Love Monkey

by Kyle Smith

  The German has spent these days doing the following: watching the news, reading the news, discussing the news, attending memorial services, lighting candles, writing heartfelt letters to the Times, and calling me, frequently, to ask if I’m okay. Never once does she mention the supreme charitable act she could perform that would hugely improve the morale of a New Yorker, and all she’d have to do is come over and take a shower with me. Much better than schlepping supplies, no?

  “You all right?” I say on the phone.

  “I don’t know,” she says. There is a wistful tone to her voice, though, and if I can’t get lustful, I’ll take wistful. Maybe when wist grows up it gets a tattoo and a naughty piercing.

  There must be something happier to talk about.

  “Hey,” I say, for no reason at all. “When is your birthday?”

  “Uh, tomorrow?”

  I realize you’re supposed to get this knowledge committed to paper as soon as you start seeing someone. On the other hand, if you don’t know, you can’t screw it up, with the Scarily Expensive Gift or the Lamely Chosen Trifle that shows lack of interest or the Wrong Color Gift that shows lack of attention to detail. Birthdays are a deal breaker for girls, no question about it. When was the last time you heard a guy say, “Oh, I had to dump her. She got me a Gap gift certificate for my birthday. Talk about a Weirdly Impersonal Gift!”

  I put down my spy novel and pick up something far more difficult to master: a stack of Randy s. I turn to the sex pages. Okay, that’s most of them, but specifically the how-to guides. This is because of the vague sense that all my life I’ve been doing It wrong. Randy will set me straight. Randy knows all.

  After a few hours of devoted study, I take the train down to Midtown. Stop by work. See if they need any help. The Toad is on the Desk.

  “You workin’ today?” he says, holding a phone in one hand and chopsticks in the other. His hair is writhing on his head. It looks fake but rewrite rumor has it that it’s actually real.

  “Not supposed to.”

  “I didn’t hear that. Take a seat. Louise’s got some stuff to dump.”

  “What’s that?” I say, nodding at his desk. There’s a weird little wooden tray with a thin layer of sand. There’s a miniature bush and a little rake. The sand is immaculate.

  “Tom, please. We need you to translate Louise. She’s all excited.”

  I extract the who-what-when-where-why out of the hoarse gibberish our third-string City Hall reporter Louise has gathered after following the mayor around all day and rewrite a couple of Reuters items. Around twelve I walk over to shoot the shit with the Toad. He’s raking sand placidly, arranging every grain.

  “Nice dollhouse,” I say.

  “It’s a bonsai garden,” he says. “Keeps me sane.”

  “Too late,” I say.

  “You hear about Max?” he says.

  “No, what?” I say.

  “He’s going to the News. I did not tell you this.”

  “Why?”

  “Remember that fight he had with Cronin last week? When they were screaming at each other and telling each other they didn’t know shit about newspapers and told each other to suck each other’s cock?”

  “The one on Monday?”

  “No, the one on Wednesday. Anyway, apparently Rutledge-Swope heard the whole thing.”

  Tyrone Rutledge-Swope is known to call in from his yacht or his jet or his Hollywood bungalow several times a day. The guy owns half a dozen of the biggest newspapers on the planet, plus a network and a movie studio, and still he reads every smudgy caption of ours. We’re his baby.

  “The big boss was here?” I say.

  “No, he was on the phone. One of the copykids had him, was trying to get Max’s attention but she couldn’t. She should have put Rutledge-Swope on hold. But she’s new. So Rutledge-Swope heard the fight. Anyway, he told Max to pack his bags. He said he’s the only one allowed to call Cronin a shithouse bitch.”

  “You say that with a distinct twinkle,” I say.

  “Cronin called me in for a chat,” he says. “Looks like Claudius takes over a week from Monday.”

  “The drooling idiot,” I say. “Did I mention how fine you look in your Sansabelts today?”

  “You’re the best hack I have,” he says. “Don’t leave town, I may have some plans for you.”

  “Aye aye, Claudius,” I say.

  Monday, September 24

  I’m done with work for the day but Rollo is looming over me brandishing the Times. “Know why they did This?” he says. “Skirt! Guaranteed each other seventy black-eyed virgins in heaven!”

  It’s true, to a point. In the writings they left behind, they described heaven as a place sounding a lot like the Playboy Mansion. Everything men do, even This, can be traced to the need to get action.

  “So what’s that tell you?” Rollo says. “We were hit by virgins. Virgins, all of them! Who else’s idea of cosmic sex involves a virgin, except another virgin?”

  I’m beginning to feel like a black-eyed virgin myself when I leave the office. Outside, summer is on the gurney, wheezing and coughing. It’s calling its lawyers and signing its will. It’s already survived three days longer than it was supposed to, and autumn needs the bed.

  Get a train to Brooklyn. It’s a complicated borough to begin with: the subway map is merely theoretical, a starting point for the endless hidden agenda of breakdowns, reroutings, and service interruptions (Need to polish 100 yards of rail? Shut down ten miles of track.) that define Brooklyn living. Then there are the changes wrought by the attack: entire subway tunnels have been crushed. I wind up missing my stop and taking the super-express train to an obscure cranny of Brooklyn. It takes me half an hour to retrace the path back to Williamsburg.

  Billyburg. Boho heaven. Sidewalk anarchists, PhD waitresses, organic-vegetarian soup kitchens, coffeehouse Commies, the Feminists That Time Forgot. Give it up for the twenty-six-year-old hipsters whose trust funds free them to live their lives in quotation marks, faithful parishioners at the church of irony, people who moved to Brooklyn because they’re so downtown that downtown wasn’t downtown enough for them. Even the dogs seem vaguely political. All those newspaper articles written by imported-car-buying white people about how much they hate oppressive genocidal imperialist globalist white people? They’re written here.

  I’m pushing my way through a crowd of men and women dressed as if it’s always sophomore year (identical unisex jeans, chunky glasses, T-shirts with racing stripes) to where the German awaits prettily with daisies woven in her hair. She’s at an outdoor table, surrounded by her friends.

  “Hi!” she says.

  I’m not sure what our policy on PDAs is so I go in for the cheek kiss.

  “I got these for you,” I say, handing over a bouquet I bought for Julia before I found out that she won’t be back in the office until Wednesday.

  “Gorgeous!” Liesl says.

  There are balloons and a cake on the table. The German is chattering excitedly, introducing me to everyone. Some of them I have met before. Shake their hands. Shake, shake. People rearrange themselves a bit so the German and I can sit next to each other. I like that. Automatic boyfriend proximity. Which also means there is at least one side of me flanking someone I actually know.

  On the other side are a couple of friends of the German. We’re talking about how to seduce a woman.

  “It has to be something specific,” says Conchita, a grad student in Postmodern Mexican Feminist Narrative. Or something. “Like, ‘You have a beautiful spine,’ ” she says.

  “Did someone say that to you?” asks Malcolm, the multiethnic bond analyst who holds three passports, two of them from strange and terrible lands.

  “Yes!” Conchita giggles.

  Malcolm and I share a glance.

  “Did it work?” I say.

  “Kind of!” she says. “But only for a while.”

  Never once did I tell Julia specifically that she had a beautiful spine. I thought it was imp
lied.

  “Where does it end, though?” I say. “What if he tells you you have beautiful nostrils? Are you buying?”

  Suddenly I’m pelted with something. I’m under attack!

  It’s some kind of crepe-paper party favor you blow on. As you do so, the streamer unfurls and flies at the target.

  “You just got your first blow job from me, honey!” the German says brightly. Loud ly.

  I flash shades of scarlet and crimson. I can’t believe she just told a table full of people that she has never given me a blow job. Actually, I would not have guessed the words were in her vocabulary.

  “What’s gotten into you?” I say. “Besides super-sized German beers?”

  She just smiles, takes another sip.

  As embarrassed as I am, I’m thinking, Must get some more of this brew into her. There’s no telling what naughty little fräuleins can get up to when the lederhosen come off. If she can speak the words, imagine what else her mouth can get up to.

  I’m blowing up balloons. We bat them around the table. Bat, bat. Hooray! We’re so wacky!

  The German’s wound-one-turn-too-tight friend Nora bats one back at me like a volleyball player. It hits me on the nose with an amusing pop.

  “Aggggh!” screams Nora.

  “It’s all right, I’m okay,” I say. I touch my nose. “I’m not hemorrhaging or anything.”

  “No!” she says. “My ring!”

  Great sentimental value, this ring. It’s not a wedding ring: it was a cheap costume thing given to her by her big sister. Apparently, it was a size too big. Make that her dumb sister. We move chairs and tables aside, get down on our hands and knees, and conclude: yes, for certain, the ring must be somewhere in Brooklyn.

  People are picking up pieces of popped balloon, birthday candles, wrapping paper. We stuff them into plastic trash bags and crawl around some more. This is no longer terribly interesting after an hour and fifteen minutes.

  Back on my feet, I talk to the German’s Irish friend, Molly. She’s the only one not still pretending to search frantically. She stands smoking, coolly surveying the scene.

  “Can I get you another pint?” I say.

  “Love one,” she says. “So d’you like her?”

  “I like her,” I say.

  “Listen, a bunch of us was thinking, there’s one more birthday present she’s wantin’. We’d like you to give it to her later,” she says naughtily.

  “Um, want to go look for the ring some more?”

  After an hour and forty-five minutes, Nora is bleakly going through a trash can full of empty beer bottles, soggy napkins, and discarded food. The German and I are edging closer to our getaway.

  “Do you want to come over tonight?” she whispers, pleasingly enough. I nod.

  “You seem different,” I say.

  “I guess I feel closer to you,” she says. “What with, everything that’s happened.”

  “That’s nice,” I say, and look in her eyes with what I hope is a Meaningful Gaze.

  “Nora,” says the German, “we have to go. But I’ll come by here in the morning and look for it. The light’ll be better.”

  Nora sobs. “Okay!” She gives a tragic wave, like a brave leukemia victim.

  And off we go. It’s a long walk to the German’s apartment. It’s in a tumbledown building, hidden behind a foreboding black door next to a kosher Chinese-Mex takeout joint where a bunch of Haitian-looking fellows are listening intently to a polka.

  The apartment’s on the second floor: Door that won’t close all the way, 50 percent of the locks on it inoperable, one room, kitchen sink in the middle, battle-scarred linoleum, dire rumblings upstairs (is someone bowl ing?), two wobbly bikes taking up most of the available floor space, yellow paint cracking on the walls, small futon instead of large comfy bed, tiny “living alcove” just big enough for a love seat, startlingly miscellaneous stuff scattered on the floor. One bookcase, books sorted by size.

  “What do you think?” she says.

  “It’s Brooklyn,” I say.

  “It’s not very nice, is it?” she says.

  “I guess you’ll probably fix it up a little when you’ve lived here for a while,” I say.

  “Yeah,” she says, looking around with fresh eyes. “Yeah. Definitely. Although I have been here six years.”

  Looking at her CDs: Everything Annie Lennox ever did. Plus the Indigo Girls. A bit of Parliament. Some PC world music for show. Must put something bearable in the stereo before she can take charge. Girls have cheap stereos and expensive bedding, I muse. Except…ho, what is this? Denon? It’s a portable, a rack job, it’s tuned to NPR of course but still: quality merchandise.

  “Who got you this stereo?” I say.

  “Oh,” she says. “An ex. How did you know?”

  “Hunch,” I say.

  We kiss for a while. My hands wander over her little short-sleeved shirt. The sleeves have tiny little slits. I love sleeves. They make me think of upper arms. Which make me think of shoulders. Which make me think of straps. How I love straps. Strapless bras: really dumb idea. Bras with extra straps would be the thing. I read somewhere once (probably in Tabloid, probably in my own section) that strippers have learned it’s really important not to have that even, all-over body tan like centerfolds. No, you have to have tan lines. Your tips will be much bigger. Why? You’re showing straps and you’re naked at the same time. It’s a helpful reminder: guys, these bits are supposed to be covered by clothes.

  And what are all these things underneath? There’s the bra strap up high, but there’s another one down low, and some kind of camisole thingy…God. I will never be uninterested in women’s underwear. She breaks off. Smiles.

  “Thirsty,” she says, and goes to get some soy milk.

  I go to the bathroom. Midget bathtub. Desolate shower curtain. Steady drip. Indelible rust stains. Encouragingly, girly makeup stuff is piled everywhere, little bottles and tubes, even on the toilet tank. (Then why doesn’t she wear girly stuff? Does she wear invisible girly stuff?) I wouldn’t want to date a girl who didn’t have some girly stuff.

  When I come out she is—what a lovely surprise—topless and changing into a filmy nightie. I strip down to my uptighty whities and we lie in bed talking. Well. In futon.

  “We don’t seem to have much in common, do we?” I say.

  “Nothing at all,” she says.

  “But I like you,” I say.

  “I’m glad,” she says.

  The phone: it’s Nora. I wait.

  “Whoo-hoo!” the German says. “Where did you find it?”

  Apparently Nora took home all of the garbage bags we shoved birthday refuse into. And in one of these bags she found success. On the third try.

  The German is in a fine mood when she returns to the sheets. The lights go off. We cuddle for a while. I figure, Why not?

  “I’m so happy for her,” she says. “But I was worried. I’m still a little on edge.”

  “Well then,” I say, throwing my voice into the lowest, growliest, purringest gear it’ll go into. “We’ll just have to get you off.”

  “Tuh-hee!” she says. But she’s game.

  I’m going over my notes like a quarterback returning to the huddle. The end zone. The G spot. The trick with the pillow. Where my index finger should be, exactly. How much time to spend on each play. Ready? Break.

  I get her naked straight off, give her a nice rubdown. Her eyes are closed. Good sign.

  Randy say: Do not touch her just there. Touch her there, there, and there.

  Randy say: However much time you are taking, on her clock you are still rushing.

  Randy say: Get comfortable. This may take a while. She won’t be able to concentrate if she thinks you’re off balance.

  Rub, rub, rub, rub.

  Knead, knead, knead, knead.

  Stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke.

  Randy say: Once you have gotten near, retreat. Then go back. Then go away again. Repeat as necessary.

  Rub, rub
, rub, rub.

  Randy say: Do not flick your tongue. Use it like a dog.

  Slurp, slurp, slurp, slurp.

  Randy say: Let her hand guide you.

  Her hand ambles into the area, then disappears.

  Randy say: It won’t happen if she isn’t relaxed. She can’t relax if she thinks you are getting bored.

  Moan, moan, moan. That’s me. She hasn’t made a sound. Am I doing this right? Hello?

  But I keep doing it. I’m right in the area, I’m moving tantalizingly closer, then I’m prancing away again. I turn up in surprising locations, launch new approaches from distant shores, creep back to HQ ever so slowly. Then I’m gone! Wherever did I go? Whenever will I return?

  She just lies perfectly still. And my manhandle? It’s aching, but it isn’t anywhere near the action. Only the face and hands are on duty here.

  An hour and fifteen minutes have gone by when she finally starts making some noises. There’s some quaking. Some vibrating. Then there’s…something. Was that it?

  Still I have to ask. I’m an idiot.

  “Did you?” I say, lying next to her.

  “Yeah,” she says dreamily.

  “How was it?” I say.

  “Wonnnnderful,” she says.

  “It’s tough for you, isn’t it,” I say.

  “Usually I only have them when I’m by myself,” she says. “But they never feel like that.”

  My nose is kinda stuffy.

  “Tell me how it felt,” I say, picking some pubic floss out of my teeth.

  “It was like, all these colors,” she says. “Burnt oranges and browns and reds,” she says.

  I need to unclog my nose.

  “I felt,” she says, “like I was in Turkey. Or Morocco.”

  It’s really dark in here. I can’t even see her. She can’t see me!

  “It was like I was in some tent, in the middle of the desert,” she says.

  I poke a finger up my nose. Ahhh.

  “And it’s like I was being initiated,” she says. “It was like a rite.”