The Stork Club (15 page)

Christ. A little voice in the back of his mind told him as she began unzipping him, undressing him, that this was worse than stupid. Not the way he wanted to behave with her. But she was taking her own clothes off now, and, God, he wanted her. Kate Sullivan, her lips and tongue on his stomach, moving down to put her wet mouth around his cock. And now when he looked down to see her there going at him, sucking him, licking him, he felt as numb and detached and alienated as if he were watching her through a camera. For an endless floating time she worked him, her hands caressing his thighs, her lips and tongue exploring his groin. And then she was on top of him, sliding him into her. Spongy and warm and slippery and fitting tightly around him. Moving again and again, riding him, taking him.

Kate Sullivan. Every young boy's masturbation fantasy. He was having her. No, you asshole, he thought. She's having you. Even in that high other world he entered just before his orgasm, the place in which there was never any presence of mind, this time he maintained enough consciousness to hate himself. For being so desperate to be held, to be warmed, so needy to hear someone, anyone, whispering reassurances that he
would seek solace inside the nearest cunt, even though it belonged to the enemy.

"Oh, yes, yes," Her hands were in his hair now, nails digging into his scalp, and he could feel her strong thighs tense on either side of his hips as she forced her knees into the sofa to give her the leverage she needed to move her pelvis into him and away, and again and again, and now he would let go. God, he was an asshole. Now he would, oh God, oh God, let go. The rush went blasting through him, escaped, and as he lay there, eyes closed, before even the first tremor of aftershock, he felt her lift herself from the top of him abruptly.

By the time he moved up onto his elbows to look at her, not knowing what he would say, feeling weak and devastated, she had pulled on her clothes and was out of his office. A minute later he heard the door to the reception area close. He lay still for a moment, then pulled one of the loose pillows from the back of the sofa, covered his wet matted groin with it, and lay there.

What did it mean? Did she think it would be so good that afterward he wouldn't be able to live without her and he'd give her the part? Was she trying to say she could behave like a man and fuck without feeling? She had used him the way he had used so many women in his life, and this was probably how all of them had felt when he'd slipped silently out their doors. After a few minutes he was sleeping.

The clanging of the cleaning crew's buckets awakened him, and he managed to leap to his feet and throw his clothes on, and in the time it took them to get from the door of the reception area and into his office, he used his handkerchief to clean the sticky wetness from the sofa.

"Evening," he said, nodding to them and moving out into the darkened hallway, wondering for a split second if in the darkness he'd been able to get the sofa
clean. The clock on the dashboard of his Mercedes said midnight. Mid-fuckin'-night. And he had an early meeting in the morning. Kate Sullivan. A wave of self-loathing rushed through him, and he could hardly wait until he got home to turn on the hot shower and scrub himself clean of her.

He had today's mail and the two scripts he was planning to read and he pushed the door to his house open, and the first thing he saw when he did was the chicken-in-a-pot, which had been served up on his good dishes, the two elaborate table settings, and next to each plate, a smaller plate containing a wilted salad. And in a bucket of what had once been ice but which was now water, there was a bottle of champagne.

He heard the snoring coming from the living room. Oh, Christ, he had forgotten all about Bobo. A week from Tuesday, his loving, gracious uncle had told him. Write the date into your book. And he had forgotten. My eighty-fifth birthday. I'll take a taxi to your house and when you get home from work we'll celebrate. I'll do all the cooking. And he had. Oh, shit. Bobo had arrived and made dinner, expected Rick, waited for him, and finally he had fallen asleep, and . . . Bobo looked angelic sleeping there.

On Bobo's birthday instead of rushing home and celebrating, as promised, he had been in a meeting and then getting drunk and fucking Kate Sullivan. The thought sickened him. Shit. He took a crocheted lap robe some girl, he couldn't remember who, had made him a few years ago that was hanging on the back of one of his living room chairs, covered Bobo, and headed for his bedroom.

"Ricky, honey, are you okay?" he heard Bobo's sleepy voice ask.

He turned. Bobo got slowly to his feet. "I was worried sick when you didn't show up."

"I'm sorry," Rick said, moving to him for an embrace. "I'm so sorry. I just forgot." Bobo patted him gently on the back.

"You look like hell," he said, with deep concern in his voice. "Go get some sleep. Before you go to the office, we can have breakfast together."

"Thanks, Uncle B.," Rick said and waited until Bobo was in the guest bedroom before he turned and walked toward the bathroom to shower. His clothes smelled of her, his body still retained the memory of her flesh against it. He stood rinsing the soap off until he had used all of the hot water, then fell naked into bed and was asleep in minutes. Until his dreams were interrupted by the loud blast of the doorbell.

He had to be imagining it, he thought, must have dreamed the doorbell rang, but then he sat up and listened and there were definitely voices out there. By the time he got a robe on and had opened his bedroom door, the voices were louder and a woman was laughing. When he got out to the living room, the picture he saw looked like something from a bad dream.

Bobo, in a pair of wrinkled cotton pajamas, had opened the door for, and was trying to play polite and gracious host to, Animal, a cocaine dealer with whom Rick had done some commerce in the past, and Gloria, a stringy-haired, hollow-eyed, too-skinny blonde who had spent the night in Rick's bed once. Maybe twice.

"Aaaah, Ricky," Gloria said, throwing spindly arms around his neck and kissing him on each cheek. "Can you believe it? Joseph and I met at a party and there we were, trying to figure out what he and I had in common, and then we realized it was that we both know and love
you
. So we decided then and there to come over and tell you that, before the moment had passed. Aren't you glad? You don't look very glad."

"Who's Joseph?" Rick asked her, uncomfortably
aware that Bobo was watching the whole scene. Gloria pointed to Animal, who for the moment looked almost as if he was blushing as he said, "That's my real name."

"Well, that's very nice, you two," Rick said. Lunatics like these could have guns with them, take offense if you didn't treat them gently. Especially because they were both as high as kites on something. "But I've got an early day tomorrow so I'm afraid I'll have to ask both of you to leave."

"Want
me
to stay?" Gloria asked. "I always got you to sleep real easily."

Rick felt shaky. Embarrassed. When Bobo had come to visit in the past, Rick had made it his business to produce the most socially acceptable friends he had to meet his uncle. These two were from the bottom of the barrel.

"He wants us to go, Glory," Animal said, looking now from Rick to Bobo and then back again. Rick's eyes couldn't meet Bobo's. Then, as if it were a peace offering, Animal extracted a vial from his inside coat pocket. "Want me to toot you up?" he asked Rick.

"No," Rick said.

"Not this time, huh?" Animal said, grinning a grin that showed his bad teeth. "How 'bout you, man?" he asked Bobo.

Bobo didn't say a word. His expression made the already nervous Animal look down at his feet and say, "Yeah, well, like maybe you'll gimme a call if you change your mind. C'mon there, Glory."

The girl looked hurt but she tried to make the best of a bad situation by patting Rick on the cheek and saying, "Call me, huh?" Then they were out the door. It was already a gray dawn outside and Rick's head was pounding. He looked at Bobo, who was looking long at him.

"
Boychik
," Bobo said, after their eyes had searched each other's for a long sad moment. "Tell me some
thing. Isn't it time for you to take stock of what you're doing to yourself? To make a decision to be a man instead of a lowlife."

Those words, coming from the gentle Bobo, who could never deliberately hurt another human being, stung him. And they were mild compared to what he wanted to call himself.

"You're going on fifty, for Christ's sake," Bobo said, as if Rick didn't know that. "What in the hell are you going to do? Do you wanna die being known as a drug-taking womanizer who made a couple of movies? Love somebody, for God's sake, make a life for yourself, stop thinking with your dick before you're an old sick man and an old sick joke, because that's where you're heading. Charlie Fall is dead, but at least his charitable work lives on and his name lives on in his children and his memory lives on with Patty. You'll die and won't even leave anyone who will come and make sure your headstone didn't topple over with the last earthquake. Ricky, you've been my relative for nearly fifty years, and from way back, even before you got so heavy, when you looked good and you were dating Farrah Fawcett or screwing Jackie Bisset, I never stopped feeling sorry for you."

Bobo, who had taken a taxi all the way from Calabassas, then cooked an uneaten dinner, and been awakened twice in the same night, had dark circles under his eyes. The two men stood silently in the cold living room, the smell of the chicken that neither they nor the sleeping maid had cleaned up still in the air. "What are you going to do? And I mean right away, because I can't stand it."

Many answers tumbled around in Rick's mind, and the one that came out surprised him almost as much as it did Bobo.

"I'm going to adopt a baby," he said.

13

W
HEN BARBARA SPOTTED A RARE DAY with a few open hours coming up on her calendar, she decided to get on the phone and schedule some personal appointments. Her psychiatrist, her hairdresser, and oh yes . . . the postcard from Howie Kramer's office was beckoning. At least this time she'd gone as far as calling Marcy Frank and asking for the information on the woman gynecologist. But where did she put that number? The biggest problem with having three desks in three different locations was that the damn number could be anywhere. She shuffled through some papers, and was delighted to come upon the phone number of Dr. Gwen Phillips she'd scribbled down last week.

"My name is Barbara Singer. I was referred by Marcy Frank," she said. "I need to come in for a routine checkup."

"The doctor's out of town for three weeks," the
voice on the phone told her. "And when she gets back she's very backed up, but I can schedule you in, let's see . . . the earliest I have would be . . . in six weeks."

"Thanks anyway," Barbara said, hanging up, congratulating herself for at least making the effort, and relieved not to have to face the unfamiliar. So much for new doctors, she mused and laughed to herself when she thought about that character Billy Crystal used to play on "Saturday Night Live" who always said, "Remember,
looking
good is more important than feeling good," so she dialed her hairdresser.

"Well, Mrs. S., after December you won't have me to kick around anymore, so you'd better start thinking about which other operator you're gonna switch over to who can do your color.''

Barbara looked up from the notes she'd been reading to pass the minutes until the timer rang to signal that the hair color had penetrated and she could get back to the office. Now she caught a glimpse of herself in the beauty-shop mirror, her face ringed with white cotton, her hair matted into bizarre bunches and coated with the gooey shoe-polish dye Delia applied to cover the ever encroaching gray. The pretty, skinny-as-an-arrow Delia was running a fat plastic comb through Barbara's ends, making sure the awful stuff covered every single surface of her hair.

"I'm going to get pregnant," Delia told her, "and all these chemicals aren't good for anybody who's pregnant, so by the end of this year, I'm quitting for a while."

"I'm glad for you, Delia, but sad for me. Maybe when you leave I'll just be au naturel for a while, and let my hair go gray."

"Oh my God, you're joking! That would be a disaster," Delia said, emitting an outraged laugh. Barbara
wasn't joking. It was an idea she'd been considering for a while, but after that reaction she decided to reconsider. When her hair was colored and blown out she hurried to her car, thinking that after that affront from Delia, it was a good thing she was on her way to check in with her own therapist.

Morgan was more like a friendly old uncle to her after all these years and when she first settled into the peeling old leather chair, on which she had been responsible for some of the peeling, she felt relieved to be able to blurt out what was on her mind.

"I'm on overwhelm, Morgs," she told him. It had been nearly a year since she'd visited the old family friend who'd been her therapist off and on since the sixties. Today he peered at her over his smudged half-glasses, and his lived-in face registered genuine concern. "My kids aren't kids anymore. Heidi sometimes goes weeks without calling, and Jeff will be off to college in the fall to heaven knows where.

"I spend five half-days in the clinic with individual families and five at my private office with the same. I lead parenting groups all week and two on Saturdays for my working parents who can only come in on the weekends. And now I'm all fired up about a new group. It's for families whose babies are the result of the new technologies and arrangements, like open adoption, or insemination. I want to create a context, a language, a way for these children to talk about things. But I've got to tell you, I'm worried about it. What if it's a mistake and families like these want to be in the mainstream and not treated separately? What if I can't think of answers for them to give these children? I mean how can a couple tell the child of a gay father what the ugly names mean? What will those two little girls who have been born via a sperm donor think about men, and how will they relate to them when
they're
women?