He ran a hand along his chest, played with his nipple ring, and rested his hand on his stomach. He didn’t know why he got that ring. He just did it on impulse one day, walking past all the freak shops on St. Mark’s Place in the East Village. It was a small gold hoop like a pirate would wear in his ear.
Melinda came out of the bathroom holding something.
He knew she saw all of him from where she stood. She was already dressed. Dark tights clung to her legs. She wore a blue boiled wool jacket, what he thought of as her fuzzy coat, against the chill of late fall she would face outside.
He figured if he played the next few minutes right, he could get something moving inside her body. If she watched him a few seconds too long, she would take all those clothes off again and they’d go for it one more time before she left for the day. Make it an even twenty.
‘What are these?’ she said.
He caught a note of alarm in her voice. It made him look at what she was holding. The first thing he noticed was a pair of black panties, too large for Melinda. His heart did a lazy belly flop as he responded.
‘Looks like underwear.’
‘I found them in the bathroom drawer,’ she said. Now her voice began to shake and her chin began to tremble. She held the label in the waistband face out so he could get a good long look. ‘They’re La Perla.’
‘OK.’ His mind went dumb, searching for anything, any thought.
She shook her head so hard that her hair bounced back and forth. It returned to almost the same position from which it started. ‘Wrong. Not OK. They weren’t there the last time I went in that drawer. Neither were these.’
She offered her other hand for his inspection. That hand held big trouble. Jonah recognized the items, a tube of KY Jelly and a clear plastic applicator which resembled a toy syringe. They came as a kit and were designed for women who had a hard time maintaining lubrication during sex play, a problem Melinda just didn’t have.
‘Where did these things come from, Jonah?’
There was nowhere to hide. He saw this and he didn’t run from it.
In his mind’s eye, as though it were showing on a giant high-definition liquid-crystal television, Jonah watched his relationship with Melinda collapse and crash apart. It was an awesome thing to behold, like a chunk of ice the size of Rhode Island calving away from Antarctica and falling into the ocean.
‘They belong to a woman named Elaine,’ he said. ‘She’s my boss at work.’
Melinda nodded.
She left without another word, but that wasn’t the last he saw of her.
‘I make myself sick,’ she said two weeks later.
She pulled on a thick wool sweater as she readied herself to leave. She checked her look in the full-length mirror. She was satisfied with what she saw. She turned to Jonah. As usual, he lay on the bed watching her dress.
Tonight had been a grudge match.
‘You know that? I make myself sick by coming here again. Already I feel horrible about what I just did. I don’t know what I ever saw in you. I don’t know what you even see in you. On the surface, you seem so arrogant, so self-centered. But what you really are is weak and pathetic.’
‘I’m weak,’ he said. ‘In what way?’
She laughed at him then. ‘In what way aren’t you weak? You’re like a weak little white boy, an accountant maybe, in a nice body. Oh yeah, you have a nice body, not the best, believe me, but nice. But inside, you’re weak and ugly, and when I think of you touching me tonight, it makes me sick.’
‘Come on, Melinda,’ he said. ‘Be honest. It was good, wasn’t it?’
She was dressed, had tousled her hair some, and was ready to go. ‘I need a man, Jonah. I need a real man, not some Oreo cookie, not some pretty boy who never passed a mirror he didn’t like, not some coward.’
She stood by the door, waiting for him to say something. When he didn’t, she went on without waiting. ‘You’re hiding, Jonah. Big ladies man. Flashes his money around. Smiles his pretty smile. Talks all that sincere bullshit. Gets whatever piece of ass he wants. Right?’
‘Hey. You said it, not me.’
‘But without all that, you’re nothing. I can’t believe I didn’t see through you sooner. You always need a new one, right? A new little piece? Because without it, you’re nothing and you know it. You’re not a man, and you think maybe if you can fuck every woman in sight, that’ll make you seem like a man. You’re so weak. You keep acting this way, you’ll be their slave forever.’
He laughed. ‘Whose slave?’
‘The people who own you.’
‘Nobody owns me.’
She pointed at him. ‘Wrong! They all own you. The job owns you. Your little boss lady owns you. She’s using you, Jonah. You might think you get something out of it, but you don’t. She uses you. And you let her do it. You’re like the house slave. They dress you up nice, and they teach you to talk nice, but you’re still a slave.’
She had something more to say, he was sure, and he couldn’t think of anything. She had him, calling him a slave. It caught him off guard. It hurt, that word.
‘Fuck you,’ he said.
She laughed, not a sound of mirth but a burst of stale air from a deflated tire. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘That’s the best you can do.’
With that, she went out.
He lay still for several minutes after she was gone, his mind dark and quiet. Then he got up, put his robe on, and went about making something to eat in the kitchen. He picked up the remote control off the counter, leaned back into the living room and started a compact disc going in the stereo.
He figured he would just put Melinda out of his mind, like he had all the others. But in the days that followed, Melinda stuck with him, more than he would care to admit. She was always simmering on a back burner of his mind, and too late he realized he had ruined a good thing. What’s more, the things she said stayed with him. He began to see how some of it made a certain amount of sense.
Jonah knew what people thought of him. He wore a pinstripe three-piece suit, Armani; a gold Seiko chronograph, stylish because it was shockproof – he also could wear it mountain biking if he wanted; silk tie, also Armani; alligator shoes; a smooth hundred dollar fade that enhanced what one art director had called his ‘delicately-shaped’ skull. He was a young executive now, working big advertising accounts. Two belated years of night school at the Westchester Business Institute got him in as a glorified secretary, but he moved up fast. He didn’t handle the accounts, no, he was too brown for that, but he was in the meetings, eating the lunches, bouncing the ideas back and forth, selling the people yet another light bulb that lasted even longer. The honchos liked having him there, and not because he ever hit the home run. They liked him there because they needed a lapdog. They paid him well. In exchange, he smiled and looked good and smelled good and didn’t cause trouble. He did what they wanted.
Sometimes what they wanted was sex.
Elaine was not the first well-kept middle-aged lady executive to bed Jonah, but she was the most giving. Even before Melinda found him out, Elaine’s generosity had begun to make the whole thing look like a job, one that paid in sushi and nights out and new clothes.
Now, with Melinda gone, Jonah was free to spend more time with Elaine. Elaine must have sensed the change, because right away she took him for a weekend on the East End of Long Island. They stayed in a rental cottage hidden back in the scrub pine and sea grass along Old Montauk Highway, with Dom Perignon on ice, a Duraflame burning in the fireplace, and the surf crashing outside and just down the hill from the sliding glass doors.