Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (7 page)

“Pure cream,” he said. “That’s pure cream.”

“That’s a good thing?” I asked.

“Very,” he said.

I dropped my skirt hem down again. “Good. I was worried you wouldn’t like it.”

He reached for my skirt again but I slapped his hand.

“Can’t,” I said. “It’s on fire. Just had it done. If you stay you can’t go down on me.”

“Give me another look, then,” he said, stepping back a few paces.

I obliged him and lifted my skirt. He stirred a finger in the air and I turned around.

“Stop,” he said, when my back was to him. “Touch your toes.”

I did. I split my legs apart and watched him, my Terrance, upside down. I felt very cheap. But newly minted.

“Nice,” he said, like the word was a mile long. I was happy that Maria had indelicately brought up my anus. I straightened upright and fixed my hair, then turned to him.

There was a long pause from him. “Wanna watch TV?” he asked.

“Yeah?” I said, though this was a little problematic. The only TV in the apartment was in the bedroom—an effort on my part to keep TV viewing to a minimum for my son. Problematic also because I’d yet to take Terrance into the bedroom. Over the course of the last week, he’d licked me in the kitchen, tongued me on the couch, on the hallway floor, and vibrated his lips against my clit while I sat on the edge of the bathroom sink. But the bedroom? Not yet. Perhaps it was in this room that I feared this fling would fall apart, would be flung into nothing. It’s in bedrooms that relationships end. I knew that from experience.

I left Terrance in the kitchen to fix us a couple of drinks while I went alone into the bedroom. There I hastily threw my clothes into the closet, made the bed, and opened the window to the cool night air.

“Okay,” I said to the empty room, waiting for my barista to materialize. When he did, I handed him the remote. “You find something to watch.”

I headed into the bathroom and ran the water until it was cold, then soaked and lightly wrung out three washcloths. I could hear Terrance flipping channels. Where he stopped would, I realized, tell me more about him as a person than anything we’d done so far. I heard a game, then symphonic strains, then news, then the roar of a stadium crowd, then someone speaking quickly in Spanish, then a husky British voice excitedly narrating some documentary.

It was the documentary’s light that bathed the bedroom when I reentered. A program on birds. We lay side by side against the pillows, the TV angled awkwardly on top of the dresser, the entire room anti-Feng shui.

“You’ll have to excuse me,” I said, hiking up my skirt. “But it burns.”

“I’m glad you feel comfortable around me,” he said.

“Feel free to do the same,” I said, another attempt to reciprocate. He just laughed then turned up the volume.

I placed one wet washcloth against my left inner thigh, another on my right, and the third I folded in half and lay across the middle.

“Better?” he asked.

“You have no idea,” I said.

We watched sea birds flying into their cliff nests, fish in their beaks. We watched the Osprey with a fish in its talons, the narrator remarking on how the female Osprey is much larger than its male counterpart. We watched as I felt the cold water drip down me and pool into the hollow of my immaculate anus.

Yes, girlfriends, what a Friday night.

The sad thing is that Friday nights before Terrance were hardly any better. Most of my friends were still married and had kids, and that meant our relationships existed mostly on the phone and online.

After a half hour I felt myself nodding off. I could imagine David Attenborough’s breath-heavy narrative style as he hunched beside my dresser, addressing a camera I couldn’t see,
Yes
, he said,
the waxed anus has an incredible display, one of the finest of all birds
. “What?” I said, coming around. I sat up. Terrance didn’t move, his eyes fixed on an ibis in flight there on my TV. I shifted. Despite the washcloths and the aspirin, I was
still
uncomfortable.

“Let me refresh you,” Terrance said, looking over at me. He peeled off the towels. I handed him the one in the middle. It was warm.

“None of that,” I said, as his face moved closer.

“Promise,” he said, “Just checking your skin.” He took my towels into the kitchen. I heard the sink run, then the fridge door open. No, the freezer. I heard him rummaging in the ice. He was gone for at least five minutes, but when he came back, oh, I can still remember the feel of the barely frozen washcloths against my thighs. And there, at the front, Terrance even buckled the fabric so the cold wouldn’t touch anywhere near my clit. I mentally kicked myself for not having left a
T
of hair there just for him. He deserved it. Terrance had also brought in a bowl of ice and proceeded to place one chip of ice on each washcloth until they almost melted, replacing them with another. Never before had a woman been turned so deliciously, delightfully frigid. This was about the nicest thing any man had ever done for me. And then the documentary was over and Terrance kissed me on the forehead and climbed from bed.

“Tomorrow?” he asked. “Olivia told me you have the weekend free.”

“I have to work,” I said, still on the bed. “Maybe. I’ll have to see.”

He bowed from the doorway, and I closed my eyes and heard the front door open, then shut, heard his soft footfalls on the stairs, then the sound of the gravel and then, from far off through the open window, the rasp of his bicycle until he’d shifted gears and rode off. I carefully removed the wet towels and placed them in the bowl of remaining half-melted ice and tentatively felt my skin, white now, no longer radiantly pink.

And then I proceeded to do something with the remote control, a condom, a half-bottle of massage oil that was at least ten years old, and my vagina—the particulars of which I believe require no exposition. How much did I want something in me after just tongue, tongue, Terrance’s delicious tongue?

I was changing the goddamn channels without using my hands.

Something was happening to me and I wasn’t sure I liked how quickly and easily I liked it, excuse the circuitous logic. I’d begun to take pleasure in missing deadlines for Terrance, in working late into the night to make up for the time, but never quite catching up. But after a few weeks of this, I felt sucked into a life made for a much younger, less sleep-deprived woman. So I was thankful when a writing assignment forced me to put a big old pause on pleasure. I dropped my son off with his father for a few days while I flew out to Los Angeles to work with an ex-baseballer—and now partner in an investment firm—on his memoir. Mr. Irldale. After making a gazillion dollars in sport and business, he was now suffering from the I-want-to-write-a-book syndrome. Still, it was sold, due out in a year, and I’d already spent two months fleshing out his ninety pages into two-hundred. And yet there was some necessary component missing from his story: continuity, a meaning, a purpose, a drive. What I had was a string of anecdotes and empty phrases and platitudes about his life. Never mind that that’s what most of our lives amount to—in a book it’s a no-no.

So there I was, in L.A., ready to get to the heart of the matter. It didn’t turn out that way. Not at first, anyway. My plan was to spend a good six or seven hours a day, for a couple of days, interviewing Mr. Irldale and finding the threads that could hold the book together. There were fresh batteries in my voice recorder, new pens clipped to my notebook. I’d even gone out without my laptop just so I would concentrate, one-hundred percent, on the job. Instead, I was pulled into his office for quick ten-minute cram sessions between his many, many meetings. I spent most of the first two days wandering around the office building, planning my words for my next brief encounter. After a couple of days it almost felt like I had one of these jobs, was fully employed, a boss above me. At least I pretended that’s what others thought when they passed me.
Who is this woman, this renegade who can wear jeans in a suit-and-tie world? Wow.
In reality, no one noticed me as I wandered around outside the office, in the hallways and corridors, past the banks of elevators and the glass walled entryways of firm after firm: law, banking, investment, finance. Behind the glass were polished rosewood tables and young men in white shirts and ties arguing and gesticulating and holding up pieces of paper and flipping pens into the air and catching them with the practiced precision of a late-night talk show host. I’d entered the world of stock photography. A world where it looked like work, but didn’t feel like it to the bones. What could these people possibly be doing in there that was real? That wasn’t just moving numbers around? And yet there I was, too, moving words around. Numbers or words, what was the difference? It was all an illusion.

Ghostwriting in a male voice, I’d tried to make Mr. Irldale come off as erudite and warm; a person you’d want to take advice from. Mr. D. H. Irldale. It was either D. H. or Mr. Irldale. I’d always thought people who used their initials like that were hiding something. Dick Head Irldale, perhaps. Doufus Hornacious Irldale. I asked. Apparently it was just D and H. Nothing else. What letters there had been were wiped clear off his parents’ minds after his mother gave birth.

On Friday, D. H. cleared out of the office early.

“When’s your flight?” he asked me on the way to his car. He was driving a black BMW. I’d climbed into the back seat instead of the front seat—why, I don’t know, and now I felt awkward back there.

“Tomorrow morning,” I said.

“That doesn’t give us much time.”

“No,” I said.

“You up for an all-nighter?”

I was nervously engaging and releasing the cap of my pen. “Sure.”

“Okay.”

We pulled up at my hotel and I checked out a day early, stuffing my belongings into my backpack and hurrying down to his car. This time I got in the front seat and the backpack sat in the rear, like a sleeping child.

Mr. Irldale was on the phone, an obnoxious bluetooth thingy in his ear. “Oh, that’s right,” he said. “Fine. No. Fine, fine.” He took off the earpiece and tucked it into a compartment in the dash.

“Listen,” he said. “I forgot we’re having some friends over tonight. Do you mind? We can start around midnight. I make an excellent espresso.”

And so there I was, sitting outside under the absurdly warm, moist Hollywood Hills sky, the air ticking with insects, lines of bulbs strung above us on the deck, and below them a few friends of Mr. Irldale and his wife. Kids played in the dusky light of a treehouse connected to the deck by a rope bridge. The canyon behind them fell away steeply before flattening into the grid of city lights, downtown Los Angeles sprouting up in the distance like something conjured up out of pure phosphorescence.

Mr. Irldale’s wife laughed a lot and touched his arm often. There was so much laughter. I spent the evening giving nervous attention to their dog, flattering Mr. Irldale when he mentioned the book, a natural deflector, me. When it was time for the kids to go to bed, I volunteered to tell them, crossing the rope bridge to the first step of a rope ladder that continued upward. In the treehouse I found the boys and girls playing games on their phones, their faces blue from the screens, all of them taking their light with them as they climbed down, leaving me alone in the treehouse looking out through a window at the party like a voyeur, marveling at him, Mr. Irldale: generous, kind, thoughtful, full of advice, asking how his friends were doing—really doing—his kids hugging him goodnight, his hand trailing off his wife’s as she got up and told him to stay seated. D. H. Dear Husband. And I remembered that I had this once, too. Not so grand, not so rich, not so sweet, but something not impossible to identify as falling from the same tree. Life had felt then, back with my ex, like I’d been riding upward within an elevator. Not quickly, no, but improving, each milestone a new floor, and then my ex and I had stalled at some unknown height, and I found myself alone in the shaft, the elevator rising high above me and there I was, not plummeting, no, because I couldn’t. I had my son to think of and my work, and these things kept me from falling, kept me suspended there on fibers of air. I’d had all this. Once.

Tree houses are grand places for tears. When I came down, finally, the kids were in bed, and the talk turned to sicknesses and losses, to plans and past regrets, and through it all D. H. was the center. Never sad, never frustrated. Always hopeful. An optimist. That was the thread I’d been looking for: the successful optimist, the true friend.

When everyone had left or gone to bed, he and I stayed up until near dawn, talking about the big things, as though we were friends and there was no book that needed to be finished.

Later, back home and transcribing the interview, I found the point where we’d both fallen asleep out on the deck in those oh-so-comfortable chairs. On the recording I could hear the birds chirping madly, the traffic building slowly, and the soft
pff, pff
of one of us puffing in our sleep, safe, a thousand thoughts away. In my apartment, transcribing, I reached to shut off the voice recorder, then hesitated and let it play. The birds sounded happier in California.

“Good morning,” came a voice, groggily, out from the tinny speaker of the recorder. Mr. Irldale. And I heard a long yawn that was me, and then the sound of the recorder being fumbled with, then switched off. I was left in the silence of the apartment, on a Tuesday, ten a.m., the sun still low, the window panes pure glare, robbing me of a view. How could things get better for me, the pessimist? I rewound.

“Good morning,” Mr. Irldale said.

I rewound.

“Good morning.”

I rewound.

“Good morning.”

So. If I returned from L.A. with a view of the good life, of fidelity, closeness, success, and family, how did I then reevaluate my own life and relationships?

1. I told my ex he’d need to watch our son for another week, pretending to still be in L.A., ostensibly so I could work.