The Booster: A Novel - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jennifer Solow is a well-decorated veteran of the advertising industry and a displaced Manhattanite. A full-time writer with (finally) a very big closet, she now lives in Mill Valley, California. Visit her website at www.jennifersolow.com.

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1

"I don't understand why you don't come, Jill." Alex Wald is yelling loud enough from the loft bedroom upstairs for Jillian to hear him clearly in the bathroom below. "Ever."

"Have you seen my Ativan?" Jillian is rushing through her apartment opening things and closing them again. Her bare, pedicured feet shuffle across the wood floor of her 940-square-foot "loftlike" apartment on Twelfth Street. "There was that small bottle in the medicine cabinet with a peeling label and then the other one in the zipper thingy in my pocketbook." The floor is like the rest of the apartment, decent enough, big enough, good enough for now. It's a fine holding spot until she can get a real apartment -- at least 1,500 square feet -- a place where she could one day serve dinner parties or keep fluffy guest towels in a spare closet.

How many times can two people have the same conversation, she wonders as she rushes from the closet to the bathroom and back again. It's not like coming is the easiest thing in the world to do; it's not as if you can just order it up, like a dry Ketel One martini with extra olives, and poof, there it is, perfectly chilled and waiting for you to take a sip.

Jillian is wearing only a pair of Cosabella thong underwear. A spot of Alex's fresh ejaculate wets the middle of the sixteen-dollar sliver of material. It's just the thing she was worried about when he woke her up early, pressing his hard-on into the middle of her back. Not that she doesn't love to feel the weight of him rolling on top of her, she does -- the fleeting moment of safety beneath him, the salty taste of his shoulder as her mouth lingers there, the way his body provides sanctuary for hers, if only for a second. She does love all that, it's just that she doesn't love all that less than seventy-seven minutes before the biggest presentation of her life.

"I know I have another Ativan." She holds her breasts, one in each hand like beanbags, as she darts from room to room.

"I am not the keeper of the pharmaceuticals, Jill." Alex rolls back underneath the comforter -- a thousand-thread count, extra primaloft Vermont goose down -- the softest she could find at Bed Bath & Beyond on Sixth.

"Shit." Jillian opens the empty prescription bottle from the side pocket of her purse. "Shit. Great. Perfect."

"You don't need a tranquilizer. You'll do great today, Bubb."

"Goddamn it." Jillian pulls the sticky cotton material out from its crevice. "I can't even wear this underwear now." She wiggles her thong down to the floor, hurls it in the direction of the laundry basket, and dashes into her closet: a second bedroom in her apartment converted with shelves, bins, and wire racks.

"You don't even want me to make you come, Jilly. I mean, I think most girls would at least want to."

She marches up the spiral staircase to the bedroom clutching a linen shirt underneath her armpit and pointing a toothbrush with the other hand. "Yogis don't have orgasms, Alex. They save up their chi." Jillian's never told him that she hasn't had an actual orgasm with another person in the room, unless you count Sharon Levy at Timberwood sleepover camp, and she's never told him that she really does want to, that she really does try to get there -- she tries to reach the point of no return, but then it just all falls completely apart.

"You're not a yogi." Alex reaches out for her hand and nibbles on her fingertips. His eyes are clear and sweet, and the sunburn he got two weeks ago in South America has faded to a soft patina. "And you have enough chi to choke a horse."

"This isn't a problem for you because you don't actually have to go to work today and make the presentation of your life -- a presentation to people who just stare at you because they haven't had their double espresso yet and they can't actually propel messages from one side of their brain to the other...."

"Oh yeah. My job is really easy."

"And I have absolutely nothing to wear and now I need to stop at McKay's." Jillian's nerve endings feel as if they're about to burst. Alex should know this about her by now.

"You say that like it's my fault you're out of Ativan. Like it's always my fault." Alex puts a pillow over his head and presses down hard. "You're the pill popper." His words are muffled through nineteen ounces of Vermont goose feathers.

"I'm not a pill popper." Jillian shoves the toothbrush into her mouth and brushes. She talks through it. "I have a prescription for exactly eight pills. Eight one-half-milligram pills last me, I don't know, months!" The toothpaste begins to foam around her mouth. "I would think a pill popper would need more than eight pills."

"Why don't you wear that black suit with the bow hickeys on the sides?" Alex squeezes along the shaft of his penis, pushing the remainder of semen out into a droplet at the tip. He rubs the white ball into his chest and turns over toward the pillow.

"Jesus. That's my bed!"

Some things should just be done in private, Jillian thinks, with a tissue, or at least when no one else is staring right at them preparing for a big presentation. Alex, she recalls, will pee off the side of a dive boat. He knows nothing of personal boundaries. "Those are my good sheets."

She races back down the tight spiral staircase into the bathroom and spits into the sink. "Plus the black suit makes me look like an anesthesiologist."

"Just wear what makes you comfortable."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Jillian wonders why she's even asking him -- Alex buys everything from the REI catalog. Not that he doesn't look great in his old Patagonias and Carhartts; he always looks great in an I-don't-care-how-I-look kind of way. The worn cotton of his collar and the hole in the armpit of his old cashmere sweater always make her heart skip a beat. Sometimes Jillian wishes she could be like him -- a carefree, hole-in-the-armpit photographer, roaming the wild one week a month with only stubborn sherpas to contend with and not big presentations to caffeine-deprived bosses.

Jillian rifles through her hangers, pulling things off one by one: the patent leather vest is too much of a dominatrix thing; the Donna Karan suit is trying too hard; the gray pinstriped vest and skirt are okay, if she were going to a meeting at Goldman Sachs instead of an advertising agency, the floral Liberty button-down looks like it was an impulse purchase from the Harrods shop at Heathrow Airport (which it was), and the black Daryl K is too down-market.

"And besides, orgasms are overrated," she yells back from downstairs as she zips up a beige suede skirt along her hip. "I don't need to have an orgasm to enjoy myself. I just really, really like, you know, the fuck itself." The beige skirt seems too short. Dorkish even. She remembers when it was her favorite thing -- the Miss Sixty skirt -- completely over now. "You generally seem to be fine with that."

Finally, after seventeen minutes and a floor strewn with the discards of her closet, Jillian settles on the Armani pinstriped pleated pants, slim at the waist, wider at the ankle. It's an elegant pant that elongates the leg, making it appear as if the line goes on forever. These minuscule vertical lines that look golden from just a foot away add butter and warmth to the otherwise crisp angle. She tops the pant with the white Vandevorst work shirt -- a classic enough garment with long French cuffs and a well-cut neckline but a surprisingly improper peekaboo slit down the back between the shoulder blades. A sliver of skin shows through as the capricious twists and turns of the day unfold. And finishing the whole thing off, at the base of the sweeping leg, a small triangle of maroon leather emerges, the tidy toe of a fierce Louboutin high heel -- neither as vulnerable as a sandal nor as relentless as a boot. The pointy glimpse of color and texture...