(How old are you?)
ID please.”
Neither rain nor snow, nor sleet, nor hail is going to stop me from going out to party this one Halloween night in New York. Not having any ID on me, however, is going to be a problem.
Winter abruptly decides to descend upon the city on the last day of October, and despite the biting cold and the falling snow all over the Lower East Side, the streets are packed with vampires, witches, and ghouls, ready to raise hell while Batman, Superman, Spiderman, Snow White, and Little Red Riding Hood, not to mention the occasional G.W. Bush and Barack Obama, plough through the slush alongside them, ready to save the world.
Close to midnight, I brave the carousing crowds and frozen streets, dressed in nothing more than flimsy layers of static-attracting red tulle and polyester underneath a leather coat, and armed with satin horns and a plastic trident. I walk the few blocks to Ludlow Street to meet my friends. Nobody messes with the devil.
But what the devil doesn’t realize is that nobody messes with a New York doorman.
“Yes, your name is on the list for Orlando’s party, but you gotta show me some ID before I can let you in,” says St. Peter in an overcoat and ski cap. He looks apologetic, but insists he’s just following the door policy.
Charm him, I think. That always works. “I’m so sorry,” I say, smiling and affecting innocent breathlessness. “I just flew in, I left my passport at home, but really, I swear I’m over twenty-one.”
“So you say, but I can’t be too sure.” He lifts the velvet rope to let a group of frat boys through.
Okay, Maxine, be cool, I say to myself, but I can’t wipe the silly, satisfied grin off my face. I turned twenty-one almost thirty years ago, and here I am, getting carded by a New York doorman! Right there and then I pledge my undying devotion to this city for the hundredth time.
“You’re not going to let me walk back home in the snow just to get my ID!”
“Where you staying?”
“On Orchard and Houston.”
He whispers something to the Dita von Teese doppelganger, his co-keeper of the gate. “Sorry, miss, I can’t let you in without any ID. Just go get it. You’re only a couple of blocks away. Your friends are gonna be partying all night.”
So much for charm. I should try pulling rank instead. Even if you’re twice my height, I’m old enough to be your mother, you know, is what I should say, complete with wagging finger. But in the end, however flattering his estimation of my age, the last thing the Asian in me wants is to cause a scene, so I trudge back through the melting ice in four-inch stilettos to the apartment, where I briefly contemplate making myself a hot chocolate and watching TV all bundled up in a warm blanket.
Just shoot for the stars if it feels right …
But the devil in me still wants to party. So I return to the gates of hell.
“I can’t believe you made me go back in this awful weather!” I tease the doorman as I hand him my passport.
“Now was that so hard?” he smiles back, and glances at the information on the page, then looks at me, checks the page one more time, then looks at me again with disbelieving eyes.
“No. Fuckin’. Way.” He shows it to Dita von Teese, who does a double take.
“Way,” I reply, as the gates of hell finally open for me.
“Respect.”
Suddenly St. Peter and the devil are one fist bump away from becoming best friends.
I don’t need to try to control you …
“So, really, how old are you?”
Please tell me before you kiss me again, I implore silently. Cut back to May, five months ago, with spring in full swing. First date and already he’s getting frisky.
“Twenty-five,” Emilio says, his lips just hovering above mine. “Is that a problem?”
Oh my God, twenty-five! And I’m—Fuck, I’m not doing the math, I think to myself. It’s so Ashton and Demi. J-Lo and Casper. Madonna and Jesus. Does that make our date tawdry or incredibly progressive?
“Um, no.”
“Didn’t think so.” He kisses me again, harder this time, with his tongue teasing its way into my mouth. He tastes sweet and strong at the same time; there’s a tang of breath mint and a hint of nicotine. His fingers reach underneath my dress and push my panties to one side, feeling the wetness within and rubbing my clitoris hard.
“Wait,” I whisper unsteadily.
Jesus, he’s hot. I almost forgot how stunningly handsome he is. Granted, I’ve only met him once before, when he drove me into the city from Brooklyn, but damn, that’s not a level of hotness you forget easily. It’s not oh-my-God-why-aren’t-you-modeling-for-Armani kind of hot, although from the little I gleaned during the ride, he certainly has the physique for it. No, it’s the expletive-inducing holy-fucking-shit-you-should-be-in-the-movies-why-the-fuck-are-you-a-driver kind of hot. You know what I mean? It’s another level altogether.
To be fair, he’s not a cab driver in a big yellow taxi. And there are no meters in his stately, leather-upholstered black Lincoln Town Car. He’s an independent contractor within a private car service network. There, that sounds better, doesn’t it? And I’m not just saying that to justify my being here with him. It’s an accurate description.
Don’t worry about it, I can hear Javier’s voice in my head. Javier, half-Spanish, half-French geeky translator by day, sexy chef by night with a serious case of wanderlust, my gay best friend ever since my Paris and UNESCO days. What was it he said the other day on Skype when I told him I had a date with Emilio? “Oye, don’t be such a snob. Blue-collar workers make the best lovers, darling. They’re like the Avis of sex. Because they try harder. They feel like they have so much to prove, when in actual fact, they don’t.”
“Wait,” I say again to Emilio. My cheeks are flushed, I’m sure, and my skin is all tingly and prickly and warm. And down there, I know, I’m wetter than Niagara Falls. But … it hasn’t even been five minutes since he picked me up from the apartment I’m staying in, and we’re still in his car, though he has stopped by the side of the road. I’m sitting in the front seat, by the way. As his date, not his passenger, in case you’re wondering.
“Qué pasa? Is everything okay?”
“I’m not sure I’m ready to … I mean, I just got out of a relationship that, well … ”
“Mira.” He leans back into his seat and straightens up, and turns his head to face me. “Relax. We’re not going to do anything you don’t want to do, okay?”
Oh, and they turn out to be quite well-mannered, too, I can hear Javier telling me, as Emilio pulls up in front of a neon-fronted dive, then walks round to open my door and lets me out.
“Your turn.” Emilio sets the freshly filled glass in front of me.
“Another one? I thought sangria was a mild drink! This is making me tipsy.”
“I didn’t mean that.”
“Really? What, then?”
I take a swig of the sangria anyway. It isn’t your usual sangria. Emilio says he’s excited to take me to this cozy Argentine bar in his ’hood and introduce me to white wine sangria, which I’ve never tasted before, much less heard of. It’s lighter, tangier, and really quite delicious. But perhaps in the darkened, marooned-on-a-desert-island ambience of the bar in the depths of Williamsburg, given our precarious position perched on swiveling barstools next to each other, and my heightened state of giddiness, everything is intoxicating, even the sangria-lite.
“How old are you? You asked me, I told you, now it’s your turn.” He has one of those twinkly-eyed smiles that make him look like a little boy who’s just had some candy.
Oh God, no, he’s going to faint when I tell him.
“And say it in Spanish,” he adds. “It’s so sexy when you speak in Spanish. Me encanta.”
“En los cuarenta,” is all I say. In my forties.
“Yeah?” He shrugs. “No lo pareces. You look thirty, thirty-five at the most.”
I smile, seized by a sudden desire to leap off my barstool and do cartwheels. “Gracias. It’s sweet of you to say that.”
“I’m not lying. It’s true. Kids?”
“Three.” I wish I could call them now, but it’s too late. You hear that, kids? I will say to them. The maximum Maxi-Mum looks is thirty-five. Thirty-five! To which my eldest is likely to reply, with weary teenage cynicism, he just wants to get with you, Mom.
“That’s hot. Husband?”
“God, no.” Divorced, and happily so.
I’ve heard it said that candor is the privilege of the youthful and the youthful-looking. I used to be candid, sometimes to the point of blitheness, about my age, knowing that thanks to the fortuitous combination of my height—or lack of it in this case, my Eurasian genes plus my upbringing in a tropical climate, I looked younger than my age. Like the doorman at the club on Halloween, most people did a double take when they realized I was born in the same decade that the Beatles rocketed to fame and redefined the meaning of mass hysteria.
Now that I seem to be attracting a different demographic, however, I’m not so candid anymore. As coy as it sounds, “I’m in my forties,” appears to be a satisfactory enough answer to the question.
Men, on the other hand, are generally never coy about their age. Except when they are men d’un certain âge with a penchant for dating much younger women. There’s something louche but tolerable about a forty-five-year-old man-about-town dating a woman in her twenties, while a fifty-something ageing Adonis with a nubile lass, barely in—or out—of her teens, reeks of pathos and pedophilia. And when the man is old and past his prime, yet refuses to accept that his looks have faded and his libido limps along, and he seeks a woman, accomplished perhaps, still considerably younger, but not scandalously so? He is called mature.
What was it Javier said once, when we were chatting on Skype after I first started dating Felipe, the Ecuadorian, five years ago? Freshly separated after a long and spectacularly unhappy marriage, I suppose I appeared vulnerable. But to a man with a Pygmalion-meets-Messiah complex, I was apparently also in need not just of rescuing but molding. And this man happened to be five years younger than my mother, and therefore, eighteen years older than me.
“What do you call a woman who chooses to be with an older man for his money?” Javier said.
“Duh. A golddigger.”
“What about a young, naïve woman with a worldly, more experienced man who says he can make her a star?”
“An aspiring actress?” I replied.
“Or a model. And what about a woman who’s not exactly young, nor exactly old, with a much older man who’s neither particularly rich nor poor?”
“Give up.”
“A caregiver.”
Hmmm. I never did look good in a nurse’s uniform. But I have rocked the short shorts and high heels combination before. Just ask Felipe.
I was all the Viagra he ever needed.