor of American sex bloggers, the networking queen of the genre. Most bloggers linked to Viviane's Sex Carni
val or referenced it, and no wonder. She was a jackpot for news of interest to sex-positive communities, vice law info', health tips, and erotica, all with a sprinkling of kinky pix.

  I put on my blue-denim pencil skirt and black keep-you-warm tights and, thanks to the Arctic blast, my trusty puffa. Then I took the subway uptown.

  In the lobby of Viviane's elegant apartment building, I took off my coat as the doorman buzzed me up. One minute later I was in a roomful of New York pervs, who entertained me with their stories of the city's swinging and sex-party scenes. It was a relief to know Giuliani had not banished all the fun from Gotham.

  A middle-aged man in a wig and a pink French maid's uniform walked around the room serving tea and nibbles. 'Thanks, cheers,' I said, as he dropped a lump of sugar in my tea. 'Are you Stephanie?'

  'Sissy Maid Stephanie,' she said clarifying. She was heavy set, talked with a deep New York accent and performed her duties with relish.

  'I used to teach school,' she told me later, as we walked down the street towards the garage where she'd parked her Oldsmobile Cutlass. Sissy was still in costume, and though she got a few looks and smirks, the New Yorkers carried on with their lives and left the sissy maid to her own. 'I retired a few months ago. This is sort of my new job, when I want to "work".'

  On her way back to New Jersey Stephanie dropped me off at the guest house. I was feeling a little tipsy, having knocked back a couple of glasses of bourbon after Viviane brought out a bottle for the party's stragglers. A little jet-lagged, a little sleepy after a fitful night in an unfamiliar bed, I felt my head spin. Then I began feeling juiced up.

  I made a booty call to a guy I'd found on Craigslist a few days before leaving London. I had posted an ad seeking a dancing partner, though dancing wasn't really what I'd had in mind.

  'Sexy erotic authoress coming to New York to launch her book,' I'd written. 'Seeks a fit, handsome, chocolate-coloured partner to accompany me to a NYC hotspot for dancing and debauchery sometime next week.' The first person who wrote back fit the bill.

  We'd arranged to meet and go dancing later in the week, but suddenly I wanted to see him now.

  'Hi,' I said, laying on the British accent to jog his memory. 'It's Suzanne.'

  'Hi,' he said. 'Daniel. Nice to hear from you. Where are you?'

  'The Village. You wanna meet up?'

  'Could be there in a half-hour,' he said.

  'Great. Meet you on the corner of Eighth and Jane?'

  Thirty minutes later, there he was. Black, about six feet tall and slim, buzzed on top, with a goatee below, he was just my type. He looked at me approvingly as I approached. I returned the look. Then we moved towards each other and kissed in a way that is more intimate than usual for two people who don't know each other.

  'Whadya wanna do?' he asked in a TV-show New York accent. 'Wanna drink or something?'

  'No, it's too late,' I said. 'Why don't we just go upstairs? I'm staying three doors down.' I pointed to the door of the Incentra.

  'Cool.'

  Together we walked up the hallway stairs, Daniel grabbing my ass from behind. I heard a clock strike nine or ten or eleven times; it seemed to bang on forever. Daniel pushed my skirt up over my waist as I shut and locked my door. I took off my boots and tights and inched over to the bed and lay back. He put his head between my legs. By the time the clock chimed again, Daniel had fucked and sucked me and gone out the door. Welcome to NYC, Suzanne, I said to myself. Thank God for Craigslist.

  The next morning, I was up by six. I curled my hair and put on an outfit I'd had made especially for the Howard Stern Show, even though I knew it was unlikely anyone would see me in it.

  Stern is a man worth going to New York for. His show is notorious in the States, as much for its scatological humour as for its riffs on conservative politicians with little cocks that matched their little minds. That, and the ritual request Stern made of his female guests, whether Hollywood starlets or rockers or porn stars, that they lift their tops. Stern started out as a disc jockey in a Boston suburb, then got a drive-time show in Hartford, eventually ending up in New York and becoming America's highest-paid shock jock, as well as the one most frequently fined by the government's dirty-talk police. Now he had a $500 million gig on Sirius, a national audience of millions and had expanded to TV. The television show was an edited-down, weekly-highlights version of the daily radio programme. With that, along with the porn stars' balloon-sized tits, in mind, I figured I and my 46-year-old, slightly sagging boobs would not make the cut.

  Nevertheless, I wanted to look my best, even for a radio slot. I dressed black and tight – houndstooth blazer, matching pencil skirt, fishnets and sky-high KG heels. I put on my glasses, looked in the mirror and thought, I could be mistaken for a librarian. A sexy librarian, but still a librarian. Poor gals, no one ever thought librarians got laid. But I'd met a few on the circuit who proved life wasn't all about the Dewey Decimal System.

  The show went better than I'd expected. Howard was kind and funny and reasonably polite, playing the schoolboy whose education hadn't included the slang words for penis, vagina and anus throughout my 25-minute interview. But a dirty-minded schoolboy just the same.

  'Have you licked a man's anus?' he asked.

  'You mean rim, Howard, don't you?' I said. 'I think we can use the proper expression for it.'

  'I didn't realise there was a proper expression for it,' he said.

  I laughed. I was sitting opposite a man who tabloids linked to scores of porn stars, and even if that was just PR, he certainly knew what rimming was.

  'Yes,' I replied. 'I've rimmed a few asses.'

  Then it was time for the listener phone-in.

  Stern: 'Irish John, you're on the air.'

  Irish John: 'Hey, Suzanne baby, what you doing? Wanna go see Blade at B.B. Kings?

  Me: 'Well, I'd love to, but I'm going to do a reading tonight at the Happy Ending lounge.'

  Howard: 'How you going to do a reading with Irish John's cock in your mouth?'

  Me: 'It will be hard. I'll mumble through it.'

  After the show I went back to the guest house, threw off my clothes, climbed into bed and napped for a couple of hours. Then my phone rang. It was Tim, my college sweetheart, the guy who'd dumped me for my pal Marsha during our last term. He hadn't called me in 24 years, but I'd kept track of him and, prior to my visit, had emailed everyone I knew in New York, including him, for the hell of it, and given my contact info.

  Tim had heard me on Stern, his idol. 'You were amazing,' he said. 'Cool and calm. I couldn't believe how great you sounded.'

  'Thanks,' I said. 'It was fun. Thanks for calling.' I wondered if he regretted dumping me all those years back.

  'I'm really proud of you, Suzanne.'

  I turned over and went back to sleep.

  When I woke up later that afternoon, I put my hair back in curlers, reapplied my make-up and dressed for my reading at Happy Ending. It's a former erotic-massage parlour on the Lower East Side, that has been given a second life as a swinging-1960s-style cocktail lounge on one floor. It retains the tiled shower stalls and sauna from its last incarnation, with tables and chairs and mood lighting added, turning the basement into a warren of cosy booths. Its website actually advertises an 'intimate, almost indecent atmosphere that harks back to a pre-Giuliani New York' – a bit forced, perhaps, but the blurb serves as confirmation that Giuliani's crackdown was a feat of historic proportions.

  I wore my 'lucky dress' – the leopard-print halter-neck number that I'd first worn at the Erotic Awards. Since meeting Carl, the Rump Shaker, my first night in it, the dress had become my fail-safe pulling outfit. It showed off my curves and, when I was squeezed into a black push-up bra first, it gave me the lift I needed. A fashion stylist had once told me during a shoot for a soul-singing diva, 'Foundation garments are everything,' and, judging from my ongoing successes in the outfit, she was right.

  I arrived at Happy Ending half an hour before the show started and was met by a guy named
Greg. He had written to me after reading a piece about my book on the Sunday Times website, and we'd corresponded since then. He hadn't offered any sexual favours; he just seemed like a normal, nice guy, who wanted to know where he could pick up a copy of my book.

  He was about my age, a bit short of five-foot-ten, medium build, with a small goatee, short dark hair swept up in spikes, brown eyes that glistened in the club lights. I took inventory and found him just as cute in person as he was on his MySpace page. We hit it off instantly. He was sharp and funny and sweet and, as we chatted in the corner booth at the far end of the lounge, I found myself thinking I had to add 'sexy' to my list of adjectives. He worked as a film editor. I thought that was cool. And he lived in Greenwich Village. I thought that was convenient.

  'I'm staying in the Village,' I said.

  'That's handy,' he said, smiling.

  I topped the bill that night, and I revelled in the attention that resulted. The space was narrow and dimly lit and packed full of people of all ages, all types. Standing centre stage before fans who had read my blog or heard me on Stern that morning, I enjoyed sharing excerpts from my first book, and digressing before the appreciative crowd to ad lib anecdotes. It was a reminder of just how much I enjoyed performing for an audience, something I'd done only sexually in recent years. I had briefly considered a career in theatre while at university, but chucked the idea when I realised I was good at stealing scenes but not good enough to star. Standing in front of the microphone at Happy Ending, I felt like one.

  Full of adrenalin, I stepped off the stage and walked over to Viviane, who had brought along some fellow bloggers to see me.

  'Hey!' I said. 'So good to see you again.'

  She told me I'd been great, invited me to a little Vietnamese place around the corner for dinner, then introduced me to the dark studious-looking man next to her. Very tall, very slim, twenty-something, he was wearing tiny round wire-rimmed specs and a preppy Ralph Lauren polo. He looked like a world-weary college student or a tortured poet, very much the humanities-studies type.