Ladies' Man

by Richard Price

  She sat down in a flimsy, white, slightly unraveled wicker chair and hunched over, elbows on knees, hands crossed to her shoulders like she was shielding her tits from me. I sat across from her on a burgundy fake velvet sofa and opened my case between my feet. I could tell she lived alone. Two gilt-framed pictures of her parents, lot of plants, tortoise shell window shades, a portable typewriter on a cheap one-piece molded white plastic table, a stack of New York and Times., magazines piled on the bottom rack of a TV stand, a small TV with aluminum foil on the antenna—I could tell plenty. And I could see somewhat between her knees if I ducked my head a little.

  She nodded toward the case, a smirk on her face as if she had read my mind.

  “So let’s hear it.”

  The sleep was gone from her eyes, which were light green. I preferred dark eyes.

  “You like coconuts? Everybody likes coconuts, right?” I plucked out a small aerosol can of room spray and shpritzed briefly in front of her. I inhaled with my eyes at half-mast as if I was smelling baked bread. Her eyelids fluttered as she jerked her head back, coughing into her fingers. Her knees parted for a second and I saw thigh.

  “What? You don’t like that!” I looked stunned. “It smells like Pago Pago in here now!”

  She waved her hand in front of her face as if to clear the air. She had intelligent eyes; they had character. I parted my legs a little. I wanted her to know I had a hard-on.

  “Do you know who my biggest customer for coconut room spray is? And I’m not lying.” I leaned back and squinted. “Take a guess.”

  “Somebody in your immediate family, I imagine.” She pumped a cigarette from a matching unraveling white wicker lamp table next to her.

  “Nope, Terence Cardinal Cooke.” I narrowed my eyes and pointed a finger. ”Us loves the stuff and has instructed the custodian at Saint Patrick’s to snag a dozen cans every time I come by the church. Next time you go in there, smell the air.”

  “C’mon, what else you hiding in there?” She arched her eyebrows, and I swear to God she stared right at my crotch. I brought my knees together and did a nosedive into my case, fumbled around like I had three hands and whipped out the foam lotion, flipping it up like a baton and one-handing it.

  “Here”—I wriggled my fingers—“give me your hand.”

  I rested the cold, bony back of her hand in my palm, shook up the can and shot a thick jet of cream onto her lifeline.

  “Am I getting a light trim around the knuckles?” That eyebrow arch again.

  “Very humorous. You’re very quick.” I smiled while rubbing the foam into her palm and fingers with both of my hands. It began to break down into a jellylike lotion. As I worked my ten fingers through her five, slithering through the taut webs and swirling around the joints my groin started pounding like a marathon runner’s heart. I ran my middle fingers up and down her palm. She had make-up on from the night before; a slice of earlobe peeked through her red hair. My knees parted company again and my Adam’s apple started doing elevator takes in my throat. “How does that feel?” My voice came out like Andy Devine.

  “Mmm.” Her eyes were closed. I couldn’t bring myself to spiel. Screw the spiel. She started weaving slightly and let her head hang back so her chin was stabbing up at the ceiling. I grabbed the can and shpritzed more foam on our hands to keep it going. For a split second her fingers massaged mine and I thought my brains would spew out my ears. I started grinding in my seat, staring between her knees. I squeezed myself with a greasy hand. No panties. Oh, my fucking God, she wasn’t wearing panties. Suddenly the phone rang, and I jumped like I was snapping out of a nightmare. I think I actually said “Aw!” like a kid. She shook her head and smiled.

  “I’ll be back!” She got up and went through louvered double doors into the bedroom. I started following her in, hunched over and slobbering like Fred Flintstone on Spanish fly, but pulled myself together and returned to the couch. I gave myself five. This was it. This was fucking it. Finally, after six years of door to door, I was getting some nut. I jumped up and started dancing in front of the mirror. Screw La Donna. She could sleep like the dead from now on. I smoothed down my hair and shot my cuffs. I was bad. I was slick. I looked like fuckin’ Marcello. I thanked God my mother was dark; the old man’s side looked like anemic bookworms. I pulled down my tie knot, then pushed it back up. It looked better down and down it went. Made me look more laid back. Up for anything. I sat back on the couch and waited, patting my banana like I’d pat a Doberman I was trying to restrain. Twenty minutes went by. Thirty. Maybe she’s putting in her diaphragm. I could’ve done it for her. I put in La Donna’s diaphragm all the time. The double doors opened.

  “Hi.” She smiled. I stood at attention as if someone had just announced, “Gentlemen, the queen.”

  “Hey look, I’m sorry I’m taking so long.”

  “No problem,” I lied.

  “Listen, this is gonna be a real long call. Maybe you could come back some other time? I’m really sorry.” She whirled her head on “really.” I could see the cranberry tips of her nipples through the nightgown. I felt torpedoed.

  “Well.” I clucked my tongue. “You know I don’t come around here that often.” I pulled up my goddamn tie knot “I can wait.” It was all over.

  “No, that’s okay. Why don’t you stop by whenever, okay? I’m really sorry.”

  “Right.” I felt so down I thought I was dying.

  “You can let yourself out… That hand lotion was nice.” Another apologetic smile and she was gone, back into the bedroom.

  I felt like pissing on her couch. It was three-thirty. I should have split right then, but I felt as if she owed me something and I started stalking the apartment like it was mine by right of rage. I wound up in her bathroom; cutesy big-eyed animal print wallpaper and matching shower curtain. Bright yellow plastic toilet seat. I swept back the shower curtain like I was looking for evidence. The bathtub was filled with stray hair and a Japanese loofa sponge lay there like the corpse of a sunken ship in a drained ocean. A fat roach waddled across a thin bar of gold translucent soap in a bright yellow soap dish shaped like a seashell on the small sink. The basin had large bright green copper water stains under each faucet The floor was covered with a cheap cut-it-yourself green rug. She had done a shitty job of laying it down; it was Punched and rolled around the toilet base at one end and didn’t reach the edge of the bathtub at the other. Her medicine cabinet contained the usual shit Nylon floral cosmetic bag, filled with eye shadow, pencil liners and lipsticks. A small jar of Vaseline on a shelf with supermarket-brand aspirin and a hair-caked leg razor. Antidiarrhea pills in an amber prescription bottle. That disgusted me. Hairs in the bathtub, the fat roach halfway up the wall, his antenna swishing in slow motion. The place was a pit and she was a slob. A big dark gold towel didn’t match anything else in the room. It was damp probably from the evening before because she didn’t take the time and trouble to fold it over the bar but just jammed it in the goddamn towel rack like who gives a royal fuck. I couldn’t find a diaphragm or birth control pills. I hated that bathroom. It stunk of her privacy and I was up for heavy sabotage, demolition, but I couldn’t think of anything to do.

  I was staring at a stalactite of hardened green toothpaste frozen from the topless tube to the white enamel of the sink when I got bit with a frightening flash of not knowing where I was. Dizziness. I got scared. I couldn’t sense me. I panicked for a second, then snapped out of it. Suddenly I didn’t want to get caught in there. She would eat me alive. I got out fast. I felt like an intruder, which I was. Her double doors were still closed and I split.

  I did the last apartment.

  “Free gift from Bluecastle.”

  “I can’t take it” from inside.

  “Good.” I clomped down the stairs. “I can’t take it either.”

  Home, James. I grabbed a cab and shot uptown. Once I sat back and lit a cigarette I started thinking about a lot of things I didn’t like to think about. Like my job, for one. I had
to quit. Fuck it I’d go back to college, finish up and do something else. Anything else. Go on unemployment and just think, relax for a while. I was pissing my life away. Maybe I’d let La Donna support me for a change. No. Better yet, I’d go on unemployment and tell La Donna to walk.

  I didn’t want her in my life anymore. Or maybe what needed to go was just the bullshit. Keep La Donna, throw out the bullshit. That could be wild. It used to be wild. We were quite a pair once. We used to be really good with each other. But maybe it was too late for that Maybe all the good times had been fired by infatuation, and that was long gone. The only things left were my sex hunger and our rage. Cut it short. Stop the dying. Cut La Donna. Cut door to door. Get a degree. Teach. Make it work with La Donna. Cut La Donna. Kenny on the fence. Make your move. Make your move.

  The sun had punched out about three, and the streets were gray. Everything was the color of iron. Old snow, sidewalks, cars. The cab pulled up in front of my building. The super had taken the canvas canopy off the front of the building and the ugly frame skeleton looked like shit, too.

  The minute I stepped out of the elevator onto our floor I smelled La Donna. When I was a kid living in the projects every floor had a distinct odor that I asso-dated with the families living there. You could have taken me up an elevator, blindfolded, ducked my head into any hallway, let me sniff and I could have told you what floor we were on. So I knew La Donna was home. I hung out in the hallway, sitting on the interior ledge of the hallway window, which faced three sides of the building, and the square made a cold ten-story drop into an enclosed concrete courtyard. There was one foil left in my jacket pocket and I flipped it out the window like a baseball card. It spun over and over itself, supped into a dead float and slapped the ground with a distant tinny noise. Next came me, knees bent, palms pressed together like I was praying, then springing up, arms out in a breast stroke. Neeearroww babooom! .Not yet, at any rate.

  “Yo! I’m home!” I put my case down in the foyer and locked the door. No answer. Big surprise, I was alone. But then I heard my electric razor from down the bathroom end of the apartment. What the hell would that mean? A guy? I got goose pimples. The bitch was with another guy. Another guy in my house. I turned to sneak out, then stopped myself. What the hell was I doing? I grabbed an umbrella out of the hall closet and holding it against my chest like a rifle I stalked down the hall toward the bathroom. My heart was pulsing like a frog gullet. Leaning against the wall, I caught my breath, then ducked in front of the bathroom, screamed “Yah!” and thrust the umbrella inside like a bayonet. The bathroom was empty.

  The buzz was coming from the bedroom, leaking from under the closed door. Two plus two, it was the alarm clock. Thank God. My pits were drenched. I opened the bedroom door and froze.

  La Donna was lying on the bed wearing only a blue T-shirt. One hand rested behind her head, and the other was ramming a vibrator up her cunt. She was concentrating so hard she didn’t even notice me standing in the doorway. Look up, bitch, c’mon, look up.

  “Kenny!” She screamed like she was trying to shout me out of the path of a Mack truck. Her face went all Os and she grabbed the vibrator with both hands. I didn’t want to see that long thing come out of her. I didn’t know whether to kill her or fuck her.

  “What…“I started pumping my head up and down like Jackie di Paris. “What’s that?” My knees were shaking.

  She was so goddamn freaked she couldn’t even turn it off. She didn’t even close her legs, I couldn’t take my eyes off her hands, her thighs, the glint of white plastic coming at me through her fingers.

  “Kenny.” Pathetic, twisting her face in misery.

  “TURN THAT GODDAMN THING OFF!” I had never screamed at her, but I did then. I kicked the corner of the bed. I felt like I wasn’t allowed to move out of my spot. She covered herself with the blanket. Her shoulders jerked down as she pulled out the vibrator. The buzz was splitting my head. I threw the blanket off her, grabbed the goddamn thing out of her hands. It slipped out of my fist and fell on the floor, buzzing and revolving like a gigantic wounded fly. I stomped it. Killed it I was afraid to look at her. Afraid that she didn’t cover herself again,

  “What’s that!” I was never so scared of another human being as I was then, pointing at that thing and barking my ass off.

  She sat up in bed, sweating, hunched over and feeling totally rotten. She didn’t cover up and I was ready to jump out the window.,

  “You know what it is.” Her voice came out in croaks.

  “Yeah.” My head bobbed again. “I know what it is, it’s like you… It’s disgusting.” Finally I had her. Had. the upper hand, and it terrified me. I didn’t know what to do with it. I wheeled around to split and she made a motion with her arms to me, like to reach out for me. Like for me to get in bed with her. I clomped out of the bedroom and ran like hell, almost breaking my neck tripping over my sample case.

  I turned in spaced-out circles in the hallway waiting for the elevator when suddenly I had this feeling that if I waited one more second my apartment would explode outward in a rolling ball of flame followed by La Donna screaming her head off and swinging a sword as big as Justice. I took the stairs four at a time down ten flights, got lost on the ground floor looking for the lobby and made it out to the street. The minute I hit the sidewalk my whole body felt licked by a damp chill. I had been sweating like a hog. The gray was disappearing into early evening and the apartment buildings on West End Avenue resembled a long row of giant dead cash registers. The hell with that. I didn’t need more depression. I walked over to Broadway feeling unreal, either me or everybody else on the street wasn’t quite human. When I was a kid my Uncle Nat used to say to me, “Kenny boy, you know your uncle’s a magician? Every time I walk down the street I turn into a bar.”

  I didn’t laugh then, and I wasn’t laughing now, but it seemed like sound advice.

  I went into the Sun Lounge. It wasn’t bad, red lights, dark, tacky, a shitty juke box with too many ay! ay! ay! mariachi numbers, but it was cozy. My finger did a search-and-destroy mission inside my cigarette pack. There was one left, but I broke it poking around. I felt crushed, as if that were the last cigarette in the world. Then I noticed the cigarette machine and my heart soared. I was acting like an idiot. For a second I couldn’t remember why I’d stormed out of the apartment in the first place. Then I remembered and I fell this horny horror, this loop de loop in my belly. What was she reaching out to me for?

  Despite the cold, the two barmaids wore hot pants. One was nice. Lemon yellow pants, henna red flat hairdo, copper waves plastered across her forehead. Big, big tits. She was okay but in another five years she wouldn’t be able to get that ass in those pants with surgery. The filigree pattern of her underwear showed against her shorts. Hot cha, hot cha. She slid a cardboard coaster in front of me.

  “Vodka martini.” I didn’t even know what the hell a vodka martini was. I didn’t drink as a rule. I used to drink a lot, but I stopped four years ago when a girl in a singles’ bar came over to me, grabbed a fistful of flab over each of my hips, and said, “Love rungs, too much love rungs,” and walked away. Since that night I stopped boozing, eating potatoes, bread, desserts. I started doing sit-ups every day and was forever more unable to pass a mirror without checking to make sure my chest bulged out farther than my stomach. If I ever run into that mysterious woman again I will thanks her prefusely, then kick her face in.

  The vodka martini tasted like lighter fluid but it helped regulate my breathing, so I ordered another.

  The other barmaid looked pretty good too. Blond. But she had plucked eyebrows, which made her look as hard as nails. She was at the other end of the bar doing dance steps to some disco shit coming over the juke box and gazing into space, oblivious to the ten sad sacks sitting around the bar leaning cheeks on fists in front of their drinks, staring hopelessly at her breasts, her crotch. I hated cockteasers. Power like that.

  A vibrator. A vibrator. Mother of Christ. How would she feel if she
came home and caught me socking it to some inflatable love doll?

  February. We had started living together in mid-June. That was just about nine months. And not once, not once did I ever ball with anybody else. I didn’t even want to. Maybe if she was available to me I would be more turned on to other women. Things certainly seemed to work that way sometimes. I flashed again on her reaching out to me after I smashed her vibrator. I felt my heart break, and I wanted to go to her. Some damn fandango. I ordered a third martini and threw it back like I was washing down aspirin. The drinks were whipping my ass. When I got high I got friendly. I wanted to talk to somebody. Anybody. Make new friends. I turned to the guy sitting next to me, but he got up peeling off a payroll five and walked to the John. It was a pay toilet but Henna Red buzzed him in from under the cash register. I winked at her but she didn’t catch my eye and I felt like a fool.

  Sheesh. I lightly pounded the bar and stifled a belch. I was worried about some guy screwing La Donna and my real competition was Everready. Fuck it. She wanted to play around? Then me too. I was wasting my time with her. I was at the peak of my manhood. And I was good. And I wasn’t just saying that the way every guy says it. I was goddamn good. And I was big. I was good, big and the best. And I was wasting it with her. Everyone said it. Every woman I was ever with tola me I was the best. I knew how to move, how to groove and I was a handsome bastard too. I had a nice frame, about six feet even. Hundred and sixty-five. Straight hair, dark skin, dark eyes, sensuous mouth, so I heard. Maybe when I quit door-to-door I could be a gigolo. Somebody put something good on the machine for a change and I winked for a fourth martini. Henna caught it that time. I could’ve made her.

  Another guy got up, walked over to the John. He didn’t know it worked by a buzzer and dropped a dime in the lock. The door wouldn’t budge. He looked around helplessly but was too embarrassed to complain to the barmaids so he sat back down.