Being Eloise (An Erotic Romance Collection, Books 1-3) (37 page)

I heard the spacing of Hank’s breaths grow shorter and shorter and waited a few seconds more so I’d burst into the bathroom at the most inauspicious time. Again I counted down, then flung open the door. Like a flood, the darkness of the bathroom chased away my confidence. I was hit by the bright flailing beam of a flashlight and a startled yell from behind it. All of it in an instant in which I felt a gripping fear that something was about to leap out at me. Not Hank, but something out of the darkness, something even he didn’t expect. Pure fear. I screamed and the flashlight dropped into the sink, the bowl splashing the light out over the actual scene: an open issue of
Playboy
propped on the counter, Hank—nearly bent double over the sink—looking at me in fright while I continued my startled scream.

A couple of my colleagues burst into the room behind me just as Hank ejaculated over the
Playboy
, a look more of fear than pleasure on his face. Zee, an aluminum baseball bat in hand, took the Polaroid from me with her other hand and took a mock picture, then pushed the camera back into my hands.

“C’mon,” she said wearily to the other women, gesturing back to the door from which they’d entered. “Eloise’s never seen such a little dick,” she said, adding, as she was halfway out the door, “Nice to see you again Hank.”

I threw the Polaroid camera onto the couch and shoved my hands into my pockets and angrily fingered a loose button there. I felt green and naivé.

Hank panted. “You almost gave me a heart attack,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You were superb,” he said, smiling, and I looked away as he cleaned himself and the bathroom.

I stood there until he’d left, and then stepped into the bathroom and turned on the lights. My eyes shot to every corner. There was nothing here in light. There was everything here when dark.

Hank was my last client for the day and the wig was mine until our next session, so I left it on as I walked home in the late afternoon, wore it shopping, wore it on the walk to my new (run-down) apartment and—because my son wouldn’t be home from practice for another half hour—left it on until I’d studied myself for a good ten minutes in the bathroom mirror in my apartment. Who was this woman staring back at me? Not so many months ago, I’d stared at myself dressed in a catsuit and had thought the same question, but spoken with the attitude of piqued curiosity. Now I was truly puzzled. Only when the wig came off and I’d hidden it did I feel like I was again Eloise. Vague. Uncertain. I washed my hands thoroughly, my psyche like an open book.
Had I just been paid to watch a grown man masturbate?
Can you imagine a woman paying a man for the same? Never.

You’re familiar with Adam and Eve from book two, so no need to detail my first encounters there. Their entry in
A Collection Of Sins
was:
Middle-aged, issues, like being watched, he’s dominant.
It’s a funny observation and one that made me feel smugly superior to Carla. Eve had not confided to Carla her innermost desire to temper Adam’s advances, nor had Adam told Carla of his desire to be tempered. But they had told me.

Given some recent events, I’m sure to come back to Adam and Eve in a future book, but I feel this is the place to mention another client, one who had me break the house’s rules on outside engagement and do a little moonlighting on the side. Granted, I had reservations for taking my work out of the relative safety of the second floor—where a group of women with a baseball bat are just a scream away—but
A Collection Of Sins
pulled me into this one. Carla had written, in small print on the back of a business card stuffed within the book:
Wine, dine and slap his advances. See him again!

I had promised, at the end of book one, not to mention this client’s predilections, but I
have
run this section past him and he’s tickled to be included–as I knew he would be. That is to say, I’ve mentioned the gist of this section to him. In truth, reader, no one (apart from my discreet publisher) has seen the content of these books except for me and you. Admittedly, this cozy relationship is mirrored with thousands of other readers—which leaves me blushing. Both for airing my dirty laundry to so many (anonymity still doesn’t leave me feeling all that secure) and for the attention, and for even mentioning that word:
thousands
. I was raised to not be overly proud. My other takeaway: there’s more of you out there than I expected.

(Forget a segue. I’m drinking this new varietal for me, malbec, and I’ve promised to get in five pages before a refill. And please, don’t think of me as a lush. I’m really not. It’s purely medicinal. So let me just tell you about Peter.)

I first met Peter in Golden Gate Park in the Japanese Garden. I was told to come dressed in a loose green skirt and a gray long-sleeved sweater. Luckily, that week’s laundry meant I could swing the sweater part. The green skirt was a thirty-seven dollar investment I picked up at Wasteland en route to the park.

I was happy to oblige his attire request, and happier that Peter had requested a sweater as the park was cold this particular mid-morning weekday. Dew still dripped in the shaded portions of the Japanese Garden, and it looked like the sun was going to let most of the garden stay wet all day—a tease. I wandered around the pagodas set atop the garden’s hillocks, and in a brief moment of sun, watched as the dark shade of a leafless tree spread across the meticulous carpet of grass and gravel like lightning’s shadow.

The city was still new to me, still unexplored and surprising. I had never been to the gardens before so it took me awhile to find Peter. Or rather, it took awhile for him to find wandering me.

“Eloise?” he asked.

I abruptly turned around from the path I’d found myself on and there, coming down a ridiculously high-arced bridge, was a man of about fifty-five dressed in a double-breasted suit, tan slacks, and wraparound sunglasses. He looked like someone stepping off of a yacht.

“Peter?” I said, my mind waffling between pigeon-holing him as a tough who was playing dress-up, or a fop with a fashion blindness in the eyewear area. He read my mind.

“Excuse the glasses,” he said. “Had a little surgery last week and have to stay out of the sun.”

I glanced upward. “Not much today.”

“It’ll be out,” he said, and he said it with such confidence that I felt as though the rich had access to some source of weather forecasting unavailable to the rest of us. “Shall we?” he asked.

Shall we what?
was my thought, but I let him lead me down to the teahouse where he ordered a small pot of tea. It was chilly there and I was eager for some warmth, scalding my tongue on the tea out of haste and nervousness. An almond cookie disappeared into Peter’s lips. Then he took a sip.

“So,” he said, dabbing away crumbs from the edges of his mouth. “How is Carla?”

“I, uh, don’t know,” I admitted. I’d never actually spoken to Carla.

“Still pregnant, though.”

“Sure,” I said. “I think so.”

“Carla was very special,” Peter said. “A true lover of art. You enjoy art?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Who’s your favorite artist?” Peter asked quickly.

A dozen names flew through my head—okay, maybe two or three—and I deliberated between giving him someone easy, say Picasso, or Monet, or throwing something out that only a true appreciator of brushstrokes would say.

“de Kooning,” I said, only because it was the most obscure one on my mind.

“Really!” Peter said. “What do you like about de Kooning?”

For a second I felt sucked in, until the images came back to me. And the only reason they came back to me, the only reason de Kooning even came to my mind was that my then-friend Petunia had a book of de Kooning’s paintings on her coffee table. I’d paged through it one afternoon while I was waiting for my son and Petunia’s daughter Eli to come back from a movie.

“Oh,” I said, casually, letting an answer to his question linger, hoping to conjure up the idea that, well, I had so
much
to say about de Kooning that, really,
where to start?
Finally I said, “His art is messy. Chaotic. Grotesque. Like life.” I took an almond cookie, the last one, and let it break between my teeth, crumbs falling into my cupped hand.

It was only later, as we walked next door to the de Young Museum, that I realized it was the
de
in
de
Young that had been the true trigger for my mind’s recollection of
de
Kooning. So much for my brilliance. I adjusted my skirt—a tad too billowing for my taste—as we walked. I have a thing about long skirts. I’m more of a jeans gal, so whenever I’m wearing skirts I feel like I’ve added a different bottom half to the rest of me. And especially with new skirts, like this one, I feel somewhat new and unfamiliar to myself.

Anyway, you’re wondering (as I was): so what was Peter’s deal? Was he paying me for my company? The only information he’d given me over the phone was that we’d have a perfectly pleasant time but that he’d eventually make a deliberate and perfectly
un
-pleasant pass at me, at which point I was to make a loud show of disapproval and disgust and to then storm off, at which point we wouldn’t meet again until another session. Easy, I thought. And a bit mysterious.

Surprising me, Peter was greeted at the entrance by name. Perhaps it’s the illicit nature of my work on the second floor (even in a city as open-minded as San Francisco) that makes me expect everyone involved to be somewhat incognito. But here was Peter, out in the open, his hand shaken, his shoulders patted, his cheeks kissed. And this before we even entered the doors.

There was a group there being led by a docent and Peter was invited to speak for a few minutes about the piece around which we were all, apparently, gathered, though to me it looked like a crack in the ground. The artist was named Goldsworthy, and this work,
Faultline
I believe, seemed like something the museum could have probably just waited a few years and gotten for free with a little 4.0 temblor. (It was a snarky thought to think, especially as I’ve since paged through a book of the artist’s work and was astounded by the imaginativeness of his work: streams turned into clots of color, leaves arranged like palettes, ice and rock balanced in shapes that speak to incredible human care and concentration with the materials of nature. Go ahead, google him. I’ll be here when you get back.)

Now, not to make this book a tourist guide, but if you’ve never been to San Francisco, go; and if you’ve never been to the de Young museum, do. The visit was a first for me. Once inside, I couldn’t help but ask Peter about his popularity, even though it risked exposing my ignorance of his fame.

“I do some work for the museum,” he said. “Fundraising, you know. Grubby stuff.”

I nodded. Peter didn’t look like the kind of man to get his hands grubby, unless it was with numbers. He had a full head of gray hair, parted at the side, and looked in every aspect exactly what I’d imagine a fundraiser and arts-advocate would look like if I had ever previously thought to imagine what a museum fundraiser and arts patron would look like. He was my height and more than once put his hand on my shoulder to guide my gaze to a painting that I was missing, something worthy of my attention which he would then go on about for a few minutes of my patient listening.

Art museums—though I enjoy visiting them immensely, or at least I enjoy the
idea
of visiting them—tend to exhaust me in reality. With Peter explicating, and with the faces of the museum-goers grabbing my eyes as much as the art, I soon felt tired, so much so that for long stretches of time, while admiring a still life or squinting and trying to appreciate something more abstract, I forgot that Peter was a client and that I was on the job.

It was during a moment of the latter act (squinting, trying to appreciate) that Peter stopped.

“Saved the best for last,” he said.

“Hmm,” I said. I tried squinting with both eyes. Then just one. Then letting my focus fall somewhere between the canvas (which looked like something my son could have brought home from day care years ago) and myself. If this was art, then I was in the wrong profession. It looked like two, maybe three smeary stick figures. Picture a children’s crude drawing as seen through a smeary glass window that’s being inundated with rain—when you’re drunk. For a moment I thought I could see the head of a snowman, carrot nose and coal eyes, too. It’d been a long week.

“Well?” Peter asked.

“Well what?” I asked. I wondered if he was ever going to get on with this indecent proposal of his. Perhaps, I remember thinking, there was no indecent proposal. Perhaps this was it: a slow, grinding and wearing down of my faculties through an overdose of art.

“Your favorite,” he said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It looks like something my son could have painted when he was a toddler.” I chastised myself for letting that thought of mine slip out loud and for mentioning anything personal at all. I’d forgotten that I was on the clock. “What’s it called?” I asked.

“
Untitled XX,
” Peter said, tapping the placard to the side.

“Ugh,” I said. “Even the artist didn’t know what to call it.”

“I thought you had a thing for de Kooning.”

“Oh, I do,” I said, then got it. “Ohhhhh, yeah. Well, not so much this older one.”

“This is a relatively recent work. Seventies I think. Yes, seventy-seven,” he said, tapping the placard once more.

“That’s what I meant. I like his earlier works.”

“Are you
really
an art lover, Ms. Spanks?” Peter asked, his tone one of teasing doubt.

“Ah, well, it depends on the day of the week,” I admitted. “Somedays I’m an art lover, some days…”

“Just a lover?”

Was this the beginning?
I wondered. Was he about to make a pass at me here in front of this de Kooning?!

“Sometimes,” I said, hesitantly.

Peter nodded. “You know what de Kooning said, of course. ‘It is disastrous to name ourselves.’”

There was truth to that: I couldn’t name what I was, who I was, what I was doing with my life. And yet I had the wisdom to know that if I ever did figure it out and could pluck a name that seemed to suit me, I’d probably be wrong.