Michael Hemmingson: Seven Women: An Erotic Private Investigation

“I got out of the bed,” Lisa tells us, “and picked up my clothes from the floor. I dressed real fast. I looked at myself in a mirror by his CD player. My make-up was smeared, my hair was a mess, and my face looked a bit puffy. I thought I looked awful and wondered why he even wanted to have sex with me. This had never happened to me before — a one-night stand with a stranger, a hangover that bad. In fact, I’d only had sex with two guys before that — both boyfriends, both I thought were serious relationships at the time, that was the only reason I made love with them. I had never, ever had sex casually before. Those two boyfriends, like my father, had left me for the comfort of other women, and that’s why they never became all that serious.

“I left the bedroom. This man, whose name I still didn’t know, was cooking eggs and bacon in the kitchenette. The apartment’s furnishings were minimal — a black couch, a shelf of books, Arabic-style paintings on the wall, a card table with a small computer.

“He made breakfast for us both. I was hungry, I was numb, I was curious, so I sat with him on the floor and ate breakfast with him. I sat a distance from him and we ate in silence. I told him I was thirsty. ‘Help yourself to the fridge,’ he said.

“I went to the fridge. There was milk, soda, juice, and beer. ‘Can I have a beer?’ I asked.”

“With a hangover?” from Amelia.

“Sometimes it’s the best thing,” Sheila says.

“He felt the same way,” Lisa says.

“‘So early?’ he said, laughing.

“‘Yeah,’ I said.

“‘Well, if you want, sure,’ he said. I came back with the beer, opened it, sat down, drank it, ate the breakfast. He got up, sat on the couch, and looked at me.

“‘Can I use the phone?’ I asked.

“‘Sure, be my guest,’ he said. I called my mother.

“She picked up on the first ring: ‘Lisa?’

“I said, ‘Yes, yes, it’s me.’

“She said, ‘Where are you?!’

“I said, ‘I’m okay.’

“She said, ‘I was so worried about you!’

“I said, ‘I’m all right.’

“‘Lisa, honey,’ she said.

“I said, ‘What?’

“She said, ‘Your father.’

“‘Daddy?’

“‘He may not come home,’ she said. ‘He’s with — Tammy. That woman.’ And then my mother proceeded to tell me that my father might move in with this woman, Tammy, and live with her.

“‘I hate that bastard,’ I said.

“‘Don’t say that,’ my mother said.

“‘He’s a terrible husband!’ I said.

“She said, ‘But I still love him.’

“‘But Mommy,’ I said, ‘even if he’s with her?’

“My mother told me that he was her first love, first and only, that they had met when she was sixteen and he was twenty-six, and she’d never been with anyone before then, or since. ‘Things will somehow work out,’ she said.

“I felt sick. I told Mommy I had to go. She said my name over and over and I said bye and hung up. I seemed to be hanging up on her a lot those days.

“When I put the phone down, this stranger whose home I was in, this stranger I’d had sex with several times although I only remembered this morning, laughed at me. I looked at him. He said, ‘Mommy? Did you say Mommy?’ I didn’t know what he meant. He said, ‘And Daddy, too?’ I made a face. I asked what his name was.

“‘You don’t remember?’ he replied.

“‘No,’ I said.

“‘Waite.’

“‘Oh.’

“‘And you’re Lisa.’

“‘Yes.’

“‘How old are you?’ he asked.

“‘Eighteen.’

“‘Eighteen,’ he said. ‘Mommy and Daddy.’

“A wave of alcoholic nausea was coming over me. I said, ‘Are you making fun of me?’

“‘Oh, no,’ he laughed. ‘Not me!’

“‘How old are you?’ I asked him.

“He hesitated before saying, ‘Thirty-seven.’

“I asked him if I could have another beer. He nodded and asked me to bring him one, too. I did. We drank the beers. He said, ‘It’s been years since I’ve started the morning with a drink. You’re a bad influence on me, Lisa.’ I sat cross-legged on the floor and stared at him. I knew I was making him self-conscious. He said, ‘What?’

“‘How did we get from the party to here?’ I asked.

“‘You don’t remember?’

“‘I remember a little,’ I said, and that was the truth. ‘Very little,’ I said.

“He said quickly, ‘You wanted to come here, I didn’t force you.’

“‘I remember you told me to smile,’ I said. ‘That’s how we met.’

“He said, ‘You seemed sad, or angry, pissed off, frustrated at the world.’

“‘Yeah, all of the above,’ I told him.

“‘What happened?’ he said. ‘Was your boyfriend mean to you?’

“‘I told him I’d had a friend with me. I came to that party with a friend, and I asked him if he had seen her. ‘She was this girl—’ I started.

“He said, ‘Hell, there were a lot of girls there, and you happened to be one of them. The lucky one,’ he added. The bastard.

“I used his phone again, this time to call Eva. There was no answer. ‘Maybe I should go,’ I said, and looked at the door.

“‘Wait,’ said Waite, ‘you don’t have to go.’

“I wasn’t sure what to do.

“He asked, ‘Do you feel uncomfortable?’ I nodded. He said he could understand that. But I said I really should go. ‘Wait,’ said Waite, ‘maybe we can get together again, have a real date? Like dinner? A movie? Something. Can I call you?’ I gave him a number, but it was a wrong number.

“So I started to go but—

“‘Wait,’ said Waite."

Amelia giggles.

“He asked me if I wanted to go to the bedroom,” Lisa says, “and fool around some more. I couldn’t believe he was asking me such a thing. ‘Another round for the road,’ he said. I said no, and went to his door and opened it.

“But I stopped. I turned around. He was standing, and now he had a smile on his face. He probably thought I had changed my mind. But I didn’t know where I was. I asked him where the house the party had been was. My car was there.

“‘Oh,’ he said, ‘it’s just down the block. It’s big, you can’t miss it.’ And so I left. I heard him say, behind me, ‘Bye.’”

“Ah,” Sheila says, “you should have had him one more time.”

“Or he have you,” Tasha says.

Sheila says, “Well, he was good-looking, right? You wouldn’t have gone anywhere with him in the first place if he wasn’t, drunk or not, right?”

“I just wanted to get out of there, away from him,” Lisa says. “I didn’t want to go home. I didn’t know where I wanted to go. It was a clear morning. The sun was out, et cetera. The house was two blocks down. My car was still there. I felt so relieved. Eva was in the back, curled up, asleep. I knocked on the window. Eva got up and got out; she looked bad. She said, ‘What the hell happened to you?’

“I said, ‘You wouldn’t believe it,’ and then I noticed this black mark, a bruise, on Eva’s cheek. I asked her about it. She touched it and said, ‘Oh. Shit.’

“We got into the car and drove away. Eva opened the glove compartment and looked in, and said, ‘Where’s that joint I left in here?’ I told her I’d smoked it. We got on the freeway. Eva said, ‘This guy I was talking to put XTC in my drink.’ She stared out the window, then said, ‘He seemed really nice, despite that. That drug made me so — hot. God, I wanted him. So he took me into this room, but there were these two other guys there. I tried to get away. They just laughed. They threw me on the bed. Over and over, they took turns.