That was up to me. Now she would hear or read a snippet about some sexploit that interested her and send me out into the field to bring back the story for her column. I was used to taking her ideas—communicated through slurred, late-night voice mail messages; messy, handwritten faxes; and scribbled Post-it notes of all shapes and colors—and translating them into neatly typed article ideas. She could’ve, of course, done this herself, but she couldn’t type.
“Good morning, Angela,” she said, looking up from a stack of magazines and peering at me over the top of tiger-striped reading glasses. She spoke with the flattened vowels of Up-state New York. Because she thought Botox caused lymphoma, her face was sturdy and lived in, age forming a gentle network of crevices.
“What’ve you got?” She spoke in her “impatient voice.” A white cord hung from her left ear, and she thumped her fingers to the pounding base of 50 Cent. I paged through a wire-bound notebook I used to jot down ideas. Ghost-writing a sex column didn’t come naturally to me, though I was pretty good at it. I was sexually inexperienced, having slept with only two other guys, in college, before Keith.
Making love with Keith wasn’t honing my skills in bed. It was like plopping down into a comfortable armchair in front of the TV. I felt at ease, unpressured, and knew what to do and what to expect, but not much in the way of passion. It was harder and harder to remember the times when Keith and I made muffled, messy love on the floor of the graduate library, under stacks of books about the years of slavery, before Columbus. Was it really us who, during an overnight road trip to Florida, pulled our rental car into a darkened driveway in a Charleston suburb and had sex in the backseat, too overwhelmed with lust to make it to a rest stop?
Making love with Keith was more interesting when I didn’t control my thoughts. Not thoughts exactly, but one thought, a memory that wouldn’t go away. Two years ago, at a drunken bachelorette after party, after the other guests had thinned out, I found myself alone with the bride, my sophomore roommate. Lying on her bed, me dressed in my butt-ugly bridesmaid dress, her in the elegant strapless gown she was to get married in next month, we swigged a bottle of warm champagne.
“Lana, why would you make me wear this ugly thing?” I said, kicking my legs in the air, and letting the shiny, peach-colored skirt fall stiffly to my waist. “I look like a Southern madame…of a whorehouse. Why do you get to wear Badgley Mischka, and I’m stuck in the frigging Belle Watling collection?”
“Cuz, I have to marry Conrad Moore and you don’t.” She burped loudly.
“Bee-otch.” I smacked her playfully and handed her the bottle.
“Here, let’s trade. You be Mrs. Moore and I’ll be Miss Jezebel,” said Lana, slurring. She set down the bottle and began clumsily unzipping her dress.
We stood looking at ourselves in the full-length mirror on the back of her bedroom door, heads together, laughing until we cried. She looked ridiculous—as anyone would—in the bridesmaid train wreck, which was way too tight, especially the bust. I swam in her gown, my breasts too small for her size 38 C cup. When she reached around me to grab the champagne, we both fell over, giggling wildly. Somehow in the mash up of raw silk, chiffon and taffeta our lips crushed together. We kissed hungrily, me on top, until Lana finally sighed and passed out.
“Lana?” I touched her face lightly, and she sighed again more deeply. She was fast asleep.
Disappointed, I carefully tugged her out of the bridesmaid dress and hung up the two dresses. Squished next to each other in the closet, they looked like two pretty girls in love. After pulling Lana to the bed and easing her under the covers, I watched her sleep. Her mouth was parted slightly, a half smile on the lips I had kissed, sucked and bitten. After an hour, I slugged down the rest of the champagne and left.
Lana and I never spoke about what had happened, but for a year, I savored the memory of the kiss. It made sex with Keith much more interesting. Until shame began to replace the sweet-sour taste of champagne on her tongue, the fruity smell of her shampoo and the cushiony feel of her lips. Now whenever I thought of that night, I’d squeeze my fists tightly, digging my nails into my palms and force it from my mind.
Despite my own sexual history, I enjoyed my work. Studying sex and all of its freaky excesses for Lucia made it a curiosity, like an interesting subject I wasn’t majoring in. And I liked Lucia and envied her bawdy openness. She really loved sex, and her column was neither a cheap publicity stunt nor a transparent ploy to lure readers. The sexual revolution had been the high point of her life, and she didn’t want to let it go. She wanted to share her joy of sex. She was the fast girl in seventh grade who taught you how to prop your heel on the edge of the toilet seat and insert a tampon or flick your tongue to French kiss. She wasn’t a sex freak; she was trying to be helpful.
“Lucia, here’s my idea: ‘Honeymoon Surprise.’” I began flipping through my notebook. “I’d like to interview a guy I met who’s into cuckolding.”
“Hmmm, what’s that? she asked, absently fingering an unlit, hand-rolled cigarette. She had quit smoking two years ago, after her father died of emphysema—a story she trotted out early and often. She was always jonesing for a smoke, and that cigarette had become her talisman, as familiar as Anna Wintour’s sunglasses. All of us on staff knew that when she stroked it, she was thinking; if she actually put it in her mouth, intrigued; and if she put it down, she was bored silly.
“I guess it would be easiest to explain it as interracial polygamy,” I replied, crossing my legs under her desk.
“Gawd, no.” She moved her hand from the cigarette and fiddled with her iPod. “You know we’ve covered polygamy ad nauseum. Neither of us is welcome in the state of Utah.”
“Wait, here’s a better way to describe it,” I said quickly, keeping my voice calm. “This is a married white man who hires a black guy to have sex with his wife while he watches. I guess ‘cuckold’ describes the husband.”
“Geez, Angela, you always surprise me. Where the hell did you hear about this twisted antebellum fever dream?” she said. Ha—the dark-chocolate stud was my fourth cousin, putting himself through Stanford. At our family reunion, I had asked how he was paying for B-school, and he had guiltily spilled his guts. Lucia picked up the cigarette and rolled it between her thumb and index finger. And smiled.
“I don’t know where you come up with this shit, since you seem like a prude. But I like it.”
Before I could savor the moment, she barked, “What else?” The cigarette was back on the desk blotter.
“Well, let’s see.” I flipped through the little notebook again. Then I raised my head and said the one thing that made my stomach lurch.
“I was thinking about covering this lesbian sex conference thing that’s being put on by some women at New Amsterdam University where my fiancé teaches.” The words tumbled out quickly, before my superego was able to snatch any of them and stuff them back inside.
“Lesbians again—bor-RING.” She feigned a yawn. “Didn’t I just write about having sex with my ex-boyfriend’s sister? And I definitely did a review of lesbo porn videos already.”
“Well, this is a bit different,” I insisted, squaring my shoulders and staring down Lucia. “This is a lesbian sex conference.”
“Conference, that sounds extra bor-RING,” she said. I looked at her hand; her index finger was touching the cigarette. Thank God. I wanted to go to this sex conference and see Cait again, but I needed a reason. I was going to make Lucia give me a reason. “What do lesbians have to confer about?”
“I see this as more of an issues-oriented gathering,” I said, my voice rising an octave. I pulled the flyer Caitlin had given me from between the pages of my notebook and glanced down at it. There wasn’t much information there. I noticed the words “closed to the press” printed in small letters in the lower right corner. I folded it quickly and stuck it back into the notebook. “It’ll be, you