Look Closer

Once again, no town car arrives to pick up Conrad Betancourt.

Maybe he’s out of town on business or took a long weekend with some buddies. Maybe that’s it.

Where’d you go, Conrad?

—

I stop a half block down from Lauren’s house and look back at it. It’s not too late, I tell myself yet again. It’s not too late to put the brakes on everything and just forget that I ever saw Lauren on Michigan Avenue last May. God, it feels like so much more than five months ago that she re-entered my life. Maybe that’s because, to me, she never really left.

—

“I hear someone has a big birthday coming up,” Lauren whispered in my ear, the smell of beer on her breath, more than nineteen years ago. Times were good that summer at my dad’s law firm, after Teddy had scored that enormous settlement in the electrical-injury case and the place was flush with cash. Happy hours every Friday night. I never stayed long; I usually went straight home after work and spent the evenings with my mother, who by then was in a wheelchair and spent her days at home with her caregiver, Edie.

But my father always let me have one beer, despite my being seventeen, his way of showing me the cool-parent thing, and the happy hours always started at four o’clock, so I usually hung around for the first hour before taking the Green Line home.

Lauren had been nice to me that first month of the summer, joking and complimentary and maybe, in hindsight, even flirtatious. But I hadn’t thought much of it, as I was the boss’s son, and pretty much everyone treated me with kid gloves—a lot more pleases and thank-yous when I dropped off a package or delivered a message than the other staffers presumably received.

But that night, that last Friday in June, Lauren looked at me differently. A couple of beers down and the atmosphere loose, she smiled at me in a way that made me feel like an adult for the first time in my life.

“I have a present for you,” she whispered.

I’d never been with a woman. My experience to date had been a few awkward kisses my junior and senior years of high school, a couple of painful dates that left me feeling inadequate and anxious.

I met her that Sunday, at her house in Old Irving Park, at 3:00 p.m. I got there early, parking my mother’s Honda along Kedvale, nervous and tense. The truth was, I was dreading it. I was scared, not aroused. Queasy, not excited. I wanted to turn the car around and drive back to Grace Park before I had the chance to disappoint her.

Lauren, who was twenty at the time, still lived with her parents in a humble, brick A-frame house north of Waveland. The parents were gone, or so I assumed. She never mentioned them one way or the other. She answered the door in a button-down shirt and bare legs.

“Hello, birthday boy,” she said to me.

In any other context, I would’ve been so aroused. This was the stuff of my fantasies, a woman who could be pinned up on my bedroom wall seducing me—me!—but I was feeling limp in every sense of the word, wilting under the pressure.

“Don’t be nervous,” she said, making a stark appraisal of my reaction. She took me by the hand and led me through her house, a small kitchen with dishes in the sink, a radiator with peeling paint, a bowl of kibble, and cat litter. It calmed me. Seeing the mundane in her life brought her back to earth, or at least that’s where I tried to maintain my focus.

Once inside her bedroom, she made it so easy. I had no context, other than the occasional foray into internet porn or sex scenes from movies, where everyone is so smooth and confident.

She took it slow, drawing close to me, letting me smell her perfume, gently brushing her lips against my neck, running her hands up the sides of my legs. She started swaying, though there was no music, humming something I didn’t recognize.

She turned around, pressing her buttocks against my crotch, her head against my shoulder, as I silently begged for an erection, to get past the nerves and get into the moment. She took my hands and cupped them around her breasts and moaned.

“You feel good,” she whispered.

Then my hands took on a life of their own, squeezing her breasts, cupping her neck, running through her hair, pressing against her silk panties.

And then, batter up, I was in the moment. She had helped me get there, had guided me through the first curves and turns, and now I was ready to take the wheel.

I wish I could say that Lauren enjoyed hours of ecstasy. My best estimate is that it was four minutes—and that was with me trying hard to hold it in—and I’m not sure any particular moment would have qualified to her as ecstatic. I didn’t have any idea how long I was supposed to hold out, not the slightest concept of how to bring a member of the female species to orgasm.

But she made me feel like she’d had the time of her life. She wrapped her legs around my back and held me there, afterward, for a long time.

“I like feeling you inside me,” she whispered.

The truth, I was more relieved than anything.