Fresh Girls & Other Stories (6 page)

          A
n old man lives across from a restaurant in a neighborhood of art galleries, picture-frame stores, and bookshops. I visit him every other night of the week, at the hour when most families are sitting down to dinner. He watches me pull up the street in a cab whose headlights aim low down the center of the road. Because the interior is dark, he can seldom make out my profile in the back seat, but he knows who it is. He is already waiting with his door open.

Across the street the sign of the restaurant flashes above a panel of stained-glass windows. Usually there are customers entering or leaving, so that the door seems perpetually half-open, and I hear the clink of
glasses on trays and glimpse the white jackets the waiters wear. I have never been inside this place, so I do not know if the bursts of laughter come from intimate tables lined against the wall, or from men sitting on barstools with women in short aprons weaving around them, or from round tables of couples and friends. As I leave the cab and turn my back on the restaurant, I hear the tap of women’s heels on the cement steps, names being called, and car doors slamming in the dusk.

But I never linger because the old man is waiting. Quickly I step onto the curb and walk across the grass that borders the sidewalk. The stiletto heels of my shoes sharply echo the sounds the restaurant-going women make as I approach the stairs of the building.

As always, the old man is half in shadow and half in light, leaning against the heavy steel door with one shoulder. A triangle of yellow light leaks out from above him and onto the top step. His face is white and retired; he wears a halo of snowy hair that smells of a shampoo with alcohol high on its list of chemicals.

“Barbie,” he says. Some nights he calls me Lolita. Or even Cuddles, because he thinks I like to hug him. He is still in the process of naming me; he hasn’t found the name that suits me best, he says.

We kiss, and he stops pushing against the door so that it snaps back abruptly on its hinges, hitting me in the
back. Once at the end of an evening, as we were waiting for a taxi’s headlights to gleam between the parked cars, he accidentally pushed me off the top step and I staggered in my heels, landing at the wrong angle on the step below. Not falling, but twisting my left ankle. He went right on talking, shouldering back the door, hands in his blazer pockets, scanning the string of lights decorating a tree on the street. I had to grip the iron handrail and bite my lip until I could taste a trickle of copper leaking between my teeth. Sometimes he does not seem to notice me; he waved cheerfully when I limped away.

Other times he notices me too well. There are certain unspoken rules, which became clear during the first week of our knowing each other. I am never to wear the same complete outfit twice, although if he likes a certain trench coat or short skirt he will be happy to see it again during a different week paired with different accessories. I must always sit with him and drink two double Scotches, smiling and engaging him in conversation for no less than an hour but no more than an hour and a half. During this time I should not allow a single moment of contemplative silence to fall between witticisms, praises of him, and news of what I have done in his absence (with the exception of any mentions of other old men). After this I must go to bed with him, although twice a week he will say that this is not necessary, you are probably tired
and wish to talk longer or to go home. I pull the corners of my smile up to my temples and say I wish to go to bed with him. Cuddles, he murmurs approvingly. Once when I was feverish and aching from the flu, nauseated from the double Glenfiddichs, I said I
was
tired, but he took my wrists and pulled me into bed and pushed my face between his withered thighs. I was silenced by the strength of the hand circling the back of my neck, its prominent green veins, and the dry creases between the joints of the fingers.

Tonight he follows me down the hallway and into his apartment. He closes the door and pushes a kitchen chair underneath the doorknob. He pulls me to him by the shoulders and directs his tongue into my mouth like an insistent offering of half-cooked meat, faintly gristly and porous. After a while he takes it back and rubs his lips together. I turn and go to my usual place on the couch. He watches me walk and I can tell he is not too happy with my outfit tonight, the red silk shirt and leather skirt, because he only says I am beautiful and wonderfully dressed three times. If I am looking very good, he will say this every five or ten minutes for the rest of the evening. When he does, I must say thank you and keep smiling. This way I end up saying thank you more often than anything else when I am with the old man. If I tire of this routine, if instead I only nod or look
at him, he will prop his elbows on his knees, lean forward, and ask me intently what is wrong. Then I will say that nothing is wrong, and he will say he does not believe me. And I will insist there is nothing wrong, and then he will point at me with a callused finger and let loose a loud, derisive laugh. I prefer to avoid this. Yet if I arrive in any way disheveled, or wearing inexpensive clothing, his disapproval clouds the air and makes it thick enough to cut through. He will stare at isolated sections of my body until I want to cover myself in a new designer micro-mini or tear off the mistake of opaque tights in exchange for stay-up stockings with a row of appliqué diamonds running up the left calf.

However, there is the danger of looking too good, and on these few occasions he will combine his attacks by both complimenting me excessively and staring for unblinking minutes at my chest or my knees or the angle at which one shoe is slightly dangling off my foot. He will ask once or twice where I am going after seeing him, all dressed up like that, and he will be looking at the floor when he does this. I will say nowhere, that I dressed up only for him, but he will grunt and refuse to look at my face, as if he is sparing himself from looking full upon a vision of depravity and disease.

Tonight the old man pours the Scotch with a generous hand. I measure the inches of pale gold liquid I will have to
sip and see there is something paddling about in my drink. It is sort of fibrous and beige and it alternates between suspending itself in the middle of the drink, wafting up to the surface, then sinking with sudden dead weight to the bottom of the glass. I rationalize that I can drink around it until the last gulp, when it will make a quick and, I hope, tasteless exit down the back of my throat.

“How are the girls?” the old man asks, settling himself into the butterfly chair in front of the television. The chair is set in such a way that no matter how I sit on the couch, I cannot comfortably talk to him and face him at the same time. Which, of course, I have to do, resulting in various aches and pains caused by the awkward set of my neck. If I were wearing jeans, I would be able to press my back against one arm of the couch, push the cushions aside, and sit relatively comfortably cross-legged, facing the other arm of the couch. I am not wearing jeans. I have my legs crossed and the glass coffee table is too close to my calves, which I remedy by squashing into the couch and raising my knees unnaturally high.

“Fine,” I say, “the girls are fine.”

“They’re still there, they haven’t gone anywhere?”

“They’re still there, I take good care of them for you.”

The old man chuckles with pleasure. “And the lady, how is she?”

“The lady is fine too.”

“Ah,” the old man says, rocking back in his chair. “That’s good to hear, that’s good to hear. Ooh, the lady. Mmm, hum.” He rubs his lips together.

Incidentally, the girls are my breasts. The lady is my vagina. I am Barbie, or maybe I am Lolita. For us, the old man has created a secret language, a series of codes and signals, the way lovers do in the early, affectionate, slightly silly phase of their courtship.

“You don’t think I’m crazy?” The old man flicks his eyes at the anchorwoman on the television screen, then turns them back on me.

“No, I don’t think you’re crazy.”

“Oh, you’re just saying that. I am crazy, aren’t I? I must be crazy.”

“No, not the least bit.”

“Not even a little bit crazy?”

“Well, maybe a little bit. Only in the most delightful sort of way.” I crack a wide grin at him.

“Ah. Ooh.” The old man is pleased with my responses, right on cue. He sets his feet apart on the floor and tugs a bit at his tie. I flatter him by noticing the puffy triangle of silk peeking from his jacket pocket. Thus we settle into our routine, the repetitious dance of compliments and reassurances, of advances and coy retreats, news of the flowers he bought that morning and the phone calls he received and how many times he ate that day and
where. I forcefeed myself another mouthful of sullied Scotch, keeping a wary eye on the creature snaking in its depths. In the distance, off to one side, he says, “You are beautiful, but then there’s no need to tell you that, you are always beautiful, aren’t you? Aren’t you, honey?” and I shake the dizziness out of my head and raise my lips and bare my teeth and say thank you and smile as if my bank balance depended on it.

The old man keeps five blankets on his bed. We make a game of having me wait naked under a different blanket each time I visit. He will creep over to the bed, as he is doing now, in the semidarkness punctuated by a square of light in the doorway coming from the lamp in the hall. He will shuffle his hands among the layers of wool and cotton, sometimes tickling or pinching me in the process. Tonight I am under blanket number four and it takes him a long time to find me, tossing the first blanket around in the air, attempting to peek under the mattress. When his hand grabs my bare thigh he chuckles and does a little caper of triumph before quickly joining me under the covers.

“Ah, you are a sneaky one, aren’t you? Thought you fooled me, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” I say humbly, “I am very sneaky.”

“Hmm? What’s that again?”

“It was very sneaky of me to hide like that.”

The old man has had enough of the preliminaries, enough foreplay. He pulls me to him by the scruff of my neck and I wrap my arms around his freckled, slightly oily back. He smells of the type of cologne worn by young, muscular men with sculpted hair and faces in magazine ads. Again he shoves his tongue into my mouth; it seems to have doubled in length and thickness since we met at the door. He works it vigorously around my gums for a while. I stroke his grainy back and think of biting his tongue off at the roots. I think of spitting it back into his surprised face, where it will wriggle and twitch before flopping like a small dead trout onto the pillow, oozing blood.

“You do like to kiss and hug, don’t you?”

“I like to kiss and hug
you,”
I say, pulling back from the tongue that is still disappointingly attached to the blurry old face beside me in bed.

“Cuddles,” he says. “You are, aren’t you? You’re Cuddles,” and swiftly he pulls me against him and inserts a cunning leg between my legs. I stifle a small scream as the edge of the metal clasp of his watch accidentally scrapes a few inches of skin off my back, and then another scream as he changes position and in doing so takes another skin sample off my upper arm. Then comes a series of karate jabs, his bony elbows, knees, and shins colliding
with soft parts of my body as he tussles with me on the bed, clambering around me and then on top, forgetting to use the mattress instead of my body as a support for his weight.

“Honey,” he is saying. “Honey? Please? Please please please please please? Honey? Honey? Can I go in?”

Most of the time he cannot “go in,” although he tries. The trying is worse than the “going in.” He takes his limpish penis, which I have yet to look at close up, preferring to close my eyes right about now, and attempts to squish, squeeze, prod, bend and otherwise abuse it into place between my thighs. It contorts unhappily, but after a few minutes of what must be agony decides to give up the struggle and go relatively stiff, long enough for it to be inserted, whereupon it instantly falls asleep again. We do not always manage to reach this stage of hasty insertion, but I am always glad when we do because otherwise the fumblings go on for much longer. Once the penis has “gone in” and collapsed, it refuses to be handled again and the evening is over, except for one or two more searing tongue-searches of my tonsils and another soul-crushing hug.

Tonight he enters, goes predictably limp, withdraws wormishly. In the weeks that we have known each other, he has not yet been able to come, although this is evidently what we are striving for. We are making progress;
during the first week he had not been able to coax any life whatsoever into his reluctant member.

“Thank you, honey,” he breathes into my neck. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

He takes my chin in his hand and turns my face towards his, moving his arm underneath me. I lose another strip of skin to his watch.

“Thank you,” he says meaningfully.

“You’re welcome,” I repeat, extracting my chin and other body parts and swinging my legs over the side of the bed. I want to hold my head in my hands. I want to run my hands over my body to make an inventory of tonight’s damages. What I want to do to the old man, I haven’t figured out yet, although the image of the severed tongue flipping about gives me a moment of satisfaction.

“Oh, just you wait,” he says from the bed as I cross the room with my clothes in my arms, heading for the bathroom. “One of these days it’ll happen, Barbie, bells and whistles will go off. Ooh, just you wait, one of these days I’ll blow your head off.”

As I hurry to the bathroom I think what a strange image that is for the effect his impending orgasm will have on me. It is almost as if he has picked up that while I was lying there with him I was thinking of
blowing my head off, in a rather different context. This is the only time our fantasies join, although even here we mean such different things that we miss each other by fifty years or so.

The old man lives across the street from a trendy restaurant in a popular part of the city. He calls me every other day of the week and I visit him in cabs with drivers who tell me stories of the countries they come from and the holidays they will take once they win the lottery. Some of them know my number, which they pass on to businessmen cabbing downtown from the airport, the ones who are looking to rent someone for an hour or two before a late meeting or dinner with friends. Lately the economy has been bad, business has consequently been slow, and the old man has been my one steady customer, my main squeeze, my man.