heat hoping to chill her to awaken her. He left her sprawled on the bed, asleep, sweat glistening off her bangs, after observing her beautiful face that sadly felt hindered by her own laziness and a funky DNA.
A pot of coffee brewed and he sat at the kitchen table thinking of ways to see her out the door so he could call a maid’s service to whiff-kill the room. Two hours later at five a.m., he heard a flush and pretended to read an article about the future of American swimming, a sport he could care less about unless he happened to be drowning without a life jacket.
“Aren’t you an early riser?”
She wobbled to him wearing nothing but her stench and slipped two fingers under the button on his fly to create an opening. Stuart felt the mushy crust of the previous night’s barbeque chicken pizza backtrack up his throat. He pulled her hand from inside the flannel and told her he’d become ill.
“Ill enough to read, but not play?”
“It’s easier to read,” he said.
She got the hint by his cold eyes and quick reply and left. In the following weeks, she looked hotter and smelled fresher and felt something to prove to him and any other guy who felt as he did. Still, he saw past her gorgeous face and didn’t care how much fragrance she pumped, how her lips behaved at night, or the countless ways to use her backside. She was one hellish memory. Yet one that allowed him clarification and a narrower focus, at the expense of heightening a growing addiction.
Stuart felt light-headed and held the Estee Lauder counter for support. He’d eaten only two bites from his tray of chewy animal fat courtesy of Panda and instead of relaxing for the final eight minutes of his lunch and peeing from all the 7UP he guzzled, he preferred to follow up with Nicole, the gal of two nights ago whose name he remembered.
A freshly baked blonde with sufficient orange spray-on and cheek-filled glitter that wore her royal blue uniform a size smaller than appropriate and provided her older clientele with an uncomfortable view of rising cleavage. At twenty, she smiled more than life had challenged her and treated every customer like her grandma and every man like a celebrity. She was easily attracted, readily appeased, and quickly bored when it came to casual encounters and the likelihood she’d give Stuart another night was rare. To Nicole, he was the redundancy of yesterday, the boringness of today, and the forever never of tomorrow.
Stuart’s age played a factor, and although a few cosmeticians, including Nicole, said he resembled Bruce Willis with his shaved head, sly grin, and seductive eyes, that view lasted as long as perfume handed on a test card. But Stuart wasn’t dim. He knew these girls said this because they didn’t know how else to describe a bald white dude they thought was cute and charming without elevating it into a way of making them feel better or coming off desiring one of their daddy’s buddies. And he knew he didn’t have Mr. Willis’s power, status, or pocketbook either.
They did too, after spending late evenings eating turkey burgers and refillable fries at Red Robin and the early morning across the mall at his meager apartment sprawled across a hard futon, yet somehow failing to realize then that the man they were about to do worked at the same place they did and made nearly the same dough.
Accidentally, Stuart made smudge marks on the glass counter waiting for Nicole to finish ringing her customer.
“Thank you, Margaret,” she said. “I’ll call you when your gift set comes in. Have an outstanding day.”
There were no customers in the direction she headed and he realized he was standing somewhere in rejection city. But she returned with glass cleaner to remove those icky smudge marks.
“What do you want?”
The answer to him was so obvious and the visible hollowness down her middle so inviting that he misread the question with I want you and goaded her into searching for just one customer to help so to avoid responding. But there weren’t any customers and she could’ve said you had me and perhaps that would’ve satisfied him, but rather she commented on how terrible he looked and how she hoped he wasn’t passing whatever he had to her, and lastly, how she needed to call her clients and set up appointments, using her job to kill any hopes of a second night.
“Alright, see you around.”
That was enough for Stuart. He didn’t get mad nor did he utter a profanity. He simply walked away. He already had her and having her again wasn’t worth real effort—even if the taste of her reminded him of his mother’s peach cobbler (so tangy and moist with sugary crumbs) and even if all her odors (yes, even those from her backside) were ripe with certified plus signs.
Moving to the department’s center, he’d taken the Moleskin pad from his suit pocket and crossed her off and glanced at the names of his up-and-comers. Shoba, the leggy, curvy nose-ring girl from Mumbai who seemed less attractive in her khakis and white polo modeling a Tommy fragrance than in the red sari he imagined undoing; Dana, the Kim Novak look-a-like who spoke quickly and repeatedly in run-ons and wondered if she’d give him language vertigo during foreplay; Kiri, the four-nine Cambodian midget shaped like a teen gymnast and offering a smile so pleasing he couldn’t imagine her not on top giggling her thick accented moans as he called her Mary Lou; and Tamara, a mousy brunette heavy on foundation, light on manners, that if seen, then forgotten, but worth a night if any of the other three weren’t available.
Stuart monitored the girls like a cynical prison guard from above the rooftop where his eyes moved left to right and right to center, imagining badness in those gal-mates, feeling his rifle rise, wanting to fire away one pecker at a time. Or was he the piss-ant guard who instigated their bad behavior? Perhaps, he thought, each girl tried to be good to combat her inherent badness. Why would so many willing girls give themselves to a man old enough to be their father and stop after thoroughly enjoying the experience of being with him?
He figured being with him was like committing a random, senseless crime they thought was liberating, but in the aftermath had gained a vacuous moral insight and sentenced themselves to a dreary relationship with a guy in their age bracket that included playing pretend love before getting hitched, having brats, having sex-less sex, fighting with in-laws, despising each other, having older brats, regretting their regrets, and dying bitter.
That was a future Stuart could see for each of the sales girls he bedded. That was a future he could see for himself—he’d be on death row instead of serving out their life sentence—if only after having failed at trying suicide first to avoid the punishment, for a relationship with one woman, the same woman, for any period of time would be the moral equivalent of death, or in his view, dying by living.
Of the four prospects, Stuart decided on Shoba because she had already given him her number and after Nicole’s rejection, he wanted a sure thing on his 40th birthday. But when approaching her, momentary dizziness had struck him and he felt himself tilting downward. He grabbed onto a tall rectangular “Join Star Rewards and Save” sign for support and luckily, did not fall with it. His mind went cloudy. His head fell light and swayed. A streak of sweat ran down his neck and onto his collar. He smelled the toasty air and his eyes flickered and soon he regained his senses.
He wondered if anyone noticed that he nearly fainted. To faint was one thing, but to faint in front of girls you were trying to screw was another. He couldn’t afford to be embarrassed, to be less than healthy or sickly. His self-worth, or better, his happiness as a man entering his forties rode on the backs of these girls, girls below the minimum drinking age, but girls at the voteable fuckable age of eighteen.
Falling face flat in their judging eyes would be the talk of the store, and many, who already despised him, would relish in seeing him humiliated, spreading rumors abound. Every new hot employee would hear about the fainting womanizing suit guy and that would greatly hinder his seductive powers when introducing himself to them.
As customers walked aimlessly, Stuart sighed in relief, seeing Kiri setting up a CK display case, Dana chatting with her zealous sales manager, and Shoba correcting an elderly man to spra
y cologne on the back of his wrist and not the palms of his hands with which he rubbed his cheeks.
He glanced at his watch and realized his break was over. He passed Shoba where they exchanged smiles and she flashed a “call me” gesture and her cocoa buttery skin glowed while his seemed pallid and it occurred to him that he might be too weak to entertain her, considering his stomach had started to buzz and his ass felt a build-up it couldn’t contain.
The shooting feeling inside had struck and he figured he caught the bug that nobody had told him was going around. He hurried to the men’s room and suffered an agonizing wait since there was only one stall, which was taken by a man taking his time singing the Caillou theme song diaper changing a crying toddler. If there was ever a moment to hate stay-at-home Dads for not potty training their little rat bastards after the age of eighteen months, it was now, Stuart felt.
He eventually relieved himself without shitting his slacks and discovered blood drops in his stool with a striking odor. The odor concerned him more than the blood. The blood, in his view, was likely from constipation or dehydration or the flu and seemed no different than a bloody nose. The smell, however, was similar to a wicked combination of reeking bad