Succubus in the City (34 page)

Everyone took this as evidence of my artistic sensitivity and let me wander away on my own. Surprisingly, the paintings were interesting. Shula had combined painting, collage, and printing, and each was organized around a few samples of typography. I found myself entranced, especially by one that featured various samples of pastel blues and the letter
m.
Nathan was still busy, which was good because I didn’t want him catching me. I went over to one of the assistants working behind the food table and said that I wanted to buy a piece.

The young man in the requisite all black and long but perfectly cut ponytail managed the transaction both efficiently and discreetly. As I munched on a canapé made of smoked salmon garnished with caviar, he wrote out all the details and affixed the red dot to the title.

Then Nathan came and found me, without his whole crowd. “So, what do you think?” he asked.

“I like her work a lot,” I told him truthfully.

“Are you ready for some dinner?”

I looked around. His friends had split up, the artist talking to several people who obviously shopped at Barneys and the two men off in a corner. “Are we waiting for your friends?” I was a little off balance because I had no idea what to expect. Was this the date where he introduced me to his friends? It seemed a little early, but what did I know?

Nathan smiled. “I had kind of hoped we’d have dinner just the two of us. I did want to see Shula’s work. She sent me an invitation to the opening and all, and I had to take a date.”

“Had to?” I raised an eyebrow. This was more interesting.

“Shula and I went out for a while a very long time ago,” he confided. “She’s been with Greg for a couple of years now, but I did want to show up with a smart, beautiful woman so she would know that I was to be envied.” Then he paused and looked at me, and his face fell. “Oh, no, I’m sorry. I didn’t think it would offend you. I meant it in the most complimentary way possible.”

I laughed. “Let’s go eat,” I said. “I’m not upset at all, so long as we’re doing more than showing your old girlfriend that you’ve done better.”

chapter
TWENTY-SEVEN

We went to Cafeteria. There was a line, there is always a line at nine forty-five, but we’d nibbled at the opening and standing on the corner of Seventh Avenue was no hardship. I had my usual blood orange martini and Nathan had a lychee mojito, and it was hard to hear him clearly even though we were sitting just across from each other. Cafeteria is a lovely place to impress someone with your knowledge of hip, but it’s a bad venue for an apology.

“I’m really sorry, Lily, I wasn’t thinking of what it might sound like,” Nathan was saying. Since he spoke so that I could hear him, half the room had heard him as well. “When I asked you to come I hadn’t thought that it would be anyone but Shula. I should have figured Greg, but I hadn’t expected Jonathan as well. But let me tell you, all of them said that you were way too good for me. And they’re probably right.”

I thought the apology a little overdone, and not particularly necessary. But the drinks were really strong, so I figured that the mojito made him more morose than he had any reason to be.

“It’s really okay, Nathan. What about that Branford guy you were following? Any developments?” And I’ll admit that this question was not entirely to get his mind off feeling badly. “You called your boss about him so quickly—did anything happen? Are you going to go to Aruba?”

He shook his head and looked even guiltier. “We informed the wife, who paid the bill and has disappeared herself now. I don’t know what’s going on, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to get any mileage out of it. I don’t know why I seem to keep screwing up with you. I wanted tonight to be really fun, really special between us.”

I took his hand across the table. “It is fun and it is special and you haven’t acted like a jerk at all. I’ve had a really good time, except for all your mea culpas.”

“Because you’re the most beautiful, most special woman I’ve ever dated,” he continued. “The very first time I saw you I couldn’t get you out of my head. And I told myself that it was just an image and that when I got to know you you wouldn’t be interesting or smart and that I’m shallow and it was just that I’d never seen a woman so beautiful in the flesh before. And then I found out that you were creative and brilliant and cared about things that I cared about, and sometimes I think you might know almost as much about the ancient world as I do. And I could not stop thinking about you, Lily. I want to take you to New Haven and show you the Sumerian tablets that I’d been working on. I want to show you my apartment and I wonder if you’ll like it, what you’ll think. Yours is so elegant and sophisticated, just like you.”

“Give him a kiss, honey, and tell him you’ll go home with him. Otherwise the rest of us will never get a word in edgewise,” a woman two tables over shouted in a heavy Long Island accent. She was a Nassau County tragedy, probably over seventy with her hair hennaed the color of a rust stain, plastered with drugstore makeup and draped with more Monet chains and bracelets than the end-of-season clearance stand at Marshall’s. The younger woman with her, probably her granddaughter, turned bright red and stared down at her plate.

“Nathan, I like you a whole lot,” I said. “Maybe a lot more than that. I’d like the chance to find out if it’s more than that. You’re one of the nicest, most interesting men I’ve met and I like your friends and I liked the art. I even bought a piece, but I didn’t want you or Shula to know, because I bought it because I wanted it. Not because she’s your friend. I’ve been around art long enough to know that you can’t buy stuff just because you like the artist.”

He looked up at me as if I’d started speaking Akkadian. Which I hadn’t. He probably wouldn’t understand my accent anyway.

“And if you’re inviting me to have coffee at your place after dinner, then I accept. Though I’ve had a lot of coffee today and I’ll have to take decaf. Do you have decaf?”

I was still holding his hand. He picked up his hand with mine in it and kissed my fingers. “Lily, Lily, you don’t know what you’ve said,” he said as softly as he could under the circumstances that I could possibly hear. “Yes, I have decaf.”

We took the L train to his apartment in Williamsburg. Even though it boasted a fair number of trendy clubs and shops, I’d never been there. His place, a large industrial loft, was very close to the subway stop and the main drag. The area seemed more edgy than Chelsea, maybe more like the Meatpacking District had been a couple of years ago before everyone started moving in. There were the clearly artsy types and the old ladies and the teenagers hanging out in the park. There was concertina wire over the entrance gate to his building which made me wonder, but it was probably just left over from a few decades ago when the area was seriously sketchy.

His building was long and narrow, one of the original warehouses. Today a lot of places are built to look like lofts. It’s very chic in New York and probably much cheaper for the developers, who don’t have to bother with a lot of walls and finishes. Nathan’s loft was the real thing, original, that had been retrofitted with the current high-end designer kitchen (maple cabinets, granite counters, stainless steel appliances—I was impressed by a man who had a Sub-Zero fridge, a Wolf stove and a Miele dishwasher. Though probably he didn’t know how to use them). The entire floor faced the river and through the twenty-foot-high windows that made up the wall I could see the Manhattan skyline in its full glory. That view was the best advertisement for living in Brooklyn I had ever seen.

He had to have had a designer,
I thought. No guy, not even the most sensitive and artistic metrosexual, would manage that mix of the industrial furniture and Art Deco woods and leathers. Scattered around, on the coffee table and on a pedestal in front of the view, were excellent reproductions of Babylonian antiquities. Or at least I hoped they were reproductions. He (or possibly the developer) had installed a mezzanine above the kitchen and dining area, so they had what felt like twelve-foot ceilings while the living area fronting the windows appeared to be closer to twenty feet.

He settled me on the huge leather sofa, curved and sensuous and upholstered in warm chestnut leather, and went to get the coffee. In front of me on the coffee table was a tiny statue that I recognized out of my very distant past. Ishtar, adorned with fruits and nuts, was depicted as the Goddess of the Harvest. I picked up the piece and studied it carefully. I was certain I had seen it before. This particular statue had graced the small niche altar in the women’s quarters of the Great King when I had been a young girl. I had been taught to make my first offerings before it, a piece of fruit or a particularly delectable honey cake.

I heard Nathan come in behind me. “Is this original?” I asked, my voice catching.

“No,” he reassured me. “It’s just a very good reproduction. Mom never did quite understand why I didn’t want something that had been brought over in the nineteenth century before the exportation laws were in place.”

“I’m really glad you convinced your mother not to try to find originals,” I said slowly, moved by his care for the origins of the pieces.

I replaced Ishtar gently on the table, treating her with the same reverence as a statue originally made for worship. They were no different—the idols I used to venerate had been made recently, turned out in workshops by journeymen supervised by master artisans. The artists carving the statuettes were on the job, following a pattern. They weren’t praying all the time or thinking of the stone as the embodiment of Divinity. They were just guys with a shipment to deliver. But to me, she was my Goddess in all her glory.

“Why aren’t you back there, working on your dissertation? Why are you here?” I asked. “You love it so much.”

He looked down, slightly abashed. “My mother…Well, my family didn’t approve of my choice of profession. That’s putting it nicely. And there were some family politics and I promised to take some time to really look at their objections and try to deal with the world their way. So I got this gig, which they disapprove of as much as they dislike my Near Eastern studies. I can’t win.”

“Why do they have a problem with it?”

He looked away from me and shook his head. “I turned down a job offer at Goldman Sachs when I graduated from college. My mother will never forgive me for that. I refused to apply to law school. So far as she’s concerned I’m an overgrown child who doesn’t know anything about the real world and won’t grow up and take responsibility. And I’m ashamed that maybe she’s right in some ways. I take their money, or at least I use my trust fund. I don’t live on what I earn as a PI, that’s for sure. I didn’t live on my TA stipend in school, either.”

I could see this conflict was older than college. I wanted to comfort him because I didn’t want to see him hurt. But I also understood why his mother was disappointed. Much as I was thrilled he was a Babylonian scholar, I was also certain that he wasn’t merely pessimistic about his job prospects. And playing PI for the time being was only another way of getting back at his family, not really exploring to see if there was anything he could like in the life they had envisioned for him.

Still—I reached out and touched the back of his hand gently. “So many people just give in, go to Wall Street, don’t stand up for who they are or what they want in life. I respect you more for having the guts to stand up to your family and pursue your own desires.”

He smiled and reached over and caressed my hair. “You’re really sweet. But I haven’t stood up to them, and that’s the problem. My mother tells me to drop the grad school thing, and here I am.” He picked up the little statue and held it. “Ishtar was the Goddess of fertility, of the harvest. To her devotees, sex was sacred and fecundity was her gift.”

As he replaced the small idol I drew him down on the sofa. And, blessed by the Goddess and with the glories of the New York skyline before us, he held me against his chest and began to kiss my forehead and cheeks. I raised my face and he looked at me for a long moment before he touched my lips.

We kissed for eternity. He was gentle but strong, not timid but slow and deliberate. When he leaned over to nibble at my ear, I sighed.

“What do you want?” he whispered urgently. “I knew you were the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen when you were all wrapped up in that bathrobe the night I met you. I’ve never been able to get you out of my mind. And the more I know you the more I know I’ve never met anyone like you.”

“I want you, Nathan,” I sighed. “I want to have sex with you and I want to have breakfast with you and I want us to date. And my friends all say that I shouldn’t call you or send you e-mails and I did too much too fast but I couldn’t help it. But you should know, I haven’t really dated many guys.”

He pulled a little away from me, so that we could see each other’s faces more easily. “We can slow down if you want, Lily. That’s okay. I want to date you and I think this may be for a long time. I can wait a little bit if that will make you happier. We can talk and cuddle and I’ll put you in a cab back to Manhattan in an hour or two if you like.”

“No. I want to stay. I want to be with you. I’m just…I’m scared of liking you so much so fast,” I tried to explain.

“Me too,” he said. “I’m scared of liking you so much so fast, too. And I’m sure that once I sleep with you I’m going to be in over my head.”

“We can wait,” I said. “If you want.” Not my usual line. I found myself breathless, panting, thinking of how warm his hands felt on my cheek, how they were large and strong and enveloped my back. How protected I felt.

“I don’t want to wait,” he whispered. “I will if it will make you happier, but I want you in every possible way.”

I almost moaned right then, with all my clothes on. I shook my head and ran my hands up under the fine-gauge cashmere of his turtleneck. The wool was unbearably soft but his skin was softer over a hard layer of muscle and his flesh was warm, oh so warm. And he tensed as I explored the bulges and valleys of his back, his ribs and the full definition of his shoulders under my fingers.