The Last Book You Read
The Last Book You Read
& other stories
Ewan Morrison
Copyright 2011 by Ewan Morrison
Smashwords Edition
The right of Ewan Morrison to be identified as the Author of the
Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,
Design and Patents act 1988.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
First publishing by Black and White Publishing 2005.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission from the publisher
Except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles
or reviews. This publication may only be reproduced, stored,
transmitted, in any form by any means, with prior permission
in writing of the publishers or in the case of reprographic
reproduction, in accordance with the Copyright Licensing Agency.
The Publisher has made every effort to fulfil requirements with
regards to reproducing copyright material. The author will be
glad to rectify any omissions at the earliest opportunity.
All characters in the publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to any real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
“A mini masterpiece. I loved every story. Beautifully, wittily, ferociously and tenderly written. Fantastic.” Chris Dolan, Author: Ascension Day
“In Scottish terms, it’s the most assured short story collection since AL Kennedy’s Night Geometry and the Garscadden Trains and the most compelling Scottish literary debut since Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting. On an international level, it signals the emergence of a precocious literary talent - a heart-wrenching clutch of post-millennial fables”. Sunday Times.
“Set in Manhattan and Glasgow, these sleek, stylish and sexually explicit fables of modern anomie, mark the debut of Morrison - there is a complex and restless intelligence at work here, expressing compound thoughts in simple sentences that flow beautifully. It’s like someone you don’t know taking a disconcerting interest in you, putting their mouth so close to your ear you can feel their breath” Jennie Renton. Sunday Herald.
“Ewan Morrison’s debut is a collection of stories about anomie, cynicism, loneliness and sex . . . Male and female; straight, gay and bi; young and old; American and Scottish, they’re all looking for the same thing: a connection with someone, a new feeling. They’re vivid characters and their voices are all subtly different . . . Morrison leaves you some searing emotional passages and a handful of precious light moments.” Laurence Phelan, Independent on Sunday (****)
“A brilliant collection of searing short stories - deeply poignant” Richard Holloway. Cover Stories. BBC Radio Scotland
“Whereas (Michel) Faber’s versatility is a question of subject matter, Morrison excels in voice and form. Though he favors the monologue, some stories are told from three or four perspectives. Many manage to encapsulate entire lives and trajectories in the span of a few pages. His art can be seen at it’s finest in “Adagio”. The fragility and grief are in effective contrast to the bravado and true grit of Morrison’s customary narrative voice.” Aamer Hussein. The Independent Arts & Books Review.
“Scottish purveyor of erudite filth … you’re going to love Ewan Morrison’s debut collection, The Last Book You Read.” Arena
“a mesmerizing, no-holds-barred collection of short stories” The Herald
“A confident and heartfelt selection of stories which flit between Scotland and America . . . Convincingly writing all ages and both sexes in the first person, Morrison equals the everyman patter of Irvine Welsh and the personable logic of Iain Banks. Yet there is also a precise mixture of the uncompromising and the tender that’s all his own, and a full-length debut novel will be eagerly anticipated.” David Pollock, The List (****) “Remarkably confident. An obvious influence is the work of short-story master Raymond Carver, which, as influences go, isn’t a bad one to have. Morrison has, however, poured enough of his own brand of creeping desolation into the scenarios to make these stories his own . . . There isn’t a duff story out of the 14 on offer, and there are at least a couple of exceptional ones . . . Scenes are often set with cinematic precision, and the dialogue bristles with energy. As debuts go, this is auspicious.” Doug Johnstone, The Herald
“Internet blind dates, a man who is penning The Adulterer’s Guide, a woman planning on seducing a friend’s husband; such fragile characters and more are featured in this rampant debut.” The List (”Best Naughty Scottish Debut” from The Books Issue)
“Morrison’s narrative voice has the perfect level of confidence and the rawness of the emotions really stings - this book’s got soul!” David Mackenzie, director of Young Adam
“A Scot finds his voice in America in these wonderfully assured stories.” Bernard McLaverty
“The Last Book You Read and Other Stories’ skillfully evinces the spiritual desolation and desperation, the intense sexual parabolae, of life in the echo chamber that is advanced capitalist society. Yet sewn subtly through the fourteen stories linked narratives are the glistening threads of hope, connection… maybe even of love.” Suhayl Saadi, Author: Psychoraag
“Similair to ambitious American film projects such as Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993), Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia (1999) or Paul Haggis’s Crash (2005)…Morrison is concerned with the indispensible necessity of personal relationships, the heroic effort it takes to initiate, trust and maintain them as well as the common everyday trials inherent in being generally human in our globalised twenty first-century world…undeniably Morrison’s collection of short stories makes a contribution to contemporary world literature.” Bertold Shoene. Going Cosmopolitan: reconstituting Scottishness. The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature.
Contents
The Last Book You Read 4
Clean Sheets and a View of the Hudson 23
The Room 35
Audrey’s Party 48
Stoop 60
The Pier 83
Adagio 94
Her Body 112
Tina 126
Re: Your Ad 136
Couples 155
The Undoing of a Story
(i) The Special Place 171
187(ii) The Park 187
‘We tell ourselves stories in order to live.’
Joan Didion
The White Album
The Last Book You Read
I’m sitting in this bar on the Lower East Side waiting for Redordead. It’s a blind date – all she knows about me is that I’m called Cassandra – well, Cassandra05 to be exact. That’s me for sure. Cassandra. The seer. Who foresaw the destruction of Troy. Who ran through the streets screaming but no one would listen. It’s a terrible thing to see the future and not be able to do anything about it. I feel like that most days. We all do. Fuck it. I’m nothing special. There are at least four other Cassandras who use this stupid dating site.
It was about three weeks ago I filled in their dumb-assed personality profile for a laugh.
Hobbies: None
Interests: None
Religion: None
Earnings: None
Celebrity you resemble most: None
The four things you can’t live without:
I know what they’re up to here. You should see all the idiots on this site with their lists. Clarin’s night cream. Echinacea. Smoothies. Sushi. Belle and Sebastian. Manolo Blahniks. They think it’s quirky, cool, to determine who you are by the products you consume. What do your shoes say about you? What these people don’t know is that sites like this sell all this information to market research companies. 200 dollars for a thousand psycho-graphic profiles. So next time they want to make an ad to sell say an iPod to thirty-something media workers they’ll type in media workers, thirty, and get your favorite song, the song that makes you cry, and they’ll put it right there on their smart-assed fucking ad and you’ll weep and, somewhere in the back of your mind, you’ll say, ‘I need to get an iPod.’ I know all this shit because I work in market research. But I’m not telling them that on the profile.
The four things you can’t live without: Air, water, shelter, sleep
More questions.
The last book you read: None
Sexual preferences:
I hesitated on that one. Thought of a good one-liner – ‘The kind of girl that can give head without losing face.’ LOL-ed to myself but deleted it and put ‘None’ because I didn’t want to limit myself.
Next question –
What do you desire?: Surprise me
I hit return and it’s done. The last part at least is true. I don’t subscribe to the idea of desire. I’m all dried up. Can’t even play with myself anymore. Need someone else to come along and show me things I couldn’t even imagine. That’s the idea anyway. If someone comes up with something genuinely surprising for me to do, I’ll give it a try. Fuck it. Online dating isn’t dating – it’s market research into the question of whether life is worth living.
After I send it, I look over the posting and it contains absolutely no information about me whatsoever. I’m an empty page. It’s pretty impressive. Perhaps someone smart will get it. Another non-person like me. Maybe I’ll get thousands of hits. Be like some empty screen for other people to project their fantasies on to.
According to the site, I live nowhere – with no ZIP code, no roommates and no health insurance. The last part is at least true. I don’t know anyone my age who can afford health insurance. It’s the choice you make. Insurance or smoking. $59 a week. It comes to the same. There’s no real choice here. Choose life. Go to where the flavor is. Marlboro country.
If you could see me, you’d see that, as I write this, I’m naked. LOL. You wish. From toe to head. Converse sneakers, Diesel distressed denims, leopard-skin print G-string from Victoria’s Secret (from the ‘too slutty’ discount bin), T-shirt from a vintage store on St Marks that reads ‘color TVs in every room’. The bra is a cotton Nike sports bra because I no longer have a problem with sweatshops but I do have a problem with sweat. My hair cost $60 in a hairdresser’s in SoHo. It was way too gay so I added pink Aveda ‘shock’ stripes, just to make it gayer. C’mon. I’ve told you enough now for you to work it out. The neighborhood I live in? Fuck, the street. The floor even. If you had a PhD in anthropology, like I do, or worked freelance in psycho-graphics for one of the world’s biggest market research companies @ $6.50 an hour like I do, you’d have no problem in finding my apartment on the top floor of a loft on Bedford Avenue, Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Do the math. A PhD so I must be about twenty-nine. Right, so why am I sharing with a bunch of students at NYU, who eat Top Ramen, smoke weed, read Noam Chomsky and think that System of a Down are a political band? Why am I sitting in a café on the Lower East Side, waiting for a blind date with a thirty-five-year-old married woman?
Right, something must have happened to me – something really horrible – to throw me into such a state. Have a guess. It’s hard – really, it is. I’ve looked deep into myself and I can assure you there’s not much in there.
I almost got married. Seriously. Not the kind of thing you’d expect from someone with my T-shirt collection and my taste in Sub Pop records circa 1992. I blame Dostoevsky but that’s another story.
So I sent out the stupid thing and, before I left work, saw I had six messages – not bad for an hour.
It’s 1.30 now – the Niche Bar, like she said. There’s no sign of her – either that or she looks nothing like her photograph. She posted a photograph. I didn’t. Who would post a photo straight up? I mean that’s just looking for trouble – inviting stalkers and perverts. Redordead isn’t a communist. She has red hair, hence the name – simple really. There’s no thirty-seven-year-old women in here with red hair.
So I look around to kill the time. By the window, there’s a modern-day Kerouac. Levi’s cowboy boots, faded 501s, retro gas-station shirt, number two army-style haircut, Jack Daniels. Mid thirties. Worked for a decade in the retail sector and dreams of giving it all up, getting an old Galaxy 500 and driving across The States. College educated. Hates consumerism. Not married but in a long-term relationship without children. Impending commitment crisis as desire to hit Route 66 looms closer. Thinks he’s in touch with the ‘real man’ inside him. Unaware that he’s been copying a nostalgic model in the same way as 50’s diners. I can see this just by looking at him. If she doesn’t turn up, I might go over and speak to him, just to see how many points I scored.
Still no sign of Redordead. I begin to worry that I’m going to be stood up. It would serve me right as this isn’t really a date at all. I’ve got no intention of actually speaking to her. I just want to see what she’s really like. Well, I think that’s what I’m doing here. I have to stop drinking so many grande skinny lattes, just in case I go hyper and do something stupid.
Noise from the bar. It’s your typical bunch of blue-collar creeps. The kind of guys who think that Gap chinos are dress wear, that S&M means sales and marketing and who write 9/11 as their most humbling moment on internet profiles, right next to 91/2 Weeks as their favorite love scene. They don’t see the irony.
Surprise me. The first surprise is how many angry replies I got. To come across a woman who is a blank slate. Who is potentially up for anything. ‘YOU ARE HOPELESSLY EMPTY!’ said Galahad45. This is terrifying to some men it seems. Like their first sexual encounter or their most challenging lover. ‘C’mon, how big is it?’ ‘I’m a hole so fill me.’ ‘Surprise me!’ They shrivel up.
‘What the hell do you want?’ writes Apex21. ‘To fuck junkies or go sky-diving?’
‘If you’ve got so little interest in everything, you’re a loser. Why don’t you just kill yourself?’ says Timor10003.
‘You think you’re open – you should become open to the possibility of waiting for me in a hotel room, spread-eagle with a bag on your head,’ said Astral201.
‘Your ad sounded kinda cynical and bored – seen it all before. You’ve got a piss-poor attitude. How could anyone be bored in New York City? This is the greatest city in the world. People like you piss me off,’ said KarmaComa5. ‘So, yeah, I’ve got plans for you – knock that attitude out of you.’ LOL.
Then there was the reply from the Wall Street trader who wanted to save me from myself with line dancing and Jesus. Two offers from mixed-race couples looking for a threesome. One, from a man who called himself a magician, contained words like sexploration and had a link to a web site with hand-carved dildos that he called wands.
New York – so many people wanting to fuck themselves into a different life.
The bar is slowly filling up. PIBs (people in black) and other indie wannabes. Given her profile, she should stand out in here. Redordead is either fashionably late or standing me up.
It’s not the first time I’ve done this. I had a blind date last Friday with some other Sarahslist guy. Met him in some ethnic bar in the village that he’d handpicked for the occasion as a symbol of his multiculturalism and authenticity. So we did the small talk. He asks me what I’m into. The last book I bought, CDs, clubs. Are you spontaneous, romantic? What do you enjoy? Biking, movies, cooking, white-water rafting or the gym. This is what passes for dialogue in this city. Would you say that you have a GSOH? Are you fun, caring, sensitive, serious, goal oriented or other? None of the above.
I think, fuck it, I couldn’t give a shit about who I am. My interests are not interesting. I decided to play the psycho-graphics game with him. You tell me about me, I tell you about you. Like Paul Newman and that actress in Fort Apache, the Bronx. The person who guesses best gets bought a drink by the loser. He doesn’t get it so I go first.
I read his clothes, Old Navy denims. Suede Hush Puppies – bought by a wife, I say. He laughs nervously and starts playing with his wedding-band finger. I tell him that half an hour ago, he had a wedding ring there, which is now probably hidden in his wallet. He drinks, nervousness mounting. He’s had three in the time it’s taken me to get through a half. Drinking problem, I say. Repression. ‘You’re a forty-one-year-old social worker. Two kids. Reached the top of the career ladder and you feel disillusioned by your inability to help people. Midlife crisis. You’re here to have an illicit affair.’ I’m on a roll. He keeps nodding. His expression is turning from amazement to something which could be anger.
‘Your favorite book is Catcher in the Rye,’ I say, ‘read when you were eighteen. You think that everyone around you is a phoney, like Holden Caulfield did. You fantasize about fucking behind bookshelves in second-hand bookstores and cheap hotel rooms, having a secret life, which you hide from your wife. But I could be wrong.’
He finishes his drink, ‘Goddamn, goddamn, you’re a smart chick,’ he says. I’m right on about 90% apparently. He thinks this is fantastic. Feels a connection.
This makes me uncomfortable. I tell him it’s his turn. ‘Tell me about me.’ He can’t do it. Like most men his age, he’d rather talk about himself. All the while he’s talking, I’m getting more and more depressed as everything he says conforms to what I guessed about him. He asks if I mind that he’s married.
‘Of course not,’ I say. ‘Look, can we just cut the crap, go to your hotel room and fuck?’
He keeps pawing my leg in the cab. Sure enough he has a room in a midtown, midrange chain hotel. He’s on the bed and he can’t get it up. He apologizes profusely. Drunk too much already he says. But I’m amazing. What a chick. One in a million. Never been with such a smart, attractive woman. Can’t understand why he can’t deliver. Perhaps if he had a little sleep? He starts to talk about his wife. How he feels a stronger connection with me than he’s felt with her in years. Tells me her name. Sally. Never could have kids. Tried. I get that rising feeling inside which could be bile or tears. I get dressed and say the bye-byes.
Redordead still isn’t here. I get the feeling I’ve been played for a sucker. Fine. You can expect this with married people. It’s like those men whose wives sign them up for a vasectomy then they get scared and don’t show. Pity, I’ve never been with a woman before. Not that I would go with her but all the same. Since we’re on marriage and I’ve time to kill I think it’s time I told you about Dostoevsky. Notes from the Underground. Found it on a stoop in Brooklyn Heights. Lovely, how people dump books they don’t need anymore – out there, on their stoops, for you to pick up. Not the kind of book I would buy. Too deep – not that I don’t read deep books. I mean all of us smart asses have done our fair share but Dostoevsky – it’s like one of those things you keep for your retirement. Anyway, Notes from the Underground. It’s all about this guy who is too smart but not smart enough – ‘crippled by his own intelligence’. He looks at people and sees how their lives will be – like Cassandra. Anyway, he gets sick of it. Knowing too much. Analysis paralysis. Being always the outsider. So he decides better to take part than be the onlooker – throw yourself in. He flirts with addiction – better to wake up each day with a desperate need than to feel nothing. He wants to know what it’s like to want, to be hungry, to feel, to breathe, to just fucking feel something. So he decides to fall in love. Makes himself do it – like some kind of experiment. And he knows how absurd this is. How can you make yourself fall in love? But he’s so sick of his own stupid intelligence that he becomes obsessed with it. Pushes himself on. Goes through the pains, the passions. Now, actually, here, I’m not sure that I’ve got the right book. It was a period in my life when I was reading anything, picking stuff up, just looking for an escape. It may have been Kierkegaard even. Whatever, the idea was there. To stop being such a fucking smart ass and feel something about something for a change. So I went for it. Pretty much decided that it would do me good and fastened myself on to the first fucking man that came along. I mean that was the point, right? So who it was didn’t matter. Seriously. And, although the whole thing started off as an exercise and, yes, I took notes and everything, damn it, after a while, it did start to feel real.
His name was Karl but he’d never read Marx. I moved in with him. I learned how to cook and how to relax enough to have an orgasm with someone. And it was great. And when he was away for, like, a few hours, I’d get that feeling in my guts. That rising feeling that could be bile or it could be tears but which was really just emptiness. Literally. I couldn’t really do anything when he wasn’t around. Eat. Sleep. And the best thing of all was that, for months, I didn’t think about myself at all. At all. Didn’t have one smart-assed ironic cynical thought at all. All I wanted to know was what time he’d be back. What we were having for supper. Would we watch a movie or just go to bed?
And we we’re fucking and I say, ‘I want a baby.’ And I’d be hearing myself saying this and it’s such a fucking cliché but, just that very fact, the very fact that I’m talking such clichéd Middle-American, fucking airport-novel crap, this moved me and, for the first time ever, I got this real sense of belonging and need and, fuck it, I do want to have kids and I do want to have a home in the stinking suburbs and breastfeed and have mastitis and stretch marks and no career and be on Valium because all that is real and we’re fucking and I swear I’ve never come so hard in my life. When you fuck to have kids, Jesus, there must be some switch gets flicked – you cry with joy. You do. Well, I did.
But then he pulls out and he’s freaking out. Am I crazy? What about our future? I am still on the pill? Let’s be reasonable here.
He didn’t get it at all. And then this is the joke. He dumps me because I’m too fucking deep. Too fucking deep! And I spend a week crying. Nausea, insomnia. And I’m not being ironic here at all. I knew I was doing that ‘can’t eat, can’t sleep’ routine. I knew it was pathetic but it felt real – it was fucking real. It was interior. Like period cramps or hunger pangs.
But then I confront him – your classic last-ditch attempt. I tell him I love him and I’m overwhelmed as I say it. It’s like the cliché that every cliché is true and no one realizes this till they really do one. It’s humbling. To admit you’re that low. It feels like drowning – like letting go – and there’s something beautiful about it. And I’m explaining this to him and he thinks it’s just weird. Too intense. So then I freak and it’s just rage – pure fucking rage – and I tell him how the whole thing was just a fucking experiment. It’s nothing to do with him. He’s a John Doe. It’s all Dostoevsky. I show him the book. The fucking page.
So, I don’t know if that makes much sense. But, anyway, I’m doing this online dating thing now and, well, as they say in New York, ‘It’s all good.’ But where the fuck is Redordead? Fine – she’s played me at my own game. She may not be real anyway. Just another fictional persona on the internet. Some perv doing it for kicks. She might be that nineteen-year-old guy over there in the Slipknot T-shirt who keeps laughing to himself.
So why did I reply to her? Because she was a woman and she would be my first? Because she read Raymond Chandler? Or had a Japanese manga movie down as her favorite sex scene? Or was only five feet tall and had a subscription to Barely Legal and a dead yucca tree beside her bed? Or liked to watch women’s Olympic synchronized swimming ‘for all the wrong reasons’? Or because, like me, she worked for Satan? No, it was because she upset me.
She wrote, ‘What could possibly have happened to you to make you so cynical and angry? Are you OK?’ The message was the shortest I’d received but it was the only one that really disturbed me. How fucking dare she presume so much. But something about what she said was right. I gave away absolutely nothing about myself but still she could tell I was angry. It took me three days to reply – three days in which I could barely concentrate at work because I was thinking up replies for her. Am I OK? What had happened to me? Had she read my mind or was I reading too much into it? I wrote six different replies and dragged them all into the trash.
Finally, on the Friday, after three Mohitos at lunch, I wrote, ‘In reply to your question ‘What made me so cynical and angry?’, I guess everyone I know and everyone I see is selling out and settling down. And all they’re interested in is meeting people from the same demographic – same books, CDs, clothes, lifestyle – and this is supposed to be romantic! Everyone is turning into clones. How can you commit to a life that you despise? What commitments have you made? What stops you from being cynical and angry? PS I’m not cynical but I do hate you and that’s a good start.’
It was only in the morning I realized I’d actually sent it. I woke up with my make-up and T-shirt still on with a stinking hangover and AOL told me I had two new messages. I tried to ignore them. But, halfway through showering, I couldn’t stand it anymore. There it was:
First Message. 10/05/04 3:12 am.
I’m glad you hate me and that’s OK. I’m not too fond of myself either. I can understand where you are coming from now. OK. Me. Where do I start? I live in Elisabeth, New Jersey. I was married at twenty-eight. Married the man who made me pregnant. I have an seven-year-old daughter, Sophie, who means everything to me. But I love women, I’m sure of that now. Before I met my ex, I was having flings with men and deep feelings for women. I thought that getting married would change me, make me straight, stop me fantasizing. I thought if I made a commitment. Something so big I could never walk away from, it would force me to change. Save me from myself. But I was wrong. I never felt understood by men, and sex was pure math. I’d steal kisses from girlfriends. Get drunk at parties and scare them. I knew I had to be a good wife and mother, but there was this one woman. Charlotte. She was a neighbor, married. No kids. We met at a dinner party. For the first time in years I felt there was chemistry. We shopped together, went for walks, talked about married life. Went dancing, had girls’ nights out. She was rock ’n’ roll, a rebel. Took me to gigs. We became best friends. It happened one day in the car park of Safeway in her SUV. She was going through a hard time with George. She was crying. I held her and before we knew what was happening we were kissing. We went back to her place and made love. Really made love. For maybe a month we saw each other every few days. But then George found out. She told him when she was drunk. They moved away in three weeks and I had to come clean. My husband was so good about it. We stayed together for the sake of Sophie. He said he felt better now, that he knew why our sex life had always been bad. So we’ve made this deal. This is not some ‘partner will be present’ thing. He loves me but knows my needs. He said I was so much calmer when I was with Charlotte. How could I leave a man who is so understanding? So one day a week he lets me meet other women.
But it’s been hard to meet anyone. How many bisexual women are there in New Jersey? Where would I pick them up? PTA meetings? So I’m on the internet. I hope my situation doesn’t disgust you.
I’ll understand if you don’t reply. Please understand that, no matter how angry and cynical you feel, this is because, deep down you have love within yourself. Find it. Don’t give up. Life can be so beautiful, I promise you. I’ll be in the garden of the Niche Bar on 23rd Street, on the 12th at one o’clock. I have four hours.
Redordead (Debbie)
I didn’t understand why but I was in a panic by the time I’d finished reading it. I reread it and the panic only got worse. Some nouveau-riche adulteress tells me who I am. I have ‘love within myself’. Some typical D5 housewife with some typical midlife crisis and a porno-dyke fantasy. She reminded me of my mother. Stuck in suburban hell, getting drunk nightly on Gordon’s and Schweppes, weeping to Joni Mitchell and having fantasies she’d never have the guts to act upon. No, but it was too easy to typecast her. Upset. Yes, I was. You could take all the sex-magicians and line-dancing traders in the world and dice them. She’d cut through the crap and hurt me. Redordead. I felt like e-mailing her back a nice big fuck off. But then there was her second message. It read:
Ignore last message. Lied about everything. Even name. Sorry to have wasted your time.
That really fucked me. Was she lying about lying or just lying? It was possible. But it was more likely that she’d got drunk, e-mailed me the truth about her self then the next morning got scared. So I had it. The truth and now she was trying to deny it. There was little else to do but turn up at the Niche Bar and find out for myself.
It must be her. It could only be her. I duck behind my laptop and peer out of the corner of my eye. She’s standing by the door looking round, scanning the place – looking for Cassandra05. She’s five foot tall with red hair. A lot like her photo. Pretty but older. Exactly as you’d expect. She looks so out of place. Weird that, that someone would go on the net and tell nothing but the truth about themselves. Naïve, I guess, but endearing. She goes to the bar and orders a coffee – a regular with half-and-half. I sit, head down, pretending to type. She sits two tables away under the canopy. I turn slightly and can see her more clearly by raising my eyes from the screen. The only moment of anxiety is when she’s got herself comfortable and sits staring in my direction. Shit. But it’s OK, she’s looking past me at the pretty Asian girl. Look at her, ultra-lo chick. Lo-tar Marlboros, lo-carb salad, lo-slung top, lo-caffeine Pepsi. Does Redordead find that attractive? What’s happening to me? Is this jealousy? And why? Do I find her attractive? Is that why I’m shivering or is it just the whole deception thing that’s turning me on?
She must have picked this place because it’s one of the places in this city that you can still smoke. I’m grateful for that. Knew I’d be under pressure and that doing this without smoking would be impossible. Of course she’s a smoker – given her background. She’s lighting up a Menthol 100. Two types of people smoke Menthol 100s – African Americans and lower-middle-class housewives. They’re hardcore. The menthol opens up the capillaries in the lungs to let more tar in. The 100s give you two centimeters of extra tobacco. The advertising tries to convince you that they are more sophisticated than normal cigarettes, they smell better – herbal almost, aromatherapeutic. The packets are green to connote health. They stink of poverty and death. If I start dating her, we could make a pact to give up together. Or at least I could get her to change brands.
So, yes, she tallies. Suburban housewife. New Jersey. Looks like a Debbie. She was telling the truth. She has a plastic bag from Tiffany’s. It’s been used before. To keep a plastic bag because the brand name shows you once could afford to shop there. To reuse it and carry it as a sign of status. I try not to judge. She’s fascinating. She’s beginning to seem a little eccentric.
Her body is pretty toned. At least from the side. She has good firm tits. Probably doesn’t need the Wonderbra she’s wearing. Although, after having a child, she might. Redheads generally have good bodies. Sporty. This is not a typical psycho-graphic fact – I spotted this myself. Her top is tight. It’s YSL. Century 21 designer discount. YSL may still be fashionable in New Jersey but here he lives in the discount bin. Her hair. Not natural – red but dyed. Roots showing. Natural auburn but dyed even redder – looks like she’s used some home coloring kit, rather than going to have it done at a salon. Looks recently cut at the front. Probably kitchen scissors. Last night for the date. It looks too short, as if she tried to cut it straight and failed and had to keep cutting it, shorter and shorter to get a straight line.
Some things don’t add up in terms of her look. They make sense only now that she’s told me so much about herself. She’s got an old grunge T-shirt on. Mudhoney, ’89 Borderline, fairly obscure. But then I work it out, she must have got it from her lover – the next-door neighbor, Charlotte, the rebel. They’d be together in her place and Charlotte would put on all her old grunge records as they made love and screamed the walls down. An hour together, clinging in sweat, to the sounds of Cobain, then out to school to pick up her kid. So it’s a souvenir of a lost love. She wears it each time she goes to pick up a woman. That’s kind of touching. But then I see the sadness of it. I see her walking round IKEA with her husband and daughter. The same T-shirt on, having to excuse herself, to go to the restroom, and there having a secret Menthol 100 in a locked cubicle, checking her messages desperately for news of her lover, while her daughter looks at the self-assembly dollhouses and tries to blackmail Daddy into buying her the new Boys ’R’ Us CD when they go to the mall and her husband wonders where the hell she’s got to.
Redordead. I’ve worked out her name. It means if I can’t be me, I’d rather be dead. That’s what it means. She’s lucky to know who she is.
She’s reaching for a book. Probably a chick-lit novel. But, no, Jesus! It’s Dostoevsky. Did I tell her I read it? Or is this one of these weird fucking déjà-vu things. The conversation starter. ‘Oh, my God, you’re reading my favorite book!’ ‘We’ve got so much in common!’ ‘I feel I know you already!’ Maybe she’s on some self-improvement fad? Or it’s for show? Or maybe this book came to her as it came to me? Cutting through all the crap? Maybe she’s been carrying it around for years? Mulling over the questions. The dark possibility the book opens up. That life could be different. That we’re all just acting roles we didn’t choose. That we could just get up and go. Notes from the Underground. I want to ask her about the book. I must have been staring at her because now she’s looking back at me. She smiles a little. She’s trying to work out if I’m Cassandra05. She’s looking at my body. Jesus. I pick my nose to try to look unattractive and pretend to type even faster.
I peer round the side of the laptop. She’s crossing her legs. Her shoes. Nine West, mid-range party shoes, down at the heel. Three or so years out of date. She must just have one pair of strappy heels like this. These are her ‘sexy shoes’. The only people who wear these at a quarter after one in Manhattan are kids who’ve been out all night and have just got up or, I guess, women like her, thirty-five, struggling to be sexy on a blind date. She’ll have walked too far in them today. I try to suspend judgment and take another look.
Then I see it. A BAND-AID on her heel. Not a regular BAND-AID – it’s got some kind of design on it. Pink. A picture. Jesus, it’s Barbie! A Barbie BAND-AID. They do that now – product placement on domestic goods, then charge you extra for the privilege. Kid’s screaming, ‘No, not that kind – I want a Barbie one, a Barbie one!’ The kid is bleeding – what do you do?
The shoes hurt her feet. They are three years old but she wears them so infrequently that they are still not broken-in. She has a blister from her day job. What to do? Wear sensible shoes on a blind date or wear the painful sexy ones and cover up the blister. She’s already wasted hours this morning, no doubt, deciding what to wear to see me. She was running out of time and, after an hour of wearing the shoes in her suburban home, already her feet were killing her. Running out of time. She couldn’t find a BAND-AID anywhere. There were only the branded ones her daughter has – Shrek or Barbie. The Shrek ones are green, Barbie, pink. At least the pink will be harder to see, closer to skin color. That’s what she must have thought.
I’m starting to feel pretty guilty about this now. She’s lit another Menthol and she’s looking about for me. Thankfully this place is full of singles with laptops – what place isn’t? And so I’m fairly invisible. But still she’s glancing up at me. Jesus, if she was to come up to me . . . I’m blushing. Keep writing. Anything.
She’s biting her nails now. Fuck. I’ve kept her waiting half an hour now. There’s no way – no fucking way – I’m going to talk to her.
She’s got up and she’s ordered a cocktail. Time to move on to alcohol. A Manhattan. Typical exotic drink for a New Jersey housewife. She’s looking around. Searching the room. I’m not her type, really. I wonder what she thinks I’m really like. Probably thinks I’m a classic 1980’s dyke. She’s checking her cell phone, to see if there’s a message from me. I can’t bear this. I should just go up and say hello. We don’t have to make love – I just want to tell her that I’m here. Say hello. It’s all been a mistake but her story has moved me. One of those awkward ‘touched by human compassion’ moments. Life is hard and I care for you but there’s no future in it. Shit but the thing is that I do find her attractive and she is reading Dostoevsky.
She walks past my table. She may be small but she’s curvy. Like Kylie. Hourglass figure. I see myself holding her hips as I go down on her. Want to see her throw back her hands and grip the bed porno style. Her legs are so thin. The bones, fragile. So feminine. Shit, but I’ve never done this before.
OK, OK, if I go up to her, the first thing I do is apologize and tell her my real name.
She’s sitting now, sipping her cocktail. Not gulping it down, like you’d imagine. She seems so confident. Not the sad adulterous housewife I know she is. She’s done this before, no doubt. This isn’t the first time she’s been stood up either. Probably happens every week.
Fuck, another fifteen minutes have gone by, with me throwing furtive glances like some dumb teenager. She’s downed her Manhattan and she’s walking towards me. It’s going to happen. Prepare myself. My voice will be squeaky, I know it. I’ll start giggling and laughing and she’ll have me. Nailed. Right, right. I prepare myself. I take off my sunglasses and look up at her. I go to speak. But, no, she’s walked right past me. Jesus, no. She’s walking over to ultra-lo chick. Christ. What have I done? Then I hear her voice. So deep and cracked sounding for someone so small. Gentle and sexy. ‘Excuse me but are you Cassandra?’
I can’t look.
But I hear the girl. She’s so rude. ‘What? Am I what?’
‘Sorry, I was . . . I thought you were someone else.’
Silence then.
The stupid lo-tar bitch laughs. Laughs at her.
Redordead walks past me, trips a little with her heels on and goes back to her drink. But it’s empty. She’s blushing. I can feel the warm glow of her humiliation from over here. She can’t sit still. Ultra-lo chick must be staring at her. She’s lighting another Menthol. She reaches out to the waiter. To order another drink? To get the check? She doesn’t know what to do anymore. She’s going to pieces, fishing around for her purse.
I have to go up to her and apologize. Feel so fucking guilty. I want to hold her, kiss her, right here. Hold her hand under the table and whisper, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here.’ I want her to take me somewhere and hold me. Somewhere private, and lick and kiss every inch of my body. And she’ll stroke my hair and whisper over and over that it’s going to be OK. And I’ll beg her to bite me, to mark me, break my skin. Please, please. But she’ll just keep stroking my head, telling me it’s wrong. Stop it, she’ll say, you don’t really want this. You just want to feel something because you’re so numb. You want to be hurt just to know you can still feel. Be strong. You know you can be. Try just for once. Try to feel my touch. How gentle it is. Try to feel me holding you. And my body will convulse with tears and the words will come stammering out. ‘Oh, God. I love you, I love you so much.’ And I can see myself with her and with her and her daughter. We’re walking through some mall together in New Jersey, the girl swinging on our arms. And it feels like the future and I want to cry. God, tears of joy – what’s happening to me? This stupid fucking café. I hope she can’t see me. I’m hiding behind my laptop. Fuck it I was going to speak to her, say her name, ‘Debbie. Debbie, I’m over here.’ I really was but look at me now – I’m a mess. I blow my nose on the napkin and look up.
She’s getting up to go now. She looks calm, dignified but her face is harder. This has definitely happened to her before. I try to avoid her gaze. She walks straight towards me. I turn my head away. And, as she passes my table, her bag brushes my shoulder. It sounds like she whispers something. I’m not sure but it could be the word goodbye.
She doesn’t look back though I want her to. I sit there for five or so minutes, staring at the skin which is forming on the top of my stupid fucking grande skinny latte.
Clean Sheets and a View of the Hudson
‘I can’t believe we’re doing this for real,’ she said.
He didn’t want her to change her mind so he changed the subject. ‘Did you buy something special for the occasion?’ He gently ran the back of his hand over her thigh, searching for the line of her garter belt. She looked up at the taxi driver then put her hand on his.
‘I’ll bet he knows what we’re up to,’ she whispered. ‘Probably driven hundreds of people like us there before.’
He linked his finger in hers and laughed.
She was still nervous. ‘How did you find the hotel anyway? I’ll bet this isn’t your first time.’
‘Yeah and I always use the same taxi,’ he said. ‘Relax.’ Telling her to relax wasn’t helping. ‘Some hotels have “refresher rates”. Isn’t that a great phrase? Means they rent rooms by the hour in the middle of the day.’
She was fidgeting. Her confidence was fading.
He squeezed her hand and leaned in closer. ‘We could just check in and, if you don’t want to go through with it, we could . . . I dunno . . . hold hands and laugh about it for an hour.’
She turned to face him and smiled.
‘Victoria’s Secret,’ she said, ‘bought them yesterday – as you said, just for the occasion.’
He leaned in and kissed her cheek.
‘Typical,’ she said.
The Sunshine Motel was at the start of the piers, by the expressway. The ad had read ‘Clean sheets and a view of the Hudson’. As they approached it, he looked out and saw it for the first time – a building in isolation, nothing but old warehouses around it. Like a solid concrete block with windows. An anonymous functional building built precisely for the anonymous function they were about to perform. It wasn’t the Hilton.
He paid the driver with the stack of cash he’d taken out of the ATM that morning. Holding hands, they nervously walked towards the main door. A surveillance camera was above them.
‘Perhaps we shouldn’t . . .’ she said. ‘People might . . .’
‘Sure,’ he took his hand back. ‘You got your driver’s license?’
They’d been through all this already – ten times or more. At a certain point a month ago, they’d passed from questions of why they should do it to discussing the details of how. It had been an exciting time. When would it happen? Should they take a day off work or make it a long lunch? Where would they go? What name would they use? What would they say to the receptionist? They’d have to pay in cash so it didn’t appear on his credit-card statement. All the time, it was the same joke. ‘I can’t believe we’re really going to do this.’ But the growing obsession with details had pulled them, somehow, beyond doubt. Now they were here.
They stood in the reception area, struggling to keep straight faces. He hovered anxiously with the money in his hand. The receptionist looked Middle Eastern, Moroccan maybe, bored. He was behind thick glass, bulletproof perhaps. There was another surveillance camera above his cubicle window. The Moroccan looked him up and down. He lowered his head, imagining his face on some monitor that was being recorded. She was trying to have a conversation with the guy. She’d insisted on having some story prepared, about how they were tourists from out of town. Jet lag. A nap in the middle of the day, before sightseeing. But now she was struck by stage fright. The script they’d worked out was falling apart.
‘Shall I?’
‘Will you?’
‘Driver license – ID.’
‘Forty-eight.’
‘One hour or two?’
‘Do I have to fill this in?’
‘Should I tip?’
‘My signature or . . .?’
‘It’s the 23rd, right?’
“One hour or two?”
‘Room 212.’
‘Two hours, right?’
‘212.’
‘Seems a nice place.
‘Is there a view or . . .’
‘Upstairs.’
Minutes later, it was over and they were walking up the creaking stairway. A South American cleaning lady bundled sheets out of a room. An elderly white man passed them swiftly, followed seconds later by an Asian teenager who could only have been a hooker.
‘You really know how to make a girl feel special,’ she said.
‘Quite a joint, huh? Nothing but the best for you.’ He was nervous and saying all the wrong things. But he couldn’t stop.
‘See that camera back there?’ he said. ‘Maybe this place is like some professional blackmail shop. A month later, you get a photo and a letter demanding half a million. There’s probably hidden cameras in all the rooms.’
Since they’d climbed the stairs, something had happened. She’d picked up some kind of confidence and now he was the nervous one. Talking nonsense.
‘God, it’s so . . . I’m really sorry about this . . . I. Jesus. You see the décor. It’s so . . . Everything you’d expect, really.’
And it was. The corridor walls were lilac with borders. There were plastic yucca plants covered in dust. The whole place looked like a porno set. You push the walls and they’d fall over. Props.
She wasn’t paying attention. ‘Well, this is it,’ she said, pausing dramatically by the door.
Room 212. They stopped and stared. For a moment neither was sure who had they key or who was to make the first move. He tried a joke. ‘Shall I carry you over the threshold, Mrs Smith?’
‘Stop it!’
‘Am I having a déjà vu or are we in a bad movie?’
‘Maybe you’ve been here before with someone else?’
‘Here, you take the key – my hands are shaking.’
She opened the door and there it was. Bright pink. Chintz and frills. A circular mirror on the ceiling. Another one behind the bed and on the wardrobe doors. A TV mounted high on the wall.
‘Fuck.’
‘It’s a joke.’
‘Look at the ceiling.’
‘I don’t ever want to look at the ceiling.’
They locked the door, edged round the tiny space by the bed and laughed. He sat down first. She was pacing.
‘It’s so fucking clichéd,’ she said.
‘Wait, it gets worse.’ He went into his bag and pulled out a bottle. ‘Champagne!’
‘Fuck.’
‘C’mon, sit beside me.’ He patted the mattress.
She went to sit down, then changed her mind and started to look for glasses. He fumbled with the foil and the cork, looking over at her, wondering how far this would go. At any moment, either of them could get up and leave. He realized he should have got a decent room in a regular place. It would only have been another $30. She came back through with a plastic tumbler for toothbrushes and a teacup and a smile. The cork popped. Bubbly pouring on the bed.
‘You’re spilling it.’
‘Who cares? I’ll bet they have a plastic under-sheet.’
‘Gross!’
He put his hand under the sheets.
‘Yup, they do.’
She sat across from him. Holding the tumbler and the cup, impatient. It was impossible to relax in a place like this.
‘Come on – I’m not doing anything till we drink at least half of this.’
He poured, pulling a face that he thought looked like a French waiter. When he finished pouring, he turned the bottle in his hand as French waiters do. ‘Le Ch[please insert an a circumflex here]teau Bordel, soixante-neuf.’
She giggled.
He wondered if she spoke French. He’d never asked.
She was fluctuating wildly between laughing at the whole thing and having serious doubts. ‘It’s all so . . . I dunno . . . Fatal Attraction,’ she said.
‘You going to boil my bunny?’
‘You have a bunny?’
‘A dog, actually.’
They knew very little about each other’s home lives – that was clear to him now. They had, in fact, avoided the subject. This was no time to start. He held up his plastic tumbler.
‘To adultery.’
‘Whatever – cheers.’
They threw the first one back swiftly and poured a second. After the next glass, he detected a change in her.
‘Mrs Smith, are you giving me a come-hither look?’
‘Might be.’
‘Shall we . . . perhaps we should attempt the kiss thing.’
‘You’re such a pro.’
She leaned over to kiss him. They banged their teeth together. Awkwardness. A cup and a tumbler and a bottle in their hands. Both on opposite sides of the bed. Spatially all wrong.
‘Sorry.’
‘We should . . .’
‘Shall we . . . I dunno . . . lie down?’
‘That would seem to be the done thing.’
They put the things on the bedside unit, lay back and stared up at the mirrored ceiling. She laughed but the laugh stuck in her throat. It was a shocking sight. Looking up at themselves looking down. An overview – which was the last thing they needed right now. For a moment he felt remorse. Thought about his wife, Sandra. The daily lunchtime call. He fought the feeling and slowly moved his hand to her breast while he looked at his movements in the ceiling mirror. There was the image and there was the touch. The two things seemed disconnected. The feel of her frilly bra, the softness of her breast, the nipple going hard with his touch. And the sight above of two middle-aged adulterers together in a bed, like two extras in a porno film, waiting for directions.
‘I can’t. That fucking mirror.’
‘Don’t look then.’
She got up. ‘I have to go to the bathroom.’
‘To slip into something cooler?’
‘Whatever.’
She took her bag in with her and locked the door. He was suddenly very alone. Surrounded by reflections of himself. He could just get up and go. Leave her here. She was obviously freaked out by the place and her self-consciousness was making him nervous. Or they could just lie here and joke about what a mistake it had been, about how they should have gone to the Holiday Inn. They’d foreseen this. But that too was too predictable. He wanted to see the damn thing through, just to make a difference. Too many times already in his life, he’d got close to something like this only to back off. It needed a bold move, a leap of faith, to turn this from a bad joke into a reality. He should have just grabbed her and fucked her there and then. Torn the panties off her with his teeth. She was taking a long time. He started to undress and looked out of the window. There was no view of the Hudson like the advert had said. They were on the wrong side. Instead, the view was of the expressway and a derelict meat-packing warehouse covered in graffiti. A sign – ‘Mario’s Meats. Quality at its best’.
Taking off his pants, he pulled out the pack of three Trojans he’d bought earlier that day and set them on the side. It had taken an embarrassingly long time to choose the packet in the deli. So many varieties. Why would anyone want flavored? It had been a decade since he’d bought condoms. Strawberry, peach, pina colada. He went for the most normal looking packet he could see. It said ‘Regular’.
Seeing himself naked in the mirrors, he became conscious of his shape. His gut – too bloated from too many years of too many beers. He tried to hold it in and then flexed his chest muscles to pump them up a bit. The flesh around his nipples was saggy. The last few years he’d been developing something resembling breasts. Some kind of hormone change. Then he caught sight of his legs. Ridiculously thin in comparison to his gut. Too many years sitting at desks, on subways and in cars. And his cock. It had been so long since he’d seen it in a mirror. He pulled it a bit to make look more substantial, got under the sheets and waited.
She was taking a long, long time in there. He could hear the sound of water running, the toilet flushing. Had she been ill? Was she taking some medication that didn’t agree with the alcohol? Was it nerves? He knew her fairly well but not well enough to know what those little pink pills were that she popped discreetly each time he saw her. Perhaps she was anxious about the way she looked. She was after all a little older than him and he’d always been too polite to ask how much. But there was evidence. Every time they met in the bar, they always seemed to be playing Bob Dylan or Fairport Convention and she’d get excited.
‘Johnny’s in the basement mixin’ up the medicine, I’m on the pavement, thinkin’ ’bout the government.’ He’d mouth along to the words with her and she’d lean over and take his hand. ‘You look so much like him,’ she’d say. Dylan she meant. They’d sit like that holding hands – their touch hidden from the rest of the bar beneath the table. They’d take it as far as they could possibly go without kissing each other. Sometimes, he’d sit beside her in the booth and play discreetly with her thighs as they talked. She’d rest her hand on his knee. He told her he loved her hair. How her ass felt so firm. They joked from the start about how corny it all was. But somehow it turned them on to be weighing themselves up against the dead weight of cliché.