The Up and Comer (6 page)

Yeah, don't be silly,
I was thinking, knowing exactly what Tracy had in mind.

"No, you don't be silly," Tracy countered. "Philip will stay with you to make sure you get home safe."

"I'll be fine, really," Jessica pleaded.

"Of course you will, because Philip will be with you to make sure," Tracy said, having what turned out to be the last word on the subject.

The cab pulled up in front of our building, and Tracy got out. She hugged Jessica good-bye and said, "Thanks, honey" to me.

"Eighty-first, between Columbus and Amsterdam," I reminded the driver. He sped off.

Manhattan was a strange enough sight during normal waking hours. After hours, it was a whole different animal. Stay out late enough and you were sure to see something to startle even the most jaded eye. That night it was the old man in the hospital gown.

On the sidewalk, out my side of the cab, was this grandfather type walking in nothing but a hospital gown. What made it truly unique was that he had one of those admitting bracelets around his wrist. As he walked, he would occasionally look over his shoulder.

"Hey, Jessica, check this out," I said, motioning outside my window.

"Huh?"

"This guy, you've got to see this guy."

Jessica blinked a couple of times and leaned over to my side. The old guy walked past the cab while again looking over his shoulder.

"Holy shit, you can see his ass!" she said, giggling.

I looked again and sure enough, the old guy was shooting the moon. We both laughed. Jessica made a piglike snort and we both laughed some more. I caught the eye of our driver looking at us in his rearview mirror. In that instant I wondered what it must be like to make a living one-fifth of a mile at a time.

It was silent for the next couple of blocks. We stopped at a red light.

"Do you want to kiss me?" Jessica whispered.

I turned to her. "What?"

"Do you want to kiss me?" she whispered, only slower.

Honestly, I was floored. Sure, all guys determine whether or not they would sleep with a woman within the first fifteen seconds of meeting her, and sure, Jessica — even as an undeveloped Polaroid — had easily been a yes. Still, a lot of time had passed since those first fifteen seconds, and I hadn't thought about it again. Until that moment.

I began to stammer, "I, ah…."

"Because I want to kiss you," she said. Then she did. She slid across the seat and began kissing me, pressing her body up against mine. I'm sure if I had told her to stop she would have. I didn't, though. I didn't want her to. Instead, as the good Reverend Jesse Jackson might have put it, I reciprocated, it escalated, and before you knew it, we fornicated. Not in the cab, however. No, our driver only got to steal glances at some heavy foreplay before dropping us off at the corner of Eighty-first and Columbus. The fare was thirteen dollars. I gave him a twenty and told him to keep the change. I winked at him. We both knew it was he who should've been tipping me.

Jessica and I started to walk toward her and Connor's apartment without saying a word. After we passed a couple of brownstones she grabbed my hand and led me down underneath a set of steps.
That's
where we fornicated. I lifted up her skirt and pulled down her underwear, letting it drop to the ground from around her knees. (I absolutely love that little two-step thing women do when stepping out of their panties.) Meanwhile, Jessica undid my pants and pulled down my boxers. Then the only words were spoken.

"Are you sure you want to do this?" I said to her.

She reached down and put me inside of her. I took that to mean
yes.

So how does a guy who's only been married a year and a girl who still has her tan from a Caribbean honeymoon end up having sex together? That's how.

When we finished, Jessica finally spoke. "We'll have to do that again," she said.

While pulling up my pants, I looked at my watch. I should've been back home by that point. We quickly kissed and I ran to hail a cab. In all the haste, we were able to avoid any post-infidelity awkwardness. Though I'm not sure there really would've been any. Alcohol or not, the prospect of regret somehow seemed very remote.

In the cab back downtown, the one thing I head-gamed myself about was Jessica's sexual history. I remembered Connor once telling me that she hadn't had too many boyfriends before the two of them met. Given what had just transpired, though, that gave me little solace. Memo to self: get tested in a couple of months. Yeah, leave it to AIDS to make the notion of an unwanted pregnancy seem almost trivial. While I assumed she was, I never asked Jessica if she was on the pill. But hey, what's an abortion when compared to one's own funeral? As I leaned my head back in the cab, far enough that I could look straight up through the rear window at the night's stars, I thought to myself what an incredibly self-centered, every-man-for-himself world it was. And without a doubt, exhibit A was me.

With any luck, Tracy would've been asleep when I returned to our loft. Instead, she was up reading in bed.

"What took you so long?" she said, her eyes remaining on her book. She no longer seemed the least bit drunk.

"What a space, she couldn't find her keys," I said. It would've been a little tough to claim traffic at 4
a.m.
The keys seemed very viable. Assuming they wouldn't be enough, though, I was prepared. "And I picked up the
Times
by their place," I added. Indeed I had picked up the paper, only it was after thinking for thirty blocks about how to handle Tracy should I have to. I told the cab driver to pull over at a newsstand on Forty-sixth Street. "I got talking to the guy in the store; he was from Yemen. I asked him if he thought it would be a good place for us to vacation and he laughed like it was the funniest damn thing."

"He probably thought you were a weirdo," Tracy said, finally looking at me. For sure she thought I was a weirdo, which was fine by me. She could think anything she wanted to, so long as she didn't think I had just been fucking her friend Jessica.

I undressed, did a little postsex wash-down in the bathroom, and crawled into bed. "You don't think there's a Four Seasons in Yemen, do you?" I asked.

"I doubt it," Tracy said. She closed her book and turned off the light.

* * *

I walked up to the counter at the hotel. A familiar face was there waiting.

"Hi, Raymond," I said.

"Hey, Mr. Randall, real nice to see you again."

"You as well. It's been a while."

"Yeah, I know. I was taking some time off."

The way he said it, it didn't sound like a vacation.

"Everything all right?" I asked him.

Raymond scratched his ear, the one without the diamond stud. You could tell he was deciding whether or not to get into it. "It's my mother," he offered. "I was back home to see her. She's been kind of ill."

"I'm sorry to hear that," I told him, and I was. "Is she going to be okay, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Don't know yet. She found out she's got cancer of the stomach. Never even knew you could get it there. She says it's the devil's doing, that he sees her as too much of a threat to him up here on earth. Pretty religious, she is."

"Well, if she's smart enough to know it's him, I would imagine the devil doesn't stand much of a chance."

Raymond laughed and told me he hoped that I was right. The entire time we were talking he was checking me in, his long fingers popping away at the keyboard of his computer.
Of course
I was there for a room. Raymond knew there was no need to ask.

I waited until after Jessica and I had sex that afternoon to tell her about my conversation with Connor the previous night. I knew that if I'd mentioned it to her before, there wouldn't have been any sex. For me, there was no such thing as thinking with the wrong head.

Jessica got out of bed and went to the window. She pulled back the curtains and stood there naked. In the sunlight that spilled in, she became a silhouette. A worried one at that.

"So he's onto us," she said.

"Correction. He's onto you."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means you're obviously acting different around him and it's making him suspicious."

"I'm not, though," she said.

"You may think you're not, but you've obviously got a tell."

"A what?"

"A tell. It's a poker term. It means you do something that you're unaware of that gives away your hand."

She didn't quite follow. "What in the hell are you talking about?!" she snapped.

"Never mind," I said. "Listen, Connor was saying that when you're having sex it's like you're not there."

"So?"

"So, what I'm saying is, you have to get your head back into the sex, or at least make it seem that way."

"I don't believe this; you're telling me that I have to have better sex with my husband?"

I shrugged. "Fake the orgasms if you have to."

She put her hand on her hip. "What do you think I've been doing?"

I stopped and looked at her for a second. She instantly knew what I was thinking.

Said Jessica, "Oh, yeah, right, like I really wanted to take on a second acting job."

My ego back in check, I pressed on. "I know this all sounds weird and I know it can't be easy for you. The good news is, I went a long way in calming Connor down last night. I don't think it's going to remain a problem, I really don't."

My jury of one looked at me. She appeared to have come around to my point of view.

Then came, "Maybe we should just cool it for a while."

The way she threw it out there like it had been a bottled-up thought, it was obvious that she was barely paying attention to me. It pissed me off.

"Maybe," I responded. "In the meantime, now that every pervert with a telescope has gotten a good look at you, do you think you could close the curtains?"

Now we were both pissed off.

"Doesn't this ever bother you?" asked Jessica, raising her voice.

"What?"

"This! Us! What we're doing here. Doesn't it ever bother you?"

"I take it I should say yes. Is that what you want?"

A snicker. "What I want, or at least what I was hoping, was that for once you would express some guilt about what we've been doing. Maybe, dare I say, a little remorse."

"That would prove what?" I asked.

"For starters, that you're human," she said.

My turn to snicker. "You're making it sound like you're being made to do something against your will."

"Spare me the two-to-tango bit," she said.

"You might also want to keep in mind that it wasn't me who led us down beneath that brown-stone the first time," I said.

"Oh, I see, so you're the innocent victim?"

"I didn't say that."

"You didn't have to. I guess my powers of seduction were too much for you to resist that night, huh? You poor thing." She was starting to lose it. "Don't you see, what I'm trying to tell you is that the only thing that bothers me more than my conscience is the fact that you don't seem to mind at all. Actually, it does more than bother me... it scares me."

I was shaking my head. "Grant me one assumption," I said. "That my not telling you about any guilt-ridden moments doesn't mean that they haven't existed for me. Yes, I'm human. Yes, I've had my doubts about this whole thing. Not to turn the tables, but you haven't exactly been forthcoming yourself. Maybe it was a game of chicken. Part of the reason I never said anything is because you didn't."

"If it's getting to the both of us, though, why do we keep doing it?"

"Force of habit?" I joked. I should've known better.

"See, that's what I'm talking about. It's like you're too fucking blind or arrogant to figure it out! This isn't make-believe, Philip, this is real, with real consequences. And you? You act like you're merely along for the goddamn ride!"

"Oh, Jesus, Jessica, give me a break."

"You want a break? I'll give you a break," she said.

Jessica immediately began to put her clothes back on. She said nothing more. I sat there in the bed and watched her. When she had angrily fastened the last button on her blouse, she picked up her purse and marched out of the room.

"Fuck you too!" I yelled as the door slammed behind her.

EIGHT

Lunch with another woman for a change.

Sally Devine strolled into Hatsuhana that Thursday at one-fifteen, as expected. The reservation was actually for one o'clock, but Jack had tipped me off that she'd never been less than fifteen minutes late for anything in her life. Consequently, I'd been waiting at our table for no more than a few minutes myself when she arrived.

We'd met once before, at an office Christmas party that she and Jack had hosted at the apartment they kept in the city, though I wasn't sure if she'd remember me. The most I'd said to her that evening was "You have a lovely place here." Had the line to suck up to her as the boss's wife not been so long, I'm sure I could have made a greater impression.