Just then, Will’s hand dropped heavily to the futon, releasing her wrists. He was, she realized, sleeping. Ripping the loosened cloth off her eyes and mouth, she turned to face him. Weren’t men supposed to fall asleep after orgasm? Had he, somehow, without her knowing it, reached… climax? By rubbing against her? She glanced down at his boxer shorts, which were plain white. They appeared clean and dry. Tentatively, she reached a hand out and touched their front. At this, Will started awake, taking hold of her hand. “No touching, Scarsdale.” She must’ve looked stricken, for he released his grip on her, smiled, and pushed her bangs to one side of her forehead. “Beth. Sorry. I just think it’s funny. I always thought Scarsdale was a mythological place. Like Xanadu. Where rich Jews go to die or some such thing.” Beth rolled her eyes. “I mean, dating a Jewish girl from Scarsdale is a bit like dating a WASP from Greenwich, isn’t it?”
Beth sat up and looked around for her clothing. “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t really think of things in those terms.” This was absurd, this kind of talk. She’d hated growing up in Scarsdale, hated every second of it, couldn’t wait to get out, and now this, this lecher—this person who was possibly some sort of pervert or, at the very least, an unscrupulous libertine—had decided to nickname her Scarsdale, as though she were some sort of metonym for conventional, conservative, upper-middle-class Jewry. And he clearly knew nothing about Scarsdale, for if he did, he’d know she was nothing—nothing—like the girls there, with their perma-manicures, their carefully highlighted hair, their spots on the soccer team, their stupid, stupid outfits from Great Stuff, their obnoxious accents, their middlebrow aspirations, their cruel cliquishness, and their moronic sorority membership (“Dee Phi Eee! At U Mish!”). These were the girls who had mocked her from, seemingly, birth. And now, eight years after she’d left the place for good, someone was mistaking her for one of them, simply by virtue of… what?
She shot him a slit-eyed glance as she climbed over his body, off the futon, and began to gather her clothes. He watched her, idly. Then, as she made her way by him, toward the bathroom, he grabbed her calf. “Let me go,” she cried, wrenching her leg. But he held on, swinging his legs around so he was sitting, his head level with her stomach, and climbing his hand up her body as he stood, towering over her, she in her bare feet. “Beth, Beth,” he began. “I’m sorry. Don’t be so sensitive. I can be a bit of a cad.” Beth was afraid to speak, certain the tears—her famous, dreaded tears—would begin to flow at the first word. She pulled away from him. “You don’t know anything about me,” she said, voice wavering. “You shouldn’t make generalizations like that. If you knew anything about Scarsdale, you’d know I’m nothing like the girls there.” He smiled without showing his teeth. “Maybe you are in ways you don’t know.” This was too much, too, too much. Her stomach clenched with rage. Suddenly, out of nowhere, she was screaming, “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” her voice ragged and shrill. She stormed into the bathroom.
Slumped against the door, the tears finally came—prickly relief—and she turned quickly to lock the nicked brass handle, trying to quiet herself. In a moment, to her surprise, she felt calm. She would wash her face and leave and never see this person—this monster—again. She splashed water on her cheeks, rubbed herself dry with a plush white towel, peed quietly, and swished yellow Listerine in her mouth. Gingerly, she stepped into her underpants and bra, her breasts still achy, pulled on her blouse, and stepped into her skirt. Glancing tentatively into the mirror, she smoothed her hair with a plastic comb she found on the counter, tucking the front pieces behind her ears. She was ready. She unlocked the door, opened it, and stepped out into the front room, her swollen lips pressed together with grim determination. Will was not there, but her boots were neatly lined up by the door, her socks tucked inside. She picked them up, sat down on the couch, and slipped them both on, closing the boots’ long zippers up over the sides of her calves. As she stood to leave, her hand hovering by the doorknob, Will appeared in the bedroom doorway, fully dressed—wool trousers, blue shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, white undershirt peeking out below his collar. Blond hairs curved out over the undershirt’s ribbed neck, filling in the hollow at the base of his throat. “Oh, hello,” he said. “You’re Lil’s friend Beth, aren’t you? We met the other night at the wedding. You were wearing the most stunning dress. I’m sure I’m not the first to remark on it. You were easily the loveliest girl there. All the old codgers were checking you out. I noticed you the minute you walked in, with that ginger-haired girl, what’s her name. Redheads. Never cared for them, myself.” She smiled, against her will. “So,” he said, smiling back at her, “what brings you to the neighborhood?” She sighed inwardly. “Well, I’m thinking about moving here,” she found herself saying, in a voice she knew to be soft, seductive, “so I thought I’d take a look around.” He held out his hand to her. “I see. Well, I happen to be an expert on the area.” Now he had stepped closer and taken her hand. “Perhaps you might allow me to…” Now he trailed off, pulling her in close to him, untucking the back of her blouse from her skirt, holding his mouth in close to her neck. “Show you around.”
Later, much later, they lay in his bed, a futon laid out on the floor like Lil and Tuck’s. Again, he held her from behind, he half dressed, she entirely undressed. Again, he’d refused to let her touch him. She slipped out of his light, sleepy grip and turned to face him, inspecting the blue circles under his eyes, the creases that ran between the folds of his nose and the corners of his mouth. “Hey,” she said gently, trying for a joking tone. “Hey, London.” He smiled and yawned. “Miss Bernstein, you know perfectly well I’m from Oxford.” He opened his eyes and looked at her. “You want to know why… why, all this?” She nodded. “Well. It’s not pretty.” He paused, smiling sarcastically. “I’m impotent.” Again, he spat out the word as though it had quotes around it. She started to protest. “No, no, no. I know what you’re thinking but you need to trust me on this one. I know what I’m talking about, m’dear. There are things you simply don’t know about.” Beth nodded. She had felt him… but perhaps there were many forms of impotence, perhaps some men could maintain the initial… erection, but couldn’t complete the… act. But then why—well… hadn’t he been intending to enter her the other way? Perhaps not. Perhaps when he asked if she’d “done this before” he was referring to the blindfold, the gag. Or to sex with strangers, in general.
“Is it—” she began. “Does it have something to do with your wife?” she asked, knowing, as the words came out of her mouth, that it was the wrong thing to say.
He laughed, almost a bark. “Yes, yes, it’s quite tragic, actually. My wife cheated on me—a regular slag, as the lads would say. She used me, it seems, as a free ticket to New York, then, once ensconced in this fabled city, threw herself at every man who crossed her path—and now—” A face of exaggerated pain. “I cannot bring myself to commit the act of love with another woman, so scarred am I by her actions. She has displaced the very foundations of my manhood.”