“Just do whatever you want,” I say.
* * *
“Nice nails.”
They’re 3-D Hello Kitty. I keep glancing at my hands and startling myself. I look at the man in the art guy’s kitchen.
“Who are you?” I say.
“Ron. I drive a limousine. Here,” he says.
He gives me a business card. I cross my arms and turn to the art guy. He pulls me a little away and whispers in my ear, not bossy though, tentatively.
“Just give him a quick blow job and he’ll give us the coke gratis,” the art guy says.
I look at him calmly.
“No,” I say.
I pick up my purse from the island. All the way out of the apartment, and in the hallway, I brace for a hand to grab me, probably by the hair. In the elevator my heart’s still racing. Now he’s my least favorite.
* * *
In Dubai, when I lost a client, I would go to the Saudi’s parties to replace him. They were disgusting, all-night gangbangs. I would look up, or over my shoulder, at a new man’s face, feeling a new man’s cock in me, and I would smile at him and think, each time, I have never hated any person as much as you.
* * *
Our tongues are in each other’s mouths and sometimes, after a long time, I move my lips and sometimes, after a long time, he moves his. I keep my hand on the ex-Ranger’s pocket so I can feel the ten grand I just gave him. I said, “Money solves most things.”
* * *
There’s a small ache in my chest cavity like I could have a heart attack. I get a cheap massage on Thirty-First Street. When the girl gets to my feet she shakes one of them.
“Relax,” she says.
I keep checking my phone for the calf’s brain guy.
“No phone. Put away.”
“Leave me alone,” I say.
She’s a stranger and I don’t like her. She makes me miss the wax lady’s gloved hands ripping out my pussy hair.
“Don’t worry. No Szechuan today,” I say.
Her oiled hands stop on my leg. That’s code for a happy ending.
“You a cop?” she says.
* * *
The waiter gives me his complicit smile.
“No water for the lady, right?”
“Wrong, I want flat,” I say.
When he’s across the room, against the wall, I sneer at the waiter and he sneers at me. In here every suit is good. Outside, above Central Park, the sky is corroboratively blue.
“It’s amazing nobody blows this place up.”
“They think they might get to eat here one day,” the guy who buys me things says.
I hold his cock beneath the tablecloth.
“Listen, I’m going away but only for three weeks. I promise. I love you,” I say.
* * *
I walk across the West Side Highway on the pedestrian bridge. I walk through a mall with a food court that’s even more mysteriously suburban than the Time Warner Center. Past that is Goldman Sachs. At the security desk I ask for the office of the calf’s brain guy.
“You’re not on the visitors list.”
“It’s a surprise,” I say.
I’m wearing my tightest red dress. While the guard makes a call I wait. He smiles at me and I smile at him.
“I’m sorry.”
“What?” I say.
The guard shakes his head. I feel my face do something ugly but then I correct it.
“Okay,” I say.
* * *
I walk around Midtown at lunchtime and it’s so packed with tourists I have to go in the street. I walk from Broadway to Park, up a few blocks, and then back again, in the shape of a rectangle. Of course I don’t always get what I want.
* * *
“Next week,” the junk-bond guy says.
Between us in the tight, prewar elevator is the doorman I don’t like. He is obvious like that waiter. He judges me like there’s morality in the service industry and he’s good and I’m bad. But I look at his burgundy back and have a feeling of magnanimity. He does have to wear that stupid hat all day.
“I’m ready,” I say.
* * *
When the bodega guy pushes six dollars across the counter I push it back to him.
“Keep the change,” I say.
I put my right hand over my heart. He does the same. I have always fought it but I am a nice person, I think. I also give him my laptop. Back at my apartment I pack and then I turn around in a circle. I open my closet, which is now mostly empty.
49
The junk-bond guy has a bottle of champagne. I sit down on my knees in front of him.
“Don’t you want to shake it up and spew it all over my face like it’s your come?” I say.
“I never thought of that,” he says.
I put my phone between his feet.
* * *
I have never been here at night. The apartment’s weird art makes it feel possessed. I stand just in the threshold of the dark living room, staring at it, like anything that bothers me, until either I’m mesmerized or its effect is lost and it becomes like everything else.
* * *
In the kitchen we eat the breakfast he’s made. I try to match his elation.
“God, it felt so good to sleep with you all night,” he says.
“Yes,” I say.
“Is that how you like your eggs?”
I look at the yolk running all over my plate, which is exactly what I hate.
“Yes.”
* * *
At a certain calculated point when I’m sucking the junk-bond guy’s dick I open my eyes and look up. I like him just as much as the guy who buys me things, I think. So what if he’s retired, what’s the difference?
* * *
The junk-bond guy comes back too soon from the bathroom and catches me kicking the baby coffin.
“Don’t do that,” he says.
* * *
In the night I can feel he can’t sleep so I wiggle down and give him a blow job. Then I lay my head on his belly.
“I wish you were here every night. I’d never have insomnia,” he says.
“If you bought me for a year you could have me whenever you wanted,” I say.
“How much would that cost?”
His voice vibrates through his skin. He’s almost asleep.
“You tell me.”
* * *
It’s morning. I sit beside him on the living room couch with a mug of coffee. I smile at him.
“Domestic.”
The junk-bond guy flaps down his newspaper.
“How about a million dollars? And I’d come over to your apartment when I wanted. Or I could rent you one. What do you think?”
“Let me think about it,” I say.
* * *
The formal dining room is perpetually set. I sit at the head of the table. I nod and am infiltrated by china and crystal patterns of the subtlest kind. They get under my skin and wind. A difference is he offered to pay me more than the guy who buys me things. I think I still have plenty of time to think and I feel sad but only for a second. It’s muffled right away. I find the junk-bond guy.
“We should eat in the dining room tonight,” I say.
“Anything you want, baby.”
* * *
I duck under the tablecloth and crawl to his chair while he unzips his pants and takes his dick out. The thought of never thinking again, ultimately, is what made me sad and it surprised me.
* * *
The junk-bond guy opens the bathroom door that doesn’t lock. He looks at me anxiously.
“Do you want some?”
“No,” he says.
He closes the door. I bend over to snort the third of three bags off the counter.
* * *
I pick the desk drawers in the maid’s room until I find my phone. I don’t touch it. I lock it back up.
* * *
After lunch the junk-bond guy takes all the place settings and centerpieces off. I climb onto the
table so the runner is between my knees. He motions me from his chair. I have never done this where the client and I are only together, all the time. It creates an intensity.
* * *
The Qatari man’s kandura was shiny and his ghutra was starched in the shape of a cobra. The man who bought my passport back for me from the woman with the silk headscarf was Emirati. His kandura had a long tassel and no collar. I knew the man who tried to kill me was Saudi because his kandura was skintight with French cuffs and gold cuff links. At the hospital the nurse, a woman all in white like a man, did not say, “What happened?” And I did not have to say, “I don’t know.”
* * *
I wake up and turn over and see the junk-bond guy, who is naked beneath the white sheet. The man is the random factor and I’m the fixed. I think today is the ex-Ranger’s birthday.
* * *
The hall is long, the length of the place. I listen to one of those robot vacuums and then I see it as it passes by the opening to the living room and then I only hear it again. I pull my feet up on the couch and watch the maid. She dusts around me and we don’t speak.
* * *
“What was that you had the other day? Coke?”
I almost laugh at the “other day” part of his question but I don’t.
“No,” I say.
* * *
“All you have to do is say a year from the eighties and my teeth start grinding. In the early nineties it was crack,” he says.
He pulls up his lip to show his gold molars.
“That’s how I got these. But I have twenty years clean.”
We’re smoking on the smoking couch. I swing my crossed leg.
“Do you ever let the maid in the maid’s room?” I say.
The junk-bond guy laughs.
“No, this is my cave. I like it stale.”
* * *
I stretch out all four limbs but I still can’t feel the edges of the big bed. The junk-bond guy comes back from the bathroom and now it’s always too soon.
“Scoot over,” he says.
I do and my wrist flies into open air.
* * *
I play with my hair. Each time I make a higher and higher bouffant. I model them for him.
“You’re a woman of many skills.”
“Let’s go for a walk,” I say.
“Why?” he says.
I put my hands on my naked hips. My hair falls down. It was in an impossible position.
* * *
In a far corner of the living room, almost hidden, I find one of those African fetish objects that must be menstruated on every month. I stand in front of it so long the junk-bond guy comes up behind me.
“I think that’s from Mali.”
I lean into him. I make my voice sarcastic like I don’t care.
“Does your wife smear her period blood on it every month so it doesn’t murder both of you?”
He snorts.
“Amy started going through menopause like three years ago. It’s a nightmare. Don’t let it ever happen to you,” he says.
I glare at it.
* * *
“What are you going to do when you can’t work anymore? Do you have enough money saved?”
“It’s never enough. You know that,” I say.
We are at opposite ends of the dining room table, eating one of the heated-up dinners that the maid made. He lifts his wineglass to agree with me.
“I’m going to kill myself,” I say.
The junk-bond guy looks at me seriously, through the shedding flowers between us.
“So am I. Eventually Viagra won’t work anymore either,” he says.
* * *
Late at night I have a recurring nightmare, while I’m awake, of my lifeless body, my brain dead, completely undefended from the touch of others, their whims.
* * *
In the morning living room we dance. Sun streams in. He turns me. He lifts my arm and I hold his thumb.
“What are you grinning about?”
I shake my head. Whether the universe is a closed system or not, it’s just a cord pulled out of a wall, death.
* * *
“Nineteen eighty-three,” I say.
The junk-bond guy’s face does many things. It settles on amused. We’re in the white bed and I’m still sitting on his cock.
“Is that the year you were born?”
I should lie, say 1987 or 1988.
“Yes.”
“Can I get a taste?” he says.
“It’s heroin,” I say.
“I deduced that.”
I drag my nails lightly down his chest.
* * *
Instead of eating we watch a Romanian movie on his computer with an undercurrent of fear. Motivations accumulate almost imperceptibly.
“When’s the exorcism?”
“Just wait,” I say.
* * *
Instead of sleeping we roll around the bed platonically, feeling each other’s skin.
“Tell me about yourself.”
His pupils are pinned and it makes me feel close to him. I think I should reply the way I always do. I should say what I said after the first time he said that, on our first date.
“Okay,” I say.
50
“I’ve never been to Dubai,” the junk-bond guy says.
“It’s shopping malls and desert,” I say.
“Like Phoenix.”
I laugh. He got up to puke twice but we’re still in the bed. I’ve heard the first birds.
“So you’re eighteen, you get to Dubai, then what?”
* * *
I can’t get my wings even. I make the right side thicker to compensate. Then I have to make the left side thicker. It’s an endless cycle. I remember the girl who told me about Dubai, in the bathroom of the club where we were bottle girls, saying, “Eyeliner can tell when you’re afraid.” I throw my liquid-liner pen at the bathroom mirror.
* * *
I sit on his lap and he feeds both of us pork lo mein on a plastic fork.
“Did you miss it over there? Bacon? Ham sandwiches?”
“You get over it,” I say.
He doesn’t want his fortune cookie.
“Why not?” I say.
“I don’t believe in them,” the junk-bond guy says.
“Of course you don’t.”
I open both of them. A NICE CAKE IS WAITING FOR YOU. I get that twice.
* * *
After dark I go into the far corner of the living room and stare defiantly at the African fetish object. I think I will have my period next week.
* * *
“Hands and knees.”
There is a lag before I do it. He kicks me in the back of the leg.
“Listen to me.”
* * *
The junk-bond guy talks to his wife in the maid’s room with the door shut and for an hour I can’t have a cigarette. I think the other person I have spent this much uninterrupted time with was my mother and that turned out badly.
* * *
While I’m fixing my smeared makeup he lingers in the doorway to the bathroom.
“I don’t know why you bother. You’re not going out,” the junk-bond guy says.
I smile to overdraw my lips more precisely.
“It’s part of the whole thing,” I say.
He stays where he is.
“Do you want more heroin?” I say.
“No, it’s fucking with my cock.”
I smack my lips together, stop smiling.
* * *
“You’re not like the other prostitutes I’ve been with. But I’m sure you hear that all the time.”
“I’m exactly like them,” I say.
Behind his reading glasses his eyes squint.
* * *
I try to follow a drawing that is hung on the living room wall. It is a flowchart of conspiratorial connections of the military-industrial complex. The artist must have found it only logical but its illness is so apparent. I giv
e up. It doesn’t bother me at all.
* * *
There is no grand pattern. Only the small, negotiable, meaningless patterns I have created that have not kept me safe. I eat my ham sandwich and look at him on the other side of the dining room table.
* * *
When the junk-bond guy asked me why I became a whore I thought of my teenage self. I said it was because I liked money. Because it was a simple straight line. It was yes. Now over and over to him in bed I say that.
“Yes, baby. Yes.”
* * *
He also asked me what I thought about to stay so wet and to answer him truthfully. I answered the way I always would, with a lie, and I felt like myself because what I think about is mine. In the middle of the night I go to the bathroom and jerk off silently with my forehead pressed to the closed door. I feel my whole life since I was twelve years old ooze over my fingers.
* * *
At the dining room table I sit where I can watch the back of the maid in the kitchen while she does our dishes. I cross my high-heeled sandals up on an opposite chair.
* * *
I look contemptuously at my Hello Kitty nails on the junk-bond guy’s dick. Afterward he’s helpful and brings me a wet washcloth to get the come off my top.
“What’s with all the red?”
“I want to look like a woman and not a little girl.”
I retie the bow beneath my tits.
“What?” I say.
He shakes his head, stops smirking.
* * *
“Yes. We were together for seven years.”
I take the last bite of our bar of ice cream. I pull the wooden stick through my teeth.
“This man you loved, who didn’t care you were a prostitute, what did he do for a living?” the junk-bond guy says.
“He made bombs,” I say.
* * *
In the dark the junk-bond guy traces the shape of my face. It’s relaxing. I close my eyes.
“So do you know how to make a bomb, after seven years?” he says.
I’m almost asleep.
“In theory.”
* * *
Once I asked the Sheikh, “Do women make bombs, too?”
“Everything’s possible,” the Sheikh said.
Then he laughed. He did care that I was a prostitute.
* * *
In the maid’s room the junk-bond guy holds up his cigarette.
“Has a client ever burned you?”
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