Jake and Mimi

CHAPTER ONE\ Some of us guys who put no stock in the next world like to lean pretty hard into this one. I lean hardest on the weekends.\ Most Fridays I set aside for the gang, but thanks to Pardo, I'm on my own tonight. Pardo had pitched Sid's bachelor party as a "low-key affair." Nobody told that to the girls. They turned out to be a lot friendlier than anyone bargained for, and when Jeremy, wrecked from shots and still reeling from the show, staggered home to find Cindy waiting up for him in a teddy, offering a little late-night relief in exchange for some honest reporting, the guy stuck his neck right in the noose.\ By eight the next morning the bride was on the warpath, crying on the phone to her bridesmaids and threatening to call the whole thing off. "Don't tempt me," said Sid through his hangover. By evening it was all back on schedule, of course, but now everyone in the gang is pulling wife or girlfriend duty for the next two weekends at least.\ Everyone but me.\ I'm single and free, and if tonight goes the way I want it to, I won't miss the guys at all. Beer, poker, camaraderie-I'll take them nine Fridays out of ten. Tonight, though, I've got a shot at the water of life.\ All day at my desk it's been building in me. I could hardly keep my mind on the new account. It's a tough one, too. Art Jensen, a Queens beauty shop maven with a Mafia don's regard for our Tax Code. By rights he'll owe a couple of hundred grand, minimum, but if I can't figure a way to tell him "refund" come April 15, he'll be calling our senior partners at home. That's what I get for being the new guy.\ I left the office at six, changed quickly at my place, then ran the sixty-hour work week right out of me. Started into the park in the last soft light of day, ran east to the water and then down along it, past the heliport, the ballfields, clear to the Brooklyn Bridge, touching the base of her and turning for home as the lights of the city came on and the cool spring night came down to meet me. After a long shower I poured a tall, bracing glass of Absolut and now I'm sipping it out here on the fire escape in shorts, looking down on the street below and thinking of the night ahead.\ She'll be a tough one, all right. The toughest yet. But what a payoff. I change into a soft shirt and slacks, lock the door behind me, and step out of my walkup and into the Manhattan night.\ Broadway is no misnomer. Thank you, Spring. The women have put away their heavy coats and are out in blouses and shawls and hose. They are everywhere, stepping sensuously from cabs, gliding from the mouths of the subway. Alone, in pairs, on the arms of men. Even the billboards have caught the spirit. Angelina Jolie, wearing almost nothing, looks down from a movie marquee, and Drew Barrymore, in not much more, flashes by on the side of a bus. I turn onto Eighty-first Street, primed.\ Her name is Melissa Clay.\ Last Sunday I saw her for the first time in twelve years, the first time since I was a kid of fourteen and she, at eighteen, the hottest girl in our small American school in Tokyo. She was the eldest of three sisters, spaced two years apart, meaning that from the day I found out what my pecker was for until the day I left for college, there wasn't a two-hour stretch when one of them wasn't setting me off. Shana and Beth were star material, too, but Melissa was already a budding young woman, and to a kid of fourteen she was as magical -and as out of reach-as a princess.\ The Clays were missionaries and summered, as we did, in a modest international resort community on a lake in the Japanese Alps. There were about a hundred of us families, most from the church but a few stray businessmen, too, like Dad, who rented the small log cabins from June through August each year for a couple of months of rustic living. There were no televisions, no telephones, even, and you hauled your drinking water from a well. They were simple summers, full of sun, exercise, and good country food. The missionaries came for the big church down by the lake, for their prayer groups and hymnals, and for the feeling of community they got from being with their own kind. The secular types, like my folks, came to beat the killer Tokyo heat, and when the religion in the air got too thick for them, they countered with the easy porch life of cards and afternoon drinks. As for us kids, we had the lake and, especially, the Boathouse.\ The Boathouse was an old wooden wonder built onto the docks of the swimming area. It was open to the air, with low benches for lounging, a Ping-Pong table that worked on the challenge system, and a stereo in the corner, complete with a pile of last year's rock records from the States. I was a crack Ping-Pong player, true, and a music hound, but I wasn't thinking table tennis or the Clash when I grabbed my towel from the porch each morning, took lunch money from Mom, and promised her I wouldn't be late for dinner. No, I hurried to the Boathouse be- cause from there you could see the whole swimming area, which meant that morning to sundown, every day but the Sabbath, you could see Melissa Clay.\ Jesus, she was something. Close my eyes today and I can still see her in that black two-piece, sunning on her towel on the docks. Two, sometimes three times an hour I'd walk by her, feigning interest in a Jet Skier or parasailer out on the lake. She'd be on her back, her eyes closed against the sun, and I'd get in a good two-second stare. Twenty minutes later, back in the Boathouse, I'd see her turn over, see Beth or Shana drip lotion onto her smooth back and rub it in, and I'd start down the dock again, gazing out at the mountains that rimmed the lake as if I'd just noticed they were there and needed to walk to the end of the dock for a closer look. The strings of her bikini top would be undone now, lying loose on the towel beside her, and if I timed it right, she would raise up on her elbows to read just as I passed and I'd get the barest hot glimpse at those magic breasts.\ Once or twice a summer I'd hit the mother lode. I'd be horsing around with a buddy out on the raft and we'd look in and see her rise from her towel, walk to the diving board, dive gracefully into the cold lake, and start our way. As she moved smoothly through the water, her gorgeous face breaking the surface closer and closer with each breast stroke, even I-the smart-ass atheist -felt a bit of the divine spirit in the air. My buddy and I would lie down (on our stomachs, of course) and watch her through half-closed eyes, pretending to be jolted awake by the dip of the raft as she pulled herself up the short wooden ladder, dripping wet, her nipples hard as tacks through that black top. She'd smile beautifully at us and then, just as innocently as you like, tug casually at her suit bottom where it had bunched up under her sweet ass. Then she'd sit down, just inches away, squeeze the water from her blond hair, and ease onto her back, one golden leg straight out, the other knee pointed up at her grateful creator.\ Gott in Himmel, as the German Lutherans used to say on bingo night, when Divine Providence delivered them the winning number. A half hour later she'd still be there, on her stomach now maybe, and we'd still be there, too, stealing looks up her legs, our hard-ons pressed into the raft, wondering idly what it's like to die of sunburn, because there sure wasn't a chance in hell that we could even turn over, let alone stand up, while Melissa Clay lay wet and perfect beside us. One Saturday a month the teenagers were allowed a dance in the Boathouse. Man, the charge those nights used to give me. If the Mets go to the Series this year, and the Series goes seven games, and on the morning of the seventh game our firm's senior partner, Abe Stein, hands me two primo tickets and his granddaughter and warns me not to bring her home a virgin, then I might feel again the rush that would hit me as I walked down the quiet lake road, a kid of fourteen, to the Boathouse on the night of a dance. And not because I had any dance moves to try out or any real prospect at action, even. No, simply because I knew that Melissa Clay would be there and that she would come, as she always did, in a T-shirt and no bra. I'm not saying she was a loose girl. Not at all. She was a sweet, healthy missionary kid who everybody loved-the pious adults, especially, because she never missed a Sunday service and always stopped to smile and talk when she passed them on the path. I'd bet all I have that she left for college in the States that fall with her cherry. She was a free spirit, that's all, and so innocent that if she didn't feel like putting on a bra under her tie-dyed T-shirt, well, she didn't and that was that. No one made anything of it.\ Except us horny teens. We were a raw bunch. Across the pond, my American cousins were getting drunk at thirteen, high at fourteen, and into girls -literally -a year later. Over in Tokyo, meanwhile, we were still learning grammar and algebra, of all things, instead of backseat moves and self-defense, and making it through to graduation without ever catching a whiff of a joint. Sex? It was a rumor, and a distant one.\ That last dance of the summer, in her last summer at the lake, Melissa Clay looked as good as a girl can look. Dancing barefoot on the wooden planks of the Boathouse, the strobe light freezing her in magic pose after magic pose, she had me at the breaking point even before Tim Crockett asked her for a dance-or rather, took her hand and coolly pulled her out onto the floor, because Tim didn't have to ask any girl. He was nineteen, in college, drank beer, smoked cigarettes, bought his clothes in the States, and, the word was, "knew what to do with it," whatever that meant.\ In the corner, all of us kids started elbowing one another, and, sure enough, Tim wasted no time putting his hands right on her. Put them on her hips as they danced, and sweet Melissa smiled and moved in close, turning innocently in his hands even, letting him drink in her taut ass, then moving away just as his hands slipped down to it. Seconds later he was in close again, and when this time he started his hands up her belly, she let them climb up to within a couple of inches of her carefree breasts and then, still smiling, took his wrists in her hands and moved them back down, then danced off a few steps and came back to him, taking his surprised hands in hers now and placing them on her belt, smiling like an angel as he lifted them, lifted them, lifted them to the very base of her perfect pair before she laughed, pulled them down, and danced away again.\ No matador ever worked a bull as well. Or left one in worse shape. When the song set ended and Tim, trying hard to keep his college cool, stood in close and whispered a question to her, she laughed and shook her head sweetly. Ten minutes later we could see Tim sitting alone at the end of the dock, slugging back a can of beer that he was using, I'm sure, to ice himself down with between sips.\ We kids were about at our limit, too, and when ten o'clock came and the social chairman strolled in, switched on the lights, locked the stereo cabinet, and announced that the dance was over, we huddled in a pack on the lake road, calling good-bye to Melissa Clay as she disappeared around the bend with Beth and Shana, her laughing "bye!" still in our ears and the thought of those sweet breasts still in our heads as we synchronized our watches, nodded that we'd all follow through on it, and then raced home to our respective cabins to whack off, in unison, at precisely 10:17.\ Damn. It all comes back like a movie. And then to see her again last week-unbelievable. I'd met Pardo at the Howling Wolf for a quick Sunday night drink and was walking home up Amsterdam, passing one of the tiny, one-woman Benetton shops that dot the avenues and stay open each night until ten. I glanced in the window and stopped dead. I walked to the glass. Twelve years, but I knew her instantly. Knew those quick, blue eyes. That angel's face, the long, blond hair swept back now with a hairband. It was Melissa Clay.\ I reached for the door but then checked myself. I watched her as she talked to a customer, standing as only a woman can, one small foot pointing in front of her and the other off to the side. Her legs were still thin and fine, but now they led up to a woman's ass. I saw her customer laugh and turn with her bags toward the door, and I ducked quickly into a doorway before Melissa's eyes could follow her and see me through the glass. I stayed in the doorway as the customer walked to the curb, waved down a taxi, climbed in, and sped away. I stayed another thirty seconds and then, not risking a last look in the window, started slowly up Amsterdam again, my mind already working a week ahead.\ I had another prospect, true. Debbie Collins, a sassy dance major I'd known up at school and had run in to again at an alumni mixer two weeks back. She'd been a hot little number on the Hill and had lost nothing in the four years since, and I'd lain awake just the night before working out a plan of attack. As I turned onto Eighty-second Street, though, and made for home, I knew that Debbie Collins would have to wait. She was a treat, yes, but this city was full of treats. It held only one Melissa Clay.\ And now it's time. I turn onto Amsterdam at 9:55 A.M. She will be closing up in minutes. I stop in front of the bookstore next door, pretending to look at the same five fiction titles that have sat in the window all year. I take a breath.\ She won't recognize me, probably, but when I say my name, it will land deep. Ours was a small community, and the ties strong and lasting. The Clays, I knew, had retired to a small Baptist town in the South years ago, so Melissa would have been cut off from the country where she was raised.\ Through the glass I see her in the back, folding blouses at a small counter. She wears a sparse white dress, the impossibly thin straps just visible under her open red sweater. I walk inside and she looks up at the sound of the bell.\ "Hi," she says.\ "Hi. I need scarves," I say, walking to a rack of them, "and I've got no eye for them. Can you help?"\ "Sure." She smiles and comes from behind the counter. Her dress comes just to her knees, and her legs are bare-bare-underneath. She wears a thin anklet and clogs. "You must have done a good deed today-we're having a sale." She steps into the light, and I see her full for the first time. She's all I'd hoped. Beautiful, still, but working at it now. Aerobics, probably, and eye cream, and even so, just months, maybe weeks from the start of the long, gentle slide.\ "Melissa? Melissa Clay?" She looks into my face, startled. Smiling still, but caught between her store manner, her natural friendliness, and the reserve this city gives every woman. "Yes. Do I?..."\ "Japan. The American School. I'm Jake Teller." "My God." She puts her soft, white hand quickly on my shoulder. I see the ring. "I was Shana's year," I say.\ She steps back and laughs, quiet and friendly, the kind you don't hear often in this city.\ "This is New York," she says. "It had to happen, right? I can't believe it. Teller...the lake, too, right?" I nod. "You weren't church?"\ "IBM. They let a few of us heathens in, remember?" She laughs. "I remember. We envied you-you could swim on Sundays. Jake Teller. You were..."\ "Fourteen when you were eighteen." She looks me over. "Yes. You never left the Boathouse." I laugh. "That was me." "And you recognized me?" "You stood out, Melissa. Still do." She smiles easily and touches my shoulder again. "Thanks. Jake Teller -all grown up, and a charmer. I'll tell Shana. She's in North Carolina now." "Doing well?"\ "Yes. Two kids." "Wow." I shake my head. "Have you been back? To Japan?" "Not once. You know us missionary kids: When we leave, it's for good. You?" "I was back last summer. And I made it to the lake." "Last summer! Jake, what is it like? The same families, still?" "A lot of them. It's ...hey, do you want to...how about a drink? I'll fill you in."\ She pauses just a fraction of a second, looks down, then back up at me. "I'd love to." "When do you close?"\ "Two minutes ago. Let me get my things." She walks to the back counter and takes her purse and a light coat from a chair. I help her into a sleeve.\ "Well, thank you, Jake. Across the street is P. J. Clarke's. Is that all right?"\ "They'll let us in? You're wearing a ring and I'm not bald." "Is it like that?" She laughs. "I've never been." "We'll be fine."\ She locks the door behind us, and we cross the street and step into P. J. Clarke's, a dark, upscale singles bar, all mahogany and mood music. I've seen a few last calls here. I walk her to a seat in the corner, where the bar meets the window and you can see out into the street, see the shops and the walkers and, a block up, the green entrance to the park. A big ex-athlete in a pressed white shirt slides two coasters in front of us and smiles. "Absolut, straight," I say.\ "A sea breeze, please," says Melissa. She laughs at the look I give her and touches my shoulder again. "Since college," she says.\ "I thought even caffeine was a no-no. Do the folks know?" "I broke it to them at the reception. What could they say?" She offers her left hand and I take it, raise it, and give her ring a long look.\ "Congratulations." "Thank you. It's been a year." Our drinks come, I clink mine against hers, and we take our sips. Her sweater is only pulled round her, and I can see the tops of her golden breasts. "So, the lake," she says. "Tell me it's the same?" "You didn't hear?" "What?" Her blue eyes crinkle with worry. "The Boathouse."\ She puts her hand on my chest. "No." "It's coming down. This summer or next." "It can't." "The prefecture wants to build a boardwalk. With shops." "How awful. They must be fighting it." "Trying to, but it doesn't look good. It is their country." "But the Boathouse ..."\ Her soft eyes look down at the bar for a moment, and she sips from her drink. I motion with my eyes at her ring. "Is he one of us?" She shakes her head. "A New Yorker, believe it or not." "Will you take..." "Steve."\ "...Steve over? To see it?" She pauses. "I don't know. Someday..." She looks for words and I wait. "It's...hard, you know?" I nod.\ "You belong, but you don't," I say. "Just like over here." "Yes." She looks at me quickly, a little more in her eyes now. "It's hard to explain to people, isn't it? The community. The..." "Innocence." "Yes."\ The bartender stands before us. "One more?" I ask her. She pauses, then nods. "Should you call Steve?" I ask. She hesitates. "It's okay. Some nights I do inventory." Our drinks come; I raise mine, she raises hers and waits. "To the Boathouse," I say.\ "Amen." She looks at me and shakes her head. "Jake, you've been a shock. I haven't thought of those days in ..."She looks into her glass and, maybe, back through the years. "Do you remember the dances?"\ "You used to dance with Tim Crockett." She puts her drink on the bar and looks at me, amazed. Her hand goes to my shoulder again, this time with a little pressure. "Tim Crockett ...there was a randy one." "He kept moving his hands up your shirt, and you kept moving them down."\ "Yes, and I wasn't ..."She looks over, sees me blush, and laughs. "It's true what they say about junior-high boys, isn't it?" "All of it," I say. I finish my drink and she does the same, struggling with the last long sip. "Do you miss it?" I ask. "When I think of it. They were special days."\ I stand and reach for my wallet. I look at her. "The crossover?" I say. "You made it okay?" She looks at me, then down, pauses, and lifts her purse and jacket from the chair. The crossover is what we ex-pat kids call the move back to the States. Most aren't ready when it comes, and some-girls, especially-it marks for good. "Pretty well, Jake," she says. She fingers her ring and smiles. "But this is my second."\ I pay the bill, and we walk out and back across the street. A taxi corners too fast, before we quite make the curb, and I take her elbow until we reach the sidewalk.\ "Which way are you?" I ask, and then, before she can answer: "The scarves." "Jake. You never got them." "My sister's birthday is tomorrow," I say. We're silent a second. "I can come back. What time do you open?" "Come on." She smiles. "It'll take two minutes. I know just the ones." "You sure?" "Of course."\ She unlocks the door and we walk in, the sound of the bell loud now in the quiet, dark store. She quickly turns on the light, and we walk to the rack of scarves. She flips through them, stops, unclips a silken yellow one, and holds it up with one hand while smoothing it out with the other. "What's her complexion?" she asks. "Like yours."\ She slips it over her neck and the two sides fall evenly over her breasts. She tosses one around her neck again with a flourish, laughing at the gesture. "It's perfect," I say. "I'll take two." "Two of the same?" she asks.\ I nod. She pauses. "Let me get the other one from the back." The only sound in the place is the rattle of the hanging beads as she walks through them into the back room. I wait one minute. Two. I walk to the doorway and look in. The small back room is filled with clothes, dresses and blouses hanging along the wall and sweaters and leggings stacked neatly on the counter. Melissa stands at a small folding table, looking down at the two scarves she has folded and laid in a box lined with soft tissue. She doesn't look up, though she knows I'm in the doorway, and I see that her small hands are not in the box but gripping the edge of the table. I walk to her and stand behind her. She turns slowly, her eyes rising to mine, and in one smooth motion I pick her up by the waist and sit her on the edge of the table. Her lips open in surprise and her palms go to my chest, but her eyes give her away.\ "You don't have a sister, do you, Jake?" she asks quietly. "No."\ I turn and walk back into the front room and to the door. I turn the lock. I switch off the lights. I step back through the beads again. She hasn't moved. I hit the switch in here, too, and she is a vision on the small table, lit only by what little light from the street filters through the beads. I walk to her and whisper into the back of her neck.\ "You have five seconds to tell me to leave." I can hear just her breathing and the last gentle click of the beads. One. Two. Three. Four. "Leave."\ I lift her sweater off her trembling shoulders. She closes her eyes and grips the edge of the table tightly, at first resisting against my hands, then letting me pull her down onto her back. She closes her legs and holds her dress to her knees. The narrow table is just wide enough for her, and I lift her hands off her dress and let her smooth, golden arms fall over the sides. I take the yellow cloth from the box and, kneeling, tie it in a tight knot around her slim wrist, then pass it under the table; she gasps as I tie it around her other one. I rise, take the second scarf from the soft tissue, and lay it across her eyes. She is shaking. "Jake," she whispers, but she is with me now, and she knows I know it.\ She lifts her head and lets me knot the scarf. I slide her hairband off and run my fingers hard through her long hair. She wants to come up off the table, but the strong silk holds and all she can do to slow the surge in her is bring one knee up to her body and then down again. I walk around the table and take a long look at her before touching her again. I take off her clogs and run my hands up her calves and back down. I can see under her dress now, all the way up her legs to the white mound of her silk panties. They are wet already.\ I lift a pair of scissors from the counter, and she gasps again as I start the flat edge of the blade up her legs and over her dress. At her shoulders I cut first one thin strap and then the other, then pull the dress down and off her and let it drop to the floor.\ It isn't pleasure but the promise of it that takes women to the edge. She is in just bra and panties now, and desperate to be touched, but I step away and slowly undo the buttons on my shirt, watching her as she strains to listen, her lips parting as I pull my leather belt through the loops.\ I leave her dressed that way for ten minutes, tracing my fingers from her face all down the length of her and then back, and so lightly that when at last I put true pressure on her taut belly, I think she'll come apart. Her skin smells better than any I can remember, the faintest trace of light spring perfume on her neck and wrists.\ Her strapless bra opens in the front, and the click of the clasp brings another gasp from her. I'm careful not to touch her hard, beautiful breasts as I gently lift the soft bra off her and pull it out from under her back. All those years ago, at the lake, I'd seen only the outline of her nipples through that wet top. Now they are just beneath me, soft and pink, and when I breathe gently on them, she turns her cheek hard into the table. Her eyes, I know, are shut tight under the silk.\ "Please," she whispers.\ Still I don't touch them. I look down at the small white triangle of cloth that covers her softest spot. It is all she wears now, and it is soaked through. I roll it slowly down her thighs, over her knees, past her calves, and off her ankles, then trail it back up her skin and swipe it back and forth across her breasts, watching the nipples harden into the silk.\ "I can't take it," she says.\ But she must. Because these are the minutes each week that I live for. The edge, I call it, and Melissa Clay is about to hit it. If she knew how long I will ride her along it, she would faint dead away.\ I run my fingers between her breasts and just around them before finally taking both in my hands and pressing them hard together.\ "God!" she gasps, her small hands fists now, jerking against the taut scarf.\ She wants to grab her hair or beat the table with her hands. To release, somehow, some portion of the pressure I've built in her. She can't, and then I put my lips on her, her neck first and then hard on her breasts, and all she can do to hold herself off is lock her ankles and squeeze her thighs tight together. It is her last defense, I know, against the pleasure coursing through her, so I take even this away, lifting her left ankle off her right and holding them, a foot apart, to the table. "Damn you!" she gasps. She is helpless.\ Women almost never lose themselves completely. Even in sex, they show you what they want you to see. Until you get them to the edge. At the edge they are past all that. Past any scheming. Past all reserve, even. Their social side vanquished. Melissa is reaching it now, a sheen of sweat on her cheeks, her breathing all soft cries. If Steve walked in now, she wouldn't recognize him.\ And I've barely started on her.\ Guys reach our mark and that's it, but women-handled just right-can crest and crest. Melissa has reached the edge, so I ride her along it, touching her, finally, where she needs it, but not with the pressure she requires. A little pressure, then none, then more pressure, then none, then still more, then none again. Thirty seconds of this, forty-five, a minute. She hangs in only because she can't believe what she feels. Still I keep on, watching her soft face slam from side to side, and only when I see that she is at her end, truly at her end, when I'm afraid I'll lose her or someone will hear her from the street, only then do I grab her thighs, pull her down to the edge of the table and lift her thin ankles up onto my shoulders.\ "God, please, God, please, God, please," over and over from her now, and still I take my time. I'm past ready, too, but I lock her legs against me, holding her still, and as she cries out, arching her back in one last effort to stem the rush, to survive just one second more, I drink in the full measure of this night.\ Melissa Clay lies beneath me. The first crush of my adolescence, my first true fantasy, and not just beneath me but at my mercy, helpless with pleasure and begging to be finished off. I ease into her.\ Her first cry is of relief. She can give in at last, surge and feel the hard answer she needs. Just a few seconds of this, yes, a few seconds and she can die in peace. She is in spasms now, but I keep a firm grip on her and build to a rhythm, and as I step into it, I hit something in her and she gasps. It can't be, she won't believe it can happen, not after all this, but yes, she starts to come back at me, then to arch again, and then she's got it, moving in time with me. It can't be, but it is -she's not finishing at all, not set to collapse but rising again, rising and turning back, back toward the edge for one final, crimson ride.\ Her sounds are magic now, and her face, even with the silk over her eyes, so beautiful that it takes all my training to stay steady. And then I break one of my rules. I close my eyes. Always I watch a girl until the end-always. Watch her face, note every last detail of her finish so the memory of it can carry me through the week to come. Tonight, though, I close my eyes. Close them and go back in my head to the lake. I'm fourteen again, watching young Melissa dancing barefoot, watching her small feet and smooth arms and watching, too, Tim Crockett's hands as they rise up her belly. I can see her so clearly, see her just as she was, even smell the lake air, and feel in my spine the weight of all those nights, the nights in the cabin dreaming of her, the crushing innocence of us both, gone now but mine again-for an instant-when I close my eyes.\ We live first in our heads and only then in the world around us. Well, I'm living in both, and right now I'm having them both, too. Both Melissas, the innocent princess of the lake and, opening my eyes again, the thirty-year-old beauty in the last golden hours of her looks. She's peaking now, outside herself with pleasure, and her cries and her sweet fucking take me to the turning point and past it, until finally I lean hard into her one last time, put my hands on her breasts, the same beautiful breasts denied Tim Crockett all those years ago, and join her, at last, on the edge, along the edge, and then over.\ The bell rings softly behind me as I step out onto Amsterdam again. The cool night air greets me like a friend, and I start for home. A comedy is just letting out at the corner Loews, and I walk for a block through the happy throng, past young couples twined together as they wave for cabs and by college kids shouting the best lines at one another as they head in packs into bars or simply out into the New York night.\ I turn onto Eighty-first Street, away from the din of the avenues, and walk the last quiet block to my building. I should be all done in, but I feel clean and electric, the spatial world around me trim and strong, the edges of buildings pressed close against the sky.\ She was tremendous. The best I've had in the year I've been doing this. Her sounds alone-Jesus.\ A suit walks by me, his cell phone pressed to his ear, querying some distant party about stock quotes. Stock quotes on a Saturday night.\ I reach my building, climb the stairs, and let myself into my one-bedroom. I pour a half glass of Absolut, strip to my shorts, and step through the window out onto the fire escape again, to end the night as I began it. I sip my drink and lean my arms on the metal railing, letting the night air chill me.\ Everything in our modern world is designed to protect us from true contact. The most we get of it is the jostling on the subway on the rush-hour ride to work. All day at our desks we speak to the business selves of others, saved from honest talk by our suits and our titles and our client relationships. And once home? We can order in our food, get our entertainment from a box, pay our bills by phone, and then, before bed, log on and reinvent ourselves on the Internet, sharing fantasies in chat rooms with people we'll never see and pretending that's intimacy, contact. It isn't.\ True contact is the moment you drive inside her. You are face-to-face, with no escape for either of you. It is the one true moment of each week for me, the one I live for.\ I look out at the lights in the quiet buildings across the street, and above them at the golden moon, which tonight seems to hang over New York alone. Next week's beauty is somewhere under that moon. Stepping lightly to a swing band maybe, or browsing in a late-night bookstore. She might even be asleep already, her slip riding up her pale leg as her soft lips part in dream. Who is she, I wonder, and how far along the edge will I take her?\ Copyright (c) 2002 by Frank Baldwin

\ Toronto SunSeduction, obsession, and murder....A clever thriller... unusual and compelling.\ \ \ \ \ Midwest Book ReviewThrilling...The story line grabs the audience.\ \ \ Larry BrooksOne wicked read.... It seduces you...teases and torments you...then leaves you screaming for more.... Brilliant.\ \ \ \ \ Kirkus ReviewsFrom the author of a previous pedestrian novel about a paralegal who gambles to make himself feel alive (Balling the Jack, 1997) comes a bizarrely flat, cynical, and moronically repugnant narrative about a young stud who finds his life's purpose in stalking, seducing, then sexually torturing women. Jake Teller is a single, mid-20s, well-educated male two-weeks new to his job at a high-end Manhattan accounting firm where he has met the competent, "pure," and inaccessible Mimi Lessing, about to be married. "Miss Lessing," Jake calls her in this first-person account that's more monotonous than chilling: he watches Mimi from a distance and even fits her apartment with a series of listening devices. Mimi, whose story we learn in alternating chapters, feels the urge for some wildness before settling into the missionary position for the rest of her life with fiance Mark. Evidently accomplished in her work even though she's consistently described as childlike, she is nonetheless drawn into witnessing Jake's repetitive games of tying up the women he meets, blindfolding them, then inflicting a series of punishments (read: clamps, burning candles, ice) that they accept with passive, melodramatic rapture. "Thank you" and "Please" are the sum of their contributions to dialogue, while Jack, by stripping them of their defenses, is confident he gives them "the fuck of [their] life." Long and sophomoric anecdotes about Jake's pubescent and college sexual initiations, and slapdash mention of his parents' traumatic deaths can't redeem this graceless, puerile, onanistic fantasy. By the end, we hear Mimi saying of Jake, "He is a good person, I know it," and the tale takes a cartoonish dive intomedieval torture. From its cover of a naked and bound woman to its senseless climax: a grievously misguided effort.\ \