THEO LIFTED THE TV wand, pushed the buttons, ran through the channels. Nothing. On television, on Saturday night, nothing. She pressed the power button, watched the image of a long-dead matinee idol fade from the screen.
Saturday night …
There was an old song from the forties, about Saturday night, the loneliest night of the week. If you weren’t with someone on Saturday night, the ache of loneliness was the worst of all.
But she wasn’t alone, not technically.
Technically, she was waiting for Bruce.
It could be another forties song, another funky title. Something about a beautiful, desirable woman, a woman who could have her choice of a half-dozen men, but who chose to sit in the cramped living room of a cramped apartment, staring at the screen of a dead TV.
A half-dozen men?
Should she count?
The tally began with Dennis and Bruce, the two men she was sleeping with. One exciting, one limp. At the thought, she smiled. Yes, it had happened once, to Dennis. Twice, really. Limp.
Two men, one for pleasure, one for profit.
Following in the field, a handicapper’s word, by Stephen, who was rich, and Jay, who was old, and also rich, followed by Chris, the options trader with the wonderfully lithe body and the Ferrari, followed—or preceded, more like it—by Jeff, who was only twenty-two. Jeff had been her fantasy come true. One incredible night. In the past tense.
Twenty-two … God, she’d never forget that night. He was in Harvard now, studying law. Someday, though, Jeff would be back.
She rose, went to the kitchen, poured a glass of wine. Cheap jug wine, the kind she’d outgrown years ago.
But rich or poor, every woman needed a man like Bruce. Someone who made the night light up. Someone who—
At the door, she heard the lock rattle. Carrying the wine, she walked into the living room to stand facing the door as it swung open. The August night was warm and airless. Barefooted, she wore jeans and a loose-fitting T-shirt, one of Bruce’s that she’d taken from his bureau. It turned him on, she knew, to see her wearing something of his, to feel her flesh beneath his own clothing, oversize on her. When he kissed her she would move in close, send him the message. It had been that kind of a day—and that kind of a night, waiting for him in his small, littered apartment, feeling herself quickening whenever she thought of him.
A coincidence, they were dressed alike. Except that his white T-shirt was tight, displaying the muscles they both loved to touch. His T-shirt was smudged and stained. Bruce worked around the Sausalito yacht harbor, doing free-lance maintenance work for boat owners. He was to sailing what ski instructors were to skiing. Junkies, all of them. He pushed the door closed behind him, and shot the bolt. Slowly, purposefully, he moved toward her: the Saturday night stud, advancing. The muscles of his arms and torso and thighs were tensed, bulging beneath his clothes. Within arm’s length, he began pulling up his T-shirt, exposing a flat, tanned stomach. She would take it from here.