Disgust and Desire, Chapter 2
2.
Laura was back at home. Glancing up at her apartment on East 69th and Third Avenue, she sighed. Another work day over. She was an accountant at J.P. Morgan Chase. Her office was at the corner of 2nd and 58th Street, in Midtown. Easily walkable. Another 27-year-old Manhattan cliché. She was born and raised in San Francisco, in Pacific Heights, and moved to New York to attend NYU. She’d graduated with a degree in accounting two years ago.
She entered her apartment, slamming the door and triple-locking it behind her. Christ. Leaning her back against the shut door she closed her eyes. She was exhausted. The first thing she did was kick off her heels—J-Crew D’Orsay pumps. Reaching in her cabinet she snatched a clean wine glass. From her fridge she grabbed her bottle of Sauvignon Blanc. She poured a nice, full glass.
Stepping into her living room, she eyed her gigantic Matisse painting on her wall, the only piece of art she owned: Large Reclining Nude. The blue tiled background in the painting always stuck out to her. The misshapen, large-armed woman. The green bars above. The yellow ball, mixed with the red long rectangular shelf. It was oil and canvass. Her mother had bought it for her years ago. Mom, despite being a doctor, was a fervent art collector. She could talk your ear off about Matisse and Picasso and Cezanne and Gauguin. She especially loved 19th century French art.
Laura sat on her gray leather couch. It crunched. She kicked her feet onto the thick maple coffee table. She leaned back against the couch. Sighing again, she drank deeply from her glass. The chilled white wine swam slowly down her throat, into her stomach, that bittersweet, cloying taste, warming her insides. Thank God for wine.
God, she thought. Greg Torino. Greg was her boss at Chase. He wasn’t a bad guy. It was just that he so badly wanted to fuck her. (Then again: Who didn’t? She laughed at her own vanity.) He was 42—fifteen years older than her. And married. He had two kids. Men were absurd creatures, really. Good ole Biology: They wanted to “spread the seed.” They didn’t care if they were married and had kids. They wanted to screw. Laura sipped more wine. She began to feel slightly more calm, relaxed.
Getting involved with your boss was a bad idea. She’d been taken advantage of. At the first job she ever had. In San Francisco. When she was just barely twenty. The summer before she moved to New York City. She’d been a server at Joe’s Crab Shack along on Pier 33. Tourists came from all over the globe. She hated the job. People acted like entitled assholes. Men undressed her with their eyes every day. The kids were out of control. Tips were shoddy. Rich people. She was annoyed by them even though she, herself, was “one of them.”
One night, after closing, when the restaurant was locked up and a few of them were mopping the floor and counting the register, Juan, one of the cooks, approached her and said, “Hey. Boss wants to see you. Told me to tell you.”
“About what?” she said.
Juan shrugged.
She leaned her mop against a nearby table and walked, slowly, across the restaurant, passing all the empty tables. She felt nervous. Her boss was a large, intimidating man. Mr. Rollins was easily 6’4. In his early fifties. He had a full head of graying hair, always gelled back like a greaser. On his right forearm he had a small tattoo. She’d realized weeks into the job that it was a military tattoo: An eagle clutching an olive branch with the letters U.S.M.C. around the eagle. He rarely smiled. He was married but had no kids. He and Laura had barely exchanged more than half a dozen words the two months she’d been there, besides her brief interview. His hands, she had often noted, were the size of baseball mitts, veined and wormy.
She stood in front of his office door. The door was big and wide and red and had a giant brass knob. The impulse to turn around and take off raced through her. She glanced back down the hallway. Empty. Barely, she could hear the sound of Juan and another boy speaking Spanish a ways off. And the very slight click of a keyboard behind the door.
Laura knocked, timidly. The typing ceased.
“Who is it?” a deep, booming voice said.
Her heart was punching her chest. “Me? Uh…Laura.”
“Come in.”
She breathed, holding the air, then releasing. Then she opened the heavy door. Stepped inside. It slammed loudly behind her.
His office was spacious. Blank white walls. Boxes everywhere. A big black safe. His huge oak desk. Mr. Rollins himself, sitting in his gigantic black leather high-backed chair. A shelf of books to his right. A window behind Mr. Rollins which faced a red brick wall.
He steepled his mammoth hands, creating a teepee with his fingers. He had a gray goatee. She didn’t think she’d even seen him in weeks. Barely at least.
“Sit down,” he said, indicating the brown wood chair in front of the desk.
She did, tugging her skirt down as she approached. She felt exposed. She was very conscious of her low-scooped blouse, with the stupid Joe’s Crab Shack gold pin.
They didn’t speak for a moment. He stared at her and, even though his eyes didn’t seem to move, she knew he was scanning her body up and down. He leaned back.
“So,” he said. He swiveled slightly in the chair. “How are you liking the job?”
Her tongue seemed stuck to the roof of her mouth. She didn’t know how to speak. Finally, she said, “It’s fine.”
He grinned. “Just fine?”
She blushed, feeling her cheeks stupidly redden. She felt like a child. An idiot.
Laura shrugged. “It’s…fine.”
He leaned back in the chair again. His eyes were pale blue and big. Everything about this man was big. He was big, she was small. That was life. That was biological sex. That was America. That was the world. She wasn’t a victim. But she was aware of his power.
He ogled her for a moment, serious, his lips clamped. And then he said, “Come here.”
“I’m sorry?”
He shoved his chair back, exposing his gargantuan thighs, covered in brand new beige Dockers, creased down the middle. He wore alligator boots. A black collared shirt, the top two buttons undone showed off sprouting chest hair. A gold chain with a crucified Christ hung where the open shirt cracked.
He smiled. “You heard me.”
Then she saw his bulge; the outline of his dick pushing against his Dockers. Fuck. She didn’t know what to do. She felt completely alone. Underwater, at the bottom of the sea, struggling to break through the surface, to breathe, to get air.
“Mr. Rollins. I better…I better get back to closing the restaurant. I have to get home.”
He smiled even wider. “Come.” He patted his thigh. “Here. Now, sweetheart.”
She didn’t like that. Sweetheart. Who did this demanding asshole think he was? One of those old-school sexist pricks.
Laura stood up. She walked to the door. She placed her hand on the knob.
“If you walk out that door you don’t have a job anymore.”
She hesitated. She didn’t move. When she turned around he was looking at her angrily. This man, she knew, was used to getting what he wanted, when he wanted it.
Uncertain, afraid, she let herself walk to him. She wasn’t sure why. She was twenty. She needed the extra cash from this job. Soon she’d be off to college in Manhattan, across the country. What did it matter? It’d be one more bad, disappointing experience. One more chink in the armor that was adulthood.
She came to him. He patted his wide, thick thigh. She tried not to look at his bulge. She turned, facing away from him, and sat on his lap. He reeked of Old Spice, sweat, and cigar smoke. She felt it push against her. Immediately the fear rose up inside of her, mixed with the slight urge to vomit. Her adrenaline electrified her whole body. Fight or flight. Run. And yet she felt captured, stuck in time. It was like standing on quicksand.
Then his hands were on her stomach, rising, rising, grabbing at her breasts. He kissed her neck. His upper lip was scratchy on her smooth skin, tickling her collarbone. She felt confused and aroused. His hand reached to her thigh, felt slowly up, up, to under her skirt, and then found her panties. He removed the cloth and inserted his mammoth finger inside of her. It hurt a little. He moved his finger in and out.
And then, as if a robot suddenly coming to life, she jumped up and leapt away, tripping on her own feet, stumbling. She ran for the door. Tore it open. She heard him yell something behind her but she ignored it. In a panic, she ran.
She never came back. She received her final paycheck two weeks later in the mail. She told her parents she hadn’t liked the job.
Her memory was cleaved in two when her iPhone vibrated. She pulled it from her bra. It was Dylan, her ex. Good God, she didn’t want to talk to him. But she answered the call anyway.