by Kris Radish
“Brilliant,” Jason says. “I have two places that might be perfect. There are places in the city, you know that, but this part of Illinois is such a changing, dynamic world. I think I understand what you might be getting at.”
What she is getting at, Connie wants to tell him, is that women want, deserve, and need sex just as much as men need it, and they don’t want to have to purchase their appliances at old fading warehouses next to the interstate.
“I’ve read a little bit about the seemingly sudden explosion of sex-toy stores,” Jason confides as they spin off of the Eisenhower Expressway and take the side streets towards Elmhurst and then down to Oak Brook. “Maybe it’s the ripple effect from Sex and the City or something but everyone is surely more willing to talk about it now.”
“Justin, I suppose it was just a matter of time before someone like Jessica or the women who have already opened up stores said, ‘What the heck are we waiting for?’” Connie explains. “Imagine, if you can, what a nice woman, say, like me, would feel like buying a toy from some tattoo-covered guy in an alley somewhere.”
Jason laughs and tells her he has been to every sex-toy store within a hundred-mile radius of downtown Chicago.
“And?” Connie demands.
“It’s an interesting blend of the tattoo man and smaller boutiques that have tried hard to set a new standard, and there are several places over in Boy’s Town, where the gay men hang, and close to Andersonville where the gay women hang,” he shares. “It totally makes sense to have a store, a chain of them, that caters to women. Just women. Something upscale and comfortable.”
“That’s what Diva’s is trying to do but, of course, men are always allowed too,” Connie says as they pull up in front of an empty store next to a busy shopping area. “This, for example, might not work because someone going in here could run into someone coming out of that children’s clothing store.”
“But,” Jason argues, “it also might work. You know, kind of the one-stop shopping theory. You get your kids some new underwear, pick up groceries over there, and then slip in here and pick up a new vibrator for later in the day.”
“You’re probably right, Jason,” Connie says, laughing. “Part of the idea is to make it seem, like it is, that it’s perfectly normal to do what needs to be done to be sexually satisfied, to feel good, to make certain that your sexual self is as nourished as every other part of your self.”
Jason does not want to get out of the car but he sees their contact standing inside of the store they are about to visit. He knows they should get out but the conversation, this particular assignment, and this woman who could be his mother, are a swirl of excitement that he finds beyond interesting.
“Shouldn’t we go in?” Connie asks.
“I talked to a lot of women too,” he admits with his hand on the door. “Friends, my sister, the woman I’m dating, my boss, who is a woman, and I can tell you that every single thing you say is correct. I think the store will be packed the day it opens and every day after that.”
Connie looks at him. She looks at him and thinks about all the mothers her age who have tried hard to raise men like Jason. Thoughtful. Open. Smart. Up to this point very nonsexist. She wonders what his dinner conversations might have been like, what his father did, how he came to be sitting in this car in a parking lot with Nurse Nixon and searching the suburbs of Chicago for a location for a sex-toy store. She really wants to know.
“Jason, will you tell me your story over dinner?”
“My story?”
“Yes. How you came to wear that fancy suit and paddle to this point in your life.”
“Business first,” he says, shaking his finger at her. “Once we get this down to two or three locations you can throw the light on me and I’ll talk, but there isn’t much to say.”
“Liar,” she shoots back, getting out of the car.
And, as she says it, Connie Franklin Nixon looks and sounds not only professional but as if she already knows the entire story.
Jessica calls three times during the day and Connie calls her four times. By 7:30 P.M. they have decided on three potential locations, all in the suburbs, and all in areas where customers can buy a bottle of wine, a new blouse, or toys for the kids and eat a bagel within shouting distance of the new Diva’s store.
“Lighting?” Jessica asked during the first call.
“Minor renovation and design work?” she asked during the second call.
“Options, legal problems, purchase plan?” she asked during the third.
Jason, Connie explained, had everything covered and then some. And the choice, they all agreed, would be simple once she and Jason sat down and laid out everything on a flat surface, called Jessica and Geneva before midnight—they hoped—and then drove back to the store one more time on Sunday and met with whoever was handling the lease agreements.
“It could take most of the day,” Jason warns as they head back towards Connie’s hotel. “I know you have a mid-afternoon flight, and we can work around that. And one more thing.”
Connie turns as he pulls into the parking lot of a brewery/restaurant not far off the freeway, two blocks from her hotel. One more thing, she thinks, could probably be the title for a movie made about her life. She’s been hearing “one more thing” for weeks now, which is exactly how she ended up here in Illinois with Jason and his white teeth.
“Your call, Jason,” she tells him. “Buy me a glass of wine and I’ll give you anything you want. I’m beat.”
“I’d love to have my mother join us for brunch before we head back to Eastbrook tomorrow morning,” he admits, somewhat shyly.
“Your mother?”
“Indulge me. She wants to ask you something and I think Eastbrook is where we will end up.”
“Buy me the wine and I’ll answer your question,” Connie says as she swings her very tired legs from the car and walks into the restaurant.
Brunch, so it seems, is on for 11 A.M. at a very old, very cool, very good restaurant that has been catering to Chicago food aficionados since 1942, just miles from Eastbrook and, interestingly, not very far from the condo where Jason’s mother lives with another woman.
“One more thing,” Connie says out loud, as her head hits the pillow that night, and she falls asleep dreaming about absolutely nothing and too exhausted to remember to glance at her list of dreams.
One more thing.
Classy, beautiful, and totally fun, Christine Belmont meets them at the back table carrying a tray of Sunday morning mimosas and looking just as Connie imagined the mother of suave Jason Belmont might look like.
The conversation roars from point A to point Z so rapidly that Connie feels as if she has been rammed by a wild, but very nice, diesel truck. Christine, at 54, is embracing the word “change” in every aspect of her life and, now that Jason has helped free her from her house mortgage by selling her home, she has moved in with her best friend and is interested in making one more change.
“I’d like to work for you,” Christine confesses to Connie.
“Really?” Connie says softly, trying hard not to swallow her entire glass and realizing that one more thing really meant two more things.
“I’ve been an assistant art director for over 25 years and I need a change so bad the veins in my face hurt.”
“What were you thinking?”
“The new store. Anything having to do with the new store, the next one, or the one after that.”
“Sex toys.”
“I like to think beyond sex toys. More like, empowerment tools for women. It’s about damn time someone opened up a place like this. If you close your eyes and listen for just a second you’ll hear the weeping sounds of women all over this area crying because they did not get any again last night….”
Christine Belmont hesitates for just a second and then finishes her sentence.
“Or what they did get was so exhaustingly horrid they shouldn’t have bothered.”
Jason does not turn away dur
ing the conversation. Apparently he has heard this particular discussion, and no doubt other discussions, richer and racier, many, many, times before.
“Do you have first-hand knowledge about this?” Connie asks Christine, throwing on her manager’s hat.
“I did, but not anymore.”
“The best friend, the new life? What? If it’s not too personal,” Connie asks.
“Nothing’s too personal for my mother,” Jason says first, not even close to blushing.
“And aren’t you glad, son?” Christine asks as she launches into her own personal quest to discover her sexual identity, to be able to feel, to be, to experiment.
“When Jason told me about this account something snapped inside of me,” Christine goes on. “I was one of those women who went to those joints, and dated five thousand men, and then discovered that my sexual power could only come from myself. I had to own it, take charge, and that’s exactly what I did and what I would love, let me repeat that, love to do for other women who are waiting, for all those voices I hear crying in anguish right this moment.”
Jason just sits and smiles. He takes a bite out of his omelet as if this kind of thing, a conversation with his mother and a client about the sexual powers of women, happens on a regular basis, which it most likely does.
Christine wants to know about plans for the store, who Connie intends to hire to work there, when it will open and, she throws in, she has talked to absolutely no one about Diva’s and she is ready to go whenever Connie is ready to hire her.
“Let’s get the location,” Connie says, turning to Jason. “Let us do that first and then someone will be back here soon—I am not sure who that will be—to interview, get the design going, and finalize all the plans. Before then, you can get me your résumé, anything we might need.”
Christine has it in her bag, pulls it out, slides it across the table and around the toast and asks why Connie isn’t going to manage the store before Connie has a chance to take a breath.
“First the location, then the staff,” Connie says, lying through her teeth and right into her coffee, which is, of course, very dark.
The store location was the easy part. By the time the plane left, Jason and Connie and Jessica, via a flurry of phone calls, all agreed that Eastbrook would be the community—either the store attached to a new and very hip development or a restored home in the center of the town.
Connie’s location, however, was something totally undecided.
Jessica’s list
3. Sex. Wild, wonderful…did I say wild and wonderful sex?
Connie’s list
14. Maybe sex. Something meaningless. Just sex. A man’s hand on my face, my breast. Not caring what happens next. Over and over again. Sex. I can’t even believe I just wrote this. It’s a HUGE dream. Sex. My list. SEX. This is a big maybe. But I wrote it down. I can’t even believe I knew how to spell it.
Jessica knew what would happen.
Connie knew what would happen.
And everyone who knew them knew it was about damn time.
Michael Dennis called first. He did not beg or whisper or assume anything more than just the notion that he would like to come back to New York, dance again, hold her hand in public, tell her the rest of his story, and spend the entire day with her and do it all on purpose, with absolutely nothing else on the schedule but that one thing.
To see Connie.
No meetings or plant tours or tuxedos or phone calls or someplace else to be but right there.
He also said please.
Martin asked next.
Could Jessica possibly spare even one half a day? Maybe a very long night in between Chicago plans, Los Angeles, general Diva madness, staffing problems, her mother, sisters, Geneva, and the rest of her heartbreaking schedule that barely left time for a hug.
Could she?
Could she please?
Connie held her breath when Michael called, a soft, sweet pause that made her smile, made her remember the moment she kissed Burt Reynolds while the sounds of the swirling swamp waters serenaded them, and how her lungs filled and then emptied into her throat. Remembered how she moved into him and how her entire body paused moments after that.
Paused and then stopped. Stopped moving and thinking and worrying and wondering, and then just simply wanted. Wanted to jump over #14 and into #3000. Connie wanted.
Wanted Burt.
Yes. Connie said, Yes, Michael, come on Wednesday and I will meet you at Diva’s and we’ll take it from there. Do not bring a tuxedo, or a schedule, or anything from the past. Bring Michael, she said. Just bring Michael, and his smile, and his open heart, and the way he stands next to me, and the electrifying charge I feel when he touches me.
Yes.
Connie said yes.
Jessica hesitated. She dropped her eyes into her robot-like planning machine and tried not to have a nervous breakdown. Chicago loomed. Los Angeles loomed. Las Vegas loomed. Manhattan loomed. Her world was a blazing sunrise of possibilities and where was the Screen Man in all of this? Where was Martin?
The pause was much longer than Connie’s. It hung in the air like a hot city breeze that was trapped between one river and the next. Birds did not fly. People walked slower. Some bars ran out of ice-cold beer. People walked around without shirts on and spoke to themselves as if they were delirious.
Martin was delirious.
Infatuation-like delirious and he had to find out about all of Jessica Franklin Nixon. All of her.
Please, he said again during the hot pause. During the pause while Jessica shifted and remembered how she felt the last time when sex turned into a garden of passion that consumed her and made her sleepless and wild and able to see images and people and predict the future. How she felt when she was on fire from the inside out, and when birds spoke to her, and she could suddenly understand 15 languages, and thought she surely could discover a cure for cancer, and walk naked across a thin wire strung from one tall building to the next.
Jessica fingered her schedule and she saw this one opening. It was a small hole in her world of time. A wedge into a place that had been sealed shut. A vault of improbability and she said one word. And as she looked at the schedule she wrote down her #3.
Well.
Martin put his hand on his head where the screen would have hit him and that was all. He did not breathe or squirm or imagine anything but the next sound he might hear from the telephone. Jessica’s voice. He loved to listen to her soft, firm, commanding, sometimes flippant voice.
Well, she said again.
And then she plunged. Jessica plunged into the real and sometimes sultry world of Divaness. She placed her hands on the edge of the desk and she said his name first.
Martin.
And then again.
Martin.
Wednesday evening. Meet me at Diva’s and we’ll take it from there.
Jessica said yes.
And Martin danced with the imaginary screen on his head and he hung up quickly before Jessica could change her mind.
Burt Reynolds flew fast. Martin danced fast and then it was Wednesday. No one slept on Tuesday. Martin, Jessica, Michael and Connie tossed and turned and walked and wrote and ate and drank and they wondered.
And there were hours of imagining. Wonderful, glorious imagining.
Everyone wondered and imagined and placed their hands on their hearts and breasts and in that one sweet spot below the waist and wondered some more.
There were few plans after that. Just a lively hurry to get there. A hilarious, almost simultaneous mingling and meeting at Diva’s that caused Sara and Meredith to whisper like high school girls in the storeroom while the couples swayed and talked and laughed at the improbability of the meeting at Diva’s. For one insane moment they considered sharing a late dinner but Michael, the Swamp Man, came to his senses and said that he had dinner reservations that he did not want to miss, and there was the exit line.
The excuse to get on with it.
And
they did.
Connie did not want to eat dinner or walk or dance or know anything more than she already knew at that moment about Michael. She wanted to rip his shirt off the second he closed the door to his suite. She wanted to feel every inch of his body and not think about anything else but that moment and what his skin felt like under her fingers. Connie wanted. She simply wanted, and as she left Diva’s with her hand in Michael’s she decided that for now, for this night, for what might happen, that was all that mattered.
She wanted.
Jessica danced from one foot to the next. Sex had not been that far removed from her, but making love, that was a long, long time ago, and she hesitated.
She hesitated and Martin saw it and he stepped forward. He stepped forward, and he took her hand, and he smiled, and he bit his tongue lest he say something inappropriate like “I love you,” and he didn’t whisper or promise or push. He just took her hand.
Jessica stopped dancing then and she lifted the keys for the door out of her pocket and she threw them behind her back so that they smashed into the door of the storeroom where she knew her prized employees were huddled, listening and smirking and laughing and whatever else they might be doing. She threw away the keys and she stepped forward, and just before she did that she made sure she grabbed her very large briefcase.
Martin said my place and Jessica said no.
Mine.
Because she knew her mother was not coming back that night.
Then they left and after that they hurried and kissed on the street and while walking and in the lobby and pretty much every other place imaginable.
And in the morning, when Connie thought of her list, she smiled.
And in the morning, when Jessica thought of her list, she smiled.
They both laughed for a very, very long time and loved, absolutely loved, the way they felt when they knew the numbers from their list had indeed become a glorious and lustful reality.