by Siel Ju
I got to my car in a huff, both angry and anxious. What if this was our last time together? I’d spent a lot of time picturing us tangled loosely on his couch, making quiet but precise plans for future rendezvous, and now there’d be no time for that. Would we find a way to talk about this stuff at work, after he returned? Or would this rushed last meeting end up making things awkward between us, putting a weird end to all of it?
Once I started driving though, I started to calm down. It dawned on me that I could just make up an excuse to not go back to work. I could call Maureen at five and blame the traffic, or say I got in an accident. Or I could bring Roy into it. He could tell Maureen the proof just took a lot longer than expected, and give her his edits over the phone. I’d heard Maureen do this before, though only with Brian the boss. Debating these options, my mind worked furiously the whole way there, and by the time I got to Roy’s place I was filled with a woozy uneasiness. I felt bolder, but scared about it.
Roy too seemed bolder, with a more solid set to his face. His attitude greeting me was different, slightly assertive. This made me nervous enough that going in the door, I tripped and dropped the proofs. They scattered into a loose semicircle around his feet.
He gestured for me to leave them. “Come here,” he said. His voice had its usual blasé tone, but when we started kissing I knew it was going to happen this time. We went into his bedroom and sat on his futon-like bed. As we took our shoes off I thought, I’m about to have a real affair, with a married guy. The thought was oddly more tantalizing than the actual feeling of the moment, which Roy still imbued with indolence. I tried to hide my enthusiasm. To appear too willing would be uncool, I thought, taking on Roy’s MO.
We lay down. As we started kissing again I grew self-conscious about my body and its newish junk food weight. I tried to wiggle out of my shirt, but it was tight and this didn’t work well, so I had to sit up again. When I did I took off my bra too; it had ridden up uncomfortably in the struggle. Inelegantly, I lay back down.
He sent a cautious hand over my breasts, like he was gauging their size, though without judgment. He let his hand trail down under my skirt and slipped it under my underwear. I was surprised at how wet I was. It embarrassed me, because it revealed how badly I wanted this. To counter that I closed my eyes and tried to make as little noise or movement as possible. Still, after just a few minutes I came, the orgasm sharp but also strange because I tried to mask its intensity, the sensation swelling to fill me, but released only in a fearful, hesitant manner, which came out in quick bursts I couldn’t control. Afterwards I was left feeling an exhausted sort of tension, both closeted and exposed.
This didn’t seem to bother him. He took my underwear off and got on top of me. He entered me first, then we wriggled each other’s clothes off, like it was an obligatory step to completing the affair properly. Once we were naked there was a rhythmic, careful quality to the way he moved above me, the same quality he’d had when touching me, and I think it was that detached concentration that turned me on, though I couldn’t articulate why, and though through it all I felt powerfully anxious, afraid and excited that I might come again.
It ended just before I did. Afterwards we lay beside each other for a few minutes. He petted my hair distractedly, the intimate way one might a child’s while remaining focused on some other task. Then he got up, pulled on his boxers, and brought me a glass of water.
“Thanks,” I said.
He smiled, and went back out, maybe for a glass for himself.
I lay back, sipping. I surveyed the room for clues. It was a semi-dark space, the blinds drawn, sparsely furnished like the living room. On the side table there was a small watch, a woman’s, face down. Beside it was a digital clock; it read 14:42. There were no pictures around, which I thought was odd. Clearly he liked his life neat and organized. Laying there, I felt good, like a carefully sharpened pencil perfectly fitted into its pencil case. Maybe we’d end up spending more time here. He didn’t seem to have any qualms about having sex with me in the bed he shared with his wife. Or maybe this meant he didn’t care if she found out, and this whole thing would move faster than I thought. Maybe I’d end up moving in. I tried to picture myself living here, and decided I’d like it, the austere walls, the cool floors. I could get rid of my furniture altogether.
I let my mind wander this way until I realized Roy had been gone for a while. I slid my legs over the side of the bed. I thought about calling him, but it seemed too obtrusive in the zen space. Instead I pulled off the top sheet and wrapped it around me like they do in the movies, then sashayed out, the sheet fanning out behind me like a wedding dress train.
He was sitting on the couch, bent over the blueline.
After a minute, he looked up and saw me. His expression tensed for a second, then returned to its neutral position. “I’m almost done,” he said.
I stood quiet for a bit, coming up with a response. “I didn’t know you were working out here,” I said finally.
“It’s due today,” he said, turning his eyes to the proof.
Something about the way Roy looked away from me brought up an intense sense of déjà vu. Suddenly I was back in college again, walking into economics class. In the middle of the back row sat a guy I’d hooked up with once, a cute guy I’d been stunned had picked me, he’d had his options at the frat party. Of course we never talked again after that incident, though we saw each other every morning in class. When I entered he’d already be sitting there, blandly watching the door. The first few days our eyes met, and he turned his face away like he was bored, his expression impassive save a hint of a derisive smirk. Each time this happened I felt I’d somehow pestered him and gotten rejected anew. I started bracing myself on my way to class, preparing, deliberately fixing my gaze at a different direction as I walked in. But once in a while I forgot, and I had to see that dismissive, insolent look on his face again.
That was Roy’s attitude now, working. Watching him I started getting that Groundhog Day feel, like I was watching my life on a loop. I was suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of tired resignation.
Then it occurred to me: there were no classmates watching, no one else for me to be self-conscious about.
I didn’t realize this consciously so much as sense it, but sense it I did, because instead of retreating back into the bedroom and leaving demurely, I kept standing there. I started really watching him, hard. And as I bore my eyes into him, I could sense a shift in him too. He was still pretending to mark things, but I could tell by his cultivated concentration that I was frightening him.
“That’s right,” I said. “Maureen said five at the latest.”
I stared at him until finally, he looked up. When he did, he gave me a shaky smile.
“Look, this—We’re cool, right?” he said. The voice he used was a firm, I know we can be adults about this tone. But I saw the alarm in his eyes.
I smirked. “Just try to make it quick,” I said. I went into the bedroom to get dressed.
When I got back to the office Maureen grinned at me and held out both her hands for the proof like a greedy kid. “Ah, finally,” she said. “After this, we’re done for the week.”
I tried to smile back at her but I knew it didn’t look right. I’d decided I wasn’t coming back, but didn’t have the heart to tell Maureen face to face. She’d been so sweet to me. I had the sense she’d take it personally, especially since I couldn’t come up with a good reason to give her for quitting. I turned away and started collecting my things, dropping them into my purse. My hand was on auto-pilot. I threw in a notepad, a post-it stack with some scribbles on it, a staple remover. The last of these I fished back out quickly and replaced on the cubicle desk.
“What’s wrong?” Maureen asked.
“Nothing,” I said, in that offhand tone I’d been refining. “What do you mean?”
“Did everything go okay at Roy’s?”
“Sure.” I shrugged unconvincingly.
She paused. “Sorry to m
ake you make that trip, in Friday traffic.”
“It’s no trouble,” I said. But I could hear the tension in my voice, strangled and passive-aggressive. So I kept talking. “It was actually a nice break from the office,” I added.
“Well, he’ll be back in the office Monday,” she said. After that she disappeared behind her cubicle wall and stayed quiet there for the last hour of the work day. Still, when six o’clock rolled around she came around again and said, “So, have a good weekend.” At that I got up and gave her a big goodbye hug, which she returned warmly. Afterwards she raised her brows comically and said, “Monday will be here before we know it,” as if to break the tension from our moment of connection. We walked to the parking lot together making small talk, then waved to each other driving away.
On my way home I thought about stopping at a 7-Eleven for ice cream, but resisted. I was better than that. Instead, I called Lisa. I’d planned to leave a message but she surprised me by picking up. I told her I wasn’t going back Monday.
“Why?” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’d just like something different.”
There was a short silence, then she started in. “You know, it may seem like you have your pick of jobs out there, but it’s really not like that. You’re putting me in a—It’ll be hard to feel comfortable, sending you out on new jobs, if you’re just going to suddenly quit like this whenever some little thing isn’t to your liking.”
I took this in. “Look,” I said. “There was this creepy guy, alright? I couldn’t take it anymore.”
Her tone changed. “Oh, I didn’t realize,” she said. “That’s terrible, terrible. Are you alright?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said.
“Sorry about what I said earlier. We take this kind of thing really seriously. You’ve read our materials …” her voice trailed off. “If you want to really address this, we can do that. You’re not powerless here. We take the welfare of our employees really seriously.”
“No, no,” I said. “No, nothing like that.” I paused. “I just want to leave before anything like that happens.”
“Okay,” she said. She sounded puzzled, but mostly relieved. I think she was curious to know more, but not if it was going to create paperwork. When she spoke again, her tone was almost maternal. “We’ll find you something else,” she said. “I’ll call you Monday.”
“Something with writing,” I said, then added, “if you can.”
Once I hung up I wondered if Lisa would say anything to Maureen about this whole alleged sexual harassment thing. I decided nothing would come of it, and that even if it did, no one would suspect Roy. How could they? Looking at him objectively now, I could see him as he was—somewhat effete and asexual-looking, too passive and lackadaisical to force anything on anyone. It was almost strange, what you could see so clearly once you detached from a situation. I was tempted to obsess about why I’d gotten so into him, but I didn’t. I had my own life to worry about.
I realized the traffic on Pico was a lot worse than usual. I wondered if there was an accident or construction. Right then, a cyclist went by my window. Then another, and another. I looked up ahead and saw that a couple cyclists were blocking the intersection so the others could get through safely. I looked behind me; there were close to fifty cyclists, weaving jauntily through the lanes.
All the cars were now at a complete standstill. Most of the cyclists moved fairly slowly, careful not to scrape the cars with their handlebars, though a few raced through on their fixies, gleeful and foolhardy. Watching them, the drivers went from angry about the delay to resigned, then curious and friendly. They started lowering their windows; mine was already open because my AC had gone out a few months before.
“Hey, let’s trade,” said a guy in a convertible to a trio of girls scooting through on beach cruisers. They giggled by. “What are you protesting?” the woman in the Corolla next to me asked animatedly, like she might get out to join. “Nothing,” a tattooed guy in spandex told her. “It’s Critical Mass.”
The woman looked around with alert, manic eyes, like she was anxious for something to happen. Then she pointed. “Hey, I’ve seen you already,” she yelled at a cyclist a lane away. “You just went by.”
“It’s a Dada-themed ride,” he said. “We’re going in circles.”
“On purpose?” she said, but he was already gone.
It was dusk. We all sat and watched the cyclists like the audience at a drive-in theater. The experience had the stretchedout, dreamy quality of a Godard film, but the whole thing really only lasted only a few minutes; the Dadaists must have decided to move the circle. Traffic started inching forward again. A few straggling cyclists still struggled in the lanes and the cars were genial toward them, slowing to let them wheedle through. Pedaling on, they yelled thank yous and waved, grinning widely like they were the stars of the show.
When the riders turned the corner, the whole block of drivers swiveled their heads to watch them go, though we knew they were headed nowhere, happy and free.
Easy Target
It happened the summer I joined Match.com. I had written a fairly normal profile but at the end tacked on that I wasn’t necessarily looking for anything serious, I just wanted someone to make out with. It had been a year and a half since I’d moved back to Los Angeles after college, and I was still that lonely. Predictably, my inbox was always full, mostly with graphic notes pecked out with one hand, which gratified me in a bitter but thrilling way. In comparison, Sam’s initial email was sedate, courteous. We both liked Modest Mouse. His profile said he was twenty-nine and six foot three, and showed a decent-looking guy with a conservative haircut, the kind you might see in a Men’s Wearhouse ad. He sent me a link to a story in the Daily Bruin about UCLA medical students who’d built Habitat for Humanity houses in South LA. He was in the picture, smiling in a construction helmet with his classmates. He said he was going to become an army doctor.
“Does this mean you might go to Iraq?” I wrote.
“It’s possible,” he wrote back.
“Are you a Republican?”
“Not even!”
We started up a playful correspondence, writing a few times a day. His missives were always smart and somewhat jocular. Then on the fourth day, he sent me another link. “To give you a better sense of who I am,” he wrote.
The link took me to a profile on a nudist website. The photo showed a naked man from the back, alone at a beach, running into an ocean that looked turbulent and cold.
I felt annoyed and cheated, but also had the weary sense that I’d more or less expected this, that there was an inevitability to his revelation I’d almost foreseen. And I was curious too, complimented, like maybe he’d appreciated something open and daring in me that I hadn’t yet noticed myself. The site was set up almost exactly like Myspace. I squinted at the thumbnails of his “Top 8” nudists, his criteria for the kinds of “new friends” he was looking for, his glowing description of his own body, including proud measurements of his penis. Near the bottom of his profile he had a paragraph warning others about “fakes and posers” who talked a big game online but never materialized in real life.
Until then I’d thought that nudists weren’t necessarily sexual thrill seekers, that they were essentially old, fat hippies who liked sunbathing naked. But Sam’s profile read exactly as a casual sex want ad. I wrote him as much.
“There are different kinds of nudists,” he wrote back.
“Just to be clear, this isn’t my kind of thing,” I wrote him. “And this website, it seems really time-consuming.”
“That’s okay,” he wrote. “I really was just letting you know something about me. I enjoy our emails.”
I couldn’t decide whether he was just a normal guy going one step above a Craigslist personals ad, or a sexual deviant. I asked him how he’d gotten into this. I asked about his family, friends, other signs of normalcy. He said his parents were in Florida, and he saw them a couple times a
year. He was an only child. As a senior in college, he and a few buddies had gotten into the habit of going to strip clubs regularly, becoming friends with some of the dancers—both the determined ones that danced to pay for college and the ones that did it for coke. Then he wrote, “All of this might be easier to discuss in person.”
I agreed apprehensively. We made plans to meet that weekend for drinks at a bar I picked out.
But when I woke up the next day, another email was waiting for me. “Option for Saturday,” said the subject. He had forwarded an evite to a party for swingers in their twenties and thirties. It was cocktail party themed, ten dollar cover for men, free for women, at a private home in Eagle Rock. Couples and single women were welcome, but single men were not. Clearly, this was why Sam was trying to rope me in. At the bottom of the evite were a dozen or so guidelines to ensure all activities were consensual, advice of the “ask before you touch” and “it’s okay to say no” variety.
Later, in the evening, when I emailed back with my number, Sam called immediately. “I mean, it sounds like we could just hang out and watch,” he said. His voice was exactly as I’d imagined from his emails, friendly and amused, laying out his argument with a strategic playfulness, like he was building an elaborate Lego tower. He said he’d never been to the group’s events. A friend from his nudist website had just forwarded it to him.
“What if everyone’s really ugly?” I said.
“Aren’t you curious?” he said.
I had to admit that I was.
He suggested we still get a drink at the bar first to get to know each other, but I drank a couple glasses of wine as I was getting ready to calm my nerves, and was tipsy when he arrived.
“You look fantastic,” he said when I opened the door. I had put on a black silk dress, the backless, slinky kind. “I’ll be honest, I was a little worried, but your pictures don’t do you justice.” I knew he was buttering me up but I told him I was relieved too. He looked clean-cut, with the self-assured affability of a guy picked to play The Bachelor. His eyes seemed to be constantly appraising his surroundings, then accepting what he saw equably. Anxious, I hadn’t been able to eat much dinner, and when I looked up at him I got lightheaded and giggly. Still, I was glad for the wine. I offered him a glass but he shook his head.
