A Round-Heeled Woman by Jane Juska

Author:Jane Juska
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307414441
Publisher: Villard Books
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

Sex at the Morgan

I am notably solvent.

—SIDNEY

Robert’s third wonderful sentence read, “Happy Valentine’s Day, sweetie, from the man who misses you.” How could I go? How much pain am I up for or maybe in need of ? How eroded by my own lust is my common sense? How selective is my memory? It selected this: “Lie on your side, sweetie,” Robert would say as we lay next to each other in his bed. He would trace me then, with the tip of his finger, the entire length of me, tip to toe, slowly, a most exquisite touching. How could I not go?

I land at JFK at four P.M., EDT, on March 7, my very birthday, in the year 2000. This time, being the New York girl I have become, I take a cab alone to Robert’s apartment building and the elevator all the way up to his floor. The elevator door opens and there stands Robert, smiling, arms open wide. Inside his apartment, he wraps me up and kisses me, and while I am feeling that in his arms is absolutely where I belong, I sense that something is different, and I don’t know what it is, but I don’t like it.

We dine that evening at Café des Artistes. As an enthusiastic resident of what has come to be called the Gourmet Ghetto, the Berkeley birthplace of California Cuisine, I have not been impressed with the food in New York, except for the hot dogs and the knishes and the roasted nuts waiting for me on the street corners. But this restaurant is just about, no, it is, the classiest place I have ever been to; San Francisco’s eateries, by comparison, seem sooo nouveau. Café des Artistes is famous for its murals, painted in the twenties, of naked nymphs cavorting daintily with one another, so it appears, in pastels and lots of chiffon. Sooooo romantic, so sweet, so pretty, just like me I am pretending as Robert guides me gently by the elbow into a booth—a booth! Privacy for lovers, that’s us. And I don’t know, but this place ought to be famous for its service: our waiter was lots more sophisticated than I and, at the same time, helpful and charming and not one whit condescending. In San Francisco, it seemed to me that too often the waitperson who came my way was less interested in waiting than in auditioning en route to my table for the part that would take him far and forever away from persons like me. On the other hand, somebody had told waitpersons they were supposed to be friendly—“Hi, I’m Ken, I’ll be your . . .” And, this being America, they were equal, which meant they could get pissed at you if you didn’t behave as a patron should; many of them let you know that, were justice to prevail, they would be the ones seated at the table and you the one serving. To be fair, let me say that, in

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