The next date was more seemly. They had dinner at a Thai restaurant; Nicki sat erect as a fourth grader practicing penmanship and gestured with her skewered meat while talking about her most recent casting-call failures as if they were hilariously funny. He asked her how she felt about their night together. She seemed surprised; she shrugged and said she didn’t know yet. He didn’t want her to think he was sensitive, so he didn’t pursue the subject. Instead, he listened to her talk about her therapists, psychics, and healers, and the progress she was making on all her problems, the great upswing her life was about to take. Her talk had the aggressive charm of someone who has just met you and wants to make a good impression, as well as the false candor of someone who doesn’t want to reveal herself yet wants to give the impression of doing so. Hey, he wanted to say, I just fucked you. Then he was embarrassed that he’d even thought such a thing.
Still, he walked with her to her apartment for “tea.” This meant roughly fifteen minutes of conversation, after which they rolled around, poking each other’s faces with their tongues. It was fun, but he had not recovered from the sense of remove her dinner chatter had caused him, and besides, at this moment he didn’t want to fuck Nicki. He wanted to find the vibrant girl he’d seen running around at work, but she didn’t seem to be present in the body of this agreeable but somehow inaccessible person who was pulling off his pants. Watching her, he felt that he could chain her to the radiator and per-form on her every obscene act possible and still not possess her.
Naturally, this made him feel he must possess her. Firmly he turned her around, pressing himself against her back and her round, dumb ass. Her body stiffened; her butt nudged him in greeting. He embraced her about the waist. Her hands splayed, her elbows poked out, he saw her crumpled, side-turned face from behind her fore-grounded haunches.
Afterward, there was a miasmic moment of separate breathing, and then, tenderly, she turned her head and kissed his hand, first with her lips, then with her hot, dry tongue. A gasp of happiness escaped him. He held her all the next morning, while the radio muttered about congressional scandal and she slept fitfully, discharging an innocent odor of sweat amid the musty sheets with every slight movement.
The third time was a drunken riot in the King Farouk Room, during which she ground astride him backward, showing him the rindy fat of her bunched ass—the unsuspected ugliness of which inflamed him all the more.
It was after this strenuousness that, as they lay sharing a smoke on the mattress, she told him she had been sexually molested as a child. He was so startled by this information that afterward he couldn’t remember how or why it had come up; suddenly it was just there.
“It was my uncle,” she said. “He and my aunt lived near us when I was nine and ten. Then they moved, and then he killed himself.” She drew on her cigarette, and for an instant her lips formed an expression he had seen on other women but never on Nicki: a tight down-ward sneer that was cynical and tough, yet weak and repellently vulnerable.
He felt bad for her. He wondered if this meant she was an emotional wreck. “Do you think it had a terrible effect on you?”
She looked thoughtful. “For a long time I tried to deny it had any impact at all. But I think it formed my sexuality a lot.”
He started to ask how, then put his arms around her instead.
A week after this discussion, they had the terminating conversation. He said he hoped they could still be friends. She said of course she cared for him as a friend, and they hung up. He felt dazed, as if he had suddenly found himself in a commercial for a love movie in which he had rapidly performed scenes of seduction, passion, emotional bonding—and then the commercial was over. He lay down and wondered if this development had anything to do with her story about her uncle.
Then their long, arduous friendship ground into being. They saw each other mostly at work, swimming through the slow, silly conversations of people doing jobs they don’t like. At first he didn’t long for her, although her abrupt ending of the affair hurt him. He wasn’t sure how he felt about her, and at times he thought there was some-thing wrong with her. His ambivalence made him receptive to her, and his receptivity gradually made him feel her charm and beauty even more potently than before. He would look at her and it would seem, even in the black anonymity of her waitress wear, even at the squalor of the break table, as if she were lounging at a casino on the deck of an ocean liner. He could not recall if she had looked that way to him before he’d fucked her, and he perplexed himself with the question of whether his perception had changed after the act to render her queenly or if she had actually become so.
Then one day he opened the door to the cold, cardboard-box-filled changing room and saw Nicki and a large blond waitress named Deirdre looking at themselves in a shard of mirror propped against the wall. Deirdre was seated, gazing dreamily at her own rosy face. Nicki stood behind her, tenderly combing the other girl’s long, pale hair. Deirdre said hi to him in the mirror. Nicki turned, dropped the comb, and looked at him, her eyes so startled and fraught that his heart filled with echoes of illicit intimacy. Suddenly he felt her touch, her breath against his chest, the lithe, muscular energy of her body beneath his hands. He wanted to have her, and he couldn’t.
“Deirdre is so beautiful,” said Nicki later. “If I looked like her, I’d be a movie star by now.”
“If I was a casting director, Deirdre wouldn’t stand a chance against you,” he said. “She’s just another pretty blonde. You’re beautiful.”
She blushed and touched his hand with her cold fingers. “Thanks, Lesly,” she said.
They had coffee, then began to go to dinner and the occasional movie together. He felt her slowly opening to him in a way that seemed more genuine and incrementally deeper than during their previous hectic dates—and he felt himself opening to her. He remembered their lovemaking with a poignant shudder; its brief, superficial nature seemed to have been an exquisite distillation of what he imagined could happen between them. When he looked into her beautiful, caffeine-shadowed eyes, it seemed to him that she was thinking these things too. The afternoons spent with her in coffee shops radiated a muted glow that permeated the entire week, leaking over into the next week, until every week was saturated with her presence. He saw other women occasionally, but the sight of them naked in his bed could not arouse him as Nicki did sitting fully clothed in a café window, sunlight baring the meeting of age and youth in her thirty-two-year-old face. He thought: It’s only a matter of time.
This thought was nurtured by the incredible fact that, in the lengthening time since their affair, she hadn’t become involved with anyone else. An expression in her eyes or a slight movement of her body toward him could make the hairs on his neck rise; he’d move forward to meet the embrace he saw coming—then she’d lean back in her chair and dive into conversation again. Still, he dreamed of her.
Then one afternoon, as he was fighting his way out of an alcoholic sleep, the Cerberus of his answering machine clicked in warning and her voice fluttered forth. “Lesly,” she said, “it finally happened! I auditioned for Brian Slossman and I got it! It’s going to be a real movie and he—he—he loved me!”
He lay back in his bed and croaked, “Oh, my God.”
When she left for L.A. he thought she was gone forever, but she wasn’t. She returned to New York often, and they would sometimes have dinner together. She would describe for him the mysterious artificial world of the movie set, with its harsh aurora borealis of lights and sounds that, by twinkling transmutation, became the magic glass that humans stepped into and mythic beings stepped out of. He liked to picture her on the set, her face covered with the sugar dust of cosmetic powder, her eyes laden with cosmetic jewels, surrounded by and bathed in lights that were like giant technological flowers.