Madam Read online

  I moved my hand over his thigh, gently, but not too gently. “Really,” I said, and leaned into him. It didn’t take too much. After all the drinking we’d been doing, I was pretty much in a leaning frame of mind.

  Front Desk Boy gave up. There’s just so long a man can hold on to his pride. His arm went up around my shoulders and he bent down to kiss me. It wasn’t exactly what I had planned to do, but why not? I kissed him back with some enthusiasm. I think the last time I kissed someone that young, I was sixteen myself.

  It was a lot of fun.

  Once he had decided to go for it, Front Desk Boy showed himself to have a great deal of enthusiasm, as well as some surprising creativity. We both abandoned the wineglasses fairly quickly, passing the bottle back and forth instead.

  We came up for air once we’d finished the bottle. Jeannette was watching us, a clear expression of amusement on her face. She had opened another bottle and handed it to me. “Enjoy,” she said.

  Front Desk Boy had decided that it was time for conversation. “So,” he said to Jen, “what do you do in Boston?”

  She smiled even more broadly. “I work for her,” she said, gesturing toward me.

  He blinked. “You mean—“

  She nodded. “I’m a callgirl.”

  His eyes widened. “Oh my God.” He looked from her to me as the information sank in. I could imagine him at school or the pizza place the next day. On second thought, they probably wouldn’t believe him. Poor Front Desk Boy. “Oh my God,” he said again.

  Jen seemed to think the whole thing was a joke. She sat back, a smile on her face, closing her eyes again.

  I, however, was still in the mood to play. I moved slightly so he could lean past me until he was lying on the chaise lounge, and then I straddled him. His T-shirt came off quite easily, and I was running my fingertips up and down his chest, a singularly naked chest. I could feel his erection through his pants, through my dress, and I was suddenly in love with this boy, in love with this moment, where things could happen just because they felt good, where nothing was orchestrated and planned and paid for.

  I pulled my dress off over my head, still straddling him, and he gasped with pleasure. I leaned down and ran my tongue from his collarbone to his chin and I could feel him quivering beneath me. He reached around and unfastened my demi cup bra with a lot more dexterity than I would have given him credit for. So he had been down this path once or twice before, after all.

  I found the thought oddly arousing.

  I reached down between us and pulled at his pants. The button and the zipper opened quickly and easily, and he lifted his hips so that he could wriggle out of them.

  I felt a tap on my shoulder. Jen, her evening bag in one hand, was standing next to me, rummaging in it and finally pulling something out of it. A condom. I nodded my thanks, then laughed out loud for no reason at all, simply feeling happy, unburdened, and alive. She was still smiling as she went back to her place, took a drink of wine, and closed her eyes again. I couldn’t tell if her disinterest was real or contrived.

  On the other hand, I really didn’t care all that much, one way or the other.

  I was back on top of him, and now Front Desk Boy was more than ready to get on with things. He held my hips as he lifted his and slid his cock into me. By now I was very wet and it felt good going in. I moaned and started moving up and down on him. He let go of my hips, reached up and grabbed my breasts, pumping into me, his cock hard and young and wonderfully filling.

  And he went on forever. I came at last, gasping, collapsing on top of him and trembling all over. Then he had lifted me off the chaise, laying me down directly on the deck and was on top of me, ramming his cock back into my pussy, wet now with my own cum, pounding me into the floor and sweating and grunting on top of me. I moved with him, and impossibly had two more orgasms, one right after the other, before he lifted me up off the deck with the power of his final thrust as he came.

  We lay there for a few minutes together, both of us just trying to catch our breath, until he finally sat up. There was sweat running down his back; I was bathing in it. He neatly removed the condom and flicked it into the wastebasket just outside the door, where we’d been discarding corks and empty bottles. Then he stood up in one lithe movement, stretched, and reached for his clothes, a man who can fuck and who knows enough not to discuss it afterward. Better still, who can assess the situation, see that in a nonsexual context he is clearly de trop, and make a graceful exit. Front Desk Boy was worth his weight in gold. I nodded at him appreciatively.

  He grinned back. “So,” he said, and I waited for pearls of wisdom. Someone who has this much sense is surely going to make some elegant, or at least meaningful, postcoital observation. “So,” he said again, “how can I prove to people that I just fucked a madam?”

  “You brought that one on yourself.” Jen said as we got ready for bed. There was one king-sized bed in the room; I couldn’t remember the last time I’d slept in one.

  “He was so young,” I said, either by way of excuse of explanation, I wasn’t sure.

  “He had pimples,” she observed, acidly. She had brushed her teeth and was sliding into a black T-shirt and boxer shorts. “What is it with French people and black clothes, anyway?” I demanded, à propos of nothing.

  “People in New York wear black all the time, too,” she said. “And London. Maybe it’s a city thing.”

  “I live in a city,” I said, looking at the white cotton nightgown that she had helped me into. Okay, so I was clearly a lot drunker than I had thought I was.

  “Not according to your wardrobe, you don’t,” she said, the smile back in her voice.

  She shut off the light, and we lay in the darkness together for a moment before she started giggling. “What?” I asked.

  She turned over to face me. “So,” she said, fighting to keep her voice serious, imitating Front Desk Boy, “How do I prove that I fucked a madam?”

  I started laughing then, too, far more than the joke warranted—but then again, that’s one of the beauties of being drunk. Everything is far funnier.

  “Like this,” I said without thinking, putting my arms around her and pulling her closer to me, and then we were kissing, soft lips on soft lips, mine still bruised and tender from the Front Desk Boy, hers fresh from her toothpaste.

  The kiss lasted about three centuries and three seconds all at once. Jen pulled away, slightly, and started to say something, but I put my finger to her lips. “Shh,” I said. “Don’t say anything.”

  She didn’t. In fact, she opened her lips to my finger and pulled it inside, sucking gently and then harder. I moved my hips closer to hers, wriggling against her. I pulled my finger out of her mouth and moved it down her body, rubbing her breast and pinching her nipple through the cotton fabric of the T-shirt. She started to say something again, but I leaned over her and put my mouth on hers, a little more insistent this time, my tongue probing.

  Her arms came up, locked around me and she pulled me on top of her, her kisses now as insistent as mine. Our breasts moved against each other, and her breathing was ragged as she fumbled with the ribbons on my nightgown. It didn’t work, and we both started giggling again. She brought both hands up and simply ripped the front of it. “I love it when you’re assertive,” I gasped.

  Our hands were all over each other, smoothing, caressing, pinching. Jen slid down in the bed, her lips and tongue on my breasts, teasing my nipples, sucking on them. I squirmed under her, but she held me down as she teased and tickled me. I undulated under her, half-breathless, twisting and turning and then I was the one on top, slithering down over her until my lips were on her pussy and she was the one moaning and struggling, her fingers entwined in my hair.

  I came up for air and we ground our hips against each other. She reached between my legs and slipped a finger inside my pussy, then another, moving them in and out, rubbing my clit, then plunging back in. By then I was panting so loud that I might as well have been shouting. She sighed
with delight and dived down so that she could taste my pussy again, and I wrapped my legs around her head and squeezed.

  It was well after three in the morning when we stopped, exhausted, still tipsy. She stood in the door to the bathroom, tipping the last of the wine from the bottle down her throat. I was examining my shredded nightgown.

  Jen laughed and started singing. “Welcome to the asylum …”

  I sat up, reaching for my cigarettes. “I was born in South Carolina,” I said, flicking out the match and tossing it into the ashtray. I inhaled, then slowly blew the smoke out into the room. “Someone famous—I can’t remember who it was—said that South Carolina is too small for a good-sized plantation and too big for an insane asylum.”

  She came back to the bed, took the cigarette from me, and put it out in the ashtray. Leaning across me to put out the light, she said, “Are you sure about that?”

  Then we didn’t say anything at all for a very long time.

  Catering By Any Other Name

  Christmas was fast approaching, and my mother was wondering, at great length and in a whole series of letters, if she was ever going to see me again.

  Her anxiety didn’t have anything to do with the religious significance of the event. My family have always been lukewarm Lutherans, and religion has never played a tremendous role in my life.

  Sometimes I’ve wished that it had.

  I listen to people, to all the echoing voices, even people from my own South, who speak of expiation and redemption as though they were common and beloved experiences, and I cannot even begin to relate to all that.

  I used to read those voices—Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor in particular—and heard that assurance of something substantial against which to measure one’s life. And I wanted it for myself, wanted that challenge and that need. Very late at night, the little girl in me wondered—still wonders—where God is, and whether He thinks about me at all, but that’s the extent of it. I hold long conversations with God, sometimes, in my poetry or short stories, but they’re not conversations, they’re one-sided monologues that I write to assuage my own pain or guilt or fear, looking for a parental figure to somehow make everything all better again.

  That simplistic view can’t begin to reflect the depth, intensity, and sense of magic I hear that other people feel. Maybe it’s because most of those other people are Catholic. I think there’s definitely something about being Catholic. They all seem to have a handle on things that I can’t access, things behind a closed door that’s passwordprotected. Jeannette talked to me one night about going to her convent school, and early-morning prayers, candles and singing and incense, “praying for the rest of the world and the rest of the world will never even know. It’s magic, you have no idea. It’s pure magic that happens there.”

  Then again, she’s Catholic. She’s part of that club.

  It has to be said that some of the best writing about faith that’s come out of the South hasn’t been typical of Southern religion, which tends to be Protestant. Flannery O’Connor was raised a Catholic in the Deep South, and her stories and correspondence reflect not just that sense of being different, but of embracing the depth and breadth of that difference. Protestants think about being religious, but Catholics, it seems to me, never give it a thought. They live it, and discuss the living of it in elevated and lofty terms that nobody else can touch.

  Yet they also ask the same questions that I think of in the night, or when I’m scared. A character in one of Gail Godwin’s books asks a priest, “How can I ask you or God for absolution when I know I’m going to walk out of here and tell the same lie the next time somebody asks me?” There’s a baffled sense of one’s own limitations, coupled with an extraordinary underlying peace, a sure knowledge at some level that even though we’re all thrashing things out here, God will ultimately figure it all out. I’m attracted to that.

  Not enough to convert, mind you. Not enough to do anything about it. Just enough to wonder, and, at some level, to envy.

  But all of this was to explain that my mother wasn’t asking me to come see her because we had fond memories of midnight mass on Christmas or anything like that. No—my mother wanted to know what was going on.

  Ah, yes. The $64,000 question. What is it that you do for a living, Abby?

  With anyone who calls me Abby, I know I have to be careful. We’re in the real world here, and it is, of course, a tricky question.

  For a long time, I told people that I had my own catering business. This covers a lot: I’m on the phone for much of the evening, coordinating whatever it is that I’m catering at any given time; I’m on the phone during the day, sometimes setting up events, contacting the women who work for me as cooks and waitresses. I don’t have a specific place of business; it’s a distribution company, as they liked to say in the 1990s. It made a lot of sense to most people, who would nod and then move on.

  And that was, and still is, the best thing about it: the fact that it doesn’t invite a whole lot of questions, for the excellent reason that it’s simply not that interesting.

  Imagine the cocktail party, the snippets of bright conversation, the superficial smiles. “And what do you do?”

  “I own a small catering service.”

  The smile stays frozen in place. “Oh! How—nice!” If the person is trapped with me, they’ll then wrack their brains for some question that they can ask. There aren’t a lot. “So, do you like doing that?”

  I shrug indifferently. “It’s okay. It’s not all that interesting.”

  They drift away. Guaranteed.

  So it’s a safe haven of sorts, this catering business. I even had some stationery made up at one time, just letterhead, something I could use for official correspondence when necessary. I told my mother I had a catering business, and once she got past the fact that I couldn’t cook (“Mom, I have people who do that for me,”), she was fine with it.

  Most of the time.

  When meeting a friend’s parent, during the brief time I was on the board at the library, I got glib and practiced. I was a caterer. Hell, I was a great caterer.

  Jeremy Burns was some sort of marketing guru. There were a lot of them around back then in the 1990s, guys whose business was to tell the dot-com wizards how to spend more money getting more famous for doing whatever it was they did. I’d run into him when I was looking for used books at the Avenue Victor Hugo shop on Newbury Street, and we’d shared a coffee or two, nothing romantic, just someone I knew casually. When Jeremy asked me what I did, the answer slipped smoothly off my tongue. “I run a small catering business.” He asked me for my card, and I feigned a surprised professional air, assuring him that I had just run out and was getting more printed. I gave him my work number because my private line was having some problems, and ran into him a few more times, as one invariably does in a city the size of Boston, and didn’t give it another thought.

  The call came on a Tuesday. “Hello?”

  “Hi, um, is this Avanti?”

  My agency has a name, but I rarely use it except for promotional purposes. “Yes, it is,” I said. “How can I help you, sir?”

  “Is this Abby? It sounds like you. This is Jeremy Burns. We—um—we met over on Newbury Street a few weeks ago, I was the guy talking about Faulkner …”

  The true way to my heart? Talk about Faulkner. But something wasn’t right here. How had Jeremy found out about my business? Did he want to have a call put out to him? I was already in madam mode, answering the telephone and anticipating the needs; this came a little out of left field. “I remember you,” I said, finally, a little helplessly. I had no idea what else to say.

  “Well, good. You sound busy, I won’t take up a lot of your time. But I have this little soiree I’m organizing—”

  Oh, goodie, I thought. An invitation. All is clear. I even preened myself a bit. Maybe there was an attraction there, after all.

  “—and I wondered if you could put together something light for, say, thirty people? Not a meal
or anything like that, and I’m not into the whole Asian fusion thing, but just hors d’oeuvres, maybe something creative. I’ll have a full bar there too, with a couple of bartenders and I think they send someone extra, so maybe just three or four people serving? What do you think? I mean, you’re the expert here. It’s for two weeks from Saturday. Whatever you think is good, that’ll work for me.”

  Oops. Big oops. “Jeremy, I’m putting you on hold for a minute, I’ll be right back.” Let him think I’m checking my calendar. I took a deep breath, and then suddenly saw the humor of it all and laughed out loud. I felt like I had been caught with my hand in the cookie jar. That’ll teach you, I thought, and reconnected with him. “Hey, you know what, we’re booked through the end of next month. I’m glad you called, though.”

  If he was heartbroken, he managed to restrain himself from showing it. “That’s too bad. Well, I’ve got some other guys I use. I just thought …”

  “No problem,” I said briskly. There was another call coming in, and business was, after all, business. “Good luck with the party.”

  He had another thought. “Hey, Abby, maybe you’d like to come anyway?”

  Ah, no, thanks. Maybe pick up some more catering customers? I don’t think so. “I’ll be pretty busy with things here,” I said, truthfully. “Gotta go, Jeremy. I have another call coming in. It was nice talking to you.”

  I hadn’t used the catering line on my mother in several years. I also hadn’t visited her in that time. I thought about her, her house, and her conversation. I thought about the de rigeur society parties that would be part of the Christmas-in-Charleston postcard experience my mother would impose on me, the sherries drunk with elderly rich people in front of too-hot fireplaces, the goodwill and cheer that I’d have to sustain without anything but alcohol to sustain me. I thought about it, had another glass of wine and thought about it some more—and came to the conclusion that there was no way I was going home for Christmas.

  It was snowing when the taxi dropped me off at the airport. At least, I thought grimly, there shouldn’t be any snow at home, so I had one thing going for me.