by Alison Tyler
‘Mm-hmm,’ she said. ‘That flower trick was absolutely lovely. I know Anthony wouldn’t have drank the thing, but it showed spark and spunk. You gotta love that.’
‘Who else is in?’
‘You wouldn’t remember the names, I think, but the man who created your Slow Comfortable Screw got in. He’s yummy.’
I poured myself a cup of coffee and took a sip. ‘So’s Anthony.’
‘Then why are you sleeping on my sofa?’
‘You told me not to fuck him on the first night.’
‘I did not.’ She sounded aghast. ‘I asked you whether or not you wanted to.’
‘I wanted to,’ I said with a sigh.
‘Then let me ask again: Why are you sleeping on my sofa?’
‘I don’t know. He translated the papers for me, and he made me all confused.’
‘He did a bad job?’
‘He did an excellent job,’ I told her, ‘but –’
‘But what?’
I didn’t know if I could confess the rest to her. What would Nora say if I told her I thought he might be playing a game with me? I found that I just couldn’t do it. Not yet.
‘But what?’ Nora asked again, looking up from the computer, giving me her total attention. On the screen behind her, I saw that she’d crossed out the faces of more than twenty contestants. I felt sad for those people. They had taken a risk and been shot down. I hesitated another moment, and then I chickened out.
‘Maybe I’m too inexperienced for him,’ I said. ‘He’s dated some of the top artists in the world. The really extreme avant-garde ones.’
‘So? You’re a total catch, Eleanor. You don’t give yourself enough credit.’
‘What if he wants someone who knows what they’re doing?’
‘You know what you’re doing.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t. Not really. What should I do? What would you do in my situation?’
She was quiet for a moment, and I could tell she had a difficult time envisioning herself in my situation. Nora is always in control. She always knows what she’s doing. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘you’re not a virgin –’
‘But I’m not avant-garde, either.’
She hesitated for another moment. Then she said, ‘You know what I’d do? I’d take the upper hand.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’d tell him that I had a surprise for him, and then I’d go into his office with a little bag of toys.’
‘Toys?’ I thought I knew what she meant, but I couldn’t believe she’d think this would work for me.
‘Go to one of the sex stores on Hollywood and buy yourself a pair of cuffs. Or better yet, take the ones from my dresser drawer. They’re velvet-lined. Just wait until Dean wakes up.’
‘I thought you said Travis …’
‘I said I showered with Travis. Dean came over after.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘After.’ Like that made sense. But I guess it did. In Nora’s world all things are possible.
‘When are you going to announce the winners?’ I asked after I’d showered. Showered alone, of course, not with Dean, Travis, Anthony or any combination thereof. Mmm, but there was a thought. Had even Nora ever had three men at once?
‘The Masquerade Ball.’
‘On Halloween?’
She nodded. ‘It’s only a few days away. It seems like the perfect time to make such an important announcement. The press will be there, and we have a great band lined up.’
‘Are you sure about your choices?’
She nodded. ‘I always am, Eli. How about you? Are you sure about yours?’
I looked down at my hands rather than looking at her. No, I wasn’t. What if I’d chosen to go home with Anthony the night before? Nora seemed to be reading my mind.
‘Everything will work out,’ she whispered, as if she were some sort of oracle, herself, as if she knew the future. I was not so sure.
I leaned back against the wall of her kitchen, dreading the weekend in front of me. I’d have to go back to the apartment, pack my belongings, find a storage facility. I’d have to face the drudge of reality. ‘How do you know?’ I asked Nora.
‘Because it will. Good things are going to happen to us –’ she smiled ‘– both of us. I can sense it.’
Chapter Thirteen
I had just taken my first sip of Columbian coffee on Monday morning when Anthony came to my office. Before he arrived, I had been sitting on my black swivel chair, thinking about going shopping with Nora. Shopping for things I’d never normally buy, never normally need. Suddenly ‘normal’ didn’t appeal to me any more.
The weekend had been a downer. Confronting Byron had taken all of my energy. He’d broken up with Gwen after the scene at Nora’s club – according to his story, anyway. My guess was that she’d dumped him. He hadn’t fully believed that the two of us were over. It was as if he’d thought that now that he’d gotten Gwen out of his system, we could pick up where we’d left off.
Nora was flabbergasted when I’d told her. ‘How could he think you’d take him back?’
‘It wasn’t like that,’ I explained. ‘He thought of it more like taking me back.’
‘That doesn’t make any sense.’
‘He’s always been like that, turning things around. He wanted to make me feel as if I’d been the one who drove him into Gwen’s arms, but now that he’d seen the light, we could continue on our path.’
‘I hope you told him about Dean.’
I bit down on my smile, and she beamed at me. But the revelation hadn’t made moving out any easier. We’d had another knock-down fight, and I hadn’t been able to collect the rest of my belongings.
Although I’d brought my favourite suits with me from the apartment, I was already nearly out of underwear. Nora had insisted that we were due for a visit to Kitten’s Top Drawer, even though it’s a dangerous activity for her. Nora spends hundreds of dollars on lingerie because she often wears underwear as outerwear. I’ve gone shopping with her every so often, but I always wind up with the most tastefully quiet ensembles one might imagine. And always black. But now, my thoughts took me to a different place. I knew that with each rustle of satin, each bit of lace, I would picture performing a striptease for Anthony.
My mind was on panties, frilly pastels with dreamy decorative designs, as Anthony knocked and opened the door. As soon as I saw him, I took too big a sip of my coffee and burned my tongue, but he didn’t seem to notice. Or didn’t seem to care.
His arrival was unexpected, surprising me before the java had sparked the synapses in my brain. Just seeing him made me think about my dreams from Friday night. Truly, the first wet dream I’d ever had.
‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you get my messages?’
I shook my head. While Anthony stared at me, I lifted the handset of my office phone. It beeped repeatedly, indicating at least one message on my voicemail. Instead of listening, I hung up the phone and looked at Anthony, waiting for him to tell me whatever information he’d left on the machine.
Ignoring the chair, he sat on the edge of my desk, then looked around the office, taking it in. My office is down the hall from his tiny space, at the other end of the building. Mine is twice the size, painted a pale yellow, with framed prints of my favorite ARTSI posters and paintings on the walls. I decided early on that if I couldn’t actually have an office with a window, at least I could create my own views.
Anthony was obviously wide awake, apparently one of those morning people I’ve read about. He exuded energy and, when he moved, I smelled fresh air, thought of him riding in his convertible to work, picking up the fragrance of the jacaranda trees that were currently dropping their purple blossoms everywhere in town. The streets near the museum were carpeted with the slippery petals.
‘I spent all weekend doing research,’ Anthony said. ‘The journal contained words that I simply couldn’t translate. I think I told you one or two of them in the papers on Friday night: hetairai, de
ikteriades. And I told you that after looking them up, I discovered that they were levels of prostitutes, which helped immensely. I grabbed one of those huge volumes on ancient Greece from the library. I couldn’t find anything more modern than the nineteen-forties, and the text is disgustingly dense. But I did learn several things. I learned that the women in the top level, the hetairai, had peculiar methods of meeting up with their clients.’
He looked at me to see if I was paying attention. When I nodded, he continued. ‘Every day, men who were interested in having a little fun would walk through the cemetery. On the headstones, a man would write the name of the prostitute he hoped to sleep with and he would list a monetary amount. The prostitutes would send their servants through the graveyard to read the offers –’
‘Servants?’ I interrupted.
‘These weren’t streetwalkers, you have to understand. They were powerful women who got a lot of money for what they offered. If the women were willing to accept the offer, they would write a proposed meeting time on the stones. If they weren’t interested, they would let the man know on the headstone. This could cause embarrassment, since all in the town could read the rejection.’
He paused, then continued, ‘I couldn’t find much else about the prostitutes, except that there were most definitely orgies, just like the journal says. There was lesbianism, and there were dildoes.’
God, I couldn’t believe we were having this discussion. At work. At barely nine in the morning.
‘Did you get a chance to read the paper today?’ he asked. He thrust one hand into his pocket, and pulled out a folded clipping.
‘Not yet. I just got here.’ I pulled my coffee cup closer, as if it were some sort of security blanket. Steam curled upwards from the porcelain mug.
‘There’s a piece reprinted from Reuters. It’s tiny, just a filler on the back page. But it’s the kind of thing I keep a look out for, the type of piece Janice is always posting on the bulletin board in the commissary. This time, the tagline of Athens caught my attention. Archaeologists have discovered what they believe to be a two-thousand-year-old dildo in a brothel in Athens. I think the museum should buy it and place it in the Greek room with your journal.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, it’s absolutely amazing,’ he said, now producing a stack of typewritten pages and placing them on the centre of my clean desk blotter. Looking at them, I realised that he must have spent all weekend working. The pages were single spaced. He was going to make me blind, even if he didn’t mean to. ‘You’re going to go bonkers, totally crazy,’ he said, still smiling.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Just like you said, it’s pornography,’ he told me. ‘Plain and simple. I guess I had thought from skimming ahead that the rest of it might be more about the girl’s life. That you would be able to use this information to create a picture of how women lived in Greece two thousand years ago. But there isn’t much about daily life. It’s all about fucking. If Colette had been hired to write ancient Greek smut for a dollar a page, she wouldn’t have been able to do any better than this. I don’t know if anyone could do better. The stuff is incredibly hot.’
I didn’t know how to respond. Was he teasing me? Looking at Anthony, again refined with his hair pulled back and glasses in place, customary blue Oxford-cloth shirt over a white T-shirt and khaki pants, I could hardly believe we had been out together. That he’d let his hair down – literally and figuratively. That he had touched my hand and sent tantalising shivers through my body. But when he winked at me, the whole of Friday night came flooding back, the feelings of it, the force of it.
‘You mean there’s more – more of the bondage stuff?’
‘It’s all sex,’ he said, grinning even broader, obviously enjoying himself, and apparently wanting to see what my reaction to the news would be. ‘It’s not a few teasing lines about how the girl was tied up and the soldier came to visit her, used her, released her –’
‘The soldier?’
‘The man. He’s a soldier. Someone high up, though. Not a drone. And it seems that he and the girl wrote their experiences back and forth. There are simply pages of play-by-play, rough-and-ready action. The stuff is smut, but delicious smut. If we worked on it together, I’ll bet it would be as big a seller as The Sexual Life of Catherine M. People who don’t generally buy pornography would snap it up because it’s old. And for some people, old is better. We’d be interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air. The New York Times would do a profile.’ He sounded extremely happy.
‘But you haven’t finished, have you? There were so many pages.’ I recalled the way the sheath of papers had looked when I’d found them in the rubble of the vase or urn. Broken fragments all around a pile of disintegrating papers.
‘I only did a few more scenes,’ he said, ‘and when I was done, I felt as if I needed to take a cold shower. A series of cold showers. With ice cubes thrown in for good measure. Or maybe I should have just gotten in my car and come to see you at Nora’s place. You would have let me in, wouldn’t you?’ He looked at me pointedly, and I returned the look, waiting. I didn’t admit that I had been up Friday night, as well, thinking that I should get in my car and drive to see him. ‘As it was,’ he continued, ‘I stood under the shower for ten minutes, then dried off outside on my fire escape. I’m probably going to get sick, and it will be all your fault.’
Fire escape, my mind whispered to me. He’d stood naked on his fire escape thinking about me. I liked that thought. Naked in his shower, the hot water pouring over his hotter body. No, the cold water. What water? My thoughts were a blur. I tried not to think of any of these images, which was a lot like trying not to think of white elephants, or pink elephants, or any other kind of elephants.
‘I’m going to have to save the rest of it for later,’ Anthony continued. ‘I’ve got a few things that need working on if I want to keep my day job. Plus –’ he winked at me once again, making me feel as if we shared something dark and dirty, which I suppose we had ‘– if I do more translating of that, I’m going to have to drag you off to some empty meeting room, tie you down, and give you what for.’
‘What for?’ I murmured.
‘For making me wait.’ There was a long pause.
‘You mean on Friday night? Being late for dinner?’ My voice was a whisper.
‘I mean for making me wait all these months since last Christmas. Don’t you know I’ve been thinking about you every day since the party? Couldn’t you tell that?’
I shook my head. I was having a difficult time processing the fact that Anthony was speaking to me like this. ‘How did you know that Gwen was a lawyer?’ I asked suddenly.
For the first time ever, I saw Anthony blush. ‘I read Byron’s blog.’
Was I the only person on the planet who didn’t read Byron’s blog?
‘I wanted to know more about him – I was trying to figure out what you saw in him.’
I stared at him, feeling shock work through my body. So I hadn’t been the only one fantasising …
‘Finding our own empty meeting room wouldn’t be so bad, would it, Eleanor?’
I flushed even deeper. It felt as if my cheeks were positively neon. Nora would have been displeased. Nora says you should never blush in front of a guy you like because it lets him know what you’re thinking. It gives your hand away. As you might guess, Nora is a very good poker player; she has the face down perfectly. She’s even been on that show, Celebrity Poker, several times, and she’s always walked away the winner, earning thousands of dollars for her favourite charity.
But Nora is who she is, and I am who I am, and I couldn’t help it. Tie me down … those words hit me with enough erotic images that I had to shake my head to clear them away.
‘We wouldn’t be doing anything but research, would we?’ Anthony continued in his low crooning voice. ‘Simply re-enacting a love scene that is over two thousand years old. You’re the best researcher at ARTSI. Everyone says so. Don’t you think you ought to try out th
is stuff yourself?’
He was teasing me. I knew it. And yet I couldn’t respond. With Nora, I’m often able to shoot back quick witticisms. With Anthony, I felt as if nothing I ever said would make any sense. I was mute and shy as a virgin. Although not the virgin in the story. The faux virgin. She seemed as if she knew what she was doing. Anthony didn’t appear to mind my silence, though. He simply added, ‘Those Greeks could be fairly kinky. I have to say that I’m impressed.’
I gripped my cup and stared down into the dark liquid. I could see my reflection in the coffee. I looked untamed, and I quickly took a sip to erase the image
Anthony stared at me curiously. ‘Was that too much to say after just one date? Have I totally horrified you?’
He kept reminding me that he thought it was a date, too, just like Nora did.
Was I the only one who had a need to keep insisting that it wasn’t?
Anthony slapped his forehead in comic horror. ‘Now, you’ll never come over and see my trains, will you?’ It was as if he had revealed himself to me, shown me who he was behind the serious fac¸ade. Now it was my turn, right? I’ve read enough romance novels. I know how the scenarios are supposed to unfold. Anthony was the hero, and I was the heroine – not Nora this time. Me. Why couldn’t I simply open my mouth and say, ‘The conference room at the end of this floor is empty. You’ve got your belt on. What are we waiting for? Tie me down just like you threatened. Take me as fiercely as the man in the story.’
But when I didn’t reply, he said, ‘Are you OK, Eleanor?’
‘I’m fine,’ I lied. ‘Let me read these and I’ll get back to you.’
‘After your own cold shower,’ Anthony said, apparently not offended at all that I hadn’t matched his dare. ‘I haven’t revealed the big secret, the crème de la crème, as it were. I’ve saved it. I want you to discover it all for yourself.’
He nodded at me, and then left me alone in my office to gaze at the painting of an open window and wish that it were real.
My coffee was calling to me.
I picked it up and took another sip. I gazed at the wall in my room for so long that the coffee grew lukewarm, and I drank it as if it were a glass of water. I wanted to be awake when I read the pages. I wanted to have my wits about me. I didn’t have them now. I had only images of Anthony grabbing me by the wrist and taking me down the hall to the conference room, leading me off like a naughty girl in need of her punishment, locking the door and spreading me out, face down on the long black table.
