by Bethany Ball
His sister was a sharmuta. Their father, Yakov, heard everything. Their mother, Vivienne, was scandalized. She cried every Tuesday night when Marc came to her house to eat lecho, the Moroccan matbucho tomato salad, and watch Little House on the Prairie.
They said the metapelet didn’t care that her husband was cavorting around the kibbutz with Shira. But when Omri and Shira ran off to Tel Aviv for three days when Shira was only fifteen years old, the metapelet threw herself off the water tower. Some said she was high on mushrooms and thought she could fly. She survived and was taken to the hospital in Sfat and stayed there three weeks. The children in the children’s house were left alone for three nights before anyone noticed that the metapelet needed to be replaced and that Shira was not coming to work. Yakov had Omri fired from his teaching job. He slunk around the kibbutz for years in disgrace. After the metapelet was released from the hospital she went back to New York, where it was said her father owned a department store on Fifth Avenue.
Marc went into the army and for years nearly forgot his sister existed. She was a shadowy thing, a source of gossip, finally.
Chapter 9
Shira and Marc in LA
She said to him, I’ve kind of run out of money. My money didn’t come in from my last television job and something is wrong with my bank account. For some reason my investment account has not transferred into my bank account and I have no access until Monday. When I get back home the day after tomorrow I’ll have to move some money around.
Shira was miserable. To ask for money from anyone made her sick to her stomach. But she needed just a little to tide her over a couple more days.
Marc was preoccupied. He fiddled with his phone and watched the young girls in their short dresses ordering complicated coffees. The café in the Standard was loud, the crowd around the register was growing, and everyone was so young and beautiful and à la mode. It could break your heart.
Marc had no time for her, Shira could see that. He stretched his leg under the table to get his wallet from his back pocket and accidentally kicked Shira in the shin. Shira winced but didn’t say anything. There would be a bruise. Marc pulled out his billfold, giving her an apologetic look. He raised his eyebrows and pointed at the phone that vibrated audibly and often. What could he do? Marc Solomon was a very busy man. Today he looked especially preoccupied, even tortured. She tried to appear sympathetic. His hand was hovering over the bills. So many of them! The hundreds on top, of course. He counted the notes under his breath and Shira looked away. She would count them back in the room.
He covered the phone with his hand. Use it wisely, he said.
That was a dig. Shira wondered if Marc had heard about Asaf. But Shira could feel joy rising in her chest. She’d buy something grand for Joseph. Maybe an iPod or the pair of American sneakers he’d asked for. She felt the muscle of her heart spasming. Joseph. Yakov had found him finally when the credit card company called him about the airplane ticket charge that boy of Avi Strauss had made. He was safely at his furious father’s apartment and Shira, humiliated and upset, could not wait to fly home.
You talk to Ima lately? Shira said, when Marc had finally set the phone down on the table.
Yes, he said. I speak to her every day.
You have always been such a mama’s boy, Shira smiled. Ima’s favorite.
I don’t see Ima, Marc said. I am not there. And I am hardly a mama’s boy. She could see he was getting angry.
Shira said, No, ach sheli, my brother. I’m sorry. I’m only jealous because after Ziv came out and moved to Singapore, you were Ima and Abba’s favorite.
Have you heard from Ziv? Marc asked. I keep telling him to come to LA.
No, Shira said. Not in a while. Thank you so much for the money. She was ready to go.
Come on, now, Marc said. I wasn’t the favorite! Hardly. And I was once so envious of you. You were older, Marc said. You know, you remind me a little of my wife.
Carolyn! No. I am nothing like Carolyn.
You are. You and she are impetuous and reckless.
Shira sat mulling this over. Of course, she was insulted. It is always this way when a man gives you things, she mused. He gives and in exchange you bow your head and accept his insults. Only prostitutes ever really get paid. But now Shira was angry.
Your children are spoiled, Marc. Your wife spoils them. Your oldest child has already had his bar mitzvah but has never even crossed a street on his own.
I know, Marc said. You are right. He shrugged and put his hands up. But what can I do? In America things are like this.
Yes, she said. America is more dangerous.
Maybe. I don’t know. I don’t think so. There are no natural enemies here, for instance. It is not as though we will go to war with Canada. No one worries about bombs here. Do you remember, Shiri, how we used to pray a bomb would wipe out the road to the school?
Or wipe out the school altogether, Shira said.
Marc signaled to the waitress again for the check. Shira thought of Joseph, safe, thank God. She said, In America children shoot up schools.
Yes, Marc said. This is true. The last one happened just twenty minutes from our old house in Connecticut. An elementary school too.
You should come back to Israel, Marc. Yakov and Vivienne miss you and they are getting old. And Joseph could use an uncle.
He has Dror, Marc said. He has Ziv.
No one has Ziv, Shira said. He won’t come back until Yakov invites him. Shira picked up a spoon and stirred her coffee. Joseph could use an uncle, Shira said again.
Marc shook his head. Carolyn would never go there, he said. She would be miserable.
Shira laughed. Yes, she never looks too happy when she is there.
It’s hard for her. The first night we stayed in the kibbutz, when she was pregnant with Izaac, I took her to a barbecue with the guys.
That doesn’t sound very wise, Marc.
No, it wasn’t very wise. There was all this delicious food spread out and all the guys were drinking a bottle of whiskey, just passing it between us. No glass. Baruch grabbed a handful of chicken wings and shoved them in his mouth. He spit the bones out into the corner of the barn. And then the wind kicked up and the smell of the lul filled the barn. Six cubic tons of chicken shit. She threw up all night long.
Horrible! Shira said. Those horrible, stupid chickens and the smell. Shira made a face.
No, Marc said. It’s the best smell in the world. Give me early morning in the lul any day of the week and I’ll take it. I look forward to getting back there.
Yes, Shira said, her face twitched. I’m sure Abba and Ima can’t wait for you to come.
Marc looked pained. Shira, he said. It wouldn’t hurt you to be nicer to Ima.
Shira stood up. Once, when they were small, she’d owned her brother. She glared down at him. Fuck you, little brother. Fuck you and fuck your American wife. Come back to Israel and see how perfect your parents are. Try and be the daughter of Vivienne and Yakov Solomon and see how great it is.
Shiri, please.
Everyone was staring and pretending not to. Shira glided out the door. Chin at an angle, shoulders squared. Her hand on the bulge of one-hundred-dollar bills in her front pocket.
Marc exhaled. His sister had always been like this. No one knew if she was born this way, or if she was molded by forces no one could foresee or control.
When things went bad in business, he assumed it was bad luck, and when his numbers looked good, he understood it was due to his intelligence and cunning.
He would get Shira her money back.
Marc thought about luck a lot these days. He thought of his company now—almost two hundred and fifty million under management—and felt a glow of pride, and then the stab of fear. No charges had been filed against him yet and every day, lawyers fought to get his money back. Every day, the prosecutors threatene
d to haul him in front of a grand jury. But one day he’d be dead and none of it—siblings, money, wife, children—none of it would matter. Marc would have to leave everything behind. It was unfair, wasn’t it, that one day everything he’d ever done would mean nothing?
Chapter 10
The Pretty Past
Boris was her manager. He told Carolyn she’d make five to six hundred dollars a night easy.
Boris gave her a new name: Susannah. “Sexy Susannah” was how the escort service billed her. She had her own ad with a photo of her legs half-obscured by a bit of fake fur tossed across her lap. Not her legs, actually, but a stock photo.
He said, You got a nice clean look. You’ll make a lot of pesos.
In the beginning Carolyn stayed away from the cocaine Boris offered her—I can get you product, discounted—but she couldn’t resist the Ativan. Attagirl! Boris called it. On her first night, he gave her an envelope with several inside. They give Ativan to people right before they go in for surgery, Boris had told her. It’s addictive. Remember, he said, You only lose your virginity once. After that, you’re a pro. He also warned her that after the first few times she’d feel high, and then she’d get depressed. But, it will all get better on payday.
Carolyn thought with the extra money and time during the day, she’d be able to work on her art.
Carolyn took a cab to the Midtown Marriott next to Grand Central. In the cab, she put her face on and pulled her fuck-me pumps from a large fake Prada bag she’d bought on Canal. She threw her flats into her bag. She’d wear them home. The pumps were impossible to walk in everywhere except the lobby of the Marriott, where the thick carpet absorbed them.
She had a tip for the doorman, who always looked lascivious, and a tip for the desk clerk, who was apparently embarrassed. She had the same room on the seventeenth floor six nights in a row and a pager. The pager had belonged to another girl before her and on the back had a glittery Hello Kitty sticker with the words fuck me embossed in red across its face. Hello Kitty had big fake-looking tits.
In her big fake Prada bag she carried makeup, hair spray, a skinny comb, a credit card machine, and condoms. She’d been instructed by Boris not to, in fact, use the special lipstick the makeup artist he’d hired told her to use. He explained, no man wants blood-red anything on his dick. She was instructed never to wear perfume. They’ve got wives to go home to.
Sometimes, just for fun, at home in her apartment, she put the special lipstick on her nipples.
The beeper beeped and someone would knock on the door. She would bring him in by the hand and sit him on the bed. She would shimmy around the room in her lace Agent Provocateur underwear doing a small striptease to the waist. The guy would lie down, his pants in a bunch around his knees. Big, small, red, brown, cut and uncut. Long and thin. Fat and short. Fat and long. Short and thin. The men waved them around with earnestness and confidence and hopelessness. It was ridiculous but Carolyn loved it. She loved them. She sat down beside them on the bed and for a little more money they could choose whether or not to fondle her tits. With her hand on their dicks, they came in two minutes easily. She learned some tricks. Astroglide. There was no actual vaginal or anal penetration. There was the occasional blow job, but it was expensive. She watched the digital clock next to the bed as she jerked them off. She rooted for them. Come on. Go three minutes. Come on. But they never did. She had an excellent hand-job technique, developed during her virginal high school years. Sometimes they liked music and she let them pick out the radio station.
One guy, barely out of high school, had completely white pubic hair. I can’t dye it, he told her apologetically, or I’ll get a rash. Another guy was desperately ashamed to have only one testicle. What is it with men and their testicles, she thought but didn’t say. Who cares? Almost all were married. None of them thought what they were doing was cheating because there was no penetration.
Sometimes Carolyn longed to fuck them. It would have been, frankly, easier, faster and less effort somehow.
She didn’t care, she didn’t care. Let them wave their ugly dicks in the air. For her effort she got ninety dollars a session. She had five or six sessions a night.
In the beginning it wasn’t boring. It was exciting and dirty and sometimes, after they’d all left and her shift was over, she’d turn over on her stomach and masturbate on the bed with a tiny vibrator Boris had given her. Let the steam out, he’d told her. She liked to imagine the best-looking guy from the evening pinning her to the bed and fucking her hard and brutally. She liked to imagine the ugliest guy tugging her hair and wrapping his fingers around her neck. One or two she imagined making love to her. Touching her tenderly and whispering, I love you. Maybe they would pick her up and take her home with them. This isn’t the life for you, they’d say, and pay off her student loans. She would come with a mouthful of Marriott pillowcase and the taste of bleach between her teeth.
It took three or four months before she began to fall in love with them. The first was Alan, a Jewish lawyer with insane pecs and skinny legs he was self-conscious of. He showed her pictures of his kids in his well-worn wallet. Then it was Vinny, who gave her two hundred dollars extra for a blow job. Yer a good girl at heart, he liked to say, just before he came. He liked to tell her she was the classiest girl in the world. I could take you anywhere, anywhere. Any club. It was temporary. They were temporary. They came and went and then eventually they never came back. Boris told Carolyn not to take it personally. If they wanted one girl all the time they’d save their money, stay home and fuck their wives.
Boris started coming around after her shift. They’d go down to the lobby bar and have a drink: a glass of whiskey for Boris and a Long Island iced tea for Carolyn. Carolyn, Boris had said. What are we going to do with Carolyn? We got big plans for you. He said it with something that felt to Carolyn like sympathy. She started to look at Boris differently.
No doubt it was what he said to all the girls. Something you say to a girl whose premium hand jobs provide your living. Of course he thought she was pretty. He wanted to make money off of her. He’d approached her at that early spring street fair on Astor Place for just that purpose.
Her roommate Whitney said, Jesus, Carolyn. What the fuck is wrong with you?
After a while, after the men had all gone, and the last customer had left his used washcloth on the industrial carpet of the Marriott, it became so lonely. She’d light up a joint, masturbate, and watch television. Sometimes she’d pull out her sketchpad, but mostly she was uninspired. A lot of times she stayed the night there alone. The room cost her about twenty-five percent of her wages, but why not? Boris had offered to get her another girl to take the late night-early morning shift and split the cost of the hotel but Carolyn put him off. She thought about giving up her apartment with Whitney. She felt that Whitney was judging her. Maybe Whitney was jealous of all the money she was making now. Whitney had always had a lot more money than Carolyn. Whitney had a trust fund and a corporate lawyer boyfriend who was going to ask Whitney to marry him.
It took some time for Carolyn to realize that she was disappearing into all those hand jobs. Had she ever existed in the first place? It had only been six months since she’d quit her temp job. Six months since Boris had recruited her on a low day at the street fair. He’d bought the silk scarf she’d been eyeing with the impossible-to-comprehend price tag of fifty dollars. He’d asked if she was used to guys spending money on her. He told her she was worth much more than a lousy temp job. She had so much potential. Carolyn had wondered if he wasn’t some kind of movie scout or modeling agent.
It seemed she’d never really been there in the Marriott, in her heels and discounted undergarments, smiling at her sheepish, silly patrons. She had floated above it all, disassociated, a voyeur of her own theatrics. A coping method she’d perfected long ago. Maybe it was all the Ativan she’d taken, the joints she’d smoked, the guys she’d jerked off. The hands on her
tits. Their eyes suddenly blind and unseeing as they pulled up their pants, and sometimes left a tip on the dresser.
Maybe the high heels she wore had ruptured a vital, invisible artery to her heart. Or maybe the heart had never been there in the first place.
She spent more and more time with Boris. Boris with his gargantuan coke addiction. He swore at cabbies, was xenophobic—despite being an immigrant himself—and muttered racial epithets only just barely under his breath. Sometimes, to Carolyn’s horror, he shouted at them. He’d started taking her out at midnight when she left the hotel, picking her up in a cab. He took her to good restaurants on her nights off. She began to put on weight. He’d stopped scheduling anyone the last hour of her shift so they could order bad room-service club sandwiches and maybe have a glass of vodka on the rocks from the minibar. He let her keep a larger and larger percentage of her wages.
He made love to her and Carolyn had never enjoyed making love—until Boris. She had generally always liked it quick and dirty. Come on my face and pull my hair. But Boris wasn’t that kind of guy. He was the first guy to make her come by going down on her. He pressed the palms of his hands against her thighs, his fingers reaching up to the skin of her belly. He only brushed her with the back of his hand, as though he, and only he, knew that was the thing that drove her crazy. He was grossly unattractive. Bald with thin hairs that crept across his speckled skull like spiders’ legs. Potbellied and so bowlegged he rocked from side to side down the carpeted hallway to the elevator. He was a full head shorter than her, but he had a huge cock. Most of the time, because of the Viagra-vodka-coke cocktail, he didn’t come. But he knew what he was doing. It was all about Carolyn.