Twisted (8 page)

For example, my schoolmate Marina liked Anton from our group, but dated 24-year-old Misha who had his own business and decent wheels, and who picked her up after classes once in a while. That made Marina feel cooler than the rest of the girls in our class (including me), and successfully substituted Anton’s great sense of humor.

Another good example was our neighbour, Dasha, from the fifth floor. She was my mother’s kitchen-small-talk friend, and came for coffee and a few cigarettes almost every day. Most of their conversations ended up being about Dmitri, Dasha’s husband, who, according to her, was a rare type of dickhead. He’d been involved with another woman for almost two years. On each visit, Dasha complained that she was tired of the life that was built on the lie, that she didn’t even love ‘the bastard’ any more, and that she would have left him long ago if she had anywhere to go other than her mother’s small apartment. Her mother lived somewhere on the outskirts of Kherson and drove her mad. These were good excuses for Dasha to continue living a life of no self-respect and constant complaints.

I saw many of these examples around me every day: because of social, economic and other circumstances, including low self-esteem, a fear of change, the belief that they didn’t deserve better, or simply to gain any sort of advantage, women often entered into – or stayed in – relationships for reasons other than love or sexual attraction. My curious logic may not have been developed at the time, but I could not see the difference between this type of relationship and one in which women honestly named their monetary price.

I saw so many of these ‘love affairs without love’ that I became used to the concept and formed my okay-with-being-a-pro attitude. As I see it, the only difference between any hooker and our neighbour Dasha is that the former’s ‘labour hour’ is the latter’s lifetime.

I go to work in an annoyingly nasty mood. No wonder I am pissed off – besides the hangover from the previous night’s booze-diving routine that doesn’t want to simmer down, and although it’s 5 p.m. and it still feels like my body has been thrown from the fifth floor onto the driveway, five minutes ago I received a text from one of my regulars.

Oh yes, he is one of the first clients whom I can proudly call ‘my customer’.

The chap is in his fifties, in good shape, not bad looking but a repulsively unpleasant and sleazy man. He lives in Paris and, of course, is married. Two or three times a month he comes to Luxembourg for business and pleasure. When we first met in the club, about three months ago, he acted like a real gentleman: asked some neutral questions about my family and my life, trying really hard to show that he was interested in me, and not sex. He kept throwing lines like, ‘Oh, all three of you are beautiful sisters! Your mother must be a gorgeous woman!’ or ‘You are an intelligent woman, Julia, you shouldn’t be working here ...’

Blah-blah-blah …

After twenty minutes of our causerie and a few glasses of champagne, he asked if I would like to join him upstairs, bought a bottle of Laurent-Perrier for €375, refusing to drink the shoddy swill the club sold for €250, and politely fucked me from behind. Before he left, he gave me his phone number and suggested that we meet outside of the club when next he was in town, offering a meal in a fancy restaurant, a room in a decent hotel and €300 for the night.

This overture sounded like a top-notch bargain to me, until our first ‘date’ …

My Frenchman is one of those characters who never lets me out of his sight. He never stops hugging or touching me, or, more importantly, kissing me, usually with his wet tongue deep inside my throat. No matter what! While walking in the street, driving, sleeping, showering or even eating.

He loves to walk hand in hand through the Luxembourg streets and pull me every few minutes, clinching and grabbing me under the skirt or sweater, while constantly licking my mouth inside and out. Every red light we hit while driving to the hotel or restaurant he burrows through my tights and panties and plugs his fingers into my slit while searching with his tongue for my trachea. The bastard loves to join me in the shower, ignoring my protests and also insisting on us lathering and washing each other while, of course, kissing all the time … he never stops hugging me at night, groping my tits and my pussy even while I sleep.

Oh, and the most annoying part is the restaurants. He always sits next to me, periodically squeezing my thighs and deep-throat smooching while still chewing on his food.
Thinking about it makes me want to throw up instantly …
He keeps on gazing into my eyes and saying ‘
Je t’aime
’
⁹
while I fight the natural impulse to show the disgust on my face, smile instead and answer ‘I love you too’.

Yuck …

Guess what the most revolting part of our ‘dating’ is? Of course it’s sex. We fuck once or twice before going to sleep and usually twice in the morning – before and after breakfast. He cannot come without me stimulating his anus. Usually that involves my finger in his ass while he is fucking me on top, or sometimes he just climbs above my face and makes me lick his asshole while he jerks himself off.

Yuck! Yuck! Yuck!

After each of his visits I feel so squelchy and drained that the only thing that can pull me out of that depressed mental condition is intensive three-hour shopping therapy. A few hundred euro spent on shoes and clothes – that is the best medicine I’ve come up with so far.

Back to the SMS I received from the French sleazeball … He is arriving tonight and is going to stay for two days instead of his usual one-night visit. It’s a Saturday night, so he will spend it in our cabaret with me. As soon as my shift is over, he will take me to some
magnifique
¹⁰
French hotel, outside of Luxembourg City, somewhere on the border with Germany, where we can ‘enjoy’ each other in full, until Monday …

Fuck! That is at least 42 hours of excruciation for my mind and body!

He arrives at the club and we move to the semi-private lounge. The only thing I can think about, while nodding and smiling to some boring stories he is telling with the excitement of an eight-year-old, is the 42 hours I am going to have to get through. I guzzle the champagne, hoping it will help me.

Already pretty loaded with alcohol, I go to the bathroom where I bump into Masha. She looks at me and roars, ‘What’s wrong, my baby? You look like a piece of trash! Do you need some extra stimulus? It looks like the alcohol does not love you tonight.’

‘Masha, nothing will work for me,’ I weep drunkenly. ‘I can’t stand the sleaze-ball anymore! I don’t need a stimulant; I need something that will switch off my brain for the next two days!’

‘Let me think …’ moans Masha. ‘I have something that just might work for you.’ She leaves the restroom.

A few minutes later, she returns with a small plastic bag with some blue pills in it, quickly hands it to me so my ‘beloved’ doesn’t notice, whispers in my ear, ‘Don’t take more than two at a time,’ and disappears.

I have no idea what is in the bag but swallow a few tablets without batting an eye. And then it comes … the world around me begins to modify. My arms, legs and eyelids get heavier … my attitude shifts too – from distressed and jerky to I-don’t-give-a-fuck-what’shappening-to-me-at-all …

Feels good … I love it! I decide to make sure that this wonderful state will not leave me for as long as possible and have another two. I feel cool as a cucumber for a little longer, and then blank out.

I wake up the next day in my bed. I can’t remember anything: how I got here or what happened the previous night. There is Lena, sitting next to my bed with a worried face, and Masha, in a hyper state, doing some cleaning in the room and irritably answering Lena’s ‘should we take her to the hospital?’ questions: ‘She is going to be fine, Lena. You should rather go to the mall and do some shopping and let your sister sleep. Stop worrying.’ Judging by Masha’s tone, she isn’t saying this for the first time.

Apparently what happened was that some time after I had taken the third and fourth hit of Valium, I’d grasped my Frenchman’s face with two hands, digging into his skin with my nails, and with an unblinking loony stare hissed something not very nice through my clenched teeth. Then, abruptly, dropped back on the couch. My eyes rolled back and white, frothy saliva started to come out of my mouth. Sleaze-ball got a fright and, while staring at me, kept shouting something like, ‘Are you okay, my angel?’

What an idiot! Obviously I wasn’t!

Masha immediately understood what had happened, and with an ‘I told you, not more than two at a time!’ pulled me into the bathroom, where she pushed two fingers down my throat and made me puke, removing the excess of the sedatives.

When I’m finally able to switch on my brain and recalculate the outcome of the night, I genuinely smile.

I didn’t make any cash over the weekend. The following day our boss barked at me, threatening to fire me if he found out about one more drug incident involving me. But I missed it! I missed the weekend from hell. I learnt that Valium and alcohol are not a good combination for my body. And that my sleaze-ball is probably angry, because I haven’t received an SMS from him.

I wonder what I hissed at him … something tells me it was not sweet and pleasant, taking into account that it was not me speaking but my psyche that was freed from abuse and suppression.

My joy doesn’t last long, though. A week later my phone comes alive with a text from him. It informs me that he is sure that I was just not feeling well and didn’t mean what I said. And that he’d be coming back the following week and would love to see me. Oh, and that he was having some difficulties with money and would not be able to pay me, but believed it wouldn’t be a problem for us, because our relationship was built on genuine feelings …

Yeah, right!

I get ecstatic. My greed, my desire to make more money, always pushed me to handle one more bout of torture and prevented me from stopping abusing myself and ceasing our meetings. But thanks to his greed, I no longer have a choice. I write back that there is absolutely fucking nothing on this earth that could make me spend even an hour with him for free, and that when he talks about our ‘strong bond’ it makes me sick.

He doesn’t respond. I spend another couple of days feeling sunny and energetic. I even forget about him. However, on the night he was scheduled to arrive in Luxembourg, his visit to the club takes me by surprise.

Demonstratively, he takes another girl upstairs. On his way past, he throws something like, ‘Venal two-faced bitch!’ at me.

I look at him and smile. ‘I know’.

I think to myself that even if he pours a barrel of crap over my head right now, I would still keep smiling, because there is only one cheerful thought that keeps swinging through my head – ‘I am not the one who has to go upstairs with him!’

Alleluia!

It is just another weekend when my sisters and I meet for our Sunday lunch, which we try to do regularly to catch up on the latest news, especially now that Lena is working out of town. Considering our habit of sleeping late, we never gather earlier than three or four in the afternoon, and we usually drag lunch out into the evening. As I’ve never had sushi before we decide to go to a nice little Japanese place not far away from where Natalia and I are staying. No cabarets are open on Sundays, so it is the only day during the week on which we can get together and totally relax without watching the time and worrying about when our shift is going to start.

‘I love this feeling,’ I say while Lena shows me how to hold the chopsticks, ‘of not having to rush to work after lunch … I wish I was the daughter of a millionaire.’ I sigh, losing myself in my delusional thoughts. ‘I wouldn’t need to work then …’

‘I’d rather be the wife of a millionaire’, says Lena, also with a dreamy look on her face.

‘Let’s say you’d rather be a wife, no matter whose,’ adds Natalia, and we giggle.

‘By the way, Nata, I hear from Jul that you are dating somebody now!’ Lena sounds very excited. She leans over the table and lowers her voice, ‘A black guy?’ A light blush covers her face.

‘I’m not dating him, I’m just fucking him,’ replies Natalia, and swallows a succulent salmon roll.

She explains that they met in the club. His name is Carlos and he is from Portugal. He plays semi-professional soccer, doesn’t speak a word of English, and his French is even worse than Natalia’s. He is good-looking, with a hot body, and is very young.

‘He is only 19!’ says my eldest sister. ‘It feels like I am taking advantage of the kid!’

He bought her a
demi-bouteille
and acted like a gentleman, without asking her for anything in return but half an hour’s company and a chat. Afterwards, he offered her €200 to join him at his place after work. Natalia agreed, telling us that he is so sexually attractive that she ‘would probably even go with him for free!’

Nevertheless, by the time her shift was finished, she was so tired that she regretted promising Carlos that she would go home with him. But the deal was done and he was waiting for her outside the club. Natalia jumped into the shower, fighting her tiredness using an old and proven method – converting the amount she would make into
hryvni
and counting how many months it would take her to earn that money in Ukraine. That always worked. Fifteen minutes later they were catching a cab together on the dark and quiet street not far from our club.

Carlos’s place was actually a small room in a lower-class apartment building that he was renting. It didn’t even have its own toilet. There was only a sanitation unit that the entire floor used. The only furniture in his room was an old cupboard, a chair and a double bed.

‘Disappointed, I thought to myself that semi-professional soccer doesn’t pay that well…’ continues Natalia, while sipping her drink.

‘And there it started – the best sex I’ve ever had!’ Her cheeks and ears are burning from the red wine and the memories of the passionate night. ‘We did it for three hours, with short breaks to take a leak or smoke. It was so good that I even forgot that I was tired. And, I’ve been coming back since then almost every night after work, ignoring my exhaustion. For free! I even pay for the cab myself. Can you believe it?’ finishes Natalia, with a contented smile on her face.