Dear Friends,
I’m sharing the short story of the week, from the collection ‘Dirty Stories.’ These are all —as the name suggests — stories about sex; and are, broadly speaking, about urban millennials.
At the partner site
, has a moving essay on her teaching career.Best,
Sam
POOL BOY
They were roommates when they were very young — he 22, she 26. It would have been nice to believe that that was a fate — the pin affixing both of their destinies — but it didn’t feel that way, at least not for a long time.
For one thing, she was seeing somebody else. Well, technically, she was seeing Attil. He was a figment of a sport coat and trim beard. He always took up a lot of space in the common room when he was over — he had a way of draping each of his belongings, messenger bag, coat, jacket, dress shoes, on as many different surfaces as possible — and he fixed Stevie with a black stare whenever Stevie was bold enough to head to the kitchen for his miso soups or his wok. It wasn’t so much Stevie’s maleness that bothered Attil — this was Arianna’s over-detailed explanation — it was the fact of roommates at all. He found it demeaning, infantilizing. He says he doesn’t want to ‘fuck in a hostel,’ Arianna narrated to Stevie. But she shrugged, she sipped her tea, she pronounced that she had no patience for that. Attil was married and had promised to break things off there but had been a little slow to take action on that front. “Anyway, that was just hustle talk,” Arianna narrated to Stevie. And he had promised as well to get Arianna her own place — they had gone so far as to visit open houses, ask for application documents — but that seemed to be hustle talk as well. “He just doesn’t have as much money as he says he does,” Arianna said after she’d had the chance to blow on her tea and to sip it. “He has like nice dinner money, do you know what I mean?” she continued. “Go out of town for the weekend money. Not second apartment money.”
So that was the arrangement for most of the time Stevie lived with Arianna — Attil resenting the fact that he didn’t have second apartment money and glowering from the common space at the other roommates. But it was very unclear — and a hot topic among the roommates, or at least in the conversations among the roommates that Arianna conducted — about whether Attil was in fact the main boyfriend at all or whether, really, she was primarily seeing Brian. Brian was a figment of a leather jacket, and even more unpleasant whenever Stevie encountered him, say when they shouldered past each other in and out of the bathroom, but at least he didn’t take up any space in the common room. He was wheeled straight to the bedroom on nights when Arianna was out clubbing or when she was sure that there was no chance of Attil swinging by to ‘surprise’ her, and Stevie was empirically aware, as were all the other roommates, of the successful progress of that relationship, and even though Brian had never really deigned to speak to anybody either when he passed somebody on his bathroom visits or when he was prowling around the kitchen in the morning, and Arianna never had a good word to say about him — “no money,” she confided sadly to Stevie, “I don’t understand how you can be in the city as long as he’s been in the city and just have no money at all, like how can a person manage to do that?” — Stevie, like all the roommates, had the odd sense that they were team Brian, and they felt as devious as butlers or chambermaids whenever Attil was over, the way that he seemed to darkly search their faces when they passed by him, trying to figure if something was up, and how they kept up their masks of perfect insouciance.
It may not have been the most dignified dynamic, but there was something, to be honest, that Stevie enjoyed about the whole thing — this glimpse he was having into a deep end of the adult world. Other than that, adulthood seemed to present itself as the copy machine, as office doors closed whenever any of the grown-ups wanted to discuss something important, as checks mailed from home — and, whenever he was summoned into Arianna’s bathroom or bedroom, the door tightly closed behind them, the feeling was that he was hitting some sort of paydirt, the ways that Attil was maneuvering money around his bank accounts to hide Arianna from his wife, the ways that Brian’s club was stringing him along — the ways that a cool guy like that, an empirical stud, was in fact getting played.
She was a bit of a boudoir philosopher was Arianna. And if her conversations in the kitchen or common space — the endless Attil-Brian back-and-forth, the endless interrogation of the electric and the wifi bill — drove everybody else crazy, made her by far (although she would never have suspected this) the least popular roommate, Stevie found that something about applying makeup and eyelashes relaxed her, altered her personality. Her greed was very much intact, but there was less of a sense of the conversation being a succession of her wants, the way that her attention seemed to flicker off if the conversation wasn’t about something that she wanted, the way that an observant roommate could just about see the various wants rotating like marbles in her brain and then positioning themselves one after another in the forefront of her consciousness. In bathroom and bedroom, the wants were there, but there was also, strange to say, a melancholy about it — she seemed genuinely surprised that her wants were both as flimsy and as all-consuming as they were, that she couldn’t come up with anything more worthy that she wanted out of life. “Why can’t somebody like Brian just get it together?” she might say, eye held wide to insert the eyelashes. “Why can’t he just say to himself, you know what, I’m going to work hard, I’m going to open my own place, I’m not going to spend every second of my life chasing pussy.” She would inspect herself; adjust — this process always took a long time. “And why can’t I just to say to myself, you know what, I’m not even going to think about a guy who’s thinking about pussy as much as Brian does? Why can’t I just say — this is not the kind of guy who’s for me?” She inspected. She moved on to creams. This was an important part of her process — Stevie always found this really fascinating, the way that nothing seemed to happen at all, the way that a cream would just be teased over the alleged wrinkles under her eyes, over the eczema on her elbow, the way that her hands seemed to move entirely of their own accord, her arms brushing one another, her holding herself tight, the way that the caressing continued long after, Stevie was sure, any possible utility could have been extracted from it, the way that she just seemed so genuinely to enjoy her own body. “The truth is that, half the time, I don’t even really like it with him,” she continued. “I spend all week drinking cranberry juice and having it hurt when I pee. So why do I do it?” She watched her hands do their work, she critiqued the eyelashes, which, on second thought, she considered, might be a little trashy. “You know what it is, it’s that when I’m out and Brian’s in the same place and I see him working his moves, I’m like no fucking way, and it’s like whatever I’m doing, whoever I’m talking to — whoever’s talking to me — I need to get over there, I need to see the way he looks between us and he’s like, oh this girl isn’t all that, this girl is cute or whatever, and easy, but Arianna —” She laughed and she inspected herself, saw herself as Brian might, the fact of her, the irrefutability of it. “And he’s stuck, Brian is stuck, no way around it, but I’m stuck too,” she said, tone shifting melancholic again, “because it’s not like looks are enough, they’re really not, if I don’t fuck him then there’s going to be some other like marginal girl at the club, who’s, whatever, cute but easy, and so for me it’s the same thing all over again, the week of cranberry juice, the holding it in because I really don’t want to pee.” By now, she’d moved on to garments, another purposeless sort of process, garment on and garment off, clothes she’d liked perfectly well the previous week brusquely discarded, Stevie watching, trying to be sympathetic, as, melancholic and frustrated, she littered the floor with the succession of dissatisfying outfits.
Needless to say, anybody Stevie was seeing had very strong opinions on the subject of Arianna. The roommates, too, were in league against her, viewed his visits to bedroom and bathroom as an acute betrayal, but the thing about Stevie was that, even at 22, he had a certain shell around himself, a certain talent for not caring what anybody thought of him. This wouldn’t have been what anybody guessed when they met him — so slight, so vaudevillian-looking in the cleanness, blankness of his features. What everybody assumed to be the essence of him — and this led to so many misunderstandings with women who tried to date him — was a portability, an adaptability, an ease in molding. And this was to an extent true — in his quiet way, he got along with just about everyone, he seemed to have almost no impulse towards judgment whatsoever — but he wasn’t exactly some empty vessel that anybody could shape in any way they wanted to. In his way he had as firm a sense of his wants as Arianna did, and, when he felt himself to be crossed, a perfect unwillingness to be bent. “I swear to God, you’re as selfish as she is,” the most perceptive of his quasi-girlfriends had told him when she was furious at him — which he took, actually, to be a fully-acceptable description of himself, the sort of thing that people, over the course of their lives, add to their personal heraldry, the harsh-but-fair assessments of angry strangers. That girlfriend of course knew nothing about the bedroom and bathroom visits — Arianna’s greed and shamelessness had been a running joke between her and Stevie, she was just reaching for something that she thought would wound him, but, like everybody else, she had the core qualities of Stevie all wrong, and, not for the first time, he lay unhelpfully on his bed and watched some cute English major, some aspiring artist, hurl her things into her tote bag and pace around the room trying to land on just the right ever-cutting insult before she slammed the door shut forever behind her.
But, with Stevie, that never worked — the insults never really landed. He nodded agreeably to the quasi-girlfriends whom he’d so suddenly undercut, he laughed along with the roommates who accused him of being a ‘pool boy,’ and then, when Arianna summoned him, he was there, he sipped tea and heard about Attil’s marriage, he watched the eyelashes and mascara and, fascinatingly, the creams, every so often — and, here, the ‘pool boy’ charge did, actually, hit him — she stepped into the shower when he was there, shouted to him about the state of Attil’s savings over the sound of the running water.
Stevie was aware of his own tendency to not-give-a-shit, and he did worry, in the case of the shower colloquium — and, yes, he did hand her her towel as she was stepping out — that that tendency had taken him too far, that he was losing self-respect as a result. Lying in bed, image of her burned into retina, he reasoned that, even from the perspective of self-respect, the shower scene was, on the whole, respectable. The point, really, was pursuit of truth — that’s what he had moved to New York for in the first place, that’s why, in theory at least, he had gotten into media, and, more obscurely, that’s what he felt he was getting with Arianna. He found her just as annoying and as self-absorbed as everybody else did — his mind, of course, drifted off whenever she went into it about the various boyfriends, let alone the complaints on the over-consumption of electricity — but it was impossible for him to participate fully in the collective eye-rolling when Arianna’s name was mentioned, the sort of smug dismissal when Brian came barreling through the apartment to the bedroom and Jen, the grad school roommate, studying in the common space, would just pop in her earbuds and make this face like nothing, nothing having anything to do with Arianna could possibly interfere with her self-composure.
Stevie — seeker-after-truth, not-giver-of-shits — suspected that there was a lie somewhere in here, and he felt it the couple of times that the entire apartment decided to put their differences behind them, to pretend that they were the sort of Friends-y young people roommates that all hung out together, went out together. Arianna was in charge of this activity. She chose the places, she notified the managers, they got all sorts of privileges — a round of drinks, their own table, an oily visit by the manager himself. But they weren’t a Friends set of roommates. Arianna had real trouble remembering that there was a group of people she was supposed to look after. She popped up to talk to the manager, the manager inevitably introduced her to one of his friends, that friend might have a table of his friends that she was led to. Stevie, with the roommates, sat in their spot and watched. There were these men — each one oilier than the one before, the way they sidled up, the way they all produced something, a fresh drink, a business card with some sort of opportunity, or just an arm around, the easing-over to a group of new friends, a new round of shining faces — and there was Arianna, the finished product that Stevie had seen so many times in draft stages, all the ridiculous creams, the disdained outfits, the too-trashy eyelashes, had seen the lack of clear progress over many hours, but here, in completed form, was the thing itself, and there were no complaints about electric bills or Attil’s marriage, everything was funny, everybody was charming, and she was graciousness itself as she leaned over, so gently, to introduce itself to the fresh group of people at the fresh table. Jen, who was the most anti-Arianna of the roommates, was whittling away at her napkin in disgust. “Like why?” she was saying. “For what? Why are we going out all together just to watch her talk to somebody else?” But what was there to say. Stevie had seen the way they dressed up, the way they inspected and compared each other’s outfits, the giddiness as they sprayed each other with the same bottle of perfume when they were in the entryway, like they were all off on an adventure together — they had been looking forward to this just the way Arianna had, more actually, and the way it had turned out was the way it turned out. Facts were facts.
There was another kind of truth as well that Stevie had to contend with. There was the time — once only — when they were in the bedroom, she had been narrating to him between garments, and then had taken a phone call from Brian, gone into the bathroom to fight with him while she brushed teeth and applied mascara, and Stevie had fooled around on his phone, hadn’t paid much attention when the call wound down, the garments returned, and Arianna, dissatisfied with all of them, had laid down frustrated on the bed. There was a kind of quiet that was unusual with her, and then she’d said, as irritated as she’d been with the stocking that had developed a new tear, “Stevie, would you eat me out a little. I’m sorry, it’s just like sometimes there’s an itch and you’re already here.”
And Stevie put the phone down and acceded to the request as if it didn’t surprise him at all. She was already in bra and panties and she slid down the panties to facilitate him. “No fingers and, you know, nothing else,” she told him. And Stevie did as he was told. Eating pussy was pretty new for him — he still had his adolescent aversion to it, his girlfriends accused him of being insufficiently feminist or something when this subject came up — but he had seen enough TV shows, had enough instruction from the girlfriends, and, with Arianna, he took great, considerate care, the tongue delicately working its way up along the lips, and then the circles on what he hoped was more or less her clit, and got himself into the spirit of it, and he found it to be surprisingly tender, made him think of the times he had seen mother cats with kittens, the licking of schmutz out of their eyes, the great circles to wash them, and this, he thought, was in its way no more complicated than that. Arianna’s breathing had changed encouragingly and at one stage cupped the back of his head to pull him tighter. When she ended it, said, “Ok that’s great, thank you,” her tone was a bit different from anything he had ever heard from her before — she sounded shy, she smiled to him very sweetly as he lay, task done, on his side and watched for her reaction just before she hoisted her panties back up and resumed getting dressed.
The truth of it was that, just as Jen and the roommates would never say no to the evening out with Arianna, however much they might end up mashing the cocktail napkins in front of them, however much they might curse themselves for ever being roped into it, so Stevie would always do as he was told, would sit on the toilet and chit-chat when Arianna was in the shower, and hand her her towel from there, would spring up whenever she suddenly had an unscratched itch, let the back of his head be cupped, let himself be pulled in tighter. Not dignified, not something he could talk about, not the sort of sex life he had ever imagined for himself — but what could he do, he liked it, he had his superpower for, deep down, not caring what anybody else thought.
Which is not to say that this realization about the contours of his sexuality, about the reality of his feelings towards Arianna, wasn’t an uncomfortable truth. It wasn’t as if the one episode of tender cunnilingus had the effect of exorcizing Brian from the apartment — he was still there, barreling past Stevie when he wanted to use the bathroom; there was still his leather jacket on the front door hook, the pairing of that and Arianna’s bedroom door firmly shut behind them. And it wasn’t just Brian, of course. The itch seemed to overtake Arianna in different settings — at a club, occasionally on the street when someone approached her with just the right line, caught her in the right mood — but never again when she was in the middle of dressing or making herself up and Stevie happened to be there.
It was this itch-scratching that caught up to her eventually. Someone — street or club — had gotten enraged by something or other, punched out all the bulbs in her room, tipped over the bureaus together with the gifts from Attil that were on the top of them. It wasn’t clear why that had happened — actual rage at something Arianna had said, just some sort of power move — but the real issue was that she couldn’t come up with a way to explain it, or maybe she was tired of roommates, tired of half-measures and alibis for what she was doing with herself every time Attil called and she didn’t pick up the phone. With that, everything came to a head — there were ultimatums, promises, an apartment was selected and actually paid for, papers actually filed.
The day she moved out, she was as tearful as a reality show contestant. She went around to each of the roommates, indiscriminately of how they had really gotten along, told them how much she would miss them, wept on their shoulder. When she finally went blubbering to the entryway and Attil held the door open for her and let it fall behind him, Jen actually whistle-exhaled. “It feels like a very different apartment, doesn’t it?” she said.
Stevie, beloved of all the roommates, part of the crew, did what he could to join in the general relief — no more blazers strewn around the common space couches, no more glowering club promoters, no more need to pop in the earbuds. She had been batty, winner of informal straw polls as ‘the worst possible roommate,’ but Stevie, chameleon that he was, didn’t quite have it in him to swap ‘do-you-remember-when-Arianna….’ stories. There was a world of people respecting boundaries, people dating responsibly, people turning into functional adults; Stevie could pass in it, but, fundamentally, deep-down, he wasn’t that.
***
If how they’d met wasn’t so romantic, how they got together wasn’t much better. There were ten, twelve years when he barely thought about her at all. Media wasn’t happening — the check-writers back home getting tired of it. Wrote a large check to law school instead, and that worked for him much better than he would have expected. It was pursuit of truth of a different kind — more so, actually, than the listicles, the blurbs, that he had been writing as part of his cool-sounding internship. It was digging around in financial records, in the aspects of people’s lives that they wanted nothing to do with, that they themselves were convinced at some level weren’t really them. But there it was — everybody lying on their taxes, everybody hiding assets, everybody a different kind of creature from how they thought of themselves, all of it clear enough by the time you’d gone through all their documents, by the time you saw what their behavior really was. And he did his schooling — a college town, an exile, as he never failed to think of it — and then he was an associate and no longer an associate and he was the one sending young people scurrying to copy machines and the one closing office doors behind him. He was in touch with Arianna in the way that everybody kept in touch — he saw photos of her vacations, her leopard prints in different cabanas, at different restaurants, over time there were more photos of great-looking food, and she commented each time he updated his status to reflect a new firm, new promotion.
That was the trigger for their next meeting — he had made partner, as far as he could tell it just meant headaches of a different kind, paying taxes in different states, having to scrounge up money for the firm, but she wrote him a long note on LinkedIn. “I always knew you had it!” she wrote. “In that terrible apartment, like a hundred roommates, I knew you were the one who would do it!” And she suggested that he might like to meet, “if you have time in your busy schedule to see an old friend.”
They met at the sort of terrible restaurant that he knew she would like, where it really mattered whether you were sitting towards the front or back, where the waiters made a point of helping her into her seat. She was wearing a leopard print, she was significantly heavier than she had been, and not just that — there were the fillers, there was the boob job that he could see had been an error, some sort of late 30s panic. She was shy in the way that he remembered the one time that he was lying on his side, watching to see the way that pleasure made her softer, seemed to take her out of herself. “I didn’t know if you’d remember,” she said. “I didn’t know if you’d want to see me or not.” Her conversation, as he would have expected, was about herself, the fairly sordid story of the breakdown of the relationship with Attil, the divorce papers that were in fact filed but seemed to take their time to drag from there, the wedding venues that were looked at, discussed, but never quite got booked, the familiar pattern of cash moved around different accounts, but this time heading in the other direction from Arianna, towards the ex-wife, towards names that Arianna didn’t recognize at all. “I wish I could have been mad at him,” she said, that thoughtful voice that he associated with eyeliner, with hand creams, “but then when I looked around, when I saw pictures — ” she had realized what she was admitting to, got shy about it, Stevie nodded encouragingly to her, everybody does it he was saying, everybody voyeurs, “it was like, oh ok,” she continued, “they were at peak, and it was like what else was there, what could possibly be more important than a woman like that at peak.” She was very shy now, she had barely eaten anything, kept moving her hand from the heavy fork on the setting down to her lap. When her hand landed, tremblingly, on her fork, Stevie put his hand on top of hers, ran his fingers over the lacquer of her nails. He lifted her palm to face him, and she allowed him to intertwine his fingers with hers.
It was very difficult to explain her to his parents, his friends, the couple of quasi-girlfriends he was dumping for her sake. She was from nothing, she had no accomplishments. Other than the partners at his law firm, nobody he knew got along with her. She had made poor choices in her life; aging — it was clear — would not be kind to her. But Stevie had his superpower. They got along, always had — that mattered more to him than what any number of Jens, of ex-roommates or collateral relatives, might have thought. And, more than that, there was that odd quality of Stevie’s, his interest in truth. When he’d met her he thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever met, he’d seen the way gravity shifted around her, he’d seen the way other people lost their minds. She wasn’t that anymore — hadn’t been for a long time, would never be again — but that had been truth, had been a fact out in the world, and now Stevie, in the privacy of his own memory, was the caretaker of that.