As a paralegal, Aimee’s job was very similar to that of a first-year attorney, except she got paid a fraction of the salary and had little possibility of advancement. Brooke worked part-time to augment her trust fund. This allowed her to accept last-minute invitations to parties in far away places such as Bali or Romania. Aimee worked full-time so she could eat and pay rent.
“Right. Um, I zipped this together this morning before the gym. It’s just a little fantasy I’ve been having again, and again, and again,” Margot said. She took out her manuscript and read the first perfectly typed sentence.
“There was something about his furniture that made her want to take her clothes off.”
Of all the members of the nascent Tuesday Erotica Club, Margot was the best paid, bringing home a check of little less than a quarter of a million dollars a year on a 60 to 80 hour workweek. She had no dependants and was addicted to shopping. Approaching menopause she saw that there was a cliff at the end of her autobahn, a great falling off. What would she do when she no longer went to work? She was not a partner at Warwick & Warwick, did not own any piece of the business she had helped to build, and therefore she could not own or control one hundred percent of her life. At some time in the not yet visible future they were going to ask her to stop coming into work.
“You’ll do the same thing you do on the weekends,” her mother had advised her. “You’ll stop working and life will be a constant weekend.”
Margot worked through most of the weekends of her life. In her free time she looked for clothes to wear to work. Even on vacations or quick trips with a lover there was always her briefcase full of necessary distractions that she could climb into when things got dull or disappointing. The briefcase was a magic bag out of which she drew respect, a sense of self and purpose, as well as a $4,000-a-month apartment, a killer wardrobe, interesting travel, and a very good facelift. She met her lovers through her briefcase. (Opposing counsel was exceptionally delicious after the deal was closed.) The intermittent months without blood between her legs reminded her that all things do eventually slow down. The thought emblazoned a new series of entries on her to do list in a bold font much larger than all the others, which read:
Find a hobby/lover.
Try to sit quietly.
Get better friends.
This nagging little sex fantasy, which had been stuck on replay in her mind, the one that was clogging up other thoughts and popping up at inopportune moments became her first attempt to access new friends. She figured writing about it could kill two birds with one stone. A little private literary session with some new girlfriends would surely exorcise this fantasy for good. She was wrong.
“It stood in the corner of his kitchen,” Margot began reading, “a large, fine, mahogany, Louis XIV china cabinet of exquisite craftsmanship, filled with Baccarat crystal and Limoges porcelain.”
Lux put down her nail file.
“She’d seen it at several late-night dinner meetings that had evolved into drinks and playful banter. And while they discussed last quarter’s earnings, or bridge, she often felt distracted by her own mind as it wandered over to that big piece and wondered how it would feel to have her naked ass pressed up against it.”
Confused looks were traveling around the room where there should have been only an interested silence. Was her erotic obsession with furniture too freaky for them? She hadn’t even gotten to the freaky part, the part where she actually hoisted her buttocks onto the protruding ledge so Trevor could make love to her. Did they not believe her old ass could fit on the ledge of a china cabinet? Or was it just too much for them? If they were so prudish, why bother making it erotic? Margot folded the carefully typed index cards into her lap. She looked up to see that Lux was staring at her.
“It’s ok?” asked Margot. “I don’t want to offend.”
“It’s perfect,” Brooke said. “Keep reading.”
Margot looked around the room. All eyes were upon her. They were waiting, even eager to hear the rest of her story. Margot jumped in.
“His kitchen was a marvel of architecture and he, a master chef. One night after pâté and champagne she threw caution to the wind and her brassiere on the floor as she walked naked across the tiles and into his waiting arms.”
As she listened to Margot’s unfolding tale of sex on a precariously balanced piece of antique furniture, Lux wondered if Margot had ever been to Trevor’s apartment.
2. The Belly
THE BELLY WAS GETTING in the way more and more every day. Aimee, seven months pregnant, held the door to her downtown loft open with her knee while balancing a pair of shopping bags on one arm and, at the same time, tried to pull the key out of the lock. It would not budge. It wasn’t even hot. There was no reason the key should so love the lock that it would not release it. Aimee tugged. She wiggled. She swore. She called his name.
“Honey, come help me,” she begged. His photography, stunning large-format, archival-quality prints, called back to her saying ‘he’s not here. Honey.’ In the end she put the grocery bags down and with two hands, slowly worked the key free from the lock. Then she flopped on the bed and cried.
Even when the sobs subsided she couldn’t get comfortable. Lying on her belly pushed acid up her esophagus until it burned the back of her throat. When she lay on her back the tears ran into her ears and the snot ran down the back of her throat until it met the acid from her esophagus. The snot should cancel out the acid, she told herself, but it just strangled her. Lying on one side crushed some nerve while lying on the other side made her feet go numb. In the end she sat down in a straight back chair at the kitchen table, rested her head in her arms and cried. No one interrupted her. Hunger and curiosity finally dried up the tears. Why wasn’t he home tonight?
No note on the fridge. No email on her computer. Her side of the answering machine had only one message and it wasn’t from him. His side had fifteen messages. Should she eavesdrop? Would there be some giggling voice recorded on his side of their machine that Aimee could filter through her fears to discover his infidelity? Aimee untwisted the black ringlet of hair she had wrapped around her finger then hit the button on his side of the machine.
Beep. A message to say that one job was cancelled. Another postponed. Look in the paper. There’s a writeup of your last show in Philly. Can you go back to Tokyo next month? It’s worth five grand a week. The repairs on your zoom lens are done. Come pick it up. I can’t be home tonight, honey. I’m working late.
“Idiot,” she said out loud. “You left a message for me on your side of the answering machine, you jerk. How was I supposed to hear it?”
And yet she’d gotten it. Maybe he could be random because he knew she would dutifully explore all possible locations until she found an explanation for his absence. Absences.
Aimee pushed her hair out of her eyes and hugged her suddenly double-D-cup breasts closer to her body. It wasn’t just the belly growing anymore. The hair had also exploded in a rage of growth, spilling curls into her eyes just weeks after she’d had it cut. And then there were those breasts. Aimee had been pleased when her 32A bra got tight. She’d been thin and flat-chested most of her life. It was kind of cool to have B-cup breasts. Then, one morning at work she thought she was having some kind of an asthma attack. She was sitting at her desk, reviewing a contract for an attorney when suddenly she simply could not breathe. It was like there was a rubber band across her chest, suffocating her. She feared for the life of her baby and rushed off to see a doctor.
The cabdriver looked terrified when Aimee breathed the words “emergency room” through the acrylic partition, and he raced as fast as he could. The nurse rushed her into an examination room. Aimee removed her blouse and the intern immediately noticed the deep cuts across her back and shoulders. As soon as he snipped off her size 34B bondage, Aimee gasped air once more, filling her lungs to capacity for the first time that day.
“Did you eat a lot of salt today?” the intern asked. “Pastrami,” Aimee had gasped.<
br />
“It’ll make you swell. All over.”
Aimee looked at the broken, lacy bra in her hands. “First baby?”
“Yes.”
But not the first pregnancy. There had been a miscarriage. And the abortion. Abortions. Not yet, not yet, he’d said. I need three, no, four, no, five years and then I’ll be ready, he’d said. And she agreed with him, while at the same time sometimes letting herself get off schedule with the pills. And then she would panic because he had panicked, and she would agree that right now a baby would ruin their lives. After seven years she and her body just had enough of it.
“I’m going off the pill,” she told him and then said it again to make sure he heard. He said ok and they didn’t discuss it any further.
He figured that after a decade of artificial hormones, Aimee would need at least two months to be fertile again. She thought it would be closer to four. Both were wrong. Aimee’s body was ready within two weeks.
Her period came like clockwork for the first three months of the pregnancy. Thinner, but red and definite in its arrival. Then another month passed as Aimee waited to see if this first missed period was just stress. After three sticks of positive pregnancy tests were tossed into the incinerator, she needed a little more time to find the strength to tell him. When she finally did, he flipped so she flipped but the doctor stood quite firm. He would not abort a five-month-old fetus.
Aimee rejoiced and he sulked.
“Our careers!” he shouted at her. “What will this do to our careers?”
But it had been a long time since Aimee had a career. She had a job and an expensive hobby in which she was highly skilled. She found herself at forty years old unwilling to sacrifice her last chance at motherhood for some filament of a career in photography.
When she told him her decision he broke down and sobbed. There was a moment of sorrow and guilt that turned to stony disgust as his sobs grew too big, too dramatic, too manipulative.
“What have you done!” he cried and turned crocodile on her. Tears flowed as he rested his head at a tragic angle on the doorway of their bedroom and watched her pack. She slammed her suitcase shut and walked to the elevator. Ohmygod, ohmygod, ohmygod she kept telling herself as the elevator descended. Where will I go? What will I do? How will I live? Scarlett O’Hara echoed in her head as she descended past the fourth, third, second floor. Her heart pounded, not with fear but with a sense of her narrow escape from him. She stood in the lobby of their building wondering where she could go to get away from his relentless disappointment in the joy that was growing within her.
In a small room at the Chelsea Hotel, Aimee stood naked in front of a poorly lit mirror and marveled at her belly. And then a little goblin of fear and loneliness peeked out at her from around the beveled edges. Could she afford to be a single mother? Was she strong enough to do this thing alone? In the middle of her large and painful panic attack, he tracked her down and begged her to come back to him, baby and all. His phone call slew the goblin. It was just bad timing.
“I miss you too,” she admitted.
“I can’t live without you. You’re everything to me. If you want this baby, you can have it. I love you. Please come home, Aimee.”
He checked her out and paid the bill and carried her suitcase to the cab. When they got back to their loft, he opened the door and carried her over the threshold. He tucked her suitcase into the space between the nightstand and the wall. He kissed her cheek. And then he disappeared.
Not suddenly. Gradually he worked longer hours, took more jobs out of town, traveled to Tokyo so often he broached the subject of purchasing an apartment there. He said this impending fatherhood-thing was forcing him to take his career more seriously. They needed security now. And cash. After years of dryly criticizing friends and colleagues for selling out to commercial photography, he dove head first into the money pool and found the waters surprisingly pleasant and a bit intoxicating. A photographer had to take jobs while he was hot, he told her as he submerged again. It could all end tomorrow, then where would they be?
Aimee stood at the enormous windows of the loft, remnants of the day their home had been an industrial space, and looked down at the city. Directly behind her, their work hung on the wall: the only two prints left over from their last year at school in Chicago when they’d shared a group show with their classmates. The big print was his and the smaller one hers.
He had big ideas. She did too, but he presented his big ideas in five-foot by seven-foot prints. She helped him pay for the paper, helped him process the huge prints. Her work was equally good, but she presented it on paper that was eleven inches wide and fourteen inches tall. She got an A in the course, and he got an agent.
She stood in front of the one print of his that had not been sold, a five feet wide by seven feet high vagina only slightly obscured by the finger inserted into it. A discerning patron of the arts would have to observe the piece for a minute or two before the angle and scale allowed the viewer to recognize which pieces of human anatomy were interacting in the photograph. There had been respectable offers but he’d refused to sell it, telling anyone who asked that Aimee was the model and he could never sell Aimee’s pussy.
When the photo was taken, Aimee was wearing torn blue jeans and a T-shirt. She was standing just left of the pussy, holding a reflector board that bounced the perfect light onto the subject. How anyone could believe that this vagina, with its pale and barely curled pubic hair, could be Aimee’s was beyond her. This was clearly an Anglo-Saxon vagina. All of Aimee’s follicles produced corkscrew curls of various intensity. Aimee had many things, but an Anglo-Saxon vagina was not among her attributes.
What have I done to us, Aimee thought as she wandered around the loft, looking at the pictures, stopping in front of her own nude, same model shot in the same studio but with more of a holistic approach to the image. And, of course, not five feet wide by seven goddamned feet high. I was good, she thought. I was just as good as he was. Why did I give up? Staring at the walls, she knew why.
Aimee could never compete with a five by seven vagina. She could never be that bold with her work. She could never bring herself to spend the thousands of dollars that he had borrowed and spent to produce fifteen huge nudes. She had been unable to take such a large amount of resources for her own ends. What if I fail, she asked before every attempt. The thought of failure made her nauseous. The inability to consume and digest risk decimated her creativity.
He, on the other hand, could eat risk and shit failure all over the place. He had no problem asking her, his parents, and her parents if he could borrow the money necessary to produce those first fifteen magnificent prints. Standing in front of the image that had jumpstarted his career, it hit her hard like a blow to the chest. He put the work first. Damn everything else and all pretenses of being a good and responsible human being. He was not polite. He was bold and reckless.
He had a career and she had a job.
I could turn it around, Aimee thought. I could be bold. I could take some risks. She sat down at her kitchen table and added up the numbers, a practical action that doomed her from the start. Even with the cost of a nanny, she thought she could probably afford to take a whole year off the job, provided she lived frugally and borrowed a bit from her mother. In a year, she thought, I could certainly produce something to start me on a road to that life I always assumed was waiting for me just the other side of college. The life where I was in charge, where I decided what I would do with my day. She knew from watching him that there was a world where people did not punch in from nine to five (or ten to six-thirty in Aimee’s case), a world where people owned themselves entirely. All I need is to make something amazing, that everyone wants, something beautiful that I can sell.
The air seeped out of Aimee’s plan as specific facts hit it, tearing little holes in the delicate spun fabric of her fantasy. If I get out of the job market I’ll never get back in. If I leave my health-care provider at forty, I might not be able to find
someone to cover me again. I’m no longer one of the swift gazelles at the front of the herd. I’m slow moving tiger-bait, and I need some better defenses than just a pipe dream of how I might reclaim my life. Change is a leap of faith and Aimee demanded proof that the floor still existed before stepping out of bed. It was a fatal error.
She felt like ripping his huge blond vagina right off the wall.
She used to barricade herself in the darkroom when sorrow like this overcame her and make pictures until she felt that she was at least chipping away at a foothold in the life she had hoped for. Even now she had four or five rolls that wanted to be printed. They were calling to her to be considered and sorted and printed into photographs that everyone could see and discuss. Bring us to life, they begged her, but she ignored them. Darkroom chemicals are not good for the belly, so Aimee kept walking around the apartment.
When he said hello I should have walked away. In those early days, though, he had eyes like spotlights that made her feel so special. He had pulled her into the circle of his narcissism where it was sweet and delicious: an addictive, high-calorie, nutrient-free dessert. She should have read the contents and escaped early.
Her first clue was the diamond that he couldn’t afford. He told her she didn’t want it; that she was too serious for those kinds of bullshit, bourgeois symbols of female conquest. She didn’t really want the rock, but those courting dances have their reasons. If he won’t alter his life before the wedding, he’s certainly not going to accommodate you once you’re married. And change is an integral part of the compromise that is marriage. A gleeful couple of hours at city hall comprised their wedding. Then they rushed back to the darkroom to finish the prints for his show. That night when he introduced her as his new wife she did not see that their wedding had been reduced to a good piece of conversation with a gallery patron.
Tuesday Erotica Club Page 2
