Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (21 page)

There was a firm knock on the door Sunday night and it brought me out of my funk. The place was still a mess. Most everything was still unpacked, the air still strong with the spices of the previous tenant. Not exactly what I wanted my son to see. I opened the door.

It was Olivia. Her gray hair was bright against the indigo-black of a night that had fallen while I’d been busy sulking.

“Eloise,” she said, matter-of-factly. “Can I come in?”

To enjoy my lesser state?—sure, why not.
I didn’t care.

I’d barely closed the door behind her when I felt a blow across my cheek and found myself against the wall.

“How
dare
you!” Olivia spat out. She dropped her bag to her feet where it fell with a thud.

I turned the other cheek and took it hard there, too, though this time I managed to stay upright.

“You had nothing.
Nothing!
I gave you an apartment. I put your mind and your talents to work.”

I raised my own hand against her. She was forgetting this was
my
place now—out of her jurisdiction.

“Don’t you dare,” she said. “I’ll tear your arm off.”

I didn’t move. I remembered her backhand in tennis.

She didn’t blink. “You think you can just leave now, debts paid, all is forgiven, the world is yours?” From her bag she pulled a letter and handed it to me. “I’ve had a nice talk with your husband.”

“Ex-husb…”

“And he’s going to reopen his complaint against you. I’ve taken the liberty of finding him a better lawyer than the last. This one doesn’t heel when his client backs down. At least, not as quickly. And he
loves
criminal law.”

It was almost the exact same letter. Only the date and law firm letterhead were new.

“Where’s my son?”

“Why don’t you ask your husband?”

“Ex-husband,” I said, but softly, just to reiterate that small, insignificant truth.

“Your son would be shocked by what you’ve been up to,” Olivia said. I winced.

She upended her bag. There was my catsuit, and another like she’d worn that Wednesday night. There was the short riding crop and a pair of handcuffs and a coil of rope. There was a roll of black tape and a pink dildo.

“This isn’t mine,” I said.

“Oh no. I added a few things you’ll need.”

And in a moment I comprehended her meaning. Here was my future employment all laid out for me. And there was my employer, tying the apron strings behind my back, pointing to the work that needed to be done, expecting thanks.

“Forget it,” I said.

Olivia pulled out her phone, tapped a few times, and handed it to me. The screen was playing video of a gray room taken from ceiling height. My bedroom, I realized, with me in it, riding Terrance’s face. It couldn’t be. But it was. I clenched the phone.

“Don’t break my phone now, Eli,” Olivia said. “That’s just a copy of the video.”

“You perv,” I said, tossing the phone to her.

“Oh honey, wait now. This is my favorite part.”

“
Terrance! Terrance! God, I’ve killed a man,”
came my voice from the phone’s speaker.

Olivia laughed. “’I’ve killed a man!’” She laughed again, stopping only when I opened the front door and pointed.

“Oh, but there’s more,” Olivia said. She tapped her phone and handed it back but I didn’t want to touch it. She held it in the air facing me. And there I went, compelled to leave my post by the door to see what other moment she’d stolen from me.

This gray video showed me going down on Terrance, his hands pressing me against him, hard. I looked tiny in the video’s fish-eye distortion. I coughed just watching it.

“Tables turned on that one,” Olivia said. “At least you give as good as you get.”

I felt sick. “I could call the police this minute and tell them about you.”

“Why don’t you?” Olivia asked.

“I don’t have a working phone.” It was true. I couldn’t even afford a cell phone now.

She held out her phone. “Here. Use mine.”

I took it, but she’d already started another video. This time it was me and my first love: the bedpost. There in the upper bedroom. This video, though, was in color. Living, loathed, color.

Olivia moved back to the edge of the bed and smoothed out the cover.

“Your son’s address is a gmail account, right?”

“What do you want?” I asked, throwing the phone onto the bed.

“I’ve already showed you,” she said, kicking at the pile of gear on the floor. “I’m your boss now.”

The front door of the motel room slowly closed on its own.

“Now then,” Olivia said. “Aren’t you going to ask me about my granddaughter?”

She said it as though our whole conversation hadn’t happened, again. The burning of my cheeks, the tears in my eyes, the anger down to my marrow, though—they were still stuck ten seconds in the past. I bit down so hard my teeth hurt. There I’d been with my little voice recorder, using it for petty spite while she’d been recording me from above. I thought, instantly, to the smoke alarm, the one with the little red light.

“Well, I won’t tell you about her then,” Olivia said, when I didn’t respond.

She looked about the apartment—something she could accomplish without needing to do much more than turn her head. It was a motel room, plain and simple—make that worn and spartan. A room that had seen ten thousand sleepless nights. Ten thousand fucks. Ten thousand heartaches. All with the same props: the bed, the table, the bolted down lamp, the AC under the window. Any murders? If not, here was the motive and means for one. I saw it in my mind: pick up the empty bag on the floor and throw it over her head, grab the rope and coil it around her throat, then again around her wrists as they grasped at her neck to remove the cover and the first go-around of bundled nylon. But because I could imagine it didn’t meant I was the kind to carry through. I startled when Olivia grabbed my fingers and held them as she looked at me.

“So,” she said. “This is my proposition: We split seventy-thirty,
my favor
, but you charge what you like. I can give you suggestions on pricing. I’ll handle equipment and costumes which you’ll reimburse me for. I already have three, possibly four, clients for you.” She stared hard at me. “Don’t thank me all at once for being so forgiving.”

I picked up the whip and felt it in my hand. I picked up a wig.

“That’s right,” Olivia said.

I had this strange clarity there. I knew how this would all turn out. If I killed her—bad; if I worked for her—bad; if I refused and she told my son—bad. But some of these would entail longer punishments than others. Besides, everything comes to the light eventually. My choice was when to step out into that light.

“No,” I said, and dropped the whip and wig to my feet.

Olivia played a video on her phone again, the sound of me huffing and squealing on her bedpost and turned the phone to me, but I didn’t need to look.

“No,” I said. “You can’t have me.”

“I’ll also send this one along…” she said, touching her phone again and holding it out to me. And there, on the screen, was the unmistakable sight of Sam tied to a bed while Olivia paraded at the edges of the mattress, whip in hand,
wearing my clothes!
Sam wore a knit top with a name tag but nothing from the waist down. Olivia, in control. And seemingly in control here, too, in this shabby motel room, displaying her exploits to me. But I knew better. It was all up to me.

“Get out,” I said. “Out out out!” There was a ferocity to my voice now that made even me nervous, as though I were performing some kind of exorcism, which I suppose I was. I wanted Olivia out of my life. Drake too. Even Terrance, the tool. I was calling her bluff—those lawyers’s papers, I doubted they were real. Showing my son those videos—he was a minor. I’d have her up on dereliction or worse.

And she knew it. I started laughing. “Goodbye Olivia,” I said, when she didn’t budge. I couldn’t stop laughing. My mind had found a chink, a way out. I was free. Free before she even picked up the bag and walked through the door, free before she got into her Cadillac and drove off, free before the last glimpse of red taillights swung round a bend in the road and was gone.

Free.

Freedom is never free. I found work at one of the big box stores processing membership applications. Data entry stuff. This after the indoctrination, after the team-building meetings, after the indignity of the drug screening. I didn’t even get an employee discount. I kept the room at the old motel because I couldn’t afford any better. First and last month’s rent for a better place was such an unfathomable and unattainable sum, it might as well have been a million dollars. I blamed myself for everything. Freedom doesn’t wash away complicity. My son changed over the course of a year that we lived at the motel, despite our physical closeness when he was there, mostly because he was almost never there. I’d lost what was most precious to me. Who could blame him for preferring the freedom of friends’ camaraderie, the pleasures of misbehavior, of the potential energy brought on by the girls I saw in the cars that followed and proceeded his gang’s Silverado. His hair, that hair I’d seen trimmed dozens and dozens of times at the barber, now was all locks and unruliness. And despite all this, I envied him his life—still open before him, panting, possible, unrestrained and seemingly endless. I wanted to make it mine, too.

This is how people die: slowly, in plain sight, weary and wearied while our potential selves become strangers to us and we latch onto the dreams of others. This is why no one wants to be middle-aged. Because when you’re young, you think middle-aged is your fifties. But who lives to be a hundred? Middle age pounces on you when you think you can still be counted among the young.

A year passed. A year in which most of this confessional was written, and then sat there, untouched, for months and months. And then I reread it. And woke. Became unglued to the life that had pressed me flat here. At first I’d stayed because of the routine, cemented by the fact that Sam lived here. But then he moved away to New Jersey for work and there was suddenly nothing keeping me here. No weekend drop-offs of my son at his father’s. And my son didn’t want to move to New Jersey, though I could feel him playing with the idea. New Jersey could be, to his mind, another place where he could remake himself. But two could play at that game.

I asked my son where he’d like to live. It began as just a game over breakfast one morning, after he’d talked to his father on the phone.

“The beach,” he said.

“The Gulf?”

My son shook his head of hair. I could see only his nose and lips, and the spoonful of cereal waiting for entrance.

“East?” I asked.

“West,” he said, like it was the obvious answer, his teeth crunching on the words. The delicious West.

And so we left.

There is no measure of distance like the miles scored out by asphalt across hills, plains, deserts, and mountains. All this land was framed for us by a succession of bus windows, the view sometimes smudged or cut by etched graffiti, but no less powerful in demonstrating its vastness. That all this land had been stolen and conquered and parceled out in a mere century or two seemed an astounding fact. There was just so much of it. Meanwhile, my son sat beside me on the bus, his nose in a fantasy novel. It hadn’t taken more than a day for him to get over leaving his friends. There had been no girl crying as he left and for that I was grateful. Had that been the case, this move might have been impossible, for a mother’s love is no match for a girlfriend’s kiss—at least not in the short term.

Underneath us on the bus sat our two suitcases, and amid the clothes and trinkets of our lives sat a cast iron skillet in each. I was buoyed by just as much enthusiasm and fresh start syndrome as the next gal heading west, but we were the late pioneers, for the land had long since been spoken for, long before we arrived there on the west coast and opened our mouths to speak.

It’s been another year. We have an apartment just outside San Francisco. My son’s grades have improved and he’s un-bullied (or a bully). We visit a new spot in the city almost every weekend—the power of a new city to expand one’s sense of the possible can not be exaggerated. I found work at a startup that’s building assistive solutions for the visually impaired—or, to put that into English, I receive mobile phone photos and write descriptions that are sent back to the blind picture-taker and read aloud in a voice that isn’t mine, a voice of bits and data, but true words all the same. When we launch, my job will be out-sourced but at this time we’re still in the embryonic testing stage. Life is perpetual beta.

Before, I was the words behind others’ books. The ghostwriter. Now, I’m the sight for the blind. I am the color of the sky. I am the number of people in the frame. I am the clothes they wear and the expression on their faces, the hands interlocked, if only by just a finger. I am the birthday, the surprise party, the wedding reception, the loneliness of an expanse of empty green park that you only know is empty when you hear my words spoken while you stand there, under cloudy skies, my every word a light.

It is late afternoon. There is no one in the frame except for a gathering of distant geese beside a lilypad-filled pond. The light is illuminating the leaves from behind and there are yellow dandelion flowers in the process of closing across the entirety of the park’s grass. To your left, where the grass slopes upwards, there is the shape of a heart on the lawn, ten steps wide, where someone sprayed paint or perhaps chalk dust. There is a glass container of flowers in the center. This is only a few minutes from where we first kissed. I wish I were there with you.

I click
submit
, there from my apartment, then close my laptop. I check my wig in the mirror, consult my gear list and throw a 1973 July issue of Playboy into my bag along with an old Polaroid camera (alas no film), and, for a client after this one—one who doesn’t like to relive the time he was first caught masturbating—a key, a paddle, and my wrestling outfit. And before you judge, do you know how much it costs to live in San Francisco? In between clients, and even during sessions, I may write descriptions for a few more photographic scenes, this time through my phone.