Nasty Girls

by Laura Lippman

  “People pay?”

  Another shy nod. “It’s sort of a . . . niche within the industry.”

  “Niche.”

  “It’s my niche,” he said. “It’s what I like. I make other films about, um, things I don’t like so much. But I love watching truly seasoned women teach young men about life.”

  “And you’d pay for this?”

  “Of course.”

  “How much?”

  “Some. Enough.”

  “Just to look? Just to see me, as I am?”

  “A little for that. More for . . . more.”

  “How much?” Mona repeated. She was keen to know her worth.

  He came around from behind the camera, retrieved a laminated card from the drawer in the vanity table, then sat on the bed and patted the space next to him. Why laminated? Mona decided not to think about that. She moved to the bed and studied the card, not unlike the menu of services and prices at a spa. She could do that. And that. Not that, but definitely that and that. The fact was, she had done most of these things, quite happily.

  “Let me make you a star, Mona.”

  “Are you my leading man?”

  “Our target demographic prefers to see younger men with the women. I just need to get some film of you to take to my partner so he’ll underwrite it. I have a very well-connected financial backer.”

  “Who?”

  “Oh, I’ll never say. He’s very discreet. Anyway, he likes to know that the actresses are . . . up to the challenges of their roles. Usually a striptease will do, a little, um, self-stimulation. But it’s always good to have extra footage. I make a lot of films, but these are the ones I like best. The ones I watch.”

  “Well, then,” Mona said, unbuttoning her blouse. “Let’s get busy.”

  FETISH, MONA SAID TO HERSELF as she shopped in the Giant. Fetish, she thought as she retrieved her mail from the communal boxes in the lobby. I am a fetish. This was the word that Bryon used to describe her “work,” which, two months after their first meeting, comprised four short films. She had recoiled at the word at first, feeling it marked her as a freak, something from a sideshow. “Niche” had been so much nicer. But Bryon assured her that the customers who bought her videos were profoundly affected by her performance. There was no irony, no belittling. She was not the butt of the joke, she was the object of their, um, affection.

  “Different people like different things,” he said to her in Starbucks one afternoon. She was feeling a little odd, as she always did when a film was completed. It was so strange to spend an afternoon having sex and not be taken shopping afterward, just given a cashier’s check. “Our cultural definitions of sexuality are simply too narrow.”

  “But your other films, the other tastes you serve”—Mona by now had familiarized herself with Bryon’s catalog, which included the usual whips and chains, but also a surprisingly successful series of films that featured obese women sitting on balloons—“they’re sick.”

  “There you go, being judgmental,” Bryon said. “Children is wrong, I’ll give you that. Because children can’t consent. Everything else is fair game.”

  “Animals can’t consent.”

  “I don’t do animals, either. Adults and inanimate objects, that’s my credo.”

  It was an odd conversation to be having in her Starbucks at the LeisureWorld Plaza, that much was sure. Mona looked around nervously, but no one was paying attention. The other customers probably thought Mona and Bryon were a mother and son, although she didn’t think she looked old enough to be Bryon’s mother.

  “By the way”—Byron produced a small stack of envelopes—“we’ve gotten some letters for you.”

  “Letters?”

  “Fan mail. Your public.”

  “I’m not sure I want to read them.”

  “That’s up to you. Whatever you do—don’t make the mistake of responding to them, okay? The less they know about Sexy Sadie, the better. Keep the mystery.” He left her alone with her public.

  Keep the mystery. Mona liked that phrase. It could be her credo, to borrow Bryon’s word. Then she began to think about the mysteries that Bryon was keeping. If she had already received—she stopped to count, touching the envelopes gingerly—eleven pieces of fan mail, then how many fans must she have? If eleven people wrote, then hundreds—no, thousands—must watch and enjoy what she did.

  So why was she getting paid by the job, with no percentage, no profit-sharing? God willing, her health assured, she could really build on this new career. After all, they actually had to make her look older, dressing her in dowdy dresses, advising her to make her voice sound more quavery than it was. Bryon had the equipment, Bryon had the distribution—but only Mona had Mona. How replaceable was she?

  “FORGET IT,” BRYON SAID when she broached the topic on the set a few weeks later. “I was up-front with you from the start. I pay you by the act. By the piece, if you will. No participation. You signed a contract, remember?”

  Gone was the rapt deference from that first day at Starbucks. True, Mona had long ago figured out that it was an act, but she had thought there was a germ of authenticity in it, a genuine respect for her looks and presence. How long had Bryon been stalking her? she wondered now. Had he approached her because of her almost lavender eyes, or because she looked vulnerable and lonely? Easy, as they used to say.

  “But I have fans,” she said. “People who like me, specifically. That ought to be worth a renegotiation.”

  “You think so? Then sue me in Montgomery County courts. Your neighbors in LeisureWorld will probably love reading about that in the suburban edition of the Washington Post.”

  “I’ll quit,” she said.

  “Go ahead,” Bryon said. “You think you’re the only lonely old lady who needs a little attention? I’ll put the wig and the dress on some other old bag. My films, my company, my concept.”

  “Some concept,” Mona said, trying not to let him see how much the words hurt. So she was just a lonely old lady to him, a mark. “I sit in a room, a young man rings my doorbell, I end up having sex with him. So far, it’s been a UPS man, a delivery boy for a florist, a delivery boy for the Chinese restaurant, and a young Mormon on a bicycle. What’s next, a Jehovah’s Witness peddling the Watchtower?”

  “That’s not bad,” Bryon said, pausing to write a quick note to himself. “Look, this is the deal. I pay you by the act. You don’t want to do it, you don’t have to. I’m always scouting new talent. Maybe I’ll find an Alzheimer’s patient, who won’t be able to remember from one day to the next what she did, much less try to hold me up for a raise. You old bitches are a dime a dozen.”

  It was the “old bitches” part that hurt.

  WHEN MONA’S SECOND HUSBAND’S FORTUNE had proved to be largely smoke and mirrors, she had learned to be more careful about picking her subsequent husbands. That was in the pre-Internet days, when determining a person’s personal fortune was much more labor-intensive. She was pleased to find out from a helpful librarian how easy it was now to compile what was once known as a Dun and Bradstreet on someone, how to track down the silent partner in Bryon White’s LLC.

  Within a day, she was having lunch with Bernard Weinman, a dignified gentleman about her own age. He hadn’t wanted to meet with her, but as Mona detailed sweetly what she knew about Bernie’s legitimate business interests—more information gleaned with the assistance of the nice young librarian—and his large contributions to a local synagogue, he decided they could meet after all. He chose a quiet French restaurant in Bethesda, and when he ordered white wine with lunch, Mona followed suit.

  “I have a lot of investments,” he said. “I’m not hands-on.”

  “Still, I can’t imagine you want someone indiscreet working for you.”

  “Indiscreet?”

  “How do you think I tracked you down? Bryon talks. A lot.”

  Bernie Weinman bent over his onion soup, spilling a little on his tie. But it was a lovely tie, expensive and well made. For this lunch mee
ting, he wore a black suit and crisp white shirt with large gold cuff links.

  “Bryon’s very good at . . . what he does. His mail-order business is so steady it’s almost like an annuity. I get a very good return on my money, and I’ve never heard of him invoking my name.”

  “Well, he did. All I did was make some suggestions about how to”—Mona groped for the odd business terms she had heard on television—“how to grow your business, and he got very short with me, said you had no interest in doing things differently. And when I asked if I might speak to you, he got very angry, threatened to expose me. If he would blackmail me, a middle-class widow with no real money, imagine what he might do to you.”

  “Bryon knows me well enough not to try that,” Bernie Weinman said. After a morning at the Olney branch of the Montgomery County Public Library, Mona knew him pretty well, too. She knew the rumors that had surrounded the early part of his career, the alleged but never proven ties to the numbers runner up in Baltimore. Bernie Weinman had built his fortune from corner liquor stores in Washington, D.C., which eventually became the basis for his chain of party-supply stores. But he had clearly never lost his taste for the recession-proof businesses that had given him his start—liquor, gambling, prostitution. All he had done was live long enough and give away enough money that people were willing to forget his past. Apparently, the going price of redemption in Montgomery County was five million dollars to the capital fund at one’s synagogue.

  “Does Bryon know you so well that he wouldn’t risk keeping two sets of books?”

  “What?”

  “I know what I get paid. I know how cheaply the product is made and produced, and I know how many units are moved. He’s cheating you.”

  “He wouldn’t.”

  “He would—and brag about it, too. He said you were a stupid old man who was no longer on top of his game.”

  “He said that?”

  “He said much worse.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I c-c-can’t,” Mona whispered, looking shyly into her salade niçoise as if she had not made four adult films under the moniker “Sexy Sadie.”

  “Paraphrase.”

  “He said . . . he said there was no film in the world that could, um, incite you. That you were . . . starchless.”

  “That little SOB.”

  “He laughs at you, behind your back. He practically brags about how he’s ripping you off. I’ve put myself in harm’s way, just talking to you, but I couldn’t let this go on.”

  “I’ll straighten him out—”

  “No! Because he’ll know it was me and he’ll—he’s threatened me, Bernie.” This first use of his name was a calculated choice. “He says no one will miss me and I suppose he’s right.”

  “You don’t have any children?”

  “Just stepchildren, and I’m afraid they’re not very kind to me. It was hard for them, their father remarrying, even though he had been a widower for years.” Divorced for two years, and Mona had been the central reason, but the kids wouldn’t have liked her under any circumstances. “No, no one would miss me. Except my fans.”

  She let the subject go then, directing the conversation to Bernie and his accomplishments, the legitimate ones. She asked questions whose answers she knew perfectly well, touched his arm when he decided they needed another bottle of wine, and, although she drank only one glass to his every two, declared herself unfit to drive home. She was going to take a taxi, but Bernie insisted on driving her, and accompanying her to the condo door, to make sure she was fine, and then into her bedroom, where he further assessed her fineness. He was okay, not at all starchless, somewhere between a sturdy baguette and a loaf of Wonder bread. She’d had worse. True, he felt odd, after the series of hard-bodied young men that Bryon had hired for her. But this, at least, did not fall under the category of fetish. He was seventy-three and she was sixty-eight-passing-for-sixty-one. This was normal. This was love.

  Bryon White was never seen again. He simply disappeared, and there was no one who mourned him or even really noticed. And while Bernie Weinman was happily married, he had strong opinions about how his new mistress should spend her time. Mona took over the business but had to retire from performing, at least officially, although she sometimes auditioned the young men, just to be sure. Give Bryon credit, Mona thought, now that she had to scout the coffee shops and grocery stores, recruiting the new talent. It was harder than it looked and Bryon’s instincts had been unerring, especially when it came to Mona. She really was a wonderful actress.

  The Crack Cocaine Diet

  I had just broken up with Brandon and Molly had just broken up with Keith, so we needed new dresses to go to this party where we knew they were both going to be. But before we could buy the dresses, we needed to lose weight because we had to look fabulous, kiss-my-ass-fuck-you fabulous. Kiss-my-ass-fuck-you-and-your-dick-is-really-tiny fabulous. Because, after all, Brandon and Keith were going to be at this party, and if we couldn’t get new boyfriends in less than eight days, we could at least go down a dress size and look so good that Brandon and Keith and everybody else in the immediate vicinity would wonder how they ever let us go. I mean, yes, technically, they broke up with us, but we had been thinking about it, weighing the pros and cons. (Pro: they spent money on us. Con: they were childish. Pro: we had them. Con: tiny dicks, see above.) See, we were being methodical and they were just all impulsive, the way guys are. That would be another con—poor impulse control. Me, I never do anything without thinking it through very carefully. Anyway, I’m not sure what went down with Molly and Keith, but Brandon said if he wanted to be nagged all the time, he’d move back in with his mother, and I said, “Well, given that she still does your laundry and makes you food, it’s not as if you really moved out,” and that was that. No big loss.

  Still, we had to look so great that other guys would be punching our exes in the arms and saying, “What, are you crazy?” Everything is about spin, even dating. It’s always better to be the dumper instead of the dumpee, and if you have to be the loser, then you need to find a way of being superior. And that was going to take about seven pounds for me, as many as ten for Molly, who doesn’t have my discipline and had been doing some serious breakup eating for the past three weeks. She went facedown in the Ding Dongs, danced with the Devil Dogs, became a Ho Ho ho. As for myself, I’m a salty girl, and I admit I had the Pringles Light can upended in my mouth for a couple of days.

  So, anyway, Molly said Atkins, and I said not fast enough, and then I said a fast-fast, and Molly said she saw little lights in front of her eyes the last time she tried to go no food, and she said cabbage soup and I said it gives me gas, and then she said pills, and I said all the doctors we knew were too tight with their scrips, even her dentist boss since she stopped blowing him. And, finally, Molly had a good idea and said: “Cocaine!”

  This merited consideration. Molly and I had never done more than a little recreational coke, always provided by boyfriends who were trying to impress us, but even my short-term experience indicated it would probably do the trick. The tiniest bit revved you up for hours and you raced around and around, and it wasn’t that you weren’t hungry, more like you had never even heard of food, it was just some quaint custom from the olden days, like square dancing. I mean, you could do it in theory, but why would you?

  “Okay,” I said. “Only where do we get it?” After all, we’re girls, girly girls. I had been drinking and smoking pot since I was sixteen, but I certainly didn’t buy it. That’s what boyfriends were for. Pro: Brandon bought my drinks, and if you don’t have to lay out cash for alcohol, you can buy a lot more shoes.

  Molly thought hard, and Molly thinking was like a fat guy running—there was a lot of visible effort.

  “Well, like, the city.”

  “But where in the city?”

  “On, like, a corner.”

  “Right, Molly. I watch HBO, too. But I mean, what corner? It’s not like they list them in that crap Weekender Guide in the paper
—movies, music, clubs, where to buy drugs.”

  So Molly asked a guy who asked a guy who talked to a guy, and it turned out there was a place just inside the city line, not too far from the interstate. Easy on, easy off, then easy off again. Get it? After a quick consultation on what to wear—jeans and T-shirts and sandals, although I changed into running shoes after I saw the condition of my pedicure—we were off. Very hush-hush because, as I explained to Molly, that was part of the adventure. I phoned my mom and said I was going for a run. Molly told her mom she was going into the city to shop for a dress, and we were off.

  The friend of Molly’s friend’s friend had given us directions to what turned out to be an apartment complex, which was kind of disappointing. I mean, we were expecting rowhouses, slumping picturesquely next to each other, but this was just a dirtier, more run-down version of where we lived, little clusters of two-story townhouses built around a courtyard. We drove around and around and around, trying to seem very savvy and willing, and it looked like any apartment complex on a hot July afternoon. Finally, on our third turn around the complex, a guy ambled over to the car.

  “What you want?”

  “What you got?” I asked, which I thought was pretty good. I mean, I sounded casual but kind of hip, and if he turned out to be a cop, I hadn’t implicated myself. See, I was always thinking, unlike some people I could name.

  “Got American Idol and Survivor. The first one will make you sing so pretty that Simon will be speechless. The second one will make you feel as if you’ve got immunity for life.”

  “O-kay.” Molly reached over me with a fistful of bills, but the guy backed away from the car.

  “Pay the guy up there. Then someone will bring you your package.”

  “Shouldn’t you give us the, um, stuff first and then get paid?”

  The guy gave Molly the kind of look that a schoolteacher gives you when you say something exceptionally stupid. We drove up to the next guy, gave him $40, then drove to a spot he pointed out to wait.