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Authors: Jane Juska

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A Round-Heeled Woman (7 page)

BOOK: A Round-Heeled Woman
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I hurry home to call the San Francisco Hotline. Because, of course, I plan on having oral sex. At least, I hope I will have oral sex. And I plan on giving some. In the dimness of my memory, I am good at both.

The young man on the other end of the hotline has a gentle, soothing voice. The possibility of contracting AIDS from oral sex is higher than had been thought in earlier times. My heart sinks. But the percentage is still low: up from 3 to perhaps 8 percent of the time the disease is contracted by way of oral sex. There should be little to fear, he tells me, as long as there are no cuts or sores on either the genital area or in the mouth. Of course, there won't be. The young man advises me that, if I do not know my partner intimately, I will do well to ask him for his sexual history. Okay, I will do whatever anybody tells me to. I will write Jonah at once. I will ask him, casually—good lord, how would that go: “Oh and by the way, I was just wondering, uh . . . ” Jonah—this stranger—will be here within a week.

My e-mail to him borders on hysteria:
“How could I have been
so naïve? This friend of mine says men of my generation don't give a flying
fig for STDs!” and at my teasing best, of which I am not altogether proud, I add,
“If I can't kiss you all over, then cancel your travel
plans because long walks on the beach will simply not do.”
I hate coy.

Jonah answers at once, declaring that he has been tested twice for AIDS, both times with negative results. His doctor has recently given him a clean bill of health. He ends with
“Listen to
a lot of classical music and we'll be fine. Love and kisses, Jonah.”
What a guy.

Jonah had arrived in packet number 1. I moved him immediately to the
yes
pile when I read,
“When I returned from my tea
plantation in Sri Lanka, I went straight to the Breadloaf Conference
in Vermont.”
We wrote daily, sometimes more than once. He wanted to know about me. Where had I grown up? When had I first heard classical music? What was it? Where was I when I heard it? This was utterly seductive. No man, save for my analyst, whose job it was to ask me about myself, had ever been interested in me and the things, like music and books, that were important to me. I wrote to Jonah my memory of hearing, for the first time and only by an accident of radio waves, Rachmaninoff's First Piano Concerto in my bedroom upstairs in the northwest corner of my house in the wintertime of my little Ohio town. In return, Jonah wrote about hearing Rachmaninoff in his boardinghouse in New York while he was a graduate student at Columbia. Omigod, Columbia! He got better and better. Every single thing he told me about himself added to the picture I had of the ideal man, a man who wanted to know me, a man who was a Jew and for whom I could be a shiksa. Philip Roth would understand. Of course, in Roth's fiction, the coming together of Jew and shiksa spells disaster. Oh well, what does he know?

Jonah and I exchanged photographs. Mine had been taken by my son the previous Thanksgiving from far enough away that the lines in my face and the drooping of my parts were not visible. It was taken after I began to receive the answers to my ad and before I had met anyone face-to-face. In the photograph I am damn near radiant. I felt radiant. Where the hell did I put the negative of that picture? I'll never look like that again, and Jonah and a few others have the only evidence that I did.

In his photograph Jonah looked Mephistophelian in his pointed black beard and reddish hair. He looked absolutely foreign. He looked terribly exciting. And then, for no reason I could decipher, he stopped writing. A long, to me very long, silence ensued. I returned his photograph without a message. Later, he would tell me that receiving the photograph sans words had determined for him that he would fly across the country to sleep with me.
“I have no intention of sleeping alone,”
he wrote. The last letter before he boarded the plane ended with
“Let joy be unconfined.”

My friends who knew about all this—Bess, Celia, Jean—were through cautioning me. They had said all the right things— “How do you know this guy's not crazy?” “What if you hate him?” “You're not going to let him stay with you, are you?” I convinced them that I had taken their concerns under advisement, that no matter what, I was going to do this unless something from Jonah made me decide otherwise, that I was perfectly capable of taking care of myself. So they decided to enjoy my ride.

I had given a lot of thought—hours and hours, waking and sleeping—to this visit. As soon as he had announced that he was coming all the way from Virginia, before I had even invited him, my mind went not to
no
but to details. I did not want to put him up in my tiny cottage. I wanted somewhere both more private and more public. I wanted somewhere neutral, a place we could decide if, really, we liked each other enough to take the next step. Jonah had written, in reply to my apprehensions,
“You
and I have made a kind of unconventional contract. I will do my best to
hold up my end—pun intended—and I hope your conflicts will not interfere
with your will to hold up your end.”
I wrote back, most assertively,
“I
have entered into no contract and reserve the right to change my mind right
up to and including the first moment of intimacy.”
By god, I was in control and planned to remain that way.

Jonah wrote that he promised to
“send you on your way to being
as sexually capable as my third wife was when we divorced.”
Hmmm. He wrote that he was bringing his favorite wine and champagne and
“a few little extras to keep things interesting.”
I flashed on the French movie
Romance,
where the girl finds herself with a sadomasochist. And likes it. Ah, those French. Thanks to them, I at least knew what the equipment looked like.

The night before his arrival I got tipsy on my own wine and went for a walk. Everybody should walk the world drunk. Or in love. Or both. People smiled. People were pretty, they moved sweetly, spoke softly, and no one seemed to mind when I drifted from one side of the sidewalk to the other. It was not the last time I would turn to wine to escape the terror of what might happen and the pain of what did.

The Claremont is a Berkeley landmark. It was built, rather it was begun to be built, in 1906, finished in 1915, added to since. It is beautiful. White, gabled, a gold-tipped tower at its center, it rambles along a hillside overlooking San Francisco Bay. It is expensive. This is where I decided Jonah and I would spend two, maybe even three, nights. We'd see after that. I couldn't afford one night, let alone two or three, but what the hell, I was going to do this right. And then the most extraordinary things began to happen: my friend Celia took great delight in all these goings-on. My age, she was and is feisty, funny, and friendly. The day before Jonah was to arrive, Celia beckoned me to her car outside our exercise studio. “Here,” she said, “take this.” She handed me an envelope. Inside was a card into which she had written, “Your shenanigans have given me such joy I want to be a small part of them.” There sat a check for $250. “You can't afford the Claremont,” she said. “Have fun.”

When I got home, on the steps of my cottage was a package from Ann Arbor, Michigan, the home of my friend Bess. Inside the package was a beautiful bag from Pierre Deux and inside the bag was the most gorgeous nightgown I had ever seen: satin with lace trim on the neck and hem. I put it on. I looked at Celia's check. I would cash it. In the mirror, I looked at myself in the nightgown. I took it off. Not yet. Someday, but not yet.

I HAD MODELED for my friend Jean, who lived a few blocks away, what I had discovered in Macy's, where I was trying to answer the question What shall I wear? I pulled it out of the bag, held it up, and breathed a sigh of relief when Jean said, “Perfect. ” It was a red, very red, silk shirt. Underneath were red-white-and-blue striped pajama shorts. “Will you need them, do you think?” she asked, shaking her head no.

And so I had taken care of everything. Tomorrow morning, on my way to the airport, I would drop off at the Claremont the picnic I had put together from the finest delis of Berkeley: pâté, Brie, a baguette, olives, grapes, those little chicken legs, a bottle of champagne. I had requested from the hotel that there be in the room a refrigerator and a CD player for the music I was bringing—Rachmaninoff and Bruch's Violin Concerto, the piece Jonah had said was the very most romantic music ever composed. I of course went out and bought it. I had bought champagne glasses, too. They were pretty and tinkled when tapped lightly together. Things were going to be perfect if I had anything to do with them. If they weren't, it wouldn't be my fault.

At the airport—I am early—I walk resolutely to the gate. Here it is December and it is supposed to be at least cool! Instead, it is hot and I am dressed as if it were December in Minnesota. I wear what I will wear for future meetings with strange men: trousers and a very big sweater—a wool turtleneck tunic— on top. I will hide my body as long as possible; I am not, after all, a trollop. What I am is hot. Sweat rolls down my back, forming a little puddle somewhere below. I stride on, resolute, the back of my sweater sticking to me, my stomach in little to big knots that feel like billiard balls crashing into each other as they roll around my guts. But I am sure I look confident, in control. In fact, I have no idea how I look. If I walk the way I feel, I will crash into walls, people, benches, anything in the way of my veering. My head swims. My mouth is dry. What the hell am I doing?

Passengers begin to file off the plane. Can this be Jonah? He is carrying a wooden box, rectangular, big enough for whips and chains and manacles and masks. But no, he walks on by. And then I see him.

Pick up your feet. The man coming toward me is a leached-out version of the Jonah in the photograph. His color is gone; his hair is gone and, My god, I think, this man is old. He carries a duffel bag perfect for leather straps and handcuffs and lots of keys. It looks heavy; I can almost hear it clank. This is going to be disastrous. Then I remember what he had written in response to my tale of discovering classical music:
“When I was a
graduate fellow in psychology at Columbia, years ago, the house where I
stayed had its radio tuned to New York's radio station WQXR, which
played classical—and some jazz—all day long. The signature melody of the
morning wake-up program was exactly the piano concerto you first heard—
the one that stole your musical virginity, so to speak. It made a lifelong romantic of me—which ain't necessarily good.”
I breathe more easily. Would an aficionado of S and M write wonderful stuff like this? Of course, I had never actually seen a person I knew to be a fan of S and M. They could be all around.

He scuffs his way toward me and, as he draws even, I say, “Jonah?” His sidelong glance is both shy and shrewd, like Shylock's. It asks the question, Am I going to get away with this? And then he says, “Jane? You're prettier than your picture.” Okay, this is going to work.

On the long walk from the airport to the car, Jonah shifts the heavy bag from one hand to the other. Proud of my well-exercised suitcase muscles (known officially as triceps), and being a good deal younger, I offer to carry the bag. “No, no,” he says. “I'm fine.” Of course, he doesn't want me discovering the paraphernalia right here in a public place. I lead the way and suddenly, I feel Jonah's hand on my butt. This is going to be good. So what if he does have a few small articles of torture? I can at least have the courtesy of listening while he explains what he will do with these things if I let him, which of course I won't, and besides, we will be in a public hotel and oh how I wished I hadn't asked for a room “very private.”

In the car, Jonah asks, “What kind of car is this? Pretty fancy.” I explain that I had bought it secondhand, that I had had the car for eight years. “Goes with your clothes,” he says. “Nice. I especially like your pants.” He slides his hand between my legs and runs it up and down the inside of my thigh. The car swerves, Jonah removes his hand and says, “Did you notice I'm not wearing my seatbelt?” “Put it on,” I order. He doesn't, and his grin returns him to his photograph. And then he says, “I am a perfect gentleman until I get behind closed doors.” The car swerves again, a tiny swerve, just enough for the car coming toward us to honk. People are so hostile these days.

I turn into the driveway of the Claremont and Jonah says, “I don't feel comfortable in places I don't belong.” What is this about?

I say, “You belong wherever you are.”

He follows me meekly to the desk, where I had reserved the room in his name. There, that ought to make him feel comfortable, especially when he sees I've already paid for it.

In the hallway on the way to the room, following the bellboy, whose ass is quite good, Jonah cups my left buttock, which, it seems to me, is settling even lower on my frame than when I got up this morning. I flash on a day of yore when one of my gay friends whispered the ultimate compliment to me: “We think you've got a great ass.” Not too round, it had been firm and high, dammit, I had had a firm ass. Oh, what the hell, whatever he is doing feels good. I walk a little slower.

The bellboy unlocks the room, carries our bags inside, and cracks open the tiny window, which offers, according to my request, a view of San Francisco Bay. It offers a sliver of a view of San Francisco Bay. I look around the room: no refrigerator, no CD player, and where is my picnic? I watch as Jonah tips the bellboy: one dollar.

We are alone. I walk to the phone. I list the errors of this room and demand my picnic. Within minutes—thank god, I can stall a bit longer—there comes a knock at the door. A very apologetic man, official-looking, leads us to the other end of the hotel and opens the door to a suite where there is everything—a sweeping view of San Francisco across the bay— and more, my picnic. “I think you'll like these arrangements,” the man says. “Enjoy your stay.”

BOOK: A Round-Heeled Woman
10.93Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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