Dark Plums (14 page)

Eileen's left eye involuntarily twitched. Both her eyes were reddened, as if she had been crying or were on drugs. Dressed in a tight purple sheath, she was small, with skinny legs and dull blonde hair.

After dinner, the girls relaxed for a while. Business generally picked up around seven.

Eight hundred a night. Sixteen tricks. Fifty-fifty split with the house.

“Safer then the streets,” said Alfredo.

“But so boring,” Adrianne said.

Despite its luxuriousness, the Park Avenue apartment oppressed her.

Days flowed into nights flowed into days. At closing time Alfredo would come by to pick her up in the new black Cadillac that he had recently bought, It had red leather upholstery, a fine radio and other luxurious options, and was costing them eighty dollars a month in parking tickets.

Her wrist watch said ten-thirty p.m. Sonya's eyes were glassy before she leaned back against the couch and closed them. Then she stumbled into the bathroom where she stayed for a long time, and
Adrianne wondered if she were on heroin.

Vanessa went off with a trick.

Waiting.

Her turn.

A flabby man in his sixties. She stimulated him for what seemed an endless time. Knock on door. “Time's almost up,” Adrianne whispered.

Finally, his penis stiffened and he grew so excited that he ejaculated before he totally entered her. His copious fluid spilled out all over the sheets.

Wash herself off. Say goodbye. Next trick. “Hello, darling.” A diminutive Oriental man.

Then a potbellied, middle-aged man with something strange about his manner, a hint of repressed violence. With him, she skittered on the edge of panic. Be very careful, an inner voice told her. “Think of me when you're screwing. Remember, I love you. You're doing this for
us
.” Alfredo's voice sounded in her mind, wrapping around her like a cocoon.

At one a.m., Adrianne vomited into the toilet bowl.

Alfredo was late. Just as she was about to step into a taxi, he pulled up, reeking of liquor. He told her he'd gone to the racetrack and then out for drinks with old friends.

Late rainy afternoon. Forty-five minutes before the end of her Wednesday shift. They were closing up early tonight for some reason, and so the evening shift of girls was not coming in.

“I don't ever screw my wife,” the trick said in his effeminate voice. With thinning fair hair and a paunch, he appeared to be about forty. His British tweeds and underwear lay in a heap on the carpet.

“Why not?” asked Adrianne.

“She's beautiful … used to be a showgirl … but she simply doesn't arouse me.”

While Adrianne pondered this, he inhaled a pinch of snuff from the small box he'd placed on the night table. Then he coughed. There was a brown residue of snuff around his aristocratic nostrils.

“Tell me, why do you work here?”

“Oh, I don't know.” She was tired of being asked.

“Fondle me.”

Despite her efforts, his penis remained flaccid, and most of his attention went into sniffing the tobacco while he lay on his back and she vainly attempted to arouse him by stroking and pumping.

“Tell me some stories to excite me.”

She looked at her wrist watch in the dim light. “You've only got a few more minutes.”

“What a shame. You're so charming. Your name again?”

“Stephanie,” she said, using what Cecily termed her “professional” name.

“There's a special quality about you, Stephanie. Perhaps I can get you a part in the film I'm doing. I'm producing an experimental film with a Hungarian director.”

He was probably putting her on. Nonetheless, he intrigued her. Perhaps she should give him a little extra time. But it was already five-thirty, and she had a sudden premonition that if she failed to meet Alfredo tonight at six, something terrible would happen in their relationship.

Falling rain began to hit against the windows behind the heavy brocade drapes.

“Look, I have to go. Your time's almost up.”

“Mmmm, just keep on stroking … oh … oh, I'm finally getting hard … just a little more, you sweet thing.”

Someone knocked on the door to signal that it was time for him to leave.

The man was alternately stiffening and going limp. Often Alfredo was late. He might not even get there until seven, and she didn't relish the idea of waiting for him on the street for an hour in the cold rain. The new Cadillac, at least, was warm inside. Let him wait for a change.

“What pleasure do you get out of this life, Stephanie, tell me.” His eyes gleamed with avidity. “Does it give you a thrill?”

Adrianne sensed he wanted her to say yes, that she had twenty orgasms a day, that she adored fucking, sucking, being mauled, intimidated, even spat on, that she loved living in fear of disease, of violence, and of arrest. He wanted her to say that she didn't mind being bored while she waited interminable periods of time in the living room between tricks. He wanted her to say she liked standing on the cold street while she waited for Alfredo at night, liked taking penicillin shots for clap, and that she liked having the gynecologist stick a cold steel instrument or an impersonal gloved finger inside her every week.

But maybe this stranger really was producing a film. Maybe she could become a film star, and then her whole life would change entirely.

“Yes, it excites me,” she said. Then she began to tell him about her tricks and began to get carried away by her own words. She heard a soft-spoken, wide-eyed girl who wasn't herself at all murmur, “It excites me to take a man's cock in my mouth. Would you like that?”

“Later,” he said. “Tell me, you beautiful creature, have you ever made love to a woman?”

“Well, a few times.” Again the soft-spoken girl took over, and she felt herself sheathed inside some other personality who was trying to please this man by telling him what he wanted to hear. She told him something about Lucille, changing her name, looks, and background
because she felt she must protect Lucille from this stranger's obscene personality.

As she talked, his organ swelled larger. “Tell me, do Negroes have bigger cocks?”

“Oh, some do, some don't.”

“What was the longest it ever took a man to come?”

“I don't know. Maybe a couple of hours.”

She remembered a trick back in November while she was still working the streets whom she had to stimulate for a very long time. She sensed murderous rage growing out of his frustration, and he seemed at a point where he might injure or kill her. In a state of intense fear, she had done everything in her power to satisfy him while she prayed for protection.

“Why are you so silent?” he asked, inhaling a pinch more snuff.

Then she made up a story she thought would please him, in which she elaborated on every detail of an imaginary, day-long erotic encounter. She heard herself as if it were someone else talking—this soft-voiced girl going on and on. He became more and more excited. In her hand, his penis was hard and huge, his breathing quickened.

She felt imprisoned in her lies, deprived of her identity, stifled like a mummy wrapped in gauze layers, a phony china doll. Yet, because this man had managed to plumb a few drops of truth out of her, she was strangely disturbed.

He reached a pitch of excitement; his pupils dilated as if on a drug, wide-open eyes listening to a fairy tale about other men's powers. Finally he mounted her and came. Then he rolled away and fell into a light sleep with a blissful expression on his bloated face.

Throughout the rest of the apartment, it was unusually silent except for the clang of a pail against porcelain. María must be cleaning up. It had grown dark outside. Light no longer filtered in through the draperies, and outside the rain fell harder.

She switched on a lamp.

Alfredo, are you still outside waiting? Don't go, she begged him in her mind. She needed Alfredo with special intensity right now because she felt phony and isolated, more used than if this trick had fucked her all day and all night. Something had been taken away. Her soul had been robbed.

“Wake up. I have to go now,” she said.

“Huh?”

He sat up and rubbed his eyes.

Hurriedly, she dressed while he put on his clothes with maddening slowness.

There was no one in the living room, but the door to one of the bathrooms was ajar, and she smelled disinfectant and saw María with her long white braids scrubbing the floor on her knees. “Good night,” she called out to the old woman.

“
Buenas noches, señorita
.”

Cecily's desk contained cubbyholes where at the end of each day Cecily would put envelopes for the girls with the money they had earned. Her envelope was missing. Had one of the other girls stolen it? Had the maid taken it? Had Cecily forgotten to leave it for her? She would have to wait until tomorrow to find out.

“What about the movie?” she asked the stranger as they waited together for the elevator. “You said maybe there will be a part for me.”

“Movie? What movie?” he asked, startled. But when they got inside the elevator he immediately recovered himself. “I'll invite you to my next party. The director is sure to be there,” he said. The amused edge crept back into his voice. “I'll speak to him about you, beautiful creature.”

“How can I get in touch with you?”

“I'll call you.”

“You can leave a message for me here.”

“I'll do that, sweet thing. You're a nice girl. Don't believe all the stories you hear,” he added, chucking her under the chin.

They had reached the ground floor.

He pranced away through the rain to hail a taxi.

She knew he would never call, and she had been conned because she was a fool.

“Alfredo was here,” said the doorman. “He just drove off a few minutes ago.”

In the rain, she waited a long time for a taxi, and when she got back to the loft it was cold and dark and empty.

“Cecily, where's my money?”

“I put three hundred and seventy-five dollars into an envelope for you last night.”

“I didn't see it.”

“It was there.”

Adrianne wanted to scream and throw the silver ashtray on Cecily's desk into her face.

“She'll rip you off any chance she gets,” Sonya had warned.

The next few hours for Adrianne passed in turmoil. Alfredo hadn't come home the night before, and she wondered where he was. Was he with another girl? Had he gotten into an accident? She wondered if Cecily really had put the money out and if someone had stolen it. Her stomach hurt; her period was several days overdue; and her head ached.

Even if this place were safe, she was getting fed up. Eileen and Vanessa had gotten close to each other and were acting a bit nasty to her. She missed Sonya, who had called in sick.

There was a general tension in the air, and Cecily was agitated. She smoked cigarette after cigarette and talked a long time with Dominic over the phone.

Adrianne's last trick, a tall, stooped man with grey hair, a professor, had just left. She looked at herself in the ornate Spanish mirror. On the bed behind her were rumpled sheets that she needed to straighten out. Used tissues were everywhere. Was this red knit dress the right shade? With her dark blue eyes and her flushed cheeks, perhaps a deeper red with more purple in it would look better. Her bleached ringlets stood out like a halo around her face. She looked into her eyes as if for the answer to some mysterious question. Then she heard rough male voices.

They were talking to Cecily. “Get your hands off me! Let me speak to my lawyer!” Cecily was shouting. She heard Vanessa's and Eileen's shrill voices and sounds of scuffling.

“Got ‘em handcuffed, Sargent.”

“
Yo no he hecho nada
!” the old woman María wailed.

Adrianne glanced towards the windows. Outside was a fire escape. Her beautiful new silver fox coat, which she had bought only last week at a wholesale furrier's, was flung over an armchair. Panic plunged her mind into a state of crystal clarity. Hastily she put on her shoes, flung on the coat, grabbed her purse and pulled open the window which led onto the fire escape. Carefully, she shut the drapes and closed the window behind her. Wind whipped against her, nearly knocking her down. Her heels were going through the steel grill-work. She took them off, moving much more swiftly than she did in normal life, and stuffed the shoes into her purse. Then she made her way down the wet, slippery steps, clinging to the rail, going down landing after landing. Snowflakes were swirling about. She could see into lighted rooms on some floors where drapes or blinds were not pulled shut. She hoped no one would report her. When at last she reached the bottom landing, she was a full floor above the ground. Below her were neatly covered garbage cans in a cement courtyard. She flung her beautiful new fur, lining down, onto the cement to soften her fall, lowered herself to a window ledge, then took a deep breath and jumped.

Landing on her buttocks, she was shaken and bruised. She got to her feet, put on her high heels, and ran out the alley to the street. There she saw a police van with flashing lights. Moving more slowly, she tried to look casual so that she would merge with the crowd. She squeezed onto a bus just as it closed its doors.

Wind was blowing through her hair and through the lining in her coat. “Baby, you're beautiful.” The memory of Alfredo's voice caressed her and warmed her bones, enveloping her like a blanket. Whether his words were true or false, she wanted to believe them. “I love you, precious. Long ago in Greece, temple priestesses used to give their bodies to strangers. They knew it was a way to gain wisdom.”

“Hey doll, want to warm up?” asked a squat, fleshy man with strong whiskey breath. He wore a windbreaker and a tweed cap.