D Is for Dress-Up

by Alison Tyler

  Finally I managed to say, “You’re a wonderful person, you’re great in bed, so what if you’re also attracted to men? Besides, everyone is really attracted to their own sex as well as the opposite sex, but most people just lie about it.”

  “No, no, no, it’s n-n-n-n-ot ab-b-bout sex, “he spat out, “and I don’t want to go to bed with other men, or women either. I want you, you’re the one.”

  “Just me?” I asked.

  “Just you,” he answered. “I love being with you. I wanted to tell you before, but I couldn’t.” He was trembling. He sat down on one of the two chairs, clasped his hands in his lap, and looked down and then back up at me. “I feel like a psycho sometimes,” he said, “because I have to hide this. I left home after high school, started to drive a taxi. I tried to write, but didn’t have the confidence. I took a few writing classes but couldn’t produce a thing. Then one day when I was alone in the apartment I shared with my old girlfriend Laura, I went into the bathroom. She had left her lipstick uncapped, standing on the sink. Without thinking I reached out, picked it up, and put lipstick on my mouth for the first time. It was a vivid fuchsia color. When I looked in the mirror, I looked like a clown with a five o’clock shadow, but then, as if I was in a dream, I went back to the typewriter. In ten minutes I wrote a terrific poem about the loneliness of eagles. Soon after that, I started to cross-dress and the writing flowed. Laura couldn’t take it and I couldn’t hide it from her, so we broke up.”

  “So that’s why you swiped my lipstick. It’s my lipstick on the cigarette butts.”

  “Yeah, of course,” he said.

  Now I was totally overwhelmed, shocked. I heard myself saying, “Certainly you could afford your own. I’ve been going crazy looking for that lipstick. It’s the most expensive one I’ve ever owned, a twentydollar lipstick, twenty-two if you count the tax.”

  “Sure, sure, I could afford my own but I couldn’t help myself. I took it because it was yours, your very special lipstick. I thought it would inspire me ... I-I-I love you.”

  I felt like bolting out the door. So this is what I attract—the first man in five years who can keep my fuse lit, and he wants to dress up like Doris Day! But then I heard the voices of the many true gods speaking in my head: So what? they said, no one is perfect.

  I thought about the boyfriend before Wayne, the one who always had to be on top. I thought about the one before that, the one who dropped me when he found out how old I was. I remembered how lonely I was before I met Wayne, how desolate. I leaned over and put my hand on his knee.

  “Put on one of the dresses,” I said, “and the lipstick.”

  “What?” he asked in disbelief. “Why, do you want to laugh at me?” “No—no, silly,” I said. “Maybe I only want to look at your legs.” He lifted his head, looked at me shyly, with a tentative, please-like-me smile, and I grinned right back. He went to the bed and picked up the chartreuse evening dress. I couldn’t repress a shudder.

  “Not that one. Any one but that one, please.” I said. He grabbed one of the housedresses and vanished into the bathroom, slamming the door.

  When he opened the bathroom door and stepped back into the room, his clear blue eyes were accented with black eyeliner. It was crooked and smudged, so it looked like he had dirt all around his eyes. He had also put on some peachy-pink blusher that clashed with his fair complexion. My Rouge Formidable was slathered too thickly over his lips. He was easily the handsomest man I had ever seen.

  “You’re gorgeous,” I told him, “so hot that my pussy is beginning to steam.”

  The housedress he had chosen was patterned with dark blue and green flowers; the dress was much too short for his six-foot frame. The bottom button of the dress was undone and the tip of his long, pink cock poked out between the blue and green flowers like a strange, delicate bud. Behind his cock I could see the purple globes of his balls. I had never wanted to suck a cock so much in my life. The way the dress opened over it made me think of the chuppah, the ceremonial canopy the bride and groom stand under during a Jewish marriage ceremony. I wanted to marry his cock. “My love is as rich with sap as a cedar in the spring,” the Song of Solomon says.

  I went to him, put my arms around his waist so that we were body to body. He was breathing fast and I could feel the blood coursing beneath his skin. I knelt before him. I lifted the hem of his dress so my face was in front of his magnificent set. His cock was a robust tree, his thighs a forest of strength. When I took him in my mouth I smelled that scent of cedar and pine. I ran my tongue round and round him, I sucked him deep, and the more he stiffened, the harder I sucked as he swelled even more and filled my whole mouth. I knew I could never get enough of him. I moved my hand to his balls. I wanted to caress his apples, his pomegranates, his fruits with their magic seeds. They were growing and I needed both hands to juggle them. I heard the sharp, rapid breathing that meant he was about to climax. I had to summon all my will to make my mouth release him, he was so sweet.

  “Wait, wait, “I said as I stood and stripped off my clothes. “Where’s my lipstick?”

  He couldn’t stop panting, he was so excited. “In the medicine cabinet,” he gasped.

  “Just wait,” I said. I dashed in, got it, and returned to him. I wiped off the lipstick he had applied. “I want to make your mouth up. I’ve had a lot of practice.”

  I carefully outlined his full lips with the lipstick and then I filled the outline in.

  I stepped back to look at his mouth, the most alluring mouth I had ever seen.

  “Now you look so sexy, like Rudolph Valentino, King of Lovers.”

  He grinned, then grabbed me and kissed me, smearing my Rouge Formidable all over my lips. Then I just lay down on his hard wood floor and spread my legs. I loved how his rigid cock looked poking out of that dress. I put my hands beneath my ass and raised my hips, opening my sweet rosebud up to my lipstick love.

  EDIT Me

  DAMN GOOD START,” Hunter said, looking over the interview I’d done with Flea from the Chili Peppers. “But your lead needs more energy.”

  I watched as he used a bright red pen to mark my draft up, and even though the stark white paper looked bled on when he’d finished, I didn’t say a word. Hunter was my mentor. That’s what he called it. I called it something else, but never to his face.

  “Like this,” he said, easily penning a new opening sentence that throbbed with the intensity of a Chili Peppers bass line.

  I nodded, awed, as always, by the effortless way he fixed my pieces. I knew he wasn’t scrawling across my paper out of spite or animosity. After several weeks on the job, I’d learned a simple truth: Hunter was extremely particular about the end result—whether it be for a story in the newspaper that he owned and I wrote for, or my own appearance. He’d adjust my lead sentence if he disagreed with a solitary word choice, and he’d adjust my bra strap when it slid free, his fingers lingering— I thought, I hoped—for an extra beat beneath the fine strap of silken fabric.

  Surreptitiously, I observed his interactions with my fellow staff members and realized that he didn’t touch the other writers the way he touched me. But I didn’t know why. I’d gotten the job from a board at UCLA, a mentorship program. A way to learn about the world. I convinced myself that the extra interest he showed in me was simply because he was taking his job seriously.

  “Lose the sweater,” he’d say, motioning to my oversized thrift-store black cardigan with moth holes in the sleeves, grimacing as if it pained him to look at the thing. “Take out the hair ribbon. Then tie the ribbon around your neck. Like that. Perfect.”

  I was eighteen, out in the real world for the first time, shy and naïve. I didn’t think it mattered what writers wore, but Hunter disagreed. He taught me how to dress, and he often re-dressed me when I came to work. I made the adjustments without a complaint. My goal was to please him. With my writing. With myself.

  Edit me, I thought every time I entered the office. Edit me.

  He was my mentor, and he
bought me things.

  Like The Clash’s London Calling.

  And pretty pink panties with polka dots.

  And high-heeled Mary Janes when he got tired of my favorite pair of battered black Docs Martens that I wore daily, regardless of the occasion. In my defense, the setting was an alternative art-house weekly where fashion was far more bizarre than Bazaar. Our photography editor, Pryor McNicols, wore Elvis Costello—style geek glasses and bowling shirts featuring other people’s names: Biff, Carlos, Ned. Our music editor sported a bright-blue Mohawk, which looked good with her cobalt eyes. The tough ex-con in charge of collecting advertising payments boasted full-arm tattoos of naked ’40s-style pinups. But even with the artsy set, wearing Docs with everything from plaid micro-miniskirts to short black dresses was pushing the fashion factor past the breaking point.

  “Try them,” he said softly when I opened the shoe box after work. “Just try them on—”

  I sat down on the floor to undo the laces of my boots, and Hunter watched patiently from the edge of his desk, his head cocked as I finally slid on the patent leather shoes he’d chosen and buckled them over the ankle.

  “Better,” he said, smiling as I did my best not to tip over. “Now, you look like a grown-up.”

  Hunter’s mother was from Japan, his father from Denmark, and he’d wound up with exotic, almost unreasonable good looks. Tall and handsome, he had the strongest jaw you could imagine, cheekbones like cut glass, and glossy black shoulder-length hair that I longed to run my fingers through. He dated girls who were models or starlets—lean and sleek, like cats in the wild, with golden manes and chestnut skin. I couldn’t have been more different. I’m slim and pale with dark hair and dark eyes, and at the time I had “goth girl” written all over me. Hunter said I was hiding—the way the best portions of my stories were buried beneath extra words. My looks were similarly hampered by the ill-fitting clothes I favored. But black made me feel safe, and my Docs made me invincible.

  With his wealth and his exotic looks, Hunter could have had almost any girl he chose, but that summer he took me for lunch each day, and he told me things. Taught me things. While we ate our meals I tried my best to emulate the model girls he dated.

  Editors—good editors—are by nature freaks for control. Hunter was no different. He needed to have his whole staff in place the way he desired. We worked for him, so that made sense. But with me, he took things further. Beyond deadlines. Beyond lead sentences. He was sexy with me, leaning across the table at lunch and saying in a low, soft voice, “I held her hands together over her head. Stretching her. I kept hold of her wrists as I fucked her and she couldn’t get free.”

  My panties, newly purchased, perfectly polka dot, were drenched. I squirmed, and he admonished me. “You flush so prettily. It’s lovely with your pale skin. But you shouldn’t squirm around as if you’re uncomfortable. You should soak it all in when a man tells you secrets. You should learn from what he says.”

  Soak. That was a good word. That’s what I did.

  “Now ask,” he’d say magnanimously, lifting his emerald green bottle of imported beer to his lips. “Ask whatever you want.”

  He was fair in that way, always allowing me to quiz him after the lunchtime lessons. I tried to show him that I was learning, that I’d paid attention and memorized the facts. But I wasn’t used to drinking beer during the day, stolen sips I took from his bottle. My mind felt hazy around the edges, and all I could mumble was, “Did she like it?”

  A headshake.

  A frown.

  I’d asked the wrong question, and I felt as bad as if he’d put me over his lap and spanked me. No, that’s a lie. Because that’s what I wished he would do. I hated to disappoint him. I wanted to make him proud. This was why I spent hours agonizing over the leads in my sentences, as well as the clothes in my closet.

  “Did she come?” I asked.

  That was better. More in-your-face, which he liked coming from me. I was so desperately quiet, so curiously shy. How’d I get like that? He simply couldn’t fathom. I was no L.A. woman, true. A transplanted San Francisco girl, I couldn’t begin to blend in a world of silicone and faux blondes. With my pale skin, dark-cherry lips, and long dark curly hair, I didn’t fit in. Hunter liked that. He wanted me to blush less, but be comfortable more. Confidence, he said, was power.

  “Of course she came.”

  And then, to show him that I was advancing, that I was finally catching on, I said in as husky a voice as I could manage, “I would have come, too.”

  His smile lit his face. He had perpetual smudges underneath his dark, almost-purple-blue eyes. The signs of fatigue proved that he ran the newspaper from dawn till dawn. He might have been wealthy, but he wasn’t a party boy. He got his hands dirty. And oh, did I want those dirty hands around my wrists. Holding me down. Stretching me. Not letting me free. Not even for a second.

  When I came out of the ladies’ room after touching up my makeup, he smeared my lipstick with the ball of his thumb, so that my lips looked freshly kissed and viper-stung. I imagined sucking his thumb, if only he’d let me. Imagined sucking his cock, on my knees in his office, showing him that I was an apt pupil, if only he’d let me.

  He said he was my mentor.

  I called him something else entirely. But not to his face.

  “He’s a misogynist,” my ultrafeminist best friend said when I confessed my crush. “Who gives a staff member shoes?” (I didn’t tell her about the rest. About the way he re-dressed me, about his thumb on my bottom lip.) “He wants to shape you. Change you. Break you,” Shanna insisted.

  But I didn’t think of Hunter in the same way. He was my editor. He wanted to edit me. I was made of good raw material, but I needed a firm hand to guide me. My fantasies went far deeper than that. I craved scarlet lines marking my pale skin, echoes of his red pen on my rough drafts. I was a rough draft. I needed a fierce lead.

  Late at night, after we put the paper to bed, I wished that he would put me to bed. Once back in my 1940s-style apartment on Malcolm and Wilshire, I’d stay awake in my tiny twin, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, and I’d remember each lesson. Hunter said he was my mentor, but I thought of him as my master. As someone who could own me. Who could turn me into the type of wild-jaguar-girls that he squired around to the best restaurants in town. As the summer progressed, I watched, and I learned. I stayed at the office until the stars came out. My writing improved until he hardly had to use that pen at all. Each lunchtime, I listened to Hunter’s stories, and I felt as though I was starting to understand the language he wanted me to learn. I grew bolder. I asked the right questions. I wore the right shoes.

  On the last day of my summer job, I straightened my hair. I even got a spray-on tan, so that my skin was golden, gleaming. I slid on those high-heeled shoes—I had learned to walk in them after hours of practice. Not toe-heel clomping, but heel-toe forceful, as if I knew where I was going. As if I had somewhere to go.

  I showed up at work in a silky pastel wrap-around dress and my stacked-heel Mary Janes, pretending that nothing had happened. That nothing was different. Big silver hoop earrings dangled nearly to my shoulders. An exquisite perfume had been dabbed at my pulse points. I knew Hunter saw me. He had to notice. Everyone else on staff oohed and ahhed at my transformation, and I glowed inside, knowing that I’d done well. As pleased as when I turned in a perfectly polished article.

  But Hunter didn’t say a word.

  All day long I tried to get a rise out of him.

  I filed in front of him, bent over the desk the way I’d read about in a Cosmo how-to article. How to get a man to notice you? Bend over while filing. That was the number one suggestion. (Number two was “Spill red wine on your white shirt during an office party and dab at the stain suggestively.”) I felt his eyes on me. I was thin and sleek and wildcat-like. My lips were smudged and bee-stung. My hair was still black, but my crazy-messy tousle of curls had been tamed. Now my hair was shiny as obsidian and fell straight past my shou
lders to the middle of my back. And my beloved Docs were gone.

  The truth was that I was gone. I just didn’t know that. I didn’t get it.

  I hadn’t learned a fucking thing.

  For the first time all summer, Hunter didn’t take me to lunch that day. He didn’t say a word.

  At the end of the day, once the rest of the staff had departed, Hunter locked the outer office door and came toward me. Those dark-blue eyes burned into me, so cold they were hot, and I thought I’d won. I’d done what he’d silently requested. I’d transformed myself into his type of girl. Yet I could tell from the look on his face that something had gone desperately wrong. He grabbed me by my upper arm and pulled me into his office. I felt weak-kneed, violently unsure of what was going on.

  He pulled the tie at my waist, and my dress flickered opened. He slid the fabric off my body, leaving me in my polka-dot panties and matching bra. And then he bent me forward, over his desk, and he slapped my ass hard.

  “You don’t have to be someone else,” he said ferociously into my silence.

  “But I thought—” I murmured, already soaking, staring over my shoulder at him in shocked alarm. Not shocked because he’d spanked me, but shocked because I’d somehow misunderstood. After all his lessons, I’d still managed to fail.

  “You thought wrong.”

  “But you always date the girls who—”

  His firm, strong hand smacked my panty-clad ass again, and I choked my words down, understanding that this was yet another lesson, that I was back in pupil mode. My favorite place to be.

  “You’re perfect,” he said. “The other you. The different you. This isn’t you.”

  None of this made any sense to me. “I don’t—”

  Another loud, hard smack, and I bit my tongue to keep myself silent. I’d taken the summer internship to learn. And here I was, learning.