“Fresh in our minds,” she repeated pointlessly. He wanted to sleep with her, and she would have been ridiculously ignorant if she didn’t know it.
She wasn’t going to sleep with the Nabisco executive, though his face was worth contemplation for some reason, and she could imagine the underlayer of his body beneath his clothing. It wasn’t just that she could imagine it; as soon as she imagined it, she realized that what mattered was that she was imagining it. But she couldn’t sleep with him. Let him think she might. That was a business transaction. She studied his face and then finally said, “Sure.”
“Why does he want to discuss it further with you?” Shirley asked irritably as they stood hanging from straps on the IRT going back downtown.
“I’ll draw you a diagram, Shirley,” murmured Evelyn.
“I’m not going to sleep with him, for God’s sake,” said Faith. She didn’t tell them that she’d met him a long time ago, and that, freakishly, he had remembered that they’d met; and that, perhaps almost as freakishly, she had come to remember it too. “But sure, fine, I’ll have dinner with him, why not? I’ll make him listen to the magazine’s objectives.”
“Maybe he’s a stealth women’s libber,” said Shirley, “and he wants to help us strategize. And if Faith can spin a magic web across his vision that enchants him and seals the deal, then that’s fine.”
“Oh yes. I am full of enchantment,” Faith said mildly.
“You are, actually,” said Evelyn. “You’re one of those people who other people enjoy. It’s a talent.”
When Faith arrived at the Cookery that night at seven, he was already waiting at a table deep in the back. Because there was candlelight in this Greenwich Village club and not fluorescence, he appeared softer to her than in the boardroom at Nabisco. He wore a Nehru jacket now, and his dark hair looked silky. “I’m glad you came,” he said as they drank the red sangria he’d ordered before she arrived. Though she thought there was a slight chauvinistic tinge to this, he probably wouldn’t have seen it that way. They knocked their glasses together, each with a small paper umbrella in it. She drank hers quickly, even though sweet alcoholic drinks generally made her feel thick-brained and a little slow. Tonight, though, the wine was just a loosening agent.
Emmett Shrader lifted the umbrella from his drink, shook it off, and wordlessly dropped it into his jacket pocket. She was going to say to him, “Do you have a paper umbrella collection at home?” but didn’t, because that would have sounded flirtatious, and she wanted to be serious here. When he asked her to tell him her “whole story,” she did, talking about Brooklyn and her parents’ overprotectiveness and her need to get out of there, and he listened in a way that no man had listened to her in her life.
“Go on,” he kept saying. He said he was interested in all of it, and she took him at his word, telling him how she had gotten passionate about women’s rights. She was prepared for some sort of sparring, because this was what it was often like with men. But what Emmett said was, “I think what you and the other women are doing is essential.” The words were an intoxicant. “But may I add,” he went on, “and please stop me if this is unwarranted—I wish you could dominate a little more. Make us buy ad space. Force us.”
“That wouldn’t work,” Faith said.
“Why not?”
“Because when a man speaks that way, people say he has authority. When a woman does, everyone resents her and thinks she’s their mother. Or their nagging wife.”
“Ah. I see what you mean,” he said. “Okay, so just be urgent. I’m in advertising, so I know a little bit of what I’m talking about. And also, if I can say one more thing? You ought to be the main person doing the talking; you more than the others. You’ve got something.”
“Well, thank you,” she said, uncomfortable but pleased. Then, “What about you? What’s your story?”
“Oh. My story. Let’s see,” Emmett said. “I’ve resigned myself to working at Nabisco, and it can be all right. But mostly there aren’t too many surprises, and that’s a shame, because I like surprises. You’re a surprise,” he added.
He took her hand then, which was shocking but not; she had expected it, and here it was. He stroked it once, then twice, with his thumb. This was a business dinner, mostly but not entirely. She had planned for the proposition moment and now it was occurring, but she was no longer resolute about turning him down. Sexual desire hadn’t weakened her or made her think with her body. It hadn’t weakened her at all, but instead it had changed her thinking. She felt a strangeness wash over her, the carbonation of arousal. This feeling was always a little sickening at first, before it settled in.
“Go to bed with me,” he said. “I’d like that more than anything.”
“More than buying ad space.”
“Yes.” He kept stroking her hand, and she didn’t move. “We can go to your apartment,” he said. “I know you live nearby. I looked you up in the phone book.”
She glanced down toward the candlelight, her face growing warm, itself a candle. “I guess that’s your commanding voice,” she said. “And I’m just supposed to fall into line?”
“Faith, I’m not commanding. I want you to want it too.”
So then they were in her apartment, a small box of a studio on West Thirteenth Street, in which she had lived alone since Annie Silvestri decamped to the Midwest. As Emmett folded his clothes on the chair, Faith thought of how he was the first businessman she had ever slept with.
Emmett wore beautiful, formal shoes with little holes in them, she saw as he untied them and began to place them against the wall beside her rose suede boots. “They look like a Nabisco cracker,” she said.
“What?”
“Your shoes. The pattern of little holes on top.”
He looked. “You’re right.” Then he smiled. “The Social Tea biscuit. One of our classic items. By the way, I like your boots,” he said.
He straightened his shoes out neatly; his shiny dark shoes and her soft, pastel boots were in such contrast that this in itself was somehow exciting. His underwear, she saw, looked as crisp as a sail. His body was gorgeous, almost reptilian but not quite. He wasn’t entirely warm-blooded, but she didn’t care at the moment. He was absurdly attractive to her with his dark longish hair and that citric scent that somehow made him manlier than anyone she had known since her father. But of course he was nothing like her father.
In bed Emmett smiled lazily, opening his arms and enclosing her. “Come here,” he said, as if she weren’t already right there. But he wanted her even closer, wanted to be inside her at once, an idea that she thought she understood in that moment, because she not only wanted him inside her, she wanted to be inside him in some way too. Maybe even to be him. She wanted to inhabit his confidence, his style, the way he walked through the world, which was so different from the way she did.
Do this, do that, they said to each other in the imperative ways that people spoke during sex, forgetting manners. He hoisted her on top of him and looked up at her with an expression that was foggy with excitement but topped with worship. “Oh my God,” he said as she was held there above him like a hovering angel. Faith realized that she actually didn’t mind being seen that way: a vision. They paused in the mutual moment, and his eyes almost rolled up into his head, then he regained himself, as if remembering what was happening, and then he pushed into her so deeply that she felt as if she might be cleaved in two. Yet he did no damage.
When he came, he groaned extravagantly and then said, “Oh, Faith,” and lost all his crispness, all his clean edges. Afterward he quieted down and renewed himself, and then he turned his attention solely to her. Her orgasms, three of them in a row like gunfire, were thrilling to them both, and he quietly said to her, “That was my favorite part.”