Run Catch Kiss

by Amy Sohn

  “Is it listed in the Rolodex?”

  “Don’t bother me with these questions.” That was the response she always gave when I asked her about the higher-order functions of temping.

  I went back to my desk, dialed information to get the number, then called the firm and asked the receptionist to spell it. “E-R-H-A-R-D comma, L-I-E-B comma, T-U-R-N-E-R ampersand sign, Y-A-T-E-S, and then L period L period P period,” she told me.

  “Jesus, how stupid does she think I am?” I wondered. Then I answered my own question.

  I asked to be connected to Jeff McCoyd’s secretary. She gave me the firm’s fax number, I went to the fax machine down the hall, sent it, and came back to my desk. Thirty seconds later, the Corposhit emerged from her office. “Did you get the number?”

  “Yes. McCoyd’s secretary said to fax it to the general number for the firm, so I did.”

  “Oh no, no, no,” she said. “You need the direct number.”

  “But his secretary said to use the general one.”

  “His secretary is a temp.”

  “So am I,” I said, half hoping she’d fire me for my insolence.

  “Call and get his direct number, and fax it again,” she said and went into her office.

  I went through the whole routine again. Then I took the dictionary out of my top drawer and began to read it under the desk, starting at page one: “abacist n. A person skilled in using the abacus.” Fascinating. I’d always wondered what they called those people.

  The Corposhit came out of her office. I dropped the dictionary on the floor with a thud. “Do you have the pages you just faxed to Erhard, Lieb?” I handed them to her. “This isn’t what you were supposed to fax. I said pages two and three. You faxed four and five.”

  “You said four and five. I’m sure of it.”

  “Fax him pages two and three with an apology for faxing him the wrong pages.”

  “Do you want the apology on letterhead?”

  “Yes.”

  “Should it be a memo or a letter?”

  “Don’t bother me with these questions.” She spun on her heel and went back into her office. I typed up the apology, faxed it, then went back to my desk. The intercom rang.

  “Yes?”

  “Do you have a copy of the apology you just messengered? I’d like one for my files.”

  “You mean faxed. You told me to fax it.”

  “No I didn’t. I wanted it messengered.”

  Suddenly I was no longer sure if the Corposhit was the insane one or if I was. When, over the course of a day, everyone with whom you interact treats you like you have a mental deficiency, you cannot help but begin to wonder if maybe they are right.

  “I really think you said to fax it,” I said. “But I can messenger it too.”

  By the time I was finished, I was dizzy and sweating. All I wanted to do was read my story in the paper so I could comfort myself with the fact that even though I was nothing more than a temp to the Corposhit, I had something going for me on the side that she didn’t know about.

  At noon on the button, I dashed out of the building, ran to the City Week distribution box on the corner, pulled out the paper, and opened to the table of contents. There it was, halfway down:

  I-Level:

  The Blow-Up Boyfriend by Ariel Steiner . . . p. 37

  I quickly turned to thirty-seven. At the top of the page was the title and my name, in the trademark City Week font, and in the center of the text was an illustration of a pixieish girl humping an inflatable man. Underneath it was the caption “Blow me (up).” I read it from beginning to end, standing on the corner, and just as I was about to leave, this middle-aged suit came up to the box and pulled out a copy of the paper. I glanced at him for a second, imagining him going home that night and reading the story, completely unaware that he’d exchanged glances with the very girl who wrote it. I was known but anonymous at the same time, and I liked being both.

  •

  I met Sara at the Met Life building for lunch, and she read “The Blow-Up Boyfriend” while we listened to a doo-wop group and I ate a Hostess cupcake she’d bought in honor of my birthday. When she finished, I said, “What did you think?”

  “I don’t know,” she said dully.

  “What do you mean?”

  “For one, I don’t like my pseudonym.”

  “What’s wrong with it?”

  “Farrah? People are going to think I’m some frosted, drug-addicted bimbo. And do you really think I”—she peered down at the page—” ‘tell all strange guys the intimate details of my life’?”

  I had to think quickly. “Uh . . . of course not,” I said. “That’s an exaggeration. That character isn’t you. She’s fictitious. I just made that part up about the protagonist being jealous so the story would have a darker tone.”

  “How stupid do you think I am? It’s so obvious you feel that way about me! I wish you’d had the guts to tell me face-to-face instead of publishing it in the newspaper!”

  “I don’t feel that way about you! I’m sorry I didn’t let you know about it in advance. I should have. But I swear, she’s not you.”

  She harumphed, took a sip of her Coke, and turned her head toward the singers on the stage.

  •

  When I got back to work there were three messages on my machine.

  My dad: “I picked up a copy of the City Week on my way to lunch today, and as I sat down in the cafeteria and opened the paper, I caught sight of something very odd. My own last name. Above the words ‘The Blow-Up Boyfriend.’ Why didn’t you tell us you were mugged? Also, should I show it to mom? I think she’d be proud to see your name in print, but I’m worried the . . . content . . . might upset her.”

  My mom: “Dad faxed me the article. Were you hurt in this mugging? Did you file a report? Come over for dinner tonight. Oh—and Happy Birthday!”

  And Turner: “Hey Ariel. Our editor in chief, Steve Jensen, and I read your second story, and we’d like to run it too. We’re wondering if you could come into the office sometime this evening and meet with us.”

  Suddenly I forgot all about my parents’ frenzied tones. It sounded like Turner wanted to offer me a column. If he did, then I’d be more than an unemployed actress who’d gotten one measly story published. I’d be a Real Writer. But maybe I was reading too much into his message. Maybe he just wanted me to submit another piece. I had to fight my Brown-bred instinct to deconstruct, and wait to hear what he had to say.

  •

  When I got to the Week, Corinne wasn’t at the front desk, so I headed straight for Turner’s office. He greeted me at his door, then led me down the hall into Jensen’s office. It was a huge white room with floor-to-ceiling windows and an incredible view of lower Manhattan. Jensen was in his early forties, short and fair, with thick glasses and cropped brown hair. He was sitting behind a huge, messy desk, which made him look even smaller, and his feet were propped up on it. He stood up to shake my hand and I noticed he had one crossed eye. I tried to look in the normal one but I kept staring at the crossed one instead. I felt like I was on Columbo.

  “Have a seat,” he said. Turner and I sat down side by side on the couch opposite the desk. I sunk down so deep I had to crane my neck to see Jensen.

  “We liked your piece very much,” said Jensen. “And we think this could be the beginning of a fruitful relationship. Do you read the paper regularly?”

  “Of course.”

  “What do you think of it?”

  I didn’t know whether to kiss ass or show chutzpah. I decided to do some of both. “Well,” I said, “I think its greatest strength is its first-person component, the columns, the fact that you can tune in to different lives each week. What I don’t like about it is that all those lives are men’s. You’ve got a masthead full of whiny, angst-ridden boys. Some neurotic, some slackish, but all male. It’s tiresome. The way I see it, your columnists are my boyfriends.”

  Turner chuckled. Jensen didn’t. “You’re right about the la
ck of female voices,” said Jensen. “That’s one of the reasons we’re interested in you. How would you feel about doing a weekly column?”

  I felt like vomiting. How could I write a column about my life when I didn’t even have a life? But Bukowski didn’t turn down Open City when they offered him “Notes of a Dirty Old Man.” Dylan didn’t say no to Columbia when they gave him his first recording contract. These guys were making me a whopper of an offer. And when somebody makes you a whopper of an offer, you take it. Especially in a dog-eat-dog town.

  “I’d . . . love to,” I said. “But I’m not sure what you want it to be about.”

  Turner and Jensen exchanged glances, like they found it amusing that I didn’t know my own angle. “The same stuff the first two were about,” said Turner. “The weekly struggles of a single girl in the city. A Perils of Pauline from a slacker slut perspective. We’re seeing it as ‘Reality Bites My Ass.’ What do you do for a living?”

  “I’m a temp and an actress. A temptress.”

  This time, neither one smiled. “That’s what we want it to be about,” said Jensen. “Going on auditions. Temping. But most of all, getting laid. Or trying to. Do you know who Suzanne Long is?”

  “No.”

  “She writes a column for the New York Gazette,” said Turner, “about the mating rituals of elite thirty-something Manhattanites. ‘WASP Nights,’ it’s called. We’re seeing you as the rent-stabilized Suzanne Long.”

  “You can write about whatever you want,” said Jensen, “as long as it’s true. We’re a newspaper. We run journalism, not fiction.”

  “Of course,” said Turner, “any record of an actual event is going to contain some element of distortion. We’re not asking you to wire yourself every time you go out. Just try to stick to basic facts of your life.”

  “OK.”

  “I already thought of a title for the column,” said Jensen. “ ‘Run Catch Kiss.’ Like the children’s game, where the girls chase the boys and kiss them when they catch them. We’ll subtitle it ‘True Confessions of a Single Girl.’ Your illustrator will be Tessa Tallner, the woman who drew the ‘Blow-Up Boyfriend’ illo. We have a feeling you’re going to be eminently illustratable.”

  “We’ll run ‘The Mammalian Come-Hither’ next Wednesday as your first official column,” said Turner. “You’ll get us your next one the Monday before it runs. If you have E-mail, you can send it in that way, as long as it’s here by nine Monday morning. That leaves you eleven days to come up with something. Think that’s enough time?”

  “Absolutely,” I lied.

  There was only one issue they hadn’t addressed. It wasn’t the most important, but it mattered.

  “You’ll get two hundred bucks a week,” said Jensen.

  “Does that include prophylactics?” I asked.

  “No,” said Jensen, deadpan, standing up and shaking my hand.

  “Steve,” I said, “I don’t know how to th—”

  “No thanks necessary,” he said. “Just go get busy.”

  •

  Jensen’s admonition stuck in my head the whole subway ride to my parents’. What exactly did he mean? Would I have to become a barfly, go to the diviest pubs in town, and come on to different men each night, just to stock up on potential material? What if none of them wanted to sleep with me?

  But what made me far more nervous than the prospect of not getting any dates was the prospect of telling my parents about the column. I’d had very bad experiences in the past when I’d tried confiding in them about my sex life. Their birds-and-bees strategy with Zach and me had been a strange combination of total openness and total avoidance. Every morning until I was thirteen, my dad would take a bath, then walk down the hallway to the bedroom completely naked. I’d be sitting at the kitchen table with Zach, drinking my orange juice, when out of the corner of my eye I’d catch sight of my father’s loping phallus swinging nonchalantly as he approached. Zach would bury his head in his cereal, but I’d steal furtive glances at the measuring rod by which I would judge all the others, wondering if they were all that dark, that bald. Eventually my mom would spot him, come out of the kitchen, and say, “Leo—have you ever heard of a towel?” and he’d dash into the bedroom with a look of chagrin.

  At night when he came home from work, he would go into the living room, take off his pants, and sit down at the dinner table in his Fruit of the Looms. Sometimes a neighbor would ring the doorbell and he’d have to run into the bedroom and hide before we opened the door.

  My mom wasn’t as much of a nudist as he was, but she was nauseatingly crunchy when it came to talking about sex. When I was in eighth grade she started buying me sex books and putting them on my bed: Period; Our Bodies, Ourselves; and Girltalk: All the Stuff Your Sister Never Told You. She always said her mom never talked to her about sex, and she had vowed to be different with her own daughter. I would study these books diligently, and at night when she came in to kiss me good night I would ask follow-up questions like “Does blow job mean you blow on it?” and she would frown a little and then explain.

  That summer I went off to summer camp for children of left-leaning parents, and one day this skater named Flip Goldin, who could catch his own spit in his mouth, asked me to be his girlfriend. The first few days of the relationship, all we did was French at good night time, but then one morning he convinced me to cut activity period and we went to my bunk and sat on my bed.

  We’d been kissing for about ten minutes when he put his hand on one of my breasts. I hadn’t even started wearing a bra yet and I was afraid he’d be disappointed when he saw how little I had to offer.

  “They’re small,” I said, pushing his hand away.

  “That’s OK,” he said, and then he slid it under my shirt and ran it over my nipple. My skin tingled and my breath got short, and I knew I’d found an A.M. activity I enjoyed. A week later we were sneaking off into the woods regularly so he could finger me and I could give him head.

  When I got home from camp I told my mom I’d had a boyfriend, but I didn’t give her any details. I didn’t think she’d be too happy if she knew I’d been orally devirginated before my bat mitzvah.

  The summer after ninth grade, I got a job as a mother’s helper for two-year-old twins in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, and lost my virginity to an eighteen-year-old stoner surfer. He didn’t have any condoms, so we didn’t use anything. I didn’t get pregnant but I was so afraid of AIDS that in the winter, after the six-month window, I went for an HIV test at a clinic in Tribeca. It turned out negative, but the experience of getting tested was so harrowing that I decided to tell my parents. I felt sure they would be supportive, and I saw telling them as a way of bringing them closer.

  I sat them down at the kitchen table one night after Zach had gone to sleep, and told them the whole story: losing my virginity to a near stranger, the sex being horrible, worrying that I was pregnant, not being pregnant, going for the HIV test, waiting for the results. As I talked, my dad started running his hand through his hair, which is what he always does when he gets tense. My mom stared at him running his hand through his hair, which is what she always does when she gets tense. When I finished, he said, “No one said you have to tell your parents everything,” went into the bedroom, and shut the door.

  “He’s just worried about you,” said my mom, following him into the room.

  I had told them the truth because I wanted them to know me, see who I was, and love me anyway, love me more, even. But instead they’d made it clear that when it came to certain areas of my life, they’d rather be left in the dark. Now I had to tell them I’d gotten a weekly column about my sex life for a paper with a quarter of a million circulation. I was not looking forward to dinner.

  •

  When I opened the apartment door, my mom, dad, and Zach were at the table, sipping zucchini soup. By the smirk on Zach’s face I could tell he’d read my story too. I sat down.

  “Happy Birthday,” said my mom.

  “Were you really mug
ged?” said my dad.

  “Yes,” I said. “But it wasn’t that bad. They only got about twenty bucks from each of us. And I don’t even think it was a real gun. Sara thinks it was the guy’s finger.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” asked my mom.

  “I didn’t want to worry you.”

  “You should have told us,” she said.

  “And you shouldn’t go out late at night,” said my dad.

  “It wasn’t that late. And I’m OK. Really.”

  It was bizarre, but I found myself feeling sort of glad they were so upset about the mugging. I was hoping it might make them forget about the phone sex.

  “What about the rest of the story?” said Zach, grinning snidely. “Was the other stuff true too?”

  But before I could come up with an evasive answer, my dad said, “Zach. The extent to which Ariel fictionalized real-life events in that story is her own business, not ours. She doesn’t have to tell us how much is true. I, for one, would rather not know.” I knew he was lying about his reasons for not wanting to know, but I appreciated the gesture nonetheless.

  “Thanks, dad,” I said.

  “How’d you get it published?” said my mom.

  They were very impressed when I told them. Part of me wanted to leave on an up note, not tell them about the column, and hope they never read the paper again. But I’m not very good at avoidance. So I gulped and said, “I have something to tell you guys.” They turned to me expectantly. “I had a meeting at the City Week today. They’re running another piece I wrote next Wednesday, and they’ve asked me to start writing a weekly column for them.”

  “Mazel tov!” said my mom. “What’s it going to be about?”

  “My life. I can write about whatever I want. Auditions. Wacky interactions. Temping.”

  “What are they calling it?” asked my dad.

  “ ‘Run Catch Kiss.’ ”

  “What does that have to do with temping?” asked Zach.

  “Well,” I said, glaring at him, “the focus is actually supposed to be on my . . . dating life.”