Eunuchs and Nymphomaniacs Read online

  Drinnggggg

  Twenty minutes later she was standing in my doorway looking gorgeous and sounding crazy. Absolutely gorgeous. Absolutely crazy. It was crucial to her that I be made immediately aware of what drugs she was on. Presumably this was so I could brief the emergency staff if she passed out. Like it had happened before. And though I marveled at her ability to pronounce the names of the drugs without slurring or missing a syllable I mentally pressed mute so I could focus on her undulating lips as they made all manner of cock-friendly shapes. After a dazzling camera-flash of a smile the tongue-twisting polysyllabic nomenclatures of pharmaceuticals subsided in favor of what began to at least look like normal speech.

  “I fucked a guy this morning.”

  Or evening, depending on whose time zone you subscribed to. Could this be some sort of joke she played on fawning idiots like me? Was that a brooch-shaped camera on her lapel? Was this going out live on RealDatesRealLife.com? Maybe one of the many young men I’d duped into buying my book had hired her to enact this sting. Right now he was ensconced in an armchair somewhere watching us on a widescreen. I thought about waving just to let him know that I knew, but such an act would make Alice the sanest person in the room, and that was unthinkable after seventeen years in AA.

  She handed me a brown paper bag with a broken bagel inside it because in her poor befuddled mind: “Breakfast.”

  Paradoxes crackled in the air around her.

  She was a devout Christian and relied on Jesus even though she had just told me she had committed adultery that morning (which in reality must have meant the previous night). Her husband had served her with the divorce papers so she didn’t feel like she was responsible for the failure of the marriage. She did, however, confess to an ongoing campaign to emasculate him. So much so, she felt like she was now married to a woman and she told him so. In fact she kept returning to this: her husband’s lack of manhood. It made me want to assert mine.

  “So do you think, do I have any chance of … you know …”

  I nodded at the general area of her groin. She seemed amused by this and immediately shook her head.

  “Oh no, doubtful, I don’t think so, shall we go to bed?”

  All in the one sentence.

  “Are you sure you want to stay? I mean if you want to go I won’t be hurt or angry.”

  She was standing up now looking around her, unsure, her nipples visible under the expensive lamb’s wool sweater.

  “Awww?” she said as if these were the exact words she had been waiting for me to say.

  And just like that we were kissing.

  She was like a thin, young, underfed man in my arms. I fretted for a second that she might be transgender and that I was about to feel the hot bulge of an erection against my own. But no, she was just another ex-model who had confused day for night and her husband for a wife. Shaking her pajamas from the tote bag she began to prepare for bed right there, right in front of me. She was topless now as one arm searched for a sleeve.

  She had woken up at eleven PM thinking it was eleven AM and rushed out to meet me for what she believed was a midday coffee date. It worked out pretty well though because once we got under the covers she turned out to be very loving and sensual. She was unusually slim but chubby in exactly the right places. I motioned her bony fingers to my cock and she fell easily into sexual step.

  The drugs prevented her from having an orgasm, she said, but she was looking forward to mine. Her son had been a caesarean birth because she wanted to preserve her pussy. I slipped my thumb into it from underneath and with my other hand tapped her clit from the front. A deep moan escaped from her as she pushed my hand away and plunged in there with her own. I thought she was going to finger herself but she was checking to see if she was as wet as she thought she was. She stared first at her glistening fingers and then at me as if maybe her trip hadn’t been a waste of time after all.

  “Oh my gosh, you have skills. I’m surprised, I mean, I wasn’t expecting …”

  I kept at it because basically I didn’t have anything else to do. I hadn’t been sleeping since I broke up with Marian so I might as well finger-fuck a drug-addled gash as binge-watch four more episodes of Renaissance TV.

  “I don’t feel like I’m doing enough for you.”

  She insisted on sucking my cock and although it was nice (she looked up to ask if she was doing it right) the best thing about it was the sight of her slim body and those pointy tits going in and out of silhouette. Like a seventies actress lit by an Italian cinematographer, or, and I tried not to acknowledge this but I couldn’t help it, like Marian was back.

  “If I wasn’t on all these drugs I’d have come four times by now.”

  She was worried that divorcing her husband was a mistake. The guy she’d fucked earlier wanted her to watch porn with him.

  “Men who watch porn are disgusting.”

  When I told her most men were like that she began to talk about how good a catch her husband was in comparison. She married him because he was the opposite of her womanizing manipulative father but now he bored her. She went on about her reliance on Jesus, which was laughable because her reliance on drugs was so much more obvious. And her beauty. She said she used men instead of mirrors. If she wanted to know whether she looked good on a particular day she gauged the level of her attraction from the looks she received from men in the street. Women hated her, and having to be so overly pleasant to them was exhausting. She said the love she felt for her young son was reminiscent of an adolescent romance. Her second chance at first love. Having made life hell for her husband for so long, she knew he would eventually have to divorce her. He was now using the fact that she was on drugs to prove she was an unfit mother.

  This was how it worked. They decided it was all over when they were still with you. They starved you of sex and affection. Watched you dry up. Burgled your balls and then delighted in your attempts at retrieving them.

  Trazpene was one of the more pronounceable drugs she mentioned and after looking it up I learned that it was an extremely strong antidepressant and that one of its many side effects was a sense of confusion about the time of day and location.

  Drinnggggg

  Kennedy eventually arrived at 10:10 the following night after originally agreeing to eight PM, but I didn’t mind at all because of her pleasantly ditzy demeanor and all that unexpectedly exposed pale luminous skin. What a rollicking fuck she’d be. Mischief didn’t quite describe what she had in her eyes. Self-destruction maybe. A spirited innocence. As if life itself was crammed into that tiny frame.

  At twenty-one all things were still possible. Maybe even sex with the likes of me. She wanted to develop a VR helmet that stimulated the part of the brain governing the orgasm. Not as outlandish as it sounded when you learned that she had spent a year assisting one of London’s top brain surgeons and had already clocked up many hours of valuable experience in the operating theater. She’d resigned though, after some upper-class twats, as she called them, performed a totally unnecessary procedure that went horribly wrong and as a result the patient was fucked-up for life. It was all covered up of course but she couldn’t bear the idea that she was working for such assholes. It didn’t help that they’d mocked her accent. I was left to wonder what offended her more—the malpractice or the accent shaming. But then as if to erase any good impression she might have made she announced she was desperately looking for tickets to Burning Man. One glimpse of her blinding white cleavage and I was tolerant even of this.

  The sparkle of a lit fuse.

  That’s what I saw in her eyes. She looked out from within herself in the knowledge that time was limited and the game was excellent. The latest contestant in this wobbly-wheeled trolley-dash through the cosmic supermarket. I must have seemed jaded to her. A spent force. Someone who’d had his shot and missed. She excused herself as she thumbed a lengthy text into her phone.

  “Sorry, I know this is rude.”

  She had already decided I was a nonstarter
so there was no need to stand on ceremony. Suddenly her face froze. Reaching for my teacup, my hand had caught her eye like something that had crept onto the table from the floor. Following her gaze I saw why. There, to my horror, and obviously hers, was the indented impression of the side seam of my jeans. Yes, I was old enough to have skin where marks such as these lingered.

  She all but shivered with disgust.

  Did it now become the subject of her text?

  Please call me … I’m sitting here with a dirty old nasty-assed man who has obviously lied about his age (and his height) but I’m too nice to tell him and anyway why should I be the one to set him straight … please call me so I have an excuse to escape!!

  Or maybe she had seen all this as soon as she walked in two hours late and there I was licking my lips far too happy to be allowed near anything as luscious as her. I had actually taken the entire day to wash my jeans and shirt and socks and generally prepare for my big date.

  Mercifully Alice called as I watched Kennedy texting. I let my phone hum and revolve on the table long enough for her name to be visible for anyone who wanted to know.

  Kennedy might not want me but there were those who did.

  But then a text: WHO ARE YOU??? PLEASE STOP CALLING ME

  She didn’t remember who I was.

  I darted a look at Kennedy just as her eyes returned to her own phone. She was going to pretend she hadn’t seen it but I could already see the blush on her cheeks as the interior entertainment looked for an outlet. Then her phone began to vibrate right there between her texting fingers. She answered it.

  “Okay great I’ll be right over.”

  A friend had just been offered two free tickets but she’d have to leave immediately to pick them up. Did I mind? We could pick this up next time. I was now on the receiving end of the same technique I used only now I had to pretend I didn’t know. My audition was over. Any optimism she’d had about meeting me had been very efficiently snuffed out by meeting me. The Extinguished Man.

  * * *

  She was capable of looking so much better.

  And though it was a huge relief not to want to fuck her I couldn’t help feeling cheated that she hadn’t made more of an effort. Even if it was just to show me what I could no longer have. The fact that she hadn’t given any thought to her appearance was a clear statement of disinterest. I shouldn’t mistake this meeting for anything more than a platonic lunch.

  Marian was dropping off a fold-up table she’d lugged all the way from Park Slope. This was where she now lived. The place where dreams go to die was how I had once described it when we were together. But I wasn’t about to remind her of that now as I helped her wedge the thing between the diner booth and the wall. It must have been quite an undertaking to get it onto the subway and up the escalator. Such Herculean effort seemed to indicate that she approved of my latest idea to sell books. I had been reluctant to shut down the fake dating profile that harnessed some of the more intimate photos I’d taken of her. Setting up that profile had been an undeniably scummy thing to do and I would have understood if she never spoke to me again.

  But the fact that she was sitting there across from me now seemed to me to imply there might be an outside chance for us. At least she was willing to meet me. Or maybe she was just enjoying the prospect of seeing me on the street trying to sell books to uncaring New Yorkers.

  It wasn’t going to be easy.

  This approach would need to be more successful than a beautiful, seminaked, supposedly French photographer/model who promised sex in exchange for buying a book. How could a guy standing behind a table compete with that?

  She picked up the salt shaker.

  “You want me to balance it?”

  This referred to the time, three years earlier, when she had caused an identical shaker to stand at an impossible angle, propped invisibly on a couple of grains of salt. I was transfixed at the time not so much by the trick itself but by the flush of triumph in her face as she pulled it off. I had taken a photo, ostensibly of the leaning salt cellar, but I made sure she was very much in focus. It turned out to be one of those heartbreaking photos I could now hardly bear to look at.

  She looked ravaged.

  By the city? By me? Did she sense this had been a beautiful moment in the early flush of our romance? How skillful of her to revisit it now juxtaposed as it was with the stalemate that represented our present feelings for each other. It was the same technique a film director used to make his audience cry. First make them fall in love with the characters. Invite them to share in the laughter and charm. Seduce them, stir their souls, open their hearts, wait until they’re enthralled. Then start the arguments and show the disagreements. Begin breaking the spell so that by the time the on-screen couple are sulking and separated the viewer is also hardened and resigned. That’s the moment to remind them of the halcyon days with a surgically placed flashback.

  The specific brand of folding table in question was no longer being manufactured and was actually quite sought-after. She knew this because her roommate had at one point used it to sell jewelry on Brooklyn sidewalks. Basically Marian was calling my bluff. To be fair, I had lied to her (and by association, her roommate) so many times already they couldn’t really be sure what to believe.

  If I was ever going to fondle that lovely pale ass again I would have to go through with it, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that having announced my intention to self-flagellate she had just made me the gift of a beautifully crafted whip.

  * * *

  Drinnggggg

  She had to be at least seventy years old.

  Maybe more. Everything seemed to hang from her: clothes, hair, skin.

  “Bridgit left you a message?”

  The head of a little dog poked out of her tote bag.

  I had of course seen her in the corridor many times and nodded or exchanged banalities about the weather or the corresponding holiday depending on the time of year.

  I was indefinitely indebted to Bridgit for getting me into a two-bedroom rent-controlled apartment in the East Village. If I had a first-born she would have been well within her rights to it. She was welcome to whatever favors I could muster.

  Mrs. Sejenko, my downstairs neighbor, was leaving for a week to visit a relative in Kansas and she couldn’t take her Chihuahua with her. Would I mind keeping an eye on him for a few days? Keeping an eye on him sounded like something I could do from a distance. It sounded like the equivalent of watering a few plants. So I agreed. But apparently a dog needed to be taken out at least twice a day and fed too. And Chihuahuas were particularly needy little fuckers.

  A plant would have been preferable.

  Anyway, I was introduced to a beige rat called Barney and handed a leash and some blue plastic bags (for picking up his shit) and a bag of edible pellets with which to manufacture the shit. Pre-shit. Shit-in-waiting.

  “Thank you so much for doing this,” she said, handing me a piece of paper with some handwritten instructions and a phone number on it. She seemed overly grateful. I found out later that real dog-sitters charge as much as $300 a day.

  But Barney seemed cool.

  Until she left.

  As soon as the door closed, there escaped from his little throat a kind of unremitting shriek that seemed to enter my skull under my eyelids and stab at the interior with aural knives. I was virtually a hermit apart from the occasional female so this was definitely going to be an imposition. But a hermit needed a cave and I was eternally grateful to Bridgit for providing me with one.

  I would do her this favor or any other she asked of me. In her email she had tried to sweeten the deal by reminding me that girls love to see a guy walking a dog and though it seemed like salesmanship I was eager to test out the theory. I didn’t tell her that I already knew the reason women were attracted to men with dogs was because they imagined they’d make great fathers. Or more accurately that in owning a dog he demonstrated a willingness to deal with all manner of excretion. Not something I
wanted a girl thinking I was good at. Anyway, as it turned out I didn’t attract even one girl. But Barney did. They began smiling fifty paces away. As Barney’s butler I would receive no more than a salutatory nod. And yet I could see how such encounters could be intensely erotic. When two dogs met they made straight for the other’s genitals. Or tried to. In fact the dogs behaved in a way that all New Yorkers would if it weren’t for the cultural constraints that bound us. But these women ignored the conversational potential of two animals basically eating other out until the unfettered carnality taking place at our feet was reduced to a cutesy interchange. Oh he’s so cute!! How old? I love his collar!!

  I had been looking forward to sharing a bench with the models I’d seen in the Tompkins Square dog run, but line three on my sheet of paper forbade me from bringing him there since Chihuahuas were known to be “antisocial.” Basically I should walk him twice a day, pick up his shit, and feed him.

  After one of our walks on a ridiculously humid day we got back to my apartment, I kicked off my sneakers, and Barney pounced thirstily on my feet. His long pink tongue protruded and retreated in and out of the nasty sweat-filled crevices between my toes. The nastier the toe-jam the more frenzied his slurping. He looked like he’d lost all reason. Whatever dog-logic had governed him up to that point dissolved. If I moved my foot to get more comfortable he whined in panic, pawing at my toes. The frantic scratching and screaming only stopped when I spread my toes again, giving that darting tongue access to the most unmentionable nooks. Here it seemed was where the gold resided. The unexpected effect was a cooling down of my fevered frontal lobe as if my brain was being magically air-conditioned. Barney got busy. Whenever I tired slightly of holding my toes wide he helpfully slid a paw sideways between them, ensuring continued access. Of the week he spent with me it was obvious that he was happiest at moments like these and so, I have to admit, was I. He had no interest in me after I showered. None whatsoever. So much so I felt rejected.