Love Monkey (27 page)

“It was like some kind of sacred, mystical ritual,” she says.

I'm feeling around the edge of the futon. It's totally jammed up against the wall on two sides. And I'm on the wall side. Land-locked! I roll the evidence between my fingers. Roll, roll. Into a dry little ball.

“It was like centuries of women passing this knowledge down to me,” she says. “I mean, I kept thinking, You don't know me. You don't know my body. How did you know all those things about my body?”

“It helps,” I say (roll, roll), “if you just let a guy know what you want.” Which she didn't, by the way. I was flying on instruments, in the dark. Look where that got JFK Jr.

“I didn't know!” she says. “It's like you know my body better than I do.”

Really? We aren't talking about a landmass the size of Wyoming here. I just did the standard stuff, only for a really long time. But
apparently this girl has had lousy lovers. So I keep my mouth shut. Let her think I'm Merlin of the mattress.

So I just roll lovingly on top of her and gaze into her eyes as I drop the evidence on the floor.

I sigh. Check the clock: 4:03. Gotta get some sleep.

“I'm just so happy,” I say (gaze, gaze), “that I made you happy.”

“Usually I have to help out,” she says. “It was just never like that before,” she says.

“Never ever?” I say.

“Never evvvver,” she says.

“So, are you ready to go to sleep?” I say.

“Um,” she says. “No?”

A
hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. hhhhhh.

I
've just pulled Rollo's dissertation on
Training Day
up on my screen, preparing to get it in shape for next Friday's paper, when the author himself appears.

“You couldn't help us out with this one a bit, could you, mate?”

I look at him. Unbelievable. A lime-green single-breasted with a blue shirt and a red handkerchief big enough to bullfight with.

I shield my eyes. “Jesus,” I say. “You get more Runyonesque every day.”

“The structure is there,” he says. “I mean, not the structure but the idea, the blueprint, do you know what I mean? Not that at all, of course—bollocks—but the mood, the milieu, the flavor, the
music,
I mean, it's right in front of you, you just have to fill in the notes, do you read me, Houston?”

I look at the review, which reads, in its entirety:

“I don't want to tamper with what you've got,” I say.

“It'd be a great favor to me,” he says. “It's just that with the excitement, you know, the news, the axis of evil, I've been making preparations, sharpening my pencils, getting fit, making the rounds, having a laugh with old mates, one last lap for victory, isn't it?”

“You've been going to Elaine's more than usual?” I say.

“Allow me to breathe one word to you.
Stans.
A-Stan. P-Stan. Unreadable stamps on the passport. Secret checkpoints, foreign intrigue, clash of nations, John le Carré, search for the killers. They're sending me. With the troops. Need I say more?”

“Why don't you just talk about the film for three and a half minutes?” I say. “I'll copy down every word and that'll be the review. It's not like this is a real newspaper or anything.”

“Problem,” he says. “Small one, admittedly, but it's there, a tiptoeing buggerer, wanking in the shrubbery—try to keep up—testing the perimeter, slouching toward Gomorrah and that—”

“You haven't seen the film,” I say.

“ 'Course not,” he says. “Except in this case I haven't seen the trailer.”

“You've been reviewing trailers?” I say. That explains the digression-filled vagueness of the last two or three reviews.

“ 'Course not, 'course not,” he says. “Just the last nine or twelve. Has anyone complained?”

“No,” I say. “But I might be the only one who reads your reviews, and I wouldn't do it if they didn't pay me.”

Blank look.

“I'll give it a shot,” I say.

“Cheers,” he says. “I know you'll make it sing like Caruso. Oh, and just put my byline on it, that'll be lovely, wouldn't want to rain dismay on the loyal readership and that.”

Training Day
was supposed to come out September 14. They already delayed it for three weeks because they figured newspapers
were still too full of real news to start treating every movie opening as a bright new hope for the republic. The studio has been previewing it for weeks. Even I've seen it, and I've got lots on my mind. Such as.

“Well, look at you.”

Julia smiles over me. “Hiya,” she says. “I just got in last night.”

Little gray skirt, tight black top. And a really nice tan.

We freeze for a moment, but then I get up and we're having a nice hug. A real one. There is no one else invited to this hug.

“I was worried about you,” I tell her cheek.

A
fter work we head downtown for a drink. And I notice she's wearing a ring. Left hand. Second finger. Not her ring finger.

Don't ask.

Mexico was nice? Mexico was nice. Flight back was terrifying? It was. When did she hear the news? That night. They were glued to CNN.

It's a cheap ring. I think. The jewelry equivalent of a clump of weeds and a daisy.

“By the way,” I say, “did you have e-mail in Mexico?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I checked it once in a while.”

She never sent me an e-mail. I couldn't send her one. I've seen her naked, but I don't have her home e-mail address.

Heading down Fifth, the sun seems to be going down too early. The farther downtown we go, the darker it gets.

“What's that smell?” Julia says.

Acrid, like burning tires. The wind is blowing uptown.

“It's still burning,” I say. “You can only smell it when the wind is right.”

A hand-lettered sign on the West Third Street basketball courts says
WE
'
RE STILL HERE
. Xeroxed fliers are Scotch-taped to walls. “Do you know of an animal whose person is missing?” says one. And there's one you see on virtually every block. A businessman. He worked on the 100th floor. There's a full-color digital photo of him on a notice carefully spell-checked and centered and laser-printed on high-quality rag paper, neatly posted in scores of locations. “Have you seen this man?” asks the flier. As if the guy simply forgot to call home. As if his absence is just another challenge to be solved by a PowerPoint presentation and a high-res printer.

“This city has changed,” Julia says.

“Yeah,” I say.

“I hate change,” she says.

“It's still Manhattan,” I say.

“Manhattan is overrated,” she says.

Quatorze Juillet is another one of those frog theme parks. Everything about it screams, “Real French bistro!” The weather-beaten marquee saying “Cafe-Journaux-Tabac-Jour et Nuit.” The drink menu written on mirrors. The ineffectual ceiling fans rearranging the cigarette smoke. The beaten-copper bar. I ask the barkeep for a carafe of dry white. He recommends Sancerre. I take one sip: blech. It's about as dry as Hawaiian Punch.

“Tell me tales of Mexico,” I say. Traveling can be tough on a relationship.

“We were both cranky,” she says. “We had a fight.”

“Oh?” I say, giving off a friendly vibe of mild interest, when I feel like a hawk spotting a field mouse on crutches.

“Dwayne has this reputation for being a little
cheap
,” she says. “And everywhere we went he was always trying to save a few
pe
sos. So while we were hiking up this hill, he refused to stop to get something to drink and I got all pissed.”

“So what happened?”

“I sort of threatened to leave,” she says.

“What did you tell him?”

“I said, ‘Maybe you'd enjoy this more on your own. I'll just fly back tomorrow.' ”

And lazily I picture the joy if she had called from JFK a week before she was due back:
Hi. It's me. I need a place to stay.

A couple of days later, though: the attack. They watched TV news for two solid days but after that Dwayne “just literally went from town to town finding a place with a TV set. So I got bored. I didn't want to watch that shit.”

“Exactly how I felt,” I said.

“Exactly,” she says. “So I went out and wandered on my own for a while.”

“Did that bother you? Being by yourself?” I say.

“No,” she says. “It was kind of nice.”

Good answer.

She orders some food but I'm not hungry after my typical late, post-workout lunch.

“You should eat,” she says. “You've really lost a lot of weight.”

“You noticed?” I say.

“You look kinda great, actually,” she says sweetly.

I take my sustenance in liquid form. After a carafe, I'm fairly drunk. So I order another. Her drinking pace slows to nothing.

I reach under the table to find her right ankle. I prop it on my right knee, slowly slide her sandal off. She's wearing the cute gray ones with the little ribbons on them. I start running my nails up and down her calf: smooth. Unlike Liesl, she shaves conscientiously. Unlike Liesl, she smells all girly.

She closes her eyes, blows smoke in my face. “I'm a sucker for scratching,” she says.

“Feel nice?”

“
So
nice,” she says. “Your
nails
.”

The Bite Me worked. I actually have fingernails now, for the first time since I was eight. And with my Bite Me–restored leg scratchers I move up and down her calf, scaling to knee and descending to ankle. Surely this counts for something. It isn't sex, but on the other hand, if Dwayne walked in he'd be plenty pissed. This seems to be my new standard: whether my actions, while not sexually satisfying to me, would at least annoy a person who isn't there to see it. Dwayne's newspaper has sent him down to interview people near Ground Zero. Not far from this very neighborhood. Why can't he just stroll by some night while we're like this? Maybe Julia is hoping also.

“So nice,” she says, swoonily.

“Almost as good as sex,” I say.

“Nothing's better than good sex,” she says.

“Define good sex,” I say.

“Sex in which I have an orgasm.”

“What's your batting average?”

“Seventy percent,” she says.

Wow. A circuit breaker in my brain flips over.

“Seventy?”

“For guys, it's a hundred and ten percent!” she protests.

“You little minx,” I say. “I had no idea.”

Dwayne is getting her off three-fourths of the time. Or, optimistically, call it two-thirds.

“Especially when I'm ovulating. I'm ovulating now. And I've been so horny the last two days.”

That she would tell me this, unbidden, connotes very good or very bad news. She would share this information with a lover. She would also share it with a gay hairdresser.

“Only, sometimes I have trouble with a new person,” she says.

“It takes a while to get used to someone new,” I agree, wondering
if my face is burning visibly in the dark.
I didn't ring her bell
. I didn't even come close. And she is possibly the most orgasmic girl in the city of New York. At least there was that time in the doorway. Does that count for anything? Does she think about it?

“Talk to Rick?” I say.

“No,” she says. “But I wrote him a letter.”

I would love it if you wrote me a letter.
Instead she wrote to him.

Scratch, scratch. Up calf. Down calf.

“See, when we were in college, we agreed we didn't like e-mail. So we used to write these letters, on real paper, when I was at Bowdoin and he was in Pennsylvania. So I thought I would write him a letter again.”

“Oh?”

In Manhattan there are these moments. You cross the street twenty, thirty times a day. Almost all of the streets are one way. You're careful. You wait till the light has changed, heed the command to
WALK
, and you step off the curb thinking about a girl or what's on TV tonight, keeping a wary eye on the eight-ton delivery truck rumbling down the block to make sure it's stopping and then—
whoosh
. The eight-ton truck waits lawfully at the crosswalk but while you were watching it your life has almost disappeared. From your blind side, a demon delivery boy misses you by inches as he hurtles by in a cloud of moo-shu pork, going the wrong way on the one way, just him and his tanklike iron Chinese bicycle. A death machine that has to move fast because someone exactly like you is waiting for his dinner and is more than willing to stiff an Asian immigrant for being three minutes later than promised.

“And I, basically, told him I love him.”

Whoosh.
Didn't see that one coming.

“And.” I say it quietly.

“And he didn't e-mail me or call me.”

“When did you send it?” I say, genuinely worried. The attack might have slowed mail service.

“I, I mailed it from Mexico,” she says.

Boom. Crash. Crack. Shatter. She destroys me, this girl. She's relentless. The original title of Elvis Costello's
Armed Forces
album was
Emotional Fascism,
did you know that? I always thought it was a better title. Maybe I'll use it myself. If I ever record an album about the Saddam of South Norwalk.

“When?”

“Last Saturday. After all, This, happened? I was just thinking, if I lived in Madison I could be with my brother, who I love—”

“And Rick,” I say.

She doesn't say anything.

“You must feel so bad,” I say.

“You're the only one who knows this,” she says. “You're literally the only one.”

“I know,” I say, scratching and stroking.

Whir, rattle, clunk. I'm in third place. But Dwayne is dwoomed and
Rick doesn't want her
. Does he?

“You were wearing a ring earlier,” I say.

“I was?”

“On your left hand,” I say. “You kept fidgeting with it, hiding it under your elbow,” I say.

“Oh, I took it off,” she says.

And I muster a joking tone. Give her a little comedy prosecutor's scowl. “Did you get engaged?”

“No,” she says. With a half laugh. “It was just something I bought.”

Oh.

“I have to get out,” she says. “It's a problem of logistics. I don't know where I'd go.”

The temptation to leap to the feet, to pump the fist, to reintroduce my mouth to hers, is there.

Randy
say:
Play angel's advocate.
Make her talk herself into it.

“Are you sure?” I say. “It can't be salvaged?”

“On the way back he brought It, up.”

“Marriage?”

A nod.

Bastard. I've been hoping for months that he would do it officially, spring out of the shrubbery with a $300 Zales ring and a fresh bouquet of weeds. And she would say no, and that would be it. Instead the little wuss has been edging his way up to it, asking her without asking her, searching for a signal. Dragging it out.

“So what'd you say?”

“I said I wasn't ready.”

Yes, she flakes just like a woman. She's just a girl who can't say no. Women have no problem rejecting you; they just can't use the word. If she had said no, maybe he would have thrown her out of the apartment that day.