Woman on Top (5 page)

•  •  •

“He’s not gay,” I declared triumphantly.

My friends and I had escaped to the Oasis once again. And once more Len’s behavior was under scrutiny similar to what we applied in legal analysis. An interpretation.

“Not only is he not gay, but he’s a great kisser. Very tender, very passionate.”

“Interesting,” Zoë said, “I’ve always wondered if those ultra-successful macho types are good in bed or not. When a man has money and power, you’d think that he would just take a woman, like doing a deal.”

“I haven’t slept with him yet, but I can’t picture that sex would be like that with him.”

“Please don’t sleep with him right now,” Zoë begged.

“That’s actually what’s so attractive about these rich, successful men,” Rachel chimed in. “They have this aggressive, macho, dynamic veneer and underneath, what you hope for, is a soft and tender man.”

“But do you get nice? A man who will treat you well?” Bonnie, ever vigilant, asked.

“The likelihood of us figuring out what makes Len tick is very low. He’s just not like any man we’ve had to deal with,” Rachel said as we paid the bill and headed out the door back to work.

•  •  •

“Would you like to spend the weekend with me in New York?” Len asked one night during a call three weeks later.

“We could go to a show, “Phantom of the Opera”, spend the night in a hotel?” he added.

I hesitated.

“I’ll make reservations at The Madisons. I’m concerned that one of my out of town partners will see us if we stay at The Four Seasons,” Len said.

The following Saturday night, we were sitting in the crowded theater during intermission when Len began to talk about Judy.

“She suffered from depression and took anti-depressants for the last ten years of her life. The doctor said it had been a biological imbalance in her body,” Len said.

She was dead. Dead meant letting Jake rest in peace without a negative word ever being said about him.

“But she was a great mother to the kids. A perfect mother,” he added. “It’s funny but we were happiest in the early years of our marriage. We fought like animals the first year and then we rarely fought.”

“When did you meet Judy?”

“In high school. We dated during college and then married after we both graduated.”

“Was Judy the first woman you ever slept with?” I asked.

He paused.

“No. I had sex once before with some girl in high school.”

Not your typical guy.

“What about you?” he said.

“What about me?”

“How old were you when you first had sex?”

“Sixteen. It was Martin Luther King Day. We had no school that day so I told my parents I was going ice-skating. I came back that night with my ice skates over my shoulder, no longer a virgin, and told them how much fun I had ice skating.” “Who was the lucky guy?” Len asked.

“Tommy, my high school boyfriend, captain of the basketball team. I was the captain of the cheerleaders.”

Len looked around the theatre for a moment.

“So how many men have you slept with since Jake died?”

“Two.” I said. “And you? How many women have you slept with since Judy died?”

“One.” He looked at me to see my reaction. “Judy and I never had sex from the day she was diagnosed. I couldn’t take it anymore. My best friend gave me the name of a woman in Birmingham I could sleep with about a month after Judy died.”

“You flew to Birmingham to have sex?”

Sex in Birmingham meant that no one in New York or New Jersey, other than his best friend, would know that Len had sex with another woman one month after the funeral.

“Her husband had prostate cancer and is impotent. She hadn’t had sex in years. We stayed in a hotel for the weekend.”

I was trying to digest the news when Len interrupted.

“Seems like you had a good marriage. Is Jake on a pedestal?” he asked.

“We did have a good marriage but I don’t think he’s on a pedestal. He was just a good guy. Only once in all of the time I knew him, I heard him lose it. A month after we met he asked me to marry him and after I finally agreed, he called his mother. She argued against it and I heard him tell her ‘Then fuck you. Don’t come to the wedding.’ I was stunned and I never heard him swear again after that.”

“You must have been worth it to him,” Len chuckled.

The room at The Madisons seemed hardly fitting for the romantic evening ahead. It was not small but decorated in forest green. The forest green rug, bedspread, pillow shams and curtains had witnessed far too many years and looked tired and worn after servicing so many guests. The room felt so dreary that when Len drew the curtains, we left the glistening lights and excitement of Manhattan at night behind.

Our first attempts at intimacy seemed terribly awkward. Len had brought his pajamas.

“You won’t be needing those,” I said and proceeded to undress him.

He was wearing white baggy Jockey underwear, the kind Ben had stopped using at six years old, and on Len’s short legs it looked like a diaper. Boxers would have to be discussed. He seemed embarrassed.

“Judy and I only made love a handful of times each year,” he said.

Some women might have found his inexperience in seducing a woman charming. Len was almost virginal.

His legs looked short and exceedingly muscular, a vestige of the years of playing catcher in college baseball. His belly protruded like the typical middle-aged man, but his arms had some definition. This was a body you had to learn to love.

If Len had approached me wearing shorts and a t-shirt at my gym, I would have taken one look at him and run the other way. But something about him had me in a hotel room naked. Either I wasn’t so shallow as to care about Len’s looks, or the seductive charms of his world now blinded me to this man’s unappealing appearance.

We rolled around in the bed for the longest time, kissing and hugging and playing with each other but going nowhere. Obviously, he didn’t have a clue. Finally, I took his rather erect penis and put it inside of me. He came quickly and that was it.

“I guess we should have used birth control,” I said, completely unsatisfied.

“What for? We didn’t have sex.”

I looked at him.

“I wasn’t inside you. What’s the problem?” he asked.

“Of course you were. I put you in me. You can’t tell the difference?”

“No, I thought I was between your legs.”

“Thanks.”

“You raped me,” he laughed.

“Not one man on a jury at our rape trial would believe your testimony - you can’t tell when you’re inside a woman.”

“Rape. That’s it. You raped me,” he said.

“It’s impossible for a woman to rape a man.”

What had I gotten myself into? I lay there wondering how a man with a corner office on Wall Street and three kids could be that clueless in bed.

CHAPTER 4

February

A
fter that weekend, Len began to call more frequently to meet for dinner, and inevitably, we’d end up at some instantly forgettable motel near the restaurant and have sex. Our sexual relationship felt pretty lame at this point. While Len expressed how thrilled he was I could excite him, he didn’t begin to know where to start to return the favor.

Soon he began to call almost every day and like all new lovers we would talk for hours. We continued to meet halfway on a weeknight at some motel, and fumbling around my body, he struggled to please me. We even skipped the pretense of having dinner together when we couldn’t wait to get into bed.

“I want you to know that I’m dating other women,” he told me one night, after we had sex. “I’m just out of a long marriage and feel entitled to play the field.”

“You are still responding to ads? Do you tell them what you told me? And if you feel entitled to play the field, then I’ll be heading back into the clubhouse.”

Lying on his back, covered with a white sheet and looking at the ceiling, a smug look filled his face.

“It’s been good. I took one woman to Café des Artistes, one of the most romantic restaurants in New York. We should go there.”

“What an idea.”

“I always check these women out. I have a security agency investigate them. Can you imagine one woman told me she was forty years old and when I met her I was absolutely sure she looked at least fifty. The agency looked into and she was fifty-one. She was lying and I was right, ” he said.

“Have you investigated me? Did they uncover my two speeding tickets, my three parking tickets?”

•  •  •

“There’s an inn in Connecticut, the Stony Field Inn…would you spend Friday night there with me?” Len asked on the phone Sunday evening.

“I’d like that,” I responded knowing that Friday was Valentine’s Day.

We met around eight that evening and Len seemed to be grossly uncomfortable about something.

“What’s the matter? Why are you staring at that young woman?” I asked.

“She’s from my office. Can’t imagine what she’s doing here.”

The woman walked over to us and Len cringed.

“Hi Amanda. This is Kate. So nice to see you,” he smiled and immediately ushered me to the table. I could not be part of his public persona yet. Dating, the sex, the intimacy were still under wraps. What would people think of him?

We had a quick, quiet dinner downstairs at the Inn. Since Len appeared so unnerved to have this woman just a table away, we rushed through the courses and headed up to a small room decorated in early New England. The room, although tiny and quaint, seemed a vast improvement over the motels we had been frequenting.

“Happy Valentine’s Day,” I said as I gave Len a pair of red silk boxers.

He opened the box, delivered a perfunctory smile and set the box on the bedside table. He offered nothing in return, not even one red rose.

We lay down side by side on the four-poster bed.

“Look, I am really uncomfortable continuing our sexual relationship as long as you are dating other women,” I said.

He lay there, apparently structuring the deal.

“I guess we have four choices. One, we can stop seeing each other altogether. Two, we can stop having sex and keep dating. Three, I can sleep with other women and you. Four, I can stop seeing other women, ” he said.

“Do you understand that I prefer being in a monogamous relationship?”

“You are. I’m not having sex with these other women.”

“What’re you doing?” I asked although not wanting to know.

“Kissing, touching their breasts. That’s it.”

He turned to me, looking embarrassed, to see how I was taking the news.

“That’s enough for me. Who says you’ll stop there? You’re like a kid in a candy shop and that’s fine for you, but I can’t just be one of your many goodies,” I said.

“I have to think about this. By the way,” he added, “these women tell me I’m a great kisser.”

Eighth grade all over again.

“I still want to make love with you tonight. Don’t know what you’re thinking or will be thinking. But one more time?” he asked.

“Might be the last time.”

“I’ll call you tonight with my decision,” he said the next morning.

What would the master negotiator, the brilliantly successful man who had been involved in scores of deals say? Len had told me he never backed down, the king of manipulation in any deal.

That night I lay sprawled out on the leather couch in the family room, enraptured by Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s,
Love in the Time of Cholera
. The room was my cocoon, cozy and comforting, with a floor to ceiling brick fireplace, built-in oak bookcases and large windows looking out to a wooded knoll. The phone rang at ten.

“I thought about it and I think that there is only one option. I want to have one-night stands and sleep around. We can keep dating,” Len said.

It didn’t take me a second to respond.

“That’s fine for you but it won’t work for me. I’m not interested in a man if that’s what he wants. If I’m not enough for you sexually, then I’m out,” I said.

Dead silence.

“I need more time to think.”

“I’m going to Atlanta for work on Monday and will be back on Thursday. Why don’t you think about it and call me then?” I said and hung up the phone.

My colleagues and I were back at The Oasis on Monday for lunch with my flight scheduled to leave for Atlanta at four that afternoon.

“Would you feel awful if it’s really over?” Rachel said.

“Well, the sex isn’t very good. He doesn’t have a clue yet how to please a woman.”

My friends laughed.

“Is he teachable?” Zoë asked.

“I’m not sure. He’s very tender when he kisses me but after that he wants me to please him. He could be a real project. Not a big loss at this point.”