The Monosexual, page 12
Paige unscrews the top of the Mason jar. Vincent immediately leans forward to dip his hand into the shining blue goop, but she nudges his hand away.
“You have to let me do this,” Paige says.
Vincent fails to note on which word she has placed her emphasis in this demand.
It could have been:
You have to let me do this (as a person with a fetish for someone with sunburns might say when they wish to experience the condition firsthand). Or it might have been: You have to let me do this (positioning herself as one better qualified than he to apply the gel).
Regardless of the inflection, he wonders what kind of woman would eagerly anticipate this? No woman—and certainly not an (empirically) attractive woman like Paige—could be so desperate to get a man to remove his shirt and touch him that she would resort to spreading a mysterious mix of mint, aloe, yogurt, and Balsam of Peru on his sensitive skin.
Paige is different from other women Vincent has met in his life (before and after Melissa). There are no bells and whistles going off. He isn’t getting any choirs of angels or Vatican smoke signals. But the vibe he’s getting is mostly positive. Paige seems super nice, and she’s being super nice to him.
Is this what flirting looks like nowadays? Vincent wonders. Maybe. Maybe not. Perhaps she is just being nice because she wanted a ride home. Or maybe she didn’t have any motivation at all. Maybe she just liked him.
What kind of people are those, anyway? It seemed impossible for Vincent to reconcile his hard-nosed cynicism with his healthy sense of doubt. But, ultimately, he doesn’t argue and lets Paige proceed. The CD changes again and it is now Charlie Parker with Strings. “Everything Happens to Me.”
Paige dabs into the jar with her nimble fingers and begins softly applying her special treatment to his forehead and cheeks. She caresses the balm over Vincent’s face, carefully, methodically, not unlike a blind person might trace the outline of a person’s features to get to know them. The physical effect is the epitome of contrary sensory feeling. There is the pain of having his raw skin touched but also the cooling relief of the balm. He is having one of those uncomfortable yet exquisite moments of wanting to say “stop” and “don’t stop” all in the same breath.
He keeps his eyes closed so that she can do her job, but occasionally he opens them and, unlike a blind person, awkwardly meets her gaze dead on.
Then her fingers are on his sensitive neck, then down to his pectorals. The balm goes on like the first layer of paint on a sun-bleached Kansas barn. Bristle-brushed, even with Paige’s soft bristle fingertips.
Slowly, imperceptibly, Paige’s touch is beginning to cross over into a sensation more pleasurable than not. As she moves across his chest, his nipples distend and harden, much as he would prefer they wouldn’t. As Paige fingerpaints across his stomach he involuntarily sighs with a satisfied, guttural grunt. The frown that has been on Paige’s face as she empathically endured his oohs and aahs, now gives way to a smile of accomplishment. A canaryfed cat smile.
“Better?” she says.
“I suppose,” he says. He tries to keep it clinical. “So, there’s mint… and aloe…”
“Balsam of Peru…”
“Balsam of Peru, yes. And what’s the slippery part of it?”
“Partly yogurt,” Paige says. “But I expect you’re feeling the Kalahari melon seed oil.”
“Kalahari…”
“… pure, Kalahari melon seed oil,” she says.
“I don’t recall you mentioning that before. Where do you get Kalahari melon seed oil?”
“From Kalahari, silly.”
“No, I mean you, personally.”
“It’s not as hard as you might think,” she says.
“What makes it blue?”
“Food coloring.”
“So, totally unnecessary food coloring.”
“It looks more soothing. Do you think that that blue lidocaine stuff you buy is naturally blue? Blue is the color of relief. The question I have for you is: is it working?”
It was working. Perhaps too well, Vincent thinks. Touching his face, chest, and nipples is as about as intimate as nearly anything he can think of. He supposes it would have been even more intensely personal if the situation was reversed, and he was touching her face, her chest, her nipples. He momentarily imagines her erogenous zones reacting to the touch of cool Kalahari melon seed oil. But she isn’t reacting that way because he isn’t touching her, and silently chastises himself for momentarily thinking about it.
“I’ve, um… I’ve never really done anything like this,” Vincent says.
“You mean to tell me you’ve never had a mixture of aloe, yogurt, fresh mint leaves, Balsam of Peru and Kalahari melon seed oil smeared on your body?”
“Maybe some sailors, once, when I was in the Navy,” Vincent says, trying to make any joke, however lame, to lighten what is beginning to feel distinctly intimate. Paige dips her fingers into the jar again. But when her hands move down to Vincent’s stomach and abdomen—which are equally afflicted and therefore no less in need of relief—he puts his hand over hers.
“It stops there,” he says.
Unfortunately for Vincent, it doesn’t stop there. It does for Paige; she rolls her eyes and obediently puts up her hands in surrender. But just below his abdomen, things are continuing. Expanding. Initially, Vincent attributes the unexpected arousal to some completely involuntary biochemical aberration. What other explanation could there be? He hopes the natural tenting of pleats in his khakis will hide it. Paige doesn’t appear to notice anything and if she does, she doesn’t say anything, and for this he is extremely grateful.
She sighs and wipes her hands on a terry cloth towel. “Let’s move on to part two.”
“Part two?” Vincent says, his voice betraying new apprehension.
“The juleps.”
“Ah. The juleps.”
“Another first for you?”
“No, I’ve had juleps before,” he says. He is about to say “in the Navy” again. But he is distracted.
Juleps. Another summer evening. Another rooftop deck. Another body of water. Melissa’s 28th floor Chicago apartment that looks out on Lake Michigan. Sitting outside on her deck on a balmy, summer-like Saturday in early May. Lounging on loungers. His shirt off. Her in a white cotton blouse and shorts. A pitcher of juleps. The television on, just inside her living room. The 123rd running of the Kentucky Derby. Horses at the gate.
“I do believe they are finally starting,” Melissa says, with an affected Southern drawl.
“And I do believe it’s fah too nice outside to be inside watchin’ people on horses,” Vincent says, matching her drawl for drawl.
“I do declare, you may be right. But it’s powerful hot in this sun.” She unbuttons the top three buttons on her white cotton blouse. Vincent admires the soft valley that appears, the wonderful alabaster skin, the promise of simple delight.
After the pitcher of juleps, they decide to go inside, to have sex on her smooth leather couch. They miss the Derby. Vincent hears about the winner later during a recap.
Real Quiet.
Vincent stares down into the julep Paige has mixed for him. He downs it quickly, while wondering if phantom Melissa can see through his troublesome khakis. He wonders again if Paige has detected anything. His mind and body are tag teaming like wrestlers in the ring; alternately grappling, thrashing, and body slamming through conflicting thoughts and sensations. Is it the memory of Melissa in her unbuttoned white cotton blouse that has made the blood rush from his head to his penis, or the loving touch of Paige’s fingers? He hopes it is the former, fears it is the latter. Another tag off.
Paige’s CD player revolves again and lands on a new CD.
Oh no, Vincent thinks.
“Sinatra? You like Sinatra?” he asks.
“Doesn’t everyone like Sinatra?” Paige says.
But it wasn’t just any Sinatra. It was the song. Their song.
I’ve Got You Under My Skin.
“Is something wrong?” Paige asks.
“This song… it’s just… oddly timed, that’s all.”
Paige smiles and looks at her hands. Vincent guesses she’s thinking that he’s referring to the fact that she’s been under his skin, literally, with the ends of her fingers.
“Oh, right,” she says. “It wasn’t planned. Now you need to sit still for a few minutes or two with this stuff on, soak it in.”
“Sit? You mean sit still? Not talk?”
“Yes, we’re going to just sit. Relax. Calm. Meditate. Enjoy the Sinatra.”
“Enjoy the Sinatra,” he repeats.
Vincent imagines himself submerging to the bottom of Paige’s fish tank, deep under the white stones, among the Emersons, invisible in a liquid narcosis of silence.
Longing to be in a place where he can’t hear the song.
Chapter 10
(the Super Cannoli)
“Who’s up for a song?” someone yells from the far end of the room.
Vincent is upstairs in the party room of Paisano Pasquale’s. His annual office Christmas Party, December 1997. Coworkers, colleagues, and strangers. Red wine, martinis, and grappa. Antipasto platters, baked ziti. A giant cannoli filled with smaller cannoli.
Paisano Pasquale’s popularity, size and success makes it a prime location for large company functions, like the Skinformation staff dinner that Vincent feels compelled to attend each year. The company had reserved a private party room on the second floor of the restaurant every year Vincent had worked there. He and all 29 of his coworkers were expected to attend. Spouses and dates were optional. Vincent had gone stag. If he had managed to corral a date during the holidays (and he had not), the last place he’d have taken her to would have been a work-related function like this one.
The writers, editors, dermatology physician advisors, and graphic designers all drink too much grappa, get loud quickly, and eventually sing a lot of insipid, inappropriate, and insensitive parody songs: “Rudolph the Rosacea-nosed Reindeer,” “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Eczemas,” and “Basal Cells” (sung to the tune of “Silver Bells”).
The downside of not bringing a date is that Vincent is forced to interact more directly with his coworkers. In the office, as a writer and editor, he can keep mostly to himself. When compelled, he can converse on easy, universal topics, like construction causing traffic problems, or the miserable weather—one could always talk about the road construction or weather in Chicago. When his coworkers are not drinking or singing, however, and are forced to talk socially and not talk about work, it often falls flat. It usually comes back to the weather, the roads, and what everyone simply must watch on HBO.
Vincent consciously seeks conversations with extroverts, people who can do the heavy lifting, conversationally. Skinformation is rife with extroverts, and on this night it’s Vincent’s coworker Mitchell George Wallace, who has corralled a seat just to the left of him and is boasting about how much he lifted at the gym the night before.
“The 220 curl is a cruel bitch,” Mitch says with serious, almost convincing bravado. “You have to work up to it.” He mimes the motion in miniature with a forkful of ziti, an action that countermands and eviscerates any macho posing he might have been trying to evoke.
Mitch is not even talking to Vincent; he’s broadcasting his alleged feats of strength to any women within earshot at the table. Vincent’s unspoken task in this scenario is to nod at Mitch’s accomplishments and make little noises as though he is impressed by it all, so that the women might be sent swooning, or so Mitch hoped. Vincent has never actually seen this tactic succeed.
Half-listening and not talking, Vincent is in compulsive sipping mode; his elbow in a perpetual state of bending. He is mostly drinking dry martinis and knows it’s a road that will lead to a nasty hangover, but…oh well…office Christmas parties come but once a year.
Vincent’s head grows increasingly buoyant, and his visits to the bathroom to clear his head and relieve his bladder are frequent and necessary. But he also welcomes opportunities to excuse himself from this party he wants no part of.
“Who’s up for a song?” one of his coworkers yells again.
No one knows it, but Vincent has an excellent singing voice, and is an accomplished Rat Pack vocal mimic, as well. But he reserves this talent for personal moments; daily showers, solitary commutes in his Fiat. He prefers to do his crooning alone in his apartment with an Old Fashioned in a rocks glass and his Koss headphones snug around his ears.
When a new employee group song seems inevitable, Vincent takes it as his cue to make another quiet exit from the party room and stands up.
“Again?” Mitch says, when Vincent gets up to excuse himself. “You’re going to miss the arrival of the Super Cannoli.”
A dessert tradition at these holiday parties, and the pinnacle of the evening, the Super Cannoli is an eight-pound, tubular pastry torpedo, large enough to have the company’s Skinformation logo recreated in blue and green icing on its side, and filled with enough smaller (comparatively smaller) cannoli to feed the entire Skinformation staff, and then some. Even Vincent will admit it is impressive to see it brought forth by several waiters, carried in like Cleopatra on a palanquin and set down ceremoniously on the glossy white tablecloth amid much exaggerated gasping and applause. “Save me a cannoli,” Vincent says. “And a regular coffee, if they come around. I’ll be back.”
In the downstairs men’s room Vincent takes care of business and then vainly checks himself out in the mirror and muses silently to himself about the drab predictability of the holidays.
He tugs at his Hugo Boss sports jacket, straightens and tightens his crimson tie, and brushes his trousers free of stray crumbs he might have collected during dinner. He checks his white shirt for any signs of marinara sauce. Everything seems in place. He always dresses well, but these are also the only nice clothes he owns. Frequently dry cleaned, this outfit travels with him to dermatology conventions across the United States, then hangs in his closet the rest of the year waiting for the office Christmas party. Vincent begins to think he should wear it more often because it gives him confidence. But that might also be the dry martinis.
“Not so bad,” Vincent says to his reflection in the mirror. “Tell me again why you aren’t dating anyone?”
The martinis have also increased his desire for a cigarette. He is not a regular smoker and is perpetually planning to quit entirely. He smokes when all feels wrong in his world, quits when things are going well. Lately, he’s been out of sorts more often than not, so the odds are not in his favor for a smoke-free holiday.
Tonight, Vincent had picked up a pack of Gauloises at a specialty tobacco shop before coming to the restaurant. A cigarette, particularly a long French cigarette, will buy him a few extra minutes before having to jump back into the fray of his colleagues upstairs. Vincent turns a corner out of the men’s room and walks into the neighboring restaurant bar, searching for matches, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips.
It is not unusual for Paisano Pasquale’s to pipe in Rat Pack favorites over their sound system. But when Vincent hears Sinatra singing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” the moment he enters the restaurant bar, it seems like the tune has been magically cued up just for him. Like his very own walk-on music, his theme song. Later, he will interpret it as introductory music for the next scene of his life. The curtain rising on his Act II. And an overpowering sense of now this happens.
The bar has surprisingly few patrons, but there is an attractive woman sitting alone at the other end of the bar, sipping a martini.
Vincent would later remember it as a thunderbolt; some powerful force that turned his head in her direction and kept it there, squarely. If there had been one of those big hand of God index fingers in the vicinity, it would have broken through the ceiling of Paisano Pasquale’s and pointed directly at this woman.
Lo and behold. This one.
He would later describe it (to anyone who would listen) as a tableau that unfolded like the scene when Tony meets Maria at the dance in West Side Story. Everything around Maria fades into gauzy soft focus. It is the same for him now. There is only this woman at one end of the bar, Vincent at the other end, and a beautiful Sinatra song floating between them.
I’ve got you under my skin.
In any other circumstance, even with a sense of initial attraction, he might have merely smiled in her direction. But the cosmic otherness of the moment causes Vincent to instead give her a quizzical look at first, rather than a smile. As if to say: Do you sense the same thing I sense happening here?
The woman’s reaction surprises Vincent even further by mirroring the look back at him. There is no hint that she is annoyed at being stared at, only the same bemused look on her face that seems to respond, Yes, what’s happening here?
Vincent does not stop for matches at his end of the bar, but continues walking directly toward her. He doesn’t break his glance. As he nears her, and she is filling the entire frame of his vision, he feels light-headed taking in her beauty. This time he’s certain it’s not the martinis. She is perfect. She is wearing a shimmering gold sweater and jet black, leather slacks. Her golden hair is shoulder length. Fine in texture, but it shimmers. A deep scarlet has been impeccably applied to her lips and fingernails.
Out of nowhere, emboldened by her beauty and/or by the booze, he begins to sing to her. Not loudly or boisterously, but rather in that intimate way Frank Sinatra used to sing to women swooning in the front rows of nightclubs in the late 1940s, making them feel the song was being sung only for—and only to—them. He’d have never done it if he hadn’t felt a) sure that he could pull it off effectively and b) inexplicably certain it would charm her.
“So deep in my heart, that you’re really a part of me… I’ve got you, under my skin.”
The woman’s lips move in sync with Vincent’s, but she doesn’t sing aloud. When he finishes his chorus, he sits down on the stool next to her.
