Nice Read online

  Nice

  By

  Jen Sacks

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  RAVE REVIEWS FOR JEN SACKS' NICE

  "So outrageous it'll have you laughing out loud… Like Bridget Jones crossed with American Psycho, only a whole lot sassier."

  —Options magazine, London

  "Funny, moving, disarmingly erotic; a deep, dark, true original and anything but nice."

  —Scotland on Sunday

  "Entertaining… An offbeat comedy on the complications of modern dating rites… Droll humor and surprisingly sympathetic characters."

  —Kirkus Reviews

  "[A] fresh new writer… [A] noteworthy debut."

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  "An entertaining debut novel."

  —Middlesex News

  "Like John Waters' Serial Mom, its comic success lies in the fact that everything is so eminently reasonable. Nice."

  — The Bookseller (London)

  "An enjoyable read, fast-paced and darkly funny… Sacks provides a fresh voice and a clever twist on age-old love stories, and I found myself completely absorbed in this witty tale."

  —synge.com

  NICE

  Copyright © 1998 by Jen Sacks

  ISBN 0-312-96925-2

  To Kim, for always being there.

  To Lisa, for coming back.

  Acknowledgments

  I wish I could say I did it alone. In future, I'll probably claim just that. My thanks to the Inner Circle—Chris, Jules, Janene, E#—some of you for your editorial advice, all of you for just loving me. I needed both. Still do. Enormous gratitude to my agent, Aaron Priest, for taking a chance on an unknown kid; to Lucy Childs, who liked it first; and to Jennifer Enderlin, my editor, for her enthusiasm and patience and for totally getting it, and me. Thanks also to Professor Walter James Miller and his class for getting the gears moving. Nut and Honey, for putting in the hours at my side. Everybody who lent me money (you're in there, Ma). My credit card companies, for staying the course—some of them. And always, always thanks to Victor, the optimist. And to everyone else who believed in me, unnamed but also unindicted. Most especially, the two to whom this book is dedicated.

  1

  Grace

  What is the definition of a sociopath? Could it be someone who's just a little more reasonable than most?

  If I had it to do over again (and I didn't know then that I would), I never would have killed the guy in my own apartment. Next time, I promised myself. Don't make the same mistake twice and all that. He was cute, too. It's strange, really. The guys I find attractive in movies and magazines are seldom standardly good-looking; they usually have more character than prettiness in their faces. Yet, somehow the ones I actually end up going out with are typically quite attractive. I just think that my ideal man wouldn't be cute. I'll know him when I see him.

  Clayton's deep blue eyes stared up at me, appearing to ask for something he certainly wouldn't know what to do with now. His dark brown hair was so short that not a strand was out of place despite his struggle. He was the first man I'd slept with who actually had a washboard stomach. I've slept with men who had once had them and men who had never had them, but never before had I hit one at the right moment in his life. All too often, men with stomach muscles like that are a little too interested in the perfection of their bodies to appeal to me. Clay, I think, was just very athletic, and his body still held that college-era flawlessness.

  Looking at him lying on the bed, the drool from his mouth staining the pillow I'd used to suffocate him, was just depressing me. It's not like he was tiny and easily movable. I sighed and wandered across the apartment to the bathroom. I had about forty lipsticks in a little box that really needed to be sorted. There were so many, some dating a decade back, to college. I grabbed the box and a hand mirror and plopped myself down on my couch, where I was able to keep an eye on the corpse. Just to keep in mind the reason for the exercise. I've always found that applying makeup helps me think things through. I don't know why. Maybe the still-ness and concentration on a single activity-clear my brain from whatever chaos is disturbing it. I had gone through about seventeen lipsticks—dividing them into pinks, reds, beiges, and other—and my lips were beginning to feel a little raw from the wiping-off process when, even more quickly than I expected, the brilliant idea arrived.

  I studied the corpse and set to work. When it was found at around 7:00 A.M. that morning just a few steps from the front door of my building, only about three hours after I'd dragged it quietly out of my apartment and laid it there, the police automatically concluded that this was yet another tragic homosexual slaying. New York had seen many lately. That perfect body, clad only in boxer shorts, the freshly cut hair, that handsome face, and, most importantly, the makeup that adorned it—a little eye shadow, a touch of blush, red lipstick—well, what else could they think?

  A policeman came around two hours later, making his way. through the apartments in my building, asking if anybody had seen or heard anything. I said I hadn't. He didn't seem to suspect me of anything or pay any more attention to me than to anyone else. Very quickly, he passed on to the next door on my floor. There was no obvious evidence connecting me to the event. Clay's clothes— big shirt and baggy jeans, now in my closet— could just as easily be mine. And now were. Fingerprints? Sure, I probably left a ton all over him. But my prints aren't in any file anywhere. Though I certainly didn't intend to press my luck in the future.

  It wasn't either him or me. It was either him or hurting his feelings. And I've never been able to do that. I'm empathetic to a fault.

  My judgment was off the first night I slept with him. I was very tired and strained from work, and his interest was so nattering and encouraging. I'd met him only a few days before at a bar—not the usual practice with me, but it was a very comfortable meeting. I didn't feel any sexual attraction to him, but I could see that he thought I was pretty. We were just joking around, cracking wise about the trial of the century—the O. J. Simpson murder trial. We were engaged in a can-you-top-this contest, and we were both firing on all cylinders that night.

  You know how sometimes two people can bring out the wit in each other, driving each other to new heights of brilliance, or so it seems to them? We didn't really have an audience—the bar was so crowded and noisy—but we could hear each other, and that was all that mattered. With that night's trial wrap-up playing silently on the TV in a nearby corner of the room, we couldn't help putting words to the pictures we saw. Of course, you can never remember the jokes later, but at the time we were both David Letterman and Dennis Miller rolled into one. Well, two.

  And we didn't go home together. I had to give Clay credit; it was a classy mo
ve not to put the moves on me that night. He just asked me to dinner "sometime" And yes, I said yes. So it was partly my fault. Because I didn't think I was attracted to him that way. But what do you say at that point? "Well, unfortunately for you, buddy, I can see right now that I will never want to sleep with you or get involved in any way, so the answer is no." Maybe I should have. If I could have, I would have. I like to think that someday I will. But everyone wants to see me date more, because it's something I've avoided for most of my life, filling my time instead with books and work and sex with friends.

  I should give him a chance, the chorus in my head said. After all, maybe as you get to know him, something will build to something. And anyway, I've dated so little, I just plain don't know how to turn down a guy when he asks. This little bit of knowledge, which I assume is possessed by more experienced women, could have saved quite a few lives in the near future, but I didn't have it. So I said, "Why not?" He took that as an affirmative.

  There are a million things to do on a date in New York. He wanted to cook dinner for me at my place. Did he think that meant we would sleep together? Well, I'll never know now. To tell you the truth, I wasn't all that enthusiastic about this plan. But he had his heart set on whipping up the perfect cold sesame noodles for me. I must have said something to give him the impression that I liked them. Who listens? But I didn't really want a relative stranger in my house. Nobody wants to be raped. Nobody wants to be bored, either. When someone else is in your house, you're the one who's the prisoner.

  But, witless me, I told him "okay." They were good noodles. And we didn't sleep together; lying, I told him I didn't do that until I knew someone very well. Actually, I'm weak when it comes to the flesh. He gave me a long, slow, and surprisingly professional massage, but it stopped there, and when I'd put in enough time, I kicked him out. Well, I told him it was time to leave. So he left.

  But he called the next day to plan when we would see each other again. That was when I began to hate him. I felt trapped. I just wasn't attracted to him—but, then again, how was I to know for sure until I'd spent a little time with him? And if it turned out that he had had a great time, how was I supposed to tell him I hadn't? I'm not saying there are no ways; I just don't know them. I put him off for a few days, but he was persistent. So I saw him again. I did not give him any encouragement, but he took me back to my place and started kissing me—and it did feel good; it often does. And then he started touching me, and that did, I confess, feel pretty good, too.

  But I knew I should somehow have stopped him. He would have stopped if I'd told him to, but I felt it was so unfair to him. I'd let him get all excited, and what was I supposed to do then? Tell him I just wasn't attracted to him? I mean, come on. Who can say that to a nice guy? And he was nice: sweet and well-intentioned and clearly in like with me. So I let him take me there. Or try. I didn't really get there. In fact, I'm not sure where he thought he was going. It's always a problem the first time with anyone. But physically, it felt good—until about halfway through, when even the physical pleasure deserted me, overwhelmed by my urgent desire to be away from him, away from someone who couldn't read the signs, who couldn't see what I wouldn't say.

  As he bounced along, I thought to myself, Jesus, what am I going to have to do? Kill him? There seemed to be no other way. It's hard to believe now, I know, but I didn't really think then that I would.

  The conventional wisdom has it that guys see sex as just emotion-free pleasure and girls attach too much meaning to it. I wish. In my experience, nice guys seem to want more from me than an orgasm. Clay, for example, kept trying to look me deep in the eyes as we were in bed. His eyes held nothing for me, except for "the look." The look is when a man's eyes soften and deepen and seem to be trying to gaze into your very soul. A very lovely kind of look—if you feel the same way. Once in my life, I welcomed the look and even met it with one of my own. I was sixteen and the boy was the kind of dream date I have yet to stumble into again. Of course, even though he was the one who said he loved me first, when I was just reveling in the sensory pleasure of heavy petting, he woke up from the dream about three months later, after I had convinced myself that love was what I felt, too. A sweet memory nonetheless, as long as I forget the year of misery and confusion that followed, as I tried to understand the incomprehensible: why he'd loved me and why he'd stopped.

  Still, you never forget that look. And I didn't really want to see it on a guy I'd met less than a week before, a guy whom—halfway through the event—I wanted not more, but gone. I borrowed a trick from a casual sex pal of mine and squeezed my eyes closed and my face together, as if I was pouring all my concentration into the act. But he kept trying to look me in the eye. He ran his finger along my face and pushed random strands of hair back off my forehead—everything you want a man to do, if he's the man you want.

  He lay beside me afterward, apparently deep in thought, his arms around me, kissing me softly on the neck now and then. Leave, leave, leave, I silently invoked, as if it were a magic formula, hoping it would make him disappear. But he was still there. He was a stranger to me, and he refused to admit it. He must have thought that the sex had brought us together. For me, it only confirmed that we were very far apart. It wasn't even a question of technique that I could have given him guidance on. We were just in two very different places—which happens a lot with new partners. He was where he went, and I was still here. The problem was, he didn't seem to know it.

  "Well," I said.

  He looked at me expectantly, stretching comfortably, as if feeling quite at home.

  "I hate to say it," I said, practically singing inside at the happy, thought, "but I have to wake up really early tomorrow for work." I caught his look of shock but ignored it. "We're in production on the magazine."

  "You mean I can't stay?" he asked, stunned.

  "The thing is, I really don't sleep well at all with someone else in the bed. It takes a long time to get used to a person. And I just can't tonight."

  It was true, but did he have to believe me? Couldn't he think I was trying to get rid of him, and get the message? I guess not. He called me the next day at work. I avoided setting a date for our next tryst on the basis that production entailed long hours, often late into the night, and I just couldn't plan. He said he'd call in a couple of days.

  What the hell was the matter with him? Couldn't he be like other guys? I mean, I'm no prize. He just didn't know it because nice guys bring out the nice in me, despite myself. He thought I was sweet and interested in him and supportive and considerate and enthusiastic and a little bit funny, just because I behaved that way with him. That isn't me. But how could he know that? It's my fault. It's a tic, a habit. Something I can't seem to control. And he would end up paying for it.

  2

  Sam

  The key to a good eavesdropping system is how well it can pick up particular voices in a crowd. Directional mikes and well-placed bugs, now as tiny as a fingernail, make listening in on targets in an apartment, hotel room, or car astonishingly easy. But people meeting in a bar are quite another story, a real challenge. In between jobs, I like to test out the latest equipment myself, naturally in the most difficult of circumstances. The wireless setup I was wearing consisted of a tiny earplug and a Walkman-sized pickup device that used microwaves to pinpoint a desired sound. Politically Correct had not only an eighteen-foot bar and at least thirty small tables but also a bank of ten video screens scattered around the walls, emitting at a level of at least a hundred decibels. I half-expected that the little piece of illegal technology in my pocket would go haywire in these surroundings. The only drawback to the location, though I had chosen it for its unique mix of mechanical and human challenges, was that Upper East Side bars infested with twenty-somethings so rarely produced conversation worth listening to.

  I found my eyes wandering as I played with the dials in the right-front pocket of my sports jacket. A couple stood at the bar, talking intensely to each other, with many gestures towar
d the nearest TV monitor. Whatever was playing, they seemed to be enjoying it. The man was a fairly typical example of the local regular, good-looking in a rather bland way, maybe five-eleven but skinny, with striking blue eyes that did not dart around looking for something better, as so many do. They were fixed on the girl next to him. She was not typical. She did not act as if she were beautiful. She seemed to lack that self-assurance, that coldness. Her face was much more expressive than those of most of the women around her. She was a redhead— convincing, if not natural—with pale grayish eyes. Her face was soft, almost round; her cheekbones were barely differentiated from her flesh. In straight jeans and a simple, tight-fitting long-sleeved cotton jersey, she was slender, with not very much in the way of curves. She was far from perfect, yet she was, in fact, beautiful, just not obviously so. She had warmth, which I found, for some reason, intensely appealing. She seemed very—for lack of a better word—real.

  What was also unusual, I noticed as I tuned them in, was that she was talking as much as or more than he was. The typical technique is to let the man hold forth, as we so often do at the least provocation, something a female colleague of mine had once pointed out. Consciously or not, that was clearly not her way. I listened to them for approximately thirty minutes; then one of her friends, apparently, turned to her and drew her back into their earlier conversation. I saw the man write down her number and, shortly after, leave. Now that she was alone with her friends, her demeanor changed markedly. Her mannerisms were boyish, and her constant wisecracks were nasty and much funnier than before. Her friend Marie was black, dressed in black; a little hard-boiled-looking, she seemed like a born New Yorker. The other girl looked a bit like Audrey Hepburn and was just as thin. I did not catch her name. They were smoking with the zeal of Eastern Europeans. Seeing them together, I could tell that they were older than the crowd in general and definitely not, based on their clothes, hair, and manner in general, from this part of town.