Death in The Life

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  Even. “There’s a lot of them around,” Julie said of the knife.

  “It means something to me, just having it.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Really?”

  “Going on. I’ve been away from home over a year.”

  “They could pick you up for truancy,” Julie said, trying to find some way to an up in the conversation. There wasn’t any. “Where’s home?”

  The girl’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “No you don’t,” she said.

  “I don’t even know your name, for God’s sake.”

  “Rita. Rita Morgan.”

  “All right,” Julie said. It wasn’t going to be her real name anyway. And who cared? “Why don’t you just go home wherever it is?”

  “I keep trying but I can’t. I’m afraid to for a lot of reasons. What if I slipped?”

  “Are you into drugs?”

  “Not heavy. Pot sometimes. I get even more depressed.” She was right. She didn’t talk like the street. Not that Julie considered herself an expert. Nevertheless.

  “How come you left in the first place?”

  “Lots of reasons. Most of them my father. And I couldn’t stand to see my mother crying all the time. When I went along with a girl friend that first time, I thought of Dad. There wasn’t a girl he could keep his hands off. I think myself he should have been castrated.”

  “Before or after you?”

  “Before. I didn’t ask to be born. Not of him. Sometimes I’ll see a John on the street and think, Oh my God, it’s him. It isn’t ever, but…” She shuddered.

  “Look, Rita, I don’t mind your telling me these things if you want to, but just don’t think you’re going to get much advice from me, and I’m not going to be taking your money for it, I’ll tell you that. I don’t take myself that seriously. I mean if a person needs a doctor, I’m going to tell them. I’m not going to say I’m the doctor.”

  The way the girl’s face screwed up, Julie thought she was going to attack her. Then the tears came and she pounded her little fists on the table. “I want help. I want to get out of ‘The Life.’ I wish I’d never got into it.”

  The tears were real and when Rita looked for Kleenex in her purse, Julie remembered the box beside Doctor’s couch. It was not an office supply she had expected to need herself.

  “Go ahead and talk if you want to.”

  “What I’m most afraid of is being blackmailed. I’d rather die than have my mother and kid brother find out.”

  She’d rather die than a lot of things. If she’d rather die.

  “Who’s going to blackmail you?”

  “My pimp or somebody. He’s a real blackmailer.”

  Julie flinched inside. Just like that, my pimp… my business manager, my agent. “Goldie?”

  “Not Goldie. Goldie’d like to cop me if he could.”

  “Me too,” Julie said.

  Rita smiled. She could smile, and it was as though she had put on a whole new face, a Gioconda smile—something wispish, enigmatic—Oh God, there it was: something innocent. At the back of Julie’s mind from the beginning was the question of how she had made it, a melancholic among the happy hookers. It stood to reason they had to pretend to be happy anyway.

  “If I was going to have to stay, I might go to Goldie. I don’t think I could fall in love with a black man. I just don’t think so.”

  “And you don’t want to?”

  “No, ma’am, not with any man, black or white.”

  You’re not telling it as it is, kiddo. What you really want is some nice young Bible freak from Iowa to take you in his arms and say, I wouldn’t ever do a thing like that to you.

  “Rita, what made you come in here? To me of all the people in New York?”

  “I’m supposed to be on the street, hustling. In front of Bourke’s Electrical Shop. Sometimes when the cops start busting everybody I go in there in back.”

  “So Mr. Bourke sent you.”

  “Not exactly. He said you were decent.”

  “He ought to know,” Julie said. “There’s a lot of decent people and some of them know a hell of a lot more than I do.”

  “I don’t know who they are. Everybody I know outside would say dirty, dirty girl. Or else go to the cops.”

  “You know the wrong people.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “What are you going to do when you go home?”

  “Go back to school maybe. If I could just make it to college I keep feeling I’d be all right.”

  “You’d be fine.”

  “No I wouldn’t. There’d always be a trick. I’d be standing on a corner maybe waiting for a light to change, and there he’d be—‘Can I buy you a drink?’”

  “You can say no, for God’s sake.”

  “No isn’t enough! I mean once he’s said that to me, there’s no other way.”

  “I guess I’m missing the connection,” Julie said.

  “That’s because you’re straight. I don’t understand it myself, but that’s the way it is.”

  “The only way to say no is to say yes? Oh, man, I don’t dig it.”

  The girl nodded. A look of deep despair. She picked up her purse from where she had put it on the floor. “Thanks, anyway.” She opened the purse.

  “I don’t want your money.”

  “It’s dirty.”

  “No goddamn it. I don’t know clean money from dirty. That’s not what I mean either. There’s all kinds of whores in the world, not just sex whores.”

  “Maybe you think prostitution is a good thing?” she said sweetly.

  That was one way of fighting back. “I think it’s a lousy thing to do to sex, to put a price tag on it. But people do, straight, gay, or in ‘The Life’ as you call it. I guess what I’m trying to say is I don’t know a damn thing about it.”

  The smile. Then she reached over and touched the ring on Julie’s finger. “But you’re married.”

  “Yeah. Maybe that’s what I mean.”

  Julie could think of nothing to do but to go to the door with her. She was angry and frustrated. If there was one thing she wanted more than anything else, it was to know, just to know. “Why were you scared of coming in here?”

  “I told you, I’m supposed to be on the street. I didn’t want my pimp to see me. I didn’t want him beating up on me in here.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I can’t stand it in front of anybody.”

  “Look. If you want to come back sometime and talk, just talk, it’s fine. Maybe I can find a way to help you. Who knows? There ought to be some way for somebody.”

  “There ought to be,” the girl repeated. She darted out the door. Once on the street she slowed down.

  Julie went outdoors and looked after her. As she neared Eighth Avenue her walk changed: a kind of sashay with the heels taking more weight than usual. Julie tried to imitate it: it brought her bust into sight. There would be a real message in Rita’s. As the girl neared the corner she took off her green jacket and slung it over one shoulder. Julie got the feeling of having been put on. To hell with her. About to go indoors again, she took one last glance—in time to see the girl fling her jacket in the face of a man. She ran immediately out of Julie’s sight; the man plucked the jacket off him and took it to the nearest trash basket. Julie thought of trying to retrieve it for her, but before she had gone a half-dozen steps an old woman scavenger had snatched it and buried it deep in her shopping bag.

  Julie went back for a dime, locked up the shop, and went to the nearest public telephone. On the stroke of the hour she called Doctor Callahan to reach her between patients.

  8

  “IT IS RIDICULOUS AND inappropriate that I should see her,” Doctor said.

  Julie, sitting in the chair opposite Doctor Callahan, kept imagining there was someone lying on the couch. “I’ll bet she’d say the same thing. Aren’t you even curious, Doctor? I mean, how many therapists get a chance to get an inside picture of The Lif
e?”

  That little movement around Doctor’s mouth. God forbid, a smile.

  “Why do you keep looking at the couch?”

  “I keep feeling it’s occupied.”

  “Why don’t we use it?”

  “Because I don’t want to be at a disadvantage.”

  “Have you always felt that way?”

  “No. But you said I had to do something for myself, and when I just lie there and make pictures, it’s not like that.”

  “Do you make pictures? Or do they come up?”

  “Well, Doctor, I don’t exactly develop them on the premises…”

  Doctor cut in, a touch of impatience. “What about this shop you’ve opened? Where is it?”

  “Forty-fourth Street.”

  “What do you sell?”

  Oh, boy. “I’d better try and tell it the way it happened, Doctor. It was a kind of stream of consciousness.”

  Doctor Callahan covered her eyes to rest them while she listened. Now and then she massaged her forehead, particularly the cleft between her brows, and every once in a while she shot Julie a dark, incredulous look. When she finished, Doctor said, “Why do you want to tell me about it at all? You can answer that to yourself. I don’t require it of you. I suppose it has occurred to you that you might get into serious trouble? That it might even be dangerous? Whores and pimps. What are you trying to do?”

  “Get even.”

  “With me. Why? Because I want you to grow up?”

  “Because you want me to grow up straight. Square.”

  “I want you to grow up. Nothing more.”

  “But there is a lot more, Doctor. I just can’t find it, but I know it’s there.”

  “The only possible advice I can give you, that any doctor could give you, is to close that… bizarre… that obscenity and do something useful. You infuriate me.”

  “That means you care.”

  “Of course I care! What do you thing I am, a robot? I care about all my patients.”

  “I know you won’t agree with me, but in a crazy way, I feel I am doing something useful.”

  “Explain it to me.”

  “I don’t think I can, Doctor. It has to do with hope.”

  “Hope.”

  “Yeah. This girl is sixteen years old and she doesn’t have any hope. She hates herself because she’s her father’s child, don’t you see?”

  “I don’t see.”

  “Well, I do. I mean I feel that I do… there’s something.”

  “Is that how you feel about yourself? Are you blaming your father?”

  “For what?”

  “What do you think?”

  “For abandoning me? Maybe. I do wish I’d known him. He was very handsome. And I identify with the Irish because of him. Mr. Ryan and Pete Mallory. I guess Pete’s Irish somewhere. He studied to be a priest. I do like Pete…”

  “Like?”

  “I’m not in love with him if that’s what you mean. But I’m not in love with anybody. I wish I were. Or maybe I’m in love with everybody. Hey!”

  “How about this Goldie?”

  “No. He’s something else. Doctor, suppose somebody called you and said, I need help. My name is Rita Morgan. Could I come and see you? What would you say?”

  “I would ask who referred her to me.”

  “And she says Julie Hayes.”

  “I suppose I would give her the first opening in my book for a consultation. Then I would be likely to suggest a doctor I thought might be able to help her.”

  “Even if she said she was a prostitute?”

  “This is quite ridiculous.”

  “I know, but it’s real. If she commits suicide, how would you feel?”

  “I would certainly not feel responsible. That is a sentimental luxury I cannot afford. I can only concern myself with my patients.”

  “But you work in a clinic.”

  “Also with patients. I see as many as I can. There are hundreds whom I cannot see. Furthermore, my seeing a patient—as you certainly ought to know—doesn’t necessarily mean I can help them.”

  “They have to want to help themselves.”

  “There’s a great deal more to it than that. But yes, that is the first thing.”

  “She does want to help herself.”

  “Then she has hope. She can take the next step and go to any psychiatric institution—Bellevue, for example—and get help. There are places for women in her situation.”

  “I guess. But it’s an awful big step for as little hope as she’s got left.”

  “Are you going to try to play therapist?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve got an ear if that’s any help to her.”

  “And if this procurer of hers decides to beat up both of you?”

  “I don’t know. I just don’t feel a human being can say no to another human being who asks them for help.”

  Doctor sighed heavily. “Give her my phone number.”

  Something began to nag at Julie on her way downtown: Had she made this enormous effort for the sake of a child-whore named Rita, or had she done it to involve Doctor Callahan? It was not until after she left the doctor’s office that she remembered the doubts she had had while the girl was at the table with her. No, she decided, it was primarily for Rita’s sake that she had gone to see the doctor; it was seeing that gesture of defiance, the flinging of the jacket, that brought her down firmly on Rita’s side. Besides, if Rita was a phony, it wouldn’t take Doctor Callahan ten minutes to find it out. It did not occur to Julie until then that Rita might put up an even stronger protest to the consultation than Doctor had.

  That afternoon Rita passed the shop arm in arm with a John, a middle-aged man wearing a Texas hat, passed right by the window, smiling up into his face. To hell with her.

  But less than an hour later, the girl came into the shop.

  “Hi,” Julie said without enthusiasm.

  “Did you see me go by?”

  “With the cowboy, yeah.”

  “Do you still want to help me?”

  “What did you have to bring him this way for?”

  “So you’d see.” She was wearing the green slacks and a gold sweater. No bra.

  “I didn’t need the demonstration.”

  “He wants me again tonight.”

  “Congratulations.”

  “He thinks he’s in love with me.”

  “After forty-five minutes?”

  “I saw him yesterday. I’ll bet I could even get him to marry me.”

  “Okay.”

  “If I ever marry anybody it isn’t going to be a trick.”

  “Besides, he probably has a wife and ten kids back in Abilene,” Julie said.

  “Laramie. He’s here with the rodeo. He invited me to see the show tonight. If I thought he’d get trampled on I’d go.”

  “Great.”

  Rita walked boldly into the back room and threw herself down in the chair. She didn’t wait for Julie to invite her. Nor did she seem to care whether or not she had been seen coming into the shop this time.

  “Do you really mean that?” Julie stood in the doorway and looked down at her.

  “I don’t know. I’m telling you the God’s truth, ma’am, I don’t know. But I feel better when I say it.”

  “Have you got enough money to go home, Rita?”

  “I’ve got some. I mean if I was going home, I’d want to buy presents for everyone, my grandmother, my mother, my kid brother.” For a few seconds she seemed to be seeing herself on the way. “Sometimes I go to F.A.O. Schwarz and pretend I’m picking out a present for my brother. He’s got a birthday coming up.”

  “All you’ve got to do is get there. Don’t you see? They’ll come running to meet you.”

  Rita shook her head, her eyes going dead.

  “Why not?”

  She was a long time letting go of the explanation. “What you said. They’d be so glad to see me.”

  “That’s what you’re really afraid of, isn’t it? Not the blackmai
l or anything like that”

  “Maybe.”

  “You think of yourself as a snail leaving a trail of muck.”

  “That’s me.”

  Julie sat down at her usual place at the low table. “Did you ever think of going to a psychiatrist for help?”

  “No, ma’am.” Emphatically.

  “Why not? If you cut your hand… suppose you were running down the street and fell, cut yourself, and got all kinds of crap in the wound. Wouldn’t you go to a doctor and have him clean it out?”

  “Maybe.”

  “What do you mean, maybe?”

  “I’d go home first and try to take care of it myself.”

  “And if it got infected?”

  “I do go to a doctor now. Mack insists on it. He pays the doctor for all of us.”

  Mack, Mac?

  “All right. I’ve got a doctor I go to, a psychoanalyst. She’s great. You wouldn’t believe the things I tell her about what goes on in my head. Wild. I’ll bet there’s nothing you’ve ever experienced in The Life that hasn’t gone through my mind. I mean I’m a walking porn shop, if you want to look at it that way.”

  The youngster looked at her, not believing. “Sex stuff?”

  “You bet. I got an imagination that runs to gang rape sometimes. Sometimes I even think of God as one great big penis.”

  Rita’s eyes had become little dark buttons. “You’re saying those things because I’m a whore.”

  “You’d be surprised who I’d say them to if I thought it would mean something.” The fact was she had not said them to Doctor. The fact was she had read the gang rape fantasy somewhere and the God part had just come into her head while she was talking. “I kind of like the idea that I’ve shocked you, if you want to know the truth. Sometimes I used to try to shock Doctor Callahan. But she caught on and she’s shockproof anyway. The way I see your situation, little girl, little shocked girl… oh, my God… you are in a bind, but the bind is in your head, don’t you see? Somebody who knows how to think straight and knows more about the human psyche than I do could straighten you out in a jiffy. Just by putting things, one by one, in the right place. What bugged you just now: that I said those things because you’re a whore? Or was it because I said them?”

  “It was that, I guess. I didn’t think you’d say anything like that.”