“I don’t think I want to go to an Oriental massage parlor, Danny,” I said.
“For me, Fielding. For me.”
“Are you serious? Are you really involved with someone who works in one of those?”
“Be careful, Fielding. This is important to me.”
We turned west on 14th Street. It was Christmas again. There were the big fat old-fashioned bulbs, green and red, wrapped like creeping vines around the frozen poles of the street lamps. A city plow was clearing the street. We drove past the Academy of Music, once the opera house in the days of Edith Wharton, now a great musty sagging place whose marquee read GRATEFUL DEAD—CANCELED.
We drove to Sixth Avenue and took an illegal turn north, through the flower district. Palms and bamboo plants and birds of paradise pressed against the steamy windows, bathed in pink light.
“Why are we going there, Danny?”
“I want you to meet her,” he said, in his evasive voice. He’d had to develop the skill of making people uncomfortable asking too many direct questions. He glanced at me from the corner of his eyes. The car swerved as the light turned green. “You’ve got to help us, Fielding,” he said. “I’m begging you.”
“You haven’t asked for anything. I haven’t said no. And you’re begging already?”
“Yes. I’m begging you.”
“Why do we have to go there?”
He looked at me with false, tactical surprise, as if he were seeing me clearly for the first time, as if I were revealing something he’d never guessed about me heretofore. “You’re afraid to go there? Is that it? Afraid to fuck up your reputation?”
“I don’t have a reputation.”
“Don’t jerk me around, Fielding. You are so goddamned obsessed with the whole boring deadass master plan that’s run your whole life, you won’t go with your own brother to meet his girl friend.”
“That’s a funny way of looking at it,” I said. “It’s not as if—”
“I am not being funny,” Danny said, pounding his fist against the steering wheel.
“OK, OK,” I said, patting his shoulder. His temper unnerved me and always had; I’d developed a way of treating it as if I took it lightly.
“Jesus, Fielding. Don’t you realize how far out of my mind I must be to be thinking like this. This girl—her name’s Kim Hahn. She speaks terrible English. She’s a complete square. She comes from Seoul. These Korean shitheads brought her over, promised her a job, and then stuck her into this fucking whorehouse.”
“Which you just happen to patronize—from time to time.”
“One of our authors brought me there. Ben Lacoste, who did this book called Oriental Love Techniques. Twenty-five bucks, they wash you head to toe, walk on your back, do some jiveball shiatsu massage that’s really pretty painful and annoying, and then for another fifty they’ll fuck you. Tiny little hard beds. All the girls have portable tape players they listen to Korean music on.The place is run by this tiny old woman who never talks. Sits there behind a desk wearing pedal pushers and a fake Madame Chiang Kai-shek black silk shirt. But the place is really run by Korean gangsters and those guys—this is something you should know about, Congressman—those guys are plugged into these fanatical Korean right-wing militarists and the CIA and who the fuck knows what else. These are the kind of guys who would kill someone like Sarah for five hundred dollars and a box of rifles. It’s a very scary scene and Kim wants to get out, but she can’t. Even if they don’t cut up her face, they’ll have her sent back to Korea—she’s here illegally. They smuggle the girls in. None of them are legal. And if she’s back in Korea she’s in disgrace because everyone knows what these girls get brought over here to do. And if she goes back then I’ll never see her again and I’m not ready for that, not yet anyhow. I really like this girl.”
“You’re in love with her?”
“No, I’m not in love with her,” he said, as if he were speaking to some hybrid of a guidance counselor and a duck. “I like her. There’s something special—look, I don’t need to explain. I like her. She deserves better. She’s a fabulous lover, by the way, though I suppose under the circumstances I shouldn’t be saying that.”
“What circumstances?”
“You sitting there judging me and feeling so pissed off that I’m dragging you into my mess. And what if we walk into this place and it’s raided and next day your career’s over. Right?”
“What is it you want me to do, Danny?”
“You’ve got power, Fielding. And I’m your brother.” He smiled— a smile that had once been so magnetic, so full of quick spirits and high feeling but which now, having been used so often to ward off disaster, looked a little cunning. “We’re two of a kind,” he said. “We’re both in way over our heads. And one day it’ll all catch up to us. We’ll run out of luck and we’ll be living worse than Caroline without a nickel to our names. But now we’re out there together and we should help each other. OK?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying OK to.”
“You can be Kim’s influential friend. You can use your connections and influence and get her a green card, or something that’ll let her stay here without having to deal with those fucking gangsters.”
“I wish it was that easy.”
“Now you sound like a politician.”
“I am a politician, Danny.”
Danny flexed and unflexed his long blunt fingers on the steering wheel.
“Well, that wasn’t how it was supposed to be. You were the one who wanted to make the world better. I always thought the idea was getting into politics so you could have power and end wars and feed people and get the snobs out of our way. But now you’re acting like just being in politics and covering your ass is the most important thing and all the other stuff comes second.”
“Well, I sure as hell am not running for office so I can get some woman in a massage parlor a green card,” I said. I took a deep breath.
“It’s not just some woman,” Danny said. When the streetlights came into the car they turned his hair bone white.
“How long have you known her?” I asked.
“Six, seven weeks.”
“A massage parlor. It’s so … ridiculous. You’re taking too many drugs. It’s poly-drug abuse.”
“Remember what Sarah used to say? We’d be walking through Union Square and we’d see some junkie on a bench with his shoes slit open and flies around his face and Sarah would say, ‘How do you know that’s not Jesus? How do you know?’ That’s what Sarah used to say and you loved her. Or are you denying that now?”
“So is this what it is?” I asked. “The woman in the massage parlor is Jesus?”
Danny turned the car west on 30th Street. The plows hadn’t been on this street yet; we were driving through three inches of new snow. Snow flew past the streetlights, millions of dotted lines. “She’s just a nice person, Fielding. And she makes me feel good. Nothing to do with her professional services. There’s something nice about her.”
We pulled in front of an old loft building, with a hand-painted address stuck up in the high window above the swinging metal doors. On the second floor, parallel to the street lamp, were the windows for an outfit called Lopez and Portillo Fashion Outlet. The rest of the windows in the building were in darkness. A line of red light bulbs was visible through the busy blackness of the winter night, marking the shaftway along the side of the building. The Jaguar’s windshield wipers waved back and forth, patiently clearing off the snow as it fell.
“Here we are,” said Danny.
I don’t know if what I felt was caution or cowardice, but it was awfully difficult following Danny into that darkened building. There was a row of doorbells outside the door. Danny lit his gold lighter and pressed the button marked 9—the one with the Oriental characters next to it. A woman’s voice came out of the intercom speaker. “Hello Merry Christmas,” she said. “What you want?”
“I saw your ad,” said Danny.
A buzzer went off disengaging the
lock and we pushed our way into the small, scuffed, and dirty lobby, which was lit by one nervously buzzing fluorescent bar. There was the smell of raw leather in the air. I followed Danny to the elevator. He pushed the call button and we heard a clatter of chains, as if we’d just roused a ghost. I was thinking firetrap, murderer’s lair, immigration raid, public disgrace, laying each fantasy of disaster before me like a Tarot card. We entered the bleak industrial elevator, with the missing panels in the ceiling and a view upward of pulleys and cold greasy darkness, and I added another possible disaster—plunging elevator. The elevator started with a great optimistic jolt but then rose slowly, slowly.
“They’re open on Christmas night?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Danny. “Shocking, isn’t it?” He put his arm around me and then, masking the affection, pretended to put me into a hammer-lock. I saw us in the small round mirror in the upper corner: two johns in their overcoats with snowflakes in their hair.
The elevator door was locked on the ninth floor. Peering in at us through the small chicken-wired window was a young Korean woman with violet eye makeup and black curly hair. She saw Danny and brightened. The door was unlatched and she opened it for us. She stepped back; she was wearing a little terry cloth skirt, fashioned like an ice-skating outfit. She had pudgy little toes, the nails painted violet; she was wearing rubber flip-flops.
“Hello, how are you,” she said in a lilt that sounded tired and sarcastic, as if she was only imitating the empty things people said to one another.
She led us into a shag-carpeted room where, on black modular furniture, four other Korean women sat, one dressed in a black leotard, another in red sparkly hooker shorts, the third in a kimono (she was squinting through the smoke of a Salem as she smoothed out a rough spot on her heel with an emery board), and the fourth woman in a bikini and leg warmers.
There was a smell of garlic and oil in the air, and the smell of bleach. The windows were boarded up and covered in tattered red velvet draperies. We were standing in front of a desk. There was a large wooden rose pumping out the manufacturer’s version of rose scent. A black telephone. A green tin money box. Sitting behind the desk was the woman whom Danny had described to me: the old woman in the Madame Chiang Kai-shek blouse. She was sipping tea from a thick white cup that looked as if it had been swiped from a cafeteria. Her little amber face looked sad, untrustworthy; she seemed to emit a kind of corruption that verged on idiocy.
“You both?” she asked. She had a high, sharp, unstable voice.
“Yeah,” said Danny.
“Fifty,” she said, opening the money box.
Danny dropped a fifty-dollar bill on the desk.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “This isn’t what we’re here for.”
Madame Chiang cocked her head and looked at me. She could tell from my voice something was wrong and she smiled in anticipation.
“Leave this to me,” Danny said. “You worried about the bread?”
“Are you paying for me to get a massage?” I felt perfectly stupid. The small-town cousin dragged by his short hairs into the vortex of a wicked good time. The woman in the black leotard and the woman in the short shorts stood up and came toward us.
Danny put his hand up to stop them. “No,” he said, to Madame Chiang. “I want Kim.”
“Kim? Kim? Who Kim?” she said, shaking her head. She locked his Grant into the box.
“Kim,” said Danny loudly. Whorehouses depend on the shame and timidity of their clients for their smooth running, but Danny seemed perfectly at ease and filled with the moral correctness of his own desires. “You know, Kim.”
“No Kim. Not tonight.” She gestured to the two women, who’d stopped when Danny’s voice rose.
Beyond the black modular sofas was an archway sporting a beaded curtain, beyond which the business of the place transpired. And now through the beaded curtain came a young, square-shouldered Korean woman dressed in sheer pantyhose and an oversized man’s turquoise shirt, with a young Chinese fellow dressed in a restaurant worker’s white fatigues on her arm. His long hair was wet and combed straight back. Hers was shiny, rather short, pulled into a small ponytail held by a red rubber band.
“Kim!” said Danny, with a laugh of relief.
“Oh, Kim, Kim,” said Madame Chiang, as if the problem all along had been in Danny’s pronunciation.
Danny waited for Kim to walk the Chinese cook to the elevator and when she turned around she came to him and slipped her arm around his waist. She had little gold star studs in her earlobes; a scent of baby oil came off her. She embraced him simply, quickly, just a touch of her head against his shoulder. I must have been staring, I must have been forgetting where I was, because when the woman in the leotard took my hand to lead me toward the back of the place I was startled.
“Shower and sauna?” she said.
“No, no,” I said, more in confusion than morality.
“Must shower first, then massage-y,” she said. She had a simple round face, hard dark eyes, a mole at the corner of her mouth. Suddenly, I had a fantastic idea: I’d go back to whichever little room she was attempting to lead me, take off my clothes, and make love to her. Why didn’t I think of that before?
Danny was at the desk, talking to the old woman. She was shaking her head. Kim stood behind him, looking at the carpet. Another woman appeared through the beaded curtain, this time with an Anglo in tow, an Isaac Greenish sort of john with a sprig of holly pinned to his suit and an odor of excellent Scotch pouring off him.
“You want drink?” my date asked me, trying to get me a little more involved.
“OK,” I said.
“No,” said Danny, turning toward me. “Stop. We’re leaving.” He went back to his negotiations with the crone. He had a hundred dollars on the table and now a hundred more. She accepted them with a shrug, locked them in her box, and then, perhaps as a way of preserving her dignity, walked away and joined the others watching TV.
“We’re going to my house,” Danny announced.
“You don’t buy me,” said the woman whom fate or perhaps a hand signal had assigned to me. She looked extremely angry and rather frightened, too. “I stay right here.” She called to the old woman and the two of them began arguing in Korean. The silk-clad proprietress was waving her hands over her head, as if the situation was well beyond her control.
“Let’s go, Fielding,” Danny said commandingly. Kim went back through the beaded curtain and a few moments later reappeared, dressed in blue jeans, boots, a purple leather jacket with a red fur collar. The woman in leotards sat down on the sofa again; none of the other women were looking in our direction. One of them got up and switched the channel on the TV set. The “Tonight Show” was on. Johnny Carson and a couple of his sidekicks were making elaborate bows toward each other, as if they belonged to one of those boozy small-town lodges. And now Danny, Kim, and I were heading for the elevator. It was waiting for us. As we got in, the old woman shouted something to Kim and Kim answered without looking back.
“I have to be back in two hour,” she said, as the elevator doors slid shut.
“We’ll talk about it,” said Danny, jamming his large thumb, with its chewed-off cuticle and weirdly phallic proportions, against the button marked G.The elevator shuddered and began to inch down.
“This is my brother, Kim. This is Fielding.”
She gave me her small, light hand and I shook it. I felt enormous, ridiculous next to her.
“He’s going to help you,” Danny said.
“Hello,” she said. “Sorry my English,” she added, shrugging.
“That’s all right, that’s all right,” said Danny, rapid fire. His nerves were starting to churn inside my stomach. I could feel the energy going through him, but I had no idea what he was thinking. It was dazzling, confusing, ultimately unsettling, like a passionate quarrel next door heard through the walls, without one word distinguishable. His leg was shaking, one of his first nervous habits, the cornerstone upon which a mansion of ne
rvous habits had been built: the nail-biting, the snuffling, the head tossing, the throat clearing. The slowness of the elevator was torture for him.
We could see the wall of the shaft through the window and we watched it tick by, brick by brick. “Come on, come on,” he muttered beneath his breath. And then, suddenly, I realized what his hurry was. He was wondering if a call had been made and if we in fact weren’t going to be met in the lobby. When we finally reached the ground floor and the door opened, Danny shot out of the elevator with that controlled hysteria I’d been taught in the Coast Guard, when we practiced taking our posts in case of attack. The lobby was empty. Now Danny just wanted to get to his car, get the snow off the windshield, get the motor running. “Come on, let’s go,” he called over his shoulder.
“My purse,” said Kim, suddenly pressing herself against the back wall of the elevator. “My purse upstairs.”
“It’ll be there when you get back,” I said. “OK? Come on.” I took her by the arm. She seemed frail to the point of lifeless when we’d shaken hands, but now she yanked away from me with the ferociousness of a whip.
Waking the Dead Page 15