Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (38 page)

“You want to check out the panorama?”

“Please,” I said.

We rose within the viewing tower’s elevator packed tightly with a group of Asian tourists who looked every bit as much tuckered out as I imagined I did. Once in the viewing area of the tower, I found myself atop a dark slab floor with every edge indented by a wall of glass. San Francisco spread its undulating self out before us in a way I’d never seen before, vast yet intimate, a city but also a town. I felt as though we were hovering above it in a spacecraft that could move and leave the city at a moment’s notice. But I didn’t want to leave. I found something plucking at my heartstrings from up here, all those neat rectangular city blocks, those encompassing hills, the bay, the moisture-heavy air. It was so unlike any city I’d ever visited or lived in before. The Asian tourists were crowded around an interior wall with a satellite photo of San Francisco, our place on the map worn away by thousands of finger touches. Point where you are on a map often enough and that place disappears. But the inverse is even truer; if you think of where you are often enough then everything
else
disappears. You forget that the horizon is something leftover from the days of a belief in a flat earth. There is no horizon. It keeps going. There are
always
other options. Wait—too far. Maybe that’s not entirely true, either. At any rate, in that tower, I began to feel myself come down with a case of the willies. Agoraphobia, maybe, but
willies
feels more evocative. I needed to see how this tower (and me) connected to the ground beneath. This illusion of floating over it all unnerved me, like I was never going to get back down there, like this was the vehicle that takes us away, to heaven or to hell.

“You want to get some air, see the sculpture garden?” Peter asked.

“Please,” I said, led again to another destination.

Peter bought two mini-bottles of wine from the cafe and we drank them under the cantilevered and semi-open roof of the museum’s edge, there overlooking the sculpture garden. A ginormous safety pin pointed outward over a path, ready to prick.

“So tell me about Eloise Spanks,” Peter said.

I tightened the small black cap back onto my now-empty wine bottle. Don’t judge. I was thirsty. “No, no,” I said, returning that serve. “Let’s talk about
you.”

“In that case, excuse me a moment,” he said, and walked away, maneuvering around the tables and chairs that sat haphazardly around us, the displaced remainders of lunches and conversations and even lonely contemplations that had taken place and disbanded before our arrival.

Peter returned with two more bottles of wine and two squares of something dark and chocolate. He cracked the seal off my bottle’s cap—a malbec—and filled my glass before sitting down.

“What do you want to know?” he asked.

I swilled the malbec around in my mouth for awhile. I can honestly admit it was the only time I’d ever tried (or heard of) a varietal by this name. It tasted like…red wine. Whatever it was that made someone a connoisseur—whether of wine, or fashion, or music—was clearly missing from my makeup. A failed development. An absent gene. I ran my tongue around my now empty mouth to try and rid it of the wine’s tannins—just about the only wine term I know.

“Why did you choose the malbec?” I asked, finally.

“Oh, is that what it is?” he said, shaking a pair of half-glasses free from a shirt pocket and beginning the act of putting them on.

“Good. I thought you were also a wine snob,” I said.

He smiled and put his glasses away, unused. “Would you rather I say I chose the most expensive bottle?”

“Is it?” I asked, taking another sip.

(Sipping at a second bottle after gulping down the first being something like delicately dabbing one’s face with a cloth napkin after ravishing oneself on ribs. Mmm. Ribs.)

“No,” Peter said. “The chief reason is I was reminded of a departed friend who always championed malbec. I thought I’d drink some in his honor.” Peter took a mouthful, swilled it, swallowed, and put down his glass. “You know how it is.”

I thought I knew what he meant. My late grandmother comes to mind whenever I think of wicker chairs. A friend’s parents are wool scarves (her) and lawnmowers (him). It almost seems like synesthesia. I wondered if the mind’s reason for these strange touchstones—and for bathing us at random moments with these memories—is to prevent those people from truly and irrecoverably perishing. They’re the ghosts within us.

Downer. Sorry.

“That’s it?” Peter asked. “No more questions? Or are you clairvoyant?”

“Ha,” I said. “But, okay. I think I have enough to go on.”

“All right. Who
am
I?” he dared.

I ate half the dark-chocolate fondant. Washed it away with malbec. Cleared my throat. “You made your money in business. Finance, before becoming an arts patron.”

Peter smiled, slightly.

“Overseas,” I continued. “Europe. No, Asia. Europe and Asia.”

“Hedging your bets.”

“Europe, then. You went to a boarding school as a kid. One of those fancy, vaguely-British academies that advertised in the back of
National Geographic
. Trust fund. Were married but it didn’t take. No kids.”

“You done?”

“Almost,” I said, enjoying myself. “In your youth there was someone you were infatuated with, but you were turned down. You didn’t let up, but still you lost. It haunts you to this day. Which is where I come in.”

“Uncanny,” Peter said, clearly impressed.

“Really?” I asked.

“Truly uncanny.”

“I used to do a bit of writing,” I said, before realizing I was letting a bit of my personal life come forward. Again. I didn’t care. Or, rather, it was the wine that made me not care. “I’m pretty good at sizing someone up and deducing their past.”

“Well it’s truly uncanny.” Peter said, relaxed as he leaned back and proceeded to sip some wine. He looked me over.

Was it now? Should I expect him to—what?—splash wine in my face? Play a little footsie. Ask me to accompanying him behind a Moore sculpture or that giant safety pin with the prospect of an attempted prick?

“It’s uncanny…” Peter said, “how much you got wrong.”

I frowned. “So that’s the game. Okay, so I’m not always right. How off was I?”

“Miles.”

“Miles?”

“Not one correct point. Don’t look so disappointed.”

“Who’s disappointed?” I said.

“Good. You done? Let me show you the garden.”

We followed the path around the sculptures, but here Peter didn’t say anything, as though his purview of art was limited to those works found indoors—which perhaps it was. Or perhaps he had something else on his mind such as how he was going to make his pass at me. Or maybe he was thinking about how right I’d been about him after all.

The path swung to the right and began to descend down a concrete-walled corridor that was open to the sky overhead. An older woman passed us coming back out, a smile on her face. What, I wondered, was at the end of this descent?

“I love this spot,” Peter said. “It feels like I’m somewhere far, far away. The Middle East, but without any people. My own planet.”

He’s the Little Prince, I thought to myself. The descending corridor, now with walls too high to climb, opened to an intimate round chamber with an open disc of cloudy sky above. It was the diameter of a mature redwood. A young couple broke apart from each other as we entered the small space, the man leading the woman back out, a barely concealed erection cramped up under those jeans. Now Peter and I were alone in the space.

Peter sat down on the inset concrete bench that half-circled the enclosure. I joined him but with a person’s distance between us, a ghost of caution. Up above, the open dome was bright white, depthless, the sky a flat disc of gray, then palest blue. From far off I could hear an airplane, then nothing, then a short segment of a bird’s chirp as it passed overhead. Then nothing. It was immensely peaceful, or would be under different circumstances. But the threat of Peter’s impending action—however it manifested itself—made me nervous. If the tower above the museum had given me agoraphobia, now I felt claustrophobic. Anticipation hissed at me as Peter stood up, walked to the side to check the long walkway, then returned. It was going to be the hand to the zipper, surely, or him grabbing my hand and putting it against him—but no, his head was simply craned up at that hole in the dome’s roof. It felt like we had fallen into some kind of trap and were trying to figure out how to extricate ourselves. Could we fit through that opening? Did we really want to be here, doing this? I could picture myself wobbling there as I stood on his shoulders, my hands reaching for the edges to escape.

I suppose all these emotions coursing through me were, in no small part, influenced by art’s power to shake loose the everyday mind and rattle it a bit. But I love my everyday mind. I’m fine with not feeling inadequate, and not being reminded of my mortality, and forgoing sensations of being agoraphobic or trapped. I don’t need art screaming Truths at me, or flashing its colors at my captive eyes.

With my eyes open, my surroundings felt too stark, as though their emptiness, their simplicity, was erasing my thoughts. Eyes closed, I remembered with clarity that I was working. That I had been working for about two or three hours now. That after this session I needed to pick up some groceries on the way home. That there were those polynomial math equations from last night that my son and I hadn’t finished tackling, that I had a library book overdue, that I had not had sex in…in…I forgot what day it was.

The sound of another museum patron’s footsteps filled me with relief. I opened my eyes but was surprised to find that, instead, I was alone. Peter had left. Suddenly, remarkably, I
loved
this space. It felt safe without him there. The expectation he’d set, and the anticipation of his inappropriate come-on, had filled the chamber with menace that seemed to have disappeared through the dome’s circular opening like invisible smoke. Replacing that sense of menace was a feeling of timelessness. The eternal. I vowed to return here on my own (and have, often) and soak up the sensation. Just before leaving, I glanced at something shiny on the ground and picked it up. Someone had lost a button, yellow, metallic. Remnants of a hasty fondle, perhaps. Hands within a blouse too tight for both breast and hand, for both support and a fondle.

Catching up with Peter there where he waited at the top of the long incline, I reemerged to the sounds and sights of the museum. The cafe was filled now with a large tour group, the air bubbling with conversation, children’s screams piercing the sculpture garden’s stoic air. I wondered, again, what Peter had planned. Had there been a moment back there where he’d intended to be obscene to me in some way? Perhaps in the museum’s elevator or tower—but the tourists had been in the way—or back a moment ago, but something had stopped him?

“I have to get back to the office,” Peter said, as we walked out of the museum’s grounds and to the street. “Share a cab?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said, though my answer came out a little disappointed sounding. Why couldn’t I have done what Carla had apparently so easily carried off? I felt fairly certain I wouldn’t see Peter as a client again. I prayed he wasn’t about to ask for a refund. I was taking a risk moonlighting like this.

We stood together at the curb, silent, until a cab pulled up. Peter opened the door for me, a gentleman. “After you.”

I ducked into the backseat, intending to sit at the far end to leave space for Peter when, just as I smiled at the driver, I felt Peter’s hand on my ass, his fingers tucked under me in an outrageous grope. It was a shock, so much so that all thoughts of being on the job were slow in bubbling up and, instead, I ended up elbowing him hard, then kicking him out of the taxi. Peter’s face was a half-snarl, half-grin. He caught my leg’s next kick and pulled me toward where he now stood, just outside the taxi’s open door. I wrestled my leg free at the expense of losing a shoe to his hands. I socked him in the jaw (with a ring on, too) and that sent him backwards, though his subsequent trip was more the curb’s doing than the power of any landed punch on my part. He landed indecorously on the sidewalk, my shoe still in his hands. People milling outside the museum had begun to notice, but not in a particularly samaritan way. We were, I think, entertaining them. What better way to cleanse the palette overly rich with art and culture than a good row between a man and a woman?

Peter’s hand went to his face and to the blood my ring had drawn, and he looked so entirely angry that I felt I was confronting another man. Gone was the knowledgeable docent, gone was the calm gentlemen, gone was my client. The cab driver began to get out of his cab, but I ordered him back inside, silencing the car’s dinging reminder for seat belts. Peter began to haul himself upright, so I gave him a swift kick which met a soft spot under his ribs. It didn’t stop him. With a little scream, I dove into the backseat.

“Drive! Drive!” I shouted, reaching to close the door which felt heavier now that the taxi was moving. I shut it just as the glass took the brunt of a thrown shoe.
My
shoe. A buckle clinked against the glass just before it fell away.

I turned and looked out the rear window and could see Peter now, fallen to his knees, a forlorn figure, something both immensely dangerous and pitiable. All of it, the grope, the confrontation, the thrown punch, the blood, all of it rushed through me as the taxi sped away. I’d never felt so alive.

“Wait!” I said, when we were about to leave the park. “Drive past the museum again.”

“O-kay,” the driver responded, as though he didn’t want any part of this decision of mine. He drove around the courtyard that fronted the museum, past a stage area, an orderly arrangement of trees, then back around. I could see the tower where I’d felt myself at home and in danger of leaving it, I saw the museum with its crack, its pit, its bottles of wine as it all came closer. But no Peter. No crowd. Just my shoe, set neatly at the curb. Mind-reader.

The taxi idled a moment while I collected my shoe, and then we pulled away from the curb for good. Inside the shoe I found a business card, identical to the one Carla had kept in
A Collection Of Sins.
Only this one had a red fingerprint at one corner. Blood. Now, you may think this odd, but my mind was eager for another session, my limbs promising me an even better defense next time. I would not be groped again.