I pushed my sandwich away. I had lost my appetite, and decided that it probably wasn’t appropriate to sit there nervously shredding the bread between my fingers. “She doesn’t seem to feel that – well, she never talked about it,” I said. “I guess I don’t know what she’s feeling.”
“Yet you were concerned enough to wish to talk to me.” His eyes were gentle, almost mournful. “I cannot predict behavior. And your friend is not behaving in a Chinese way, so I cannot see what path she is taking. But – I hesitate to say this –” He looked away, then finally brought his eyes back to my face. “What I am about to say is repudiated by many,” he said. “It is not considered modern. And many people are saying that it should not be done. But when a person, and especially a woman, does something – well, let us say wrong, then an acceptable way to…” He broke off, shaking his head in frustration. “I am a scientist,” he said, apologetically, with a wan smile. “I do not have the vocabulary required for this explanation.”
I prompted him. “Maybe what you mean is, an acceptable way to be forgiven?”
He frowned; that wasn’t quite it. “To erase what was done,” he said, finally, still dissatisfied with the words. “To take away the shame, and to clean the soul, then the person is encouraged to take her own life, to commit suicide.” He hesitated. “I bring this up because I wonder, if it is so bad that your friend is causing you this concern, perhaps this is a route that she might take.” He shrugged, touched his napkin to his lips, and rose. “I must now go for my one o’clock lab,” he said, his tone polite and slightly regretful. “I can be available to you again, if you have other questions.”
I nodded. “Thanks, Henry. I appreciate your time.”
The news was bleak. The early abuse had taught Sophie that she could only be attractive to a man if she was childlike, even frightened, if he imposed the rules and she obeyed them, even at tremendous cost to herself. And then when she did everything right he rejected her anyway, teaching her that love was conditional, inconsistent, unkind, random. Had she run away to the States as an act of assertiveness, of strength, as a way to care for herself as her parents never had? Or was she running from the guilt that Henry believed she was feeling, the guilt of her early years, the guilt of refusing that precious place at the university? Had she felt, here, that she had escaped and could start over, or had she learned that there are some things that you can never escape?
I knew the answer. Sophie had escaped from nothing. She had surrounded herself with fantasy animals and adoring men and books and thoughts, and still she was pursued. I imagined her in Conan Doyle, running down that infinitely long avenue, the hound of the Baskervilles slavering at her heels. It must feel like that, to her. Running, as we all run in the worst of our nightmares, running and running and never getting away.
Small surprise that she had looked for other means of escape.
I sighed and signaled the waiter for the check. I already knew the answers to my questions. And I also knew what she was doing. The crack pipe isn’t as efficient as jumping off a building or slashing one’s wrists, but in the end it’s just as effective. She might not know it herself, but she was finally doing what was expected of her. In the end, she was being the good Chinese daughter.
And then the anger came, seizing me with an intensity that made my hands tremble as I searched in my purse for my wallet, my car keys. Not if I can help it, Sophie, I thought with determination. Not if I can help it, you won’t.
I had barely noticed the slip of paper that had just been put in front of me; I was too busy trying to figure out how to save her. Then I found myself staring, somewhat stupidly, at what was in my hands. The bill for the lunch.
And my wallet, which had contained just under two hundred dollars the day before, before I went to watch Fargo, was now completely empty.
*
I didn’t see the point in asking Sophie about the money. I didn’t waste time wondering if I had misplaced it: I am very careful with things like money. There was only one place that it could have gone.
She had had plenty of opportunity. I had been drinking beer; I visited the bathroom several times during the evening, peeing under the watchful gaze of whatever marsupial it was she kept there.
I sat in the restaurant, and I felt hurt, and shocked, and then eventually I felt sad. Still, I wasn’t going to give up. She wanted to steal from me? Fine. She wasn’t going to drive me away that easily.
I was going to make Sophie see that she wanted life.
The first step, I decided, was to show her that I wasn’t angry about the money. In fact, what I had to show her was that I could help her. That I cared about her, that I wanted to help her.
Peach would have decked me if she had known, but that night when I went on a call, I put on my most honeyed voice and persuaded the client that he really did want a double, and that I had a friend.
“We’re hot for each other,” I purred; and I just know she’s going to be hot for you.” When he agreed, I called Sophie. It’s not that Peach dislikes doubles; she just wants her girls to do them. Together.
The telephone in Natick rang eight times while I massaged my client’s thigh to keep him interested. I was about to give up when Sophie answered.
I didn’t wait for her to say anything. “Isabelle, it’s Tia! Listen, I’m over here in Weston with this absolutely fantastic friend of mine, and I told him about you, and so we wondered if you wanted to come over and join us for an hour.”
She cleared her throat. “How much?”
I forced cheerfulness into my voice, though her question was not reassuring. “The same as usual, don’t worry. Can you come? I’m so anxious to –“ I slid into the Sex Voice for Andy’s benefit “ – be with you again.” Come on, Sophie, I thought. You can do this.
She came. She came forty-five minutes late, which did not please the client and entailed some creative manipulation of the truth when Peach called; but she came. She had even tried to do it right; she was wearing a gauzy Indian dress that floated around her small frame, lipstick, earrings.
But her face frightened me. Her cheeks seemed somehow to have flattened; there were shadows where they used to be. Her eyes were glassy and staring, a clear indicator that she was pretty railed. And, unless I was mistaken, she was missing a tooth. I didn’t even want to think about what that meant. I didn’t want to feel the fear clutching at my stomach.
No time for speculation, anyway: we were on the clock.
I tried to get the party going. Sophie was passive, making halfhearted attempts at going down on me, at sucking Andy’s cock, at slipping her finger into his ass after he asked her to. I sighed inwardly and got to work, making love simultaneously to both of them, giving him pleasure physically while feeding his fantasy about our lesbian status by trying to rouse Sophie. It was an uphill battle.
Why had I called her? So that the memory of times we’d shared might make her feel better? Or might make me feel better? Who had I done this for, in the end? If things looked the same, maybe I could pretend that they really were the same?
“Isabelle” finally asked to go to the kitchen for a glass of water, and wandered out of the room even as Andy, pumping into my pussy while at the same time getting his ass fucked by my finger, was nearing and then reaching orgasm.
I got her out of there as quickly as I could. She had arrived in a taxi, so we both got into my Honda. “Hey, Sophie, are you all right? I asked. “You didn’t seem like yourself in there.”
No answer. She was busy counting the bills he had given her.
We got back to Natick and climbed the three flights to her apartment. She seemed more animated now, more energetic, as though she were coming back to life. We got in and she went immediately to the phone in the kitchen and called her dealer. I had known she would, but I was still irritated. I wasn’t used to being ignored.
There was no furniture in the living room except for a futon mattress on the floor.
I marched into the kitchen. “You s
old all your furniture,” I said hotly. “And that’s fine, who needs furniture, who needs a TV, but Sophie, what the hell did you do with the animals?”
She was preparing a glass tube in anticipation of the upcoming delivery. She shrugged. “I was tired of them, anyway.”
“I know what you’re doing,” I said, keeping my voice as calm and steady as I could. The state of her apartment had distracted me from my purpose. “You think that you’re worthless, you feel guilty because of your father and because of the way they blamed you for what happened, and you feel guilty for leaving them. But you don’t need them, you have me, I’m your friend, I want to help you. I know that you’re hurting, and that it’s not your fault. It’s fucking unfair, Sophie, and I know that. Don’t you see? You’re not alone. And I’m the one you should be leaning on, I can help you, really I can!” I took a deep, shuddering breath. “Because the worst part of it is this: I’m here to tell you, Sophie, that there’s not enough men or alcohol or cocaine in the world that will keep you numbed from feeling all that.”
There was a knock at the door and her eyes slid away toward it.
My irritation flared and I turned and left. As I reached the door and jerked it open I heard it, so soft as to barely be audible, Sophie’s reply. “Maybe not,” she said, in the frightened voice of a very small child, “But at least it does for a while.”
The next day, just as I was getting home from On Death and Dying (and who says that God doesn’t have a macabre sense of humor?), Peach called. “Well, we lost that one,” she remarked.
“What’s up, Peach? What are you talking about?”
“Andy Miller. Your call last night.” I could hear her lighting a cigarette, listened to her inhale. The smoke she was holding in her lungs made her voice tight. “Seems that there was a robbery while you were there.” She exhaled, while my stomach clenched in dread. “As soon as you left, he started noticing things missing. His watch, for one thing. It had been by the bed. And then there was some cash he kept in a box somewhere, I don’t know, he didn’t say. Some decent jewelry that was in his daughter’s room.” “I’m not saying this for you to feel bad, Jen. You had nothing to do with it. I know there was another girl there, from another service, he told me that. I don’t know which agency, he couldn’t remember, but anyway he says he’s not using us anymore, that the whole experience turned him sour.”
I was still assimilating that fact that the client had covered for me, claiming that it was he who had called Sophie, not me. Clients didn’t do that sort of thing, as a rule. “Gosh, Peach, I had no idea.”
“Well, of course not.” She sounded completely unconcerned. “There’s a lot of that in this business. Don’t worry, Jen. He’ll be back. He won’t call for a few weeks, and he’ll try some other agencies, and then he’ll decide that we weren’t so bad after all, and he’ll call. I’ve been here before. They always come back.”
Her lack of concern wasn’t particularly contagious. As soon as I got off the phone, I looked through my purse until I found the scrap of paper where I had scribbled his number the night before, when I called to confirm the visit. “Um – Andy? This is Tia, from last night.”
He didn’t seem surprised. “Yes, what can I do for you?”
I swallowed. “I just talked to Peach. She said that – that some of your things got stolen. I want to say that I’m really sorry that happened.” I hesitated, but there was no response, and so I went on. “Peach told me that you – that you said – um, you told her that Isabelle was an agency call. I wanted to thank you for doing that. I would have lost my job with her if you had told her the truth.”
“Yeah, I figured that it was like that.” There was the briefest of pauses. “Listen, Tia, it’s none of my business, but I’m going to give you a piece of advice anyway. You’ll be all right, I can see that you’ve got what it takes, but you’re close to making a bad mistake. Stay away from that girl. She’s drowning and she’ll take you down with her.”
I said, stupidly, “I don’t think –“ He cut me off. “I told you, I’ve been around. I can see what’s going on. And I have a brother doing his fifth stint in rehab, and I know what you’re doing. It’s called co-dependency. I know because I did it for a while, too. You’re trying to help a friend, and that’s commendable. But she’s not your friend.”
I thanked him and hung up the phone. I resented him for saving me, and then for using that leverage to lecture me. I could take care of myself.
But the voice in the back of my head was saying something else altogether. Sophie had nearly lost me my job. Sophie was stealing from me. Sophie was using me. Sophie was encouraging me to use the same substance, to do the same activity, that had so harmed her. Addicts do that, I learned later on. She wanted company in her death march.
Andy was right: she was not my friend.
But I wanted her to be. If I pretended that she was, maybe all the bad things would go away, and she really would be my friend again, like we had been in the beginning.
But I lay in bed and watched the changing patterns of the shadows on my ceiling, and I knew that I wasn’t willing to put my flimsy theory to the test. I didn’t call Sophie after that, and she didn’t call me.
Three weeks later, my Death and Dying class was organized around funerals, how different cultures practiced funeral rites, what these rituals provided for those who grieved. And even as I was talking about Buddhism’s concept of Bardo, that intermediate step so important to ensure proper reincarnation, assured only if the family of the deceased enacts the rituals properly, I had a sudden vision of Sophie, trying in my fantasy to do the right thing, going back to China for her father’s funeral, and being turned away. I was glad that the class was nearly over. I was finding it hard to breathe.
I didn’t even bother going home after that. I drove straight to Natick, pounded on her door until she opened it, carelessly, water bottle-cum-crack pipe in hand. “Hey, Jen, what’s up? Do you want a hit?”
You may ask yourself, gentle reader, what I was doing there.
What kind of sick rescue fantasy was I feeding? Was I trying to help Sophie, or was I trying to help myself?
I had a simple idea. Sophie had lost her furniture and was slipping into addiction. Maybe, just maybe, if she had furniture again, she’d get better, she’d remember how things used to be. Well, I believed it at the time. Hard to believe that I have a doctorate. Hard to believe that I have a brain.
I propelled her out the door and into my car. She probably resisted, she probably protested; I was impervious. On Route 9, I pulled into the parking lot of the first furniture store I saw. I was obsessed; I was on a mission. I bought her a bed, and a coffee table, and two easy chairs. “You have to live,” I hissed at her as I paid with my credit card and arranged for delivery to her apartment. “You’ll pay me back, that’s your responsibility.”
She was amazed. “This is so kind,” she said. “You believe in me, Jen! I won’t let you down. You know I won’t let you down, don’t you? I will pay you back, as soon as I am able. The next call I make, I’ll give you some money.”
“I know,” I said, and drove her home, where she cooked some more crack and I – to my shame, can you spell enabler? – joined her on the futon for some hits. When it was finished, she proposed calling her dealer for more, but I had had enough.
I took a very long shower when I got home, washing away the sweet smell of the smoke, letting the hot water massage my metabolism as well as my scalp. Coming down off a cocaine high is extremely uncomfortable. Coming down off a crack high is hell. I didn’t want to deal with it, and I didn’t want to think about her anymore. I took some sleeping pills, washed them down with a shot of Oban from the bottle that I kept around in case I ever had guests with decent taste in single malts, and went to bed.
Sophie came by a few nights later, bringing with her an envelope to give me, her first payment toward the furniture. I wanted to trust her, but I watched her anyway. Apparently my vigilance leaves something to be
desired, however, because after she was gone I realized that my own watch and my diamond stud earrings had gone with her. I opened the envelope; it was filled with sheets of lined paper, torn from a notebook.
I cried and cried and cried.
In the end I finally decided that Andy was right. This wasn’t the way that I wanted to live. I didn’t want to keep freebasing, which Sophie expected of me and which I was agreeing to a little too quickly. I didn’t want to lose my career, my apartment, my cat, my furniture, my life. I didn’t want to lose my reputation with Peach. And I sure as hell didn’t want to keep getting robbed by a friend.
Of course, it didn’t stop just because I wanted it to.
Sophie became more and more needy as time went by. I suspect that, one by one, people were dropping out of her life. She started calling me all the time, at all hours, begging me for money, for a ride somewhere, to do a call with her so she could get some crack. Or she needed me to make a buy for her, she’d pay me back the money, she promised. Come on, Jen, please, just this one time. Please, okay? I’m asking you to do this for me. Please do this for me, Jen… She always had a good story – no, a brilliant story. It would just be this one time. She was making plans. She was going to go back to school. She was thinking about going into rehab. But in the meantime, if I was a friend, I’d help when she was hurting. Don’t you care that I’m hurting, Jen? Don’t you even care about me anymore?
Or she had perfectly plausible reasons for wanting my help. It wasn’t about drugs, she hadn’t done anything in days, almost a week, wasn’t that good? No, it wasn’t about drugs, I had been right about that, she just didn’t want to be alone tonight. Just for tonight, Jen, please come over, don’t let me be alone.
She sounded so very reasonable. That is the addict’s gift, the gift of the silver tongue. They are always convincing. They can make you believe anything. I was then, and am, reminded of the Rod Stewart song: “Even though you lied, straight-faced, while I cried/ Still, I’d look to find a reason to believe.” And, oh my God, did I look to find reasons to believe Sophie. And she knew it.
Callgirl: Confessions of a Double Life Page 15