Market Forces (41 page)

“This is crap, Carla.”

“Is it?”

Silence. A tear broke cover under her left eye. He pretended not to see it, reached for his whiskey instead. She found a tissue in her jacket.

“I’m leaving you, Chris. I thought maybe. But I was right the first time. There’s no point.” She gestured at the hotel around them. “You’re happier like this. Living on room service, locking out the rest of the world. It isn’t just the job you do anymore, that fucking tower you run your remote-control wars from. It’s everything, 24/7, insulated from reality. How long would you have gone on sitting in this place if I hadn’t come here tonight? How long would you have shut me out like everyone else?”

She got up abruptly.

He sat staring straight ahead, out the windows of the bar to the street outside. “You fucking left me, Carla. Don’t try to turn it around.”

She gave him a bright, brittle smile. “You’re not listening to me, Chris. I’m leaving you. I’ll need a couple of weeks to get my stuff out of the house—”

“And where are you going to go?” It came out ugly.

“I’m going to stay with—” She laughed a little. “Not that it’s anything to do with you anymore, Chris. I’m going to stay in Tromsö for a while. Until I can get the divorce sorted out. I’m assuming you aren’t going to contest it, you’ll probably be happier than I am to get free. Give you plenty of room for your new penthouse playmate, whoever she is.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Oh, please. I’m not stupid, Chris. I saw the way the people at the desk looked at me when I asked for you. I hear the way they react when I try to call you. I’m not the only woman you’ve got coming here. I just hope whoever it is, is worth what you’re paying.”

He shrugged. “Think what you like. Better yet, check the credit card accounts. Spot all the charges to escort agencies I must be making. You never did have a very high opinion of me, did you?”

She shook her head, drew a hard breath that had tears in it. “You don’t know how wrong you are about that, Chris. You’ll never fucking know.”

“Yeah. Whatever.”

She turned to go. Paused and turned back.

“Oh, yeah. You’d better come out and collect the Saab, Chris. Sometime soon. I haven’t touched it, but I’m not sure how long I can stand it sitting there in the drive while I know you’re here fucking some moan-on-demand tit job. My maturity’s wearing pretty fucking thin.”

She walked away from him.

L
IZ
L
INSHAW CAME
over the following evening and walked bang into the aftermath. Chris was moody and snappish, and when they got into bed he needed a hand-crank start. They fucked, but it wasn’t much fun. He went through the motions, wrestling irritably over choices and changes of posture, and only finally managed to lose himself in the pay-channel perfection of her body as he came. Scant seconds later, he hit the real world like concrete from fifty floors up. No postcoital warmth, no chuckling or smoothing of sweat-soaked skin. There was a raw hollow behind his eyes and in his chest.

They unplugged and lay apart.

“Thanks,” she said, staring at the ceiling.

“Sorry.” He rolled toward the juncture of her thighs. “Come here.”

She pushed his head away. “Forget it, Chris. Just tell me what’s wrong.”

“You don’t want to hear it.”

“Yes I do.”

He rolled onto his back again. He blew imaginary cigarette smoke at the ceiling. “Carla came to see me,” he said finally.

“Great.” She sat up against the headboard, arms folded under her breasts. “Fucking great. You seeing her again?”

“Told you you didn’t want to hear it.”

She looked down at him, angry. “You’re wrong. I do want to hear it, I want to hear all about it. Every fucking detail. You’re what I do in the evenings now, Chris. Anything that’s going to ruin it this badly, you better believe I want to hear about it. Are you seeing her again?”

“Doubt it.”

He recounted the conversation in the bar, almost word for word. When he came to Carla’s parting line, she grimaced.

“Nice.”

“Yeah.” Chris stared off into a corner of the room. “Used to scare me sometimes, how she could get inside my head like that. Just read stuff out of me like I was a screen.”

Liz Linshaw’s gaze twitched around. “Excuse me?”

“I mean, the way she knew that—”

“That’s what I am in your head? A moan-on-demand tit job? Well, thanks a fucking lot, Chris. Thank you
very
much.”

“Liz, I’m not. That’s not what I meant. It’s.” He groped after some explanation of what he meant, the way she seemed to form an integrated part of the smooth-lined hotel-suite reality he was living. “Christ, you’re
beautiful,
that’s what I was trying to say, too beautiful to be real, it seems like. Okay? And that must have been what she picked up on in my head. I mean, look, she was right about the tit job, wasn’t she?”

Liz cupped her breasts at him. The anger on her face robbed it of sexuality. “You got a problem with these? Funny, because you didn’t seem to earlier when your face was fucking buried between them. You know, Chris, this is me. I’m here for real, all of me. I’m not trying to sell myself to you as some piece of fucking merchandise.”

“No?” A little of his own anger was starting to seep back through the emptiness under his ribs. “So why send me the edited highlights of your porn career? Good old airbrushed girl-on-girl action? You wouldn’t call that merchandising the goods?”

She stared at him. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“Oh, come on Liz. You’re trying to tell me you didn’t do porn?”

“No, I did.” Something in her face had changed. “Back when it was the best way I knew to make money. I just want to know how come you never told me you’d been jerking off to it.”

“Liz, you fucking
sent
it to me.”

“No, Chris. I didn’t.”

“You’re saying you didn’t mail me a videoclip of you and some blond bimbette on a, like, an exercise rack or something. You never sent that?”

She sighed and sank back against the headboard. Her gaze rolled out to the middle distance. She seemed to curl into herself.

“Donna’s Dominion,”
she muttered.

“Sorry?”

“
Donna’s Dominion.
That’s what it was called, that particular piece of classy erotic art. I was Donna Dread, gym-training world dominatrix.” She smiled without much mirth. “Pretty infantile stuff, huh?”

Chris gestured uncomfortably. He was pretty sure he was blushing. Liz Linshaw nodded.

“Got you hard, though. Right?”

“Uh.” He looked away.

She sighed again. “Look, don’t worry about it. Stuff’s made to get you hard. As a male, you’d be practically dysfunctional if it didn’t. Youthful tits are supposed to turn you on, and there you’ve got four of them on screen, all rubbing up against each other, and all blown up to hyper-real proportions. You might as well get embarrassed about four lines of uncut NAME powder keeping you awake all night. It’s just another drug, Chris. Refined, maxed-up, bang-on-the-nail sex chemistry trigger dust.” Another weary smile. “So you liked me, huh?”

He cleared his throat. “You, uh, were you really into, you know?”

“Girls?” She shrugged. “Not really, no. I mean, get someone licking your clit for you, that’s not unpleasant, whatever sex the person doing it is. Once you get used to the six or seven people watching you off camera, that is. And you’d be surprised how quick you do get used to that. But no, I was never a tryout lesbian, not even a tryout bi. It’s pure theater, Chris. Just a job. Oh, yeah, and if you stick to girl-on-girl, your health insurance premiums go way down. Less risk, less general wear and tear on the works.”

“Why did you, I mean, how did you get into it?”

This time her smile seemed genuine. Her posture unwound. She shook her head, reached over the edge of the bed for her bag, and started going through it. “Well I wasn’t kidnapped into it by white slavers, if that’s what you mean.”

She found a bent and crumpled ready-rolled spliff, a lighter. Sat back against the headboard again and lit up. She coughed and waved little eddies in the sudden cloud of smoke.

“You want some of this? No? Sure?” She pulled down a lungful of smoke, held it for a moment, and let go. She looked critically at the embered end of the spliff. “Thing is, you listen to some twisted evangelical fuck like Simeon Sands, you’d believe we
are
all sex slaves by any other name, kidnapped, trapped by drugs, victims of our own unclean, incest-aroused lust—I think guys like Sands like that one especially, you hear the way they trot it out. One hand on the pulpit, one hand below, eh.” She grinned crookedly. “But it just ain’t so, Chris. I mean, it isn’t this other thing the industry wants to sell you, either. You know, we’re all dripping-wet sluts, just can’t wait to get our orifices stuffed. Forget that. You want clinical and jaded, go watch a porno shoot. It’s work, Chris, pure and simple. More or less professional, depending on who you’re working for, better or worse paid ditto. But no one ever put me under pressure to do stuff I wasn’t happy with, and no one tried to stop me when I quit.”

“Do you think you were typical?”

Liz held down more smoke. Frowned, then let it up. Shook her head. “Globally? No. I heard a lot of nasty stories coming out of Costa Rica and Thailand. Still do. But you don’t need me to tell you about that, Chris. This is what you do for a living. Enterprise zones, political instability. Market forces, weak governmental structure, the poor get fucked. Literally, in this case.”

“Oh right.” The casual way she’d said it stung, made him snappish. “So everyone you worked with was smiling and happy, were they?”

She plumed smoke, looked at him quizzically.

“No. Even in Copenhagen, you’ve got some fucked-up girls working the trade. That blonde I was with in
Donna’s Dominion
? Renata something, I think she was Polish. She had some strange ideas, and those tits were just insane. She had to go to three different plastics guys before she found one who’d give her those implants, and then she had on-and-off postop trouble the whole time. So yeah, who knows? Maybe old Simeon was right in her case. Turned on to pornographic filth because her father abused her as a child. But to be honest, I think she just wasn’t very bright. Yeah, Chris, there are going to be women doing porn who were fucked up by abuse when they were kids, it makes sense. But most of the ones I worked with were just like me—uninhibited, maybe overly exhibitionistic media wannabes, marking time while they looked for their big break. I went out to Copenhagen, looking for work with the pirate ’casters out of Christiania. I got into Danish porn instead. It was easier, there was a lot more of it about than pirate work, and it was better paid. It was a couple of years, it felt weird and different and maybe taught me a few things about myself that I wouldn’t know otherwise. And I saved a lot of money. End of story. And. Happy ending, yeah.”

“But you need to smoke that stuff to talk about it.”

The quizzical look again. “Chris, you need to get a grip. You’re telling me you’ve really got some kind of moral problem with my career as a porn doll a decade ago? For a man who works in international finance, you’ve got some fucking nerve.”

“I don’t have a problem with it. And I didn’t think you had a problem with what I do, either.” Spite gleamed through. “In fact, I thought it got you off.”

Her eyes narrowed. “What?”

“Sure. You fucked Mike Bryant, now you’re fucking me. Spot the connection. Hey, I’m not complaining, Liz, but take a look at your own fucking motivations. This is textbook passenger-seat passion. Let’s be honest about it.”

She sat up abruptly, flicked ash off the spliff. “Yeah,
that’s
a good idea, Chris. Let’s be honest. If you had a problem with me, you could have left me well alone.”

“Left
you
alone?” The injustice of it staggered him. It was like fighting with Carla all over again. An opening well of curdled hurt. “You came on pretty fucking strong to
me,
as I recall. At Troy’s party. After the party, at Regime Change. You
called
me for that one.”

“Oh, yeah, well maybe you shouldn’t have sent me a copy of your wife’s flight times to Norway, then. Because you know Chris, as invitations go, that was pretty fucking blatant.”

Shock held him unstirring for a moment.

She caught it, coiled back on the bed, face still tight with anger. “What?”

“I. Liz, I didn’t send you anything.”

“Right.”

“No, fucking
listen
to me.” He reached out for her with both hands. She gestured him away. Stared out the window. “I didn’t send you that stuff. I didn’t even know Carla was going to Tromsö until about an hour before you called me. I. Someone’s fucking with us, Liz.”

Her gaze tracked warily back to him. She didn’t turn her head. Her whole body was closed to him again, limbs folded defensively.

“I’m not a drive-site groupie, Chris.”

“Okay.” He held up his hands, palms out. “Okay, you’re not a drive-site groupie. Whatever you say. But I’m telling you, I never sent you those flight details. And you’re telling me you didn’t send me
Donna’s Dominion.
So. Someone’s fucking with us, right? It’s got to be that.”

And he got her back. Limb by limb, line by line, the softening stole through her. The place in Carla he could no longer reach, the point of reconciliation abraded by years of impact along the same emotional front. She opened a little, turned to face him. Nodded.

A tiny shard of hope spiked him, unlooked for. A prickle across the underside of each eye and a sudden surge in the empty space he’d excavated in his own chest.

This time,
he promised himself silently.
This one, this time, this woman. I will not fuck this one up.

But the hyena was still out there, still prowling in silhouette on the sunset horizon of his thoughts.

And would not shut up.