by Star Jones
ONCE THEY WERE IN Molly’s room, she was unsure of her next move. It had been so long since she had been in such a situation that all her skills in the art of romance were laden with rust, weighed down from disuse. Should she just wait for Roger to do everything? Should she have gone to his room instead of bringing him to hers? But then again, hadn’t she heard that it was better to be on your home turf? And besides, Roger’s room was all the way over at Bally’s and the last thing she wanted to do was get short of breath before they even did the deed.
There was no need for Molly to fret; Roger was a take-charge kind of guy. And his romance skills certainly weren’t weighed down from disuse. A well-known comedian like Roger Mason who spent the majority of the year on the road got more than his share of ass thrown his way. He moved over to her in-room Bose speaker and found an appropriate radio station. It was playing smooth jazz. Molly would have preferred some Frank Sinatra or Tony Bennett, but this was certainly better than heavy metal or hip-hop to set a mood. Molly sat down on the edge of the bed and watched Roger remove his jacket. He was immense. Much of it was pudge, but she could tell that he was probably an impressive specimen at one time.
“Did you play football or something when you were younger?” Molly asked. She realized that she actually knew very little about Mr. Roger Mason.
He nodded and flexed his biceps, chuckling the whole time. Molly really liked his chuckle. It was like rolling thunder, with a low, slow vibrato that made her bones rattle.
“Two-year starting defensive end for the University of Michigan Wolverines,” he said. “My job used to be to kill as many people as I could every Saturday.”
“Wow,” Molly said. “I bet you were pretty good, huh?”
Roger nodded. “As a matter of fact, I was. I was even invited to a few NFL training camps. But I had already gotten the comedy bug in college, so I knew what I wanted to do with my life. And it didn’t include becoming a piece of human chattel in the NFL, the property of some asshole billionaire.”
“Well, would you mind being my property for a little while?” Molly said. She reached up to Roger and he sat down next to her on the bed, taking her in his arms and holding tight. Molly ran her hands over his arms and shoulders, loving the feel of strength and energy. Roger pulled back and looked into Molly’s eyes. They moved forward at the same time, their lips meeting in soft, tender kisses that gradually built up in intensity. After several minutes, their mouths were wide open and they were engaged in the most passionate kissing that Molly had done in a long time. They fell back together on the bed, their hands roaming while their mouths explored. Molly heard a loud sound in her ears and was tempted to stop until she realized that it was her own moaning. She felt like her body was about to explode, she was so hot and horny. Roger’s hand went to the back of her neck and she heard the sound of her dress zipper being lowered. He was trying to take off her dress now? But they hadn’t even turned off the lights!
When the zipper was down, Roger smoothly went to her shoulders to pull down her dress. Molly felt a severe panic start to set in. It had occurred to her in a vague way that she would have to disrobe at some point, but now that the moment was at hand she felt like she couldn’t go through with it. She didn’t know him well enough; she wasn’t sure if she could trust him. What if he was disgusted by what he saw? He said he liked his women big, but what about flabby and old? The rapid weight loss and subsequent weight gain had not been kind to her skin; it was much too loose and droopy. She hated the way she looked in the mirror. She was certain that a man would hate it too—particularly a popular comedian who probably had access to some very high-quality ass. He surely was used to bedding starlets and starstruck twenty-five-year-olds. How was he going to react to a decidedly low-quality forty-five-year-old with a big, fat ass and very large, sagging tits? Molly felt a painful sensation in her chest, like she was short of breath. She started to gasp for air. She pushed Roger off of her, held the top of the dress against her heaving breasts, and ran toward the bathroom.
“What the fuck?!” Roger said as he watched her run away, her retreating ass jiggling as if it too were trembling in fear. For him, her reaction seemed to come out of nowhere, as if her body had suddenly been taken over by an alien force. He shook his head, alarmed by the look of terror he saw on her face. He had thought he was about to have the night of his life, a chance to become intimate with one of his idols, but she had run from him like he was wielding a butcher knife. He did not want to believe that his beloved Molly McCarthy Stein was schizo.
Inside the bathroom, Molly was just on the verge of a meltdown. There was only one thing that could bring her back, perhaps return her to a semblance of calm. Her pills. But they were in her pocketbook, which was sitting in the chair right next to where Roger was waiting on the bed. Well, actually she wasn’t sure where Roger was right now. That poor man. His head must be spinning.
“Molly?”
She heard his voice from the other room, sounding tentative, maybe even a little afraid. Molly stood over the sink, staring at her face in the mirror. She saw the bags under her eyes, the vertical lines starting to form above her lips, like prison stripes. She looked at the flab under her chin, which was more like two chins. Her jowls were heavy and just starting to sag. In other words, what man in his right mind would want to be with her? She was a fat, ugly, aging woman who probably would go the rest of her life without having sex. But then again, there was a great guy in the other room, on the bed, eager to have sex with her. Apparently she wasn’t as fat and unattractive as she thought if he was willing to get naked with her and partake in her body, right? Molly was confused and scared. She knew that this was a pivotal moment for her. If she couldn’t beat back this panic and allow herself to enjoy a night with this man, she didn’t know if she could ever let herself get to this point again. How could she trust that she wouldn’t freak out the next time a man showed some romantic interest in her? If only she could get a pill in her system. Then she might be prepared to face whatever was waiting for her out there.
She started hatching a plan. Maybe she could run out there, grab her purse, then rush back into the bathroom and take the pill. All she had to do was tell Roger that she would be right back, she just needed something from her purse. He’d understand.
Molly took about ten deep breaths, trying to calm her shaking hands. She opened the door and saw Roger sitting on the edge of the bed with a look of utter consternation. She felt sorry for him at that moment, getting mixed up with a wacky broad like her.
“Are you okay?” he asked. But Molly wasn’t ready to talk yet. As she came out of the bathroom, her focus on that pocketbook containing those pills, Roger mistakenly thought Molly was walking back to him. When she was near, he reached out and swooped her back down onto the bed. He was laughing at the time, thinking that she would be laughing too. He moved down and started kissing her ears and her neck, thinking to himself that she smelled really nice and that the rest of her would smell just as good. But what he didn’t expect was a loud, crazy-as-a-loon scream. He looked up and saw Molly’s mouth wide open, her eyes terrorized, her hands and arms pushing against his chest, trying to get him off of her.
“Molly, what’s wrong—”
“Aaaahhhh!” She kept screaming at him. It was all too much for her. And Roger too had had enough.
“Would you please shut the fuck up?” he said as he pushed himself up from the bed. He reached over and grabbed his jacket, all the while looking at Molly, who had stopped screaming, as if she had two heads.
“Whatever the hell is wrong with you, Molly, I hope you get some help real soon!” he said as he moved toward the door. “I really liked you. I was really excited about getting to know you better. I thought that maybe this could be something. But I’ve had enough crazy fuckin’ broads in my life. I certainly don’t need another one.”
The door slammed shut behind him, leaving stunned silence in his wake. Slowly, unsteadily, Molly reached out and grabbed her pocketbook
. She saw a tear fall down and stain the beige leather. It was followed by many others. As she drew the pill from the bottle, Molly couldn’t stop the torrent of tears. She fell back on the bed, sobbing, feeling sorry for herself, feeling as low as she had felt in a long time.
For Maxine, the weekend was by far her least favorite time of the week. It was when all the work halted, her friends and colleagues busied themselves with family and loved-one obligations, often traveling out of the city to do so, and Maxine was left alone to rattle around her massive Park Avenue apartment and think about all the people who had left her, all the family members who avoided her. The weekends forced her to come to grips with some of the unfortunate turns her life had taken, the bad marriages, the ugly state of her relationship with Jared, one of her twin sons. The weekends made her think about her other son, Darren. Darren had taken his own life about seven years earlier. He had mentioned his mother in the suicide note, saying that he knew this final act would be his greatest disappointment in her eyes, but he didn’t know anymore whether he was capable of pleasing her. She had managed to keep the note out of the press, but she still felt his words like a bitter slap. How could her own child hate her so much that he would leave such haunting words to torture her in perpetuity?
After the suicide, Jared kept his distance. It had been several years since Maxine last spoke to him. He moved to Washington state, about as far from New York City and Maxine as he could get in the United States, and now she heard he was running a food co-op outside of Seattle. Maxine didn’t even have his phone number. What kind of mother didn’t even have her son’s phone number? Maxine knew that Jared did keep in touch with his father, Chad Ross, Maxine’s second husband. This was especially galling to Maxine because she knew that Chad’s family had been part of the reason Chad left her. In the end, they couldn’t stomach the idea that the family estate could one day wind up in the hands of a poor black woman from Texas. No matter how famous and accomplished she eventually became in her own right, no matter how much Chad loved her and told her over and over that he didn’t care about her race, in his family’s eyes she was still the daughter of a sharecropper. Chad’s parents were long gone now, but in her most bitter moments Maxine sometimes considered telling Jared the real reason why his father and mother divorced.
Maxine opened a bottle of wine and wallowed in her self-pity. The weekend, usually Saturday night, when she was sipping on some of the vintage selections from her wine room, was the only time that Maxine ever allowed self-pity to do a slow creep through her soul. By the time Monday morning rolled around, it was all but erased. Maxine curled up her feet on her burgundy silk couch and poured another glass of the delicious Château Pavie Bordeaux. At over three-hundred dollars a bottle, it was probably best saved for a special occasion—but at the moment, keeping her sanity seemed special enough. She gazed around her at the glory of her home, but she could get no satisfaction from its beauty. Maxine’s apartment was the envy of the city. On Park Avenue, the apartment was an interior design geek’s wet dream, overflowing with exquisite drapes, Oriental rugs, and heavy damask silks with gorgeous fringes framing enormous windows that allowed the sun’s rays to wash over rooms full of judiciously chosen pieces of furniture and artwork. Because she had owned the twelve-room, two-story space for so long, Maxine brought in new teams of designers every three years to create a totally new home—one that had been featured in Architectural Digest not once but twice. She wasn’t even sure how much the place would fetch on the open market these days—probably some obscene number with lots of zeros—but it didn’t matter because she wasn’t going anywhere.
Maxine was halfway through the bottle of Bordeaux when the front door opened and her longtime butler, William Clark, walked in, carrying a bag of groceries. He smiled at her. “Maxine, I thought we’d have some roasted chicken for dinner tonight and watch a movie.”
“Yes, William, that sounds lovely,” Maxine said, smiling back at him. She knew that William could help her shake off the loneliness. Dear William would make it better. He always did.
Everybody in Maxine’s world knew of her butler, but there was something about him that none of them knew: William was also her lover. Her relationship with William managed to be remarkably simple yet complicated at the same time. Over the years, in between and during her marriages, William had become her “maintenance man,” a warm body and reassuring presence who was there when she needed some private bolstering. William was also a skilled lover who had become adept at satisfying Maxine’s needs. Most of Maxine’s friends and colleagues assumed that she no longer had sexual needs, that she found them too inconvenient and had long ago banished them. She knew that the cast and crew of The Lunch Club called her “Grandma” behind her back. But Maxine was a different person when she was around William, looser, more relaxed, happier . . . and certainly not anyone’s grandma.
There was just one problem: Maxine wanted to keep their relationship closeted. She was a bit embarrassed about anyone knowing she had established a real relationship with her butler. What would people think about the distinguished Maxine Robinson consorting with the help? Of course she never expressed these sentiments to William—though he sensed them anyway. She told William she would let him know when she was ready to go public. It had been a source of tension between them for the past few years. After much discussion—with Maxine doing most of the talking—they had agreed to keep their real relationship private. But William wasn’t totally content with their arrangement, and every once in a while he would let Maxine know it.
Their relationship really started way back in the 1980s, during Maxine’s marriage to Chad. Chad was one of the most successful arbitrage kings of the eighties, exploiting imbalances in the stock market for maximum, breathtaking financial profit and, like the better known Ivan Boesky and Michael Milken, often destroying venerable companies in the process. Chad was usually gone for days, sometimes weeks, at a time. Maxine was busy too, with a fast-rising television career. But Maxine also had two little boys at home, trying to raise them while tending to an increasingly demanding career. Chad did the one thing he knew how to do best: he threw money at the problem, hiring a nanny, a butler, and a housekeeper to ease the burden on Maxine—and reduce the anger she was aiming at him with growing frequency. Maxine wasn’t even forty—still fairly young, beautiful, and sexually unsatisfied. William was kind and he was gorgeous, tall and graceful with a blinding smile and a body that looked like it had been carved by Michelangelo out of burnished mahogany.
Maxine was amused by her husband’s clueless cockiness, to hire a sweet and beautiful black man to look after his needy and lonely black wife. It was just asking for trouble. Maxine and William danced around each other for two years, exchanging lingering stares and not-so-accidental physical contact in the many rooms of the new Park Avenue home. Maxine’s longing for William was reaching a point of desperation, but William refused to make a move. Maxine would even do things like walk around the house wearing see-through lingerie or leave her bedroom door ajar when she was getting dressed. But William would not cross that line. Finally, one night, when it was storming outside and Chad was on a weeklong trip to Europe, Maxine took matters into her own hands. Literally. She got out of her bed in the middle of the night and she went to William’s room. She stood over him for several long minutes, gazing appreciatively at his strong, square jaw and long, fluttering eyelashes as he slept. At last Maxine crossed the line. She removed her silk chemise and slipped into his bed, completely naked. She climbed on top of him, pleased to discover that William also was naked. When his eyes opened slowly, he found himself staring deep into Maxine’s eyes. Their lips met in a deep kiss and Maxine’s hands went south, taking hold of William’s thickening penis, delighting as it grew in her hand. They proceeded to explore each other’s bodies for the rest of the night. Maxine had three orgasms that first night, the most she had ever had in one session. She was hooked on William; he became her drug. During the day she honed her image as the to
ugh-as-nails, unforgiving television reporter and interviewer, but at night she was disappointed when Chad was around. On a few occasions she was so desperate for William’s touch that she slipped out of the bed she shared with Chad and ran through the apartment in the middle of the night to William’s bed. Once she even forgot to go back to Chad after their lovemaking was done; they both awakened to the smell of Olivia, the cook, frying bacon in the kitchen. Her heart racing, Maxine rushed back to her bedroom, only to find the bed empty. Chad had already left for work. But he was so arrogant that he never would have suspected his wife was spending her nights with the help. While he had interviewed and hired William—leaving it to Maxine to hire the nanny and the cook—Chad proceeded to ignore him after that, going weeks at a time without exchanging more than two words with William. William hated Chad and the way he ignored Maxine’s needs. Once they had crossed that line, William was all too glad to have his way with Chad’s wife.
While Chad found Maxine’s brown skin to be exotic and sexy, she liked being married to a powerful man. It worked for them. That is until they started building a family. It was one thing for this scion of New York to dally with a little brown sugar, but when children were added to the mix, it became clear that his parents thought Maxine and her children were in the family for the long haul. Chad’s father had a sit-down with him and threatened to shred his inheritance if he didn’t cut his losses and divorce that woman. So he started to distance himself from their marriage and their family, and right about the time that Maxine was tapped to be the first African-American anchor of a nightly news broadcast, Chad left her. He was kind in the divorce settlement, giving her the Park Avenue apartment, several expensive cars, their Sag Harbor home, millions of dollars in cash, and extremely generous monthly child support payments for their boys, Darren and Jared. In a few years, the boys would be shipped off to boarding school anyway at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, so her time as a single parent would be very short. Years later, Maxine would regret the decision to send them away—she knew, and they were all too willing to confirm, that it was the wrong move for them, two shy, sheltered boys who still needed to be mothered. The distance was never closed. Once they were at Andover, emotionally disconnected from their parents, consorting with the children of presidents and senators (one of whom became their stepfather for about twenty minutes), they were effectively lost to her forever. Soon they both began to express their anger at their absentee mother by acting out—stealing from their classmates, sleeping with every townie tramp they could find, and taking every drug imaginable. Yes, Maxine tried rehab for both . . . but she had lost them long before Darren took his own life. Jared just walked away. He said it was because of self-preservation that he didn’t want to see her. Maxine knew it was unadulterated hate.
