The Ladies' Man (33 page)

His secretary hadn't said anything except, “Nice job. You were very natural.” When he'd frowned, she had added, “I know you were nervous beforehand, but it went great.”

“I don't know the totals yet,” he'd grumbled.

“Do you want me to check with Development?” she'd asked. Marty thought he'd heard an acknowledgment of an office romance.

This is why he is single, he thinks. He's terrible at this. He can get promoted to station manager but he can't do anything else right. Maybe it's for the better. Soon enough she'd find out he has inhalers in his desk drawer and epinephrine in his night table. He has acid reflux, bad gas, and lactose intolerance, new. He thinks his penis is unremarkable, and maybe Adele has seen better. What a jerk, refusing to come clean with the brother. Now Richard could say, “I saw that guy in action, watched the two of you raising money. Is he as much of a jerk as he struck me on TV?”

It is past ten, too late to call anyone. The Boston phone book has no listing for Richard Dobbin. Of course it wouldn't—a sheriff wouldn't have his number published. He stares at “Dobbin, Lois,” on Stearns Road. What a shmuck, to have a crisis at an hour when he can't fix it. What can happen between now and tomorrow when Adele is at her desk? Richard might poison the well. Adele could call in sick. Adele could quit! He'd seen her in Development and barely acknowledged her. Coward! Shmuck!

He might be able to fix it. Maybe his mother was right: Maybe Adele likes him; maybe he did look handsome on television. He was so happy Saturday night. They'd sent the Hillel kids home with their thanks and their 'GBH water bottles, and acted as if it were the job of the station manager and assistant director of development to lock up. They were the last to leave. She'd called a cab, and he'd waited with her on the curb, wondering what he could do to prolong the evening. When the taxi arrived, he wanted to give the guy ten dollars to disappear. But how could he? She'd made the call; it was not his place to cancel it. He opened the door for her, and as she passed him to step into the back seat, she—a mind reader, a miracle—kissed him lightly on the lips.

What a shmuck he was not to have put his arms around her and
kissed her as if he'd meant it. But he was not a master of the grand gesture.
Here buddy, here's a ten. This lady's going with me
. It never occurred to him to slip in beside her and ride with her to Brookline like a spontaneous leading man would. To find a bar still open and have a nightcap like normal people do. He knows how he must have looked when she kissed him: astonished. He'd felt torn and hopeful, standing on the curb, watching the white taxi pull away, and inept. Had he responded at all? Had she known how pleased he was? He'd almost called her that night, too, but it was late when he got home and she lived with her sisters. He didn't know if she had a phone by her bed. And how would he ever ascertain such a thing?
Adele, do you have a phone by your bed? Why? Because I didn't want to disturb anyone
.

Sexual harassment! He couldn't ask that. That was like asking if there was someone in her bed.

Was
there? Did he really know anything about her? What did a peck on the lips mean between colleagues of long standing? Why hadn't he called on Sunday, at ten
A.M.
? At noon? At eight o'clock, after
60 Minutes?
What was wrong with him? How late can you call a coworker, an employee, who's kissed you?

What time was it now?

P
eople never ask, but they do wonder: Is it possible for relatively well-adjusted and attractive women to have passed into middle age without having found a path across the great divide into sexual activity?

Almost. Adele, for example: Her scorecard shows one time with one man, a deflowering engineered by the intact Adele herself in a hotel room in Chicago—sexual congress with a proper (well-mannered, well-spoken, well-educated) stranger, fourteen years ago last Christmas.

She had decided in advance, a plot suggested by novels and movies, and by the rumors that fly about after affiliates' conventions, that one can step out of one's life while out of town, ignore one's own moral compass, meet someone amenable and discreet, and have a fling—without dating, falling in love, or ever seeing the sexual partner again. Like a man would. Like a character in an Erica Jong novel would, repeatedly. No family to meet; no family standards to uphold; no (insurmountable) regrets.

So on the second night of an affiliates' convention (first night being a banquet hosted by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, with remarks by Judy Woodruff) the thirty-nine-year-old Adele bathed, shaved, darkened her eyelashes, reddened her lips, put on a peacock-blue wool crepe dress over a special bridal-white lace bra and bikini underpants, and went to the bar one hotel over.

As soon as he sat down two barstools away, then asked her permission to move one seat closer, Adele knew he was exactly right for the job: young, eager, apologetically on the prowl. His eyebrows and mustache were blond, his cheeks ruddy, his jacket corduroy. There was a Slavic tilt to his eyes and cheekbones. The Modern Language Association badge on his chest announced, “Ted Jelavich, U. of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.”

Adele kept her mission to herself for the first two glasses of wine; needed only to smile at his clunky lines and say yes to dinner. She could see him growing hopeful; sensed that he'd come to the bar to get lucky in the manner of an academic on holiday. His field was English, seventeenth century. Confidentially? He was interviewing with—oh, what the heck—Yale, Tulane, Rutgers, and U.C.–Santa Barbara. Adele nodded and asked questions, all the while making meaningful eye contact; when they moved on to a steak house and were toasting over their menus, she murmured, “To tonight.”

Ted repeated her words and clinked her glass. Adele, by now tipsy, leaned in and asked the coy question she'd fashioned in advance, “Would you believe that someone my age could still be a virgin?”

As soon as Ted grasped that he'd been elected, his demeanor changed. He wanted a role in, and credit for, this seduction. “I find you incredibly attractive,” he soon proclaimed.

“I'm thirty-nine,” Adele had offered. “You look about twenty-five.”

“Twenty-eight. What could be better?” he murmured.

“How so?”

“An older woman, the mythology:
Tea and Sympathy? Candida. The Graduate?”

“Except,” said Adele, “in this case—”

“In this case, I walked into the bar and saw you sitting at the end of the row, looking a little wistful, a little sad in the half-light of the Tiffany shade, twisting the stem of your wineglass. It wasn't that you were telegraphing any coded message, just the opposite, but now that I know what I know …”

He continued the needless campaign over dinner, staring dreamily while she conversed, then snapped himself out of his fake
reverie with, “I'm sorry. You were saying? Your eyes are extraordinary.” He found her hand wherever she hid it. She was sure that the waiter, the busboy, the cabdriver, the doorman were in on the countdown: One more course, now just the check, now just our coats, and now, amazingly enough, I'm going back to the hotel to get laid. I just rolled into town! I fell into it!

He kissed her passionately in the taxi, his sturdy Czech or Serbian or Estonian barrel chest clamping her to his trench coat, crinkling his badge.

“Would you like to come up to my room for a nightcap?” he whispered at the elevator.

“I assumed that was the plan.”

“I'm a gentleman,” he said. “If you meant what you said back there, this isn't something you do lightly.”

“Or ever.”

“Would you mind if I took a quick shower?” he asked when they got to his room.

Adele waited quietly at the foot of his queen-sized bed. It was not thrilling or romantic, but at thirty-nine it was time, not necessary but recommended, like a baseline EKG or a mammogram. He sounded happy in there, sloshing confidently, now the shower door creaking, now the hair dryer roaring. She didn't remove any clothes, or slip off her shoes, or skim his convention materials, or proofread his C.V., or eat the mint on his pillow, or change her mind.

He exited the bathroom, still damp, wearing only his eyeglasses and a white towel around his waist. Beneath the thin terry cloth, a mass the size of a jelly doughnut shifted.

He sat down beside her. “How
are
you?” he asked.

“Fine.”

“Are you ready?”

“For …?”

He stood up and faced her in front of the TV/armoire. “This!” The towel came off with a flourish and a triumphant smile, as if doves would fly forth. Adele blinked, then stared while the new Ted, star of his own instructional video, lectured.

Pedagogically speaking, he was ideal—proud of what he had
and how it obeyed him. “Have you seen one of these before? Of course you have. You're not a nun. Watch what happens as I respond. Now I'm going to kiss you. See what I do. Now you do it. Right there is the best. Ahhh. Two hands. Do you remember how it started off, flaccid, but as the blood flow increases it enlarges and becomes turgid. What would you estimate? Thirty-five percent bigger than what you first saw? Forty? Are you glad you chose me? Those are just veins. That's normal, too. This clear emission? This is not semen, but something men produce in preparation for ejaculation.” He was a sexual pedant, a verbal exhibitionist. “This is the glans. This is the head. This is an exquisitely sensitive area. I'm probably about average—maybe a half inch bigger—in case you were wondering.

“You know what's nice for the man?” he continued. “To see the woman naked. Start with the top button. Not too fast. That's good. Slow is good. Now the arms. Upsa-daisy. Now the slip. Can I do that? Those are pretty. Leave them on for a while. God. Let me help. Isn't this liberating? Even interesting? Are you feeling anything? Isn't this nice?”

She said she knew her own anatomy; yes, she did have a pocket mirror in her purse but didn't feel the need to use it right now.

“You wouldn't want to kiss it, would you, at this stage? You haven't touched it much. Before I put on the prophylactic? Or before
you
put it on? It's nice to incorporate that into the lovemaking.

“Are you ready?” he asked, his voice finally strained.

“I guess so,” said Adele.

“Now we'll lie down. I'll get on top. This is the missionary position. Am I too heavy?”

He stopped the play-by-play once he'd worked his fully engorged teaching tool into Adele, after a brief soliloquy about the overvalued currency that some cultures assigned to the breaking of a woman's hymen. He didn't talk as he climbed the scale to a loud climax. When it was over, he offered her a chance to investigate the semen pooled in the tip of his rose-colored condom.

He said he could do it again in a little while if she was interested. He was at her disposal. He said he felt this evening would appear in a poem because he'd been profoundly moved by the experience.
This wasn't like other M.L.A.'s, and she wasn't like other women. This was extraordinary. How could he thank her? He'd never forget this night. Would
she?
It was a rare privilege for him. For any man. Virgins were generally freshmen, and while several in his Introduction to Reading and Writing had tried to enlist him for this very lesson, he had an ironclad rule against sleeping with undergraduates.

About the poem: No one would recognize her. He might have to keep the hair of the woman in the poem vermilion, because auburn pubic hair and ivory skin and the lightly freckled chest and arms were images he couldn't easily forgo. But that was hardly something to worry about. He wouldn't use her name. “Susan” didn't resonate for him anyway. Too common. He'd think of something—Maggie, maybe. Or Allegra. If the poem was accepted anywhere, he would alert her.

“Was it all that you had hoped for?” he asked. “You weren't disappointed, were you? The first time is a physical and an emotional experience, but not necessarily an erotic one. Would tomorrow after my last appointment, Rutgers, be convenient? It doesn't even have to be dinner, if you wanted to use me purely as mentor rather than date. Anything. Feel free. I know this is important to you, isn't it? Approaching the big four-oh?”

“Next month.”

“No wonder. A passage. I'm so honored. Even if nothing comes out of the meeting, professionally, then it all will have been worth it.”

“Thank you,” Adele said.

“No, thank
you
. And may I presume to give you a small piece of advice? Don't regret this. You did the right thing, opening yourself to this experience.”

“We'll see.”

“I'm worried that it wasn't satisfying for you. I was concentrating too much on the anatomical component without giving enough thought to your pleasure. I could take care of that right now. If you relax, it probably wouldn't take long.”