by Hank Moody
“Maybe if you warned me you were coming,” she says to Nate without taking her eyes off me, “I wouldn’t have made plans with the girls.”
“They always say they want more spontaneity,” Nate says, “Until you surprise them.”
“That’s only because your idea of a surprise,” protests K., “is to accidentally slip it into my ass.”
Nate grins like a well-fed cat. “You weren’t complaining for very long.”
“And they say romance is dead,” I deadpan, a major accomplishment given the nuclear explosions taking place in my brain.
“I like this guy,” Nate tells K., whipping a tentacle-like arm around my shoulder. “So what do you say, Weed Man? Boys night out?”
I look at my pager, amazed at the speed of my transformation from would-be cuckolder to cuckold. I know I don’t have any good reason to be angry at K., but I am anyway. “Why not?”
Who the hell walks into a room holding up tickets?
As Danny promised, the seats are close enough to smell the game. But smelling sweaty men hardly seems like a consolation prize. When Nate offers to buy me a beer with my own money, I pull a twenty out of my pocket, crumple it into a ball, and wing it at him.
“Classy,” he says, picking it up off the floor.
I try to lose myself in the action. The game moves both faster and slower than it does on television. Up close, the players jump and cut much faster than their freakish size (also more impressive in person) should allow. But the Knicks’ style of play, halting and deliberate and bruisingly predicated on fouling the opposition every time they drive toward the basket, seems to suck some of the joie de vivre from the room. Not helping is their coach, who calls a timeout every time the Sonics manage to string together two baskets in a row.
“You should see the asshole who usually sits here,” I hear a guy behind me say about my seats.
A backhanded compliment? Damnation by faint praise? Does it fucking matter? I am itching for a fight.
Only when I spin around, I see Liz, my favorite client from the Upper East Side. Her attention-demanding breasts provide support to something fuzzy and charcoal, too long to be a sweater but too short to be a skirt, allowing plenty of exposure for long, athletic legs wrapped in shimmery black tights and high-heeled boots. Her hair is moussed and tousled. A light layer of makeup helps her eyes to outsparkle the diamond studs in her ears, while the string of pearls around her neck make her look like she’s just stepped out of Vanity Fair.
“Hi,” I say.
“You know this guy?” says the man sitting next to her, the one I’d targeted for a fight. He’s in his mid-forties, wearing a brown suit and a Yankees cap to cover what I assume is male-pattern baldness. Liz’s mind seems to be cycling through potential replies. Or potential escape routes.
“Liz and I went to high school together,” I say, extending a hand. “The name’s Coopersmith … Biff Coopersmith.”
“Jack Gardner,” he replies, taking my hand tentatively, then crushing it. “High school? I could swear Lizzie said she went to Spence.”
“Mmm-hmm,” I say, freeing my hand.
“He means summer camp,” Liz interjects, “since Spence is an all-girls school.”
“Summer camp!” I laugh. “She was an absolute beast during Color War.”
“Coopersmith,” says Jack, rubbing his chin. “No relation to Casey Coopersmith …?”
“You know my cousin Casey?” I slap Jack on the knee. “He’s the best.”
“Casey’s a she.”
“Well, sure,” I say. “Since the operation.”
Liz, who’d been smiling wryly, allows herself a soft giggle. Nate returns with the beers and I make introductions all around. I don’t bother with my ridiculous new alias as I doubt Nate remembers my real name.
“You have a lovely daughter,” Nate says to Jack, nodding toward Liz and moving way up my admittedly short list of people I like. With a bullet.
“I do,” Jack manages through clenched teeth. “She’s thirteen and lives in Boston with her mother.”
“Good for you, old man!” says Nate. Now it’s his turn to slap Jack on the knee. “So the plumbing’s still in order then?”
“The plumbing is in excellent condition,” he replies with surprising pride. “I should know. I’m a urologist.”
“You’re a cock doc?” screams Nate, once again capturing the attention of the Sonics’ bench. “Brilliant! You probably get this all the time, but I’ve got this spot on my wanker….”
I look at Liz, expecting to see mortification. Instead she’s biting her lip, determined to keep the giggles from becoming guffaws. “I’m going to get a pretzel,” I announce, already on my feet. I’ve just planted myself on line when Liz appears behind me.
“Want to smoke a chonger?” she asks.
We settle on a service corridor off the upper deck. She pulls a joint out of her clutch. I do my trick with the Zippo. “You’re just full of surprises, Biff,” she says, blowing a cloud of smoke over her shoulder. “But thank you for not, you know, just blurting it out. It’s only our third date. Too early to tell him I have my own weed dealer. Your name’s not really Biff, is it?”
“Third date’s a biggie. You two done the wild thing yet?”
“The wild thing?” She folds her arms. Playfully. Maybe even flirtatiously. Then again, I misread the signs with K.
“I’m not judging,” I say. “We can’t control who we’re attracted to.”
“It’s not as if …,” she sputters. “I mean, he’s handsome. . . .”
“Bald.”
“Distinguished,” she counters.
“Rich?”
“He is that,” she sighs. “Look, you don’t know me at all. . . .”
“Not yet. But I do know this. You could be doing a lot better than the Cock Doc.”
Her cheeks redden. “That’s sweet of you to say.”
“I speak only the truth, milady. I know plenty of young bucks who’d be honored to lay their horns at your doorstep.”
“I have no idea what that means. Is that supposed to be some kind of metaphor?”
“Meta-what?!” I am already buzzed. “The truth is I don’t know what I’m talking about. My brain’s been running low on oxygen from the minute I saw you tonight.”
“You’re bad,” she says.
What happens next isn’t a kiss, exactly. She darts in, touches her lips to mine, and pulls away.
“It’d be a shame to miss the rest of the game,” I say.
Five minutes later, we’re making out in the back of a cab, destination Upper East Side. Arriving at her building, I peel off another twenty and tell the cabbie to keep the change. We fast-walk into the building, trying not to giggle at the door-man.
The charade falls apart in the elevator. We’re laughing. Tears stream down our faces. Then the tongue-mashing resumes. My hands are in tactile wonderland, sliding between the fuzzy sweater and the textured tights. I run my hand under her sweater, cupping her carriage. She moans and presses toward me. I risk a move to the front of her hose, gently tracing a line up her thigh. Two fingers pause between her legs. I can feel her wetness through the nylon.
The elevator opens and we stumble into the hall. Liz leads me by the hand to her apartment. She’s fumbling through her clutch for the keys. I try to kiss her again but she places a finger over my lips. She unlocks the door. Inside, a redheaded girl, fourteen maybe, looks up from the TV.
“You’re home early,” the redhead says.
“Everything okay?” Liz asks.
“Not a peep,” the redhead replies. She’s already putting on her coat.
Liz thanks her and hands her some money. Double-locks the door behind her. She turns toward me like she’s going to explain something, but my lips are already back on hers, my hands again finding their way below her belt. We fall onto the couch. Her hand slides inside the waist of my jeans as far as it can—I’m rock-hard and there’s not exactly a lot of room to maneuver. She uses bo
th hands to rip down my pants and boxers—problem solved. My cock springs out. She squats in front of me and runs her tongue up my shaft, beginning at the base. Reaching the tip, she stands up, satisfied at the view from above. She retrieves a condom from her clutch and tosses it to me. I wrestle with the wrapper while she wiggles out of her tights. She waits for me to finish, hand on hip, a few threads of sweater to protect her modesty.
In the next room, an infant begins to cry.
Privately I’ve always considered myself to have some talent for measuring a woman’s mood. But the expression on Liz’s face is forcing me to reconsider. Not blank, but the opposite. Regret coexisting with pride, with hints of resentment, joy, frustration, shame, resignation, and curiosity. When it comes to emotions, women know how to paint with the full set of oils, while men are busy doodling with crayons.
Liz mumbles a few words of apology and exits in the direction of the intensifying wail. I sit on the couch and look at my raging hard-on, feeling ridiculous. So I slip on my under-wear, grab my pants, and beat a path for the door.
The wailing disappears—I can hear Liz whispering some-thing soft and reassuring. Just ditching her is starting to feel like the wrong play. I look around for a telephone: I can write down her number and call her later to apologize.
“Classy,” I hear Nate saying in my head.
I tiptoe into the bedroom. Having ditched the sweater, Liz sways bare in front of a vanity mirror. She’s nursing a baby, sex indeterminate at this distance. The scene in the mirror confirms I’d been right about the attention-demanding breasts. But I’d missed altogether on their target audience.
Maybe I hadn’t been totally full of shit during my last conversation with Tana. Maybe it’s not about scoring, but about giving.
Liz looks up at the mirror, catching me grinning like Buddha. I recognize her current expression: puzzlement. I wonder if she’s awed by what I imagine to be beams of pure enlightenment shooting out of my eyes, until I realize her focus is stuck on my lower chakras. I glance down at the source of the commotion. Not Buddha, but a boner, back at full mast. By the time I look up at her again, she doesn’t look so puzzled anymore. Something else entirely has moved in.
Still cradling the baby, she sits down at the edge of the bed and falls slowly sideways, until mother and child are horizontal. I sit beside her, resting my hand on her arm. She scissors her legs, an invitation to complete the circuit. Give to receive, I think as I enter her. Give to receive. I thank the universe for serving up such an excellent part for me to play.
Then I get to work. There is some serious providing to be done.
10
I WAKE UP, HARDLY AN EASY FEAT given the cocoon of silky cotton sheets and a mattress forged from some fluffy polymer of the future. Louvered blinds temper the morning sun. Rich people sleep better, which might be one of the reasons why they’re rich.
Liz sits on the edge of the bed, Indian style, staring at me.
“You’re awake,” she says. “So glad.”
“Me too.” I sit up, keeping the sheets over my lap. Partly I don’t want to offend with my nakedness, as she’s already fully dressed: jeans and a pink Oxford button-down. Mostly I’m just resistant to having to give up the luxury of the sheets. “Last night was great.”
“Great?” she asks. Her tone is scolding. Last night’s sex kitten in tights has clearly departed, replaced by a dour devotee of the L.L. Bean catalog. “That’s what you think? Great?”
“Really great?”
“Really great? Really great. Good God, I’ve just hit rock bottom.”
“I’m a little confused. Did I suck in bed?”
“No, you were fine,” she says. “Better than fine. I had fun, I did. But I need someone to explain to me how I go from a date with a doctor, a very successful single doctor, a grown-up, for once in my life, who knew about Lucy and still wanted to … Who still seemed interested in me as something more than … How do I go from That Guy to sex with my teenage drug dealer?”
“I’m no psychologist, but you were high. We were high. Speaking of which … I don’t know about you, but I’m a big fan of the wake-and-bake.”
“I was high,” Liz says.
“I don’t know why, but saying it just makes you feel better, doesn’t it?”
“High while I was nursing my daughter. While my teenage drug dealer fucked me from behind. I mean … what kind of parent does that makes me?” Liz picks up the telephone and thrusts it toward me. “Will you call Child Services? Because if you don’t, I will. Lucy would be better off in a foster home.”
“All right, sister. Let’s take a deep breath. First of all, I’m not a teenager. I’m twenty-one.”
“Twenty-one. Imagine that.”
“Almost twenty-one-and-a-half. And while I agree, the sex plus the nursing might have been a little on the freaky side, it doesn’t make you a bad parent. Trust me on this one. I know the bad parent, and lady, you’re not him. We had fun last night. Everybody deserves to have—”
“You’re sweet,” Liz cuts me off. “Thank you so much. You’ve really helped me to see how completely fucked up and out of control my life has become. Now if you could just get dressed and get out of here, I don’t need Clarinda judging me too.” She exits the room.
I gather my clothes and dress quickly, passing a husky nurse—this must be Clarinda—on the way out the door. She grins at me, a gap-toothed smile that knows all about what goes on in the night. “Lady’s gonna be in a good mood this morning,” she says.
“I wish you were right,” I say, mostly to myself, and board the down elevator. In the lobby I’m treated to an equally knowing but much less smiley look from the doorman. At college, we had called this experience “The Walk of Shame.”
I hail a cab back to the Chelsea. I slink low in my seat, replaying the night in my head, trying to freeze-frame the moment when it went all wrong. The scene I keep stopping on is me, entering K.’s apartment, tickets held high like a peacock’s feathers.
I pay the cabbie and walk into the lobby, immediately grateful that Herman’s weekend replacement is behind the desk. Manuel happily ignores me in favor of the Spanish-language soccer game on the small black-and-white. I’m half-way up the stairs to the safety of my room when I run into K.
“Ho ho,” she says. “I heard you had an interesting night.”
“Interesting?”
“Nate says you ditched him for some doctor’s girlfriend.”
She’s smiling at me with a look I’ve seen before, generally when my rap has crashed and burned. You’re cute and I might sleep with you, it says, if I was a loser devoid any self-respect. Whatever window I had with K. is now closed.
“It wasn’t exactly the night I planned,” I say coolly. “The night we planned, actually.”
“You knew I had a boyfriend.”
There might be some regret in the way she’s said it, but I’m in no mood to see it. I can’t think of anything else to say that doesn’t sound desperate, vindictive, or just plain pathetic, so I continue up to my room.
Under normal circumstances, I am a big fan of the long postcoital shower. As sick as it probably sounds, washing dried sex off my body makes me feel like a man with a mustache who discovers a few crumbs from last night’s delicious meal. But I don’t want to think about last night anymore. Despite the unspeakable luxury of having the communal bathroom all to myself, I scrub quickly and return to my room.
The Motorola is buzzing on the bed. A Long Island number I don’t recognize. I throw on some clothes, grab a handful of change, and walk downstairs to the Mexican res-taurant.
“Kings Park,” says the receptionist on the other end of the line, quickly clearing up the identity of the mystery caller.
“Daphne Robichaux, please.” Two more quarters go into the phone before she speaks.
“Hiya!” Daphne says brightly. “How’s America?”
It’s a line from Sid and Nancy, a call-and-response we’d appropriated as our own. “Fucking bo
ring,” I finish. “Now, who are you, cheerful person, and what have you done with Daphne.”
“She met fluoxetine. And let me tell you, it was love at first swallow.”
Daphne’s bubbly take on life in the loony bin makes it sound more like F Troop than One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I actually find myself getting envious of her life, spent with colorful characters in what sounds like a stress-free environment. Maybe not entirely stress-free—when my father finally called the police to drop the charges, they told him she still faced possible criminal prosecution—but Daphne’s last conversation with Larry has her feeling confident that at least there won’t be any jail time.
I’ve just about run out of quarters when she asks me if there’s been any news about her father. I promise to call the private investigator, which I do as soon as I hang up. This conversation turns out to be a lot shorter.
“Glad you called,” says Henry Head. “Why don’t you swing by the office?”
The office is in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen. On the second floor of a storefront promising fake IDs and Live XXX, I find the door with Head Investigations stenciled on the tempered glass. There is no receptionist, just the Head-man himself, leaning back in his chair, feet on the desk. He wears a track-suit that looks more ironic than functional—Henry Head must weigh three hundred pounds. He notes my arrival, washing half a Twinkie down his throat with a Snapple. “Brunch,” he explains, gesturing toward a couch splattered with mysterious stains. “Make yourself at home.”
I play it safe, resting my ass against the armrest. A radiator clangs noisily in the corner, pushing the temperature about five degrees higher than comfortable. It really does feel like home.
“Do you have any idea how many Peter Robichauxs there are in the tristate area alone?” Head asks.
I shake my head.
“Me neither. Maybe someday with the computers and all that we’ll have some way of knowing. Until then, we got the white pages.” He holds up a weathered phone book.
My internal temperature rises to match the room. “Let me get this straight,” I say. “I just paid you five hundred dollars to skim the phone book?”
