Makeup Sex
Well, Symphony said. I’m going out with Monica tonight so you better get your ass over here in an hour and bring me what I want and maybe we can talk later, but only if you make me happy. She hung up the phone.
There are times in a man’s life when he is absolutely certain of the existence of God. For Albert this was one of those times. Albert was an idiot. He accepted that. He had said something stupid in the heat of argument and then had the further audacity not to apologize on the spot. She told him to go to hell. During the three weeks he spent there he came to realize that she was the sun, moon and stars, and that he was utterly undeserving of her.
Symphony was a portrait in grace, class and manners. She had gone to a Manhattan prep school and some college in Switzerland. She came from money and worked as a model, not for the money, but because the world would not let her escape her lanky good looks — the perfect angular chin and poised features of her nose and cheek bones, a face that radiated intellect and confidence. How Albert ended up with her was a mystery of the universe.
Albert had spied her at a Starbucks and, as she was more given to something like Panda dung tea than coffee, explained to her the difference between a plain Espresso and an Espresso Con Panna. She had been out of the United States so long that she was like a melody looking for a harmony and only finding dissonance.
She was not of the world but inhabited it like some alien creature — beautiful and strange, frightening and alluring. For some reason known only to the God of Fools she fell for him and his comic, quirky orbit of acting auditions and stage rehearsals for off-off Broadway plays that never got reviewed. This only endeared him to her, that he pursued his craft with purity and purpose and that he gave his heart and soul to work that most people would never see.
But it was her success in the fashion world and his scraping by at the bottom of the acting world that ate at him in secret and that finally burst full into the open when in a drunken rage of jealousy he shouted at her: You are nothing but a spoiled child of looted money, undeserved privilege, and the corruption of your class.
She blinked at the accusation, wondering how he managed to fit all these ideas into the same sentence. She came back with a seething rejoinder: Only savagery and unrestrained lust between barnyard animals could have concocted a creature so full of self loathing and unrequited envy, but apparently appropriate for such a simple-minded Louisiana mutt as you — a veiled reference to his mixed-blood New Orleans Creole heritage, he presumed.
Albert was still trying to decipher the enormity of the insult when, during his time in hell, he realized that she was his dream of a lifetime — warm and radiant as a fire built in a clearing of soft virgin snow, as perfect as a fine cut diamond, as ephemeral as a fleeting memory, a wonder.
He finally had the good sense to call her up and beg.
She let him go on and finally set the terms of his surrender. Beside himself with joy, he showed up at her door thirty minutes later with a bottle of Dom Pérignon and a box of Italian chocolate truffles, dressed in only a jacket, boxers, a silk necktie, and a large red bow around his erect penis.
When she opened the door he flung open his jacket, beaming. They stared at each other for a second.
You are such a horse’s ass, she said at last. He was stunned.
I thought you… She let him stew in his juices for a moment.
I said makeup set. The one by Dior. Are you dense?
He lost his erection and the bow tied to his cock dropped to the floor. She gave him a look of utter pity and slammed the door shut in his face.
Albert stood there looking like a fool, too stupefied to get his feet to move.
Then, to his complete amazement, in the next moment she opened the door, grabbed him by the tie and pulled him inside, slamming the door behind them.
Horse’s ass that he was, she decided she was not going to go without.
