I paused again, stared curiously at the screen, as if this message were being composed collaboratively by me and the hotel’s computer. And then suddenly something quite gross and lustful seized my mind and I wrote it down just to see it.
How about this? You come over, we drink the champagne, we get a little light-headed, and then you give me a look with your dark eyes and I start kissing you all over, your face, your ears, your neck, and even the palm of you hand, and then you grab my hair and give me just that little bit of encouragement I need, and the next thing I know, I’ve got my tongue deep in the human honey of your pussy, which I guess from your eyebrows is sublimely hairy, and you are coming so hard your thighs beat against the side of my head, ding dong ding dong.
I sat back in the chair. I was breathing through my mouth and if anyone had been there to see me, I would have looked deranged. I was aroused by my own erotica, like Genet titillating himself in his cell by writing Our Lady of the Flowers, only mine was lousy. My fingers continued to wave in midair. Okay okay, delete, I said to myself. But instead I clicked SEND, and a heartbeat or two later the little spasm of insanity was on its way to Isabelle.
No, I shouted, grabbing the top of my head with both hands. But how to stop it? There was only one solution: I must disconnect the computer. I fell to my knees and groped chaotically beneath the desk for the plug, but by the time I found it I realized it was too late, if it had ever been possible. I remained under the desk for a few extra moments—it was weirdly relaxing there—and stared at the bristling weave of the carpet. At last, I crawled out again and sat heavily in the chair. In a box at the top of the screen, written in green letters: YOUR MESSAGE HAS BEEN SENT. I sat there trying to imagine just how such a thing could happen—how I could have been so careless, so gross, and how, as well, a few ill-advised lines of smut written in a trance in Iceland could make their way to a computer terminal on Seventh Avenue South, how I had most likely blown my chances for that apartment, and how my finger, one of the least heralded, least respected, least important parts of my body, could commit an act that would plunge the entirety of me into a cauldron of undiluted humiliation.
I FINALLY MADE IT to my room, took another sulfurized shower, got into the bed—I had yet to unpack. I fell asleep fast, like a dog being euthanized. First of all, a dreadful dream about my mother. I’m sitting with her in her Costa Rican apartment. She’s as tan as a wallet, wearing a red one-piece bathing suit, with white sunblock smeared on her nose and lips, like she’s going to go out surfing. She offers me a drink, in a silly girlish voice, like You want a drinky-winky? And I am somehow offended, and I say No thank you, Naomi. And she takes offense at THIS, that I called her by her name. I’m your mother, you think you could call me Mom? No thank you, Naomi, I say. She’s getting angry, and I start saying Naomi Naomi over and over. I am goading her on but feeling horribly frightened at the same time. She’s going to hand my head to me, I’m thinking, and I start stealing these furtive little glances over my shoulder, just to check on the door, so I can get out of there if I have to. But then, there IS no door. I mean, where there once was a door is a solid brick wall, and someone’s knocking from behind it. I wait for my mother to say something, but she gives no acknowledgment that anyone is knocking. She is rubbing her fingers together; they are making this insectlike clicking sound. Click. Click. And from behind the door, bang, bang. Finally, I say Who’s there? Shhh, my mother says, and I only say it louder: Who’s there??
It’s me, a voice said, Sigrid, and by now I was half awake, but still pretty much in the dream, too. Hello? I said. Hello, she said back. And it really was her, not in the dream but in the hotel. I scrambled out of bed, just in my boxers, and I somehow made it to the door without falling on my face. Sigrid? I said, still not sure what was happening. Open up please, I’ve come to see how you are.
And somehow the sound of her voice dropped like a stone in my dark heavy blood and created a little wave of love. At the time—and I know that three-word preamble is often utilized by scoundrels—but, at the time, I somehow believed that Sigrid had come to my room because she actually cared about me, that against all odds and defying all logic there had somehow developed between us a small but real connection. I’m not 100 percent certain I was awake; part of me might still have been in dreamland with my mother and that brick wall. But the next thing I knew, I was fumbling for the lock, opening the door, and when I saw her—dressed in black, with stockings, high heels, as if she was on her way to work, which she was—I reached for her, touched her shoulder, and instead of saying How did you know which room I’m in? or How did you get past the desk? I said Come in, come in, and once she was inside my room I gathered her in an embrace not really any different from one I would give to someone I loved, someone I knew.
As I held her, she moved closer. Tenderness, tenderness, the fragile consolations of tenderness. And it was tender, even though it wasn’t real. Elevator music isn’t really music, either, but it can trigger memories of music; it can create music in your mind. Out of nowhere seemingly I remembered something I read at least ten years ago written by Karl Barth: Women in their whole existence are an appeal to the kindness of men. Yes, well, how do I say this? The moment she touched me in this provocative way, the resolve I had to get through this trip without becoming Part of the Problem was practically gone.
Sigrid smiled shyly, stepped back. So? she says. Everything is okay? I took her by the wrist and steered her toward the bed. Am I really going to do this? I asked myself, but it was like someone had just pitched me off a roof and I’m asking myself Am I really falling? Am I really getting closer and closer to the ground? Is this really the last moment of my life?
And so: the bed. It still held the visual echo of my brief sleep, a big fetal dent at the edge of the mattress. I aimed my fall so I filled it again and pulled Sigrid in after me. She laughed merrily, slid next to me with surpassing grace—the way she responded to my tug, the willingness to be pulled into the bed, her responses were exactly as I have always fantasized but have never really experienced. In every other instance in which I have dived or rolled onto a bed and attempted to pull a woman in with me, I have always sensed some little hitch of hesitation, coming either from her desire not to be dominated or from some concern about personal safety, no matter how carefully I have wrapped the whole thing in playfulness. It’s always been What are you doing? Or Avery, you’re twisting my arm. When I think of all the things I wish were different in my life, I can’t help but wish my experiences with women had been a little more joyous, by which I mean a little less fraught. I cannot wholly blame this plodding seriousness on the women I have slept with, but, still, I think it would have been possible for someone possessing a measure of erotic anarchy to shake me up and bring a little light to what has on balance been a slightly melodramatic, even morbid, experience. But now, I was with a professional, and holding onto Sigrid and feeling the effortlessness with which she followed me onto the bed was one of the least fraught, most graceful moments of my life, and it struck me that what was in store—or at least could be in store—might be a revelation, the way dancing with a great dancer can suddenly reveal you to yourself and from then on you are never again wholly without grace.
I rolled onto my back and casually gathered Sigrid to me. It crossed my mind that her pretty white blouse and black skirt were liable to get wrinkled, but nothing in Sigrid’s manner suggested that anything so mundane was on her mind.
And so the grand presumption began.
Because if I knew anything in this world, anything at all, I knew that the contents of Sigrid’s mind were not available to me. The inner-Sigrid may have been screaming in rage, My blouse! He is ruining my new blouse! This fucking American baboon, I’d like to scratch his eyes out! Or maybe she was more of the melancholy type, and her mourning for her blouse was more resigned: Oh, there goes another pretty satin blouse. I don’t know why I even bother. Everything I touch turns to shit. Or maybe Sigrid was one of those women for wh
om being with a man, any sort of man, was a reliable source of pleasure, like a veterinarian who works with dogs, dog after dog, sick dogs, shy dogs, snarling, nervous dogs that must be muzzled even to have their ears checked, gassy dog leaking the stench of festering meat, whatever the day brings, all that is certain is there’s a dog on the table, there are dogs in the waiting room, and there are more dogs on the way. The doctor may love dogs, but would she treat them without charging a cent? Maybe so, in some earlier period of her life. But not now, now she has become a professional. Spending the day with some thirty dogs, sticking her finger up thirty canine rectums, drawing canine blood, all free of charge? Not possible. Nevertheless, it is no accident that this is how she spends her workday. She loves dogs. And Sigrid loves—or at least loved—men, and what better way to make a living than sticking her fingers in us, taking our blood, sending us trotting home with our noses wet and our tails wagging?
She slipped her rough-skinned hand beneath my T-shirt, snuggled closer to me—it was all so affectionate. Or reminiscent of affection. We were in a play about affection. We were in a play about sex. We were in a play called Irresistible, I was playing the role of the man exhausted after a long journey—and I was perfect for the part!—and Sigrid had the role of the girlfriend, or the girl, who had a few ants in her pants, and was glad to see me and who wanted to comfort me, help me relax. Of course, I use the word me advisedly. It was me, but it was me playing the part of me, and it was me also playing the part of not-me. Similarly, Sigrid was involved in at least as many roles as I was. The psychoanalysts, looking at an ordinary couple, used to ask How many people are in this bed? Well, here we had at least six, maybe eight, maybe ten. Maybe none.
The astonishing thing was you could choose, choose what you knew, choose what you felt, and believed. You entered a state of double and triple thinking. Being in bed with a whore is like being press secretary for a president. You believe his story even when you know it’s not true, and you also believe in his right to lie.
I rang down the iron curtain between what I knew and what I wanted to know. One moment, she was clearly and totally a hooker who had come to my room because the whole thing has been prebooked and paid for. An ambitious hooker, or a conscientious hooker, who thought she needed to pick up where we were when Castle came to collect me. But then I felt the weight of her leg as she cozily (or calculatedly) draped it over me, making a seemingly accidental half contact with my genitals, and I also detected a kernel of something sweet in her breath, the last olfactory echo of a sucking candy, or perhaps some breakfast marmalade, and the information that was once so luridly mine—the information that she was a prostitute, a whore—was suddenly unavailable to me, was superseded by the flesh and blood of her, and the flesh and blood of me, and some larger universal force of which we were both a part.
I am going to help you relax, she said to me, and she shifted her hips so the contact between us was more emphatic. Before long, my clothes were off and her hand was working me over, and her tough little tongue was banging into my ear with all the oomph and anger of a shoulder trying to break down a door. I couldn’t tell if what I was experiencing was Sigrid’s sexual gestalt, or if this was just how she kept her autonomy around johns. Maybe she felt some specific irritation with me. I felt unusually hard and at the same time vaguely numb, and then suddenly I was in her mouth and within a minute I ejaculated, wondering, as soon as it was over, If an orgasm can be bought and sold, then does that make it no more intimate than peeing into a plastic cup? and, second, Can I still tell myself I am maintaining my journalistic remove from the tour?
I decided I could.
I covered my eyes with my forearm and was overtaken by an avalanche of…what? Happiness? Far cry. Regret? Not really. Relief? Just trace elements. Ennui? Perhaps, or in other words: Yes. An annihilating boredom with myself, my body, the world. I felt a pubic tug, a little gnat’s whine of pain, and I lifted myself up on my elbows, looked down where Sigrid had been at work. She was peeling off my condom. I didn’t even know I had one on. Some dazzling whore-craft to roll it on me without my knowing. She gave my cock a little pitty-pat-pat and then she made a wait-right-here gesture and rolled out of bed, smoothing down her skirt, her blouse—these things suddenly mattered to her again. She disappeared into the bathroom, and I waited for her in bed, in my T-shirt but otherwise naked. Who dressed like this? Someone in the movies…Oh right: Porky Pig. A few moments later, Sigrid reappeared. She had a warm wet washcloth, and she swabbed the dreck. I scrambled under the covers. How did it turn out that she had kept her clothes on? She asked me if I wanted her to stay or go. I shrugged, turned away. Some terrible mood was coming on, rushing in like darkness. She took this to mean Go, and she started to leave, following the ancient wisdom that one of the things men pay prostitutes for is to get out without a fuss when it’s over. But before she was halfway across the room, I said Oh you may as well stay. I had no idea that’s what I wanted, but there you have it.
11
AN HOUR LATER, I was awakened by the sound of a single piece of paper sliding beneath the door to my room. I am not a deep sleeper, but I don’t know if I have ever before been jolted out of sleep by such crumbs from the sonic table. I scrambled up, my heart pounding, and then I stumbled hastily across the room to read the message, expecting the ill-defined worst. What a relief to see that all it was an announcement of a day trip to the Blue Lagoon. I stood there, holding the sheet of paper, my heart bobbing like a little rowboat lashed to the dock during a storm. Sigrid, too, had fallen asleep. She was a thumb sucker, the first undeniably true thing about her, and as she sat up, she dried her thumb on the bedspread.
Feeling I must experience whatever the tour had to offer, I readied myself to go downstairs. When I told Sigrid I was going to go to the Blue Lagoon, she assured me it was not only beautiful but beneficial to one’s health. I asked her if she wanted to come along—I couldn’t help myself; I felt close to her and somehow obligated. She said she was happy to make the trip, but it was pretty obvious she wanted to be free to go back to her old life, and down in the lobby she gave me a quick dry kiss and walked away from me, wriggling away with increasing speed, like a trout that has been unhooked and released back into the cool rushing water.
Those of us who were going to the little side trip convened in the Royal’s main bar. It was called the Mojita and it was meant to look as if it were some stylishly seedy old place resurrected from old Havana, during the reign of Batista and Meyer Lansky, when whoring, Christianity, and free enterprise were the Cuban style. I was the first to arrive and I sat at the bar. The bartender was a young blond guy with the tattoo of an iguana crawling out of his shirt collar. I ordered a coffee, a club soda, and a glass of red wine—I didn’t know what the hell I wanted.
A few moments later, I heard the click of heels, turned on my stool, and saw Gabrielle. She was dressed in khaki pants and a safari jacket, with a silk scarf poofed up around her neck. Where is Sigrid gone? she said, as she slid onto the stool next to mine. Gabrielle was freshly perfumed, though it seemed she had tried on one kind, decided against it, and covered it up with another. Oh, she went home, I guess. What? Gabrielle’s voice was sharp with concern, as if I had just told her Sigrid had been rushed to the hospital. She began rummaging through her shoulder bag—out came cosmetics, a calculator, a small biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, and, at last, her cell phone. She flicked it open as if it were a switchblade. Are you going to call her? I asked, to which Gabrielle nodded curtly. Oh, don’t, I said. It was my idea. I asked her to leave. Gabrielle stopped. You sent her away? For what problem? There was no problem. I don’t need her for sightseeing. Gabrielle held her cell phone, kept it at the ready. There was no problem? She raised her eyebrows inquisitively, frowned. No, I said, she was great. Gabrielle clicked her phone shut, dropped it back into her bag. In French, she ordered a glass of red wine. Then, to me, she said Sigrid is a beautiful young woman. I smiled, nodded. But I think you should have done what Lincoln sug
gested. You remember? Back in New York? She glanced over her shoulder, making certain we were alone. Didn’t Lincoln talk to you about upgrading? she asked. Didn’t he offer you the Platinum Membership? With Platinum you get our best girls. Believe me, I said, reaching for the club soda, then the coffee, and finally settling on a sip of wine, Sigrid is all the woman I can handle. The bartender brought Gabrielle’s wine. She picked it up, cocked her head at me by way of a toast, and then said All we want is for you to be happy, Avery. It’s not rocket surgery.
We sat in silence for a few moments. Then she began pitching me on the upgrade again. One of the men, she said, was not so happy with the girl he chose. It was all to his specification, he saw her, it was Hello, how are you, nice to meet you, come up to my room. But these things are very mysterious. There was no magic. And so he wanted to change. And as a Platinum member he could do this, no problem. I just can’t, I said. Anyhow, all the women are great. Of course they are, she said, and patted my arm. But I’m sure Romulus was glad he signed up for Platinum, because as soon as he told us that he wanted a change, we sent up a new girl.
Really? I said. I was surprised that Gabrielle would be so indiscreet, but I did know how to do my job, at that point. What did he want? She answered me without hesitation. Someone more maternal. Older, with the full body. A full body? You mean pregnant? She laughed, patted my arm again. Both she and Castle liked a lot of physical contact. It wasn’t enough for them to just talk to you; they had to have access to your skin, as well. Not that full, she said. But, yes, the mother type. To me, it comes as a relief, not to have everyone wanting someone the most crazy young. Do you have motherly types available? I asked. We do our best, she said, with a shrug meant to imply modesty. Why? Do you want someone like that? I shook my head, more emphatically than necessary.
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