by Maile Meloy
“That’s not true. Never mind. It was just an idea.”
“What was that about?” he asked, when they were alone in her yellow bedroom. The other painting Martin had told him about faced the vast bed: it looked exactly like a reflection of the room, with a maned lion sleeping on the floor.
“I don’t know,” she said. She lay on her back on the bed, still clothed, and stretched her legs up to the ceiling. “I was bored.”
“It was kind of a high school suggestion,” he said.
“I was playing strip poker in junior high.”
“No wonder you get bored. Did you want some kind of two-onone?”
“No,” she said. “But sex does get boring, doesn’t it? This isn’t a complaint, I just mean it in a general way.”
“What’s up with you and him?”
“Nothing.”
“What was up with you?”
“I’ve known him since I was fifteen,” she said. “Something had to happen, at some point. There’s nothing now.”
“Except that you just offered to strip in front of him, because you were bored.”
“Who was offering to strip?” Saffron asked. “I play to win.”
“When I was your age,” Jamie began.
Saffron laughed. “I’m twenty-seven.”
“When I was your age,” he said, “I was happy with a hand job in the dark.”
“And you slogged through the snow to school?”
“With no shoes.”
“Poor Jamie,” she said, touching his face. “But—and don’t take this the wrong way—weren’t you an unemployed, aging college student at my age?”
“Yes,” he said. “I still am.”
“So you were lucky to get the hand job. You still would be. Everything else is a bonus.”
“ You’restarting in about unemployment?”
“Girls don’t need jobs for men to want to fuck them.”
“Well, someday they won’t want to fuck you anymore,” he said.
Saffron looked shocked for a second. But she had hurt his feelings—she had taken the gloves off first.
“Don’t say that,” she said, in a small voice. “I’m so afraid of being my mother.”
Saffron’s mother lived on a ranch in Argentina, where she had adopted a Romanian orphan through an exiled princess she had known in her socialite days. The princess had since become a nun, involved in good works. When the child arrived, still an infant, Saffron’s mother remembered how much she disliked babies and handed him off to her staff. He was now four. The situation made Saffron livid.
“Are you thinking about the kid?” Jamie asked now.
“She got old and bored, and men lost interest in her, so she adopted a refugee and ignores him,” Saffron said. “It would’ve served her right to get one of those psycho toddlers.”
“He’ll be all right.”
“They’re all alone out there.”
“With the maids and the cooks and the gardeners.”
“Don’t be sarcastic.”
“I’m not,” he said. “I’m serious.”
“People with money have problems, too.”
“I’m beginning to see that.”
Saffron slid a leg across his body, then sat up, straddling his hips.
“When I was seven,” she said, “my mother told me that sex was the most beautiful thing that could happen between a man and a woman. Then my cousin Nell told me there was a thing called a prostitute who had sex for money. I put those facts together: The most beautiful thing that can happen between a man and a woman, and you can get paid for it. That was the job for me. I told my mother I was going to be a prostitute.”
“If this is a demand for cash, I can’t afford you,” Jamie said.
“Wouldn’t you do whatever it took?” she asked. “Pawn your watch?”
He held up the black plastic band on his wrist. “It cost twenty-four dollars new.”
She pulled her shirt over her head, and there were her round, honey-colored breasts, the small nipples already hard. “Would you sell your car?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. He reached for her breast, but she leaned back out of reach, which pressed her pelvis against him and stretched out her torso, the flat stomach disappearing into her jeans. He gave up on her breasts and unbuttoned the jeans, but she stopped him.
“Would you steal?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, and he thought he would.
“Would you sell your blood?”
“Ugh,” he said. “But yes.”
“Okay,” she said brightly. “What do you want me to do?”
“Take off your jeans,” he said.
She stood and peeled her jeans and underwear down over her hips. “Like this?”
“Turn around. Let me see your ass.”
She turned, and slid the jeans further, looking over her shoulder, then bent over to slide them down her legs, so that he could see the mauve asterisk of her asshole, and a hint of the pink slide beneath it. She stepped out of them and turned, naked. “Now what?” she asked.
“Put a finger inside your cunt,” he said.
She slid her hand down her stomach to the dark blond patch of hair and pressed her middle finger inside. “It’s so wet,” she said.
“Taste it.”
She put the finger in her mouth. “It’s salty.”
“Come here,” he said. He was caught. She could say anything she wanted, be shallow and spoiled and easily bored—he couldn’t blame her. He just wanted to have her. He pushed his pants off his hips so she could impale herself there on his cock: his Saffron, his whore.
18
TEDDY WAS READING The Wall Street Journalone morning over breakfast, and the story in the center column was about a man who embodied the principles of hard work, responsibility, and care for his fellow man. This man had built a business up from nothing and now had a thriving charitable foundation. Teddy read the paper through his glasses—he had to hold it at just the right distance as his cataracts got worse—and then clipped the story for Jamie. Even as he folded it up to send, he knew the article would have no effect on his son.
Teddy didn’t understand what he had done wrong with Jamie. He had tried to teach him the value of hard work. He’d given Jamie chores to do, so he could learn the pleasure of earned rewards. He had paid for all of his children to go to college, but Jamie had never finished. It was as if his son had started to tear open a gift and then abandoned it without taking it out of the box.
Teddy blamed California, in part. He and Yvette had grown up in hard times, in northern climates, in cold houses and families racked by the Depression. They knew how to appreciate California’s abundance and warmth and beauty. Children who grew up with it couldn’t appreciate it. They took everything for granted, and time seemed to flow past them; they had no sense of urgency. Nothing was difficult for them, not even the weather. They floated through school and went to the beach in all seasons. When he passed these young people on the street, he saw a blank, entitled, sunstruck look in their eyes.
He had heard that Jamie was in San Francisco, and when Yvette called there, a girl said Jamie was staying with a rich new girlfriend. But what kind of life was it for a man, to live off a woman? He would never have the respect of his children—assuming that Jamie could keep this one long enough to make her his wife and have children.
Teddy unfolded the newspaper clipping again and thought he would send a copy to Margot’s husband, Owen, too, although Owen didn’t need it. He was just the kind of man the article was talking about: hardworking, successful, generous.
It didn’t seem right to send it to Clarissa. It wasn’t easy to be a divorcée, and she still hadn’t found another man. She’d bet on a bad horse, he supposed, though he had always liked Henry. He sat at the table with his cut newspaper and his breakfast dishes and felt paralyzed with sadness. Two of his three children were lost.
Their children would be lost, too; it stood to reason. Abby was a good girl, but s
he’d been raised with no God, and now had no father.
Yvette came inside. “Why are you moping in here? It’s a beautiful day out there. You can fix the fence.”
His wife was a blur since his eyes had worsened, but he knew she was still beautiful. People commented on it all the time, and she took their admiration as it came.
“I planted that lobelia,” she said. “Oh, Teddy, are you clipping inspirational things?”
He smoothed the folded piece of newspaper.
“Don’t send it to Jamie, honey. He’ll think you’re disappointed in him.”
He thought about it and then said, “I am.”
“Oh, Teddy, don’t say that.”
“Why not?” he said. “I am.”
“Oh, Teddy.”
He got to his feet on his stiff knees and took his dishes to the sink, and got ready to go fix the fence.
19
INJUNE, JAMIEand Saffron moved into her place in the wine country. It had been in her mother’s family for a hundred years, and her father had given it a new roof and a shored-up foundation. It had cornices and gables and things Jamie didn’t know the names of, long upstairs hallways that led to other hallways, and two staircases, one grand and one for the servants who weren’t there anymore. A housekeeper, around sixty and skittish, came in the afternoons and kept her distance from Saffron.
The key to Saffron’s personality, Jamie thought, was her enormous capacity to be bored. He was happy to make her laugh and make her come, in every way he could think of, and the big house had its own novelty, but he could sense her mind wandering. Without work to keep him busy, boredom stalked him, too. He read books off the shelves: an old thriller called Mayhem in Greece and Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards 1982 . He played guitar on the covered porch, and backgammon with Saffron. The housekeeper came at noon, made lunch, cleaned up, and left cold things for dinner. One day ran into the next, and on an afternoon when Jamie thought he couldn’t stand the creeping restlessness anymore, he asked Saffron to marry him.
“Really?” she said.
It was a good question, under the circumstances, but he said, “Yes.” He meant it. An engagement was a tangible change. Maybe marriage would rekindle things. That suggestion, made by someone else, would have made him laugh, but it seemed like a possibility for Saffron. Who knew how she would respond to marriage? It would be a new game. And Saffron was beautiful and depraved—he would be crazy to give her up, and he would be lost if kicked back out into the world.
To his amazement, Saffron agreed, and they searched the house until they found an old square-cut garnet ring in a drawer. Saffron put it on her left hand and kissed him, which led to a very straightforward hour in one of the baroque beds.
Afterward, wearing nothing but the ring, Saffron rolled toward the nightstand and picked up the old black rotary phone. Jamie sleepily admired the curve of her ass and thought she was going to call her parents, but instead she called Martin Russell. She told him she was engaged, and asked him to come visit.
Martin arrived from New York with gifts for Saffron and a congratulatory handshake for Jamie; Jamie searched his face for skepticism, but it was kept hidden. His clothes seemed to fit better than Jamie’s ever would. He went for an effortless-looking swim in the pool and settled into his old banter with Saffron.
After dinner they played Botticelli, and Jamie fell asleep on the carpet. He had meant only to rest his eyes for a minute, but when he woke it was morning, and the room was light. Saffron was in the kitchen making coffee, in a short yellow flannel bathrobe that showed off her legs. Jamie shuffled in, groggy from sleeping on the floor, and sat at the table. His fiancée put a cup of coffee in front of him. The robe made a deep V in the front.
“Hello, floor sleeper,” she said.
“Why did you let me stay there?”
“You were dead,” she said. “What was I supposed to do, carry you upstairs?”
He drank some coffee. Saffron’s hair was wet. She didn’t usually wash her hair in the morning, because they would be swimming later.
“You could have woken me up,” he said.
“Easy for you to say.”
“Where’s Martin?”
“He’s still asleep.”
“You’ve seen him?”
She shot him a look. “I’m guessing. His door is closed.”
“Why’d you take a shower?”
“Why the inquisition?”
“You never take a shower first thing.”
“It was hot last night. I felt sticky.”
“Look, I might’ve fallen off the turnip truck yesterday,” Jamie said, “but we learned a thing or two back at the turnip farm.”
He wasn’t sure, though, what exactly he thought. To believe she had actually fucked Martin would put him in a blind rage; he could feel himself at the edge of it but didn’t want to be pushed over. He had to be careful. If he kept calm, he might still prevent her doing it.
“What’s this about?” she asked.
“Wake me up next time.”
“Next time what?”
“I fall asleep first.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, and she left the kitchen with her coffee, the yellow flannel brushing the backs of her smooth brown thighs.
20
ABBY SIGNED UPfor a poetry class in the spring, and when the sections were assigned, she found herself on Peter Kerner’s list. She wanted to ask if he had done it on purpose but was too embarrassed to suggest that he had. Miranda had seen them walking after a lecture and demanded to know facts.
“He’s writing his dissertation on Poe,” Abby said.
“So he’s attracted to craziness,” Miranda said. “That’s good. But I mean real facts.”
Abby told what she knew. He was thirty, and had grown up in Philadelphia. His parents were philosophy professors. His Jewish grandparents had been furious when their only son eloped with a halfhearted Lutheran, and his mother’s parents had warned her that she’d never get her new husband into the tennis club. So Peter and his sister had grown up without religion or the tennis club, but with long arguments at the dinner table about philosophy. He’d been kicked out of college for a year and said it was the good thing about being in your early twenties: that you could afford to waste time.
“You’re blushing like crazy,” Miranda said. “Are you going to sleep with him?”
“No,” Abby said.
“Why not ?” Miranda was dying to have an affair with a teacher, but she was a design major and her TAs were all women or gay. Professors were harder to land; she didn’t want to be obvious about it.
“I’m just not,” Abby said. She couldn’t go from her uncle to her teacher; she would start having attacks again. But she couldn’t explain that to Miranda.
“Can I have him, then?” her roommate asked.
“No!”
“How fair is that?”
Abby had started trying to write a novel, which she kept in a computer file called “English 199a” so Miranda wouldn’t read it. One Sunday night she was in the basement computer lab in the Central Library printing out two chapters—one from the point of view of a woman like Yvette, and one from Teddy’s—when Peter came in. She turned the printed pages facedown.
“Writing a paper?” he asked.
“No,” she said, then wished she had thought to say yes.
He sat without looking at her screen, and she ejected the disk.
“What are you printing?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know ?” He laughed, watching her. There was one other student in the lab, a boy at the other end of the long basement hallway, typing away. “Do you think he’ll leave soon?” Peter asked.
“He looks busy.”
“You’re wearing a skirt.”
She shifted in the chair and felt her bare knees rub against each other. The skirt was pink: Miranda’s. “It’s my roommate’s.”
He nodded and waited. Final
ly he said, “Do you wish he were gone, too?”
She nodded, and they sat looking at each other. She could feel her heart beating and tried to slow it down.
“There’s a room,” she heard herself say. She had found it while looking for the bathroom. It had industrial carpet, temporary shelving, and some overhead projectors.
“Show me.”
She slid the printed pages into her bag and wondered if she were creating a diversion to lead him away from them. But she wanted to go. She found the door, which opened, and let it close behind them.
Peter looked around. He plugged one of the overhead projectors into the wall and turned it on, and switched off the fluorescents. The room went dark blue, with a square of light on the bookshelves and the sound of the fan cooling the machine. He put his hand on the back of her neck, under her hair, and she shivered. She had gone off the pill so she wouldn’t do things she hadn’t planned to do, but he wouldn’t be expecting to fuck, not the first time.
She watched the whole thing as if at a distance. He was interested and reverent: he knew that girls like to be praised. It was the first time since Jamie left, and she wondered how long it would be before she stopped thinking of Jamie when someone took off her clothes. He went down on her as soon as she would let him, and he was good, he knew how to draw out the end. She lay thinking about the shape of the orgasm, and then she did the same for him. It seemed to cost her nothing.
Peter took her face in his hands and said, “What if I had let you go by?”
She lay with her head on his chest, on the tight-napped carpet, listening to the overhead whir. She had his section on Tuesday, and one more paper to write for the class.
“I’ve never done this before, with a student,” he said.
“Good.”
“Have you done this with a teacher?”
“God, no.”
He laughed. “I love that indignation. I was just asking. Let’s go somewhere with furniture.”
They dressed, and he left first, to see that the coast was clear. She turned off the overhead and smoothed down her hair and her skirt before following. The typing boy was gone, and everything seemed quiet.