Calling Out

by Rae Meadows

  “So. Why don’t you take off your coat and stay a while?”

  Scott has uncrossed his legs and now leans forward with his elbows on his knees, his fingers laced between them. A nervous tightness around his mouth makes his smile stiff and unnatural.

  “Okay. Sure.”

  In the past few minutes my confidence has seeped out. I think that the polite thing for him to do would be to help me out of my coat, but he is as still as marble. All right then. I shake my shoulders until my coat slips down my arms. I know the effect would be better if I let it fall to the floor in a romantic cascade, but I’m starting to feel like I don’t owe him anything so I place it first on the bed, then reconsider and move it to a chair. I lift my hair off my neck to feel some coolness and I try to resettle the composure that I know my face has lost.

  “That’s better,” Scott says. “What I want to know is why you put me off for so long, anyway. The chemistry was so clear on the phone.”

  There is a hole in his ear from an old piercing and his fingernails are bitten. I look from detail to detail for insight or distraction. Not knowing what to do next to ease the awkwardness, I fall to my knees and untie his shoes, slowly working each socked foot from his barely worn oxfords. He has dressed up for me. He blinks his baby-long lashes in a quizzical flurry, as if going for the feet was more intimate than an escort is allowed to be; too forward, too fast.

  “Are you married?” I ask, rubbing the arch of his foot.

  “Me? Are you kidding? Why would I be calling you all?”

  “You wouldn’t be the first,” I say, taking the heel of his other foot in my hand. “Girlfriend?”

  “Oh, that feels nice. Girlfriend? No. Not at the moment,” he says, letting his head rest against the back of the chair. “We broke up a few months ago. She wanted to get married. Mormons think they’re spinsters if they’re not married by thirty. I don’t even think I was in love.”

  “Have you ever been in love?” I ask.

  I’m stalling. Scott now seems more like a country singer than he does an athlete. I pull off his socks just to have something to do. His feet are white and clammy but not as gross as they could be.

  “Yeah, I guess. I’m not some sort of freak or anything,” he says, running his fingers through the side wing of his hair.

  “Of course you’re not,” I say.

  I lean back on my hands and look at him, wondering whether he is scrutinizing me—if he sees the pimple on the top of my forehead, the freckles on my nose, the wrinkles at the corners of my eyes—or if he sees me at all. Maybe he just sees what he imagined me to be from the phone. My thoughts descend from “He is a lucky bastard” to “I hope I’m not a letdown.”

  “Wouldn’t you be more comfortable over there?” I ask, pointing my eyes toward the bed.

  Scott clears his throat and looks down for a moment as if to think it over. His smile is catlike when he looks up again. I wonder how much time has been used up but I don’t dare glance at the clock.

  “I just might be,” he says.

  I shift back on my heels and he hops up from his seat. I hold out my hand in the direction of the bed like a game show model displaying the showcase prize. He sits first with his feet on the floor but then scowls, swiveling around to lean against the headboard, crossing his legs straight out in front on the bed. I have an urge to settle in next to him and see what movies are on. Instead I push him gently forward to stuff the pillows behind his back.

  “Now isn’t that better,” I say, attempting to embody the character of my phone voice.

  “Much,” he says. He crosses his arms across his chest and grins like a boy caught in a bad lie. “Show me what you got.”

  I am unnerved by this but I try to let it slide. He is becoming more of a type, a subset of maleness. I want to be back in command. One by one, I lift a foot behind me, arching, to slip off my shoes. Scott cocks his head like a puppy. Like Ember, I lift my leg up against the side of the table, slipping the fishnet stockings slowly down thigh and calf and pointed toe. One, and then the other. The curtains are open and in front of me is the southern sprawl of the valley, its grid of lights grounding me for a moment before I resume and toss my stockings on the floor near my shoes.

  “I knew you’d have nice legs,” Scott says. “Let’s see them.”

  I arrange one leg in front of the other like a beauty pageant contestant—hoping he doesn’t scrutinize my thighs—and slowly slide my dress up, the soft silk grazing my legs, until it’s just below my underwear.

  “So you like to hunt and play golf?” I ask, realizing how ridiculous I sound, standing there with my dress pulled up to my waist. But Scott laughs and eases the moment and I slowly take a turn on my imaginary catwalk.

  “Uh huh,” he says, “Now lift it higher and show me your ass.”

  I bite my lip and do what he asks, then bend over, making small rotations with my hips. This seems to be the right thing. Scott gives a small whistle.

  “I need some help with this,” I say, fiddling with the zipper in back of my dress.

  I’m surprised at my willingness to lose my dress without even needing a nudge, but it seems like the obvious next motion in the sequence. As I sit gingerly on the edge of the bed, Scott unzips me. His large damp palms push the straps of the dress down over my shoulders with a certainty that makes me anxious and I’m glad to be turned away from him. His hands travel over my back and I can only think “hot” and then I think for a second, “not clean,” and when I eye the clock, I still have thirty-five minutes left.

  I try to get up but he holds me down for a moment before he lets me go.

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  “I just want to get out of this,” I say, drawing my hands across the bodice of my dress, “so we can really relax. Can I put on some music?”

  “If you want,” he says. He seems peeved at my tactics, but resigned.

  I find a jazz station on the radio and let my dress fall, stepping out of the heap when it ends up on the floor. My instinct is to run into the bathroom but I close my eyes and imagine myself a mysterious burlesque performer. I start dancing, run my hands over my bra, my stomach, my hips, and shake my hair across my back.

  “Why don’t you help me get out of this stuff,” Scott says.

  I had forgotten that his getting naked was part of the bargain. I’m glad for the time it takes to undo the buttons on his shirt; his breath on my chest is impatient. His nose hairs need clipping and there is a fleck of something stuck in his bottom teeth, which are now at eye level. I tell myself that he is just a person, flawed and needy, good and bad, deserving of compassion and affection. And that he picked me, out of all the others in the world.

  He smells like musky cologne and he gives off heat, his skin only inches from mine. I touch his chest lightly with both my hands, as if there were the chance of an electric shock. It’s like petting an unfamiliar animal; alive, pulsing, foreign. I’m glad he’s not too hairy and maintains the nicely shaped body of a once-physical man. This is not so bad at all. This could be a drunken blind date that is going too far. If only I were drunk. When I kneel next to him, Scott slides down toward horizontal and closes his hands around my wrists, pressing my hands firmly against him. He has working hands, rough and blunt, veined and strong, and I feel a flicker, not of attraction but of nerves. I am now the animal—small, timid, and rabbitlike vulnerable.

  “You feel great,” I say. “So strong.”

  My tone is wooden but he hears what he wants to hear. I move my hands in languid circles and he eases his grip. I wish he would close his eyes—it would make it easier for me to perform—but he keeps them riveted on me.

  “Hi, beautiful,” he says softly as he puts his hand on the side of my face, and vicelike, moves it until it cradles my skull, and pulls my resistant head to his, his open mouth waiting. The kiss feels flat and uncharged, his lips chapped from dry Utah air and his tongue feral as he licks my lips and gropes into my mouth. This is an experiment, I t
ry to convince myself, and it’s really no worse than kissing Rob Thurman in the ninth grade with his spitfilled mouth acrid from dip. At least Scott tastes like toothpaste. At least he is not trying to get halfway down my throat.

  But as soon as the thought passes, his oral assault becomes more frenzied and his tongue jabs straight back as far as it can into my mouth. I try to hide a reflexive gag that makes my eyes water. I pull away to regain some bearings. “Hey, slow down there,” I say. “Let me change positions so I’m not all twisted around.”

  “Yeah. Okay, yeah. You’re right.” Scott’s eyes are heavy-lidded as he undoes his belt. “Take off my pants. I want to feel you.”

  This is entirely voluntary, I think, and I am choosing to take off a stranger’s pants even though I don’t want them to be off. I unbutton and unzip his chinos, my hand alarmingly grazing his erection under his blue plaid boxers. He lifts up so I can pull his pants off.

  I don’t have a lot of options left. I straddle him and his mouth and hands are everywhere. It’s almost acrobatic trying to monitor what’s going where. I wish the lights were off but that might make it easier for him to transgress. He’s about to unhook my bra, his breathing hard and determined, but I grab his hands.

  “No, baby. You know the rules.”

  Without comment he drops the task and begins to massage my buttocks with vigorous kneading. I gyrate on his lap like I have seen the strippers do, simulating sex, simulating everything. It’s a curious thing to be acting out these steps without any sparks urging me forward. It doesn’t feel bad exactly, but it feels impartial and distant. I suck on his neck, wanting to give him a hickey as a memento. He rubs my breasts through my bra as I roll around on top of him.

  “I want to see you touch yourself,” I say. “I want to watch you.”

  This is not legal for me to say, but I want to do this for Scott because he’s my first and I know he’s not a cop. He reaches inside his underwear, and as he watches me writhe around the bed through half-closed eyes, he gulps and moans. I smile and move faster.

  *

  The only time I have ever slept with someone I didn’t really know was the first night I met McCallister. We had been set up by a friend of mine from work, and all I knew of him was that he was tall, neurotic, strawberry blond, and funny. We met at a dark and uncrowded little nook of a bar with overstuffed booths that enveloped us in instant intimacy. We discussed the merits of different breakfast cereals, whether Hud was cooler than The Hustler, the hotness quotient of various pop-star vixens. We drank, we smoked, we laughed. It was easy and I liked him straight away—his squint, his square-tipped fingers, his incessant self-deprecation, his charming laugh. He had a sureness in the way he asked me questions, held his beer, chatted with the bartender, put his hand briefly on my back on the way out the door, but he also had a childlike need for affirmation on things as small as the way he parted his hair. The combination got me.

  We walked the fifteen blocks to his apartment on the pretense of watching a movie. I felt young and drunk and sanguine. It was early June, before the unbearable, heavy heat of the city in summer, and McCallister took my hand with instinctive ease, as if we’d been dating for years. He stopped for beer and cigarettes and M&Ms at the corner store. We started to make out as soon as the elevator doors closed.

  It wasn’t that I was overwhelmingly attracted to McCallister. It’s more that there wasn’t anything wrong with him—no embarrassing political remarks, no troubling tics, no evidence of trying too hard, no warning signals for possible land mines. He wasn’t cheap, belligerent, effeminate, overly earnest, loud, conservative, strident, cynical, arrogant, or recently dumped. There were no cringe moments. He made me laugh. He thought I was smart. I liked his smell. He was a great kisser. One night with McCallister, and I exhaled and settled in.

  *

  When Scott is finished, I reach over him and click off the radio. An intensified silence follows and I’m aware of the creak of the mattress, the sound of my breathing, the drip in the shower, a police siren. The room has surrendered itself to calm. I help Scott wipe off his stomach with a wet washcloth; I feel like I’m playing nurse, generously administering to a patient. However false the moment is, I feel a closeness, even though the moment is more foreign than any before it. I slide under the covers and Scott rubs my arm, back and forth with soft strokes as I lie on his chest. He tells me about the first time he went deer hunting with his dad and how connected he felt to everything. He says that he is almost embarrassed sometimes about how much he likes his job, being in charge and building things. He wonders how he came to be a man of thirty-seven when he still feels the same as he did in high school. I am paid to be the listener and the giver, to have no needs of my own.

  The ring of the phone is jarring intruder. I rise from the bed to answer it, grabbing my dress from the floor along the way.

  And now there is no pretext of half-truth or excuse, no quiet resentment, no need to pretend it was something it wasn’t. Scott tips me $50 on top of the $120. I wonder whether he will want to see me another time or if in our pseudo-consummation he discovered everything he wanted to know. I have a feeling he will never call again.

  “That was fun,” he says.“You can stay and hang out if you want. I mean, I don’t know. Get some food. Watch a movie. I have this place for the night. Just casual, you know?”

  “I have to get going,” I say. “But thanks. It was nice to meet you. Maybe I’ll see you again sometime.”

  I pull my coat over my unzipped dress, and all at once can’t get my shoes on fast enough.

  “Roxanne?”

  “Yeah?” I ask, barely disguising my haste.

  “I know this was work and everything. But if you ever want to play some golf, grab a drink or something.” He knows the answer even while he asks. I admire his optimism. He looks away and searches for the remote control.

  “Oh, um. Scott. Thanks. But…”

  “No, totally. Just wanted to, you know, put it out there.”

  He clicks on the TV and stares at the History Channel, appearing to be captivated by Winston Churchill.

  “Okay, then. Bye. I’ll see you,” I say, “around.”

  I head for the door in a trot.

  A man in a gray cashmere sweater holds the elevator door for me when he sees me coming.

  “Thanks,” I say, attempting to straighten my undone dress and get oxygen to my brain.

  “You’re welcome,” he says, with the slightest of smiles.

  We watch the lights of descending floors. I sniffle but I don’t care enough to scrounge for a tissue in my purse. I’m afraid to think about anything, in case this man can sense the nature of my thoughts. I concentrate on my fingernails and clench the inside of my cheek with my teeth.

  “On your way out?” he asks, as we stop on the fifth floor. No one gets on.

  “Not exactly,” I say.

  From the side of his face I’d guess he was forty. He’s well-groomed with a fading tan.

  “I’m in from San Diego,” he says. “For work. Do you know where I might go for a drink around here?”

  Because he only glances at me when he asks this, and because he doesn’t have a coat with him as if he had planned on going out, and because of something about the way he clamps his lips together as if to cover a sure-ofhimself grin, it crosses my mind that he thinks I am a prostitute. And for this I want to ask him what he’s really asking, to humiliate him, to make him feel small.

  “I don’t know,” I say instead. “I’m afraid you’re on your own.”

  When the doors open to the lobby, I step out in front of him without looking back. I just need to make it to the car, count the steps, breathe deeply, focus on the pattern of the marble floor, but as soon as the cold air hits my face, a tear escapes in a loose, warm rivulet down my cheek.

  “Watch that sidewalk there, ma’am,” the doorman says. “Someone fell already. The ice is invisible.”

  I wonder if he knows.

  “Thanks,”
I say. “Good night.”

  “Good night, dear,” he says.

  It occurs to me that I might see this man again and again, different nights, different dresses. He will watch me get older. Fantasize about me. Pity me.

  But by the time I make it to the car, I have conquered the need to cry. I did it. The heater blows hard and dry, and I realize I’m starving. I drive to 700 South and the fast-food strip, pull into the drive-through at Dunkin’ Donuts and order a half dozen assorted. I drive east up the hill toward the university, turning at random on quiet streets until most of the donuts are gone, and then I wend my way back to the Avenues and my apartment. Through the window I can see Ember curled up on Ford’s lap in the dancing blue light of the TV, and Ralf asleep near their feet.

  chapter 10

  I awake at dawn to find Ralf asleep on my bedroom floor using my bathrobe as a blanket and a towel as a pillow, his hands tucked under his chin. He must have slipped in during the night.

  “Ralf,” I whisper. “Ralf.”

  “Oh, hi. Sorry,” he says, rubbing his eyes. “I know I should have asked if I could sleep in here but I didn’t want to wake you to see if it was okay. I didn’t want to be a third wheel out there.”

  “It’s okay,” I say. “Why don’t you move up here?”

  I know that he is too shy to ever make any kind of move, and I really want the company.

  “No, no. I’m fine. I have to get up soon anyway.”

  “Ralf, it’s not even six. And it’s Saturday. Come on.”

  He yawns, then scrambles up onto the bed in his jeans and T-shirt, curls away from me on the far edge, and pulls up the covers. I scoot over and hug his body into mine to glean his warmth, to feel his realness, his familiar and gentle presence. The smell of smoke and winter lingers in his hair.

  “I was having this dream where you guys were all trying to stuff things in my suitcase when I wasn’t looking,” he says.