Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (2 page)

Olivia Drake was younger than her husband but not by much. She had two daughters from a previous marriage to a performance artist. In contrast to her husband, she enjoyed napping as a kind of sport. She would time the onset and duration of her siestas based on some formula of her past night’s rest, her sexual activity, diet, and last bowel movement—a formula she told me once but I’m unable to remember right now, perhaps more consciously than unconsciously. (I wish I could bottle my brain’s combination of chemicals and electrical charges that prevented that short-term memory from becoming long-term. There’s quite a few things I’d use it on.) Olivia was generous to a fault in the beginning, and once she learned that I worked from home, she would often invite me over for lunch or a late breakfast. We became friends insomuch as two women in our position—landlord and tenant, one generation and a younger one—can, which is to say I was never one-hundred percent comfortable around her. She found out, though, that I was a ghostwriter and that I was grasping for a project of my own. She told me she’d dream on it. Yeah, I wasn’t sure how that worked either.

Now, enough with the bios. Let’s move on to our first scene: the country club where the Drake’s were members.

“Thirty - Love,” Olivia shouted, then served with a wicked stroke that made her grunt.

I managed a return but her subsequent two-handed backhand was too strong for me, yet again. It was the third match of the morning. I wanted nothing more than to end the charade. Our bouts of unbalanced tennis had become a habit: an invitation to the club on Wednesday morning, slaughtering me at tennis, then lunch with her and her husband at the club’s pond-side restaurant before the three of us headed back to the house— they to theirs and me back to my work in the apartment over the garage. I think she invited me because I provided slightly more conversation than a tennis ball machine.

“You look like you’re just about done,” Olivia said.

I nodded and wiped the sweat from my forehead. I’m a sweater, which is a polite way of saying I was out of shape then. I don’t really play tennis—I only played for a summer at a regional park when I was fourteen. I’d left out this detail when Olivia had first asked me if I played the game. Now I was paying the price for cavalierly exaggerating my experience.

“Forty - Love,” she called.

Game over. I didn’t even try for the ball as it marked up the ground just inside the white line. I sighed loudly and headed for the bench, where my nearly empty water bottle sat waiting.

“One more before showering,” Olivia said.

“I’m sorry, Olivia,” I said. “I don’t have it in me.”

“Nonsense. I’m older than you by decades. You have to
want
it.”

Oh, I wanted it all right. This was something like the fifth week of being slaughtered on the court. Don’t get me wrong: I was thankful to be here. I loved being at the club, the fall colors strong and omnipresent around the clubhouse before turning evergreen around the links. After all, I’m not the kind of person who could ever afford such a life, and you, reader, likely aren’t either. (And if you are, well lucky you. Lucky, lucky you.) I loved the clubhouse restaurant and the pond and the bar, but the sight of that rectangle of clay made me ill.

I stared into the late morning glare where Olivia stood, legs apart, haunches large and muscular beneath her pleated skirt. She wore her tennis glasses—dark indigo slits that made her seem like a visitor from the future. A cyborg. I could imagine myself serving; the hollow
thwok
of the strings against the yellow felt, the ball kissing the top of the net on its way over, then grinding so hard into the clay it left a skid mark. Olivia’s fruitless swing would howl through empty air, her racket thrown into the sky in anger, swinging strings over handle, up and up, then pausing, pausing, only to come down again right on Olivia’s head, the world buzzing as it released all the karma I’d been depositing. Oh, I wanted it all right.

The reality? My first pity serve of our final match stumbled off the top of the net and back onto my side. So did my second. And Olivia, through this last humiliating match and all that came before that day’s, talked throughout, as though tennis were the kind of sport where two women can be conversational, like speed walking, or light jogging. We’d been talking about my project.

“You should just write erotica,” she said. “Have you?”

“No,” I lied.

“Love - Love. But you can write anything.”

“I suppose.”

“Then you should write erotica. It’s what sells these days.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said, though I did know and my experience was the opposite of her position. I didn’t tell her that I’d ghostwritten a book of erotica several years ago. It was, of all things, by a cook I’d previously ghost-written a dessert book with. The premise was combining food with sex. It was very messy: his prose, the ideas, all of it. Empty calories. I think it sold less than five-hundred copies, which, for a book about sex
and
dessert, says something damning about something—and hopefully not my prose, or you’re in for it.

“Twenty - Love,” Olivia called out. “It’s the final frontier for women.”

“My loss?”

“Erotica. Pay attention. Erotica lets us enjoy pornography as much as men, but on
our
terms.”

“It’s been done,” I said, “There’s nothing new to be said. Who wants to make up fantasies? It’s just more lies.” Damn. Thirty…

“Forty - Love. Who said anything about making it up?” Olivia continued. “You should write down what really goes on. An exposé.”

There hadn’t been anyone in my life since the divorce, and, honestly, I was fine with that. My love life was like that yellow tennis ball, bouncing up against the green backing behind me, then rolling, now still. A nice thing to contemplate, but I really wasn’t good at the sex game and didn’t feel like playing right now.

“It’d be a very short book,” I said, watching Olivia pull a ball out from under that magic skirt of hers.

“Sorry Elly,” Olivia said.

“About the game or my love life?”

“Why both, of course.”

Of course.
“Thanks.”

“Don’t worry. I’ll dream on it.”

And a moment later we were done and headed toward the gym.

I am—correction,
was—
incredibly self-conscious about my own body around others. This made using the club’s showers a close second on my list of aversions to the sight of the clay tennis courts. To put off the showers, I sat out on the terrace sipping ice-tea infused with some imported mint brought to me by someone who could pretend as well as I could that I belonged there. I stayed out so long I only headed back into the bathroom and showers because I needed to pee.

When I entered the locker room, Olivia was directing a hair drier at the long, fogged mirror. She then leaned forward to examine herself as she applied lipstick in a bare oval of reflection. Olivia wasn’t a beautiful woman, but she was a prettier sight for eyes than I was, and this, coupled with the fact that she was much older than me, was more than a little depressing. Even her gray hair was far thicker than my flat brown, even before I’d clipped out the dozens of gray hairs I’d been discovering more and more often. Now, I realize that describing people as they look at themselves in a mirror sounds so
obviously
like a fiction device, but in the case of Olivia I remember her sitting there for the simple reason that there was something written in the mirror, some faint smudge of oil from lipstick that revealed itself in the mirror’s delicate state between being completely misted over and being dry, coaxed back to legibility by Olivia’s hairdryer. The mirror read:
Greta Danielson Mung is a whore. Keep your husbands close.
And
this
I remember only because that name belonged to my son’s second grade teacher, who, if a whore, must have been one during Prohibition.

I slipped past Olivia unnoticed, exchanged my clothes for a towel, and stored my “tennis outfit” in my backpack in my locker. Once within a shower stall I could relax and wash away the sweat of another humiliating loss, though by now it stung hardly at all. Being here was a little like being on a vacation. Then, as now, my mind tends to recall sundry and vaguely important to-dos while I’m showering, and on this occasion I remembered that I needed a haircut, realized I’d somehow forgotten to shave my left leg above the knee, and that I was nearly out of breakfast cereal, milk, and witch hazel—don’t ask. There I stood, under the hot pelts of water, letting those concerns rinse away until I felt relaxed again.
I’m Eloise Spanks
, I thought to myself.
Mother, ex-wife, $4500 in the bank, if not a heaping plate of ghostwriting jobs, then a 1950’s-sized plate of work. I’m doing okay. I’m okay. Okay.

The locker room was packed when I stepped out of the showers, full of the sixty-five and older crowd coming in from their water aerobics class. I will spare you the details. I took another towel for my hair and wrapped it tight, then pulled out my pack and changed into a skirt and blouse. My usual outfit was jeans and a T-shirt, but I made an effort for the club. Were I to wear denim and fraying concert T-shirts, I imagine even Olivia’s influence would be no match for code and tradition.

With no one in the locker room-or at home-to impress, not even myself, I didn’t bother to dry the mirror while combing my hair. Muscle memory was all I needed. As I went back to the locker for my pack, I discovered a folded page of stationary lying on the shelf beneath my sunglasses. It read:

Terribly sorry—must run. Drake stopped by earlier than expected and needs a partner for golf—business, you understand. Would you mind taking a shuttle back?

Also, re: earlier conversation—if you need material, the back door of our house is unlocked. Conceal yourself in the upstairs bedroom facing the woods and wait for us to return. You may learn a thing or two.

Along the note’s crease was an imprint of Olivia’s lips.
As a salutation? Or had she blotted her lipstick first, then thought to write the note?
I didn’t know, not that it mattered. Though I couldn’t shake the feeling that it did matter. Immensely.

I held the note on a bus ride back into our neighborhood. I must have read it fifty times, and each time thought a variation of the following:
But I’m Eloise Spanks! I’m no voyeur!

I arrived home and went straight to work. After having glanced up at the empty gravel drive a dozen times over the course of more than an hour, I went downstairs and across to the French doors at the back of the main house. I peered inside. No one was home. I tried the door. It
was
unlocked. And I felt then, with sudden certainty, that this was a trick: the moment I opened the door an alarm would sound and Olivia would know it had been me. She’d have even more reasons to pity me. Eloise, the sucker.

But what if it
wasn’t
a test of my curiosity, I thought. What if something really was going to happen up there in that bedroom that could give me a dozen or two pages of material? I walked around the pool, stopping to look up at the windows, guessing which one could be the bedroom she’d mentioned, each glance a
what if…
No,
I thought.
I’m certainly not going up there.
I turned and looked in the direction of the woods. I could picture myself climbing a tree, armed with binoculars, gazing in. Ugh. Curiosity gnawed at me but I went back to my apartment and by the time school let out and my son was home I’d forgotten about the invitation. It wasn’t until that night, when I took out a bag of trash, that I remembered Olivia’s note. I stood in the fresh darkness of a fall evening by the trashcans, looking up at the house and the solitary light upstairs. The back wall danced with the reflection from the pool’s lights. I could see Olivia downstairs in the sunroom, curled up on the couch and chatting on the phone, a drink in her free hand. And then the light upstairs turned off and was replaced by the undulation of the pool’s reflection, unbroken now against the windows and siding, and I waited to see Drake come downstairs, but he never did. At least not while I stood out there, which was longer than I’d like to admit. I almost felt like I’d imagined the whole thing: the note, its contents, the unlocked door. The note was somewhere in that tied-off trash bag, under yogurt lids and moist paper towels, under empty toilet paper rolls and the uneaten vegetables from my son’s plate. Trash.

To avoid temptation—okay, okay,
humiliation
—I vowed to make an excuse to get out of another tennis match. But all my brainstorming for plausible excuses were unnecessary. That week, and for nearly all of October, the Drakes were out of town. It was their anniversary. They were combining a series of business trips in Europe and Asia with their anniversary, leaving me with the easy task of making sure the house was cleaned by their crew on Mondays, the pool treated once a week, and that the house’s many houseplants got their thirst quenched on a regular basis by
moi
. My son wanted to explore the house the day the Drake’s left, but I told him about privacy and trust, waiting until he was in school to do the snooping myself.

To my credit, I
did
wait a few days—until I received a phone call from Olivia, just checking in from Shanghai. Knowing that the Drake’s were on the other end of the earth, and that no one would be entering the house for the entirety of the day, was all the excuse I needed to insert my key, turn the knob and do more than take in the mail and water the plants. I left my sandals in the entrance hall and headed upstairs. The only sound came from the faint ticking of two clocks: a grandfather clock downstairs and a brass affair upstairs, one of those rococo time pieces under a glass dome with lots of spinning parts, like people had once thought that time could only exist surrounded by a vacuum, which—big-picture now, extreme wide zoom—I think is actually fairly accurate. Or not. The science keeps changing.