I secured it to the chain around my wrist, feeling a boldness rise in me, making me giddy. I did the strangest thing! The strangest thing was done to me! I wanted to scream, Something happened to me. Something is happening to me. And I will never be the same again.
They always say that the first step is the hardest. That first surrender, the first time you say: Yes, I accept that I need help. I can’t do this alone. Scott struggled with that when he gave up drinking. He hated the idea that he had to accept help from anything or anyone. So he fought it, whatever it was. Yet, here I was in full surrender. I had stopped fighting. I had accepted help from a strange group of women.
Then I walked into a room bathed in candlelight, wearing only a towel. I let that towel drop around my ankles, and I bared myself. I trusted this process, this man, this S.E.C.R.E.T. group. But everything that had happened occurred in my home, in my living room, and though it was my body, I gave it over only temporarily to a complete stranger. As I recounted this a week later to a rapt Matilda, I couldn’t help but feel I was talking about my experience as if it had happened to another person, someone I knew very well but who had aspects I was only just beginning to understand.
I told Matilda I had felt safe, that what we did was erotic, and I was beyond compelled to complete the fantasy. And for a one-time thing, I had to admit I had felt wanted, desired, which of course makes any woman feel ecstatic.
“So, yes. I was … transformed, I guess,” I said, burying my burning red face in my hands, suppressing a giggle. A few weeks ago, I had had no one to talk to, unless you counted Will. Now, here I was sharing intimate secrets with a woman I could no longer call a stranger. In fact, I had to admit she was becoming my friend.
During the weeks that followed my first fantasy, I was as busy as I had ever been. I even took on a couple of night shifts so Tracina and Will could go on dates. When I waved goodbye to them one of those nights, I couldn’t detect an ounce of jealousy or bitterness in my bones. Well, maybe a droplet of jealousy, but no bitterness. No longing. No detectable sadness. I had made a vow to be nicer to Tracina, to try to see what Will saw in her. Maybe we’d become friends, too, I thought, and Will could make another attempt to set me up with someone—after I’d completed my Steps, of course. At that moment, while I was thinking about double dating, Dell caught me whistling in the walk-in fridge. I sometimes stood in there for a few minutes to cool down, all the while pretending to look for something.
“What are you so happy about, girl?” she asked, lisping through her missing tooth.
“Life, Dell. It’s a good thing, isn’t it?”
“Not always, no.”
“I think it’s pretty grand,” I said.
“Well, goody for you,” she said as I headed back to the dining area. I left her scooping out ice cream for a small birthday gathering of bankers.
My couple, my favorite fawning duo, hadn’t returned since the night Pauline dropped her journal. But thoughts of their caresses were now replaced by lightning flashbacks, my own memories of that man’s beautiful face between my thighs, of the hungry way he looked at me, so deliberate, so keen. I thought of his fingers, how they engaged at just the right moment, and how his firm hands guided and moved me, like I weighed nothing, like I was made of feathers—
“Cassie, for crying out loud,” Dell yelled, snapping her fingers in front of my eyes. “You keep on leaving the planet.”
I almost jumped out of my boring brown shoes. “Sorry!”
“Table eleven wants their bill, nine wants more coffee.”
“Yes. Right,” I said, noticing the two girls from table eight blankly staring at me.
Once I’d served the two tables, I went back to my thoughts. Dell had it wrong. I hadn’t been fantasizing. I was remembering. Those things had actually happened. I was recalling things that had been done to me, to my body. I gave my head a healthy shake. If this is what it felt like after Step One, what would it be like with a few more fantasies under my belt?
One day in early April, on my only day off that week, a cream-colored envelope arrived in my mailbox. There was no stamp on it. It appeared to have been hand-delivered. My heart leapt to my throat. I glanced down the street. Nobody. I ripped open the envelope. Inside was the Step Two card, and the word Courage. There was also a single ticket for a jazz show at Halo, a bar on the roof of The Saint Hotel, a newly built boutique hotel that was making its debut during this year’s festival. Though I was no big music buff, even I knew these were hard tickets to get. I looked at the date. Tonight! This wasn’t enough notice! I had nothing to wear! I did this all the time, excuses, one after the other, building and building, until the fear got so big it toppled any plan for adventure. That’s how it had always worked for me. Somehow opening the door to my apartment to a stranger seemed easier to contemplate than venturing out into the hot night on my own, walking into a bar by myself, and sitting there alone, waiting for … what? What would I do while I waited? Read? Maybe three or four weeks is too much time between fantasies. Maybe my courage had retreated. Yet Step Two was about Courage, so I decided to concentrate on that, on staying open, the opposite of my usual way, which was to begin my day with the word no on my lips. That’s how, hours later, I was trying on little black dresses, and an hour after that, sitting very still while coats of red lacquer were layered on my fingers and toenails. The whole time, I told myself I could always back out if I wanted to. I didn’t have to go through with anything. I could change my mind at any time.
That evening I grabbed my fantasy folder from my night-stand. What is it about going out alone, seeing a movie alone, or enjoying dinner alone, that is so difficult? I could never bring myself to do it, preferring to rent a movie at home rather than sit alone in a darkened theater. But the alone part wasn’t what I was afraid of. The alone part was easy; I’d felt alone my whole life, even when I was married. No, I was afraid that everyone else, all those people, coupled and cozy, would see me as one of The Great Unpicked, The Sadly Unselected, The Sexually Forgotten. I imagined that they would point and whisper. I imagined that they would pity me. Even I treated lone customers at the Café with extra care, like they were a little hard of hearing or something. I may even have been guilty of hovering around their tables too much, in my attempts to keep them company.
But maybe sometimes people who went out by themselves wanted to be alone. There are people like that: confident, solitary, secure with their own company. Tracina, for instance, pays someone to take her fourteen-year-old brother for ice cream every Saturday afternoon so she can lie on the couch and watch TV uninterrupted. She once told me that going to the movies alone was one of her singular pleasures.
“I get to watch what I want, eat without sharing, and I don’t have to sit through the credits like Will makes me when I’m with him,” she said.
But it’s easy to be alone when it’s a choice, harder when it’s your default position.
I was feeling pure terror about entering that jazz club, when Matilda’s Step Two advice rang through my head. During a pep talk over the phone, she told me, “Fear is just fear. We must take action in the face of it, Cassie, because action increases courage.”
Damn it. I could do this.
I called Danica to send the limo.
“It’s on the way, Cassie. Good luck,” she said.
Ten minutes later the limo turned the corner at Chartres off Mandeville, stopping in front of the Spinster Hotel. Ah! I wasn’t ready! Shoes in hand, I took the stairs in twos, running out barefoot past a very puzzled Anna Delmonte.
“It’s the second time I’ve seen that limousine parked in front of the house,” she said as I whizzed by. “Do you know anything about it, Cassie? It’s so odd …”
“I’ll talk to him, Anna. Don’t worry. Or maybe the driver is a woman, right? You never know.”
“I suppose …”