He made us a drink at his place before we went out, and I saw the way he noticed her moving through his space. I felt young, like a supporting player in my own life. Nick was doing some version of his seductive, turned-on behavior, but it wasn’t one I recognized. So many questions he had for her, right away, as if she were immediately this creature of pure fascination. What was her stage name? Prada. How did she like LA? Loved it. At first she was game, even a bit amused. What was her favorite song to dance to? “Black Velvet.” But I could tell that after a while it grew tedious. It was as if I were seeing for the first time how men really acted around women they were attracted to—like untrained puppies. What was Carolyn like when she was a kid? Exactly the same as she is now. Nick had shown his hand, and Ashley was bored.
Location change. We filed out of the taxi onto an East Village sidewalk. It was late, and we were going to the Tenth Street Lounge. Nick had had the most to drink among us already, and I could see it in the way it took him an extra second to count the bills in his wallet while paying the driver. The bar was a place I had never been to before that Nick had picked. Apparently, he had been with work friends or other women or people I had never heard of at all, when he was off and out being one of the versions of himself that had nothing to do with me.
I was anxious that I wouldn’t get in if they were checking IDs, but I felt I couldn’t say so. Had that even occurred to Nick? Doubtful. The potential embarrassment I’d feel if I got carded and turned away was almost too much to bear. I had no choice but to wing it, gritting my teeth as we sailed up to the door. I stared straight ahead as if I belonged, following Ashley as she breezed past the bouncer with a nod. For a moment after we’d gone by, I imagined I’d be grabbed by the scruff of my neck and pulled back out, caught trying to pass in a place where I wasn’t supposed to be.
There was a long hallway, and then we were inside a packed room with vaulted ceilings and a big diamond-shaped bar in the center. There was a wall with all sorts of recessed ledges covered in flickering votive candles, and bartenders with skimpy tank tops who shook cocktail shakers with purpose, as if they knew they were being watched, because they were. We grabbed stools in the back, somewhere along one of the pointed corners of the bar. We were arranged in a triangle shape, Ashley and I next to each other while Nick faced us both.
I’m the only link between these two people, I realized, and how very strange that is. I had intimacies and an almost primal connection to them both, but their tie to me was the only thing that had brought them there to this very spot at the same time, sipping vodka tonics through skinny black straws. Yet at that moment, it didn’t seem to be much of a thread at all.
Ashley leaned back into her seat, surveying the room. Couples nuzzled each other along the banquettes, and groups of girls stood awkwardly in their spaghetti-strap dresses, feet in perfect third position. The guys were everywhere: staring, smiling, trying to catch her attention. I was starting to almost—almost—begin to imagine what the world looked like through her eyes. So many men were such a disappointment, clearly. And they all, embarrassingly, fell for the same stupid stuff. You heard the same lines over and over, the same tone, the same way they flattered you and gave away all their power. Couldn’t anyone do better? No one knew how to try something different? Just one time, you wished it all wouldn’t be so fucking predictable.
Somewhere after midnight, Nick crossed the line. The threshold where, due to drunkenness, arrogance, or perhaps just Ashley’s preternatural pull over any and all men, he suddenly dropped all pretenses. He wanted her; there were no two ways about it. And he seemed to be willing to humiliate himself or me or both of us in pursuit of that goal. It appeared as though he had done a little math in his head, calculating a personal cost-benefit analysis of his chances to score with her against the potential loss of our relationship if it happened. He appeared to be going for it.
“Have you ever kissed a girl?” he asked Ashley. Weak. She knew it. I knew it. The bartender knew it, too. I was cemented to my chair, practically dizzy with shame.
Ashley had been asked that before, I was sure of it, by some stupid guy hoping for a little titillation. Hell, I had been asked that, too, but at least one of us probably got paid for it some of the time. Ashley had talked about bachelor parties the day before, how they were easier than being onstage. You just walked in, kept the energy light and buzzy, let them buy you shots. Sometimes they’d want to take the shots off your boobs, and you’d let them if they were being polite. I pictured her laughing, head thrown back, a crowd of men circling her. She was in control of all that roiling testosterone, even while naked to the waist.
• • •
I had seen the aftermath of one of those parties before. Once, while staying with a friend’s family at a golf resort in San Diego, she and I had gotten into a conversation with some rowdy guys who were out on their balcony in the room above ours. They shouted down and we shouted up and it was a bit madcap and buzzy, palm trees and California bluffs stretching out in front of us for acres. When they invited us up, I felt more like I wanted to have done it than to actually do it, but up we went. I was on vacation. The guys were drunk, red-faced. There were probably a dozen of them and an open living room with a circle of chairs ringing the perimeter; all the furniture had been pushed to the edges. They told us the strippers had come and gone about an hour ago, and things had gotten a little wild toward the end.
“Wild how?” I asked. They laughed conspiratorially, but no one would say anything more. They gave us some drinks, and then one guy tried to kiss me and I let him while my friend looked on, shocked. I was on vacation!—or something. But really I was on a newfound mission to find out what had happened. Why, exactly? I wasn’t sure. There was a spent, morning-after energy to the group, and it felt as though there were some truth waiting to be uncovered. I was fascinated by the suggestion of this behind-closed-doors maleness; I wanted to understand its contours.
“Wild how?” I asked for a second time. Reticence again at first, protectiveness of the guy code perhaps. But little by little, the story came out. I got bits and pieces from different guys, asking leading questions of one and then trading information with another like a seasoned detective. They said there had been two girls and that they had brought some toys that a beefy security guard had carried with him in something that looked like a toolbox. The girls danced with each other in the center of the circle, and then they had pushed the groom-to-be into the ring and traded off giving him lap dances. After that, one of the guys had gotten on his back in the middle, and then they had put a dildo in his mouth, pointing it straight up toward the ceiling. He’d clamped down on it tight with his lips while one girl, the blond one, had sat on his face, moving herself up and down on top of him. The other girl had kneeled over his chest and kept things going, and occasionally the two girls would kiss.
I was floored and instantly disgusted. Did this kind of stuff really go on? Was this fun for them—for anyone? Was this kind of thing a necessary rite of passage that I just didn’t understand yet? The revelation seemed to bring an element of danger and extreme raunch to the air that I hadn’t noticed before, but really it had been there all along. I wanted to leave immediately. I grabbed my friend and told her I was bored, but on our way out I asked someone to point out the guy who had been on his back. Laughter again. They wouldn’t spill.
Why did I need to know? Perhaps I hoped it was the awkward one in the corner, the guy with a goatee and oversized polo shirt whom I could easily pick out as having something off about him. Only someone with something to prove, or something to hide, would behave that way. It couldn’t just be a regular guy or one I’d be attracted to. Those kinds of urges, or judgments, just didn’t square. Right? They couldn’t. I continued to press, to tease. I needed to make it add up. Finally they told me his name was Dave. Dave! Which one was Dave? Ha, no way.
My friend and I made for the exit a few minutes later, but before I got to the door, I turned back to the room, and in a
defiant act of I don’t know what—indignation?—I looked toward the group of guys sitting near the window. “Hey, Dave!” I shouted loudly, not making eye contact with any one in particular but trying to pass it off as if I had an honest question. Which, technically, I guess I did.
“What?” an unassuming, pasty dude answered. He wasn’t the awkward one or the best-looking one. He was somewhere in between, someone eminently average. He looked up at me, more amused than confused. The odd guy I had pegged from before stayed facing the wall, his eyes downcast into his beer. I paused, a little flummoxed, not sure of what to say next.
“Nice to meet you,” I replied, while the room exploded into fratty laughter. I turned and walked out, a strange combination of smugness and sadness sticking to my back.
• • •
“Would you kiss Carolyn?” Nick said, his eyes a little glassy as some horrendous techno song pumped out of the ceiling speakers.
The night had taken on a surreal quality. This wasn’t actually my life but some sort of morality play being staged with nonprofessional actors who were my friends, playing themselves, for my benefit. They were here to perform a parable about loyalty, trust, and respect. Perhaps there would be some betrayal thrown in, like in one of those Greek tragedies where only the chorus is left at the end.
I looked at Ashley and thought of Dave in San Diego. I wondered if he remembered that night at all and how that recollection made him feel. Ashley’s eye makeup sparkled in the low lighting. She had taken extra time applying glitter over my sink before we went out, and flecks of it had fluttered to the ground and were still lodged in my bathroom tile grout. Lots of other things were sparkling in the room, too. The candles, the ice cubes in people’s drinks, the women with tube tops that had bits of sequins stuck on them.
What would I do if she said yes? Was this what was supposed to happen? How gross and strange and possibly fitting. I would do it, I decided, if it came to that. I would take it as something that confused and saddened me in the moment, but later I would look back and understand. It would be a turning point, a definitive before and after.
“I don’t do stuff like that for someone else’s entertainment,” Ashley said, stone-faced. A pause. A long one. “And anyway, Carolyn is my best friend.”
Exhale. Silence. Okay, no. Never mind. That was what was supposed to happen.
• • •
The rest of the night was in muted tones. The colors were dark grays and washed-out blues, tinged with fuzziness as if seen through some hazy screen. It was 2 a.m. or maybe even 3 a.m. We were back in Nick’s apartment. How did we get there? Another cab, another walk across a sidewalk. The key in the lock, the doorman nod. Another key, another lock. A living room. The lights were low. Oliver was there.
He was on the couch drinking a beer from the bottle, still dressed but with his shoes off and his feet on the coffee table. Just back from a date with Katie, a receptionist from work he’d started seeing, Oliver was relaxed and in for the night. He wasn’t expecting us but was tired and amused enough to roll with it nonetheless. We were a trio in varying stages of drunkenness carrying with us three very different energies and narratives about the last four hours, but Oliver had entered at the end of act three, and no one was about to bring him up to speed.
Chatting ensued. Ashley appeared to be immediately buoyed by the change of scene and the new player, and Oliver’s unassuming bachelor-in-the-wild vibe was working for him. Ashley perched next to him on the side of his chair, her playfulness rising up in a way that hadn’t been evident earlier. She was enjoying herself. Even though we had said we’d stop by for only a minute, here she was accepting Oliver’s offer of a beer and warmly touching his arm to make a point. Nick glowered. Was she doing it intentionally to spite him? This couldn’t be happening. How long was she in town for? What was she up to the next few days? Not fair! It was he who had laid the groundwork for all of this, and here was Oliver closing without even having to try. It seemed as though Nick knew it was what he deserved, but that was the part that felt the worst.
• • •
It was decided that Ashley and Oliver would go out the following Tuesday, her last night in town before she left to go back to her grandmother’s house and then California. I had helped make it happen, as something of a why-the-hell-not as well as a fuck-you to Nick. On our walk back to my place after the night they met, Ashley said he seemed like a nice guy—a good guy. Not like the ones she was used to meeting in LA, and not like Nick, either. We left it at that and went to bed.
The arrangements were made between Oliver and me the next day while Ashley was out of the city visiting her grandmother. I suggested a place called the Screening Room, a retro art house theater in Tribeca where you could order dinner during the show and they served you martinis and truffled popcorn on little café tables. That summer they were showing a series of reissued seventies porn movies in 3D. That week it was Behind the Green Door. I had seen the poster on my way to the subway, a backlit Marilyn Chambers with feathered hair and jutting collarbones.
It was clearly a date I would have wanted to be taken on—not Ashley. Part of me must have understood that it would be completely inappropriate for her. At the time, dates for me—before Nick—were made up of straitlaced activities like Holocaust documentaries at Film Forum or dry literary readings in the basement of the campus pub. The idea of something as out there and explicit as watching porn in public—at a dinner theater!—I would have found shocking and ironic. For Ashley, it was a little too on the nose.
From: Oliver Nelson
To: Carolyn Murnick
Subject: before the plane and while awake
. . . i slept with ashley. she is aggressive. katie called in the middle of it. i was kissing to the sound of her voice over the recorder; “i just spoke to nick, he says you’re home. i don’t understand why you’re not picking up.” yesterday morning i felt horrid. nick was still being a recluse, and katie didn’t even look at me as i passed her in the office (my mind told me she knew). i felt as if i had lost all my friends . . .
And then he continued on about some work drama. Ashley’s take was just as unpleasant. “It felt no different than a fucking call,” she said crisply when I saw her the morning after. Oliver had dropped her back at my place so we could have a final half day together, but both of us were so tired that we couldn’t get up to much. To me, it almost felt beside the point. The hours just flowed into a slightly larger chunk of preparing-to-leave time, which looked like real time only if you viewed it from the outside.
There was a walk to the bagel place, squinting in the sun, and then some aimless browsing in the shops along upper Broadway. Details trickled out, but I wasn’t asking too many questions. She told me he had met her at the train, and that he had shoved his tongue down her throat as a greeting. After the movie started, the night began to take on a prickly feeling of inevitability. By the time they got had to his bedroom, she was over it, but figured she’d just give him what he wanted, anyway. It was easier. It was her default. It allowed her to tune out.
I felt intimidated by her casualness with having a one-night stand—was that what it was?—but none of it seemed surprising. Of course she was past the point of being affected by the potential fallout from casual sex—it was I who wasn’t.
I was disappointed in Oliver, too, even though I could see how easily those kinds of disconnects could take shape: the way we pick out a few carelessly observed details about a person and are absolutely sure we know what’s what. Oliver was an insecure twenty-five-year-old who saw girls like Ashley as out of his league and then couldn’t believe his luck to have her (a stripper!) fall into his lap with no effort. Ashley, on the other hand, for all her experience with men, didn’t usually make time with “nice guys” or even ones who were just pretending to be. Oliver, to her, was someone who had met her out of her usual context, her comfort zone, who couldn’t afford to buy her much and seemed to want to hear what she had to say for its own sake. She’d tho
ught it might finally be a chance to be herself. They’d both wanted to connect with the side that the other was desperately trying to cast off. I could relate.
We were both hungover, her physically and me emotionally. The party was definitely over. It was time to go.
On the subway to the Port Authority bus terminal, Ashley was chatty, but I wasn’t quite there. I half listened to some story about her father, how he was thinking of buying a fat camp and how there was some other drama with her parents. No one seemed to be talking about it directly, so she’d finally had to be the one to bring it up her mother, like, wake up, Mom.
Ashley was still next to me on the C train, but already I was taking stock of the aftermath: Nick and I weren’t speaking. The girl I’d used to paint pictures and play piano duets with was now a stripper and an escort, and being around her made me feel like shit. She had slept with Oliver after knowing him for only a day. I felt as though my self-esteem were at an all-time low. There was still glitter on my bathroom tile.
The train pulled into her stop. I stood up, and we hugged in the middle of the car, right before she slipped out of the closing doors. Watching her walk away, I felt as if a tornado had blown through my life and turned everything I knew to dust.
The Hot One Page 5