The Dark End of the Street: New Stories of Sex and Crime by Today's Top Authors

by Jonathan Santlofer

  Marina stepped back in and placed the scissors to one side. She lay a gentle fingertip at the bottom edge of the perfectly squared sideburns she’d created, testing their rightness as a carpenter tests a shelf with a level. “Are you happy with the length? Her name was Jessica Droory.”

  Was she testing me? “Yes, the length is perfect as usual, Marina, thank you. Could you do something about—?” I waved vaguely around my ears and nose, knowing she’d understand, but also that she’d wait until I asked, never presume. I’ve long since shed any embarrassment at requesting the pruning of my nostrils or ear canals. In fact I look forward to this moment, another sensual treat, for me if not for Marina. Though, who knows?

  “You might remember her,” said Marina lightly, or with a semblance of lightness. Was it my imagination that the others had halted their activities to listen? Well, it was a quiet day, and I was undoubtedly interesting to them, nourishment for the starved.

  “Yes?”

  Marina gestured at the open chair, visible in the wall of mirror before me, along with the whole tableau of Maja and Larissa, the overelaborate, trying-too-hard decor of their workplace, the counter bearing the telephone, computer, and appointment book, and a tantalizing sliver of window onto the wide world outside their door. Passing sidewalkers appear and vanish in this margin as brief, almost strobelike flashes of clothing, flesh, hair, and other clues for the visual cortex to sort in retrospect: Was that a cell phone? Or mirrored sunglasses? “Maja cut her hair right there beside you the last time I saw you.”

  “Really?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  I shrugged. “You know how often I come here. And I always reserve my attention for you, Marina.”

  “I thought you might remember.”

  “Sorry.”

  This conversation wasn’t interesting. Very much my fault; I was quashing any interest. If Marina had been pushing, she’d gone as far as she dared, and now we reverted to platitudes concerning the weather, the desirability of vacations from New York City during blazing summer months, the price of real estate, and my imaginary workdays, which evidently left plenty of time for haircuts, though this as ever went unremarked. After she’d worked a few products into my scalp and rearranged my part a dozen times until sculpted into just the effect she thought best (I always wash the gunk out as soon as I arrive at home and revert to a “dry look”), Marina declared me finished. With all the usual ritual delight at the cut’s result and studied affection for Marina and the others I paid, tipped, and departed, only promising—in a mock-threatening way—that they’d sure see me two weeks from now. Thinking all the time that it was probably the last time I’d set foot in the place, or even walk down that particular block of the city.

  I remembered Jessica Droory, of course I did. It is another eccentricity of salons such as that run by the Israelis that they fantasize not only about their clients but on their behalves. What I mean to say is that in a career dedicated to the vanity of others, hairdressers understandably become champions of more than hair, but of lives, of yearning bodies made more attractive and confident and then sent out into the world to entice other bodies. Jessica Droory was one who, unlike myself, was surely entirely truthful in her convivial self-revelations to hairstylists, masseurs, pedicurists, anyone. She’d gone months without an interesting date (I’m guessing here); wasn’t noticing heads turning as often as previously; wondered if at thirty-seven (this I confirmed in the newspaper’s reports) life’s romantic parade was getting too far up the road, around some bend beyond sight of her ditched vehicle.

  Jessica was healthy, thin, not unappealing—the Israeli girls liked her chances, I suspect, and felt no bad faith in being optimistic on her behalf. Did she want to marry? Where did she go to meet men? Did she use Nerve? Would she consider someone older, more serious? It took men in New York a while to grow disenchanted with the singles scene, but it happened eventually. Of course, all such talk would have been silenced by the time I walked in that afternoon and filled the second chair. Most of their discussion would anyway have been glancing, peppery, apparently incidental, in no way revealing its underlying purposefulness nor the insinuating force of the identification between the impossibly youthful Israeli women and the older New Yorker who’d begun to wonder if she teetered on the brink of the middle-aged, and had surely, yes, begun to think a man a decade or two older wasn’t the worst possibility in the world. He’d only have to be appreciative. And not have a paunch, or some awful gray beard.

  So, when I entered my sensorium that day, I found it altered. The girls who’d never once have considered me seriously as a prospect for themselves were more than comfortable with my sexual personhood through the proxy of Jessica Droory. Far from being possessive of the weird edgy air of flirtation that hovered around my presence in their space, the insertion of Jessica Droory as a rather more appropriate focal point relieved them of a certain anxiety, put a good solid normative footing behind it all. They were matchmakers! None of this would have been in the least enunciated, even to themselves. But framed together in that vast mirror, Jessica Droory and I found our chairs subtly angled together. Marina and Larissa were more effusive with me, the fingertips in my scalp and briefly resting on my shoulders even more lingering and enticing, as though their hands could serve in place of hers while Jessica and I, two heads tucked atop pyramidal black aprons, were efficiently serviced while we looked for a place for our eyes to rest other than on one another—and in this effort helplessly failed. I smiled. She blinked surprise, then split the difference, smiling back briefly and shifting her eyes to her hands where they bunched under her apron, or to the furry floor.

  And the talk became deliberate, wretchedly obvious. They didn’t introduce us, didn’t break that mystical fourth wall of their profession, but instead interviewed us in tandem, asking questions the answers to which they perfectly well knew, Jessica’s truths, my lies. Career, birthplace, status. The scripted-seeming pauses in these oh-so-casual twin interrogations, intervals devised to make certain the replies were sinking in, revealed the Israeli girls as aspiring directors of a one-act play, one in which Jessica Droory and I were cast both as the audience and, eventually, the star performers, even if the final act was intended to take place out of view of the directors themselves.

  Their pièce de résistance, their showstopper, was a piece of timing: By slowing my haircut to a crawl, Marina managed to have us reach a conclusion at nearly the same moment. Jessica Droory was released from her chair, to pay and tip, and then delayed with chatter, a charade with which Jessica cooperated, it seemed to me. Meanwhile I was finished too, and freed to reclaim my jacket and to step to the counter to pay. They’d orchestrated it so that we might leave at the same moment, and then find one another available for conversation on the pavement, leading perhaps to coffee, an exchange of phone numbers or cards—nearly anything was possible, wasn’t it?

  This I wrecked deliberately, with a pantomime of my own. I keep a no-good credit card in my wallet, just for such occasions, decorated with the name I’ve assumed, and though I’d always previously paid the Israeli girls with cash, this was obviously the moment to employ it. Most people, I find, are plagued with shame at the refusal of a credit transaction; American class definitions are so insecure that a small plastic failure can threaten to undermine them, and in fact the tradespeople who are forced to deliver the bad news are often drawn into shame themselves. This was not my situation, obviously, but I do find such discomfort both useful and entertaining. When Larissa handed back my card with an apology, I smiled and handed it back to her and insisted she try again. Ripples of awkwardness spread through the salon, as Maja was forced to struggle to delay Jessica Droory further. Jessica Droory already had her coat on. The card failed again, of course. Larissa suggested sheepishly that I might have another one. Jessica Droory, embarrassed to be stalling, moved for the door. I asked Larissa please to call the company and inquire as to the problem, since, I insisted, the card was perfectly good. (It
is astonishing, or perhaps not, how few people in her position feel able to refuse such a request.) Jessica Droory at last went through the door, smiling as bravely as she could in my direction, but there was nothing to be done. Perhaps she’d idled on the sidewalk an instant or two, but I made certain enough time passed in my dumb show with the credit card that the Israeli girls could entertain no hope whatsoever that we’d meet outside. Meanwhile, with Larissa occupied on the telephone and Maja washing the hair of Marina’s next customer, an older woman (I mean, a woman my age) who’d entered in the meantime, I leaned over the appointment book. Jessica Droory’s phone number was written beside her name, as was my own. I memorized it, just for sport.

  When I dialed the number at nine the next evening, that was for sport as well. I sometimes think my life is nothing but sport. Likely Jessica Droory was in her robe and pajamas by then (I’d find these later, on the pegs of the bathroom door), settling in to watch Lost, but, supposing my guess was right, she had the self-respect not only to let her phone ring a few times but to mute the television in the background. I explained where we’d met, as swiftly and courteously as I could, then interrupted myself and asked if I’d made a mistake, and that it was too late to telephone her? An unfair question: She’d never have admitted so, and by assuring me that no apology was needed Jessica Droory eased herself past other, perfectly valid objections to what was surely a disconcerting call.

  I could have made it easier on both of us, I suppose, by calling at seven instead of nine. Yet even as recently as eight o’clock I’d been deaf to the summons of my appetite, while after the passage of barely less than an hour more it had become too clarion to ignore, or even to defer to the following evening. Such is appetite. And I do like to walk a tightwire, sometimes, just seeing what people might actually balk at. They so rarely do. On that same score, who am I to say that Jessica Droory shouldn’t have let me inside? I appreciated her self-possession and daring, even, in reaching for what was before her, or seemingly so. That we had in common. Beginning with the really exquisite contents of her liquor cabinet, her apartment, a parlor-level floor-through, was superbly appointed for my purposes, the high ceilings and heavy sashed curtains giving us privacy and making a nice proscenium for my foolish indulgences. Very little of her liquor had to be poured before I was able to beguile the giggling Jessica into a reenactment of “how we met”: two chairs in the center of her parlor room, in front of the large framed mirror I’d moved to the floor for this purpose. More drinks, pantomime haircuts, mock Israeli accents. How obvious those girls had been in steering us together—how poignant, really, their surrogate yearning! My hands invaded Jessica’s clothes while we parsed the paltriness of the salon, judged the abjectness of the girls’ makeup and dress sense, all of it giving sweet sustenance to Jessica Droory’s need to believe that youthfulness, that svelte, kibbutz-firmed flesh, wasn’t enough to turn the head of a man of substance, rather that style and poise and experience meant something, and that that was why I had called her telephone and arrived at her door and why she was cross-eyed drunk and half undressed in a chair, pretending to let me shampoo her while my cock pressed against her ear. We fumbled along like this until Jessica’s eyelids sagged once or twice, then it was time enough. Curtain sashes more than sufficient to bind her limbs to the chair’s legs. Her own shredded blouse to muffle cries. Then a search. That it was pinking shears I found was pure accident; I savor those serendipities which distinguish one adventure from another. The rest you know. You read the Daily News, don’t you?

  So it was that I had to find another salon. I’ll miss Maja and Larissa and most of all Marina, and I suppose you may wonder why it was necessary to ruin a good thing. Sometimes I wonder this myself. But really, women such as these and myself were never meant for one another; this sort of vicarious transmission is the only thing possible between us. No matter how imperfect our actual encounter, a woman like Jessica Droory and I come from one world, the same world, while the girls at the salon come from entirely another. They’re not, finally, my type. In truth, I’d never so much as touch a hair on their heads.

  Tricks

  LAURA LIPPMAN

  HE IS AWARE of the glances they attract as they cross the lobby of the Hotel Monteleone, but doubts she even notices. She is too busy looking at him. Her gaze is like a stray hair on his cheekbone—light yet irritating, hard to brush away. He’s much too handsome for her. Everyone sees it. Even she sees it. She clearly cannot believe her good luck.

  She shouldn’t.

  He, however, is flush with luck, the luck that comes only with due diligence and hard work. You don’t find a mark like this by accident. It takes weeks and, at first, moving patiently and slowly, building a rapport. It takes a little money, too, to appear as flush as he claims to be. This suit he’s wearing, the Hermès tie, the Gucci loafers—those things cannot be faked. Stolen, on occasion, but never faked.

  However, that’s phase one. Moving on to phase two now, the honeymoon, literal and figurative, where everything will be on her. Also literally and figuratively.

  They approach the registration desk and she is all fluttery, old-fashioned enough to think that the hotel cares whether they are husband and wife yet. “Darling, lots of women don’t take their husbands’ names,” he assured her when he told her to make the reservation. “I would,” she said. “I can’t wait to take your name.”

  And I can’t wait to take whatever you have to give. But there will be time enough. Time enough to settle in, to move into her house in the Pacific Palisades, the one in all the pictures she has sent him. Time, too, to persuade her to tap into the equity, which he will use for his can’t-fail business venture. That part is true—it never fails, not where he’s concerned. He makes a profit every time, no matter what’s going on in the economy.

  “Olive Dunne,” she says to the clerk in her little mouse of a voice. God, if he really had to live with that voice until death did them part, he would soon be exhausted from leaning in, the better to hear her. She’s a timid one. They run to timidity, his brides, but she’s especially shy, irritatingly shy. The courtship was an unusually long one, almost three months since he sent his first e-mail, and that doesn’t include the start-up costs, the search process on various matchmaking sites. But once he gets her in bed, she will be his.

  He hands the clerk his new credit card, the one Olive presented him with just this morning when they met face-to-face for the first time at Louis Armstrong International Airport. She was the one who offered to add him to her account after he explained how the problems in the financial markets overseas were tying up all his accounts, threatening this long-planned rendezvous. The clerk takes them in. The clerk takes him in—his tailored suit, the Hermès tie, the Armani sunglasses. All the real thing, purchased with his own scarce dollars, the cost of doing business; he should be able to deduct them from his income tax. Not that he pays income taxes, but why should he, when the system is rigged against the working man? And make no mistake about it, he works hard for his money. He’s like a soldier, or someone on an oil rig. When he gets a gig, it’s 24-7, no time off for weeks. Sometimes the highlight of his day is his morning crap, the only time he gets to be himself, by himself.

  The clerk upgrades them to the Tennessee Williams suite, but it’s not quite as grand as he’d hoped. Nice enough, but he’s seen better. Olive, however, is overwhelmed by the smallest things—the galley kitchen, which is nothing more than a noisy minifridge and a coffeemaker, the enormous glass box of a shower stall, the fact that there’s a dining room table. “It’s like an apartment,” she says over and over. She flits from window to window, taking in the views of the French Quarter, exclaiming over everything.

  “What do you want to do first?” she asks.

  He thinks that’s pretty obvious, although it’s not what he wants to do first, but what he knows he should want to do first.

  He takes her in his arms, closes his eyes, and thinks of … his mind scans several images, actresses, and mo
dels, settles on the literal girl next door, Betty. She used to anoint herself with baby oil and offer herself up to the sun, moving her ratty old lounge chair as the shadows crept over her, hour by hour. That was out in Metairie, barely ten miles from here, where he grew up. Betty was always on her back when he saw her, breasts pointing to the heavens, yet her tan was very even. She was five years older; he had no shot, the gulf between twelve and seventeen too huge. When he started out, the women were five years older, ten years older, fifteen years older. He likes older women. Olive is his first younger woman in a long time and she has a trim little figure beneath her dowdy suit. He caresses her promisingly firm little rump and thinks of Betty, wonders if Viagra is going to be added to the list of his professional expenses, but, no, thank goodness, he’s going to be able—

  “Not now,” she whispers, pulling away. “Not yet. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I want to wait until I’m your bride. Besides, didn’t you say you wanted to call your bank, straighten out what’s going on with your credit cards?”

  “My bank is in London,” he says, “and that’s six hours ahead. They’re closed for today.”

  The story, this time, is that he’s a victim of identity theft and all his credit cards, even his ATM card, are “locked” until he can talk to his personal money manager. He discovered this problem when he and Olive began planning their trip a week ago, and she quickly agreed—volunteered, in fact—to add him to her credit card account, even procured an extra ATM card for him, which he used this morning to pull out the maximum amount. “Because a man needs to have cash,” she said. “Walking-around money, my daddy called it.”

  Yes, indeed. A man does need money to walk around. And even more to walk out. How much will Olive be good for? Assuming she can get a second mortgage, the house in California must have at least a half million in it. He’s looked up the property records and she’s owned it for at least ten years.