Tuesday Erotica Club

by Lisa Beth Kovetz

  The papers had been signed and the money was in her bank. Lux was ready to go back to life as normal, except she would live at home and have a different job. It would be better this way, she knew. They wouldn’t see each other every day and so she wouldn’t feel so threatened and trapped by his love. Late at night, as she slid her key into his door she thought for a moment that she should have called first. But that would have ruined the surprise. He probably thought she needed more time, but in truth, she missed him. Lux entered the apartment and went straight for his bed.

  He was still awake, just out of the shower, lying on his back, staring at the ceiling and thinking about loss and his recent near-death experience. He kept telling himself it was not death. She had only threatened his job, his reputation, but not his life. The bruises would heal. He turned sharply to the door when he heard the key in the lock, panic raising his shoulders almost to his ears. He looked for a weapon or a hiding place or the telephone. He was dialing 911 when the door slid open and he saw it was her. She who could destroy his whole life.

  And yet, when she stood there naked in front of him he could not find the words to tell her to get out. “Get out,” his brain had screamed, but he could not form the words on his lips. The fear that inhibited his initial erection went numb when her hands traveled around his body. Numb but not gone. As he looked down at the top of her too-red head bent low over his crotch he felt like a very large, very old animal stretched too far between the branches of a too-high tree trying to grab a sweet fruit that was just out of reach. He felt like he was going to fall; and in the height of painful pleasure, Trevor actually groped the bedclothes with his hands looking for some branch to pull himself up and away from her. She was going to destroy him, he just knew it.

  Lux was working to pleasure her man. Margot had been correct in her assumption, Trevor had a lot of dick to work with; and suddenly Lux was thinking about all Brooke had said about how too big could be a problem. Trevor had always been the perfect fit but tonight her jaw was aching and her back was tired. And he didn’t seem any closer to loving her.

  She put her hands on his thighs and rubbed him all the way up to his chest. She let his penis fall out of her mouth and pushed a little on his chest to indicate that she wanted him to lie back down on the bed. Trevor didn’t move. She rose up and pulled him down onto the bed. He lay there as she climbed on top of him, shoved it in and started to rock. Since he wasn’t helping, she fondled her own breasts. It took her three or four cycles of rubbing and rocking before he broke.

  Lux thought about the moment an amusement park ride kicks in, the fast, hard jolt and then suddenly you’re off on your adventure. When Trevor finally bucked and started to make love to her in earnest Lux thought, at last, I’ve won.

  Their lovemaking lasted exactly fifteen minutes. Trevor came and Lux didn’t. Then he rolled off of her and excused himself to the bathroom. A moment later he returned, his face red and damp from a quick, if too aggressive, scrub. Lux, a little tired and a little confused, smiled at him, hoping for the same in return.

  “Lux,” Trevor said, “I’ll need my key back.” “Oh!” Lux said. “But…”

  But before she could protest he was in her purse, winding the two keys that allowed her entrance to his home off her key chain.

  “Please, get dressed.”

  Lux sat there in his bed, wrapped in the good quality all-cotton sheets his ex-wife had bought on sale at Macy’s. She had assumed when she walked in the door that she would be staying the night, if not the weekend. It was one o’clock in the morning, and she did not know where she would go. It seemed too late to take the subway back to Queens, and she did not have enough cash for a cab. Moreover, why would he want her to leave? She had gotten him his job back. The mess at work was over. Just by coming to his apartment, she had said he could have her again. What part of that didn’t he understand?

  “Get dressed, Lux,” he said again and still she sat there, not understanding at all.

  “You have to go. Get out. You can’t come here ever again.”

  “Yes, I can. I can do whatever I want to now. I don’t work there anymore. You don’t have to worry. I have some money, Trevor. I don’t need anything from you. I never asked you for money and you know what, I don’t need it, so fuck you on that. I just want to be with you.”

  “I packed your things and had them sent to your attorney’s address.”

  “Why?”

  “Just go,” Trevor said, starting to get angry. Nothing had been said to him, but he believed he was on probation at work. He believed he had lost all seniority and would be the first to be laid off when times were bad. At the end of his career he was back to the beginning when he had to be on his best, boot-licking behavior at all times. He had cost the firm $15,000 for no reason at all. He was fifty-four and did not think he could ever find another job again if he lost this one. All his comfort and security was written in watercolors on silk sheets and he had come all over them, blurring and ruining his life for this pretty little dirty girl. He could not risk anyone finding out about tonight.

  “Didn’t you love me?” Lux asked angrily, as if he had broken his promise.

  “Lux, you have to leave,” Trevor said.

  Lux was not prepared to face the reality that he was dumping her. All her life she struggled with the problem of men who wanted to steal her, trap her, own her, and control her. She didn’t understand the concept that someone would actually send her away, and therefore, Lux could only focus on the physical problem of where to go. Her apartment was close but the tenants had already moved in. It was a long trip back to Queens, and she didn’t want to ride the subway in her too-short skirt.

  “I’ll need money,” Lux informed him, “for a cab.”

  She got out of Trevor’s bed and walked naked into the shower. She steamed up the bathroom and washed herself clean. She used a pair of fresh towels and left them both on the floor in a heap. In the bedroom, Trevor watched as she dressed silently and at her leisure.

  Lux snapped on the pink frilly bra that would show both bra and breasts through the white sleeveless tank top that went over it. She found the tiny scrap of fabric that masqueraded as underwear, but did not put it on. She purposely slid into the high-heeled shoes she’d borrowed from Jonella and then paraded around, underwear dangling from a fingertip, looking for her skirt. When she found it, she turned her backside to him and bent deeply at the waist to pick it up off the floor. She listened carefully for the grunts and hoots and “oh baby baby” that should have been spilling out of his mouth, but Trevor was sitting on his bed, looking a bit crumpled. The palms of his hands were pressed together, and he was considering the matching curve of the cuticles on his thumbs.

  “Trevor,” she said. She hadn’t meant to say it so angrily. She wanted it to be soft and loving, but her voice was thick with Queens and the whine of a rejected mongrel dog, a fighting dog who knew the pound and all that waited there for it. She stood in her youth, high shoes, and nothing else, waiting for him to see her. It took a while, and when he finally looked up at her with everything except love and desire scribbled across his face, she finally understood that it was over. She threw her long legs into her tiny underwear and skirt. Then she grabbed her handbag and stood in front of Trevor with her palm outstretched.

  He opened up his wallet and placed thirty dollars in her hand. It was almost enough to get a cab back to her mother’s house, but she stood there and demanded more. He placed another twenty in her palm, but she did not close her fist around the money and leave. He added two more twenties.

  “More,” she said.

  A fifty slapped down on top of the pile, but it did not appease the rage in Lux. Another pair of fifties and three one-hundred dollar bills. Still she stared at him. “That’s all that’s in my wallet, Lux.”

  She imagined dragging him down to the ATM and making him pull out his daily limit of cash, but by then she might start to shake, and she didn’t want him to see that. So she snapped her
fist over the cash, clicked her heels to the front door and shot him the bird as she left his apartment. Fuck you Trevor, she wanted to shout at him, but, as she could barely breathe, she did not want to risk screaming.

  Five hundred and forty of Trevor’s dollars felt thick and hard in her pocket and Lux wondered if Auntie Who-ah had felt this much rage at all her johns. She got down to the street and tried to find a cab but on Trevor’s quiet residential block there was little traffic at that hour. Lux walked to the corner, suddenly uncomfortable in her too-high heels and the colorful little outfit she’d thrown together hoping to ignite her old man lover. The world was quiet and deserted and Lux ran towards the lights of a main street.

  She chose a busy diner with a waitress who was wearing too much makeup, the kind of girl who looked like she rode the bus back home at dawn.

  “Pea soup any good?” Lux asked, her nose deep in the menu.

  “If ya want it thick wit lotsa ham,” the waitress confirmed.

  Lux looked up, revealing to the waitress the darkness of telltale mascara streaks, the western world’s understood symbol of bad date gone tragic.

  “How ‘bout a coffee?” Lux asked.

  “At this hour?” the waitress warned. “It’ll make ya crazy. I could do you an egg cream.”

  “My brother used to bring me down the street for egg creams when my mom was too sick to cook. He told me it was made a’ eggs, and it was good for me.”

  “It is good f ’you,” the waitress confirmed. “You want one?”

  “Nah. Just the soup. But thanks.”

  Lux handed back the menu. The waitress put a rush on the order and brought the soup with some extra warm bread, butter, and a box of industrial tissues. She wanted to tell her pretty customer with the raccoon eyes that whatever he was, he wasn’t worth it. Oh the stories the waitress could tell of lost love and handsome men who were tragic assholes.

  “You ah’right?” she asked as she set down the bread.

  “I will be.”

  “Yeah.”

  Lux spread the first sheet of scratchy white paper across her eyes and pressed it there, letting the thin white tissue catch the next fall of tears as they washed more makeup off her eyes and onto her face. If life is going to be this hard, Lux thought, I’m going to have to get a waterproof eyeliner. And then she hiccuped a laugh that started the tears going. Snot and mascara flowed into the fragile tissues until Lux finally got up and went to the bathroom.

  Sitting on the toilet, Lux tried to decide what to do and where to go. She easily wrote the whole scene with Jonella. What Jonella would say and how she would laugh at Lux being dumped for the first time; how she would crow about the fist full of money.

  “Gimme some of it,” Jonella would demand. “Let’s go shopping for clothes, buy some dope. Go out to a club. Come on prissy pants, this is the final payoff. Let’s go play.”

  Lux scratched Jonella off her list. She didn’t feel like playing; she’d lost her taste for drugs in grade school. And she intended to spend Trevor’s money on a new sink for the next apartment.

  If she told Carlos, he would be tender(ish) but only to get into her pants. If she went home, the ghosts that had been her family, the tired old stoners drinking beer and smoking pot in front of reality TV, would stare and say something that might border on comfort or philosophy, provided it could be enunciated clearly enough to be understood. All those people loved her, and Lux felt their love as poison. So sitting on the toilet in the diner, Lux flipped open her cell phone and called Brooke.

  23. Cheese and Sympathy

  “BRRRRRRRRRRRING BA BA DOO dah!” Brooke’s cell phone sang from inside her tiny evening bag. Bill looked at her from across the sheets. They were lying naked in his bed, holding hands and talking about everything except the thing he really needed to tell her, when Brooke’s cell phone rang. She leaned across his naked chest and collected her phone.

  “Uuuuuuu, hello?” Brooke said, curious as to who would call her at such an hour. “Lux? No, yeah, sure it’s ok to call me. I said anytime, right.”

  “You know someone named Lux?” Bill asked.

  “Shh! What’s up? Really? Shit. Wow. I’m sorry. Yeah, no, I’d love you to come over, but I’m not at home.”

  “Is her name really Lux?”

  “Sh! No, I’m over at a friend’s house. But I have a car, well it’s my mother’s car, and I could come get you.”

  “You could bring her here,” Bill said. “I’ll put out some cheese. I mean, if her name really is Lux. Who names a child Lux? Maybe her parents teach Latin. Is she French? What does she look like? Is she interesting? Where is she from?”

  “Sh! Listen, I’m staying at my friend Bill’s house. He’s at 8 Fifth. Can you get here? The penthouse. Oh you’ll have to tell the doorman you’re visiting the Honorable Bill Simpson. He’s really strict, especially after midnight, but I’ll leave your name with him so he’ll let you up. You sound terrible. No, of course it’s ok. Nah, we’re not doing anything. I said anytime, right. So come on over. Bill says he’ll put out some cheese.”

  “Queens,” Brooke said when she snapped her phone closed.

  “You know people from Queens?”

  “Only one person and she’s coming here so get dressed.”

  When he said he’d put out some cheese, Bill Simpson really meant that he’d put out a variety of cheeses, with crackers, a bit of leftover pâté and smoked salmon on a silver tray with linen napkins. He was startled when Lux, in her too-short, too-loud skirt, walked across the grand parquet floor that he had inherited from his grandmother.

  When Lux stepped off the elevator and stood in front of a set of huge mahogany doors stained blood red and varnished to a high sheen, she thought for sure she was in the wrong place. She rang the bell and heard Brooke’s voice from inside call, “It’s open.”

  Lux entered Bill Simpson’s home and looked around. Her eyes popped wide in amazement. This was not an apartment but the main office of some large mid-city bank. A huge painting done by Brooke hung in the foyer. The painting depicted two men in three-piece suits sitting at opposite ends of a large, beautiful couch. A spaniel lying on the rug was looking lovingly at the gentleman sitting on the right. The gentleman on the left was stroking a sleeping kitten curled up on his lap. The two handsome men sat rigid and perfect, separated by an ocean of fine upholstery.

  “Do you like my painting? It’s my favorite,” Bill happily volunteered when it seemed like Lux was never going to stop looking at the canvas.

  “This is your house,” Lux said as a statement, still staring at the painting.

  “Yes, it is now.”

  “And that’s the painting you picked. Or did you have Brooke paint it for you?”

  “I bought it from one of her early shows. I just fell in love with it. How did you know it was one of Brooke’s?”

  “Duh,” Lux said, still staring at the painting. The signature was far too small to be read from where Lux was standing but after several visits to Brooke’s studio, her style became obvious to Lux.

  “What do you think of it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know nothing about painting, except that more people like beige than purple, which is crazy, but I think you should live somewhere that you’re really comfortable.”

  “What do you mean?” Bill asked as his eye flittered around his sumptuous home.

  “No, I mean it’s real nice,” Lux said, “but all the gay guys from my high school dream about moving to like Greenwich Village, right, or that place in Rhode Island. Or is it at Cape Cod?”

  “Cape Cod,” Bill said as his mouth went dry.

  “Oh,” Lux said. She did not mean it as a test, but the fact that Bill immediately understood that she was referring to the gay enclave in Provincetown confirmed for Lux that Bill was either homosexual or clairvoyant.

  As a judge, Bill Simpson was trained not to show his thoughts and so he just looked at Lux who just looked back at him. Standing on the grand staircase watching the
scene unfold, Brooke began to laugh.

  “Bill isn’t,” Brooke said but the tumblers in her brain had already started to spin, “gay, Lux.”

  Brooke’s mind was reeling. Lux just called Bill a homosexual, Brooke thought. Next thing she’d be calling him a cocker spaniel.

  “He’s not? Geez, I’m sorry. I ah, geez, I ah guess I don’t meet many guys who are so, ah, I dunno, cleanlooking as you are. And ah, stand up as straight as you do,” Lux stumbled, feeling like she’d come in with poop on her shoes. Real poop, not imaginary poop. As far as Lux could tell, Brooke’s guy was gay.

  “Not to worry,” Bill assured Lux warmly.

  “Uh, ok,” she said to him. “I’m Lux.”

  “William Bradley Simpson IV, I’d like you to meet Lux Kerchew Fitzpatrick,” said Brooke, wondering what other colorful sparks that might flare up if kooky Lux smashed into stiff, conservative Bill. Bill gay? How odd that Lux would say such a thing.

  “Lux et Veritas? Your father was a Yale man?” Bill asked.

  “No,” Lux said.

  “Your mum, then?” he asked.

  “What about her?”

  “Did she attend Yale?”

  “No. She’s from Jersey, but she graduated from Thomas Jefferson High in East New York because they moved there after my grandpa died, but she still thinks of herself as a Jersey girl. Weird, huh?”

  “Um. Yes.”

  “Listen, do you know what the word ‘lux’ means?” Lux asked.

  “Yes,” Bill said brightly and then waited for her to say it.

  “What does it mean?”

  “Oh,” Bill laughed, caught off guard. “It means ‘light’ in Latin. And the Latin phrase ‘Lux et Veritas’ means ‘light and truth.’ It’s the motto of my alma mater. Yale. And that’s why I thought maybe your father went to Yale also.”