Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

She slithered lower in the tub and jumped at feeling the plastic—the simulated porcelain—against her thigh. She wanted something real, a clawfoot tub, real tile walls. She wanted a home. The summit of her own climax moved perceptibly closer; she did not need a finger inside her any more than she needed to add details to the fantasy in her mind: Mike standing over her, watching. A husband. As she worked at that most sensitive part of her anatomy, the noise came from her in one long, shallow exhalation, and her orgasm was there, tepid, as furious as a damp sparkler, something left over from the year before.

ROOM-SERVICE dinners fell into two categories, romantic and necessary, and now, in the middle of the night, Cadence could see nothing romantic in the sediment-choked dregs of her empty wineglass, the grease-smeared plates. A glance at the clock radio told her the New Year was nearly two hours old in the Central Time Zone, that its occasion had come and gone without her noticing. She’d slept through it.

At least it was quiet, Michigan Avenue some twenty-seven floors below no longer ringing with the evening’s sonata of car horns and the occasional drunken shout.

She was angry because she’d gone to bed with him again and hadn’t said anything. If they were going to keep fooling around, then Cadence wanted to do it in her own particular manner. She was willing to permit access to her body, but she was going to demand certain attentions, a minimum of his ham-handed groping. Thinking of how to explain this to Chadley, how to correct his errant techniques, Cadence’s mind drifted to Richard.

Richard’s habits—browsing the Sunday Times naked save for his tortoiseshell reading glasses, bringing a glass of wine to the bedside table and never drinking it, even his more earthy proclivity toward cleaning his toenails with the tines of a dinner fork—seemed endearing quirks now that she could view him from seven weeks’ distance. She felt a comfortable abandon when they were together. He could make her laugh too, even during the awkward moments of their lovemaking when his feet tangled into a maze of sheets and blankets and threatened to throw them both onto his apartment’s hardwood floor.

It was never going to be like that with Chadley, even with the lubrication of three stiff cocktails. She looked at Chadley’s face and saw only the imperfections, the small places where he was not careful enough with his shaving, the one stray hair always poking out of his left nostril. And then there was the fucking.

At least there had been some recent improvement, less of the thrust and counterattack approach that reminded Cadence of the worst of her drunken college couplings. Too much of how Chadley performed was just prelude to something else, the next thing implied by the placement of his fingers or the pushing of his hands. Cadence showed her frustration by simply picking up Chadley’s hand and putting it where she desired. Richard had never needed such remedial instruction.

She missed Richard’s way of expressing his needs, when she would beg him to tell her what he thought about, what secret film loop rolled in his head, while he masturbated. She asked him to tell her everything as long as she appeared in the fantasy somewhere; whatever he asked of her, she would gladly try.

With Chadley, each new encounter felt more like she was in survival mode, their lovemaking an awkward mix of recklessness and sensible precautions. She could not imagine how the provisional approaches they were taking might dissolve into a sea of spontaneity. They used condoms, and Chadley never broached the subject of feeling skin on skin.

Cadence could give herself over to a man in any manner she chose—she would tell them they could have her any way they pleased, and for most of them, that was enough. By the time most of the men she had known were able to give voice to their desires, it was too late, too late for Cadence anyway. Only Richard could let the darkness out of himself and know that in the morning he would still be able to close the lid on that box. He announced his desires— I am going to fuck you hard —and then acted; the hottest thing she could think about was Richard whispering in her ear about how desperate he was to taste her, to fuck her. The appearance on his face, the concentration and release, became something she always thought about when she was with Richard, and now those thoughts of Richard intruded on her moments with Chadley. Eventually, she supposed, it would be this way when she was alone and her hands started their fundamental ministrations to the needs of her body. It would become a need, and the need would become imperative. And she would think of Richard. And thinking of Richard, she knew, was the part that turned her on.

Chadley rose up on his elbows. “What are you doing?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Cadence admitted. The thought of waking to a plate of day-old French fries congealed in grease made her want to retch, as did the pile of tissues next to the bed, all lacquered with the fluids of half-inspired lovemaking. She took the greasy plate, the tissues, all of it, and dumped the pile onto the room-service cart, pushed it into the cavernous hallway.

“What time is it?”

Cadence returned, shimmied under the covers. “Almost two. We missed it. I didn’t come all the way to Chicago just to miss the New Year.”

Chadley turned and gave her a garlic-and-booze-riddled kiss before saying, “You didn’t miss it. You were otherwise occupied.”

“Okay, fine, I didn’t miss it, exactly. But isn’t the point of New Year’s Eve that you’re there, right at the moment? The moment is what makes it special.” Cadence could tell Chadley was more focused on what they had been doing at the stroke of midnight.

“I thought it was a pretty good moment. But let me be the first. Happy New Year.” He leaned in for a kiss again, and Cadence withdrew, watching the telltale point of his persistent tongue rising from between his lips, then departing quickly, a rodent emerging from its burrow.

Chadley hopped out of bed and carried his condom to the bathroom garbage can. He yelled back at her, “There’s champagne in the fridge. You can’t have an occasion without champagne.”

Cadence grabbed the bottle by its neck and inspected the label. It was one of the usual brand names that most guys Chadley’s age had memorized from films; that meant he’d been too shy to ask for help. Richard would have consulted the hotel’s sommelier, had something delivered. “Impressive,” she said, picking at the bottle’s foil cap.

When Chadley came out of the bathroom naked, a white hotel towel draped over his shoulders, she noticed how the girdle of his hips looked boyish, slim, almost hairless. All she could think of was the other men she had been with, men she had loved, Richard especially, their musculature, their entirely manly appearance.

“I didn’t think you were going to stay,” he said. “I just kept thinking that something would come up. I keep expecting for us to be interrupted.”

So he was smart enough to feel her ambivalence. When she’d spent the night in Richard’s bed, she could often feel the gentle waves of nervousness roll off Richard, as if he was always anticipating the worst possible news from her. She could calm him with a touch, a hand on the flat of his chest. But what she felt from Chadley was different, a timidity that reminded her he was a stand-in.

She wanted to be alone, now, to open the windows to Chicago’s blasting cold, extract the spare blankets from the closet, and cocoon herself against the harshest winter she could imagine; she wanted to watch the city buses sloshing diagonally up the street in a sudden squall, businessmen in trilbys and fedoras turning up the collars of their Chesterfield coats and struggling up the avenue against the wind. She would watch until the city ground to a halt and then wake to room-service coffee and a bath as hot as she could stand. Or, better yet, she could leave. A forty-dollar cab ride to O’Hare and the first flight home would fix everything. Among all her impulsive enthusiasms, this might have been the dumbest, thinking that she could spend the weekend with a near-stranger and distract herself with the mildest of hedonisms, a few cocktails, a good steak.