by Kirsten Koza
NIGEL ROTH
Cold London Summer
A tale of how sex changes everything.
STEPHANIE WAS 26 WHEN I MET HER IN LONDON. SHE WAS TALLER THAN any other girl I had dated and more attractive and more confident. She walked like a model because she was, and she conversed like an actress because she was that also. This was far too good to be true, but I didn’t really want to believe my own wisdom.
That first night we drank at a bar in Islington. Islington was the new West End (whatever that meant), and the bar was billed as trendy and “kicking.” Stephanie’s smile was not the first thing I noticed about her when she swaggered in. She wore a tight Lycra top. Her breasts had a perfect shape to them—not too full, with a slight bottom-heaviness that accentuated her nipples.
She sat and we said hello. She said I was handsome. I laughed and said she was beautiful. She was beautiful. In truth though, I was horny and she was stunning. We met in the middle out of politeness.
I ordered whiskey; she ordered Scotch. I drank slowly; she gulped greedily. I ran my fingers through my hair; she swung her head and blond-amber curls unfurled and regrouped. I missed a breath; she just smiled. I talked about India; she spoke of friends. I described my dreams; she listened, teared up, let her head fall to the left. I noticed men staring at her; she never took her eyes off of me. I was, I believe, in shock. She was just beginning to relax.
When I told her of my careless marriage, Stephanie stretched out her hand to hold mine. I had given her the cue, fed her the line. She had seized it. I looked at her hand; eye-to-eye would be too soon. She squeezed; I smiled.
“Another drink?” I asked.
“At my place,” Stephanie suggested.
The play was complete. The curtain fell as we walked to her shiny car, and I heard the audience roar as we drove north along St John Street.
Her small flat had complexities I could not have imagined. The kitchen was tiny and brand new. The table pulled out from a sidewall and a leg sprung menacingly out to support it. The cold tap was on the wrong side and the socket was underneath the table. The kettle was in the corner cupboard that could only open if the washing machine was pulled out first.
“They put it together so cheaply,” Stephanie explained, as she made coffee for us.
The milk, sugar and coffee—which were in long, round sachets with Café Noir written on the side—went in the cup first. Stephanie mixed them together and then poured in the water. The whole thing fizzed and foamed, and we took it to the living room.
“It’s only a small place,” Stephanie said, “but it’s mine.” I agreed, then quickly added that it was good to have your own place.
We sat on good furniture with strange patterns. We drank the foamy coffee with our knees together. Stephanie began to tell me about her acting career. I listened, intent on keeping my stare at eye level. I became aroused just listening to her. When she spoke, her mouth would stay open after she released the last word. Just a few seconds enough for my imagination.
“I started young,” she said. “They say that’s a good way to get into acting, right? Start young?”
“I’ve heard that,” I said, hoping to sound sincere. I was sincere, just distracted.
“My first role.” Stephanie pointed to a picture in her album. She’d brought it down while I was trying to turn around in the bathroom without having to back out. She was 12 in the photo. She looked older to me. She was playing Sinbad. Her pirate’s bandana and high boots looked authentic. She made a good boy.
We sat together and looked through the album, from cover to cover. After the pirate, Stephanie appeared in a play about drug abuse called Getting the Needle. She was “twenty-two” she said “and a few months.” She smiled as she anticipated my question.
“I took a break from school and college, you know,” she laughed, and kissed me. I kissed her too. Her lips were strong and full, she pressed hard. Her tongue was clumsy.
After, she said, “Well, that didn’t take long, did it? You’re a cheeky one!” I smiled at the thought. It hadn’t taken very long at all. A few hours. My actress.
“Do you want to see more modeling stuff?” I did, but I also wanted to make love to her.
“Sure, show me,” I said.
That called for more coffee and a cigarette for Stephanie.
“They’re only mild. I don’t smoke much. Just...you know.” I truly didn’t but I nodded.
She held her cigarette like my grandfather used to, between her thumb and first finger, and she turned it to face her after each drag. What a mix this girl was. She drank Scotch and held her cigarettes like a gangster, and yet she acted and modeled professionally. And, she made frothy coffee, which I sipped as she showed me page after page of lingerie and swimsuit magazine tear-outs.
“No more photos,” she said, as she closed the book.
“They were great.”
“You just wanted to see me with my kit off, didn’t you?” Of course I did, who wouldn’t?
“No, of course not, but you are beautiful.”
“You think so?” Stephanie said, dragging the last from the Embassy No 1.
“Yes,” I said, almost laughing. She was incredibly beautiful. And she kissed me again.
“Do you want to have breakfast with me?” she asked.
The sun caught the mirror and made me look pale. But I couldn’t help smiling. “My actress,” I said softly and laughed at my good fortune.
“Coffee here,” Stephanie called from the tiny kitchen. Sexy voice, I thought. A little guttural.
We sat by her window and looked out at Temple Fortune high street on a Saturday morning. For a moment I pretended I was alone. Not just alone, but lonely. A straggler. With no day ahead of me. A whole Saturday. I savored the despair, knowing I was alive.
Stephanie sipped her coffee. She slurped the froth and licked her lips. Her hair was beautifully messy, my actress in the morning.
“I’ve got something to tell you,” she said, without warning. No facial expression, just a confessional tilt of her head.
“What is it?” I put my empty coffee mug to my lips to diffuse the appearance of caring too much about what she might tell me. Already I cared too much.
“It’s not too bad. I just need to tell you.” I resisted wondering. I focused hard, gave a look of concern, rather than worry. Not worry, fear. Don’t take away my actress, I thought.
“When I was young, I used a lot of drugs,” she said, pronouncing drugs, “da-rugs” as if sounded out for a child. I nodded, feeling slightly nauseous and lightheaded. “I’m clean now. But it was a bad time. A few bad years, you know what I mean?”
I searched. Why did no answer seem right? My silence had been too long.
“Do you still like me?”
Of course I liked her. God, I almost loved her. Loved her?
“Shit happens,” I said. I had never taken a drug in my life. Unless you include aspirin. “As long as you’re clean now, that’s what counts. You are here and you are you.”
“Well, it took a while to get here. I was out of it for about five years. Well, a bit longer really. On the streets for a lot of the time.”
She seemed quite blasé about it, so I imitated tone. “Made you who you are.” Stupid comment.
“Yep, that’s for sure,” Stephanie said, and we finished our frothy coffee holding hands and watching the sun bleach the Saturday shoppers.
That night we made love. It started in the kitchen at my hotel room in Knightsbridge. Kissing and holding each other’s hair, then laughing and pulling our t-shirts off. Revealing my actress: her slim, smooth body, her long legs, her dolphin tattoo, her exquisite breasts, her firm nipples. I took every part of her in my mouth and savored her sweetness. I used my tongue to explore her and she caressed me firmly with strong hands. At some point, a point I can never guess at or preempt, she guided me into her and breathed in sharply as I entered. She bucked once against me, began to moan in that
same moment and ran her nails up my back, and I felt the skin tear from me, and she came, screaming; long, deep, guttural screams, and closed her eyes, and smiled, and held me tight.
It was only later I realized I had not reached orgasm. She had, in a matter of minutes. So quickly that I had felt slow and somehow less excited. I was excited and yet I had been fine to let it go. I felt strong, masculine, and proud, like a quiet hero. I was my own audience, and I felt I played my part well.
Our sex was always like that, fast and strong. Almost manly. I thought I would raise the subject over whiskey in the pub that evening. But, sensing my question, or at least my curiosity, Stephanie preempted me.
“I need to tell you something else about me. Something I’m not proud of, but it happened, and like you said, it made me.” I braced myself, that numb, nauseated feeling returning.
“I don’t know how to say this,” she mumbled. “Well, it’s not that bad, I suppose.”
Tell me now, I thought, but I nodded nonchalantly.
“I had sex with another girl for this politician. You know, just fumbling around in front of him. He never joined in.” She sipped her Scotch.
I smiled, I think out of nervousness or out of shock, or out of anger. All three maybe. “That’s it?” I asked, faking surprise at how insignificant it seemed. It worked.
“Well, I did it a few times. You know, for a few months. Couple of times a week. We were just pretending really, but he liked it.”
“Pretending?”
“Yeah, you know, bit of kissing, licking, fingering. Nothing really.” She downed her Scotch in one gulp. “He paid for my car and the flat, silly sod. I’ll never do it again. You know. It was a one off.”
A one off, I repeated in my head. This girl was a one off. The feeling of nausea had not passed. I couldn’t finish my whiskey. I thought of walking out, leaving, going north to The Lake District, clearing my head. But then again, it was fairly harmless, wasn’t it? And a car and a flat isn’t a bad reward. What would I do to get those things if I had to? Who was I to judge?
“Well,” Stephanie asked. She had been talking to me. I had been so deep in my emotional spiral, I hadn’t heard her. “Want to play some pool or not?”
“Sure, yes, why not?” I managed. I ordered more whiskey and played pool with my actress.
I returned from New York the following Saturday morning and had dinner at Stephanie’s that evening. It was good to see her, tall and beautiful and barefoot, her nipples showing through her cotton tank top. We made love in the bath, and we lay on the bed with a cool breeze blowing against our nakedness.
“Do you like New York?” Stephanie asked.
“Yes, I do. It suits me very well.”
“Would you live there?” She had read my mind.
“I would. I dream more when I’m there.”
“I missed you.”
I held her. She had become softer since I last felt her body, smoother.
“I know you’re going to think I’m crazy,” she said, “but there’s something I need to ask you.” Ask me sounded less threatening than tell me. Or was I just becoming desensitized to Stephanie’s heart-wrenching secrets?
“Tell me anything,” I said boldly, hoping Stephanie would tell me nothing at all.
“Well,” she started in that odd kindergarten voice again, “before I met you, I was with someone, someone who’s a girl.” She paused for my reply.
“A girl,” I said genuinely relieved.
“Bridget,” she said.
“Bridget.”
“Yes. I was with her for three years.”
“O.K.,” I said, “that’s fine.”
“You don’t mind?”
“No. Why should I?”
“Well,” she began, with the kid voice, “I’m still seeing her.”
“You’re still seeing her?”
“Yeah. Only now and again.”
“But you’re seeing me.”
“Yeah. But it’s different with Bridget. Not better,” she added quickly, “just different, you know.”
I think I sighed audibly.
“Are you O.K. with that?” Stephanie asked, her voice trembling slightly. What could I say? I preached openness. I celebrated sexual diversity. I argued with everyone for experimentation and empirical evolution.
“Of course I’m O.K.,” I said, and I was.
“Really?”
“Absolutely,” I said.
“Good, because I want you to meet her.”
It struck me for the first time in our short but loving three-month affair, that I might be the victim of subtle manipulation. But why? To what possible end? I was dating a model and actress, a beautiful woman who came every time I fucked her and who wanted me to meet her female lover. Where was the downside?
“She’s on her way. She’ll be here in a few minutes. You’re going to love her.”
I couldn’t think of a downside.
Bridget was as beautiful and as amber-blond as Stephanie. She was shorter, and had a fuller figure. More womanly, less androgynous. Stephanie said Bridget’s ass was gorgeous, and Bridget bent over and proved it. Bridget said she loved Stephanie’s neck and kissed and held it as we drank Scotch. Stephanie told me how Bridget could spend hours between her legs, and she spread herself as if to invite a demonstration.
This was pure sex. In its purest form. Lust. A raw, desperate longing that I immediately envied. I watched as they found reasons to touch each other, pinch each other, and caress each other. I was losing my actress, if, that is, I ever had her. As I watched Bridget and Stephanie kiss, I knew I never did.
When I came back to the living room with a glass of water, they were gone. I listened for their voices and could hear them in the bedroom. Breathless whispers, moans, and hard smacking lips. I imagined two boats in a harbor crashing together with the tide. I heard them moaning and stretching and I heard light pats against their skin, and yelps as they enjoyed each other.
I put my water down and took my jacket from the closet. I tied my laces and left the glass in Stephanie’s tiny kitchen. I turned and walked to the door. I was leaving the warmth of the flat for the cold evening air. Leaving the candlelight for the dark night. I listened for a moment longer to the women kissing and moaning and whispering their love.
“I love you so much,” Stephanie was panting, “do you still love me?”
I smiled at her insecurity. This stunning woman. This model. This tall, slender goddess.
“Of course I do,” Bridget answered in her sweet melodic voice, “as much now as when you were a fella.”
I stood. Very still. The door ajar. The cold air rushing in, keeping me from blacking out as the blood rushed from my head. My heart thumped. My eyes were staring but seeing nothing. I thought: my actress. I closed the door behind me and stepped into the honesty of a cold London summer.
Nigel Roth was born in London, England, and grew up wherever his family found work. His father was a journeyman dreamer, and his mother managed the office at an old-age home. He moved to Canada when he was two years old, while his father headed north to the oil rigs above the Brooks Range, until the family moved back to England and to a series of homes across the country. Nigel attended London Guildhall University and Birkbeck College in London.
VANESSA VAN DOREN
Going Feral
in Filoha
The stool collector: a monkey-business researcher has to hand over her own business.
“ARE YOU SICK? WERE YOU HAVING DIARRHEA?!” MAT YELLED AS I came slinking back from the camp’s toilet.
Fuuuuck. “Err…what?” I mumbled. Apparently my plan to unobtrusively drift over to the toilet for the twelfth time that day on the pretense of “admiring the view” wasn’t all that subtle.
“Tell me your symptoms and I’ll look them up!” Mat said, opening our worn copy of Where There is No Doctor and rifling through the chapters with his long fingers.
Some pe
ople ask for their coworker’s opinion on the latest Game of Thrones episode and others ask about her exploding bowel situation. While listening to Office Manager Kenneth salivate over his favorite King’s Landing brothel scene does get uncomfortable, my day-to-day workplace mortification hit a fiery new zenith while I was in Ethiopia for fieldwork.
I had been living in a one-man tent in a remote outpost of Awash National Park for the past month, collecting genetic samples (read: monkey poop) from the hamadryas baboons I was studying. And it had become recently clear that there was something terribly wrong with my GI tract.
At first things went great. I’d been rising before the sun with the project manager, Mat, and research assistant, Teklu, walking out to the baboons’ sleeping cliff, and following them from sunup to when they settled in for sleep at a new cliff. It was wonderful to begin each day like that: hearing the baboons grunting and murmuring as they awoke; arriving at the top of the cliff just as the sun began to peek over the horizon; watching it slowly warm and color the land below. I was walking up to 20 kilometers a day in searing heat and navigating acacia thorns that ripped at my skin and clothes. I finished each day by rejuvenating my dirty, sweaty, exhausted self in the hot springs. I was sunburnt, never quite clean, and covered in festering mosquito bites. And I felt great—I felt invincible. I was impressed with how adaptable and resilient my body was proving to be.
But at some point, I got overconfident. I had decided to toughen my body up (inside and out) by doing everything the Ethiopians did, including eating anything put in front of me. Sometimes I wasn’t even sure what I’d eaten until after it was already down the hatch, like the time Mat invited me to try “the best part of the goat.”
“What do you think?” he’d said, mirth bubbling just below the surface of his sharp blue eyes.