A Better Goodbye (23 page)

“I'm kind of obsessive-compulsive,” she said.

“Me too,” he said. “Just don't expect to find anybody else like us here.”

“Why am I not surprised?” she said, smiling and getting a crooked, almost boyish grin in return. She liked it. All she'd been hoping for was someone who wasn't drooling, and here was a guy she wouldn't have minded hitting on her in a club. And yet he was different from the lawyers and software designers who usually took a run at her. They didn't flow when they walked, and he did. Their eyebrows and cheekbones weren't riven with scars, and his were. She didn't need to look at his fists to know she was in the presence of a tough man, but that was cool. She'd never met one before. Her only real question was, what would she talk about with him? She would figure it out soon enough. At the moment there was something else she needed to know: “Is Scott around?”

“He's not exactly a morning person,” the security guy said.

“Oh.” For a moment, she thought about explaining what had happened when Scott interviewed her, how she had been late and that really wasn't like her at all, hence her arrival at 10:23
A.M.
Instead, she reminded herself of who she was supposed to be and said, “I'm Coco,” and offered him her hand.

“They told me you'd be here,” he said as he took it. “I'm Nick. Any problems, I'll take care of them for you.”

His grip was comforting, like he was saying she could trust him. His eyes said the same thing. But she saw sadness in them, too, and she got the feeling that the sadness was there to stay.

Jenny was wondering what that was all about when she realized she hadn't let go of Nick's hand. When she did, she tried to hide her embarrassment by glancing around the apartment. “Nice place,” she said. It was better than saying it was just like every other upscale massage operation she'd seen. She wondered if they all got their room dividers from the same store.

“You want to hang up your stuff, the master bedroom's that way,” Nick said.

“Thanks,” Jenny said, grateful he had looked at her face and not her boobs.

She had everything in a tan canvas tote: a pink teddy and a white one, a black slip dress, a short red-and-gold robe, a bunch of thongs all jumbled together, two pair of heels, cheap oil and lotion, the fancy unmarked bottles she would put it in, and her music. There were the CDs she'd bought on her own—Sade and Enigma—and CDs she'd learned about from older men she had dated, Miles Davis's
Kind of Blue
and Chet Baker's
Chet
. Plus Mazzy Star, of course. She hadn't listened to them since she'd fled the Valley, but she knew one thing: Her first client would hear Mazzy Star whether he liked it or not.

When she came out of the bedroom, everything put away neatly, Jenny wanted to ask Nick why the place was so clean, but Sierra was already there answering the phone so she kept her mouth shut. Didn't want to sound like she expected to work with a bunch of slobs even though she did.

“Hi,” Sierra said when she hung up.

“Hi,” Jenny said. “Your hair looks great.”

It was dyed a champagne color and cut in a way that reminded Jenny of Jane Fonda in an old movie she'd seen. Jane Fonda as a hooker. She wondered if Sierra realized it.

“Thanks,” Sierra said, flashing a real smile. “I thought I'd try it, you know? Like, it'll grow out if it's a disaster.”

Jenny decided she didn't know about the Jane Fonda movie.

“They're calling already,” Sierra said. “I booked an eleven-thirty for you.”

“Thanks. Was it, like, anybody you know?”

“I don't think so. Said his name was”—Sierra checked her steno pad—“Greg. All I can tell you is, he sounded like a guy that needs to get off with a hot Asian.”

“Rice chasers,” Jenny said, laughing. “The story of my life.”

And so it began again, in that high-rise a block south of Wilshire: Jenny opening the door for a stranger who would be seeing her naked inside of ten minutes, and letting her instincts dictate what happened after that. They were in the guest bedroom; no amount of flattery would have convinced Sierra to give up the master when they had appointments at the same time.

Greg turned out to be slender and darkly handsome, with a hundred-dollar haircut and teeth so white they looked like they had been dipped in high-gloss paint instead of merely capped. When she heard his voice, a baritone oiled with sincerity, Jenny started thinking she had seen him before. It took a couple of minutes before she realized where it had been: on the TV news. Not one of the big stations, one of the others. She thought the news was propaganda—why didn't those people just come out and say that George Bush wanted to blow up the world?—and she was tempted to tell him so. Yeah, and his name wasn't Greg, either. But first things first.

“Ready to turn over?” she asked.

“Do me a favor?” he said.

Uh-oh,
she thought. “What kind of favor?” she said.

He reached into the briefcase he had been careful to set beside the futon. He pulled out a toothbrush.

“Would you stick this up my ass?”

“No,” Jenny said with seen-it-all-before calm even though she hadn't seen this before.

“Coco, come on,” he said. “If you do that with the toothbrush, I'll come like Vesuvius.”

“I'm sure you'll do that anyway,” she said.

“Please, Coco.” His baritone was reduced to an unbecoming whimper.

“I told you no,” she said. “Now please turn over.”

“You're sure, huh?”

“Yes, I'm sure.”

“Okay.” Rolling onto his back, he looked like a little boy who'd been cut off on seconds at dessert. “You won't tell anybody, will you?”

Like who am I going to tell?
Jenny thought.

The phones had stopped ringing, the way they usually did after lunch, and Sierra was in the master with a regular who walked in apologizing for canceling the day before. It was the only quiet time Nick was likely to have until evening. He was reading the sports section from a
USA Today
he'd found abandoned in a coffee shop, the rest of the paper lying at his feet. The new girl was curled on the other sofa, lost in a hardback book she had pulled from her tote and not noticing when Nick glanced over at her. He liked what he saw.

As soon as she had walked through the door, he'd wondered what she'd be like in bed. He'd wondered about the other girls too, but this one—
What the hell is her name?
he asked himself—this one made him think the sex would be fun even if it was for pay. There would be laughter afterward, not an anxious glance at the clock, and maybe if you got her laughing long enough, she'd want to go again. Or maybe she'd just want to talk, and it wouldn't be about her rotten ex-boyfriend or whether you liked her eye shadow. For all Nick knew, it might be about the book she was reading.

He could see old-time soldiers on its dust jacket, guys riding horses and swinging swords, but he had to squint to make out its title.
The Charterhouse of Parma
had just registered on his brain when the new girl looked up. Right away she made sure her robe covered her boobs, as though he hadn't already seen them when she came out of her second session. The gesture told him she thought he'd been trying to sneak a peek, that she'd probably decided then and there he was a creep.

He asked the question that was on his mind anyway: “What's a charterhouse?”

“A monastery,” she said, sounding like she expected to have to explain what a monastery was.

“Some Catholic I am,” he said. “I should have known that.”

She didn't say anything, but she did smile.

“Parma's got to have something to do with Parmesan cheese, am I right?” he said.

“Yeah, they make it there.”

“There where?”

“In Northern Italy. Toward the French border.”

“You been there?”

“No, I just read about it.”

Nick was right. She liked to laugh. She was doing it now. But he still couldn't think of her name, and it was driving him nuts.

“So your book,” he said. “True story or made up?”

“A novel,” she said.

“You like it?”

“Great so far. I mean I'm only on page two-thirty-seven, but there's all these rich people scheming back in the nineteenth century, and a nobleman getting thrown in prison, and an aunt loving him enough to break him out.”

“He the good guy?”

“I'm not sure there are any good guys, not like Americans expect anyway. The writer, Stendhal, he's French, and the way he saw it, everybody's pretty spoiled and corrupt. And they're all, like, I don't know, in love with themselves.”

“But you keep reading anyway?”

“Of course. It's way better than modern novels.”

Nick shook his head. “Keep looking. There's got to be a good guy in there somewhere.”

“Why?” the girl asked, smiling as she closed the book, using a finger to mark her place.

“Well, it's a story, and stories always have good guys.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Okay, maybe if it's a true story, there isn't one. But you said your book is made up. So why would the writer waste his time on a bunch of—”

“Corrupt narcissists?”

“College girl, huh?”

“Sorry,” she said, a guilty look on her face.

It stayed there until Nick said, “Why be sorry? If I was smart, I'd talk that way too. Corrupt whatevers, huh? I would have just called them scumbags.”

“Me too,” the girl said, “but we just met.”

They both laughed. Then Nick said, “So you're positive there's not gonna be a hero?”

“The book's not about that, I don't think.”

“What's it about then?”

“Happiness. They're all searching for it.”

“They going to find it?”

“I don't think so.”

“You don't?”

“I'm not sure anybody ever finds it,” the girl said. “Not all the time anyway. If you're happy all the time, you're an idiot. Of course, you don't want to be unhappy all the time either. I used to be like that. Unhappy, I mean. And then I told myself I was going to change and be happy every single minute. But that's impossible. So now I'm just, like, trying to balance things out.”

“You were unhappy all the time?” Nick asked.

“Yeah.”

“What was wrong?”

“I'd rather not talk about it.”

She gave Nick an apologetic smile and started reading again, leaving him to do whatever he wanted, go back to his sports section or keep wondering what her great unhappiness was. Her problems certainly didn't show on her. Nick guessed that was part of her appeal to clients. He had felt it himself, the two of them talking the way they might have over lunch or maybe even on a date. She was the first of the massage girls who made him feel good about his sleazy, off-the-grid job. But he couldn't remember her name until Sierra came back and called her Coco.

Nick was trying to embed it in his memory when Scott showed up with far different concerns about Coco. “New girl doing all right?” he asked Sierra.

“Four clients already,” she said. She looked at Nick. “Or is it five?”

“I'll check the book,” he said.

“Whatever,” Sierra said. “She looks like a good producer.”

“Figured she would be,” Scott said.

“Asshole,” Sierra said.

Scott wiggled his eyebrows. “Hey, power has its privileges.”

Nick knew it shouldn't have come as a surprise, Scott banging the girls who worked for him. This wasn't a piano recital. The girls got hired because they looked good and didn't hesitate when it came to sex with strangers. But he still felt, well, not bad exactly—let down was more accurate—to hear Coco lumped with the others. The only question Nick had about her after that was how long she'd last.

The girls for the evening shift flaked. Or maybe it was just Ling, who didn't bother to call. “I knew we'd never see that bitch again,” Sierra said, not sounding the least bit unhappy. The other girl, Heather, had gotten on her cell to say she had car trouble and was stuck in Culver City. No way Sierra could complain about that. Massage girls seemed to have cornered the market on cars that broke down every other week. Jenny sat there hoping hers wouldn't be next.