Page 60 of Dirty Diana
After sorting through a stack of receipts, I have to ask. “How did you fall so far behind?”
“I don’t know. The work feels harder to do these days. I don’t know why.”
I do. The work is tedious. And Oliver’s heart has never been in it. “Do you ever think about quitting this job? Finding something else?”
He looks up at me. “Every day.” It feels like the most honest thing he has said to me in months. “But I’m in so deep. I even brought you in.”
I laugh. “It’s not prison—”
“I don’t know what else I’d do. I’ve waited too long. I’m sorry I pulled you in.”
“It’s okay. I don’t mind it as much as you do.”
“Of course you do. Who would like doing this shit? This place. It just feels like…”
“Your father.”
“Exactly,” he whispers.
We order a pizza for lunch and eat on the floor. We make a real dent in the work, and Oliver is calmer. By seven, the office has cleared out.
“You should take a break,” I say. “We can easily finish in the morning.”
Oliver looks at me as if slowly recognizing someone he thought was a complete stranger. His face softens and he smiles.
“I don’t have to play cards tonight. Maybe we could grab a drink. We have a sitter anyway. It might be nice.”
My heart all but leaps. It would be nice. But I haven’t let up on finding other women to interview. Alicia found me a woman named Jada, a friend of a friend from her NYU days, who she swears I’ll think is fascinating. I’ve asked her to come to the office at eight, figuring everyone would be long gone.
“I would love to, but I can’t. I have work of my own to catch up on. You go to your card game, and I’ll see you at home later.”
Oliver looks dejected, but he knows he can’t be upset after I helped him all day. He sighs and grabs his keys. “Okay,” he says. “If that’s what you want.”
—
“Do I just start talking?” Jada sinks into my office love seat wearing a bright green sundress. I can tell by the way she settles in that there’s no need for me to try and make her comfortable.
She tells me about her new job at a tech start-up. “Our offices look like a millennial blogger threw up. I’m not kidding. There’s a tire swing and a free cereal bar, the whole deal.” She looks around my office. “I like that this place is like, fuck it, we’re old and crusty, so get on board. Or don’t. You know?”
Jada is easy to talk to and when I tell her about what I’m trying to do with gathering other women’s stories, she smiles brightly. “Okay. Cool.” She runs her fingers through her shiny black hair. “I love it when it’s all about me. This is very on brand.” She has a hint of a nonrhotic accent, like a New Yorker who drops herRs and occasionally sticks them back in, in a different place. “Let’s start.”
—
On the drive home, I have a familiar, electric feeling. I replay pieces of Jada’s interview in my mind and thrill at how willing she had been to share. We talked about longing and sex and I asked her about the last time she felt the most in her body. Jada thought for a long time, and then like the sun breaking over a field, her face lit up.
When my girlfriend and I lived in New York, we had this tiny fourth-floor walk-up apartment. I could never live there now, I’ve gotten so lazy. I drive a block to the grocery store these days. You know?
But once, I got really sick with strep, and I was basically bedridden for a week. Bored out of my mind but too sick to read or really focus on anything. So I’d spend hours just lying there and watching my neighborsin the building next door, waiting for something interesting to happen. The street between the apartment buildings was so narrow that I might have been in the same room with them. There was a banker who had endless coke parties and ordered dim sum every night. There was a sweet old lady whose face would light up every time the phone rang. And directly across from my apartment was a woman with long dark hair and short bangs. I decided she was French and I named her Celine. She must have worked from home. She was always on her laptop. But she would leave once a day with her yoga mat and return with coffee from the shop on the corner that I thought was too expensive. She had a dancer’s body. Tall and lean with small, perfect breasts. She lived with her girlfriend and they’d have sex right there by the window, the drapes open.
When I get home, Oliver is still out. I pay the sitter while she tells me about the new game Emmy made up, where the two of themplayed Disney princesses lost in a dinosaur jungle with only Capri-Sun and a guide to eating insects to survive. “We legit played for over an hour. Then she fell asleep, fast.”
Once she leaves, I find my drawing pad and pencils and sit at the kitchen table with my headphones on. I hit play, and my voice fills the empty room.
Does that turn you on? Watching them?
No!Jada answers me.No, the sex was so boring. Always the same. Even with the drapes open there wasn’t much to see. She was on her back, the sheets pulled up over both of them. The good part was always when they finished. After her girlfriend fell asleep, Celine would masturbate on her own. With no sheet. She’d turn away from her partner, toward the window, and it was like she was looking right at me. She’d lay on her side, and stretch out her legs, pointing her toes like a dancer, like maybe she was showing off for me. Then she lifted an arm over her head and sighed. Like she had all the time in the world and she wasn’t going to rush. She would exhale and let her arm fall slowly and gently to her neck. I think about that a lot, the way she caressed her neck. Her fingers kind of lingered, eventually finding their way to her chest. That’s where she started, caressing one of her breasts, then the other. Then her hips started to move, like they were waking up to the greatest sensation you could feel and they shifted, writhing just slightly beneath her. Her body was ready to be touched, everywhere, aching the same way I was aching to touch her. Then she teased herself. She traced her fingers up and down her stomach then back to her mouth where she’d suck on them, looking at me the entire time. My face was so close to the window, watching, waiting. And finally, she moved her hand between her legs and turned onto her back. She spread her legs wide and shifted her gaze so that her eyes were locked on mine. Then she slipped her fingers inside, moving them in and out. Slowly at first, and then much faster when the feeling started to grow. Then she pulled her hand away, teasing us both. But her body wouldn’t let her get away—her hips rose up and her fingers found her again, moving in circles, faster and with more pressure, her hips moving in circles, too, until her body clenched, holdingin the sensation. She turned away from me then, her eyes closed, she didn’t need me. She was on another plane. And that only made me want her more. I could see her face when she climaxed, flushed and pleased.
I can’t get the slope of Jada’s neck right. I pause the recording and pour myself a glass of water. For several minutes, I wander the house, quiet and still. I take my sketch pad and pencils to bed and make a desk on my lap with pillows. I press play. Jada continues:
