by John Enright
Dominick stood and offered his hand, and then Lord Witherspoon took over. “I was referring to how you placed in your race.”
“I came in sixth, but that doesn’t matter. It’s team racing. Our team placed second, so we get to go on to the next round. So nice of you to come all this way. I thought you might enjoy it.”
“A change, yes.”
“I didn’t know if you would come or not. I was beginning to wonder if you actually existed or were just the nameplate on some real estate scavenger outfit.”
Lord Witherspoon made an I-am-amused noise in his throat and took a sip of ale. “No, I am real, and I have a real interest in your family property. Would you like a drink?” Here he was offering her hospitality in her own club.
“You don’t sound very British, Lord Witherspoon.”
“We don’t all sound like Prince Charles. I went to school here in the States, in Virginia. I come here often, I don’t mind passing for an American. Are we to discuss our business here?”
“I suppose all I really need to hear from you is that you are real, that you are serious in your bid, and that you would consider increasing it, because your past offer is clearly unacceptable.”
“I came all this way for that? Interrupted my trip? All that was needed was for you, through your agent, to make a counteroffer for us to consider and respond to.” Lord Witherspoon was put out.
“Well, we could have a proper meeting, I guess, and see if we can come closer to an agreement. That real estate agent is really quite useless. You are kind of cute when you get angry like that. I like a man who can strike right back.” Angelica’s tone had softened and her face had relaxed into something approaching a bemused smile. “Shall we do dinner tonight, Lord Witherspoon? I have another race coming up right now, but this evening? If you’re not busy, that is.”
“I am free. But at a proper place in the city, not out here. I am staying at the Mandarin, Boylston Street. You know the neighborhood?”
“Of course. There are some fine restaurants around there. Shall we have a date, at eight, say? I’ll meet you at your hotel, and we can start out with drinks at that excellent bistro there?” Now Angelica was being charming. With a toss of her head she flicked an errant strand of blonde hair away from her face and smiled, showing perfect teeth.
High maintenance, Dominick thought, but Lord Witherspoon said, “Well, yes, that would be fine. At eight then.”
Angelica stretched out her perfectly manicured hand for him to shake, elbow locked, palm down the way women do sometimes, as if giving you the option of bowing and air-kissing the back of their hand. “And let’s decide to be friends no matter how our little business deal works out.”
Driving back, Dominick did get lost, missed his exit and ended up somewhere in Cambridge. He hadn’t been paying attention. It had been some time since his last date. He couldn’t even remember whom it was with. Dating was just something that when you reached a certain age you didn’t do, and in any event the women he met to whom he might have felt attracted were invariably married or burdened with children or too worldly and sardonic to take any overture seriously. He could not remember the last time a woman had asked him out. And an attractive woman at that. He found a bridge back across the river to Boston and then found Boylston Street and finally his hotel, where he delivered his car to the valet, glad to be free of it.
Why was it, the more expensive the hotel the more embarrassing the bathroom mirrors? Drying himself off after a shower, Dominick had a many-sided, morgue-lit view of his physical self. The corpus revealed was not the same as the one he held in his mind’s eye. It was wider, paler, lumpier—a collapsing pile of flesh, his private parts dwarfed by the roll of flesh above them. There were good aesthetic reasons why no one else had recently viewed this travesty. When he shaved he could see every facial blemish and scar and exploded pore. He tried to clip his protruding nasal hairs with a fingernail clipper, but succeeded only in painfully yanking out the most obvious ones. He opened both tiny bottles of Glenfiddich from the minibar and poured them over ice. Dominick told himself this was not a date, just a business dinner, a flimflam exercise that had nothing to do with him personally. It was Lord Witherspoon’s gig. Only His Lordship was not around, just Dominick wondering what he was doing there.
When the call came it was half an hour late and Dominick had opened and finished the other two mini-bottles of lesser scotch in the bar. Angelica was down in the lobby bistro, waiting for Lord Witherspoon. By now Lord Witherspoon was ready. He brushed and gargled to take the taste of whiskey out of his mouth and dabbed on some extra cologne. In the lounge Angelica was seated at the bar. The place was full, a younger crowd, not hotel guests but young cosmopolitan types cruising. It was a place to be seen. Floor-to-ceiling windows looked out onto busy Boylston Street. There were no empty seats at the bar, so Lord Witherspoon stood beside Angelica’s stool and ordered a rusty nail.
Angelica was in a short black basic evening dress, over which she was wearing an open, long-sleeved, pumpkin-colored, embroidered and hand-beaded, textured cotton jacket with Mandarin buttons—something a woman in the foothills of the Himalayas had spent many days creating. Her long blonde hair was swept back from her face and held with a silver butterfly clip. She was wearing no jewelry whatsoever, not even earrings or a wedding ring. Her tanned athletic legs were crossed. She did not look like a go-kart racer. She was drinking a martini. Though older than the crowd around her, she was still closer to their age than Dominick’s.
When his drink arrived, they clinked glasses and she toasted him, “To your health, Lord Witherspoon.” They sipped their drinks. “I can’t keep calling you that. It’s four syllables long. What do your friends and lovers call you?”
“My friends call me Dominick. That’s only three syllables. My lovers call me less often. And what shall I call you?”
“I’m pretty much Angie to everyone, but I wouldn’t mind it if you came up with your own private name for me, as long as it is polite and endearing. I’m tired of being just Angie. What say for just this evening we pretend I’m Lady Witherspoon? That would be fun. I’ve never been a ladyship before. Or is there already a Lady Witherspoon?”
“No, no Lady Witherspoon since my mother passed on.”
“That wouldn’t be too painful then? I mean, I don’t want to be your mother or anything, just not Angie for an evening.”
“No, m’lady, that would be fine. We shall pretend thus. Might I then presume to say that your ladyship is looking very fine tonight?”
“Why, thank you, my lord.” She smiled. “I like this already. Where shall we eat? This place is so . . .”
“Loud,” he suggested.
“No, beneath us.”
There was a four-star steakhouse nearby, Morton’s, that Angelica suggested. They walked there. There was a chill wind off the harbor, and she took Dominick’s arm and pressed against him away from the wind. She came up to his shoulder. She had already made reservations there for them, for Lord and Lady Witherspoon. The meal was superb. They drank champagne and lingered over cognacs and coffee. She laughed at his monologues and his imitations of American speech. Angelica asked about England and his family there. Lord Witherspoon invented something thin and dismissive. When he in turn asked about her family, she demurred, reminding him that tonight she was Lady Witherspoon. “So, you tell me my family tree and who I’ve been.”
“Your great-grandfather was a British admiral best remembered for getting lost in the fog on his way to the Battle of Dogger Bank,” Dominick began. It was a fun fictional evening.
On their stroll back to the hotel, Angelica told him how refreshing it was to be in the company of a non-American male. “They are so raised to be crude. Only the crude seem to survive. The meek are eaten, and the polite ones are trampled underfoot. I’ve enjoyed your company tonight, Dominick, your Old World charm and chivalry.”
“But I don’t believe we once talked business, did we?” Dominick said. He wondered if this was g
oing to be so simple and easy.
“No, we haven’t,” Angelica agreed. “Let’s do that over a nightcap back in your room.”
Chapter 8
Dominick’s cock was not particularly long, but it was thick and uncircumcised. This seemed to delight Angelica. She made cooing, approving noises—“Oh my, oh yes, yes”—as she wrapped one slender feminine hand around it and her tongue flicked at his foreskin. In her other hand she held the heft of his testicles as if they were some fragile Tiffany gift. She licked the length of his shaft. “Oh, Lord Witherspoon, you are so gorgeous.” She wrapped her mouth around him, sighing.
She cannot possibly be pretending that, could she? Dominick wondered, watching Angelica as if from a very great distance as she made herself comfortable along the long white bolster-sized pillow that was his extended leg and her head moved slowly up and down and in little circles in his crotch. For the first time he noticed the dark, deep roots of her hair. She was still wearing her short black dress, though she had shed her shoes and jacket. She was squirming with pleasure, crushing her breasts against his leg, grinding her pelvis along his foot.
Dominick had long suspected that the pleasures of fellatio were mainly pretentious. The idea of a male member in his mouth repulsed him, so he had trouble imagining how anyone else might enjoy it. It was demeaning, subservient to be the fellator. Popular culture concurred on that. She was servicing him. What fun was that? Yeats’s line, “But Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement.” Angelica moaned deep in her throat. Her eyes were closed, but it still looked like work.
There was a philosophical basis for his suspicions as well. As the cheap simulacrum of an essential actual action, fellatio committed the fallacy of equivocation. For Dominick to ejaculate into Angelica’s mouth could only be syntactically and falsely substituted for a coital and perhaps mutual ejaculation. The act’s unnaturalness encompassed a lack of engagement and commitment on the part of the actors. There was, of course, the question of altruism. But lust and altruism had nothing in common beyond the four shared letters in their names. Angelica stroked him harder, sucking now like a calf at its mother’s teat.
She knew that with an older man like Dominick if she could make him come once her work in that department would be done for the night. That would be fine with him. He reached down to squeeze her breast inside her dress and bra. She liked that and moaned and turned more onto her side so that his hand could reach farther down onto her belly. He pulled up Angelica’s dress, and she shifted and turned, moving between his legs and pulling her knees up so that he could now reach his hand down between her legs and up her smooth thigh to her—what was that word from the porno classics?—quim, her warm, moist quim beneath her sheer panties. His thick fingers found the swollen crease beneath the hair and with one slip opened her outer lips. Angelica shuddered and groaned and her legs opened wider.
But Dominick was going soft in Angelica’s mouth. The truth was he disliked blow jobs and had never come while getting one. Was it the thought of the teeth? Wasn’t a woman’s mouth the true and original vagina dentata? Or was it just that the distance left too much room for thought altogether. In any event, an erection was nothing to be toyed with, and now it was going away. Just the ghost of erections past, Dominick thought, a miasma.
As Dominick’s erection vanished, first in her mouth and then her hand, Angelica seemed mystified. She yanked at his flaccid member and squeezed it as if she were working an exhausted tube of toothpaste. This hurt, which only made him shrink faster. It was as if his penis was an entity entirely to itself, no longer part of him, a misbehaving pet. He pulled his hand out of her panties and touched the side of her head, pushed the hair away from her beautiful ear. “Angelica,” he said.
“No, I’m not Angelica,” she said. “And you are not my father, who is the only person alive who still calls me that. What? Are you gay? You don’t find me desirable?”
“No, I find you very desirable.” Dominick spoke softly. Absentmindedly he raised his fingers to his face to sniff them, smell her there. “Only . . .”
“Only what?”
“Only I enjoy getting oral sex only up to a certain point.”
“And then?” Angelica had abandoned her attempts to rearouse him and sat up, pulling her dress back over her lap.
“And then I would like to move onto something more mutual.”
“Oh, bullshit, Your Lordship. I’ve never met a man who didn’t enjoy a good blow job, at least American men, and I give a good blow job. And if you expect me to let you stick your thing into me on our first date, you are sadly mistaken. What kind of girl do you take me for?”
“Is this our first date?” Dominick suddenly felt very vulnerable and unattractive lying there in just his socks and shirt. She had strewn his pants, shorts, and shoes on the floor beside the couch as she had stripped them off of him.
“Well, I was looking forward to our getting to know each other better.” Now she was rearranging her hair. Grooming, always grooming. “I’ve never been to England, you know.”
“Look, I’m sorry. Perhaps you are used to younger men.”
“I’ve never had that happen to me before. Are you alright? Physically, I mean?”
“It has been a long time,” Dominick said as he sat up and reached for his clothes on the floor, becoming Lord Witherspoon as he did so. “So, you were hoping to fellate your way to a transatlantic invitation?”
“Look, just because your prick isn’t working is no reason to get insulting.”
“Enjoyed playing Lady Witherspoon, did we?” He got back into his shorts and pulled up his trousers.
“Wait, Dominick, don’t get all huffy on me. As a matter of fact, I did enjoy being Lady Witherspoon. I enjoyed your company. I . . . don’t know what to say right now.”
The bar had been restocked with scotch. Lord Witherspoon poured himself one. “We have yet to discuss our business,” he said, his back to her, as he went to the drapes and opened them on the lights of Boston.
“Your shirt’s not tucked in in the back,” she said. “May I have a drink, too?”
“Help yourself,” he said, putting down his drink to unbuckle his trousers and tuck his shirt in properly. He was still in his stocking feet. “By the way, Angie, you have very comely ears.”
“So, there is hope for us.”
“Why do you not wear any jewelry?”
“I suppose because my mother never did. I never learned how, never felt safe with my choices, so never got in the habit.”
Dominick thought of Lydia’s mismatched earrings. “Not even a wedding ring?”
“That really is nobody else’s business, is it? Some ancient now meaningless custom, one of the easiest public lies to tell without saying a word.” Angelica had poured herself a glass of white wine and was now standing beside Lord Witherspoon, looking down on the lights of the city. “Scary, isn’t it?’
“The expanse of it? All that wasted energy?”
“No, the height, I mean, looking down on it. I don’t like heights. You meant that? About my ears?”
“Exceptional.”
“Where do you go from here?”
“On to Los Angeles, estate business. A lawsuit in progress, a deposition, American attorneys.” The Lord Witherspoon fictions were coming quicker and thicker. Dominick suddenly felt very tired of it all. “Listen, Angie, about Mt. Sinai, your bargaining position is poor—prices are still dropping—but I have been authorized to sweeten our initial bid by fifty thousand on the condition that you or your agent present a bona fide authorized competitive bid from another potential buyer. We are prepared to negotiate a higher price if necessary, but not against some phantom player.”
“You’re dismissing me, aren’t you?
“I’m tired. I have an early departure tomorrow.”
“Will you be stopping back in Boston on your way back home?”
“I was not planning on it. Why?”
“I thought we might try a second date
. You know, even if you are gay, I would still like to be friends.”
“Yes, well we have each other’s e-mail address now. We can stay in touch.” Lord Witherspoon was a bit put off by Angelica’s assumption of his homosexuality. Dominick thought it was funny. “Please do get back to me about whether we still have a window of opportunity on the Mt. Sinai negotiation. Perhaps we could celebrate a closing some day.”
“Let me sleep on it. I think I will be changing agents. You really do like my ears? No one has ever told me that before.”
“I think you are altogether exquisite. I love the way you smell and the way you do your hair.” Dominick wondered if Lord Witherspoon knew how faggoty he was sounding. “You’ve maintained yourself wonderfully. Yes, of course, do let us get together again.”
Angelica went off to the bathroom. Now she seemed miffed, but when she returned she was composed. She had fixed her hair and reapplied lipstick. She put on her shoes and retrieved her wine glass from the coffee table and finished her drink in one swallow. “I will be in touch, Dominick. May I still call you Dominick? And the negotiations on the house are still open. And we will get back together again, I assure you. I am not so easy to get rid of.” She slipped into her beaded coat of many colors. “You do have a beautiful cock, by the way.” She came over to where Lord Witherspoon was still standing by the windows, pulled down his head with both of her hands, and gave him a lingering kiss on the lips. “Let’s try it again sometime.”
When she left she forgot her small handbag, and Dominick had to run down the hotel corridor with it, catching her just in time as the elevator doors opened. He was still in his stocking feet and shirtsleeves. He could taste her lipstick on his mouth.
“Oh,” she said and laughed when he handed her the bag. “Thank you, sweetheart. You make me forget things.” And she gave him another kiss on the cheek. A couple was coming out of the elevator and was stopped by the exchange. They gave each other a knowing look and smile—the conclusion of a hotel liaison, older man, younger woman. In their minds, at least, Lord Witherspoon had just gotten laid. The fact that it had not actually happened did not matter.
