High Maintenance

by Jennifer Belle

  21.

  BACHELOR PAD—CONV MDTWN LOC

  Right before we had sex, Andrew got up and pulled something out of his bag. I wondered if he was going to try to tie me up. He brought it over to the bed. It was one of those things doctors use to test your blood pressure.

  “What do you have that for?” I asked.

  “I want to see if my blood pressure gets too high when we fuck,” he said.

  “I’m flattered,” I said.

  “I tried to do it this morning when I was jerking off but I couldn’t do it by myself.”

  “Why didn’t you ask Jordan to help you?” I asked.

  “She wasn’t home. We have very different schedules.”

  “Why don’t you jerk off at your doctor’s office and have him test it?” I asked.

  “I already thought of that but jerking off isn’t as strenuous as fucking you. I thought about trying to fuck my doctor right there in the office so she could test me properly but I want to try this method first.”

  He went back to his bag and pulled out a silver stethoscope. “I just love this thing.” He put it around his neck.

  “How much did this stuff cost you?” I asked.

  “A lot,” he said, “but you can’t put a price on health.” I couldn’t imagine Andrew buying anything, let alone something expensive.

  He put the wide black pad around my upper arm and fastened it with the Velcro strips. It was too tight, but I didn’t say anything. Then he unfastened it and made it tighter around my arm.

  “It’s much too tight, Andrew,” I said. He pumped the thing up in his hand, ignoring me. He held my wrist and looked at his watch.

  “Not bad,” he said.

  “What happens if your blood pressure gets too high when we’re having sex? Are you going to stop having sex with me?” I asked, smiling.

  “No, honey, we’ll just have to modify.”

  He put the black rubber tips of the stethoscope in his ears and put the cold metal mouth on my chest. He tucked it under my left breast. He smiled. “I can hear your heart,” he said, like a little boy. The blood pressure meter was still wrapped too tight. “I can hear that you’re in love with me.”

  “I need a second opinion,” I said.

  He moved the metal disk around my chest. “Breathe in,” he said, “breathe out.”

  “You’re giving me a headache,” I said. I moved it to my nipple.

  “This isn’t a toy,” he said. He ripped the pad off my arm and placed it around his own. Then he fucked me, stopping every few minutes to check the meter. He made me hold the pump and give it a few blasts from time to time.

  He wore the stethoscope in his ears the whole time and as soon as he came he listened to his own heartbeat.

  In the morning, Andrew climbed tentatively into the shower. He was getting the hang of how to manage the faucets with the large pliers. After he got the water running I went into the living room determined not to look in the bag he always carried around, the royal blue gym bag. I looked at the way it sat on the floor by the door, wrinkled in certain spots, smooth in others, some compartments zipped all the way, some only part of the way. I studied the bag as if I were preparing to describe it to a police sketch artist.

  I got very close to it and squatted. The metal tab at the end of the zipper of the main compartment was sticking straight up. I gingerly unzipped Andrew’s bag and pulled out the plain brown notebook, noting exactly how it was positioned.

  I opened the book and looked down at Andrew’s neat architect’s block writing. Got up, made myself a baked potato, gym, had sex with Liv K. for the 3rd time, it said. I wondered how many Livs he knew that he had to use my last initial. I was on the same list as a potato.

  I heard Andrew sigh in the shower. I turned to the next page. I was brilliant in the S.B. meeting. I am a fucking great … The water stopped and Andrew pushed open the metal shower door. I closed the book, put it in the bag, panicked momentarily trying to remember which direction it had been facing, then turned it around, adjusted a ball of sweat socks, zipped the zipper, and turned the metal tab on the end of it so it was sticking straight up. I stood and moved away from the bag.

  Andrew came into the living room wrapped in a yellow towel. His eye went to the bag. I was still nervous about the placement of the notebook.

  “I killed something in your shower,” he said.

  “Thank you.”

  “What did you do while I was in there?” he asked.

  I hadn’t thought about that. I should have had the TV on. “Looked out the window,” I said. The window was closed. Ominous heavy ropes swayed and banged against the fire escape.

  “How is it out?”

  “Nice.”

  “I could go out and get us some bagels.”

  If he went out I could lock the door and read more of his journal. “That’s a great idea,” I said.

  Again his eye went to his bag. “Or we could go together,” he said. He went back into the kitchen and put on my deodorant and pulled on his underwear, jeans, and turtleneck.

  “I’d rather stay here,” I said. I turned on the TV and sat on my bed.

  Andrew finished getting dressed and opened the front door. “Be right back,” he said. I went to the door to lock it. His bag was gone.

  I was desperate to keep reading that notebook. I had to know more about the sex life of Liv K. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on it again.

  Andrew’s journal was the first book I had enjoyed since my divorce. The most terrifying thing about living alone, I had decided, was reading. Lying alone in bed and reading a book, noisily turning the pages, glancing guiltily at the clock. With every half hour that ticked by, while I lay alone and read some book about a fat girl or a girl in England, I had the feeling that I was ruining my chance to have a life. I should be out Rollerblading or smoking a cigar in a lounge somewhere, trying to meet men. At the very least I should be reading at a bookstore and making eye contact between sips of latte. Reading in bed with my husband had been different. Alone, I might as well have been reading by a penlight in a coffin six feet underground. Reading is what it must feel like being dead.

  Nothing had changed since I was a little girl reading all day in the hammock my father had installed in my bedroom. When I was a child I won a contest at my library for reading the most books. As a prize I got to choose any book so I chose the most exotic title: The Wind in the Willows. I was so excited. What a disappointment. Some prize. It was a childish book about animals, and I hated all books about animals. All I got for reading all those books was another book. A book no one in his right mind would like.

  But now I had the next segment of Andrew’s diary to look forward to.

  We ate our bagels sitting next to each other on the side of my bed. “It’s my mother’s birthday and I want you to meet her,” Andrew said. “Do you want to come with me to Virginia?”

  “Won’t she tell Jordan that you brought another woman to meet her?” I asked.

  “No,” he said without elaborating.

  After a while I said, “Does your mother like Jordan?”

  “She’s never met her. I haven’t brought Jordan down there. I think it’s better that way. Although I think she suspects I’m a fag, living with a man named Jordan.”

  Andrew was the only man I had dated, including my husband, I was sure wasn’t a fag.

  I called Violet as soon as he left to tell her that Andrew wanted to introduce me to his mother. “He’s taking me to Virginia in his girlfriend’s car.”

  Violet was silent on the other end of the phone.

  “Isn’t that great?” I said.

  “Ohhh,” she said.

  “Oh what?” I said after a pause.

  “Don’t go,” she said.

  “Why not?” I said.

  “I just have a feeling you shouldn’t,” Violet said. I hated when Violet had a feeling.
She waited a moment for me to react to her feeling as if her feeling would mean something or be in any way accurate this time when it never had been in the past. I didn’t react. “I think it might get really”—Violet paused as if summoning her intuitive powers—”intense.” She sighed, collapsing from exhaustion, as if the spirit she had channeled had just left her body. I pictured her in flowing scarves and a turban on her head looking deeply into a bowl of Haagen-Dazs.

  “Just don’t get married,” she said grimly, almost nastily, as if I married every man I met and she had to buy me an expensive gift each time. As if Andrew weren’t living with someone and it would be perfectly easy for us to get married over the weekend.

  “I said he was taking me to meet his mother, not the justice of the peace,” I said.

  “I know,” she snapped. We didn’t say anything for a while. I got off the phone as fast as I could and lay on my bed staring at the ceiling. I wondered if we would just go down for the day or if we would sleep over. I wondered if she had a guest room or if we would stay at an inn. If there was a guest room I would probably stay in it, and Andrew would sneak in to see me in the middle of the night. I figured out when I was expecting my period. I wondered what I should wear and if his mother would like me. All mothers liked me. I planned some things to say to her.

  The next day I went to Tiffany’s and bought a ceramic honey pot, in the shape of a beehive with bees painted on it, for Mrs. Lugar’s birthday. I brought it to the office, swinging it in its baby-blue bag. I plugged a typewriter in at my desk and typed up a rental lease on a Blumberg form. At the bottom I put in a rider stating that the tenant had to pay four hundred extra dollars a month to have the owner’s plant caretaker come to the apartment to water the plants once a week. “The plants cannot be moved!” the owner had screamed. My phone rang.

  “Liv Kellerman,” I said.

  “Do you miss the feel of my cock in your cunt?”

  “Andrew, why can’t you just say hi like other people?”

  “Hi,” he said. “Do you miss me?”

  “I can’t talk now, I’m closing a deal,” I said. I had wheeled my chair over to Maria Lorta’s desk all morning to help her look at pictures of wedding gowns. “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Virginia,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything.

  “But I’m going to make it up to you. I’ll be back tomorrow and I can stay at your apartment for the next few days.”

  I was still fuming at eight that night when I brought a man who had his own seat on the stock exchange—whatever that meant—into a stunning loft on Canal Street. He wore pale cowboy boots and carried a matching ostrich-skin briefcase. On the way up in the elevator, he pinched my shirt between his thumb and forefinger to see what it was made of, if it was silk. It wasn’t. “Sorry,” he said, “I just had to know.” It was one of the rudest things that had ever happened to me in an elevator.

  “So what do you think?” I asked, after he had looked around for fifteen minutes. It was truly one of the most magnificent places I had ever seen. It belonged to a famous artist I had never heard of and it had enormous windows looking out on the Hudson. The sunsets would be incredible. You could watch the Circle Line go by.

  “It’s dark,” he said. I looked at him in disbelief.

  “It’s nighttime,” I said. “The loft is flooded with sun in the day.” I tried to smile. I had to remember apartment hunting was stressful. People got nervous. They weren’t themselves.

  “But I work during the day,” the man said, sounding frustrated, as if I were the stupidest girl he had ever met. “I’m only home at night. If it’s sunny during the day that doesn’t do me much good.”

  “I don’t have any lofts that are sunny at night,” I said.

  “But that’s the only time I’m home and I want light. I put that on my list.” I had given him the Smoothe Transitions Wishlist to fill out. The buyer was supposed to list the qualities he was looking for in a loft in order of importance. I opened the shiny Transitions folder and looked at his list. Sun was number one.

  “That’s why I brought you here,” I said. “You have direct south and west exposures. It doesn’t get any brighter than this.”

  “But look how dark it is in here,” he said. “Your ad in the paper said, ‘Bring your sunglasses.’ I clearly don’t need to put on my sunglasses.”

  It was like showing Jerome an apartment. I felt like I was in a production of The Taming of the Shrew set in a Canal Street loft. I was supposed to admit the sun should shine at night, after the market closed. Just for him.

  “You’re absolutely right to be upset, sir. I don’t know why it isn’t sunnier tonight. I just can’t understand it.” I looked out across the dark Hudson River to the lights in Jersey. “Maybe the sun is hiding behind a cloud.”

  “I’ll just have to find another broker,” he said.

  “That’s probably a good idea, sir. I hear the sun sets later on the Upper East Side, maybe you should try up there. And I believe Corcoran handles night sun, why don’t you give them a call?”

  “I think I will,” he said walking out, leaving me to pull down the special heavy-duty shades the owner had installed to protect his art from all the sun.

  22.

  ARCH DESIGNED

  Andrew came to me when he got back from Virginia and apologized. I didn’t ask if he had gone with Jordan.

  When we woke up he said, “I’m having an early day and I want to come here after work. Give me your key.”

  “I’m not giving you my key,” I said. At the last minute I agreed to keep my door open all day so he could let himself in. I figured it wasn’t any more dangerous than having the door locked, because it was so easy to break in. I made my bed before I went to work, something I never did.

  When I got home I looked for signs of him. His gym bag was on the bedroom floor but he was gone. It was too risky to open the bag and look for his diary without knowing when he was coming back. He could walk through the door at any time, unless I locked it, which would seem suspicious.

  I undressed and got into the shower. I wouldn’t read it, I decided. I would do whatever it was I did when I was home alone.

  I got out of the shower, wrapped myself in a towel, and went into the bedroom. The bag was there. I decided to ignore it. I took my new flesh-colored bra out of the tissue paper it was gently wrapped in and tried it on. It fit perfectly. In the mirror I saw the bag again on the floor. I couldn’t stand it anymore. I locked the front door and went back to the bag. I squatted beside it and unzipped it carefully. I reached into the bag and pulled out the diary.

  I know Liv loves me, I read. We came simultaneously last night. I told Liv that the one time Jordan let me go down on her she did the Sunday Times crossword during it the whole time….

  “What are you doing?” Andrew said.

  I jolted to my feet. Andrew was lying on the bed, on his side facing away from me. I had walked past the bed twice in my bra and not seen him lying there. I was still holding the diary. If he turned over he would see me with it. I bent down fast and shoved the thing back in his bag. He rolled over to face me. He was wearing a green silk paisley ascot of some sort. I stepped away from the bag as if it had a car alarm going off inside it.

  “I watched your wedding video,” he said sleepily. “That jackass you married has the personality of a piece of cardboard.”

  “What!” I said. I was horrified. “You shouldn’t snoop through my things.” I was vulnerable as a bride. I didn’t want people tuning in anytime they wanted to. It was like Dorothy’s future boyfriend watching her trip to Oz on video one day and making snide comments about the scarecrow. It was my dream from my tornado concussion. My father was in it, and my mother, and my aunt Em, and of course Jack.

  “I was hoping it was a porno,” he said.

  It was, I thought.

  “When we get married it’s going to be differen
t,” Andrew said.

  “Are you going to be wearing that scarf?” I asked.

  “Come here,” he said.

  “That’s a girl’s scarf. You look like a cross-dresser in that thing.”

  “This is a man’s scarf. I thought maybe I could tie you up with it,” he said.

  In bed Andrew overwhelmed me. That was the thing that made him better than other lovers. He would leave me confused. I felt like I was in the wrong decade. Having 1940s sex in the present time. I always felt like dusting off my bottom afterward as if we had been doing it on a metal desk in a small office belonging to a private eye in old New York. I had the impulse to hand Andrew his hat when it was over, even though he didn’t wear one, and adjust my own invisible garter belt. When I was with him I felt like a blonde.

  After we had sex I said, “Don’t throw the condom on the floor. Give it to me and I’ll throw it in the garbage.”

  “I think we can stop using them,” he said. “I want to shoot a baby into you.” He rolled on top of me and kissed me and bit my neck a little. His words ran through my mind. No man had ever said that to me before. It was the most romantic thing I had ever heard.

  “If anyone were to give me the AIDS virus, it would be you,” I said, taking the condom from him. It was limp and empty. Andrew had come. I had witnessed the veins of his thick neck pop out and his chin point up in the air like a bull terrier’s. I knew he had come, but the inside of the condom was completely dry. I wondered if he had managed to slip the condom off. Having sex with Andrew was like having sex with the magician David Copperfield.

  “Did you come?” I asked him.

  “Mmm, yes,” he said, smiling.

  “Inside me?” I asked.

  “Honey, no,” he said.

  “Where’s the come?” I asked, pinching the condom’s reservoir tip.

  “I can come without ejaculating,” he said.

  “What!”

  “It’s a technique I learned from my Qi Gong master.”