Loonglow

by Helen Eisenbach

  He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, haughtily. “I wouldn’t know.” She snorted. “So you think it’s the most brilliant thing you’ve ever read?”

  “Tolerable,” she said. “Now and then a line or two isn’t too offensive.” She pulled her dinner toward her and surveyed it with distaste. “Did I really eat this?”

  “No, that was me. So you think it’ll win all awards hands down and I won’t have to sell my body anymore?”

  “But that’s your destiny, Clay.” She affected a pained expression. “If you really cared about art, you wouldn’t fight it.”

  “Was that a yes?”

  “All right”—she gave in. “Satin sheets will be hung at half mast all over town.” She toyed with the food on her plate. “I don’t suppose you’d like to slam the rest of this down?”

  “What do you take me for?”

  “Trash.” She looked on as he pulled the dish back and calmly finished her meal. “Everyone knows it, and it’s time you did, too.”

  “I don’t keep you around for your insights, missy—just your sweet nature.”

  She grabbed an olive. “Ditto, pruneface,” she said, stuffing it into his mouth. “Now don’t you think it’s time you decided what I want for dessert?”

  The thing that surprised Louey most about the months she’d worked with Clay was how easy it was to spend time with him. Often when she came to work and shuffled through her pile of messages, the only one that didn’t make her shudder was from Clay.

  “Tell me why I don’t mind getting calls from him, no matter how busy I am,” she asked one morning, bringing Kevin tea.

  “Compulsive blabber?” he suggested.

  She didn’t even mind it when Clay talked her into holding their discussions over drinks or dinner. “It’s not as if I don’t like boys,” she mused. “I like them.” She stared down at a giant doughnut in his hand.

  “You like the ones who blush like pretty girls,” said Kevin, handing her some slightly sticky galleys to be sent for quotes. “We’ve all seen how you tease them.”

  “We can’t agree on everything.” She shook a finger at him. “Just because your own tastes border on …”

  “Sublime?”

  It puzzled her; she’d never found straight men that interesting for more than short periods of time, and sooner or later—usually sooner—they always came around to making a pass. (If had happened too often to surprise her. The number of males who were genuinely baffled when she took their hands from her hips or waist made her wonder what other women’s responses to such tactics were, and if any man had ever been rejected before she’d come along.) With Clay, though, no rules seemed to apply. She had no precedent for their friendship.

  “I’ve seen boys with just his kind of charm,” said Kevin.

  “Seen?” she snorted. “Nice euphemism.” Why didn’t Clay fit any pattern she had come across, straight or gay? “He’s not one of those suave guys,” she went on, “who keep doing you favors—until you find out why.” She handed him the galleys with a pile of letters to be typed. “You, for instance.”

  Kevin laughed. “What I think,” he said, “is that this polite-guy stuff is camouflage. He’s a brute at heart—you wait and see.”

  “You like that kind, eh?” Louey turned to rewrite jacket copy for three books someone had mistakenly placed in their science-fiction line.

  Several hours later Kevin returned to slip the heavily rewritten pages from beneath her elbow. “May I?” She nodded, covering her eyes. “I think we’ve done more than enough here, thank you.” Her shoulders shook. “By the way, I’ve solved the Clay conundrum, if you’re interested.” Louey looked up at him, curious. “He’s a simple, sweet, but spineless child who gets crushes on inaccessible women to avoid facing his own true sexuality.”

  “I don’t think that’s it,” she said, “but let’s just ask him, shall we?” She picked the phone up, and Kevin fled her office in mock terror.

  It had been Louey’s idea to transpose Clay’s theories about love to fiction. “I sense a closet novelist lurking inside that shameless body,” she’d said, and Clay had to admit she’d been right. Nothing could have prepared him for the way he lost himself in his creations, characters who wouldn’t exist without him. And Louey called him “a born writer”: fresh, funny, original, she said. The book (which she referred to as Bright Lights, Hot Pussy) still expressed his thesis about love, but she had helped him create a male character who embodied its follies and aspirations. “Why not make the narrator a boy with a lot of talent and a bright future,” she suggested, “who keeps forestalling his own potential by becoming obsessed with one woman after another, mistaking the passion each provokes in him for the heightened life experience he’s seeking?”

  Why the hell hadn’t he thought of it himself? “You could even salvage your research,” she added, “give the hero signs he’s on the right track—you know, ironic proof from movies, songs and books that love is more important than achievement.” By offsetting his hero with characters who tried to restore him to a life of conventional accomplishment, Clay was able to voice his ambivalence far more subtly than his essay had allowed. And there was great fun in creating the women his hero longed for—laying out a portrait of Manhattan as he’d first seen it gave him a nearly malicious satisfaction. Louey had a few sly ideas of her own, as well—especially as to where his hero should meet women.

  I met Mimi in a small dark room. I was riding up in the elevator of the tallest—and the first—office building I’d been in since arriving in New York. The one suit I owned was newly pressed and on my back, and although the building was (if anything) overly air-conditioned, my nerves were making me uncomfortably warm.

  At the twenty-fifth floor, the elevator stopped, and all the other people filed out, leaving me to my thoughts. The door was closing when a husky voice called out, “Could you hold it?!” I stared at the air for a split second, then moved to hit the “open” button when a stocking-clad leg stuck its way into the door and prevented it (with no little pain to its owner, I imagined) from closing.

  He didn’t know what he had done to deserve the attention she’d shown him. Her willingness to take time out from what he knew was an insanely busy schedule to go over the most minute problem he might have with his material, the most inane question, seemed to transcend mere mortal patience. And the way her mind always came up with the answer to illuminate his difficulties was remarkable. He couldn’t match the feeling he got when he showed her a batch of pages and her face lit up with pleasure, letting him know he was on the right track. Perversely he even enjoyed it when she criticized him, as if she’d understood better than he what he’d meant to say.

  I pushed the button decisively, as if to make up for my delay. The door opened, and I faced a woman in an evening dress. A spectacular woman, actually, nearly six feet tall, all legs and flashing eyes and brazen shoulders and hips.

  “Thanks.” She grinned conspiratorially, then looked me up and down. “Interview, eh?”

  I gave her the same treatment. “Convention, eh?” I said.

  She laughed, raucously—hardly the kind of sound I would have expected from someone who had walked off the cover of Vogue. “Nothing gets by you, does it, honey?” she said.

  Two things happened next: I sneezed and the elevator came to a thudding stop.

  The only real problem was the ending. Louey was partial to the unexpected twist, but as yet neither of them had come up with anything inspired. Clay couldn’t decide just how to bring his hero’s plight to a resolution; simply having him continue his fruitless search for validation in physical bliss with women seemed inconclusive and unsatisfying, while providing him a pat resolution—like a woman who fulfilled all his dreams—seemed a cheap trick that betrayed his thesis. He considered having the character suddenly and unaccountably in the arms of one of his male friends—the biggest protester against the hero’s quest for meaning, say—just to satisfy Louey’s sense of the absurd, but he suspected
this was a private joke few besides Louey would appreciate.

  My companion looked on in amusement as I played with the buttons. We couldn’t be stuck.

  “You may as well give up,” she said. “Once it sticks, it stays stuck until the repairmen come to fix it.”

  “But I have an interview in fifteen minutes. We can’t just stay here!”

  She shook her head. “Doesn’t look promising.”

  I moved to ring the emergency button, but a surprisingly strong hand covered mine and pulled me away. “Calm down,” she said. “Listen, there’s nothing we can do but wait, so we may as well accept it and make the best of the situation.”

  “Great,” I said. “How do you propose to make the best of three feet of space, no air, and nothing to do?”

  “Depends on how you look at it.” With this, she slid to the floor, slipping off her shoes with a sigh of relief. “I’ve been dying to get out of these for hours. In fact, this whole ensemble is more than I can stand for one more minute.” Before I could blink, she was stripping off the charcoal stockings and then unzipping the tiny strapless dress. I could hardly believe my eyes.

  “You can’t be serious,” I managed.

  “Why’s that?” A smile played over her lips as she rose and inched out of the tight dress, revealing a breathtaking collection of flesh and bones.

  “Look,” I said. “I hope you don’t mind, but I’d really rather—”

  “Aren’t you feeling a bit … warm?” she asked. My throat was parched suddenly, and when I tried to answer, no sound came out. She scolded me with an outstretched finger, then moved it so that she was tracing the inside of my collar, toying with the buttons of my shirt.

  “Are you crazy?” I pushed her hand away.

  “Now, now,” she murmured, “you don’t want to get overheated.” She slipped the jacket off my shoulders; I looked around the elevator for escape. Next thing I knew, she’d moved so close her breasts were pressing against me. My heart beat wildly as my nipples strained against the thin silk of my shirt as if to meet hers. Her hands came around me, barely skimming the surface of my body, unbuttoning my shirt. I stood frozen as she let my pants slide to the floor. I stared, wide-eyed, into what seemed to be a normal, sane face—my breath was coming in short gasps now. Her tongue slipped into my mouth, licking the soft inside of each lip, and then—

  “I can’t stand another minute of this.” Kevin put down the mock chapter. Louey’s face was red. “I’m going to die.”

  “But not alone,” said Louey, her stomach sore from laughing. “Lucky everyone’s gone home, or we’d be fired.”

  “Don’t you think they know the reverence with which you treat your authors?” Kevin rose and got his things together. “You’re not fooling anyone, dollface.”

  “That’s what I hired you for, isn’t it?” He put his coat on. “Walking home?” His face lit up. The two of them walked home together with a frequency that scandalized (and baffled) the whole office, but Kevin never failed to beam at her suggestion, as if the occasion might not come his way again. “Need protection?”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” said Kevin.

  I broke away from her, moving to the farthest corner of the elevator and turning my back. Was she crazy? I peered over my shoulder; except for the fact of her complete nakedness, she might just as well have been a corporate executive waiting to interview me herself. I knelt, giving myself a serene mental picture to focus on, stretching my foot out to reclaim my pants.

  Strange hands softly stole over my back, tracing the muscles to make me shiver. Soft breasts pressed against me and a hot tongue began lapping at my neck as if it was the most natural thing in the world for a stranger to do. As lethally skilled fingers crept down the front of me, I realized I was losing what little grip on rational thought I had managed to retain. After a few more moments of this, I realized I had no choice but to turn around and see what she could possibly have in mind for me.

  “Creatures from Mars,” Kevin called straight men. “So,” he asked after they’d been walking for some time, “having dinner with the New Age Man?” She nodded. “Again? What do you see in him?” A painstakingly well-dressed executive passed, his lip curling at the sight of Kevin, who glanced at Louey, rolling his eyes. “That boy’s far too nice and pretty to be truly straight,” he added.

  “Somehow I don’t think he’d agree.”

  “I can see I’m going to need to have some words with him. He’s ruining your reputation.”

  “All he wants from me are my brilliant insights.”

  “Poor child.” Kevin covered his eyes. “How little you know of the world.”

  She laughed. In a moment they’d arrived at Kevin’s building. “Need anything before I go?” he asked. “Illegal drugs, fresh weapons?”

  She declined politely. “Now go make yourself irresistible.”

  “That should take some doing,” he said. “But keep a kind thought.”

  It made no sense, thought Louey as she walked the rest of her way home: Clay simply shouldn’t be someone she could spend effortless hours with. On all the basics they were as different as two people could be. No doubt he’d been raised to have contempt (or at best pity) for everything she stood for, everything she was. How could he know what it was like to be a woman, Jewish, gay? Christ, she thought, he wasn’t even middle-class.

  So why was she so comfortable with him? It baffled her. He seemed delighted by her in a purely selfless way—and he was so soft-spoken that often his wry humor caught her totally off-guard. He had none of the neurosis she’d always considered a necessary part of the urban personality she otherwise adored. Was it possible that someone could be intelligent and worldly without being frantic and intense or temperamental and unrelentingly self-involved? He’s so much fun, she thought ruefully, shaking her head. She’d never known a person so apparently without conceit or ego, so agreeable without being spineless or dull.

  It was true she’d never known anyone really rich before; perhaps wealth gave one the luxury of selflessness. She could only speculate, however, as Clay was reluctant to talk about money, his family, or anything truly personal. He was curious about her, she knew, and she spoke easily about her childhood, her theories, her foolish aspirations.

  One topic was never broached, however: her love life, and her past with Mia. She knew he wanted more than anything to ask but wouldn’t dare pry into her private life. She wondered if she’d ever want to tell him about Mia, if she’d ever be able to talk about it dispassionately, especially to someone like Clay. Still, she thought, as long as he hoarded his own secrets, he could hardly expect her to reveal hers.

  Clay was awakened from a late night’s work by the tail end of his father’s voice on his machine. It was unusual for him to sleep through the phone’s ringing, unheard of to sleep through a message. Yet lately it had become harder and harder to wrench himself from sleep. Despite the high of working on the book with Louey, he’d begun to find himself slipping into melancholy with increasing frequency. As he considered the third paternal wedding party in three years (this one no doubt with a pre-teen—his father’s mates had been getting progressively nearer his own age), he realized why he’d been so morose the past few weeks. He dialed Louey’s number.

  “I’ve been calling all your other authors and telling them you’re dead.”

  “Again?”

  “I just thought you should know.”

  “Kevin?!” Louey called, and Kevin poked his head into her office. “Do we know a Pamela Kelly Boone III? She seems to feel she has some business with us.”

  “We don’t associate with white trash,” Kevin said. She handed him the receiver. “I’m terribly sorry, but Miss Mercer is no longer with Regent Boob,” he explained sweetly.

  “I’m afraid we couldn’t put up with her kleptomania any longer.”

  “Nancy Reagan, please,” Clay said.

  “Speaking.”

  “Let’s talk about those dresses, babe. I mean, put a l
ittle meat on those bones! You look like a carcass.”

  “Ron likes me this way,” Kevin said smugly.

  “And who can blame him? God”—Clay sighed—“if only he did appreciate the likes of you, we’d be better off.”

  “Tell me, is there any reason I should give you back to Louey?”

  “How does eight million dollars sound?”

  “Reason enough.” Kevin handed back the phone. A moment later he had vacated Louey’s office and left Clay to see how she would respond to his latest plot development.

  The past six months working with Louey had been more satisfying than he’d imagined possible, that was what was getting to him. That the project might be nearing its conclusion meant he’d no longer have any excuse to see her as he did now—so often that she seemed the most constant presence in his life. The thought depressed him beyond words. He’d never had a friend like her: so quick, so interested in wildly different things, as able to be transformed into a silly, giddy child as she was capable of sudden depths of understanding that made him feel almost in awe of her.

  “I’m calling with a proposition,” he said now.

  “You mean the complete annihilation of my other authors was mere fabrication?” She sounded disappointed. “And I was so happy for a time …”

  He hesitated: would she be offended by his invitation? “Actually, I wasn’t calling about business, Louey. It seems my father is throwing a party for my stepmother—the third in a continuing series—and I was wondering if you’d consider being my escort.”

  She was silent so long that he wondered if he’d made one step too many over the line of their professional relationship. His spirits sank. She obviously had no interest in him as a friend, apart from their work together.

  “When?” her voice came, interrupting his thoughts.

  “Uh—next Monday, actually; it’s at my father’s tastelessly overfurnished apartment on Gramercy Park.”

  “How is your father?” she said.

  He laughed. “Asks after you constantly.”