Winter Break

by adrienne eisen

"Why don't you wear your wedding ring?" I ask him. "I never would have approached you."

"Well, my marriage isn't going that well."

"I can tell."

"How? You've only known me two minutes."

"Because you were sitting in the pit a half hour after close. Only clerks stay late, not traders. I figure you have a bad life and you don't want to live it, so you sit here."

Richard doesn't say anything. I feel very clever. I say, "This is the most expensive lunch I've had since I moved to Chicago."

"They let me use the phone if I have to call in a trade, so I eat here a lot."

"Well, I'm always available."

"Good."

I don't care that he's married. I don't need to have sex with him. I just want a friend who's a trader. And maybe just a kiss so I know he really wants to be my friend. "We can just be friends," I say. "I need friends because I hate everyone on the floor."

"Why?"

"What do you mean why? Don't you hate them?"

"Yeah, but why do you hate them?"

"Because they're idiots. And all they care about are their pools and their margins."

He smiles.

I decide it's a game: to see how long it takes him to kiss me. To see how irresistible I can be. I want to be so cute and clever that he can't keep his lips off me. I want him to spend lots of time with me. I think I could stop throwing up if I always had him around.

At the museum he wants to be deep, be moved, believe that we're doing something intellectual. I make some comments that I rip off from my art history teacher.

Richard tells me his wife is a docent at the folk art museum across the street. I pretend to be impressed so he can be sure I'm being my cute, intellectual self--not trying to get him to kiss me.

He tells me he met her in college, in an art history course and she got the highest grade in the class. "She always got the highest grades," he says.

"She must be smart," I say.

"She just studied a lot," he says. "She's the nicest woman in the world, but she's not an intellectual powerhouse."

I make a note to present myself to him as both-intellectual and nice. On my way to the latter, I say, "She sounds really sweet."

"Yeah," he says, "She's great with our son."

"You have kids?"

"One. And one on the way."

I say, "Do you want to leave now?"

We take a cab back to my apartment, where his car is parked. I want to take cabs for the rest of my life. This is why Richard will be a good friend for me.

I invite him up to my apartment. This will be the first step toward getting a kiss. I think of another step, which will be having him drive me out to my parents' house, since he lives near them. I ask him when we get up to my apartment and he says, "Yes." I relax because at least I'll be alone with him again on the drive to Wilmette.

He sits down on my floor, and I make popcorn and put the bowl between us. I eat because I have nothing to say.

He says, "I could never sleep with you unless I loved you. And I love my wife," he says. "I mean, I really love her. We have ten years together, and that means a lot."

"Don't worry," I say. "I just want to be friends." When I say this, a kiss seems much more of a challenge.

I look away from him and he lifts my chin with his hand and kisses me. On the lips. With his tongue.

I am mostly disappointed because the game is over.

I kiss him one more time.

#

Richard crawls out of my closet at 5:00 a.m. to go to work. I wake up at 11 a.m., and I have an hour to kill before he's back at my apartment. I move my Judaism books on to the floor to make room for the CD player he brought from home. I cash my unemployment check and buy CDs because he hasn't listened to a new group since Simon and Garfunkel.

When he gets back to my apartment, I'm dancing in the mirror to SonicYouth. I go over to kiss him, but he says I should keep dancing. He wants to watch. I say he should dance with me, but he says he doesn't know how to dance.

"Just do what you want," I say.

"No, I can't," he says.

I dance until the end of the next song. I'm sweaty and breathing heavily, and I pull him into my closet. "I love having you here," I say, and I kiss him and roll onto him and wrinkle his shirt, because now it doesn't matter.

Richard goes to the end of the bed and pulls at the legs of my pants. I lift my hips, and as the pants slip, Richard watches my slowly appearing pink.

He takes off his pants. I rub my cheek against the soft blond curls on his leg while he fishes his market computer out of his pants. He tosses it by the pillow. He's short yen, and he has to watch the market.

I move my cheek up his thigh to his balls, and I lick around them and under them because this is what Cameron told me to do during one of my moments of incompetence.

Richard moans and says, "I love this." I put his balls in my mouth and he yells out and drops to his knees. I want to do this forever because I feel like somehow, I got good at it.

He pushes me back on the bed and slips my panties off. He puts them to his face, and I hope they're clean. He licks them, and I laugh. He puts his head in between my thighs and says, "Can I kiss you?"

I had been thinking that this is something for after he gets a lawyer, but he's so close, and I'm so curious. "Okay," I say. I spread my thighs a little more, to make room for him, but I don't spread too wide because I want him to think we're doing this for him, not me.

His tongue feels soft and warm. I pick up my head to see what he looks like, and he looks like he's getting really messy. The more he licks around my vagina, the more I want him in there. I hear myself being loud, and the louder I am, the tighter he wraps his arms around my thighs. When my hips are tipped up and my head is tipped back, I'm not even thinking of him when he says, "I want to go inside you."

I'm silent while he adjusts his body so his penis is waiting right outside, waiting for an okay. I am silent while his hips rock his penis back and forth, back and forth, until I say, "Yes."

Afterward, when we're lying together, Richard wants to check where the yen is, but we can't find the computer.

When we sit up, there's a red welt where it dug into my back.

"I can't believe you didn't pull it out from under you," he says, checking the Tokyo exchange.

Copyright © 2000 Adrienne Eisen. All Rights Reserved.

Adrienne Eisen's first print novel, Making Scenes, is available for purchase. Reserve your copy by e-mail: adrienne@apc.net