The Eighth Girl

by Maxine Mei-Fung Chung

  I peel myself away from Ella’s side. Every intention of stuffing my tiny bra with tissues.

  When I return, the two girls have left, replaced now by a man, tall and athletic, and an older woman, short and severe.

  I reclaim my spot beside Ella.

  “I’m Cassie,” the woman says, shaking my hand.

  In a place where men think it’s acceptable to buy sex, the surest way to spot the madam is to look for the businesswoman north of fifty in a sharp suit and a cruel smile. She hands me a drink, bending the pink straw at its ridge. Her eyes squint tight like razor clams, working over me.

  “Thanks,” I say, noting the tension in Ella’s awkward lean. Her smile held and fake, arms crossed against chest.

  The man finally turns to me. A toothpick loosely hanging from his lip.

  “I’m Navid.” He smiles.

  My first reaction is panic, his hand resting on the back of Ella’s barstool, wet animal eyes scanning me up and down. A Tod’s loafer raised to position himself closer. Too close, I think. Dressed in a navy cashmere sweater and a blaring white shirt, he stares, working the toothpick between his lips. The two girls from before slink past us, catching his eye. He tries his best to stay focused, buckles, then turns back to face Ella.

  “I’m so pleased you’re thinking of joining us,” he says, his voice slow and soft. The depths of his eyes like pits of rich fountain ink. “You’ll fit in nicely. Won’t she, Cassie?”

  Cassie nods.

  Urgh, say the Flock.

  Ella aims her body at him, dropping her hands between her thighs, energized, it seems, by his attention. Growing fat with his praise. For a moment I picture the girls I knew living on the west block of my neighborhood. A flicker of hope that one of the older boys—or their fathers—might notice them. Someone to set them free from a life of never feeling good enough. Rarely touched or held.

  Cassie looks at Ella like a prize cow. A sly diamond winking on her right hand as she reaches for a handful of nuts in a bowl on the bar. She throws the nuts at the back of her throat, then leans in, her jade bangle clacking against the bar’s polished chrome. Arm flab swinging like the underbelly of a spayed cat.

  “We pay two-fifty a night,” Cassie says, “then there’s tips.”

  “How much?” Ella asks.

  “That depends.”

  “On?”

  “How much they like you,” Navid offers. “How much you smile.”

  Ella smiles. “Great!” She shines, and all three of them laugh.

  An outsider, I catch Shaun from the corner of my eye, now standing behind the bar.

  “Back in a minute,” I say.

  “Sure,” Navid says, “no rush.”

  Of course there’s no rush, I say in my head. It’s not me you’re interested in.

  Shaun spots me draw nearer.

  “Hey,” he says, winking.

  “Hey.” I smile back.

  His arms bulge at the hem of his white short-sleeved shirt, and I note the creep of several tattoos. On his right arm: the tail of a mermaid; on the left: the heel of a monster. Monsters and mermaids.

  I wonder which he prefers, Oneiroi says. Mermaids: no fear of depth, yet a fear of shallow living? Or monsters: not under your bed but inside your head?

  Shh, I say.

  I watch him shake a cocktail, arms flexing. The mermaid’s tail stretching while he adds a tiny violet hibiscus to the salted rim of a glass. He slides the peach-colored cocktail over to a girl with a stink face who breaks out in a smile, revealing crooked teeth before lowering pretty eyes.

  He leans over the bar and kisses me on the mouth.

  Stink Face takes her drink and hurries along.

  “Still on for tonight?” he asks.

  “Sure,” I say, thumbing Ella’s meet-and-greet situation with Navid and Cassie behind me, “I’m just—”

  “It’s fine, go. Find me out back in half an hour.”

  I know I shouldn’t, but I grab his neck and kiss him again, hoping people are watching. This time a tongue. A possessive act to mark down that he’s my date—tonight.

  Runner covers her eyes. Eew, she says, squirming.

  “Another drink?” Navid asks as I rejoin them, Cassie now talking to the hostess with the fake chest at the end of the bar.

  “No thanks,” I reply, noting the hostess fidget nervously with the hem of her short black skirt. Close to tears, she turns and points at a group of men in the far corner beneath large deco mirrors. Uplighters on either side shine down on their clammy cheeks.

  “It’s such a great location. How long have you been here?” Ella says, turning amorous, noting Navid’s distraction.

  “Will you excuse me?” He smiles, Cassie’s voice now raised. He brushes his hand across Ella’s knee.

  Ella smiles. Flashes her teeth. Her cheeks now the color of ripe fruit, her body vibrating with pleasure.

  Navid walks over to Cassie and the hostess and slams his hand on the bar. Both are silenced, their faces suddenly hushed into stillness. He leans in, taking each of their shoulders, then sends the hostess back to the group of men.

  Nice, real nice, Runner says.

  I watch Cassie finger her stiff black hair, a skunk stripe of alabaster chasing the contours of her skull. She nods, full of compliance. Navid then catches her unease and places a comradely hand on her arm and leaves, heading toward our two band members, with whose tanned flesh it seems he is well acquainted. They delight like idiots, broken in like shoes from his attention. The promise of something they probably don’t get at home. He looks at the girls in turn, as though waiting for a kiss. When neither girl responds, he slips them something under their table, sliding his hand up their thighs.

  I turn to Ella.

  “I have to go now,” I say.

  “Okay, I’ll call you tomorrow.” She smiles. “Have fun with Shaun.”

  “So, you gonna take the job?” I ask.

  “Why not?” she says, composed and breezy—drunk on the bait of Navid’s touch and flattery. “He said I can start tomorrow night.”

  I walk toward Navid and the girls with a sense of disappointment, unlike Ella. Her decision to join the Electra now weighing heavily on my mind. That she’s been fed like some starved kitten by a man capable of hurt and manipulation seems not to dwell on her mind in the slightest. But for me, her choice stinks. For me, it’s the beginning of something wrong.

  Runner takes the Light and taps me on the shoulder.

  “You’d better watch him,” she whispers. “He’s cunt drunk.” A discreet fore-and-middle-finger V directed at my eyes and back out at Navid. Her gaze boring into the back of his head. As she returns to the Body I notice her fingers pointing, like a gun. She blows on them, a cool shot released.

  7

  Daniel Rosenstein

  “So, you see my dilemma?” she says.

  “I do.”

  “First the jacket. Now the club.”

  A pause.

  She taps the tip of her knee several times. The act, I suppose, regulating her anxiety.

  “You’re concerned,” I say, “understandably.”

  Arms raised now, she removes her sweater. Tosses it in her leather purse. Underneath: a thin tank top, the simple shape of a bra. The curves of her breasts rising and falling as she catches her breath.

  She sits erect now, coral mouth lightly parted, legs crossed. Both arms resting on the chair.

  “Yeah, I’m concerned,” she says. “There’s a zillion other places she could work. And she wants me to go back there again with her tonight.”

  “I see. Speaking of work?”

  She looks to me, her face suddenly softening. Seemingly pleased I’ve remembered.

  “Well?” I ask.

  She suddenly sits up straight, waits, grins. She is toying with me.

  “I got it!” she sings. “Jack called and offered me the job. Said he loved my portfolio, and thought I did well in the interview. He thinks we’ll make a great team.”

>   “Congratulations, that’s great.” I smile.

  “Thank you. I start next week.”

  “So, new job and fun date.”

  From lowered eyes she gazes up at me. Coy.

  A pause.

  “Me, a photojournalist. Who’d have thought?” She smiles.

  I smile back.

  “I’m so excited,” she adds, leaning forward. “I’ve followed Jack’s work for such a long time. I can’t wait to assist him, you know; make a difference, help communities connect with each other. Use my photography to tell news stories that are important.”

  I nod, encouraging her.

  “There’s something about informing people. Making them aware. Mastering a scene. Arming yourself with a camera and putting yourself at a safe enough distance to understand a situation.”

  “This distance, it means something to you?” I ask.

  “I guess so. When you place a camera between yourself and whatever you’re shooting there’s a certain autonomy. It can feel intimate without the fear that someone or something could engulf you.”

  “Interesting word, ‘engulf,’” I say.

  She clears her throat and throws her hands in the air. A spontaneous act.

  “I guess,” she offers.

  I wait. Taking in her animation and zeal. Her eyes widening with optimism, the truth of what she speaks all at once infectious.

  “And your date?” I finally ask, mindful to pace the session. Our work a marathon, not a sprint.

  “It was a lot of fun.” She smiles again, seemingly lost in the weekend’s events: The slow walk to Smoking Goat, where she and Shaun had eaten wild yam mussels and velvet crab washed down with delicious red wine; how he’d noticed her shyness, setting her at ease with a smile; much talking; then the cab ride home; the beginnings of kisses; the morning after, when he made her pancakes swimming in butter and syrup—her favorite, apparently.

  Interestingly, she skipped the part where they practiced fevered sex, but I filled in the gaps. Briefly allowed myself the youthful fantasy of their two bodies, budding and wild.

  Alexa gazes at the lithograph of the woman with a long neck propped against the window and stretches her own. Her eyes eventually settling on the oil painting above my head: “One of your other patients?” She points.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Do you like it?” she asks. “Or did you hang it because you had no choice? After all, you don’t have to look at it.”

  I move forward in my chair, turn and face the painting. My eyes alert to the edge of the cliffs.

  “I like it,” I say. “You?”

  She makes a face. “Hm, not sure,” she says.

  “About?”

  “It looks kinda cold. Unnerving.”

  I gesture with my hand for her to say more.

  “Makes me think of all the ways I could die up there,” she continues, crossing her arms.

  I lean back.

  “Such as?”

  “Such as jumping off the cliff. My neck twisting as it hits the sea. I’d float around. Like a discarded piece of rubbish that some sandcastle kid failed to throw away. I’d drift off slowly. Head crashing against the jagged chalk before—”

  She pauses.

  “—before some poor dog walker eventually finds me. Screams when she sees me floating facedown. Hair matted with blood. She’d call emergency services. A stretcher arriving to carry me away.”

  She clears her throat.

  “Then there’s the boat,” she continues. “I imagine myself stranded. Unable to swim. In time I’d die of dehydration, the circling gulls pecking at my eyes. A slow and painful death. Or maybe old and alone in the lighthouse, just like Virginia Woolf’s. Nothing but my thoughts to drive me to despair. My hair eventually turning white with madness.”

  “There’s that word again,” I say, “‘madness.’”

  She looks down.

  Slides one foot inward.

  “There’s a bridge,” she says, “by Archway. Near where I live.”

  I nod, knowing of Jumpers Bridge. Of the many suicides committed late at night.

  “I go there sometimes,” she says, “when I feel sad. I stare down at the traffic.”

  “You think about jumping?”

  “Sometimes . . .”

  Her sentence trails off.

  I wait.

  “I try to imagine what my mother was thinking before she jumped in front of the train.”

  I nod.

  She reaches inside her leather purse, recovers her Zippo, a pack of Lucky Strikes. Looks at them, bemused.

  “No smoking, I’m afraid.”

  She throws me a black look, hurls the flimsy cigarette pack back in her purse.

  “What do you imagine?” I ask.

  “How desperately lonely she must have felt. How I’d like to stab my father in the throat.”

  I uncross my legs, fixing both feet firmly on the ground.

  “Your rage,” I say. “Your notes indicated there was violence at home. That your father was incredibly controlling and unpredictable. Tyrannical.”

  She nods.

  “He was. Toward both of us,” she says, “me and my mother, then later—Anna.”

  With damp eyes, she looks away.

  “Can you say a little more about your mother?” I ask.

  “I’m angry she killed herself and left me with him. With his violence. Then there’s part of me that thinks it was my fault.”

  “You were a child,” I say gently. “You had no such power.”

  “Power? Pfft.” She rolls her eyes. “Neither of us had any power. He. He had all the power.”

  “Sometimes we direct hurt toward ourselves when we feel powerless,” I say. “Believing it was your fault might suggest your not wanting to face the truth of your mother’s misery. How desperate she was.”

  She takes a tissue. Her hand wiping gently beneath her eyes.

  A pause.

  “Sometimes I hurt myself,” she says.

  I lean forward.

  She leans back.

  “I cut. It helps.”

  “How often?” I ask.

  She shrugs, reaches for a glass of water. Takes a sip.

  I watch her set the glass down, making a mental note that trust is emerging. During our first session she was unable to take a drink of water. Was too self-conscious. But maybe someone else is here today?

  She clears her throat.

  “How often?” I repeat.

  “When things—you know—get too much.”

  “Where?”

  “The backs of my legs. And my thighs.”

  She makes an effort to touch behind her left knee. Soft and arched. A moment when mind and body synchronize. The Body holding the score and remembering previous harm.

  “We need to look at alternative ways to self-soothe,” I say, “direct the anger out. Not in.”

  Both feet shaking just a little, she looks down, faltering.

  “Sure,” she says, defeated, “whatever you say. Just tell me what to do.”

  My ears linger over her words. The power she gives me. My countertransference indicating she grants power and control too easily. Is this exclusive to men, I wonder, or does she do it to women too? Do her different personalities take on diverse views of power? I shiver, the stark realization that Alexa can morph and switch and shape-shift to be someone completely different from who I think she is, and I wonder which persona is now in control.

  She straightens up, brushes the palms of her hands along the thighs of her jeans.

  “I should have stopped Ella from stealing the jacket,” she says.

  I note the diversion. The switch of events. Alexa now revisiting an earlier part of the session.

  “The tyranny of ‘shoulds’ and ‘musts,’” I say.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Tyrannous scoldings are not helpful. It’s more effective to reflect on the decision you made at the time. Then we have more hope of learning from it.”

>   “Right, well next time I’ll intervene. It was wrong. I was negligent.”

  “You want to punish yourself?” I say.

  “Probably.”

  Silence.

  “It’s possible part of you believes you deserve to be punished,” I say. “Is there a voice that tells you to harm yourself? Slice the backs of your legs?”

  She looks up again at the oil painting and nods. A glaze of wet building in the corners of her eyes.

  “But I imagine there is another voice telling you not to,” I say, “its polar opposite.”

  Still staring at the painting, her eyes narrow. “I have another voice that wants me to kill myself. Should I listen to that one too?” she snaps, her gaze now turned cold.

  “It’s important to listen to all of the Voices,” I say. “It doesn’t mean you have to act on what they say. But pushing them aside only makes them stronger.”

  I watch her throat swallow.

  “When you’re ready,” I say cautiously, “you could try introducing me to everyone inside.”

  She reaches into her purse again.

  “I’m scared,” she says, smoothing on lip balm.

  I lean forward a little farther.

  “Listening to everyone means acceptance of your whole self, Alexa. Not just cherry-picking the good parts accepted by others.”

  “I’ve always self-harmed,” she says. “If I stop, I don’t know where the anger will go. Who I might hurt. I might lose control.”

  “Control is action. And one you can change over time. Fear prevents you from accepting your feelings. But no feeling is final. They don’t have to destroy you.”

  “But they’re risky.”

  “True. But there’s little progress without risk,” I say.

  She lowers her gaze.

  “Can I trust you?” she says.

  Sinking into my chair, I realize she’s conflicted and unsure whether to commit. But I want to see how eager she is to seek and be frank—take a risk—and not overfeed her with interpretations and answers.

  Her gaze returns to me slowly.

  I sit up straighter and smile. “Tell me about the Voices.”

  She pauses, a striking expression of unknown freedom on her face. Fear and relief all at once. I watch the rise and fall of her breath. A zing of anticipation in my own chest.

  “Yesterday,” she begins slowly, her voice shaking at the edge, “we were all cleaning my bedroom. Only Dolly, the youngest, showed any kind of enthusiasm. The rest just mooned about, kicking their heels and complaining about wanting to be someplace else. Oneiroi fancied yoga and Runner had ideas about some kickboxing class. And the Fouls, well, they just stayed inside. They want no part in anything we do these days. None of them seem to realize how exhausted I am.”