Mask Market

by Andrew Vachss

  “It’s a good dream, Loyal.”

  “It is,” she said, closing her eyes for second. “I used to babysit all the time when I was in school. But it wasn’t until I got out in the world that I understood what that takes. Not to have a baby—anyone could do that—to be a mother. I kept telling myself I wasn’t ready. And the years kept on rolling, like a river that won’t be dammed. You know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Remember, when we were having dinner, I told you about something that almost happened to me?”

  “Your girlfriend? The one who went somewhere on a promise, and it turned out to be a trick?”

  “A trick,” she said, bitterly. “That’s it, exactly.”

  “She wasn’t my girlfriend, not like you’d say ‘girlfriend’ where I come from. Just another girl I knew, from the business.”

  It was like a game of chicken—the loser would be the first person to say “prostitute” out loud. It wasn’t going to be me.

  “I didn’t come to New York to be in movies,” Loyal said. “Nobody in their right mind does. I wanted to be on the stage. Not Shakespeare or Mamet, more like musical comedy. I can sing and dance, too. Not good enough to be the lead, and I’m way too short to be a Rockette, but I thought I could get chorus work.”

  “That didn’t work out?”

  She made a harsh sound in her throat, like a strangled laugh. “No. I did all the usual stuff girls like me do: went to a thousand auditions, waited on a thousand tables. I got little, little tiny parts. In off-off Broadway. Plays that ran a weekend, and didn’t cover my cab fare home.

  “The first ‘agent’ I got didn’t want to get me jobs; he wanted to get me. But I was expecting that, and all it cost me was time. I didn’t get discouraged; I didn’t think I was going to set the town on fire or anything. But I was hustling like a crazy woman just to put together the cash for head shots and audition tapes.

  “That’s when I started working as a B-girl. I told myself it was just like an acting job, sitting with men, listening to them go on and on. I threw down so many watered drinks, I spent half my time in the bathroom, I swear.

  “After a couple of years, I’d had my fill. I’d been up here long enough so I could go home and tell folks I’d given it my best shot. I even had a couple of clippings I could show people, but…”

  I stayed in my silence, waiting.

  “Could you go in the living room?” she said.

  I got up without a word. Walked over to the armchair, guided by the light spilling from the kitchen.

  Time passed.

  I heard sounds I couldn’t identify, coming from the bedroom area but deeper, as if there was another room behind it.

  Loyal stalked into the living room like a woman on business. “Here,” she said, handing me a leather folder. The cover was soft, as if filled with foam. She walked behind me, turned on the lamp. My lap filled with frosted light.

  “Go ahead,” she said, still standing behind me.

  It was a photo album. The first shot was black and white, an eight-by-ten glossy. Loyal, in a straight chair, facing the camera head-on. She was wearing a short black skirt and a white blouse, black pumps on her feet, blonde hair pulled back into a bun. Each of her ankles was lashed to a leg of the chair. Her hands were behind her back. A white cloth was tied around her mouth, parting her lips.

  “Keep going,” she said from behind me. “I did.”

  The photographs were in some kind of sequence, telling Loyal’s story. They went from ropes to duct tape, from cloth to ball gags, from fully dressed to partially, then not. The last one had Loyal on her knees, facing a wall, naked. You couldn’t see her face. Her wrists were handcuffed behind her back, her ankles were bound together, and a single chain linked the two.

  When I was finished, I closed the book.

  Loyal turned off the light behind me.

  “Say something,” she said.

  “You’re a good actress.”

  “What does that mean, Lew? What are you trying to say?”

  “Just that. In the earlier pictures, when they came in close on your face, you looked like a damsel in distress.”

  “What does that mean?” she said again, her voice tightening down to braided wire.

  “You looked terrified,” I said. “Like the villain had tied you up, and your only hope was that Dudley Do-Right was going to ride in and rescue you.”

  “That wasn’t acting,” she said, putting her hands on my shoulders.

  “They really do it,” she said, standing by the window in the living room, this time facing me. “Tie you up, I mean. The first time I…modeled, I thought it was all fake. Like it would be Velcro or something. But it wasn’t.”

  “So you were afraid of…what, exactly?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, blowing a stream of smoke out the opened window. “Being…helpless, I guess. Not in control. They loved that. I had the ‘look.’ So I had all the work I wanted.”

  “Why did you stop, then?”

  “Did you ever look into a fireplace when it’s working? Well, that’s what it was like. If you start a fire, you either feed it, or you watch it go out. Do you have any idea of what I’m telling you, Lew?”

  I flashed on a not-so-young-anymore girl I’d met in Los Angeles years ago. I’d been out there looking for a photographer who took crime-in-progress pictures for money. He knew I was looking, and he’d gone to ground. I’d gotten the girl’s name from someone who told me that she might have an address for him. And that she’d be stupid enough to give it up, if I worked her right.

  That girl hadn’t been stupid. Just sad. All done, and she knew it.

  When you’re fresh stuff out here, they may not treat you like a little princess, but they don’t…torture you, you know? But every video you shoot takes a little of the bloom off you. One year, you’re getting a thousand bucks for naughty schoolgirl—and I was never the lead, okay?—the next, they expect you to take some rough stuff for less money, and do it more often. And if you do that? Another year and you’re down to double anals and gang bangs. After that, it gets really disgusting.

  “A real good idea,” I said to Loyal.

  She took my tone for truth, shifted her own to one less challenging. “It’s like with my apartment,” she said. “I knew I had to get off the elevator before it started going down.”

  “They asked you to—”

  “I wasn’t looking at myself. Just sleepwalking through it. But I was sliding. It started with girl-girl. Not sex—they never even asked me to do that—but there’d be another girl in the pictures. Like she was the one who tied me up. Maybe I wasn’t raised on the fast track, but I could feel the heat when I got close enough to the fire.”

  “You’re not the first actress to do that kind of modeling, early in her career.”

  “If that was all I’d done, I could see what I want to see when I look in the mirror.”

  “I don’t see that when I look, either,” I said. “I don’t know anybody who does, all the time.” That wasn’t the truth. I’d done time with glistening psychopaths whose self-worship was the sum total of their existence. But that was Burke, not the man she knew.

  “Yes,” she said absently. She gutted her cigarette. I waited while she did her full-disposal routine in the bathroom.

  “All the time I was…modeling, I had been trying out for parts. But I was getting used up there, too. Like I was disappearing. And the less of me there was, the less I felt I could go home.”

  “So you stayed….”

  “Until now. Yes. But I didn’t just quit modeling, I quit trying to work, too.”

  “How could you do that and—?”

  “—still afford a place like this? You know the answer to that, Lew. I’m a toy. A pet. A rich man’s life-size doll. I’ve had four of them since I left off working. You were going to be the fifth. That day we met? I wasn’t shopping for cars.”

  I don’t know why I told you all that,” she said, as the green numbers on her
alarm clock blinked 4:09. “I know how it makes me look. You know, I used to be able to lead boys around by the nose. All I had to do was take a deep breath, wiggle a little, and talk baby talk. I never had to…do what I told you to pay the rent, or keep food on the table.

  “I wasn’t addicted to drugs, I wasn’t…I didn’t have any excuse, not really. I was just ashamed to go home. Not because of anything I did, but because I wouldn’t have anything to show for it. Can you understand that, Lew?”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I can. And when you go now, after you sell your apartment, you’ll have been a hardworking actress who saved her money.”

  “I sure will. I’ll be able to fix up the house so it’s one of the nicest ones around. Have a swell car. Maybe even…”

  “Meet a guy?”

  “I…don’t know about that,” she said, letting me in on a conversation she must have had with herself a hundred times. “Here’s what I do know: I can’t go back home just to be getting a job in some store. I need to come back with enough money to live right, so people know I made something of myself while I was away, be proud of me for it. It wouldn’t take a fortune for me to be somebody back home. I just don’t want to be a fraud.”

  I touched the vertebrae at the base of her neck. She made a little moaning sound that didn’t have a trace of fake in it.

  “It looks like you’re staying the night, for once,” she said, reaching for me.

  Loyal slept with her face buried so deep in the pillow I couldn’t see how she got a breath, but her rib cage moved rhythmically as I punched in a number on my cell. I stepped into the living room and waited for the call to be answered.

  “Gardens.”

  “It’s me, Mama. Can you find the Prof, ask him to meet me, anytime this afternoon?”

  “Twelve hours?” Mama said, making sure.

  “Perfect.”

  “Max, too?”

  “No, I won’t need—”

  “Yes,” she said, hanging up.

  “You don’t take coffee even in the morning?” Loyal asked me. We were back at her kitchen table. She was bustling around, wearing a pair of baggy gray shorts and matching jersey top. I was just sitting still, stealing glances at my watch. Almost ten in the morning.

  “Well, you have to have something in your stomach to start the day,” she said, firmly. “At least let me make you some toast.”

  “That would be great.”

  “And have some juice, too. I’ve got…” She bent at the waist to look in the refrigerator.

  “You keep juice on the bottom shelf?”

  “Oh, you!” she said, turning over her shoulder to smile at me. “You know all a girl’s tricks, don’t you?”

  “Not even close,” I said, as much truth as I’d ever told in three words.

  “Well, you sure know what a girl likes.”

  I chuckled. Said, “Even I know that trick.”

  “Hmmpf!” she said, turning around, hands on hips, face glowing with mock annoyance.

  “Come here for a minute, girl.”

  She took that as a request to sit on my lap.

  “What?” she said, innocently.

  “Remember last night? You were telling me about how you almost got into real trouble. A girlfriend of yours went somewhere….”

  “Oh! That’s right, I was. I forgot. You really want to know about that?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  She squirmed around in my lap. Not playing, getting comfortable. “I never thought I was better than anyone else,” she said, her tone telling me it was very important to her that I believe her. “I met a lot of girls like me. Not just when I was…modeling. When I worked in bars, too. And went on casting calls, of course. I was kind of in the middle of them. Not one of those dreamy-eyed ones who believe they’re going to be ‘discovered’ someday, and not one of those who believe you have to put out for producers if you ever want to get a part, either.

  “You know how they say there’s lines you shouldn’t ever cross? Well, I found out that those lines move. Right in front of your eyes. Even if they don’t move for you, they move for your judgments. Do you see what I’m saying, Lew?”

  “What you might have once thought was…wrong, or whatever, you learned that there might be good reasons for it.”

  “Yes! I may be very old-fashioned. I guess I’m even country in my heart. But, to me, there’s always going to be a difference between a woman who sells herself for money to buy a fur coat, and one who does it to keep a roof over her kids’ heads.”

  “And before you came to this city, you would have thought the same of both, that’s what you’re saying?”

  “That is what I’m saying. It’s easy to point the Bible at folks like you’re aiming a gun, but it’s just a book, isn’t it? Everybody who reads it comes away with whatever they bring to it. So it wasn’t going to be me casting that first stone.”

  “Right,” I said, squeezing her waist slightly to underline my approval.

  She took a deep breath. Let it out slowly. Then she stood up, went to the sink, and drew herself a glass of tap water.

  “The job was what they called being an ‘entertainment hostess.’ Like a B-girl, but very, very high-class. It was a six-week contract, working for this club. They paid for everything: plane fare, your hotel room, meals, the works. And you came back with thirty thousand dollars. In cash, no taxes.”

  “Where was this, Tokyo?”

  She gave me a long, measured look. “Yes, that’s right. How did you know?”

  “Just a guess.”

  “Uh-huh. Then I bet you could guess the rest of the story, too.”

  “I might. When your girlfriend got there, they took her passport away. And her visa. That was to make sure she fulfilled her contract, they told her. And they told her she’d misinterpreted what they meant by ‘entertainment,’ too.”

  “I’m not sure about that last part,” Loyal said. “I mean, about them fooling her. Lace—that’s what she called herself—she was…I’m not going to call names, but I think she might have known what she was going to have to do. What she didn’t know was that she wouldn’t have any choices. It wasn’t one man. Or even one man a night. By the time they allowed her to leave, it wasn’t even one man at a time. When they let her go, they took most of the money away from her, too.”

  “She told you this when she came back?”

  “Yes. I told her she should report it. To the UN or something, I don’t know. I mean, Japan, that’s not someplace where they don’t have laws. It’s a very civilized country. And we do all kinds of business with them, don’t we?”

  “All kinds,” I agreed.

  “Lace said she was mad, but she wasn’t crazy. ‘They’ve got different rules for whores,’ is what she told me. It made me sick.”

  “I don’t think you were lucky, girl.”

  “What do you mean?” she said, frowning.

  “It wasn’t luck that kept you from going over there. You were either too smart or too scared.”

  “Scared.”

  “When it comes to an offer like that, one’s as good as the other.”

  She came back over to me, threw one leg over mine, and sat down on my lap again, this time facing me.

  “I told you a lot of truth, these last few hours.”

  “I know.”

  “Yes. I think you do. I think you do know it was the truth.” She bounced slightly, as if she were making up her mind what to do next.

  “What?” I said.

  “How about you tell me some truth, Lew?”

  “What truth would you like, girl?”

  She leaned in so close I lost focus on everything but her eyes. “Tell me why you pretend you’re married,” she said, very softly.

  “I don’t like it,” the Prof said. “You never get too brave around another man’s cave, because…?”

  “That’s the quickest ticket to an early grave.” I finished the rule, to show I hadn’t forgotten the first time he’d taught it to me, eons ago.
<
br />   “You want to trap a weasel, you don’t look for his den,” the little man rolled on, unmoved. “What you do is, you set a trap in a chicken coop. You don’t need to know where a man lives…?”

  “To know where he’s going to visit,” I said. “I know, Prof. But we’ve got no way to put the watch on Charlie, not in that neighborhood.”

  “My main man Mole—”

  “He got us the pictures, sure. But that was because he knows people who live around there. They weren’t watching for Charlie special; they just snapped off a shot when they ran across him.”

  “What’d they take the pictures with?” he asked. From the way he turned toward Clarence, I knew the old man wanted to make sure his audience was in place before he hit me with a jab.

  “One of those camera phones,” I said, playing along.

  “Camera phone, you said, Schoolboy?”

  “I get it, Prof. But it’s not that simple. Who do they call? They don’t know us. And the Mole doesn’t want them to know us. But let’s say he could get them to just ring a number when Charlie was in the street. Where are we going to be sitting in ambush? There’s no hotel close by. No poolrooms or gin joints we could hang out in. Not even a lousy OTB. And we could never rent a house in that neighborhood. So?”

  “If my father—” Clarence started to say.

  “Nah,” the Prof cut him off. “I never said Burke was wrong, just that I didn’t like it. We’re done, son.”

  Max tapped the face of his watch, shook his head in disapproval.

  “You, too?” I gestured. “We only get one chance, right?” I said to them all, holding up one finger. “And, from what Mole’s people told him, the window only opens at certain hours,” I went on, my hands saying the words to Max. “So there’s only one way I can see to make our move.”