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The construction site was walled off from the street by a makeshift bay door that Rich had padlocked from the inside.They were both flush-faced from the thought of him cheating on his fiancee, Gynnie. They stood inside the empty half-built clothing store on a busy downtown street. It was seven o'clock at night.
Their summer of flirting led them here. It felt nice to be standing beside Nora, explaining the benefits of an auxilliary water pump.
No one ever really cared about an auxilliary water pump.
The summer was over. He was about to get married. He felt protected from his life's unpleasant nauseating impending upheaval the more he joked with her and lied and led her on. It was a relief from the pussified wedding-planning crap that had taken over his brain--from the flowery mailings, the drilling and reenameling of his teeth. Nora was the reward for getting a facial that left him bleeding and humiliated. Why was getting married so humiliating? He didn't know, but it was.
The only time she tipped her hand even slightly, a week earlier on the phone, it shook him up: "If you're so into marrying her, then why do you call me every night?"
Rich worked so closely with incoming tenants that when it came time to hand them the keys, he drove away from the site immediately, speechless, and went somewhere alone, exhausted and used up, feeling bleary. No one ever stayed in touch. The magic was in the building. Already Rich and Nora had been through a $29,000 roof-cost overrun, a sinkhole in the street. They'd taken long drives out to the country to look at celery-colored marble.
She was "sweet," and she "adored" him. She had the demeanor of a cooking-show hostess about to apologize for burning the turkey. She wore a brown cashmere cardigan, a short skirt, white knee-high socks. She sold clothes that looked like that. All over this city preppy but sexy was in, and now she was renovating the store from scratch.
For all their long talks, he didn't know much about her. She was violently allergic to nuts, she played soccer in college. He didn't know, for instance, her age, what decade she played soccer in college. She had thick, creamy makeup, a face that quickly shifted to record any injury. Her walk was jumbled, stilted, uneven but purposeful; it implied a hip injury from childhood that came back and plagued her when it rained. She had a dozen decisions to make tonight about the street-level floor plan so walls could go up next week, questions from the engineers about louvered mezzanine windows, questions about plumbing from the project superintendent.
Nora was his only client. Nora's happiness was his full-time job.
"You like working with me because I'm lovable--because you love me," she said once, hoarse from a cold, her voice breaking, hacking in fits.
She had a weirdly shaped head, long in the back, which haunted him. He'd tried to add her strangeness to that well of all women's mysteries.
She had a long, slightly crooked nose, really good perfume. The fact that she wasn't Gynnie, the wrongness of it -- she existed apart from the feminine regime that disoriented him. She was someone else. She could die tomorrow; he didn't care.
There was nobody in the building but them, and they'd been talking about the structural column that would go where they stood to support a staircase that wasn't in yet. Nora stomped on his foot. He pushed her. She laughed. They went from that to, like, silence. He was looking at her big lips, so nervous he had flu-like symptoms. He knew it was there for the taking. God, he deserved a little makeout session.
There'd been some months of lead-up to this moment, and their bodies came together and their arms went around each other with such excitement and relief that a sobbing noise or a grunt got stuck in her throat. He measured her in terms of his fiancee--he thought she was a few multiples in width. Nora fell within the category of women who are not fat, whose hair is bigger, who know how to dress themselves with wide belts, nail polish, jewelry. The kiss was quick, she tasted like cosmetic powder, he felt relieved and wanted to finish the walk-through and get out of there. He felt a pressure, from her mouth, broad and forceful, her tongue pressing forward, and he tried to meet her tongue but it pushed his out of the way and came deeper into his mouth. In the very delicate balance between what is sexy or risky, her tongue was difficult to make room for.
He stood back, tried to smile, to breathe, to change the rhythm of the tongue thing she just did. She had a curious look on her face, one of vacancy and desire.
She moved closer, opening her mouth wide; tiny white strings of opaque spit had formed, like webs, in the corners of her mouth. She licked her lower lip, which had become dry and pitted. Some of her lipstick had come off. She grabbed the back of his head and jacked it toward her. Her own head moved forward steadily--like a shark's head, like a prosthetic limb, some football wrapped in bologna. She threw her tongue down his throat like a waterlogged sneaker.
He maintained his footing, jaw open, impaled.
She leaned back and said things like, "OOHHH fuck!" and "Finally."
Kissing her was so terrible he stopped and thought of what to do next.
This was his only client, and if he offended her or did something ugly—she owned the building.
You idiot, idiot, idiot.
This was supposed to be some dreamy diversion but it was turning out not so good.
He didn't know what else to do, so he tried her bonbons. She took off her cardigan, then her shirt.
Her bra was sheer, simple lace netting, with no decoration on it. She had fine stretchmarks at the top of her chest. She had goose bumps on her hairless arms. There were other smells now, among the ammoniac and dusty smell of glue guns, tar sealant, sheetrock dust. There was some smell coming off her, her smell Ð he thought of chickpeas and deodorant. Most of the gutted first floor was dark behind her, and she backed up. Looking directly at him, she undid her skirt, which opened like a kilt, and dropped it. She came forward in the loafers and knee socks and underwear. She seemed huge now, making googoo eyes. She was the biggest girl who'd ever made googoo eyes at him. She reached out and pulled on his nuts, which hurt.
He took off her bra. Her tits—fell down. He tried to raise one up to normal height, where it had been in the bra, and then he tried the other. Bloop. Like deflated bags of water, hanging to the waistband of her undies, cold, the consistency of chunky soup. She looked at him, her sad eyes smiling, her sad mouth looking for its tongue, her sad tongue looking for a crack in her lower lip to lick.
What was this?
She asked him if he was nervous. He wasn't nervous.
She examined and squeezed his behind. His hand slid across her stomach and felt soft, pillowy fat. And then she stepped back and lifted one leg and then the other, humming quietly, and he realized she was dancing.
She owned the one and only building he was building. Her father owned the other project Rich's company was in the process of constructing, a $125 million deal about a mile from here involving forty subcontractors from around the country--a job so huge Rich had been relegated to underground utilities and landscaping. He wasn't in any position to push her away. He could feel the vast inexperience of a woman of complete fragility, shielded by her wealth, with a lot of power, reacting to his withdrawal.
"I'm getting married in three days and you are disgusting" was what he wanted to say. "Haven't you ever just goofed around a little? Why don't you put your clothes back on?"
He had to get out of here because he had to be at the airport by eleven tonight so he could fly to France to get married on Saturday.
"My darling," she said to him, and pulled his head to her chest.
* * *
A little later, he was caught in a kind of eternal now—an eternally present moment—adrift, but where?: They were on the floor, she was mostly on the concrete, he was mostly in the dirt, trying to breathe through the top of his head.
How long could this go on? Had she ever orgasmed in her life?
The giblets were only palatable if you were horny and liked the person, he now had learned.
What was happening to him was, he observed, actually worse than any punishment he was going to get from Gynnie, if he told her, which he would; he'd have to. He saw now that there would be no good way to do it. He felt as if he'd been singled out for some kind of crystalline moral instruction. He tried to zone out, he pictured lying on a beach in Rio, reading a magazine, eating the same ripe plum over and over. He looked at his watch. In fifteen more minutes he would quit. He began rewriting this time of his existence into the untrue negative: "I never befriended Nora Garleck outside of work. I am not lying here now."
Am I in hell? he thought, awhile later. She rode against his nose, getting closer. She launched her pelvis many inches into the air, and then down, then up again, like an old Greco-Roman wrestler trying to earn a fighter's wage, to keep from being pinned. Gynnie was on the beach in Rio with Rich as he ate his plum again and again, and she looked gorgeous in her bikini -- as always, an epiphany. Rich actually began to picture Gynnie helping him escape: she urged him to finish eating the plum so they could go swimming—it didn't make any sense, but he thought of her beside him in those moments, and it did save him. Of course, in reality, she didn't know where he was, and if and when she did find out she would dump him and never speak to or look at him ever again.
"ARRRGHH!" Nora yelled. What made her yelling so awful was not any fear that a passing stroller might hear her or come onto the site—though during the last few moments Rich had begun hoping that a crazy person would break in and beat them to death with the spade beside Nora's writhing head. What made her yelling awful was the sound--a lonely yell, from a woman who didn't have boyfriends, who would have to be satisfied with this degraded scene for months, who didn't have to worry about what Rich thought of her, because she knew he wouldn't be calling ever again except with a catastrophic problem about the renovation. At the end she crammed his head into her with the fearsome power of a combat-ready United States Marine feeding on adrenaline, her body like a vise, yelled, "RRAAGGHH," like a butcher in a poker game, like a buckshot gorilla, and he felt like crying. He could've thrown up at any time, lying there in the dirt; and to think he'd done this in the name of love, in the name of freedom, of a last fling.
To read the rest of the story, buy the book...
Copyright© 2000 by Matthew Klam
Read more excerpts from Sam the Cat and Other Stories
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