Dancing With Cupid

by Jennifer Stevenson

  One, while I hadn’t burnt up any more lingerie or black wool separates, I felt very different from how I had before my smoky adventure in Judge Green’s restroom.

  In fact, I began to hate my wool separates. They were thin cashmere weight, and, since I couldn’t get the smoky smell out of the black, I had been wearing my navy and sepia. But…it was summer in Chicago. Pigeons cooed on the courthouse plaza. Tourists and students took one another’s photographs in front of the sculpture of Picasso’s wife. Everyone at the firm became friendly toward me. I felt welcome. I caught myself smiling a lot.

  So I went to Field’s to look for flowery undies. They had six pairs left of the ones Kama had brought me—in my size and in no other sizes. That was miraculous in itself. I bought them all, blushing, and quickly stuffed the bag into my briefcase.

  The second thing I realized was that my mother hadn’t called back. That was almost unheard of. It could only mean she was arguing with my father and spending hours and hours at the temple, collecting ammunition to use on me in the next call.

  Fine. Let her sulk. I could do without another lecture just yet.

  I hadn’t been in the office all day. Kama came to court with another bale of documents, but he wore an appropriately subdued suit and tie and never spoke to me, which was also entirely appropriate.

  The one time he caught my eye, I felt the heat blow clear through me, up to my cheeks. He flashed me a look of startled guilt. That made me remember how I had attacked him in the restroom, and I looked away. When I looked back, he was already leaving court.

  At that moment my pleasant mood died.

  I confronted the facts.

  I had set fire to my own underpants and sexually harassed the office mail clerk and now my mother wasn’t speaking to me. I has kissed a man once—once!—and now I couldn’t breathe without imagining that I tasted his mouth, or speak his name without blushing, or catch his eye without feeling my skin shiver.

  I went home in a state of gloom, put away my new undies, and read a hundred and seventy pages of depositions. That didn’t help, either.

  I needed girlfriend talk and I needed it now.

  I had one friend left in the world—my Auntie Lakshmi in LA. No matter what crazy thing I might have done, she would find a way to defend it. But my frantic e-mail to her got a not-home bounceback: We’re sorry, Lakshmi is in Cyprus, getting hammered on retsina. The office will reopen when Greeks run out of wine.

  I laughed, but I felt shaken. I needed girl talk. My auntie was partying. My mother was no doubt paying a priest extra to pray for my virtue. I didn’t know anyone at my firm well enough to share, and besides, they all knew Kama better than they knew me.

  Much better, I imagined.

  That reminded me of Lolly’s lovelorn face, and her web site. HAVE YOU SLEPT WITH THIS MAN?

  I felt a surge of heat. God forbid. If this is how I feel after kissing him.

  Wasn’t there more on her site about this?

  I opened my laptop and pulled up KamaKult.com. I scrolled quickly past Kama’s photograph and clicked on Take our survey!

  Did he tell you who he was? No, he didn’t have to. I clicked the No box.

  Did you experience anything unusual during your contact with him? That was nice and discreet. “Contact with him.” I clicked Yes.

  Please describe.

  That stopped me. I wished I could see some of the other responses. I felt terribly exposed, typing all this in for who-knew-whomever to see. My fingers moved before I could stop them.

  Frowning, I looked at what I had typed.

  In the box for “describe,” I had typed, I’m too shy.

  I stared at that short sentence and felt myself begin to tremble.

  I could not be too shy. My mother, my father, Auntie Lakshmi, my law professors, and my law partners all stood, invisible, on my hunched shoulders, screaming into my ears, How can you be too shy? We did not raise you to be shy! We did not teach you to be shy! We do not pay you to be shy! It is your client’s place to be shy, not yours!

  Nevertheless, I could not type the truth into this cold computer form.

  Somewhere in my purse, I had Lolly’s business card.

  Chapter Eight

  I couldn’t tell from her face how Rathi had taken yesterday’s adventures, so I lay low in the copy room, ostensibly generating evidence facsimiles for the Sandsreicht jury. About twenty times I almost ordered roses sent to her at her office, or started downstairs to fetch her another chai, or crawled over there with a friggin’ pencil sharpener with a ribbon around it.

  I didn’t.

  Eventually I had to admit I was just scared shitless of her reaction.

  By the end of the day I was kicking myself for being such a chicken. Hell with it. I would go home and do a good deed. Something nice for my roommates. I didn’t feel in the mood for playing sexual benefactor to some strange woman.

  I agreed to help Veek clear out Archie’s bedroom at the Lair, since Baz seemed too depressed about Archie leaving to do it.

  “Man, I thought Lido was a mess, but just smell this!” In twenty minutes I had filled an entire garbage bag with dirty boxers, wife-beaters, and athletic socks. “This is over the top.”

  “Something went wrong today?” Veek said, stoically loading free weights into a cardboard box.

  “How did you guess?” I kicked the full bag of dirty laundry into the hallway and stomped back into Archie’s room, trying to hold my breath.

  “You don’t clean unless you feel guilty.”

  “I don’t. I never feel guilty.”

  Veek shrugged. “I expect it will last until this job is done.”

  “Smartass,” I grumbled. Veek doesn’t let himself get drawn into macho displays. He has roughly eight times as much dignity as I have.

  Under the bed I uncovered a mother lode of crusted pizza boxes, porn mags stuck together with dried jizz, and almost every book Carl Hiaasen or Thomas Hardy ever wrote. Fastidiously I rescued Hiaasen from the cesspool. Then I shoveled the rest into another garbage bag, touching it as little as possible with my bare hands.

  “I met that girl yesterday,” I said. “The one with the new cult of Kamadeva online?”

  “Huh.” Veek opened the window. A rush of foul air swept through the room. Then we smelled the dinner Baz was making: chicken tinga tacos with side fillings of guacamole, chorizo, sweet onions, watercress, and minced pineapple. I felt suddenly better about the rewards for my act of kindness. “I mean, I saw her. Didn’t stay to chat, obviously.”

  I grabbed one end of the mattress and Veek grabbed the other.

  “So?”

  “So she met Rathi. They talked for twenty minutes.”

  Veek tipped the mattress up and looked at me over the edge. “Oops.”

  “No shit. I hid behind a pillar and watched them. They exchanged business cards!”

  Together we wrestled the mattress to the window and tried to fold it small enough to shove it through. Dust and noxious smells puffed all over us.

  “What bothers me—ugh—is that this crazy bitch is in a position to tell Rathi—stuff—I’m not ready—to tell her—myself. Shit! Let’s drag it down the stairs after all.”

  We unstuck the jammed mattress from the window and carried it, not letting it touch any doorways or floors, down the hall, down the stairs into the old factory, and out the loading doors in back to the Dumpster. The kitchen smelled like heaven. Baz sent us a look as we passed on our way back in, but didn’t interrupt his lord-of-the-stove thing to speak.

  “Her pants caught fire yesterday,” I said, when we had worked in silence for another five minutes.

  Veek looked up and cracked a grin finally. “You’re kidding.”

  “Seriously. I’m afraid it’s because I touched that ring—the one I told you about.”

  “You mean you hope it’s because of you.”

  “All right,” I said, nettled, kicking some sticky, dusty electronics cables together into the box with the free w
eights. “You think Salvation Army will take this stuff?”

  “Why not?” Veek dropped a couple of stainless travel mugs clanking into the box.

  “I want to matter to her. I want it to make a difference that we’ve met.”

  “It seems to me you are lowering your expectations. Two days ago you wanted her to remember your six thousand years of marriage. Now you just want her to remember coffee with you last week.”

  “I haven’t had time to piss her off yet,” I said somberly.

  In the kitchen, Baz banged a pan against the sink. “Supper’s on!”

  We looked around the room. The bed was down to a frame, and the big piles were all in garbage bags.

  “I think we can depart this field with honor,” I said, knowing that we wouldn’t open the door again for six months or until Baz found a way to make us do it.

  “Absolutely,” Veek said. We each grabbed garbage bags and shoved them one at a time through the window. The bags plopped into the alley not far from the Dumpster. Only one broke open.

  I sniffed the air. Tacos! “Good?”

  Veek sniffed too. “C’est bon!”

  “I was so excited when you called,” Lolly said, sucking an iced pomegranate tinirita through a tiny straw. “It’s so cool that you’re from India and everything.”

  “Mm, yes,” I said. I was drinking white wine, which I despise, to prevent myself from overindulging and overconfiding. “I was fascinated by one line on your web site—in the section about Kamadeva’s history.”

  “What his wife thought about it all, right?” Lolly guessed accurately. “If it was me, I’d of been sooo pissed.”

  “That your husband was burnt up?”

  “That he didn’t get his body back. You realize they rewrote the Kama Sutra at the same time that they were pounding down women’s legal rights. ‘Indian cultural renaissance,’ my ass.”

  “Really.”

  “It used to be this egalitarian sex manual, how men could please women, how women could please men. Then they made it into a manual for husbands to control their wives sexually and take away their money and their rights and cut them off from the support of their families.”

  “What?” That jerked me out of my Kama reverie. “That’s terrible!”

  “That’s typical. I blame the final watery trigon of the Jupiter-Saturn Great Conjunction, which occurred in fifteen eighty-three. Do you realize that all over the planet, in that same period, men were seizing women’s property and making laws taking away women’s rights?”

  History, sociology, and astrology, good heavens. I frowned.

  “Fact. In Europe it was all about enclosure of open lands, establishment of the right of primogeniture—meaning, only oldest male children can inherit land—the rise of the Inquisition, forcing women of property to remarry if they were widowed so that some man could control their money. All that happened around the same time. Even the breweries. Did you know that all through the Middle Ages in Europe, women brewed all the beer? They only started having men do it during the fourteenth through sixteenth century era. You’ll notice they call that period the European Renaissance. More like the rise of institutionalized misogyny,” Lolly said darkly.

  In spite of myself I was charmed and fascinated. “I had no idea you were so interested in the history of women’s rights.” She certainly hadn’t seemed so scholarly when we’d first met.

  I’d said the wrong thing.

  “You thought I was just a sex-crazed American girl?”

  “Not at all!” No more than any other sex-crazed American girl, I thought, but I managed to sound sincere.

  Lolly raised her chin. “The right to great sex is just one of many fundamental rights women are still fighting for.”

  “I’m sure that’s true.”

  “But nobody can tell by you, can they?” Suddenly she was winking at me. “That’s okay. I understand you were raised strict.”

  “I want a great sex life,” I said indignantly.

  At that moment the waiter arrived at our table with Lolly’s next tinirita. I looked up at him and blushed.

  The waiter just smiled at me. “You go, honey,” he said in a gay voice. “How about that TR, missy?” he said to Lolly. “Enough pomegranate for you?”

  “Perfect. Really sour,” Lolly said.

  The waiter bent closer. “I’m really here to tell you that two separate guys have asked me to bring you more drinks.”

  He was talking to me!

  “What?”

  “The suit by the cigarette machine and the playa on the third barstool from the end,” the waiter said. “Don’t look. Be cool, girlfriend. I can tell you’re shy.”

  What did he mean, he could tell I was shy? And Lolly “understood” that I was raised “strict.” I glared at him.

  He just beamed. “What’ll it be? More white zin?”

  “No, no. Thank you. Please don’t,” I said.

  He put up his hands. “Hey, girl. No means no.” He sashayed away.

  Lolly bent toward me. “What’s the matter? The playa’s obviously drunk, but the guy in the suit looks cute.” She touched elbows with me. “C’mon. You said you wanted great sex.”

  “I’m fussy.” Then I admitted, “And shy.”

  And in major trouble in the underpants department.

  Lolly just nodded. “Stay fussy.”

  “I have so far. May I ask you something?” I blurted.

  “Sure.”

  “On your, um, cult web site, you have a survey about, that is to say, for women who have—”

  “Slept with the god? Yup.” Her brow darkened. “I thought you said you hadn’t?”

  I gave a shudder. “Absolutely not. But you have, um, I take it?”

  “I sure did. Only once. I’d like to do it again, but I can’t seem to track him down.” My face must have betrayed my thoughts, for she said defensively, “A lot of women have slept with him. I get more hits on that survey every day.”

  “Well.” I swallowed, licked my lips, and lost my courage.

  It was very difficult to avoid looking in the direction of either the cigarette machine or the bar.

  “Here.” Lolly handed me my wine glass. I gulped down what was left in it. She said in a cuddly voice, “C’mon. Dish.”

  “Well, what does it mean when a person becomes rather…rather warm?” I wiggled my forefinger discreetly. “Down there?”

  She grinned. “It’s a good sign.”

  “I mean quite warm.”

  She laughed out loud. “How warm are we talking here?”

  “My clothes caught fire.”

  “For reals?” She blinked. “Whoa.”

  “Smoke. Flame. Blisters. Melted pantyhose,” I said solemnly. “So is that one of the strange things that women have reported?”

  “But you haven’t had sex with Kamadeva.”

  “I haven’t had sex with anyone!” I said, louder than I intended. Two men sitting at the next table turned to look at me. I leaned toward her. “You have to help me,” I hissed.

  Lolly gazed into my eyes a moment. “You’re freaking out.”

  I could feel the attention of the neighboring table like heat from a—oh no—from a fire. I pressed my lips together and widened my eyes at Lolly. Abruptly she swigged the last of her tinirita, gathered the straps of her giant straw handbag over her arm, and stood up.

  “Come on. I think I know what’s happening.”

  “Thank goodness,” I said, seizing my own bag and following her.

  Outside the bar, the Chicago evening was cooling down. I could feel heat beating out of me in waves. Lolly stopped suddenly at the street corner. I bumped into her.

  She recoiled. “Wow, you really are burning up.”

  “But why? Tell me, what is it?” I pleaded. I stared at the sky instead of at taxis and tourists rushing by. “Don’t play with me. I’m desperate.”

  “It’s your kundalini, of course. I thought you’d know that. You’re from India.”

  I
rolled my eyes. “Oddly, I have not spent a lifetime in an ashram, nor charming cobras, nor sitting on a cold mountaintop communing with my jivatma. I’m a normal, well-brought-up, middle-class Hindu girl from a good suburb of Delhi.”

  “Well, all right, you don’t have to bite my head off,” Lolly said placidly. “Let’s go to Millennium Park and find you a stone wall to sit on.”

  This was smart thinking. I glanced at her with new respect.

  I made it to the park without spontaneously combusting. Just as Lolly had suggested, there was a concrete retaining wall by the garden.

  “Oh, no, wait,” she said, and led me twenty yards farther, to a trickling artificial stream that ran down a gradual fall of limestone slabs across the park.

  I sat on a retaining wall beside the stream in the twilight and took off my shoes, feeling the heat soak out of me into the stone as icy water ran across my panty-hosed feet. I closed my eyes thankfully. “Tell me about your priestess work.”

  She did. In autumn of the previous year she had met Kamadeva in a bar on Chicago’s north side and brought him home for one memorable evening. The experience apparently revolutionized her self-image. She had demanded a raise and got it—she worked in a salon as a hair colorist. She began a program of diet which, while it had not reduced her weight, made her feel much better because, she said, she had eliminated impurities and was now aware of her food sensitivities. She was going to night school to learn about theatrical makeup and hair.

  Then she had met two other women who had also taken Kamadeva home with them. Once each.

  “Why only once?” I said, puzzled. “If he is so superior a performer in bed, surely he wants to take advantage of all these five-star notices.”

  Lolly leaned forward and gripped my arm. “He’s looking for his long-lost wife,” she said. “It is the sweetest, saddest thing. They had a big fight after Shiva burnt up his physical body and wouldn’t give it back. He didn’t want to talk about it, but you can just imagine how that went.”

  “No, I can’t,” I said. “Move over. I want a cooler spot.” It was getting fairly dark. I hiked up my skirt so that my upper thighs were directly on the cold stone.