In the Drink (30 page)

“You’re the one who put me on the pedestal. I didn’t do that.”

I went over and refilled his glass until the foam rose in a column that toppled and slid down the sides of the glass onto his hand. “Sure you did,” I said. “You created some perfect-guy character and made me think you were him. If I’d known all along that you were a—”

“Pervert. Sit down, why don’t you?”

I sat next to him. “A pervert, then I could have, I don’t know, I just could have known.”

“What difference would it have made?” he asked with real curiosity.

“I don’t know whether or not I would have been so gaga over you if I’d known.”

“Well, what about now?”

There was a silence, not uncomfortable, during which we just sat there and looked at each other. We both sighed at the
same time, then laughed. Then he reached over and cupped my cheek in his palm and ran his thumb over the bridge of my nose. “You’re so beautiful, Claudia,” he said. “I’m sure you know.”

“Am I?” I leaned my face into his hand and closed my eyes. My head nuzzled its way along his arm to his shoulder, my mouth found his neck and rested there. I could happily have drowned in the smell of his skin.

“I like this shirt you’ve got on,” he murmured into my ear, sliding his hand over my back, my shoulder, my breast. “Very slippery.”

Here I was, on William’s couch with him, in his arms, on the verge of something. But the whole dynamic between us was wrong, or at least, not as I’d imagined it would be; there was that quality in his body again, the thing I’d sensed that night after George’s, a cooperative elasticity which held no answering heat, just a desire to intuit and accommodate whatever I wanted.

I pulled away.

“What is it?”

“This is just—my God, how gullible am I?”

“Come back here,” he said with some urgency. He had an erection; I could see it outlined in his jeans. How strange, I thought with a detached sense of wonder: I had given William an erection.

“This is just the same thing again, isn’t it?” I said.

“What same thing?”

“Have you ever resisted the temptation to give someone what they want?”

“That’s not what this—”

“Have you?”

He watched me, and didn’t answer.

“Do you have any idea how it feels to be the beneficiary of
your sexual generosity? I’ll tell you: it feels like being sent home in a cab.”

“But—listen.” He stopped.

“Your father cheated at poker,” I said. “My mother just told me.”

“Please stop taking this personally,” he said swiftly and warmly. “What I told you was painful and difficult. I didn’t mean to—to hurt you, Claudia, or whatever I did. I had no idea. What do you want me to say? That I’m sorry I did such an awful thing to you? But I didn’t do anything to you. I did it to myself.”

As he said all this, I had the awful sensation in the pit of my stomach of being taken to task. He was right. He was right, and yet I still didn’t forgive him. “I want you to tell me straight out exactly how you feel about me,” I said. “Whatever it is, I can take it.”

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Believe me,” I said through a rising panic, “after three years with Jackie, I’ve grown accustomed to criticism.”

“I have no criticism of you at all,” he said bluntly. “That’s what I’m not sure you can take.”

“But you think I’m wholesome.”

“That’s a compliment, you idiot. You’re always telling me how screwed up your life is, but have you ever done anything you couldn’t get out of, or walk away from, or undo somehow?”

“Yes,” I said bitterly. “I fell in love with you.”

“Man,” he said, shaking his head. “I take it back, you’re worse off than I am.”

I let this sink in for a beat, then stood up and headed for the door. “Okay,” I said, “I’m leaving, good night, thanks for telling me the truth, I’ll talk to you soon.” I didn’t look back. I was out the door and down the hall and almost to the
elevator when he caught up to me, grabbed my arm and whirled me around.

We looked at each other in silence; he looked ashen and unhappy, and I imagine I looked about the same.

“Let go of me,” I said tersely, stabbing the down button.

“Don’t go, Claudia.”

“I think I’ve served my purpose here.”

“Your purpose?”

“You think you’re all cool and bad and underworld, don’t you? Sneaking around, pretending to be one thing and actually being another thing entirely. What exactly did you expect me to say? Do you think I enjoy being your mother confessor? Well, I don’t. I feel like I can’t trust you any more. You were the one person, the only one, and now—”

“Wait, don’t—”

“You needed me to think you were perfect, that’s why you didn’t tell me before. Well, I hope you’re not sorry you blew your cover; I hope it was worth it.” The elevator arrived with a little “ding.” The doors slid open and I got on. “I’m not mad at you, William, I’m mad at myself.”

“Liar,” he said, stepping back as the doors slid closed. As I sank to the lobby I felt a heady relief. I was free. I walked out into the evening air and stood for a moment on the sidewalk, looking up at the rows and rows of dark and lighted windows, all the way up to William’s floor, where his own particular windows were too high up to see. At least all my own foibles and fuckups had always been right out in the open; William’s had been festering, hidden all these years behind this expensive, ugly facade. The thought of him all alone up there with his problems and regrets was a dark bruise on my frontal lobe. God damn him. He’d been so profligate with himself, his body, his affections, and all along I had been right there and he’d
never even tried to touch me. Why the hell not? Why them and not me? I found to my surprise and annoyance that I was crying again. I wiped the tears away and struck out for the subway.

Before I reached the corner I was tackled from behind, brought to the sidewalk on my hands and knees and pinned there, firmly, but without menace, so I knew it wasn’t a mugger or rapist. I struggled, breathing hard. He had one arm across my chest and another around my waist. “Just tell me one thing before you run away,” said William into my ear. “Would you rather I’d taken advantage of you up there without telling you everything?”

It didn’t hurt, my palms and knees pressed against the sidewalk, but it wasn’t all that comfortable either, and his forearm was crushing one of my breasts.

“Let me the fuck up,” I said intently.

Immediately he released me and we both staggered to our feet. I flew at him and shoved him so hard he went back a couple of steps. “Are you going to stop sleeping with weirdos?”

“I already have.”

I shoved him again. “How could you sleep with a sleazebag like Gus?”

“He’s not a sleazebag,” said William. “And that was ten years ago!”

I bent over and crashed my head into his ribs; he held on to me as I pummeled him. Then he took my face in his hands and pressed his face against mine so our noses mashed together. He kissed me for such a long time, and so passionately, that I thought I might faint. I bit his lip until I thought I tasted his blood. No matter, he was disease-free.

He pulled back to look at me. “One of the senior partners at my firm lives a block away. Can you imagine his reaction if he walked by right now?”

I bit him again, then pushed him against the wall of his building, slid my hands along his arms, pulled them out to either side so we were sprawled vertically, snow-angel style, squirming and rolling around, straining to press as much of ourselves against each other as we possibly could.

“Are you trying to get me in trouble?” he asked, chuckling.

“Are you trying to invite me back upstairs?”

“God, yes.”

In the elevator we clawed at each other; it was a good thing the elevator went straight to his floor without taking on any other passengers. He stepped off first and headed down the hall to his apartment, and I flew at him, landed on his back, held on and rode him to his door, then was carried down the hall, into his bedroom, and deposited on his bed.

He flung himself onto me, covered my body with his and my mouth with his. Something tickled; I couldn’t breathe. I started to laugh and he gave me a light pinch on the earlobe.

“Relax,” he said. “Jesus, you’re squirrelly.”

But I couldn’t stop giggling. Everything was funny: his confession, my reaction, our being here like this, the way his mouth felt on mine—warm, intimate, hungry—“Stop just a minute. Please. I just have to catch my breath.”

Very slowly and with all of his attention, he freed one of my breasts from that ridiculous shirt, covered it with his mouth and breathed warm air on it. Without undue awkwardness or effort, we helped each other take our clothes off. The grainy light in the room was just enough to see by. I admired William’s limbs in silence, raising myself above him to look down through the tunnel our two bodies made. He was sinewy and narrow-hipped. His thighs, from this angle, were rounded mounds. His skin against mine was smooth and cool, except for the extremely hot clublike thing attached to his groin, poking me blindly in the abdomen. I reached down and touched it
for the first time; doing this to William was so purely strange that I inhaled sharply as I grasped it.

“This feels so incestuous,” I said.

His eyes glinted evilly.

“Pervert,” I said, laughing.

He held my hips, positioned me over him, and then he was inside me. We stared at each other, hardly breathing, then eased into each other. I felt like a starving person at a banquet, overwhelmed by sudden plenitude, beset by a greed so vast it made me feel a bit demented. I devoured him, gorged myself, wallowed in gluttony. William gave himself up to my hands and mouth, both of us laughing a little at how good it felt.

After I’d vented as much of the past year of frustration and deprivation as could be expelled at one go, something shifted between us. We gazed at each other, our faces nearly expressionless, while our bodies did whatever they wanted. The half-light made everything feel both slowed down and slightly unreal. There was an immense stillness right at my core that wasn’t any particular emotion, it was just myself, wholly present, a more concretely and intensely pleasurable sensation than anything I’d ever experienced before. I burst out laughing again from sheer pleasure. He smiled back at me, cupped my face in his hands, looking as stunned and replete as I felt.

Near dawn, without a word, he turned me over and nestled against my back, curled himself around me, one hand holding a breast as casually as if he owned it. He fell asleep, breathing against the back of my neck. How could he lie there so calmly? How could he sleep? All my muscles were twitching. I cast back over the night, replayed every detail of every moment from my tentative arrival onward. Somehow, magically it seemed to me now, I had managed to end up here in William’s bed with him. I had very little experience with fulfillment and
joy; I found them, as I found most new things, nerve-wracking and potentially dangerous.

I made myself think in lurid and explicit detail about what William had done with hookers, Gus, middle-aged couples and masked women with whips; the images rolled by, a seedy film in my head. More strongly than my own shock and disappointment I felt his loneliness, how degraded and lost he must have felt, no matter how much pleasure these encounters might have afforded him on another level. What surprised me most, in the end, was how little what he’d told me surprised me, now that it was beginning to sink in. It all jibed in an odd way with what I’d already known about William, which struck me now, lying here, as a lot more than I knew about anyone else. We each knew the worst about the other, I thought, for whatever that was worth.

What was he going to make of this? What did I make of it? What were we to each other now? From here on in, it was going to be painful and awkward between us; it was inevitable, that was the way it always went. I already dreaded tomorrow. Maybe he would regret all this as soon as he woke up; maybe I would. Oh, God, maybe I should just get up and go home now and spare us both.

Slowly and carefully I slid my limbs away from his, got out of bed, dressed in the now-daylit room. He didn’t wake up. On the coffee table in the living room were two empty bottles of champagne, the bottle of mineral water and two half-empty flutes with no coasters. I carried them all into the kitchen and left them on the counter by the sink, then wiped the coffee table with a damp sponge. I silently let myself out, closed the door of his apartment behind me. I heard the click of the automatic lock.

In William’s elevator I stared at my reflection. I looked as
unabashedly gorgeous as a starlet: rumpled, bright-eyed, cheeks glowing, lips rosy and bee-stung. My body had a slightly swollen look about it, a soft, sexy puffiness. I decided to walk home. The sun felt good; it was a relief to be outside on the street, in the quotidian bustle of delivery vans and late-night partygoers getting out of taxis and Korean delis doing a brisk trade in newspapers and coffee. The air was fresh and bright. Leaves on young saplings growing between sidewalk and street had just begun to bud; a few early crocuses were opening. My mood lifted higher the further I got from William’s building. I almost ran across the park, so glad I’d left William’s it was all I could do not to burst out in wild, triumphant laughter, imagining his relief at finding me gone.