Driving Me Wild

by Maria Benson

  I looked my naked body up and down. “Going great here, Tisha.”

  “I hope you’re not breaking too many hearts.” Stated with barely suppressed laughter.

  “Oh, you know me.” Relieved to finally see my boxers, I put the phone on speaker so I could continue the conversation partially dressed.

  “Look, I can’t get it out of my mind, so I wanted to make sure I was clear with you from when you were last here at the house.”

  I leaned over toward the phone as I yanked my socks on. “I know, you think I’m being ridiculous.”

  “See now, that’s what I thought,” she said. “I don’t think you’re being ridiculous, Michael, as long as you have the right goals. I’m just afraid you got the wrong one.”

  I buttoned my jeans but cradled the phone in the crook of my neck. “Which would be?”

  “Are you in touch with the fact that you really seem to be trying to win Aimee over? After all these years?”

  Tisha’s words brought heat to my temples, and I bit my lower lip as I responded. “Tisha, that was ancient history. Maybe my recent date with Aimee kicked off my transformation, but that was about present day stuff. I am over what happened back at Kenwood.”

  My case would have felt much stronger if my words hadn’t brought that very day rushing back. I had convinced Tisha to walk home with me in a bid to get her to give Brody, who had reacted poorly to what turned out to be a false pregnancy alarm, a second chance. We were cutting across the football field when we heard Aimee and her scumbag boyfriend, Chad Tucker, arguing. I had charged in without much thought and done the right thing–pulled Chad away from Aimee and shoved him for good measure. Not that I exactly deserved a medal–the pothead was a couple inches shorter than me and probably twenty pounds lighter.

  Who knew he had such a strong right?

  I wasn’t sure whether to be horrified or relieved to be interrupted when the bedroom door suddenly swung open. Standing there half-dressed before a lanky Latina-looking woman clad in silk pajama bottoms and a tank top, I updated Tisha. “I’ve, uh, got to go.” I hung up without allowing for her response.

  “Look who’s up.” The young lady, whose loose-fitting clothes still failed to hide how well-endowed she was, stepped to the foot of the bed, eyes momentarily glued to the bare chest and abs I had worked to lean out over the past month. “You’re, uh, doing the right thing. How quickly can you leave?”

  I frowned as I searched for my upper garments. “Was it that bad?” Despite a buzzing headache, the sight of my bedfellow had jogged my memory. I still didn’t know her name, but I definitely recalled meeting her the night before and kissing her in my Audi before driving her home. Either Scott or Bobby had paid this woman, or I was a quick study.

  She smiled playfully at my question. “Michael, it was fine–really.” She looked over her shoulder. “That said, I don’t think either of us were exactly looking for love last night. Plus, there are some, ah, complications.”

  Visions of a jealous boyfriend forming in my head, I accelerated the dressing process. Leaning down to tie my shoes, I realized I hadn’t found my socks. Probably better to sacrifice those and live to tell the tale.

  As dressed as I needed to be now, I stood. “How long do I have?”

  “Not long,” she said, showing me out into the hallway.

  Still following my new, uh, friend down the hall, I became a human scanner focused on every detail of the woman’s apartment. Come on, give me a diploma, a certificate of some kind from work . . . maybe she had her driver’s license lying on an end table? By the time we reached her small family room, which shared the apartment’s foyer and main door, I had still failed at my mission.

  “I should have gotten you up before now,” she said as we reached the door. “I’m sorry. I got caught up on the phone just now–had to talk this out with a friend who’s not as judgmental as some of my girls.” She smiled sheepishly. “Girls like Tisha.”

  I tried not to audibly gasp... “As in Brody’s Tisha?”

  “What other Tisha do we know in common?” my sexual partner asked, frowning.

  A name popped into my head, and I went with it. “Camila,” I said, snapping my fingers.

  “Yeah?”

  The anxious look in Camila’s eyes reminded me that I had bigger problems than completing a homework assignment. “Camila, please tell me that you barely know Tisha.” I failed to suppress a cough. “I’m really hoping you maybe just work at the lounge?”

  The twist of her mouth and her deadpan glare said plenty. “Sorry. Tisha’s due here in thirty minutes to go out with our running group.”

  I nearly fell against the door. “Oh no.”

  “I don’t think she ever properly introduced us last night. I got there late, so our girl was a bit toasted and wasn’t thinking about making any more intros by then. Let a mom of four get a minute away from the kids, she goes buck wild.”

  “That sounds right,” I said. “I recall you were on a couch full of the only people there that I didn’t know.” I stared at her intently. “Are you guys really close?”

  “We’ve been colleagues for about four months,” she replied. “I work at her day job, not her and Brody’s place.”

  “The call center.”

  “That’s the one. Tisha kind of took me under her wing. She heard a few of my man problems and said she’d help me chart a better path.”

  “Well,” I said, sighing as I grabbed the doorknob, “getting with me definitely qualifies as moving in reverse.”

  She crossed the linoleum tile to the doorway, then turned toward me with a hand on the doorknob. “Sorry to have to be so rude, but it’s better this way.”

  “No, I understand, trust me.” I was actually relieved, but as I pawed at the back of my head I gathered my will. I had two questions for Camila, but neither was very polite. I decided to lead with the one that was potentially the worst. “Is there any chance you can tell me why you slept with me, exactly? It’s kind of important.”

  Her eyes grew big for a moment, but then the confused look on her face gave way to the brightest, boldest smile. “Oh my God, you can’t ask me that.”

  I shrugged, then instinctively scratched at the fresh addition to my nascent beard, which I realized had to go. It was starting to draw undue attention around my office, where a clean-cut first impression with influential investors was table stakes.

  Camila leaned in, peering up into my eyes as if seeing me for the first time. “Do you know how insulting a question that is?”

  “I know, it sounds bad,” I replied, my hands splayed wide open as if begging for mercy. “It’s just, look, I see you and you are a beautiful woman who apparently saw enough in me to get intimate within a few hours of getting acquainted.” I failed to maintain eye contact, knowing such a weakness would enrage Scott and Bobby. “You see, this doesn’t happen very often.” I need to know what I did right.

  Camila’s gaze softened a bit, but she pivoted enough to swing her door open. It looked like her unit was at the end of a hallway, so I wasn’t surprised when she continued the conversation. “You seemed interested in me,” she said, dropping eye contact for a second herself. “Not like we were going to fall in love, but you asked a lot of questions about my life.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “That was it?”

  Her shining brown eyes narrowed suddenly. “Oh, not good enough for you?”

  Standing there, eyes locked momentarily with a woman I instinctively knew I wouldn’t be seeing again, my brain began to thaw. Bits and bytes of our conversation the night before resurfacing, I realized that it was largely as simple as she was painting it. I recalled the hour or so we had spent on a lounge couch and my adept pitching of one question after another, punctuated with tidbits designed with Scott’s and Bobby’s help.

  I sensed I had pretty much hit every bullet point in the script. I boasted gently about my Kellogg MBA, made my job sound bigger than it was, honored Camila’s struggles as a single mom, made obliqu
e references to having survived multiple girlfriends’ “false alarm” pregnancies, and sought her advice about how to break it gently to three women who were pursuing me.

  The material, bogus or not, had apparently killed.

  Stepping into the hallway, knowing the clock was ticking down to an uncomfortable “triangle” confrontation with Tisha and my one-night partner, I couldn’t stifle one last research question. “Camila, can you identify the moment when you decided ‘Yes, I am taking this guy home?’ It would really help me understand how to recreate–”

  The look in her eyes now said I was dead to her. “Do I look like a lab rat to you?”

  Knowing time was short, I made do with a shrug.

  She placed a hand to her door, face hardening. “Yeah, you’re really not very good at this. No wonder it’s never happened before.”

  I really, really wanted an answer. I gently placed a hand to the door. “All I’m trying to understand, is what attracted you beyond my seeming nice. Were you more intrigued by the things I shared or hinted about myself??”

  She sniffed. “Truth? I was drunk, feeling pissed about my ex, thought you were cute and, I guess, a little mysterious. I probably had some curiosity about how you’d carry yourself in the light of day.” She applied force against the door, which hurtled toward me as her words zoomed forth. “You’ve killed that, of course.”

  CHAPTER 17

  Aimee

  My father was clearly indebted to DePaul University. Maybe he had some B.S. adjunct teaching gig with them, or perhaps they brought him in annually to deliver a keynote address in return for his standard speaking fee. Something like that was going on, because Dustin Fineman did not believe in supporting corporate bookstore chains, which at this point meant Barnes & Noble. Even I, his well-ignored “love child” daughter, was well acquainted with his loyal love for the independent bookstore.

  My father was ultimately all about himself though, so here he sat enduring a reading at the DePaul Barnes and Noble in return for something. As I remained hidden amidst taller onlookers in the standing-room-only space behind the rows of packed chairs, I realized the explanation for Dustin’s “Barnes and Noble bedfellow” might be more entertaining than a paycheck. It was just as likely that he was here because of the latest woman of the moment. He could be sleeping with the bookstore manager, her neighbor’s cousin, or some random DePaul employee who had called in a favor.

  With him, you never knew, and it didn’t really pay to try and figure things out.

  Still smarting from my firing, I had arrived just as Dustin finished a reading from his most recent book. After the reading, he had not surprisingly gone straight to taking Q&A; Dustin Fineman was not a big fan of the prepared speech.

  By now I had endured the initial, predictable stream of fawning fan questions. Where do you get your ideas? How much of you is in your major characters? Of which book are you most proud? What advice do you have for aspiring authors? From dewy-eyed women young and old, as well as a couple of effeminate male readers, came streams of loving queries premised on my father’s identity as a Great American Novelist. Some of them were frankly embarrassing: They might as well have just come out and asked, Can I kiss you? The only compensation for enduring these softball lobs? The thinly veiled contempt in Dustin’s eyes as he provided acerbically tolerant answers.

  This portion of the program ate up nearly twenty minutes, and when I realized there were still a dozen people with their hands up I got a little nervous. I had enjoyed stewing in anonymity, a newly-unemployed woman with plenty of problems I could leave at the Barnes and Noble entrance. There was something freeing about seeing my father, about really letting myself feel the contempt that his actions over the years stirred in me. Maybe I had no job and less than two months’ pay in the bank, but I would always be a better human being than the man before me.

  I was here, though, for someone besides myself. The painful fact was that after spending my adult life trying to ignore Dustin, my lack of income meant I needed him to pick up a mantle I could no longer bear. And while I felt like I was being ignored by Ian and had been tossed away by Todd, I would make damn sure I got Dustin’s attention today.

  “Mr. Fineman, an important question for you.” I raised my voice just as he completed his response to a young man’s question about his literary influences. It wasn’t my turn–my father’s handler actually had a mike extended toward a female college student whose blouse was far too tight around her D-cups–but I angled around enough people to emerge from the crowd. I stood tall and proud in my Bohemian silk patio dress with its zigzag floral pattern, well appointed in matching accessories I had purchased just weeks earlier. There was a good chance that this outfit would be one of many I would wind up hawking on Craigslist to cover an extra month’s rent, but for today I was working it. A ball of desperation and bewilderment inside, I figured I could still project an arresting image. Which is to say that as I had calculated, the room quieted and all eyes went to me. Especially Dustin’s.

  It had been a handful of years since we had seen one another, but to his credit his eyes immediately confirmed his recognition. He was far too unflappable to show any shame or embarrassment, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do what I’m sure he wanted to: blow me off. After tugging self-consciously on the lapels of his natty plaid blazer, he waved his handler away from me and asked, “What’s your question?”

  I folded my arms and locked eyes with him, wondering whether any onlookers had picked up on our resemblance. “Speaking of your literary influences, I just have to ask. How do you keep your calm when people say you’re a poor copy of Phillip Roth? In light of all the awards you have won, it seems downright disrespectful when people go there.”

  Dustin held eye contact with me, but bit his lower lip. As he pawed at the back of his curly mane of thinning hair, I fought back a nasty smile. I had very clear memories from childhood of the ways in which my Uncle Brian, my mother’s younger brother, would express his hatred for my father. “He’s a two-bit Phillip Roth,” he would say while sitting in our dining room nursing a glass of Mother’s Scotch. “He thinks he’s on that level, know what I’m saying, but he’s not all that. Even if he was, it wouldn’t excuse the way he treats you two.”

  As Dustin raised a hardening gaze toward me, I recalled my mother’s attempts to separate Uncle Brian and Dustin on the rare occasions when my father came around. Apparently the “two-bit Roth” epithet had bored its way under Dustin’s skin and amounted to fighting words. Two decades had passed, but the words clearly retained their power.

  Dustin cleared his throat, then swung his gaze around the room. “I don’t run from questions, nor from topics. You all deserve better than that.” He glared at me, the contempt now seeping through. “There are certain bottom-feeders whose dissatisfaction with their own lives spurs them to throw rocks at the accomplished. These are the same people who wrap up dead-end day jobs to come home and play Internet troll.” He glanced toward his handler as if asking forgiveness before turning back toward me. “They can, quite frankly, kiss my Russian Jewish ass.”

  I played at being classy, acting as if his shit fit wasn’t personal and then sitting by calmly as he spent the next hour enduring the handshakes, stories and love from the fans whose books he signed. I had gotten lost in my smart phone’s apps when the bookstore handler lady, who was far too mousy and plain-Jane to be the one Dustin was sleeping with, tapped me on the shoulder. “Mr. Fineman went to the men’s room,” she said, clearing her throat, “but he asked me to point you toward the car his publisher has waiting for him.” She nibbled a little anxiously on the pair of glasses in her hand. “Does this make any sense?” She was probably afraid Dustin had put her up to propositioning me.

  When he climbed into the back seat of the fully loaded Lincoln MKZ, filling it with the smell of his smoky cologne and the cough drops on his breath, he didn’t bother to look over. “Do you need a ride?”

  I continued whittling at my nails w
ith a freshly-sharpened file, which had been a nice distraction during my wait. “I can get home fine on the Metro.” I looked over at Dustin, nodded toward his driver. “Do you really want to do this here?”

  My father smirked, both at me and at the rearview mirror image of the driver’s eyes. “Unless I’ve really underestimated you, Jackie has seen much worse than we’re about to get into.” He stroked his wrinkled brow, and I realized his face was now thinner through the jowls. He still looked pretty fit for his age. “What’s this about, Aimee?”

  “It’s about obligations, Dustin. Plain and simple.”

  He nodded ruefully before looking out his window at the bookstore. “My obligation to you.”

  “Um, no,” I replied. “Well, maybe indirectly. You owe Mom more than you owe me. She raised me with minimal help from you, and I like to think I’ve turned out pretty well.” That last sentence tasted like ash right now, but it was the best I had to make my point. I turned toward him, trying not to let my tone get too earnest. “She did her job raising me, Dustin, but that left her without the resources to have a very comfortable life, without much of a cushion, you know? She needs a lot of financial help, help I have provided for the past several years.” I ran down the drivers of Mom’s financial shortcomings–the medical bills, the plummeting value of homes in her deteriorating neighborhood, the constant need for home repairs.

  Dustin had two fingers to his lips, but spoke around them. “I admire the way you and your mother support one another. I have long wished that Kim and my girls had a comparable rapport.”

  I steeled myself against the chill his words sent. My girls. A phrase having nothing to do with me. “I’m not here for compliments,” I said matter-of-factly, still filing my nails as a calming mechanism. “I need you to step in and provide Mom with some financial relief.” I looked down into my lap. “I’m unable to do my part right now.”