Jillian Abbott's: Queens Noir

When he met the right hot chick, never older than the French formula of half-his-age-plus-seven, he’d buy her drinks. After two rounds he’d ask if she was hungry and then treat her to the famous crab cakes, shrimp the size of mandolins, and the porterhouse steak that he insisted was as good if not better than the ones served at Peter Luger’s over in Brooklyn. “Meal whores,” Nikki had overheard Dr. Sheridan call his prey to other middle-aged men on the prowl on Ladies’ Nites.

Dr. Sheridan always paid with cash when he left and usually had one of the Cosmo’d babes plopping her bubble butt in the leather bucket passenger seat of his Beemer on his way home to Douglaston. But Nikki knew — as did he — that those consenting adults in high heels were as much on the make as Dr. Sheridan. He wanted to get in their pants; the ladies wanted to get on his left ring finger. It was a game, though he was the one who stacked the deck.

In the mornings after, through her all-revealing telescope, Nikki had seen many of those young women stagger out of Sheridan’s house, or the salon of his boat, still dazed and woozy. He’d drive them back to the cars they had left on Bell Boulevard the night before.

Of late, however, with spring prickling the air, Dr. Sheridan was fond of taking his lady friends for a nightcap at the elegant, brilliantly lighted Caffè on the Green overlooking the Throgs Neck Bridge, a high-end restaurant that was once home to Rudolph Valentino and Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. And then for a moonlight cruise on his $300,000 luxury Silverton, replete with living room, salon, wide-screen satellite TV, quadraphonic sound system, full-service kitchen, elegant dining room, master bedroom with queen-size bed, and smaller guest bedroom. Nikki would watch him drop anchor under the Throgs Neck Bridge, where he and his young dates would spend the night rocking in the tide.

Nikki knew his routine. A month ago, she had positioned herself alone at the bar of Uncle Jack’s so that Dr. Sheridan would spot her wearing her skin-tightest jeans, high spaghetti-strap heels, and matching tight red leather waist jacket. He offered to buy her a drink and she asked for a bottle of Heineken, no glass. As she drank the beer, she watched him sip his Grey Goose in careful measures through the swizzle-stick straw.

“Real guys don’t suck straws,” she said, pulling it from his mouth.

He laughed. She clinked her bottle against his glass and he drank from the lip.

“Real guys offer to buy beautiful women like you dinner,” he said.

“Maybe some other time. I just stopped off for a cold one before work.”

“Where do you work?”

“Queens.”

“Queens? Queens what? Queens Hospital? Queens College? Queens Supreme?”

She slugged more beer. “Nah.”

He laughed. “Okay, doing what?”

“My job.”

She wanted him to remember her. Nothing makes a rich man remember you like a little bit of mystery and declining a dinner invitation, she thought. Go to dinner, fuck his brains out, and tell him your life story... and you are as memorable as yesterday’s Dow index. Turn him down, keep your pants on, tell him nothing, and he’ll never forget you.

He wrote his cell number and his private e-mail address on the back of his embossed business card and handed it to her. She opened her pocketbook and stuffed the card into her wallet, then discreetly slipped the swizzle stick in a clear plastic bag. She finished the beer, said thanks, and left for work.

The job consisted of sitting in her dark-blue Jeep Cherokee with tinted windows, parked up the block on Bell Boulevard. Three hours later, after bar hopping along the same street, Dr. Sheridan left a place called The First Edition accompanied by a gorgeous wobbly blonde with a bubble butt and pants so tight they looked like they hurt. Nikki figured her fake ID said she had turned twenty-one the day before.

Nikki followed Dr. Sheridan’s BMW to the Bayside Marina, where he and his date boarded The Dog’s Life . Later, Nikki watched them through her telescope from her condo window as he pulled the boat under the Throgs Neck Bridge. After one glass of bubbly, the young woman got up from a deck chair and staggered sideways. Dr. Sheridan helped her into his salon and closed the door.

Hours later, Nikki watched him come up on deck wearing only boxer shorts, gabbing on a cell phone. The second time he came up he was completely naked, spraying Windex and wiping off the railings and deck furniture. Nikki turned away, but then felt compelled to look back with the zoom lens because something seemed odd. A close inspection through the telescope revealed that Dr. Sheridan was a man completely devoid of body hair. Shaved from neck to ankles, like a toy poodle in summer. Nikki could think of nothing less sexy than a completely hairless naked man doing housework. Retch-ro-sexual , she thought, suppressing a wave of nausea.

The girl never reemerged. Not until morning when Dr. Sheridan had to help her off the boat on her wobbly platform shoes. Through the telescope the woman appeared to be dazed, confused. He stroked her hair, shook his head, kissed her, and patted her cheek, as if reassuring her that nothing sexual had happened. Then he tapped his watch and helped her into his Beemer, and drove her back toward Bell Boulevard where she would have left her car the night before. Some hangovers you never recover from, Nikki thought.

Now, on this sun-filled Mother’s Day, Nikki jogged just ahead of Dr. Sheridan along the wooden planks of the Bayside Marina, knowing he was watching her. She slowed to a sweaty, panting walk. Asian and Latino fishermen crowded the end of the marina, casting their lines into the dark waters. A bride and groom stood posing for pictures that would keep them forever young, even when married life got old before they did. Nikki nodded to a grizzled dock hand running the boat-rental concession and entered the snack shop at the end of the pier, opened the soft drink refrigerator door, grabbed an ice-cold bottle of Poland Spring, and approached the cashier. She patted her hips as if just realizing she didn’t have her jogging pouch with her.

“Damn it,” she said. “Forgot my money.” She turned to return the bottle, counting: One Mississippi, two Mississ — “Let me buy it for you,” she heard Dr. Sheridan say in that soothing, deep voice that sounded like a priest giving absolution.

She looked up. “Nah, thanks anyway.” She opened the refrigerator door.

“C’mon, don’t you remember me?”

“Sorry?”

“Uncle Jack’s? Several months ago. You said I looked gay sipping a straw.”

She snapped her fingers and pointed at him. “I didn’t say you looked gay. I said that real guys don’t suck straws.”

“Dr. Sheridan... um, George. I’m a veterinarian. I offered to buy you dinner.”

He paid for her water and bought some for himself.

“Yeah, well, thanks for the water, doc.” She turned for the exit.

“You said you’d have dinner with me some other time.”

“I’m positive I said maybe .”

“ Touché . Is maybe still an option?”

She smirked. “Look, I don’t date married guys and you look like the married ty—”

He held up his bare left hand. “Never.”

She cracked open the water bottle, took a long gulp, her neck muscles and veins bulging, her face and pronounced clavicle bones gleaming with a patina of fresh sweat. She rolled the cold plastic bottle on the back of her neck. “Italian?”

“Caffè on the Green?”

“Promise not to suck straw?”

He laughed and nodded. “Promise.”

She swigged more water. “When?”

“Tonight? Eight? I’ll pick you up. Where do you—”

“See you then.”