No. 22 Pleasure City

by Mark Fishman

  She was already finished with the man who’d been at the hotel bar on Jackson. She’d gained nothing from it but another layer of disappointment in herself because it had ended badly just as nearly all her relationships with men came to a bad end. His messy blond hair and soft gray eyes were out of her life as quickly as they’d entered it. She hadn’t been as careful with him as she should have been and he turned out to be a lot smarter than she thought he was.

  But she never felt better than when she found herself in a jam since a good thing in the shape of a new idea always came to her out of a difficult situation. She worked best when she was in a corner and had to fight her way out of it and the pressure was too much and it squeezed her thoughts hard until they forced a spark in her head that gave her a new idea.

  She was still short on cash or at least she always thought she was and she wanted to get her hands on some money so she figured she’d catch somebody else sleeping who wasn’t expecting anything more than the routine and she’d make them pay for walking in their sleep.

  The first cup of black coffee went down smoothly and she accompanied the second with two slices of toasted bread and strawberry and rhubarb conserve and when she’d finished the second cup her mean, scheming little mind thought of the man who’d smashed in Burnett’s face, Burt Pohl.

  [ 63 ]

  Angela leaned awkwardly against the filthy bathtub with her hands tied behind her back and her eyes blindfolded as Fitch sat quietly reading the notes he’d taken from their last session. He wasn’t bothered by what Shimura and Aoyama had said and he didn’t want to waste any time worrying about it until he’d pulled Angela a bit further along the path she’d made for herself by speaking the truth.

  He looked at his wristwatch. It was nine-thirty. He straightened his tie and smoothed it down under his crumpled linen suit jacket.

  “I want to see your face,” she said.

  He put the notebook on the edge of the sink and untied her blindfold.

  He ignored her steady gaze, picked up his notebook and said: “Let’s begin.” He caressed the barrel of the pen with his fingertips, waiting.

  “You’re late.” Her voice was quiet.

  He didn’t reply. She looked at him without blinking her sea-blue eyes.

  “I was worried you wouldn’t come.”

  He calmly returned her gaze.

  “I know that I love you,” Angela said. It came out of her mouth like a shot.

  Fitch didn’t say a thing.

  She repeated: “I love you, you know.” Her voice trailed off.

  He cleared his throat and said at last: “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to let it ride. I’m going to sit back and watch you louse yourself up. And come to think of it, it’ll be a pleasure.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say to anybody.”

  “I’m trying to make a point,” he said.

  “You don’t believe me.” She’d made a flat statement that struck him as the truth.

  “That’s more like it,” he said, nodding. “No, I don’t believe you. I know that you believe what you’re saying, but it’s not love.”

  “No, Fitch. I’m leveling with you.”

  “You’ve been playing with that thought since the other night when it came to you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I mean the love angle.”

  “Angles have got nothing to do with it,” she said, her voice turning a bit aggressive. “I’m being straight with you and you know it.”

  Fitch scribbled a line in his notebook.

  “Quit writing and listen to me.”

  He looked up but kept a cool and self-confident expression on his face. “Go on,” he said professionally.

  “Have a heart,” she pleaded. “Don’t you feel anything like love for me?”

  It was his turn to get upset because he didn’t like being on the wrong end of an interrogation which is exactly how he felt now that she’d asked him this question. Instead of arguing with her, he shut the notebook, lit a cigarette and took a long stiff drag at it and took his time letting the smoke out.

  “Okay, you don’t want to talk about it. Maybe not now, but later. I can wait,” she said.

  Fitch watched her try to find a comfortable position. He finished the cigarette, put it out under the running faucet, turned off the faucet, tossed the butt into the wastebasket and picked up the notebook but didn’t open it.

  “This deal tonight isn’t something new for you,” he said. “For years and years you’ve been dragging yourself down into a kind of swamp thinking you’re in love or just fucking somebody because it took your mind off what you really wanted which was something you thought you couldn’t have and didn’t deserve and it was too painful knowing it, and believing it was true, so you kept on with what you’ve been doing all your adult life. And now you think you love me because I’m listening to everything you say without making a judgment, that love’s the answer when it isn’t the answer because when the answer comes it won’t come from the outside or somebody else.”

  “How am I supposed to know when it’s really love?”

  “You aren’t listening,” he said impatiently, tapping the pen on his knee.

  “I’m trying to figure it out.”

  “I’m no therapist.”

  “Go on.”

  “For you, here with me, it’s a shift of the emotions you had when you were a kid, the transfer of feelings about a parent to an analyst, me, and it happens in all kinds of nickel and dime therapies and maybe in a way between so-called normal couples or even close friends, but it isn’t love. And because that isn’t love, this isn’t love. Do you follow me?”

  “So, what do you suggest?”

  “You won’t know love until it’s really love.”

  “That’s a load of shit!”

  “Call it what you like,” Fitch said, opening the notebook. “I don’t give a damn whether you buy it or not. It’s just the way I see it.”

  He was trying every possible way of manipulating her present state of mind to the point of making her more frustrated in the hope that she’d find her own way out of it. As far as Fitch was concerned therapists were crazy. Finally, he’d be glad to get out of it himself and he saw the advantage of having got caught by Shimura. Still there was more work to do and he thought of the twenty-four hours Aoyama had given him.

  “Put the blindfold back on and leave me alone,” Angela said.

  “We aren’t finished yet.”

  “We are as far as I’m concerned.”

  Fitch was trying not to look at her. But Angela’s sea-blue eyes were doing something now, operating like tiny fishhooks, and Fitch went on trying to turn his head and couldn’t turn his head. He sat there staring, waiting.

  Angela was looking up at him, and she looked at him for a moment that had depth and weight, as if it were something she held in her hand.

  He heard Angela saying: “Maybe you’re right, maybe there still are a lot of things to talk about and you were just trying to give me a healthy push in the right direction because my mind needs clearing and that’s what I’ve asked you to do for me and it’s why we’re here. Is that it?”

  “Now that sounds like a load of shit.”

  “Answer me.”

  He didn’t want to explain anything to her, it wasn’t part of the setup, but he heard himself saying: “Yes, okay. Something like that.”

  “I figured as much.” Angela smiled at him, content with herself.

  Fitch excused himself for a minute, got up and went to the kitchen for a bottle of cold water from a small refrigerator he’d installed beneath the kitchen sink. He picked up a spare glass from the countertop.

  Back in the bathroom, he poured out two glasses, held one to her lips, then set it on the floor beside her. He swallowed a couple of mouthfuls from his glass of water, sat down on the lowered toilet seat and took up his pen and notebook.

  “Let’s begin,” he said.

  She starte
d talking, looking at the floor, ceiling and walls.

  He thought of the arrangement they’d made and the money that was part of it although it counted less to him now than at the start, and he figured he might have to extend the twenty-four hours he was given by Aoyama because she had more progress to make and it would take as much time as it took for her to get where she had to go by the time the sessions came to an end.

  [ 64 ]

  Shimura was surprised when he’d learned that the plump young girl named Gracie was in fact Stanky’s daughter and that he’d wanted to fuck her and couldn’t get the picture out of his mind of her spread buttocks, and he didn’t feel any shame because of it. It wasn’t written on his face so Stanky could see it, and so he figured that what really bothered him was the lack of guilt he felt and how it made him close to and hardly different from the inhabitants of the city chasing pleasure without a conscience.

  He scratched his chin, thinking. He was turning out to be just like them. He’d fought with himself and lost on the subject of fidelity while his girlfriend flew east and west, and even though he hadn’t followed through with it infidelity jumped around in his head like a nervous rat.

  He unlocked the door of his apartment, went in. His mind was a bit foggy. He felt the unusually potent stimulation he’d got from looking at Gracie, but didn’t want to get rid of the feeling by masturbating a second time. This personal question of self-gratification was something he’d have to figure out without talking to Rand Hadley. The bigger question of how the same subject affected the city was something else. It was late enough to get into bed and read a book but that didn’t interest him either and so he went to the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea.

  The phone rang as he poured boiling water into a cup with a teabag dangling in it. He picked up the receiver with one hand while he raised and lowered the teabag with the other. It was Tomiko calling him from the hotel flight attendants stayed in on their layover, and Shimura was immediately drawn away from the obsession with Gracie and his hard cock moved logically toward Tomiko even though she was far away.

  Maybe there was something they could do about it since the phone was made for conversation and conversation could be whatever two people wanted to talk about and right now he wanted more than anything to talk about sex and it wasn’t the first time they’d done it over the phone on account of her traveling. Shimura’s mouth formed itself into a big grin that seemed to come from way back in his throat and it was made of pure satisfaction.

  [ 65 ]

  Violet found the bar without much trouble, remembering it was opposite the place she’d gone to with Burnett before he’d tried to burn her with a cigarette for a second time at the intersection of Winthrop and Front Street. She remembered it even though she’d had a lot to drink that night, first with him, then with Pohl after he’d settled her account with Burnett by beating him up.

  She wanted Pohl to be there so that she could size him up under better circumstances than the first night she’d met him because tonight she hadn’t swallowed a drop of vodka.

  She made her usual entrance with her narrow hips swinging just enough to draw attention from the customers who had the habit of watching the door open and close as drinkers came and went. The hem of her lightweight charcoal-gray skirt was well above her knees and she wore a matching jacket over a deep-blue silk shirt. The heels she wore accentuated her bare legs and the muscles of her calves.

  Violet’s eyes searched the room for Pohl and didn’t find him. The hands of the clock behind the bar said ten o’clock. The bartender nodded at her just like every bartender in every bar acknowledged her as she sat on a stool in front of him. She ordered a lemon vodka and ice, which she intended to drink slowly.

  The bartender served her a straight vodka with a squeeze of lemon over a few ice cubes since that was all he had behind the bar, there weren’t any imported bottles back there except whisky. She spun the ice cubes around the inside of the glass with a red plastic stirring stick that had a ball at the end of it. She turned the stick around and submerged the ball, twirling the stick between her fingers, then drew it out and stuck it in her mouth, tasting the sting of cheap liquor on her tongue. She took a mouthful, swallowed it.

  When the stuff reached her stomach she had to catch her breath because it burned like fire as it went down and she could almost hear it hissing as it tore her throat up on its way down to her belly.

  She tilted her head back, her hair cascaded like a baby waterfall over her shoulders and for a second she didn’t ever want to have another glass of vodka for the rest of her life if they were all going to taste like this. She snapped her watery eyes shut until she got used to the taste in her mouth. Now she understood why Pohl had ordered cocktails for them because a cocktail covered up the taste of cheap liquor.

  She shifted her position on the bar stool when she saw her skirt had gone far up her bare thighs showing the customers more than she thought was a good idea since she was alone in a third-rate joint without a man to keep her company.

  She took another swallow of vodka, a small one this time, and thought of Pohl as financial support, and then she wondered why he’d taken her to a dive like this if he had any money because if he did he wouldn’t bring a respectable woman to a third-rate bar unless he didn’t want to spend anything in which case it wasn’t going to be easy to play him for big stakes.

  She took a cigarette out and the bartender lit it for her and she looked around the room. There wasn’t anyone in the bar who hadn’t noticed her slanting eyes and jet-black hair. She finished her drink and ordered another. With each swallow of vodka she grew more confident and didn’t mind if she gave them all a good view of the fine soft hairs on her thighs. She wasn’t thinking about Pohl anymore. No one came up to talk to her even though she felt the atmosphere was charged with sex and that she was the source of it.

  A couple of customers left the bar but were replaced right away by a young man and woman who came in together out of the warm night, seemed to know everyone and must have been regulars. Then Violet remembered she had come here to find Pohl. She waved at the bartender and he came over to her and leaned on the bar to get as close as he could to the face with a pair of green cat’s eyes.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “You can answer a question for me.”

  “Ask it, anything.”

  “Don’t get funny.”

  “What’s funny? I’m just looking.”

  “You get any closer you’ll be in my drink.”

  “That’s not where I’d like to be.”

  “And I’d rather be someplace else.”

  “I can look, can’t I?”

  “Just don’t burn yourself up doing it.”

  He pulled his face away from her. “Okay, what do you want?”

  Violet described Burt Pohl using what she remembered of him from the night they were together in the bar to give the bartender an idea of what he looked like and she gave him just enough of a picture so he could help her out on how often Pohl came into the place.

  “Yeah, he comes in here, but he isn’t a regular — if that’s what you want to know.”

  “That’s what I wanted to know.”

  “I don’t even know his name.”

  “And you won’t get mine, either.”

  “Did I ask you for it?”

  “Pour me another vodka, will you?”

  The bartender turned around and fixed another lemon vodka for Violet. He put it down in front of her and picked up the empty glass, eyeing her.

  Time passed slowly, she drank heavily waiting for Pohl. She swung around on the bar stool. She looked around the room watching the customers until she got tired of seeing the same faces and the faces were men looking at her and trying to catch a glimpse of what she had under her skirt.

  Now when the door opened and closed, she didn’t pay attention to it. Somehow she’d get Pohl’s phone number and call him tomorrow night. There was nothing to keep her busy but cheap liquor
and cigarettes and dreaming with vodka-soaked eyes wide open.

  [ 66 ]

  Shimura’s car was parked at the end of Nightingale Lane away from where it intersected Lavergne Terrace, and he sat behind the wheel tapping his fingers on it waiting for Fitch who’d said that he’d meet him here at nine. He watched the road behind him through the rearview mirror. He looked at his wristwatch. Aoyama and Eto were a block away in a car belonging to the agency.

  At five past nine Shimura saw Fitch coming up the lane toward his car. He leaned across the passenger seat, raised the handle and opened the door for him. Fitch got in and shut the door, lit a cigarette.

  “Is she ready to leave Pigsville?” Shimura asked.

  “Everybody’s ready to leave Pigsville.”

  Then Fitch explained the setup within the limits of what he called a professional secret since he wasn’t going to say anything private that had passed between them, and Shimura said that he didn’t want to know more about Angela than what he had to know if it didn’t have anything to do with why she’d disappeared and the fact that she’d arranged it all herself.

  “It’s got plenty to do with why she disappeared but it isn’t any of your business,” Fitch said.

  “Okay, we agreed that you wouldn’t say anything about what you haven’t got the right to talk about,” Shimura said. “I’m just a little curious.”

  “That’s right. And the answer is no, she’s not ready.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I want to see her tonight, then we can do it. I’ll bring her out tomorrow.”

  “When?”

  “In the afternoon.”

  “Have you figured out your end?”

  “That’s none of your business either.” He paused, then added: “And you better not have any plans of your own.”

  Shimura looked at him, squinting, and shook his head.

  “Right.” Fitch opened the door and tossed his cigarette out into the lane. He got out of the car.