The Thrill of It

Chapter Twelve

Harley

The house is quiet when I unlock the door. My mom is nowhere to be seen or heard. She usually calls out to me when I come home, but if the house is silent she must be at the office.

Thank God.

That’s exactly where I need her to be. She’s out on assignment a lot, or meeting sources, or visiting with her editor – my chests tightens when I think of her editor, the woman my mom reveres, the woman who mentored her – for her books. And while she often writes her books and articles from home, she spends time at the office too. She says she likes the discipline, the sound of other voices, the clickety-clack of colleagues tapping away on keyboards. The camaraderie helps fuel her. No surprise. My mom is a social beast.

I say a silent prayer of thanks for her office mates, and now all I have to do is wait thirty more minutes. Miranda said the package – her marked-up pages of edits – would be here around three-thirty. I’ll grab it when it arrives, tuck it under my arm, and like a quarterback with the ball, keep my head down and run like hell out of here.

I leave my purse on the marble table by the door. My stomach rumbles. I never ate lunch. All I had was coffee and toast at the diner this morning. Then I picked up the bagels for Trey.

I feel so stupid just hearing his name in my head. I can’t believe I thought everything he said last night was real and true. Then he point blank admitted to me this morning that I shouldn’t believe a word he says when he’s wasted. Maybe that’s the reminder I need to apply the brakes because I was starting to think there was hope. But capitalistic love and sex and kisses are better. Safer. At least they’re honest. No one’s pretending they feel. The money is on the table, and no one can get hurt.

Without an exchange, you can be played a fool.

With money, everyone is safe.

Cash can be recouped. It can be made and multiplied. Feelings can’t. They are loaned and borrowed and you can never pay them off.

I head to the kitchen.

There’s a tupperware container on the counter, and a Post-in note bearing my name. For Harley, only. Your favorite cookies in the whole world.

Inside are chocolate chip cookies with walnuts. I run a finger along the edge of the container, feeling wistful for a moment, longing for more of the cookies, more of the homework help, more of the bedtime stories.

More of the mom.

These treats from her will be a reminder that she can play that part too.

But first I need food, so I open the fridge and find a tupperware container full of African stew from the other night. I have no interest in food my mom makes for her latest lover. I spot a container of pasta primavera, but I bet that was last night’s culinary offering to Neil, so I pass on that too. I grab some carrots and hummus, set them on the counter, and open the drawers for a napkin.

I see a shadow in the living room. Only it’s not a shadow. It’s a man. It’s Neil and he’s about to walk into the kitchen.

In. His. Birthday. Suit.

“Oh crap.” He is tall, lanky, furry and his parts are swinging around.

I jerk my head away, because I want desperately to wipe the image of his limp dick from my brain. But it’s like an ambulance siren, screaming at me. You just saw your mom’s lover’s penis, and you noticed it was smallish, and had a mushroom head and now you can never ever ever escape from the image of his pecker swinging flaccidly between his hairy legs.

“I’m so sorry.”

I drop the hummus container onto the floor and it explodes on the tiles.

He jumps back, makes sure the hummus didn’t hit his toes. I stare at him – above the neck only, I will not look down – my eyes wide with shock. “Seriously? You are walking around the house naked and you’re worried about hummus on your feet?”

“No. No. No. I was just surprised.”

I roll my eyes. “Obviously. Now get the hell out of here,” I say, and I don’t care that I don’t live here anymore. I don’t care that he probably has every reasonable right to have fucked my mom in an afternoon delight on a Friday. But he is naked and gross and in my house where I grew up, and I have had enough of my mother’s lovers.

“Barb went back to work, and I was taking a nap after –”

I hold up my hand in a firm stop sign. Shake my head forcefully. “No. Don’t go there. I don’t want to hear the story,” I say sharply because I don’t need to know he was taking an after-sex nap. I don’t need to know that my mom helped herself to a naughty nooner, then left her lover to snooze when she knew I was stopping by. That is the very definition of TMI.

“I’ll just turn around and go.”

“Yeah. Exactly.”

I bend down to pick up the hummus, and I want to throw it at him. But then I’d have to lay eyes on his naked body and there isn’t enough bleach in the world to white out what I just saw. I grab a towel, wipe up all the hummus, then toss the towel and the container in the trash.

Tears well up, but I don’t let them out. Because they’re mixed with far too much anger. Too much frustration. And way too many foul memories. Even though my mom’s at work I can smell her. My nostrils are filled with a scent I want to erase from the entire universe, and I can recall other encounters like this, when I’d bump into her after she’d had a roll in the hay while I was home. She’d be wearing a red dressing gown, mid-thigh length and silk, and smelling of sex. Musky and dirty and adult, like sheets tangled up that beg for a washing. Her scent, the scent of her bedroom, her nightgowns, her sexuality that she shared freely with me. I wrinkle my nose and try to hold my breath as the olfactory memory floods my senses.

I grab the bag of carrots from the counter and crunch into one, biting down hard. Chewing as if I can rid my mind of these images if I bite hard enough. Drilling into another carrot, I bear down, my teeth now a lethal weapon, slicing the carrot in half. I imagine it shrieking. Wishing it could.

Screw this.

I leave the carrots on the counter. Let her clean up the bag when she returns to her den of iniquity. Maybe they’ll be dried out and inedible when she sees them. I leave behind the cookies too, my small act of defiance.

I head for the front steps when Neil reemerges. He’s wearing jeans, cuffed once at the ankles ,and a striped button down.

“I’m so sorry,” he says, as if a double apology alleviates his trespass. But I will never see him as anything other than unwelcome.

I don’t answer him. I walk toward the door.

“Wait. Harley. Something came for you a few minutes ago.”

My ears prick, and I spin around.

I spy a package on the coffee table. “Barb had left for work, and a few minutes later a courier knocked on the door.”

My lips quirk up into a traitorous smile. I want to jump up and cheer. He intercepted the package! He unknowingly intercepted it from my mom.

I race to the table and lunge for the envelope. It’s manilla, thick and padded. It already has the well-worn look of an envelope that’s been manhandled on its route across town. I clutch the package tightly to my chest. “Thank you.”

Then I want to smack myself. Why am I thanking him? He has nothing to do with the good fortune of my mom missing the early delivery.

“Is everything okay?”

He casts his eyes to the package momentarily, then back to me. He notices the logo.

“Of course,” I say quickly. Does this half-baked lover of hers think he can catch me in trouble since he’s seen Miranda’s name on the return address? I can lie with the best of them. I can dance circles around the truth.

“Because I saw the name on it,” he adds, gesturing to the package I’m clutching like a newborn baby. “Just curious.”

My heart races in my chest, but the wheels turn quickly, and the lie is already fully formed. “Oh. Yeah. Of course. Because it’s a gift we’re working on for Barb.” Then I press a finger to my lips. “Shh...Don’t say anything.”

“Ah,” he says with a knowing wink and a smile, since it’s natural that Miranda and I would pair up to give my mom a gift. Now, Neil and I are co-conspirators. Or so he thinks. He grabs his phone and wallet, and says goodbye.

Good riddance.

I peer out the window, making sure he’s gone, waiting until I see him raise a hand, and hail a yellow cab on Central Park West. He’s off in a sea of New Yorkers, fanning out from clandestine encounters, the city hiding all their secrets. The anonymity, the size, the surreptitiousness of Manhattan, the cloak we all wrap ourselves in.

I sink down on the royal blue couch, rip open the package and pull out the pages I’ve written in the last few weeks. Maybe fifty or so, full of Post-it notes and penciled-in marks, instructions to me. Notes that say things like: “More salacious,” “More details,” “Is this how it really happened or are you leaving out key parts?”

On and on, they’re all the same: More, more, more.

Shame, shame, shame.

I find one more note. I read it, and it’s a shovel digging through my innards, scooping them out, serving them bruised and battered on a platter for me. “This story about Pierre and the carnival? I don’t care that your mommy taught you to kiss. You should have some more respect for your mother. After all she’s done for everyone. I don’t need you psychoanalyzing yourself and why you did what you did. You did it because you’re a whore. Your mother is not to be dragged through the mud. Even anonymously. Shame on you.”

I toss the pages on the table, make two fists, dig my fingernails into my palms, then scream. A loud, shrill, sharp sound like a train whistle tearing through the cold, quiet midnight of a lonely town. It knocks picture frames from walls. It rattles vases off tables. It reaches all the way to the top of the building and out into the afternoon sky. Neighbors drop their afternoon coffee cups. Curious. Concerned. Terrified. Is everyone okay?

But none of that happens.

Because no one notices, nothing changes, my father leaves, my mother reinvents herself as my friend, and so when a tree falls in the forest and no one can hear it, it doesn’t make a god damn sound.

I reach for the pages and pull at the ends, wishing I could tear them apart.

If Miranda only knew how much my mother had done. If she only knew the full truth of why I’m writing these awful, horrid memoirs. I push up the sleeve of my shirt, grip my shoulder, as if the red ribbon will give me strength to finish, courage to get this monkey off my back. To leave Miranda behind me, say goodbye to this debt, and move into a new life.

I jam the pages into the envelope and tuck the envelope in my purse.

My phone rings. “It’s your mother. Neil just called me. Darling, I’m so sorry.”

“Hi,” I say, trying to collect myself, to let go of the rage. Of the sadness. So I can make her happy as she has always needed me to do. To be her best friend.

“I want to apologize. I feel terrible that you ran into Neil.”

“It’s nothing,” I mumble into the phone. I want to get out of here. I want to go. I want to finish this damn book. I want to rid my body and my mind of all these memories. And Miranda is wrong – it’s not the memories of the men that hurt so much.

It’s the other ones. The memories of her. Of us.

“Oh good. I’m so glad it didn’t bother you,” she says, and I can hear her clapping once, Happily. I roll my eyes. Seriously? She believes me? But I guess that’s what you get from spending your life pretending you’re fine with your mom’s parade of lovers.

“So,” she says in a flirty voice. “What did you think? He’s not too shabby in the downstairs department, right?”

My eyes go wide, they practically pop out of my head like a cartoon character’s, pupils bobbing on the end of their coiled wire springs. “What did you just say, mom?”

“Well, you know. He’s got it going on, right? He’s no Phil, of course,” she adds wistfully. “But not everyone can be Phil.”

“Uh….” My jaw is hanging open. I can’t believe we are discussing the size of Neil’s penis or Phil’s for that matter, like we’re a couple of girlfriends, like we’re Carrie and Samantha having Cosmos and discussing our conquests.

“What’s going on with you, darling? I feel as if I haven’t seen you in ages. Do you have a date tonight?” She can’t mask the hope in her voice. She’s dying for me to say yes. Dying for me to share every detail. It’s been so long since she heard anything. So long since I shared. There’s a part of her that’s probably wasting away from the lack of oxygen. “Maybe someone new? Someone you haven’t told me about yet?”

She might as well be saying, “Just a quick hit, Harley? That’s all I need.”

Maybe we are all addicts. I consider making up a name to make her happy. Creating a fake boyfriend, a fake date, a fable she’d lap right up and love. I could spin thousands upon thousands of tales, I could make up fantastical stories of boys and men, men and boys, and she’d love them. But I don’t.

Maybe this is progress. Maybe I will tell Joanne I had a little victory.

“No. Not tonight.”

“Anyway,” she continues, like my run-in with her lover is no big deal because it isn’t to her. “I know we were going to chat this afternoon about summer plans, and I want to. But I need to reschedule. I had to rush back to the office. I landed a tip on a new story and it’s terrible. A terrible blackmail story,” she says, and I nod. Blackmail is a shitty, shitty thing. “But I have another piece I’m snooping around on too, and I was hoping you could do me a little itty bitty favor. You know that lawyer I work with from time to time on stories? I need him to take a look at a document I received from a congressman’s intern. It’s on the thumb drive in my laptop on the dining room table. Can you grab it and drop it by his office? He’s only a few blocks from the house.”

“You have a lot of sources, mom. Who do you mean?” I ask because I’ve helped my mom on stories before. Ran errands here and there. Dropped off documents. Ferried information.

“The one who looks like Vince Vaughn.”

I grin, a wicked, thrilling grin at the description. Little does she know. Little will she ever know.

“It would be my absolute pleasure,” I say in my best happy daughter voice. If she’s going to be all delighted over me seeing her boyfriend’s dick, then I can act happy about seeing my ex-pimp.

Because you know what? It’s not an act. I am happy to see Cam.

Cam doesn’t lie to me. Cam doesn’t hide things from me. Cam isn’t hot or cold, turning me on or off, telling me secrets, then backpedaling. Besides, whatever sweet nothings, sweet somethings, sweet everythings that came out of Trey’s mouth last night were all lies. Probably lies to get me undressed.

There is no such thing as real love. There is only agenda. There are only expectations. And if you can remove the sticky mess of feelings from the equation, you’re better off.

Cam is a one-track man, and he brings me out of the mess of my life.

Page 203…

Mac, short for MacDougal, was the first man I saw naked. Such a fond memory from the year I turned nine. He was a Scotsman visiting Manhattan for a summer for his dissertation and quickly became my mom’s lover.

One time when he stayed over, I woke up in the middle of the night to pee. As I left the bathroom, he was walking down the hall without anything on. I froze and so did Mac. Then he laughed and his laugh even had a Scottish accent. He kept walking and patted me on the shoulder.“Someday, you’ll like it.”

He didn’t even shut the bathroom door, just started whizzing with it still open. I slipped back into bed and tried to fall asleep. But I couldn’t because Mac and my mom were going at it again. It’s really hard to get some shut-eye when your mom is crying out, “Oh my god Mac, I’m so wet. I’m so turned on. I want you to fuck me hard, Mac.” I pulled the pillow over my ears, so tight and hard I was drowning my ears in pillowcase, but it didn’t matter. My mom’s cries rattled through my skull, then burrowed into my skin and I was never going to erase them ever. Because once you’ve heard something like that you can’t blot it out. Those bedroom moans are tar you can’t wash off your hands.