Love and Demotion (3 page)

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Regina climbed the five flights of stairs to her apartment on Bank Street, her bag heavy with books she couldn’t resist checking out of the library.
She lived in a small apartment, on the most perfect block in the most perfect neighborhood in the city. She thought of it as her Great Escape – not only from the limitations of her hometown, but from the far-reaching, needy arms of her mother. There, tucked away in a brownstone in a neighborhood that was once home to literary greats such as Willa Cather, Henry James, Edna St. Vincent Millay and Edgar Allan Poe, Regina was truly on her own for the first time in her life.
The only blight on this otherwise perfect landscape of newfound freedom was her roommate, Carly. Carly Ronak was a tragically hip Parsons student who only cared about two things: fashion, and men. And the men changed more often than her jeans; It seemed every week there was a different guy in the rotation.
Regina had never had a roommate before. During college, her mother had insisted that she live at home rather than one of the Drexel University dorms in center city Philadelphia – a twenty minute drive from their house in the suburbs. She realized, now that she lived with Carly, that her mother had had maybe too much influence over her social life in the past few years. As daily witness to Carly’s whirlwind dating life, Regina had to wonder why she hadn’t ventured more into that arena herself. It was partly her mother’s fault – she was so negative on the issue of Regina dating that sneaking around hardly seemed worth the effort. The few dates Regina had gone on were so disappointing, they weren’t worth the lies to or the arguments with her mother. But now Regina had to wonder if she had missed out of something important.
As for Carly, it took Regina a few weeks to figure out why she even bothered having roommate. She appeared to have an endless supply of cash, at least when it came to clothes. Shopping bags from Barney’s, Alice and Olivia, or Scoop were ubiquitous in the apartment. Regina didn’t know much about clothes, but she knew these stores were a far cry from Filene’s and Target, where she did all of her shopping. And then there was Carly’s constant maintenance of her long, highlighted hair at Bumble and Bumble, and seemingly endless meals out. Regina had never seen Carly so much as pour herself a bowl of cereal. She even ordered in scrambled eggs on the rare weekend morning when she woke up in their apartment.
The mystery was solved one night when she was awakened by Carly and her hookup du jour banging around the kitchen at two in the morning. Carly admonished the guy for all of his loud moaning (which had awakened Regina an hour earlier) – “My roommate will be traumatized,” Carly had said. To which the guy replied, “I don’t get why you even have a roommate. Your dad is Mark Ronak.” Carly told him that it wasn’t a money issue; her parents insisted she have a roommate for “safety reasons.” They had both laughed over this, and the guy had said, “Good thing you have someone around here to keep you under control. Otherwise, you might be a bad girl.”
Of course, Regina Googled Mark Ronak, and learned that Carly’s father was the founder of the country’s largest hip-hop record label. This little background detail served to widen the gulf between Regina and her roommate; The idea of either of her parents even listening to hip hop — or even pop music — was unimaginable to her. Regina’s father had been in his mid-thirties when she was born, and died eight years later. He had been an architect, and the only music he listened to was opera. Regina’s mother was a classically trained cellist who listened to only classical music, and insisted Regina listen to only classical in the house. Alice Finch worked as a docent at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and as far as she was concerned, the only acceptable forms of music, painting, and literature were the classics: in her household, there was no “pop” in music, no “modern” in art, no “pulp” in fiction.
“How was your first day?” Carly asked, looking up from her copy of W magazine. She was sitting cross-legged on the couch, wearing a pair of perfectly faded bell-bottom jeans, a cashmere half-sweater, her honey-blonde hair was in a messy knot. “Did the other library kids play nice?” The room smelled like her Chanel Allure perfume.
“It was fine. Thanks,” Regina said, dropping her heavy bag on the floor and walking into the kitchen to get a Coke. She could never tell if Carly was genuinely interested in talking to her or if it was just a reflex since she was the only other person in the room. Regina knew that Carly didn’t understand how “shelving books” — as she put it – could be the fulfillment of a lifelong dream. But that’s exactly what it was to her; From the times she was six and her father starting bringing her to the library every Saturday afternoon – not even the New York Library, just their small library in Gladwynne, Pennsylvania – Regina had known it was where she belonged. She never went through a phase of wanting to be a schoolteacher, or a veterinarian, or a ballerina: for Regina, it had always been about becoming a librarian. She wanted to be surrounded by the smell of books, to be responsible for the rows and rows of tidy shelves, of the meticulous cataloguing and of helping people discover the next great novel they would read, or the book that would help them so the research that would earn them a degree or solve an intellectual riddle. She knew this from the time she was little, and she never lost focus.
And now her dream had come true, as small and ridiculous as it might seem to a woman like Carly Ronak, who had spent her girlhood dreaming of becoming the next Tory Burch.
“Good to hear,” Carly said. “Listen, I’m having a friend over tonight. I hope we won’t be in your way.” What she really meant was that she hoped Regina would have the decency to stay in her bedroom and not get in their way.
“Don’t worry about me. I have a lot of reading to do.”
“Oh – and your mother called. Twice,” Carly said, handing Regina a purple post-it note with the message scribbled on it in illegible Sharpie ink.
In an attempt to cut her expenses for the move to New York, Regina had gotten rid of her cell phone. This had the welcome consequence of making it impossible for her mother to contact her twenty-four/seven. Unfortunately, anyone in Regina’s life who happened to have a land line was now paying the price.
Regina crumpled the note and stuffed it in her pocket.

*** ***

Regina woke to the sound of someone breaking into the apartment. At least, that’s what it sounded like to her. And then she realized it was just Carly’s headboard banging into her wall.
This was accompanied by moaning, and Carly’s no doubt unnecessary cry of, “Fuck me!”
More moaning, this time a man’s voice. The sound of the headboard hitting the wall got harder and faster, and the tenor of their voices seemed indicative of violence rather than pleasure. And then it was silent.
Regina found herself breathing heavily. She didn’t know whether it was from being startled awake, or from the nature of the sounds she was hearing. It was disturbing and arousing at the same time, and this bothered here more than the fact that she was literally losing sleep over her roommate’s sex life.
She knew she was behind the curve as far as the whole sex thing went; to be a virgin at her age was unthinkable to most people. But it was her reality – a reality that hadn’t bothered her until she moved to New York and realized she was the last one to the party.
It wasn’t like she planned on never having sex. She hadn’t taken a chastity pledge or anything. It was more that the opportunity hadn’t presented itself. Her friends back home told her that she walked around oblivious – that guys were always checking her out and would ask her out more often if she made more of an effort to get out and do things. “You’re so serious all the time,” her friends told her. It’s not that she didn’t want to have fun. It’s more that she was painfully aware that every party she went to was a night of missed studying, and every guy she had a crush on threatened to take away from her focus on what was important: studying. Working hard. Her future.
Focus. It was her mother’s mantra. She was quick to tell Regina that boys were nothing but a distraction “a surefire way to derail your future.” It had happened to her, Regina’s mother warned her solemnly. Regina had heard the story dozens of times, but every time her mother spoke about how she had “given up her dreams” to support Regina’s father as he went through architecture school and then in the early years of struggle – and then her pregnancy with Regina. “And then your father died and left me holding the bag. No one thinks about worst case scenarios, Regina. The only one you can depend on is yourself.”
Regina looked at the clock. It was two in the morning. Five hours until her alarm went off.
Laughter, and then another moan.
Regina rolled over on her back, desperate to find her way back to sleep. Her nightgown, a gray cotton shift from Old Navy, was twisted around her waist. She loosened it, but kept it above her hips. She stroked her stomach, trying to relax herself, to recapture sleep. And then her hand, as if moving of its own volition, drifted to the edge of her underwear.
She paused. From the next room, silence.
Regina moved her hand into her underwear, her fingers touching herself lightly between her legs. The thought of the man just a few feet away on the other side of the wall both excited and distracted her. It had been a long time since a guy had touched her, and the few experiences she had had been fumbling and unmemorable. Now, it was almost impossible for her to imagine someone else’s hand in this inquisitively private and sensitive place, stroking her until she was wet, then pressing inside, moving in and out in just the right way to trigger that powerful release. She moved her hand quickly, the walls of her vagina pulsing against her own finger, her hips move in tandem. She felt the familiar rush of pleasure, and then lay still against her rumpled comforter. Her heart was pounding.
What would it be like to have someone else next to her at that moment of climax?
She was beginning to wonder if she would ever know.

Chapter Three

A girl wearing a Columbia University T-shirt with dyed red hair handed Regina a crumpled pile of requisition slips.
“So do I, like, just wait here?” the girl leaned on the desk.
“You can wait at one of the tables and just watch the board for your number. That will indicate your books are ready for pick up,” Regina said.
Regina was already addicted to the predictable rhythm of the delivery desk: the quiet early mornings, the afternoon hub of activity, and the slow drift in the early evening as people left for dinner – some returning, some gone for the day. She knew she was lucky to spend her days in arguably the most beautiful room in the entire city. And while her job was not intellectually challenging, she did get a certain sense of satisfaction in handing the books over to the eagerly waiting library patrons. She wondered, as she looked out at the rows and rows of people bent over books and laptops, what everyone was working on. Was the next great American novel being written in that room? Was something being invented? History re-discovered?
And yet sometimes, when there was a lull, she felt fidgety.
“Why don’t you read something?” said Alex, a wiry, slightly-awkward-but-cute-in-a-puppy-dog-sort-of-way NYU student who worked part-time running books from the various rooms to the delivery desk.
“Are we allowed to read behind here?” she said.
“No one’s ever said anything to me,” he said. “And you and I both know
Sloan doesn’t miss a chance to jump down our throats. So I’d say yeah, it’s
cool.”
Regina thought maybe she and Alex could be friends, although she’d never had a real guy friend before. Her mother always warned her that guys were never real friends – that they “only wanted one thing.” But Alex did just seem genuinely friendly. Although, she felt she had somehow offended him when he told her he liked her haircut, that it was, “Very Bettie Page.” Regina had said, “What’s a Bettie Page?” And he looked at her kind of funny, as if not sure if she were serious or joking.
“You know – the legendary pin-up model? With the black hair and the short bangs?”
Regina had nodded, although she had no idea what he was talking about. People sometimes told her she looked like “that girl on that show…with the bangs,” or they would snap their fingers and say, “Zooey Deschanel.” She had seen Zooey Deschanel’s sitcom, and while there might have been some resemblance in coloring and haircut and even facial features, the star’s zany effervescence made any comparison ridiculous, in Regina’s opinion. Now she would have to Google this Betty person.
“Is it truck time?” Alex said.
She and Alex had fallen into the habit of walking out for lunch together to grab a burger or hot dog from the food truck that parked around the corner on 41st Street. But today, Regina decided she would try to find Margaret and see if they might have lunch together.

She took the South Stairs up one flight, to the fourth floor that was home to first editions, manuscripts, and letters, and also the Trustees lounge. She passed a room that was gated off, and she took notice of it.
She found Margaret logging a pile of books into a ledger.
“You do this all by hand?”
“Yes. And we have an intern put it into the computer. I can’t be bothered with those machines.”
“I wanted to know if you wanted to have lunch together. I brought mine and we could sit outside…”
Margaret was already shaking her head. “I don’t eat lunch on Tuesdays,” she replied. Regina wasn’t sure what to say that. Margaret added, “As you get older, you need to sleep less and eat less. You’ll see.”
“Okay, then. Well, I’ll see you later, I guess. Oh, by the way – what’s Room 402?”
“Barnes Collection — visited by special permission. First editions of Virginia Woolf and Charles Dickens.”
“I used to take the library tour once a year when I was a kid – I don’t remember it.”
“They built it about five years ago. The Barnes family donated twenty million dollars. They renovated the entire Main Reading Room. Remember when it was closed for over a year?”
Regina nodded.
“The Barnes room used to be open. I spent some time in there, but not since I had to start bothering with permission.”
“Whom would I ask for permission?”
Margaret shrugged.
Regina was not one to ignore authority, but she couldn’t imagine the works were meant to be hidden from library staff. It made sense that the public couldn’t go traipsing through the room at will, but surely it couldn’t hurt if she just took a peak.
The dark bronze doors were framed in marble, with the words JASPER T. BARNES ROOM in gold letters. Regina gingerly approached the door, and thought that if it were locked, that would solve her dilemma of whether or not to try to sneak a look inside.
She placed her hand on the gold, lever-like handle, and with only a few seconds of hesitation, pressed down. The door was unlocked, and she pushed it open.
The first thing she noticed was that the room was much simpler in style than most other places in the library. It was English classical, and the walls were floor-to-ceiling books in wooden and glass shelving. In the center of the room was a long, dark wood table – almost like a dining room table, surrounded by antique chairs finished in red velvet.
And then she realized she was not alone.
A strange, almost keening sound emanated from the corner of the room, a space obscured from the view of the doorway. But as she stepped further inside, the source of the noise became shockingly clear. A naked woman was bent over a marble bench, her arms supporting the weight of her upper body, her head down, long hair sweeping almost to the floor. Behind her, a man – also naked – stood with his hands on the woman’s hips, pumping into her with a ferocity that made Regina question if what she was witnessing was a woman in the throes of pleasure or in pain. A part of her – the practical, rational part of her – knew she should turn around and get the hell out of there. But another part of her – a part she didn’t quite understand — was riveted.
Regina, her heart pounding, quickly realized that what was seeing was most definitely pleasure. The steady rhythm of the two bodies moving together, the uncontrolled moans of the woman and the sheen of sweat on her long arms that Regina could see even from her distance — it was raw ecstasy. Regina knew it was wrong for her to be there, and, as if punishing her for her trespass, her own body betrayed her with a hot flicker of excitement between her legs.
Ashamed of herself, Regina tried to avert her eyes, but instead ended up looking directly at the man’s face, and to her shock, she realized that she actually recognized him: The dark tumble of hair, the black eyes, the chiseled features. It was the man from the steps the day before.
And from the smile on his face as their eyes met and locked, it seemed he recognized her, too…