He looked back at the porthole window where the black woman’s face had appeared and winked at him. He wanted to give her some kind of answering look, a look that meant he knew what she knew. But the window was empty. The light behind it had been turned off.
In Phoenix, the Weiboldt “Sales Festival” had taken over a towering chrome-and-glass Radisson in a crowded western foothill suburb that presented big views back toward the oppressive, boundariless city. There were two golf courses, forty-five tennis courts, a water-fun center for kids, an aquarium, a casino, an IMAX, a multiplex with eighteen screens, a hospital, a library, a crisis counseling center and an elevated monorail that sped away someplace into the desert. All this seemed to guarantee silent and empty hallways where no one would encounter the two of them together, empty back stairways, and elevators opening onto faces neither of them would ever see again. Plus sealed, air-conditioned rooms with heavy light-proof curtains, enormous beds with scratchy sheets, giant TVs, full minibars, jacuzzis and twenty-four-hour anonymous room service.
Yet they knew they could be detected by any hint that something was funny. Following which they would immediately lose their jobs. Real estate wasn’t like it used to be, when an office romance flamed up and everybody thought it was sweet and looked the other way (to gossip). Office romances, even romances that took place between offices miles apart, now landed you in federal court for polluting the workplace with messy personal matters that interfered with the lives of loser colleagues obsessed with getting rich in a boom market and looking for an excuse for why they’d crapped out. Personal was now a term that meant something like criminal. Everyone was terrified.
Consequently, Howard and Frances had flown out from separate airports—Providence and Hartford—and requested rooms in different “towers.” Howard had requested a smoking room, though he didn’t smoke, then asked that no calls be put through. The first night, at the Platinum Club ice-breaker, they’d mingled with completely separate crowds—Frances with some high-spirited lesbian agents from New Jersey; Howard with some dreary, churchy Mainers. Afterward, they’d gone off to different daiquiri bars, then to separate Mexican restaurants, where they made certain not to drink too much and to talk about their spouses non-stop, without once mentioning each other’s name or even Connecticut.
As a result, by the end of night one, when Frances tapped lightly on Howard’s door at eleven-thirty ready for fun, they each found it not immediately easy to set aside their blameless public disguises, and so had sat for an hour across a little wooden card table in uncomfortable hotel chairs, doing nothing but discussing what had happened that day, even though their days had been 100 percent the same.
Frances liked talking about real estate. To her surprise, she’d enjoyed her night out with the “Garden State lesbos,” had picked up on some new thinking about cold-call strategies in low-income, ethnic concentrations, and had discovered she had useful intelligence of her own to put into play about structuring earnest-money proffers so that the buyer offered full price up-front, but was protected right to closing, and could get out without a scratch in case of buyer’s remorse. She said that because her husband, Ed, had suffered an industrial accident in the indistinct past, an unspecified injury that left him not fit to work anymore (he was “older”), she’d been forced to jump into real estate as her full-time career, whereas she’d hoped to be a physiotherapist, and maybe work in France. It was a stroke of luck, she felt, that she’d turned out to be so “goddamned good at selling.”
Howard, on the other hand (he’d already explained this in the dark and cozy boss-and-secretary bar they’d found after the awards banquet in August) thought of selling real estate as just a “bridging strategy” between his first job out of college (playground supervisor) and something more entrepreneurial, with travel, an incentive bonus and a company car built into the equation. His entire family were lifelong Republicans, and two of his brothers were engineers in the road-paving business down in New London, and they were thinking of bringing him in. The only problem was that he didn’t get along with those brothers that well, and his wife, Mary, didn’t like them at all. Which was why he was still selling houses.
Frances had brought a bottle of not very cold, not very good Pinot Grigio, and it sat sweating on the hotel table attended by two clear-plastic bathroom cups they were drinking out of. The vast and darkened desert colossus of Phoenix lay to the east beyond the window glass—cars moving, planes descending to outlined runways, blue police flashers flashing, wide, walled neighborhoods tainting patches of the night pumpkin orange with their crime lights. It was exotic. It was the west. Neither of them had ever been here, though Howard said he’d read that Phoenix was the American city where you were most likely to get your car stolen.
Frances liked Howard Cameron. Feeling drunk, jetlagged and talked out, she appreciated that he could come up with this good humor, yet could also exhibit caring sensitivity—in this case, not to presume upon her for showing up in his room, though they’d been in bed together four different afternoons in four different seaside motels since the awards banquet. He understood consideration (even though she assumed he was ready to pop with desire just like she was). He also recognized the precarious situation they were in and how she might feel stressed. True, he was ready to cheat on his wife back in Pawcatuck; but he also seemed like a decent family man with a strong sense of right and wrong, and no real wish to do anybody harm. She felt the same. It was tricky. There was probably a category in some textbook for what the two of them were doing, slipping around this way, but she wasn’t ready to say what it was.
She let her gaze rise woozily above the sparkling rhomboids of gaudy Phoenix and into the moonless dark, to where the face of Howard’s wife, Mary, a woman she’d never seen even in a snapshot, materialized out of the dark clouds like a picture in a developer’s tray. The image was of a young, sweet-faced blonde like herself, whose oval face and small heart-shaped mouth bore a look of disappointment, her eyes large and doleful and unmistakably expressive of hurt.
“That’s true,” Frances Bilandic said. “I understand that.”
“Hm?” Howard said. He looked around at the door as if someone had entered and Frances had begun talking to whoever it was. The red message bulb on the phone was blinking as it had been since he came back from dinner. Too late to call home now, he’d decided, with the time difference.
No one, however, had come into the room. It was chain latched. “Were you talking to me?”
“I guess I’m pretty whacked,” she said. “I must’ve gone to sleep sitting up.” She smiled a smile she knew was a sweet, probably pathetic smile. It was her surrender look, and she was ready for him to give up being so reserved. It hadn’t been at all pleasant to see Howard’s wife’s face frowning out in the sky. It hadn’t been the end of the world, but it had left her feeling a little dazed. But that would go away if she could get Howard to take her to bed and fuck her in the damn near frightening way they’d gone at it back home.
“I feel so free now,” he said suddenly, incomprehensibly. His great, smooth, ball player’s hands encircled his tiny plastic cup of cheap wine. He was looking straight at Frances, his elongated, not particularly handsome face full of wonder, his sensuous lips parted in a dopey smile. “Really. I can’t explain it, but it’s true.”
“That’s good,” she said. She hoped he wouldn’t give a speech now.
Howard shook his head in small amazement. “Not that I’d ever really thought different. But this is no sidetrack we’re on here. This is my real life, you know? This is as free and as good as things ever get. I mean like—this is it.” He nodded instead of shaking his buzzed head. “This is as real as marriage, for sure.”
“Lots of things are that real.”
“Okay,” Howard said. “But I’m not sure I ever knew that.”
“Read the fine print,” Frances said. It was another of her dad’s Polack maxims. Everything you either didn’t like or were surprised by meant you hadn’t r
ead the fine print. Marriage, children, work, getting old. The fine print was where the truth was about things and it was never what you expected.
“I really like you,” Howard said. “I’m not sure I exactly said that.”
“I like you, too,” she said. “I wouldn’t fuck you if I didn’t like you.”
“No. Of course not.” His grin showed his large teeth behind his almost feminine lips. “Probably me, too.”
“Then why don’t you just fuck me now.” She intentionally widened her pretty blue eyes to indicate that was real, too.
“Okay, I will.” Howard Cameron said, moving toward her, touching her knee, her breast, her soft cheeks, her lips in quick, breathless assault. “I want to,” he said. “I’ve wanted to all day. I don’t know why we waited ’til now.”
“Now’s okay,” Frances said. “Now’s perfect.” Which, she felt, was only true.
One thing he liked about Frances Bilandic was the direct, guiltless, almost stern yet still passionate way she involved herself with screwing the daylights out of him. His sexual preference had always been for a lot of vociferous bouncing and spiritedly noisy plunging; Mary referred to their early lovemaking as the side show, which embarrassed him. But Frances gave fucking a new meaning. Her eyes fixed on him with an intensity that was frequently intimidating, she entered a different sexual dimension, with assertive declarations about exactly how she expected to take hold of him, and him of her, raucous tauntings in the form of instructions as to how vigorously he was expected to bring her to fulfillment; plus limitless physical stamina and perplexing orgasmic variety and originality. “That’s not it, that’s not it, no, no, no. Jesus, Jesus,” she’d shout in his ear just when he thought he had her on the cusp. This insistent, uncompromising voice alone could blow the top off of him. “Don’t you dare lose me, don’t you lose me, god damn it,” she’d command. “That’s right. You’re right. There it is. I see you now. There you are. There’s no one like you, Howard. Nobody. Howard. Nobody!”
She made him think that in fact it was true. That by some amazing luck, among all men there was no one like Howard Cameron. He was as sexually insatiable as she was; he did possess the need, the vigor, the ingenuity—plus the equipment to do things properly. He’d never thought much about his equipment, which just seemed normal, given his height. And yet, why other men couldn’t cut the mustard wasn’t really a mystery. Life wasn’t fair. Nobody ever said it would or should be.
Frances, however, was unqualifiedly his sexual ideal. That was irrefutable. He’d never known there was an ideal, or that this version was what he’d always really wanted (his sexual experience wasn’t that extensive). Only here was a flat-out, full-bore sexual appetite, and with an arrogance that said that if all this wasn’t absolutely fantastic she wouldn’t even bother with it. Except it was fantastic. And he was moved by Frances, and by sex with Frances in ways he’d never in his whole life thought he’d be lucky enough to experience.
Of course, it wasn’t the kind of experience that ever led to marriage, or to any lasting importance. He remembered what she’d said about the Old Norse word. She understood plenty. She and poor lame Ed probably had polite, infrequent sex, just like his parents, so that her own ravenous appetites were permanently back-burnered out of respect for whatever pitiful use he was. His own luck, Howard understood, was to play a bit part in their life’s little humdrum. Though it was way too good to miss, no matter where it led to or from.
One thing had surprised him. After their first epic session at Howard Johnson’s in September—this after three weeks of steamy meetings in shadowy bars and roadside cafes in little nowhere Connecticut towns between Willamantic and Pawcatuck—they had stepped out of the room into the laser sunlight of the HoJo’s parking lot, with Interstate 95 pounding by almost on top of them. He’d looked up into the pale, oxidized sky, rubbed his eyes, which had grown accustomed to the darkness of the room and, without much thought, said, “Boy, that was really something.” He’d meant it as a compliment.
“What do you mean, something?” Frances said in her husky blondie voice—a voice that electrified him in bed, a voice made for sex, but that suddenly seemed different out on the harsh, baking asphalt. She was wearing red-framed sunglasses, a short blue leather skirt that emphasized her thighs, and what was by then an extremely wrinkled white pinafore blouse. Her hair was pressed flat on the sides and she was sweating. She looked roughed up and dazed, which was how he felt. Fucked to death would’ve been a way to say it.
He smiled uncomfortably. “I just mean, well … you’re really good at this. You know?”
“I’m not good at this,” Frances snapped, “I’m good with you. Not that I’m in love with you. I’m not.”
“Sure. I mean, no. That’s right,” he said, not happy being scolded. “We don’t do these things alone, do we?” He smiled, but Frances didn’t.
“Some people might.” She frowned from behind her shades, seeming to reassess him all in one moment’s time. It was as if there was one kind of person whom you met and maybe liked and thought was okay-looking and funny and whom you fucked—one kind of Howard; but then there was another Howard, one you never liked and who immediately started comparing you to other women the moment you fucked him, and who pissed you off. She’d just met that Howard. It was her “tough cookie” side, and she was dead serious about it.
Although maybe, he thought, Frances just wanted it clear that if somebody was going to be the “tough cookie” it had to be her. Which was fine with him. If you had only one situation in your life with no unhappy surprises and that one worked out just halfway well—the one his parents had had for thirty years, for instance—then you were a lucky duck. His own marriage, all things taken into consideration, might be one of those rarities. He wasn’t hoping to make Frances Bilandic number two. He just wished she wouldn’t be so serious. They both knew what they were doing.
Frances had tiny, child’s hands, but strong, with deep creases in their palms like an old person’s hands. And when he’d held them, in bed in the HoJo’s, they’d made him feel tender toward her, as if her hands rendered her powerless to someone of his unusual size. He reached and took both her little hands in both of his big ones, as semis pounded the girders on I-95. She was so small—a tough, sexy little package, but also a little package of trouble if you didn’t exert strong force on her.
“I wish you wouldn’t be mad at me,” he said, bringing her in close to him. Her strong little bullet breasts greeted his maroon Pawcatuck Parks and Recreation Department T-shirt.
“I’ve never done this before, okay?” she said almost inaudibly, though she let herself be brought in. They didn’t have to be in love, he thought, but they could be tender to each other. Why bother otherwise? (He absolutely didn’t believe she’d never done this before. He, on the other hand, hadn’t.)
“Same here,” he said. Though that didn’t matter. He just wanted a chance to do it again sometime soon.
One of the tractor trailers honked from up above. They were standing out in the hot parking lot at two p.m. on a Tuesday in early September. It was sweet and touching but also completely stupid, since the Weiboldt Mystic office was only five blocks away. An agent could be picking up clients at the HoJo’s. If someone blabbed, it could be over in a flash. Boom … no job. Their colleagues would love nothing more than for two new agents of the year to be fired and to take over their listings. And for what? For a minor misunderstanding about Frances being good in bed—which she definitely was. It made him suddenly anxious to be touching her out in the open, so that he stopped and looked around the lot. Nothing. “Maybe we ought to go back inside,” he said, “we’ve got the room the rest of the night.” He didn’t really want to—he wanted to get to an appointment in White Rock. But he would go back if fate required it. In fact, a part of him—a small part—would’ve liked to have gotten in his car, piled Frances Bilandic in beside him, and headed up onto the Interstate, turning south and never coming back. Leave the whole sorry
shitaree in the dust. He could do that. Worry about details later. People who did that were people he admired, though you never really heard what their lives were like later.
“I’m afraid if I went back in that room I might not come out for a week,” Frances said, looking around at the green door of the motel room. She put her rough little hand flagrantly against his still-stiff cock and gave it a good squeeze. “You’d probably like that, wouldn’t you?”
“I guess there’s your evidence,” Howard said solemnly.
“Just checkin’ in on Garfield,” Frances said behind her shades. “I’ll save him for Phoenix. How’s that?”
“I can’t wait.” Howard realized he was grinning idiotically.
“You better,” Frances said. “I’ll know if you don’t.”
And that’s how they left it.
The sales conference, following the first day’s jet-lagged festivities and spiritless camaraderie, developed into a slog almost immediately. Frances kept running into the loud-mouth lesbians from Jersey, who kept repeating the punch line of the joke they’d told twenty times the first night. “Suck-off’s just a Russian general to me, soldier.” They’d bray that line in the elevator or in the ladies’ room or waiting for a panel to begin, then break into squalls of laughter. She couldn’t remember how the joke began, so she couldn’t tell it to Ed on the phone.
All the seminars, chalk-talk panels, motivational speeches and mano a mano sessions with the Weiboldt top management team were tedious and repetitive and usually insulting. They were aimed, she felt, at people who’d never sold a piece of real estate, instead of Platinum agents who’d spurted past 4 million and would’ve been better off at home, fielding stragglers at the end of the summer selling season.