My Old Man

by Amy Sohn

  He moved in and out of me for what felt like a very long while—probably because of all the Guinnesses. If I ever slept with another customer I’d have to cut him off sooner. “Is this OK for you?” he finally said.

  “Great!” I said.

  “’Cause you don’t seem that into it,” he said, “and a woman’s pleasure is very important to me.” It was funny the way some guys felt the need to announce this, like it was a special citation on their résumé instead of just the norm.

  “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “Just think about yourself.” I could fuck a stranger but I couldn’t come with one. It was illogical but irrefutable.

  He gave it a few more strokes, then stopped and said, “I think I drank too much. And I’m kind of nervous. I find you very intimidating.”

  I nodded sadly. He pulled out and said, “You sure you don’t want me to kiss her a little?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  He didn’t say anything for a while and then he pulled the condom off slowly. Then he went out to the fire escape and smoked a cigarette.

  When he came back to bed he said, “I’m really sorry.”

  “So am I,” I said.

  He gave the kind of pitying look that meant he was disappointed too. I was probably the first bartender in the history of female bartending this had ever happened to. We were supposed to be easy happy-go-lucky sluts but I couldn’t even get my one-night stand to come. He gave me a halfhearted kiss on the mouth and we turned back-to-back, facing different walls.

  Difficult Women

  IN the morning, after Guinness left, I took a shower and tried to scrub the smell of him off. Then I changed the sheets. There is nothing worse than bad substifuck sex; it makes you feel worse than you did before. I didn’t want a barfly; I wanted Powell, even with his insanity, his coldness, his narcissism. He knew what to do to me, how to rev me up, and he was never, ever boring. Maybe the key with Powell was to come on as strong as he did. He needed to know I wasn’t scared of him, that I could be a big-enough woman for the man in him.

  It was a chilly Sunday and the streets were crowded with yuppie couples that were way too attractive for anyone’s good. They wore rugged autumn colors and toted babies that wore more fashionable outfits than any I could ever hope to own.

  I ate breakfast in the park and afterward I found myself meandering over to Strong. When I got to Powell’s window I looked up at it. There was this great scene in Difficult Women where Lola (Lena Olin), a Latvian cocktail waitress in Brighton Beach, was trying to win back the heart of Shmuel (Michael Imperioli), the small-time Russian Jewish Mafioso who frequented her bar. He had broken up with her because some thugs were after him for money and he didn’t want her to get mixed up in his problems. She cried for a week straight but then one night she had a vision of her dead grandmother Rushka saying, “Tell Shmuel you love him.”

  She snapped into action, ran to his apartment, made a pulley out of stockings, and airlifted a bottle of Chivas up to his bedroom window. Shmuel was sitting at his desk composing a suicide note because he knew he couldn’t come up with the money, when he saw the bottle swaying in the wind outside. Right then it started to snow. He opened the window to find a tray with two glasses filled with ice and the Chivas, looked down, and saw her standing in the street, holding the stocking pulley.

  “Lola!” he cried.

  “What is it, Shmuel?”

  “I was gonna kill myself but now it’s all different!”

  “Whaddayou mean, Shmuel?”

  “I thought death was the answer but really it’s love!”

  “Of course it is,” Lola called in an accent that sounded more Swedish than Latvian. “You’ve always been dumb.”

  He started crying with joy, suddenly recognizing the value in life, grabbed the bottle and glasses, and clambered down his fire escape onto the snow-glistening street. He ran up to her and kissed her all over and she wept beautiful tears that mixed with the snowflakes. Then she said, “It’s happy hour,” and they sat on a hood of a car and drank to their future.

  I wondered what Powell would do if I airlifted him a bottle of Chivas. If I somehow managed to get a pulley rigged up to the roof, I’d probably smash his neighbor’s window in and wind up getting arrested. Plus it was a mistake to be that derivative; he might consider it plagiarist. I had to come up with a variant, a shining declaration of my love, like Lola’s for Shmuel, that nonetheless took into account the Powell of Powell and the me of me.

  I walked back to Court Street and down to Winn Discount. I roamed through the aisles, among the tools and screws and nails, the garden hoes and hoses, until I finally saw what I needed: a big spool of white clothesline rope. I kept meandering through the aisles and found a pile of bandannas, so I bought one for ninety-nine cents.

  D’Amico was closed so I went to Starbucks and ordered a large cappuccino with a travel lid and stuck it into one of those four-cup Styrofoam trays with a couple sugar packets since I couldn’t remember how he took it. As I walked briskly back toward his house I put the clothesline in the second cup, and the bandanna in the third. When I got to Strong I stopped on the stoop next to his and took out a piece of paper from my bag.

  Dear Powell—

  Want to have a cup of morning coffee, or are you all tied up?

  —Block

  That sucked. I crumpled it up and tried again.

  Dear Mr. Powell—

  Can I rope you in for morning coffee?

  —Lola

  That was worse. Something was missing and not just in the note. I looked down at my chest, and within twenty seconds I had wriggled out of my bra, a Wacoal minimizer. I stuck it in the tray, next to the cappuccino, the rope, and the bandanna, and tried the note again.

  Dear Mr. Powell—

  Now that I know your cup size I felt it was time you knew mine.

  Love,

  Your Cock Tail Waitress

  I folded the note into a square, nestled it next to the bra, and opened the door to Powell’s building. I set my tray of love on the foyer floor like an offering and pressed the buzzer. “Who is it?” I heard him say.

  I ran outside in search of a place to wait. Some kid had drawn a pink hopscotch board in chalk right in front of the stoop and I lay down on it, my head between the one and two. I crossed my hands over my chest like I was dead and closed my eyes. After a few minutes the door creaked open and slammed shut. I flinched and felt my blood coursing through me. A pair of feet jogged down the stairs and then stopped right by my head.

  I could feel the cold pavement against my back. Through my eyelids I saw something block the sunlight. I felt a hand on my neck and prayed it was Powell’s; you’re asking for trouble when you lie down braless on a sidewalk. I kept my eyes closed and gasped from the thrill. “I don’t take sugar,” he grunted, as the two paper packets ricocheted off of my boobs like bullets of love.

  I opened my eyes and smiled openly as though he had just given me a piece of beautiful jewelry. He put his hand under my head and pried it up like I was in a war hospital with an amputated arm and he was feeding me brandy from a bottle. I felt the cool cotton of the bandanna over my mouth as he tied it behind my head. He grabbed me by the arm and raised me roughly to my feet. “Whr w gng?” I said through the gag.

  “Don’t talk.”

  He steered me up the stairs and through the door. We walked down the hallway and he opened the door to the basement. I had a momentary flash of him cutting me into a million pieces. As we started down the stairs I noticed there wasn’t a banister or a light. He gripped my arm tightly as we went down, then steered me around a corner. A few bikes were chained to the pillars and barbeques and old exercise equipment were scattered around the room.

  We came to an open door and he nudged me in ahead of him. I heard a loud humming and felt a sudden rush of dust. I sneezed into the gag and wiped my nose with the back of my hand. “Gesundheit,” he said.

  There was some rustling behind me and then the light came on
and I was face-to-face with a boiler. It was huge and terrifying and reminded me of a locomotive. Powell came around and looked at me like I was an exhibit in a museum he wasn’t sure he liked. Then he smoothed my hair. I was reminded of the game where you put your hands on someone else’s and then they try to slap you when you don’t expect it.

  “Take off your shirt,” he said.

  “What if your landlord finds us?” I said.

  “This is a co-op!”

  I turned my back, lifted my shirt, and deposited it delicately on the filthy floor. He came around with the rope and gazed at me calmly, like a surgeon about to begin a complex operation. He tied both my wrists with some sort of fancy sailor’s knot and maneuvered the rope up over a pipe, then pulled until I rose onto my toes. He lifted me just enough that my heels were hovering off the floor, the balls of my feet still touching down. Then he tied the rope to the pipe and threw the spool to the floor. It bounced a few times on the concrete below and he walked out of the room.

  “Whr y gng?” I called lamely. I heard his feet disappear up the stairs. A minute went by and then another. I began to worry that he’d never come back, that this would be my punishment for messing with a maniac.

  On Sunday mornings when I was little, my dad would take me on the back of his bike to the Lower East Side and we’d shop for cheese and coffee for my mom. Before we went back he’d always stop in the Chinatown branch of the library to check out books. Inevitably when we got there it would be right before closing, and as he went through the aisles grabbing books they’d suddenly start shutting off the lights. “The library is closing in fifteen minutes!” a male guard would call out in a sonorous voice, a jarring violation of the whisper code.

  “Dad!” I’d cry. “We’re going to get locked in.”

  “I just need a few more things,” he’d say. “Why don’t you pick out some books for yourself?” Reluctantly I’d wander the aisles, as more and more lights went out in huge sections at a time, until I was standing totally in the dark. Finally I’d find him in the mystery books section and tug on his shirt, telling him to hurry. “I’m almost there,” he’d say.

  I’d start to sweat because something about libraries always made me have to shit, but I wouldn’t ask to go because I was too afraid I’d get locked in the bathroom. More lights would go off, and the room would feel airless and bleak.

  “Dad!” I’d cry. “I’m scared. They’re going to lock us in!”

  “I promise they won’t,” he’d say.

  “The library is now closed,” the voice would call, and even then he’d take more books before finally making his way to the checkout counter, forcing them all to wait till he got what he wanted.

  Out on the street I would cry at the stress of it all, and he would say, “It’s all right, we didn’t get locked in, everything’s fine,” but still I’d clutch his back the whole ride home.

  I hung from the rope, feeling my calves getting more tired, trembling from the strain. What had I been thinking coming over with rope? It was like walking into a bar brawl and then handing one of the guys a gun.

  I heard footsteps on the stairs and Powell came through the door, a folding chair in one hand and the Sunday New York Times in the other. He sat in the chair a few inches from where I hung, crossed his legs woman-style, and opened up SundayStyles. He flipped forward to the weddings section and held it up for me to see. “You see this?” he said, “This is porn for single women.”

  He pointed to a photo of a shifty-eyed frat type and his generic-looking bride. “He’s gonna cheat,” he said.

  “He doesn’t love her,” he said of an Asian couple.

  “Something’s funny about him. She’s marrying for money. These two’ll last because they’re Indian. This guy hates her guts. This one’s a pooftah. She’s already pregnant but he doesn’t know.”

  As I hung there wobbling on my feet, my calves losing all sensitivity, the feeling beginning to leave my ankles, my wrists raw and weak, he went through every single photo and gave his prognosis. Then he read for a while, calmly, going through Real Estate, optimistically crowing about the property values in the neighborhood; Arts and Leisure, mocking a profile of a young ingénue he didn’t find intelligent; working himself into a frenzy over a “manipulative and thoroughly false” Banana Republic ad spread in the magazine showing a woman, man, and baby happily sleeping in bed.

  “Hnk!” I cried. “Pls tk m down!”

  “You have no stamina.” He was right. It took courage to be a masochist, way more courage than it took to be a rabbi. You had to have the focus and the will. I wanted desperately to be good at suffering but I was too much of a coward.

  “I cnt fl m ft!”

  He sighed, shook his head, stood up, and put both hands on my breasts. He ran his fingers over the nipples. I closed my eyes, trying to get into it but afraid I was going to pass out from the exhaustion.

  He knelt down on the floor, unbuttoned my corduroy Levis, and eased them off. He pulled down my underpants—black bikini Jockey for Hers, laundry panties I only wore when I hadn’t done a wash in a while—and set them on the floor with no comment. Then he knelt, placed one hand squarely on each of my buttocks, and arranged my legs on either side of his head.

  Slowly he rose and as he supported my ass with his hands, he began to eat me with the sound of a man who has not had a meal in many months. His technique was all right but I was struck with a wave of performance anxiety. Sometimes when I’m with a guy I feel like a painter with a disobedient model. Every time I get a decent stroke the goddamn girl moves and I have to put down my brush, walk across the room and reposition her, then struggle to get back into my groove. It would not be good if this didn’t go anywhere. You come all the way down into a boiler room to be illicit, you expect it to lead to an O.

  He moved his mouth around like a wild animal devouring its prey and I grimaced and jerked my pelvis back. He raised his head like a bull, his eyes red and angry, and said, “You have a problem accepting pleasure.”

  He raised the hood with his hand, like he’d taken a course, and did a series of magical tongue flicks. I wondered if he was spelling out his best lines. There was something so commanding and nonchalant about the way he maneuvered, so proprietary and matter-of-fact, that after a while I let him take over. I went limp and threw my head back. As he lapped he eased in a finger and I started to tighten and sweat. There was an advantage to being with a guy who had sampled from the cooze buffet. He knew just what to do. This was why young women liked older men. It had nothing to do with status or money. It was much, much simpler.

  I moaned and he grunted, a cunnilingus call and response, and then he moved his finger in a particular way and I came, my body warm and electric, my thighs quivering, my throat forming the hollow bleat of a dying lamb.

  He lowered my feet to the floor and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He untied the knots so I was standing again, and untied the rope. I undid the bandanna, bolted toward him, and kissed him, trying hard not to cry.

  Instead of kissing back he fumbled with his own pants and pushed me down onto the floor. He flailed around demonically, his hand reaching up every few seconds to claw at my breast or down to grab at my ass. I tried not to think about the fact that I had had sex with somebody else less than twenty-four hours before.

  I wrapped my legs tightly around his waist, clenching my insides like a socket wrench, and after another twenty minutes he was out and I felt a puddle on my stomach. “We’re going to have to find another contraceptive,” I said.

  “I know,” he said, rising to his feet and brushing off his pant knees.

  I sat up and looked at him. “Do you want to maybe go to brunch?”

  He gazed down at me with an expression of utter contempt. “You’re outta ya goddamn mind.”

  “Why?” I said, sitting up. “It’s such a nice day. I thought we could go to Banania.”

  “If the wedding pages are porn for single women, then Sunday brunch is the money
shot.”

  “They have free muffins,” I tried, but he had already stormed out the door.

  I stood up and grabbed a piece of the paper, and as I wiped the come off my stomach I saw that my wrists were red and raw. There was no blood but there were two big marks, and when I touched them they stung. This was a totally different level than stubble scab; I’d have to wear long sleeves at work or my customers would start to ask questions.

  Upstairs the front door was propped open. Powell was sitting on the stoop, watching a young mother with a baby carriage pass. The only indication of our sex was the hopscotch board, which was smudged from where I had lain in it. The three looked like an eight. “Hank,” I said, sitting down next to him. “I’m sorry I asked you to brunch. I didn’t mean to offend you.”

  “Yeah, well don’t do it again,” he said.

  We sat in silence and I said, “So did you like my gift? Did you like my little note?”

  “Yeah, but stop asking. You gotta learn to quiet your mind. Every Jew I know is like you. You do the whole world’s math homework in your head. What’s the latest with ya pop?”

  “I told him I knew and he says he needs a little time.”

  “Uh oh.”

  “What do you mean ‘uh oh’?”

  “It means the jury is out.”

  “I don’t want to talk about him! I’m glad you came down,” I said, taking his hand. “I really thought I’d lost you.”

  “I was gonna call you anyway.”

  “You were?”

  “The pitch went well. I sold the film.”

  “That’s amazing!”

  “Not really,” he said. “Now I gotta write it.” Powell could find a way to complain about anything.

  “I missed you so much,” I said, lowering myself one step and resting my head on his knee. “I’d like to come here every day with a different present for you.”

  “Easy now,” he said, but he didn’t move his knee.

  “I’d like to live underneath your desk,” I said. “I’d like you to tie me up and leave me in your place and then go run some errands, maybe buy yourself a free-range chicken. If I lived with you, you wouldn’t leave the house. You could order Chinese all the time, and I’d sit under the desk and blow you whenever you needed it. A maid could come once a week to clean. You could bring your friends over and watch them fuck me.”