Tuesday Erotica Club
Page 4
“I like girlie things,” Trevor said with a smile.
“But you’re not invited,” Lux informed him.
“Fair enough.” Trevor laughed as he held the door open for Margot to rush through and off to her meeting. But Margot did not get up from the table.
“The contracts are all on my desk, Trevor,” Margot said, trying to be cool. “I’ll be there in just a minute.”
“A minute is too late. I need you now. Mrs. Peabody’s a bit, well, ‘rigid’ would be a polite way to describe it. Let’s get this thing signed and done with before she starts to pick at it.”
Margot looked at her friends and sighed. She abandoned the Tuesday writers’ group meeting, ran through the conference room door, raced into her office, grabbed the contracts and then sprinted back to Trevor’s office. She moved with remarkable speed for a woman of fifty, hobbled by a tight pencil skirt and spiked heel pumps.
If I can get this contract signed quickly, Margot thought, maybe I can catch the tail end of Brooke’s story.
Oooo! Tail end! Good pun, she told herself as she stood outside of Trevor’s office and collected herself. Contracts in hand, Margot brushed the image of Enrique and Brooke out of her mind, straightened her blouse and entered Trevor’s office.
Crescentia Peabody and her personal assistant Barbara, both looking like comfy Connecticut housewives, were sipping tea and chatting with Trevor.
“Ah! Here she is,” Trevor said a bit too loudly upon Margot’s entrance.
“Hot off the press!” Margot said gaily, waving the contracts in the air. “The contracts for your Christmas clitoris.”
The clients stared back at her, their matching pinklipsticked mouths each forming a little round “O” of surprise.
“Catalogue, Margot,” Trevor said.
“What?”
“Christmas catalogue.”
“Didn’t I just say that?”
“No, I believe you said ‘clitoris,’” Barbara said.
“Oh, thank goodness,” said Crescentia, “I heard ‘clitoris’ too and I thought for a second that I was hearing wrong, but if you both heard it too, well actually, I’m relieved. I mean that it wasn’t just me.”
“Oh. Well,” said Margot in that cool clear voice. “My apologies. I meant catalogue, not…the other word. Shall we get on with it then?”
4. Housing
LUX RETURNED TO HER desk after the meeting of The Tuesday Erotica Club to find an email from her attorney regarding her fifty percent share of a detached single family home in Queens. Her aunt, a prostitute (or “who-ah” as Lux’s mother, in her Jersey accent, referred to her sister-in-law) had chipped in with another working girl and bought it many years ago when real estate values were so much lower. The two women had quietly used it on the side for well on twenty years. When they retired, they rented it to other who-ahs.
Lux, knowing full well where the diamonds came from, had loved her aunt the who-ah. As Lux was the only blood family member who visited the woman in the hospital, Lux inherited her aunt’s fifty percent share of the house and the rolling rent the house was earning. The rent money was delivered by hand in a white envelope to her attorney’s office on the first of each month. Half went into Lux’s account. In recent years, that account had grown to more than $30,000. Lux never saw the white envelope or the actual money, usually presented in a stack of overused twenty-dollar bills, faded from the touch of too many hands, carefully counted and all facing the same way.
Lux read the email from her attorney quickly and made an immediate decision. The other prostitute was dying and would gladly sell her half of the house for $20,000 provided she could get the money quietly, quickly, and in cash. Was Lux interested?
“Yeah,” Lux typed into the computer. “Will she take a check?”
“No. It’s got to be cash only,” her attorney wrote. “Can you get me the money by Thursday?”
“Yes! Tell her I said thanks.”
“Drinks later?” the attorney had written back. “To celebrate your home ownership?”
“Not tonight,” Lux wrote. “Busy.”
Lux smiled, imagining her aunt’s best and often only friend taking her $20,000 cash and going one last round in Vegas before calling it quits with the world. It was good of her to give Lux the house and Lux would make an effort to do something good back before the old lady left for Vegas and beyond.
Even though it was now all hers, Lux couldn’t live in the house. Her mother would have a major fit if she knew Auntie Who-ah had given it to her and a very different fit if she knew Lux had so much cash at her disposal. Now that the house was one hundred percent hers, Lux planned to clean it up and maybe sell it. Or maybe she’d rent it by the month, instead of by the hour. Maybe she’d even tell her mother about it.
Auntie Who-ah thought Lux’s mother had a tendency to fawn on powerful people and take an untoward interest in controlling the power of others, rather than claim and hold both power and pleasure for herself. Auntie Who-ah did not use this exact language. She told Lux that her mother had a “blow job personality.”
“Yeah, sure,” Auntie Who-ah had told a younger Lux. “When his dick is in your mouth you rule his universe, but what happens when you take it out? And you gotta take it out if you’re gonna ask for anything at all. I mean, anything for yourself. And that, baby girl, is what is commonly called a Catch-22.”
Lux, at Auntie Who-ah’s insistence, had been careful not to cultivate a blow job personality. If she wanted something, she got it for herself.
Lux left her inner city high school unable to spell, understand complex thoughts, or string a sentence together on her own. However, she had attended faithfully and this put her in the top of her graduating class. Her parents expected her to quickly get into the business of having babies, but Lux had access to good birth control and did not like any of the big dogs that wanted to slobber on her face. She scraped the money together to take a college course load that was really just four years of high school crammed into two, minus the obnoxious and destructive kids who had made learning impossible for everyone else. Lux had done well enough to obtain an associate degree. That led to work in Manhattan as a secretary. She was amazed at the paycheck, got a small apartment with friends, and bought lots of clothes. When she inherited her aunt’s house and the rolling rent that came with it, she saw a light at the end of the tunnel.
“Yeah, yeah, you could do that. It’s a good idea,” her aunt’s septuagenarian attorney had wheezed. “Live at your mother’s house. Don’t buy anything that’s not necessary. Save all the money you make. Buy an apartment. Start renting it out and you’ll double your income. You’ll own your own little business. Then you can marry me, I’ll retire, and we’ll have lots of kids. Ah! Ha! Ha!”
They laughed and drank and planned for Lux’s brilliant future. Now Lux worked hard and tucked away all the money, but she did not move back to her mother’s house.
“Trev,” Lux asked, over eggs and orange juice. “When I talk out loud, do I say “and then” a lot?”
“Hadn’t noticed,” Trevor said as he stretched and scratched the broad expanse of his well-muscled, slightly grayed chest. “Anything in there about me?”
Lux slammed the notebook closed. The kitchen in Trevor’s three-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment needed a paint job. Lux had never thought about things like that before. He said the apartment cost him almost nothing because his parents had lived here until his father died and his mother’s Alzheimer’s became too intense. He had been able to hold onto the lease, but because of the low rent it was almost impossible to get the landlord to do anything. Lux was thinking about how low rent on a roomy apartment could make your paycheck feel bigger than it actually was when her eyes fell on the mahogany china cabinet.
“Trevor, that thing in the corner of your living room, the one with all your wife’s glass and crystal stuff inside.”
“The credenza? The one where we…last week after the basketball game?”
He l
ooked up at her over the top of his morning coffee to make sure she was smiling. She was grinning broadly.
“Yeah, that was fun.”
“What about it?” he asked.
“Whadd’ya call that clay stuff inside?”
“The porcelain is Limoges and the crystal is Baccarat.”
“No shit. Have you had it a long time?”
“It was my great grandmother’s.”
“It’s not a particularly rare piece of furniture though, is it?”
“Actually, I think it is.”
“Oh.”
A crinkle of concern passed over his little bunny’s face, worrying him deeply. Was she going to leave him because of his grandmother’s credenza? Lux was young and beautiful and full-spirited. She needed him in a way his ex-wife and their grown children never had. She was wowed by his limited knowledge of the world outside the five boroughs of New York City, by his willingness to take a stab at the Sunday crossword puzzle, and his ability to spell polysyllabic words. He had been to places like Europe, in fact had lived in London for part of his junior year in college. He rented an apartment in Manhattan and had paid to send two children through school all the way to the end of their undergraduate degrees.
Trevor was quite handsome and still strong. She wasn’t crazy about gray hair, but, so far, he had not hit her. She loved that he never put her through unpleasant tests in order to prove her love and devotion to him. He never asked her to ride the A train from Far Rockaway to Harlem wearing a very short skirt and no underwear. In Lux’s eyes, these things made Trevor the supreme silverback, alpha male gorilla, the best boyfriend she had ever had. Trevor did not think he could live without that reflection of himself racing back towards him from her dark green eyes.
The fact that she was the secretary to one of the partners in his firm wove a small ribbon of concern through their relationship. He insisted they keep their affair hushhush. He made up a list of rules for her. The most important rule was never talk about their relationship at the office, not even to make dinner plans. Never enter or leave the office at the same time. Never go out after work together with people from the office. And never, ever bring their relationship into work with them. Lux agreed and their deception added to his excitement. He felt like he was cheating just a little. Lux didn’t mind. He was a secret worth keeping.
“Has that, ah, Margot lawyer from work ever come over here to this apartment?” Lux asked Trevor, trying to be nonchalant about the question.
“Margot? Hillsboro?”
“Yeah.”
“Hundreds of times.”
“Really?”
A passion flared up in Lux. She had to have him right now. She kissed him and pulled open the sash of his terrycloth bathrobe.
“We’ll be late.”
“I know,” she said.
“I can be late but you have to be there by nine.”
“It’ll be fine,” she said.
“If we do this I’ll have to cancel my tennis game and come home after work for a nap,” he said. “And we have theater tickets tonight.”
“I promise it will be better than tennis,” she said as she flicked her pink, sateen robe off her shoulders and stood naked in front of him.
Shazam!
She loved that it only took nudity to get him going. No dancing around, no promises of tricky positions. The moment Trevor saw Lux naked he got an erection. Every time. It was a glorious thing for both of them. She became important, and ten years fell off Trevor’s shoulders.
Hickies were for kids but Lux still wanted to mark Trevor as her property, to protect him against that Margot Hillsboro and her correctly punctuated fantasy about sex on Trevor’s furniture. First there was the preamble of the best oral sex Trevor could remember, like a velvety vacuum cleaner tugging the head of his penis higher and higher, making him feel so strong and important. This was quickly followed by a bump and grind, then penetration so deep and fulfilling tears came to his eyes at the thought that it might stop. When he couldn’t hold on for another minute, Trevor, an apartment dweller all his life, howled as he came and damn the neighbors. The clock ticked 8:45 when she rolled off him. She ran to grab a quick shower, leaving him on the kitchen floor in puddles of sweat, semen, and happiness.
“My wallet, my wallet,” Trevor motioned to his wallet when Lux came back in dressed for work. As he lay on the floor waving feebly to the wallet that lay in his pants across the room, something deep in Lux turned sour and horrified at the gesture. She gave him the wallet with trembling fingers, then turned away as he struggled to one elbow and dug out some cash.
“What?” he said.
“I gotta go,” she answered.
“I know. But here, take a cab, darling, you’re so late as it is.”
Lux looked at the languid outstretched hand urging her to take $20 to pay for the cab.
“I’m cool. Gotta run.”
Lux dashed out the door with an uncomfortable, dirty feeling. Trevor knew he had done something to insult her but couldn’t imagine how his reminder to take a cab could be misconstrued as mean. He didn’t want her to be late for work. He didn’t want her to be unhappy or troubled in anyway. He was crazy for her.
Lux tumbled into the office ten minutes late. They noticed. A disapproving scowl was followed by a brief lecture on dawdling.
“I wasn’t dawdling,” Lux said, knowing that if you defend yourself it just got worse. She should have just smiled a beggar’s smile and kept quiet. But still, the word “dawdle” is best used to describe a distracted child or someone who can’t seem to focus on the goals at hand, and Lux was definitely not dawdling this morning. Of course, the truth, “I was fucking Trevor’s brains out on the floor of his kitchen so he would be too tired to look at other women,” was not appropriate either.
While the lecture rolled off her back, she thought about the way she’d raced out of Trevor’s apartment, heart pounding, feeling her life was not her own. If the clock ticked to 9 a.m. and Lux was not in her seat, Mr. Warwick behaved as if she was stealing from the firm. His look, as if Lux was something small and dirty under his shoes, created a knot of rage somewhere between Lux’s stomach and her chest. I gotta escape this ownership, Lux told herself. I gotta belong to me and just me. I’m gonna make a ton of money and buy myself back from all this.
The lecture flowed on. Lux was an ok secretary. It’s true she couldn’t spell and had no sense of grammar, but she was substantially cheaper than the perfect automaton who had retired with a good company pension after thirty years of service. Lux would probably move on or be fired before she became vested. With an eye on the bottom line, Mr. Warwick jumped into the twenty-first century and learned to type his own emails. Any substantial documents were sent down to Brooke in Word Processing. Word processing and copyediting were billable to the client; a secretary’s salary was not. Lux did his filing, kept his schedule, answered his phones, and occasionally picked up things like lunch, dry cleaning, or theater tickets for him. It paid really well compared to what Lux originally expected to get out of life, and right now collecting money was the key to the kingdom. As the lecture receded, Lux settled into her desk and flicked on her computer.
“Can I take you shopping at lunch?” came an instant message from Trevor.
“Can’t today, baby. How about Saturday?”
Today at lunch Lux had to go to the bank, withdraw $20,000 and deliver it in person to her lawyer. When she handed him the money, he would present her with the full deed to the house in Queens. Lux wrote a checklist of everything that would happen to the house after this afternoon’s transaction. It looked like this:
1.) Get rid of the girls.
2.) Fix it.
3.) Sell it.
Those girls could get ugly so she would tell them that the house was being painted—something it desperately needed. After painting there would be plumbing and roofing to keep them out of it. Lux would schedule the work to go slowly, giving the girls plenty of time to find other, better
places to ply their trade. Lux would have the landscaping redone and all the crappy old furniture hauled off to the dump. Then, with absolutely no money left in the bank, Lux would sell it. From her own obsessive perusal of the real estate sections, she figured she could get serious money for the house. Cash down, that house could translate to a decent Manhattan apartment with a small enough mortgage and maintenance compared to the income it could generate. Lux was about to acquire her first major asset.
I’m on the road from slavery to freedom right now, Lux thought.
After the big brouhaha of being late, there was nothing to do at the office that morning. If she owned herself, Lux would be able to put her head down on her desk and catch a little nap, but she didn’t. In spite of the fact that there was nothing to do, Lux needed to look busy. She pulled out a notebook and started to write.
Making love to him on the kitchen floor was like, it was like something good. It was like feeling, ok, the girl was feeling like she was all chained up ok, and then, she broke all the chains, ok, and then she flew up into the air, ok and then she inflated like a, like a big balloon, ok and then…
Lux stopped writing and chewed on the tip of her pen while she reread her work.
“It’s stupid,” Lux said out loud and then looked quickly around to make sure no one had heard her. She crossed out all the oks and the likes and then read it back to herself. Still stupid. Sex this morning with Trevor was not like balloons or breaking chains. He was just the best man she’d ever had.
He was the best man she had ever had, Lux wrote on a clean sheet of notebook paper. Ok, I believe that, she told herself. Now, why is it true? Go on girl, make a list.
He was strong and he was gentle, Lux added to the paragraph, and he saw all the things that were right and wrong about her all in the same breath and time, and from the very first time she touched him, right, she knew it was right, ok, and it was forever. With him there was no fear. And her old friends would laugh at her, right, because he was an old guy but I don’t care. I really like him and what he can teach me.