The Tuesday Erotica Club
Lisa Beth Kovetz
Copyright © 2006 by Lisa Beth Kovetz
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Kovetz, L. B.
Tuesday erotica club / Lisa Beth Kovetz.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-40221-542-1
ISBN-10: 1-40221-542-8
1. Erotic stories—Authorship—Fiction. 2. Women—Societies and clubs—Fiction. 3. Female friendship—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3611.O74945T84 2006
813’.6—dc22
2005025115
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
DR 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Jonah and Aubrey
And also for the girlfriends who have kept me going through the years: Beverly Crane, Jennifer Gunzburg, Tina K. Smith, Star-Shemah Bobatoon, Margot Avery, Lara Schwartz, Sandi Richter, Cookie Wells, Nataly Sagol, Margo Newman, Pascale Halm, Deborah Hunter-Karlsen, Antonella Ventura Hartel, and Michael Rosen.
And thanks to Adam Chromy who picked me out of the puppy pound of hopeful writers and sold the book to the perfect publisher. And a special thanks to Hillel Black of Sourcebooks who polished the story into a professional manuscript.
1. Mahogany
“…AND THEN AGAIN AND again against the fine mahogany china cabinet, and then he pressed the warm flesh of her buttocks, which is really just a fancy word for ass, against the cool glass, ok, and then that sent these ripples of like sensation through her back, ok, and, it was because of the cold you know, and then also her front, ok but that was his hot tongue because it like, it tickled her neck and her like, her boobs, ok, right, and then she heard this tinkle sound of these little clay statues, right, and all that other stupid crap on the shelves that used to belong to his ex-wife, in her ear, ok and then he started to…”
Lux Fitzpatrick suddenly stopped reading. She looked up at the door as it opened. Her heavy red lips stayed parted, waiting for the next word to fall from her mouth. Her cheekbones were high and her skin would have glowed with youth and vitality had it not been hidden under a thick layer of drugstore makeup. Her long mess of pretty hair struggled against an unprofessional dye job and too much hairspray. Streaks of eye shadow in shades usually reserved for plumbing fixtures hung over each eye. Lux’s long legs were wrapped in plaid purple stockings; her rounded buttocks were just barely covered by a short orange skirt. D-cup breasts rode high in a brightly colored, low-cut top. If you chose not to take a second look, Lux might be summed up by the industrial term “DayGlo.”
Lux’s sense of shame was as underdeveloped as her sense of fashion, and therefore when the conference room door swung open she did not stop reading her opus erotica out of embarrassment, but simply because she was interested in who might be coming into the room.
The other two women already in the room were not as bold as Lux. Gripped with the fear of getting caught doing something dirty, they seized their brown bag lunches and tried to look cool. Aimee tucked her own little erotic manuscripts under an office report while Brooke slid hers directly beneath her butt. Then the pair swiveled their heads like a single terrified doe to see who was opening the door of the conference room.
Margot Hillsboro, Esq., laughed to see the frightened women staring at her as she strode into the room.
“Sorry,” Margot said. “For being late, I mean.”
“Late for what?” Aimee asked, tugging on a corkscrew of her black curly hair.
“Oh, for your meeting. Your club. Your Tuesday writing group thing.”
A sigh of relief. She was one of their own.
“Is the club by invitation only?” Margot continued. “I was under the impression it was a literary club open to anyone in the office who was, well, literate.”
Margot’s assumption was incorrect. The latest club circulating through their large law firm belonged exclusively to Aimee.
When Aimee first realized she was pregnant, she knew she needed something to distract her from the growing fear that the growing baby was going to change her life so dramatically that she would lose herself entirely. Aimee wanted company. She wanted creativity. So Aimee handpicked forty of her closest colleagues and invited them to brown bag lunch every Tuesday in the conference room and share their literary musings.
Aimee presented first, reading a short story she’d written in college about a little bird she’d rescued from the mouth of her cat only to have it die in her kitchen. She laughed with her girlfriends over her use of a particularly cumbersome metaphor and secretly wept at the realization that what had seemed, at the time, to be her great, nascent literary talent, wasn’t. In the first month of meetings, everyone had at least one old poem or story to share but by the second it became apparent that the only way Aimee’s Tuesday writers’ group would survive is if the members started writing something new. Something interesting. Half the women dropped out.
The remaining club members put their minds to creating something fascinating to read out loud to their friends, but time was short and their complaints too similar. Even Aimee started to get bored with all the flowery haikus about blah, blah, blah and the epistles to the extreme tedium and unfairness of completing an advance degree in the arts only to discover rent and food are indefatigable ways of expressing money. When the Tuesday writers’ group looked like it was about to fall apart, Aimee suggested they spend a few sessions focusing on erotic writing. When Lux dubbed the venture The Tuesday Erotica Club, five of the remaining women dropped out immediately. Seven said they would come and three— Lux, Aimee and Brooke—actually showed up. Margot Hillsboro’s sudden, unexpected arrival made four.
“I mean,” Margot said as she closed the door and chose a good seat at the conference room table, “I assumed your writers’ group was open to anyone.”
If Margot was embarrassed, she did not show it. Aimee liked that.
“Did you come to listen? Or did you write something?”
“Oh, I’ve written something. Something erotic. And I definitely want to read it,” said Margot in the cool clear voice that made her ideas seem terribly important. A voice that had served her very well through law school, that rang out in meetings above the slushy baritones of her arguing male colleagues. “You’re wrong,” she would say boldly in dulcet tones. They had heeded Margot’s advice often enough to raise her up to the position of Senior Counsel at the law firm of Warwick & Warwick, LLP.
At fifty, Margot was fit and strong and wore expensive dresses two sizes smaller than the cheap cotton ones she had worn when attending high school in a small cornfarming town in the Midwest. Like Lux, Margot dyed her hair and sprayed it. Both wom
en wore foundation and pressed powder and mascara; however, the final effects were completely different. Maybe it was the quality of beauty products each woman had access to. Margot paid thousands of dollars a year to have her hair dyed the exact color that grew naturally out of Lux’s head. Overcompensating for her sense of invisibility, Lux hung her head over the kitchen sink and dumped in a bottle of $7.95 goo that turned both the sink and her pretty auburn hair the color of a bright copper penny. Or maybe it was the quantity of products used that made the two women appear so different. Margot used hairspray to gently keep her tresses in place while Lux unintentionally created a hairstyle that could protect her skull from rupturing in the event of a head-on collision.
Like Lux, Margot Hillsboro had not been invited to join Aimee’s literary club. Margot was a lawyer and Aimee a paralegal. Margot, therefore, flew above Aimee’s friendship radar. Lux Fitzpatrick, as a secretary, had not been invited because she was beneath Aimee’s interest. Everything about Lux annoyed Aimee, starting with her name.
Lux Kerchew Fitzpatrick was to have been called Ellen Nancy, after her mother and paternal grandmother, respectively, but Mr. Fitzpatrick was really high the night his only daughter was born, so he named her “Lux,” because he liked the way the word rolled around in his mouth and “Kerchew” like a sneeze because it made him laugh. He did not consider the fact that “Lux” rhymes with, among other things, “trucks” and might someday be a burden for a pretty young girl. Her mother was not amused by the name, but changing it meant a trip into the city, a trip that was often planned but never executed. By the time Lux was out of diapers the name had stuck and couldn’t be scrubbed out.
Once, on a school field trip when she was fourteen, she met an older gentleman who told her that her name meant “light” in Latin. She was pleased with the information until that same gentleman started showing up at her school, claiming to be her husband. He was quickly recaptured and returned to the ward from which he had escaped. Alone, Lux could not figure out how to confirm whether he was lying or telling the truth about her name. The people who loved her told her to forget about it, that names weren’t important. The event planted a lovely seed of thought deep inside her. The idea that words had meaning lay dormant inside Lux, waiting for some sliver of sunshine to set it growing.
“I’m joining your, you know, writing thing,” Lux had announced one Tuesday at lunch. When she plopped down at the head of the table in the conference room, her purple miniskirt rode up to reveal a tear high up on her blue and fuchsia striped stocking, hastily patched with a blob of clear nail polish to prevent a deeper run down the leg.
Oh, no you’re not, Aimee wanted to say. Get your cheap, too-tight, purple suede skirt out of that chair and march it back to your secretarial station right now. This lunch hour is for me.
If she had said those words out loud it might have made Lux’s lower lip quiver, might have made Lux slink tearfully out of the room. Or it might not have. Lux might have told Aimee to fuck herself and remained in her chair, but Aimee would never know because Aimee did not have the courage or strength to confront Lux and order her out of the club.
And so Lux, with her scribbled-upon, handwritten manuscripts, manuscripts that actually spelled out all the “likes” and “you knows” that peppered her normal speech, became a member of Aimee’s writers’ group. After Lux’s first literary presentation (something about a dead cat that had been run over by her boyfriend’s motorcycle) a new rule circulated to everyone except Lux via company email that read, “no laughing at the submissions, no matter how stupid Lux sounds.” When the club whittled down to only three members, Aimee might have been grateful for Lux’s dogged appearance, if only to make up the numbers. She wasn’t. The close proximity to Lux’s raw youth and ignorance grew more annoying every week.
Margot Hillsboro heard of Aimee’s club through office gossip and quickly forgot about it until she saw the women file into the conference room holding manuscripts and emerge a lunch hour later with hugs and a few tears. I’d like a little bit of that, thought Margot. I can write, she told herself. I’ve made a very successful career of expressing my ideas and arguments on paper. Surely I can write something interesting and new. Margot wracked her brain looking for some thread that she could pull to unravel her great genius to the women in the writers’ club. If she could just imagine some deeply tragic and personal story, she too could be on the receiving end of some of the warmth and congeniality that would seep out of the conference room every Tuesday after lunch. She was still waiting for the story to find her when Aimee’s Tuesday writers’ group took its erotic turn.
Suddenly inspired, the whole fantasy spilled out of her pen with Margot just transcribing it. And then, manuscript in hand, she walked boldly—Margot only knew how to walk boldly—into the conference room, interrupted Lux’s recitation, sat down and joined up without actually being invited to do so.
“You wanna go after me cuz I’m almost done,” Lux said and then put her nose back into her own smudgy, smutty opus.
“Yes, if that works for everyone,” Margot responded politely.
“And then, ok then when he comes, it’s like this joyful, grunting noise,” Lux continued reading her piece.
“A joyful, grunting noise,” Brooke said, turning the phrase over in her mouth, judging the literary and physical quality of it. Lux eyeballed her suspiciously and then continued.
“And then that noise is big, right and then it, I mean his coming noise, it like kind of shakes the whole room. And this girl, right, she’s like kind of totally digging the way he’s making noise, right, cuz she knows he knows the neighbors can hear, ok, right, ha! ha! And then it is over. The End.”
Lux folded her story in half and promptly sat down.
“I’m sorry? That’s it?” Brooke asked shaking her head as if she didn’t understand.
“That’s it,” Lux said. “The end, I said it, the end. You going deaf or something?”
“Yep, that’s it. That’s the end. Anyone else have anything to read? Margot, you ready to go?” Aimee said quickly, ready to push on, push away from Lux and her oozing sores.
“Did you actually write ha! ha! in your story? Or was it an editorial part of the performance?” Margot politely inquired.
Lux swiveled around in her chair and looked at Margot, trying to figure out if she meant something rude by the question. Margot had a slight smile and an open face, and after a moment, Lux decided the coast was clear.
“I wrote out the ha! ha! s,” Lux admitted.
“There you have it,” Aimee pressed on. “Thanks Lux. Anyone else have something to read?”
“Hang on. I think I missed something in your piece,” Brooke said to Lux.
“Like what?” asked Lux, trying not to sound as defensive as she felt. She had pushed her way into this room for a reason. If she kept hitting back every time she believed herself attacked, she would not get the thing she wanted from these women.
“She didn’t come,” said Brooke.
“She doesn’t.”
“Why?”
“She just doesn’t.”
The older woman looked sympathetically down on Lux, so young, so pretty, so stupid.
“Your character is frigid?” asked Brooke, her perfect blonde bob waving gently as she shook her head in disbelief.
“Hell no! It’s just not part of the story. It’s not in like the author’s vision, ok.”
Lux started folding her manuscript again. When it was a tiny, little box that could not be folded another time, she stuffed it in her orange, fringed handbag.
“Ok,” said Brooke. “But I think in your story the girl should come too. I’m just saying it would make a better story. In the first place there’s all the feminist implications, but also it’s more balanced that way. I mean, if you consider the architecture of the piece.”
“She doesn’t come,” Lux insisted.
“Why?”
“Because there are things in sex that are more important
than sex,” Lux said. And that was all she was going to say about it.
Brooke looked at Lux for a long time. She took a long cool sip of what Lux said and washed it around in her mouth, savoring the flavor of the thought and considering the woman who had said it. Brooke had been a debutante in New York, Palm Beach, and, for reasons she could not comprehend, Geneva, Switzerland. All those white dresses bored her. Brooke loved color. Brooke’s mother considered her a pathetic failure because she had chosen a career as a painter over a well-matched marriage proposal.
Lux squirmed under Brooke’s gaze. She didn’t like being looked at like that. Although there was something delightful about it, there was something frightening in it too. She wanted to say “fuck” or do something stupid to make Brooke think she was less than she was, to make her stop looking. Lux pushed away from the conference room table and scribbled a set of entries in her notebook, which read:
architecture of the piece—What the fuck is that?
Brooke a dyke?
Don’t write no more ha! ha!—why?
Lux’s ears were turning red as she scribbled. Anger? Shame? Aimee hoped it didn’t explode out on the conference room table.
This is why, Aimee told herself, I didn’t invite any secretaries into the club. They can’t handle emotion. They have no sense of humor or irony. Aimee needed deep, intelligent emotions and personal interaction to live, but she needed them from a safe distance. Safety and distance, to her, was what art added to make pain beautiful. At the moment, she deemed it best to take the focus off Lux and move on.
“Margot, you look like you have a burning need to share with the group. Would you like to do so now before you burst?”
“Actually I would. I’m Margot Hillsboro. I work mostly with Corporate and sometimes Contracts, although I started out in Trusts and Estates.”
“I’m Brooke, one of the supervisors in Word Processing.”
“Yeah, yeah, we all know who we are,” said Aimee dismissively. She had become a paralegal after admitting to herself she was never going to make enough money as a photographer. Brooke, an old friend from art school, helped her get the job at Warwick. As a supervisor, Brooke sat at a big desk in front of all the word processors’ tiny desks and solved their problems with the computer programs or the attorneys or their work schedules.
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