by Lisa Zeidner
“You on-line?” he asked. “’Cause I really need to check some stuff,” and before I had time to respond he had lunged for the machine, unplugged my phone, plugged in the modem, commandeered the mouse, found a local access number. “Give me your password,” he demanded.
Given that I’d just let him fuck me, you’d think I could tell him my password. I could always change it afterward. Instead I got up and punched it in for him, quickly, so he couldn’t read it. Then galumphed back to the bed. It amazed me that he could be this relaxed, naked, with his back to me.
“No smutty chat rooms now,” I warned.
“Yes, Mom.”
“Oh please.”
“America Online is shit,” my mini-man informed me. From the bed I watched him log on to check baseball stats, then stock quotes. Stock quotes! He sat as if on a bar stool, knees up and out, his toes, which for some reason I expected to be longer, thinner, hooked on the rungs. He was bopping to the graphics. My shame was turning into a low-grade burn, like the onset of a yeast infection. I checked my watch showily—pointless, since he wasn’t looking.
“It’s late,” I prompted. “I assume your mother will be missing you.”
“Nah. Shopping. Won’t be back for hours. Days maybe. Down memory lane, past the old haunts with her wallet open. She’ll come back like those bad movies, so many packages in her arms she can barely see over the top.”
“How old is she?”
“Your age, I guess. Little older.”
“You don’t know how old she is?”
I must have sounded petulant. He turned to study me. How could he be this cavalier at eighteen? I swear the wary expression was exactly that of a long-time bachelor, calculating how to squirm away from the grasping intentions of the chick he’d just bedded. This couldn’t be, I told myself. I had to be imagining it. Either that, or I was projecting my own morally questionable use of him, my own intense, almost physical desire to have him gone.
“Sure,” he said. “Forty-five.”
“I’d like to meet her.”
His trigger-finger stopped itching on the mouse. “What for?”
“Maybe we could all have dinner together or something, after our run.”
Now his gaze was curious. “I don’t get it.”
I don’t either, I thought, but then I said, “I don’t have a son starting college. That’s just what I tell people. My son’s dead. It’s still painful. My marriage is shaky. I’m shaky. So it would do me good, I guess, to see a woman my age with a boy the age my son is supposed to be. And it might diffuse some of the awkwardness, no? Of what we’ve done. Because though you’re being very cool here—shockingly, almost pathologically laid-back and cool—I just can’t accept that this is all in a day’s work for you. If it is, that’s very sad, Zach.”
He contemplated his response to this for a minute. “Man,” he finally said. “You’re weird.”
We both laughed.
The laugh was surprisingly tension-dispelling. My physical embarrassment seemed to bottom out, so that I felt perfectly comfortable sloppily sheeted, while Zachary sat naked at the hotel desk. Actually, I felt somewhat maternal, in all of the full and complicated senses of the word.
At the laugh’s tail end, a commanding knock on the door, like a policeman with a warrant. The door swung open immediately—the key must have already been in position—and a huge, furious-looking woman stormed in. “Clean!” she barked.
The maid had diamond-encrusted fingernails so long they curled under, and one of those Nefertiti coifs, hair swept up and sculpted high on the head with decorative things caught in it like debris in a fishing net. She looked from me to Zachary with unmitigated contempt. “Clean I said,” she almost spat.
“Are you new here?” I asked.
When she made no response, I continued.
“Because I sincerely doubt that this is Four Seasons protocol. Try ‘So sorry, I’ll come back later.’”
“Fuck you,” she said, and violently shot me the finger, in case I had failed to understand the words themselves, whereupon she spun the cart around and thrust it out ahead of her, leaving the door to the room open.
When I looked up at Zachary, he was recoiling, slack-jawed, from the hurricane-strength force of her.
I got up to close the door, sidling along the walls, since I was naked.
“I don’t think she even noticed anything out of the ordinary here,” I observed. “Too caught up in her own anger.”
“What was her problem?”
“How should I know? Resents the Republican Congress? Needs some exercise? Speaking of which. Come on, Zach. Let’s get your mother’s running shoes and do that run.”
He grinned agreement, threw on his bathing suit, threw his towel over his neck. His neck, shoulders, and back, I noticed only now as I put on my shorts and T-shirt, had a serious acne problem—weight lifting? I remembered to stick my automated teller machine card in my shorts pocket: time for another cash infusion. When Zach got to the door, he made a point of going low to peer out cartoonishly, looking left and right as if there were a sound track for his escape.
I did the same, sneaking up to him to press my breasts into his back, mold my chin into his chlorine-smelling hair. What can I say? The boy pleased me.
Because of the Marx Brothersy, Room Service way we were positioned, both Zachary and I saw the same thing at the same time. Down the length of the long, long hallway, in the middle of the day, an impossible number of illicit couples were entering or exiting hotel rooms. Rushing in or rushing out with a rustle. Except for one tired fat man hefting a crushed and woeful garment bag, every guest here was an empty-handed participant in the same classic drama of lust and satiation, and they all seemed to be acting it out at the same moment.
Zach turned backward with eyebrows raised, to see if I’d seen. I beamed my amusement.
We took the stairs up two flights and on his floor, too—right next to his room, in fact, the room which, it turns out, he was sharing with his mother, he in one double bed, she in the other—the same thing. Manic sexual activity. Giggling and spooning as people came from the gym or lunch. A veritable Ziegfeld Follies of broad-daylight copulation. It was surreal, positively Roman—there were so many writhing bodies I was almost expecting togas, vomitoria.
I can say that in all the time I have been a hotel guest, I have never seen so much syncopated in-and-out. Usually the hallways are almost threateningly empty.
“Is this the place that had the Legionnaires’ disease?” I asked Zachary. “There must be something new in the air ducts here. We oughtta can it, sell it.”
He had no idea what I meant.
He cocked his head. Through the wall, behind the dresser, a squeal, then a grunt, then a moan—two moans, comically operatic. As the moans escalated Zachary bopped to their rhythm, then puffed out his lips Jagger-style and did some kind of Egyptian or Madonna posing routine with his hands at a funny angle, like the one you’d use to do shadow puppets of ducks. Then went over to the closet and threw open the doors, still in rhythm, thrust out his hands like a game-show hostess to reveal the bounty within. I watched him with mounting uneasiness as I realized that everything he did—everything I observed, in fact—was being translated through this scrim of reference. Even the moans themselves: I had been about to say “How Animal Farm!” to Zachary before his little dance began and I remembered how inappropriate and useless literary allusion was as a mode of communication with this particular human.
And now he was handing me his mother’s running shoes, one shoe resting in the Cinderella pillow of each of his upturned palms. Then, as an afterthought, some socks.
The running shoes looked brand-new, barely worn. As far as I could tell, they had never even been completely laced up. They had that deeply satisfying new-running-shoe smell, enticing as the smell of a new car. I put them on, flexed my toes. The fit was perfect—he must have gotten her size wrong.
“Wow,” I said, glancing up at the contents of the c
loset. “How long are you in town for?”
The mother had enough clothes for a couple of weeks. Six or seven pairs of shoes. Business suits, evening gowns, multiple choices for snappy casual.
“Couple of days,” he answered, with what seemed to be fond contempt. “But it’s always a costume drama for Mom.”
“Don’t you think she’d mind, about the shoes? It’s not like she won’t be able to tell.”
“She’d mind. If she noticed. But she won’t. Anyhow, she wouldn’t mind as much as she’d mind the other stuff.” He laughed. “We just have to beat her back.”
He watched as I lined up my sandals at the end of her soldier-row of footwear. My shoes looked dog-eared and unprofessional, frank impostors. “Ready?” he said.
I was. In the elevator, where we were alone, we both limbered up, actually took turns getting down on the carpeting to do tendon stretches. We exited the hotel, caught the crossing light, and sprinted into the square of green surrounding the fountain in the park, where we fell into a companionable pace. Whatever competitiveness he had brought to his swimming was gone now; he was almost chivalrous as he ran beside me on the outside of the pavement, closer to the traffic. I hadn’t run in years—had never liked it all that much, in fact, though I’d done it to keep Ken company, before his knees got too bad for it, early in our courtship. Ken had a lovely, loping stride. Zach’s was creakier, more lumbering. I wasn’t really looking at him so much as feeling him beside me, feeling the tension he was trying to keep in check. It touched me, how he didn’t quite inhabit his own body. Imagine having a son this age, imagine having a boy this age bend to hug you. It must be so strange. There must be a kind of grief in that too, if you get there. I was really eager to meet his mother, to watch them together.
“Boring,” he announced, after four or five rounds. “Thisaways?” I nodded assent and let him lead me onto the city streets, where we panted and sweated through the tendrils and thickets of the workers of the world, mostly tired and defeated, or distracted, but some leaving work early with boxed cakes and flowers and the secret smiles of actual lives passing behind their eyes.
At some point I stopped to catch my breath. Stupid: it had been too long, too far, for an inexperienced runner. I would have shin splints at least. Zachary kept on for a while, as if he wasn’t aware that he’d lost me, then circled back to me, charged as a boxer. I just shook my head no, not ready. He did the same puppyish loop, back and away, back and away.
Strangely, I wasn’t sweating that much. But my lungs hurt. I felt as if I’d just swilled down fiberglass.
“Why don’t you just go on,” I managed to get out, “and I’ll meet you back at the hotel.”
“You sure? I can wait.”
I waved for him to go on.
He saluted me and took off. I was frozen in place, trying to breathe. Men in suits eddied around me, curious; secretaries, overdressed as for junior proms, contemptuous. I was dizzy, bent slightly, hands on my thighs. My eyes were squeezed shut and my breath came in trios of short bursts, followed by gasps—breathing for labor, I realized. Lamaze breathing.
At that moment, on the Philadelphia streets, something subtle scattered or congealed in me. It was as if I’d breathed sharply enough to make all the physical sensations of the last hours converge: the pleasure of the sex, the grief, the longing for Ken and the anger at him and, at the base of it all, the promise of pregnancy that was a bath of light, amorphous as endorphins. It was a sudden clarity so complete and unexpected that it felt religious—then, immediately, close to crazy. Because I swear I could locate that sperm in my body, felt its homunculus personality like Zachary himself, guileless as a golden retriever with a Frisbee in its mouth, as it panted and slobbered its way toward its destiny. I was sticky, and it was sticking, that sperm. I could feel it. I was pregnant!
And then, still panting, I scolded myself. Don’t even think about it. Get a grip!
I opened my eyes. I existed, almost naked in another woman’s shoes, on a city street full of shops: the bright, impersonal promise of commerce. On my left, a money machine. On my right, Victoria’s Secret.
There was no one in line at the machine. I got $300 in cash. “Would you like another transaction?” the machine asked. “Yes or no.” Sure, I said, and tried to get another $300.
I’m sorry, the machine informed me, but you have reached your limit for cash withdrawal.
Well, why did you offer then?
Three hundred dollars in twenty-dollar bills makes quite a pile. I was standing on a street corner with this roll of cash, large as something relay racers would hand to each other, with nowhere to put it but in the pocket of the nylon gym shorts. I tried to accomplish this without looking around too anxiously. To my amazement, no one seemed to have seen. Usually, in cities, the ATMs are fairly heavily patrolled by panhandlers, but this one had been left alone. The cash weighed the shorts down so much that I looked lopsided, deranged, like an outpatient, but it seemed like an even worse idea to spread out cash here to divide it up evenly, between two pockets.
Then I went into Victoria’s Secret.
My thought at first was only to kill some time, in case anyone had been surreptitiously watching, and acquire some kind of box or bag to help me get back safely to the hotel. The second I entered the store, I grabbed a satiny pastel bathrobe off a rack, as if I’d fallen in love with it upon sight, and held the hanger up on my shoulder so that the garment covered my hip and the wad of bills. Then I strolled around: just taking a little jog, thought I’d duck in and see if I needed anything. This working-girl posture seemed perfectly reasonable to the salesclerks, who nodded, fake-chipper, as I meandered through racks and racks of push-up bras in jewel-toned laces, satins, and velvets appropriate for a grade-school play about royalty. It occurred to me, I could use some clean underwear. I was going into my third week on the clothes in my suitcase. Who knew how much longer I would be away? So I found some reasonable bras in beige and white, gathered up matching underwear (panties is not a word I will use voluntarily, even in such a place), took them into a dressing room.
By this point I had finally stopped hyperventilating. I looked calm: a grown woman with a good if somewhat disarrayed haircut, in need of undergarments. I stripped out of the T-shirt, took off my bra. Then the shorts and my underwear too, which of course was not part of the program. Stood naked there, skin slick and tingling, pubic hair slightly matted (I had not showered, after all, after Zachary), nipples hard for no reason other than the change in temperature: a woman who had enjoyed a couple of vigorous bouts of sex and run a couple of miles and was now just going to see how some bras fit.
But I was excited. Unquestionably. Titillated in idiotic Victoria’s Secret with its classical music pumped in to bestow an aura of class on all that trampy, blue-collar lust among the cleavage, thongs, and garter belts. Well, why not. Why not. Who cared. I tried on the bras, which fit nicely. Brushed the shadow of my nipples through the translucent material, turned sideways as the catalogue models would to admire the firm curve of my hip and the swimmer’s hollow of my gluteus maximus. Not bad for an old lady.
It occurred to me that I could masturbate, right here in the fitting booth. Or just think about masturbating, which, given the new, improved responsiveness of my body, amounted to almost the same thing. Though certainly, for official moral or legal purposes, there must be a difference. I flattened my hands on my hips with fingers spread as a lover would, sucked in whatever the vaginal muscles are called in a slow roll that fluttered up my neck to my face, closing my eyes; then sent the roll back the other way, slow and stately, like a red carpet slinking down the steps of a presidential plane.
I do recognize that this is not normal behavior, although I also suspect I’m not the first woman in the history of retail to have done this in a fitting room or contemplated doing this in a fitting room. Maybe the same characters who, once they find lovers, like to take possession of them in public rest rooms or elevators. I’d like to know, actua
lly. I’d like to know if the overweight women—I’m assuming they’re women, as I’m assuming they’re overweight, sedentary at their desks with their sodas and corn chips, soap operas blaring on tiny, tinny TVs in the background—whose job it is to scan these fitting booths have any feelings about what they see. My guess is not much, mere flickers of contempt. It was three o’clock. I imagined the guard with her feet on the desk, calling home to make sure her children had gotten back from school. “Whatcha doin’?”
I shook my head at myself in the mirror, got dressed. Divided up the bills between the pockets, leaving out enough for my haul. Paid for the merchandise with my beautiful new bills, requesting a box, of course, for the robe. Watched the salesgirl daintily fold the garments into the rustle of tissue paper, as if even too lingering a touch on the luscious fabrics was somehow naughty. I slipped the cash into the box as I left the store—the guard on duty, who was in the middle of an extended sports conversation with a male patron, didn’t notice.
I did make one other stop before I returned, at an athletic-equipment store providentially placed in my path, where I held up my foot, pointed at the running shoe, and asked if they had them in my size, for Zachary’s mother. They did. The salesclerk plopped himself on the bench and opened the box, ready to help me try them on. Ready to help me decide. I shook my head as I peered into the box. I’m sure they’re fine, I said. He looked amazed, either because this was such an easy sale, or because I was foolish enough to buy two pairs of the identical overpriced running shoes. The woman who rang me up looked equally impressed or suspicious about the cash.
I walked back to the hotel jauntily swinging my bags, like any consumer.