The doorman hung up the house phone. ‘Go on up,’ he said. ‘This elevator goes as far as the tenth floor, where there’s another desk for our premier floors. They’ll tell you what to do from there.’
A double layer of doormen.
The elevator whisked me through a column of air and let me off ten floors up, where a second pair of doormen directed me toward another elevator. I pressed PH3. This elevator was glass on all sides, so I could watch the rooftops of Brooklyn fall away beneath me.
There was only one apartment on the floor. I rang the bell.
A middle-aged housekeeper opened the door and took my jacket.
She said, ‘The Señor is out on the terrace.’ Did I want a cocktail? Absolutely. Bueno. Already poured. A young man, also Hispanic, also friendly, brought me a martini glass on a tray. Balancing the glass—filled to the brim with orange-golden liquid—I followed the maid through a huge living room that looked like a modern art museum, with white couches, white marble floors, walls whose perfect whiteness was defiled only by the violent splashy energy of the large abstract paintings. Was that a real de Kooning?
The glass wall to the terrace was open. The Customer stood with his back to us, looking out over the edge. I gulped down half my drink.
‘Thank you, Maria,’ he told the maid, without turning around.
The maid—Maria—asked me, ‘Are you all right, Señora?’ I wondered how many girls she’d watched stop dead in their tracks, barely able to move.
He didn’t turn around or acknowledge me in any way. I went and stood beside him. He was wearing jeans and a crisp white shirt, open at the neck. He looked even more handsome than he had at the store. I grasped the edge of the low brick wall and hung on. The view made me dizzy, or maybe it was being near him. Or just possibly it was the drink. It was all very confusing, but I loved it. I loved the last rays of daylight twinkling in the windows, the giant red ball that was the sun bouncing on the water.
Now I knew what it meant to feel like you owned the city. The Manhattan skyline spread out before us, lay at our feet, begging us, its rulers, to tell it what to do. Though maybe I was confused again. Maybe that was how I felt. Like a queen.
I took another sip of the cocktail. It was intensely delicious. Tequila, I thought. Edge of chili, edge of something fruity but tart.
‘Hibiscus flower,’ The Customer said.
The strong drink went straight to my head, especially since I’d skipped lunch. I’d been too nervous to eat. But now I kept drinking till it was done. I’d never tasted anything so amazing. I felt tipsy, terrified, and happy.
The sun dipped into the river. Matthew moved closer to me, and like a reflex or afterthought, as if he wasn’t paying attention, he rested one hand on my ass.
‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘No?’
‘Yes,’ was all I could say. But what was I agreeing to? The loveliness of the sunset, or the lovely warmth of his hand?
‘Come take a look at the bed.’
He smiled as he stepped back and let me precede him into the apartment. He took my arm and guided me down a long corridor lined with small vitrines, cut into the wall, displaying classical Greek and Egyptian statuettes. I paused in front of a figure of a human with a dog’s head.
‘Anubis,’ he said. ‘The lord of the dead and the underworld.’
I wanted to say I’d been reading poems about the underworld, but I was afraid of sounding pretentious. And I’d dated enough to know that too much anxious chit-chat could kill the sexual buzz. And there was plenty of buzz.
The bedroom was as stylish as the rest of the apartment. There were windows on three sides, so it seemed to be perched, like an eagle’s nest, above the city below. Could you have sex in a room like this without thinking about all the strangers who might be watching? Or maybe that would be part of the fun, the excitement.
Was it really me thinking that? I was shy about my body. I’d always preferred to have sex with the lights out. But now I was ready to do it any way, anywhere…
In the center of the room was the bed: the mattress from our store. Not that I would have recognized its organic cotton and hand-knotted tufts covered by a simple but beautiful midnight-blue silk bedspread and a half dozen matching throw pillows. Was he married? Would a single guy have a bed like that?
Maybe this was how rich men lived, men who never made their own beds. It shamed me to think of my bed at home, a tangle of rumpled sheets and blankets piled with books and, right now, with the entire contents of my closet, clothes I’d tried on for this evening.
Why had I bothered? I could read his mind, sort of. And I had the definite sense that he wasn’t getting ready to throw me down on the mattress. He wasn’t even going to ask me to repeat what I’d done in the store. We stood there in the doorway, looking into the room. He was still holding my arm.
He said, ‘Do I have to have it moved?’
‘What?’ I said.
‘The feng shui,’ he reminded me. ‘Does it work?’
Was he serious? I didn’t know him well enough to ask. I was ready to have sex with him, but I wasn’t comfortable enough to find out if he was joking.
From a strict feng shui point of view, the bed should have been diagonal to the door, which it wasn’t. But I wasn’t going to say that. There was really no place else in the room that the bed could go.
‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘Perfect.’ If he had bad luck, or got sick, or developed insomnia, it would be my fault. Fine. Anyhow, I didn’t even believe in feng shui. It was just a way to sell mattresses.
He said, ‘That’s odd … I had the impression that the bed was supposed to be diagonal to the door and facing the other direction.’
My face burned with shame. ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘That’s probably right…’ Then why had he even asked me?
‘But I think I’m going to leave it where it is,’ he said. ‘Live dangerously, right?’
‘Right!’ I said. ‘That’s right.’
Standing beside me, he reached around and put his hand under my T-shirt, on my bare skin, on my back, just above my waist. My breathing quickened. It didn’t take much. He could feel it.
‘What now?’ I said. It was up to him. I would do whatever he wanted.
He took his hand out from under my shirt.
He said, ‘Thank you, that’s great. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.’
‘But…’ I couldn’t help myself. Something could still happen.
Or did I fail some sort of test when I’d lied about feng shui?
Only later I would learn that I’d passed the test when I lied.
He said, ‘I’m looking forward to getting to know you better, Isabel.’
Was he trying to make me beg? Maybe I would have, if I could have figured out how to beg a man for sex without humiliating myself. I was ready to humiliate myself, but I didn’t believe that it would work.
‘Could I ask you a question?’ I said.
‘Ask me anything,’ he replied. But I could feel him tense. What did he not want me to ask? What was he hiding?
‘Well. I suppose we might call this our second date. And you haven’t confessed to any other names. But what’s your last name?’ I said. ‘I was terrified one of the doormen would ask me for it on the way up tonight.’
He laughed. ‘I assumed you knew.’
‘I don’t,’ I said.
‘Well,