[Fiction]

[a/k/a]

An excerpt from Chapter Four of a/k/a

By Ruthann Robson

Ann-Marie is my rent. I am her identity, her adultery, her orgasm. We are each other's Thursday evenings.

She tells her husband she is taking art lessons to fulfill her long-neglected talents. She tells me this conversationally, guiltily proud of her deceit. She tells me this, week after month after year. Sometimes we go to museums, as if we are art students, and then go to dinner at mediocre Midtown restaurants, as if we are tourists. Other times we go to galleries because Ann-Marie wants to see work that is trendy. But our schedule demands we hurry back to my apartment on Riverside Drive; Ann-Marie must leave the city by eleven P.M. And, if she does not linger too long after sex, petting my head and practicing her excuses, I sometimes have time to see someone else. But usually I read; sometimes I study.

Ann-Marie is a large woman. She wears size eleven shoes and shops at Tall-Girl. Middle age has not eroded her hesitancy about her height. She hunches, folding her shoulders as if they are flaps that would close the envelope of her body. Her back curves like a question mark: the one which I answer. It is the hook by which I hooked her.

Ann-Marie is a good woman. Balancing generosity and morality. She is not paying for my services, she is helping me out. She is a minister's daughter, a minister's wife. She is a cheerleader's mother, a choir director. She calls herself my lover, or my friend. She calls me Tamara. She pays cash, the first Thursday of every month.

Ann-Marie wants to be an artist, a painter perhaps. Or even a potter. Instead of practicing those techniques, she flexes her long fingers above her head, gripping my pillows as I touch her. Her talents are evident as she arches her back, inverting my interrogatories into declarative moans; her shoulders stretch, unselfconscious, smoothed by my talents. Afterwards, I massage her broad back and watch the clock.

"Tamara," she says when she leaves, hunching into a blazer that seems too small.

"Thursday," I say. And smile at her as she shifts her long, long bones toward the place she calls home.

This Thursday she seems preoccupied. I move to soothe, but also to excite. It is a precarious balance. I suggest a museum, an important one with a new show and Thursday evening hours. She declines, shaking her head.

I swallow to allow me a second to contemplate my reactions. Compassionate or rude? What does she really want, beneath the bent wings of her shoulder blades, kindness or direction? Or some subtle combination?

"Oh," I say, "I should have known." I sound contrite.

"Known what?" Ann-Marie betrays her curiosity, but also her anxiety.

"That show would probably upset you," I say.

"It would not.,"

"I've heard it's very graphic."

"What does that mean?"

"Graphic, you know, like sexually explicit." I wink at Ann-Marie.

"About what?" I lick my lips, slightly. Ann-Marie's eyes follow the edge of my tongue. She no longer seems so preoccupied.

"About that. About me being upset by some show. What do you mean?"

"Oh, nothing."

"I can't believe you think I'm like that."

"I don't," I say. But now Ann-Marie is riveted on me, or more precisely, on my perception of her. Ann-Marie wants me to value her artistic judgments; sometimes it seems as if she forgets I am not her art teacher.

"I've just heard that this show isn't as spectacular as its hype."

"Probably not," I agree.

She smiles.

"But it does sound like fun," I tell her.

"Let's just have dinner."

It is my turn to smile, so I do.

"Some take-home."

I nod. We turn back and walk a few blocks to that most famous and most crowded of Upper West Side delicatessens, a department store of gourmet food. I always meet Ann-Marie here, near the cheeses. She usually has one of the store's distinctive white-with-orange-print bags, full of treats to bring home to her husband and child. Nothing that needs to be refrigerated. But this evening she buys a bag for us. "What would you like?" she asks me.

"You choose," I tell her. Her eyes brighten and focus, rewarding my hunch. She wants to try me out as a different life but not too different from the one waiting in Connecticut. I assume that things are not going well at home. I sense her fear.

I let her unwrap the packages in my kitchen. "Roasted chicken, how wonderful!" I compliment her.

"Do you really like it?"

I kiss her neck in response and take out a bottle of wine from the cupboard. "Just a glass."

I kiss her neck again, almost chastely but certainly appreciatively.

"I hope you like potato salad." She holds up a plastic container. "It has some of that French mustard in it."

I kiss her neck again, murmuring about mustard.

After our kitchen picnic, Ann-Marie commenting several times on the smallness of my apartment, she takes out the final box from her bag. "Russian pastries," she announces.

"Would you like some coffee?" I offer, although I do not want to dilute the effect of her three glasses of Cabernet.

"Coffee?" She turns on me as if I have said something ugly.

I try to step back into the tiny kitchen.

She softens quickly, not only because she is a woman who always softens quickly, but because she must realize she is being silly. "Oh, I must not have told you. I'm giving up coffee. Have given it up, really. I think it's ruining my life. All that caffeine. You know, it just takes over your life. It's really been my major problem."

I stifle a smile, but she does not notice.

"Did you know I started drinking coffee when I was thirteen years old?" She looks at me for confirmation of this tragedy. "I mean, my parents gave it to me. My own parents! Can you believe that? That parents could be that uncaring. It was my parents who started me on coffee!"

She is nearly shrieking now, so I nod sympathetically. I suppress the urge to murder her by pouring her another glass of wine.

Your parents gave you coffee? My parents gave me up.

Of course, I do not say this.

What I say, to myself, is that it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters that can't be changed. I lead her to the windowless bedroom, where I will lick the chicken grease from the side of her mouth, where her lipsticked lips meet.

Tamara browns the lamp and sits next to Ann-Marie on the bed, taking the glass of Cabernet and putting it on the shining white night table within reach. She holds Ann-Marie's hand for a moment before unbuttoning Ann-Marie's crepe blouse. Ann-Marie sighs, tilting her head back as if to offer her throat, or perhaps her still-encased breasts. Tamara accepts both, starting with simple kisses that accelerate to untoothed sucks with the pace of Ann-Marie's breaths.

Tamara is careful not to make slurping sounds, careful to remove Ann-Marie's blouse and drape it neatly on the white bedroom chair, careful not to snap the elastic as she unfastens the substantial bra, careful to modulate her motions to the blotches of excitement speckling Ann-Marie's chest. Ann-Marie shifts, stands up, slips off her shoes, and removes her skirt and stockings, tossing them toward the crepe blouse. when the clothes fall to the floor, it is Tamara who folds them neatly, arranging them more sturdily on the chair. Ann-Marie poses on the bed, imitating a Renaissance artist's model. She pats the empty space next to her, as if Tamara is a painter who will color and shape her with admiration, making her real.

Afterwards, Ann-Marie cries. Ann-Marie sobs on Tamara's still-shirted shoulder about her minister husband, the one who will not fuck her. Ann-Marie rages against Tamara's ceiling about her first lover, the woman who did fuck her -- oh, did she ever -- but then left her for the army. These weepy monologues are as predictable as Ann-Marie's orgasms, only more passionate and less efficient. Ann-Marie says "fuck" as if it were the ultimate release, prolong its single syllable as long as she can. Tamara delivers the attention required of her by listening for a change in Ann-Marie's weekly narrative -- a detail embellished or omitted, an insight gained or erased -- but it is always the same, almost exactly.

Always ended by Ann-Marie asking curtly, "The time?" and Tamara announcing it, passing her clothes. The dressing, the bathroom, Ann-Marie gathering her things together, checking the bathroom again. Ann-Marie's polite kiss at the door with her relipsticked lips in the same pucker she uses for the elderly parishioners. And, if it is the first Thursday of the month, there will be Ann-Marie's envelope of money, a rectangle remaining on the chair where her clothes had been.

When I step out of the shower, steam still circling around the black vinyl curtain, I am no longer Tamara.

I slip into my closet. That long hallway of a closet, like a coffin almost, that separates my apartment from itself, that separates my life. On the other side of the closet is the back bedroom.

It is just past midnight, but the lights of the city flicker off the river and through my three windows, my three glass graces. I look west, out the windows, as if trying to see a future I could choose. But my horizon is interrupted by New Jersey.

In these moments, I am no one. Hovering. Pure. Like an angel. Like the moon or a river on another continent. Like the brightest blue.

My hair is still wet. I could wrap it in another towel, but I don't want to go back through the closet, back out there. I could check my messages from my numerous services, but I don't. I could study, but I have no classes on Fridays, so I don't. I could masturbate, read a book, get dressed and go get an ice cream or a coffee or a slice of pizza, but I don't want to do any of these.

I just look out the long narrow windows, recounting how they came to be my windows. Reciting silently how this boarded-up back bedroom came to be my room, as if examining a bolt of expensive fabric for a hole in my story. Retracing my steps, looking for the missing link whose name is Dominique.

Maybe I was fourteen, maybe a bit younger, maybe older. But definitely not twenty, not yet eighteen. I was still a ward of the state. I was illegal.

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