We walked the nine blocks to my apartment during which time Kevin explained that he was the first in his family to go to college and that his parents back in Michigan were working-class good eggs in a factory midmanagement life.
I admitted that I was working-class Jewish, too, but mostly just listened to him talk. I was drunk and I wanted to get laid.
Cathy smiled jealously when I brought Kevin inside and introduced him. We’d only yesterday talked about how desperate we were for any half-decent male companionship. I offered Kevin all we had to drink, cold club soda. My party pickup was loudly amused by how many bottles of salad dressing were in the refrigerator when I opened it up—fifteen in all including ranch, Italian, green goddess, Caesar and tarragon.
Cathy explained that we were both following a new Glamour diet of nibbles instead of full meals, and needed whatever flavoring we could get.
I coughed loudly when enough was enough; this girl can talk as much as me. Cathy flashed a knowing grin at me and retired to her room.
“How do you say, ‘You’re so amazingly hot?’ in Ubba Bubba?” Kevin said, just before he kissed me again.
Kevin’s first I Love You came quickly, at the Fourth of July outing on Roosevelt Island two weeks after the party smooch. We were with his friends, and he seemed five years younger, and not in a good way. Kevin’s face was covered with gooey melted chocolate hazelnut gelato. He was also plenty smashed—buddy Doug saw to that, personally handing Kevin Bud after Bud, trying to pry him away from me. He wanted Kevin to see how he’d mastered “Stairway to Heaven” on a toy pineapple-shaped ukulele his parents had bought in Hawaii.
I was taken aback by Kevin’s drunken holiday announcement, but since I hadn’t heard a sexual I Love You said for several years, secretly I was a little moved. I playfully tugged at the bendy green glowstick around his wrist that we’d each bought for a buck from a Puerto Rican street vendor turning his own holiday hibachi chicken. I told Kevin that it was early for me but I was “really digging him”—which was true—and he waved over another holiday peddler darting through the crowd, chancing for a quick sale to the newly in love.
The red rose was rather sweet. But the next day as we nursed his hangover I’m not even sure he’d remembered buying the rose, let alone what he’d said.
The next I LoveYou came in mid-September right after I had decided three months was enough of a go. He was sweet and sex was okay, but I knew in my heart of hearts that this wasn’t a match. I had what I was going to say all worked out. I would lead off with what a catch he is. “I mean seriously,” I practiced out loud before Kevin’s arrival, “how many women in New York are looking for a handsome and kind Jewish guy? You’ll forget about me in a millisecond.” But just before my letting-him-off-easy speech, Kevin fractured his wrist. In a New York scene the writers from Friends might have written, I rushed him to the emergency room in a pedicab: we couldn’t get a taxi and he was too embarrassed for me to call an ambulance because he’d apparently brought this injury upon himself after he’d heard that his mother in Michigan was diagnosed with cancer. Nick, our cyclist, deserved a medal for pretending he couldn’t hear a thing Kevin was saying and for that record time he made a mile and a half to St. Luke’s Hospital in the Village.
Not the day to break up.
His mother died in November, and then before I knew it, it was New Year’s Eve.
I know, I know. How could I let this continue? But he was having such a terrible year.
We were dining at Roberto’s in the “real” Little Italy of New York City, Arthur Avenue in the Bronx. Kevin had made reservations after I’d casually mentioned that I had just finished the “Best of New York City” issue of The Village Voice: Robert Sietsema, the notoriously persnickety and adventurous food critic for the Voice thought Roberto’s modern Italian was ten times better than the dime-a-dozen red-sauce joints on the strip.
“I love you more every moment,” Kevin said with a teeny bit of mozzarella sticking to his tongue. I was already a bit nauseous from the texture of the tomatoey mussels in my mouth. I decided right then to drop the bomb sooner than later; it was just not right spending the New Year deceiving someone in mourning. He deserved real love back.
I smiled uneasily. Why ruin his day during an expensive dinner? At coffee, that’s when I’d do it.
We shifted over to one of the coffee houses whose windows brimmed with cookies and cannolis, and we dug our spoons into the icy rock-hard chocolate and strawberry spumoni he’d ordered for dessert.
“So no I love you from you?”
“Kevin—” I really was going to answer him this time, but after one look at my face he quickly brought up how his mother gasped for words as she neared death. He squeezed my hand as he said, “She was calling out her kids’ names, and bits of recipes, and Blade, the name of her first dog. She was staving off death, Shari—”
And just like at the party, he’d said the exact right thing to get me to do what he wanted. I’d tell him tomorrow…honest.
CHAPTER 4
Crumpet, Anyone?
I sit on the corner of the double bed in my hotel room, its tan-and-plum quilt still neat, I banish all thoughts of Kevin.
Kit sits down on one of the two plum polka-dotted armchairs.
“Are you still peckish?” I ask.
“I am, a bit. I could order up some room service. I’ll put it on my card, of course.”
“Well, sure then.” I’m all for that. I’m an academic with an unfinished dissertation; I feel amazed but guilty as hell that NYU has sprung for a hotel as deluxe as this one. The conference is here, sure, but they could’ve easily stashed me in some faraway Econolodge. I think Dr. Cox, my Ph.D. advisor, was being kind to me when he saw I had nothing new to report at the start of year four. He made me swear that I’d do some cultural vacationing on my time off. “Go early and take in some blues,” he’d ordered, “or bundle up and walk along the beach.”
I owe it to Dr. Cox to be careful about charging the university a double meal, as the departmental financial auditor will be going over my expenses with a magnifying glass.
Kit grabs the hotel folder off the desk and pulls out the menu. “Beef stir-fry wrapper? Or shall it be the fresh fruit plate? Or maybe a bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwich?”
“Do they have any chicken?”
To-mah-to, I echo in my head. Tomato, Tomahto.
Kit checks the room service menu. “Chicken Caesar.”
“Oh, I’ll have that.”
Kit places my salad order, and his order for a vegetable omelet. I’m silently thrilled that he also asks for a pot of Earl Grey.
The bright afternoon light floods my eyes and reveals every pore on my guest’s pinkish-pale complexion. I’m guessing he’s around my age, thirty-five, no more than forty.
My basketball date retrieves his cool lighter from his pocket again.
I extend my palm for a better look. “I noticed that before.”
He hands it over. “Do you smoke, too?”
“No, I just wanted to see it.”
“It is a Zippo. This model is called The Viper.”
“My uncle once told me that all of the Royal Air Force pilots used to carry only Zippos in the Second World War.”
Kit nods. “Your uncle must be an old man if he was in that war.”
“He’s fifteen years older than my mother. She was an accident.” I give it back. “Um, by the way this is a no-smoking floor.”
“Do you care?”
I’m not about to give him a sermon about my father’s early death, but I did go to the trouble of requesting a non-smoking floor. I glance up. “I do.”
“Very well,” he says with a small, pained smile. He puts away the lighter.
“I appreciate it.” Suddenly I feel at a loss for words. “Do you mind if I close the shade? The light is blinding.”
“Be my guest,” he says nicely, although he looks antsy now that cigarettes have been given the kibosh.
Goodbye v
iew facing a gorgeous slice of the skyline of Chicago.
“Can I ask why you have a cot in your room?”
“I’m guessing there was a family here before me. The maid probably forgot to take it away.”
“That’s probably it.”
I have to fill holes of silence. I am a Jewess, and genetically programmed to do this.
“I can remember when my nursery school cots were rolled out and the nap record went on.”
“You can?”
“Most likely I remember many days rolled into one. It was always the same record, the soundtrack to the movie Born Free.”
“That’s the lion film?”
“Yes.”
“Very melancholic if I recall?”
“‘Pretend you are Elsa, the poor little orphaned lion cub,’ our liberated braless teacher would say as the music filtered through the room: ‘Born free…’”
“‘As free as the wind blows,’” Kit finishes the lyric line.
“I can still see the shadows racing along the ceiling as I listened, pushing away my thoughts of sleep.”
“You know of course that you have a wonderful way with description.”
A Cambridge grad thinks that? “Thank you.”
There is the sound of a vacuum cleaner in use down the hall.
Okay, enough. What happened to the randy ass-pinching? His renewed “good breeding” is taxing my patience. I’m thinking maybe Gary is right and this bloke could even be gay until, perhaps emboldened by the industrial soundtrack, he stands up, sits next to me, and kisses me gently on my lips.
I breathe out. “I really hoped you would do that.”
“I would have been more of a gentleman but with no smokes, see, I needed to speed up the action.”
I hold up his hand and examine it in front of him. “Tough fingertips.” He smiles as I chew on one. We buss and nuzzle but we don’t get any further carried away; we’re both well aware that there will soon be a room service door-knock. When it comes in the form of an earnest rat-tat-tat, Kit unbolts the door, and in scuttles a twenty-something room service attendant, a young man with a perceptive smile.
After Kit is back in his chair I reach toward the teapot but he puts a hand on mine and says, “Let me be mother.”
“Excuse me?”
He pours for us. “That one is a British expression. It just means let me serve.”
“New to me. I like it. Men don’t mind saying it?”
He stops to mull over the question. “I never thought about it too much.”
I watch him eat, and admit that I’m afraid to eat in front of him after reading in a passage in a British novel about Americans spearing our food like barbarians. He is balancing everything on the back of his fork, and without even a pea tottering, gets the sliver of folded egg and its contents to his mouth.
“Would you like me to show you how to do this?”
I nod, amused.
Kit flips my wrist over, and tells me to put a bit of everything on the upside down fork. When the bits of chicken, tomato and lettuce fall off, he holds my hand until I get the precious cargo into my mouth. I never knew having someone hold my wrist could be so erotic.
Before our meal is halfway through, I joke, “I’m glad you don’t have a briefcase with you.” You idiot, Shari! Did you actually say that out loud?
“Pardon?”
I can’t curb the nervous rant. “Uh, what I mean is, this is the part of the film when you chain me to the bed, and that’s not for me.”
Kit whistles. “Not in this film. My kinks are much more harmless than that.”
“Oh, man, I’ve heard about those British kinks. Are you going to put on my makeup?”
“No I am not!”
“Is it ice? Do you like ice rubbed all over you? Wasn’t there a duke who liked ice?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
Happily, he doesn’t seem to mind the excessive New York verbiage. He’s still smiling at me like he’s undressing me.
“I’ll find out.”
“Oh, you will, will you?”
I remove his loafer and black sock and reach for the ice water.
“Eh, what’s your game?” he cries out in a mock Cockney accent.
“Your heels?” I rub a slightly melted cube along the arch of his foot. His toenails are squarish like Kevin’s, but his second toe is longer than his big toe, and Kevin’s go down in neat order, stubby little Matryoshka dolls. I push Kevin’s face out of my thought clouds. “Ice on your heels?”
“Ooh, that’s quite lovely really.”
I remove his other loafer and sock.
“Keep that ice coming. This is much better than a smoke.”
We move over to the bed and Kit lies on his back as I rub three more ice cubes into his heel. “That would kill me. You are an iron man.”
Kit wrestles loose and pulls his black rollneck sweater back over his belly button. With all the G-rated bed action going on, a good number of gold pound coins and American quarters have fallen out of his pants pocket. He leans down to scoop them all up and plops them on a side table.
I chokehold him with my legs and he wrestles again until we find ourselves both back down next to each other in our clothes. We’re laughing our heads off.
“Recite!” I demand as I lie next to him.
Hesitation. “Recite what?”
“Any British poet.”
“What makes you think I know any poetry?”
“You read English at Cambridge for fucksake!”
“I know a little verse—”
“Then recite!”
“I know a little of—will Christopher Marlowe do?”
“Indeed! Recite! Stand on the bed!”
“What is this, A Fish Called Wanda?”
Only one of my favorite movies. “Recite!” I say, excited to be connected to those beloved characters even in a moment of inadvertent umbrage.
He rises in his bare feet, stands on the mattress, and even if only to humor me, pretends to be swept over with an ungovernable passion. “Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium? Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss!/Her lips suck forth my soul— I’ve forgotten the rest.”
I laugh and tackle him to a reclining position. He has the gathering-dignity face of a nude male model about to remove his loincloth. Kit unhooks my new “Wanton” Wonderbra and leans over the bed for his belt that I have just thrown to the floor. From my prone position, I’m amused to see a little zipper on the back of the belt leather.
“You have handcuffs in there?”
“A Frenchie.” He adds with a little laugh, “I guess it’s a condom to you.”
The name of the package catches my eye. I’m finding this entire encounter a bit filthy, yet I like myself placed squarely in this scene. I’m wide awake for one, and for me that’s a rare state lately. Then again should I worry about a man who has a condom belt zipper? Is he the optimistic type who has random sex all the time? But you have to think at least he’s using a condom. I laugh a little at the thought of a British condom, and idiotically say out loud: “One-hundred-eighty pounds-worth of Durex, please.”
“Pardon?”
“The Young Ones. The ‘Sick’ episode when Mike the band manager asks the drugstore lady for condoms while Vyvyan is hammering a nail into Mike’s head.”
“Right, I saw that,” Kit says with a bit of exasperation.
“Sorry about that. I need to pick my timing better.”
“Don’t worry. I’m just surprised you got that program here.”
“On video. I’m a complete Anglophile. You can test me on anything by A. A. Milne. Monty Python, too.”
He takes a finger and puts it on my mouth to shut me up. This is a sexual strategy the men I’ve slept with have probably wanted to take but dared not risk.
He takes off his glasses, looks at me a little fuzzily and says, “Am I just a fetish to you then?”
“Keep your glasses on!” I beg
. “You won’t look British without your glasses.”
Kit shoves the corner of the pillow in my mouth. “Now I’m really going to shut you up.”
His face is so convincing that I’m actually nervous for a few seconds that I’m going to get hurt, but am quickly relieved to see he is just playing along.
“So, fancy a bit of crumpet?” he whispers into my ear.
The many room lights we left on have rehued Kit’s pink face a blanched and yellowy color, but he still looks mighty good to me having, as Austin Powers would put it, “Shagged the Yank rotten, baby.”
Can I be this content? Me, the sourpuss? Has Kevin been a forced hibernation on my happiness quotient? I breathe in Kit’s pleasant musky scent impregnated into my skin from the missionary position.
Kevin’s boxy body bathes me with his perspiration during sex—he’s soaking wet even when he performs like a wind-up circus acrobat whose might wanes out after two or three tumbles. Kevin’s sweat repulses me. There, now I’ve officially thought that mean thought, too. But this man lying next to me is not Kevin, and I readily lick my wrist to taste his delicious salt again.
Although silent with postorgasmic fatigue, Kit holds my gaze. He scratches my thigh and stomach with his fingers. Is this the silent British version of afterplay? At least he’s not rudely asleep. I play with a reddish strand of sweaty hair clinging to his cheek and coo into his pale white ear, “Help, Chris Robin, I’m stuck in the tree!”
“Christopher Robin!” Kit says in a jokey indignant way before he pecks the tip of my nose.
“I’m so glad Gary had that meeting,” I say.
And then he mysteriously sits with a start.
“What is it?”
“Of course, you know, I wasn’t planning on being in your hotel for so long. I mean this little rendezvous just happened—”
Rendezvous is it? “And?”
“And I have my own presentation tomorrow in this hotel. I don’t want you to think me rude, but I do have to look my papers over before we go to the game. I’m going to shatter my competition. I could get them and come back if you like before we go to the game.”
The Anglophile Page 5
