What A Girl Wants (3 page)

Crushed, Hayley just looked at the girls and shook her head. They. Just. Didn't. Get. It. “This isn't a
guy
story. The issue is my totally inappropriate response! You've completely missed the point.”

Audra kept her face hidden in her latte mug, but Suz let out an inelegant snort, which apparently gave Diane license to ask, “Fondling the policeman wasn't the point?”

“Okay, I get what's happening here,” Hayley huffed. “You think I'm just being my usual alarmist self. You think this is just another one of my bush-league traumas. Uh-uh. Let me tell you. This was nothing less than a cry for help.”

She leaned forward. “I found a coworker dead, decomposing after at least a day of going unnoticed, and apparently my strongest emotion was acute horniness. It's not the horniness itself that's an issue here. It's what's behind the horniness. I clearly have some sort of problem here. And I was hoping you could, you know, help me figure it out.”

Suz raised her hand. “I have the answer to what's behind the horniness. It's called a failure to get laid.”

Really, Hayley should have expected this. She was only getting as good as she gave on any other Sunday. And if it weren't her problem, she'd be laughing as hard as the rest of them.

“Oh, wow. Oh, man. I'm a genius. I can help. We can all help.” They all looked over at Diane. She looked mighty pleased with herself. “Say you'll come over to the apartment on Thursday night.”

“For what?” Suz asked.

Diane shook her head. “I don't want to spoil it.”

Audra folded her arms across her chest. “Last quarter when you
said that, you made us do an experiment for your biology elective that turned our fingernails green for three weeks.”

“It's nothing like that. Just say you'll come. If you won't do it for me, do it for Hayley.”

“I don't even know what you're talking about,” Hayley grumbled. She had a bad feeling about this.

“It's not going to hurt you. But it could help. Come on, guys, say you'll do it.”

“Oh, all right,” Hayley finally said. Suz shrugged and Audra nodded reluctantly. After all, how bad could it possibly be?

H
ayley hid in Diane's tiny bathroom, listlessly rummaging through the contents of the medicine cabinet. Although she wasn't compulsive about it, Diane had obviously straightened up recently. Things were clean and white, including the towels. The whole place had a slightly antiseptic, two-star-hotel quality to it.

Hayley stared at Diane's lackluster collection of toiletries. Maybe she was just feeling resentful because Diane was a student and had spare time to do things like clean bathrooms. Lucky girl.

Of course, Hayley hadn't cleaned much of anything during the paid week of “mental health” time-off that New Economy Mouthpiece had provided, most likely to ward off one of those unpleasant emotional distress lawsuits. Granted she probably had enough evidence against the business even without the corpse, but free time-off was free time-off.

The sounds of Suz and Diane arguing about the DVD player filtered through the door. Those two seemed to be in cahoots about something. Audra was probably still in the kitchen arranging
her signature crab puffs on a silver tray. With a shrug, Hayley closed the cabinet and delved into the top drawer under the sink.

Really, one would think with Diane's interest in analysis, she'd have some serious psychotropic drugs or something. Something mood-altering would be good.
Lithium, anyone? Heh. Oh, hello! Jumbo-size ridged condoms. Good girl, Diane. Ooh . . . expiration date: 2001. Not so good. I guess I'm not the only one
—

“Hay? Is everything okay in there? I made crab puffs. I know you like them.” Pause. “Are you ever coming out?”

Hayley paused with her hand in the drawer. “Nope. I've got a clean bathroom and a closet full of blankets and towels. If you just leave the crab puffs outside the door and replenish every half hour, I see no reason to ever come out.”

“Seriously, Hay. You're worrying me. Come out and let Diane do whatever it is she's going to do . . . Hey! What do you two think you're doing?”

Hayley heard Audra's footsteps retreat, followed by the sound of the microwave. Now Suz, Audra, and Diane were all arguing. She could hear the terms “crab puffs” and “popcorn” being discussed in angry tones. Well, she might as well go out there and get it over with.

Hayley closed the drawer and stepped out of the bathroom into the living room. Diane's studio apartment was that small—and very light-wood IKEA. Not that Hayley was judging, or anything, but although most of
her
apartment furniture was still black-metal IKEA, she'd at least managed to upgrade the bedding and such to Calvin Klein.

Audra sat hunched in the corner of the couch with her legs crossed and her nose in the air. Suz and Diane stood facing her with their backs to the television set. Diane tugged nervously at the
hem of her oversize yellow-and-navy rugby shirt, while Suz kicked one of her pink flip-flop sandals into the carpet, trying to look innocent in spite of the fact that she was obviously concealing something behind her back.

Assuming her most morose expression, Hayley looked pointedly from one girl to the other, then sat down next to Audra. She plucked two crab puffs off the tray in quick succession and crammed them into her mouth.

Suz cleared her throat. Everybody looked at her. “Before we begin, I just want to say something.” She cleared her throat again, which was unusual, because Suz generally leaped before looking. “Everyone should keep an open mind.”

Audra and Hayley looked at each other in alarm, and Suz elbowed Diane.

“As you know,” Diane said in that authoritative voice she often used when explaining esoteric concepts to idiots, “I've been taking an elective in human sexuality.”

Audra and Hayley looked at each other again, and Audra started to get out of her seat, but Suz came forward and shoved her back into the couch.

“You don't need me. I'm delicate,” Audra whispered through gritted teeth. But Suz gave her some special look and Audra sat back quietly, if not exactly calmly.

“Right. So. . .” Diane continued, speaking faster and faster, “we are going to test on Hayley the premise that adult films are useful for therapeutic purposes.”

Suz whipped a DVD out from behind her back.

Audra gasped. “Hayley has mental problems. I don't see how that relates to adult films.”

Hayley frowned. Sometime between Sunday brunch and Thursday she'd been downgraded from upset and confused to mental catastrophe. How nice. And these must be her three best friends from the asylum.

And that was when Hayley was struck by the delicious absurdity of the situation. Audra with her money issues and her ironic insistence on spending it all discussing said issues with pricey therapists, Diane racking up degrees in a prolonged campaign to use education to avoid the real working world, and Suz with her inability to function on anything other than a short-term physical level with a guy (although apparently she functioned in that capacity extremely well); these well-intentioned pals were just as mentally flawed as she was.

And these were the people who were going to help her through her crisis. Hayley gazed at her oblivious friends fondly, a bubble of hilarious laughter welling up in her throat.

I love you guys!

“. . . and therein lies the question on which my thesis is based,” Diane was saying, “which is: Have the therapeutic possibilities of adult films been underestimated?”

Suz knelt by the entertainment center, loading the disc into the DVD player. “This is some hard-core shit. I don't want to mess with their expectations by saying ‘adult film.' This isn't E.M. Forster; it's porn. Can't we just say ‘porn'?”

“I don't think we should,” Diane said nervously.

“This is unbelievable.” Audra appeared as incensed as Audra ever got. She was compulsively smoothing her mauve suede skirt, kneading it, actually, from thigh to knee. “First you trump my crab puffs with popcorn, and now you expect me to watch group
porn. And this is supposed to result in some sort of personal epiphany for Hay?”

“I want you to know that my thesis is based on research findings in the
New England Journal of Psychiatric Studies
. And I know what you're thinking, so let it be known that I did not make this up. And it's not as if I'm using you as guinea pigs or anything.” She coughed. “I will personally attest to the fact that adult films can be educational on many levels.”

“Yeah, I've found them to be quite handy as reference material,” Suz said.

Hayley giggled, and the girls all turned and looked at her, suspicious of her sudden mood change. “So, Diane, what you're saying is that I'm going to find self-understanding by watching . . . What's it called, Suz?”

“Bambi's Boobs.”

“Oh. Well, that sounds delightful. See, Audra? It'll be just like watching Disney.”

“Not funny.”

Suz held the plastic DVD case out to Hayley for inspection, but Diane intercepted it. “You know, I have to admit,” she grumbled, “how these people actually think they can build an entire story line around breasts is completely—”

Hayley stood up and grabbed the case from Diane and looked at the cover. “Look at the size of those things. They might actually be able to carry the picture.” She started giggling again. She was feeling immensely better, and they hadn't even started the film.

Suz rolled her eyes and pointed sternly to the couch. Hayley took her seat again and Suz pushed play, then settled in beside Diane.

The opening credits began to roll along with a tinny
synthesizer soundtrack. A muscular man with a face that looked like an unfortunate misunderstanding between his parents appeared on the scene in a white uniform and said, “My name is Thorne Savage. I'm here to . . . fix your copier.”

Bambi, concealed behind a computer monitor, suddenly stood up from her desk and dramatically removed her suit coat, allowing her blouse to gape and reveal the largest set of breasts Hayley had ever seen in her life.

“I think I'm going to throw up,” Audra choked out as Bambi led the ugly guy to the mailroom. Once there, the plot took a turn for the worse, and within five minutes Bambi and her copy-machine repairman were stripping down. The moment the guy removed his tiny briefs, multiple screams from all four women reverberated throughout Diane's apartment.

Thorne had a sort of a boomerang-shaped dick. As Diane hastened to remark, it bent at a forty-three-degree angle. And before anyone had time to calm herself from that shock alone, Bambi and her man got busy on the collating table, right between the paper cutter and the hole punch.

Audra shrieked and covered her face with a throw pillow. She'd look every once in a while and then scream at the top of her lungs before hiding behind the pillow again.

Suz sat forward, turbo-eating popcorn and pumping her fist in the air, yelling, “Yeah, baby, yeah! Give it to her! Yippee-ki-yaaay!” She jumped up and slapped her ass, then pantomimed roping a steer as the repairman flipped Bambi over and the two of them just kept going.

It was chaos. Popcorn flying everywhere. Audra screaming bloody murder. Suz hootin' and hollerin'. Diane waving the plastic disc case and ranting about the structural weaknesses of the plot.

Hayley sat very still on the couch in some kind of pseudocatatonic haze, a crab puff held frozen in midair between finger and thumb as she watched the movie. She tilted her head sideways to accommodate the horizontal nature of the scene before her, as she struggled to process the information.

Bambi's energy and drive were truly amazing. Of course, one had to factor in that these things probably weren't filmed in just one take, and it wasn't likely that Bambi had had all that sex in a single day. But she clearly had a tremendous amount of stamina and forward momentum.

Hayley put a puff in her mouth and slowly chewed as she sat back in despair. She had less momentum in her whole body than Bambi did in one boob.

And maybe that was the point. Hayley clearly suffered from some sort of urban malaise. And watching Bambi, she had a sense that the root of it was the total lack of momentum in her life. As an English major with no interest in teaching, she'd really just been drifting since college, simply taking whatever path the eager cold-calling head-hunters unfurled before her. Going from one dot-com to the next hoping to make it rich before everyone figured out the companies in question had no meaningful product or service.

But what an impossible task it seemed to change one's behavior and get out of the rut. She hadn't really thought about what she wanted, and for that matter, even if the desire was there, the drive certainly wasn't. Of course, her parents had thought quite a bit about all this. They'd relocated to the Midwest but phoned periodically to implore Hayley to seek stability. This translated roughly to 1. Go to work for a large, stable corporation, 2. Get married, and/or 3. Move to the Midwest. To Hayley, their notion of stability would merely be the exchange of one sort of rut for another.

In any case, Bambi's drive was clearly in high gear. She and Thorne had gone back to her place, ostensibly to fix her personal copy machine. Bambi was thrashing about enthusiastically on her pink satin bed like a giant spawning salmon with two bobbling fins.

Like a second wind, there was a sudden frenzy of movement and a tremendous amount of noise from both parties, and then it was over. Thorne put his tool belt back on and left. The movie faded to black with Bambi just lying there—finally sated, one would hope—staring up at the ceiling with an imbecilic smile on her face.

The four girls managed to sit in silence for a record forty-five seconds until Diane couldn't hold back any longer. Peering at the fine print on the compact-disc box, she said, “You know, I'm really disappointed with this production. I picked it out especially for this final paper. It says here that it's supposed to be a story fraught with tension and conflict.”

“Tension and conflict?” Suz snorted. “That would be the moment where Thorne rolled over and his winkie got too close to the paper cutter.”

Audra appeared to have recovered nicely and was now returning the throw pillows to their original locations. “In spite of the lowbrow quality and the lack of finesse by both parties, it was a little bit like primal-scream therapy for me. I feel quite refreshed, actually.”

Diane looked at Hayley eagerly. “Well, you're my primary subject. What did you think?”

“You were right. This was a brilliant idea.”

“Did Bambi speak to you in some way?” Diane asked.

Hayley nodded slowly, actually sort of enjoying making Diane
wait for the Great Porn Epiphany. “Why, Diane, I believe Bambi
did
speak to me, in her own way. You see, it's like this. There's Bambi, lying in bed getting screwed, and it's her own doing.”

She paused and looked meaningfully at the girls. Blank. “Think about it. She takes whatever comes, so to speak, and if she's not happy about what she gets, it's her own fault. But she seems perfectly happy with her situation. You can see that. Our Bambi's got energy, drive, momentum. She's a . . . she's a . . . a rolling stone not gathering any moss.”

Suz and Audra snickered in the background. Diane whipped around to glare at them.