by Greg Olear
“I wish. The last woman I dated worked with me at Drexel. That was five years ago.”
“What happened?”
“You want the long story or the short story?”
“Both.”
“The short story is, she dumped me. The long story is, I drove her away. I got the job at Quid Pro Quo, and I started working all these crazy hours. Eventually she got sick of it. She left me for a bass player in a jazz fusion band. His lifestyle was more stable, she said.”
“Well,” said Taylor, “it’s her loss.”
“You’re too kind.” He caressed her fingers. “What about you? You have a special guy back in Missouri or something?”
“No.” Taylor laughed off the suggestion. “I’ve never had a special guy. I always seem to date creeps, for some reason. I’m a creep magnet. Like flies on shit. You’re not a creep, are you?”
Asher took longer to answer the question than she would have liked, as if he first had to work it out. This made Taylor wonder what his inevitable flaw might be, and when it would reveal itself.
“No,” he said finally. “Some might allege otherwise, but I’m not a creep.”
“Modesty doesn’t become you.”
“I’m just being honest. I have intense relationships with people, but for a brief period of time. I’ve always been that way. The candle that burns at both ends. And my job just makes it worse.”
“So why don’t you quit? I’m sure it’d be easy to find another gig, being a headhunter and all, no?”
Asher looked at her like she’d grown a third breast. “I have the best job in the world. I’d be insane to give it up.”
Taylor imagined being a headhunter, what it must be like, meeting with new hopefuls every day, scouring résumés, maintaining relationships with ill-tempered employers. Even if the pay was good—and it clearly was, if the Jaguar and the Dakota were any indication—it didn’t seem particularly fulfilling.
“What exactly do you do at Quid Pro Quo that, like, makes it so great?”
This caught him off guard. Asher shuffled in his seat, and she felt his palms begin to sweat. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve met a lot of headhunters. They’re all the same—but you’re nothing like them.”
“A backhanded compliment, but I’ll take it.” Asher withdrew his hands, wiping them on the tablecloth. “I’m an executive. I do what all executives do. I execute.”
“Ha ha ha.”
He signaled for the check. “You want to get out of here?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
If Asher was past the legal limit—and he must have been, given the liquor he’d consumed—it wasn’t evident in his driving. Which was even more remarkable, when you consider that the Jag was a stick shift and his right hand was on her knee most of the time. Whenever they hit a red light they were all over each other. Somewhere in Chelsea, Taylor’s updo collapsed. He spent the rest of the ride running his greedy fingers through her Rapunzeled hair.
Finally they reached Ninth Street. Asher parked in front of the fire hydrant, and they fell upon each other. (From my perch on the terrace, I could see the car rocking back and forth and the windows fogging up.)
Wine-primed and sex-starved though she was, Taylor was unsure what her next move should be. On the one hand, she wanted very badly to add Asher’s name to her list. It was now twenty-eight days since she last had sex, her longest-ever dry spell (not counting the two months in high school when she was laid up with mono). On the other hand, she didn’t want to come off as easy. She’d been on too many dates just as promising as this one, only to sleep with the guy and never hear from him again. J.D. was but the latest example.
Asher was different. Asher was a keeper.
Then again, it wouldn’t hurt to invite him up for a nightcap, would it? Her roommate was home; how out of hand could things get?
“Would you like to come up?”
“I’d love to,” he said. “But it’s getting late. I should go home.”
Suddenly, Taylor felt insecure. She disentangled from him, grasping at the door handle, and studied him closely—impossibly handsome, meticulously groomed, perfectly dressed, practically unavailable, somehow single. Of course!
“You’re not gay, are you?”
This made Asher laugh. “No, I’m not gay, thank you very much. I’m just…old-fashioned.” He gazed into her eyes until the idea of him being gay melted away. “This isn’t the greatest timing, I’m afraid. I’m leaving tomorrow for a business trip.”
“When will you be back?”
“Not for two weeks. I’m gone until the end of the month. It sucks, I know, but what can I do? I have to work. Can I take you for drinks when I get back?”
A guy who liked her but wasn’t in a hurry to get in her pants? What a novelty! “You weren’t kidding about the crazy hours.”
“Don’t I know it.”
“Whatever, that’s fine. Where are you going?”
“Nowhere exciting.”
They kissed again—this time gently, tenderly—and she stepped out of the car and into the still-stifling heat.
As Taylor stood there, quite literally hot and bothered, watching the Jaguar speed off, she had no idea that I was out on the terrace, nursing my fifth Rolling Rock of the evening, watching her with the same lustful longing she trained on the departed Asher Krug.
Given that her date did not accompany her up the three flights of stairs and into her little room—given that she came home at all, as I hadn’t expected her until the following afternoon, glowing from what was certain to be a satisfying fuck followed by a satisfying breakfast—I knew that it was possible that tonight, the night Asher Krug revved her engines for hours only to leave her motor running, could very well be the night when Taylor decided to break the emergency glass.
But it was not to be. By the time I climbed back through the window and reached the hallway, Taylor had already barricaded herself in her room. A Whitesnake album was playing on her—on my—tape deck (she loved Duran Duran to death, but her heart belonged to eighties hair metal bands—Iron Maiden, Poison, Def Leppard, etc.). Pressing my ear to the door, I heard, over the tin-eared strains of “Here I Go Again” and her own soft grunts, the whir of what I believe they call a pocket rocket.
So much for broken glass.
Following Taylor’s example, I retreated to my room, where the Lubriderm and Puffs awaited. As I lay on my bed in the pathetic afterglow, I thought of that Hadesian Greek who can never quench his thirst, even though he’s standing in a pool of potable water. What was his name? It hovered tantalizingly on the tip of my tongue, but I could not give it voice.
CHAPTER 9
I
n the summer of 1991, I was working as a librarian at the long-since-defunct photo archive at API—the latest, and what would be the penultimate, in a series of McJobs I’d tenuously held since my graduation from Trenton State in 1986. I was a glorified file clerk. Customers, usually magazines, would call up with special requests—photographs related to the JFK assassination were big that summer, thanks to Oliver Stone; Lee Oswald, J. D. Tippett, stills from the Zapruder film—and I would fetch the negatives. Then…I’d put them back. The only requirement was a working knowledge of the (English) alphabet, although you could sing the song if you were too hungover to remember if R or S came first. The job was beneath my talents, for sure, but it was decent enough: easy, vaguely interesting, and never more than forty hours a week per collectively bargained rule. I’d been there nine ho-hum months. The main drawback was my boss, a hulkingly obese woman named Donna Green, who, for some reason, did not like me. Not that I much cared for her, either—especially her habit of bursting into song at the drop of a hat. Her voice was loud and, if you’re into Whitney Houston, pretty good. But I’m not into Whitney Houston, and even if I were, I wouldn’t like the way Donna riffed her way through “Happy Birthday” every time we had cake for one of the admins. It was a photo library, not Star Search.
; The Monday after Taylor’s date with Asher, I was pulling a photo of Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, when who should stroll into the library but my unbeknowing Cupid, Jason Hanson. After the usual pleasantries—Jason and I met for beers at 119 Bar every once in a while, so we were pretty tight—he asked how it was going with Taylor.
“Dude,” I told him, “you should have warned me.”
“Is it that bad?”
“Um, yeah.”
“You said you were desperate.”
“I know, but dude. You should have given me a heads-up.”
“Oh, shit. I’m sorry, man. I haven’t seen her in ages. I figured she’d have calmed down by now.”
“Calmed down?”
“Yeah.” He gave me the same nonplussed look I was giving him. “Isn’t that what you meant?”
“Isn’t what what I meant?”
“You know.” He drew close and mumbled under his breath. “That she’s a friggin’ nympho, man.”
What I meant, in actuality, was that Taylor was clockstoppingly hot. But I played it cool. “Oh, yeah. I mean, she’s a total superfreak.”
“The kind you don’t bring home to mother. You know what I heard?” Jason put his arm around me, leaned in conspiratorially. “I heard she turns tricks.”
“Turns tricks?”
“Yeah. That’s how she paid her way through college, is what I heard. It’s not like her old lady has a pot to piss in.”
I remembered the hundred-dollar bills crumpled in her miniskirt the day she arrived; five crinkly pieces of evidence that seemed to corroborate Jason’s claim. Then again, there was no mention of prostitution in Taylor’s diary. Moreover, I didn’t want to believe it. So I decided to discard what was most likely the truth, in the same way that creationists ignore science.
“I don’t know if I believe that,” I said. “She doesn’t seem the type.”
“She still keep the list?”
“The list?”
“Of her sexual partners. Should be like a fucking telephone book by now.”
“Not that I know of.”
“Don’t tell me you like her, dude.”
“Well, I…”
“Whatever you do, Todd, don’t go there.”
“Why shouldn’t I go there?”
Before he could reply, Donna Green lumbered in, with all the grace of the Juggernaut in the old Fantastic Four comics, hollering at me to hurry along. Jason never did answer the question. Taylor a nympho? This was a new twist. Her diaries suggested a laissez-faire attitude toward sex, certainly, but symptoms of this complaint had yet to manifest themselves in the time I’d known her. Diddling after her date with the clit-teasing Asher Krug hardly qualifies—a Carmelite nun would have done the same thing. Then again, if Jason Hanson was right—and he had more knowledge of the subject than I did—it could only bode well for her in-case-of-emergency-break-glass roommate.
I went home immediately—I told Donna I had a follow-up dental appointment—and searched Taylor’s room. The two-page list was folded neatly and tucked into the pages of the King James Bible she kept, for purposes of irony, on her nightstand. The first name therein, Matt Harris, was dated September 30, 1983. Jason Hanson checked in at number sixteen, June 8, 1986. J.D. (no other name supplied), the most recent entry, dated August 22, 1991, was number seventy-four.
Seventy-four different men in seven and a half years! I did the math: that’s almost ten new partners every year, roughly one every six weeks. Not exactly Wilt Chamberlain territory, but for a twenty-three-year-old from Warrensburg, Missouri, either impressive or notorious, depending on your view of promiscuity.
And, of course, it made me want her all the more.
Across town, the object of my lust sat in the Braithwaite Ross cafeteria with her new colleagues. It was an awkward lunch. You could have cut the tension with a proverbial knife…or maybe even a real one. Why the long faces? The new publisher was expected any minute.
Taylor was characteristically blasé about the whole thing. Why should she give a shit? A new publisher would probably update Walter Bledsoe as editorial director (whom she had yet to see in the offices, although she’d been there almost two weeks), and she was fine with that. Plus, she was still buzzing about her date with Asher.
But everyone else—Charles and Brady, Mike and Chris, and Angie, who was sitting next to Taylor—looked like someone had died.
Suddenly, the door opened and a short, handsome, and fastidiously groomed fellow strode into the room. He wore black jeans, a black turtleneck, and a black blazer. Black eyes peered through black Calvin Klein spectacles. The man in black stood at the head of the room, surveyed the assembly, arched one eyebrow, and spoke.
“Good afternoon. I’m Nathan Ross.” He sounded so much like Jack Nicholson that Taylor thought he must be putting it on. “I had intended to come here today to meet with you and ease any concerns that I’m sure you have. I had intended to talk to each and every one of you, to see what you like about the company, what you don’t like about the company, what you suggest I can do to make this a better place to work. I wanted to wheel in trays of hors d’oeuvre and glasses of champagne and toast the success of Braithwaite Ross. I wanted you all to think that even though my old man owns the company, I’m not unapproachable, nor am I inept.”
His eyes fell to the floor. “All that, unfortunately, will have to wait. I’m afraid that my first order of business as publisher is to be the bearer of bad tidings.”
This unexpected twist had a pronounced affect on the stomachs of those in attendance, Taylor included.
“Walter Bledsoe is dead.”
Judging from their reaction to this news, the rest of the company liked Walter Bledsoe as much as Taylor did. There were cries of surprise, but none of genuine grief.
“Late Sunday afternoon, he had a heart attack. By the time the ambulance arrived, it was too late to revive him.”
Somebody—one of the many female employees Taylor failed to mention in her diary—gasped.
“I’m sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, I really am. I was really looking forward to this day, and this is not the way I envisioned starting off.” Nathan Ross took off his glasses and wiped his eyes, although he was not crying. “Walter Bledsoe meant a lot to this company. More than I can possibly convey. We’ll have that celebration in a few weeks. At that time, I will announce Walter’s successor as editorial director.” A smile crossed the new boss man’s baby-smooth face. “And if you’re dressing up on my account, you can stop. There’s no reason for an editor to wear a coat and tie.”
And Nathan Ross strode slickly out of the room.
“You called it,” Angie whispered to Taylor.
“Called what?”
“You said we couldn’t have a thriller without a dead man. Now we have a dead man.”
Other than adding a few more weeks to Taylor’s dry spell—and, needless to say, a few more to my own—Asher’s fortnight away passed uneventfully. She concentrated her energies, in the daytime and nighttime respectively, on Roger Gale’s witless manuscript and her pocket rocket. I continued to harbor the delusion, optimist that I still was, that my hour would soon arrive, that Taylor would have to break glass. But she held out. Like a Mother Abbess, she held out. And it was a torture, lurking by her locked door every night, like some unloved puppy left out in the rain, my dick heavy as a slab of granite, listening to the whir of the piece of plastic whose company she preferred to my own. But all I could do was wait my turn.
I tried to keep busy. I went on some auditions. I saw the Violent Femmes at Irving Plaza and Soft Parade, the Doors cover band, at the Red Lion. I read The Stand. I took Syd Field’s seminar at the Learning Annex. I bumped into Laura and her new boyfriend, Chet, near the fountain in Central Park. They were walking their bichon. They were living on the Upper East Side. They were engaged.
Bored, I called up Jason Hanson and met him for beers at our usual watering hole, 119 Bar, off Union Square. He was a big music guy, so I w
anted his take on Use Your Illusion, which had just come out—there were two albums, and Jason would know if I needed to buy both of them. But it wasn’t all ulterior, meeting him—I liked the dude. He did a hilarious impression of Donna Green riffing on “Greatest Love of All.” Plus he was an upbeat guy, and I needed more upbeat in my life.
But it was a somber Jason Hanson I found at the bar, already on his second beer.
“Dude,” he said, over the Ramones blaring on the PA, “I’m worried about my job.”
“Why? Did you fuck something up?”
“All this shit with the Mirror Group.”
The goateed bartender came over, and I ordered a Guinness.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said.
“The guy who owns API, Robert Maxwell? He’s in serious shit, man. There’s some sort of big pension scheme or something. He’s in trouble with the regulators over in England. If the company goes under, dude, I’m fucked.”
This was news to me. I knew API was owned by the Mirror Group, but I had never heard of Robert Maxwell. Not that it mattered; API was the largest company of its kind in the world—too big, and too important, to fail. The bartender brought me my pint—a perfect pour, down to the shamrock in the foam.
“Where did you hear this?” I asked.
“I read it in the Post,” Jason said, chugging the last of his beer.
“The Washington Post?”
“The New York Post.”
“Dude.” I chortled, and foam from the Guinness stuck to my nose. “That’s like one step removed from the National Enquirer. They do stories about UFOs and shit. Next thing, you’ll tell me Elvis is alive and working the copy desk. Fuck API, man, and give me the skinny on the new GNR. I hear there’s a song where Axl tells Vince Neil to fuck off.”
“And Andy Secher at Hit Parader.” Jason brightened up a bit. “ Get in the Ring,’ it’s called. Great track. But the highlight is the cover of ‘Live and Let Die.’ That’s, like, totally killer.”