Hair and belly and hands above, creamy thighs to the left and the right, but in front of me, a mystery, curves and tucks and protrusions that bore, it seemed, little resemblance to the air-brushed pornography I’d seen since I was fifteen. Or maybe it was just the proximity. Or maybe it was just my nerves. Being confronted with a mystery is a scary thing.
“Tell me what you want,” I whispered to her, and I remember how far away her head seemed at that moment. “Tell me what you want and I’ll do it.” But then I realized that by telling me what she wanted, she’d be as much as admitting that… well, that she knew what she wanted. That someone else had stared into this strange, unknowable heart, had learned the geography, had unfurled her secrets. And even though I knew she’d had other lovers, that seemed somehow different, more intimate. She’d let someone else see her here, like this. And I, being male and a former Sam Kinison listener to boot, resolved to bring her to paradise, to make her mewl like a sated kitty, to obliterate every trace of memory of the He Who’d Gone Before.
Strange unknowable heart, I snorted. He Who’d Gone Before. Somebody get me a shovel!
And she tried, and I tried, too. She demonstrated with her fingertips, with words, with gentle pressure and gasps and sighs. And I tried, too. But a tongue isn’t like a finger. My goatee drove her crazy, in precisely the opposite of the way she wanted to be driven crazy. And when I heard her on the phone once refer to me as the Human Bidet, well, it seemed easier to rely on the things I knew I could do better.
Do any of us know what we’re doing? Does any man? I ask my friends, and at first they all guffaw and swear they have to scrape their women off the ceiling. I buy them beer and keep their glasses full, and in a few hours I have my more perfect truth: We’re all clueless. Every single one of us.
“She says she’s coming,” says Eric mournfully. “But I dunno, man…”
“It isn’t obvious,” says George. “How are we supposed to know?”
How, indeed? We’re men. We need reliability, we need hard (or even liquid) evidence, we need diagrams and how-to guides, we need the mystery explicated.
And when I close my eyes I can see her, still, as she lay that first time, furled tight like the wings of a tiny bird, seashell pink, tasting like the rich ocean water, full of tiny lives, things I’ll never see, let alone understand. I wish I could. I wish I had.
“Okay, Jacques Cousteau,” I muttered, and struggled to my feet. When he closed his eyes he could still see me, he’d written. Well, what did that mean? And when had he written it? And if he still missed me, then why wasn’t he calling? Maybe, I thought, there was hope after all. Maybe I’d call him later. Maybe we still had a chance.
I took the elevator up to the hospitality suite on the twentieth floor, where a variety of young, larva-pale publicists in variations on black stretch pants, black bodysuits, and black boots sat on couches and smoked.
“I’m Cannie Shapiro from the Philadelphia Examiner,” I said, to the one sitting beneath a life-size cardboard cutout of Maxi Ryder in battle fatigues, brandishing an Uzi.
Larva Girl paged languidly through some pages full of names.
“I don’t see you,” she said.
Great. “Is Roberto here?”
“He stepped out for a minute,” she said, flip-flopping one hand toward the door.
“Did he say when he’d be back?”
She shrugged, apparently having exhausted her vocabulary.
I peered at the pages, trying to read upside-down. There was my name: Candace Shapiro. And there was a thick black line through it. “NGH” read the note in the margin.
Just then Roberto hustled in.
“Cannie,” he said, “what are you doing here?”
“You tell me,” I said, trying for a smile. “Last I heard I was interviewing Maxi Ryder.”
“Oh, God,” he said. “Nobody called you?”
“About what?”
“Maxi decided to, um, scale way back on the print interviews. She’s only doing the Times. And USA Today.”
“Well, nobody told me.” I shrugged. “I’m here. Betsy’s expecting a story.”
“Cannie, I’m so sorry…”
Don’t be sorry, you idiot, I was thinking. Do something!
“… but there’s nothing I can do.”
I gave him my best smile. My most charming smile, which I hoped was underscored with my I-work-for-a-large-important-?newspaper steel. “Roberto,” I said, “I was planning to talk to her. We saved the space. We’re counting on the story. Nobody called me… and I schlepped all the way up here on a Saturday, which is my day off…”
Roberto started wringing his hands.
“… and I would really, really appreciate it if we could maybe just get even fifteen minutes with her.”
Now Roberto was wringing his hands and biting his lip at the same time, plus shifting from foot to foot. Bad signs all.
“Listen,” I said softly, leaning toward him, “I watched every single one of her movies, even the direct-to-video ones. I’m, like, the complete Maxi expert. Isn’t there anything we can do?” I saw him start to waver, when the cell phone on his belt shrilled.
“April?” he said. April, he mouthed to me. Roberto was a sweetheart, but not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
“Can I talk to her?” I whispered, but Roberto was already rehol-stering his phone.
“She said they weren’t comfortable with your, um, compliance.”
“What? Roberto, I agreed to every single one of her conditions”
My voice was rising. The larval creatures on the couch were starting to look vaguely alarmed. As was Roberto, who was edging out into the hallway.
“Let me talk to April,” I pleaded, holding out my hand for his cell phone. Roberto shook his head. “Roberto,” I said, hearing my voice breaking, imagining Gabby’s gloating grin when I came back to the office empty-handed. “I can’t go back without a story!”
“Look, Cannie, I am so, so sorry…”
He was wavering. I saw he was. And that’s when a tiny woman in high-heeled calf-length black leather boots came trip-trapping down the long marble hall. There was a cell phone in one hand, a walkie-talkie in the other, and a no-nonsense look on her unlined, carefully made-up face. She could have been a very mature twenty-eight or forty-five with a great plastic surgeon. This, undoubtedly, was April.
She took me in – my zit, my anger, my black dress and sandals from last summer, far less fashionable than anything any one of the couch larvae were wearing, in one cool, dismissive glance. Then she turned to Roberto.
“Is there a problem?” she said.
“This is Candace,” he said, pointing weakly at me. “From the
Examiner.”
She stared at me. I felt – actually felt – my zit expanding beneath her gaze.
“Is there a problem?” she repeated.
