Shopgirl

by STEVE MARTIN

  Lisa has developed a taste for Mr. Ray Porter, even though she has never met him. There is simply a problem that he has selected Mirabelle and not her as his arbitrary object of desire, and Lisa is sure that once he lays eyes on her, correct thinking will occur. Lisa cannot imagine Mirabelle being an expert sex partner. Of course, Mirabelle’s lack of advanced training might be exactly why Ray Porter wants her, but this reasoning is way beyond Lisa, because she has no idea that her own sovereignty could be usurped by one square inch of Mirabelle’s skin, glimpsed under a starched blouse.

  The day Lisa heard Mirabelle blab her story at the Time Clock, a vestigial memory was jarred in her head at the mention of the name Ray Porter. Lisa went home that night, concentrated, and remembered that his name had been in the air a few years ago because he had picked up and had an affair with a shoe clerk at Barneys, the fashionable department store two doors down. Then, when he came in with another woman six months after the affair was over, the salesgirl went berserk and threw two pairs of Stephane Kelian shoes at him, with one falling into an open fish tank, and she was promptly fired. Barneys has a “don’t ask don’t tell” policy when it comes to customers and employees, and throwing shoes clearly violates the “don’t tell.” Lisa also remembers that Ray Porter is powerful.

  Lisa doesn’t see an interposition of herself between Mirabelle and Ray Porter as unethical. In her mind, Mirabelle deserves no one, and Lisa will be doing him a favor. What would Ray Porter do with a leaden Mirabelle lying nude on his bed with her legs open? What would any man do with a soggy girl who can’t assert herself, who has a weak voice, who dresses like a schoolgirl, and whose main personality component is helplessness?

  Second Date

  BEFORE THURSDAY’S DATE, THERE ARE several formal phone conversations between Ray and Mirabelle, which establish that he will pick her up, that the time will be 8 p.m., and that they will go to a fun local Caribbean spot that Mirabelle knows called Cha Cha Cha. She is concerned about him seeing her apartment, which, at five hundred dollars a month, is only slightly more than the cost of their meal at La Ronde. She is also concerned that he’ll have trouble finding it. The apartment is at the conjunction of a maze of streets in Silverlake, and once found, still requires complicated directions to achieve the door. Down the driveway, second stairway, around the landing . . . .

  When Thursday comes, Mirabelle speed cleans the apartment while simultaneously dusting herself with powders and pulling various dresses over her head. She settles on a short pink and yellow plaid skirt and a fuzzy pink sweater, which sadly prohibits any of Ray’s peeking. This outfit, in combination with her cropped hair, makes her look about nineteen. This look is not meant to appeal to something lascivious in Ray but is worn as a hip mode-o-day that will fit right in at Cha Cha Cha.

  Then, finally prepared, she sits in her living room and waits. Mirabelle doesn’t have a real sofa, only a low-lying futon cradled in a wood brace, which means that anyone attempting to sit on it is immediately jackknifed at floor level. If a visitor allows an arm to fall to one side, it will land on the gritty hardwood. If he sits with a drink, it has to be put on the floor at cat level. She reminds herself not to ask Ray to sit down.

  The phone rings. It is Ray, calling from his car phone, saying he is only a little bit lost. She gives him the proper lefts and rights, and within five minutes, he is knocking at her door. She answers, and both of them scurry in to avoid the harsh glare of the bare hundred-watt porch bulb.

  If Mirabelle worried about Ray seeing her apartment, her concern was misplaced. This collegiate atmosphere dislodges a musty erotic memory in him, and he feels a few vague waves of pleasure coursing just below his skin. Mirabelle asks him if he wants anything, knowing that she has nothing to give him except canned clam juice. He declines, but wants to snoop around the apartment, and he pokes his nose into the kitchen, where he sees the college-girl dish rack and the college-girl mismatched drinking glasses and the college-girl cat box. The problem, of course, is that Mirabelle is already four years out of college and has not been able to earn an income at the next level.

  She asks him if he wants to sit down, which she immediately regrets, and Ray squats down onto the futon, bending himself into a crouch that for someone over fifty would be considered an advanced yoga position. After the absolute minimum conversation required to make the futon invitation not ridiculous, she suggests they leave. As Ray helps himself up, his body sounds a few audible creaks.

  They leave the apartment and walk toward his Mercedes, with all the spontaneity of a prom date. Driving, he stiffly points out the features of the car, including the electric seat warmers, which prompt a few jokes from both of them. At the restaurant, they squirm and talk and wriggle until midway through the entrée, which is a chili-hot fish of some kind prepared to blast the heads off all comers. Things are wooden between them, and would have remained so for the complicated second date, had it not been for an elixir called Bordeaux.

  The wine greases things up a bit, and this little relaxation, this gear slippage, makes Ray bold enough to touch her wrist. He says he likes her watch. It isn’t much, but it is a beginning. Mirabelle knows that her watch is of a dullness that could arouse no opinion at all, and even though her own eyes have filled with shallow pools of alcohol, she suspects that this contact is not about her watch but about Ray’s desire to touch her. And she’s right. For as Ray drags the tip of his finger across the back of her hand, he measures the degree of tropical humidity that her skin delivers to his fingertip, and impulses of pleasure leap from neuron to neuron and are delivered to his receptive brain.

  He slips his finger and thumb around her wrist. “Now I’m your watch,” he says, boyishly. Mirabelle and Ray, not drunk but hovering, are trying to figure some way out of the conversational mess they have gotten themselves in. Ray really wants to be driving around with his hand on her thigh, but he is stuck here in Cha Cha Cha making small talk. Mirabelle wants them to be strolling down Silverlake Boulevard holding hands, getting to know each other, but she needs a closing line about the watch, or they are just going to languish forever in endless circularity. Then Ray has a brilliant idea. He orders one more glass of wine and suggests they both drink from the same glass. Mirabelle is not a drinker, so Ray downs about two-thirds of it, and right in front of her gets out a pen and calculates his body weight versus the amount drunk minus the food eaten, and announces he is okay to drive. Which leads them to the car.

  Which leads them to her porch.

  Where he kisses her good night, and presses himself against her, and she feels him thicken against her legs. And neither cares about the harsh porch light. And he says good night. And as he walks away, he thinks that he cannot imagine anything better than their next date.

  Their Next Date

  MIRABELLE ENDS UP AT RAY’S house, where, fully clothed, they get on his bed and she sits on top of him and he unbuttons three buttons on her blouse and he finds the area above her breasts and confirms that it is her skin he had seen at La Ronde and not a flesh-colored underthing. That’s all they do, and he drives her home.

  The Conversation

  THE CONVERSATION CONSISTS OF ONE involved party telling another involved party the limits of their interest. It is meant to be a warning to the second party that they may come only so close.

  Again, Mr. Ray Porter takes Mirabelle to La Ronde. They sit at the same booth and have the same wine, and everything is done to replicate their first dinner, because Ray wants to pick up exactly where they left off, with not even a design change in a fork handle to break the continuum. Mirabelle is not sparkling tonight, because she works only in gears, and tonight she is in the wrong gear. Third gear is her scholarly, perspicacious, witty self; second gear is her happy, giddy, childish self; and first gear is her complaining, helpless, unmotivated self. Tonight she is somewhere midshift, between helpless and childish, but Ray doesn’t care. Ray doesn’t care because tonight is the night as far as he is concerned, the night where everything
is going to come off her. And Ray feels compelled to have the Conversation. It is appropriate tonight because of Ray’s fairness doctrine: before the clothes come off, speeches must be made.

  “I think I should tell you a few things. I don’t think I’m ready for a real relationship right now.” He says this not to Mirabelle but to the air, as though he is just discovering a truth about himself and accidentally speaking it aloud.

  Mirabelle answers, “You had a rough time with your divorce.”

  Understanding. For Ray Porter, that is good. She absolutely knows that this will never be long term. He goes on: “But I love seeing you and I want to keep seeing you.”

  “I do too,” says Mirabelle. Mirabelle believes he has told her that he is bordering on falling in love with her, and Ray believes she understands that he isn’t going to be anybody’s boyfriend.

  “I’m traveling too much right now,” he says. In this sentence, he serves notice that he would like to come into town, sleep with her, and leave. Mirabelle believes that he is expressing frustration at having to leave town and that he is trying to cut down on traveling.

  “So what I’m saying is that we should be allowed to keep our options open, if that’s okay with you.”

  At this point, Ray believes he has told her that in spite of what could be about to happen tonight, they are still going to see other people. Mirabelle believes that after he cuts down on his traveling, they will see if they should get married or just go steady.

  So now they have had the Conversation. What neither of them understands is that these conversations are meaningless. They are meaningless to the sayer and they are meaningless to the hearer. The sayer believes they are heard, and the hearer believes they are never said. Men, women, dogs, and cats, these words are never heard.

  They chat through dinner, and then Ray asks her if she would like to come to his house, and she says yes.

  Sexual Intercourse

  WITH ONE SWITCH, THE LIGHTING in Ray’s house goes from post office to jazz nightclub. He starts fantasizing about events that are only moments away. His hours of being with Mirabelle and not having her are about to give way to unrestricted passage. The memory of her sitting on top of him, when he gave a slight squeeze of her breasts through layers of clothing, crystallizes his desire and causes it to crackle.

  Ray is lured on not simply because he is a guy and she is a girl. It is just that Mirabelle’s body, as he will soon discover, is his absolute aphrodisiac. His intuition sensed it, led him to the fourth floor, and has been reinforced with every whiff and accidental touch. He deduced it from the sight of her, and from the density of her hair and the length of her fingers, and from the phosphorus underglow of her skin. And tonight, he will feel the beginning of an addiction that he cannot break, the endless push and pull of an intoxication that he suspects he should avoid but cannot resist.

  He puts both hands on the sides of her neck, but she stiffens. She says it makes her nervous. This takes a bit of undoing, and he breaks from her, makes a few irrelevant comments, and resumes. They get on the bed and dally, a mesh of buttons and buckles and shoes clashing and gnashing. This time he buries his face in her neck and draws in his breath, inhaling her natural perfume. This gets the appropriate response. A few clothes are removed.

  They are relaxed. They are not on a straight path to intercourse, as they take talking breaks, joking breaks, adjusting-the-music breaks. Things intensify, then ebb, then reheat. After a few minutes with Ray exploring the landscape of her bare stomach, he takes a bathroom break and disappears through a doorway.

  Mirabelle stands up and methodically takes off all her clothes. Then she lies face down on the bed and smiles to herself. Because Mirabelle knows she is revealing her most secret and singular asset.

  Mirabelle’s body is not extravagant. It does not flirt, or call out, and that causes men who care about drama to shop elsewhere. But, when viewed at the radius of a kingsized bed, or held in the hands, or manipulated for pleasure, it is a small spectacle of perfection.

  Ray enters the bedroom and sees her. Her skin looks like it has faint micro lights under it, glowing from rose to white. Her breasts peek out from her sides as they are flattened against the sheets, and the line of her body rises and falls in gentle waves. He walks over and puts his hand on her lower back, lingers there, then rolls her over, kisses her neck, runs his hand down her legs and in between, then touches her breasts, then kisses her mouth while he cups her vagina until it opens, then he eats her, makes love to her, as safely as the moment allows. Again she thinks how different this is from Vermont. Then he faces her away from him and brings his body up next to hers. Mirabelle, fetal, curled up like a bug, receives the proximity of Ray Porter as though it were a nourishing stream. They wake in the morning on either side of the bed.

  Breakfast

  AT BREAKFAST, EARLY BECAUSE SHE has to get to work, Mirabelle becomes age seven. She sits, waiting to be served. Ray Porter gets the juice, makes the coffee, sets the plates, toasts the bread, and pours the cereal. He gets the paper. Mirabelle is so dependent, she could have used a nanny to hold open her mouth and spoon-feed her the oat bran. She speaks in one-word sentences, which requires Ray to fill the silences with innocuous queries, like an adult trying to break through to a disinterested teenager. In this snapshot of their morning is hidden the definition of their coming relationship, which Ray Porter will come to understand almost two years later.

  “You like your breakfast?” Ray decides to try a topic that is in both their immediate vision.

  “Yeah.”

  “What do you usually have for breakfast?”

  “A bagel.”

  “Where do you get bagels?”

  “There’s a shop around the corner from me.”

  Total dead end. He starts over.

  “You’re in great shape.”

  “Yoga,” she says.

  “I love your body,” he says.

  “I have my mother’s rear end. Like two small basketballs covered over in flesh, that’s what she said once, on a car trip.” She emits a little chuckle. Ray gets an odd look on his face, and Mirabelle reads him and she says the only funny thing of the morning:

  “Don’t worry, she’s older than you are.”

  He wants to reach over and slide his hand in between the opening in the robe that he has lent her. He wants to relive last night, to trace his hands over her breasts, to analyze and codify and confirm their exact beauty, but he doesn’t. This will take place on another night with dinner and wine and walking and talking, where the seduction is not assumed, and the outcome undetermined. His sexual motor is already whirring and purring for their next date.

  Ray’s libido is exactly twenty-four hours ahead of his reason, and tomorrow at this time he will recollect that Mirabelle became quite helpless in the morning and wonder about it (his mind works slowly when it comes to women; he often does not know that he has been insulted, slighted, or manipulated until months or sometimes years later). But since he does not know what to expect from a woman––his four years of dating have not really educated him––he accepts Mirabelle’s morning behavior passively. Ray’s former experience has been with tough-minded, outgoing, vital, ambitious women, who, when displeased, attack. Mirabelle’s dull inertia draws him into a peaceful place, a calm female cushion of acceptance.

  He drives Mirabelle home, just in time for her to get ready and be late for work.

  Jeremy’s Adulthood

  THE STENCIL ADHERES TO THE amplifier by manila tape, and Jeremy has learned to evenly apply the paint in one skillful squirt of the airbrush. The Doggone Amplifier Company has a logo of a dog with cartoon speed lines trailing out behind it, with the brand name laid out in a semicircle underneath. It is not easy to fill in the delicate speed lines; some of the earlier paint jobs, before Jeremy joined the ranks, are uneven and sloppy. When he works he crouches in an uncomfortable position that only someone under thirty could bear for long before he would have to seek work elsewhere. His
salary is so small that his paycheck could read “so and so measly dollars” and no one would contradict. But it’s Jeremy’s work clothes that tell the story of his line of business: his jeans look like a Jackson Pollock and his T-shirt looks like a Helen Frankenthaler––he is working at the bottom end of the arts.

  His boss, Chet, ambles through the warehouse with a client in tow, and their faint muffled voices waft over the stacks of amps to Jeremy’s straining ears. He catches a glimpse of them and notices that the client is a sharply dressed businessman, presumably the manager of a rock band trying to make a deal for a ton of amplification in exchange for promotion. The problem in the negotiation, of course, is that Chet only wants to sell amps, and the manager only wants them for free. There is no middle ground. Chet’s business is waterlogged and about to sink and he simply can’t afford to ship out fifteen thousand dollars worth of equipment for use months later. The manager slips away with a handshake and Chet stands there as the Mercedes disappears out of the lot through the chain-link fence.

  For Christopher Columbus, it was the sailing of three ships that launched his life’s great journey. For Jeremy, it is the sight of the sinking Chet watching the ass-end of a hundred-thousand-dollar car shrink to a vanishing point down an industrial street in Pacoima. He lays down his spray gun and gets in Chet’s field of vision.

  “You know what I was thinkin’?”