Blue Money

by Janet Capron

  But I was hungry. Busy night at the Retreat. A small band of coke smugglers who came up from Florida about once a month and took over the joint had descended the night before. They were gorgeous outlaws. My favorite customer was the wiry, intense leader. The two of us soared on his high-quality cocaine all night long. From the minute this pirate walked into the waiting room and nodded silently in my direction until my shift ended hours later, there was no way to distinguish it from an abiding passion, except for the wad of cash he threw at me up front. This time, we broke away from the orgy in the Karma Sutra Suite. He pulled a massage table out of one of the small trailers. The two of us on wheels, sailing from one end of the long, empty corridor to the other, banging against the red flock walls as if we were on a bumper-car ride.

  I sat ramrod straight, sipping my Bloody Mary, buzzing, as usual, maybe slightly more than usual. My father chose to ignore the frenzied light in my eyes, or if he did notice, he simply thought I was full of energy. The only kind of high he knew how to detect was drunkenness. So his perky daughter, just as bright as a shiny penny, was not stoned by his definition.

  I think my father had a pretty good idea of what I was doing. He let me know that reading porno and watching blue movies around Times Square were secret hobbies of his. I didn’t really approve of my father. I didn’t approve of him tacitly approving of me to be exact, but that’s the way it was. I would bait him, tell him secrets, try to get a rise out of him in a futile attempt to turn him into a normal American dad.

  “Don’t worry, you and I will never make love,” he once said, his green eyes jumping with tiny lights, revealing that the thought had obviously occurred to him.

  I was the one who invariably ended up shocked.

  That morning, I told him I could no longer meet him like this, because the place where I worked had changed my shift. I was being promoted to the ten A.M. to six P.M. slot.

  “I’ll miss these breakfasts of ours,” he said, banging his unlit Player’s Navy Cut cigarette against the edge of the table.

  “Oh, me, too. After this when I see you in Cobb’s Wharf, I guess we’ll have to revert to our father/daughter roles.”

  We sat there for a moment.

  “Say, Pop, tell me something. I just don’t get it, you know, why people put up with it, why they keep trying to organize themselves into these little constricting units—one man, one woman, babies. Why? I mean, what are they after? I mean, Pop, I just don’t get what it’s all about, the whole family thing.”

  “The truth is neither do I,” he said.

  When he answered me, he looked deep into my eyes, as if his intention were to bore a hole through the bewildering muck of civilization, as if to acknowledge that, finally, we were no longer strangers.

  Michael had welcomed me, this time without any hesitation. It didn’t occur to me that he might have been upset by my marriage. I wouldn’t fully understand that until later. In the meantime, I delighted in how openly glad he seemed to have me back again.

  The scene had changed during the time I was married. I started out freelancing at a few of the larger cathouses, but massage parlors were all the rage just then. It was Michael, naturally, who suggested that I case massage parlors for a steady job, especially the Sultan’s Retreat, the one with the best reputation. And Michael was also the one who, treating me like an escaped refugee after my hasty return from Palm Beach, right away found me a place to live. He turned me onto a residential hotel, a few blocks north of Slim’s Wide Missouri, called the Mohican, which was a poor man’s Chelsea, if that’s possible, a rotten, falling-down old thing that cast its lurid shadow like the shameful block-buster it was over the neighboring town houses right on Gramercy Park.

  I took a suite of two rooms and a bath on the seventh floor. From both my windows, I could see the squareheads trotting around the park’s tall iron fence, exercising themselves like apartment-house dogs. The inside room held on to the remains of a kitchen, while the other room was furnished with a club chair, its stuffing long since ground into dust; a sagging double bed; and a funky bureau with a cracked mirror hanging above it. I draped blankets across the windows to block out the sun and brilliantly shaded paisley silk scarves someone had given me over the bedside lamps, and I was home.

  Now Michael had two of his women conveniently housed at the Hotel Mohican. The other contender, and moving up every day it seemed, was, of all people, Evelyn’s daughter and Eddie’s little sister, Ava. She had matured some, but she retained a doggedly passive air, as if she were an amused child watching the silly grown-ups. She said very little. At the same time, Ava possessed her mother Evelyn’s earthiness. She had a wry sense of humor, a way of laughing at human folly that made her seem much wiser than her years. I can’t say I ever resented her presence. On the contrary, I invited it, because all three of us reveled in play. Our threesome was Euclidean—a balanced, even plane—an equilateral triangle that floated through the night. Together it seemed as though, like black magicians, we could defy gravity. We read a translated version of Baudelaire (“Be Drunk”) and William Blake. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” was one of Michael’s favorite bits of poetry, while mine was from “The Question Answered”:

  What is it men in women do require?

  The lineaments of gratified desire.

  What is it women do in men require?

  The lineaments of gratified desire.

  We took turns reading out loud, hovering close to the sultry light of the paisley-scarf-covered lamp like children around a campfire, a prelude to the elaborate sexual concoctions Michael would cook up to keep us entertained.

  Michael had gotten hold of a Polaroid camera. He usually preferred to watch us and take candid snapshots than to actually participate. This is perhaps why no one felt left out. Ava and I experimented. I climbed on her. She was big and sturdy, her body a pale tabula rasa, her limbs immobile as she lay loose but inert underneath me. Her pleasure was secret, her orgasms still private in spite of the circumstances. I understood why so many men loved girlish modesty. Ava was sweetly obliging, easy to use.

  On my days off, we convened at my place, because I was the parlor boarder. My apartment looked out on Gramercy Park, and my bed was the newest. But four days a week, my lobster-hour shift prevented me from joining them, and I was so preoccupied with my work at the Sultan’s Retreat, so intent on doing a good job, I could easily ignore the fact that Michael might be on the floor below with Ava. He’d burn out on the youngster soon enough was how I figured it.

  Then I started working the day shift, while it was Ava’s turn to work the lobster shift at an all-night coffee shop in the East Village. Michael and I found ourselves awake and alone yet again. He would spread my grandmother’s thirty-year-old abandoned silver mink coat over the dusty club chair, which he pulled close to the bed so he could prop his feet up. I lay on the bed naked and he sat nearby naked reading magazines. It was a study in fur, the mat of black hair on his chest framed by the silver mink. Every so often, he would wriggle his behind deeper into the chair, as if he were sticking it to my grandmother.

  We were constantly surrounded with music coming through the two big speakers right next to us. I can still remember that we were listening to Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks, in which finally he had become so musically and lyrically sophisticated, he tore himself out of the genre he loved. Joni Mitchell’s disillusioned silver siren voice, Van Morrison’s aching, melodic poetry, Al Green’s songs of innocence, Tom Rush’s expressive ballads, and, of course, always, out of loyalty, we listened to the Rolling Stones, who were currently in a slump, stuck in the shallow end of the genre they were pretending to disdain. Taken together, this music was our private swan song, a lyrical farewell to an era, because every night at Slim’s the piercing death rattle took over. Not that we didn’t love the final rush, that last burst; it could be argued that the New Wave produced some of the finest music of all. But the righteous anger and the anarchy portended the death of the unde
rground. It was a gasp, a spasm of defiance. And when the final set was over, Michael and I preferred to retreat to the bosom of old time rock ‘n’ roll.

  Music was not a casual, in-the-background kind of pastime. We listened to a few albums at a time over and over for days, until the melodies and the lyrics had sunk in far enough to become the medium through which we experienced the world. Michael never stopped seducing me; I don’t think he knew how to stop. The songs we played were love laments. There was always the promise of love hovering around us. It had me confused; my head would sometimes unexpectedly jam up with the static of thwarted desire, and I would have to talk myself down. “This is all there is,” I would have to tell myself.

  Inside the sound, we were silent, unafraid to sit awake saying nothing for hours. I thought it was the essence of revelry, this deliberate exclusion of the outside world. Like every room Michael inhabited, the old one at the Mohican was hallowed. As high on speed as ever but more reverently now, that is to say more cautiously high, I would eventually drift into an alpha state, at last free from the noise of my mind.

  But along with the serenity, there was a dead-in-the-water sense to the time we spent together. Occasionally, I found myself feeling embarrassed for both of us, the nights were so pointless. Very often, we did not even bother to have sex. Once in a while, he dragged out a vibrator, or on occasion we did make love, our no-surrender version of love, but it was more for something to do than anything else. Early one morning, I became preoccupied with the troubling thought that we were the ones who were played out. I decided, after much agonizing, to talk about it. I pulled myself up on the bed, covered myself with my kimono, and crossed my legs underneath me. Then I leaned over slightly toward Michael, who sat facing me in his mink-lined chair, and I asked him what was wrong between us.

  “You know what the problem here is? You don’t think I feel any pain,” he said abruptly, as though he had already given the subject a lot of thought.

  “OK, I admit what you’re saying is true. You’re sort of a father figure to me, so of course, I won’t let myself think of you as vulnerable or hurting. Too scary. You’re supposed to be invincible, and I know that’s probably a strain.”

  His silence seemed to confirm this.

  “But I mean, what is it you’re trying to say here? Are you hurt? By me? I can’t believe it. What did I do?”

  “Why don’t you think about it and get back to me.”

  “Why don’t you tell me, for God’s sake?”

  “I would think it’s obvious, Janet.”

  “Well, it’s not. Meanwhile, Michael, while we’re on the subject, you always do know when I feel pain. That really is obvious because I don’t know how to hide it, but since when did you care? It was never about how I felt. And after I married Gunther, it got worse.”

  “Did you want me to wait around?”

  “What is that supposed to mean? Have you left me?”

  “In a manner of speaking, yes. I’m already gone.”

  “I hadn’t noticed.”

  “You will one of these fine days, you will.”

  “Are you leaving me, Michael?”

  “Were we ever together, Janet?”

  “Yes, I mean, OK, it’s an unconventional relationship, but it does exist. What am I saying? Of course we’re together, practically every night. And I want us to stay together.”

  “Then why did you get married? Why did you become exclusive—exclude me? I never would have done that to you.”

  “I had no idea you cared one way or the other. I had no idea you even missed me.”

  “I’d rather have someone put a gun to my head than to hear them say ‘I love you.’ Owning is the opposite of loving as far as I’m concerned. But what happened in this case is you cut me out altogether. You made yourself inaccessible.”

  “Haven’t you ever done anything like that?”

  “No. I have never done that.”

  “What about Roseanna and the baby?”

  “What about it? She wanted to have the kid. I couldn’t stop her. Anyway, nothing changed. I didn’t marry her, did I?”

  “But my marriage is over now. Tell me we can survive—OK, OK—survive my mistake. Because, really, I can’t imagine life without you.”

  Silence.

  “Michael?”

  Silence again.

  “Maybe we’re like one of those patchwork quilts they just keep adding pieces to,” I said.

  “That’d be quite a patch job.”

  One evening, I came home to find Michael still in my suite where I had left him that morning. He was on my bed with Ava. They were rolling on the ancient, greasy bedspread with their arms around each other, locked in what looked like a desperate kiss. They were making out, something I had often reassured myself Michael didn’t know how to do anymore. When they saw me, they sat up abruptly like two kids who had been interrupted by their mother. Then Ava stretched out and sunk down onto one elbow. She lay there facing me, her long brown hair parted like two sides of a wavy shawl, falling in tresses over each bosom. Michael was right behind her, also on his side, framing her. His own dark hair, still long, hung wet and loose about his shoulders. Right then I felt hot tears on my cheeks that came out of nowhere. I wanted to give them my blessing; it seemed as if they belonged together. Ava had a particularly implacable look on her face, as if she were saying, Keep away: he’s mine. And the message that came to me from Michael was plaintively clear: Please let me go.

  Island of Women

  It was Tall Ships Day, the long-anticipated bicentennial on the Fourth of July 1976. My coworkers and I were sitting around freezing in the too generously air-conditioned receiving room of the Sultan’s Retreat, still the most prestigious massage parlor on the Upper East Side. I was spacing out on the red-on-red velveteen wallpaper, a gold sateen pillow propped over my bare stomach to keep warm. Other girls were watching the giant boats sail up the Hudson on the tube. It was, as always, dark inside the massage parlor. The bright blue sky outside flickered live on the screen. There was no business, but the girls were not discouraged.

  “Look at those hot pieces raggin’ in the wind,” one of them, Penny, said, pointing to a medium shot of a man hanging off a jib. “Any time now, I’m going to be rubbing that sailor’s cock, any time.”

  “This place gonna be overrun, overrun. I can feel it in my clit,” Molly said.

  “Listen, kids, I don’t know how to tell you this, but those guys aren’t coming in here,” I said.

  “Why not, they’re sailors, ain’t they? Don’t we always get the ships in here? Look at ’em, hundreds of ’em,” Lorelei said.

  “Yeah, but you’re not going to see them in the flesh,” I said.

  Nobody paid any attention to me. They just kept gaping at the set.

  “Man, I got me extra rubbers. I’m up for this. Bu’ness been slow as a dry turd lately. C’mon, boys, c’mon down,” Penny said.

  “I’m telling you to forget it,” I said.

  “Since when are you such an expert?” Molly said, turning her milky-white body over so that she could curl up in the corner of the couch. It was cold in there.

  “You don’t have to be an expert to know they’re not those kind of sailors,” I said.

  “Sailors is sailors,” Cleo said.

  A chorus of “yeahs” and “right ons” followed. I wasn’t getting through. I decided to drop it.

  We could have been a troupe of June Taylor dancers on a break, all fifteen or so of us outfitted exactly alike in our halter tops, diaphanous sultan pants, and spike heels. But one look around the big anteroom, its red flock walls lined with gold sofas covered with waiting women, and you’d have to notice the variety. Each one of us was a different type. Pretty clever on the part of Max and Sam, the two managers, the way they had stocked their stable, something for everyone.

  We were all white, except for Cleo and Jasmine, who was Puerto Rican.

  “It’s what the traffic will bear,” Max said matter-of-factl
y.

  The Sultan’s Retreat might very well not have employed any women of color, at least in the daytime, seeing as how neither one of the managers had to answer to either the law or a liberal conscience, but Cleo was too good to pass up. She was probably the classiest whore in the place. Her hair was always perfectly coifed in a relaxed, soft flip, and her skin was her trademark. She was constantly swabbing her legs and her arms with perfumed lotions. Cleo could also be depended upon at some point during the long afternoon to deliver a lecture on nutrition. She knew exactly what wicked foods would block the colon, as well as what best promoted white teeth, shining eyes, and supple joints. As for Jasmine, she compensated for her Indian-brown skin by behaving at all times like the decorous lady. She was the only one of us who eschewed foul language, even referring to the johns as her “clients.”

  My best friend’s name was Anita. She pronounced it “Anida.” She was a gorgeous young Irish-Italian woman from Bedford-Stuyvesant, a real lowlife from a long line of lowlifes, easily the most popular one in there, besides me when I had a suntan. Anita was tall, with slanty green eyes just like mine, only hers were extremely wide-set in a cat’s face. She wore her light brown hair long, parted in the middle, nothing fancy. Anita was a no-nonsense type of broad, with a highly developed sense of justice. Men are only after one thing, well, OK, they were only going to get one thing. No frills.

  The john would say, “What’s your name, sweet thing?”

  “Anida,” she’d say, sullen, pouting.

  “Anita, that’s a pretty name,” he’d say.

  “You wanna get on with it or what?” Anita would say, growing impatient.