The Accidental Virgin (8 page)

Wednesday, lunch

T
wo women, both lovely and young, shared a pizza at the neo-Neapolitan restaurant, Cosa Nostra, located in the MetLife building, in front of giant windows facing 44th Street. Their shoulders touched as they ate; hands busy underneath the table. Stacy, as vivid of the imagination as she was pink of cheek, would have never pictured herself in this scene. Yet here she was.

The pair sat on the same side of a booth (“theater seating,” Taylor said before scooting in next to Stacy, trapping her on the inside). When they’d ordered the pizza to share, the waiter (who would be receiving a very small tip) said, “That’s cozy,” and licked his chops. Taylor wanted the Vesuvius (olives, capers, and anchovies). Stacy wasn’t surprised. She took Taylor for a savory woman — salty, not sweet.

Taylor wore one of the newest innovations from the Gap: the braless tank top. Stretchy material was sewn into the inside of the garment, a built-in support system. Considering Taylor’s voluminous flesh and her dire supportive needs, the tank failed to prevent flop. Not that Taylor knew or cared. Her breasts — and her spirit — could roam the open prairie. Her wild blonde hair was down over her neck and shoulders despite the heat — no ponytails for her. Taylor wouldn’t restrain any part of herself, and she flung around her mane and bosom with the stomping bravura of a prize mare. Nay (or, rather, neigh), a stallion.

Since Stacy wanted to be seduced, she was entranced by Taylor’s riot of hair and skin. Contrarily, Stacy had always maintained a pathologically neat personal appearance, planning outfits, carefully ironing, mending hems and buttons. Her apartment, though, had a relaxed “springtime in Baghdad” decorating style. She didn’t obsess too much about the untidiness (to say the least) of her dwelling. Hardly anyone saw it.

“You have a drop of tomato sauce on your chin,” Taylor informed Stacy. Without asking permission, Taylor wiped away the red drop with her pinkie. She next inserted said finger into Stacy’s mouth. As she withdrew it, Taylor traced Stacy’s lips, and then deposited her pinkie between her own.

“Have I mentioned today that I like you?” asked Taylor for the third or fourth time that hour.

The lunch, Stacy knew going in (had hoped), was not at all business. Almost immediately, just after they’d taken seats in the booth, Taylor reached under the table to lift the red hem of Stacy’s pink skirt and (hello) drop a hand on her bare thigh. If a man had done that, Stacy might have bristled, as if the gentleman were claiming ownership of a property that wasn’t for sale. But Taylor’s hand was well manicured and soft. By no means innocent, the contact was, however, non-threatening. No migrating crotch-bound stroking or squeezing. Just a nice imprint in the shape of a woman’s hand, warming her leg against the bite of high-impact air-conditioning. This lesbian thing, thought Stacy, was neither scary nor revolting. She took a sip of bubbling Pellegrino and dipped a pinch of bread in a dish of olive oil.

Stacy had confirmation from Charlie that a lesbian encounter would certainly qualify as a de-revirginating event. “But there has to be genital-on-genital contact, or reciprocal oral-genital contact. It’s not enough to let her go down on you,” he’d said earlier.

“Are you reading this out of the celibacy handbook?” she asked. “Genital-on-genital? How would that work?”

“Scissored legs.”

“You’ve seen this? I haven’t read any of your pornography reviews on flick.com.”

“We can work it this way,” he said. “Just do whatever you want with Taylor, and then report back to me. No detail is too small. You’ll have to give me some advance notice. I’ll want to have my tape recorder ready for the call.”

Stacy had spent some pre-lunch minutes making lists. On the plus side, a lesbian experience would be solid seduction material for future dates with men; she needn’t worry about an unwanted pregnancy; a romantic entanglement was out of the question; she was always interested in trying new and different things. Charlie gave her a little pep talk à la Bela Karolyi (“You can do it!”). She didn’t need the prodding though. Stacy had had some spicy dreams about women. But there was one undeniable minus. Stacy might be able to have sex with Taylor, but could she face her ever after in the office? Would Taylor pressure her to have lunch at the Y every day? Might that get sticky? Fiona and Janice would notice something had changed between their two most senior employees, and the last thing Stacy needed was more scrutiny from The Women.

Regarding libidinous matters, especially in her dire situation at present, Stacy resolved to stop thinking and start doing. Best to let the juices flow and mop up the mess later. Now that they were sitting close together at lunch, finger sucking and thigh touching, the whole affair seemed like a grand idea. The future weirdness could be forgotten for the next hour.

And then Taylor said, “I’m leaving thongs.com.”

Stacy blinked. “When?” she asked. So much for future weirdness.

“Friday is my last day. I got a job offer from pets.com to reproduce the site. No offense to you — you’re amazing — but I don’t think thongs.com will last the year. I posted my resume on monster.com a few weeks ago, and I got calls from garden.com, kosmo.com, urban fetch and CDNOW. Pets.com is the safest bet. Did you notice that the sock puppet’s collar is a man’s watch? I love that.”

Stacy’s initial reaction to the news: relief (the sex would be that much easier). Second reaction: disbelief. She was surprised Taylor had so little faith in Fiona’s ability to stay afloat. Third reaction: rank jealousy. Stacy hadn’t gotten calls from anyone. Non-tech people were disposable. Taylor’s talents, making all the moving parts on a webpage fit, encoding the programs, troubleshooting. These were valuable skills. What skills could Stacy list on monster.com? That in three minutes flat, she could invent fifty
hotcha
names for faux satin G-strings? No one would want her. Perhaps that explained her fealty to thongs.com in a job-hopping industry.

In her time at thongs.com, Stacy had seen 42 staffers come and go. She knew the exact number because she made hash marks on the wall of her office to keep track of the turnovers. Most of the fly-by employees stayed less than a month before quitting or getting a better job. Some lasted just a week. She’d read in
Fast Company
that the average length of employment at a dot-com startup was three to six months.

The typical trajectory went something like this: Land an Internet job with fancy yet dubious title (Stacy’s was “vice president in charge of merchandising and marketing”), drool over pre-IPO options/benefits package, slave from 8
A.M.
to midnight six days a week plus a couple hours of catch-up on Sunday from home working on a company-distributed laptop. Form a superficial attachment to one’s colleagues that feels deep (spending that much time with anyone will lead to a false sense of intimacy). The attachment quickly turns to disgust (spending that much time with anyone will get on one’s nerves). Employee unity is further eroded by competition to land the next fancy yet dubious-sounding job, and a feeling of futility when the stock price slips. Bosses tend to be megalomaniacs. Everyone is ambitious, but no one is secure. The Internet is an every - geek - for - herself world.

At the three-month mark, the employee’s days are numbered (whether s/he knows it or not). Departure Scenario #1: Employee suffers from a sudden work-related ailment (carpal tunnel syndrome, sick-office syndrome, etc.) forcing him or her to take time off. Departure Scenario #2: Employee’s good work is noticed by a larger or hotter dot com. Phone calls are made, more options with larger salaries are dangled, jobs jumped. Departure Scenario #3: Employee is terrorized by the tyrannical and overzealous boss of the dot com, a man or woman who has put up his or her own money as well as huge chunks from banks and private investors (everyone s/he knows, including family, friends and people s/he met last night at a Silicon Alley party in a SoHo gallery space). The boss believes that the employee’s gentle joking about bankruptcy makes him or her a saboteur. And saboteurs must be expunged.

At thongs.com, the bulk of former employees had been expunged. Only Janice, Fiona, Taylor, and Stacy had been there since the inception. Stacy’s mother, in her gentle way of asking about her daughter’s dating life, routinely asked, “Don’t you meet a lot of people at work?” Yes, Stacy met tons of people. But as soon as someone walked in the door, the newbie began plotting his or her next job hop. No one made a real effort to get to know Stacy. She was viewed as a Fiona loyalist, which rendered her useless for networking. Stacy feared the hash-mark people were right. She didn’t have the guts to job hop. Stacy would go down with the ship (or should she say
slip
).

Before Stacy could properly express contrition and cheer over Taylor’s imminent departure (her usual speech, “I have the utmost respect and admiration for you. I wish we’d gotten a chance to get to know each other better. Best of luck to you at_________(fill in the blank) dot com. I’ll be sorry to see you go,” didn’t apply to this situation), Taylor said, “I can get you in.”

“In where?”

“At pets.com. I can get you a job.”

Stacy’s heart fluttered. She’d fantasized about leaving thongs.com nearly every hour for over a year. But if she left, she’d lose out on the 10,000 additional stock options that were promised to her after the New Year. Most of her fantasies centered on that date. She’d get her paperwork squared, and then march into Fiona’s office, announce that she was cashing out and resigning. She’d retire for a year, and then, after getting the 3,000 hours of sleep she so desperately needed, she’d go back to public radio. Could she throw away her fantasy for a sock puppet? Besides which, if she were to go with Taylor to pets.com on Monday, she couldn’t very well screw her today.

“Can I think about it?” she asked. Stacy didn’t want to shatter every window of opportunity. There was always the chance that sex with Taylor could turn her into a full-time lesbian. She might
want
to be Taylor’s bitch.

The buxom blonde said, “Take a risk.”

The hand again. Upper thigh now. Stacy popped a crust of pizza into her mouth and placed her own hand on top of Taylor’s.

“If we kiss, will they throw us out?” Stacy asked, not studied in lesbian PDA etiquette.

Taylor smiled. Her cheeks were spotty and red with what Stacy assumed was the flush of excitement (or prickly heat). “My apartment is on Fiftieth and Lex.” Only six blocks away.

The check settled, Pellegrino drained, the pair walked quickly and silently to Taylor’s apartment. The blonde, one ropy leg out the door of thongs.com, was beyond caring if her work for the day went undone. Stacy couldn’t ignore the itch of responsibility. Taylor said, “This is it.” Too late to turn around. Stacy would attend to other itches first.

The building was one of those charmless vertical egg cartons built in the 1970s. Stacy had always hated this style of architecture, considering it the brick-and-mortar equivalent of a peanut butter sandwich (sustenance you’d force down when you couldn’t get your hands on something tastier). But the utilitarian facade seemed to fit Taylor’s personality. She had no compunction about living in an apartment with white walls and box-shaped rooms. Nor did she mind the lecherous, paunchy, middle-aged doorman who tipped his silly hat and put his hand on Taylor’s lower back as he showed them to the elevator. Stacy wondered if the doorman touched her every time she came and went. Taylor didn’t appear to mind, but Stacy was disgusted on her behalf.

The apartment itself was sterile and minimalistic. She surveyed the space, standing next to Taylor in the middle of her boringly immaculate white living room. Taylor was Stacy’s reverse: disheveled self, meticulous living space. Stacy had no idea if that spoke to her character or psychosis. She’d have to ask her mother, the decorator who’d minored in psychology at Smith College in the 1960s. It occurred to Stacy for the first time that her own mother might have had a post-adolescent lesbian experience at Smith way back when. She pushed that thought out of her head easily enough when Taylor’s arm encircled Stacy’s waist and she began licking the side of her neck.

“I can feel your pulse against my tongue,” Taylor said.

Oh, yes, Stacy’s jugular was throbbing with such violence, she feared her ears might pop. The touch of a woman’s mouth on her skin was both foreign and familiar (another disquieting mommy moment, remembering scents and softness). And sexy. Surprisingly so. Stacy found herself nervous and twitchy with the electric shock of the illicit, the heretofore unexplored, the unfurled turf, this strange land of girls.

Stacy found Taylor’s lips and the women kissed. Unlike the mauling of Tom Strumph or the homey smack of Brian Gourde, smooching Taylor was sweetly hypnotic. It reminded Stacy of sharing a dessert. Taylor’s lips were puffy, coated in gloss that made the kiss as slippery and bouncy as flan on a teaspoon. The hint of flavor — could be vanilla — tickled Stacy’s nose and taste buds.

Peeling away, the smeared waxy residue of gloss on her lips, Taylor cupped Stacy’s left breast with both hands. She massaged it with care, as if it might leak when pressed too hard. Most men will grab the breast as if it weren’t actually attached to the body, batting it around, squeeze until flesh bulged between open fingers, pinch the nipples like pencil erasers. Stacy much preferred Taylor’s tenderness, and would instruct her next boyfriend (whomever that might be) thusly. A bit fearfully, Stacy reached out with both of her hands to reciprocate. Taylor’s breast was heavy and fluid in Stacy’s palms, like a water balloon. She tried a gentle massage, but it was too unwieldy (despite the Lycra encasement). Stacy attempted kneading the gland, and that seemed to please Taylor. She moaned. The sound distracted Stacy. When she was with a man, Stacy made all kinds of noises, and loved to hear the same from the guy. Taylor’s vocalizations seemed out of place, inappropriate and disturbingly intimate. Sex with a woman, Stacy reasoned, was inherently more personal than sex with a man because, ultimately, it was like making love to yourself.