Rules of the Game (49 page)

“Josh, let Neil go,” Nancy coos from inside the elevator, finger mashed against the open-door button. Then to me: “He's excited because he's going to stay with his piano teacher tonight.”

The door closes. And I wonder what she meant.

Was she just apologizing for his behavior?

Or was she trying to let me know she's going to be alone tonight?

I can't even say for sure that she's ever thought about me in that way. And, surely, after seeing Darcy, she can't expect I'd actually be interested in her.

The whole thing is just ridiculous. I see a lot of potential in Josh, though; I'd like to turn him on to more good music. It would be nice for him to have a mentor closer to his age.

That night, I find myself on Nancy's doorstep. There is a Zombies CD in my hands. I keep telling myself I'm just dropping off a CD for Josh, because I think it'll open up a new world of music for him. But I know why I'm really there: to see what happens.

I don't think I would actually go for it, if given the chance. That would be
gross. I just want to satisfy my curiosity. And she seems interesting as a person. Very cultured. I'd like to know about her background: What she was like before she had Josh. How she makes a living. Where she learned French. Stuff like that.

Nancy doesn't seem surprised when she answers the door. She is wearing a black shapeless dress and lumpy stockings, and her cheeks are awkwardly rouged. The sleeves of the dress cinch her arms above her elbow, creating a roll of skin that reminds me of a Polish sausage.

She steps to one side and holds the door open. According to the rules of politeness, I must enter.

Now I am in the lair. And I feel the energy shift around me.

“This is for Josh,” I tell her.

She takes the CD from me. Her fingers don't touch mine.

“Would you like some tea?” she offers. “I just made some.”

The web is forming.

“Sure.”

I sit on the couch. It is burlap, with a yellow-and-white–knit blanket thrown over it. It smells like sandalwood and ashes. I'm having trouble breathing. My chest is tightening. I look at the door. It seems so far away.

I am sunk.

My dick is pushing lightly against the denim of my jeans. What is going on?

I look at Nancy. My grandmother was a prettier lady than her. This doesn't make sense.

She shuffles over with the cup of tea. I thank her.

“Je vous en prie,”
she responds.

I love it when she speaks French. Her accent is perfect.

We talk about Josh. That is all we ever talk about. He is practicing for a piano recital. He can figure out any song by ear. His teacher is impressed. I can't focus. I can't focus. I can't focus.

She wants to show me pictures. They are in a cream-colored album. She sits next to me, lays it in her lap, and opens it with elegant fingers. The front cover drops onto my left leg.

“This is Josh and his teacher standing outside the Schoenberg Music Building.”

I don't see. I don't know. I don't care. My nostrils are filling with her scent. My heart is hammering. The room is spinning. I need to do something to stop it.

I raise my hand and clumsily brush a stray strand of hair off her face. It feels like a pipe cleaner.

She stops speaking, lifts her head, and turns toward me. A blast of sandalwood ash hits me in the face. I must have her.

My lips crush hers. It is like the triumphant last chord of a symphony ringing in my head.

Her lips are rough and bumpy, but her tongue is soft and fat. She just sort of puts it in my mouth. It lays there, and it feels nice. It emits that slow, sensual energy she has, sending it all through my body.

I know this is wrong. I'm fully aware that a line has been crossed.

Fortunately, she senses that I'm uncomfortable.

“Should we go into the bedroom?” she asks.

I am not shocked by this. I actually think that it is a great idea.

She leads the way. I follow, and as I see her body moving in front of me, bulging everywhere with no shape that could be defined as sexual, the spell breaks. For a moment, I have the option to leave. But I don't.

I am compelled by my own nature to finish what I start. And perhaps I never really had the option to leave anyway.

She sits on the edge of what looks like a hospital bed. With effort, she slowly raises her legs off the floor and onto the mattress.

I remove my shoes and join her. She doesn't say anything and neither do I. One word would ruin it.

Her hands wrap around my back. Our tongues reunite. The smell of old lady oozes from her skin. I do not want to take this slowly.

I start to pull off her dress while balancing on top of her, then roll off and let her finish the job.

Her skin is the color of oxidized newspaper. Her underpants end where her bra stops. Both pieces seem excessively large. And they do not match. The underwear is white, the bra is what they call nude. They are about function, not form.

I do not want to linger here. I do not want to linger anywhere.

I reach behind her and release the bra hook by hook. I place a breast in my mouth. It seems like the right thing to do.

I am able to disconnect for a moment, to imagine her as desirable as I circle my tongue around her nipple. Encouraged, I decide to stop looking and retreat into the world of feeling.

But then I reach down to slide off her underwear. And beneath, instead of
skin, I feel plastic. I grope around it. There is some sort of plastic bag attached to her side.

I can't remember much after this. I recall a strange wave of nausea coming over me. I recall proceeding anyway because it is my nature. I recall it lasting no more than five minutes. I recall making the minimum amount of necessary conversation afterward to ensure her comfort. And then leaving.

In the days that followed, I didn't think about Nancy much. Not in the way I used to. I talked to her on the phone a couple times afterward, just so she wouldn't think I was avoiding her in the hallway, which I was. I can't say why I no longer fantasized about her. Maybe it was that I'd attributed a certain sensuality to her that didn't exist in reality. Or maybe it was the plastic bag.

A month later, I moved out of the building. Not because of Nancy. Because I felt isolated and listless in Pasadena. I wanted to live where people were struggling and striving and trying to become, because that's always where the action is. That's where you find life. That's where you find beautiful, desperate women, if that's your sort of thing.

I called Nancy and said good-bye. I promised to stay in touch and see Josh's upcoming recital.

That's where the story should end. But it doesn't. In fact, it probably shouldn't have even begun. Nonetheless, seven months later when I was collecting my mail from the building manager, I saw her again.

She looked thin. She'd lost at least thirty pounds. Her hair was clean, dyed black, and tied in a perfect bun atop her head. She was wearing lipstick, mascara, eye shadow. She practically glowed.

On her arm was a man. He appeared to be her age. Small and bald, but not bad-looking. He was sprightly, well-tanned, confident.

“Hey, you look great,” I told her.

“Merci.”
She seemed happy.

“Where's Josh?”

“I moved him to a different floor,” she said in that slow voice that had once charmed me. “He lives in apartment 502 now, with a tutor I found for him.”

She fell silent for a moment and smiled thinly at me. She'd even bleached the hair over her lip.
“Merci,”
she repeated.

There was a new energy around Nancy. It wasn't attraction. It was gratitude. I felt like I'd done something nice for her, that I'd unlocked and released
something she'd forgotten she had. Perhaps that was the energy I had felt the whole time: an exuberant woman trying to break free from the prison she'd been in since her son was born.

I thought for a moment that maybe I'd found a calling: the angel of fuck. There are, everywhere, women who have given up on their sexuality. I see them in the airport, too scared to break up with the cheating husbands who take them for granted. I see them at the beach, so busy tending to their ungrateful children that they've forgotten to tend to themselves. I see them at the twenty-four-hour diner, still nursing the wounds of a breakup that happened decades ago, watching the twenty-year-old waitresses with hateful eyes, thinking, “Someday. You'll see.”

They were all once eighteen and bursting with youth, spirit, sensuality, possibility, and countless potential suitors, one or two or ten or twenty of whom would drain away all that light. I could seduce them. I could slowly, tenderly fuck each and every one of them. I could make them eighteen again. Not for me, but for them. So their sexuality, their passion, their selves could reawaken, and they'd realize that life still lay ahead of them and eighteen wasn't all that great a year anyway.

I could do that.

As I left the house, climbed into the secondhand SUV I'd just bought, and drove back to my new place in Hollywood, I realized the flaw in my plan: it wasn't me who had seduced and saved Nancy. She had seduced me. And I'd moved. I'd changed. I'd grown up.

Maybe the gratitude I felt was my own.

Kevin is going to be here any minute. He wants to go out and meet women. And I'm still in my boxer shorts. I have not showered or shaved in days, man. When I look in the mirror, I see the ghost of Yasser Arafat staring back at me.

I should not be going out when I have a book due in fourteen days. But my eyes are going to melt in their sockets if I keep staring at this computer. I've been writing for three weeks straight. It's time to interact with living beings again. My social skills are rusting.

Have to get my act together quickly. My lucky broken vintage Vostok Soviet military watch has somehow time traveled into the kitchen, where it's lying facedown in peanut butter. I need to clean the kitchen. It could be embarrassing if anyone came back here.

I should add that to my list. But first I need to find the list, which is probably in the pocket of my Levi's premium boot-cut jeans. The jeans are in the clothing pile. This is where items go that I've worn but don't smell bad enough to get cleaned yet. It is an altar from which I compose my identity every day.

I had an idea last night for a book that I also need to add to the list. What was it? Something about living without technology for a year.

Shit. There's the buzzer. It's Kevin. Forgot he was coming and he's already here. Get it together, Neil. Kevin needs you to be his sacrificial lamb and start conversations with the beautiful women of Southern California.

Grab Levi's premium boot-cut jeans. Smell jeans. The scent is a cross between macadamia nuts and my room after sex. That'll work.

“Hey.” Kevin grins lopsided when I answer the door. “You going out like that?”

Putting on other leg of jeans now. Just have to find a shirt. Something cool. Something from my pile, because if it's cool, I've probably worn it in the last month. And if I've worn it in the last month, I definitely haven't washed it.

Fish for black shirt. When in doubt, wear black. It's the safety net of male fashion. Grab tail of gray knit tie I bought in London and pull loose from pile. The tie looks puffy. I may have accidentally washed it last month.

Just need a belt. Must sort through pile to find belt. Every item tells a story. This yellowy T-shirt I picked up seven years ago at a Boston warehouse that sells clothing for a dollar a pound.

“Hey, man, it's gonna be crowded if we don't get there soon,” Kevin says. He shows up late and he's mad at me, like I'm some kind of dawdler.

Just use puffy gray tie as belt. Now need something around neck. Pendant necklace? Too disco. Shoelace? Too thin. Red ribbon from Christmas present? Fine. It's like nature's own silk tie.

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

“Like that?”

“I'll be fine. I can rely on my charm.”

Kevin is my friend, but not really. If my car broke down, he's not someone I would call to fetch me. We are united only by our shared pursuit of women.

“Remember the girl I had call you the other night?” he asks as I unlock my car door. Somewhere underneath these Coke bottles and Red Bull cans, there is a driver's seat. “I brought her home and we were gonna get in the Jacuzzi, but my mom fucking drained it.” There's precious, life-giving Red Bull left in this can. Need my taurine. “So we got in anyway, and she gave me head while I looked at the stars.” Kevin is sitting on my rough draft.

Feel like there's fog in my head. Gotta clear it out. Get present in the moment. Clap my hands. Shake my head. Use my voice box.

“Testing, testing.” It works.

“What are you doing?” Kevin asks.