“I made lunch,” I say to Jason.
“Faggot lunch,” Jason says, and shakes his head and gulps his beer as if he’s forgotten he now reads magazines that tell him to eat faggot lunches and buy pink shirts. He’s still a pig, the same pig I used to share a room with in school.
I serve Gloria vodka and soda. She doesn’t eat lunches.
“Oh, you’re just the nicest,” she beams. In her early thirties, Gloria dated a Polish count who turned her onto vodka. The count was the only man she ever regretted not marrying. She wanted the title – she wanted the title so badly that when I first met her, she actually claimed to be a countess. Eventually she confessed: the fake titles and the fake orgasms, which, especially the latter, only improved our sex lives.
“To the beach house,” says Gloria, sipping her vodka.
“To the beach house,” I say, and turn to Jason.
“Why are the windows dimmed?” Jason asks. “To the beach house.”
“He shoots porn in here. To the beach house,” Gloria says in a tone that makes me feel proud for a moment, as if I had built this place myself. I like the easy, bored joke she made about the porn.
We spend the rest of our day joking and gossiping and sipping. We talk about Gloria’s workplace. It’s a PR firm that is now starting to get bigger deals: a small film festival and a small fashion week. Her firm, idiotically named after her – G-PR – has just hired a new slew of women, fresh out of PR school. Gloria says she no longer can tell the women apart. They all seem to be exactly the same age, though what age exactly she isn’t sure: twenty-one? Twenty-seven?
“Plus they’re all named Kayla or Krista or Karen, and they all have perfect skin and shiny hair, and this year they wear these indecent little outfits, I don’t know, like teddies or something, I don’t even know what those things are called but they’re –”
“It’s such a tease,” Jason says. “See-through. But not.”
“Exactly,” Gloria says, and I want to tell her how impressed I am with her second joke, the one about all the K names and ages, but instead I say, “How’s Kerry doing?”
Kerry is Gloria’s right-hand girl, possibly the only girl at G-PR without the shiny locks and smooth skin. She vacationed with us in Hawaii and took care of Gloria’s pet, a little ferret-like dog named Fifi. (Fun fact: it was the dog’s name that inspired naming $isi.)
“Kerry’s amazing. She was really helpful when Fifi –”
“Fifi was lovely,” I say. “Pinch between your index finger and your thumb. It stops the tears,” I squeeze Gloria’s arm gently.
“She ate her own shit.” Jason says exactly what I would like to actually say about the dog instead of what I just said.
“Fuck you.” Gloria shakes her head. Her eyes are wet but no tears. “Kerry is taking over the London account soon, and then she can have my job.”
“Nice,” Jason says. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to start a magazine.”
“Or a line of jewellery,” I try to help, suddenly remembering some pillow talk Gloria and I had, maybe even during that trip to Hawaii, when Kerry stayed in a room next to the room where I fucked Gloria. I fucked Kerry in her room when Gloria was at the gym. It was very tiring.
Gloria thinks for a moment. “Or write a memoir.”
“You should hire someone to write it for you.You’re too busy and too pretty to be a writer,” Jason says. He’s trying to make up for the shit comment.
“Thanks. Maybe Guy knows someone. Do you know someone?”
“I do,” I say. “Lots of someones who write, and who won’t make it boring.”
Gloria says, “You’re mean. I’m not boring.”
“You’re not,” Jason says. “You dated that count.”
“You’re not boring,” I say.
“And I could always develop a cocaine addiction. Addicts are hot.”
“It’s been done, and it’s not so hot,” I say. $isi’s face pops into my head.
Gloria says, “Or I could adopt.”
Jason yawns, “It would have to be an Indian. Or a Jamaican. A little Rasta baby.”
“Jason,” Gloria hisses.
“Or it could be like the kids my mother used to tutor. Learning disabled,” I say. Gloria’s painted big toe pokes me gently in the side. Her feet are in my lap – her large, bony feet that have none of the sloppy softness of Dolores’ feet, or at least what I guess Dolores’ feet are like. I imagine chipped pink polish and some white fuzz on her toes, which she never thinks to shave. This thought produces a feeling of a sob coming on, somewhere in the bottom of my throat: oh, the tenderness of those imagined plump feet. I must be getting drunk.
Gloria talks some more about her job, something about how on Fridays there’s always a little box of mint-green or pink or yellow macaroons from a place called Nadège, and there are little matching mint-green or pink or yellow flowers in a glass vase waiting for her on the desk. It’s one of the new girls, a Kristen, who does this, and Gloria picks a macaroon every few hours and throws it into a plastic bag in her purse so that it looks like she’s eating them.
“She’s just trying to make you fat,” Jason says.
“Oh my god, she is.”
“It’s passive aggressive. You should fire her,” I say.
“There are laws about that,” Gloria giggles.
“Laws schmaws.” Jason burps and gets up, wavering a little as he walks to the fridge. He makes a lot of complicated noise, cursing something about how “these fucking ice cubes are wrong,” which is the sort of thing that would bother Jason; he’s straight but sometimes acts textbook gay, bitching about ice cubes being wrong.
I turn to Gloria and mouth shall we? meaning a fuck and a nap. It’s getting late, almost three p.m. Soon we’ll move into pre-dinner, and there’s no way any of us will be able to survive it without a little rest.
I move Gloria’s feet and pull her up. She sways and leans on me. “Bye-bye, Jason,” she coos.
We go upstairs to the master bedroom, where we stand by the bed and undo my shirt first. Then Gloria’s white-and-cream dress comes off. It floats like a little cloud, bouncing off the bed and settling on the wooden floor. And then we’re in bed.
Her body is a combination of softness and muscle, the way her stomach barely ripples when she bends down, but when you touch it, it’s soft, just like the rest of her body, which looks hard.
We don’t kiss for long. Gloria is not much of a kisser, or maybe she used to be and is not anymore. I don’t really care to kiss her anyway, but a gentleman should kiss; otherwise the lady might feel like a hooker. I heard somewhere hookers don’t kiss. Jason said it wasn’t true. In any case, when Gloria and I kiss, for a moment I taste her slightly tangy tongue, the spritzer, the vodka, and then she spits me out.
I move down to her neck and her breasts with nipples like tiny pink bulbs. I nudge with my nose under her breasts, feel the trace of moisture in the crease. I lick the trace of moisture, trying to get some salt out of it, but it’s not really there; Gloria is too scrubbed. I’m talking years of scrubbing, not just this morning.
Her pussy is shaved. It’s another soft/hard extension of the small planes that are her body. I cup the mound of it and slip my thumb between the folds. She’s wet, the only part of Gloria that doesn’t get scrubbed, or maybe is impossible to scrub, and that opens up, uncontrolled. She moans quietly. I rub the little nub inside it, which grows even slicker and harder under my finger.
I look at her face. She mouths I want you.
I’d prefer she was filthier, said something like I want your cock instead, but she just smiles expectantly as I roll a condom over my unaddressed cock and aim at the warm, pulsing hole.
I fuck it slowly first, and then faster. As I speed up, Gloria’s legs go up and up until she locks them over my back. I lift her ass and pull her legs up to move them over my shoulders.
I close my eyes and imagine that I’m fucking someone else: Kerry, Gloria’s assistan
t. I feel myself expand even more, sweetly, painfully.
I wait for Gloria to sync completely into our rhythm. It takes her a moment to get there, but I don’t mind because the longer it takes her, the more Kerry she is. I hold her heavy, hard legs and pretend that they’re heavy and soft, spongy almost, the way Kerry’s legs would be.
“Now, baby?” I say.
Gloria moans in response, “Yes, yes, yes, now. Harder,” and I fuck her harder and her pussy starts to spasm and squeeze me, come on, so I come, hard, inside Kerry, Gloria.
6
THE SATURDAY WITH GLORIA AND JASON IS MORE OR less a repetition of the Friday afternoon. Jason ventures out to the beach twice while Gloria and I fuck. I make two different salads and a puréed sweet potato soup for lunch; in the evening we drink and eat the leftovers. On Sunday, I wake up next to Gloria and my bed seems too small; I want her out of the bed. I feel like shouting at her to go, but I would never do that, shout at a woman.
I shake her and kiss her on the neck to wake her up.
The breakfast is eggs Benedict and silence. A table full of newspapers.
“I’m going to miss you, babe,” Gloria says before they leave.
“I’m going to miss you, too,” Jason says in a high-pitched voice.
“I’m going to miss you,” I say back to him in my normal voice.
***
I’m impatient to go out and find Dolores, but it’s no use this early in the day.
I watch the recap of the news on my computer. Amy Winehouse almost overdosed. A bomb in the Middle East killed forty people. A young woman got hit by a train and survived. Slow day. There are seventeen emails from $isi. I delete them all without reading.
I close my laptop. Go outside. The morning is cool and rainy, which is great weather for a run. Running, I try to focus on an image that will inspire me and make the inspiration stick, form into a girl, one girl, Dolores, but I’m all over the place mentally: $isi, Gloria, the pretty blond – the friend of Dolores’ – a voice from the past, some girl’s voice accusing me of something. Kerry or Kayla.
After the run, I work out in my basement, but my workout is as disastrous as my mind – I forget to count reps, I break a dial on my stationary bike; I say, “Fuck it,” out loud and stop.
I take a shower, and after the shower I eat plain yogourt with muesli and drink a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.
I take my dog for a walk. The beach is just starting to fill; the morning’s dampness is still lingering in the air. It won’t be damp for too long. I can sense the heat coming on. I walk along the road for a while, taking in the sights that I usually only get in a blur when I run first thing in the morning. There’s a man-made waterfall to the east of my beach house. There are more beach houses to the west, and most of them are rentals. The fact that they’re rentals is an ideal setup for me. I despise neighbourly relations, the expected pleasantries between people who happen to share a road and nothing else. The rentals are like musical chairs with a set of asses plopping down for a bit, a week or so, then disappearing to make room for a new set of asses.
Here it’s mostly college kids. The biggest wave of them is during Spring Break, although we don’t get full Daytona fuckery here. But it’s all sex, humid air, sheeny skin, drunken vomit. Coconut oil and sugary drinks. The kids stumble by, flirting, pouncing on each other like lion cubs.
This early in the morning, the houses are still in disarray: wet shirts, wet towels, stacks of flip-flops and floatation devices and open coolers, empty cans of pop, puddles of fresh puke starting to dry, empty cartons of beer and bottles – bottles everywhere. Sometimes you see big, pink-faced, crusty-eyed boy cherubs rubbing their eyes on the too-bright porches. The girls who belong to these boys are sleeping inside. These are the pretty girls who get invited to beach houses with boys.
It is too early for the kind of girl that I’m looking for – a Dolores-girl. A Dolores-girl is also probably not at one of those beach houses. She’s staying with her parents. Or maybe with friends whose parents own a house off the beach. She doesn’t get invited to beach houses like these, anyway, and if she does, she thinks someone is playing a joke on her so she politely says no.
This early, a Dolores-girl is still slurping her fluorescent cereal, taking just one more bite of a muffin. She’s trying to figure out which bright bathing suit to squeeze her doughy body into. She is in a dining room that is clean and bright and smells of Pine-Sol.
I know it seems like I make fun of a Dolores-girl by constantly referring to her pudginess and shapelessness and overall lack of contour, or even character, but the truth is just the opposite. I admire everything about a girl like this. I like how she thinks that nobody is looking at her. How she doesn’t even make an effort, how she’s already given up on her dream of becoming a model. Because let’s face it, most girls her age would still be dreaming about being like Gloria, who at sixteen had modelled for an underwear label.
A Dolores-girl doesn’t allow herself to think that she will run the world one day, be a model one day, if she only snaps out of it and fixes her nose and loses the sweet twenty pounds. She doesn’t think she’ll ever meet a prince and start a business of her own, a PR firm or a designer furniture store. She has realistic dreams, none of the delusions of the thousands of strung-out dieters out there who support modelling schools that are spreading like fungus all across the cities. A Dolores-girl dreams of men like me, but she doesn’t believe men like me talk to girls like her.
And then I see her.
The promise of the second chin, and her perky nose, and the roots poking through the strands of blond hair. My Dolores. I say her name out loud. I actually enjoy how it rolls off my tongue – Do-lo-res. I remember now that this is Lolita’s real name, the heroine in Nabokov’s novel that I read as a child because it was supposed to be dirty, but it really wasn’t. Dolores, the real one, with her sturdy trunk, is the opposite of Nabokov’s lithe nymphet. In that, she is perfect.
My Dolores is sitting on a big towel with a book in her hand. The dog tugs at the end of his leash and gives a tiny, stifled woof. He probably remembers her smell, the way she stroked his head.
She looks up. Her eyes round and clear with bright irises and thick lashes. That mouth-breather mouth, pink lips parting in a daze that comes over her face. “Hi, Dog,” she says.
“Dorothy?” I say, and give her a big smile.
“Oh, hi,” she says, and looks up from making faces at the dog. She doesn’t correct me about her name.
“What are you reading?” I point to the book.
“Oh. It’s nothing. Just one of those stupid vampire books.”
“Why is it stupid?”
“Oh, you know. Everyone’s just like basically chasing each other with their fangs out and trying to not eat each other when they have…when they get together.”
“A book? I haven’t seen a real book since 2007,” I say, and bend down to pick it up. “It’s very interesting. I like the feel of it; it feels nice in the hand, solid. What do you do when the battery runs out? I don’t see a USB slot anywhere.”
“Yeah. I know,” she says, and pretends to giggle, which is worse than if she just didn’t do anything. I can’t tell if this is because she found my joke lame or because she’s so tense she can’t get into it with me.
I put the book down, peek quickly at her toes: thick nails, no nail polish. Tiny thatches of blond hairs.
“So, how long are you staying for?” I say.
“Leaving Wednesday. It sucks, but Emily’s parents won’t let us stay on our own.”
“Bummer. You’re going to miss the tribute band for New Kids on the Block.”
“You’re kidding, right?” She giggles. I feel relief. Giggling is a must. And I don’t know how to make jokes. It’s painful for me to have to make them because I’m not good at them. And these aren’t even jokes. It’s true that there’s going to be a tribute band for New Kids on the Block. There was a poster about the concert in the smoothie sh
ack. I wonder if Dolores had noticed it, if she’s indulging me – if she’s indulging me, that means she’s already hooked on me.
“I hate New Kids on the Block,” she says. Even though it’s impossible for her to sustain eye contact for more than a few seconds, we’re talking with our eyes again. I tell her that I find her beautiful. She says she doesn’t believe me. I tell her again, with my eyes. She, again, with hers says it can’t be true. I need to keep this going.
“What kind of music do you listen to?”
“Why do you ask?” she asks, and I like this little spark of defiance or flirtation, I’m not sure which.
“I’m in the music business. I find music talent,” I say.
“Would I know anybody you work with?” she asks.
“Sure. $isi and Charlie and before them some indie acts, like Ciraplex. Ciraplex is the name of an antidepressant. Clever, isn’t it?”
Her mouth forms an almost perfect O. “Are you serious?”
“Sure.” I bend down to pull the dog away from her – and to make physical contact for the first time. I let my fingers brush her arm very gently, just the tips of my fingers against her hot skin. “I can tell you more about my work if you’re curious. Would you like to go for a walk?” I ask, breaking eye contact.
She gets up. She’s not saying anything, probably trying to figure out what this is all about – me and my interest. A guy like me. It’s going to take her some time to figure it all out, maybe the rest of her youth. Or maybe the rest of her life. I’m sure she’s thinking that it’s just too suspicious. She might be thinking that I’m going to skin her alive, make a hat out of her or leave her by the side of the road to bleed to death for fun. But she likes books about bloody things; maybe she hopes I’m a vampire.
I smile at her and she smiles back. “I usually just walk to there and then go back, is that okay with you?”
“Yes,” she says, her voice small. She is perhaps imagining herself being bitten in the neck, perhaps picturing my face turning feline, fangs emerging from my mouth. We walk in silence for a while, just taking in the sights: the proudly jogging joggers, and the still-drunk-from-the-night-before teenage boys, and the guys in orange shirts with garbage bags who clean up the beach, and the young moms with uncombed hair sitting by their strollers or trying to contain their energetic toddlers, viciously smashing the sand.
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