Margot started to wiggle and shake and tug the girdle off her breasts. The right boob popped out like a rounded hunk of Styrofoam bobbing up to the surface of a lake. Struggling to free the left mammary, she started to slip off the toilet, the spikes of her shoes unable to balance on the curve of the toilet seat cover. As her legs flew out from underneath her, the left breast popped out, sporting red ribs where the spandex had dug in. Margot cried out when her tailbone, unprotected by fat, hit hard on the seat.
“You ok in there?” a girl’s cheerful voice cried out from the bride’s room.
“Fine!” Margot called back as she locked both the doors into the room. Sitting was better anyway. She could slide the rest of her bondage down her body. The waist rolled off easily and, although the tush required a bit of bump and grind, it was Margot’s feet that clung hardest to the girdle. It finally came off, turned totally inside out with both her shoes trapped inside it.
Breathing and sitting comfortably for the first time all night, Margot smiled. She snatched her dress off the floor and flung it over her head, glad of the tousle it made of her hair. No more hair spray, Margot told herself. Let it fly and be free. Margot reapplied her lipstick and put on her shoes. She was ready to get out there, sit down and have a good time. She stepped back onto the toilet to look at the full effect of her transformation and began to weep.
14. Phone Sex
“‘SO, WHAT ARE YOU wearing?’ David asks.
‘Nothing,’ Grace says even though she has on jeans and a T-shirt.
On the couch, Grace reaches down the front of her jeans.
‘So? What are you doing to me now?’ she wants to know.
‘I’m pulling your body into mine, and I’m tracing my hand along your inner thigh. Do you like it?’ he asks
‘I love it. Tell me about my breasts,’ Grace says.”
“I thought the group decided to move away from erotica and was writing about technology,” Aimee interrupted.
“It is about technology,” Brooke answered, looking up from her manuscript.
“How is it about technology?”
“They’re having sex on the phone.”
“Oh. I get it. I didn’t get that, Brooke. You have to make it clearer in the first paragraph or I’m just confused,” Margot said.
“Confused? Really? About what?”
“Well, I’m wondering why he’s not touching her,” Margot said.
“Didn’t I make that clear?” Brooke asked.
“Not to me. Aimee, did you get that it was phone sex?”
“No. Not at the beginning,” Aimee agreed, although that wasn’t the point she was trying to make.
“I mean,” Margot continued, “I thought it might be something, some barrier between them, because he was touching his penis and she was looking out the window.”
“Actually,” Aimee said, “I liked that part.”
“He’s holding his penis and she’s looking out the window doesn’t just scream phone sex?” Brooke asked.
“Nope. Not for me,” Margot said.
“I thought when he said, ‘What are you wearing,’ that it was such a classic phone sex line that the situation was understood,” Brooke said.
“Oh yeah, that’s a phone sex line,” Margot said, thinking about it. “But you know, Aimee and I still both missed it, so maybe it’s not enough of a clue. I think we would enjoy the whole piece more if the phone sex thing was clear from the beginning. Although I like the idea of burning desire at odds with physical limitations yet they manage to get themselves off with what they have at hand, no pun intended.”
“I guess I could spell it out.”
“I think you should.”
“Can you really get off on phone sex?” Aimee asked, wondering if there was some possibility of reaching across her belly and the miles to Tokyo. Sex had held them together through poverty; maybe sex could work its magic against his sudden prosperity.
“Yeah. I mean it’s not the best. I suggested phone sex to this guy I had in Paris and he answered ‘ma sex n’est pas si long,’ or roughly translated, ‘my penis isn’t long enough,’ you know I mean to cross the Atlantic. It was funny at the time. Why is everyone so quiet?”
Lux did not stand apologetically at the door and wait to be invited in. She opened the conference room door, entered, and sat down.
“Sorry I’m late.”
They had not spoken to Lux since the hair-pulling episode. She called in sick the Tuesday prior (and had, in fact, been looking very run-down and tired lately). She never did show up for the wedding, according to Brooke, who had stayed drinking and dancing as late as the synagogue would allow. Aimee had grown tired and split around 11 p.m. Margot disappeared before dinner.
Lux sat down at the conference table and took out her notebook and a pencil.
“Good to see you,” Brooke said.
Aimee glared at Brooke. Aimee had said she didn’t want Lux in the writers’ group anymore. She thought it was too dangerous. Lux was too dangerous. Lux didn’t know how to behave. And so they decided to stop inviting Lux. They would continue to meet, but not tell Lux when and where. And yet, here was Lux taking her place at the head of the table. Brooke looked very pleased.
“Um,” Lux said, “thanks. I, ah, haven’t had a chance to write anything cuz I’ve been busy with something and Brooke said you’d switched to writing about technology so I’m gonna have to think about that for a while but I, you know, I’m gonna listen if that’s ok.”
“Why didn’t you come to the wedding?” Brooke asked Lux.
“What wedding?” Lux replied, looking at them blankly.
“Saturday night. Teddy’s wedding,” Brooke pressed.
“I don’t know anyone named Teddy.”
“Trevor’s son, Teddy,” Margot said it a little too loud, as if Lux should know. And a second later Lux understood. Trevor had a son named Teddy and Teddy had gotten married over the weekend and everyone in the room, except Lux, had been invited.
“Oh right, Teddy,” Lux said with unusual composure. “Why would I be invited to Teddy’s wedding?”
Well you’re fucking his dad, aren’t you, was the thought Margot did not share with the group.
“Don’t feel bad,” Aimee said.
“Why should I feel bad?”
“I mean, it’s just the way it goes.” Aimee kept talking even though she had nothing to add.
“Just the way what goes?”
“Just the way men are,” Aimee said flatly, although the words were thick with meaning. Lux wondered if Aimee was doing that thing called “irony” that she’d been reading about. Irony was a tricky thing, and Lux was struggling to understand it.
“Ok, so who’s presenting today?” Lux said, also flat, but devoid of irony. She just wanted to get on with it.
“Brooke,” Margot informed her. “Something about Grace and David and they’re about to have sex.”
“I thought we moved on to technology,” Lux said.
“Phone sex,” Margot and Brooke said at the same time.
“Ok, I’m just not quite ready to give up the previous topic,” Brooke said defensively.
“It’s all right by me,” Lux said.
“You’re barely a human being.”
Aimee said it and, although it seemed like a non sequitur to the rest of the women, it flowed perfectly from the line of thoughts in Aimee’s head that went from (a) she doesn’t belong here, to (b) she never once apologized for what she did to me, to (c) Trevor’s fucking her but didn’t invite her to his son’s wedding and she doesn’t even care.
Lux sighed. She looked out the window and wondered if this writers’ group, which had been so full of promise, was going to fall apart or become a stupid waste of time, just like everything else. Aimee’s furious comment bounced off Lux because Lux did not doubt that she was, in fact, a human being. She immediately understood that Aimee hated her (but who cares), wanted her to leave the room (which she would do when she was good and ready), a
nd that there was no danger of physical violence. That meant, to Lux, that she could do as she pleased. So Lux sat in her chair and stared blankly at Aimee, waiting for her to say something interesting, something that had meaning.
“You’re an idiot!” Aimee started. “How can you let him use you like that? How can you have so little concern for yourself, for your body. He’s just using you for sex.”
“You think?” Lux said laughing. Of course Trevor wanted her for sex. Every man she’d ever known wanted her for sex. What did Aimee think she and Trevor were doing together? Washing windows? And suddenly the ball dropped for her, but on another subject entirely. Is this what was meant by irony?
“No, I think he loves you,” Aimee answered, using irony too subtle for Lux to understand. “Yeah. I think he’s so lonely after his divorce that all he wants is to get married again and you’re the perfect wife number two because you’re so young and beautiful and full of life. You can give him that second family that he’s longed for now that his children are grown up and out of the nest. He loves you because you’re so special, Lux, and all he wants is to make you his very own.”
Lux’s blood ran a little cold at the very thought of it. Belonging to someone was slavery as far as Lux knew, and she was doing everything possible to own herself. Just yesterday morning Trevor had grilled her about where she’d been all weekend, wanting to come help her take care of her sick but fictional friend. He wanted to know why she was so tired when she came back to him on Sunday night, who she’d been with, what she’d done.
“Aimee,” Brooke said, cautioning her old friend against pushing Lux too hard.
“Yeah, that’s enough. Let’s call it. Maybe we’ll get together again next week,” Margot said.
“I’m sorry,” Aimee reflected. “I’m just being honest. So the poor girl doesn’t waste her time.”
Margot, planning a quick exit, gathered up her things. She didn’t want to look at anyone so she kept her eyes glued to the table where they raced over Lux’s open notebook. There she saw a list of words written in Lux’s childish scrawl:
Louis the 14th— some french king
pat-ay—some kind of food? or drink???
To throw caution to the wind—not giving a fuck
brazeer—a fancy word for bra
la-siv-ee-us—(sexy? dirty?)
Ha! thought Margot, she’s using us for vocabulary insights. She’ll never find the meanings of those words until she learns how to spell them. Someone should help her with the spelling.
Aimee pushed passed Margot on her way out the door, leaving Brooke and Lux alone in the conference room. Brooke smiled at Lux.
“Sorry,” Brooke said. “She’ll get over it. I’ll have a talk with her.”
“Forget about it. It’s not important.”
“Yes, it is.”
“What? That some girl don’t like me? I got my own road.”
Brooke looked at Lux and decided to do whatever she could to become Lux’s friend. Not because she thought she could help Lux, but because Lux was so damn interesting. Because Brooke visualized everything in the world as graphics that might lead to paintings, she imagined Lux’s naked body in the lower right-hand corner of a large canvas, her skin glowing against the long red ribbons of stories that flowed freely and luxuriously from her head, becoming everything else in the painting, from the red couch that she reclined on to the roses in a glass vase on a table.
“You, ah,” Lux started, “do you want to read your thing to me?”
“Nah.” Brooke sighed. “The mood’s gone.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry about Aimee,” Brooke said.
“Yeah, whatever. I crashed her club, her personal art party and she’s pissed. Whatever, I needed to hear the words.”
“Our words?”
“The stories.”
“Why don’t you just read a book?” Brooke asked.
“Cuz books don’t have any mistakes in them. They’re so cleaned up but when, like, when, you know you’re reading and it’s something you just wrote and you’re excited about it and you’re reading it out loud for maybe the first time and the good parts are really good and, let’s say you get to like, a dull part, something you didn’t know was going to be dull, and as you’re reading it you know it just don’t work, and we know that it don’t work and you’re like embarrassed because it’s happening right now and we’re listening and wow, there’s like all this drama going on in the room, and that…”
Lux stopped speaking so she could think for a minute.
“I need that drama,” she continued. “I like it. I need that kind of contact and human stuff to live. And I don’t care if you guys don’t like me. It’s not like you’re gonna break my fingers or anything.”
Brooke laughed at the absurdity of breaking Lux’s fingers.
“No,” Brooke agreed, “your fingers are safe with us.”
“Yeah. Well. Thanks. I gotta go. If the club meets next week I’m gonna be here and fuck Aimee. And I mean that last part metaphorical, not literal.”
“Metaphorically. Literally. They’re adverbs, not adjectives. They describe how you mean, or rather how you don’t mean to fuck Aimee. Respectively.”
Lux opened her notebook and added a new thought about adverbs to her list of discoveries she didn’t fully understand and needed to consider further. She also added the word “respectively.”
“Thanks,” she said, slamming her book shut. Brooke gathered up her things and wanted to ask Lux if she would come model for her. It would mean traveling and giving up several evenings or weekends to sit in the studio. Brooke decided to start out with something kind to make Lux feel good before she invited her to come out to the studio.
“Listen, don’t worry, Lux,” Brooke earnestly said. “You’re a special girl. I’m sure Trevor really loves you very much and he does want you all for his own.”
“You think?” Lux asked, fear replacing irony.
Brooke was trying to be kind and so she warmly said, “Oh yeah, honey, I’m absolutely sure of it.”
The women gathered their things and walked together towards the door. Pulling the handle, Lux swung too hard and it banged against the opposite wall, leaving a deep gouge in the drywall the size of the doorknob.
15. The Shower
“IT WAS JUST SO damn sweet,” Aimee said to Brooke as she waddled out of her apartment building into the warmth of the summer day.
“Honey, don’t think about it,” Brooke said, but Aimee could not stop her brain from rerunning the episode again and again. They stepped onto the street and Brooke slid her sunglasses onto her nose to escape the great, bright, golden sunshine. Aimee fumbled in her purse looking for glasses that would hide the dampness of her eyes. As they walked, Aimee retold the tale.
“I mean, he actually fainted,” Aimee said. “Not right away, but after in the waiting room, and practically at my feet. He said it was because he saw the needle come so close to the baby on the monitor screen and he just panicked. Even though his wife and their baby were perfectly safe.”
“Some husbands are just more, I don’t know, Aimee. All husbands are different. That woman’s husband probably faints a lot.”
“Yes, but not all husbands take a call in the middle of the amniocentesis,” Aimee said as she shoved her sunglasses aside and blew her nose.
“He didn’t!” Brooke said and stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to turn to her friend.
“As the needle was going in,” Aimee admitted.
“What did you do?”
“Well, I started to cry. And he asked me if the needle hurt me! Can you believe it?”
“Did it?”
“What?”
“Hurt?”
“Well, some. I mean it’s a huge, fat needle. But not enough to make you cry.”
“So what did you do?”
“I told him to get the hell off the phone.”
“Did he?”
“He did. ‘I gotta go, Sheila-dar
ling,’ he says. ‘I’ll call you back later.’”
“Who is Sheila-darling?” Brooke asked suspiciously.
“His agent. She’s a tall, older lesbian. Steel gray buzz cut. Horn-rimmed glasses. Barks when she talks. Not that it matters who it was.”
“I’m so sorry, Aimee.”
“I called a divorce lawyer,” Aimee admitted.
“Can you divorce a guy for talking too much on his cell phone?” Brooke asked. And then, “What’d he say?”
“He gave me some idea of what I can expect in terms of child support, alimony.”
“No, I meant, what did your husband say,” Brooke asked.
“My husband got on a plane last night for Ecuador to shoot girls in bikinis. From there he’s going on to Bucharest for a car commercial and then back to Tokyo for more rock bands.”
“Did you tell him you wanted a divorce?” asked Brooke.
Brooke stopped in front of a small, charming Italian café on Cherry Lane. She opened the door and motioned Aimee inside.
“Come on, the party is in the back,” Brooke said.
“I told him I was thinking about it. That I’d had enough and that he had to be here for me during the pregnancy,” Aimee said as she walked to the back of the café, keeping an eye out for pastel streamers and paper cutouts of storks. “So he hands me this check for $26,000.”
“That’s a lot of money,” Brooke said.
“That’s just one paycheck for the last month he worked in Tokyo. Gives me a speech about how expensive it is to raise a kid. He says how can I chuck seven years of good times when he’s trying to be responsible. He says he’s inches away from being famous and that’s why he has to be on it all the time. I’m glad he’s doing well. I mean, $26,000 is a lot for one month. Still, the test took all of twenty minutes. He could have turned off his frigging phone.”
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