Nine & a Half Weeks (6 page)

The bed is piled high with packages. Not giftwrapped, but what one spills on a bed after a day of shopping, just before Christmas. The room key is in the ashtray on the bedside table, his handwriting on a note stuck above the dial numbers on the phone. “Open them,” it reads, “and take a bath and get dressed.”

1 start with one of the smaller shopping bags from Brooks Brothers. It contains a light blue shirt, like the ones I have been wearing at night, but smaller. Men’s socks in an Altman’s bag. A container that looks like a child’s hat box holds a sandy beard and mustache wrapped in tissue paper. My hands shake a little by the time I unwrap the largest package: a dark gray suit and vest. Shoes next. A tie. A blond man’s wig. A small packet of hairpins from Woolworth’s. A white handkerchief. A man’s summer hat.

1 push the wrappings aside and sit down on the edge of the bed, holding the wig in both hands. It’s an expensive wig, the hair human and soft to the touch. Alarm and excitement race inside me, side by side, like speeding cars on a dark highway. Every few moments they narrow the space between them and touch without noise or sparks, gently. Once I’m in the bathwater—Estee Lauder, Jean Nate, and Vitabath to choose from (but I can’t, put careless amounts of each under the gushing faucets; they cancel each other out, for the first time in weeks I’m submerged in milky water without foam amid a confused mingling of scents)—alarm chooses a turnoff. Excitement hurtles me onward, dark miles stretching ahead, headlights illuminating only a few yards of gray road as I turn the virgin square of soap over and over between my palms.

I dry myself in the sequence in which he dries me every evening: face and neck, feet and calves, back and buttocks. The only thing missing from the costume now spread out on the bed is underwear. The trousers’ lining is smooth against my skin. The socks fit, the shirt fits. My breasts are small enough so that the layers of shirt and vest and finally suit coat obscure them completely.

I put on the shoes—an old-fashioned wing-tip style, like his, the gleaming leather lining pungent, why don’t women’s shoes ever smell this delicious?—the left one feels tight at first.

There is a small pot of theatrical glue, a brush attached to the inside of the cap. I’m in a quandary, can’t decide whether the glue goes on the backing of the mustache and the beard or on my skin. I end up spreading it thinly on the backing, something like canvas, and position the mustache under my nose. It tickles and looks straight out of a high school play and makes me laugh out loud. I need to make three adjustments to get it to sit evenly above my upper lip. The beard is harder. Again and again, while the glue is setting and turning sticky, I take it off and start over, repositioning it, until it ends up at the same distance from my earlobes on each side and stays put under my chin. The wig, by comparison, is easy: I brush my own hair into a scrawny ponytail high up on my head, twist it, pin loose strands close to my scalp all round. Once the wig is pulled over my hair onto my head it fits tightly. 1 carefully lift an upper layer of hair and anchor another few pins through the canvas backing to my own hair beneath. The wig’s hair at the back of my neck touches my shirt collar, almost covers my ears at the sides, falls onto my forehead in a thick wave.

In the process of replacing the tissue paper in which the mustache has been wrapped, I find, in the same round box, a set of eyebrows. I glue them over my own. I have been scrutinizing myself in the mirror above the dressing table all along, but fixed on details. Now the mechanism comes into play that allows one to switch from focusing on a panel of glass, every dust particle and thumbprint important and distinct, to seeing the outside beyond, the windowpane gone. There is a face in the mirror, no longer an isolated beard or the tilt of a wig. Alarm screeches at me from an obscure sidestreet and collides with excitement before both continue to speed on side by side. I see that he looks ill at ease in a manner familiar to me, but I recognize nothing else. Across from me sits a slender, pleasant-looking young man. Were someone to introduce him to me at a party I’d register the involuntary response, a nod somewhere in me: possible…. He has wide gray eyes, thick blond hair, light bushy eyebrows, a fine nose; pale skin, a short, reddish-blond beard. Acknowledging the spark of a preliminary understanding between us, he leans toward me; he, too, likes what he sees. It lasts for only a moment. There is a violent wrenching inside me, alarm takes me over. The room swims, I cower on the floor at the foot of the bed, one sentence pounding in my chest: I want my mother.

That, too, passes. I push back the hair over my forehead, open the pack of Camels that is lying on the bedside table. I’ve never smoked a Camel and begin to cough immediately, my throat raw. But I inhale more deeply the second time and, perversely, the rough flavor clears my head, I’m no longer dizzy but clear-eyed and calm. I wonder, briefly, where to put the handkerchief. I can’t remember where he keeps his and finally put it into the back trousers pocket. I have never worn a garment with back pockets before and slide my hand in and out of it, feeling the slippery lining and the curve of buttock beneath.

Only two items are left, the tie and the hat, and both give me trouble. The tie, I discover, comes with instructions: tucked into the tissue paper that is folded around the silk is a thin sheet of paper. He has done five diagrams. The heading reads: “What’s on the drawing is what’s in the mirror, follow step by step.” The first time around the knot ends up an inch below the top collar button, the second time I get it right. The hat, however, is beyond me. I set it on top of my head carefully, then pull it down slightly, tilt it this way and that. I know enough about hats to realize it is my size, or, rather, the correct size for my own head and pinned-up hair and the wig, but no matter how 1 push at it, it looks odd. Not even trying to summon the hat angles of various male movie actors, or the appearance of my lone male friend who wears hats regularly, makes sense when applied to the image in the mirror.

I finally give up, reluctantly, and put the hat back in its box. It is seven o’clock on my wristwatch, which I take off and put into my handbag. I wash my hands. 1 stand in front of the full-length mirror, buttoning and unbuttoning the jacket, posing first with one, then the other hand in my pants pockets. Then, idly and smiling, I take off my earrings and put those, too, with the watch. And I discover the belt, while carefully folding the many wrappings, returning—as if following a specific assignment—each smoothed sheet of tissue into its appropriate box or bag.

The belt is identical to his, but stiffer. It fits into the palm of my left hand and slowly uncoils when 1 lay it on the bedspread. I run its length through thumb and forefinger, then close my hand into a fist around the buckle. 1 open it, wind the leather a few times across my palm and over the back of my hand, then close my fist once more. I am overwhelmed by the memory of a woman, her wrists tied to a shower head, writhing under the blows of this belt, which cuts through the curtain of water again and again. The phone rings. “I’m in the lobby,” he says. “Come on down. Don’t forget the room key.”

I slip the key into my right jacket pocket, transfer it to the right pants pocket, put it into the left jacket pocket, anxiously now. I thread the belt through the trouser loops, fumble the buckle shut. 1 pick up the Camels and a book of matches, don’t know where to put them, and end up holding them in my left hand. A balding, short man waits with me at the elevator for a moment, then mumbles under his breath and walks rapidly down the corridor. I look after him and realize that he is no shorter than 1 am. Wearing sandals with three-inch heels I am tall for a woman; now I’m a man of below average height.

A middle-aged woman stands at the back of the elevator. I step in and stand near the door. When we come to the first floor and I am about to walk out into the lobby, I remember. I step aside and she passes through the door on ahead, without looking at me. I am blushing and have to force myself not to smile. What an astonishing ritual, I think, and simultaneously, gleefully: I passed!

He is sitting on a corner sofa, motions me to the chair facing him across a low round table with a brass bell, his glass of scotch, an empty ashtray. He is wearing his gray suit, identical to mine. He looks at me for a long time, taking in the shoes, the fit of the vest, the knot of the tie, the beard and hair. “What about the hat?” “It… 1 couldn’t get it to look right. I tried for a long time.” He grins, then laughs out loud, takes a sip of his drink, seems utterly delighted. “Never mind,” he says finally, still smiling. “You look fine. You look great, in fact. Let’s forget about the hat.” He leans forward and takes both of my hands between his, as if to warm them for a child who has come inside after building a snowman. “Don’t be nervous,” he says. “There is nothing to be nervous about.”

A waiter appears, hovering two steps to one side of us. He orders wine for me, more scotch for himself, still in the same position: his elbows on his knees, shoulders hunched forward, his hands around mine. I sit stiffly, erect, my eyes on my arms stretched woodenly toward him. 1 am overcome by that mixture of contradictory feelings I should long be used to, since one variation or another has assaulted me almost daily since we’ve known each other. I am deeply embarrassed, 1 am flushed, 1 am shaking—and I am exhilarated, drunk before my wine arrives, ablaze with mindless gusto.

The waiter has no reaction at all, at least to judge from his expression when he brings our drinks and when I can finally bring myself to look up at him. “It’s all inside you, you know,” says the man sitting across from me, in the same suit that I’m wearing. “Nobody else ever cares. But it does make it a lot of fun for me that you do.” We move on to a dining room then, where he holds my hand between courses. I have difficulty chewing, even more so swallowing; 1 drink close to twice the amount of wine I’m used to. He has another drink at the bar, his hand loosely on my thigh.

Upstairs in the room he propels me toward the mirror. His arm around my shoulder, we look at our reflection: two men, one tall and clean-shaven, the shorter one sandy-bearded; dark suits, a pink shirt and a pale blue one. “Take your belt off,” he says, in a low voice, and I do, unable to take my eyes from his in the mirror. Not knowing what to do next, I coil it into the tight serpent it had been in its box. He takes it from me, says “Get on the bed,” and, “No, hands and knees.” He reaches from behind me to open my trousers, then says, “Pull your pants down over your ass.” Something gives way in me and my elbows can’t hold my weight. On my knees, my head on my arms, sounds from my throat that I can’t interpret: neither fear nor longing but the inability to distinguish between the two, adding up to… He beats me, a pillow over my head to muffle my cries, then takes me as he would a man. I cry out louder than before, my eyes wide open to the dark of the pillow covering my face. Deep inside me his pounding stops abruptly. He forces me down flat, his right hand under me and between my legs. Lying on top of me, stretched full length, he lifts the pillow, listens to my sobs subside. When I realize that we are breathing in unison, calmed, his fingers begin their infinitesimal move. Soon 1 am breathing rapidly again. He pushes the pillow back over my face when I come and soon he comes, too. He puts wadded Kleenex off the bedside table between my buttocks. It is soaked with semen and tinged pink when he removes it, later on. Curled against me, he murmurs, “So tight and hot, you can’t imagine….”

SOMETIMES I WONDERED abstractly how it was possible that pain could be this exciting. Once during that time I stubbed my toe, in sandals, on my bottom desk drawer. I swore, hopped up and down, hobbled down the corridor to a co-worker’s office to get sympathy from him, and couldn’t concentrate on work for the next fifteen minutes because the slight but incessant throbbing distracted and annoyed me. But when he was the one inflicting pain, the difference between pain and pleasure became obscured in a way that turned them into two sides of a single coin: sensations different in quality but equal in result, equally intense, one stimulus as powerfully able as the next to arouse me. Since pain always came as a prelude and only then—sometimes hours earlier but always eventually leading to orgasm—it became as longed for, as sensuous, as integral to lovemaking as having my breasts caressed.

THERE IS A pounding at the front door. It’s 6:30 P.M. and I’ve only just let myself in a few minutes earlier. When I peer past the chain lock, there he is: rolling his eyes, a bag of groceries in the crook of his right arm, the handle of his briefcase between thumb and index finger, the remaining fingers of his left hand curled around the top of a bag festooned with the Bendel’s logo; the Post, folded lengthwise, is stuck between his teeth.

A decisive shake of his head—the newspaper swishes across celery tops—tells me he does not wish to be unburdened. He walks into the kitchen and sets the groceries down with a satisfying thump; makes a sharp turn, drops the Post in the hallway and his briefcase in the doorway to the bedroom. The briefcase clatters loudly. He winks at me gravely and with both hands, ceremoniously, deposits the Bendel’s bag on the unmade bed. “After dinner,” he says, to my raised eyebrow and grin. “You didn’t carry the paper in your teeth on the street,” I say. “No,” he says. “I stuck it in my mouth just before I banged on the door, with my foot. For effect.” He looks me sternly up and down.

“Now?” I ask, after the salad. “Certainly not,” he says. “What do you think this is, Weight Watchers? We’re having an omelette.” “His Majesty can’t think of what to cook. Again.” He nods grimly: “And you’ll love it.” After the omelette is gone—his omelettes are luscious: crisp vegetables laced throughout, melted cheese on top, whole, sauteed mushrooms on the side—I clear my throat. “Now?” “Really,” he says, “you’d think you’ve never eaten here before. Don’t I usually manage some sort of dessert? There’s baklava.” “Baklava,” I groan, “after eggs, what a lurid combination, I’m full.” “Please yourself,” he says. “I’ve been tasting it ever since it leered at me from a greasy deli on Bleecker. You can watch me eat.”