He took a step back and looked at her searchingly, trying to read her reaction. “A little too much too soon, huh,” he said, tenderly touching her cheek. In the next second, he changed gears, however, like a child who suddenly discovers a different toy. “Let’s have some wine, hey?” he said, swinging the bottle onto the counter as if pleasantly surprised to find that he was holding it in his hand. He opened the cabinet and took out two wine glasses. “I just got these at Crate and Barrel. You ever been there? They have everything on sale. These were only five dollars apiece and they’re crystal,” he said, uncorking the wine and pouring it into the glasses. “One time?” he continued, with a youthful questioning lilt, “I went on this rich guy’s yacht? And all the glasses, even, like, the juice glasses were crystal. But what I love about New York is that you can get really great stuff for cheap. You ever notice that?” He handed her a glass and she nodded, watching his movements, unable to speak. Desire had made her mute.
The dog squeezed into the kitchen, mercifully diverting their attention. Nico patted the dog on the head, then slipped her hand under its chin and turned its face up so that it had to stare her in the eyes. The dog stared back, submissively. “He’s a good dog,” she said. “Does he have a real name?”
Kirby looked sheepish. “I was waiting to see what his personality was like before I named him, you know? Because sometimes you name a dog right away and then you realize it’s not the right name and you’re stuck with it. You can’t change a dog’s name, you know? They’re not that smart. They get confused,” he said. “Like kids. What would happen if a kid was five, and all of a sudden, the parents changed its name? It probably wouldn’t even know what school it was supposed to go to.”
Kirby looked at her expectantly, and Nico laughed, which seemed to please him. She hadn’t known what to expect, but she hadn’t been expecting this—this naive, charming, unexpected . . . intelligence? Well, maybe not intelligence, she thought. But there was certainly something about Kirby that was more interesting than she’d initially thought. “Hey! I forgot,” Kirby said suddenly. “I just remembered that I was supposed to show you my apartment. That’s how I lured you here, right?” he asked. “Except I got distracted. By a pretty lady.” He looked at her pointedly, and Nico winced slightly. Maybe he wasn’t stupid, but she did wish he would stop using that word, “lady.” It was making her feel old, like she was his mother or something.
“Kirby, I . . .”
He walked by her and turned, suddenly embracing her again with a long kiss. Maybe he called every woman “lady,” she thought, as he pulled out her blouse and slid his hand up her back, expertly unhooking her bra. In any case, he certainly wasn’t treating her like his mother, she thought, as his hand gently cupped her breast. He knew how to touch a woman, and as he lightly circled the top of her nipple with his finger, she felt herself yielding to him in a way she never had with Seymour . . .
She suddenly panicked, pushing him away again, and turning her head. What was she doing? Seymour . . . Kirby . . . in a few seconds, he’d have her clothes off, and what would he think about her body? He was probably used to sleeping with twenty-five-year-old supermodels.
Kirby removed his hand. “Hey,” he said. “Are you all right? Because we don’t have to . . . you know.”
“I want to,” she whispered. “I’m just . . .”
He nodded knowingly. “First time?”
She looked at him quizzically, unsure as to what he was talking about. “You know,” he said. “Cheating on your husband.”
She opened her mouth in shock, and he took the opportunity to swoop down on her for another kiss. “Don’t worry about it,” he murmured. “You gotta figure you’ve got your reasons, right?” He suddenly put his hands around her waist and lifted her up like she was a child, placing her bottom on the countertop. He pressed forward and she leaned back, not ready to give in to him quite yet, especially after that remark about cheating. Why did he have to put it so baldly? she wondered. But it was the truth. She was cheating. Maybe it made it more exciting for him.
“And in case you’re wondering, you have a great body,” he whispered, sliding her skirt up and working his hands between her legs to pry them open. She resisted, thinking about how good it felt that he wanted her enough to work at getting her to give in to him, and also knowing that if she resisted she could lie to herself later, telling herself that she hadn’t been able to help what happened—she was overcome. She suddenly allowed him to open her legs, and he ran his hands up and down the inside of her thighs, watching her face. Thank God for Seymour, she thought, thank God he made her work out for half an hour every morning at six a.m. in their home gym in the basement. He said it was for health reasons as opposed to aesthetics, to increase her stamina and concentration. It suddenly occurred to her that Seymour treated her more like a racehorse than a human being.
“Do you need these?” Kirby asked, pulling on the waistband of her panty hose. She looked at him in blissful confusion. “Or can I cut them off?” he asked boldly. “I want to cut them off with scissors, so I can get to you, but maybe that’ll be suspicious later on, huh? If you go home with no panty hose . . .”
“It’s okay,” she whispered, lying back to allow him to proceed with the operation. This was so not like her, she thought, but no one was ever going to know what she had done here in Kirby’s kitchen. She had another pair of panty hose in the small dressing room attached to the bathroom in her office, and no one would notice if she came back to the office without her stockings intact . . .
Kirby removed a pair of kitchen shears from a flowered ceramic holder containing an assortment of wooden spoons and spatulas. On top of being great in bed, he was a cook, she thought. He teasingly ran his hand over her belly and inner thighs, and then, pulling the panty hose away from her stomach, began to snip downwards with agonizing slowness. When he reached the top of her pudenda, he put down the scissors and with his two hands, ripped the panty hose open.
She thought she was going to die from anticipation.
Then he gently lifted the crotch of her underpants (which, thank God, were nice—light blue silk mesh from La Perla—and ran his finger in a circle over the lips of her vagina. She never liked to speak during sex—in fact, she actually preferred not to make any sound—but she surprised herself by emitting a low, guttural moan. It was a tiny bit embarrassing, and she thought she sounded like something out of a porno movie, but Kirby didn’t seem to mind. He pulled the crotch of her underpants farther to the side, exposing her, and then opened her lips with his fingers.
Oh God, she thought. God, she was really having a good time. Could it get any better than this, having great sex with a fucking Calvin Klein underwear model?
How did she get so lucky?
She suddenly felt a stab of guilt. If Seymour tried to do this to her, she would have told him to forget about it. She had kept pushing Seymour away, more and more over the years, so that now he hardly ever made any advances at all.
“You have a beautiful pussy,” Kirby said, and began licking her, pushing his fingers into her vagina as he did so.
“Next time I’m going to put you on your knees,” he said hotly, causing her to forget about Seymour and envision all kinds of possibilities with Kirby instead. “Oh fuck, I can’t wait any longer,” he said. He picked up the scissors and with one powerful snip, cut the crotch of her underpants. He reached into his pocket and took out a foil-wrapped condom, ripping the top off with his teeth. In a few quick seconds, he unzipped his pants, releasing a rock-hard penis (okay, it was a cliché, she thought, but there really was no other way to describe it), the proportions of which appeared to be slightly bigger and longer than average. Or bigger, anyway, than Seymour’s . . .
He expertly rolled the condom onto his penis, and she nearly laughed with girlish embarrassment. Condoms! She’d forgotten all about them. She’d never been with a man who had used one, because for the past fourteen years (longer, because she hadn’t been with anyone
for at least six months before she’d met Seymour), she’d only been with one man. And she’d only been with five men in her whole life, not counting Kirby. “You don’t mind, do you?” he asked. “It’s better this way. Then we don’t have to worry. And you’re so wet . . .”
She shook her head, anticipating how it would feel when he pushed his penis into her.
She fell back with a groan of pleasure, knocking her head against the wall. He pushed her legs up, so her feet were nearly resting on the edge of the countertop. She was completely vulnerable. The fact that she was allowing herself to be so open was in itself exciting, because she was never like this . . . not with Seymour . . .
And then she pushed Seymour out of her mind. She wasn’t going to let her husband spoil her one moment of pleasure.
* * *
AFTERWARD, SHE LAY SCRUNCHED up on the counter like a rag doll. “That was pretty great, wasn’t it?” Kirby asked, helping her off the counter. She stood up, smoothing down her skirt. Somewhere in the process she’d not only lost her underpants and panty hose, but her pumps as well. “You really screamed when you came,” Kirby said.
She suddenly felt embarrassed. “Did I?” she asked, retrieving one of her shoes from the corner. “I don’t normally do that.”
“Well, you did today,” Kirby said, with a fraternal heartiness. “Don’t worry about it. I liked it.” He held up the pair of cut panties. “Do you need these?” he asked.
“I don’t think so,” she said, wondering what he might imagine she would do with them—maybe pin the edges together?
“You’ll be riding bareback for the rest of the afternoon,” Kirby said, cupping her face between his hands. “I’m going to think about you that way. And every time I do, I’m going to get a boner.”
She laughed nervously. She wasn’t used to men thinking of her as a sex object. But did this mean that Kirby wanted to see her again?
She hoped so, she thought, resting one hand on his shoulder while she put on her shoes. But now what? Should she just leave? She glanced at her watch. It was now two-thirty. If she left immediately, she could be back at her office by three. But would Kirby be offended?
“So now I really am going to give you a tour of my apartment,” Kirby said. “Can you believe we never got out of the kitchen? That’s pretty cool, huh?”
She looked up at him, staring at his face. He really was beautiful. His features were perfectly proportioned, but it was more than that. It was the tightness of youth. Some things couldn’t be fixed by the surgeon’s knife or the dermatologist’s needle, and that was skin tone and the firmness of the muscles, especially around the neck. Kirby’s neck was so smooth and the skin was like butter. Just looking at his neck was enough to turn her on again. That whole idea of women not being attracted to a man for his looks and youth was a complete lie . . .
She suddenly wondered if he did this with a lot of women. But she couldn’t ask him that, could she? She mustn’t seem insecure. She’d better take her cues from him.
“I’d love to see the rest of the apartment,” she said.
It wasn’t much, only a living room and a bedroom and a standard New York City bathroom, but the furniture was surprisingly nice. “I get an eighty percent discount at Ralph Lauren, so that’s pretty great,” he said. He sat down on the suede couch and she sat down next to him. His modeling book was on the table, and she automatically began flipping through it. There were photographs of Kirby’s face in advertisements for aftershave, Kirby sitting on a motorcycle for a leather company, Kirby in Venice, in Paris, in a cowboy hat somewhere in the West, maybe Montana. He put his hand over hers. “Don’t,” he said.
She looked at him, wishing she could fall into his eyes. They weren’t really brown, but a light tawny color, with flecks of gold. She wanted to connect with him.
“Why not?” she said. Her voice didn’t sound quite normal. Glancing down at a page in his modeling book (Kirby on a horse), she couldn’t believe what she’d just done with him. It was kind of a miracle. Who would have thought that she could still have sex like that, at her age, with a man who was so young and gorgeous?
“I hate modeling,” Kirby said. “I hate the way they treat me. Like a piece of meat, you know? They don’t, really, give a shit about me as a person.”
What would it be like to fall in love with Kirby Atwood, she wondered, staring at him with sympathetic horror. Thank God Kirby couldn’t hear her thoughts. “That’s terrible,” she said, finding his distress extremely touching. There was nothing more powerful, she thought, than discovering that the beautiful were just as vulnerable as everyone else. “But you’re so good at it.”
“Good how? There’s, like, nothing about it to be good at. They point the camera at me and tell me to look happy. Or strong. Or some other shit. But sometimes,” he said, jokingly touching her arm, “I give them something different, you know. I try to look thoughtful. Like I’m thinking something.”
“Show me that look now,” Nico said encouragingly.
Jesus, what was she doing? She had to get back to her office.
“Yeah?” Kirby said. He lowered his head, and then raised it, staring off into the middle distance. He held this pose for a few seconds. He looked slightly pensive, but other than that, his expression didn’t resemble much of anything. Oh dear, Nico thought.
“Did you get it?” he asked eagerly. “Could you tell that I was thinking?”
She didn’t want to be cruel. “Oh yes. That was great, Kirby.”
“Could you tell what I was thinking about?”
Nico smiled. He was so childlike, it was refreshing. “You tell me.”
“Sex!” Kirby exclaimed with a grin. “The sex we just had? Okay, you’re probably thinking that I should have looked really happy. But I tricked you, because I was thinking that I really hoped I’d be able to see you again, and I wasn’t sure if you’d want to.”
“Oh,” Nico said, tongue-tied. He kept throwing her off balance. She had never been good at emotional declarations, especially with men. “I do want to see you again. But Kirby,” she said, looking at her watch, “I really have to get back to my office.”
“Yeah, I better get going too. I’ve got shit to do too, you know?” They stood awkwardly for a moment, then Kirby leaned over and kissed her.
“That was really fun, huh?” he said.
“It was great,” she murmured, wishing she could tell him how wonderful it really was.
“Puppy!” he said, breaking away from her. The dog came trotting out of the bedroom. “Sit!” Kirby commanded. “Shake!” The dog held up its paw. Nico shook it.
* * *
WENDY HEALY SAT IN the back of the screening room on the forty-third floor of the Splatch-Verner building.
The screening room held fifty seats—dark leather, the size of club chairs—and was paneled in blond wood. There were cup holders in the armrests, and small wooden desks swung up from the right side of the seats for people who wanted to make notes. There were about twelve people in the room: Peter and Susan, the two executives who worked beneath her; Selden Rose, the head of the cable division with two of his executives; Cheryl and Sharline, the East and West Coast heads of publicity; the director and his girlfriend; and three of the actors in the film—Tanner Cole and Jenny Cadine, plus the “newcomer” Tony Cranley, a short, mousy-looking young man whom everyone was predicting was going to be a star, and who didn’t go anywhere without his publicist, Myra, a heavyset honey-colored blonde, who looked like everyone’s mother.
“Hi sweetie,” Myra said, kissing Wendy on the cheek after having settled Tony into a chair in the front row next to Tanner.
“Sit with us,” Sharline said to Myra.
“For a minute,” Myra said. She looked up at Tony, who was pretending to box Tanner around the ears.
“How’s it going?” Wendy asked, pushing on her glasses. She was slightly nervous, and her glasses kept slipping down her nose.
Myra glanced at Tony, rolled her eyes, and shrug
ged, a gesture that caused Sharline and Wendy to laugh.
“No, really,” Myra said. “It’s going great.”
“We saw that item in Page Six,” Sharline said. This item concerned Tony groping a famous starlet at an awards ceremony and getting his face slapped.
“I hate actors,” Wendy sighed.
“You,” Sharline said, pointing a finger at her, “love actors. You are known as the actor’s producer. They all adore you. And you adore them right back.”
“Sharline’s going to India,” Wendy said.
“God, I wish I could do something like that,” Myra moaned.
“You can,” Sharline said passionately. “I mean, what’s stopping you? I woke up a month ago, and I looked around, and I thought, what the hell is my life about? What am I doing? And I realized I need to live. Outside of all this. I need to get some perspective on life.”
“It’s all about that, isn’t it,” Wendy agreed. “Perspective.”
“You can come,” Sharline said.
“Oh, but she can’t. How can she, with the kids and everything?” Myra asked.
“I’ve been thinking about it, believe me,” Wendy said.
“Pretend you’re location scouting,” Sharline said.
Wendy smiled. She would never, she thought, be able to make a trip like that. But the idea of taking a trip like that . . . it was the kind of thing she’d always dreamed she’d do when she was a kid. See the world. Exotic locations . . . she quickly put the thought out of her mind.
She looked around the room, pushing her glasses back up on her nose.
“Who are we waiting for?” Myra asked.
“Victor Matrick,” Sharline said, giving Wendy a wink.
Wendy gave her a grim smile. She hated this part of her job. The agonizing moments before a screening started, when, no matter how good you thought the film was, you knew, in two hours, that you might be completely wrong, that what you thought was brilliant or funny or clear, failed, for whatever reason, to touch the audience. And then, no matter how many films you’d produced, no matter how many successes you’d had (and she’d had quite a few; possibly, she knew, more than her share), the failures hung over you like death. She knew better than to get emotionally involved with her films (that was what men insisted women did), but it was impossible to put that much work into a project unless you were emotional about it. And so, when a movie didn’t work, it was exactly as if a good friend had failed. The friend might be fucked up, they might be a complete mess and a loser, but that didn’t mean you didn’t love them and you didn’t want them to succeed.