Exposed (10 page)

An honest, even a half-honest, response was not going to satisfy them. That was not as easy a lesson for me to learn as you might think.

The fact is, for the most part the sex wasn’t that good…

We’ll start with the obvious. Men often think they have to “lower my inhibitions.” I think we’ve dealt with that issue here. I really don’t have many inhibitions. If you want me drunk, it’s about you, not about me. And what that’s about, I don’t like all that much.

You don’t want me to be fully aware, fully participating, fully consenting with all my faculties? Too bad for you.

Secondly, many men are just not good at sex. It’s like once we get to the bedroom, they bounce between “can’t shut their mind off” to “can’t think at all.” Maybe when they get an erection all the blood leaves their brain.

The mystery here is that these are men who spend hours in the gym to look good, or who will study every stroke of their golf game, buy books on how to swing a club, how to hold a putter, how to read a green. “Keep your eye on the ball. Swing relaxed. Concentrate on the the ball in front of you, forget the last shot.”

Some of the same techniques apply.

Or those who take driving lessons:

After my divorce was final, I went down to Seattle Raceway for a day of driver training in my Porsche. Just for fun. There was one other woman there, about a dozen guys.

They taught us to look where we wanted to go and not at the wall, to drive with relaxed hands, and that we’d lose control if we weren’t smooth or tried to do too much.

Some of the same techniques apply.

If men are willing to spend thousands of dollars on golf lessons or driving lessons, why won’t they spend a few hours learning to be better lovers? Anyone can improve, and the practice is so much less tedious!

My first few attempts to help, if they were lacking style or stamina, drew various levels of resentment. Sometimes this was passive. They would not call again, even if I made it obvious I wanted them to.

If I said that perhaps five or ten minutes of overly athletic pumping right after a meal wasn’t quite enough foreplay, I was called demanding.

If I said I liked giving and receiving oral sex, both as an appetizer and dessert, I saw in their body language they thought that was a bit gross.

If I took forty-five minutes to reach orgasm for any reason, I was called greedy or cold.

Other times, they turned it around on me, and actually attacked me for answering the question they had asked.

If I wanted more spontaneity, suggest we have sex after a concert while driving home on the Alaskan Viaduct, I was called perverted.

I tried elevating my vocabulary, but it was no use. Even when I said it was “great,” they knew I was also saying, “But it wasn’t the best.”

Maybe the worst were the “hurt feelings.” Somehow, by not saying something that bolstered their self-esteem, I had betrayed them. All of which quickly brought me to the conclusion that if I wanted a child in my life, I would have had children. Every now and again they tried harder, sometimes they gave up. Other times I gave up, too, which was okay because I wasn’t emotionally invested.

A handful of men were good, almost as good as Mark, but I’m not going there. They were fun and adventurous, but something always screwed it up. Often it was their fantasies. Several times I was asked what I thought about bringing another woman into the bedroom.

Mateo was a good example. He was a banker whose parents were Spanish, but Mateo was born in the US. God he was handsome. Maybe it was his Latin blood, but he was a great lover, too.

One evening after dinner and a second glass of wine at a restaurant over in Bellevue, he asked if I would like, or “consider” I think he said, bringing another woman into our sexual relationship.

I’d heard this before and had a ready reply.

“I would definitely consider it…” I said, then paused and looked off, slowly rotating my wine glass in my fingers as if I were reviewing the sensual possibilities at that very moment. I saw his eyes light up as endorphins soared and the blood rushed from his brain to other organs.

“But of course we’d have to have a quid pro quo. Do you know any men who’d be willing to join us on occasion? If not, I may have a phone number or two.”

The light drained from his eyes as if I’d splashed him with icewater from the glass on the table. His lovely eyebrows knit together. He shook his head. “I don’t think that’s my thing,” he said at last.

“Too bad,” I said and shrugged, leaving him wondering whether I was jacking him around or if I really wanted a couple of men for my entertainment. I knew the discussion would not end there, though our fling probably would, and I was okay with that. As pretty as he was and as good a lover, we didn’t have a lot in common and the relationship was starting to get old.

For fun I decided to be noncommittal when he brought up the subject of whether I’d had more than one man at a time. God, he tried to ask in so many ways without appearing to be asking at all. I’m a lawyer, so, duh, he got no real answer, and sure enough, by the time we got back to his place, he was “very tired” and ready to sleep.

I let myself out and didn’t hear from him again. As I said, that was okay.

And don’t get me started on jealous men, or those who feel that because we’d had sex once, or a half-dozen times, they need to “take care of me,” that somehow they had “responsibilities.”

I know it’s biology and they can’t help themselves, but a half-hour a day of quiet thinking on the subject would do them a world of good. We had sex. It was fun. Don’t make assumptions about the future without talking to me first, okay?

Eventually, one night, I was bored and went by myself to SASSA.

I didn’t know what I wanted or why I was there, really. I won’t tease you or lead you on: I didn’t “do anything” that first night. But I was like a candle in a room full of moths.

It didn’t matter where I sat, at the bar or at the foot of one of the tented alcoves where couples put their mouths all over each other, which did get me pretty aroused, or at one of the “stations” where couples lovingly slapped and spanked each other or tied each other to a section of chain link fence fastened to the wall and invited others to touch.

Wherever I sat, I was soon surrounded by men, but I always felt fairly safe because of SASSA’s strict “no means no” and “no touching without permission” rules.

But in that environment you don’t expect much personal space. There’s touching… and then there’s touching.

Men leaned close to talk, and I would feel the pressure of their leg, or their erection, on my thigh. Sometimes they would put a hand on my shoulder as they inched closer, pretending to close the space between us to be heard above the music.

I could smell them when they did, and usually it was a very nice smell. I didn’t flinch, I didn’t tell them no, I didn’t discourage them.

In truth, I liked it. I liked the feel of a hand on my shoulder, fingertips on my skin where the strap of my dress had slipped, ever so slightly. I liked the pressure of a stranger’s erection on my thigh, feeling it throb, knowing they wanted nothing more than for me to reach down, unzip their pants and take that hard cock in my hand.

When I shifted in my chair, sometimes I sat so I could put even more (inadvertent, of course) pressure on the hardness being offered. They liked that. And I liked it even more when there was one of them on each side.

I liked being there, I liked being there alone, I liked knowing that I could have anything I wanted, there, that night.

And that was enough, that night.

• • • •

Somewhere during this period, my appearance began to change. I don’t know if the style of some of my clients or that of my younger assistants Lily and Sarah, even though they weren’t that much younger than me was starting to rub off. Or if it was just Seattle.

But I acquired a bit more “edge.”

The next time I got my haircut, my usual girl was on maternity leave and the new one asked if I wanted to try something different. I said, “Sure.”

She cut it quite a bit shorter than it had been, distinctly shorter on the left side. “It should be darker,” she said. “Sure,” I replied.The warm browns and soft yellows of my wardrobe went into storage, and my suits became black, gray, and white. Oh, I would wear a fuchsia or teal blouse to add a splash of color, but the suits tended more to the dramatic, and the cut sexier and much less like some knock-off of a man’s Armani.

There seemed to be an unwritten code that female lawyers were to dress as much like men as possible. I started pretending I didn’t get the memo.

But really, it was the hair. They say clothes make the man, or in my case, the woman. Maybe. But there is something very different about hair. It’s so much more personal, so much more of a statement, so much more of an identity.

We can change our clothes and dress up or down, but hair doesn’t have the same temporary character. It’s a much stronger statement.

A woman with half her head shaved or died purple can change her clothes ten times a day and wear anything, but she’ll still be making a very different statement than a woman with long, blond, succulent waves who wears the same outfits.

I did not shave half my head or die my hair purple, b
ut
it did change color pretty often after I stopped pretending any one shade was “my own.” At times it was pretty spiky, and sometimes my bangs
draped
over one eye.

It was always thick like my grandmother’s, and I experimented. What can I say?

I can’t say I was a hundred percent aware of this while it was going on, but others noticed. “Nice look,” said Tony one day.

“Good for you,” said Claire, nodding approvingly when I came in with fresh black hair and a new white pantsuit one morning when we were scheduled to have an important court hearing. The jacket had one button quite low, and shoulders twice as wide as normal; the pants had very wide legs so that the whole statement was of a certain excess in fabric.

It wasn’t cheap in any way. Some outfits cost about two Armanis. But it was style.

I worried a little about the impact when I became more aware of it. One time we were in the courthouse on an issue a little more serious than usual, and one of the prosecuting attorneys, a young one I’d obviously not met before, came up to me before the appearance and said “You probably should not be out here without your lawyer.”

“I am her lawyer,” I said, and held his gaze until he dropped his eyes and walked away.

“Elise” had grown up in Spokane and fled the farm life of her family, who owned orchards. Her father accompanied her on the first visit to my office, since he was paying the bills.

I don’t know who was more surprised after Sarah led them into my office.

“I expected someone more… mature,” he said.

“Did you mean mature
or
conventional?” I asked

“Well, maybe a bit of both,” he said, and I gave him an immediate ten credits for honesty and let it drop.

His daughter Elise got a more direct lesson when she pushed back as I was explaining the way she was going to dress during trial.

“Why do I have to do that? Look at you!” Elise said in a snotty tone that I imagine she had been getting away with since she was twelve, and that I was already tired of. She’d been busted for selling heroin at a restaurant where she waited tables in Belltown. Tips were quite good, she said with a smug smile.

“I’m not trying to avoid five years in prison, Elise,” I said calmly, with no attempt to soften the tone or the message, and as if her attitude didn’t matter to me one way or the other. The snottiness disappeared.

In fact, she became a model client, and after I got her off, we’d meet once a month or so for coffee. Elise asked questions about the law and law school, and I learned more than I wanted to know about the local drug trade.

It was Tony’s theory that my new look worked to our advantage.

“Next to you, these girls look even more like hometown kids led astray,” Tony said. “In fact, I think your edginess gives you more credibility when you explain how these girls ended up in their tragic situations. It’s like you know the ropes from personal experience. I think it works,” he said.

“Plus, I like it,” he added and smiled as he walked away.

Once he said the same thing when we were talking about tattoos and then piercings. I did not ask him to elaborate then either.

Only once, in front of Judge Burns, did my new look come up in the courtroom. True, the outfit was cut a little deep under the arms, but I thought the higher neckline might let me get away with it.

“You might want to rethink your personal presentation,” he said to me when he called me to the bench after putting his hand over the microphone that taped proceedings. “You flirt with the edge of propriety.” I toned it down maybe a quarter of a notch, but not more than that.

• • • •

I had one case that drew a lot of attention. It’s a fact of life that newspapers and TV stations are pack animals. Once one gets on a scent and starts baying like a hound, they all join in even if the others smell nothing.

I was waiting on what I thought was a standard appointment. When the women came into my office, it was obvious they were mother and daughter, if for no other reason than they were both over six feet tall.