“Really and truly, Daddy, no more pictures. Do you know if there’s still coffee to reheat?”
“Should I look?” Louis tapped the camera’s on/off button and the snouty lens retracted with a tootling whir. It amazed Tacko how agreeable the guy was, like a new boyfriend or a seasoned butler. “Mr. Tacko?” he said. “If there’s coffee, do you want a cup?” Louis only called him Mister. DaBlonde, come to think of it, never called him anything. “Or do you want another glass of wine?”
“Coffee sounds great.”
After Louis went out, Tacko turned on his back, pulled the sheet over him to mid-chest, and folded his hands behind his neck. He could hear it raining, a sleety, hard-ticking persistent March rain. He could also hear muffled sax, drums, and bass surging up from the art gallery below. Some kind of fund-raiser there tonight. Noticing a photograph in a pewter frame on the dresser, Tacko did a stomach crunch to have a better look. When he lay back down, DaBlonde loomed over his face. “What?”
“Just checking out the picture.”
“That’s our wedding.”
“Really?” He looked at it again, Louis in a dark-blue suit, DaBlonde in an Easter-pink cocktail dress. Outdoors on bright green grass, a flowering tree behind them. “How long ago?”
“Last spring.” Tacko watched her remembering, her mouth shifting into a private smile. “We’re still newlyweds. Year in May.”
A year in May, and practically from day one, they’d told Tacko, DaBlonde had been fucking strangers with Daddy’s blessing. Hot Wife/Husband Watches But Doesn’t Join In. That was their lifestyle niche. They’d started playing strictly for thrills, because they wanted to and could, but then Louis and DaBlonde wondered if they might earn some income from it as well. They recorded so many videos and took so many pictures, what were they supposed to do with it all? And frankly, they could use the extra money, what with their two divorces, which they hadn’t gone into in any detail about with Tacko. A website seemed worth a shot.
Louis, who was living on permanent disability (apparently he had twenty things wrong with him), was a seasoned entrepreneur. Before he’d hooked up with DaBlonde (they’d met online, each in a miserable marriage), he’d owned a small chain of video stores in the Petersburg area, and during the dot-com boom a website where he marketed things like patio misters and mosquito lures. He’d run that business out of the family garage in Chesterfield County while holding down a good job assessing and purchasing liability coverage for a residential building contractor. It wasn’t hard for Louis to do the research, stake out their domain, take care of all that technical stuff.
The site went hot six months ago. The original version was amateurish and skimpy, offering only a few dozen nude-slash-action pictures of DaBlonde and a handful of short clips. Over time it got better, easier to navigate, and grew to include thousands of photographs and more than eighty videos. About two thousand subscribers signed up, guys like Tacko paying $23.95 per month with automatic credit card renewal. Subscribers from all over the country, she’d proudly told him. Europe, Japan, Australia, Brazil, even the Middle East. “Arabs and blond women,” Louis said once, meaningfully clenching his jaw, and let it go at that.
Tacko had never intended to contact DaBlonde, even though as a member of her site he was encouraged to. But ten days ago—the same day that Dave Sandlin of the Eury Agency telephoned out of the blue and asked Tacko to fax over his resume—he’d impulsively written her an e-mail. Saying how much he enjoyed her newest video, adding that he’d been in the same bar dozens of times, the bar where she’d picked up that stringy Jamaican guy with the white teeth. It was the Tobacco Company, wasn’t it?
She’d e-mailed him back, using emoticons and u for you, which Tacko loathed. Would he like to meet? Tacko didn’t reply. Fantasy was okay, but actually doing something? Very damn unlikely. DaBlonde persisted. She wrote Tacko again, and included two cell numbers. When he didn’t call, she wrote a third time: they would be at Siné Irish Pub in Shockoe Slip on Wednesday evening at 8:30. It would be so great if he joined them.
By ten past 8 last Wednesday, Tacko still hadn’t made up his mind.
He’d been so nervous when they met that his lips kept sticking to his front teeth. He just nodded and smiled, sipped his beer, and let DaBlonde and Louis do most of the talking. This was their dog-and-pony show. Not that either of them had dressed to impress. Louis, in need of a beard trim and a haircut (his full beard was salt-and-pepper; the hair on his large head gray, thin, and wind-blown), had come to the pub wearing khaki pants and a plum-colored knit shirt stretched over his big stomach like a drumhead. He hadn’t worn a coat. Twenty degrees out and no coat. Louis was about five-eight, but his bulk made his presence overpowering; he took up so much room! They’d stood, all three of them, talking at the bar for more than an hour. Tacko wondered if they stayed there because the tables and booths were too confining for the guy.
DaBlonde introduced herself as “Ann-dray-ah but spelt like Andrea,” and Tacko thought she looked dowdy, a little drippy, in person. At any rate, in clothes. Charcoal slacks and a pale gray blouse, black vest hand-decorated with colored glass beads. A dobby four-button jacket. She’d dressed like a third-grade teacher out for a drink—a non-alcoholic margarita—on a Friday afternoon, even though it was a weeknight, and she drank a White Russian, then a second. This is what they liked to do, she said. She looked Tacko straight in the eye. He smiled back. There was their marriage, she said, and then there was this. She gave a happy shrug. This was just a hobby they shared.
But it was a business too, said Louis. Tacko would have to sign a consent form. They would try not to show his face in videos. Louis was careful about that. However, if Tacko were recognized, they could not be held accountable.
He had to think it over. What would happen if he were recognized? What could? Tacko wasn’t married, and his friends and professional acquaintances were universally unlikely to surf into DaBlonde’s “hot wife” site, although you could never know anything for certain. His parents were deceased, so was his brother, he didn’t plan on running for public office, and he’d been laid off from his job, so he couldn’t be fired.
Fuck it, he signed the waiver.
“That your real name?” said Louis Amboy.
Tacko blushed. Had he done something wrong? Was he supposed to make one up? “But nobody calls me Vincent,” he said. “Vin sometimes, but not so much. Never Vinnie. Usually either Tack or just Tacko.” Shut up.
DaBlonde had put her hand on his leg, right thigh, underneath the bar ledge. She moved it back to his crotch. At that moment her cell phone started playing Van Morrison’s “Have I Told You Lately?” and she withdrew the hand to root though her bag. “Excuse me.” She turned away and answered, frowning.
“Look, I’m in a restaurant. Because I am, that’s why.” She planted an elbow on the bar and slumped in dejection. “Nice. Classy. And I’m supposed to listen to this crap? Scott. I’m not listening to you. No, Scott, you may not speak to my husband, either. Because that’s who he is, Scott. And now I’m going to hang up. Same to you, asshole.” She listened a few more seconds, then snapped her phone closed. Flipped it back open and turned it off. Then she raised an eyebrow significantly at Louis. “That was Scott.”
“I gathered. And?”
“You heard me. I wouldn’t listen.” She looked testy, then didn’t. She widened her eyes, doing mock-waif, and smiled at Tacko. “Scott’s my ex-and-I-couldn’t-be-happier-about-it-husband. And I’m especially happy that he lives in Greensboro. He makes cheap furniture. And empty threats.” After a shrug, DaBlonde leaned forward and kissed Tacko on the mouth, with tongue.
“Well,” said Louis, recovering abruptly (he’d paled at Scott’s name) and paying for his and DaBlonde’s drinks with a twenty, “shall we continue this somewhere else?”
They’d gone to the Omni since they could walk to it from the pub, Louis explaining to Tacko on the way how it was standard practice for the single guy to pay for the room. Tacko th
ought, Standard practice. In the Amboys’ world it was standard practice for the single guy to pay for the room. In the Amboys’ world, and in Tacko’s world now too.
He’d felt a knot of fear when they arrived at their room and he unlocked the door with a magnetized card. (What if they robbed him? Tied him up and tortured him? What if—?) Then it was gone. DaBlonde threw off her clothes like it was nothing. White cotton underpants, white undershirt with spaghetti straps, no bra. Tacko was delighted by her smooth skin, her small breasts, impressed by her intensity. The more DaBlonde carried on, and the louder she got, the more Louis enjoyed it. That was demonstrably evident. All told, they were at the hotel for about an hour and a half.
Afterwards, Tacko felt conscience pangs. He’d wondered if he would, and he did. He felt like some kind of crazy amoral heathen, and as big a pervert as Louis Amboy. Well, maybe not quite as big.
He was surprised when the Amboys e-mailed him and suggested another get-together. He’d been flattered too by the follow-up invitation, but uncertain how to respond. He’d met them just to say (to himself) that he’d done it, to actually do something outrageous for a change. But what was the point of seeing them again? Sure, that. But did he really want any more of the Amboys? No. Yes. No.
Eventually, he decided to see them again, and then to his further surprise (and slight discomfort) they’d invited him to their condo on Decatur Street, just south of the Mayo Bridge. Tacko knew their pay site well, and all of the videos and pictures there had been shot in hotel rooms or in public or semi-public places, never their home. Till now they’d not so much as hinted at where in the city they lived. For all Tacko knew they actually lived somewhere else and just played in Richmond. No, it turned out they lived on Decatur and Third.
A few of the red-brick early-twentieth-century buildings in the old Manchester district still operated as factories (Alcoa had a plant, there were a couple of box companies), but most were either derelict or had been gutted and refurbished into work space for artists, art galleries, or luxury condos. Where the Amboys lived had once been the United States Cardboard Company and still bore the name chiseled above the entrance door.
They owned one of the few residential units that had been sold in the building. Two or three cooperative galleries, a banquet hall, a café, and about fifty artists’ studios comprised the ground level. Louis and DaBlonde lived on the third floor, a wide-open industrial space, exposed brick, timber columns and trusses, everything else chrome or glass or bleached canvas, Ultrasuede or black leather. The place was furnished, Tacko thought coming in earlier tonight, like a full-page design collection ad in the New York Times Magazine—except for all of the computers.
There were desktops and laptops, Macs and IBM PCs, and monitors either shining a dead blue light or playing explicit videos Tacko recognized from the pay site. DaBlonde with the Sports Bar Guy, the Sharp-Dressed Man, the Man in the Woods, the Cowboy Trucker. In the restroom at Chesterfield Towne Centre, on a farm, on a different farm, behind the Ashland Wal-Mart, at the Virginia State Fair. All of the monitors had the sound turned off. Even so, it was disorienting, porn everywhere you looked, and the actual woman, the “hot wife” herself, standing right there, dressed in herringbone slacks and a white fuzzy sweater, urging Tacko to sit down, then sliding onto the sectional beside him.
They drank red wine (Louis poured) and smoked half a joint (Louis rolled, Louis lighted, Louis declined to partake, same as he’d passed on drinking wine). DaBlonde pulled up her sweater and exposed her breasts, then slotted her tongue at Tacko while Louis talked geekishly about a new camcorder he’d bought that took higher quality videos. They required more time to load, he said, but it was worth it.
Once they’d moved into the bedroom, the sex was better than last time. Not so bing-bang-bing or as impersonal. They were learning each other’s moves, adding finesse. Tacko forgot about Louis and his camera, except for whenever the husband asked DaBlonde how she liked it so far and urged Tacko to come wherever he wanted, externally, internally, whatever struck his fancy. Unlike last week, Tacko wasn’t impelled by a flight reflex immediately afterwards.
“Tell me something,” DaBlonde was saying now. “You a cheater? You can tell me, I don’t care.”
“Cheater?”
“Married.”
“Jeez, no. I’ve been divorced since ninety…seven.”
Louis stuck his head into the bedroom. “There wasn’t enough to heat so I put on a fresh pot.” Then he was gone again.
DaBlonde flung herself upright as if suddenly and willfully were the only ways she could ever force herself to move again. She laughed when she almost bounced Tacko off the mattress, then swung her legs around, grabbed her Chinese robe (black and red with a firecracker dragon on the back) from a chair, put it on, and cinched it. “Do you want to take a shower first?”
“If you wouldn’t mind.”
“No, you go ahead.”
But Tacko felt like dawdling. “Do … do a lot of guys you meet say they’re not married?”
“You’re kidding, right? Because I’m not even sure I believe you’re not.” She laughed and came back and sat down on the bed. “You’re all a bunch of genetic liars.”
“Harsh.”
“Except Louis. Otherwise you’re all cheaters, if you ask me. Not that I give a damn.”
“I’m really divorced.”
“I believe you. No, seriously. I was kidding.” DaBlonde’s expression changed again, her long face looking placid, her gray eyes vacant. “But most men are cheaters. You know they are. And worse. Like my ex? Was just convinced that I screwed around, and I never did, not once in seven years. But meanwhile Scott’s out knocking off new stuff every other weekend. And—and carrying on with my best girlfriend, maid of honor at our wedding.” The corners of her eyes crinkled and her smile returned. “Louis is probably hovering out there right now, hoping we’re having sex again, and here we are having a regular conversation.”
Tacko thought, A regular conversation? That’s maybe not how he would’ve described it, but they were having … something. Something Tacko was okay with. That he was here for, present for. He was good with all of it. It was just—he still had a hard time convincing himself he could do something like this, weird shit like this, and get away with it. He’d probably get AIDS. Or maybe Louis was right that second dropping a diamond-shaped purple roofie into his cup of coffee, he’d end up with a ball-gag in his mouth and dangling from a ceiling beam. Jesus. Had he lost his mind? Had he lost his mind since he’d lost his job? He wondered.
For almost nineteen years he’d worked at Greene and Scivally Advertising, the last eleven as a group creative director. Then: new management, and out he went. Week before Thanksgiving. One day he’s brainstorming a new campaign for a national brand, the next he’s emptying his desk with a security cop standing by in case he goes berserk. But Tacko wasn’t the excitable type.
It was scary carrying away his carton of personal items, but also a secret relief. He’d been in career burnout a long time, he just hadn’t let on. In recent years, movies and novels and TV series about characters who found the courage and/or the foolhardiness to abandon stifling lives had held great appeal for Tacko.
The first two months he didn’t do much. Got out to the gym more regularly, subscribed to Netflix and caught up on the third season of Lost, scheduled and kept doctor and dentist appointments before his company health insurance lapsed, and worked on his screenplay, the one based on a botched kidnapping that happened in the early 1990s. But the story got trite as he was writing it, not basing it closely on the real case at all, and he gave it up again. He knew he wouldn’t go back to it.
During this period Tacko wasn’t dating, by choice. He’d had an on again/off again friends-with-benefits thing with a married secretary who used to work with him and now worked for the Virginia Bar Association. But when they didn’t get in touch over the Christmas holidays, Tacko wondered if maybe this time the off-again was permanent. Upon consideration
he discovered that possibility not even slightly painful. Thinking about Connie Agnew and how insignificant she had become in his life was the first inkling Tacko had that he might have left more behind recently than his job.
People he knew well, whom Tacko considered friends, called and left messages. Tack, a bunch of guys are getting together for poker tonight, we’d love to see you. Vincent, my man, you at all interested in seeing a movie? Tack? I sent you an e-mail about Robin’s birthday party. Call me. Vin? Nikki and I were saying how we haven’t heard from you. Vincent? Tack? Tacko? He didn’t get back to most people. It just wasn’t anything he cared to do. After a while there weren’t many calls. Tacko had no problem with that.
At the end of December his brother died suddenly, but he didn’t fly out to Salt Lake City for the funeral. They’d been estranged. Their personalities, their politics, their dad’s will. His brother, though. Jesus Christ. Heart attack. And he was younger than Tacko by four years! His brother Kenny’s death shut Tacko down for weeks, well into the new year. Except for paying bills online, he mostly slept and moped around the house. He watched four seasons in a row of The Wire. Grew a beard and shaved it off.
He’d received a good severance package, and had significant savings, even some excellent technology stocks, so money wasn’t an issue. The rest of his fucking life was. But even deep into January his future remained a subject Tacko felt he couldn’t deal with yet. If something great, some fabulous new direction, didn’t happen or present itself by the first of February, he’d look for another job in advertising. First of February. February the first. He marked it on his calendar.
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