High Maintenance

by Jennifer Belle

  “Did you come or not?” I said. I was getting angry.

  “It’s not good for men to ejaculate every time they come. You release your power that way. You lose strength. It’s the worst thing a man can do. It took a lot of practice but now I can have as intense an orgasm without sacrificing anything. And I can keep fucking all night if I want to.”

  I was so angry I could barely speak.

  “You wouldn’t want me to feel all … spent now, would you?” he asked.

  “Yes I would, Andrew,” I said. “I would like you to feel spent.”

  “Most women would be happy,” he said. “I still have all of my energy.”

  “You’re so cheap you can’t even give me your come,” I said. I just sat on the edge of my bed holding the rubber. It was the same color and texture as my new expensive bra, which I was still wearing. Its cups had stretched out during the sex and formed little reservoir tips of their own. “You withhold even that.”

  “What am I depriving you of, a mess on your belly? Don’t worry, I came great.”

  “How do I know you weren’t faking?”

  “How do I know you weren’t faking?”

  “That’s a woman’s prerogative,” I said. “I want you to ejaculate, Andrew. If we have sex again, I want a mess on my belly.”

  “I want my baby in your belly,” he said. He rolled on top of me and fucked me hard for less than a dozen strokes before he came and collapsed on top of me. “Satisfied?” he whispered. “If I hold you upside down for half an hour there’s more chance of getting a boy.”

  “No one’s holding me upside down,” I said. I felt his come wet my thighs and the bed under me. “It would probably be better if we had a boy baby There’s less chance you’ll molest it.”

  “Now I’ll probably be too tired to work tonight.”

  “Good,” I said. “Andrew, you shouldn’t have come inside me without a condom.”

  “I thought you wanted me to ejaculate. You don’t even know what you want. I’m glad I did it. We’re going to have a beautiful baby boy together.”

  He got up and started getting dressed. I hated being left behind in my apartment. It was somehow easier to part on the street in the midst of New York. It made it a more equal parting. I got up and pulled a velvet shirt on over my head. “I’m leaving with you, I’m going out,” I said.

  It was raining when we got out on the street. The tops of buildings were fogged up. There was red mist glowing in the distance from the giant neon umbrella of the Travelers Insurance offices. I looked for the Empire State Building, for the World Trade towers, for the moon, but they weren’t there. Like David Copperfield, Andrew had made them disappear.

  I had seen a magician shoot an arrow with a scarf tied to the end of it through the stomach of his assistant and into the bull’s-eye behind her. I wondered if Andrew had shot a baby into me.

  23.

  CORNER APT, EXPSD BRK

  Andrew and I stood in Minetta Lane, kissing. It was midnight. My back was against a wall and Andrew stood in front of me with his legs spread apart.

  I didn’t want him to come up to my apartment. I was trying to convince him that he needed to have a place I could come to.

  “Where are we going to make out tomorrow night?” I asked. “We’ve kissed on every corner in the Village. Maybe we should try something new.”

  “Tomorrow we’re going to kiss on the corner of Fifty-ninth and Lex and the next night we’ll try Thirty-third and Third. I also have a couple of nice spots picked out-for us near Lincoln Center.”

  I remembered a cabdriver telling me that Thirty-third and Park was the most dangerous street in New York. More accidents occurred there. For some reason I remembered his name, Ishmael.

  “How about Thirty-third and Park?” I said.

  “Any place you like.”

  “Okay, your bed.”

  “It might be a little crowded.”

  “I showed Maya Lin that house,” I said. I pointed to a four-story house on the corner with a wrought-iron gate. Maya Lin was the young architect who designed the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. I looked at Andrew’s face to see if he was jealous that Maya Lin was looking to buy a whole house. He didn’t look jealous at all. “She wants to turn the whole building into her offices.”

  Andrew nodded and smiled at me.

  “She’s really nice,” I said. I hadn’t actually shown her the house. Another woman in my office had. “Are we still getting together tomorrow night?” I asked as casually as possible. Two dates in a row was rare.

  “Yeh-hes,” he said in a high falsetto. He kissed me hard and forced my mouth open wider than normal. He pressed his tongue into my mouth.

  A big peach overstuffed chair was across the street. It was missing its cushion but it still looked comfortable. In New York you never see a couch or a chair on the street with its cushions intact. You see bums carrying peach cushions off to their carts like ants carrying crumbs. Even though I would normally never touch anything on the street that was upholstered, this chair looked very inviting. I wanted to sit on Andrew’s lap in the chair and pretend we were in his apartment. I wanted to straddle him in that chair.

  “When was the last time you went to the dentist?” Andrew asked.

  For a second I was taken aback. That is the last question in the world anyone wants a date asking them. It’s almost worse than “Have you ever been tested?” I had been to the Bausches’ dentist not too long ago. When my husband and I started talking about getting a divorce, I wanted to be in perfect physical condition for our fights. I went to every kind of doctor. I went to massage therapists. I also got constant manicures and pedicures and wore exquisite bras and panties all the time. Once a salesgirl in a lingerie store asked me why I was buying all those things. “Are you going someplace special?” she asked. “I’m going to war,” I replied.

  “When was the last time?” Andrew said again.

  “Just a few months ago,” I said. “Why?”

  “I think you have a cavity.”

  I was horrified. “What?”

  “You have a cavity, you should go have it taken care of.” He kissed me again.

  “I don’t have a cavity,” I said. “I’ve never had a cavity.”

  He probed my mouth with his tongue. “You have one now. I can taste it, honey.”

  “Well, stop kissing me then.”

  “I don’t want to stop kissing you, I just want you to make a dentist appointment this week. I love your taste. And I love your smell.”

  He buried his face in my neck. A man walked past us and looked at us. I wished Jordan would walk by. I wished Jordan would walk by in her plastic shoes carrying her ugly canvas tote bag and we could have a big scene and put an end to this whole thing. Andrew could stay at my house that night and go get his dogs and his things in the morning. I would buy a toaster so I could make toast with his eggs. We had been kissing in that small alley for over an hour and only one man had passed us the whole time. The chances of Jordan walking down Minetta Lane at midnight were pretty slim.

  “Come on, let’s go upstairs and I’ll give you the rest of your checkup,” Andrew said.

  “I don’t think my insurance will cover it,” I said.

  The next day I was desperate to go to the dentist. I called the Bausches’ dentist at eight and got the answering service and then I called again at nine. “Dr. Blum has no appointments available today,” the receptionist said.

  “Please,” I said. “I really have to see him today.”

  She told me all the other days he was available.

  “I have to come in today,” I said again. “It’s an emergency.”

  “Are you in pain?”

  “It’s an emergency situation,” I said. “Why don’t I just come in and wait in case someone cancels?”

  “I’m sorry, there’s already a waiting list,” she said.
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  I went anyway and waited in the dentist’s office for most of the day, talking on the patient courtesy phone and reading articles in Glamour about kissing.

  Finally I was escorted to the chair. “Dr. Blum?” I asked, before I was even seated. “Is it possible to detect a cavity in someone else’s mouth by, you know, kissing?” I felt like a teenager.

  The dentist laughed. “I don’t usually perform a dental exam by kissing,” he said. “But I can if you want me to.”

  He seemed to think I was coming on to him. “I was just curious,” I said. “So, can you?”

  “No,” he said. “Of course not.”

  As he worked I closed my eyes and imagined he was Andrew.

  “I don’t know what the big emergency is,” he told me. “You have a cavity but it isn’t deep.”

  He smiled at me as if he were on to my little plan to come up with any flimsy excuse to see him again. He still didn’t have any curtains.

  He filled the cavity with an invisible white filling, and I sat patiently in the chair waiting for him to finish. “Now go home and kiss whoever you want,” the dentist said.

  That night Andrew lay on top of me kissing me. “How did you get an appointment so quickly?”

  “What appointment?” I asked. I had brushed my teeth as soon as I got home to get the dentist taste out of my mouth. I didn’t want him to know I’d been to the dentist.

  “You had your cavity filled. I’m proud of you. Open your mouth and let me see,” he said.

  “No,” I said, and clamped my mouth shut.

  “Come on, open up,” he said.

  I shook my head no like a little girl. I could feel him hard against my leg.

  “Open your mouth, like a good little girl,” he coaxed. Then he pinched my nose closed with his thumb and finger. I couldn’t breathe. I made noises of protest through my closed lips. Finally I was forced to open my mouth.

  He put his finger in my mouth and felt the tooth I had just had filled. “That’s what I do with my dogs when I want them to let go of a ball,” he said. He kissed me gently. “I love playing dentist chair with you.”

  “Dentist chair?” I said.

  “I meant Dentist,” he said. “Liv, we’re going to have so much fun when we’re married.”

  Suddenly the not being able to breathe episode of a few moments before began to leave my mind. “When are you going to leave Jordan?” I asked.

  He lay next to me, silent. “I really want to,” he said.

  “Then do.”

  “I can’t right now.”

  “Why not?” I asked, genuinely interested in what reason he was going to give tonight.

  “Jordan has found a lump in her breast.” Lie said it with reverence as if he were saying, “Jordan has won a Pulitzer Prize.”

  “Did she have a biopsy?” I asked, coolly.

  “Her doctors are taking care of it. She’s in good hands.”

  Yeah, yours, I thought.

  I didn’t say anything for a while. I had never considered Jordan’s breasts in all of this. I had never thought about what they looked like. I wondered if Andrew had discovered the lump the way he had discovered my cavity. Suddenly my cavity seemed like very small potatoes.

  “You’re not doing her any favors by staying with her,” I said.

  He sighed sadly. “Maybe you’re right. But I can’t leave her now with all of this happening. I can’t do that to her.”

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “It just wouldn’t be the right thing to do,” he said.

  “But I think it would be the right thing to do, Andrew. Sometimes a crisis like this can make a person strong. You should tell her the truth about us.”

  “If you think I should hurt her like that now when she’s going through this, then you have shit for blood,” he said.

  Who talked like that? Who said things like “shit for blood” in normal conversation? “I hope you’re joking,” I said. I couldn’t believe what he had just said. It sounded like something a mafioso would say before hacking off a thumb. “If you’re not joking, I think you should leave.”

  He got up, slid on his loafers, and walked out the door. Later that night he called me.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You and I are supposed to get married and have children. I know that. I can feel it. I feel like we’re meant to do that. And I know that by not leaving Jordan I’m interfering with the history of the world. We’re supposed to be together.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “Well, right now I’m going to go to sleep and tomorrow I have a big meeting.”

  “Do you want me or not?” I asked.

  “Yes, I want you. I love you.”

  “Then do something about it,” I said.

  “Honey, tell me what it will be like when we live together,” he said sleepily, demanding his bedtime story.

  “Well, you’ll come home every night after work and I’ll check through your pockets for phone numbers and lipstick-stained hankies and …”

  “We’ll need a big apartment.”

  “Yes, we’ll need room for the twenty-four-hour armed security guard I’ll have to hire to make sure you don’t bite me.”

  “Maybe we’ll even take over your husband’s apartment. Force him out and live there together.”

  “Yes.” I missed my apartment so much I hadn’t even let myself fantasize about living there again. And to live there with Andrew!

  “Why don’t you move in here in the meantime,” I said.

  “Liv, we’ll never make it in your tiny place. We have to wait until we have time to get a big apartment.”

  “I can’t wait that long,” I said, and hung up.

  24.

  MNTH-2-MNTH

  Every morning I scalded my hand from the steam of the teakettle and told myself that the next time I would use an oven mitt. I scalded my right hand first, and then I scalded my left. The steam was soft and pretty and harmless-looking. I turned off the only burner on my stove that worked. The kettle was shaped to look like a rooster. The oven mitt, with its price tags still attached, looked like a rabbit. I stood naked in my kitchen running cold water on my hands feeling like I was in the middle of an Aesop’s fable unable to find the moral. The slowest, stupidest, vainest animal. Certainly the one most easily fooled.

  I got to the Monday meeting twenty minutes early so I could get a bagel and a seat. There were only eight chairs around the conference table and twenty or thirty agents always attended and had to stand crowded into the corners of the room and spill out into the hall. If you sat you looked punctual and eager. If you stood you looked busy, too busy even to sit, as if at any moment you were expecting a call that would produce the offer that would close the deal that would get you into the “Millionaires Circle.” I usually missed the meeting altogether and came in at the very end with my hair wet.

  On the last Monday meeting of every month Kim handed out the ribbons, including a First Deal ribbon to new agents who had completed their first deals for the company. I was expecting my First Deal ribbon for a condo I sold to a fat woman after showing her twenty apartments in one weekend. She made us stop between every apartment for soup and hot chocolates. I had actually expected my ribbon the month before for the high-end rental I had done in Tribeca but Kim said they only gave out ribbons for sales, even though my commission for the rental had been as high as most sales. I didn’t push the issue. There had been a big holdup on getting the commission for the rental because I had accidentally left the certified check for $10,000 in the back of a cab. I had closed and received commissions for selling the architects’ loft and then selling them the house on Harrison Street, but that hadn’t counted because I had technically stolen them from Dale.

  Then I wasted three weeks showing apartments to a couple who owned three small dogs. All they talked about was their dogs. They brought the dogs to al
l the showings to make sure they responded well to the space. They ended up buying a $1.4 million loft from another broker in a building that didn’t allow dogs. “How could you do that?” I asked. The woman burst into tears. “We sent them to live with my parents. I’m so unhappy. The broker convinced us to put ourselves first,” she wailed.

  I had zero respect for people who sent their dogs to live with their parents. Violet had done that. Her dog had swallowed a used condom from her bedroom floor and she had to take him to the vet and spend a lot of money. Then she sent him to live with her parents in Texas but she still referred to him as “my dog.”

  In addition to wasting time with the dog couple, I was also spending night and day with Audrey and Noah Bausch. I was really beginning to despise them. They were my Moby Dick. I wanted Noah Bausch stuffed and mounted over my nonworking fireplace. Everyone was buying and selling except the Bausches. New York real estate was like a giant game of musical chairs. When the music stopped everyone grabbed an apartment but Noah Bausch.

  But now I had done a sale and I would get my ribbon. Some of the agents, like Carla Lerner, hadn’t gotten their First Deal ribbon yet, but most of them had. With all the ribbons pinned to the bulletin boards over everyone’s desks, the office looked like livestock stalls in a county fair. I thought it was the most ridiculous thing in the world but everyone else seemed so happy to get theirs. I wore a suit.

  In the second grade I got dressed up for a bake sale that was taking place in my school’s gymnasium at lunchtime. I wore a velvet skirt, a red-and-white-checked blouse, and Mary Janes. I felt excited about the bake sale. When I got to school a mean girl named Harriet said, “Look, Liv got dressed up for the bake sale,” and everyone laughed. I hoped nobody would think I got dressed up for my ribbon.

  I sat alone at the table and spread vegetable cream cheese on a bagel and bit into it. The cream cheese was crawling with onions that would give me bad breath all day. I put the plastic knife back in the cream cheese and continued to eat alone at the conference table as professionally as possible.

  “All agents to the conference room for a sales meeting,” Yvonne said over the PA. I sat up straighter in my seat. The agents piled in.