Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (34 page)

I wondered if Adam would manage with the new routine or, like Terrance had admitted to me, if he’d find himself so bottled up that he began having wet dreams again. It’d been a few weeks since Terrance and I had attempted to make love, drunkenly, and I wasn’t sure how long I was going to make our break last.
With great power comes great responsibility
, as Voltaire said. As long as Terrance stayed locked, so did my own passion. It was a strange phenomenon. Terrance called it:
quantum entanglement.
I called it
empathy
. That I wasn’t off galavanting with anyone else, or self-pleasuring, meant that I was, way down at the basest emotional level, still decent.

Adam dressed while Eve and I chatted about a new farmer’s market. As they were my last client, I walked them downstairs and held the door open as they stepped outside. We had another appointment in two weeks. I was done for the day. Clients satisfied.
Finis.
But then…

“Forgot my wallet,” Adam said, and his hand went around the nearly closed door. Stanley propped it open for him with the rubber stub of his cane. I could see Eve down by the curb, clutching her handbag, rubbing the toe of her shoe into the dirt as though snuffing out a cigarette. She looked up with a smile on her face, eyes fixed on something on the building’s facade she’d just noticed for the first time. A pigeon, the whitewashed windows, a recent memory, perhaps ghosts of laundry past.

“Okay?” I said to Adam.

“How’d you do it?” he asked, excitedly.

“Oh, it was her idea,” I said.

“Come off it.”

“No really. See, you two do think alike.”

“Can’t thank you enough. Never thought she’d agree to it.” And with that he did a little bow and headed back outside. “Had it all along,” he said to his wife, patting his back pocket to complete his little falsehood.

Stanley looked up at me from his magazine and said nothing.

“What?” I said.

“Says it’s gonna be foggy tomorrow,” he said and went back to his newspaper.

“It always says that,” I said, then smiled. Not only had Adam’s fantasy been about making his wife more dominant, I’d taken his desire and taken it to the extreme. He was now beholden to her, in all things. He’d soon learn whether his desire could maintain itself through the mundane hours. I wondered how he’d handle his daily swims at a gym, showering in public, all of it. And, if he broke down, how would
she
handle the begging. Terrance, lucky me, didn’t know where I lived, didn’t share my bed every night. Because if I saw those eyes of his,
click
, he’d be free. But thanks to the restraint (and my own restraint), I was certain Terrance, refocused, would ace every course, excel in teaching, maybe do whatever it is astrophysicists do: detect dark matter, measure the chemical composition of stars, fathom the original recipe of the universe. Perhaps Einstein’s wife had him in a cock cage.

As for my growth, well, that I was working here, on the second floor, facilitating clients’ fantasies, okay, that one was the outlier, perhaps. But the pay meant I had freedom. I was by no means making a lot of money, but most of my day was mine, and at my age, time becomes a most precious commodity. Better than gold. It’s value only goes up. Guaranteed.

I waited a few minutes for the happy couple to leave, then said goodbye to Stanley and walked outside, turning right (after so many weeks of heading left) toward my still-new-feeling apartment. I checked my phone. My son would be home shortly—no, wait, he’d been invited to eat dinner with Eli and Petunia. I’d grown more tolerant of Eli; her affect on my son was, as far as I could tell, positive. He was reading books she recommended, asking to rent films she said were
musts.
They were texting continuously, a novel passing between their thumbs every month, surely. I was invited to dinner, too, but wasn’t yet set on going. It depended, on large part, on whether it was going to be a continuation of last week’s marathon of westerns. I had an aversion to John Wayne.

Just then, a figure stepped out of a car across the street, someone vaguely familiar but hidden by a hat and glasses. The hat came off first, tossed back into the car, then the glasses came off as he closed the car door and crossed the street toward me. And by the halfway mark I was fairly certain who it was, and by the time he reached the sidewalk, I had a name. I froze.

“Hi Eloise,” he said.

“Mr. Irldale,” I said. “Mr. Irldale.”

He smiled, broadly, and we stood there close enough to shake hands, close enough to hug, to kiss, to caress, to hold, to tie, to smother, to slap, to spit, to suck, to lick, to awaken, to fall for, in, out, in. The actions to describe what he and I had done before, at his home in L.A., and the verbs which constituted the rest of my life and fantasies, swarmed together angrily, like bees. I put my hands together.

“What are you doing here?” I said, still shocked at the sight of him.

“Oh, you know. Just like you back in L.A. Just
happened
to be in town.”

“Oh?” I said. Was he: joking, playing, honest, lonely, in the know? Which was it?

“Bad time?” he asked.

“Uh, no,” I said. “I uh, I think I just forgot my purse,” I said, borrowing Adam’s ruse.

“You’re carrying one.”

“This. Yes. No, a different purse.” I jogged the thirty steps back to the door, and was admitted by Stanley. I stood there in the dark hall, hands shaking.

“You okay Ms. S?” Stanley asked.

“Someone outside,” I said.

Stanley’s hand went to the pistol he kept under a stack of last week’s newspapers. He liked to hold onto the weather reports so he could judge their accuracy the day after.

“No, no,” I said, “Nothing like that.”

“You sure?”

“Yes,” I said.

I wanted to wait there in the dim hallway and not leave. Would Mr. Irldale depart if I stayed here? Would the universe realize its blunder and tuck Mr. Irldale back into his world and leave me be, free to bumble through mine? Why do this to me just as I was finding my place in the city, a job acquired, a schedule to go by, my sexual needs met, my heart…
My heart.
Is that what was missing? How long would he wait?

“Ms. S?” Stanley asked.

“I’m okay,” I said to Stanley. “I’m fine.” I ran my hands down both sides of my face, adjusted my hair, then kissed my hand and deposited the smooch on Stanley’s bald pate. I opened the door, the light brighter, bleach-bright, clouds lifted. It couldn’t possibly be foggy tomorrow, could it? Mr. Irldale stood there patiently, sunglasses back on, graying hair the color of hot steel.

“Find it?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said.

“Maybe?”

I looked him over. “Maybe. Tell me: how do you feel about John Wayne?”

Book 3 of
Being Eloise

So here we are again.

This volume,
A Collection Of Sins
—like the two books before it—is another entry in the unfolding story of what it’s like being me, Eloise Spanks. It’s messy (my life, and perhaps at times my prose) but it’s also true, despite that disclaimer a page or two back which my publisher
still
insists on including—the one about this book being a work of fiction. Believe me: I don’t have this good of an imagination.

This may be why I was a ghostwriter for so long, working with provided plot lines and pre-existing characters; relegated to a world of sequels and prequels to the original work of others. I was good with imagining what came before and what followed—the rest of the creative process baffled me. The way we are, the way
I
am, bewilders me still. Why did I let myself become entangled with a much younger man? How did I find myself debasing my landlord at the insistence of his wife? Why would I padlock a lover? Decisions’ arguments and actions’ starts and stops seem like water through my fingers sometimes: felt but intangible, seen but then not. This series of books is my attempt to rectify this and be true to myself and you. This fiction business—conjuring something from nothing—is best left to others. The ones without jobs or kids or worries.

I’ve had some wonderful comments from readers and I wish to say, before we get started:
thank you.
Two questions that keep coming up are: a)
Is this fiction?
No. And, b)
How do you write?
That second question takes a bit longer to answer. You’ve perhaps read author interviews where writers mention things like, “I write from midnight until five a.m., when the house is quiet,” or “I carve out a writing space while the kids are in school.” You picture the writer, in pre-dawn darkness, making herself a cup of tea, then curling up in a chair, her notebook resting on a pashmina throw that covers her legs. She takes a sip of darjeeling, a thought drops into her head, and out come the words, flowing from a fountain pen’s nib. Yeah. Well, I tried that, minus the tea and pashmina. Turns out there’s this physical process, something called—and forgive me if I misspell it—
s-l-e-e-p
that turns out to be more than tangentially important for remaining a functioning woman. Also, there’s this other responsibility called
work
that has a nasty habit of taking up 5/7 of every week. But to the original question—how do I write? Well, this book was written, like the two before it, mostly in the hours between two and three a.m., when my old roommate, insomnia, jostles restlessly beside me. I say that not to forgive the errant typo or mangled phrase you may come across.
That,
dear reader, I blame on the second glass of wine that allows me to grab another hour or two of sleep after I’ve written a few more confessions. And if that’s
when
I write, then
how
I write is this: painfully, with much embarrassment and mortification and, occasionally, a deep, dark wanting. And
why?
I write for myself first, to learn why I make the choices I make. But now I also write for Susan who tells me she has the same curse of insomnia, there in an apartment in Wyoming. For Cassy, in New Jersey, also a single mother and an aspiring writer. For a couple, Darren and Donna, cruising somewhere in the Mediterranean, who sent me a photo of them reading book one out on their room’s private deck, Darren’s hand doing a little bit of naughty on his wife. Tsk tsk. For Mali in the Philippines—thanks for your personal note—and in France, Ali. Not a bad way to improve your English. And I write for you.

There’s nothing less satisfying than a lengthy preface. So let me wrap this up. If you’ve come to
A Collection Of Sins
after reading my earlier books, you know that I need to qualify that tricky word I used a paragraph or two earlier: the word
true.
First, all the names and places that follow have been altered to protect people’s identities, both those I love and those who’ve slipped into the outer orbits of my affection. I’ve also compressed time and reordered a few events to make the story flow more smoothly—but never, I assure you, by manipulating the basic truthfulness of events. Everything I have to tell here is physically and emotionally intact. Everything I have to tell, I tell to you.

So let’s get to it. Sins.

Mr. Tailor was in his late sixties and retired—though
tailor
seems one of those professions that are so deeply part of a person that the person can’t be divorced from the skill. I imagine it would take all of five minutes for Mr. Tailor to once more become a master of needle and thread. All he’d need would be a measuring tape slung across those stiff shoulders, some fabric and a piece of chalk. I can’t think of any advancements in tailoring (if that’s a word) that would take him more than a few minutes to absorb. If anything, it seems our wardrobes are becoming simpler over time. I can’t imagine that a retired surgeon can reenter her profession quite as swiftly, nor an engineer or a lawyer. Perhaps the purest professions are those that don’t require a brush-up on the latest research, or sitting through corporate hiring videos, or filling out paperwork. The professions that feed us, shelter us, clothe us—there’s something inherently essential about those professions and those people, even if their wielded skills are ones few of us have inherited or would want to.

Working on the second floor, I saw myself as a comforter of the fourth want. Others could provide the food to those who had none for themselves, others could provide the shelter, the clothing. Who then to provide the raucous mix of pleasure, fantasy, desire, and release to those who have no one—or whose loves find their essential needs alien, perhaps unpalatable?

But this argument wasn’t even fooling their creator. I knew it was a steaming turd pile. I was here for work. And I’m not even sure Mr. Tailor was ever a tailor. Names can lie.

“Twenty-five,” Mr. Tailor whispered, his papery fingers releasing another button from the dress I wore. He was now one-quarter of the way up my body, the fabric parting there at my legs.

We were in the smallest of the upstairs rooms, a frosted bulb hanging overhead from the ornate tin ceiling by a cord, the bulb still swaying from when Mr. Tailor bumped it with his head as I’d taken my position on the Prussian blue velvet sofa. I faced away from him wearing the ivory-colored dress Mr. Tailor had provided for this session. The sleeveless number covered me from neck to ankle, done up not with a zipper but with one-hundred closely spaced mother-of-pearl buttons along the side seam. It was an exquisite dress, an antique which Mr. Tailor had said was from the late 1800s. It’d taken me all of half an hour to button it up—and I’d needed assistance from some of my colleagues in the break room.

Though old, it wasn’t musty. (The dress that is, not Mr. Tailor. I didn’t make it a point to smell Mr. Tailor.) The dress still bore a faint amalgam of perfumes. It seemed impossible that a fragrance could linger for so many years, but I imagined that some purer oils had been used back when this dress had been worn to balls or soirees or whatever women did back then for fun, the perfumed scents fixed for a good century or two by ambergris. The remnant scent was an earthier one than today’s perfumes: more musky than musty, and not unlike what I imagined seduction would have smelled like a century or two ago. I also thought of all those un-depilitated pits, pubes, legs and upper lips. But clearly hair had never stopped a man or none of us would be here, now.