Beth felt a twinge of guilt, since she had not given one moment’s thought to what she herself could do for a j.o.b. Frankly, she’d felt she was lowering herself sufficiently by agreeing to have sex with three different men for thirty pieces of silver a month.
“I don’t know if I can find a job,” she confessed. “I was ready to stick my head in the oven before—” She remembered Pog warning her not to mention Delilah. “Before. Because I couldn’t find a job.”
“If you feel guilty, help Reg with the kitchen,” Amanda suggested. “I gotta warn you though. We really can’t support more than one slave.”
Beth sputtered.
“I’ll go over the punchlist with Carl this morning. The incentives checklist is inside the freezer door on the far fridge,” Amanda reminded her in a pointed tone. On her way out the door, she turned back and sent a wink to Beth’s outraged and indignant face.
At the dishwasher, Reg snickered. “I din’t think she had a sense of humor, did you?”
“I do not want to be a slave!” Beth sputtered.
“You won’t be. You gotta have someone teach you. She’s just messing with ya.”
Beth started automatically clearing the table, putting away eggs and syrup and butter and milk and the leftover basket of blueberries and the ingredients for Jee’s morning mimosa. “What shall I do with this whipped cream?” she said, holding up the bowl. Reg must have whipped it. The girls, she knew by now, would have used canned rather than bother to whip their own.
“Will it keep until tomorrow morning?” Reg said.
“No. There’s such a lot of it,” Beth fretted. She looked at the bowl of pancake batter still sitting on the stove. “Did you have enough breakfast, Reg?”
“I din’t have any,” Reg said, as he wiped down the kitchen table.
“What! Sit down. I’ll make you pancakes.”
“No!” Reg leaped for the bowl in her hands. “I don’t have permission.” But he looked into the whipped cream with such hungry eyes that Beth was touched.
“I’m giving you permission.”
“Only me and Pog cook in here,” Reg said.
Beth already knew that the kitchen was Pog’s domain, but she felt oddly offended at being told to butt out by Reg. She inhaled semi-patiently. “All right. You can cook yourself some breakfast and eat it. I said so.”
“Not if you’re not eating, too,” he said anxiously.
“Oh, all right!” She threw her hands in the air. “Cook some for me too. Aren’t you allowed to feed yourself?” she said, sitting back down, then getting up again to reset the table.
“Sit, sit,” Reg said, gesturing with both palms. “I might get in trouble for it later, if Jee finds out.” He sent Beth a calculating look.
“I wouldn’t tell her,” Beth said. “Why? Does she punish you if you feed yourself?” That was so icky.
A slow smile spread over Reg’s face. “Kinda.”
Beth shut her mouth, which was hanging open.
“How many more pancakes you want?” he said, looking into the bowl.
“How much batter do you have?” she said, realizing she was ravenous. Again.
“Eight, ten more pancakes. I’ll make more,” Reg said, and went to the third fridge, removing the eggs, milk, butter, and blueberries that Beth had just put away.
“Make enough for forty more pancakes,” Beth said. If she couldn’t eat ten, at least she could see that Reg got the rest. The boy looked scrawny. She wondered if he had suffered the same kind of magical transformation the women had—so that he got fatter if he failed to eat. Beth suspected that, in spite of his salary, Reg wasn’t getting many of the Regional Office benefits.
That thought annoyed her so much that she opened the freezer door on the last unit and examined the checklist. A drywall guy named Nando was on today’s list to receive incentives.
She wondered if Nando had had a bath recently.
Only one way to find out.
It turned out Nando was still pretty tidy. He was measuring drywall to fit around the sinks and mirror-cabinet units when Beth came into the bathroom. Carl was there, peering at the complicated set of pipes for the fancy new multi-jet shower, while the plumber whom Beth had already incentivized explained something. The two of them looked hungrily after Beth as she led Nando from the room. Their voices dropped when she was out of sight. No doubt discussing the incentives program.
“Do you know the deal, Nando?” she said, more bravely than she felt. “By the way, I hope you’re not married or engaged or anything like that.” Then she kicked herself for talking like that stuffy socialite the detective had mocked. What kind of sex demon worried about her partner’s marital status? “Never mind. Forget I spoke.”
She was tempted to do him in Jee’s room, but that would be an unacceptable intrusion. Instead she took him to her own room. There she backed the wide-eyed, grinning Nando up against the door and unfastened his belt. Then she dropped her bathrobe to the floor. “This won’t take long.”
It didn’t. Nando’s eyes were round. He was six inches shorter than she was. He didn’t grab her or try to kiss her, which comforted her. In a bland way, Beth found that she was eager for penetration. Boom, he was inside. And boom, she came. She felt the rush and burst of pleasure as if they were no more than a cold beer on a hot afternoon. Nothing like the emotional roller coaster of her encounter with the detective yesterday.
She patted Nando the drywall guy on the cheek, helped him fasten his belt again, and sent him back to the bathroom.
Then she put on her new basketball shorts and tee shirt and sneakers and went back to the kitchen and thirteen more of Reg’s pancakes with butter, maple syrup, blueberries, and whipped cream. Reg ate thirty-five.
After that he was more willing to accept her help in the kitchen. Together they cleaned up after the morning fressen. Then they rolled the first fridge off its position against the wall.
“Ugh,” Beth said, looking at the uncovered patch of linoleum.
“How long you think that’s been sitting there?” Reg said.
“Ten years?” she guessed. “That refrigerator-freezer model isn’t very recent. They wouldn’t have installed a new fridge over a dirty floor, would they? Don’t answer that.”
The linoleum was tarry with old grease and dust and studded with stuck-down bottle caps, broken glass, cigarette butts, and random splashes of gummy guck. The guck looked so old, she doubted it would ever come up.
“We can do this,” Reg said bravely. “We got the technology.”
He showed Beth where all the cleaning supplies were hidden under the sink. They pulled on rubber gloves and drew a bucket of hot soapy water.
Cleaning the floor soothed Beth. The two of them worked steadily, and slowly the linoleum began to reappear. She found herself telling Reg about what she’d found in Blake’s apartment at the Doral—skipping over the part where she and Jee took their clothes off for Pog’s camera, and dwelling with some bitterness on the properties Blake had forced her to sell and then secretly bought up at sacrifice prices, the credit cards he hadn’t told her about, the fake identity and the cash bonuses he had desposited under that name, all the while he was telling her she needed to tighten the family’s expenditures.
“I don’t get it,” Reg said, putting his back into scrubbing up a ten-year-old ketchup packet, burst and glued to the floor. “You talk about wasting your life on this guy, but seems like it’s just the money. He shorted you, his check bounced. Is that it? Because, have you seen the price of silver these days? In two years here, you’ll make more money he ever seen in his life.”
“No, it’s not about the money,” she said through her teeth, tugging at a stuck-down beer bottle cap.
“Because maybe you undersold yourself. I mean, not just on the settlement. The whole time.”
“I did not sell myself. I did it for love.”
“Yeah? How’s that work?”
She glanced up sharply at him, but he was focused on his sc
rubbing. “When you love someone, you do things for them out of love.”
“Sounds like the other thing to me,” he said, squeezing his sponge out in the bucket.
After twenty seconds, she couldn’t stand it. “What other thing?”
“You know.” He glanced up under his eyebrows and back down at the floor. “The S-word.” He shifted the magazine under his knees. “Jee told me about you and that housewife slavery. How you don’t get paid and they treat you like shit and you can’t quit. North Shore fancypants housewife. AKA slave.”
“She talked about me to you?” Beth gasped.
“Hey, hey.” He showed her his sponge and his empty rubber-glove-covered palm. “I’m just one a the girls.”
“No, you’re not,” she snapped. “You’re Jee’s slave.” Everything she’d thought last night came up in her throat. If she couldn’t get Jee to see it, maybe she could explain it to Reg.
He smiled, washing out his sponge. “Her love slave.”
“Whatever kind of slave! She uses you!”
“Best kind.” Reg expanded philosophically. “You was just unlucky. You gave your love slavery to people who shouldn’t be allowed to own slaves. Just like some dogs is unlucky enough to be owned by people that shouldn’t own pets.”
“There’s something wrong with that logic,” Beth said. “Really, Reg. This is not a good bargain.”
“Better’n your North Shore gig. Old Blake wouldn’t even look at you.” Beth felt that like a slap in the face. “That musta sucked. You’re tryin’ to show your love and he don’t want it. That’s the worst. Nobody loves you, hey, everybody’s got that problem. But if you got nobody you can give your love to?” He sounded sober for once, as if he knew.
Pain tightened around Beth’s chest, squeezing the air out of her lungs and two tears out of her eyes.
Reg didn’t notice. He scrubbed and rinsed and scrubbed some more. “See, that’s why I’m so happy to be on the team. ’Cause now I got a outlet for my love. And I feel love back.”
She was flabbergasted. “What? From whom?”
“Jee, of course.”
“She tortures you!”
“I wouldn’t call it torture exactly. Besides, she also lets me, uh, do stuff with her.” He ducked his head lower, and Beth saw his ears go red. “We do it together. She’s not just letting me do it to her.” He smiled wistfully. “She don’t hafta do that.”
“How is hitting you a sign she loves you?” Beth had been through this with a friend from Junior League only two years ago. She thought she knew what to say.
Reg silenced her with his next remark. “She cares more than the rest of you. You guys threw me off a balcony,” he said, shocking Beth again. “I bet even my Ma would do that if I pissed her off enough. You see, I don’t have to be here. I could still be living in my Ma’s basement. But why would I go back to that? Instead of this? Are you kidding? You guys give me more than anybody ever has. Jee...she’s trying to make something of me. Nobody ever done that,” he said with wonder. “Nobody.”
“She’s trying to make you a slave,” Beth said again, ashamed because she had stood by, shivering in her underwear after his casual grab at her boob, and watched the others throw Reg off the balcony, and when she got home that night she’d forgotten all about it, never even noticed that his twisted, broken body had vanished from the basketball floor. She almost felt ashamed for trying to burst his bubble.
Reg said seriously, “Well, I hope I can be a good slave someday. ’Cause it’s the kind of slave-and-mistress thing where she works with me a whole lot, until I get it right. She don’t have to do that. That’s love. And I love it. Ahh, gotcha,” he added, carefully peeling the ketchup packet off the floor with finger and thumb and holding it up to show Beth.
“Are you sure you know what love is?” she said helplessly.
“Are you?” He looked at her at last. “Hey, you cryin’?”
Beth took one huge hot gasp of air and burst into tears. She’d been trying to strip away Reg’s faith in Jee, and instead he’d shown her exactly how she had kept thinking of the money as Blake’s language of affection.
Reg shuffled across the soapy linoleum on his knees and put an arm around her. “He din’t love you back enough. That don’t make you a bad person. He’s the bad person.”
“Stop saying that word!” she wailed. “Oh, God.” She turned and shoved her face against his shoulder while storms of sobs shook her.
“Ain’t you cried this whole time?” he said incredulously. He patted her on the back with his rubber-gloved hand. “I shouldn’t a said that.”
“No, it’s true, it’s true, oh, oh no, it’s true.” It was that word love. Hearing it in Reg’s mouth had shattered her defenses. She blurted, “As long as I kept worrying about money, I could push all my w-worries about l-love away. Blake was always too busy working to b-be affectionate. His money was how he loved me. That’s what I told myself. Years and years ago. And then the kids came, and he worked more and more, and I’d better believe it really hard, because the money was good but there wasn’t any love—”
“He insulted your love, the prick,” Reg said, petting her head awkwardly, his rubber glove catching on her hair. “‘At’s gotta hurt.”
She crashed her face against his shoulder again. “It does,” she choked. Her tears stung, as if the hurt was bleeding out of her eyes. She wrenched her thoughts away from a memory of Blake at twenty, handsome and confident and so proud of his first big paycheck. She sniffled hard enough to give herself a headache.
No wonder Jee’s deal seemed good to Reg. She had to admit that Jee took a lot more trouble to manage Reg than if he were just a dog chained to a post. What kind of life does he come from that makes that feel like love to him? His mother must be a piece of work.
Or she might be just terminally exasperated with his denseness.
Yet sex slavery was bringing out a sensitive side of Reg that astonished Beth. If he was right, if he saw something inside that scarred, angry heart of Jee’s that Beth couldn’t see, then what kind of life had Jee led that made this thing she did with Reg into a labor of love?
She gulped air until she burped, laughed, and disengaged from his hug. “We’d better get back to this floor. We’ve only done one refrigerator so far.”
“Okay.” And boom, he was back to picking ancient popcorn fragments out of the primordial ooze.
This gave her the space to calm herself. They scrubbed companionably for two more hours. At noon, the contractors clanged down the metal stairway to eat their lunches on the basketball deck, and Beth and Reg made giant sandwiches out of bollitos—Mexican baguettes—and every kind of leftover in the fridge: meatballs, chow mein, sliced papaya, french fries, sushi rice, cold tamales, wilted salad swimming in dressing, with jalapeño slices and sixteen kinds of mustard left behind by the previous team of sex demons. Reg was no succubus, but he could definitely pack it away.
After all that emotion, Beth desperately wanted a beer or six, but she wasn’t sure how little it might take to get Reg tipsy, or how he might behave while tipsy in her company, and she didn’t know if she’d even want to tell him no if he got inappropriate, and she didn’t feel she could refuse him a beer while she was guzzling them the way the succubi had taught her, right in front of him.
So she scrubbed silently at each refrigerator-sized footprint of evil, sharing the work with Jee’s love slave, thinking about love.
He’d hit the nail on the head. It wasn’t getting love that was so important. It was getting a chance to give love. Everyone was born wanting to give love, weren’t they? She remembered now with searing clarity watching her babies grow, thinking that even if Blake wasn’t home—”Blake wasn’t home” being the code phrase, the excuse for “Blake doesn’t love me”—eventually, surely, her babies would look up at her and show her some sign that they, too, felt this agonizing burden of love that flowed out of her like milk from a leaking breast. And she would know that someone was there to receive it
. But the babies were too busy, focused on growing. And then they were running, squealing, whining, laughing, playing, either wanting something with all their hearts, or contented.
She’d settled for caring for them. Love was giving. She had people to give love to, love in the form of meals and clean clothes and a lovely home and all her many services to them, and that ought to be enough. Had Blake trained her to give, like a cow that’s just thankful to get milked every day, to the point where she couldn’t tell if he and the kids were aware of her presence?
Because that was what was eating away at her insides now. That Blake would betray her was no surprise anymore, and Darleen had called her on that. Beth knew. She’d always known about Blake, deep down.
But she’d expected more from her children.
She still had hopes that they would come around somehow. That her disappearance would trigger some concern, as it obviously had when Darleen reported her missing. That their abandoning her was just a mistake somehow. A misunderstanding.
At four o’clock, the construction shift changed over in the bathroom. Beth declared the floor-under-the-fridges project done for the day so she could go over the punchlists. The upstairs crew went downstairs to work on the ancient communal shower-tub in the old locker room, and the steam room, and the big cold tile showers that hadn’t worked in decades. A finish-carpentry crew came up to help Nando with the drywall and start installing bathroom cabinets. She began to imagine that someday they’d be able to take more than a ten minute shower per person.
When the contractors were back at work, she sat down with the Regional Office’s laptop and Googled “sexual dominance.” Apparently it was very popular. She skimmed manuals for subs. She read manuals for doms rather more closely. She dipped into fiction, her cheeks burning and sweat trickling down between her shoulderblades.
Just when Beth felt like her skull couldn’t hold any more, Jee blew in looking fresh and rested from her “interviews.” Beth couldn’t wait. She took her rage mentor aside, in her bedroom, while Reg curled up on his dog bed in the kitchen with a beer.
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