by Jason Starr
She paused. “Call me Spanky. And that doesn’t mean I’m into any kinky stuff. It’s just a nickname I have.”
“What’s your real name?” I said.
“I don’t give out my real name.”
“You don’t have to tell me the last name. Just the first name.”
“I’m telling you, I don’t give out no names. You don’t tell me your name, I don’t tell you my name.”
“My name’s Bill. Come on, I promise I won’t tell anybody.”
She stared at me.
“Denise, all right?”
“Denise?” I said. “That’s funny.”
“What’s so funny about it?”
“It’s just all those times I saw you I thought you’d have some exotic name, something Spanish or Italian.”
She looked at me blankly, as if she had no idea, and didn’t care to have any idea, what I was talking about. I realized right then that in her mind she had never seen me before today.
“You don’t recognize me, do you?” I said.
“What’s this with the questions? Are you here to fuck me or interview me?”
“You’re not joking. You really don’t know who I am.”
“Why?” she said. “You famous?”
“No, but I’ve seen you so many times, for weeks now. You always smile at me and I smile back. That’s why I came to you today, because of your smile.”
She had the same blank look.
“Sorry, honey,” she said. “I never saw you before today.”
By her voice, I knew she wasn’t lying. I couldn’t help feeling offended. I knew she probably had to smile at a hundred men to get one of them to pick her up, yet I still felt I should have stood out. Even if it was just the color of my eyes or my hair or my teeth. Something about me should have been familiar to her.
She fitted the condom on me and made sure it was secure. I thrusted in and out in a slow, rhythmic motion. Although I was looking directly at her, her gaze was focussed at my left ear or some point beyond it. It was nothing like how I’d fantasized it would be. There was no screaming or moaning or cursing. She didn’t kiss me passionately, or kiss me at all for that matter. She might as well have been dead because she was as rigid as a piece of wood.
It only took me about a minute to finish. Right afterwards, I thought about Julie waiting for me at home. Then the guilt set in. Suddenly, I felt like a disgusting person, someone I didn’t even want to know. I couldn’t believe I’d had sex with another woman. Not even with another woman – with a whore. A whore who didn’t even have the decency to recognize me!
“Hey, what’s the matter?!” she screamed. “You crazy or something?”
I hit her again, not because I was mad at her, but because I was mad at myself. The trouble was at the time I couldn’t tell the difference.
I stood out of bed and left her there holding her cheeks. She was screaming and cursing at me, calling me all kinds of names. I barely heard any of it. It was just noise to me, no louder or more sensible than the noise inside my head.
I ran down the steps, out to the street. Then I started walking, unaware of what direction I was heading. I felt totally alone. It was the lowest point in my life, and I’ve had a lot of low points. Like a kid who discovers there’s no Santa Claus, my biggest fantasy had come crashing down to reality. I’d had sex with a whore and I had nothing left to live for.
9
‘‘I want to become a Jew,” I said.
Julie stared at me incredulously for a few seconds, then started to laugh.
“Right,” she said. “Like you really expect me to believe that.”
“I’m serious,” I said. “I thought about it a lot when I was walking home tonight. I mean, as you know, I’m not very religious, but I know religion is important to you, so I don’t see any reason why I can’t be Jewish. And it’s not something I plan to take lightly. I’ll study and I’ll go to temple with you, or shule, or whatever it’s called. Who knows? Maybe I’ll like it. And if I don’t like it, I guess I’ll just be a non-believing Jew which I guess won’t be much different from being a non-believing Catholic.”
“What happened to you today?” she asked suspiciously.
“Nothing,” I said, afraid she might somehow suspect I’d gone to the prostitute. I wondered if I had lipstick on me or smelled like perfume. I said, “I just suddenly realized how stubborn I’ve been about this, and for no reason at all.”
Now Julie made a sad face.
“You don’t have to convert for me,” she said.
“But I want to,” I said. “I’ve given it a lot of thought and I really want to do it.”
“But people only convert for each other when they’re getting married. We’re just living together.”
“But I want to marry you,” I said. “I mean if you want to marry me.”
She continued to look sad.
“Of course I want to get married,” she said. “You know that.”
“Then let’s do it. Let’s get married.”
“You don’t mean it.”
“Do I look like I’m joking? I’m proposing to you, Julie. I want to marry you.”
She stayed sad awhile, then her face slowly brightened as she started to believe me. Then it hit her. She wrapped her arms around me and kissed me again and again and kept telling me how happy she was and how much she loved me.
Then I said, “Well, you didn’t give me an answer.”
“Yes! Yes! Of course I’ll marry you! What did you think? Of course! Of course!”
I apologized for not having a ring and I explained that the idea to propose had come to me suddenly and that I’d get her a ring as soon as I could afford one.
“Oh, I don’t care about a stupid ring,” she said as if I was being ridiculous. “It’s the emotion that counts. Besides, it’ll give me something to look forward to.”
The rest of the night, Julie made phone calls, alerting what seemed like every friend and relative she had about our engagement. Although I preferred to have a simple wedding, perhaps even at City Hall, I knew better than to suggest this to Julie. When she called her parents, I overheard her telling her mother that she wanted to start calling wedding halls and caterers as soon as possible, and that she didn’t want to go overboard, she definitely wanted to keep the wedding under three hundred people.
By the time she made her last call it was after midnight. I put on a CD of old Billy Joel songs she liked and lighted two candles. We danced close together and, I have to admit, my eyes started to tear during Scenes from an Italian Restaurant. I don’t think I realized until that moment how badly I wanted to get married myself. Rather than confining me as I’d always thought it would, marriage would free me, allow me to concentrate fully on other parts of my life.
Gradually, Julie and I moved into the bedroom and started making love. I felt like I had become a different person again, completely different from the one who’d stormed out of the room with the prostitute just a couple of hours before. That wasn’t me, I was convinced. That was someone else, and I wanted to forget that that other person had ever existed.
For the next several days, Julie and I started living a normal life again. My impotence disappeared com-pletely and we had sex regularly, sometimes two or three times a night. Although I’d thought that Julie and I had been getting along well, I realized how much intimacy had been lacking in our relationship. Now when I came home from work, instead of parking myself on the couch and watching Yankee games, Julie and I talked, exchanging stories about our days, offering advice and support to each other. In the mornings, we took showers together and then Julie would leave the apartment at the same time I did, so we took the same subway to work. We talked about life after marriage – moving to the suburbs, perhaps to northern New Jersey or Rockland County. I had new fantasies, fantasies that had nothing to do with prostitutes. I dreamed about continuing to do well at my job and then getting another job at an ad agency. Eventually I’d be a Senior Executive, making twic
e what I’d made at Smythe & O’Greeley. Then Julie and I would have children, maybe two or three. I imagined how satisfying it would be to come home after a long day at the office to my family, knowing that I was living a successful life. Going to the prostitute had been a real blessing in disguise. It made me realize how much I had in my life, and how much I had to lose.
Then things started to happen. Ed stopped by my office after lunch one day and told me that he needed to speak with me right away, that it was “urgent.” It was the middle of August and less than a week had gone by since I’d gone to the prostitute. Things had been going well at work. The new computer network was still up-and-running and the Telemarketing Department had been running much more efficiently because of it. Appointments and sales were up and there was talk of expanding the department, perhaps even moving to a new location. I’d thought that Ed wanted to speak to me for some routine reason, perhaps to review the call report of a telemarketer or to discuss a change in scheduling. But when I arrived in his office and saw his grave, serious expression, I knew there was something more important on his mind.
“Is your computer on the blink again?” I said, hoping I was still wrong and he had called me for some minor problem.
“Sit down,” he said coldly. “Make yourself comfortable.”
I sat down, starting to feel nervous. Had I done something wrong? As hard as I tried, I couldn’t think of one possible reason why Ed would want to reprimand me.
“We have to have a talk, Bill. Now. Before this gets out of hand.”
“Before what gets out of hand?”
Ed paused, as if he had so many things to say, he didn’t know what order to put them in.
“Something has been brought to my attention, something that disturbs me a great deal, and I’m not exactly sure how I want to deal with it. So I want to talk with you and get your side of the story. I think that would be the best thing to do.”
“Sorry,” I said. “Did I do something wrong?”
“You tell me,” Ed said. “I had lunch with Nelson Simmons today. He had a lot of interesting things to say. Things that you and he had discussed.”
“Okay,” I said, and my confusion was genuine. “Was it wrong of me to speak with Nelson?”
“I told you very clearly when you started working for me what the chain of command is here. I told you that you bring all your grievances to me, not to Nelson.”
“First of all –”
“I’m not finished. You’re my assistant, not my boss, and any policy changes that you think should be implemented must be delivered to me first, in writing, and if I think the points raised are valid, then, and only then, will I bring them to the attention of Nelson. If you ever go to Nelson without going to me first you’ll be terminated immediately, is that understood?”
“I don’t –”
“Is that understood?”
“No,” I said calmly. “I mean I understand what you’re saying, but I don’t understand why you’re saying it.”
“I thought it was all very clear.”
“It’s true I spoke to Mr. Simmons yesterday, but I didn’t go into his office to talk to him – he called me in there. You see, we both like sailing and he wanted to tell me about this trip he’s planning and –”
“I don’t care why you spoke to him. The fact is you spoke to him.”
“He asked me how things were going at the job. I told him they were going well. Then he asked me whether or not I thought the company should hire more telemarketers. I thought it would be rude if I didn’t answer him so I told him how I felt.”
“You told him how you felt all right. You told him that you thought it was ‘a mistake’ to fire all those telemarketers, that you felt the department was mismanaged.”
“I didn’t say that. There must have been a misunderstanding.”
“Are you trying to suggest that Nelson was lying to me?”
“Of course not,” I said, fighting to stay calm. “What I said was that if we had the computer network up a few weeks ago, we might not have had to fire all those people. But since we didn’t have the new network, of course we had to fire them. At the time, it wasn’t cost-effective.”
“You told him that you questioned the policies of the department and that you thought morale was down.”
“He asked for my opinion, and I didn’t say it like that. He asked me what I thought about the morale of the telemarketers and I was honest – I told him that it’s not as high as I thought it could be. He asked me why and I told him I thought people were still upset about the firings and that a lot of people felt the rules in the department were too strict. I also said that people wanted more information about their commission money and they wanted to be paid more promptly. But I never questioned the leadership of the department or said any of those other things. That was taken out of context.”
Ed stared at me, holding my gaze until I became uncomfortable. But I didn’t look away. I knew that looking away would make me seem less believable, so I kept staring at him, trying not to blink.
“This time I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt,” Ed said. “But you understand why this concerns me, don’t you?”
I didn’t answer.
“It concerns me,” he continued, “because I’m afraid you might be trying to show me up to Nelson. You’ve done some good work here with the computer network and, overall, I’m happy with you as my assistant. Yet that’s exactly what you are – my assistant. You don’t run this department and no one makes suggestions about the policies of this department except for me. I don’t care what the circumstances are, if you act as if you’re running this department, you’re going to be terminated, understood?”
I nodded.
“Good. And remember – this conversation, and all of our conversations, are between you and me and you and me only. Under absolutely no circumstances are you to tell Nelson that I spoke to you, and I don’t care who initiates the conversation. If you want to keep your job here, you’ll play by my rules. If you don’t have any questions, you can go back to work now.”
Feeling completely humiliated, I returned to my office. In some ways it was worse than when he’d made me apologize to the company in front of the other telemarketers. Then I was a ten-dollar-an-hour employee and I didn’t have any emotional investment in my job. But now I took my job seriously. I was planning to use it as a stepping stone to rejuvenate my career and I felt that by attacking my work Ed was purposefully trying to attack me. I hated Ed, more than I ever had before. What difference did it make that many of the things he had accused me of were true? Nelson hadn’t asked me about office morale and the management of the department, I’d volunteered all of that information. Why shouldn’t I have? It wasn’t as if I’d lied to him. It was true that despite the increased sales numbers, morale in the department was incredibly low, and it was all Ed’s fault. Everyone hated Ed. Black people hated him because he was racist, and everyone hated him because of the idiotic backwards way he ran the department. As an employee in a management position, why shouldn’t I alert the President of the company to a potential problem before the problem explodes? If I were President, I’d want someone to alert me.
That night I told Julie what had happened.
“Ed’s just a jerk,” Julie said. “He probably just feels threatened by you.”
“Threatened?” I said, wondering if that could be true. “You really think so?”
“Of course. You’re young and educated and ambitious, and what does he have going for him? He sounds like a fat ex-alcoholic from Long Island who probably hasn’t gotten any sex recently. Why do you think he always makes those racist comments? There has to be a lot of anger in there someplace.”
“I think he’s afraid I’m trying to take his job away from him, that’s what I think.”
“Are you?”
“Am I what?”
“Trying to take away his job.”
“Of course not. I mean I’m trying to do as good a job as possib
le and I’m trying to be friendly with Nelson, but I’m not trying to get Ed fired. But I think that’s what he thinks.”
“He probably didn’t mean anything he said to you. He was probably angry at something completely different. My boss gets like that all the time. He has fights with his wife and then comes to the office and starts making life hell for everybody else. Believe me, tomorrow Ed’ll probably forget all about it.”
I decided Julie was right, I’d probably blown the whole thing out of proportion. Ed was probably in a bad mood and not nearly as angry at me as he’d seemed. So I probably shouldn’t have gone around his back to talk to Nelson. It wasn’t as if I’d said anything that awful. By tomorrow, Ed would probably forget that the incident had ever taken place. There was no harm done and in the future I’d be more careful about the things I said to Nelson. There were ways of impressing him without criticizing Ed and I knew it wouldn’t work in my favor if I got on Ed’s bad side.
The next day everything at work appeared to be back to normal. I spent the morning talking to software vendors and in the afternoon I met with Mike to discuss the telemarketers’ performance reports. Although Ed was in meetings all day, I passed him once in the hallway near the bathroom before lunch and he smiled at me as if all was forgotten and forgiven. I was relieved. I decided I’d go back to how I was before I’d gone to the prostitute – absorb myself in my work and avoid any confrontations.
Pouring over statistics and sales trends, I sat at my computer until about seven o’clock. I thought everyone had gone home for the night so I was naturally surprised when Ed appeared in my office.
“Jesus, you scared me,” I said, turning around suddenly. “I thought I was all alone here.”
“I have some unfortunate news for you, Bill,” Ed said in a serious tone, as if he was unaware that I’d spoken. “We’re letting you go. You can clean out your office and take everything home with you tonight.”
It sounded unbelievable – it still sounds unbelievable. I’d been doing great work for the company and I was being fired? Why? What had I done?
