And then I saw them: a crowd of twenty outside the glass—men, women, mouths, little O’s of lust, their sweaty hands applauding. I was naked, my hands and feet sparkled red, the color of the whore I was, the whore I wanted to be. I was swollen, I was ashamed, and I was Karen’s. I wanted to be Karen’s more than I wanted to moan, more than I wanted to come.

I turned, and there she stood, in a pink smock and nothing else. Nothing else, that is, except a black leather harness and a white marble dildo. And a mean gleam in her eye. I wanted to ask her permission, but I had lost my voice.

“Bend over the chair,” she said. I eagerly complied.

But then she shook her head and gave me a mean little smile.

“No. Let’s wax your legs first.”

MARTHA GARVEY

on “The Manicure,” first published in Best American Erotica in 2000

I wrote “Manicure” just as the first Internet bubble was beginning to sag. It was in the late Clinton era, when New York knew nothing of 9/11.

When I read it now, I detect a giddiness that I can’t summon up so easily today. I’m still proud of the story, but I write more self-consciously and politically now…I can’t help it. I’ve gotten more interested in history. John Quincy Adams popped up in one of my more recent stories, and could not be denied. “Manicure” makes me miss the old New York of my story, and a little bit of the writer I was then.

I don’t want to get too nostalgic, though: I believe when one hedonistic door closes, another one will open…if you’re a registered voter.

The origin of “Manicure” is straightforward, although I admit to a lifelong ambivalence about the beauty-industrial complex, which I believe shows up in the story.

I’m the kind of Gemini who worships fashion—I am the proud owner of an autographed Tim Gunn bobblehead—but I order the same jeans and button-down shirt from L.L. Bean every year. I’m not sure why I know who Bobbi Brown is, or that a certain movie star’s wife is breaking out as a stylist, or why I buy only one MAC lipstick (Desire) every two years. But I do.

On a lovely spring day in the Village, in between jobs and sweethearts, I decided to cheer myself up with a professional manicure, one of perhaps ten I’ve gotten in my life.

The manicurist took my money, softened my cuticles, put a clear coat on my nails, and then made it very clear that I was kidding myself if I thought a manicure was all I needed.