Later, I am still awake because I’m not very good at sleeping and I’m achy so I’m feeling tender toward him. He does, and a pleasant soreness begins spreading from between my thighs and my head is slamming against the headboard. A thin line of sweat beads along his hairline. “Are you with me?” I open my eyes and look up at him.
Boys don’t really know how to hurt girls. Our offices are right next to each other but we spend most of our time on the phone talking about our all-girl fight club, no boys allowed. We write off our gym memberships and depilatory regimes. We have to look pretty and make people believe in false idols and hold our liquor. We are not motivated to change our professional circumstances. We work together as publicists and often lament how we are sacrificing our souls. He grins and I think about my best friend Tate. I tell him to fuck me like he hates me a little. I squeeze his shoulders and wrap my thighs around his waist. He follows directions well so I lie beneath him and imagine a little more hair on his chest, a little more muscle wrapped around his bones. I set the baby arm on my nightstand and provide him with a little seduction instruction. I’m quickly becoming enamored by the scraggly beard unevenly covering the baby arm bringer’s face and his thin lips and the sensation of him rubbing my back in lazy circles because he never knows how to make a move, still doesn’t understand he only needs to push me on my back and tell me to spread my legs. My mouth tastes fruity yet sour, cheap, I don’t mind. We take a bottle of wine and the baby arm to my bedroom and I caress it while we kill the cheap red. He hands it to me and says, “I thought you might like this,” and I take the baby arm and tell him if he’s not careful, I will fall in love and he says he would be fine with that. A couple months later, he comes over to my apartment in the middle of the night because we’ve long abandoned any pretense of a mutual interest in anything but dirty sex and he’s holding a fiberglass baby arm, painted the color of flesh.
On our way to his place, we stop at a video store and rent the movie and he loves it and for the first time I think the guy is not a complete tool. I explain about Meshach Taylor and Andrew McCarthy and Kim Cattrall frolicking in the middle of the night in a department store thanks to the magic of an ancient Egyptian necklace, all set to an synthetic eighties soundtrack. I say, “Like in the movie Mannequin,” and he doesn’t get the reference-disappointing.
He tells me he dresses windows and has access to a storeroom full of mannequins and mannequin parts. It always seems like such a waste of time. I’ve never enjoyed sitting through previews at movies. I say, “I’m ready to go back to your place whenever you are.” I am anxious about all the “getting to know you” conversation we are having. When he tells me about his job, we are at a sleazy bar, drinking beer from the tap in frosted mugs. I’m dating a guy who works as a merchandiser for a large department store and one of his duties includes designing window displays.