Of all the days. This morning, Fiona was hosting a breakfast party to celebrate Janice’s 50th birthday and mourn Taylor’s defection to pets.com. Employee birthdays were rarely acknowledged by Fiona (thongs.com never feted the passing of Fiona’s years on Earth, since the date she entered the world was a mystery to one and all, including Janice). Either the staffer didn’t last long enough to pass a birthday on premises, or a party would have cut into precious work hours. And serving cut vegetables and gift certificates to departing employees — that was unheard of. Most people left thongs.com with barely a “don’t let the door hit you and crush your miserable carcass on the way out.” But Fiona had always liked Taylor. And she’d been around as long as Stacy had. If Stacy were to find a better job, or just up and quit, she wasn’t sure Fiona would throw a party for her. With Taylor, Fiona knew it was business. With Stacy, she feared, Fiona would think it had something to do with her. And she’d probably be right.
No time to think. Stacy had to dress, but quick. She usually pulled a purse from her collection off the wall to match her outfit of the day, but, in her rush, she had to stick with the black evening bag from the night before (a horrible combination with her blue half-sleeve shirt and pink miniskirt from Barney’s).
The birthday/farewell breakfast was well under way by 9:45, her arrival time. She realized she’d been late or missing for nearly every group gathering all week, and that Fiona’s patience with her would be used up soon, if it weren’t already. She got lucky, though, when she entered the conference room. Fiona wasn’t in sight. The Turtle was laid out with a gorgeous spread (blue-berries and raspberries, chocolate-dipped strawberries, muffins of every flavor, bagels, ten bottles of champagne in a row, orange juice, silver thermoses of coffee, condiments and a cheese platter from Mangia).
Stacy dove in and mingled with ardor. The only person she couldn’t bring herself to talk to was Taylor. The departing tech whiz sat at the head of the Turtle by the strawberries, eating them one by one while every lesser producer and site manager filed by to kiss her ring. She was going to Internet heaven; the rest of them were in hell. Taylor avoided eye contact with Stacy, much to her relief.
Janice had to be on her third mimosa already. She was slurring her speech and acting a bit too cheery about turning 50. Stacy, smiling shyly, gave her a kiss on her creamy, doll-like cheek. “Happy birthday, boss,” she said brightly.
“You only turn fifty once!” said Janice.
“Are you having a good time?” asked Stacy.
“I’m touched by the party, by the love in the room.”
Stacy could barely register the tolerance in the room. “You’re in an uncommonly good mood.”
“Surprising, isn’t it? I’m middle-aged. My children have forgotten my birthday. Our sweetheart deal with smut.com is kaput. Fiona’s at their office right now, begging Stanley Bombicci to reconsider. He pulled the plug last night when he couldn’t convince Credit Suisse to cosign the loan.”
Stacy’s heart shriveled. If the deal fell through (not her fault), would that be a fatal blow for the company? It couldn’t be. Janice would be crying in her office, not giddy in the conference room. “So, if life is so wretched, why are you smiling?” asked Stacy.
“I’m in love,” she said. “That guy? The one I e-mailed from your office? The Upper West Side lawyer? He’s the one.” Janice swallowed her mimosa in a gulp and started pouring another. “We spoke on the phone for two hours last night, and I’m going on a birthday date with him tonight.”
For Janice, the potential for love could eradicate the devastation of a cash-strapped company and forgetful, selfish offspring. Janice had a hot date, she was delirious. It was insane. And, if not insane, it was dangerous. Considering Stacy’s own match.com disaster and Janice’s mountainous body count of disappointment from the on-line service, Stacy doubted that her boss’s date would be as wonderful as it’d have to be to compensate for everything else that had gone wrong (was going wrong) with her life. Janice was in for a long fall, one that would be monumentally hard to get up from.
Wanting to make the precipice shallower, Stacy said, “Your children haven’t forgotten your birthday. At least Tom didn’t.”
“He hasn’t called from London, or e-mailed, or sent a gift,” said Janice.
Stacy said, “Remember, I took him to lunch? He did buy you something. We had to go all the way to SoHo to get it. I’ve been holding it for you.” Stacy reached into her evening bag and (thank God), found the small square jewelry box from Reinstein Ross. Janice opened the box and squealed when she saw the earrings Stacy had, only twelve hours ago, lovingly selected for her own lobes.
Janice said, “They’re beautiful! How could he possibly afford them? And I know he doesn’t have such good taste. I have you to thank for that, Stacy.”
“He picked them out himself. Went right up to the jewelry case and pointed.”
“You are a fabulous liar,” said Janice.
“So are you. The company’s not in trouble. You’re just saying that to push me out of the nest like a kindly mother bird,” said Stacy.
Janice laughed. She’d laugh at anything this morning. “Well, Fiona does have a rare talent for begging, borrowing, and stealing.”
Stacy let out a sigh of relief. Fiona would save the day. She always did. The idea that, overnight, Stacy would go from being a future millionaire to another of the ever-expanding community of unemployed dot-commers was too much to fathom. She’d invested her time and energy in the company. It would have to pay off. It had to. Guilt tightened around her chest. She’d been fucking off all week. While she’d been chasing men, the company was floundering. As soon as Fiona returned, she’d apologize. She’d work harder. Refocus.
On cue, Fiona came crashing into the conference room, head to toe in a purple satin low-cut bodice sheath straight from the cover of a supermarket romance novel. Her helmet head of black raven hair had leaned to the left, giving her a windblown, crazy-person look. Stacy thought it worked for her.
“Sit,” barked the Dark Lady.
Everyone sat. Stacy had come to accept the way Fiona ordered her staff around like dogs. There was some small comfort in knowing who was master. Stacy parked herself at the left foot of the Turtle, next to Janice, who’d put on the earrings. They looked a bit soft with her ash blonde hair. Still, the sight gave Stacy a saintly thrill, knowing she’d done a nice thing.
Fiona stood next to the seated Taylor at the head of the Turtle. She waited for silence, and then held aloft a small piece of paper. It looked like a bank note. The Dark Lady was also a magician, apparently, who could turn dross (or mesh), into spun gold (or metallic-hued strapless bras). “We are saved,” she announced, owing the success of her coupe with Credit Suisse solely, and rightfully, to her talent for hucksterism. “This is a deposit slip for two hundred fifty thousand dollars. And there’s more coming in. Stanley Bombicci is back on-board. People! We will launch Meshwear 2001!”
The employees, including Stacy, were silent for a beat, and then applause bounced off the Turtle and around the glass walls of the room. Stacy clapped right along with her colleagues, with huge relief. For five minutes there, she’d convinced herself that the company had faltered in the past week because she’d been distracted by personal matters. That she was to blame for their troubles. Now that the moment had passed, Stacy had revived loyalty to her job and her employers. She was in it, all the way, and she’d win big. Huge. Money and glory and, one day, in the not-too-distant future, she’d rest on top of a mountain of $100 bills. And wouldn’t that be just grand?
Her fearless leader continued. “I want every person not working on product production to help Stacy with marketing and promotion,” she directed. “We need deals, deals, deals, publicity, cross - promotions. Stanley and I have outlined an attack plan, and smut.com is going to give us a one - hundred - thousand - dollar launch party, his models serving drinks, outfitted in our designs. No tech or business journalist will miss it. We could throw the Sil
icon Alley party of the decade. And that’s just the beginning. Now, have another drink, eat a muffin, and get right back to work. Janice, in my office. Stacy, twenty minutes.”
“Here we go again,” Stacy said. With renewed vigor, she went back to her desk to collect her thoughts and notes. At no point in the next month, Stacy knew, would she breathe air that wasn’t inside her office, the subway or her lonely bedroom. The quest was over, for now. Sex would have to wait.
Her phone was ringing as she stepped into her glorified cubicle. Assuming the caller was Charlie requiring further contrition, she grabbed the receiver and said, “I can’t express how sorry I am — again.”
“At least you can admit you’re at fault,” said the male voice that was far too nasal to belong to Charlie. “I haven’t been paid by thongs.com since May. You owe me over seventy thousand dollars, which, I’m afraid, I’m never going to get. I refuse to be ripped off by a bunch of females.”
“Harry?” asked Stacy.
“How many other people are owed seventy thousand?” he asked.
Stacy didn’t dare guess. “We’ve just had a large cash infusion,” she said to Harry Watuba, president of Bolt Fabrics, the supplier thongs.com used for all its product. “I can personally assure you that we’ll will cut you a check today.”
“You’ll do more than that, Ms. Temple. You’re going to personally deliver the check, and personally stand next to me at the bank while I deposit the check, and personally take me back to your office if the check bounces. And if I don’t get what’s owed to me, you will personally escort me back to my warehouse where I can shove three thousand bolts of nylon mesh up your ass.”
“Are you flirting with me?” she asked.
“You’ve got one hour,” he said, and hung up.
Ordinarily, say, on the street or in a bar, if an angry man threatened to shove anything up Stacy’s ass or other hollow parts, Stacy might have felt a pang of fear. Her otherwise pink cheeks might have gone white as chalk, and depending on what she’d had for dinner, she could easily imagine herself moved to nausea from fright. But Harry Watuba was approximately five feet five inches tall. He couldn’t weigh over 140 pounds. His age was indeterminate, but judging from his gray tufts (over the ears, the rest of his head was blindingly bald), he was at least 58. He smoked heavily. She could take him in a tussle.
Not that she’d have the heart. Harry spent fourteen hours a day sitting behind a coffee- and cigarette-strewn desk in a windowless office at the rear of a drafty warehouse a few blocks south of the Chelsea Piers. When he wasn’t begging for business on the phone, he was screaming at the men who drove Bolt’s fleet of two trucks, carrying fine fabrics from around the world to the farther reaches of New Jersey, New York, and Connecticut. Nearly every apparel company in New York produced their designs overseas, and Harry had long struggled to hold on to solvency. Fortunately for him, a few politically conscious suckers like thongs.com, who outsourced manufacturing to a “sweatshop” in Trenton (union-run: bathroom breaks every ten minutes, coffee breaks five times a day, and one sick day per month) kept Bolt in the black. But not, of course, if bills went unpaid. Harry had to spend at least a few hours per day chasing money. When the economy was good, Harry made out. When it turned bad, he took a beating. In July 1999, he was hanging on with both thumbs, to the edge.
And he was alone. Harry’s wife left him three years ago because she couldn’t handle the stress. Wisely (for her), she’d socked away some money in preparation for her move. She’d been planning it for years, and had saved enough to hire a vicious bastard of a divorce lawyer, who wrung every last drop out of poor Harry’s pockets. He was forced to move into an inferior studio apartment in Clinton Hill, the up - and - coming - but - never - quite - getting - there neighborhood north of Hell’s Kitchen. Stacy had heard that Harry spent several nights a week in his windowless warehouse office, a block from the Helicopter Tours launchpad on the lip of the Hudson River, just to avoid his studio’s oppressive four walls.
Stacy had met him only once after his initial handshaking business lunch with Fiona, just over a year ago. Since then, Fiona hadn’t spoken a word to him. He’d barely spoken a friendly word to Stacy in six months, around the time thongs.com’s second wave of financing fell flat. Harry and his weekly phone tirades had been Stacy’s sole responsibility. She’d figured out how to handle him, though. Let him rant for five or ten minutes until he got tired and 1) needed to use the bathroom, or 2) paused to take his medication. Then she’d make lilting assurances he’d so desperately want to believe about delivery dates and deadlines. She’d get off the phone and do her best to honor her promises.
And she intended to honor the one she’d just made. She went to Fiona’s office and explained the crisis. Stacy was able to extract a check from Fiona for $25,000. Swearing she’d be back in no time, Stacy took a cab to 20th Street and 11th Avenue.
The taxi dropped her off at the entrance to the warehouse Bolt shared with Good Times, Inc., a party-supply company that rented chairs, linens, silverware and giant coffee urns, among other good-time things. She signed in with the part-time security guard and then climbed over stacks of folded chairs and a pile of twenty-gallon punch bowls before reaching the office suite at the back of the warehouse.
She knocked on Harry’s door, confident she was about to make a cranky little man very happy.
No one answered, so she walked in. Talk about bad feng shui, she thought. Harry’s desk faced the back wall of the office, so he couldn’t see the front door unless he turned all the way around. Stacy noticed a telephone book on his desk chair. Was he that short? She closed the door and perched herself on the edge of his desk, crossed her legs and waited patiently.
Five minutes went by before the knob turned. The door opened and, on the other side, stood an Adonis. He was in his late 20s, six feet tall if he were an inch, broad of shoulder and smooth of chest. She could see the marked absence of hair because his shirt was off. His skin, almond, glistened slightly. His dark brown eyes glowed. His legs, in denim shorts and work boots with heavy socks, were thick with muscles and nearly hairless. When this godlike statue of flesh saw Stacy, not Harry, inside the windowless room, he smiled slow and neat, teeth gleaming like white pebbles, lips red and juicy.
She broke the ice. “You’re not Harry.”
He nodded mutely, still smiling, and then said with a heavy accent, “I am Schlomo, from Israel. The deliveryman. I don’t speak English.”
A deliveryman who didn’t speak English. Well, now. Stacy had come to make Harry happy and beg forgiveness. And low and behold. Stacy got off the desk and took the man’s hand. No wedding ring. She wasn’t certain that rings were common practice in Israel, but she didn’t care. She said, “Follow me.”
The scene was straight out of Penthouse Forum, she assumed, never having read it — or lived it. But Stacy had learned, in her week of romantic misadventure, that opportunities knock and must be seized. She led her Israeli beauty into the warehouse. The security guard was nowhere to be seen, and even if he were, she was beyond caring about discretion. There wasn’t a single zipper anywhere on her entire outfit. It was an omen. She would have her zipless fuck, and tell Charlie all about it — the perfect get-well gift. Plus, she didn’t have to worry that this would be casual sex, or loving sex, or anything with implications about who she was and what she’d become. Balling Schlomo would be accidental. As much of an accident as her revirginity. As if she’d fallen off a ladder and landed snugly on Schlomo’s cock with an “Oh!” and an “Isn’t this a pleasant surprise?”
They found a spot against the south wall behind an eight-foot-tall stack of collapsible tables. The space was cramped, but there was enough room for two adults. They’d have to do it upright, but she’d long been a member in good standing (as it were) of the Vertical Club. Stacy put her hands on Schlomo’s hips and kissed his mouth. His sweat tasted salty on her lips. She kissed him more passionately, and he responded by raising a flagpole in his shorts.
/> “I like American girls,” he said.
“American girls like you,” she responded.
He pushed her back against the stack of tables. While staring into her eyes (which made her feel weird: perhaps the secret to a zipless fuck was to keep one’s eyes, and soul, shuttered), he reached under her shirt and bra matter-of-factly and began playing with her breasts. Taylor Perry had done the same things with little effect on Stacy. But the roughness of Schlomo’s palms and the way he pinched her nipples, gently at first and then harder, caused that familiar crashing sound in Stacy’s ears. He pushed up her clothes to look at her chest — that adorable wide smile — and then dove in.
She held his head against her tits, thinking and saying, “Yes.” The electrical impulses traveled along the invisible cord from her nipples to her clitoris, sparking her off like a match (a really, really big match). Schlomo didn’t hesitate before pushing her skirt up around her waist. He dove into her panties with both hands, expertly rubbing and yanking and gliding with all ten fingers. Stacy’s legs began to shake and buckle. Feeling her unsteadiness, Schlomo lifted her off the ground (effortlessly, like a shapely sack of feathers), propped one of his feet on the edge of a table, and sat her on his thigh. She put an arm around his neck, spread her legs and deposited her head on his shoulder. He tore off her panties, which said more about the quality of thongs.com products than Schlomo’s strength. The underwear fell on the ground into a small puddle of brown water. Plenty more where those came from, thought Stacy.
Hurrying now, since Stacy knew she’d come quickly, she used her free hand to undo the button on his shorts. She reached inside and pulled him free. Flagpole was an understatement; he was an Israeli cannon. As Stacy beheld the monster in her hands, she did have a moment of concern that he’d be too big for her. That such mass couldn’t be stuffed inside her with a crowbar. Schlomo wasn’t concerned. He’d been stretching and widening her for five minutes now, and he even had the skills (language, that is), to say, “I fit. Don’t worry.”
The Accidental Virgin Page 14
