THREE
My cell phone was ringing as I pulled into the driveway. “Did you see it?” Sarah asked.
“Just the headline,” I told her. I’d been late again. Mrs. Dale, the take-no-shit teacher who was on drop-off duty that morning, had given me a tight-lipped smile as I’d made excuses over Ellie’s still-damp head.
“It’s mostly great. Seventy-five percent positive.”
My skin went cold; my heart contracted. “And the other twenty-five?” I asked, trying to keep my voice light.
“Oh, you know.” She lowered her voice until she sounded like Sam the Eagle of The Muppet Show fame. “?‘Some in journalism question the proliferation of female-centric websites, and whether the issues they cover—such as sex, dating, and the politics of marriage and motherhood—and the way that they cover them, with a particular off-brand, breezy sense of humor, are doing feminism any favors.’?”
“?‘Some in journalism,’?” I repeated. “Did he quote anyone?”
Sarah gave her gruff bark of a laugh. “Ha. Good one. As far as I’m concerned, ‘some in journalism’ are his girlfriend, his mom, and a pissed-off intern who couldn’t cut it at Ladiesroom.”
I flipped open my laptop, saw that the battery had died because I’d failed to plug it in the night before, and then started hunting the living room for Dave’s. I knew that Sarah was probably right. I’d been in journalism long enough to know that anonymous quotes usually came from disgruntled underlings too chicken to sign their names to their critiques. But I was the one who’d written about—how did the Journal put it?—“the politics of marriage and motherhood,” and whatever the piece said was sure to sting.
I had started on the marriage-and-motherhood beat by accident with a post on my personal read-only-by-my-friends blog called “Fifty Shades of Meh.” I’d written it after buying Fifty Shades of Grey to spice up what Dave and I half-jokingly called our “grown-up time,” and had written a meditation on how the sex wasn’t the sexiest part of the book. “Dear publishers: I will tell you why every woman with a ring on her finger and a car seat in her SUV is devouring this book like the candy she won’t let herself eat,” I had written. “It’s not the fantasy of an impossibly handsome guy who can give you an orgasm just by stroking your nipples. It is, instead, the fantasy of a guy who can give you everything. Hapless, clueless, barely able to remain upright without assistance, Ana Steele is that unlikeliest of creatures, a college student who doesn’t have an e-mail address, a computer, or a clue. Turns out she doesn’t need any of those things. Here is dominant Christian Grey, and he’ll give her that computer, plus an iPad, a Beamer, a job, and an identity, sexual and otherwise. No more worrying about what to wear—Christian buys her clothes. No more stress about how to be in the bedroom—Christian makes those decisions. For women who do too much—which includes, dear publishers, pretty much all the women who have enough disposable income to buy your books—this is the ultimate fantasy: not a man who will make you come, but a man who will make agency unnecessary, a man who will choose your adventure for you.”
I’d put the post up at noon. By dinnertime, it had been linked to, retweeted, and read more than anything else I’d ever written. The next morning, an e-mail from someone named Sarah Lai arrived. She was launching a new website and wanted to talk to me about being a regular contributor. “I write about sex,” she told me. “Don’t be alarmed when you Google me.” So I’d Googled her and read her posts on pony play and next-generation vibrators on my way to New York City.
I’d walked into the Greek restaurant in Midtown where we’d decided to meet for lunch expecting a leather-clad vixen, a kitten with a whip, in teetering stripper heels and a latex bodysuit. Sarah Lai looked like a schoolgirl, in a white button-down shirt with a round collar tucked into a pleated gray skirt. Black tights and conservative flat black boots completed her ensemble. “I know, I know,” she’d said, laughing, when I told her she wasn’t what I expected. “What can I say? The quiet ones surprise you.” She set down the wedge of pita she was using to scoop hummus into her mouth and said, “So how’d you know your husband was The One?”
I looked at her, surprised. I’d figured she’d want to know how I got started with my blog, where I found my inspiration, which writers I admired, what other blogs I read. What I saw on her face, underneath the tough-girl pose of a cynic in the city, was unguarded curiosity . . . and hope. She was twenty-six, maybe old enough to have a serious boyfriend of her own, and wonder, as I had at her age, whether he was a keeper or just a guy who’d keep her happy through the holidays.
“On our first date, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to see him again,” I told her, picturing Dave across the table at the Chinatown restaurant where we’d walked after work. “He was handsome, but really serious. He scared me a little. I thought he was a lot smarter than I was—I still think that, sometimes—and he was, you know, completely focused on his work.” We’d talked about his current project, about the mayoral candidate he admired and the three others running for the office he thought were stupid or corrupt, and then he’d told me the story that had won my heart forever, his dream of the Me So Shopping Center.
“The what?” Sarah’s expression was rapt, her eyes wide. She’d done everything but pull out a notebook to take notes.
“You’re probably too young to remember the movie Full Metal Jacket, but there’s a scene where this Vietnamese prostitute says, ‘Me so horny’? It was the title of a rap song.” I was convinced Sarah had no idea what I was talking about, but she nodded anyhow. “Dave’s big idea was to have a bunch of shops. Like, Me So Horny would be the town brothel, and Me So Hungry would be the diner, and there’d be a psychiatrist’s office called Me So Sad, and a clothing shop . . .”
“Me So Naked?” Sarah guessed.
“It was either that or Me So Cold. And the doctor’s office, Me So Sick, and the cleaning service, Me So Messy.” I was laughing as I remembered the increasingly silly ideas we’d come up with, how I’d contrived to touch Dave’s hand and wrist as I’d laughed. “And that was it. He was already losing his hair, and I could see that sometimes he’d bore me, but I thought, we’ll always have Me So. He’ll always make me laugh.”
Sarah nodded. I had the sense of clearing some invisible hurdle, passing a quiz I hadn’t known I’d taken. Sarah had moved to New York from Ohio, had gotten a job in a coffee shop and given herself a year to make it as a writer. When we met, she’d started making a decent amount of money from the ads on her blog. Her dream was to start a bigger, more comprehensive, less sex-centric site. “Fashion, food, magazines, marriage, children, all that,” she’d rattled off, before giving the waiter our order—moussaka, grilled lamb, stuffed grape leaves, and more warm pita. “I’ll write about sex, of course, but I’ll need someone to cover marriage and motherhood.” Throughout the lunch we discussed design and ad buys, ideas, headlines, and titles. By the time dessert arrived, Sarah suggested I give the column a shot and try to write a few blog posts.
“Are you sure you don’t want someone with more experience?” I’d asked. I’d never thought of myself as a writer. Dave was the writer; I was a graphics-and-images girl. But we could certainly use the extra money. And the truth was that staying at home with a baby—now a toddler—did not fulfill me the way working at the paper once had. With work, there was a sense of completion. You’d start to lay out a page, or create graphics, or embed just the right video clip in an article about the city’s failing schools, and eventually, after editing and feedback and sometimes starting over again, you’d be done. With motherhood and marriage there was no finish line, no hour or day or year when you got to say you were through. Life just went on and on, endless and formless, with no performance evaluation, no raises or feedback or two weeks’ vacation. I thought that maybe working for money again could give me back that sense of satisfaction I’d once gotten from a job well done . . . or even just done.
“How is this website going to be different from the women’s websites that are already out there?” I had asked. Sarah, who’d clearly been waiting for that question, launched into her answer, about tone and content and reader engagement. I nibbled a stuffed grape leaf and thought about how lucky I was—how without my even trying, a solution for my worries had landed, like a gift-wrapped box dropped out of a window, right in my lap.
Ladiesroom.com had launched six weeks after my interview, finding its niche in the online world—and its advertisers—faster than either of us could have expected. Four months after its launch, the site was acquired by Foley Media, a bigger company looking to expand its brand. I was working harder than I had at the Examiner, pulling my first all-nighters since college, powering through the next day on espresso and a twenty-minute nap, engaging each day with the people who commented on my posts. And now the Wall Street Journal had decided we were, in a sense, newsworthy.
“Call me when you’ve read it,” Sarah said. I made some kind of affirmative noise and then turned on Dave’s laptop and found the story. I scrolled through their recap of our success, the quotes that captured Sarah’s and my funny banter, and the claims from critics who questioned our experience and asked whether our motives were self-promotional. Beneath the words LIVING OUT LOUD, I found my photograph. “Oh, God,” I groaned. I’d worn a pink jersey dress and nude heels, and Sarah and I had posed on Sarah’s desk, in front of her floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked Bryant Park. When the shot had been set up, I’d thought we looked nice. Seeing the picture now, all I could think was Before and After. Way, Way Before and After. Worst of all, the caption underneath read “SEXY MAMAS: Mom-bloggers Allison Weiss and Sarah Lai at play in Manhattan.” Never mind that I hardly looked sexy, and Sarah wasn’t a mom.
Ah, well. At least we looked reasonably professional. The photographer, who’d clearly been expecting the online version of Girls Gone Wild, had been disappointed to find ladies in business clothes, one of whom was almost forty, with nary a tattoo in sight (Sarah had a few—“just not,” as she put it, “where the judge can see them”). He had not-so-subtly pushed me toward the edge or the back of the shots, while trying to get Sarah to bend over her desk, or to stand with her hands on her knees and wave her bottom in front of her laptop—“so it’s, you know, sex and the Internet.” When she refused, and also politely turned down his offer to shoot her posing with a whip, he’d asked us to have an edible-body-paint fight (thanks but no thanks). Finally, he asked if we would at least stand side by side. “And can you kind of touch each other?”
We’d declined but agreed to play catch with the Egg, a vibrator designed to look like a retro kitchen timer that Sarah had reviewed in her monthly sex-toy roundup.
I turned away from the laptop and slipped my finger into my bag, found my tin, put the pills I knew I’d be needing—two Percocet, courtesy of my dentist, who was still prescribing them for the wisdom teeth he’d taken out six months ago—underneath my tongue. Then I called Sarah.
“It’s great!” I said. I’d meant to sound cheery, but I thought I sounded closer to hysterical.
“I told you it was NBD,” Sarah answered. I took a deep breath.
“I guess I’m just worried about what Dave’s going to think.”
“Ah.” Sarah’s boyfriend, an architect ten years her senior, was unswervingly supportive and, as far as I knew, completely unthreatened by a girlfriend who wrote about threesomes and bestiality for a living.
“But it’ll be fine,” I reassured her. “Hey, I should get going on my post. Call you later?” We hung up and I scrolled, idly, to the bottom of the Journal’s story, where twenty-three comments had already appeared.
I clicked, and began to read. LOL the one in the pink looks like Jabba the Hutt. No wonder she needs sex toys! “But I’m not the sex-toy writer,” I said, as if my computer could hear me. I shook my head and kept reading. I’d hit that . . . the second commenter had written, followed by three blank lines that I scrolled past to read, . . . with a brick, so I could get to the hot one. The third left behind the topic of my looks to consider my credentials. This is why the terrorists hate us, added commenter number four.
I closed my eyes. I told myself it did not matter what a bunch of strangers who, clearly, could hardly read and who would never meet me had to say. I told myself that it was ridiculous to get upset by comments on the Internet . . . It wasn’t as if the people could reach through the screen to actually hurt me. It wasn’t as if I was real to them; I was a name, a picture, a thing: Feminism, or Women Today. I told myself that I looked just fine and that the people who’d written those hateful things were probably idiots who played video games in their parents’ basement, putting down their joysticks only long enough to spew a little hate online and then masturbate bitterly.
Dave’s computer gave a soft chime, the same noise my laptop made when an e-mail arrived. Reflexively, I toggled to the e-mail screen and double-tapped the link that would let me read the incoming missive. Which turned out to be for Dave, from one [email protected]. Happy birthday!
Okay, I thought. Totally benign. Except that when another e-mail arrived, I clicked it open again, almost without thinking. This one was from Dave, asking, We still on for lunch?
Absolutely, wrote back L. McIntyre. I ran through lists of male names that began with “L.” Larry. Luke. Lawton. Lonnie. Then I scrolled to the next line. I wouldn’t miss it!
Hmm. Possibly still innocuous. Dave’s reply, See you soon, was also perfectly proper. But, in addition to his usual e-mail signature—David Weiss, Reporter—he’d used an emoji, a winking yellow smiley face, the kind that subliterate fourteen-year-old girls would text to their crushes, the kind Dave and I rolled our eyes at and had vowed to never use. “We’re word people,” Dave had said, and even though I was more of a picture person myself, I’d agreed with him that these silly symbols were the height of the ridiculous, turning adult conversations into puppet shows and ruining the English language. Except, if I could believe what I was seeing, here was my husband, using emojis, with someone named L. McIntyre.
Don’t do it, a voice in my brain mourned. The computer chimed again, and here was L’s reply, another smiley-face emoji, only hers had lipstick and long eyelashes.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me!” I cried.
First things first. I pulled my hair into a ponytail and literally rolled up my sleeves. I’d never acquired the ninja-level Googling skills that Examiner reporters took for granted, but I didn’t need them. A quick search revealed that L. McIntyre was Lindsay McIntyre, and she was an assistant United States attorney, and she had gone to UPenn and law school at Temple and she looked—I would ask Janet to confirm this—like a younger, paler, mousier version of me. We both had shoulder-length hair, and similar features, only my face was rounder and her complexion was lighter. But there was a definite resemblance. Except she was single. And young.
It was just after ten o’clock in the morning, but it felt like my wet-the-bed wake-up call had happened to a different person, possibly a century ago. I was considering another pill but decided that I didn’t have the luxury. No matter what was going on with my husband, I had work to do.
I sat in front of the laptop. I opened a new window and typed a single word: Exposed. The word seemed to expand and contract, throbbing like an infected tooth at the top of the page. I think my husband is having an affair, I wrote, then, as if typing them might make it real, I erased the words, then wrapped my arms around my shoulders, sitting in front of the computer and rocking. I thought about calling Sarah and asking for a sick day, but I knew that, today of all days, with traffic probably at an all-time high, there was no way I could afford to go dark.
I squeezed my eyes shut, hearing the percussion of my fingers coming down harder than they had to on the keys as I typed: Hey, commenters, I’m sorry. I’m sorry my disgusting, blobbity body (which is, after all, no bigger than the average American woman’s, but who’s counting) offends you. I’m sorry I was foolish enough to pose for a photograph, and let that photograph appear in the world, instead of hiding behind an avatar of an actress or insisting on being air-brushed into acceptability. I’m sorry my mere existence has forced you to actually consider the reality of a woman who is neither a model nor an actress and does not feel compelled to starve herself, or binge and purge, or spend hours engaged in rigorous workouts so that she scrapes into “acceptable” territory and can thus be seen in public.
I’m sorry I’m not skinny. I’m sorry I haven’t had my fat sucked, my face plumped, my nose bobbed, my skin peeled, and my brows plucked. I’m sorry that I forced you into the unwelcome realization that MOST WOMEN DO NOT LOOK LIKE THE WOMEN YOU SEE ON TV. I’m sorry that even the women you see on TV don’t look like the women you see on TV, because they’ve been lit and made up, strapped into Spanx and posed just so.
I’m sorry that, evidently, you are living with terrorists who have the ability to force you to read stories you’re not interested in reading. That must be terrible! I, personally, can click or flip away from something that doesn’t hold my attention, or interest me, or line up with a worldview that I want affirmed. Whereas you, poor, unfortunate soul, are required to read every loathsome syllable written by some uncredentialed housewife. How sad your life must be!
They’ll never print this, I decided. So I saved it, logged off, and then sat there, my heart beating too hard, wishing I was somewhere else, or someone else.
I told myself I wouldn’t look at Dave’s e-mail again, and I didn’t. I also told myself I wouldn’t read any more comments on the Journal story, but of course I found myself refreshing obsessively, watching the tally grow higher, feeling each insult and cruel remark burn itself into my brain. FEMINAZZI, read one. Angry and a shitty speller. Excellent. I wondered whether Dave had seen the piece, whether he was reading the comments, how he might feel, watching the world consider his wife and find her wanting.
Just before noon, my phone buzzed, flashing my mother’s number. Since the day she’d called me and said, “Daddy got lost on the way to the JCC this morning,” we’d talked every day, even if most of those “talks” consisted of my mother sobbing softly while I sat there and squirmed.
I picked up the phone. “Hi, Mom.”
“Are you okay?” she asked. For a crazy instant, I thought that somehow she knew about L. McIntyre and that she was calling to comfort me. Which was, of course, insane on two fronts: my mother had no idea what was going on in my private life, and if she did, she wouldn’t have any idea of how to help, and she wouldn’t even try.
“Am I okay with what? Did something happen?” Did I sound awful? I must, I decided, if every caller’s first question was whether or not I was all right.
“Oh, no. But I saw the story.”
“Don’t read the comments,” I said. As soon as the words were out of my mouth, I realized that if she hadn’t already, my telling her not to look was a guarantee that she would.
“It’s been quite a morning,” said my mother. “Sharon Young picked me up for yoga, and she had the story up on her phone.” She paused. I braced myself.
“Slow news day,” I murmured.
“I told her that probably not many people read it. I told her that Dave’s the real writer, and you just do it for fun.”
“For shits and giggles,” I said.
“What?”
“You’re right. I only do it for fun,” I said, marveling, as I often did, at my mother’s passive-aggressive genius, the way she could minimize and dismiss any of my achievements, all under the guise of doing it for my own good.
Having dispensed with the subject of her problematically opinionated daughter, my mom moved on to a new one. “Daddy has an appointment at the urologist’s tomorrow.”
By “Daddy,” she meant her husband, my father, not her own . . . and I thought the visit was next week. Had I gotten it wrong, maybe entering the date incorrectly after taking a few too many pills?
My mom lowered her voice. “He had an accident this morning, so I called to see if they could fit him in.”
I cringed, feeling ashamed for my father and sorry for my mom, that she now had to see her husband, the man she’d loved and lived with for almost forty years, shamefaced, with sodden PJ’s clinging to his skinny legs. “There’s a lot of that going around,” I said.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
My mother started to cry. “I’m sorry,” she said, the way she always apologized for her tears. “It’s just so hard to watch this happening to him.”
“I know, Mom.” It was horrible for me, too, seeing the slackness of his mouth, the eyes that had once missed nothing swimming, befuddled, behind his bifocals.
“He was so embarrassed,” said my mother. “It was just awful.”
“I can imagine,” I said, knowing that as hard a time as Eloise had given me, coaxing a seventy-year-old man in the grip of early Alzheimer’s out of his clothes and into the shower would be exponentially more difficult, especially for my five-foot, ninety-five-pound mother.
“I need you to take him to the doctor’s.”
“When’s the appointment?”
“Nine.” She sniffled. Her Philadelphia accent stretched the syllable into noine. “That was the earliest they could see him.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll make it work.”
My mother hung up. Without remembering reaching for it, I found a pill bottle in my hand and two more pills in my mouth. Crunching and swallowing, I waited for the familiar, comforting sweetness to suffuse me, that sunny, elevating sensation that everything would be all right, but it was slow in arriving. My heart was still pounding, and my head was starting to ache along with it, and I was so overwhelmed and so unhappy that I wanted to hurl my phone against the wall. My husband is cheating. Or at least he’s flirting. My father is dying. My mother is falling apart. And I’m not sure what to do about any of it.
Instead of throwing the phone, I punched in one of my speed-dial numbers. The receptionist at my primary-care physician’s office put me through to Dr. Andi.
“The famous Allison Weiss!” she said. “I was drinking my smoothie this morning, and there you were!”
“There I was,” I repeated, in a dull, leaden voice.
“Ooh, you don’t sound good.” It was one of the many things I liked about Dr. Hollings—she could take one look or one listen and know something was up. “Back go out again?”
My life, I thought. My life went out. “You got it. This morning. I crawled up to bed and I’ve been here ever since. I took a Vicodin, but, honestly, it’s not doing much, and I can’t stay in bed all day. I’ve got a million things to do, and it’s Dave’s birthday dinner tonight.”
“Well, God forbid you miss that!”
“I know, right?”
There was a pause. Maybe she was pulling my chart, or checking something in a book. “Okay, let’s see. We called in a refill, what, three weeks ago? I don’t normally recommend doing this because of the acetaminophen—it’s not great for your liver—but if you’re really struggling, you can double down on the Vicodin.”
“I tried that,” I confessed. “I know I wasn’t supposed to, but . . .” I let her hear the quaver in my voice, the one that had nothing to do with my discs and everything to do with L. McIntyre, my dad, and the article. “I’m really not doing so well here.”
She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, thinking. “Okay. I can call you in a scrip for OxyContin. It’s a lot stronger, so be careful with it until you see how you react. I don’t want you driving . . .”
“No worries. I can take a cab tonight.”
“Good. Check in with me in a few days. Feel better!”
“Thanks,” I said.
An hour later, the pharmacy had my prescription ready. I zipped through the drive-in window to pick it up and tucked the paper bag into my purse, but at the first traffic light I hit I found myself opening first the bag, then the bottle inside it.
The OxyContin pills were tiny, smaller than Altoids, and bright turquoise. “Take one every four to six hours for pain.” Pain, I thought, and crunched down on one, wincing at the bitterness, then swallowed a second.
By the time I got home, I was finally beginning to feel some relief. I floated up the stairs and drifted into the bathroom for a proper shower, not one with Princess Bath Soap. As I lathered my hair I sang “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair” under my breath. Why had it taken me so long to find OxyContin? It was lovely. Blissful. Heaven.
L. McIntyre. Maybe she was just a work friend who’d become more like a work wife. I felt the knot between my shoulder blades loosen incrementally as I thought of those words. I knew what a work wife was. I’d been one myself, back when I was at the Examiner. My work husband’s name was Eric Stengel. He was a photographer, and very discreetly gay, my friend and ally, my partner-in-crime and my lunch buddy. We talked about everything—MTV series, the spin classes that were just popping up in Philadelphia, the mysteries of men’s hearts, our shared obsession with the movie Almost Famous. We never saw each other outside of the newsroom hours, but every Monday morning I’d pick up cappuccinos for both of us and a single muffin to split, and we’d spend our first hour of the workweek at his desk, debriefing each other about our weekends. We had lunch together at Viet Nam at least once a week. In warm weather, we’d buy fruit salads from the vending truck on Callowhill, and sit outside and talk about Liev Schreiber and Jake Gyllenhaal and the mysterious appeal of Ryan Gosling (Eric got him; I didn’t). I was there to talk Eric out of having his name legally changed to Edward (“It has nothing to do with Twilight; it’s just that Eric’s such a nerd name,” he’d said). He’d been there to convince me that Dave wasn’t cheating after I’d found an inscribed book of Pablo Neruda poetry, dated two weeks after we’d started seeing each other, under Dave’s bed. “He’s not going to marry someone who reads Neruda,” Eric had told me. “Cummings, maybe. Auden, Larkin, those guys, I could see it. But Neruda? Nuh-uh.”
“He’s so mysterious,” I’d moaned—back then, when I thought I had things to complain about. “How am I supposed to know if he’s cheating?”
Eric had lifted one finger. “Is he working late?”
I shook my head. Some nights, he was even home before I was.
Eric continued the questions. Was Dave finding excuses to go out, alone, on the weekends? Had he joined a new gym, started wearing a new cologne, bought himself a new wardrobe or a new car? No, and no, and no again.
“Finally,” Eric had said, performing a fingertip drumroll on his desk, “are you two still making the beast with two backs?”
I’d giggled and said, “All the time.” It had been true, then . . . and it was true now that at least one of us wanted an active sex life. At least once a week I’d get into bed and feel my husband’s hand brush the side of my breast, or my thigh, marital shorthand for You wanna? The trouble was, I didn’t. Ever. At the end of a day, especially after I’d taken a pill or three to deal with the emotional obstacle course of getting Ellie to bed, the absolute only thing I wanted to do was curl on my side with my cheek against the soft white pillowcase, close my eyes, and let sleep take me. Sex felt like an invasion. Things weren’t as bad as they had been the first few months after Ellie was born, when Dave’s touch had actively revolted me, when, more than once, I’d shuddered in dismay if he tried for a kiss, but they hadn’t improved all that much. I hadn’t worried about it, either. Judging from the women’s magazines I read, and the stories I’d hear on the playground or in the school pickup lane, our story wasn’t especially original. When we’d first started dating, and during the first year and a half of our marriage, we’d done it in the bed, in the shower, on the kitchen table, and, a few times late at night, in various corners of the newsroom. By the time I left the paper, there was one editor’s desk I couldn’t look at without blushing. Dave had a great body. Better than that, he had an amazing imagination, and the two of us would pretend all kinds of crazy stuff. He’d be a reclusive dot-com genius who’d made ten million dollars at nineteen but had never slept with a woman, and I’d be the high-priced hooker he hired to teach him about women. He’d be the quarterback for the Eagles, and I’d be the rookie sportswriter he invited up to his apartment for an in-depth interview. He’d be a BMW salesman, and I’d be a woman who’d do anything to get a break on the price of the new sedan.
The last time we’d attempted any role-playing had been months ago. It had not gone well. “How about we’re both virgins, and we’ve just gotten married in an arranged marriage, and it’s our first night together?” he’d suggested, one leg slung over both of mine, his erection growing against my thigh.
I’d stifled a yawn. I wasn’t bored, just tired. “Were there elephants at our wedding?”
“Boy, you really weren’t paying much attention,” Dave said.
Focus, I told myself. Maybe I wasn’t a hundred percent into it, but for the sake of the greater good, I could, as they said, take one for the team. “Okay. You’re Ramesh, and I’m Surya. What’s your job?”
“I’m a chemical engineer.”
“What, you don’t own a Dunkin’ Donuts?”
He’d propped himself up on his elbow, glaring at me. “Jeez, Allie.”
“I was kidding!” I said, thinking, sadly, that there was a time, not long ago, when I wouldn’t have had to explain that it was a joke.
“Fine.” He flopped onto his back, removing his leg from mine. His erection was wilting. I placed one hand gently on his chest, on top of his T-shirt. “Can I touch you?” I whispered, in character as an inexperienced bride.
“Yes,” he whispered back. Slowly, I began stroking his pectoral muscles, feeling his nipples getting stiff against my palm. I tweaked one gently, hearing him suck in his breath. “Just like mine!” I said, delighted. “Will you kiss me?” I whispered.
He nibbled at my neck, nipped at my earlobe, pressed his lips gently against mine. I shut my eyes, lost in the sensation of his tongue dipping into my mouth, gently prodding my own tongue, as one hand slid up the leg of my pajamas. “Actually,” he breathed in my ear, “I lied. I have been with a woman before.”
I drew back, feigning shock. “When was this?”
In the darkness, he looked ashamed. “Well. You know I’m an engineer. But I also play the sitar in my uncle’s restaurant on the Lower East Side on Saturday nights. And you know how ladies love musicians.”
“So you didn’t save yourself for me?” On behalf of the imaginary Surya, I was feeling legitimately angry. “Where did you take your groupie?”
“We did it . . .” He stifled a yawn. “In the back of my uncle’s minivan.”
“You couldn’t even spring for a hotel room?” Unbelievable. Why did Dave have to be cheap, even in fantasies?
He flopped on his back. “You know what? Let’s forget it.”
And that had been the end of that. The truth was, in the past year, I could count the times we’d had sex on two hands . . . and I’d probably have fingers left over.
Tonight, I promised. It was, after all, his birthday. I would force all thoughts of L. McIntyre and the jerks from the comments out of my head. I would pull on my flimsiest, most tight-fitting T-shirt, and the drawstring bottoms Dave liked best. I’d light candles by the side of the bed; I’d sing “Happy Birthday to You” Marilyn Monroe style; I would do all the things he liked, just the way he liked them, and we would come back to each other and be a team, a partnership, again.