collective noise of the food court never bothered him. Only children, men, and unattractive women if they took his precious time with mindless chatter. If a fellow associate joined him at the table, he’d sigh and resume reading as if he or she were a stranger on a bus. If joined by a worthy female, of course, he tolerated the interruption. But the meeting was unlikely since women he preferred ate at places that wouldn’t make them fat. He actually believed this, and more telling, he saved the last ten minutes of his break to walk the cosmetic counters to flirt, tease, and compliment any of the ladies he’d like to see wearing less than their uniform and caressing something other than a spray bottle.
Stuart’s daily fix was similar to an obsessed shopper buying a pair of shoes after trying on a dozen—mouth-watering excitement coupled with indecision. Yet Stuart never bought the shoes, never committed to that one pair. The many colors and styles weakened his ability to ever buy, enjoy, and cherish a pair he could call his own. Or one could say he was a cheap ass who’d rather borrow, scuff up, and send back to its rightful owner before moving on to mooching the next pair.
His lack of commitment hadn’t gone unnoticed by few cosmeticians who’d already been with him or who’d been there long enough to witness his years of philandering. Stuart viewed these ladies as poisoned because he wasn’t deranged enough to put a ring on their finger. He knew the beauty of retail lied not in its product assortment or fancy displays, but in its high turnover. Flocks of new beauties arrived every few months in transition between school, a husband, or a better job. Stuart’s choices were endless.
He favored the girls in cosmetics over other departments for one simple reason: they smelled better. To Stuart every inch of their body had an arousing smell, the powerful megahertz of a rose. A vacuum-like energy that’d unplug any plugged nose by widening its nostrils and cleansing it of life. Giving him a renewed life.
He pleasured himself in knowing they looked and smelled as wonderful at the end of their shift as they did at the beginning. Eight hours of wiping counters, enhancing faces, and selling credit in hot fluorescent lights draped in polyester stooped in four-inch heels on hard tile would give any lovely female the stinks. Not them. Never them. Birthright or not, freshness was a basic entitlement and odor was sacrilegious. This was even more evident after Stuart’s jarring experience with a stunning handbag associate years ago.
He’d spot the Coach girl passing his area when given a store tour by her department manager. She had long jet-black hair with big brown luscious eyes and porcelain-like skin, complimented by the most gorgeous plump lips Stuart had ever seen. They were big and sumptuous and probably cost a paycheck or two.
For seven days she had filled his brain with fantasies and scenarios that made him swelter when he slept, irritable when he worked, and erratic when he did most anything else. Blinded by his own desires, he wondered how a woman controlled a man she hadn’t noticed or knew existed. Did she posses a power? Silly thought, but nonetheless a quality he didn’t share and a power he wished he had so he could wield it over her to fulfill his own desires.
So on the seventh day, he used his wand, that manipulative voice in his head to create a lie about a customer so blown away by her fabulous service she’d promise to tell her friends and write the CEO. This imaginary customer got him fifteen minutes, the cost of two lattes, and a small, shaky table at Starbucks. There, fifteen minutes turned into forty-five as he listened to her spout off about her college loans, her jobless ex-boyfriend, and her embarrassment of working retail. Other than the usual oh gosh, really, and wow, he said just two words. Two words of such power any imbalanced woman would be grateful to hear. Two words that warmed her heart and said he cared, two words that extended her biography another three hours at California Pizza Kitchen, two words that enabled a man like Stuart to get what he wanted after salad, pizza, and dessert, and by 3AM after another round, she’d be wearing his Oxford shift and he’d be making her a cheese omelet, two words and she’d save his number and hold thoughts of a future—two words: I understand.
Stuart knew to achieve his desired result meant striving for friendship before all else. He had to make them understand that he, and only he, understood their pain, whether imagined or real. Often this would take an entire night, sometimes a series of phone conversations or short chats during his lunch breaks over several days, and the rare occasion, where his smile was enough to get their number, set up a time, and see clothes vanish.
But the Coach girl had forced him to narrow his playing field to cosmeticians only. No different than a recreational drug user falling deeper when the tumble came at the expense of a single drug with the greatest high. Cosmeticians were Stuart’s crack. Their perfume-laced bodies gave him euphoria, and after climax, a crashing comedown. He wanted more, and after a few times with whatever fresh smelling gal, more was impossible because he couldn’t get it up any longer. He thought about taking Cialis, but he wasn’t sixty nor was he greedy nor did he have ties to any underground prescription drug peddlers.
He had to wait and conversing with a cosmetic girl after sex was unfeasible. In his view, they were brain soft because they knew nothing of sports and politics, only of clothes, matters of beauty, The Kardashians, and how to get a man. A harsh generalization, but Stuart lived this belief due to his own socialization process. He was basically a pig and it was fair to assume one doesn’t become a pig unless a paternal pig raised him. Nevertheless, his constant memory of this initial joy, this intense rush, meant using the end of his lunch breaks to satisfy newer cravings.
When unable to satisfy them at his workplace, he’d resume the hunt at Nordstrom’s, JCPenny, or Sephora after his shift. His mind created two female categories: fresh and vulgar. However, his sight wasn’t limited by traditional beauty standards. From a physical standpoint, many fresh females weren’t attractive, while many vulgar ones were. It depended on how they smelled and where they worked. Stuart knew to anyone but he, his reasoning was bizarre and inane. His phobia of bad smelling woman drove him, and even if he wanted, he couldn’t kick their manufactured odor out of his mind.
Blame the Coach girl. The one with the lips, the one who wouldn’t leave his dreams for days, and the one whose guts spilled onto him for hours. She’d be the e-coli on his patty, the life-threatening contaminant that gave him noxious judgment. When Stuart initially kissed her that night at his apartment, she became giggly and confessed, “I ran late this morning and I didn’t get a chance to get as ready as I’d like…I feel sticky.”
Stuart fixated on sticky and didn’t read code for I didn’t take a shower and I stink. If he weren’t so invested in being inside her, he’d have realized she was supposed to be sticky after the fact, not before.
He sat at the bed’s edge and her bareness towered over him. He spun her, holding a fifteen second view to savor the memory. He made sure to always get a fixed look of a woman’s backside in the light. In the dark, cellulite conscious ladies had leapt into bed, stripped, finished, and grabbed a sheet for cover while they dressed themselves between a toilet and a door, giving Stuart not enough fleshy crack to revel in.
After seven seconds, the Coach girl sneered in discomfort, while Stuart’s eyes rose in curious shock. She had the widest and hardest square bootie he’d ever seen, yet with a small and cushy waist. The ass wasn’t round as a b-ball or grip worthy as a tight laced pigskin as he’d hoped. No doubt, he thought, why she wore loose black skirts to hide such a large extensive area. He wondered what made her blessed on the front and cursed on the back, what foods her mother deprived her of or was it her love of Ding Dongs, how costly her alterations were to continually let out the seat, and the improbability of a hard and square ass ever turning soft and round.
“What are you waiting for?”
The Coach girl turned, smothering Stuart on the bed. Skin to skin and her scent crept into him past the point of no return. Her smell, a wicked mixture of moisture and two days of sweaty feet, arms, forehead, back, thighs, leather hand
bags, fading perfume, and bowel troubles from the previous afternoon, grew stronger with every position change.
One particular position that resembled more sumo wrestling than any Kama Sutra illustration was where Stuart got trapped by her awkward body shape and leathery smell that he couldn’t move, breathe, or feel his mouth for a long minute and striking images of milking cows getting slaughtered filled his head. After coming he gasped for air and felt his body rot and saw the whiteness of milk, the redness of blood, and the brownness of turd pummeling him in their three distinct shapes.
He rolled off the bed, hunching his shoulders into the bathroom, using the shower for shelter. Scorching water and his incessant scrubbing did little to remove her stink from his mind. Thirty-five minutes later, he exited through a fog cloud and wrapped himself in a towel, then proceeded into his room where he held his breath, putting on new flannel pajamas.
He sprayed Aqua Di Gio on his neck, wrist, and chest. Sanity required smelling himself. The enormity of the room’s odor, her dirty geometric ass, and the likelihood she’d want seconds burdened him. He turned down the stuffy electric