the sound of breaking glass followed by gales of laughter filled my ear when I picked up the phone. Then, the faint hum of the overseas connection. “Who is this?” I shouted with mock severity. I had a fair idea it was either Mary or Sallie, my extremely loquacious British girlfriends, but it seemed a little late even for them. I looked at my watch: 6 in the evening here, 2 in the morning in Shepherd’s Bush.
“Remember that chat about what women don’t talk about?” Sallie said, not bothering with a preamble. “Mary has another dirty little secret that we’d like our Yank journalist friend to out for us.”
“Hello to you too,” I said. So much for British manners. “Been drinking, have we?”
“Hello, love.” Now it was Mary purring down the phone. “We’ve been meaning and meaning to ring for ages. We do miss you. When are you coming over?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Are you having a party right now or something?” I imagined Mary in her strapless black dress and big combat boots, cell phone pressed to her ear. I heard some voices shouting jovially in the background and then a door close.
“Now I have Sallie here, sitting alongside me on the settee,” continued Mary. “I had the most dreadful experience which I’d like to share. And I’m certain this has only happened to me. I’m mortified, I really am.”
“That’s rubbish,” Sallie said in the background. “Ask her.”
Mary cleared her throat as if she were to begin a prepared speech. “Tonight I had a man actually fake an orgasm on me,” she said primly. “And I have to know: Do all men do this? Has this happened many times before and I just didn’t realize? And most importantly, has this happened to you?”
Sallie grabbed the phone. “I keep telling her he was a wanker anyway and not to worry about it. She got off, which is the only thing that’s important anyway.”
“How do you know he was faking?” I asked.
“How does she know?” Sallie cupped her hand over the phone as I heard her say to Mary, “She’s asking the physical evidence question too.”
Mary grabbed the phone back, and hissed “Well, Miss Weaver, there’s this little biological phenomena known as ejaculation — perhaps you’ve heard of it.”
“So he wasn’t using a condom is what you’re telling me,” I said. “Because, yes, I have heard of men faking it in condoms. It’s pretty easy to do, especially if they’re getting soft or sore anyway, toward the end. My friend Andrew used to do it with surprising regularity. Or so he said.”
“Now why on earth would he do that?”
“He’d get tired,” I said. “Same reason why girls do it. Performance anxiety and all the rest of it. But what happened to you?”
Mary sighed. “I’m on the pill, you know. And I was making love to — well, let’s just keep the names out of it. We’d just returned from seeing the Verve, and I was really quite amorous. And I came — after quite a while, because we’d been drinking all night. Usually I come right away.”
“Always bragging about that, she is,” Sallie put in.
“Shush, you old bag. And I was trying to get him to come, because I was a little sore, employing all my little tricks, and then he came. Or I thought he came. He groaned, arched his back, got softer, rolled off of me immediately. So, fine, I thought. Maybe not the most interesting or creative lovemaking I’d had but you can’t always be at the Albert Hall, right? Sometimes you have to settle with the Mean Fiddler.”
“She doesn’t live in London, love,” I heard Sallie whisper. “Those metaphors aren’t useful.”
“I get your drift,” I said irritably. “Then what?”
“Well, I got up to go to the toilet, like I always do because I can’t risk cystitis, now can I?” Mary worked at a woman’s health magazine and often peppered her speeches with preventive tips. “And before I sit down on the loo, I stand there for a moment. And I feel the oddest sensation, like something’s missing. You know that funny little internal dripping you get after sex when you stand up, and you know you have maybe two seconds to get to the toilet before his spunk starts running down the inside of your leg? Well, this time — nothing. Not a thing. So I sit down and think, well, I’ll just push it all out, it’s probably caught in some crevice. Still, nothing. I stand up after having a pee and look down, expecting to see that little frothy, cloudy bit. But no.”
“Now the poor dear is reassessing every lovemaking experience she’s ever had,” said Sallie, in the background.
“Yes, I am,” said Mary. “I’m terribly worried. When did men start doing this? Is it a trend that I don’t know about?”
“Maybe he just doesn’t come very much,” I offered. “Sometimes men don’t, particularly if they masturbate a lot.” I lay down on the sofa, suddenly tired. “Did you ask him about it?”
“As a matter of fact, I did.” Mary sounded indignant. “Sallie thinks I ought not to have bothered, but I wanted to know. And when I asked him, as tactfully as I could, he got so wound up and vicious that if I’d had any doubt before, it was immediately obliterated. I sensed he was highly embarrassed, which I find odd.”
Sallie chimed in, “It’s hardly a badge of honor for a bloke, Mary.”
“That’s true,” I said, considering. “I guess guys are expected to come every single time, to always be ready, or there’s something wrong or … or … effeminate with them.” Mary shifted the phone and I heard their heavy-booted steps return to a noisier part of the flat. “I’m pretty sure it’s happened to most women,” I said.
Sallie came back on the line. “She’s now downing another gin and tonic, poor thing. Isn’t it just like her to blame herself. And you’re probably right, it’s happened to us lots of times before and we just didn’t realize.” We started to say goodbye, as Sallie called to Mary, “Ignorance is bliss, love. Remember that next time.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of what those Yanks say on their bottles,” Mary responded loudly. “No Deposit, No Return.”
Maureen raised her eyebrows across the table. “A bacon cheeseburger?” she asked incredulously. “Is that really what you’re going to have? And do they still make Tab? I had no idea.”
“It’s a sorry state of affairs when a bacon cheeseburger becomes the ultimate sin left in life,” I said. “Never mind her,” I told the waitress. “You just bring her little salad with the dressing on the side. And I’ll have an Anchor Steam instead of the Tab.”
Maureen was an old restaurant crony, from the days when I worked in the high-profile eateries run by celebrity chefs. No matter how long I stayed out of the food service industry, I had to check in with all the gossip. Restaurants, as I saw it, were the last frontier — a land curiously untouched by the political correctness of the day. Temper tantrums, sexual hi-jinks, drugs, narcissism run amok: You’d find it all behind the Staff Only door. Behind every $22 seared halibut served on a bed of basil mashed potatoes and drizzled with arugula pesto lay more intrigue and ego than a Donald Trump divorce.
“You know, one thing about these trendy open kitchens is that the chefs can’t abuse you like they used to,” Maureen was saying. “Now they just seethe and mutter instead of throwing things. Anyway …” She was rearranging the cutlery on the table. “Well, I’m committing an ultimate sin,” she confessed.
“Well, you’re still not eating meat,” I observed. “What’s left? Anal sex?”
Maureen made a face. “Ick. No, I’m seeing a 22-year-old guy. I know that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is so embarrassing. The good thing is he’s too young to be neurotic yet, and too naive to see how neurotic I am.”
I took a swig of my beer. “I’d be embarrassed, too,” I said, thinking of the Hercules I met at my sister’s graduation. “Of course, you can’t bring him around your friends, because you’ll never hear the end of it. This is one of the bad things about being 30.”
“Maybe the only bad thing. But, I really like him. He’s cute, he’s sweet, he’s got the little-boy grin thing that melts me — he’s a waiter, too. But, God — talk about young! Why are women so much more mature than men? When does that gap close?”
“In the 30s,” I said. “Even then, don’t count on it.” Maureen was looking demurely down at her fork. “But really, who cares about age difference? Is it just that he doesn’t get your cultural references? Does he know who Jan and Cindy and Marcia are?”
Maureen sighed. “Believe me, I would kill for one ‘Brady Bunch’ reference. Courtney, the boy doesn’t even know who the Go-Go’s are! Do you know how old that makes me feel?”
I drank some more beer. “Come on, Maureen, you’re not Methuselah. So there are some gaps. But, seriously, you can’t bring him around your friends?” Maureen shook her head vigorously. “Is he really that bad?”
The waitress set down our plates, and Maureen smiled at her. “Could I have some coffee?” She whispered, “He was at my apartment last night. I am totally, totally exhausted, but I have to tell you, it’ll be worth every order that I screw up tonight at the restaurant. Jesus! On and on and on it went last night. Passionate, warm, intense — the boy never gets tired. It’s a cliché about those young 20-year-old puppies, but it’s true.” She stabbed a radish with her fork.
“Sounds great. If you were a man, this wouldn’t even be an issue.”
“But I can’t take him seriously! I feel wiser than him — I’m one step ahead of everything he says. I have to restrain myself from finishing his thoughts! All I see is the age. And it’s not that he’s stupid, it’s just that I’ve been through all his little dilemmas, and they seem so insignificant.” She took a swig of my beer. “I was telling him about opening up an IRA, and how proud I was that I finally had enough money …”
“And he asked, ‘Who’s Ira?’” We nodded sadly, in unison.
“Have you ever gone out with someone younger?”
I lifted up the bun and methodically began piling tomato slices on the side of my plate. “Well, it’s sort of like dog years, you know? It may only be eight years between the two of you, but in reality it’s probably about 56. So, the answer is no, I haven’t.” I remembered how absurd I felt lusting after the barely post-pubescent pups at the graduation, and shuddered. “But, remember when Kevin went out with a 21-year-old chick? The one who still lived with her mom?”
“Yes, I do,” Maureen said slowly. “We girls all got really angry at him. Like, why couldn’t he handle going out with a woman his own age, what threatened him about that?”
“Not only that,” I said, “we weren’t very nice to her, either. But you do realize that among his male friends, she was a trophy. There was the back-slapping, the high-fiving. And believe me, your young puppy’s male friends are probably doing that to him right now when they hear about The Older Woman.”
“Oh, no.” Maureen rolled her eyes, then brightened. “Another cliché — about hitting our sexual peak in our 30s? Well, he’s the only one I’ve met who’s been able to keep up. And he’s so open to new things …” she drifted off. She finished the rest of my beer and sat up. “I know he’s just a distraction, that it’s all just a meaningless experience to keep me from getting serious about my life.”
“Don’t knock it, Maureen. As Woody Allen would say, as far as meaningless experiences go, it’s right up there.”
“People die. Husbands cheat. Women cry.” Marie ran her fingers through my freshly shampooed hair and met my eyes in the mirror. “That’s the ad slogan for the opera. Funny how I can relate to it.” She began working a comb through my tresses. “You know, you don’t have to have a hair appointment to talk to me. There is this contraption called the phone.”
“I’ve heard of it.” I sniffed a wet chunk of hair, and smiled. “I like this new conditioner. Rosemary and peppermint, huh? Reminds me of my mother’s roast leg of lamb.”
“How much do you want taken off? The usual eighth of an inch?”
“How about a half an inch?”
“Living on the edge, I see.” She tightened the fire-engine red nylon smock around my neck. Some tinkling bells wafted through the air, followed by an unearthly wail. “Bulgarian women’s chorus,” Marie said, anticipating the question. “This guy I’m seeing, he’s a Buddhist. I’m trying to get more spiritual, and this was the closest I could get at the present time.”
I settled back into the chair as she spritzed my head with a eucalyptus-smelling mist. “I guess that means you and Gavin aren’t back together.”
“Divorce,” said Marie flatly. “I have all the papers. I’ve filled them out. It’s just a matter of filing them. But first I want it in writing that that wench isn’t getting anywhere near my daughter.” She sectioned off parts of my hair, pinning them to the top of my scalp. “I probably can’t ask for that, but believe me I’m going to try.”
I thought uncomfortably about my own transgressions in this department, and shifted in my seat. “I can’t believe he’s still seeing her. Really, I thought by now he would have gotten her out of his system. Didn’t you tell me she has fake breasts? Or did I dream that?”
“I did not tell you that. But if you’d like to spread that around, feel free.” She held a few aluminum clips between her teeth and continued. “Last week, Gavin comes over in the middle of the day. Just drops by to see the baby, he says. Yeah, right. So as I’m talking to him on the stoop, he says oh so casually, ‘So, whose truck is in the driveway?’ And I tell him, ‘You know damn well whose it is. It’s Brian’s.’ His face goes all red, and he gets that nostril flaring thing that happens when he’s really upset. He says, ‘I thought we had an agreement not to bring our dates around the baby.’ I just about hauled off and slapped him, I really did. I told him, ‘What we agreed is that you wouldn’t bring that cunt that split up my family around my daughter. I did not say anything about not having Brian, my boyfriend, around. And it’s a little different, since I have Davia six days and six nights a week. So don’t you dare even pretend to get possessive with me.’”
“What did he say?”
“He just stormed off. Asshole. Hang on, I’m going to change the CD.” She disappeared behind a crimson velvet curtain and continued talking. “How does Portishead sound to you? Too spooky?”
“Seems appropriate,” I commented. “Well, you’re seeing someone?” I asked as she returned and began measuring ends, repinning sections in the back.
“Brian’s great,” she said absently. “He’s got an amazing body, and he’s really good with the baby. He’s one of those snowboarding people — you know, who live for snowboarding. During the summer he works on a construction site. Did I mention he’s a Buddhist? Very calming. I can’t say that I really buy all his Zen stuff, but it’s nice that he has something to believe in, you know?”
“Sure,” I said. “Is he smart enough for you?”
Marie stopped mid-snip and thought for a moment. Then she continued, a little more slowly. “I don’t really think that’s an issue right now,” she said. “We have a great time, amazing sex. He’s simple, you know? He’s a widower, did I tell you that? His wife died a year ago. Talk about spooky.”
“Jesus, Marie.” I thought about the last time I heard the word “widower.” It seemed like such an anachronism.
“Yeah, I know.” She sighed and inspected the top of my head. “You need to get your roots done, you know. You can really see them in this light.”
“OK,” I said. “Are you in love with this guy?”
“What does that mean?” Her scissors moved faster. “I thought I loved Gavin, but now look what’s happened. A month ago the baby was sick, and I had to take her to the doctor. I called Gavin and he met me. Afterwards, as I was pulling out of the parking lot, I saw him standing there, his forehead leaning against the cement wall. So I drive up. I’ve got my sunglasses on and I’m smoking a cigarette, and I lean out of the window and say, ‘What the hell is the matter with you?’ He mumbles something like he misses his family and I just said, ‘Uh huh.’ Then I said, ‘I hear you’ve been at the hospital a lot with your girlfriend,’ because I’d heard her father’s dying in the cancer ward. He says, ‘Yeah, it’s been rough on Veronica. She’s very broken up.’ And I just lost it. I said, ‘Well, karma can be a real motherfucker.’ And I just pulled away and left him in a cloud of dust. So is that love?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. No. Yes.”
“Later, I was snooping around at Brian’s.” I nodded. “I was waiting for him,” she said. She stopped snipping my hair and stood there motionless. “And sitting in a box, right on the mantel, I come across a little urn with Brian’s wife’s name on it. It’s her ashes, for God’s sake. I held the urn in my hand, and asked her, ‘Are you OK with this? Is this all right? I make love to your husband in the next room. Are you going to haunt me and hex me? I don’t want anyone to get hurt.’ And I think she thinks it’s OK. We talked for a while and it felt good. I put the urn back in the box, and now I talk to her all the time when Brian isn’t there.” She motioned for me to flip my head over so she could begin drying it. “Isn’t love really weird?” she yelled over the roar. “You just can never see anything coming.”
“what did I do?” Kevin asked me. “How come she won’t call me back?” He had warily returned to the shark-infested dating waters, a month after his inamorata, Ms. Trouble, had dumped him, having found larger, more limitless checkbook balances to plunder. Kevin was trying — “really trying!” — to find a Meaningful Relationship. “It’s time,” he said to me. “Don’t let anyone tell you that men don’t have a biological clock.”
“Is that right.” I sprayed some more Easy-Off on a crusty mass embedded in the slots in the broiler. He was the perfect person to talk to while cleaning, since he never really listened to what I said and I only half heard what he said. We were comfortable with this arrangement.
“Tell me again the series of events,” I said. “She was with Harriet, you ran into her again at the computer center, she’d given you change for the copy machine, you asked her out, you went out and now she doesn’t return your call. Right?”
“Yes,” he said, “I don’t get it. We had a good time. I thought we did.”
“Where did you go? What did you do?”
“Uh, some Mexican place. And then, I thought we were going to go to a movie. But then she said she had plans after dinner, so she left.”
“Bad,” I commented, “very bad. My advice to you is just forget it.” I examined an unidentifiable crusty black ball that looked like a charred cherry, imagining this failed date. There this girl sat under the blinking colored lights, looking like a poor man’s Christy Turlington (all Kevin’s dates looked the same — thin, brown hair, garbed in J. Crew, generically pretty), surrounded by serapes and mariachis, sipping a watered-down margarita as her eyes darted around the room. The eyes: that’s how she’d give herself away, the glances at other tables, the close examination of the salt on the rim of her glass. All the signs were there if Kevin knew where to look.
Knowing Kevin, I had a feeling I knew what went wrong, but instead, I said, “I could ask Harriet, if you want to know what the deal is.”
“No!” Kevin said, predictably enough. “I mean, no, thanks. It’s like … well, whatever. Maybe she’s got a boyfriend.”
“Sure,” I said. “But wouldn’t you like to know her version?”
“What do you mean, ‘version’? I told you everything. There isn’t any version to be had. It was a date, not an Oliver Stone movie.” He sounded embarrassed. “Besides, it’s not worth it. Harriet won’t have heard anything, anyway.”
“OK,” I said. I wondered how, at this point, men couldn’t know that women talk about everything, everything with their girlfriends.
“What do you think happened?” Harriet asked me later, when I called.
“I think I know. It’s the Contemporary Guy Cripple, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” Harriet said, sounding irritated. “I ran into Jennifer on the street yesterday, and asked her how her date went. ‘Horrible!’ she said. Right off the bat. She said she’d bumped into him at the computer center, and they chatted away. On and on — it was clear he was attracted to her. After an hour or so of this, he finally said, ‘So, do you want to go out sometime?’ She said sure, and he said ‘Great!’ They talked some more, and he asked what was good for her. She said Friday. On Friday, she gets into his car and asks, ‘So where are we going?’ And he does that, ‘Oh, where do you want to go?’ thing. She says, ‘I don’t care. Where do you want to go?’ He replies, ‘I don’t care. Where do you want to go?’ Back and forth for 15 minutes. Finally, she picks someplace where she knows he’s comfortable. He says, ‘Sure! I just went there yesterday but that’s fine.’ And at the restaurant, same thing. ‘What movie do you want to see?’ On and on, back and forth. At that point she decided to go home and wash her hair.
“The funny thing,” she went on, “is that Kevin is not actually a wimp. He’s not one of those rollover kind of guys — in fact, he’s gotten in hot water with some people at work for being overly aggressive and tactless. But every time he goes on a date, he pulls this Hamlet routine.”
“Oh, Lord. Why do guys do this?”
“My mother says it’s feminism.” We groaned in unison. “They don’t know what to do, so they do nothing. They’re scared of making the wrong decision — like, ‘will she think I’m a jerk if I take her to a biker bar? Do I look too pretentious by suggesting French food? What if she hates Kevin Kline and is too polite to say so?’ When actually the very fact that they can’t even make a decision whether to eat Thai or Japanese makes us think less of them. And who wants to sleep with some indecisive guy? It is definitely not sexy. If there’s one thing I hear from my girlfriends, time and time again, it’s that passive guys are the ultimate turnoff.”
“Yeah. And then when we say ‘I want a man to be a man,’ they call us hypocrites, as if we’re saying ‘pull me around by the hair and cry at the same time.’ So instead they let us take control and come off as congenital weaklings.”
“I asked Kevin about this one time,” Harriet said. “He said, ‘You know, the truth of the matter is, I just don’t care about where we eat or what movie we see. And you girls seem to really care about those things. So I just make it easier and let you decide.’ Anyway, Jennifer said she’ll never go out with him again. And she even said she realized that he wasn’t really wimpy. But it didn’t matter.”
“And of course Kevin has no idea why.”
Harriet’s voice turned instructive. “No more Contemporary Guy Cripple for her, she says. From now on, it’s one thing and one thing only: A Man With a Plan.”
“i envy you,”
I said to my mother. We were two hours into a three-hour car journey, roaring up Interstate 80 to a family wedding. “You lived in an era when dating really existed.”
My mother frowned and glanced into the rearview mirror. “Don’t you date?”
“No,” I said. “Dating implies a certain plurality. As in, ‘Tonight I’m going out with Billy Bob. Tomorrow night I’ll go out with Jackie Joe. Maybe the next night, if I’m lucky, I’ll go out with Hank.’ Somewhere along the line, all that fell by the wayside.” I turned on my side, irritable and hot. “Could we turn on the air-conditioning?”
“No. It makes the engine overheat.”
I sighed, started to make a smart-ass comment about her car, and thought the better of it. “So, Mom. Did you go out on lots of dates? Tell me how it went. Did guys call you up and say, ‘Hello, is Peggy there? This is Jimmy Jake, and I’d like to take her out for a soda and a movie.’ Was it like ‘Happy Days’?”
“Yes, it was like that,” she said, slowly. “Although I don’t know where you get these names. I grew up in South Dakota, not Mississippi.” She glanced at me. “Things were much more defined in those days. Boys asked girls out. Girls played hard to get. A good girl never phoned a boy. You know the story. Blah, blah, blah. It was awful.”
“It sounds sort of nice,” I said. “I wish we all knew what the rules were.”
mom downshifted, weaving in and out of the timid traffic, gunning into the fast lane. “It was all absurd. Then in the ’60s, everyone was hopping in and out of each other’s bed. The rule then was, if you didn’t sleep around, you were uptight. That’s when your father and I started having our problems.”
“I know, I know.” I waved my hand dismissively. I didn’t want to hear that litany again, which, over the years, seemed to include more lurid details and pointed innuendoes each time it was told. “Well, here’s the deal now, Mom. People don’t date anymore. They go out once, they go out twice, and then they’re a couple. This getting to know lots of people, trying on new experiences — it just doesn’t exist anymore. Monogamy until proven otherwise.”
“Well, what’s wrong with that?” she asked hesitantly.
“Wrong? Whatever happened to going out with lots of different people? I mean, if you look at it crudely, dating is really a means to an end. The end, of course, being marriage. But depending upon what route you take, you could end up at a bad end or a good end. Don’t you want to take lots of different paths so you increase your odds of coming to a good end? Don’t you want to know that the path you took was the best path, so you never have to lie awake when you’re 80 and gray and haggard, asking, ‘What if? What if?’”
She screwed up her face, an expression I recognized in myself when I was struggling not to say something. “This really has everything to do with sex,” she said finally. “It’s not prudent to sleep around with many men nowadays.” She glanced at me sidewise. “I hope I don’t have to tell you that.”
“No one’s talking about sex, Mom,” I sidestepped. “Besides, you can date people without sleeping with them.” I rolled the window down further. “I’m just saying it’s weird,” I said loudly, over the roar of the warm wind, “how monogamy is assumed until proven otherwise. How nobody is on the same page about it. How, if we do have that discussion, and I say that I’m pro-dating — i.e. I want to go out with other guys too — that automatically translates in some guys’ mind that I’m a slut.”
“So things really aren’t very different from the ’50s after all,” she said. “It sounds like you do have rules and proscriptions and boundaries.” She pushed the button on her side to roll up my window. “I never knew you were a control freak.”
“Yes, but the rules are different for every single person.” I pushed my button and unrolled it again. “Could I please have some air, Mom? Sheesh, talk about control. Or turn on the air-conditioning.”
“Just deal with it. For heaven’s sakes, you’re such a wilting lily.”
“Oh, pardon me for being used to San Francisco’s chilly climate, which, may I point out, you chose to bring me up in.” My mother rolled her eyes and I unbuckled my seat belt. “My friend Julianne was saying the other day that she met this wonderful guy. He was incredibly cute, smart, funny, interesting, the whole nine yards. He was at some dinner party that she went to without her boyfriend. Well, now he’s all she can think or talk about, all week. She’s been with her boyfriend for almost a year, and she says they have a great relationship. ‘All I want to do is to kiss this dinner party guy,’ she told me” (a G-rated version of what she actually said). “‘Is that so very wrong? All I want is a weekend furlough from this relationship. Just one little weekend. Then I’ll get this obsession out of my system, and everything will be back to normal.’”
“Naive,” my mother commented dryly.
“Mom, she was being facetious,” I said. “The point is, if she’d dated more before going into this monogamy thing hook-line-and-sinker with the boyfriend, she wouldn’t be lusting after Mr. Dinner Party.”
“Now you’re being naive.” Mom carefully passed a white Toyota full of screaming, red-faced children. “If you think temptation can be cured by a heavy dose of dating in the early years, look no further than your father. Or me. Or anyone. Desire is always there.” She moved back into the fast lane and, sighing, rolled my window up once again. Turning on the air-conditioning, she said by way of explanation, “Anything to cure you of looking so hot and bothered.”
“By the way,”
Renee said before she hung up, “you’ve certainly got a convenient memory when it comes to straight people with HIV. Have you forgotten about Damian?”
I had been foraging for food — opening cupboards, peering into the refrigerator, unscrewing sticky jars with labels that had fallen off long ago. Now I straightened up abruptly. “I guess I did,” I admitted. “Didn’t you decide not to see him?”
“But it still counts,” she replied. I heard her clicking a pencil between her teeth, considering. When it came to sex, Renee was one of the more open women I had ever met in my life. She never was at a loss for partners — what with her straight blond hair, beautiful white teeth and strong body — so when she’d told me about Damian of the HIV-Positive Fame, I simply dismissed her interest. Renee had too many sexual choices already; she wasn’t going to risk her life to get laid, for heaven’s sake. Was she?
“I still see him,” she continued. “He’s incredibly sexy. There’s definitely something going on between us, some kind of sexual energy that’s really rare.”
“That’s nice,” I said, after a pause. What I really wanted to say, no, scream, was, “Are you plumb fucking out of your mind?”
I struggled to come up with a mental picture of Damian. Long blond hair, a few strategically placed tattoos, motorcycle, New York Dolls, the usual. A nice enough guy, as I recalled, but certainly not husband/daddy material for Renee. “How did he get HIV again?” I asked. “Through needles? Not that it matters.”
“Sex. Lots of it. With chicks, incidentally.”
“Uh, huh,” I said, the imaginary gay male chorus in my head howling, “of course that’s what he says.”
“And you’re sleeping with him because …”
“Oh, I’m not sleeping with him,” Renee said hastily. “Jesus! For a while there, I didn’t even know if I should kiss him, what with that article about passing on the virus via deep kissing. It was on the front page.”
“I saw it,” I said. “Personally, I don’t believe it. But then again, I’m not dating someone with HIV.”
“Neither am I,” she said. “We’re just fooling around.”
This seemed even worse. But here I was, espousing the notion that straight people didn’t have to worry about HIV as much as the media would have us believe, so who was I to judge? “Well, can I just ask one simple question?”
“I know, I know. Why? That’s your question. Believe me, I know.” I could see Renee swiveling around in her office chair, gazing out the window of her second-floor Marin corner space, knitting her brow thoughtfully. She’s part of a clique that I mentally refer to as the Bored Cat Women — beautiful, sleek blond girls who respond to my constant intrusions into their personal lives with impassive round blue eyes, slightly irritated, as if I’d just disturbed their afternoon nap in the sun.
“Well, we don’t sleep together, as I said,” she began. “And I called up the AIDS hot line, and asked what the chances were for HIV infection from fellatio. Slim to none, they said, unless I had a cut in my mouth, and even then, there wasn’t any proven case to back it up. And he is an amazing, amazing lover. You don’t have to have intercourse to have fun, you know.”
“Yes, thank you. Still, Renee. Christ. Why take the risk?”
“Because I honestly don’t think that I’m in any risk. From saliva? I don’t believe that deep kissing crap either. He’s not bleeding all over me, and I don’t get near his sperm. And you want to talk about risk? If anyone is at risk, he is.”
“Is that so.” I sat down on my kitchen floor.
“I’m lying on my stomach the other night. He’s on top of me, and he’s moving in and out of my thighs, you know, sort of like fucking but between my legs. I’ve already come a few times, but now I’m starting to want him to come, because it’s getting late and I’m getting tired. And I like this position. So, it’s getting really close, I can tell, when suddenly I feel this intense pull — or tug, right outside my vagina.”
“Tug! What does that mean?”
“I told you he’s got a pierced dick, right? Through the shaft?”
“No, you didn’t happen to mention that.” I scrambled to my feet. “This is insane. You must be telling the truth, because you couldn’t possibly make all this up.”
“Well, you can imagine what happened. His pierce got caught in my pubic hair. And I didn’t want to stop him, because you know, I wanted him to come and I’d already come so many times. But then it started to kind of hurt, and I thought, ‘Fuck this, I don’t come lots of times and it’s no big deal, so he’s just not going to this time.’ By this point, he’s stopped moving, and has realized what was going on. ‘Uh, ouch!’ I said, and we started to laugh. But then, I couldn’t get him loose. The hair was really, really wrapped around the pierce. And I thought, Now what? Where are the scissors? Do I call for my roommate? Do we slide out of bed, and hop around, all connected like two dogs, trying to find the damn scissors, which I think are in a drawer in the kitchen?”
“And?”
“I remembered that I had some scissors in my night stand,” she said, clicking the pencil again. “I sort of rolled on top of him, kind of flipped him over on his back — remember, both of us are on our backs now — leaned over, rooted around for the scissors, found them and finally cut the pierce out of the pubic hair. And naturally, since I’m not a contortionist, I had to do it all by feel, I couldn’t see what I was doing. And in the dark! So, now you tell me who’s at risk.”
She had a point. “I’m glad to hear this has a happy ending,” I said. “But Jesus, Renee, what a way to level the playing field.”
