Wanted

I wear a blue and white toile apron depicting scenes of cows, barefoot peasants harvesting apples, and French maidens feeding cocks. When performing chores involving chemical cleaners or hot water, I wear yellow rubber housework gloves lined with flock. I am not the type of person to wear a hairnet. I am not "Lucy Lunch Lady" looking for love in the cafeteria. If you are fit, male, and not averse to hot sex in a cheap motel, respond to this ad with your bio and two reasons I should choose you. (no drugs or fatties, pls.)

--Joe's Wife

Alley behind the Hot Club. Me: fur, motorcycle. You: apron.

--Butch

I've waited inside the club for hours, drinking beer in anticipation of our date. Still, I recognize him immediately from the way he leans against a fireplug. Black fur glimmering with fog, leather jacket, biker boots: he's all dog.

"Butch?" I say.

He drags off his stubby cigarette, letting the smoke circle his head. "Yeah, that's me." His lips stretch back to a feral smirk, as he leans in to stick his nose between my breasts. I don't flinch.

"Where's the apron?" he growls.

"I'm wearing it," I say, giggling. "Underneath my sweater."

He inhales deeply. "You wore it to cook pot roast."

He's a smart dog, a good dog, I think. His lustrous black fur, shiny brown eyes, and floppy ears indicate Great Pyrenees: a breed I've never seen outside Dog Fancier Magazine.

Butch removes his head from my chest and drops to all fours.

"Are you going to smell my ass?" I say, startled, yet interested.

"Maybe later," he says. "Just picking up my keys." He rights himself, tossing the cigarette onto the sidewalk where it fizzles in an oily puddle. "Let's get something to eat."

His confidence turns me on, my cash has gone to beer, and he's standing proprietarily close to a 1929 Harley, so I climb into its rickety sidecar. Soon we are speeding over dark, rain-slicked streets. He hunches over the handlebars, runs red lights, points his nose skyward, and bays at the full moon. I can't take my eyes off him. He turns to me and grins, showing a hint of wet pink tongue behind long incisors.

I wear a black cashmere sweater, Ann Taylor skirt, patterned tights, and Via Spiga pumps. They do not protect against the rain and night wind. I shiver. Highway lights reflect off wet pavement, casting faint shadows on the brown hills bordering the highway. Butch swerves into an exit lane, then a McDonald's drive-through, where he gobbles down three hamburgers before we even leave the parking lot. I don't order anything. "Aren't you hungry?" he asks.

"I ate before I came," I say.

(A near lie: I shelled at least a pound of peanuts at the bar drinking my six beers. I'd toss each denuded peanut in the air, catching it on the way down in my mouth, like a trained seal. The bartender found my trick unsettling. "Please stop," he said, moving my plastic fake-wood bowl of peanuts behind the counter.

"Peanuts are a good source of protein."

"You won't need protein after you're dead from choking on a peanut in my bar."

I picked up my beer and moved to a round table between the jukebox and the ladies' toilet.

"You only live once," he called after me.

Butch pulls back onto 195 East, toward Fall River, tires screeching and smoking. I stare at my hands turning purple with cold--a slow fade starting at my fingertips--and decide to sit on them for warmth. "Hey," I say, as we pass an SUV, then a Mini Cooper. "Any idea where we're going?"

"You asked for a cheap motel."

He downshifts off the highway. We snake along a deserted road, black on this overcast night. The Harley's single headlamp is useless. Only the tip of his cigarette glowing red convinces me I am not alone here in the woods.

Frigid air lashes in from the left, the horizon broadens and lightens, and we are cruising down the main drag of an old mill town. Butch stops hard in front of a saltbox-style building with "The Continental" painted in shaky black letters above the front door. "Here we are."

"What is this, a residence hotel?"

"Twenty-seven fifty a night. Can't get much cheaper than that."

"Are you kidding? My apron is toile! My gloves are lined with flock. Didn't I make that clear in the ad?"

"Yes, but you also said you wanted a cheap motel. The only place cheaper was the Providence Y, and I wasn't sure how they'd take a lady there."

"Don't you know the difference between a cheap motel and a residence hotel?" I sputter. "I don't want to lie down with hoboes and bedbugs; I'm looking to enter into a covenant of mortal sin, you know what I'm talking about? The kind of sinning that means something on your otherwise clean record. The kind of sinning that makes or breaks you."

Butch jerks his head toward the hotel's decrepit farmer's porch. "Then this is what you wanted, right, baby?"

"No! Residence hotels are for habitual sinners. Don't you get anything?"

Butch pulls a cigarette from the inside pocket of his jacket. He turns his back to the night wind, lights it, turns back to me. "Look," he says. "I'm just here for a fuck. If I had understood the difference between this place and a cheap motel, I would have picked the cheap motel, believe me, but since we're here, and it's getting very late, and we both have places to be, shouldn't we just get to the fucking?"

I look into his eyes, which are surprisingly warm and intelligent, and I want his pink tongue inside my mouth.

"Let's go inside," he says, softly. "Aren't you cold without a hat?"

My head aches from the beer at the bar and the wind from the bike ride. "Yes," I reply. "Let's go inside and get to it."

"That's a good girl!" says Butch.

The hotel lobby stinks. Vagrants, junkies, hoboes, and the insane lie side-by-side on blue and white striped mattresses without sheets or pillows. They have nothing but thin gray blankets to cover themselves, and many sleep naked. A gum-snapping blonde wearing big hoop earrings works the front desk. Butch leans far over the counter toward her massive breasts while requesting a private, non-smoking room with bath. If she's disturbed by his doggie appearance, she doesn't let on. "Easy there, big fella," she croons. "Let me get you your key."

I'm itching to see our room and the bed where we will commit our act of lust to filthy sheets. Once we ascend the stairs, however, the corridors are empty and our room is shockingly clean with bunk beds, fresh linens, and a transistor radio. Butch throws his jacket on the floor and makes a running leap for the lower bunk.

I pull the sweater over my head, kick off my pumps, and wiggle out of my skirt, till all that's left is the blue and white toile apron. Butch regards me for a moment before jumping from the bed, knocking me out of my position in the doorway.

I'm up against the wall, his arm soft and fuzzy behind my head. I want him to kiss me, but instead he runs his cold wet nose along the top of my shoulder past my armpit along the side of my breast into the curve of my waist and finally to my ass, where he leans into me, panting gently. The room is airless and overheated. I imagine opening a window, feeling icy rain on my face. Then Butch begins to peel off his head--from the shoulders up, slowly revealing blue veins, new hairless skin, and a second head: this one smaller and more naked looking than the first. I touch his face; it feels like ripe banana skin. His nose is short. I touch that, too; it's warm and dry. I'm standing there wearing nothing but a Kitchen, Etc. apron on the third floor of a derelict residence hotel, and it occurs to me that he is only a man.

I work as a lawyer for a collection agency on South Main Street in Providence. My husband, Joe, heads a gerontology practice. We keep no children. Why bring children into this world when all ends in death and litigation? Our condo on the Narragansett Bay in Warwick appreciated unexpectedly last year, as people from New York and Boston discovered deals available here in Warwick Neck. Once landlords of addled Section 8 apartments, we renovated to prestige units with private boat launches and sold to physicians in Joe's practice. But this is not the story of a wealthy, barren wife desperate for a shock. After all, I love Joe.

What prompted me to place the ad? I had fallen for a man being prosecuted by my agency, a debtor with no means to pay, a little blond man from East Providence, the proprietor of a fruit market he had inherited from his parents. "Who owns a fruit market anymore?" he said, pausing for a sip of coffee. "I'm no match for Stop and Shop."

He's a charity case, I told myself, feeling guilty for all the men and women I had pursued till their houses were foreclosed upon, their late-model cars repossessed. This man, though, with a shelf of fine blond hair angled across his forehead, moved me. He held valuable assets: the fruit stand, a colonial on half an acre in Rumford; yet, he carried enormous debt: delinquent student loans for the BS in accounting he had taken from Salve Regina University, charged-off department store credit cards, and thousands in back excise taxes due The City of East Providence.

After our first office meeting, I invited him for coffee to discuss his finances in global terms, rather than demanding money from him I suspected he could not afford to pay without selling his house or business. He responded to my lecture with apparent delight and gratitude. He insisted on paying for the coffee.

The following week, I constructed a payment schedule for him; he never mailed me even the first check. Twice I stopped in at the fruit market, hoping to witness a dearth of customers and stock; instead, men and women in decent suits packed the aisles. Each visit, he greeted me with a Styrofoam cup of Hawaiian Punch over crushed ice. Each visit, I bought six apples, which I billed to the agency. Still he displayed no interest in paying off his creditors, beyond nodding cheerfully as I described the probable course of action he had forced my agency to pursue.

Although I felt sad at having to open a lawsuit against him for money owed, calling him on the phone to make one last demand, then hearing his voice on the answering machine gave me an unexpected thrill. The next day I phoned again, hoping for the answering machine. His girlfriend Cheryl answered, so I hung up on her.

Our first day in court, I realized I loved him. He sat at the defendant's table doodling--the morning sun illuminated bits of dust surrounding his head--while I argued for the prosecution. As the judge ordered the house, business, and other assets seized, a tall woman with auburn hair sprang up and stumbled from the courtroom, crying. Cheryl, I figured. Now that she was out of the picture, and he had nothing to lose, he would jump at the chance to get together with someone like me, but what about my commitments? I had my husband, our condo in Warwick, my career to think about.

I placed the hot sex ad in the Providence Journal the next morning, because sex with a stranger is more ethical--when you're married--than sex with the man you've accidentally fallen in love with. Adulterous sex with a stranger in a cheap motel--I calculated--would protect me from illicit danger. (That afternoon, a toddler in a back carrier grabbed the glasses from my face, dashing them to the concrete floor at Whole Foods. I took a surprised step backward and crushed the lenses with the heel of my pump).

After my evening with Butch at The Continental, I find myself in the throes of hysterical appendicitis. I check into a deluxe suite at Kent Hospital, where Joe has privileges. I have led an extraordinary life, I think, as the anesthesiologist enters the room. I have experienced love.

Copyright © 2003 The President and Fellows of Harvard College.
All rights reserved. Comments. Last modified Tue, Dec 9, 2003.