The Autobiography of Benjamin Abbott - Chapter 7: (The) Particle Zoo
I think Mike was glad it was Friday. He didn’t like working in the mailroom. I could tell because of the stream of curses he let out throughout the day. Every time there was a small mix-up with the sorting or the delivering or the picking up, Mike would go off like a boiling tea kettle, and there were always a lot of little mix-ups. After all, it is a mailroom, and mailrooms and mail delivery in general are God’s way of injecting little mix-ups into everyday life.
But Mike was a perfectionist so he just couldn’t stand God’s plan. He was a tea pot with a low boiling point, or maybe that meant he was a small tea pot, whatever the comparison should be it didn’t take much for the stream of curses to begin flowing from Mike’s mouth. If Anderton received the mail for Anderson, or if he returned to the mailroom with an extra stack still in the outgoing bin of his cart because he had accidentally passed by a row of cubicles on the 57th floor, the curses would flow with proficiency and a brutal kind of elegance. His vocabulary of curses was so impressive it made me blush, and if I wrote down even half of what he said right now I would be arrested. (I chalked this all up to the famous Irish temper Mike obviously inherited from the Shaughnessy side of his family.)
At lunchtime, instead of being invited upstairs to the magically reappearing corporate dining room, the mountain came to me, trailed by VP’s. As they approached the mailroom, all of us raised our heads like impala in a particularly dangerous game reserve. We could hear Humphrey and his court laughing, boasting, bragging, laughing, selling; a prep school lacrosse team roving down the hallway ready to inflict themselves on the freshmen in the locker room.
Humphrey noticed Mike first. This wasn’t an accident because Mike had strategically positioned himself near the doorway as soon as Humphrey and his five groupies could be heard.
“Mike!” Humphrey said as the chorus of 5 repeated the word “Mike” excitedly in the background. Even though Mike was the first to hear Humphrey and his group in the hallway and even though he used this to his advantage by making sure he would be the first face Humphrey would see when he walked into the mailroom, Mike had made the mistake of looking down at the mail he was sorting in the minute or so timespan between first noise and contact. In looking down at the mail he noticed he had accidentally filed the mail for Jan Illith in the J’s instead of the I’s, so he was in mid-curse when Humphrey finally came around the corner.
Humphrey slapped Mike on the back as the “unt” of Mike’s last curse escaped from his mouth.
“How’s it going?” Humphrey asked, and he actually looked like he was curious about Mike’s week in the mailroom instead of asking to make a show of kindness and concern for the benefit of the other mailroom employees who stood around watching this display unsure if they should be watching or instead working harder than usual to show the CEO of the company they shouldn’t be fired. (This look of interest was one of Humphrey’s many talents, he wasn’t actually curious, he was just good at faking curiosity.)
As Humphrey’s hand released from Mike’s back and the lingering reverberations of his last curse died away, Mike’s body and face instantly transformed like a superhero changing from their regular nondescript alter ego to their caped form. It’s a shame he didn’t wear glasses (Mike had had Lasik surgery two years earlier around the time of the Variety profile) to take off to highlight the transformation. First, he stood up rigid and alert, not in the impala way, but in the predator in a pack taking orders from the alpha male way, the sweat disappeared from his forehead and the teapot steam stopped whistling from his ears. He was Calm Mike, Obedient Mike, Impressive Mike. I was all the more impressed with Impressive Mike because this is a transformation I’ve never quite been able to pull off myself in the face of a superior.
Mike began to talk in clipped tones that reminded me of an old teletype machine, giving Humphrey a more detailed report than I knew anyone could ever give about sorting and delivering the mail. After he was done with his brusk yet informative two-minute report, I wanted to promote him back to his old job. But Humphrey was used to these kinds of reports, so he seemed less impressed with Impressive Mike, or at least nonplussed (I may have used that last word incorrectly but it feels like it’s the way it should be used).
Humphrey nodded a few times as Mike reported his news, he took in the information, appearing to deliberate on every word while still being able to furtively make eyes at me. With a second slap of the back to let Mike know it was time to return to the sorting and delivering of mail, Humphrey and his rat pack roved through the room to my desk where I was still seated with a copy of Elle magazine in my hands that featured a profile (and demurely lewd photos) of an appealing actress I had a crush on at the time. (And was in the process of promoting a new film from Landmark Studios she was starring in.) Humphrey noticed the cover of the magazine and the naked actress whose sexual organs were obscured by a strategically placed swimming pool and gave an “I fucked her” smile and then once again made eyes at me. (To be fair to the 22 year-old innocent-seeming, despite nudity alluding magazine pictorials and years as an actress in Hollywood, actress, I don’t think Humphrey fucked her in the carnal, literal sense of the word, but I have no doubt that he did fuck her in at least one, if not more, of the other meanings of the term.)
Humphrey had come down to the mailroom for the first time in his decade long reign as Chairman and CEO of Landmark to take me out to lunch. I was somewhat disappointed by this because the French-Canadian in white tails had told me the day before that one of the entrees was going to be Chicken Kiev the next day, which unlike the other versions of fish or chicken or beef and potatoes I had not only heard of before, but absolutely love. However, I had to give up my Chicken Kiev dreams to go out with Humphrey to the newest trendiest restaurant in Los Angeles. Humphrey said the food wasn’t that good, but there would be a lot of famous people and other Hollywood executives and agents in attendance and he could do business and I could get a taste of glamour and power.
We rode to the restaurant, which was more Century City than Beverly Hills, in Humphrey’s limousine, the two of us in the back alone and the five VPs crowded in the front seat next to the chauffeur. I must say, even though the last time I had ridden in the back of a limousine was the night of my senior prom when my date and I shared a limo with four other couples so I shouldn’t take such things for granted, I was rather unimpressed with Humphrey’s limousine. It was just a long long black car. There was no hot tub, no television, not even a minibar in the back. If Humphrey wanted to seal the deal he was going to have to do better.
We arrived at the restaurant and the five clowns tumbled out of the front passenger’s seat and Humphrey exited from the back before me making sure to hold the door open. (Who says chivalry is dead.) The restaurant was called Particle Zoo, which made me a little desperate because I wanted to put a “The” in front of the name and referred to it as “The Particle Zoo” all throughout my first meal there and ever since. (At least until the preceding sentence.)
The Particle Zoo was founded by Ray Davies (not the one from The Kinks), a former physicist at UC-Irvine who had spent 20 middling years on the faculty there before deciding the real money was on Wall St., and then moving to New York to work at a hedge fund in the early 90s. He made his first million at that hedge fund (that was named for some biblical character I can’t remember, which may or may not make it the same hedge fund that Mike worked at) during the tech bubble of the late 90s by exactly matching the rate of return of the Dow Jones Index. Luckily for Ray, he got bored before the bubble burst and left for Silicon Valley and began to play around with electronic gadgets.
This is when he realized the real money wasn’t on Wall St. but in the tech world and he came up with one of most popular games for the new breed of cell phones emerging in the new millennium. The game itself was not that fun or impressive on a technological or creative scale, it was more the equivalent of pong in its rudimentary design, form, element of skill involved, etc.., but Ray was smart enough to get it included on all of the new Blueberry phones that were so popular from noon on December 12, 2001 to 9:51 a.m. on August 21, 2003.
The game itself was really a simplistic digital representation of the motor skills and brain development test where toddlers (and various of the more intelligent ape species) are asked to put the correctly shaped object (star, rectangle, square, circle) into the correctly shaped hole, but it was a great time waster and Ray had created an intensely complex scoring system that no one (not even he) could understand, so it caught on helping to propel Blueberry sales into the stratosphere for the time period given above, which made Ray an eight-digit millionaire who pretended he was really a nine-digit millionaire. By the time of our lunch at The Particle Zoo in the year of 2004, Ray’s game was so passé it was no longer included on most phones (even the now limited number of Blueberry phones that were still being put out by the bankrupted parent company of Blueberry, Testosterone Inc.) and no one who actually frequented his restaurant would be caught dead playing it or talking about it or referring to it; a collective amnesia descended upon Ray Davies and his “little game history” and now he was a restaurateur who must have made his money in “physics or something.”
Ray greeted us right after we had been seated at Humphrey’s usual table near the back of the nucleus of the atomically shaped dining room (the VPs were exiled to the outer spaces where electrons roamed). Ray and Dave literally rubbed elbows as I ordered my drink, a French Martini. I had never had a French Martini before and this seemed like the time and place to do it. I may have been subconsciously influenced since Ray and Dave were talking about the previous year’s Cannes Film Festival as I looked at the quark-shaped drinks menu.
“Our food products division has come up with an edible plastic that can solve the world’s hunger problems. It’s cheap, it’s tasty, did I say it’s cheap, good profit margins.”
In the half-minute it took me to say the words “French martini” to the waiter, they had moved from last year’s Cannes Film Festival to a wannabe film mogul’s yacht at last year’s Cannes Film Festival to a delightful buffet table on the wannabe film mogul’s yacht at last year’s Cannes Film Festival to food in general, which gave Humphrey a chance to plug one of Landmark’s potential future products. “The only problem is the damn thing causes mice to go infertile.”
“Infertile?”
“The edible plastic, which is marvelous, it can take on the taste of any food, creme brulee, prime rib, carrots, anything, apparently it does something or may do something to the sperm of the mice, that’s what the food scientists say, so when we introduce it into a population of mice that population stops reproducing completely and dies off. But it’s not a major problem. I’m sure it can be fixed.”
“Interesting.” It wasn’t apparent if Ray actually thought this was interesting or if he was humoring David Humphrey because he had noticed an extraordinarily famous actor who was even more extraordinarily temperamental than the extraordinariness of his fame. The actor had just walked in with a very beautiful heavily-tattooed woman and been seated at a neutron 15 yards away.
“I say it’s a small price to pay to solve the world’s hunger problems.”
Ray nodded a distracted nod and said, “interesting,” again having definitely mentally moved on to the famous actor.
I would physically describe Ray Davies to you but he left our table to give encouraging words to the temperamental actor and his gorgeous mate before I noticed what he looked like. He existed more as a fast-moving cloud formation I never bothered to notice than as an actual person to me. This may be because I was distracted by all of the sumptuous people watching as the nucleus of the atom was filled with 5 of the 13 most famous people on the planet (according to me), 4 of the 12 most powerful people on the planet (according to Forbes), and roughly 21 of the 50 most beautiful people on the planet (according to People Magazine).
Much to my disappointment my pool-covered current crush of an actress was not one of these people, but her objectively more attractive yet vaguely sluttier rival that she pretended to be friends with but really hated was there with her new boyfriend, who professionally made music of some kind. (I’m not familiar with his genre of music, but just pretend that whatever music is currently the coolest, most talked about, downloaded and sampled form of music at the time you are reading this is the type he made and you’ll get the idea.)
First French Martini drained and second one recently arrived, I let Humphrey order food for me because I didn’t see Chicken Kiev on the menu. After the food arrived and as we continued to eat or more accurately drink because I don’t think either of us liked the food (although Humphrey repeatedly insisted it was because he was watching his weight because he was on a new diet named after one of the geologic time periods when dinosaurs roamed), Humphrey received a steady stream of people from the lists I had named earlier. He made short work of most of them, a quick in-joke, or talk of the day’s market or some new film opening and the famous and/or powerful person would leave and Humphrey would return his attention to his date, me. He knew the power this would have over me of blithely dismissing the type of people that are constantly fawned over, autograph sought and sucked up to. He knew how to show off his influence and friends while still keeping the focus on the object of his affection. I no longer felt like sexual prey, now I was being seduced by a master seducer: Cary Grant, Frank Sinatra, George Clooney.
Speaking of such stars, [redacted by publisher] stopped by our table after I finished my third French Martini. [redacted by publisher] was by his side and they were both dressed in tuxedoes, which I thought a little excessive for an early Friday afternoon. Humphrey invited them to sit as I ordered my fourth French Martini. (Even Humphrey had a limit to the amount of sheer luminescent star power he could resist.) The seduction was now a Menage a Quatre.
“I didn’t know you guys were friends in real life,” I said to [redacted] and [redacted], slightly buzzed, now holding my fourth French Martini. They gave each other a knowing look before politely saying they were and then quickly calling the waitress over.
Humphrey leaned in to me while [redacted] and [redacted] were occupied with their drink orders and whispered into my ear. As he leaned and whispered my body instinctively shuddered expecting sweet nothings to be said, but instead of sweet nothings Humphrey was giving me discreet information. “They’re actually closer than friends.”
“Closer than friends?” The words bounced through my alcohol-saturated skull not connecting with the parts of my brain that are able to turn abstract hints into concrete thought. If Humphrey had anything it was an Einsteinian EQ and he could tell I still wasn’t getting it. “They’re, y’know, together.”
“Like?”
“Like, y’know, together.”
“No.”
“Yeah.”
We had reverted to junior high speak.
“Aren’t they both in relationships? I mean, he’s dating…. and he’s with…”
“It’s for their careers. You know how it is.” I think Humphrey was a little embarrassed by my naivete.
“I honestly had no idea.”
“They’re good actors.”
“Yeah, they are.”
I think [redacted] caught the last part of our conversation and blushed a little at the awkwardness but [redacted] saved us as he told a story from one of his last location shoots that involved an oil painting, a labrador retriever and 5 members of a remote Arctic tribe who were extras in the cast and had been accidentally set adrift on an iceberg. This made me think of the 5 VPs as they floated electron-like on the edge of the atom and it wasn’t long before David and I had left [redacted] and [redacted] and joined up with the VPs to leave the restaurant. This was probably for the best because as the conversation and alcohol flowed over the time of our extra-long lunch hour, [redacted] and [redacted] were getting a little handsy with each other and David and I figured they might want to be alone.
*
The French Martinis fought the sunlight as best they could when we stepped outside to the valet stand, but I began to sober up anyway as Humphrey was talking animatedly about something and the VPs were looking on jealously huddling with each for warmth because they weren’t getting any heat from Humphrey.
The fucking valets are taking forever, I thought to myself in my sobering up in the afternoon extremely irritated state as a hangover was in the process of instantly blooming above my right eyebrow. I stared into the sun in an attempt to reclaim my buzz. Not the best of ideas, I know, and now my pupils hurt in addition to my forehead and I heard the words “Malibu place” coming from somewhere in front of me, probably Humphrey, and I desperately desperately desperately wanted a cigarette.
“What?”
“You should come by my Malibu place this weekend. We’ll have dinner by the ocean.”
“That sounds nice,” I squinted, thinking about laying down and resting on the Malibu beach in my current state.
I wanted to shout at the unemployed actor who was valeting our limo, the power of the contact high from our lunch and the angry throbbing of my temples, both going to my head, as I tried not to think of the absurdity of the need to valet a chauffeur driven automobile. (The chauffeur was standing next to Humphrey and myself and the 5 VPs waiting for the valet like everyone else.)
Humphrey must have noticed the annoyed look on my face because he shifted into concern mode.
“Is there anything wrong? You look tense.”
“No, I’m fine,” I said through clenched teeth.
“No. You look tense. Take the rest of the day off. Mike can handle the mail.”
Humphrey reached into his inside jacket pocket and pulled out a laminated card. “Here’s the address of my masseuse, go see her this afternoon. I’ll have Polly let her know you’re coming.”
“No, seriously, I’m fine,” my teeth clenched harder, “I don’t need a…”
“I insist.”
The card somehow ended up in my hand like a magic trick where the magician puts strange coins, playing cards, little bunnies into your pockets without you realizing.
The limo showed up and the chauffeur and the gang of five piled in the front and Humphrey moved towards the back. “I’ll have them send the other car for you.” Humphrey said to me as he sat down and the valet closed the door for him. Humphrey methodically lowered the tinted automatic window the way old rich guys do in films about oil tycoons and Wall Street titans and looked up at me as I stood next to the hustling valets on the sidewalk outside of (The) Particle Zoo.
“You need to relax and enjoy life.” Humphrey told me and I nodded or something, I don’t know, it was all a French Martini blur. “Just wait, a car will be here in less than 2 minutes,” was the last thing he said before the glare of the tinted back window of his limousine got into my eyes, reminding me of my growing soon to be cantaloupe-sized headache.
I didn’t have to wait 2 minutes, the other car, a Town Car not a limousine, pulled up to the valet stand in less than 90 seconds and a chauffeur, a mild-mannered sort named Pete, ambled out and opened the back door for me.
“Can I sit in front?”
“Whatever you want,” Pete said and ambled back around to the driver’s seat as I got in the passenger’s side.
I gave him Humphrey’s laminated card because it had the address on it. Pete looked at it, and then looked at me and smiled and handed it back to me. “I know where this is.”
We were off to an anonymous office building one block off a major thoroughfare in West L.A. that was filled with doctor’s offices, dentist’s offices, chiropractor’s offices and an office for M. Rose situated on the top floor, the 4th floor.
Pete dropped me off at the front steps, telling me he would be back in a half an hour but I convinced him his services were no longer needed for the day and I could get back to the Landmark building myself. This was important because I felt strongly that behind his placid dopey Dodger-loving demeanor, Pete was silently judging my trip to the “masseuse” and I didn’t need someone waiting for me and morally evaluating me and giving me a deadline I needed to finish by as I tried to relax by having a stranger rub their hands all over my body because the mere fact I was aware of Pete and his waiting Town Car would suck all of the relaxation out of my body like a jet turbine sucking a pigeon into its engine. Normally I wouldn’t have said anything out of a misplaced sense of politeness and just toughed it out and not enjoyed my massage at all, but my lingering ¼ buzz ¾ soberness and 4/4 hangover didn’t have time for politeness so Pete would have to be sacrificed.
I made my way up the 1970s era elevator to the 4th floor of the 1970s era building that had never bothered to change its 1970s era yellowish brownish orangish carpet and walls. The dentists and doctors and chiropractors must have occupied the lower floors or the directory in the lobby was shamelessly out of date because all but two of the offices on the 4th floor were empty. 401 housed an accountant by the name of Halfpenny; Steve Halfpenny, C.S.A. is what it said on the name placard affixed to the wall next to the door.
Number 402 had a more temporary thin piece of transparency someone had obviously printed out on their home computer and cut themselves using a scissors and shaky hands and then slid into the nameplate holder; M. Rose, Massage Therapist. The doors were made of solid oak or some kind of solid dark brown wood with no windows so I wasn’t able to see inside as I buzzed the little buzzer underneath the transparency and waited. And waited.
Mr. Halfpenny, or who I can only assume was Mr. Halfpenny, emerged from behind his solid oak door with a giant plastic mug in his hand that bore the Landmark logo on the front and jauntily passed me in the hallway humming an old Lionel Richie song on his way towards a door at the end of the hallway he punched a three-button code into and I assumed was the bathroom. As I watched the closed bathroom door at the end of the hallway waiting for Mr. Halfpenny to return, there was noise and movement behind 402 and the door opened revealing a young woman in a canary yellow t-shirt (also with the Landmark logo on it) and blue fairly short shorts and white tennis shoes with short fluffy white socks sticking out of them. She was staring at me unenthusiastically. “You must be rabbit.”
“Yes,” I answered hesitantly, my brain slowly working out that she probably said Abbott instead of rabbit.
“David told me you were coming. Take off your clothes and get on the table.”
It was a small dark room with a massage table in the middle and little else. There was no way the original 1970s architects of this building designed 402 to be its own suite, it must have been annexed from a conference room or storage closet of 401 long ago.
“I’ll be back in a sec.” M. Rose said to me, as the oak door shut behind me and she went for an identical door on the other side of the massage table that probably went into another of 401’s old conference rooms or closets. I was standing and looking down at the massage table, eye’s readjusting to the darkness of the room from the fluorescentness of the hallway and heard the metallic click of the second door shutting, leaving me alone.
My buzz was now 0/5 and my hangover was 10/5 as I briefly contemplated escaping and playing hooky for the rest of the day by finding a West L.A. movie theater and passing out in the pleasant darkness of the back row of a hopefully unpopular and sparsely attended film.
There was a fluffy white towel that reminded me of M. Rose’s fluffy white socks on the massage table folded in the way they do at the finer hotels. The towel I suppose was for me and I suddenly felt bad that M. Rose had gone to so much trouble of neatly folding it and putting it on the massage table I realized I had no choice and began to undress.
I haven’t had many professional massages in my life. Most of my massages have been more of the reciprocal kind given in relationships. I’m not exactly prudish but I’m not one to walk around nude or semi-nude either. I was never a beach person, I don’t do well in the sun, I don’t tan and my physique is average I suppose which means I’ve always generally thought of it as inadequate. I’m not fat, I’m quite skinny by modern standards, but when I take off my shirt I can still detect the beginnings of a middle-aged man’s gut that one tends to see when you leave your late twenties and enter your early thirties. I definitely do not have a six-pack. Sometimes it seems every male in Los Angeles has a six-pack. At that moment as I looked at the fluffy towel thinking of fluffy socks and my naked body prone on a table that many other naked bodies (including Humphrey’s?) had laid on before, I wished I had a six-pack.
I was thinking all of this, clothes still on, still waiting for M. Rose, still desperately wanting a cigarette or at least a couple of Advil. There were dark wood cabinets (that matched the oak door) on the far side of the room and I went foraging for some medicine. I figured a masseuse is in the medical field, is kind of in the medical field, so I started opening cabinets expecting to find nothing but hoping against hope there would be something for my headache.
The first cabinet didn’t contain anything except for a few pellets that may have been mouse droppings. Time to quickly close the cabinet door without thinking about the pellets, moving on to door number 2.
Door number 2 had a stack of the fluffy white towels all folded neatly like the one on the massage table, a box of powder-free latex gloves (unopened) and some gauze. I was getting closer to actual medicine, so I was hopeful as my right hand moved to door number 3, but I heard a metal click of the opening of the back oak door that M. Rose had earlier disappeared into before my hand could reach the U-shaped handle.
“Shit.” I don’t think she heard me as the click was followed by the sound of the bottom of the door brushing over carpet. “Just a second,” I said panicked like she was opening a bathroom door on me as a I sat on the toilet. “One more minute.” The brushing stopped and then retreated and I began to throw off my clothes with abandon.
A few seconds earlier I had been worried about all of my inadequacies but now the sweet imprisonment of a deadline cleared my mental hard drive and I found myself standing naked next to a massage table clutching a fluffy white towel and thinking of the Statue of David for comfort and reassurance. There was a full length mirror at the head of the massage table and this started to bring back insecurities, so I leapt face down on the table, trying to reach behind me to strategically place the fluffy white towel on my ass (with limited success, covering only one and a half cheeks) in the way I thought it is supposed to be placed during professional massages and shouted, “I’m ready!” to the dark brown door that M. Rose was hiding behind.
I rested my chin on the edge of the massage table and watched through the mirror as she came back in wearing a different, now white, t-shirt that also had the Landmark logo on it, and carrying an open can of Diet Coke.
“My name is Melrose,” she said not looking at me and then took a sip of the Coke, setting it down on the counter near the cabinets and began doing some massage preparatory business. She opened a cabinet, I hoped she didn’t notice I had slightly disturbed the stack of fluffy white towels, and took a bottle out from behind those towels I hadn’t discovered in my earlier inspection. Something glooped into her hands and I heard rubbing. More rubbing. There was a second gloop and she turned around and met my eyes in the mirror. I smiled. She did not. She whipped the towel off my ass and went to work with her gloopy hands.
“Do you work with David?” She was doing something with my left ass cheek that was somewhere between mildly irritating like a persistent itch and downright painful like torture.
“Kind of.” We were moving up the pain scale when she decided to stop and move to the other cheek, bringing me temporary relief.
“He doesn’t usually send coworkers here, you must be special.” Now my right cheek was under interrogation.
“He wants to buy something from me.”
“Do you own a company or something?”
“No. A screenplay. He wants to buy a screenplay I wrote.” The rubbing stopped. And I heard and felt and saw hopping as Melrose made her way to the front of the massage table. What had been a terse, bored, slightly put-out young woman moments earlier was now bright-eyed and hopeful.
“Can I do a speech for you?”
“Excuse me.”
“Can I do a speech for you?” Maybe the buzz was coming back because the words didn’t make complete sense to me, I had never had anyone offer to do a speech for me before, or maybe I didn’t understand the question because a large percentage of my gray matter was still focused on the painful burning of my ass cheeks. (And the rest of my gray matter was overtaken by my near debilitating headache.)
“Aaaaah.” I opened my mouth and let air escape not even forming intelligible syllables.
“It’s from Ibsen.” Melrose offered hopefully, which didn’t help because I couldn’t think of any politicians from history with the last name Ibsen. Maybe it was the first name. Nope, still no famous politicians.
“It’s from A Doll’s House.” Oh, that Ibsen. My mental hard drive was rebooted as I now desperately tried to find the folder labeled “excuses.”
“I was kidding about the screenplay. It was a joke. I’m not really on the talent side of the company. I work in the mailroom.” I smiled weakly. Melrose put out her bottom lip and looked like an adorable (and now sad) puppy.
“I’m sure it’s great. You can still do it if you want. It’s just there’s nothing I can do for you.” I’ve always had a soft spot for puppies. (I’m not a fucking monster. Who doesn’t like puppies?) I couldn’t stand to see that look of disappointment. I was ready to listen to her do a one woman show of Ibsen’s entire oeuvre if it would get her to cheer up, or at least return her to the terse, business-like Melrose who was torturing me a minute earlier. This whole experience had quickly turned from the awkwardness of a stranger vigorously rubbing my ass to the awkwardness of a blind date that our mothers had set up for us and I was failing at. “I want to see it. Please.” I was now begging and she looked kind of pissed off and I hadn’t even done anything wrong. (So exactly like a blind date.) Her left hand made a fist and went to her hip, her elbow at a 90 degree angle. She let out a sigh.
“So are we going to have sex or not?”
“What?”
“That’s why you came here, isn’t it?”
“No, I’m sorry. I think there’s been a misunderstanding. Humphrey, I mean David, I mean, Dave, sent me here for a massage.”
“Hah!” she laughed dramatically, a mocking false laugh one usually gives when a lover is lying to you and you both know it. Just as rapidly as we had moved to a blind date, our relationship now progressed to the breakdown of our engagement stage. I sat up on the table looking around for my towel, feeling a little exposed, hoping Melrose wouldn’t let out another dramatic laugh. I found my towel and covered myself and smiled weakly again. “I’m kind of seeing somebody right now, so…”
“David’s married and he comes here all the time.”
“I don’t think I would feel right about it?” The question mark at the end of that sentence is not a mistake because it was a question. But it was a question Melrose didn’t want to answer for me, I was going to have to answer it for myself. I could hear game show music in my head counting down the seconds as I jumped down from the table still holding on to the now slightly less fluffy white towel.
“I should probably get back to work?” (Question mark still not a mistake.)
Our relationship now went from the angry breakup stage to the regretful sad stage. She looked at me with her puppy dog eyes again, disappointed, like she had failed at the task Humphrey had given her and he was going to scold her the next time he saw her like he scolds one of his vice-presidents after their division has a particularly bad quarter.
“Don’t you at least want a handjob?”