Brothel

by J. Boyett

  Meanwhile, Joyce suffered her own petty humiliations. First, a guy who kept slapping her on the hips and buttocks, muttering “Come on, bitch, come on,” in some tedious Dirk Diggler fantasy; Joyce counted her teeth with the tip of her tongue, waiting for Superfly to hurry and splooge. He might just as well have gone out to a field and found a nice fat cow. Somewhat creepier was this frat guy, Atchley. Joyce already disliked frat guys, especially in the boudoir. Even so, it was difficult to put her finger on exactly why Atchley immediately scared her so much. Something about the jokes he told. Plus he wore a Sig Tau shirt; those guys had almost gotten their charter revoked, because a gang of them had broken into the house of a rival frat and beaten its members with flashlights. In the room, taking off their clothes, Joyce felt convinced that there was something off-kilter about the guy. Once naked, Atchley had trouble getting it up. He accepted some help from Joyce, but mostly insisted on working it out himself. All the while a big grin was smeared across his face. The grin frightened her: he was unashamed of his impotence because nobody was there, really, to see his performance. Joyce didn’t count.… That was the vibe she got, anyway. The fucking itself was fine. She just couldn’t relax during it, was all. Afterward he yuk-yukked and asked Ken if he could get a discount because she’d had a huge nasty fucking pimple on her butt, and once the door was shut behind him, she hissed at Ken never to invite him again.

  Sherry’s week went better, but she was still put out because two of her johns asked her to stop talking while she fucked them. One asked her politely, but the other just told her to shut up. Not only that, but a couple of johns heaved big sighs right in the middle of her stories, after they’d been riding her for ten minutes or so.

  But unbeknownst to the rest of the gang, Sherry had a consolation prize: Bryce. He had taken her out twice so far, once to dinner and a movie, once just to dinner. He was a perfect gentleman, never getting fresh, only giving her a peck on the cheek when he dropped her off at the dorm—God, she was fresher than he was! He said that for their next time he wanted everything to be perfect. He said that having been so ignoble as to pay for sex would have been the worst mistake of his life, if he hadn’t been so lucky as to have chanced upon her. Bryce said a lot of sweet things, and at restaurants he pulled her chair out for her. He did look like a total dork, but even that was sort of charming (not that Sherry thought with words like “charming.” She thought he was “cute”).

  They still had classes and stuff, and Joyce remembered that she had an exam coming up in Dr. Morgenthau’s World Lit class. She’d done crappily in the class to date, and hadn’t read any of Candide, or the book before that, whatever it had been. Some poetry thing. So she decided to pay a visit to the prof, because his exams always included exhaustive essay questions (a thousand words or less), and nothing could convince Joyce that the grading of these essays was not an entirely and scandalously subjective process. Therefore, she figured that a personal show of interest, a reinforcement of the face which matched the name, might be enough to push Dr. Morgenthau’s evaluation of her essay into a friendlier spot on the critical spectrum. She’d perused a classmate’s notes just enough to manage an intelligible question about Candide, and now she walked down the carpeted blue-and-gray hall of the English building to Morgenthau’s office. She rapped on the doorframe, a grin already fixed on her face, and, as there were no other students present and the professor was there reading a book at his desk, she stepped inside, automatically pulling the door closed behind her.

  Dr. Morgenthau glanced up and greeted her with a vague smile. Then, once he’d placed her, his expression darkened. “Would you mind leaving the door open, please?”

  Joyce hesitated. Lots of the male professors left their office doors wide open when they had female students inside, and there were rumors of professors recording all their meetings, in case of any accusations. Had Joyce been thinking, she wouldn’t have closed the door. Even so, it was odd that Dr. Morgenthau should worry about such things. He had no wedding ring, in every work they read he managed to find a gay character, and it was widely assumed that he was a homosexual himself. If Joyce were to tell any of her classmates that Dr. Morgenthau had hit on her, she’d be laughed at. But she supposed the university lawyers wouldn’t laugh; nor would her mom and step-father consider the news that one of her profs was gay much of a comfort. Fair enough. “Sorry,” she said as she opened the door, trying to give her most professionally innocent smile. Then, with just a hint that Dr. Morgenthau had overreacted: “Guess I wasn’t thinking.”

  Dr. Morgenthau leaned back and steepled his fingers. “That’s fine,” he said. “Joyce, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said, pleased that he’d remembered her name, considering she’d never raised her hand in class.

  “I thought so. What can I help you with?”

  “Uh . . . well . . . it’s just, I sort of had a question about the book, you know. You know, for the test.”

  “I know about the exam, yes. Which book? There’s been more than one, I’m sure you’re aware.”

  Joyce tried to laugh, and wound up yelping like the prof had pulled a gun on her. “Candide, sir.” Jesus, since when had she called the fucking professors “sir”? “I had a question about Candide.”

  “All right. Shoot.”

  “Well, uh, there’s that woman. You know? Cunegonde’s maid, I think. The one who gets half her butt eaten by the starving guys in the boat. You know?”

  “Yes. I know. I first read the book when I was twelve, and I’ve been teaching it now for fourteen years.”

  “Oh. I guess so, yeah. Well, I was just wondering. You know how, like, when we talked about that book in class, it was like all the different parts meant something? Like, they all had some special meaning. So I was wondering if all that stuff about her getting her butt eaten off was the same way. Like, when you read it, it’s so funny, you don’t think about anything else. It’s just . . . you know . . . funny. But it’s also pretty horrible, when you stop and think about it. I mean, it’s a pretty messed-up thing to do to somebody. So, I guess I was just wondering, since it’s like all funny and horrible all at the same time, if it had some special meaning, like the rest of the book. Or, uh . . . if it was just funny.” She shrugged to signal that she was done. Shit. Stupid lame bitch. She should have looked over those notes better.

  Dr. Morgenthau waited, as if not understanding that she’d finished. Then, seeming at a loss, he spread his hands and said, “If you’re looking for some specific metaphorical or allegorical meaning, that’s open to interpretation. I suppose that perhaps Voltaire is telling us something about the nature of humans, who will eat the living flesh of their fellow creature without compunction. On the other hand, yes, certainly it’s meant to be funny.”

  Joyce nodded, as if this were very profound and she had to give herself a moment to let it sink in. She tried to think of a graceful exit line. Dummy! Dr. Morgenthau would remember her, all right. “Okay,” she said, “thanks a lot, that really helps.”

  She spun around in retreat. But Dr. Morgenthau called her back. She jerked to a halt and half-turned to face him, one foot still edging toward the door: “Mm-hm?”

  He studied her, head tilted back and to one side. At last he said, “Do you know a guy who calls himself Ken?”

  And here she’d been priding herself on her recent strides towards unflappability. She’d held eye contact with Mal. She’d smiled and put a calm hand on her cool hip when Ken had done things that could have gotten the both of them seriously fucked up. Despite her middle-class background and total lack of addiction expenses or cash flow problems, she’d fucked many strangers for money. And all it took was her nice World Lit professor confronting her with Ken’s name to make her blush, fast, hard, and crimson. She tried to salvage the situation with a bright, friendly, probably maniacal grin, which Dr. Morgenthau was in no mood for:

  “Do you?” he repeated.

  Joyce nodded enthusiastically, as if they were making fun small tal
k. “Yeah, I know Ken.”

  “Are you aware that he came to see me earlier today?”

  “Nope, I didn’t know that.”

  “Would you care to venture a guess as to what he wanted to talk about?”

  She burst out laughing, and exclaimed, “Oh, I could guess, but no, I wouldn’t want to!”

  Dr. Morgenthau’s eyes narrowed. “What exactly does that mean?”

  Joyce let her laughter trickle away. Having started with her big super-watt smile, she felt stuck with it now. She shrugged. “Nothing. Except that Ken has a kind of oystery sense of humor.”

  “Oystery?” He sounded annoyed rather than curious.

  “It’s an acquired taste.”

  “Oh. Yes, I suppose so. He had some rather unsavory propositions.”

  She kept grinning, desperately willing Dr. Morgenthau to see it all as a big joke. “I can imagine. But he’s just a big kidder.”

  “All of these propositions involved you.”

  “Well, you know. We’re buddies. We kid each other a lot. He was probably just playing a practical joke on me and he took it too far, is all.”

  “This was the kind of kidding that could get him sued for slander. Assuming he’s lying.”

  “You know, I was just the other day watching a TV special on how America’s being crippled by needless litigation.”

  “His ‘practical joke’ wasn’t entirely limited to you. He saw fit to make me a part of it, too. I believe his guarantee was that you would—how did he put it—‘turn’ me. Or my money back.” Now would have been a good time to quit smiling. She didn’t, but on the inside her face fell. Earlier in the semester, some jock in the back row had demanded to know “how come all the books we got to read up in here are full of faggots?!” Dr. Morgenthau had continued with the lecture, but grimly ordered the jock to see him after class. Now Joyce felt like someone more qualified should be called in to give the professor a hug. For her part, she just kept grinning stupidly at him. Later she would realize that he must have thought she was laughing at the joke.

  Once it was clear that her expression wasn’t going to change, Dr. Morgenthau shook his head and returned to the papers on the desk. “I don’t appreciate being harassed on account of my sexuality. I said as much to your little friend, but I’d appreciate it if you could reinforce the message. . . . What’s more, I don’t enjoy having the details of my students’ unsavory pastimes graphically related to me during my work hours.” Shooting Joyce a look, he added, “Whether they’re true or not.” She kept on grinning like a wax woman. “Please tell ‘Ken’ that if there’s a repeat performance I won’t hesitate to lodge a complaint with the university authorities. I’ll feel no qualms about mentioning your name as well.”

  Joyce finally jettisoned her ridiculous grin. In what was meant to be a conciliatory tone, she said, “I’m sure Ken was only kidding, Dr. Morgenthau.”

  Her effort to make up didn’t put a dent in Dr. Morgenthau’s cold armor, not after he’d had to stare at that funhouse grin. No wonder—since junior high, how many hours had she spent staring into mirrors and practicing looking smug? Without looking up, Dr. Morgenthau said, “Yes. He didn’t seem to take much of anything seriously.” Joyce shrugged, offered a weak goodbye, shuffled out of his office, and hurried out of the building. Although she’d dropped the smile, the blush was harder to shake.

  But it was gone by the time she got to the brothel. For one thing, Joyce would never show Ken even a speck of squeamishness if she could help it. She was planning to confront him right away—although she would’ve been hard-pressed to say why, since she couldn’t confess to any anger, and had in fact almost convinced herself that she wasn’t even really mad about his little joke, although it was too bad Dr. Morgenthau had gotten miffed. But Sherry had arrived at the brothel first, and was in the middle of declaiming one of her never-ending anecdotes at Ken. She was standing in front of him, arms straight down at her sides, bent forward at the waist, head pushed out, blue eyes bulging out of her reddening face, her strident tones growing more and more insistent as the story progressed. Ken looked away, picking imaginary bits of something out of his hair and pretending to eat them, ignoring Sherry. When Joyce entered, Ken looked up at her with cartoonish relief, and, removing a thumbnail from between his teeth, stepped toward her with his arms out. “Thank God you’re here,” he exclaimed, “I have had no one to hang out with—”

  “Ken!” shouted Sherry. “I am talking to you! . . .” Luckily, Sherry’s john for the night was Bryce, and even luckier, he showed up early. Joyce yielded them the marijuana room over Ken’s protests, so that they wouldn’t have to worry about Joyce and her tardy john traipsing through. Ken turned to Joyce and, while Sherry and Bryce were still in the room, said, “Well, Joyce, you don’t have to pay the higher percentage.” But Sherry was so happy to see Bryce, and Bryce was so embarrassed to be in the living room of the brothel with everyone knowing what he was about to do, that no objection was raised.

  Once Ken had read the speech and the couple had left the room, he stared after them, shaking his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t like it when my girls get too attached to one client. Bad for business.”

  Joyce confronted him about the Morgenthau incident, which he readily took credit for. They had a good laugh over it. “Yeah,” said Ken, “he got pretty pissed when I brought up the whole gay thing. Go figure. I was like, dude, I don’t care if you fuck boys, I’m just saying, don’t you want to try fucking a girl?”

  “Reasonable.”

  “I thought so. And I pointed out that since I was offering him his own student, he already knew the goods were good. I was like, hey man, don’t be a fool. That Joyce is a fox!”

  “Much obliged. I wonder what he got all fussy about.”

  “Go figure. Some people, you know? Oh, and he got all touchy when I started in about where he was from, too.”

  “Where he’s from? He’s from Mabelvale, I think.”

  “Naw, naw. That name, I mean. Morgenthau. Sounds like he’s Jewish. Or German. Or German-Jewish. Or something.”

  “Ken, you make such poetry out of ignorance.”

  “Well, what else am I supposed to do with it?”

  Just then Joyce’s john showed up. Ken read the poor guy the spiked bat speech, even though it was like his fourth time to hear it. Then he waved at them as Joyce led the guy back to Ken’s bedroom to get fucked. They didn’t talk about the Morgenthau incident again.

  7.

  A boy who sat next to Joyce in World History told her about a party that was being thrown by a friend of a friend of a friend of his. He drew her a map; the house was comfortably outside the town limits. There would be assloads of alcohol, he assured her, though it was always a good idea to bring your own, as there were bound to be still greater assloads of people. This boy seemed to have no idea that Joyce was a whore. Joyce told Mal, Sherry, and Ken, none of whom had anything better to do on Saturday night. (Sherry made a sassy joke about how it wasn’t like they had to get up for church on Sunday morning, and Joyce and Mal smiled politely.) Somewhere along the way, the three whores and their pimp had become each other’s primary social group.

  Ken had the richest parents and the biggest car, so he drove. They parked near the house on a swampy patch of ground, with other jumbled cars of every age and description: classic muscle cars, a Lexus, beat-up pick-ups, shiny girlish pick-ups, a Chevette that would still chug along in earnest frailty, secondhand Hondas, a VW van with dolphins grotesquely airbrushed onto its sides. The place was pandemonium, with music thumping through the night air to scare the crickets, people shouting and shrieking, and the light of a bonfire on the other side of the house haloing it and diffusing out from its edges. Most of the guests were college-aged, but a few stretched out into middle age, and, after a bit of detective work, they found that their host was, in fact, a hostess—a fifteen-year-old sophomore at Conway High who was dating a junior at CAU, and whose parents were out of town for the wee
kend. Joyce went on reconnaissance and, after asking around, reported back to the other three that their benefactress was buck-naked and drunk in the bathroom upstairs, lying in the tub and squealing with delight as her boyfriend and his buddies dumped cooler after cooler of ice into the water to see how much she could take. Apparently the chick was planning on having all the mess cleaned up by the time her parents got back tomorrow night. They had a big laugh at the nasty surprise that would welcome her when she came to.

  The girls naturally had no problems getting drinks, and Ken was able to smooth-talk his way into bumming one apiece from each girl’s supplier. They did have a cooler stuffed with beer in Ken’s car, but no one felt like fetching it—they’d have to contend with parasites bumming off of them, and the heavy cooler would require constant guarding. They parted ways for a bit. Ken wandered off to try to get laid, Melissa not being quite trained up yet (although he’d assured Joyce that she was getting there, moving around more and all that), and Sherry, with vague, inexplicable haughtiness, informed the girls that she was going to go mingle. Joyce and Mal stayed together by default. Mal asked Joyce what she’d been doing with the extra money the brothel brought in. Joyce shrugged. “Oh, you know. I’m not really in it for the money.”

  “You been putting it in the bank?”

  “No, I guess it’s still lying around the room.”

  “Like in a shoebox, under the mattress? Or maybe that’s not the sort of thing you should tell your roommate.”

  “Jesus, like I give a shit. It’s not in any hiding place. It’s just kind of spread out through the room.”

  “Are you sure? I haven’t seen a bunch of cash lying around. I’d notice if there was like a thousand dollars on the floor.”