GIRL 50
NAPLES BISTRO GIRL
I'm not one for dating New York City chicks. Forty miles away, but may as well be on Pluto. Bridges, tunnels, and one big-assed hassle. Every female profile on Match says, in addition to "I love cozy nights by the fire, sunset walks on the beach" and other such bullshit, they invariably say, "I love the city."
God, please. The female idea of loving the city is being driven in by a limo (which is paid for by the guy), being taken to a play (guy bought the tickets), being taken to a five star restaurant (which all suck in NYC, yet cost hundreds a plate, all due to snotty snob appeal, but anyway, ALSO paid for by the boy) and then chauffeured back home again, where the girl is dropped off early enough to get a good night's sleep but too late to have sex. Gee, sorry Mr. Man! I guess you'll have to suffer blue balls!
I say, fuck the city. To me, New York City is as much a place of work as a cubicle on Monday morning. I go there, get my ass chewed by agents, editors, editors in chief, cover artists, marketing gurus - and that's my "fun" writing career. The "real" work, heavy industrial construction, means going to the city and negotiating for my supper. You try sitting across the starched tableclothed Italian restaurant table from Tony Soprano and explain to him why you're taking a million off his invoice. See if you can do that without floating face down in the East River, I dare you! For me, that's just a normal Tuesday. And there's no champagne limos either, it's a mud-encrusted 4Runner in bumper-to-bumper traffic.
And don't get me started about the "finest restaurants in the world." They are about as good as Cleveland's at seven times the price. Although, I'm sorry, that was an insult to Cleveland, which didn't do anything mean to me.
So when the stunning Italian woman hit on me and hit hard, I was put off a bit. Naples Bistro Girl had this beautiful Italian accent, was only here for ten years, and ran a very cool restaurant in the Village (for you folks from west of the Hudson River, that's a cute little area on Manhattan, New York City, where various artists and weirdos hang out; the bars are good, but the restaurants - did I mention this before? - suck). So I had a double stand-up comedy routine for her, my hate of the city and of the city's garbage-bin food merchants. Fortunately, she had a sense of humor.
There's a lot to be said about foreign cultures. Wake up, America! French girls, Italian Girls, even fuckin' British bitches with short hair and their eyes too close together from all that island inbreeding, are superior to American females when it comes to romance. American materialistic cunts are all about the money. They want the NBA player, the doctor, the lawyer, the CEO, the entrepreneur, and they don't want that guy out of true love, but to suck all the money out of his wallet. And they'll only suck the cum out of his cock to get to the wallet. You guys of wealth, listen up. Never try to impress a girl with money. Act like you are penniless. If she loves you, if she's one of those truly rare American females of character, THEN reveal that you've got a smokin' hot wallet. I swear, the degree of prostitution in this country is amazing. I hear about it every goddamned day, I just want to clap my hands over my ears! Attention American females - earn your own goddamned money.
Okay, speech over. Now, little Naples Bistro Girl was very unusual. She was 50, but let me tell you, she was gorgeous. She had to be the hottest woman I'd seen on the other side of the table in, well, days. I couldn't believe she was that old. She had the face of a 30 year old in her picture. I'd never dated many females older than me. What was the point? Hell, women ten years older than me are more mature than I am. Of course, there IS that mommy-fantasy thing! But Naples Bistro Girl had to be seen in person.
I met her this side of the bridges and tunnels, in neutral territory at a cozy candlelit restaurant I knew in Morristown. You can say all you want about Jersey, I don't give a damn, the state can sink into the earth for all I care (hey, I'm from Denver), but the restaurants are a damned sight better than New York's.
When I walked up, she was waiting for me in the vestibule, and as I walked uptoher she took off her coat to hand it to the coat girl. She did it in slow motion, and as she did, the most gorgeous chest came into view. And when I looked up, I saw an incredible, sultry, feminine, sexy face. Wide gorgeous brown eyes, sleek black hair, olive skin without a single blemish or wrinkle, an upturned delicate sculpted nose, and apple red thick cocksucking lips. This just had to be a dream. This shit just didn't happen in real life.
I might as well fuck it up as soon as possible, I thought. I walked up to her and kissed her and brushed her nipple as I did. It was a polite, warm, hello kiss, but she got the immediate message that I felt sexual about her.
I watched for her response. She smiled slowly, an expression of girlish delight coming to her face.
Dinner was amazing. The food tasted wonderful, the wine sparkled, even the water seemed an elixir. There was something about this woman. I kept thinking about how YOUNG she was, not how old she was. I was through the looking glass, it was that strange.
No matter how much I was myself, she still seemed to like me. I couldn't understand it. I am, after all, a total jerk when I let it all hang out. As evidence, Exhibit A, this blog. You'll see one comment after another about how much of an ass I am. And how can I argue? It's all true. I swear to you, even my mother doesn't like me, and never has. No comments, please, about how that explains everything.
So I figured I'd just completely make her hate me by going for the tit in the parking lot. In her shiny brand new metallic blue convertible BMW, I kissed her deeply, my cock raging in my jeans - despite the frumpy formality of the restaurant, I'd worn jeans, and I haven't been kicked out of a restaurant for them yet - and my fingers closed in on her nipples. The woman actually removed her blouse and her bra so I could get to her breasts!
Oh my God, I thought, I love Italian women!
After kissing me for ten minutes, she pointed down the road. "Follow me," she said in that damned hot accent.
Where are we going?
"There's a bed and breakfast, a cute inn just a few blocks down the street. They have soaking tubs. The owner is a girlfriend of mine."
Wow, an old girls' club. I loved it.
It couldn't have been twenty minutes later that Italian Bistro Girl was naked and moving under me, my cock hammering her. I'd seen possibilities early on during dinner, and had downed the break-glass-in-case-of-emergency Viagra pill I carry in my wallet just like we all used to carry a rubber when we were teenagers. And thank God, because Italian Bistro Girl loved the cock. She came in little multiple orgasms, not the 11 Richter Scale boomers of Girl 51 or the hydrogen bomb thermonuclear detonation orgasms of Girl 94, but she looked at me with sparkling eyes like she'd known me forever, and I just got the oddest feeling about her. She looked at me like she truly was in love with me, when we were two hours into knowing each other.
The next morning was an initial meeting with a Baltimore construction contractor client of mine, and I needed to be on my game. I could have climbed out of bed at 10 and gone home to sleep until door time, but I wanted Girl 50. I entertained, just for a moment, the hopeful thought that the hundred I'd foreseen being the final number of females dated might be able to be cut in half. Fifty Girls didn't have the ring of The Hundred Girls Project, but I wasn't doing this to write about it. I was doing it to turn around a life that had been loveless for too damned long, and there is simply nothing on earth like the caress of the female hand attached to the female soul who loves you. Nothing, nothing, nothing.
So I stayed with her until 3 in the morning, fucking her, resting, then sucking her, resting again, then doing her one more time. She stood completely naked in the kitchen of the suite she'd thrown her Amex card at and made me coffee in a road cup at 3:15, after my hurried shower, and there in front of me she danced as carefree as a teenager. My own personal stripper, I thought, mesmerized.
We met at my Snake Ranch for an entire weekend of decadence. Making love as snow piled up around us, the silence of it sweet as waking up eighteen. I loved every inch of her body, exploring the achingly tight warmth of her anus as she gasped in surprise and delight, never having been opened up there. She thrilled me with those full lips of hers, and when we were done we talked about her business and her partners who were her cousins, each one nastier than the next.
It was that last that did it, I realized. The age gap, culture gap, the New York thing, even her never-been-married-childless state didn't bother me. She was beautiful and intelligent and successful and a dream in bed. But after our second sex session, our conversations became flat. Had you transcribed them, never in a hundred years would you think we'd known each other as lovers. I was her management consultant. She'd complain about a partner or a lawsuit, and I'd weigh in on it in my typically Machiavellian ruthless business macho style. She would ask fifty questions about something I'd advise her to do, then she'd do it, and she'd report to me about the results and who reacted which way. After the second week I felt like I should be invoicing her a hefty per-hour fee for all of this. I remember the evening I was returning from blackmailing a client to pay me, and I sat there with my finger poised above the cell phone's SEND button, with the speed dial highlighting her name:
NAPLES BISTRO GIRL
cell
212-867-5309
For what seemed thirty seconds my finger paused there. I thought about her, about how lovely she was, what if felt like to have those lips sucking me, how good she smelled, how amazing she had tasted, and how boring she was on the phone, and how many problems she had with her business partners.
I put my hand back on the steering wheel, pulled off the hands-free headset and threw it to the other side of the truck.
I drove the remainder of the way home in silence.
Many times since that day I've wondered about her. How hasty was I to dismiss her for the crime of having bored me. Today it seems petty. But for all I know, Girl 51 saved me from Girl 50. If I had gotten into a relationship with Naples Bistro Girl, I might have ended up sad and alone and broken inside yet another cage.
Or maybe it was not that I was bored, but it was Girl 51, the fabulous Corvette Girl, who took my attention away from unpretentious and loving Naples Bistro Girl.
But I can't tell you how many times I see in my mind the image of Naples Bistro Girl dancing happily naked in the kitchen of the B&B suite, her hips gyrating as if she couldn't contain her joy. How her eyes had looked at mine as if, after a half-century long search, she had finally found me again.
I asked her during that snowed-in weekend what it was about me that had attracted her to me.
She'd looked into my eyes and answered with a simple directness.
"I loved you from the moment I saw you."
She never wavered from that certainty. She was mine if I'd wanted her.
People ask me if I have any regrets about my dating life. I always tell them that I was true to myself, that if in doing so I could help someone or open a door or let some light shine on them, then I was happy. I tell myself that though this search was about feeing my soul and my heart and my life, that it was not fundamentally selfish. That in the end, connecting to another human being is what it was about.
But the snow fell outside the window, and Naples Bistro Girl offered herself to me, and my finger hesitated over the cell phone button. And when it did, I lost her.
And I'm not so sure, when I tell this story, if the meaning I always insist is present is really there. I look back on it, and I wonder if we really met, or if we were just in each others' dreams for three nights.
When an animal is old and sick, sometimes it refuses to eat, and by starvation it grows weaker until it dies. This one bothers me. The supreme being put her in front of me, and like a dying dog, I refused to accept her.
Or maybe it is just that 50 is a number that isn't a hundred.
I do know this. The real life Girl 48, Literary Agent Girl, read the entry on her, and her sweet joyful voice filled my ears as she said, "you know, in your story, you made me love you a hell of a lot more than I did in real life. I liked you, but I wasn't that into you. On New Year's Eve, it was you texting me furiously, not the other way around."
I swear on the blood in my heart that I have never lied in these words, not even one of those corrosive "chick lies" of self-deception. But reality is different when you're wearing male flesh than when you're female. Literary Agent Girl is wrong. In her memory, I rejected her, and in the spirit of sour grapes, she didn't love me that much. Naples Bistro Girl was different than the usual American self-hypnotizing female. If I were to ask her today how she felt about me, I can almost hear her voice:
"I loved you from the moment I saw you."
I'll end this entry feeling like a driver who sped by a rain-soaked woman in distress by the side of the road, trying to justify why he didn't stop and render assistance. I sped by Girl 50 and kept on driving, even though she represented a destination. I still don't know why I did what I did.
That day I didn't call her, I walked into the Snake Ranch. I opened my email and there it was. The famous email from Corvette Girl.
"Dear Book Boy, tell me, what is your naughtiest, nastiest, hottest and sweatiest sexual fantasy? I promise you, if you tell me what it is, I will do my UTMOST to fulfill it for you, in a way you will never forget. Here's a kiss that you can put ANYWHERE you want or need it. <SMOOCH!>Love always, Corvette Girl"
I stared at the screen, my mouth hanging open.
"Dear Corvette Girl," I typed.
Ten seconds later, Naples Bistro Girl ceased to exist.
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