by Lolita Files
“Now?”
“Yes. It’s gone now.”
“Kind of uncouth, huh?”
“No, really, not at all…”
Penn began sucking the chutney from the tips of his fingers. There was nothing ill-mannered about it. It seemed like a natural, unpremeditated thing. Her eyes were riveted to his mouth as he inserted each digit, let it linger between his lips, did a slight pucker-pucker thing, then pulled it out. Slow. Clean. Glistening.
His finger wasn’t the only thing glistening.
Beryl was wet. She hadn’t been wet in months. Quite possibly all year. She squirmed inside her skinny jeans. Her knee shook. She wondered if her makeup was okay.
“Sorry,” he said with a sensuous curved smile as he wiped his hands on his napkin. “The chutney’s too good to let go to waste.”
He took a big swallow of his Kingfisher beer, his head tilting back as he hurled a strong splash of the full-bodied drink against his throat. Her eyes rolled over the grace of his long neck, hit the hill of his Adam’s apple, and settled on its peak.
She couldn’t believe how hot he was. Model hot. Actor hot. Superhot. Beryl never got the chance to dine with men like this. Not casually. It happened quite often in business situations. She mingled with the beautiful all the time and was sleek enough to hang, if not equally pretty, and while she was welcomed, she was never mistaken for someone who naturally belonged.
She was so nervous right now. She didn’t want to mess this up. She pressed her right hand on her knee to slow it down. What was he thinking? Could he be attracted to her in the same way? It was possible, wasn’t it? He’d been so sweet back at the bookstore, and it was he who had suggested they have dinner. And what about his holding her hand on the way over? Even if it was just for a moment as they crossed the street, he had done it. A guy wouldn’t do that if he wasn’t interested, right?
Penn wiped his mouth with his napkin and plunged his hand under the table for something. He came up with a small tube of Kiehl’s. He squeezed a tiny bit on the tip of his forefinger, then smeared it across his lips.
She sipped her Diet Coke, watching him, hoping he couldn’t see how thrilled she was that this was even happening.
Men like this never dined with her casually. Men like this only paid her attention when they were trying to get a book deal.
It suddenly occurred to her that Penn might want a book deal.
“So what is it you do?” she asked.
The last piece of poori was on its way to his mouth. It hovered in midair a nanosecond, pinched between his forefinger and thumb. His lips were parted a fraction, and a burst of air was on its way up his trachea to push out the first word.
“One murgha tikka musalam.”
The waiter slowly passed the creamy chicken dish beneath Beryl’s nose with a flourish, then placed it in the middle of the table.
“One dildar curry with lamb.”
The grinning man seemed to put special emphasis on the way he said “dildar.” Dilldarrrrrrr. He waved the dish under Penn’s nose, then put it on the table. Penn smirked at Beryl and made a slight nod toward the waiter. She giggled. He smiled and gave a seductive, conspiratorial wink.
The floodgates burst inside Beryl’s skinny jeans. She smashed her little legs tightly together.
“One shaag bhajee.”
Shaaaaaag. Again the dragging out of the word. The waiter was turning the arrival of their meal into a pornographic celebration. Beryl squirmed harder, tiny jolts of electricity igniting her loins. The cheesing waiter was about to orbit the spinach dish past her face, but she leaned back. His grin weakened. The plate orbit was his shtick, his moment of theater. He lived for it. This fraggle-faced girl was stealing his joy.
“Kashmiri pillaw.”
The waiter was deadpan this time, though he still managed to stretch “pillaw” out into something obscene (pee-lowwwwwww, heavy on the owwwwwww). He set the rice mixture in the middle of the table without ceremony. The sweet aroma of plump, moist raisins and crunchy nuts flooded their senses.
“EnjoyyourmealthankyouverymuchIgonow,” the man blurted with a bow as he backed away from the table.
Penn’s face was frozen, then he broke into a full-fledged laugh. Beryl was too overcome for laughter. Between the dilldarrrrrrr, the shaaaaaag, and the pee-lowwwwwww, she was deep in the throes of a simulated food fuck.
“Would you excuse me for a sec? I have to go to the…” She made a weak gesture toward the bathroom.
“Sure,” Penn said, leaping to his feet and stepping over to pull out her chair.
Beryl grabbed her purse and got up cautiously, convinced the back of her jeans were wet. She tried to pull her Chanel jacket a little lower, but it was one of those short jobs that stopped at the waist. She was riddled with nervousness as she walked away. She couldn’t help looking back to see if Penn was laughing. He wasn’t. He was still standing, watching her leave. Beryl couldn’t stop shaking. She was overwhelmed by so many things. Too many things. Penn, the way he looked at her, the way she was feeling right now, the geyser action between her legs, panic at the thought of staining herself. It seemed as though everyone was watching her make this infernal trek to the bathroom. Eyeballs pressed against her. She looked askance. There was the supersexual waiter, grinning once again, his teeth towers of white cruelty. She quickened her step.
Beryl was barely inside the bathroom when everything she was experiencing merged in a wave of emotion that was no longer manageable.
She went down, down, crashing to the floor.
Her face was in a puddle when her eyes opened. Her right hand was on something cold. The porcelain base of the toilet. It took a second for her to register the environment, then she realized that her lips were resting in pee.
“God! Oh God!” she sputtered, scrambling to get up. She scuttled over to the sink and turned on the water. It was bitter cold. She pushed the button on the soap dispenser at least ten times, filling her palm with the stuff. She let some water mix with it, and furiously scrubbed her face. She scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed. Her makeup ran into the sink, mixing with the soapy foam as it swirled down the drain. She mashed the soap button again and scrubbed some more. She did it again. And again. And again.
She snatched up a handful of paper towels and rubbed her face dry. She was hysterical, unable to get the phantom taste and thought of the urine to go away. She pressed the button for more soap and plunged her face back under the faucet. Scrub, scrub, scrub. Pee and panic. Scrub, scrub, scrub. Neither one would wash away.
She stopped when she caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror. Her face was turgid pink, screaming for a reprieve.
“Look at me,” she said. “This is awful.”
She’d had two cataplexies in one day. Two. This kind of thing just didn’t happen, hadn’t happened in over a decade. She still hadn’t taken her pills, even though it was now too late in the day. The reason for taking them in the morning was so she wouldn’t be too alert at night and would be able to fall asleep. Not taking the pills had proved a grave error. Missing one day’s dosage reduced her to a quivering, cataplexying mess.
“I should take them,” she decided. So what if she was up all night from the jitters? It was worth it rather than risking another collapse.
She glanced around for her brand-new Pucci, a charming confection that was a gift from a friend at Apple, an exec she’d given advice regarding a ghostwriter. She had loved the purse at once, the moment she saw it. The signature Campanule print bag had silver chain-link straps and the fabric was a swirl of pink, green, burgundy, yellow, and white that coordinated beautifully with her jacket. Where was it?
She checked the counter and below. A flash of pink caught her eye. There it was.
On the floor next to the toilet.
Soaking in pee.
Mitali East had good food and amusingly distracting décor, but they were also the proud owners of one of the pissiest johns in the city. That day, anyway. Someone, presumably a woman,
had come in and sprayed the floor and walls like a cat in season.
Beryl raced over to retrieve her precious Pucci, crying all the way.
“Why is this happening?” she sniveled, holding a corner of the bag with two reluctant fingers. “Why is this happening to me?”
The faucet was still running, wasted gallons rushing down the sink.
She looked at the water, then at her stained bag. It couldn’t be helped. She thrust the Pucci beneath the cold stream. She was crying the whole time. She grabbed more paper towels, wet them, squished on more soap, and with manic zeal began to systematically ruin the delicate silk.
In the midst of her tears, she noticed something else. The knees of her skinny jeans were circles of pee.
Her mouth flew open in an unmitigated bawl. She wet more paper towels and began dabbing at her knees. Beryl scrubbed and cried and soaped and scrubbed, catching intermittent glimpses of her hysterical self in the mirror.
Someone banged on the bathroom door. The sound was startling. Whoever it was rattled the knob. They were about to come in.
Beryl rushed to the door to block it, as if her slight build were substantial enough to block anything more than the slightest of breezes. It flew open, hitting her in the face.
She went down.
She was cozy, peaceful, blissed out, cocooned within the rapture of down feathers and warmth. Yves Delorme sheets, three-hundred-thread counts of satin-soft pure Egyptian long-staple cotton, graced the front of her body in a gentle shroud and underscored her backside with equal attention. She floated on goose down featherbedding that topped a most exquisite mattress—a McRoskey Airflex, luxurious, made to specification, an experience in sumptuousness that defied the average wallet. Her head nestled in yet more down, flocked within elegant pillowcasings, plucked from the wings of airborne angels. The frosting, the agonizing pièce de résistance, was a Frette Demetra Foglie Arredo duvet, six-hundred-thread counts of brazen divinity. It covered her from chin to eternity, an epic expanse of material that promised paradise to anyone who dared venture underneath.
Penn sat beside the bed, next to a small table covered with potted African violets, enchanted and enraged by such extraordinary expression of decadent comfort. He was all man, and none of that manhood was metrosexual or remotely gay, but he knew high quality, and he knew it by name. He had been raised on supreme bedding like this. He was intimately familiar with every nuance of its elegance and feel. His mother had insisted upon Frette and Delorme bedding and bath linens in all their homes. She taught him that extreme thread counts didn’t always translate to quality. A higher thread count was good, but the overall construction was key, and it was important to purchase the best. He sometimes went into the Frette store on Madison just to egg himself on in doing what it took to return to the lifestyle that had been so cruelly stripped from him.
The lush bedding wasn’t the straw. It was the bed itself that broke his back with envy. He had recognized the McRoskey Airflex at once. To think that El Scrawnio, this less-than-lovely collapsible chick, the object of his grand scheme—she owned one. She was sleeping on something that should rightfully be his. It was probably just a really expensive bed to her. To him, it was a throne.
It had been Dane, his father, and Dane’s father, Pilgrim, who taught him as a boy about the scientific significance of McRoskey beds. Something about steel coils, innersprings, pressure points, resiliency. Grandfather Pilgrim, a man of enormous wealth and enormous quirks, had had the same McRoskey bed for sixty-three years. It had been made expressly to accommodate his six-foot-six frame. When he died, he was burned, per his request, on the indestructible thing like a funeral pyre. It had been an absurd ritual. All that was missing were the coins on his eyes and a ride up the river Styx.
Dane’s bed had also been designed for him. So had Penn’s. The Park Avenue apartment, the house in Lloyd Harbor, the Belgravia town home—McRoskey beds had been in each, made to spec for Liliana and Dane as a couple, and for Penn as a growing boy. McRoskey, headquartered in San Francisco, had been shipping beds thousands of miles for years for the Hamiltons’ maximum enjoyment. Penn had imagined he would spend his entire sleeping life on one. He hadn’t counted on his parents’ death, his near-destitution, and Ekeberg, his bed from IKEA hell.
Dane would spin on his theoretical axis if he were alive and knew Penn was sleeping on something as mass-replicated and prepackaged as Ekeberg. Penn hoped his father was spinning in hell for having been the reason he was sleeping on Ekeberg in the first place.
Ekeberg didn’t have it in him to evoke the kind of serenity Beryl’s face wore now. This was a woman dreaming of heaven. Either that, or she was dead.
She moaned. Signs of life.
Beryl stretched her limbs about beneath the covers, smiling in her sleep. She snuggled against a body-length pillow. She was on her side now, facing Penn. She moaned again, exhaled, ground her loins into the pillow, and opened her eyes.
The breath she’d just blown out was quickly sucked back. She sat up in the bed, clutching the duvet close to her chest. There was no need. Penn wasn’t threatening to come at her and she wasn’t nude. She was still in the clothes she’d been wearing all day.
“What are you doing here?”
“Making sure you’re okay.”
“What do you mean? Of course I’m okay. How’d you get in my house?”
“The doorman let us in.”
“What!” She pulled the duvet tighter.
“Calm down. Let me get you a glass of water.”
He went into the bathroom with an air of authority. Small potted African violets lined the back of the toilet, the counter, and the sides of the tub.
“What’s the deal with these,” he mumbled as he ran some water into a glass he found on the counter of the sink. He took it to her.
“Here.”
Beryl’s eyes were Frisbees as she took the glass with both hands, paused with apprehension, then drank. He sat in the chair he’d been in for the last five hours and watched the rapid return of her senses.
“What time is it?”
It was an absurd question, given the apparent significance of time in the room. On the wall facing the bed was an enormous black digital clock with bright red LED readouts for five different zones. The top left corner was Pacific, the top right Mountain, the lower right Eastern, and the lower left Central. Square in the center, in even larger bright red, was Zulu time. It didn’t fit the classic elegance of the rest of the room.
All she had to do was turn her head just a skosh, not even a full inch, and the time would have emblazoned itself upon her eyeballs. But she didn’t, which Penn took to mean one of two things: either she was so high maintenance, she was too lazy to even check the time for herself; or, she was so taken with him she just couldn’t look away. He was banking on the latter, but with all the mishaps she’d come with so far, he wasn’t quite sure.
“It’s two-eighteen.”
“In the morning?”
“Yes.”
He had the tube of Kiehl’s in his hand, squeezing more onto his finger, smearing it on his lips.
Beryl glanced down at herself and noticed she was still wearing the Chanel jacket. She raised the covers a little higher and peeked at herself. The piss-kneed jeans were still intact. Penn watched her cacophonous face go through a series of twitches as everything began to come back to her.
“The bathroom at the Indian restaurant. I fell down in the bathroom.”
“Yes. I got worried when you were in there so long, so I sent the waiter over. He banged on the door and tried to open it, but you must have been coming out or something because it knocked you in the head.”
“The waiter?”
“The door.”
“Oh,” she said, then, “Oh!” and flung back the covers, rushing off to the bathroom. She was barely inside before he heard something hit the floor.
“Hey. You all right in there?”
She didn’t answer. Penn hurried toward the bathr
oom.
It was Beryl. She was down. Out cold.
Again.
He was kneeling above her when she opened her eyes.
“You’re narcoleptic.”
In his hands were her bottles of pills.
Beryl shook so hard, the sleeves of her Chanel jacket flapped at the wrists.
“Wha—”
“You didn’t want to go to the hospital when you hit your head at the restaurant. You made a big stink about it, even though all of us—the waiters, the owners, the other customers, everybody—we all thought you should go. You just kept saying ‘take me home, take me home,’ then you blacked out again. I looked in your purse to get your address so the cab could bring us here. That’s when I noticed the pills.”
“Oh God,” she cried. Big blobs of water were falling out of her eyes.
“I’m sorry I went into your purse. I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t know what the drug names meant, so I got on your computer and Googled Provigil. The drug modafinil’s for narcolepsy. Suddenly your blacking out made lots of sense.”
She stared into Penn’s perfect face for what she feared would be the very last time. The truth was out. She’d finally found the One, and now this. He’d hang around long enough to make sure she was all right, then he’d be out of there. It’d be just like the boy from the mailroom years ago.
This was happening just the way she feared. Just as she first told Ripkin it would.
Ten minutes later, she was cradled inside his arms as they sat on the floor. He rocked her gently, brushing her forehead with feathery kisses of comfort and concern.
“It’s all right,” he said, “it’s all right, Beryl, don’t cry.”
“But no one’s ever known about it. Nobody’s ever known.”
“It’s okay. No one has to know now.”
She looked up at him, her wan face awash in wetness.
“But why would you protect me? I just met you. Why would you do anything for me?”
He hugged her closer, stroking her hair.
“I feel like I need to.”