The Fuck-Up

“I don’t want to talk about it. It might sound rude but I’m really tired.”

“I am too.”

“I have a spare bedroom you’re welcome to use,” she replied.

“I can leave if you like,” I replied.

“Despite the fact that I don’t know you,” she began, “I don’t really want to be left alone now, and few things seem more depressing than waking up at night all alone.” Fine with me. She led me to one room and disappeared off into another. And then there was sleep. And then sounds awoke me. It was dark out, hours had passed. I dressed and joined her. She was making us some food, the TV was on, we watched. She still seemed dazed, preoccupied, violently silent. I got increasingly tired. After “Joh

“How dare you!” I bolted off the couch, expecting an Angela. It was light out.

“How fucking dare you!” she repeated, screaming into the telephone. “Ten years of all we’ve been through together! You little sleazebag! There’s no reason for you to, cause I’m tearing up all your clothes! Some little bitch just out of secretarial school has to be the one to tell me!”

There was a tense pause. She held the phone to her ear. I awoke and realized she was speaking to him. This would be the interlude when he would be pleading, begging, wallowing, crying, punching his genitals, and quickly trying to hammer together a perspective that would minimize his crime: “I’m just a lonely middle-aged man whose life has amounted to a hill of beans. I started my first business day when I was twenty-one, fresh out of college, and now I’m forty-five, and that prototypical business day—right down to the one o’clock lunch with the boys—hasn’t changed. Twenty of my most fertile years, Gle

The longer Gle

“What’s up?” I asked for the verdict.

“It’s over.”

“What did he say?”

“It doesn’t matter. Nothing he can say can change any of it. He fucked everyone in that office that could type over ten words per minute.”

I sensed that she didn’t care to reexplore the event. Although she was in her mid-thirties, that morning, as the sun came into the window, after all the tears and sleeplessness, she looked fresh out of puberty. Her current frame of mind probably made the future seem bleak and lonely. She had suffered a slight death. So I got up from where I was sitting and sat down next to her. Gently I put my arm around her and gave her a peck on the cheek. She was icy cold and I held her paternally, but she just calmly pulled away. After a couple of minutes, when oxygen made its way back up to her brain, and when her lost blood had been replaced, she murmured, “What a schmuck.”

I wasn’t sure whether she was referring to me or the guy on the phone until she kissed me. I started softly kissing her face, along the ridge of her collarbone, undoing her blouse buttons, moving down along her breast. All the while I expected her at any moment to properly stop me. I wondered if perhaps I wasn’t taking advantage of her at a vulnerable moment.

When she led me into her bedroom, I could see all the traces of him, the cologne on the bureau, his satin and monogrammed robe, and so on. She slowly massaged, rubbed and tickled over me in the course of the afternoon and early evening.

In the few days since I met her, I thought of her as neither promiscuous nor giving, but I had lucked out. It was all timing. I had won all the love sired by spite. I made attempts at reciprocating, but it had been so long since I had been on the receiving end that I couldn’t bring myself to put an end to her outpouring.

When I awoke, it was afternoon the next day, I could feel her gently stirring against me, nude to nude. She opened her eyes slowly and then burst open her arms in a yawn. Through the lace curtains the sun softly speckled everything, and from the backyard beyond the windows, I could hear birds chirping. There were no sounds of sirens, pigeons or sidewalk crowds.

“I’m ravenous,” she whispered, and the kissing started again. But just when she started loosening and I began stiffening, she broke off and led me off into her bathroom. It was the size of a studio apartment. A Jacuzzi was sunken into the floor and after it was filled and turned on, we slid in. Water of equatorial temperature whirled around us making creamy bubbles, and we made love again. Slowly towelling me off, she pampered me, first with a lotion and then with a powder. She then led me back into the bedroom. I felt a combination of rebirth and redevirgination. My skin was never silkier. We both began to dress, until she saw what I was wearing. “You can’t wear those clothes.”

Leading me to a deep closet filled with enough men’s clothes to stock a store, she picked out an expensive suit, a new Armani shirt complete with cellophane wrappings, pins and the cardboard necking. She spent the longest time finding the exact tie. Everything was a little loose on me, but it was still pure extravagance. As I put it all on, I was grateful for the guy’s vanity. We locked arms, and Gle

The waiter, some young Pierre, brought over two silver platters with covers. When he opened the platters, the food was still sizzling. One plate was fish and the other was meat; both were nestled in unusual vegetables and sautéed in a terrific wine sauce. After two days of fucking and fasting, I was starving. Grabbing my utensils with both hands, I forked that food into my mouth faster than any farm boy ever flung hay. Soon Gle

“Really, you should masticate your food,” she commented.

“How are you going to pay for this?” I asked just to get the insecurity out of the way.

“With money,” she replied. “I write di

I continued eating at her pace, and felt somewhat insecure by the security and control she had about everything. Her remark about the meal being a “business expense” had put everything in its proper framework: the last two days were nothing more than business. After di