Love Monkey (18 page)

She looks sad.

“I've got mustard,” I say.

“That's right,” she says, brightening right up. “Mustard. It was the
m
that threw me.”

Thank God she doesn't know what that
m
really stands for.

“And I see some kind of…lunch meat.”

“Absurd,” I say. Every guy has lunch meat in his fridge. Except, as it happens, me. Just the stuff I use to make a Bloody Mary takes up practically a whole shelf.

And that's when the waitress breaks in to tell us time's up.

“That's it,” I say. “Gotta go.”

“Wait,” says Bran, looking more smug than usual. “She hasn't read your tarot yet.”

“Tell me some other time,” I say, thinking, This girl can see
right through me. Just like Neil Diamond, Dan Fogelberg, and Bread.

“Five more minutes?” Katie asks the waitress, and gives her this sweet smile. The waitress shrugs.

“Okay,” she says, and deals me four cards. “You're the Questioner. We're going to read them left to right. First card.” She turns it over. “Eight of cups. Interesting. It means a beginning, in the relationship sense. Traditionally, a blond woman could be of some assistance to you.”

She gives me the kind of little smirk only blondes can do. This girl is cute, no doubt about it. But I'm thinking about Julia's dirty-blond hair. Come to think of it, Liesl is a blonde too.

“It's always about the blondes,” says Bran, shaking her dark head. “The world is so…blondist.”

“Two,” says Katie, flipping again. “The knight of swords. Okay. This indicates a clever, charming man, a trusted adviser you consult with regularly. But he could be unreliable. He could bring excitement, or trouble, into your life.”

I try not to look at Shooter, but at this very moment he and Rollo are sitting next to each other on an overstuffed sofa. Both of them have a girl sitting on either knee. Rollo is whispering obviously dirty things to one of the girls. The other one he's tickling. The girls on Shooter's knees are…well…I believe the word is “undulating.”

“Three,” says Katie. “The two of swords. Stalemate, a dead end. Things drag on endlessly.”

You know how you never think about your armpits until you notice something is going on there? I'm thinking about my armpits. I don't need antiperspirant. I need a couple of Maxipads.

Snap, snap. Katie, with the fingers. “You ready?” she says, fetching me back to earth.

“Pay attention, Tom,” says Bran, looking highly entertained.

“Four,” Katie says.

It's a guy with a moronic giggle carrying a stick on his shoulder and wearing bells on his hat. A dog is chasing him, pulling his pants halfway down so his butt sticks out of his pants.

“Now,” says Katie, “I have to caution you, this one is something of a misnomer. See how he's marching forward, and he's got his traveling stick? This is the card that generally indicates new beginnings. Fresh starts. A new job, or a journey of some kind.”

“You can't argue with the cards,” Bran says. “Tom, you're the fool.”

A
lways take a personal day to follow the birthday. Sleeping in. So nice. And the dreams. I had an excellent sports fantasy: championship bowling, a record-breaking score; also, for a ball I was using Dwayne's head. Then up for some toast and tea, a languorous morning wielding the TV clicker, and now I can get on with the serious business of the day: not calling her.

I'm not going to call her, I'm not going to call her.

I'm not going to call her.

Outside it's 80 degrees, and 80 percent stupidity. But I'm not going out there. Why take a chance?

I shower and “blow out” my longish hair. It's starting to look like something that should be seen only on a member of the New York Islanders. In the attempt to cultivate flowing poetic-mysterious Johnny Depp hair, or at least interestingly demented-wavy Beethoven locks, I have created a formidable humidity mop. Something must be done.

When I turn off the dryer, the phone is ringing. I get there too late. My machine clicks off and the phone goes dead. A hanger-upper. Julia is a hanger-upper, a machineophobic. Instantly I hit*69. Well, not instantly. Can I afford to waste the 75 cents, plus the roughly 150 percent tax that mysteriously seems to apply to everything telephone related?

I get a pleasant morning-chat-show-type voice. The number I am calling cannot be reached by this method.

It's ten
A.M.
Obviously it was her, calling from work
—Tabloid
blocks the number on all outgoing calls, natch—and how kind of her! To worry that I might still be asleep. That's why she hung up.

I don't dare leave the apartment lest the phone ring. I wonder if I'll be able to last the entire day without going to the bathroom, though.

One
P.M.
The phone.

“Hello?”

“Hello? I don't know if you remember me, but…”

My relief tank is refilling rapidly, making cheerful glug-glug noises.

“You sound,” I say, “like a girl I used to like.”

She half-laughs. “I know. I know!”

“Did you sleep through it?”

“Yup.”

“Poor sleepyhead,” I say. And she's done it again: she's turned me. I am the one offering sympathy. When she slept through my god-damned birthday party.

“I woke up at eight and I thought, ‘It's okay, I'll just take a cab downtown.' Then I fell asleep again.”

I half-laugh. And I can't help it. I get a plate and prepare to load it up from the self-punishment buffet.

“Do you want to hang out after work?” I say.

“Okay.”

Get dressed. Suck in. Psych up. I want to be everything for her. I want Tom Cruise's smile, Bob Dylan's poetry, and Elvis's swagger.
Instead I have Tom Cruise's height, Bob Dylan's hair, and Elvis's liver. Cinch the belt one notch more than usual. The pain is not, as I expected, Satanic; it is merely excruciating. One more notch and I can throw this belt away. I have lost some pounds.

I'm there at five on the dot to pick her up. We go see a movie about a guy who can't create any new memories. Whatever he sees, whatever he hears, whatever information is shoved right in his face, he just forgets. There's a scene where his girl is really mean to him, knowing that five minutes later he won't remember a thing. Some guys, they just don't learn.

“Let's go to the park,” I say. “We have to take advantage of these summer nights. The snows will be coming in, like, three weeks.”

“That,” she says, “would be lovely.”

I have prepared for the occasion. I've got a backpack containing a bottle of wine, two plastic glasses, a corkscrew, and a sheet. We go to the park and sit under a tree. The Sheep Meadow is alive with chirping. Not birds. Cell phones. Daddies are playing with their little girls all around us. Julia looks wistful.

Fifty feet behind us, a couple is making out. Fifty feet in front of us, a couple is making out.

“Reminds me of a Dylan song,” I say.

“Most things do,” she says.

The lyrics just leak out of me.

“ ‘Simple Twist of Fate,' ” she says.

“Correct.” I smile gratefully. This girl is so much fun to talk to, it's like talking to myself.

Dusk is already happening. This, too, is part of my plan.

I open the wine without getting any cork in the bottle (hooray) and we sit on the sheet and I pour her a little more wine than I pour myself.

“I loved your note,” she says.

Her first byline in the paper today. To celebrate, before I left work yesterday I left her a funny card and a bottle of champagne. Also a long-stemmed rose.

I know. Don't tell me.

“What did you think when you saw the rose? Did you think some copy editor was stalking you?”

“I knew it was you the minute I saw it,” she says.

She is sitting up. I'm lying behind her. Adoring the cello swell of her hips, the fascinating smallness of her waist. She's wearing a tight little sleeveless number that rides up above the small of her back. My fingers take a walk.

“You have all these little white hairs on your back,” I say. And she does. It's like chick down. It's adorable.

“I know. I used to shave my back. I'm so hairy!”

“It's okay,” I say.

I fill my lungs. She notices.

I sit up and move nearer. I pick up her hands. We've had two glasses of wine each.

“I'd like to say something,” I say.

After the roller coaster has finished creeping up its steepest incline and before it begins its descent, there is that moment. Of absolute stillness.

She winces a little. The uh-ohs are etched into her forehead.

I pause for a long time. Partly this is a dramatic pause. Partly it's the pause you use when you don't want to know what's going to happen next.

I hunt for non-clichés, but there aren't any. Everything I feel has
been felt before. Everything I have to say has been said better. But this could be the last chance I have to tell her these things she already knows.

“I want to thank you,” I say. “For being you and sharing as much of yourself as you have.”

Her eyes are desperate. We're sitting close. You couldn't slip a Frisbee between us.

“But the thing is,” I say, “it's obvious you're not going to marry him. And I know you've been thinking, ‘Am I a bad person?' You're not a bad person. If anyone would think you're a bad person, it'd be me. And I know you're a…kind, thoughtful, generous person. You just made one mistake.”

Her face goes all damp. “You don't have another bottle of wine, do you?”

“And you thought maybe you'd fall in love with him after a while, but you didn't,” I say. “You don't want to hurt his feelings. But you're not doing him any favors if you wait another two or three years before you tell him. You're torturing him, Julia.” Aren't I a great guy? He's living with a sexy, sweet, smart woman. And I want to save him from all that.

Big pause. The sun is setting. The broiling has ended, leaving an absolutely perfect summer evening. Red wine is starting to spread over the horizon, the plaid light of dusk arriving filtered through the leaves. People are starting to pack up their beach blankets and their beverage coolers and their footballs and their dogs and children. But everyone moves slowly. Everyone is clinging to the day.

Julia is really crying now.

“You're right,” she says.

And I think, This is going rather well.

“I think you just moved in with him because you needed a place to stay in the city,” I say. I try not to remind her that she has never, in all of our conversations, mentioned this scrap of information.

“It all sort of happened at the same time,” she says through the tears. “One time I tried to tell him. We went out for coffee and, I told him I didn't want to go on, but he just started crying. So I said, ‘No, no, I'm not leaving!' ”

Zip. Boing. This is news. I wonder what was happening between her and me around that time.

“When was that?” I say.

“A couple of months ago,” she says.

A couple of months ago. I think back to what was going on between us a couple of months ago. And just like that, it's like adjusting the knob on a pair of time binoculars.

“He's always saying, ‘I know you're going to leave me someday,' ” she says.

I'm trying not to touch her, trying not to turn this into a sex thing.

“I want to take care of you,” I say.

Shooter say:
Don't
ev
er let her catch you caring
.

“You're going to regret this,” she says, “when I'm sitting on your couch every night crying for a week.”

“My couch,” I say, “is Scotchgarded.”

And I'm holding her. I'm stroking her hair. And I pull her down so she's half-reclining in my lap. Her head is nestled in the crook of my arm and her eyes are closed and I'm looking at her soft cheek thinking, This girl is ridiculously beautiful.

But she only does the nestling thing for a couple of minutes. And then she pops back up.

“I've always had a boyfriend,” she says. “Since I was fifteen. I don't know what to do without one.”

Does that mean I'm not her next boyfriend?

“Do you ever wish,” she says, not looking at me, “that we could skip over this part?”

I just wait for her to finish.

“I mean,” she says, “skip to however it ends up.”

We watch the darkness crawl in. A firefly wanders into the wine bottle. I cork it back up and we watch the bug turning on and off. We can hear crickets. They sound like Dylan to me.

She picks up the wine bottle. Takes out the cork. But the firefly won't leave.

“Come on,” she says gently. Tapping on the bottom.

“It's just a bug,” I point out.

“No,” she says, tapping. It takes a while to get the firefly out.

“Yay,” she says, as the firefly darts away drunkenly.

She wouldn't hurt a firefly. Full-grown adult human males are another story. Us she stomps on.

B
ack from lunch. Got the sweaty gym bag, the red face from the workout, and the sandwich (sad salad on stale bread) growing bacteria in its sad sack. Check the phone messages.

“Hey, it's me.”

A sigh oozes out of me like a slow leak. Her voice. Her soothing radio-talk-show-host voice. Her talk-a-jumper-off-the-Brooklyn-Bridge voice. Her impotence-happens-to-everyone voice. Suddenly I'm relaxed.

“I was just wondering if we're still going to this party thingy tonight.”

I have refrained from badgering her. I invited her to this party a couple of weeks ago, and I mentioned it to her again last week. She has a habit of canceling things at the last minute, but tonight I figure I have a little ace in the hole. How many girls get invited to parties with the president?

Well, not
the
. A. Clinton. He's going to be at this party at the apartment of one of these toothless literary lions who haunt the Upper East Side. Apparently, one of Clinton's aides got him to contribute a chapter to a book about famous people and their childhood memories about sports.

I call her later at home and we arrange to meet down the block from the party. She's across East End Avenue when I clock her: she's changed out of the khakis she wore to work today. Now she's in a shimmery salmon summer dress. She looks ultrafeminine, a Super Bowl commercial for beauty. At work I can boss her around. She's a copygirl; everyone is her boss. But when it comes to sexual authority, she's General Patton. In complete command—ten
hut!
—of my privates.

She's pacing around, looking at the sidewalk, having a cigarette. She's a little nervous. She always is. I find this a little irresistible.

I'm stuck across the avenue waiting for the light to change. So I pull my camera out of my bag and hold down the telephoto lever and I snap a couple of pictures. She smiles.

Across the street, I don't go for the big kiss. There's a little kiss, a little hug. And off we go.

I give my name to the PR bunny at the door, and she checks me off her list. But there are no metal detectors. There are no hired mugs or Secret Service gorillas either, and no one asks to check my bag. Obviously the president is not here. And I have let Julia down once again.

We go upstairs, where the women have faces stretched like the Joker's and the men wear rep ties and talk about what prep schools their grandsons are going for. There are a few people our age but not many, and I don't know any of them. So we find a couple of plush chairs by the window and slowly start to drain the bar of its wine supply.

The apartment looks like the kind of place where capital-I Intellectuals meet to swap hot gossip about the 1952 presidential campaign.
Obesely overstuffed chairs, books on the shelves whose dust jackets have gone crispy with age. Fat Persian carpets. You could land a helicopter in the book-lined living room, and then there's the book-lined study and the book-lined bedrooms, and…wait a minute, I didn't even see a bedroom. Maybe the bedrooms are on a different floor entirely. This place is a mansion. How can you not be an accomplished writer, living in these digs? The brandy and quips probably came with the lease.

We make fun of the various “characters.” A gossip girl from the
Daily News
's Rush and Molloy column working the whole Holly Golightly thing, complete with elbow gloves. Liz Smith and Cindy Adams, each making sure everyone is noticing how she takes no notice of the other. There's our “downtown” writer, a dandy in a cream-colored three-piece linen suit with matching fedora and, possibly, spats: in other words, he's a typical Bennington graduate. In the corner is the swashbuckling, grenade-lobbing Elvis of gossips, Richard Johnson. The guy's about six-four, better looking than the people he covers. He stands as still as a maypole as publicists and sycophants do their little dance of fear around him. Occasionally he laughs his evil laugh.

While I'm at the bar I look out to the foyer and see a familiar face.

Coming back to our chairs, I figure not many guys ever get a chance to hit a girl with a line like this.

“The president,” I say, “is here.”

He's trying to move through the crowd but to them he's Moses in a light brown suit, canary shirt, not-cheap tie. He's heading down the three steps to the sunken living room, at the moment of peak attendance.

Julia is acting all shy. “Come on,” I say. “This may be your only chance to meet him.”

The crowd is pressing in on all sides, but I'm pressing harder,
pulling Julia toward him. She's in handshake range and reaches out to touch his beefy paw. I'm snapping pictures wildly but people are jostling me from every angle. I need to back up to get them both in the frame but there's no room. So I take wild-ass shots, trying to get Julia in the foreground while the big He surfs on the adulation. He takes her hand, looks her in the eye, looks her in the body. I'm flattered at first, but then I remember his taste in women.

Eventually we return to our original position, backed up to the far corner.

Clinton begins to speak, tells us this long boring story about how the guy who edited the book was one of the first volunteers on his campaign staff back in '92. And he's off telling us how it was back in those early days, back before he became the pope of politics, back when there were only 100 phones and a few million bucks in the bank and the interns were nerdy Jewish guys instead of needy Jewish women and on and on it goes and I'm not really listening because I have decided to put my hand on Julia's ass.

I start with the small of her back, all civilized like, but three glasses of wine and a stance within groping distance of the most beautiful girl in the world can play tricks with a man's judgment and my hand takes all of three seconds to work its way down to her left rump.

I'm teasing, not squeezing, just running my nails over the cool curve. And I discover two very nice things:

1. Julia is wearing a thong.
   
2. Julia is enjoying having her ass stroked in front of the forty-second President of the United States.
   

She's leaning into me and Clinton is regaling the crowd, so I just keep regaling her ass. She puts her head on my shoulder and moves in close. Nice. God, her ass is so sweet and round and perfect and I
will never stop stroking it. Until this moment, I never thought I was much of an ass man. (What's the big deal? I've got one of those.) Now I just want her ass for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Clinton wraps up and the crowd starts to follow him out the door.

“Time for the next adventure?” I say.

“Mmm-hmm,” she says, and it's a yummy sound. A stroke-me sound.

“So,” I say, whispering conspiratorially, “how do you like being molested in front of major heads of state?”

And she laughs.

We stroll lazily uptown looking for a place to eat. Turning on East Eighty-fourth, I notice it's a quiet block. It's a pleasing night. And I'm as horny as Rosie O'Donnell at a WNBA game.

“Look at this,” I say rakishly. “A doorway. Let's go check it out.”

The doorway is down some steps, five feet below street level, and marked
REFUSE STORAGE AND PICKUP
in a big red triangle. The bottom step is cement. The door is metal and locked. There is no garbage around.

I skip down the stairs and toss my backpack on the ground. She stands on the top step warily, hovering. Waiting to be talked into something, like Eve.

And then she's down the stairs and she's in my arms and I'm all over her. Pawing her waist, rubbing her back, drinking her lips, squeezing her ass, hickeying her neck. I want to publish my lust right there above her collarbone.

And my mind is exploring options.

I've got one hand under the hem of her dress, my nails on the soft valley behind her knee. She flinches a little but I'm already well on my way to the destination, determined to make her do some arriving of her own.

She starts to turn around but I hold her tight with my left arm.

“Don't worry,” I whisper in her ear as my right hand goes to work. “No one's there. People walk by and they keep walking.”

A few people have strolled by already. They glance quickly, but then they look away.

“Nobody can see anything,” I whisper. “Your dress is hanging down in back.”

I'm working. And playing. Touching, circling, teasing.

Her eyes are closed. All of her body weight is leaning on me.

She still hasn't let go of her shoulder bag.

“No one's going to make off with this, I promise,” I say, and take it and put it on the ground next to us.

And I'm back to work.

Hello, upper thigh.

“Does it feel nice?” I say.

And in slow motion, with her eyes closed, she nods and nods again.

Hello, thong.

“We could meet on the West Side sometime…,” she whispers.

My neighborhood. That sounds like an invitation. You could hang wet laundry on my schlong. I could do push-ups with no hands.

And I'm bringing her along.

And then I bring her right on home.

Her mouth is all over mine in gratitude. I want every cell of her. There isn't any part of her I don't want in my mouth. The voluptuousness of her kneecaps. The lubricity of her toenails. And I pull her away for a second to get a look at her face: it's a bog of sweat. Her hair is hanging down as if she's just gotten out of a hot shower.

Then we're back at it.

And I'm panting, “I have to see your thong.”

Then I'm on my knees, a supplicant to love, worshiping at the church of Our Lady of the Holy Fucking Hot Thong.

“I have others,” she whispers.

It's red.