by Myles, Eden
“She said I was to look after you, take you into the city sometimes.”
He sipped his drink and then rested the tumbler on his thigh. He sat with his legs slightly spread apart, so I checked out his package. I figured why the hell not? It wasn’t like Mr. Karenina was in a position to notice. His suit was nicely fitted, obviously tailor-made, making a pleasant enough bulge in his pants. It reminded me of a good underwear ad, where the model’s briefs are just tight enough to rub and keep the cock semi-erect.
Mr. Karenina had said something and it took me a moment to backtrack and figure out what it was.
“Do you know how to walk a room properly?”
“Sure,” I said. “Um…what do you mean?”
Mr. Karenina gave me a grave look of disapproval. “I’m looking for someone to walk the rooms of the house and make certain everything is in its proper place and there are no obvious tripping hazards. My housekeeper has a tendency to move things around on me, which, frankly, annoys me.”
I had a feeling that a lot of things annoyed Mr. Karenina. I rolled my eyes but said, “I can do that.”
“Don’t bother with the sarcastic gestures, young man. It’s a waste of energy where I’m concerned.”
The fuck…? “Sorry.”
“Are you going to keep apologizing the whole time?”
“Sor—no,” I said. I shut my mouth.
“I’ll need you on Saturdays and Sundays, from eleven in the morning until six in the evening. Is that a problem?”
“No.”
“You have no life to speak of?”
My body flushed with anger. I almost said something rude and obnoxious, but I’d been raised better than that. Three years in New York hadn’t changed me that much. “I’m available to do the job, Mr. Karenina. That’s why I’m applying.”
“You sound angry.”
“I’m not angry.”
“What kind of accent is that? Midwest…Kansas City?”
“Manhattan…Kansas.”
“Ah. What are you doing here, Daniel? Aside from studying economics and dreaming of being a CPA? What do you think New York has to offer you?”
I sat in silence. I had no intention of rationalizing myself to Mr. Karenina.
“Now you’re angry again.”
“I’m not angry,” I insisted, a little too angrily. I grabbed at my pack, finally ready to stand up and get the hell out of here. Mr. Karenina was a total dick, and if I wanted this kind of abuse, I could just as well phone home and talk to my dad.
But before I could go for the door, he said, “Can I see you?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Touch your face.”
The request made something jump uncomfortably inside of me. Normally, a hot guy wanting to touch me would make for a very happy Daniel, but I’d decided I didn’t like Mr. Karenina, hot or not. “I don’t think so.”
“Are you always like this?”
“Like what?”
“A defensive little bitch.”
I stared at him long and hard. Who the hell did he think he was? I marched over to Mr. Karenina and dropped my pack. I stood there. “So touch me.”
“Kneel down.”
“No.”
“Then leave.”
Fuck me. I thought about laying into the guy, telling him he was an overbearing prick, but Kate was offering a lot of money to take care of the old bastard. Enough to fill in the gaps during the winter semester. Enough to send a little home. And, I reminded myself, it was only two days a week.
I knelt down on the floor at Mr. Karenina’s feet so we were almost eye-to-eye and I was inches away from his crotch. This close, I could feel his heat. Mr. Karenina shifted the tumbler of scotch to the table beside the chair and reached out both hands to touch my face. His expression remained impassive as he set his big, heavy hands on my cheeks, then brushed his thumbs over my fluttering eyes and down to my mouth. He had slim hands, pianists hands, and a gentler touch than I’d expected. His thumbs brushed across my lips, leaving a tingling sensation in their wake. He grunted, though I had no idea if it was a sound of approval or indifference.
He put his hands back on the armrests of the chair. Kneeling in front of him, I noticed the bulge in his fine, tailored pants had grown substantially in the last few minutes. “You’ll begin this Saturday,” he told me. “Don’t be late. Now leave.”
Definitely the weirdest interview of my life.
* * *
“So he’s creepy,” Sheri said over Skype that night as I sat at the desk in my dorm and worked over one of Simon’s papers.
“Creepy…in a hot kind of way,” I said into the mike clipped to the front of my T-shirt.
“Like Hannibal Lecter.”
“I don’t think he’s eaten anyone of late.”
“The night is young,” Sheri said with a diabolical laugh as she rubbed her hands together on the cam.
I ignored Sheri’s ribbing.
“You going back on Saturday?”
“The money’s good.”
“Well, if you disappear, I’ll know he ate you with a side of fava beans and a nice Chianti.”
“Thanks a lot.”
Sheri laughed and logged off to smoke some weed and call one of her boyfriends. I spent the next half an hour finishing up Simon’s paper and emailing it back to him. I thought about including a friendly note, but what would I say? Great game. That last play was brilliant. Do you want to go out with me?
Yeah, right. He’d probably tell his friends all about the country mouse who threw himself at him, and then everyone on campus would be laughing at the expense of Daniel Collins, the hillbilly transplant.
Out in the hall, I heard the hall monitors doing a final round of the dorms before locking up for the night. I realized it was almost one o’clock in the morning. I turned off my laptop and sat there for a moment as I got an idea, a stupid idea, but it still made me curious.
I finished out one of my uniform ties from the closet, tied it around my eyes, turned out all the lights, and tried to navigate the room. I barked my shin three times and stubbed my toe twice, and I’d lived in this dorm for three years! This was definitely harder than it looked. After battering myself up, I climbed into bed, wondering how Mr. Karenina coped.
I lay there wide awake for a while before turning the light back on and grabbing the old, dog-eared Neiman Marcus catalog I kept stashed in a drawer of my bedside table. Call me weird, but I’ve always had a thing for men in good, snug suits, though I’ve never told anyone that, not even Sheri. Ten minutes after perusing the Versace collection, I’d rubbed one out good and was feeling sleepy enough to switch out the light. Normally, I thought about Simon. One of my favorite fantasies was of him trapping me in the men’s locker room, our Columbia uniforms rubbing together deliciously as he kissed me. I imagined him undressing me slowly, a hot shower, holding me against the wet tiles. But that hadn’t brought me tonight. Instead, I’d thought about kneeling in front of Mr. Karenina while he forced me to deep-throat him and he called me his bitch.
“Shit,” I said before turning over. It was pretty obvious that I needed to get laid, and soon.
* * *
On Saturday, I got to Mr. Karenina’s house a half hour early. I hadn’t planned it, but traffic had been light in the West Village. I went to the west entrance where Mr. Karenina’s housekeeper Maria waited to let me in. She said Kate had flown out to Vancouver, but had left some numbers on the refrigerator in case I needed to contact her.
The first thing I did was walk the house the way Mr. Karenina had asked me to. I didn’t see Mr. Karenina anywhere. Since I didn’t know the place very well just yet, I just made certain there were no obvious tripping hazards. It was pretty easy, as far as jobs went, and I realized I was getting paid to go through some rich guy’s shit. It was definitely better than working retail or waiting tables, both of which I’d done over the years.
Maria was less than happy with my presence and kept giving me the look of
death. I got out of the kitchen and surrounding rooms as soon as possible. When I finished the gazillion rooms on the ground floor, I went upstairs where I found a gazillion more, all very spare and white and airy. For instance, there was a giant white room with just a glass table and a big stone amphora in the middle of it. I wondered if that was a rich guy thing, or if Mr. Karenina had purposely stripped his rooms down to the bare minimum so he had less to worry about tripping over.
I felt a pulse of anticipation as I stepped into the master bedroom. It was huge, with vaulted ceilings, and full of old, well-preserved Colonial furniture and more of those leather chairs and settees that Mr. Karenina seemed to favor. He had thousands of books on shelves that stretched the length of the room, but when I took one down off a high shelf and opened it up, I realized it was composed of old cassette tapes. Bigger, ring-bound books were located on the lower shelves, and when I checked those out, I saw they were in Braille. I’d never seen a Braille book before.
The king-sized bed was old, wrought iron, and full of picket-like spokes that looked faintly dangerous. A prickly bed for a prickly man, I thought with some irony and moved to the sunny window seat with the cushions that looked very broken in. I thought Mr. Karenina must spend a lot of time sitting here, reading his Braille books. I looked down upon the pavilion and spotted the man of the house sitting at a table in a long dressing gown, sipping his morning tea, a shaggy calico cat resting in his lap. He hadn’t struck me as the cat-lover type when I’d first met him, but then, I wouldn’t have imagined him having a hard-on during our interview, either.
Downstairs again, Maria said, “Mr. Karenina is planning to go into the city shortly. You can take tea in the breakfast room while you wait.” She still didn’t sound happy with my presence.
I didn’t actually like tea, but I drank it anyway and munched on a few fancy imported biscuits while I waited for Mr. Karenina. My stomach growled and I remembered that I hadn’t had anything for breakfast that morning. Ten minutes later, I heard Mr. Karenina in the kitchen, arguing with Maria in Spanish. Since I didn’t know Spanish, I didn’t know what they were arguing about, but I figured it probably had something to do with me.
Mr. Karenina looked dapper—if grim—when he finally stepped into the breakfast room. He was dressed in a fine, three-piece, pinstriped business suit that fitted him like a glove and a long, unbuttoned wool coat. He carried a heavy leather valise. “Daniel, we’re leaving now,” he said in that harsh mechanical voice, and I sprang up, a biscuit in my teeth, and followed him out into the front hallway, snatching my coat and shoving my arms into it as I hurried along. Mr. Karenina wasn’t exactly taking his time, and for a blind guy, he sure could book. Once outside, he slipped on a pair of dark sunglasses and took my arm.
He had a shockingly powerful grip. His warmth soaked into me as I walked him to an idling Lincoln Town Car waiting at the curb. A chauffeur held the door open and we both ducked inside. I slid my ass along the suede interior, leaving a reasonable distance between us, yet the moment the door closed, the dim, confined space started feeling way too intimate. The car was too warm, and I could smell Mr. Karenina’s aftershave, and a scent that was just male, just him, I think.
We’d driven along for about five minutes when Mr. Karenina said, “Did Maria give you a hard time?”
“Yes, sir. But it’s okay. She’s probably just not used to people checking up on her work.”
“Do you have a good idea of the layout of the house?”
“I think so.”
“What do you think of the books?”
I started at that, and wondered how in hell he knew I’d checked out his library. Then again, how many people would not want to check out the book collection of a blind man? “They’re interesting,” I admitted.
“Do you like classical literature, Daniel?”
“I did a paper on Tolstoy once.”
“I hope you brought along something to read. We might be a while.”
“I brought my netbook,” I told him.
I sat in silence as the car headed into Midtown. On Fifth Avenue, we parked in an underground parking garage and got out. Mr. Karenina unfolded a cane but took my arm again, his fingers digging into my bicep, and instructed me to walk him to a glass elevator that would take us to the penthouse suite of the NorthStar offices. The receptionist seemed happy to see him, and while he went off to the executive offices, she led me to a café next door that doubled as an employee lounge. I found a table near the back wall, plugged my netbook into the Internet, and spent the next four hours working on a paper I had due for Advanced Calculus. After that, I spent some time trying to draft an email to Simon that didn’t sound lame as hell but wound up playing Second Life instead.
Around four o’clock, Mr. Karenina appeared in the café to collect me. “I’m stopping at the Royal for dinner. Are you hungry?” he asked.
“Sure. I guess.”
“You don’t know?” Mr. Karenina said, sounding annoyed.
“No, I am,” I said as he took my arm and I led him back to the bank of elevators.
The Royal was one of those formal bistros you see on a lot of nighttime soap operas but figure you’ll never see the inside of. The maitre d’ seated us behind a privacy screen and Mr. Karenina told me to pick out whatever I wanted, which surprised me. As far as I knew, we weren’t exactly friends. Since the cheapest entrée on the menu was fifty dollars, I decided on just a house salad.
“You’re not hungry,” he said, sounding accusatory.
“I like salad,” I explained. He’d already stated he was paying and this wasn’t coming out of my salary, but I’d never felt comfortable dining on someone else’s dime. Midwestern pride, if you will.
When my salad arrived, the server explained it was a mix of spring greens tossed with prosciutto ham and Asiago cheese dressing, and garnished with goat cheese pesto croutons. I wasn’t quite sure what all that meant, so I just poked at the green stuff I could identify on my plate and watched Mr. Karenina. He added a dab of wasabi to one of the fresh oysters resting on the crushed ice before him, them upended it into his mouth. He savored it a long moment before swallowing it down, his Adam’s apple bobbing. He caught a bit of oyster liquor on his chin and sucked it off his finger instead of using his napkin.
“Do you like the work so far?”
It took me a moment to wake up after that performance. “Sure. It’s great.”
“Not too boring.”
“No. It’s fine. I worked on some papers, wrote some emails, and I played Second Life.” I wished I would shut the hell up already.
Mr. Karenina didn’t reprimand me this time for talking too much. “Do you think you could handle a few more responsibilities?”
I stabbed at the ham on my plate and hoped that meant he was happy with my work so far. “Sure.”
“There would be more pay in it for you, of course.”
“Okay.”
“But I might require your presence a few more times during the week.”
As long as it didn’t clash with my morning classes, I was okay with that. “No problem.”
“I’d like you to work as my courtier.”
“Is that like a valet or something?” I had a sudden fantasy of dressing Mr. Karenina like in a British TV show. Yum.
“It’s a male sexual companion.”
I dropped my fork and glared up at him in shock. Was he fucking kidding me? I started choking on my ham, but once I’d coughed the knot of meat out of my throat and into my napkin, I blurted out, “What are you, some kind of pervert?”
“I’m a gentleman,” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
Mr. Karenina removed his glasses and looked at me with his stark, almost black eyes centered on a place at about the level of my chin. “I have an admission, Daniel. The ad I placed for your position was partly because I do in fact need a ‘human seeing-eye dog,’ if you will. But I’m also seeking a courtier. A male companion.”
“I don’t un
derstand. I thought Kate put the ad up.”
“No,” he explained calmly. “I did. I’m part of an exclusive group of professional men who keep sexual companions called courtesans, if they’re female, and courtiers, if they’re male.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“The gentleman/courtesan relationship is an old establishment going back centuries, Daniel. In fact, it goes back to the very founding of this country. Generally speaking, a gentleman favors a young woman, trains her to be his companion, and then shows her off at special Society gatherings. In the past, the Society has been somewhat reluctant in their support of same-sex relationships, but that’s changing now. They’ve become very open-minded.” He added a dab of wasabi to another oyster and swallowed it down as though he were talking sports with me, or about the weather, something mundane. “The Society has approved my request to take a courtier, and I would like that courtier to be you.”
I sat there, my heart thudding, just trying to grasp what he was telling me. I’d heard some weird shit in my time, particularly in this city, but this literally took the prize. “How exactly do you know all this?” I asked.
“I kept a courtesan for many years. Kate’s mother. But she died two years ago of breast cancer.”
“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“We were together for twenty-seven years.” Mr. Karenina’s face was hard and impassive, not like a man who felt nothing, but like a man who had accepted the inevitable. I’d seen that same expression on my mother’s face all through my dad’s illness.
“I’m just…I’m really sorry about that,” I said.
“I miss Elizabeth, of course,” Mr. Karenina explained. “We were closer than even a husband and wife can be. But Elizabeth is gone, Daniel, and I’ve mourned her for two years. I’m ready to move on now, and I know she would want me to.” He paused, not touching his oysters now, just listening to my silence. Finally, he said, “Does my offer interest you?”
I told the truth. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Are you a virgin?”
