“A new chess set?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Did we need one?”
“We needed this one.” He drops the box to the bedroom floor and unlaces his boots, tossing them in front of the fireplace to dry out.
“What’s so special about it?” I move toward the edge of the bed where Adam sits, unbuttoning his shirt. The box is a bothersome obstacle on the floor between us, and I step over it to get to him.
“You’ll see.” He flashes that wicked grin that I love.
I straddle Adam’s lap and rock against him, communicating my desire. I unbutton his jeans and stroke him through the parted fabric. “Love me,” I whisper against his ear.
“I do.” Adam pulls the sheet away. It hangs in loose folds to the floor and his hands cover me.
“Fuck me.” I bite gently at his bottom lip, no longer shy about saying what I want.
Adam eases me from his lap and onto the bed, pulling me beneath him. I watch his eyes, knowing what I’ll see reflected there.
“I will,” he answers, his mouth descending to mine. “But first, I’ll teach you how to play chess.”
A LOVE DRIVE-BY
Susan St. Aubin
MONICA’S LATEST BOYFRIEND THINKS SHE LIVES alone. He has no idea there’s someone living in her closet, not a roommate, really, but a woman Monica thinks of as a fellow sufferer on the road of life. “Chandra,” Monica whispers, feeling the syllables slide off her tongue. Surely nobody’s parents could come up with such a name, but Chandra says hers did.
“It’s Sanskrit, for daughter higher than the moon and stars,” she says in the bored tones of someone who has been repeating this information all her life—but Monica is still impressed.
“I love the way it sounds like Sandra, but not so ordinary,” she says.
The first time Monica saw Chandra was through the peephole on her front door, a view that pushed Chandra’s beautiful face forward, her curls framing her head like a dark halo. Monica had no idea who this bell-ringer was, so she opened the door cautiously, leaving the chain hooked. It was like looking into a mirror that reflected an image of what she wanted to be—a slender girl wearing nothing but a silky tank top and matching jogging shorts, her hair pulled on top of her head in a scrunchy, bouncing on her toes to cool down from her run.
“Hi,” she said breathlessly. “You’re Monica, right? You don’t know me, but a mutual friend told me where you live. We have a lot of the same connections in D.C. I’m Chandra.”
Monica took the chain off and opened the door a bit wider. Of course she knew that name from the newspapers, from television, from radio, and knew the hell of having everyone know all about what you once thought was your private life.
Chandra stopped moving and pulled the scrunchy off her head, shaking her curls.
“I read you’d been missing for three weeks, but you don’t look like you spent all that time running from Washington to New York,” Monica said.
“Of course not. I’ve been traveling, staying with people I meet along the way. I’m no long-distance marathon runner, but since I’m running away, I thought I’d actually run the last couple of blocks.”
“I’m starting a new life here, too,” said Monica, pushing on the door. “I’m letting D.C. go. That’s something I’ve learned in therapy. I’m sure I don’t know whoever it is who told you where I am.”
Chandra put out her hand to hold the door open. “I met your guy Bill once,” she said. “We’ve got more in common than you think.”
Caught off guard, Monica relaxed her hold on the door enough to let Chandra into her living room, where all the windows were open to the sun.
“You didn’t…” she began, but Chandra immediately laughed and shook her head.
“I have my own man, I don’t need yours.” Chandra blinked, as though used to dark rooms.
In the bright light, Monica could see that her well-made-up eyes were slightly red around the rims, with white cover-up no doubt hiding dark circles underneath. Monica knew the signs.
“So, Gary told you to take a hike?” she asked.
“No, I just took off. Obviously. I’d had about enough.” She sank to the couch and held her head in her hands while she sobbed. Monica didn’t need to hear the story, which she knew by heart from her own life.
“So where’s your luggage?” asked Monica.
With a dismissive wave of her hand, Chandra answered, “I left everything behind me, except these keys.” She threw her key ring onto the coffee table with a clank. “The last thing I wanted to keep,” she said. “I’m not going back. I don’t need any of that old stuff.”
But Chandra did need a place to hide, some place where even her best friends wouldn’t find her, so Monica gave up her closet, the one the size of a small room that was in fact being used as a baby’s bedroom when she’d first looked at the apartment. There was a smaller closet in her bedroom across the hall so it was no trouble to make room for Chandra by removing coats, and boxes of stuff she hadn’t unpacked yet. She even bought a futon, something she’d been meaning to get for guests, and curtains for the small window. She took out the clothes bars, except for one so Chandra could hang a few things, and put in a four-drawer dresser and an extra bedside table she had. Until the room was ready, Chandra slept on Monica’s couch; Monica let no one in, telling even her boyfriend that she’d gone to Miami for a couple of weeks.
Lying on the futon in her new room, Chandra begins to spill her secrets, most of which are common knowledge by now, but Monica notices how Chandra avoids watching the news or reading the papers, and knows how rude it would be to tell her that everyone’s already heard what she’s telling. Monica lies beside her, like girls do at a slumber party.
“He shaved his whole body,” says Chandra, clutching a pink flowered pillow she carried in from Monica’s couch. “We had this ritual before sex—we’d have a bath together and shave each other all over. He even shaved my crotch, and I shaved his. He had a thing about hair, hated it anywhere but on his head. He’d had hair transplants and I used to tease him that he should use his pubic hair there, and his underarm hair, but he really didn’t think that was funny. Actually, he didn’t think much of anything was funny.
“You know, all that smooth skin, it was like making love to a snake.” Chandra shudders. “I should have known. Especially after he talked me into getting a Brazilian bikini wax where they even do your pubes and your butt, yanking every last hair so it won’t grow back for months. The only really nasty thing he ever said to me was that Jews are just too hairy down there. But even then he was apologetic, like it was his fault.”
Monica sighs. “Yeah, both of us should have known, especially when they pretended to be so nice. Excessive politeness is always a bad sign.”
“Right. That’s why I came to you. Who else would understand? I mean, everyone knows what you went through with…”
“Yeah, but I’m so over him now.” Monica takes a deep, meditative breath. “There was a time I thought—well, you know what I thought—that the big creep would leave his wife, quit his job, abdicate just for love of me. Me!” She laughs, but Chandra, who isn’t ready to laugh yet, can only manage a weak smile when she whispers, “My guy still might, if I tell him.”
“Tell him what?” Monica is caught short.
“That I’m pregnant with his child,” Chandra whispers.
“No!” says Monica. “Now you’re really trapped.”
“Don’t say that!” shouts Chandra.
Monica shushes her because someone might hear and call the police since she’s still supposed to be on vacation in Miami.
“I’m happy,” Chandra says with a shiver as she cradles Monica’s pillow in her arms. “I’m so happy, but you’re the only one I can tell. I was going to tell my aunt, but she can’t keep her mouth shut. I mean, I love her, she’s like my best friend, but I couldn’t let her tell my parents. They might want me to have an abortion, so I have to wait until it’s born. I can’t kill his chi
ld. If I can’t have him, I want his baby!”
“Don’t be stupid,” says Monica. “What are you going to do with it?”
Chandra sits up, shaking her silky curls. “I always told him I wanted a child, I wanted us to be together as a family, but he said he already had a family and wasn’t interested in starting another one.”
Monica puts an arm around Chandra’s slender shoulders. “I guess both our guys already had what we wanted—real lives, with homes and kids. We were just love drive-bys for them. They shot us through the heart, and sped off. The big creep and the little creep, that’s what they are.”
“What’s left for us, then?” Chandra pounds the pillow with balled fists, raising a cloud of dust. Because of the hours she spent decorating the closet, Monica hasn’t kept up with the housework.
Life in Monica’s closet isn’t as cramped as you’d think. It’s very spacious, with a window that frames a view of the city lights—but Chandra only opens the curtains at night, so she doesn’t know what it looks like during the day. There’s an overhead light, which is too bright, so Monica has had a wall lamp installed, with a soft pink bulb. The bathroom is next to the closet. Chandra is free to roam the apartment on weekdays when Monica is out working. Chandra isn’t sure what she does, but Monica says she’s self-supporting, which she encourages Chandra to become when this is over. Monica’s involved with fashion, designing and selling purses or something—but Chandra doesn’t pay much attention because she’s focused now on what grows inside her.
On nights when Monica sleeps alone, Chandra doesn’t have to hide, so she wanders around the apartment thinking of her man. He hasn’t lived with his wife for years because his work keeps him in Washington, where she was until she lost her internship and couldn’t find another job, and what did such a powerful member of congress do about that? She doesn’t want to go there. It was different with Monica and Bill—he lived with his wife and he always worked behind the scenes to find jobs for Monica, even if they were jobs she didn’t want. Chandra looks behind her own scene and finds nothing but dangling, empty strings. She’s been cut free. The play is over. Time to move on. She moves around the apartment, running her hands over her still-flat belly. She wonders what’s inside—a real baby, or something as horribly smooth as a snake, ready to devour her from within.
“I don’t see how you do it,” says Monica over a breakfast of low-fat yogurt with strawberry jam on cornflakes. “I could eat nothing and never be as skinny as you. I’d kill for your body.”
Chandra thinks she’d kill for Monica’s breasts—that cleavage, that sensual mouth chewing the cornflakes. Every move she makes is sexy. She’s glad her man never met Monica. She runs a hand through her curls, feeling their spring and bounce. Her hair, at least, is better than Monica’s, which looks frizzy and bushy in the morning before she washes it, taming it with half a bottle of cream rinse until it’s slick and smooth.
“What are you?” asks Monica. “Three months? Is there really room for a baby in there?”
Chandra helps herself to a bowl of cornflakes.
“You should see a doctor,” says Monica.
“I did,” Chandra replies, “and everything’s okay.”
“You need regular visits,” Monica tells her. “My dad’s a physician, so I know these things.”
“So’s my father,” says Chandra, a catch in her voice. “I know how to take care of myself.”
“Is he an ob-gyn?”
“No, an oncologist.”
“No kidding—mine too. Doctors of death. What do they know about birth? To them, everything’s cancer.”
“That’s not true!” exclaims Chandra. “My dad cures people. Cancer doesn’t have to be fatal.”
“Life doesn’t have to be fatal,” Monica answers, “but it usually is. Listen, my boyfriend knows this guy who’s an ob-gyn, an older guy, very discreet. He used to do abortions back when they were totally illegal. I mean, even if you don’t want an abortion, you can trust this guy not to say a word, whatever you decide to do.”
“No, no one must know about this,” says Chandra.
“So, what about the doctor you already saw? He knows, doesn’t he?”
Chandra looks down at her cornflakes.
“Ha! You never even saw one, did you? Look, I’ll ask Mike for this guy’s number. I won’t say you’re here, I won’t tell him anything—except that it’s not for me, of course.”
Mike is just one of Monica’s boyfriends, the one she calls the current one. She’s trying to diversify, as well as train herself away from older, married men. She recommends her program to Chandra, but Chandra, peeking out of a crack in the closet door into Monica’s open bedroom door, is not impressed.
Mike, an obsessive tennis player with a preference for night games in the heat of summer, usually arrives at Monica’s apartment around eleven, dripping with sweat, his thick blond hair held off his forehead by a blue bandana. When Monica opens the front door, she shrieks and giggles for reasons Chandra can’t see, then wrestles him down the hall and into the shower, where things become strangely quiet, except for the sound of running water. Once Chandra went into the bathroom and saw through the glass shower door that Monica was on her knees while Mike stood, his raised arms gripping the shower head.
Mike doesn’t notice much—not the extra glass on Monica’s sink, not the extra bottles of shampoo and cream rinse on the bathroom windowsill or the second razor on the side of the tub, a green one next to Monica’s pink. Chandra wonders if they ever shave each other in there. She misses the shaving ritual she once thought was so weird, and thinks about it whenever she shaves her legs. She had Monica buy her a green razor because Gary’s was black, and she wants to be similar, yet different. She’s letting her pubic hair grow back, and is surprised at how smooth it is after the wax job.
With her closet door open a crack, she has a clear view of Monica’s bed, but mostly what she sees is Monica’s ass as she bends over the supine Mike, who just lies there groaning. That seems to be all they do. No wonder Monica is so dismissive of him in the morning, as she thoughtfully spoons cornflakes past her swollen lips.
“I think guys aren’t worth the trouble,” she says. “I’d rather just earn my own money, and take care of myself for sex.”
Taking care of herself in any sense is a strange concept for Chandra, who wants above all to be wanted. What good are your own fingers if they don’t love you? What good is the vibrator you buy, like buying time with a prostitute? What good, for that matter, is peddling purses for a living? Chandra is ambitious, not so much for money as for pride. She wants to be more than someone’s wife. Her internship in D. C. was supposed to be the beginning of her career as a lawyer, then a judge, perhaps all the way to the Supreme Court, with her man supporting her goals along with his own.
Monica has plans, too. One hot Saturday afternoon in August, while they lie on Monica’s bed to catch a breeze from her open window, she says, “I have a design concept—a vibrating purse. Listen, it’s obvious: you hold your purse on your lap, right? In restaurants, on buses and planes. You have everything you need inside this bag—but also, you have satisfaction whenever you want.”
“What kind of satisfaction is that?” Chandra giggles uneasily. “A purse instead of a man?”
“Listen,” says Monica. “A vibrator may break down, but it’ll never break your heart. It won’t make comments about your body, or refuse to leave its wife for you, or make you have an abortion, or even make you need an abortion. It’ll never get you in the news, and you won’t have to fix it breakfast. Let me introduce you to one of my favorites.”
She reaches under her bed and pulls out a long rod with a soft rubber ball stuck to one end.
“What do you do with that thing?” Chandra squeals.
Monica laughs. “No, it doesn’t go inside. God, you’re so penile.” She places the end with the soft ball between Chandra’s thighs and presses the switch on the shaft.
Chandra sucks in her breath
. “Oh,” she says. “Oh! Turn it off.”
But Monica follows her as she tries to twist away. “Oh, please,” says Chandra, pushing the vibrator away with her hands while her hips and belly still thrust against it. “I can’t take it!” She’s breathing like she was the day she ran up to Monica’s door. “I don’t think I want to do this now,” she says, glaring at Monica.
“That’s okay,” Monica answers. “But you can borrow this any time you want. I keep it under my bed. You can try the other ones I have there, too.”
Bob the fireman is another one of Monica’s boyfriends, but he’s married so he’s not part of the program. Chandra watches through the cracked closet door while Bob carries Monica into the bedroom. Sometimes he even wears his red fireman’s hat, while Monica cries, “Ooooh—save me!” Bob carries her like she weighs nothing at all. Chandra is impressed by the muscles rippling under his thin white cotton T-shirt. He always closes the bedroom door, but Chandra can hear the buzz of the vibrator, and Monica’s low-pitched growls of pleasure.
“Politicians suck,” Monica says the next morning, her eyes half closed. “Actually, they don’t suck, which is more often the problem. Except for…” Her eyes seem focused on something beyond the apartment walls. “They’re basically all afraid of losing—their wives, their families, their jobs, the next election. I only date real people now. Single, if possible.” She sighs, as she always does after a night with Bob. “Of course, the best are already married.”
Chandra nods. “I was tired of little boys by the time I was fifteen. That’s when I started smoking. I’d light up a cigarette, and all the little boys would go away. Then I started meeting men.”
“Yeah, I used to smoke, but I never inhaled. It was just for show. Do you think our mothers did any better than us, marrying doctors like they were supposed to? Mine ended up divorcing him.”
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