The Virginity of Famous Men

by Christine Sneed

  “You know, Marcus,” she said when they were seated at a table next to windows that overlooked tourist-congested M Street. “You shouldn’t trust anyone we work with, even me.”

  He laughed a little, which made her frown. “What?” she said, incensed. “You think I’ll fall so hard for you that I’ll compromise my career if you get caught doing something stupid and ask me to come to your defense?”

  He shook his head. “No, I would never think that. For one, you’re not going to fall for me.”

  “You need more confidence,” she said. “How did you end up here?”

  “At this restaurant? Or do you mean how did I end up a sheep in wolf’s clothing?”

  “You’re a weirdo, Marcus,” she said, unable to suppress a small smile as she looked down at her menu. “Just relax. Not everyone is as bad as you seem to think.”

  He had never before spoken so flippantly to a woman he was attracted to. Sleep deprivation had turned him cavalier at the same time that it was draining him of every molecule of energy and good judgment. There was, however, the chance that Jennifer was attracted to him too.

  Or else she was their boss’s spy: a sexy, merciless woman the Secretary used to identify and flush out the weakest of his staff members. Marcus knew that he should be wary, but he was too tired, too weighed down with forebodings and long-entrenched misery, to care very much that Jennifer might be the kind of message it was best to send back unread.

  They didn’t talk about the office or the Secretary for the rest of the meal; she spoke at length about a college friend who had just moved to Rome to live with a man as old as her father, “a sugar daddy,” Jennifer said with contempt, but Marcus could hear envy in her tone too. When they finished dinner—salmon for her, steak for him—she smiled at him across the table, took a sip from the cup of black coffee that she’d ordered instead of dessert, and announced, “If I go home with you, I’m not going to stay the whole night.”

  He stared at her, both flustered and thrilled. “Okay,” he said, his voice faltering. “That’s fine. I’m just a couple of miles from here. Up in Dupont Circle.”

  She laughed. “I knew that had to be where you lived. It’s where all the soulful types live.”

  “And the drag queens. Don’t forget them.”

  “Yes, them too. You’re in good company. Better than I am in boring Arlington.”

  “I like Arlington,” he said.

  “Actually, I do too.”

  She let him guide her by the elbow out of the restaurant and into a cab, her long, gleaming hair so tantalizing that he gently pressed his face to it when she had turned to look out the window as the taxi driver sped north on Wisconsin Avenue, away from the melee on M Street. “We’ll have fun,” she said with a smirk. “I’ve wondered for a while what it would be like with you.”

  “I’ve wondered about you too,” he said.

  “I’m sure you have. There aren’t many women in our office a guy your age would wonder about.”

  “That’s true,” he said, “but even if there were, you’d be the one I’d want.”

  “That’s very sweet,” she said. “But hardly necessary.”

  Despite her earlier declaration, she did stay the night. After she took off her clothes and climbed into his bed, her pride in her slender body obvious, after she used her mouth on him, twice—her generosity startling him, along with her aggressive appetites, her almost masculine predilections—she fell asleep. Sex with her was like stumbling upon something treasured but long believed lost, and he was very happy that she did not wake again until six A.M., an hour and a half before she usually appeared at the office. With her in his bed, he’d managed to sleep for five hours without interruption, the first time in weeks that he hadn’t woken at two A.M. to stare despondently at his alarm clock, sensing the dead women’s ghosts, aware that he’d allowed his job to consume his life.

  When Jennifer awoke and peered at his bedside clock, morning light slipping past the window blinds, she was suddenly, irrevocably awake. Marcus knew that he would not be able to convince her to stay a little longer, to open her body’s closed doors to him once more. “I had fun,” she said a minute later, fully dressed, slipping on her heels. “You did too.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “We’ll do this again soon,” she said, running a hand through her beautiful hair.

  “I’m going to hold you to that,” he said.

  She smiled and nodded a little. “Sure, that’s fine.”

  At the door leading to the outside hallway, one that would take her to the street and back to their coldly impersonal professional lives, she gave him a measuring look. “If you’re still obsessed with those dead girls, Marcus, you’d better figure out how to get over them. There are bigger problems out there.”

  You don’t mean that, he thought, but he could see that she did. “I don’t know,” he said noncommittally. “Maybe, maybe not.”

  “It’s true. Just get over them. Why waste your time obsessing? What can you possibly do about it now? Save yourself, not some ideal or daydream or whatever you want to call it.”

  “A nightmare is more accurate.”

  She shook her head. “See? You’ve got to stop that.” She leaned closer to him. “At the office, just so you know, I’m not going to flirt with you. Business as usual. No offense.”

  After she was gone, her scent remained with him, the feel of her skin on his hands. She was a live woman, the only kind that could do him any good.

  He still did not understand any of it, though—her, his job, the underground room where men gathered to eat other men alive. But this was the way the world functioned, according to the textbooks he’d read in grade school. He was supposed to know how to dismiss cruelty and distant catastrophe, to not take them personally, because with time, they would go away and be replaced by newer versions, refined variations, which at first would not appear to be the same things. He would be replaced by a newer version of himself if he quit. He had learned long ago that if he stood before one mirror with another mirror behind him, his image would endlessly repeat itself.

  WORDS THAT ONCE SHOCKED US

  At the call center lodged within Clean n’ Soft’s sales and marketing department, five of us earn our livelihoods working twenty-five to forty hours per week. We have no windows in our workspace, but we do have a functioning coffee machine and an eerily glowing man-size box that, if fed the right coins, will disgorge fattening snacks like Snickers bars and Lorna Doone cookies during good weeks, waxen donuts and filling-ruining peanut chews during bad. The youngest among us is twenty-one, the oldest seventy-two. It is the two people in the middle, Sam and myself, who refuse to reveal our ages, but Cassie, who is twenty-one, and Britt, who is seventy-two, happily answer any co-worker’s questions about their ages, love lives, driving records, and weight-loss anxiety. Rachel, who started just two days before I did, is thirty-two. I turned forty a week ago, but even when bribed with cake and Pepsi and a few thoughtful presents—a gift card for movie tickets, an electronic poker game, and a clover-green scarf that Britt knitted for me after work while watching episodes of Days of Our Lives that she TiVos during the day—I refused to tell them that I was turning forty. It seems a strange thing to be—so far removed from childhood and adolescence, some of which is still so vivid in memory, and also past the safest era for bearing children. Forty is more likely than not the midpoint of my life, if I am lucky enough, that is, to live for another four decades.

  Employee turnover in the call center of Clean n’ Soft is high, considering the not-generous pay and benefits, and the data entry we’re required to do when not performing the often thankless task of taking calls from rude or distraught strangers, but Sam has worked here for a whopping five years and Britt is closing in on eighteen months. Rachel and I have been here for almost six months, Britt’s birthday scarf possibly begun before I was even hired, but she has said that she plans ahead, stockpiling gifts in her closet for last-minute birthday and hostess gifts. S
he plays bridge with seven other women she has been meeting on Tuesday mornings for thirty years. She always brings a gift for that week’s hostess, though not everyone in the group does, something she knows is reasonable enough, but it is not her way. More than I have at past jobs, I feel close to my four co-workers at Clean n’ Soft, even if we aren’t all together eight hours a day. Rachel and I arrive at eight thirty on weekday mornings and work until five, and Sam comes in at noon and stays until eight thirty at night, with Cassie and Britt working part-time, their hours different on different days, but usually three of us are here to answer the call center phones and reply to the twenty or thirty daily emails that come in through the address included on most of Clean n’ Soft’s products.

  Within our first week of working the WATS line for our soap- and shampoo-company employer, Rachel and I identified four main kinds of callers: the know-it-alls, the neurotics (mostly parents of small children), the kooks, and the lonely hearts. It is this last category that is sometimes hardest to respond to both affably and professionally, in part because they keep us on the phone for as much time as we will give them. They’ll start with a common question, the same kind the neurotics often ask: “Are there any known carcinogens in Quick Clean shampoo?” Or “I got a rash when I used Powerhouse soap the other day, and it won’t go away. What do you advise?” The answer to the first question is no; the answer to the second is “Please discontinue use for now and call your doctor if the rash persists beyond a few days.” Straightforward questions with equally straightforward answers.

  But then the lonely heart will often let out a small, self-conscious laugh and say, “What I really wanted to ask is, how did you get started doing this job? Do you like it? Do you get calls from a lot of wackos? I’d think that you would.”

  Our training manual has tips for abbreviating calls from the lonely hearts, which cost Clean n’ Soft money because someone has to pay for our toll-free line, though I’m not sure if we even need a toll-free number. Most people have cell phones now with unlimited minutes, but maybe the bigwigs here are thinking of the customers with landlines. Whatever the reason, we do what we can to keep calls to a maximum of ten minutes. This can be difficult, though, because for one, some callers actually have quite a few legitimate questions. When a caller feels rushed or slighted, our previously cordial conversation can get a little unpleasant, and it’s not like I can remind them that the call center is a courtesy to customers, not a central pillar of the Clean n’ Soft business model. It would probably be the first thing to go, along with free soft drinks and fruit juices on Fridays, if we ever fall on harder times. It is relatively expensive to maintain, and Clean n’ Soft is not a freewheeling company, not one that hands out generous annual bonuses to the lesser lights among its staff. And “customer comfort specialists” are indeed among the lesser lights.

  Customer comfort. I just love this. Especially when someone calls to say, “Comfort? Who do you think you’re fooling? You call this chemical burn comfortable?”

  As for the best way to abbreviate a call when we’re faced with a lonely heart’s small talk, our training manual prescribes a number of responses. One is that we ask the caller to hold the line for a moment and then leave him in limbo until the blinking red light dedicated to his line goes dim. Another is that we simply hang up on him (while we are in midsentence so that it will seem a true accident), and if he calls back, we apologize and tell him that currently we are having technical difficulties and then, midsentence, we cut the line again. A third is that we answer his non-product-related questions with a question of our own, repeated until the lonely heart gets the message: “Do you have any other questions about Powerhouse soap/Clean n’ Soft laundry detergent/Quick Clean shampoo (or conditioner)/Tub n’ Tile Taskforce/Sunshine dish liquid … ?

  There is one other last-ditch tactic in the manual, this one for the chronic repeat-offender lonely heart: “Sir/Madam, I’m sorry, but I now need to speak with another valued customer because there are a number of callers patiently waiting in my queue. But please feel free to call us again if you have a specific question about one of our products.”

  Rachel and I haven’t yet found the nerve to use these hard-hearted tactics. We are hostages to our sympathetic natures, or else just foolishly patient, rarely cutting off lonely hearts unless they say something obscene, which, thankfully, does not happen very often. Still, it does happen, and when it does, we laugh over it, but sometimes I think about what was said for days afterward.

  In the past month and a half, Rachel has acquired an ardent lonely heart fan, Jack, who says he is in his early fifties and already retired from a career as a stockbroker in Chicago. He also says that he has been a widower for three years and has two grown children. A few days after my birthday, not long before Halloween, Rachel and I are alone in the office when Jack calls. She gives me a sly smile and puts him on the speakerphone, something she doesn’t do too regularly because Sam is often with us, but today he called in sick with food poisoning, an excuse so overused that Rachel and I are sure it’s a fib. Jack’s voice is deeper than I expect, and there’s the hint of an accent I can’t place. German maybe, or Italian.

  “How are you today, Ms. Rafferty?” he says. “I tried the new Spring Fresh Powerhouse scent like you suggested and it’s very nice,” he says. “I also want to tell you that my ankle is healing just fine. The doctor says that I can start skateboarding again in a couple of weeks.” He laughs and so does Rachel. It looks to me like she’s blushing a little too.

  “Do you have a crush on him?” I mouth, raising my eyebrows. Even before now, I had a feeling that she might, but when most of Jack’s previous calls came in, I was busy with my own callers or in the bathroom or else loitering in front of the vending machine, trying not to let Flamin’ Hot Cheetos win out over the more boring but less fattening Rold Gold pretzel twists.

  She waves an impatient hand, silencing me.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” she tells Jack. “I was a little worried that you went waterskiing with your daughter last weekend. But if you’re only skateboarding, that’s just fine.” She laughs again.

  “Listen,” he says, lowering his voice. “I want to ask you something. But it sounds like you have me on the loudspeaker. Is somebody else there with you right now?”

  She clicks him back over to the regular line. “You’re not on the speakerphone,” she says. “The line’s just been a little tinny today.”

  I make a face but she ignores me. He’s twenty years older than you, I want to say, feeling vaguely betrayed. The lonely hearts are the ones we pity, not fall for. Also, she’s married.

  And only recently—she and her husband, Ben, were married a little over a year ago. Ben is adorable, someone I would have noticed too if I’d been lucky enough to meet him at a friend’s birthday party like she did. I’ve seen him a few times when he has come to pick her up, shyly saying hello and waving when I walk with Rachel out to their red Corolla. They only have one car and sometimes she gets to use it, sometimes not.

  “Yes,” she says to Jack. “I think I can do that. This Saturday? At the Olive Garden in Coralville? You’re sure that’s not too far out of your way?”

  Right before she hangs up a minute later, my line rings. I answer it, annoyed by the interruption, but as always, I use my nice-lady voice. “Yes,” I tell the neurotic on the other line. “You can use Quick Clean conditioner with any shampoo. It doesn’t have to be Quick Clean shampoo, but we do recommend that you use them together.”

  To the neurotic’s next question, I reply, “It shouldn’t give you dandruff if you mix and match shampoos and conditioners, but you’ll get the best results if you use the Quick Clean hair products together. We recommend Quick Clean conditioning spray too. It’s excellent for getting out tangles.”

  Rachel is on another call when I finish with the neurotic, someone who might have been a twelve-year-old crank caller rather than a real neurotic; there was a lot of muffled giggling and rustling in the backgroun
d during our conversation, but I ignored it. I can hardly accuse a caller of cranking me, even when it’s clear that’s what the person is doing. “Would you recommend using Quick Clean detangler on my pubes?” “What if I stick a bar of Powerhouse soap up my uncle’s tailpipe? Would his car backfire?” One week not long after I started, there were so many ridiculous questions that I complained to our boss, Mr. Lambert, who sits in an office with four big windows three floors above our workspace and looks at sales reports when he’s not checking up on us. He gave me a strange look and said, “Well, Marcie, I’m sure you can handle it. That’s what we hired you for, after all.”

  For a number of reasons, it was not a good idea to complain. Sam and Britt were certain that the call center would be shut down if Mr. Lambert or anyone else started to keep track of how many pranksters and how many legitimate callers we have each week. There really aren’t too many crank calls, but we do have outbreaks from time to time, as if the whole graduating class at Coralville’s high school is pulling a senior stunt before they go on to college or jobs at the mall.

  It’s several minutes before both Rachel and I are off the phone and I can grill her about what happened with Jack. “Is he coming to see you?” I ask.

  For a long second, she doesn’t look at me, but when she finally does, I can see that she’s embarrassed. “Yes, he is. He’s coming to visit his son who’s a professor at the university and he asked if I wanted to meet for lunch.”

  I feel sort of strange when I hear this. I’m worried for her but also, I suppose, a little jealous. “Does he know you’re married?”

  She looks down at the notepad she’s doodling on. “It’s only lunch,” she says. “It’s not a date.”

  “So he doesn’t know about your husband.”

  She shakes her head. “No, but does he need to? I just thought it’d be fun to hang out with him for a little while. Everyone needs a new friend, don’t they?”

  “Oh, Rachel,” I say, trying to keep my voice light. “That’s how it always starts.”