Magdalene

by Moriah Jovan

  I looked at the mess around me and realized that as the day had worn on, my prostitution had ceased to be about the people I’d fucked that Mitch would run into on a semi-regular basis. It was now about who had taken advantage of him, when, why, and how—and what he intended to do about it. For now, anyway.

  It’d come back again and again, each time he met someone on the list and he would know in explicit detail what I’d done with that person, knowing that person would have a pretty good idea what Mitch was doing with me.

  There was no judgment attached.

  He was jealous. Insecure.

  No more, no less.

  So I asked him again, because he’d already intellectualized it once, then choked.

  “Um...” I gestured to the paper trails when I had his attention. “Are you going to freak out on me again like you did Monday?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know. It does freak me out.”

  “And how’d your golf game go yesterday?”

  He paused. Thought. “Pretty well,” he admitted. That didn’t surprise me. “Pierre congratulated me for being the only man able to get you where everybody else wanted you.” I raised an eyebrow. “At the altar.”

  I snorted. “Altar, my ass.”

  “Apparently it wasn’t uncommon for your clients to fantasize about wrapping you up in a ring and vows.”

  “That’s news to me.”

  “He said you give off an irresistible homemaker vibe. Martha Stewart by day and Mata Hari by night.”

  “Good thing he doesn’t know how apt the Mata Hari reference is. But it makes sense, I guess. Sex and food, appealing to a man’s only two vital organs. The madonna-whore complex.” I eyed him. “Clearly you’re susceptible to that one.”

  He shrugged.

  “You know I was named after June Cleaver?”

  “Cassandra June. Got it.”

  “That’s it. And so?”

  He raised his arms and dropped them in weary defeat. “It helps to know how many of your clients just wanted to talk.”

  “I give good ear.”

  He chuckled reluctantly. “I know. And...if what Pierre said about your appeal applies to some of the others, that’ll help, too. I’ll get over it. Give me time.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help you get over it?”

  “Yes,” he said, his tone now brisk. He strode over a bunch of paper trails and stopped to pick up one particular piece of paper, with one particular spot highlighted in fluorescent orange. “Do that.”

  I took the paper warily, gave him a second suspicious glance, then started to read. I couldn’t stop my smile from growing if I’d tried any harder.

  I looked up at him. “Not tonight.”

  “Why not?”

  “It requires accoutrements, which I don’t have.”

  “Where would one find such things?”

  I smirked. “You have two choices. I can order them online and wait for them to be shipped or we can get them tonight, but you’ll have to step foot into a sex shop—at which you can be seen by anybody driving by. Pick your poison.”

  He stared at me, lids lowered. “I have a very fast car. We could go, say, two hundred miles round trip in any direction, stop for dinner, and be home by midnight.”

  “Or get a hotel room.”

  “Even better.”

  “His majesty wants to play with his mistress, I see.”

  “Oh, yes, he does.”

  * * * * *

  Apron Strings

  April 1, 2011

  I intended to spend Friday, Saturday, and half of Sunday in my New York office because that weekend the Church held something called “General Conference” that required Mitch’s presence Friday evening for the men’s meeting, and for meetings all day Saturday and Sunday. From what I could gather, it was a semi-annual thing wherein all the head honchos in Salt Lake gave world-broadcast talks all weekend.

  It was all I could do to make it through three hours on Sunday. I sure as hell wasn’t up for the masochism of an eight-hour weekend marathon, and I wasn’t going to sit around in an empty house all weekend with nothing to do while my husband went off and played with God.

  More than usual.

  I was tempted to talk to him about asking to be released from being bishop, but he was a grown man and if he wanted to spend a good portion of our year together at church, that was his business.

  I didn’t have to like it.

  Clarissa popped up from the couch when I let myself in the townhouse Friday night after work. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.

  “Uh... I live here?”

  “Uh... No, you don’t?”

  “Are you expecting someone? Should I make myself scarce?”

  “No,” she said with a strange edge to her voice that made me look closer. I dumped my stuff on the kitchen island and went to her. I took her chin in my hand and tightened my grip when she would’ve jerked away.

  “What’s wrong with you?” I asked, noting her red-rimmed eyes and disheveled appearance.

  “Nothing.”

  I looked around. The coffee table, floor, couch—all strewn with empty ice cream cartons, beer bottles (the expensive stuff, naturally), pizza boxes. There were textbooks, a laptop, an iPad, and an iPhone piled in a chair at the end of the couch.

  “Okay, so either you’re having a pity party or you’ve been smoking too much weed and you got the munchies. Or both.”

  She jerked her face out of my grasp successfully this time, and arose to busy herself picking up the mess. “I don’t smoke pot,” she muttered as she worked. “Makes me puke and fucks around with my grades.”

  That had to be the truth, because while she might only take six hours a semester to prolong her aimlessness, they were hard ones and she maintained a 4.0.

  Her pride would not allow her to be less than perfect.

  “I also quit smoking,” she admitted.

  Ah, well. That explained a lot. My Botox lecture must have worked. “What happened to the boyfriend? The one who—”

  “Gone. Two boyfriends ago.”

  Several DVDs from Netflix were strewn in with the mess and I picked one up. Maid in Manhattan.

  I sighed. “Go take a shower,” I said abruptly.

  “But—” She snapped her mouth shut when I raised my eyebrow at her, and went up to her room. Maybe all that time in sacrament meeting watching Prissy control her children was paying off. I started clearing up the mess and soon I heard the sound of water through pipes.

  “You and I,” I announced when she was showered and dressed, and I was likewise showered and changed, “are going out.”

  She looked at me suspiciously. “Is this the mom version of a pity fuck?”

  “Take it or leave it.”

  “What happened to my new stepfather?”

  “Mitch. God’s not going to strike you dead for saying his name.”

  “Fine. Mitch.”

  I explained the whole General Conference concept to her and she stared at me, clearly as mystified as I. “Oh,” she said when I finished. “So, you’re not back back?”

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  I had to forcibly drag her into the bowling alley, but by the time I’d taunted her through her first two frames, she forgot herself and began to really bowl, taunting me back whenever she bested me a frame. But...I’d taught the girl to bowl and apparently she’d kept up because it finally dawned on me she might beat me.

  We drank beer and stuffed ourselves on nachos. A collection of college-age boys took the lane next to us, and it wasn’t long before they decided they were interested in flirting with Clarissa. She participated with great enthusiasm—

  —until one of them decided to hit on me.

  I like it when twenty-year-old kids hit on me. It means I don’t have to shell out for plastic surgery yet.

  “She’s married,” Clarissa snapped at him. “Note the four-carat rock on her finger?”

  Clearly, the boy didn’t k
now how to process this unexpected attack, and I simply watched it play out.

  “Why do you care?” he asked her, genuinely puzzled. “Sissy can’t speak for herself?”

  “She’s my mother, not my sister.”

  The boy looked me up and down. Slowly. “No shit...” he whispered.

  Well, my bank account might thank me for basking in a little flattery in lieu of a surgeon’s bill, but Clarissa would not. If I didn’t put this boy down hard and fast, she would conflate that failure to me flirting with him. Or worse.

  “Okay, look, kid, thanks,” I said. “But I’m pushing fifty and I have better things to do than babysit, here or anywhere else.”

  Red suffused the boy’s face, and he turned away while his buddies howled, poked, and elbowed. He might never live it down.

  I regretted that, but a mother’s gotta do what a mother’s gotta do.

  They were done with us, but it didn’t matter. The evening was ruined.

  It wasn’t until we had put away our bowling things, endured a silent ride home, and were each getting ready for bed that she knocked on my bedroom door.

  “I, uh...” She looked around at the new suite as if she’d never seen it. “Would you have— If that guy had asked you— Um...”

  “No,” I said as I toweled my hair. She wouldn’t look at me. “I made a promise to Mitch and I’m going to keep my promise.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “No. I’m attracted to him, and I respect him more than anyone I’ve ever respected in my life.”

  She stared at me for quite a while as I prepared for bed, her expression indecipherable. At least she wasn’t sneering or angry. It surprised me when she said simply, “Okay.”

  “Clarissa,” I said briskly, “you know you’re always welcome at your dad’s and Nigel’s if you don’t have a date. Don’t sit around here being lonely. There is no reason a smart, beautiful woman should be sitting home alone on a Friday night watching chick flicks and getting plastered on expensive beer and cheap pizza.”

  She shrugged. “Better than expensive pizza and cheap beer.”

  That made me laugh. “Are you even speaking to your dad yet?”

  “Some. Helene won’t.”

  Mmmm, well, that would take time. “Just remember he loves you dearly.”

  She ignored that. “I’m graduating in May.”

  “I know. I have the date marked.”

  “And I got into UMKC law school.”

  I’d known that weeks ago. “Was there ever any doubt?”

  “You seemed to doubt.”

  “I doubted your motivation and timing, not your ability.” She said nothing. “Well, let me know when you want to go to Kansas City and find an apartment.”

  “I’m staying with the Kenards.”

  I blinked. “Um, good. Great. Whose idea was that?”

  “Dr. Hilliard’s.”

  “Are you sure you want to do that? Living with strangers is a lot different from living on your own. Their house, their rules.”

  She shrugged. “They seem like nice people, and they live close enough to the law school that I can walk. I guess they have a little boy.”

  “Don’t let yourself become a nanny just for a roof over your head.” Her mouth pursed. “And if that happens,” I continued blithely, as if I couldn’t figure out her fears, “either you present them with an invoice or find a way to move out on your own or call me. Don’t babysit unless you’re paid. Find out what the going rate is and charge four times that if he’s a good kid and ten times that if he’s a monster. If they say no, then you don’t have to babysit. If they say yes, then you have a decent gig. Win-win. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  I stopped what I was doing and looked at her, standing in the doorway there uncertain of her future, shoved into it when her mother had turned her world upside down by getting married so abruptly—

  Clarissa wasn’t prepared for this. She couldn’t even bring herself to sleep away from home for more than four days, even though it was just at her dad’s. I blinked and saw a small girl standing in my door, wearing Hello Kitty pajamas, her raven hair in two tight braids and her green eyes big with fear. Mommy, can I sleep with you?

  —a mother who had failed her utterly by allowing her to live in the well-appointed nest far longer than she should’ve.

  “Go get your PJs on,” I murmured. “You can sleep with me tonight.”

  She vanished. I turned the lights down and went into the bathroom to check in with Mitch, give him a chuckle at what had happened at the bowling alley. The suite was cast into darkness by the time I climbed into bed. My little girl turned into me, and I played with her hair while she cried herself to sleep.

  * * * * *

  Feel the Fear in My Enemy’s Eyes

  April 5, 2011

  It was Tuesday night and, as usual, the building echoed with laughter and chatter. Mitch liked hearing it. It meant people were happy, happy to get together and have a good time.

  “Oh, good. You’re here.”

  Mitch looked up from the weekly stats the ward clerk had given him to see the stake president in his office doorway. “Hey, what’s up? C’mon in.”

  President Petersen did just that, closed the door, sat, made himself comfortable with one ankle over the opposite knee. “How’s Cassie?”

  “Great,” Mitch said with a little smile, thinking about her. He felt about fifteen with his first crush, and he liked it. Liked that he could go home tonight and park his car in the garage right next to hers, see the evidence of her presence around him, her toiletries in his bathroom and her clothes in his drawers and closets. She would have dinner ready for him, would wait until he got home from church to eat with him.

  “Is she here?”

  “She’s at home.”

  Petersen looked confused. “I thought she was traveling this week.”

  Mitch paused. “Um...no,” he said slowly, wondering where he’d gotten that idea and why he was keeping tabs on Cassandra.

  But Petersen shook it off and asked, “So when’s the baptism?”

  “What baptism?”

  “Cassie’s. That’s who we’re talking about.”

  “There...isn’t one,” Mitch answered carefully. “At least, not that I know of.”

  “Well, you are working on her, right?”

  Mitch dropped his pen and sat back in his chair. “No, Dave. I’m not working on her. She is who she is, and she has no interest in the Church at all. That’s who I fell in love with and that’s who I want to stay married to. If she changes this direction, it’ll have to be because she wants to, not because I’m pushing her.” He paused. “Is there some rule I’m supposed to know about a bishop being married to a nonmember?”

  Petersen hemmed and hawed. “It’s just... It’s...strange.”

  “Being a widowed bishop is worse, yet you didn’t seem to mind that. But hey, I have another wife now, so the universe is back in balance.”

  His mouth tightened and Mitch tensed as he waited for Petersen to say whatever he had on his mind.

  “I’ve been...hearing some things,” he said low, picking at imaginary lint on his dress socks, not looking at Mitch.

  “About...?”

  “Cassie’s...ah...past.”

  Really, Mitch had expected it before he and Cassandra tied the knot. He knew Greg would be feeding bits of information to Petersen on the golf course, over business lunches, and Sunday dinners at Greg’s home.

  “What about it,” Mitch said flatly.

  Petersen sighed. “I’m not sure how to tell you this— I don’t want to shock you or anything...”

  “Yes, Dave, she was a prostitute. I’ve known all along, and it’s no secret on Wall Street.”

  He started. “You do? It’s not?”

  Mitch shook his head. “Now, I didn’t know when I first asked her out, but she told me right up front.”

  “And you continued to go out with her
anyway.”

  Mitch bristled at the flat tone, the condemnation in his voice. “Don’t make me break out the scriptures. I shouldn’t have to. Not to you.”

  “Is she still doing it?”

  Mitch snorted. “No.”

  “Is she repentant?”

  “I’m not her confessor,” Mitch murmured, feeling the knife edge creep in his voice.

  So did Petersen. “Oh. Okay. Ah, hmm.” He paused. “So did you— While you were dating, before you got married, did you— Ah, you know...”

  Mitch thought he might be losing his mind. Surely this conversation wasn’t happening.

  “Because I’ve been hearing things that make me think— And I wanted to ask you directly and— And, so, did you and, and Cassie—?”

  Mitch stared at him stonily.

  “Oh, c’mon, Mitch,” he said, exasperated. “Humor me. Yes or no. Either you did or you didn’t. Easy.”

  Mitch struggled to keep hold of his temper, the one he only showed on the highway and the soccer field—

  —and to Cassandra, who could take it and twist it until they were both wrapped up in it, in each other, when she would wave her magic wand and make it go away.

  “I thought you knew me better than that,” Mitch said slowly.

  Petersen laughed without humor and shook his head. “Mitch, right now, I don’t feel like I know you at all. I’m hearing things all over the stake and then I find this out about Cassie, and you tell me you knew— I’m looking at you and wondering who you really are.”

  Mitch sat in stunned silence the way he had when he was twenty and unable to believe the insults coming out of his mission president’s mouth.

  Mere insults, though. Not accusations of fornication.

  “Okay, fine. You don’t want to talk about that. Whatever. But there’s still Sally.”

  Mitch picked up a pen and wrote “call Dan” on his scratch pad. “We already covered that ground,” Mitch muttered, his pen poised. “Nothing’s changed.”

  “But you didn’t answer me straight then, and now I’m hearing more things.”

  “What...kinds of more things? Exactly?” Mitch asked, each word difficult to find and produce.