“What do you mean?”
He let go of her, leaned back against the toilet tank, and reflected. “Baby, you’ve never faced that slave core of yourself. Until you do, you’ll never be free.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Something inside you has always wanted to be a slave, because you are one. We have to live out who we are before we can change. Most people never face who they are. So they stay children all their lives, fucking up the world.”
“I still don’t understand.”
“Someday you will. But first you need to be a slave completely. Then you’ll become a magnificent woman. You’ll grow beyond slavery, and you’ll leave me. Someday you’ll realize I was your teacher.”
“I don’t want to leave you! I want to marry you and have your children.”
“You may just do that, sugar. That may be part of the whole trip.”
“I don’t like Dominic.”
“Why?”
“I don’t trust him.”
“You don’t need to trust him. I’ll deal with him.” He looked into her eyes. “Baby, tell me, ‘I’m your slave.”‘
“I’m your slave,” she murmured uneasily.
“If you leave me now, Adrianne, you lose your last chance of making it. You were on the verge of cracking when I met you.”
He stroked her pelvic bones. “You’ve gotten almost skinny,” he said. “Got a cashbox between those thighs.”
They both laughed uproariously, filled with a strange burst of energy.
“Let’s see how you do a blow job with a trick.”
She stared at him.
“Puta!” he cried. ‘You’re nothing without me!” He struck her across the face. “Go on. What are you waiting for?” He pushed her down to the floor and thrust his erect cock into her mouth. “Blow me, baby.”
The linoleum floor was cold. Her face stung from the blow, and her neck was sore as she leaned her head backwards, then cupped his testicles in her hand. Tears streamed down her face as she began to suck him while she stroked his balls and thighs, licking and sucking. Her knees ached, and she wished he would come. He was taking such a long time. She tried every technique she knew, every titillation between anus and scrotum, until finally she heard him breathe faster, and then the semen came in thick spurts that she swallowed. While she licked him off, he pressed her head against his thighs.
Chapter 19
She was carrying a tube of contraceptive jelly, along with black lace panties and an extra pair of nylons. Her large handbag also contained three bras to return to Saks, because Alfredo said they looked like nursing bras. At the bottom of her bag lay a thin book on the history of European music, which she had found the other day in Brentano’s. The book stirred old memories. As a child she had loved to play the piano.
As she waited for a taxi, it began to drizzle, cold and icy, half-rain and half-sleet. Despite her fur coat, she shivered. Her slender heels dug into her feet; her toes were cramped, and the small of her back ached from the way the shoes pitched her forward so that her spine over-arched.
Three p.m.
A taxi stopped.
“Ninety-seventh and Park, please.”
“Good morning, miss,” said the doorman. She knew that Dominic and Cecily gave him generous gifts.
Adrianne went up in the elevator with a middle-aged woman swathed in mink who got off at the eleventh floor. At times she wondered if the other inhabitants of this building knew or cared what went on. She, as well as the prostitutes she worked with, appeared to be simply three or four fashionably dressed young women who shared an apartment on the fifteenth floor. When men in heavy overcoats visited them, this aroused no great stir as they were indistinguishable from other strangers who lived in the building.
Cecily nodded to Adrianne as she walked inside the luxurious apartment with its dark, polished furniture and thick carpets. Cecily had reddish mahogany hair, and today she wore a grey knit adorned with an elegant gold necklace. While she talked on the phone, she was paying bills which were stacked up on the desk in front of her.
Was there any essential difference, Adrianne wondered, between typing for Eureka Fabrics and acting as a human receptacle for sperm and confessions? Either way, as Alfredo would point out, she was a slave, but here the pay was better.
A sweaty stranger pressed on top of her and pounded against her numb vagina walls. For a while, she used to fantasize about food when she lay with strangers, as she had been constantly hungry. But with the Dexedrine pills the hunger gradually lessened. Now her mind went blank, or else she soared far away from her body and thought of the ocean or a song she had heard on the radio. When the stranger climaxed, she gave a fake moan of pleasure, then drew her face away and buried her nostrils in the sheets, drifting off half-conscious into a world of pine forests.
Cocks in her cunt, her ass, her mouth. The varied tastes of semen, like seaweed or cheese or slightly sweet. A blow job was more personal than straight screwing. Far more offensive to take a stranger’s cock into her mouth and swallow his semen than to take his fluid inside her vagina. After each encounter, she washed her mouth out with Listerine.
Semen ran down her legs. Strangers’ fluids filled her. Where did she end, and where did they begin?
The smell of Sonya’s nail polish filled the living room. A spike heel dangled from one of her feet, and she surveyed the fresh scarlet tint.
“Want a game of rummy, Adrianne, when my nails are dry?”
Irritated at the interruption, Adrianne looked up from the chapter on the harpsichord in the eighteenth century. “No, thanks. I’m reading.”
Cecily said, “You shouldn’t do your nails here in the living room.”
“I forgot,” muttered Sonya. The expression on her broad-planed face was impenetrable. Why did she work here? Adrianne wondered. Although Sonya went places with Dominic and screwed him, she didn’t seem to be in love with him. Did she do this just for the money?
Vanessa, a strikingly beautiful woman in her late twenties with chalk-white skin and glossy dark hair, wandered out into the living room. Her last client had just left.
“I’ve got some kind of infection,” she said.
“Vanessa, dear, I’ve got you scheduled all through this evening’s shift. Wear your diaphragm, and make sure they use condoms. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow morning to get a checkup. Girls, don’t any of you forget your weekly medical checkups.”
While Cecily was talking on the phone, the buzzer rang. The elderly Puerto Rican maid, María, who was afflicted with arthritis, limped to the door. Then a man came in and chose Sonya.
While she waited, Adrianne read about Clementi. When her father was alive and they still had the piano, she had practiced Clementi exercises for hours. Now one of the melodies she used to play floated through her mind.
The next trick summoned her. He was a thin man with receding hair.
Fifty dollars a shot.
An expensive house.
“Hey, don’t tell Alfredo, okay?” Dominic was feeling her all over. Then he took off her clothes, and he made love to her slowly, with surprising gentleness. She noted that he left his socks on, though, as many tricks did. Close up, with his acne-scarred face, his lips on her body, Dominic took on a different aspect.
Afterwards, he took out a small plastic bag of heroin from his vest pocket.
“This stuff relaxes you, doll, and you’re very tense. Try some.”
“No, thanks.”
“Don’t be scared of it.”
“I’m afraid of getting hooked.”
“You can’t with one shot. It’s here any time you want. Just ask me.”
“So tired,” Adrianne would moan at night in Alfredo’s arms.
“Baby, you’re doing fine.”
She wanted to tell him about Dominic, but she didn’t dare as she did not know what Alfredo’s reaction would be. She nestled more tightly against him, but he soon stirred, got up, and went into the kitchen, probably to get s
ome beer. She heard him pace back and forth, and then she heard him moving canvases.
While Sonya, Vanessa, and a new girl named Eileen ate a pork-chop dinner which the maid had cooked, Adrianne sipped her broth and munched on celery. Then she lit a cigarette. She had lost thirty pounds. Her hip bones protruded, her waist was slender, and her large breasts hung pendulous. She felt as if her heart were seeping through her breasts, as if soon her heart’s blood would drain out completely and she would vaporize into mist.
Eileen’s left eye involuntarily twitched. Both her eyes were reddened, as if she had been crying or were on drugs. Dressed in a tight purple sheath, she was small, with skinny legs and dull blonde hair.
After dinner, the girls relaxed for a while. Business generally picked up around seven.
Eight hundred a night. Sixteen tricks. Fifty-fifty split with the house.
“Safer then the streets,” said Alfredo.
“But so boring,” Adrianne said.
Despite its luxuriousness, the Park Avenue apartment oppressed her.
Days flowed into nights flowed into days. At closing time Alfredo would come by to pick her up in the new black Cadillac that he had recently bought, It had red leather upholstery, a fine radio and other luxurious options, and was costing them eighty dollars a month in parking tickets.
Her wrist watch said ten-thirty p.m. Sonya’s eyes were glassy before she leaned back against the couch and closed them. Then she stumbled into the bathroom where she stayed for a long time, and Adrianne wondered if she were on heroin.
Vanessa went off with a trick.
Waiting.
Her turn.
A flabby man in his sixties. She stimulated him for what seemed an endless time. Knock on door. “Time’s almost up,” Adrianne whispered.
Finally, his penis stiffened and he grew so excited that he ejaculated before he totally entered her. His copious fluid spilled out all over the sheets.
Wash herself off. Say goodbye. Next trick. “Hello, darling.” A diminutive Oriental man.
Then a potbellied, middle-aged man with something strange about his manner, a hint of repressed violence. With him, she skittered on the edge of panic. Be very careful, an inner voice told her. “Think of me when you’re screwing. Remember, I love you. You’re doing this for us.” Alfredo’s voice sounded in her mind, wrapping around her like a cocoon.
At one a.m., Adrianne vomited into the toilet bowl.
Alfredo was late. Just as she was about to step into a taxi, he pulled up, reeking of liquor. He told her he’d gone to the racetrack and then out for drinks with old friends.
Chapter 20
Late rainy afternoon. Forty-five minutes before the end of her Wednesday shift. They were closing up early tonight for some reason, and so the evening shift of girls was not coming in.
“I don’t ever screw my wife,” the trick said in his effeminate voice. With thinning fair hair and a paunch, he appeared to be about forty. His British tweeds and underwear lay in a heap on the carpet.
“Why not?” asked Adrianne.
“She’s beautiful … used to be a showgirl … but she simply doesn’t arouse me.”
While Adrianne pondered this, he inhaled a pinch of snuff from the small box he’d placed on the night table. Then he coughed. There was a brown residue of snuff around his aristocratic nostrils.
“Tell me, why do you work here?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She was tired of being asked.
“Fondle me.”
Despite her efforts, his penis remained flaccid, and most of his attention went into sniffing the tobacco while he lay on his back and she vainly attempted to arouse him by stroking and pumping.
“Tell me some stories to excite me.”
She looked at her wrist watch in the dim light. “You’ve only got a few more minutes.”
“What a shame. You’re so charming. Your name again?”
“Stephanie,” she said, using what Cecily termed her “professional” name.
“There’s a special quality about you, Stephanie. Perhaps I can get you a part in the film I’m doing. I’m producing an experimental film with a Hungarian director.”
He was probably putting her on. Nonetheless, he intrigued her. Perhaps she should give him a little extra time. But it was already five-thirty, and she had a sudden premonition that if she failed to meet Alfredo tonight at six, something terrible would happen in their relationship.
Falling rain began to hit against the windows behind the heavy brocade drapes.
“Look, I have to go. Your time’s almost up.”
“Mmmm, just keep on stroking … oh … oh, I’m finally getting hard … just a little more, you sweet thing.”
Someone knocked on the door to signal that it was time for him to leave.
The man was alternately stiffening and going limp. Often Alfredo was late. He might not even get there until seven, and she didn’t relish the idea of waiting for him on the street for an hour in the cold rain. The new Cadillac, at least, was warm inside. Let him wait for a change.
“What pleasure do you get out of this life, Stephanie, tell me.” His eyes gleamed with avidity. “Does it give you a thrill?”
Adrianne sensed he wanted her to say yes, that she had twenty orgasms a day, that she adored fucking, sucking, being mauled, intimidated, even spat on, that she loved living in fear of disease, of violence, and of arrest. He wanted her to say that she didn’t mind being bored while she waited interminable periods of time in the living room between tricks. He wanted her to say she liked standing on the cold street while she waited for Alfredo at night, liked taking penicillin shots for clap, and that she liked having the gynecologist stick a cold steel instrument or an impersonal gloved finger inside her every week.
But maybe this stranger really was producing a film. Maybe she could become a film star, and then her whole life would change entirely.
“Yes, it excites me,” she said. Then she began to tell him about her tricks and began to get carried away by her own words. She heard a soft-spoken, wide-eyed girl who wasn’t herself at all murmur, “It excites me to take a man’s cock in my mouth. Would you like that?”
“Later,” he said. “Tell me, you beautiful creature, have you ever made love to a woman?”
“Well, a few times.” Again the soft-spoken girl took over, and she felt herself sheathed inside some other personality who was trying to please this man by telling him what he wanted to hear. She told him something about Lucille, changing her name, looks, and background because she felt she must protect Lucille from this stranger’s obscene personality.
As she talked, his organ swelled larger. “Tell me, do Negroes have bigger cocks?”
“Oh, some do, some don’t.”
“What was the longest it ever took a man to come?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a couple of hours.”
She remembered a trick back in November while she was still working the streets whom she had to stimulate for a very long time. She sensed murderous rage growing out of his frustration, and he seemed at a point where he might injure or kill her. In a state of intense fear, she had done everything in her power to satisfy him while she prayed for protection.
“Why are you so silent?” he asked, inhaling a pinch more snuff.
Then she made up a story she thought would please him, in which she elaborated on every detail of an imaginary, day-long erotic encounter. She heard herself as if it were someone else talking—this soft-voiced girl going on and on. He became more and more excited. In her hand, his penis was hard and huge, his breathing quickened.
She felt imprisoned in her lies, deprived of her identity, stifled like a mummy wrapped in gauze layers, a phony china doll. Yet, because this man had managed to plumb a few drops of truth out of her, she was strangely disturbed.
He reached a pitch of excitement; his pupils dilated as if on a drug, wide-open eyes listening to a fairy tale about other men’s powers. Finally he mounted her and came. Then he ro
lled away and fell into a light sleep with a blissful expression on his bloated face.
Throughout the rest of the apartment, it was unusually silent except for the clang of a pail against porcelain. María must be cleaning up. It had grown dark outside. Light no longer filtered in through the draperies, and outside the rain fell harder.
She switched on a lamp.
Alfredo, are you still outside waiting? Don’t go, she begged him in her mind. She needed Alfredo with special intensity right now because she felt phony and isolated, more used than if this trick had fucked her all day and all night. Something had been taken away. Her soul had been robbed.
“Wake up. I have to go now,” she said.
“Huh?”
He sat up and rubbed his eyes.
Hurriedly, she dressed while he put on his clothes with maddening slowness.
There was no one in the living room, but the door to one of the bathrooms was ajar, and she smelled disinfectant and saw María with her long white braids scrubbing the floor on her knees. “Good night,” she called out to the old woman.
“Buenas noches, señorita.”
Cecily’s desk contained cubbyholes where at the end of each day Cecily would put envelopes for the girls with the money they had earned. Her envelope was missing. Had one of the other girls stolen it? Had the maid taken it? Had Cecily forgotten to leave it for her? She would have to wait until tomorrow to find out.
“What about the movie?” she asked the stranger as they waited together for the elevator. “You said maybe there will be a part for me.”
“Movie? What movie?” he asked, startled. But when they got inside the elevator he immediately recovered himself. “I’ll invite you to my next party. The director is sure to be there,” he said. The amused edge crept back into his voice. “I’ll speak to him about you, beautiful creature.”
“How can I get in touch with you?”
“I’ll call you.”
“You can leave a message for me here.”
“I’ll do that, sweet thing. You’re a nice girl. Don’t believe all the stories you hear,” he added, chucking her under the chin.
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