A Bestiary of Unnatural Women (22 page)

Besides, if he had left a note, one of the
kids might have found it before she did. They weren’t likely to get
back until after midnight, but who knew how long Hillary might have
to spend trying to find some man who would actually want her frumpy
forty-year-old body. She might not come home until the bar closed,
and there was nothing that he would say in a note that he wanted
his children to read.

Without further contemplation, he hit the
road.

As she was getting to the bottom of her Coke,
Hillary heard a burst of laughter behind her. She had spent the
last twenty minutes nursing the drink as slowly as possible and had
not dared to look around.

She clung desperately to the hope that Walter
would still show up to rescue her, and she was afraid of
inadvertently encouraging some other man to approach her. In her
fantasies, she had imagined that she would have been bolder from
the outset. That if Walter were a no-show, she would have begun
acting like a real hooker immediately, turning around and making
eye contact with the customers, enticing likely johns with a coy
smile, actively soliciting interest in the wares that she was
putting on display, open to all offers.

Instead, she was sitting here like a
wallflower at a high school formal, too shy to meet a fella,
knowing that she would go home again without having danced a single
step.

Which was exactly what she wanted. The only
man she wanted to dance with was her husband – the man she
loved.

But she wasn’t going to get what she wanted.
If Walter failed to show up damn soon, she’d be dancing on her
knees with her lips around someone else’s cock, however much she
hated the idea.

She prayed with all her heart that Walter
would walk through the door right now, whisk her off to the Men’s
room for their exciting adventure, and then take her safely home
where they would collapse in gales of laughter about their bold
walk on the wild side.

For a second, she thought that her dreams had
come true; a bass voice mumbled in her ear, “Hey, babe, want to
have some fun tonight?” exactly the way she expected Walt to come
on to her when he entered into the spirit of the game.

But, when she turned, she saw a grizzled man
ten years younger than her with a five o’clock shadow and bloodshot
eyes leering at her.

Walt was MIA and it was time to complete the
promise that she had made to him and to herself. She replied in
what she hoped was a sultry voice, “You look like a fun guy. I’m
ready if you are. What did you have in mind?”

“Maybe let me buy you a drink and we can talk
about it.”

“No need for a drink. Let’s just talk about
it now.” She licked her lips and leaned close, giving him a good
shot of her cleavage. As though on a string, his head bobbed down,
the better to enjoy the view.

“Maybe you’d just like to get it on with me?”
he said, boldly.

She presumed that ‘get it on’ meant regular
sex, so she countered with, “I think maybe I could make you happy
with a nice big sloppy blowjob.” Her ears burned with shame as she
said the crude words, but there it was, right out on the table. No
misunderstanding possible.

“Would you like that?” The young man raised
his eyebrows.

“I’d love that,” Hillary lied with a smile,
drawing out the word, ‘love,’ as long and lasciviously as she
could.

“Okay,” he drawled the word the same way
while his whole face broke into a broad smile.

“I’ll need twenty dollars up front.”

Now it was the man who turned red. “I don’t
pay for it, lady. I don’t need to pay for it.”

“Do you have a job?”

“Of course I do. I have a good job down at
the docks.”

“Do you work for free?”

“Hell no.”

“Well, I don’t work for free, either. Twenty
bucks isn’t much, but that’s what I charge.”

“Twenty buck is more than your fat old ass is
worth. I can get a lot of beer for twenty bucks and that much
beer’ll make me feel a lot better than you can.”

“Don’t be so sure about that, son. I can make
you feel damn good.” But her words were wasted. The man was already
heading back to his friends. After a minute, their laugher turned
nasty and she heard the word, whore, being thrown about with
abandon.

She had thought that having to suck off a
strange man in a Men’s room would be the ultimate humiliation, but
being told that she was too old and fat to be worth even a measly
twenty dollars was an altogether more degrading experience.

No matter. The word was out and someone would
pay for her service soon enough.

The moment she accepted some man’s money, she
would no longer be playing whore. She would actually be one.

Having no particular destination in mind,
Walt drove toward downtown – it was natural – there was nothing
happening in the suburbs that would interest a single man,
footloose and carefree.

It was only natural that his meandering would
take him close to Broadway, but not entirely accidental that he
turned left toward the seedier end of the street instead of right
toward the centre of town.

What was that place that she said she was
going? O’Malley’s? O’Brian’s? Something Irish. O’Reilly’s! That was
the place. Right there across the street! She could be in there
right now, even as he was driving past.

Walt slowed down as much as traffic permitted
and tried to peer through the window, but he could see nothing but
a dark blur. She probably wasn’t even there. It was already 9:30.
Whatever she had decided, it had to be over by now.

But a block further, he saw her gold-colored
Honda parked by the curb. Damn, she must be still inside trying to
find someone brave enough to let her wrap her vicious little mouth
around his pecker.

He whipped a U-turn, parked in the first
empty spot, and walked back toward the bar. He did not kid himself
about finding this place by accident, or about having some deep
subconscious needs. He freely admitted to himself that he had
become curious about what was happening. He wanted to know if she
were really going through with her plan.

And he was more than a little curious about
the line in her email where she said that she would “dress in a way
that would make her intentions obvious.” He wanted to see what his
prissy little wife thought a fuck-me outfit looked like.

This was the woman who had insisted on
wearing flannel pajamas to bed every night since their honeymoon.
She had whined, “But I get cold,” so often that he could swear that
he could hear her walking behind him, right now, complaining that
she deserved to be comfortable in bed. Her idea of sexy clothes
probably included baggy blue jeans, a freshly pressed sweatshirt,
and a beige bra designed by a certified structural engineer.

He would just peek in the window for a laugh
before he moved on.

‘Okay,’ Hillary told herself, ‘the ice is
broken now. I’ve made an offer and set my price. It’s almost 9:30,
Walt has decided to make me go through with it, so it’s time to
find a john, close the sale, and then get the hell out of here. I
can do it. Giving a blowjob never killed anyone.’

She swallowed the last vestiges of her pride
along with the last of her Coke and turned around on her stool. She
began looking at the men in the room, one at a time, ready to
negotiate with one of these men for the privilege of paying her
twenty dollars and letting her suck his cock to an orgasm as
quickly as he could manage. Hell, twenty bucks was almost nothing
and she was sure that most of these guys weren’t too proud to take
advantage of a bargain like that.

At first, she avoided looking at the table
where the young man who had previously rejected her offer was
sitting. Undoubtedly, to demonstrate their solidarity his friends
had already agreed that she wasn’t worthy of any of them.

The feeling was mutual.

As she looked at the men, she could not help
but form opinions about them, to try to imagine whose cock would be
the least distasteful to suck. If the truth were known, she wasn’t
even that keen to suck Walt’s cock, but maybe a young Richard Gere
was slumming in here somewhere. A twenty-buck whore couldn’t afford
standards, but she would be allowed preferences and she was sure
that one of these men had to be preferable to the others.

As she surveyed the room, she a shocking
truth slowly dawned on her. While she had been sitting here,
nursing her Coke and moping about Walter’s abandonment, the men
behind her had not been sitting idle. They had been whispering
among themselves, passing the young man’s story being told from
table to table.

She noticed a twenty lying on a table in
front of one of the men. Then she noticed another. And another. She
realized that every single man in the bar had a twenty lying on the
table in front of him. Even the young man who had previously blown
her off was now fingering a twenty and grinning at her like the
devil himself. Not one of these men had taken the money out of
their wallets to buy another round of beer.

After talking to each other and agreeing that
twenty dollars was a cheap price, every man in the whole bar had
been quietly waiting for her to finish her drink and get to
work.

She wasn’t going to be able to choose just
one man and then leave.

Walt had an inspiration. If he were going to
get a divorce, he would need grounds. What better grounds than that
his wife had begun engaging in prostitution? Not only would the
grounds automatically include adultery, but he could claim a
pattern of illegal activity. Any judge in the state would be so
disgusted that he wouldn’t even listen to a question of alimony.
He’d just tell her that she could fall on her back and earn her own
damn alimony. Hell, Walt would only have to threaten to expose her
disgusting behavior in open court she would scurry away without the
word,
alimony
, ever passing her lips.

He slipped into the bar.

Of course, she noticed him as soon as he
entered – it was a small bar and she was turned on her stool to
face the door as well. He grinned at her, shrugged, and sat in a
chair at the nearest empty table.

The whole room was silent, expectant.
Something was about to happen.

A man at the next chair leaned over to him
and said in a stage whisper, “She’s a hooker. She’s going to give
us all blowjobs for twenty bucks apiece.”

Walt looked around, astonished, and said,
“All of you?”

“Yup. That’s what they say. All comers. Get
your money out.”

“Twenty bucks?”

“Yup. That’s her rate. That’s what she told
the guy over there. I haven’t heard of a blowjob that cheap since
the eighties, but who’m I to look a gift whore in the mouth?” His
giggle sounded like gravel rattling in a tin bucket.

Walt looked back at his wife. She sure looked
like a gift whore. Her dress was so short that he could see garter
straps stretching half way up her ass cheeks and her tits were
hanging half out of a tiny Mary-Kay-colored tube top that was
stretched practically to the breaking point.

Who would have guessed that his prissy little
lady had it in her to costume herself like a back alley street
walker?

She was frozen in fear. Looking at the
tableau that could have been created solely for his amusement, he
could see the pretty little pickle that she had gotten herself
into. She thought that she was going to cherry pick some young stud
but had completely misunderstood how a group of horny men
behaved.

That was no surprise to Walt. She had
misunderstood him for twenty years.

Now, there was no way she was going to be
allowed to leave the room before she serviced every stallion in the
stable. And some of these stallions were not only past their prime;
they already had one hoof in the glue factory.

Before the night was over, she was going to
get a close look at more diseased skin than a resident
dermatologist saw working a full shift in a leper colony.

After these men got through with her, her
mouth was going to be filthier than a sewer pipe. He wouldn’t ever
put his own cock into that hole. He’d never been allowed to fuck
her mouth before and he wasn’t ever going to want to fuck it after
tonight. Kind of a pity. The way she painted those lips bright red
like that, they looked damned hot. He felt a stir in his groin
despite himself.

The only other man in the joint who wasn’t
fingering his money with one hand and his personal joint with the
other was the bartender.

Walt was going to have to subpoena him as a
witness in the divorce proceedings.

Hillary almost collapsed with relief when she
saw Walt walk through the door. No damsel had ever been as happy to
see a white knight coming to her rescue as she at that moment. She
tried to keep her composure, but felt her eyes tear up in
gratitude.

Then her husband sat down on the far side of
the room and grinned at her.

She silently cursed him. He was so dumb that
he couldn’t understand how much trouble she was in. He didn’t have
any time to waste. She needed him up here with her right now,
offering his protection, not sitting back there, waiting to be
served a drink.

Even as she held her breath, expecting him to
make his move at any moment, someone else moved first. An old man
with greasy white hair and a sagging potbelly heaved himself out of
his chair, clutching his money in a grimy, nicotine-stained fist,
waved it in the air and shouted, “I’m too old to wait any longer.
My money’s as good as the next man’s. Let’s get this show on the
road.” As he yelled, she saw that he had only a few snaggly yellow
teeth left in his mouth.

She had promised that she would service the
first man who made her an offer. That was the rule. But she told
herself that the geezer had not yet made an offer to her because he
had not yet mentioned trading his money for any specific sexual
act.