Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (22 page)

And then, after these two sessions, I’ll change and meet my son at the Japanese Tea Garden a half hour before it closes, when the light is best and the crowds are thinnest, and then afterwards, if he wants, we’ll stroll through the de Young Museum next door where I have an annual pass courtesy of a client of mine who is fairly high up the echelon of de Young museum donors. He might even meet us there—no, not the one I’ve kissed.
This
client is one of the few who I permit to see me out of character and as I am. And I do this only because he and his fantasies are harmless. And because he does, on occasion, treat my son and me to outlandishly expensive dinners, where we’ll continue our exploration of the city, shifting from talking about art to talking about food:
you must try this, you’ve never had that?
and we’ll point out our favorites from the table’s bounty and pretend that we are living the life we’d always known was promised to us, even when things were dark. For this courtesy of his, and his generosity, I’ll leave him out of the next book.

The rest of you, though? Fair game.

Book 2 of
Being Eloise

What I’ve written here in
Lock & Key
is a true story—
my
true story. That disclaimer a page or two back, the one that begins:
This book is a work of fiction…
is there at the insistence of my publisher.

That said, there
are
some untruths within—and because I have something of a contract with you, reader, to tell the truth—the basis of any autobiographical writing, really—I’ll reveal my manipulations here, now. For one, all names and some places have been changed to protect the innocent and the wicked, equally. Also, the chronological order of a few events have changed in the interest of a better read, but without, I assure you, harming the veracity of the events themselves or their consequences. As an example, the upcoming scene with a bouquet actually occurred on a different day than the one where I’ve placed it, but it works better the way I’ve presented it. You know how it is: sometimes the universe gives you life’s pages out of order. It’s only looking back that you see it all makes sense with a little bit of reshuffling.

Also, before I forget, while I used to be a prolific ghostwriter and could conjure up the prettiest phrase and paint you one of those intensely evocative scenes that takes, like, three pages to portray the way our heroine’s purple locks reflect the light of the water-moon
Grshynsnöcksihliað
, I’m sick of that breed of lies (that genre, too) and will try to refrain from over-detailing my story here. Also, let’s be honest for once, writer to reader: how in the world am I to remember little details that took place months and months ago? Whenever I find a memoirist engaged in presenting scenes with excruciating detail, I know they’re lying. Our brains our designed to discard the unnecessary. And mine is no different. If you really need to know a person’s eye color, or a description of every object in a room, well, for heaven’s sake, use your imagination. It’s as good as mine. Oil it with a drink and see. So, to beat this stallion one last time: if you find any stock descriptions, any clichés, then you’re right to be suspicious of my recollections. Even the dialogue is, of course, an approximation. But know this: I’m going to try to stay true. To you.

This next bit is going to sound like an up-sell, but so be it. (It’s not like I’m selling you a $1000 household item.) You’ll get a better appreciation for
this
part of my life story if you read the book that precedes it:
Tongue Tied,
book 1 of
Being Eloise.
In
that
book you’ll deepen your understanding of some of the people presented in
this
book. You’ll learn what I’ve been through in the past few years, too, prior to the events about which you’re about to read. Some writers preface their serial books with little summations of characters and events, but I’ve always felt that this was like throwing an anchor around the head of the story. So no—or very little—catch-up will be presented here. I value the reader who sticks with me from the beginning. So, if you haven’t read
Tongue Tied
, please go on ahead. I’ll be waiting for you when you get back, no hard feelings. And if you choose not to, that’s fine, too. You’re a fast learner, right?

Now, where did we leave off?

I dialed the A/C’s temperature down as far as it would go, but the arctic-blue color on the faceplate didn’t at all match the lukewarm air puffing from the dusty vents. It didn’t help that the infrequent San Francisco sun had decided to pick this hour to emerge and bake the nearly floor-to-ceiling bank of windows of this large room. I chipped a small piece of whitewash from the window with my fingernail and looked out. I saw the windows of the characterless building across the street, small windows set in brick with window A/C units in the lower casements, affixed like barnacles. I saw paperwork piled on desks, wilted plants in too-small pots, and not a soul. I could hear honking outside, though, but signs of life here were different from other big cities I’d been in. San Francisco streets—at least out here in the former industrial areas away from the touristy vistas—were unappreciated and worn. Even the honking of cars was less urgent and more cautious, as though any of the nondescript buildings could suddenly roll open a wide metal door and swallow passersby whole.

It was like the A/C unit wasn’t even trying. I kicked it with the toe of my boot, then turned and resumed my pacing in front of my clients. I was dressed in the fur coat they’d brought for this session. I could hear one of my colleagues barking orders a few rooms away, here on the second floor of a former textile factory that had its heyday back in the sepia days. Now, though, the building had a plain graffiti-covered door, a buzzer, and Stanley, who sat just inside and kept things safe for us. The first floor used to be a punk club, years ago, but had been vacant for decades, or so Stanley told me. We all loved Stanley. Maybe sixty-five, big as a house, and never one to ask any of the women what we did up here. Maybe he knew everything. Maybe he’s secretly the owner. What he couldn’t see, though, is this:

I wore Eve’s fur coat while Eve wore my blindfold.
Eve
isn’t her real name, of course, nor are most of the names in this memoir of sorts—
of sorts
because I’m turning my daily deeds into words fairly quickly, without the benefit of letting them age a few decades. I figure that life’s too short to put off inking your memories. My motto: these
are
the halcyon days, believe it or not.
Live now
, as the cliché goes, to which I amend,
Write now.

This desire to live in the present, to the fullest, was a quality I admit to liking in my clients, especially in Eve and her husband, call him Adam. Not that I had many clients. But the few I had and the existence of a workplace for me gave me a routine, albeit a highly unusual one. I hadn’t had a routine since I last worked as a ghostwriter, back in that apartment above the garage (see
Tongue Tied
). Moving out to San Francisco with my son had been a bravado move for someone like me, but the boldness began to wane—until I took this job, the description of which was eerily similar to the
job
I’d fled earlier, a thousand miles and fears ago. Sometimes the thing you run away from ends up being right there beside you at the end of your flight, like a shadow. It’s that pesky thing called Fate, with a capital F, some might say. I try not to, conjuring up other more likely explanations: I’m half-way decent at this, I’m half-way experienced.

If I found Adam and Eve admirable it was because of this: they didn’t suffer through their days with their passions stifled. They came to me, openly, honestly, instead of the obvious easier routes: suffering, cheating, separating. They could have—any one of my clients could have taken those routes. Instead, they converted long hours at their jobs—many tedious, no doubt—into the money to spend for mere minutes of pleasure and release with me, Ms. Eloise. This is something unbelievably intimate, confessional, almost holy. Well, until I get started. But the act of coming here to the second floor, to me,
that
takes guts.

Eve was one-half of my only twofer client; Adam, her husband, was the other, and both were here with me in
the room that wouldn’t cool down.
We’d had several sessions together already. The circumstances of today’s fantasy of theirs was that I’d broken into their house while they lay sleeping. A cat burglar was I. I’d tried to make the room look as much like a bedroom as possible. There was a bed, but also a couch I’d had a couple girls help me carry in from the break room on the promise I wouldn’t get it soiled, two chairs, and a fake TV, like the kind in showrooms. The whole room felt, in fact, like a showroom, if showrooms featured slightly used furniture and, as a matter of course, naked married couples sitting next to each other on a bed, both blindfolded, hands clasped together, while a woman in a fur coat pointed a pistol at them and cursed the A/C.

At least they thought I still had the pistol pointed at them. It was their idea, but I’m not much into ontologically hostile weapons, or giving anything that can kill or maim sexual connotations. Even I have my limits. I paced back to the A/C unit and opened the fur coat and let the faintest whisper of chill rise up against my legs. It was about as cool as an early summer morning, the temperature of a morning newspaper opened up at the kitchen table, in other words:
not damn cold enough!

Compounding the heat, of course, was the matter of the fur I was wearing. I’d never worn a fur before, something I didn’t tell Eve. I had, in this session, just “stolen” it from her closet while I held them hostage on the bed contemplating my next move. Their nakedness explained by the fact that I’d “broken” in just as they were engaged in a little foreplay. Discovering them naked in bed, I, the cat burglar, was to…
What?
That was the tricky part. The part I was getting paid for. What
was
this cat burglar going to do? For the moment? Try to cool down.

Back to the fur a moment: I felt no compunction wearing it. Yes, animals of some breed died for this article to come into being, but I was merely wearing it for another half hour and it would disappear from my life then, likely never to return to my shoulders. I understood, the moment I put it on, why some women loved furs. It was like being cloaked in nostalgia, like every dog you’ve ever loved was there with you again, pushing themselves against you and asking to be petted. Except you didn’t have to do a thing other than wear it: unconditional love from a garment. But it was also hot as the devil’s armpits. I hovered over the A/C unit to deal with my crotch sweat (I see all, tell all). I remember thinking that maybe if I kept their blindfolds on for the entire session I could ditch the coat.

Adam and Eve had taken a liking to me from our first session, and after only one more, had wanted me to come to their place for this particular enactment, break-in via fire escape and all. But management disallows out-call work, and I’d heard they get messy. For one thing, there’s no Stanley in case things get out of hand, and
out-of-hand
is pretty much the
lingua franca
of this job. So here we were.

Adam and Eve were in their early forties, both Russian-looking, but only by blood. He’s from Portland, she’s from Florida. They met at a trade convention eighteen years ago. They told me they don’t have kids, but they were likely lying. Which is natural: we don’t even trade our real names.

As I stood there in the fur it was one in the afternoon and their kids, even if only imaginary, would be in school. Teenagers, probably. I could picture them, bored out of their minds in algebra or trig (not because the class was easy but because it was unimaginably difficult) or else reading poetry in an English class, about flea-blood co-mingling or Ozymandias or maybe some newer multicultural poetry even less memorable, words they’d never see again until they were old enough to have kids of their own with Norton anthologies slimmed down by technology into impossible flatness. Not once, in a million guesses, would Adam and Eve’s kids hit upon this: that their parents were here, buck naked, under my control. Being a parent myself, I can say that with some surety: I think most kids stop thinking about their parents the moment they leave the house for the walk or bus ride to school, as though their parents cease to exist for seven or eight hours, or, once they enter college, for weeks, even months, at a time. To them, their parents are on pause, instead of where they really are: at work, at home, crapping, fucking, dozing, crying. Waiting for the kids to come home. Wanting to hug them and shrink them back to young kids, wondering when to break bad news to them, feeling the cruft of living build up on them, they who had once known nothing but little pains. But mostly, mostly, what parents felt was love that was so pure and uncut that it hurts. I know.

I digress. To setup the particulars of this session, i.e. fur coat, pistol, cat burglar, etc., Adam and Eve and I met a couple of weeks before to talk it through. This is customary for me, and I think for many girls who like to do things more imaginatively. Some go straight for the hard stuff, and that’s all their clients want, but I prefer a scene, a plot, movement. A fantasy should involve more than a spank and a wank, as some in my trade have put it. I think so anyway, and so did Adam & Eve. They invited me out to eat and after running this past Management, we continued to an empty Thai restaurant where Adam told me a bit about their predicament: boredom. Monotony. They’d tried swinging but it really wasn’t for them.

"It was icky," Adam said.

"It was a little icky, Eve said.

"How so?" I asked. It was up to me to pretend I’d swung—after all, I needed to seem the world’s most experienced pleasure-seeker for them to have any reason to pay me to fulfill their fantasies, even if, really, the closest I’d come to swinging was a grade school playground.