Mrs. Robinson (Mrs. Robinson #1) (4 page)

Needless to say, my grandmother, the only decent adult to have ever been in my life, would be absolutely horrified that I was even sitting here, listening to Carol’s nonsense. My grandma was as gentle as a lamb, but even
she
would probably smack me upside the head for considering this. But still, the stroke had taken her up to the sky eight months ago, and tonight I was sitting here, broker than a proverbial joke, with no other options before me…

“Before we go any further, we do have some rules to take into account,” Carol said, and I was thankful for the distraction. “First off, before you so much as take off your shirt for the first time, you will sign the strictest confidentiality agreements known to lawyerdom. I don’t want a word about this, ever, to anyone.”

“Hey, now,” I said. “Beggars can’t be choosers. You’re obviously desperate to sign me, or else you wouldn’t have put on this whole show. Assaulting me with demands right out of the gate isn’t exactly the best way to win me over.”

“Hmm – you’re more discerning than I initially thought,” Carol said with a raised eyebrow. “I like that. But I am going to continue. No exchanging of contact information – period. No personal questions, no long conversations. I don’t want you so much as learning the clients’ favorite nail polish colors. Anonymity is what keeps this operation going, and it needs to stay that way.”

“Gotcha,” I muttered. “Not that it matters.”

“Good. Additionally, no exchanging of semen – we don’t want to be linked to any pregnancies.”

“Ha,” I laughed. “I doubt that will be an issue.”

“You’d be surprised,” she said as she stared down at my thigh somewhat longingly. I shivered a little, remembering how my cum had looked as it dribbled down her face in the shower before she’d licked it up and swallowed it…

“And now for
my
demands,” I said to get my mind off the flashback, and she looked at me a little differently. “First, the women – how do I know I’m not getting Judge Judy or someone? How am I supposed to get hard with someone like that?”

Carol laughed. “Just like the women will be able to screen prospective Hookd boys, you will be able to screen the women, too. You’ll be shown photos beforehand, and you’ll be able to say yes or no. I wouldn’t be too selective, though, as I’m afraid you’re probably not going to get that one gorgeous former Republican vice-presidential nominee, or anything. Trust me – I’ve tried to recruit her, but her husband seems to be pleasing her adequately. And anyway, you’d be surprised at what closing your eyes and using your imagination can do –
especially
when money is involved.”

“You say that with experience,” I said, and she cut her eyes away.

“My experience is none of your business. Any more demands?”

“Yes. What’s the schedule like?”

“You work whenever you want to work, however often you want to work.”

“Seems reasonable. When would I start?”

“Tonight.”

“
Tonight
?”

Carol smiled. “Why do you think I drove all the way to your house? We’re experiencing a
major
backlog right now, and when I realized I had a shortage, you instantly came to mind – for obvious reasons. You were phenomenal the other night. It’s too bad you were too drunk to finish the deal, actually – I would’ve enjoyed the full-service package from you.”

I fidgeted a little. “Um, yeah…I was drunk, like I said. Sorry.”

“Forget it. Anyway, a myriad of tests and training would usually be involved in your hiring, but since I’ve already ‘tried you out,’ in a sense, we’re making an exception – as long as you wear a condom until you submit to testing, of course.”

I looked off into the night, fiddling with my fingernails. I pictured what someone else my age would say to this, even though I found it hard to relate to people my age and didn’t really have many friends. “
Get paid to fuck a hot cougar? Fuck yes
!” they’d probably exclaim, fists pumping in the air. But for some reason I just felt
different
from them. My feelings tended to get intense and run deep; sink into me and put down roots…

“One night,” Carol said into the darkness. “This is only one night of work. Even if you walk away tomorrow, you’d still be making enough money to save your house
and
keep your sister out of a welfare hospital. You already had a successful audition, technically, and the rest of the steps can be taken care of later. All you have to do is have sex. But it’s getting late and I need an answer. What do you say?”

As my stomach churned and my fists slickened with sweat, I pressed the Home button on my phone to display my favorite photo of my sister. She was smiling, but her eyes were still heartbreakingly empty and vacant, just as they had been ever since that night five years ago when my world had collapsed. I stared out of the window again and clenched my fists as that urgent, overpowering, and somehow very
male
urge coursed through me – that urge to provide for her, to be there for her, to save her. I reminded myself of what drove me to work minimum wage every day, and thought of that burning guilt in my chest that kept me up all night…

Come on, man. Claire, Claire, it’s all for Claire…you gotta help her, she has nobody else and you know it…you’re the reason she’s like this in the first place, actually, and you can’t deny it…

But still, even if I did say yes, I knew there was one thing I’d have to tell Carol – one very big thing. One
gigantic
thing. But how could I even broach the subject?

Tell her…she needs to know…tell her…

I pushed down the voice and shook my head. It was time to step up and provide, no matter how I was doing the providing. I wasn’t going to let myself let Claire down.

As my sister’s sweet face swam in my brain like a mirage, I chugged the last of the golden liquid in my glass and then turned to Carol with my hand held out.

“Okay – I’ll do it. But I’m gonna need a lot more of this first.”

4

Grace Robinson

An hour after the butt dial incident I sat on my sofa and burped. After Richard’s call I’d tossed a hundred dollar bill onto the table, wandered out of the restaurant, and started down the sidewalk in a daze, autumn leaves falling down around me like shrapnel in the war zone my life had become. Somehow, I’d ended up at home without being flattened by a passing car. As I sat there I glanced at an old VHS copy of
Fatal Attraction
gathering dust on a shelf below my window and thought of love, and of how quickly love can turn to hatred, and of all the things hatred can drive people to do to people they’d once loved, and somehow I felt that big things were coming.

As I scratched my elbow, my go-to anxiety move, my bird called lazily from her gilded cage in the dark corner. I glanced over at her and then noticed a photo of myself with Samantha, the “friend” from the phone call, on holiday in Venice. I should’ve known that Samantha “volunteering on Richard’s board to end childhood hunger in the D.C. suburbs” would lead to her becoming hungry for a lot more than just
charity
. As outrage pounded in my ears, I stared at the stupid bracelet on Samantha’s left wrist in the photo. I’d gotten it for her in Paris during that same trip, actually. Samantha and Richard had gone back to the hotel together after lunch one day, claiming that the caviar had treated them badly, and like the complete idiot I am, I’d spent the afternoon at Hermes buying the three of us matching bracelets engraved with the saying
AMERICANS IN PARIS  - BEST FRIENDS – 2012
. Meanwhile they’d probably been having a bang-fest in my hotel room the whole time. I didn’t even
get
to enjoy Paris, actually, as I’d been left to walk the streets alone all week while they’d come up with a laundry list of different excuses to go back to the hotel together – sicknesses, jetlag, a fear of heights Richard had suddenly invented when we’d found ourselves at the Eiffel Tower, etcetera. “But didn’t you skydive two different times at that work retreat in Arizona last year?” I’d asked Richard after his claim that he was too scared to get in the elevator, only to have him nervously mumble something under his breath and then scurry away with Samantha, leaving me standing alone under the tower with a tour guide in my hand like a moron. As the bird squawked in the corner again, I said a silent prayer that the Hermes bracelets would turn both of their hands ugly and rotten and green before reaching over and knocking the picture off the table, sending razor-sharp shards of glass flying across my parquet floor. Samantha could – and would – be dealt with later. Right now it was time to focus on Richard’s fate.

The way I saw it, I had three options: file for divorce and risk destruction at the hands of my vindictive husband, say nothing and continue living this miserable life, or play Richard at his own game. This third one was the riskiest – and most appealing – of all, and thanks to a little news story I’d noticed, I knew exactly how to do it.

Wait – no. That was ridiculous. Once again, I sat taller on the sofa and chided myself at even considering using that stupid app. I could
never
do that, and not only because I’d been raised Catholic, and using Hookd would be literally paying for sex, no matter all the flashy technological jargon its inventors attached to it. They were simply taking the world’s oldest occupation and glossing it up for the digital age. I mean, I was desperate, but not
that
desperate. Everyone had good and bad in them – that was human nature – and it wasn’t the absence of bad that separated the wicked from the good, but the choice to
overcome
the bad. And there were other, slightly more embarrassing, reasons not to download Hookd, too. Honestly I wasn’t really where I’d like to be, looks-wise. Old age was running right at me like a freight train, frantic in its unending assault against all that I knew, and my body was changing swiftly. It seemed that while my light dimmed with the years, Richard’s just got brighter. While I had to start putting all sorts of creams and potions on my skin every night to keep from looking like Margaret Thatcher, he just became George Clooney with better hair. My laugh lines got deeper every month, certain body parts were starting to droop, and I’d even found four grey hairs the other morning. Four! Long nights spent on my ass (along with the Lil’ Debbie cupcakes I routinely kept in my pantry) had made me about ten pounds bigger than I would have preferred, and my depression wasn’t exactly helping me get the motivation to hit the sidewalks and melt off the weight. My face wasn’t terribly unattractive and my eyes were a pleasant hazel, but I was by no means a MILF or a cougar or whatever horrible name the kids were using these days to refer to any woman over the age of forty who still possessed a healthy sex drive. And sure, Richard had cheated, but he was a
man
, and male indiscretions were far more accepted in this world, no matter how much people claimed we had moved forward. I was already seen as enough of a failure for being forty-two and childless; I didn’t need even more labels added onto my Resume of Doom, too. I’d seen it time and time again: a straying husband was almost always pitied by society, and if not pitied, than at least understood. People assumed the wife had neglected him at home, and somehow failed to fulfill her womanly duties – she hadn’t given him enough pussy, or emotional support, or Eggos, or whatever – and the poor shmuck had been forced to seek companionship outside the home. Meanwhile a cheating wife was sneered at and seen as some pathetic, predatory Demi Moore-type figure who went out every night to chase men (and, not to forget, her fading youth) while her poor husband and children sat at home with no dinner on the table. Every way I looked at it, I lost. And there was
another
big factor, too. I hadn’t even considered what would happen if anyone discovered my real identity, and who my husband was, and why the stationery on our side table held government seals. I hadn’t asked for this life, and I’d been just as astonished as everyone else to watch Richard rise through the ranks with dizzying speed and reach his current lofty position. He had become so successful, in fact, that there was talk about him reaching for an even higher office, a prospect that would complicate my life to an extent that I couldn’t even think about…

I shivered a bit, pulled in my legs, wrapped my arms around my knees, and pushed the stupid app from my mind. I was going to sit on this couch, treat my Acute Numbness of the Heart with white wine, and be content with my weird little life. The risks of using the app and alienating Richard were too much to even consider. And I didn’t have to do this – if worst came to worst, I could always slip into my favorite red dress, grab the keys to the ’86 Corvette my husband kept in the garage as a passion project, and thunder down the road; maybe find redemption in the burnt-out canyons of the West like something out of my windswept romance novels. I didn’t have to make such a bold move as Hookd, especially now…I still had time...and maybe, just maybe, Richard would make everything right and rescue me from myself…

I was a few chapters into my latest book, trying not to cringe as the main characters had a terribly overblown sexual interaction involving an apple and a mirror, the biblical imagery all too obvious, when my phone rang. Something between terror and anticipation shot up into my stomach as I noticed the name “Richard” on the screen. And for some reason – maybe some insane hope that he had realized what he’d done, and was going to beg and plead for forgiveness for the rest of his stupid life – I answered.

“Hi,” I said, putting the proverbial knife to my proverbial wrist, my voice sounding like it had come from a corpse.
Why
, again, did I subject myself to this?

“Yeah, uh, bad news,” Richard said, sounding thoroughly untroubled about whatever it was. I could picture him looking over his shoulder at that whore, who was no doubt beckoning him back to the desk, or whatever surface she’d just fucked my husband on. “Looks like I won’t be able to make it home tonight at all. This Campbell file is taking forever, the interns are losing steam, and I’m gonna need to stay here tonight and guide them into morning. I’ll probably just crash on my cot here, or get a room at the St. Regis like usual, if I can’t make it home.”

I stared at our stupid bird as she sat in her golden cage, hating herself. “Okay,” I said dully, the voice that came from my mouth sounding alien even to me.

“Sorry again, I’m just
so
slammed. I’ll make it up to you. We can-”

I heard giggling in the background.

That filthy fucking whore is giggling while her boyfriend is on the phone with his wife,
I thought.

“Ah, the interns need me, gotta go,” Richard said, and I thought I heard a smile in his voice. “Why are you up to tonight, anyway?”

Something dark and hot and angry stirred within me.
I could say it,
I thought.
I could totally say it.

The woman you think is your powerless little socialite wife is about to use your money to get banged by a younger, hotter, and more virile man than you. How’s the weather?

But I didn’t.

“Not much,” I said instead, but this time my voice wasn’t broken down and burned-out – it was cold and clipped; frozen in anger. “Maybe some laundry and a good book.”

“That’s great. Have fun.”

‘That’s great?’
I asked myself.
That’s what you give your wife on your twentieth anniversary? ‘That’s great?’

I narrowed my eyes as my inner monologue ramped up.

I love you so much, and I am going to ruin your fucking life for doing this to me.

“Love you, too,” I said in my chilly new voice, and then the line went dead. A ball of white rage formed at the pit of my stomach, spreading flames that licked across every inch of my body, filling me with a burning hatred I had never felt before. And for the first time, I really considered using Hookd. Richard deserved this. A searing montage flashed through my mind of all the times he had left behind a trail of badly-hidden clues to flog me with; whether it was letting that bitch laugh in the background of our conversation or leaving a smudge of foundation on the sleeve of his shirt for me to notice or leaving a phone number in his pocket for me to find on laundry day. Richard was no lost, neglected man searching for love – he was hurting me, at least in part, because it was feeding something inside of him. That was so clear now. And all at once, I decided to quench his hunger once and for all. If he was pushing me away, I was going to run.

I took out my phone and searched the word “Hookd” in the App Store. Soon the icon popped up, red and sexy, on my screen. Maybe I’d been wrong: maybe I wasn’t some pathetic cougar by dipping into the younger guy pool. After all, it was a new century, a new era. I had everything I needed to throw aside my moral hang-ups and become a Hookd client: I had the money, a big house to myself, and a wounded, willing, and wine-soaked heart. Grace Phaedra Robinson would be nice no more – it was time to have a little fun. And maybe, just maybe, have a little sex, too.

As I stared at the screen, a newfound sense of purpose settled into my bones.
Crazy bitch
, I’d heard Richard call me earlier, and not for the first time. And maybe I
was
a little crazy. I’d been an artist in college, and I was always the girl who Felt Too Much, who let things affect her deeply and thoroughly – and as a woman, that made me fucking insane in the eyes of the world. Meanwhile men were praised for the same surplus of emotion – they were sensitive writer-types; soft-spoken artists. Van Gogh was a “passionate lover” for sending his own ear to an ex, while Taylor Swift was a “deranged psychopath” for writing songs about the guys who fucked her and then dumped her. Any woman who wore her emotions on her sleeve and didn’t play the part of Cool Unaffected Hot Chick was a “Crazy Bitch,” a bitter harpy who kept giving her opinion long after men wanted to hear it – and now I was about to take that title and fuck up Richard’s life with it.

This Crazy Bitch is about to take a lover, Richard. How’s
that
for crazy?

I tossed aside my book for good – it was time to take charge of my story and go from helpless to heroine. In a world where women were told to stand down, I was going to stand and be brave –
and
slutty. As blood hummed in my ears and adrenaline pooled in my veins like an oceanic thunderhead popping up on the edge of the horizon on an August afternoon, I cursed the day I had ever heard the name Richard Paul Robinson III and then pressed Download.