He pulls back, grinning, and swallows. “What?”
My legs drop off his shoulders. “Just stop,” I say, shuddering. “That’s enough.”
I sit back. Dennis rests his head on my knees, kissing my thighs, and massages my feet with his hands. I catch my breath. It has never been like this before. I have never exploded into a woman’s mouth, not like that. I’m never left gasping for air.
But the minutes pass and I compose myself. It is hot and I ask Dennis to turn off the heat. He stands up and steps awkwardly across the van, the excess flesh hanging from his body in folds. He is an unattractive man. And look at me—talking like a faggot already. I read once that just because a person had one homosexual experience, that didn’t mean they were a homosexual. Why did I just waste my one shot with a slob like Dennis Mulvey?
He kneels down and places his head in my lap. I put my palm on his forehead and push him away.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“You mean what’s wrong with you,” I say. I stand up and shake out my clothes.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It means what it means,” I say, standing up. “There’s nothing wrong with me.”
He’s confused. “What are you doing?”
“We’re done, aren’t we?”
“I don’t know,” he says.
“We’re done.”
“I did something wrong,” he sighs, and I don’t let him think that he didn’t. I shake out my jeans and step into them, not even bothering to look for my underwear.
Dennis drags the lawn chair in front of his body, suddenly self-conscious. “Brad,” he asks. “Did I do something wrong?”
“Do you think you did?”
“I don’t know.”
I pull on my shirt. “That’s the thing. You don’t even know. You have no concept of it.”
“No concept of what?”
“If I were just two years younger,” I say, “you could be arrested.”
I reach for my sneakers and uncover the tattered remains of my white briefs; I shove them in my back pocket and then lace up my Nikes. Dennis holds his head in his hands. It serves him right, I think. He should be crying.
I open the door to the van. “You can’t just leave,” he says. “I thought—”
“You thought what?”
He holds out his hands. “I thought we’d stay friends.”
“That’s not what this was.”
“But Brad—”
I shake my head. “My name’s not Brad.”
A blast of frigid air blows into the van and Dennis cowers behind the lawn chair, holding it over his body like an awkward blanket. I jump out and sprint across the parking lot; for a while I can’t find my car and I panic, zigzagging up and down the aisles with no sense of orientation or direction. Then I spot the familiar shape of my Honda and run for cover.
• • •
I persuade Shereen to let me into her house, then into her bedroom, which is in the basement. Both of her parents are upstairs, asleep.
“I have nothing to say to you,” she whispers.
Her bedroom is dark. I sit at the foot of the bed but Shereen won’t join me. I watch the silhouette of her body as she paces across the floor. “Listen,” I say. “I’m sorry about the party.”
“That’s not the issue here, Rick.”
“But I am,” I say, and I really am. I feel terrible.
“The issue is why you lied to me. And what you did instead.”
“I just needed some time to myself,” I say. “To get my thoughts together.”
“Bullshit, Rick.”
“No,” I say.
“What thoughts do you have to ‘get together’?”
“About us,” I say.
“What about us?”
“I love you,” I say, and it is God’s honest truth: I love her and I want to be with her, only her, forever and ever. She is basically all I need. “You’re everything I need.”
“Save it.”
“I’m serious.” She hears the crack in my voice and sits next to me. I put my arm around her. “Can’t you see it working out? Picture us in a nice house, with two kids. Can’t you see it?”
Shereen studies my eyes. “I’ve always seen it,” she finally says, letting out her breath.
“I didn’t, until tonight.”
“There were no girls with you?”
“No,” I say, “no,” and she stretches back on the bed, relieved. I lie down beside her. “Come on,” I say. “Don’t you think we could live that way? Like our parents are? Happy.”
“I want to . . .”
I kiss her. “Then we’re all set.”
Shereen grabs my sides. “Listen, you,” she says. “If you want it to work, you have to try.”
“I know.”
“You have to want it to work.”
I slide my hands under her nightgown, up and over her breasts. She reaches around my waist and hooks her thumbs into my back pockets.
“I want it to work,” I say. “Believe me, I want it to work.”
And just for an instant, all the guilt vanishes and I realize that I am normal, that I’ve got nothing to worry about, that I’ve got a hopeful and happy life ahead of me with the love of a beautiful woman. I will never give up Shereen, not now, not ever.
Then her thumbs discover the tattered remains of my underwear, shoved into my back pocket. Shereen turns the cloth over in her hands, feeling the elastic waistband, realizing what it is even in the darkness of her basement.
“Rick—” she starts.
It’s not what you think, I want to say, but I’m speechless. She reads the guilt on my face and slaps at it, hard, then slaps me again and again, shrieking and sobbing and shoving me down on her bed. I don’t make any move to stop her.
ROAM
Kathleen Bedwell Hughes
“I lost him,” Valerie said, turning to me with the cell phone held away from her head as we flew down Highway 27 in her Land Rover.
I nodded and said, “Well, we’re way out here.”
“No, Rachel, we’re most of the way to Montauk,” Valerie said to me as if I were her daughter instead of her cook. “The Hamptons is not ‘way out here.’ Friday afternoon traffic just makes you think so. Really we’re less than a hundred and twenty miles out of the city.”
I didn’t bother reminding her that I was from Syracuse and that I had some sense of New York geography, apart from the fact that we’d been driving out to East Hampton every weekend for two months.
She brought the phone to the steering column and held it with both hands, staring at it. Her French manicure and plump pea-sized diamond looked so good and the phone and the leather steering wheel looked so impeccable that she could’ve been doing an ad for Motorola or Land Rover. Valerie drove with her knees while examining the phone. After about thirty seconds, she pushed her sunglasses up on top of her head and brought the phone closer to her eyes. The Land Rover continued to hurtle down the road at about ninety miles an hour.
“I can’t see what light is lit on this thing,” Valerie said, squinting at the phone, which was nearly touching her nose. Then she sighed an extravagant sigh and thrust the phone toward me without looking so that she nearly clocked me in the temple. “Here, you look,” she said. “See if you can get Jamie back for me.”
I caught the phone just as she let go and looked at the lights, which plainly read “No Svc.”
“Oh. We must be between towers,” I said.
“Really?” Valerie started peeking out, up from under the front windshield, as if there were a tower so near the car as to be hovering above us like a UFO.
“Could you not see the little red light here?” I said as I snapped the gray phone shut and set it on the dashboard.
“Could you not see the little red light here?” Valerie mocked me in a high-pitched cartoon whine. Then she smiled. “You’re not supposed to point out your boss’s shortcomings, Rachel.”
“I like to th
ink of you as a client, Valerie,” I said.
“Of course you do.” She smiled a magnanimous burgundy-lipped smile. Then she flipped the sunglasses back down on her nose. “There was a glare,” she said. “Coming in my window. I couldn’t get away from it.”
And then, as if by miracle, the phone rang.
Valerie picked it up. “Baby,” she cooed.
“You lost me,” Jamie said.
“I hate that,” Valerie said.
• • •
Valerie and Jamie hired me after Valerie’s first trimester. I had been out of cooking school exactly one month when I catered a party for my older brother, who was a business associate of Jamie’s. Valerie loved my gazpacho. “I haven’t tasted gazpacho this good since I was in Andalusia two years ago,” she said. “You’re a genius.”
“It’s the New Jersey tomatoes,” I said. “They’re great this year.”
She was also a particular fan of the coconut and cinnamon sorbets. “You must come work for me,” she said to me in the kitchen at the end of the party. “You need a full-time job, don’t you? Young chefs always need work. I can introduce you to great people. Really get your business off the ground.”
I didn’t bother telling her I didn’t have a catering business per se, that I was just doing my brother a favor. I also didn’t say I was waiting for my phone to ring with a call from Union Square, Gramercy, or Bouley saying they were looking for a sous-chef. “I’m going to be a superfamous chef” isn’t exactly the thing to tell inquisitive strangers. Anyway, I had other things on my mind—namely the recent scalding failure of my planned nuptials—and wasn’t likely to come up with a good response.
My fiancé and I were college sweethearts (we met sophomore year in a music 101 course nicknamed Clapping for Credit) and after graduation we survived a few years of Michigan-New York distance while Dan studied law and I attended cooking school. We resolved to come to the city, together, and rented a tiny one-bedroom walk-up in Park Slope that had a working fireplace and a view of Prospect Park, if you leaned way out over the fire escape and squinted. The apartment was quiet and smelled like my grandparents’ house, or mothballs, I guess, which I liked. Dan got a job with a commercial real estate firm. I was cleaning lettuce in midtown. On weekends, we took the D train to Coney Island or watched movies or met friends in bars. Everything seemed to be going super well; we both thought so.
He proposed on Halloween, with a mood ring in a cab riding home from a party. The next morning we were at Tiffany’s when the doors opened—Dan’s grandfather had left him some money that he was supposed to use for his wife’s engagement ring and Dan stayed true to these wishes. By Christmastime, we had set a date, deciding on October 9, fall color and crispness and all that.
It was a snowless winter and a soaking wet March. And then, the day I came home dizzy from dress shopping with my sister-in-law, Dan was too quiet and ate nothing of his favorite squash soup. In bed in the dark, I started to kiss his neck and he gently pushed me away. He said he thought we were jumping the gun, that maybe we had changed more than we thought in our years apart. He wanted to suspend the specifics (“For instance?” I said, and he replied, “Don’t buy the dress yet”), and just stay engaged for a while, see how it went. But how it went was, a week later he said he’d fallen in love with the other lawyer in his office, he was sorry, but, well, he was sorry, what could he say? I set the ring back in the turquoise blue box on top of his TV, packed some clothes, my knives, and my two best saucepans, and I took a cab to my brother’s. The next morning, I decided I couldn’t face the arugula, so I quit and started looking for a better job.
It was during this heartbroken, angry, unemployed half-consciousness that I first spoke to Valerie. Sure, I said to her, I’d love to meet and talk about cooking privately for you. Sounds great.
A couple days after the party, I went to her loft above a SoHo gallery. The floors were blond wood and the whole place smelled like nothing except, vaguely, leather and wood—it was an expensive space that never got dirty or complicated or worn; no animals, no cooking, no body odor, no children. The walls were white, as were the moldings and trim. The living room windows were huge. There were some paintings that looked like a series of cloth swatches—mere black stripes on white canvas. I call such paintings “I could do that” art. My assessment was that Valerie and her husband rarely cooked in and that they had a very good cleaning lady who came twice a week. I counted twelve closets and two doors along the hallway between the front door and the living room.
All of this was fine with me, just a contrast to my new Hell’s Kitchen studio, which smelled like whatever was ripening on my counter melded with starch from the Chinese dry cleaners downstairs and exhaust fumes from the Lincoln Tunnel. If I left the bathroom door open while peeing, I could touch both the front door and the kitchen cabinet. It was cozy.
She offered me an espresso or an Evian and then we sat opposite one another—me on the couch, she on a black leather chaise longe.
“My baby shouldn’t be fed by my mouth,” she stated right off. In response to my look of puzzlement she said, “For me it’s either mac and cheese and ramen at home or oysters and foie gras out. Jamie’s a good cook, but that’s only dinners, and that’s only sometimes. This baby needs nourishment, I suppose I do too, and the last thing I’m going to take on with this pregnancy is a lesson in being I-can-cook girl. You know?”
I nodded sagely as if I’d had so many clients hire me before for exactly the same reason. I hadn’t, in fact, even known that Valerie was pregnant. So I smiled and said, “You have a problem with I-can-cook girls?”
“Oh no, I didn’t mean to offend you, I just meant, well, you know.” She looked to me with her hands raised, and I decided not to pursue the ridiculous comment.
Then she confessed her phobia of raw meat, and I began to write down her food principles. She said she was allergic to nothing and ate most everything, except dairy products.
“No dairy whatsoever?” I said. “So you drink soy milk, rice milk . . .” I was searching.
“No, no,” she said, tossing her head back as she reclined on the chaise longe, and then arching way back so that she could look upside down out the window behind us.
I waited for her to return.
Then she sat up, stretched her arms over her head, and dropped them back in front of her and clasped her hands around her belly. “Nope. I don’t drink milk.”
I didn’t bother to ask how she made mac and cheese. I assumed she meant the Kraft boxed kind, which calls for milk.
“And cheese?”
“Oh, I eat cheese from time to time,” she said.
“Regular cheese?”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“Gouda, Swiss, Cheddar, Gruyère, Brie, Feta . . .”
“No cheese slices,” she said.
“Ah-hah.” I wrote this down.
“How about yogurt?”
“Frozen yes, Dannon no.”
“Okay,” I said. “So you do eat some dairy products.”
“No,” she said. “I thought I already said that. No dairy.”
“But cheese and frozen yogurt . . .” I started to say, then stopped.
She was still looking straight at me, waiting to contradict whatever the end of my sentence would be.
“Okay,” I said, “no dairy. Except cheese and fro yo, which are technically considered dairy.”
“I don’t eat dairy.”
“Right.”
We talked for a few hours that day. I got the whole story about her fancy casting agency just a block over, in another loft. It meant some weird hours for her, and thus for me, too. But there was a kitchen in the office—it was a big, fun, run-down space, she said, and everyone was so friendly. Lots of good-looking people, maybe I would even meet someone special. She winked at me.
“Great!” I replied, without a trace of sincerity.
“It feels like being St. Peter sometimes,” Valerie said. “Just watching these
people stream through and knowing you’re only going to tap one or two or maybe three for an ad or movie or pilot. Anyway, I shouldn’t think it will be much of an inconvenience for you to work out of both places.”
As she said this, I imagined walking down Prince Street at noon on a Saturday with my arms full of pots and knives, while tourists from all parts of New York and the world packed into SoHo with hopes of either seeing someone famous, or seeming famous themselves.
“Anyway,” she said, “the agency is a fun place to be around. Or I suppose it is if you aren’t me and running it.”
I decided not to say that I didn’t plan on hanging around a lot, to meet people or otherwise, at “the agency.” Nor did I say then that she’d have to provide some basic cookware at the office if I was to cook there. Instead I asked her about getting extra calcium during her pregnancy and about avoiding shellfish, both things I remembered from my sister-in-law’s pregnancy. “Yeah, my doctor said something about that,” she said. “I do have supplements. But she said I shouldn’t count on those for my calcium.”
“Uh-huh.” I decided we’d get her the calcium-fortified orange juice. Spinach. Lots of brie. I kept these thoughts to myself. I learned very quickly that it was best to keep Valerie strategically uninformed. How my food tasted was all she needed to know.
When I realized that I would take the job, I was a little horrified. I didn’t like Valerie and I thought I was too principled to give in to her simply because she knew famous people and had tons of dough. I was supposed to be waiting for my big break, and if it was just money I needed, I could flip burgers or clean lettuce again. But I’d be a liar to say I didn’t envy her huge loft (plus the houses in East Hampton and Aspen). I’d also be lying to say it was no big deal that she called Robert DeNiro “Bob” and Martin Scorcese “Marty.” She could get a table at any restaurant in town; Madonna was in her Rolodex. Still, I had hoped I was too principled.