Mr. Nice Guy

by Jennifer Miller

  Carmen slipped off the bed and stood in the middle of the hotel room. “Well, let’s see. Because I’m strong enough not to care. I don’t just take; I dish. And dishing on a public stage is power. I’m not crying into my Pinot with a bunch of girlfriends. I’m talking to the entire city. People may not agree with me, but they do listen. And the more that I put myself out there, the more power I attain. I stand so far above everyone; their judgments can’t touch me.”

  “My judgment got to you. My first column.”

  “Like hell it did.”

  Now Lucas was angry. They were partners in this, despite what she’d said. She should take him seriously. “There’s a good chance people aren’t judging you because of what you write. They’re judging the fact that a woman your age is writing a column meant for a twenty-three-year-old. I mean you’re what, thirty-five? Thirty-six?”

  “I’m thirty-one,” Carmen said, her voice hard.

  “Exactly,” Lucas muttered, and hopped off the bed, to face her on his feet.

  “All right, fine. You want me to communicate with you, Lucas? Well, here’s what’s on my mind. I’m doubtful that you can do anything even halfway proficient or pleasurable with my breasts. But here they are, so please, by all means…”

  Carmen pulled her shirt over her head and tossed it hard against the wall. Then she removed her bra and sent it flying. Lucas looked at her breasts. They were, he decided, excellent. It was what he’d have written down if he had a notebook in hand. And yet Lucas, for the second time in one conversation, opened his mouth and found no words to release.

  “Do something to them,” she stated. “You want to level up with me? You want to have more control? Get used to being judged, pal.” She cupped her breasts hard with both hands, pushed them up, and held them there. She locked eyes with him and raised her eyebrows expectantly. Then she took her hands away; her breasts fell back down with a little bounce. “Last chance,” she said. “Do something to my tits. Make it good.”

  Lucas paused. Then he stepped forward and went in face first.

  CHAPTER 15

  Dear Nice Guy,

  Have you seen that movie Turner & Hooch, where a slobbering dog bathes Tom Hanks in saliva? I just saw the sequel—and it was you giving me the complete canine experience this week. It was called Turner & Cooch. (Or was Hooch the dog, not Turner? Don’t ruin this joke for me, people.)

  To eager men everywhere, here’s a little advice on tit sucking: Don’t go straight for the nipple. You’re not a two-month-old and my breasts aren’t there to pump you up with protein. This is sex, not nursing. For god sakes. I told Nice Guy to impress me, and he led with his lips like some laser-guided mouth missile. There is an entire boob that could use some attention first. I want you to Make. Me. Feel. You. Kiss the sides. Kiss the undersides. Cup them, caress them, squeeze them. Squeeze them harder. I should have woken up the next day a little sore. But Nice Guy was the Niagara Falls of drool. Yuck. He’ll probably write that I stepped away after a few minutes. Well, yeah, because I worried about drowning.

  Here’s what you could have done, Nice Guy: You could have locked eyes with me; you could have shown me that, yeah, you know my boobs are there, but you’re a man who’s seen plenty of boobs before, who knows exactly what to do with them and will do it in due time. You could have stepped toward me, strongly and confidently, eyes still on mine. Then hands on my tits, coming upward like you’re scooping them up, like you’re holding my whole body. Play. Feel. Kiss me. Then go down. Press yourself into me. Kiss. Inhale. Suck. You should know the order. Build me up. And had you done all this, and done it right, I’d have let you grab me around the waist and throw me faceup on the bed, and then waited for you to take your pants off, and then let you straddle me and fuck my tits. Because that’s how you do it, Nice Guy. Or that’s how you’re supposed to.

  See you next week. If I must.

  Carmen finished writing next week’s column on her iPhone. She was standing in the middle of this dump of a hotel room, her wet hair turbaned in a towel. She’d fumed all through her shower, scrubbing her body red with anger. She felt only mildly calmer now.

  Carmen loved luxury hotels. She especially loved the novelty of spending the night in a hotel in her own city. For her birthday, she sometimes booked a ridiculously expensive room, savoring the sense of escape. A hotel room was like a blank canvas. For twelve hours, you could be anyone: artist, rock star, or high-powered executive. You could even be a writer in the old mold—stylishly accommodated, boozed, and fed while on assignment. And so, when she’d negotiated her contract with Jays, she said that she would not be made to feel as though she were renting a room by the hour. She wasn’t asking for the Pierre. Just a decent-sized bathroom (preferably with a soaking tub), room service, and a firm bed whose linens had an acceptable thread count. This way, she could take back something for herself; at the end of each session with Lucas, she would relax for the night on Empire’s dime. But Jays had not held up his end of the bargain. He’d put them in this two-star dump. It was infuriating, especially since she knew that the Editor himself would never stay anywhere that cost less than six hundred dollars a night. (She’d seen his expense report; not so long ago, some of those “work-related” itemizations had been itemized on her.)

  And after tonight’s encounter with Lucas, Carmen felt an almost desperate need to climb into a large porcelain tub. She had not felt this grimy in a long while. Possibly not since the gallery owner had tongue-raped her in the back of a taxi. He’d leaned in unexpectedly and shoved the hot, wormy muscle into her mouth. Carmen had been too startled—and the kiss was too short—to do anything. It was already over. The guy was getting out. He thought he’d been a gentleman, not asking her to come upstairs. Back home, she had literally considered washing her mouth out with soap. She vowed never to let anything like that happen again.

  And yet that was the moment she returned to, in thinking about the last hour with Lucas. When she’d ripped off her shirt and bra, she’d done it as a challenge—a power move. He’d been blindsided by her breasts, by a body of which he was clearly in awe. If that wasn’t power, what was? But if that was power, then why did she now feel sullied, outside and in?

  She got dressed, left the hotel, and stood on the sidewalk, unsure where to go. In the past, she would have happily seated herself at some bar and waited for a man to pick her up. Now she cringed at the thought. Her closest friends, Martin and Dale, lived in Chelsea, not far away. But she knew how that would go: Too much white wine and then she’d be spilling everything. Martin couldn’t keep a secret. Dale could, except from Martin. She couldn’t help but think about Jays and what—or who—he was doing. The rake. She should have insisted they treat the columns like creative writing assignments. (And when Jays grew tired of foreplay and demanded that she and Lucas start fucking, that’s exactly what Carmen would insist they do.) But she had succumbed to pride. Jays had issued her a challenge, and (unlike certain moments in the past) she was determined to face it honestly. Which meant she was trapped in this tussle with Lucas every other goddamned week. And still Jays claimed victory. Because nothing would change the fact that he’d broken her heart.

  Carmen hailed a taxi and asked for the Museum of Modern Art. The museum had been closed for hours, but Carmen knew Charles, the night security guard. She’d been introduced to him years ago by her grandmother, a onetime Broadway actress, at a party hosted by a group of producers. Charles had regaled Carmen with tales of the museum’s intrigues, and before leaving she’d delivered him a plate of fancy desserts and a playbill signed by her grandmother. Since then, he’d been happy to do Carmen the occasional favor.

  “You’ve had a night?” Charles asked, letting Carmen into the spacious, silent lobby. It was his typical question. Carmen only called on Charles in her worst moments: those rare occasions when her confidence faltered, when she felt like a fraud, a hack, an outsider in her own city. She came to remind herself why she’d made such a difficult, capricious, and exp
ensive place her home.

  “I won’t be long,” she said. There was only one painting that Carmen wanted to see.

  After she graduated from New York University with an English degree and with no idea what she wanted to do with her life, Carmen spent a summer backpacking across Europe. She visited the Louvre, Uffizi, and Tate. In Amsterdam, she went to the Van Gogh Museum, where she saw Bedroom in Arles, Sunflowers, and Almond Blossoms. But when she went looking for The Starry Night, she couldn’t find it. She doubled back through the entire museum before finally flagging a docent.

  “You are from America?” the docent asked, and smiled mischievously. “I am afraid Starry Night is at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.”

  Carmen had traveled thousands of miles, hoping to see a painting that was back at home. The moment clinched something for her. She still had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, but she was certain that whatever awaited her, it waited in Manhattan.

  And so she visited this gallery on the fifth floor of MOMA when she needed to remember who she was and why she’d chosen this life. The Starry Night, the cliché of a million dorm rooms, always started Carmen’s heart pounding. Not just because it was remarkable and absorbing—which of course it was—but also because, against all odds, it lived here. And because it was here, and not over there, it could belong to her—just as it belonged to every other person who, by their perseverance and their moxie, had struggled to carve out a piece of this city for themselves.

  Carmen stood before the painting for half an hour, casting her troubles into van Gogh’s turbulent sky. When she’d vanquished all thoughts of flight, all doubts and second guesses, she headed back downstairs, thanked Charles again, and hailed the evening’s final taxi.

  * * *

  From the time that she could talk, Carmen had called her paternal grandmother Mira. “Miranda” was too difficult, but variations of “Grandmother”—“Granny,” “Grandma,” “Nana,” what have you—were deemed unacceptable. Mira had spent her life bucking categories. As the daughter of Irish immigrants, she was expected to marry young and raise a brood of children. Instead, she frequently reminded Carmen that she’d been a divorcée at age twenty-five, in the 1950s, with a child. She’d made her living as a waitress, an artist’s model, a girls’ school gym teacher, and, in her last act, a celebrated actress. She’d been proposed to six times and managed to fend off five of these suitors. Then in her “succulent late sixties,” she’d fallen madly in love with a white-bearded, Birkenstocked folk singer—“can you imagine, Carmen!” They lived out of wedlock for many years, until fourteen months ago, when a heart attack felled him. Now Mira lived alone in his creaky ground-floor apartment on Perry Street. It was rent-controlled to the tune of six hundred dollars a month, which was fortunate, seeing as she had almost no savings.

  Carmen arrived there just past 11:00 P.M. and let herself in. Mira, always a night hawk, lounged on the patchy Baroque Louis XVI settee in one of her many “evening-in” getups. This one was a silky aubergine-colored robe and matching slippers procured from the depths of Chinatown. She was drinking hot chocolate and simultaneously working through a game of Solitaire, a biography of Czeslaw Milosz, and an episode of House Hunters on her iPad.

  “Multitasking, are we?” Carmen slipped off her heels and walked across the uneven floorboards toward the lamplit living room. She kissed Mira on the cheek, breathing in her powdery scent and the fragrance of her lipstick, which given how much the woman had applied over eighty-six years was more or less permanent.

  “Is everything all right?” Mira asked.

  Carmen visited her grandmother multiple times a week, accompanying her on various outings and shopping expeditions. But evenings, Mira knew, were for Carmen’s work.

  “Don’t mind me,” Carmen said, and scanned the apartment’s impressive built-in bookshelves. A rolling ladder, which provided access to the upper reaches, had long been Carmen’s favorite detail of this little home. “I’ll just find something to read.”

  “Oh please,” Mira said. “There’s chocolate on the stove. Or—I’m guessing you’d prefer whiskey?”

  The galley kitchen was submarine-like, windowless and pulsating with greenish light. Most people would have found the apartment’s 450 square feet claustrophobic. But Mira contended that they were enough: manageable enough, affordable enough. “I have a home,” she’d say. “I have the Village for a backyard. What else do I need?”

  Carmen could think of a few things, including natural light and a bathroom where your knees didn’t hit the door when you sat on the toilet. But she knew how lucky Mira was. Now Carmen fixed her grandmother a new mug of cocoa and poured herself a drink. Back in the living room, she said, “I’m involved with something that’s either very smart or very stupid.”

  “Something or someone?” Mira asked.

  “Both.”

  Carmen could see that Mira was now revved up, as much as a woman pushing eighty-seven could be. There was nothing she’d loved more than puzzling through a problem. So Carmen explained everything—about the column, the deal she’d made with Jays, and the exchange with Lucas earlier than night.

  “Are you comfortable with the physical arrangement with this young man?”

  “At the moment. More or less,” she said.

  “And this corner you’ve backed into?”

  “Corner?”

  “Well, you did good for yourself, negotiating a new contract. But, Carmen, as soon as this column achieves its goal—gets the numbers up or whatever—what’s to stop Jay Jacobson from firing you?”

  Mira had met Jays exactly once. And from that encounter, she’d pronounced him the “Sultan of Smarm.” From then on, she insisted on referring to him by his full name, like he was an evil spirit that must be properly labeled in order to be exorcized.

  Carmen had assumed that “Screw the Critics” would grant her greater cachet in the mediasphere, more assigned pieces at higher word rates. But Mira was right. Jays could dispose of her when he got what he needed.

  “You’ve got to think about the long game,” Mira continued. “Professionally speaking, what do you really want?”

  Suddenly feeling shy, Carmen traced her toe along the rug. Instead of the dusty threadbare object she was used to, her foot sank into plush fiber. “Wait, is this new?” she asked. “Mira, this looks expensive.”

  “It was—and don’t give me that look, Carmen. Harry always treated this place like a short-term rental, even though he’d lived here for thirty years. He never fixed things, never invested in anything new. And, well, as I said, this is my home. At least until I step onto that Broadway stage in the sky.”

  “Very funny,” Carmen said. But she suddenly understood what her grandmother was trying to communicate. Carmen needed to take responsibility for her career. She needed to own it. “I want a cultural position in this city that’s equal to my intellect,” she said. “And I want to be paid for it.”

  Miranda nodded. “Then go get it.”

  Carmen just shook her head. “A sex and relationships columnist becoming a public intellectual? Please.”

  “If I could elbow my way onto Broadway, then you can certainly expand your repertoire. After all, you’re already on the inside.”

  “I’m stuck inside the sex-columnist ghetto, Mira. Whenever I pitch anything else I get, ‘Nice writing, but this topic is outside your comfort zone.’ And Jays isn’t the only one dishing out that kind of condescending bullshit.”

  “You deserve to be liberated. The question is how?”

  Carmen had been asking herself this question for years. She’d had big ambitions. After returning from her post-collegiate jaunt across Europe, she’d enrolled at Columbia Journalism School. The following summer, she’d actually secured an internship at the New York Times. But it was unpaid and she had a whopping amount of school debt from college and grad school. Meanwhile, her parents had retired, sold their Hamilton Heights apartment, and moved to Tucson, so she no longer had a place to
crash. Reluctantly, she turned down the internship. But she refused to leave New York City—the pulse of the media world—to cover community board meetings in Bumblefuck, Pennsylvania, or even Nowheresville, New Jersey. She found her way into corporate copywriting, describing dresses for catalogs, and landed the occasional essay in women’s magazines, which paid a glorious two dollars a word but often required her to amp up the ogle factor and play down the facts. When a friend told her that Empire was hiring Web writers on contract, Carmen jumped at the chance.

  From the get-go, she understood that Jays had taken both a professional and nonprofessional interest in her. She also understood that if she took advantage of the latter she’d have a better shot at attaining her ultimate goal: her own column in the magazine. And so she figured out when to be confident with him and when to be coy. After just a year, to Carmen’s delight, Jays delivered the prize. And maybe the gig didn’t come with health insurance, but Jays had talked about cutbacks from the publisher, and how could Carmen argue with that?

  Carmen had also come to like Jays: his passion, his ambition, and, despite his massive success, the vulnerability he harbored over his common upbringing. To the world, he used his humble roots as a humble brag, but behind closed doors, he was convinced that everyone considered him a hick. It was possible that, deep down, he still saw himself that way. But he guarded these feelings like precious gems. Carmen was the only one he let in, and this convinced her that she was different. Special.

  Three years after she’d first come to Empire, they began dating in secret. When it came to Carmen’s job or Jays’ public love life, they had an unspoken understanding: Anything was game as long as it wasn’t serious. This went on for years with the occasional blowup and breakup—inevitable given how stubborn, strong-willed, and jealous they could be. But they always returned. Most of the time, Carmen was happy.

  Then she was no longer in her twenties and something shifted. It was such a cliché: Turn thirty and you start to worry about the future, about being alone. Yet Jays, nearing forty, seemed to feel the same. A new intensity had entered their romantic interactions, as though they were running out of time. But why should that be? They were changing. Why couldn’t their relationship change, too?