“Bueno,” he concluded.
My cell phone was sitting on our table. I pretended to check it. I needed to divert my eyes from his intensity. I acted as if I didn’t see him staring at me.
“I’m expecting a call from the office,” I mumbled. “A never-ending edit I’ve been trapped in all week.”
My face was getting hot. I have the kind of skin that easily red dens in the heat or when I get nervous or excited.
I downed my whiskey too fast.
“So what are you reading now?” he asked.
“Well,” I began hesitantly, “I just finished reading you.”
“Thank you, that makes a whole ten people.”
I smiled. If ten had read his last novel, that meant less than five poor souls in the New York literary world would have read my own pathetic attempt at experimental fiction a few years back.
“Did you hear about Samuel Reverte-Ferrante’s latest novel?” I blurted, without pausing to think about the book’s racy subject matter.
“About the Italian talk-show host who goes to bathhouses to fuck adolescent boys?”
He said the word “fuck” in Spanish. I was surprised at how my nipples hardened with the release of that single word. Follar. Just to pronounce it forces one to clench one’s teeth and snarl.
“Did you read it?” I asked.
“No. Read about it. It’s caused quite a stir, no? Everyone thinks Reverte-Ferrante is gay now, though he’s happily married to some big-shot editor.”
“Everyone is thinking: How could someone write about it and describe it so well if he hadn’t done it himself?”
“Men have been writing about the female orgasm for centuries, Anna. What do they know?”
It was the first time he addressed me by my first name, so soon after saying fuck. Ah-na. He pronounced it softly, as if he were stroking the back of my neck with his words.
“Too true,” I said.
“I say good for Samuel!” David said suddenly. “What’s the big deal really if he screwed some guy in the name of good research? Flesh is flesh, no?”
“Sure.” I shrugged, though I didn’t really agree. I decided to give him a taste of my New Yorker attitude. “But screwing your wife’s brother is crossing the line, don’t you think?”
“Perhaps. But haven’t you ever crossed the line in a close relation ship?” he asked.
“Of course, but. .” I replied, wondering how I could change the subject.
We were coasting quickly into unchartered waters for your standard Publisher’s Forum interview.
“Really?” he said playfully. “What, with a friend or something?”
He was as excited as I was, hanging on every careless word that flew out of my mouth. David was sitting up straight, resting his hands placidly on the tops of his spread thighs. His head was tilted low and slightly to the side. He was my captive audience.
I took a breath and told him about my room-mate at Vassar, even though I couldn’t believe what I was saying. I remembered the drunken night when things went too far with Natasha for the first time. The smell of Johnson’s baby powder exuded from her belly button as I pulled down her panties.
Our friendship had reached that point of overwhelming curiosity. She asked if she could kiss me. I couldn’t say no to a girlfriend. We were both each other’s first, and we took it seriously. We left our usual fits of cackling laughter out of it.
I was larger breasted than Natasha, but just as malnourished. We both lived on cigarettes and Diet Coke. We rolled around my twin dorm bed kissing. I told David that her small pointy breasts and bony hips barely touched mine. I said that Natasha moaned too loudly and overdramatically for what I was doing beneath her perfectly manicured landing strip of a bush. (Mine in comparison was an untidy patch of overgrown ivy.)
Shocked at how dirty I was talking, I stopped myself. His face had turned red.
“This conversation has gone way past any chance of professional ism, hasn’t it?” I told him. But I relished the macho bravado of my words.
“I’m enjoying myself immensely,” he said with an earnest smile. “Do you still talk to this Natasha?”
“No, her husband doesn’t like me much.”
“Fool.” He tsk’d.
“So, what about you?” I shot back, downing another gulp of whiskey for support.
“My turn, huh?” he said.
“Come on. I just revealed a little too much information to you. Offer me something as good. None of this will be published, I swear.”
He let out a tinny laugh. I couldn’t tell if it was nervous.
“OK then. You’ve heard of Sergi Canetti, right? The writer who wrote the historical novel about Hadrian, the Roman emperor?”
“Yes, you and he and some friends started Crack. You two related?”
“By father. We grew up together. Our father had moved us to Paris when we were boys. He was just opening his bookshop at the time. We were lonely, awkward looking and had no friends. Our French was poor, and we felt like outsiders in that city. We spent a lot of time alone together. One day we just decided to experiment on each other.”
“What do you mean, experiment?” I asked.
“We gave each other our first blow jobs.”
I nodded.
“This is quite common for boys you know, at least in Europe,” he said. “I don’t know about American boys.”
“How old were you?” I asked.
“Sixteen or so.”
“Here, boys feel each other’s cocks at sleep-away camp,” I said. “But no one dares to talk about it. It stays in the woods, with their campfire tales.”
He laughed at my attempt at being funny.
Then he suggested we try another place.
I chose this divey basement bar on Mott Street. It was called Double Happiness, and I found the name cynically comforting. The light from the hanging red paper lamp in our corner booth ruddied our sallow cheeks to a much-needed healthier glow. It seemed we both shared a dislike for healthy outdoor lifestyles.
We sat close to one another. So close that our knees kissed, though they were still separated by a hairline crack. This proximity interfered with making conversation. So I pulled my knee away slightly to concentrate on what the hell I was saying, and hopefully, to seem a little out of reach. If that were still possible.
We jump-started the dialogue by discussing new book releases we thought important (always an ice-breaker for book people), when David mentioned one that I had read by a Mexican American journalist. It had just been translated into Spanish. It was about little boys in Mexico who cross the border by themselves to look for their labourer mothers in the United States. The boys leave their country with only a few pesos in their shorts and an approximate address. They try dozens of times to sneak over, only to die like stray dogs in the desert.
My heart had begun to beat faster and I felt the blood drain from my face. The mere mention of that book brought me back to that terrible time in my life.
“So you haven’t read it then?” David asked.
“No, I have.” I responded, sounding stiff.
“Oh. It didn’t look like it registered with you.” He looked con fused.
I hadn’t wanted to tell him about my mother. I preferred not to talk about her with anyone. But the sad man trapped in his eyes told me to. Despite his generous smiles, he had a sombre look that made me think he understood the incomprehensible, like death, or why we fall in love with the wrong people.
“That book takes me back to a hard time in my life recently,” I said. Then it all came out. The alcohol was making me emotional. “It’s been two years since I last had sex with a guy, you know.”
I was suddenly insane with an urgency to talk about it. It was like I was a bottle of Coke he kept shaking, lifting the cap to watch me splatter. He took a sip of his Scotch and placed it down slowly on to the coaster with the Chinese Double Happiness symbol.