“You mean you’ll do something pleasurable to yourself while she watches?” Georgia asks.
Peter laughs. “Yes, something like that.” His hand is still waiting for mine.
I glance at my friends, hesitant to leave them in the middle of dinner. But they don’t seem to mind. They’re smiling at me.
I finally accept Peter’s hand and we leave the restaurant.
Once in his apartment, he gestures for me to sit on the huge white couch. I do, admiring the sumptuous living room with lots of glass surfaces.
He takes care of a few things in the kitchen and comes out with a small tray. He positions a chair right in front of me, very close, and sits on it. His seat is slightly higher than mine, so he is looking down at me somewhat, his legs open to accommodate mine between his. Our calves are touching.
He picks up a chocolate truffle and bites into it and chews it slowly, looking at me like I’m the next truffle he’s about to relish.
He then takes his iPod, puts the buds in his ears, and makes his musical selection. He goes back to gazing at me intently, while I hear the faint tinny noise emanating from his earbuds. It sounds like classical. Something passionate. Wagner, perhaps.
After about three minutes he selects another piece of music and another piece of chocolate and consumes both while we stare at each other for another two minutes.
“Do you feel anything?” he asks.
I chuckle and say, “Yes,” though I doubt the excitement I’m experiencing has as much to do with his emanating pleasure vibes as it does with my anticipation of what might happen next.
He switches off the iPod and pulls his earphones out of his ears.
He stares at me for a few more seconds and says, “I saw you bite into a bruschetta, once, during one of our Nights of Creation. You closed your eyes and leaned your head back, reveling in the taste. As I observed you, a feeling I’ll never forget coursed through me — a feeling so spectacular, it felt like a drug. And I thought, Our world doesn’t pay enough attention to that feeling. Almost as though it hasn’t been discovered yet. Maybe that tribe really was onto something.”
I smile. We are silent, our eyes locked. Now is the time. He will lean toward me. He will touch me. He will kiss me. He will be the only man who has ever done this since I started wearing my ugly disguise after Gabriel’s death.
He starts moving. He picks up his iPod, searches for another song, and puts his earbuds back in his ears, saying, “I bet this one will sound great to the sight of you.” He listens to it while staring at me.
He is trying to torture me. That must be it. I am so drawn to him that were I to move toward him, it would simply feel as though I’m letting gravity take me. But my policy specifies that he has to make the first move because I need to be utterly convinced — I need irrefutable proof — that he wants me in spite of how I look to him with my disguise on.
When the song ends, he places his iPod on the coffee table next to his chair and says, “That was very pleasurable, listening to music while staring at you.”
“Great. I look forward to reaping the fruits of your pleasure,” I joke.
He nods. “Now, during this session I’ve derived pleasure from each of my senses.” He pauses. “Except for one.”
“Is it an important one?”
“Yes.”
“So what are you going to do?”
This is the moment. This is the very moment when he is going to make a move to indulge his sense of touch.
He answers, “I’ll make sure it’s not neglected next time.”
How it is that he brings the evening to an end without anything having happened is a mystery to me. It must be my teeth. Or my fat, my gray, my frizz, my brown contacts, my glasses. Perhaps I should take them all off. No, I can’t believe I’m even thinking this, after my resolution — after Gabriel. My throat tightens at the memory of him.
Peter says he’d better call it a night because he has to get up early the next morning. He offers to escort me home. I tell him that won’t be necessary. He kisses me on the cheek and I leave.
I decide to walk home to clear my head. My apartment is 45 minutes away, but the air isn’t cold for December and I’m wearing a big coat over my bloat wear.
“You look a bit hot and sweaty,” Adam notes, opening the lobby door for me. “When you get upstairs, why don’t you cool off by opening your window and sticking your head out, feet first?”
Of course, he doesn’t know that my best friend killed himself by jumping out a window. I doubt he would have made that comment if he’d known — despite his disorder.
THE FOLLOWING EVENING, Strad and Lily are walking to his friend’s birthday party when he suddenly takes hold of the edge of Lily’s mask and tentatively begins to lift it off her face.
She grabs his wrist. “Never,” she says.
“Oh, come on, won’t you let me?” Strad pleads.
Lily shakes her head. “No one ever takes off my mask. Only I do that, when and if I choose to.”
“I think I’m going to go home. I’ll see you tomorrow, maybe.”
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m feeling a bit sad.”
“Why? Because I won’t take off my mask?”
“That’s just a symptom. The spot I take up in your heart seems… so small. It’s hard for me to get used to that.”
“What makes you think so?”
“Your unwillingness to be truthful,” he says, leaning against a lamppost. “You allow me to believe things that are completely inconsistent with ways that you act, and you don’t bother explaining the inconsistencies, as though I’m not even worth the trouble.”
“What inconsistencies?”
“You let me believe that you absolutely have to wear a mask in public so that you won’t be harassed by strangers, but then why do you put it on when I go to the bathroom in your apartment? It insults my intelligence. Also, you refuse to take off your mask to go to this private party, and yet you took your mask off at the bookstore on our first date. So why can’t you take it off now as a special favor to me? My friends aren’t going to pester you the way those jerks did at the bookstore.”
Head hanging, shoulders drooping, Lily says nothing. She can’t explain to him that she puts on her mask when he goes to the bathroom because there’s no music in the bathroom and when he emerges from it, he’ll see her in all her ugliness; he’ll instantly recognize her as Lily until the music’s power takes hold of his brain again.
He continues. “I want to help you find another way to deal with the problems you’re struggling with that make you wear the mask.”
“That’s not likely to happen. I’ve been wearing a mask for fifteen years.”
“You have?” He pulls her to him and tenderly whispers in her ear, “I knew there was more to it. Things didn’t quite add up. Please open up to me. I want to know you.” He kisses the edge of her ear. “Will you tell me? Let’s forget about the party and go home.”
She nods. They walk back to her place. In her mind, she’s rehearsing Georgia’s concoction. She dreads using it. When she first heard it, she cringed and was tempted to ask Georgia to make it more literary, but Georgia had already made it clear she wouldn’t, that it wouldn’t be effective on Strad.
Strad and Lily go straight to her bedroom. She turns on the music. A minute later, she takes off her mask. She lies next to Strad on the bed.
He strokes her hand. “Tell me everything.”
She gazes at him for a long moment and then takes the plunge into Georgia’s fabrication. She describes at length a torrid history of sexual abuse that supposedly happened up to and including the age of eight, and that involved many pedophiles: her swimming instructor, her neighbor on vacation one summer, an art teacher, etc. The offenses were never genital penetration — because, as Strad knows, she was still a virgin their first night together — but it was everything else. Lily tells him she had an uncle she adored, who’d never laid a finger on her, until one day when he became one of the others. He couldn’t bear the guilt of what he did to her, and what he did to her again twice, and what he knew he would continue doing to her, so he killed himself.