The door swings open and Alice jolts; she stands up straight and makes like she’s drying her hands. Nadine, the new hire in marketing, smiles at her shyly and disappears into one of the bathroom’s two handicapped stalls. Alice stares up into the fluorescent light above her until she sees spots, and when she hears the toilet flush, she leaves.
Back in her cubicle, she drums her fingers lightly on her desk and compulsively checks for new e-mails, of which there are none. Slyly, she rolls her chair backward and cranes her neck so she can peer down the long row of cubes, past the neon THINK BIG! sign, and into Jonathan’s glass-enclosed office at the northwest corner of the floor.
He’s on a call: she can see him standing, wearing his headset, arms gesticulating fluidly, his white shirt unbuttoned to show just enough of his chest. Behind him, the Hollywood Hills, with their quilts of mismatched houses, are obscured behind a screen of smog. In half an hour, Jonathan will flip a switch and a vanilla scrim will slide over the windows, blocking that same view (“It saves energy,” he told her once. “Gotta think green”). Then he’ll emerge from his office, navy blazer hooked over his shoulder, and saunter over to her cube. He’ll knock lightly on the squat gray wall, as if there’s a door to open, and ask her if the status reports for the Beijing accounts are ready yet (or maybe he’ll ask for the Paris accounts, or the Rome accounts—it all hinges on where she’s asked him to take her to dinner). She’ll tell him it will be another fifteen or thirty minutes, depending on how much gussying up she thinks she needs before meeting him downstairs in the parking garage. (Time which, over the past eight months, has become less and less important, mainly because she likes to see what she can get away with: if, between cocktails and appetizers at Mélisse, he’ll still want to slide his hand under the table and up her skirt if she decides to forgo eye shadow and blush. Even today, when she looks halfway like shit, she promises herself she won’t reach for the tube of lipstick rolling around in her desk drawer.) The whole charade has reached a point of predictability—honestly, at this point, Alice is shocked they haven’t been caught—but that doesn’t bother her; the Thrill of the Illicit wasn’t the reason she started fucking Jonathan, anyway.
It was more the ever-changing power dynamic that first drew her to him, the idea that at one moment he might be screaming at her in the middle of a meeting for missing a deadline, and forty-five minutes later she’d be pinning him down against the shotgun seat of his Alfa Romeo, riding him to the precipice of climax, but never actually allowing him to come. She thinks of what Paul told her when she asked him what he liked most about having sex with another man; he described this feeling of being challenged, and the anticipation that at any moment the balance of control and dominance could shift.
At the time she accused him of being a gay misogynist (she was a junior in college and exclusively reading Susan Sontag); she said he was implying that a woman was expected to exercise docility in the bedroom, and only men—two men, for that matter—could be sexually aggressive. And while she still sort of agrees with all that (she continues to flip through Styles of Radical Will every now and then), she now understands a little bit more of what her brother had meant. Looking back, she’s lost count of how many times at UCLA she had some half-drunk frat boy lying on top of her, squashing her tits as he pumped his doughy thighs to an awkward beat. Each time she’d wanted to do something to shake things up—roll on top of him and hold him down; work a finger up his ass, just to the first knuckle; something, anything, to break the monotony of being controlled. Whenever she did, though, the guy would freak out. Would rip himself out of her and stand abruptly, protesting that he wasn’t into whatever it was she was trying to do to him, professing with slurred consonants how he was just looking for a nice girl (the implication being that a nice girl is something Alice is not). And while admitting so is a massive disappointment, things haven’t changed much in the twelve years since she graduated. Despite their claims of sexual adventure, their organic diets, and their liberal voting records, the men Alice has encountered, at least until Jonathan, have all been beleaguered with the same redundant hang-ups. A bunch of perpetual eighteen-year-olds who, in the safety of their own darkened rooms, jack off to the nastiest shit they can find online, but who, once the lights are flipped on, squirm at the idea of eating her out.
“How are those Tokyo accounts coming?”
Alice looks up to see Jonathan smiling.
“Twenty minutes,” she tells him, perhaps a bit too flatly. He winks at her, nevertheless, and saunters toward the elevator.
She glances down at the clock on her computer screen: it’s nearly five o’clock in L.A., which means it will be coming up on eight in Philadelphia. If he isn’t home by now, then something has happened. He boarded the wrong train and ended up in the middle of New Jersey, or drowned in one of the two rivers that run through the city. Knowing Paul, either option is plausible. How long has it been since she tried him last? She looks at the clock again: ten minutes since she tried his cell, twenty-seven since she called the landline in the apartment, when Mark answered and told her that Paul wasn’t home yet. If Mark picks up again, she’ll likely get an earful. Or not an earful, exactly. But he will do that thing where he explains to her again that Pauly isn’t home, but that he’s expecting him to walk in the door any minute, and in the meantime, is there anything he can do to help. And it will all be said in that lilting, condescending tone that he managed to pick up at Columbia and that she and Paul have too much fun imitating whenever they happen to be on the same coast.
The phone rings once, and she hears the receiver on the other end click.
“Alice. Thirty minutes. Right on time.”
“Mark, I—”
“No, no. It’s fine. He’s here. Hold on.”
Needing something with which to busy her hands, Alice reaches into the drawer for her lipstick. She holds the tube out in front of her, letting it roll back and forth across her palm.
“Yes?”
She hears him crunch into something hard. A carrot. He always eats while talking on the phone. He could be having a conversation with the Queen of England, and he’d still have half a goddamned Twinkie stuffed between his cheeks. It drives her nuts.
“You’re home late,” she says.
“Am I?”
“It’s after eight there. And Mark said you got out of work early.”
“Did he?” A pause. “We-ell, sometimes the train takes a while.”
“Don’t do that,” Alice says. “Don’t do that we-ell thing. It’s irritating. It makes you sound like Mark.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You know exactly what it means. It’s that same voice we—”
“Is this why you were so desperately trying to get ahold of me? To berate me?”
Alice takes a breath and closes her eyes and calms herself by trying to determine whether she can hear the traffic building up on Wilshire.
“Al?” Paul says.
“I’m here.”