“Here we are. Come on, I’ll make us some coffee. I have a new espresso machine.”
“Ah, the gadget king!”
“Yep, that’s me!”
Pink stucco? His town house opened right on the street and we stepped onto his long narrow porch. The door concealed a lit private garden with a center fountain. The porch had rocking chairs and a joggling board, that most traditional of Lowcountry toys. Joggling boards are found all over Charleston—a long plank of wood pegged into two rockers that moves sideways. Immediately, I went to the center of it and sat down, bouncing.
“I used to play for hours on one of these when I was a kid,” I said.
“You had one?” He was fumbling with his keys.
“No, but there was a house on the Island that had one and I’d sneak up on their porch and use it,” I said.
“I’ll bet you were hell on wheels,” he said.
“Suh! Please! Southern Catholic ladies are perhaps purgatory on wheels, but that is all.”
“I see,” he said. He was pretty cute when he smiled. Finally he found the key and opened the side door. His alarm sounded. Four monotone beeps followed by another one disarmed the system and we went inside. Stepping in, I was surprised at what I found. His living room looked like something from Southern Living magazine. I guess I had expected a bachelor pad, thrown together–type room.
“God, Roger, this is beautiful!”
“Yeah, thanks, I went out with a decorator for a while. It was incredible what she could spend just on fabric. Pretty, though, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Make yourself comfortable, I’ll put the coffee on.”
“Okay.”
I wandered around the room. From the picture molding to the chair rail, the walls were covered in padded red silk with embroidered gold bumblebees. The paneling below the chair rail was solid cherry and looked to be two hundred years old. The floor was covered in a Persian carpet—navy, red and ivory swirls and birds. One sofa was red and gold stripe and the other was a soft taupe velvet. On the walls hung paintings of ships, dating to the early part of the century or earlier. Over the fireplace was a nineteenth century portrait of a man.
Roger returned and caught me staring at the painting. The man in the portrait had the saddest eyes but the most beautiful face. His brown eyes looked at me, his lips were full and sullen.
“My great-grandfather,” he said, “painted by John Singer Sargent at the end of his life. A good one, hey?”
“Beautiful.”
He handed me a small cup and motioned for me to sit on the sofa. I took the cup, tasted the espresso and inhaled the richness of it.
“I know you’re worried about drinking espresso and sleeping, but don’t. I have something to take care of that,” he said.
“Oh?”
With that he leaned over to a box on the coffee table and opened it. It was an antique wooden box, inlaid with jade, an old tea box. It was filled with a greenish brown dried herb, something that resembled marijuana. He pulled a pack of rolling papers from another box and began to roll a joint.
“You’re kidding,” I said and started to laugh.
“Oh, don’t tell me you never got high in your life,” he said.
“Um, yeah, but not since Woodstock.”
“Excuse me, but during Woodstock, you would’ve been about fifteen.”
“Seventeen. But I was a sympathizer.”
“Well, you’ll be delighted to know that the quality of drugs has vastly improved.” He lit the cigarette and took a long pull.
“Oh, that’s great news. Listen, Roger, I don’t want to seem like a prude, but I don’t do this shit anymore.”
He laughed and handed it to me. I hesitated and then, in a moment of wild abandon, took a small drag and passed it back. “Holy smoke,” I said.
“Yep!” He coughed and laughed and handed the joint back to me.
Now, ordinarily, I would have said, “Gee, this is cool but I gotta go.” Somehow, for some reason, those words weren’t coming. I was a little bit tired of doing the right thing all the time and I figured, what the hell, this guy was a responsible doctor. What was the harm? I’d get a little high, I’d probably love it and then I’d go home and sleep like a baby. Sure. I took another toke and all of a sudden I felt myself rising from my body. “Whoa! What is this?”
“Be cool! It’s Colombian and very strong. Just relax. It’s okay.”
I was paralyzed. I watched him get up and put a CD on and every movement of his seemed to be under a strobe light. Jerk. Jerk. Jerk. It was so weird. I didn’t remember pot being like this in the seventies. No, this was a new kind of pot. Pot? Pot? Did someone say pot? Teflon? Calphalon? Cast iron? I started to giggle. Oh, my God! My ass was flying. The music he played was mostly bass and the thumping of it reminded me of sex.
Roger came back to the couch and stood in front of me, holding out his hand. “Want to see the rest of the house?”
“Sure,” I heard someone say and then realized it was myself.
Lamb to the slaughter, lamb to the slaughter. No, no. I can handle it, I told myself. He led me through a series of rooms. The dining room, a kitchen, a study then back out to the foyer. We went up the steps to the second floor.
“Nice!” I managed with no small struggle. “Don’t you think it would be nice to sit on the porch and rock?”
He started to laugh.
“Sit on the porch and rock!” He laughed again and again. “Come on!”
So we walked through two bedrooms, an office, two bathrooms and up to the third floor where there were two more bedrooms and a cedar closet with one giant bathroom in the hall. One of the bedrooms held exercise equipment.
“Well, this is handy,” I said, getting on the stair stepper and beginning a fevered workout.
“Come on, now, you’re gonna hurt something!”
He pulled me down from the stair stepper and into his arms. In the next instant his mouth was on mine. I thought for a second he was going to Hoover my lips. It was a curious thing to be so stoned and be kissed so heavily by someone I barely knew.
“Roger? What’s happening here?”
“Come on,” he said, taking me by the hand.
He led me down one flight to his bedroom. The moment Maggie predicted had arrived. I was stunned that it could happen so quickly without any real discussion and I wasn’t quite mentally ready for all this action. We walked in the room and I took a good look at his bed. It looked harmless enough for a king-size bed with pillows all over it. It had an upholstered headboard and a matching spread in brown and rust paisley velvet. It certainly looked comfortable and suddenly I was very sleepy.
I stood there while he went to his closet and pulled out a wrapped box. A present! For me? I was so tired, all I wanted to do was have a nap for an hour or so and then I knew I’d be fine. My head was spinning and his voice seemed to come from another place.
“I saw this and all I could think about was you,” Roger said. “Open it.”
I removed the paper and found a box from Victoria’s Secret. Oh, oh, I thought, what the hell is this? I undid the tissue paper and pulled out an ivory lace corset, matching thong panties and stockings. Try as I did to suppress them, I was choking on giggles. He mistook them for nerves.
“Will you put it on for me?” he asked.
“Sure! What do you think? That I’m a nun?”
Shit. He was serious. Now what? If he wants to see me in this, no problem, I thought. Maggie’s right. The first time would be the worst. I would’ve been a wreck except for the fact that it all seemed so hilarious. He cracked up and I started laughing too.
In the bathroom, I flipped on the light and studied my face in the mirror for a minute. My eyes were bloodshot from the pot. I became fixated on that and couldn’t stop staring at them.
“You all right, Susan?”
“Yes! I’ll be right out.”
With a boldness that came from the most remote rampart of my loose-cannon brai
n, I undressed and sort of tossed my bra over his shower curtain rod. I had a hard time with all the hooks and eyes of the corset and finally decided to put it on backward and then spin it around. That worked but while I was pulling and twisting, I was getting an aerobic workout. I started giggling again. Good Lord, I thought, when was the last time I laughed this much? It was a darn good thing I had waxed. It’s a good thing, Martha! The panties were indecent! I laughed again, realizing I’d better get a grip on myself if I was going to be this dude’s fantasy. Dude? I hadn’t even thought of that word in twenty years! Okay, thirty.
After I had the stockings hooked up I had to decide whether or not I was going to parade back into the bedroom with or without shoes. I decided to wear the shoes, thinking I’d look taller and thinner. I used his hairbrush and ate a little bit of his toothpaste.
Suddenly, I completely lost my nerve and sat down on the lid of his toilet. Why was I doing this? If this guy asked me to run naked in his living room would I have said yes? No, I told myself, this was different. Roger had thought this out and this was what he wanted, badly enough to ask me.
I saw his robe hanging on the back of the door and put it on. It was black silk. One more look in his mirror and I saw that my face was frozen in worry. My head was still spinning a little and I couldn’t remember if I’d been in the bathroom for an hour or for ten minutes. He knocked on the door again.
“It’s okay, Susan, I’m not going to jump on you,” he said.
“Oh! I’m coming out!”
“I just want to see you, that’s all.”
“I know.” My voice quivered a little like a six-year-old’s.
“Haven’t ever done anything like this, have you?”
“No.”
“It’s okay. I understand. Want me to come in and get you?”
I tightened his robe around my waist. “Yeah, okay. I mean, if you want to.”
The door opened and there he was. Cute, thoughtful and harmless. He held out his hand to me.
“Come on, I don’t bite, unless you want me to, that is.”
I took his hand but his last remark sent a tiny chill up my spine. We walked into his room and stood before the sliding mirrored doors of his closets. He stood behind me with his arms around my waist. Slowly, he untied the sash of the robe. The sash hung by my sides. He moved my hair and kissed me on the back of my neck. His breath was hot. With his right hand he opened the robe and pulled it back over my shoulder. The entire robe slipped to the floor between us. I couldn’t look at myself or at him. I flushed with embarrassment.
“You are magnificent,” he said.
He took me by the hand and led me to the bed.
“All I want to do is kiss you,” he said.
I didn’t believe that for a minute, but I had already resigned myself to the fact that this train would be very hard to stop once it got moving. He undid his tie and slipped it off. He unbuttoned his shirt and pulled his shirttail out and finally threw it on a chair. He pulled down the covers and I sat on the side of the bed while he folded his trousers neatly and put them on the chair too. Although I was preoccupied with holding in my stomach, I couldn’t help but notice that he was wearing tight white briefs that told me everything else about him that I was shamelessly curious to know.
“Move over,” he said.
Like a good little girl, I did. By this time I was thinking some pretty wicked thoughts. I had to admit that dressing up in this costume made me feel pretty sexy. I wanted to kiss him and the thought of making love was exciting. He began kissing me and it wasn’t like the hard kiss he had given me upstairs but more like someone who was conserving his energy. I loved it and I’d be a liar to say I didn’t. He moved his lips all across my throat and down the middle of my chest, never touching my breasts. This frustrated me, but he was in control here and I was eager to see how long his kisses could last. I wiggled backward, up into the pillows, as his mouth traveled my legs. From one leg to the other he went, every now and then a little nibble on the inside of my thigh. My breathing became deeper and desire took over. In fact, I was becoming rather wanton, to my complete surprise.
He unsnapped my stockings and began to remove them ever so slowly. Now I was tortured. If this man didn’t crawl on me pretty soon I was going to scream. He removed my shoes, flipping them across the room over his shoulder. Now he was on the floor, kneeling at the bottom of his bed, kissing and licking my feet. Thank God I had a pedicure, I thought. I heard someone moaning and it was him. Finally! I thought, finally!
“Roger? Come back here,” I said.
He began sucking my toes and they were incredibly ticklish. One of his hands disappeared, his moaning became louder and he sucked harder on my second toe.
“Roger?”
“Not now.” He moaned and moaned and moaned, and stopped, rested his head on the end of the bed and dropped my right foot.
He looked up at me with the most bizarre sheepish look and said, “You were fabulous!”
“I was?”
“Yeah, do you want to spend the night or can I drive you home?”
I didn’t know what to say. Was that all? I mean, no romp in the sheets for me, just clean feet? Suddenly, I wasn’t stoned anymore. “Gosh, it’s getting late, you know? Why don’t I just call a cab?”
“Don’t do anything. I’ll be right back,” he said and disappeared into the bathroom.
The sounds of water running were background music for what was one of the strangest moments I’d ever had in all my adult life. No, I thought again and added my childhood too. Here I was, lying on the bed of a man I’d met only twice wearing a corset and thong panties. I had been wined, dined, and had a little smokey thrown in for good measure and my desire had died on the vine like an overlooked ripe grape. It was such a waste.
The bathroom door opened and he came out in a towel. He picked up his robe from the floor, put it on and, in the cheeriest voice I’d ever heard him use, he said, “I’m going to pour a cognac. I’ll meet you downstairs.”
He was getting all snuggy for the night. Now that my toes were spent he didn’t need me anymore. Suddenly, I found this funny.
I rolled out of bed and wondered what Maggie would say if I told her this. As I put on my clothes in the bathroom, I practiced my lines. Oh, yes, Maggie, Roger is a wonderful guy, no doubt about it. No, he’s a man of his word! He said all he wanted to do was kiss me. Okay, he left out the part about wanting to get off while sucking my toes, but hey! You can’t expect a man to tell you everything, right?
This was too good to drop on the phone. I’d have to drive out to the Island so that I could see her face when I told her. This would freak her right out of her Talboted, duck-motiffed, monogrammed, Junior-Leagued gourd. Yes, this was a classic dating story of industrial strength.
I invited myself over to Maggie’s for brunch, promising to bring fresh bagels. I threw on an old pair of khakis, my Weejuns with no socks and a paint-stained sweatshirt with some feminist political statement on it. I drove over to the Island as fast as I could. When I pulled up in the backyard, Grant was pulling out with the boys and the boat.
“Hey! Y’all gone fishing?”
“Hey yourself! How’s Roger?” Grant called out.
“Well, Roger’s a very interesting guy,” I said. “Want a bagel?”
“See? I knew you’d like him! Got pumpernickel?”
“Sure, here’s two for my little baby nephews too.”
The boys groaned and I smiled. They were huge—hardly babies anymore.
“Thanks. See you later,” Grant said.
If Grant knew the truth about his pal Roger, he’d flat drop dead, I thought. I went in the house and helped myself to a cup of coffee. I put two bagels on a plate, got a knife out of the drawer and some cream cheese from the refrigerator. I brought it all out to the porch, where Maggie was reading the Sunday paper. The sun was shining and it was a beautiful morning. Sweater weather.
“Hey, sister,” I said, “hungry?”
“Fresh bagels! Sure, gimme one. Hey, you look great—your hair, that is, not the outfit. What did you do?”
“I spent two hours with Svengali last week. He wants to meet you.” She was wearing a turtleneck and a new neon green running suit—the kind that cost twice my mortgage payment. I split a bagel with the knife and spread a thin layer of low-fat cream cheese across it. “You got some helluva nerve insulting my clothes. Go look in the mirror, baby, Halloween’s over.”
She leaned over, took the bagel and gave me a sisterly peck on the cheek. “Kiss my fanny, honey chile, but not before you sign me up for a makeover! I just bought it. Wild, huh? ’Eah, let me see the back! Great cut!”
I just shook my head and told her all about Eva at the Chanel counter with her cache of samples and about Kim. She got very excited about the discount, as I knew she would.
“Now tell me all about Roger,” she said. “How was your date? Did you do the deed?”
“Are you comfortable? Do you have any blood pressure medication in the house?”
I told her the tale, every single thing I could remember. We screamed and laughed until we had tears streaming down our faces.
“Tell me you’re lying!” she said, over and over.
“Honey, I ain’t lying, ’eah? This is the gospel!” I said at least ten times.
“Lord have mercy!”
“I tell you, Maggie, I ain’t cut out for this singles business. I’m too straight and I’m too old to change.”
“I’m glad you’re straight. I like you just the way you are.”
“Thanks. Hey, did I tell you that Tom’s back with Karen?”
“Bump them.”
“Yeah, that’s what I say. I can’t keep track of him and his love life and frankly, I could finally care less. I sign the papers this week.”
“It’s about time,” she said.
“Yeah, Tom finally agreed to the money I wanted. In fact, after weeks of holding us up, he suddenly called Michelle and said that he’d give me whatever I want.”
“Why would he do that? That’s not like him at all.”
“I have no idea. Maybe he’s afraid of the Millennium.”
“Which reminds me, what are we going to do on New Year’s Eve?” she asked.