Chameleon in a Candy Store, page 8
“Wow.”
“Wow? What does this mean? Wow?”
“The passion,” I said.
“I’m deciding if I should go or stay.”
I had come all the way to The Hague to hear this.
“And you’re short,” she added. It was with a smile, but she said it.
“It doesn’t matter when you’re lying down.”
“You’re not lying down all the time.”
I wanted to tell her to go fuck herself, but I’d come all the way here and I felt I was owed something. Something I’d have to wait to get.
“You could be a sweet guy, but you hide behind the jokes,” she said at last.
Then she told me she was still married, but I hardly even heard her. When Valeriya told me the same thing, I nearly broke in half. Anita and her husband of seven years had lived in a very respectable neighborhood in the Hague. I was suddenly thinking about Valeriya. I couldn’t comprehend how she had become so deeply embedded in my being. Like an arrow that hurts less if it is allowed to remain in place. Anita was almost waving as she tried to get my attention. She invited me back to a depressingly large, mostly white apartment. Didn’t she say she had a husband somewhere? Was this where she took her online dates? Would the husband walk in any second? The moment we got inside, she turned around and kissed me. I had no idea she would be so feminine and gentle under all that Slavic frost. We ripped at our clothes as if they had become poisonous. Naked and with her hair down around those slender shoulders, she became so much nicer. Sweet, even.
She whispered to me as I fucked her.
“I love eeet . . . yessss, oh baby . . . ohhhhh, nice . . . nail me!”
Nail me?
She got on top and let her hair fall over me like darkness.
I laughed out loud when she orgasmed because the sounds she made were so girlish and innocent, I just assumed she was faking it. But then I saw the telltale red patches on her neck and chest like embarrassment. With her taut stomach still shivering against mine and my cock still hard inside her, I began to feel something other than just lust for her.
It was gratitude.
The sort of gratitude you feel for someone who has done you a great kindness. There was a selflessness about her in that moment that endeared me to her. I had never made a girl come solely from fucking before. And the fact that I hadn’t come yet merely confirmed my status as stud. I’d give her a rest before going again. Lying there beneath her limp, perspiring body, with her hair spilling across my face, I began to talk about, of all people, Valeriya. How she had lied to me. How I was better off without her. How she saw herself as a slut. I couldn’t stop. I even mentioned the magical lure of the pussuq.
And because I felt I was at least being listened to, I began to talk about Yvette. How she had insisted I join her in a therapy session with her psychiatrist. The gray-haired, lesbian-looking woman who had heard so much about me (all bad) had decided it was time she met me. Fifteen seconds after being introduced, she asked me the one question I didn’t want to be asked by anyone anywhere ever: “Do you love her?” My silence was more eloquent than any answer I could select. Anita continued to make soothing sounds of encouragement. She was hearing my confession, making me truly hers to inhabit. How girlish she had turned out to be after all. A minute passed before I realized she was snoring. She had fucked me and fallen asleep.
REBECCA
Rebecca’s profile picture showed her straining against the confines of a skintight minidress in mid-conversation at a party. The faceless silhouetted male with whom she chatted was obviously for presentation purposes only. Look at my scorching-hot body. This was how she wanted to be seen on a dating site. In another picture, a close-up of her face, she looked like the aging mother of the party girl.
Her aristocratic accent confirmed she had spent her childhood in Oxford. Following her parents’ death in a tragic auto accident, Rebecca was sent to live with her uncle, a former Oxford professor who had moved to Amsterdam after an incident with one of his students. He would turn out to be her first sexual experience when he made her come with his fingers. She was fifteen.
I had by now realized that I could use my abuse as a sort of twisted method of getting sex and sexuality into a conversation. Because I had introduced the idea of using a safety pin to lock my predator out, she felt comfortable enough to confess some experiences of her own.
“So he abused you?” I ventured.
“Yes, I suppose so, but he didn’t go all the way. I mean, he didn’t actually have sex with me.”
I was reminded of how I had defended Brother Ollie, because in defending him I could convince myself that I had actually wanted my balls fondled by a clergyman. She was astonishingly generous with her sexual musings. In fact I got the impression she was relieved to talk to someone about it all. Relieved and maybe even a little turned on. It was sad to think of all that sexuality dammed up inside the conservative life of a geography teacher in Amsterdam. She looked like she was holding her breath permanently. But after one kiss, Agatha Christie became Julie Christie, and yes, she had the accent to match. You need six hundred years of British oppression stored away in your DNA to appreciate the satisfaction of thrusting your undeserving Irish cock into a mouth that has just finished saying, “Darling, I’ve been frightfully busy today.”
Fucking her took on political status.
“This is for the Famine, and this is for Bloody Sunday, now turn over, this is for Maggie Thatcher. And this? This is for Princess Dian-aaaaaaggggh.”
On rain-soaked Mondays, which were indistinguishable from any other day of the week in the Netherlands, she cheered herself up by appearing in front of her class wearing a light gray one-piece boilersuit that showed off her lithe body to full effect.
When she turned to write on the chalkboard, the class fell silent. For most teachers it was the other way around. It was an honor, she said, to be part of their sexual awakening.
She intentionally made spelling mistakes at the chalkboard, knowing full well that she would first need to bend and reach for the eraser before shaking herself vigorously as she scrubbed the word away. She delighted in the idea of these boys pummeling themselves at home under the blankets with the image of her superb ass coaxing them out of puberty.
And she loved to suck me off. It was the first thing she’d do. I began to think her uncle had taught her well. She was so good at it only because she enjoyed it so much.
I felt seriously twisted that this thought should even occur to me, and if I had any sort of decency, my cock would have softened and we would have stopped. But it didn’t. If anything, the idea that fifteen years later I should benefit from the sexual teachings of an Oxford don surged into my balls, up the length of my undeserving Irish cock and down her gulping, well-spoken throat. And the moment just before she reached her own orgasm she would look at me as if she’d just been grossly insulted. Like she was being overtaken not by ecstasy but by a shuddering exhalation of abhorrence. As if all the platitudes and denials burned away, and there beyond the smoke for a split second was the reality.
A Mick was fucking her.
OLGA
“You live a charmed life.”
Seeing myself through the jealous eyes of my houseguest felt unexpectedly good.
Tim was only halfway through his first day and he’d already visited the red-light district and two of its prostitutes before we even got back to my place.
Tim was a sexual tourist and my apartment was his base.
As a fellow AA member from Saint Lacroix, I had gotten to know him just enough to invite him to visit me in New York, but he had never taken me up on it because I suppose New York didn’t offer the same sexual possibilities as Amsterdam. And what’s more, he had supposedly fallen in love with a Russian girl, and so a short layover in Amsterdam seemed to him to be a good idea before continuing on to Moscow. It transpired after only a little questioning that the girl in Moscow whom he now talked about marrying was in fact a self-confessed—I didn’t dare say the word in front of him because he was convinced she was his girlfriend—prostitute. Tim was what I imagined a hooker dreamed of.
A constant source of employment.
He talked about asking her to come and live with him in Saint Lacroix. Meanwhile, from among the well-maintained red-lit windows, he selected a rather buxom girl who wouldn’t have been my first choice, but it was his money, not mine. While I waited for him outside in the street I noticed a girl in an adjacent window who, when she thought no one was looking, took swigs from a tall glistening black bottle and surreptitiously stroked the white tail of a cat hidden behind her little bed. The tail straightened between her slender fingers like some headless python, or yes, I suppose, a penis. I felt like I was spying on her life between fucks and sucks.
I had already spent more time than I would have liked waiting on the little brown-bricked bridge for Tim and his sex worker to conclude their transaction. Flanked by his luggage, I looked like a newly arrived tourist, and as such, found myself scrutinizing the area as if I had indeed just arrived. I noticed for the first time that the window-shoppers weren’t all men. Behind gently embarrassed smiles and bathed momentarily in reflected red fluorescent light, women looking surprisingly comfortable in such a potentially controversial area slowed down as if recognizing something familiar about it all. It was the business of attraction. The Dow Jones of who wanted who. Maybe they were reassured by the fact that if you were alluring enough or just present enough (some of the prostitutes were unashamedly ugly), you too would eventually attract your man. Here sexual attraction was reduced to its barest necessities. There was no literature, no sonnets, just naked sexual honesty. The yearning of organs for organs chaperoned by their owners. There was something maddeningly straightforward about it. It was all so practical. So very Dutch.
You want sex. We have it.
Tim finally emerged from the one-girl brothel without even a trace of a smile.
He preferred his women not to make sound at all.
“I appreciate it if they just stay quiet. I always tell them this in advance. If they charge one-fifty, I’ll put three hundred down so I have some room for maneuver.”
I was impressed by this no-nonsense, albeit paradoxical approach. I would need to believe they wanted me for the encounter to have any value. After all, wasn’t this what was on sale? The illusion that a beautiful young woman was aroused by me. But by letting them know he wasn’t interested in their performance, Tim held control of the situation. And control was the real commodity here. You were absolved of the pressure to figure out if a woman actually wanted you. Tim already knew they didn’t mean it, so why should he have to suffer their bad acting? He said he couldn’t come with the buxom hooker because she spoke to him, and in doing so, she broke the sexual equivalent of the fourth wall.
“Have you been smokink maruijana?” He mimicked her. “You only get ze one position,” and when he couldn’t come, “Maybe you should cut it off, ja?”
He picked up his bag with the airport tags still attached and we were about to head back to my place when he noticed the girl with the Liebfraumilch beckoning and gesturing toward us. Even though she gyrated amateurishly and giggled unconvincingly, I felt a stirring.
Tim didn’t know that she was beckoning at me. Or maybe he did. Either way he didn’t care. I tried to find some way to claim her as my own. I’d seen her first.
Surely he wasn’t about to just go and fuck her so soon after the last one? She was a prostitute and as such she was only doing what a prostitute does. She was standing there nearly naked in a window coming on to men for money. Legally. It was a strange sensation. As if she was just performing in three dimensions what we all knew but were too afraid or too ashamed to talk about. That men wanted sex and women wanted security. And yes, of course I wanted her, but I couldn’t bring myself to pay for a woman like a cut of meat from a butcher. And my poor little ego couldn’t handle the notion that any guy with the correct amount of cash would fill this slot. Literally.
She had winked at me while I waited for Tim and now she was going to fuck him? Tim dropped his bag again and looked at me. He could see something was going on between the girl and me.
“I won’t be long,” he said.
The uninvited heat of jealousy invaded my thoughts and my initial, almost naive sexual fervor for the girl in the window dissolved first into disgust at her, then hatred for Tim, and finally anger at myself. What the fuck was I doing standing there waiting for this asshole to get his rocks off? With a whore. Had the filthy little cunt noticed something competitive between Tim and I and capitalized on it? She had seen him arrive and watched me wait for him. And this was business, after all. She was after a sale. How had I been tricked into this? After what seemed like an eternity, Tim reappeared, and I searched his face for some sign of pleasure or relief or shame or spite.
“I fucked her in the ass,” he said.
I felt filthy. I was as jealous and enraged as if he had fucked my girlfriend. I felt wronged, but what could I say? It disgusted me to think that by being there I had inadvertently added to his pleasure. There was no conceivable way to justify what I was feeling, which made the feeling even more dangerous. I couldn’t berate Tim for fucking this beautiful young girl any more than I could if he had rented a rowboat. But why did I feel so enraged? So betrayed? So . . . hurt? I was jealous that Tim had fucked a prostitute.
I called my sponsor and he suggested that I tell Tim he should get a hotel room. So this was what I did. He wasn’t even surprised when I told him that I disagreed with what he was doing and that I felt it was not sober behavior. It was as if he wanted me to throw him out so that he could think even less of himself than he already did.
“Oh, by the way,” he said before he left, “her name is Olga.”
Open on a shot of me in Albert Heijn Supermarket.
I take out my credit card and swipe it in the self-service console. A green light flickers and we hear an automated voice: “Astobuleef.” In subtitles we see the translation: “Thank you.” Bagged groceries are lowered into my cart and I wheel them away. Cut to another scene, this time I’m buying some new clothes and swiping my credit card as the same greeting appears in a friendly flashing typeface. “Astobuleef” (Thank you). I exit the store with my shopping bags. Cut to an interior of my apartment. I’m wearing the clothes I bought earlier and I’ve prepared a beautiful dinner for two with the groceries. The doorbell sounds, and after one last look at the table to make sure everything is in place, I open the door to reveal a stunningly beautiful young girl standing in the doorway. Before she enters the apartment, she asks me for my credit card. Taking it, she reaches up under her skirt and appears to insert it between her legs. She stands motionless for a second, smiling at me as if waiting for the result, and then her eyes widen and a huge seductive smile spreads across her face. “Astobuleef,” she says seductively, and steps into the apartment. A title appears on screen: “God is good but business is better.” Issued by the Dutch Institute of Commerce.
PAMELA
“Tell me he’s going with you, Jonathan, you can’t not bring him.”
In taking up my cause like this, my newly employed assistant Pamela made it seem like Jonathan hadn’t already decided to invite me to the awards ceremony, when for all any of us knew, he might have come upstairs to do exactly that.
She had employed such a strategy, I imagined, since it would seem like she was fighting in my corner while getting rid of me at the same time. She had been hired when Lucien left because even though he and I were both art directors, I had none of his computer skills. Pamela was not an art director, but she was fluent in Photoshop, InDesign, After Effects, and many other programs I hadn’t even heard of. Also recommending her for the job, as far as I was concerned, was the fact that there was no danger of anything even vaguely sexual ever transpiring between us, since she had difficulty squeezing herself in, and extricating herself from, between the armrests of a normal-sized chair. This seemed to suggest that my superiors knew more about my proclivities than I realized.
Her substantial presence made mine even less relevant. She could easily make all the adaptations necessary for the print ads and posters, which was all that was left to do now that The Life Less Driven was running across Europe. In fact there was now no need at all for me to be in Amsterdam apart from the fact that I had been deported. This was the term being used in agency emails to describe my situation. But Pamela was no mere technician; she was also the self-appointed curator of the Agency Celebrity Phone List.
Hilarious, if (like Silvestro) you resembled the classic Italian film star Marcello Mastroianni, or (like Christoph) you were often mistaken for the Dutch footballer Sven van Beek. The Agency Celebrity Phone List sat laminated on every desk, by every phone, so that every photographer, illustrator, visiting client, or pizza delivery guy saw your name and extension under an image of Uncle Fester.
Was this Pamela’s revenge on me for making her work so late and so often while I rummaged around online looking for women? (I was convinced she checked my “recent history.”) Seeing the trauma in my face the first day the list appeared, and perhaps fearing retribution in the form of even longer hours, she confessed. “Silvestro said to find a picture of Uncle Fester. I didn’t know what it was for.”
I let her off light. After all, her name appeared under a picture of Princess Fiona, Shrek’s wife.
But Jonathan (Colin Firth) responded to her beseeching with a gracious smile and handed me a large manila envelope full of mail diverted from the New York office.
I knew without opening it that it contained director’s showreels and photographer’s brochures begging me for possible employment. Dropping off the envelope was probably the only reason he had stopped by, but now that Pamela had shamed him into it, he did indeed invite me to join Silvestro, Christoph, and himself for a weekend in Cannes for the Cannes Lions advertising awards, and I of course accepted graciously, because what kind of a crazy bastard would refuse an all-expenses-paid trip to the South of France?
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