“Whatever that means.”
“But then two of them welcomed me and said their names, and another handed me a cup of coffee, so I sat down. Then the meeting started and a woman told her story. She looked like a woman at a bank who’d help you fill out a mortgage application, and she had a story that would take paint off a trailer hitch. Her uncle started messing with her when she was, I don’t know, eleven years old? And five years later a pimp turned her out, and she never got in a house or on the phone, she went straight onto the stroll in the East 20s. Blow jobs in cars, mostly, and a couple of times she thought she was gonna get killed, but, you know, she survived. It was a horrible story and nothing like anything in my own experience, and all the same I hung on every word and got a lump in my throat and found myself having to hold back tears.”
“You identified.”
“I guess. Meetings are Tuesday afternoons at the Croatian church way west on Forty-first Street.”
“Easy enough to get to.”
“Which is good,” she said, “because we’re the only group in the city, as far as I know. I went back the next week and again there were all these sweet young things, and I felt like they’d take one look at me and figure I was some demented Church Lady who’d wandered into the wrong room, but then a couple of them remembered me from the week before and said hello and I sat down and the meeting started. Most of them, I’m old enough to be their mother, and there are a couple who could be my grandkids, but for the services of a friendly neighborhood abortionist. But they honestly don’t relate to me like I’m a woman in her sixties.”
“You realize, of course, that you don’t come close to looking your age.”
“You’re sweet, and I guess that’s true, but nobody’s going to card me in a gin joint. These women know I’m older but they relate to me like I’m the same age as they are.” She cocked her head. “Or maybe that’s just something I’d prefer to believe.”
“No,” I said. “It’s probably true. Age disappears in an AA room. We tend to be more aware of length of sobriety than time on the planet.”
“This afternoon,” she said, “there was a woman who had to be five years older than me. She tried to disguise her age with makeup, and who doesn’t, but she overdid it and it had the opposite effect.”
“An old-timer?”
“In the life, for sure. But not an old-timer at Tarts. She turned her last trick three or four days ago.”
“Jesus.”
“If it is her last trick, because she’s been trying to quit for a while now. She’s got this apartment in a full-service building in Murray Hill, and she had one of the porters come up to tell her how much he’d charge her to wash her windows. He quoted her a price, and she said that seemed on the high side, and he gave her a sly look and told her he figured they could work something out.”
“And I gather they did.”
“What is it Mehitabel always says? In archy and mehitabel? ‘There’s life in the old dame yet.’ ”
“And she said that?”
“What she said, word for word, was ‘So I took him into the bedroom and fucked his brains out.’ ”
“I hope he got those windows spotless.”
“Oh, that’s the best part. Afterward, while he’s lying there with his eyes rolled up into his head, she tells him to do a good job on the windows and she’ll give him a nice tip. And he did and she did.”
“I can see where a person might go to those meetings just for the stories.”
“You’d like to be a fly on the wall, huh?”
“Can men come? I could be a retired male hustler.”
“That might be a hard role for you to play, honey. But it’s women only. There are other groups for gay male prostitutes, but you’d probably be less likely to get off on the stories.”
Another time, I expressed some surprise that staying out of the game could be as hard as making a break in the first place. “I had a client once, a blonde who got off the bus from Wisconsin and went straight into the life. She wanted out, and hired me to help convince her pimp to let her go.”
“Kim somebody,” she said.
“Dakkinen, and I guess I told you about her. The story doesn’t have a happy ending.”
“She wound up getting killed, but not by her pimp.”
“It was a complicated story. But I had the feeling that once I’d assured her she was free to go, that there’d be no hassle from the pimp, she’d be able to leave the life behind.”
“And maybe she could have.”
“But maybe not? Maybe she could stay chaste until her windows needed washing?”
“Chaste?”
“Well, I don’t know the word. What’s your group’s equivalent of sober?”
“People say different things. Some of the girls say straight, but the gay ones don’t like that. Some say righteous. I’m not crazy about that myself, it’s too religious, but it doesn’t give me hives. Clean means drug-free, and some of us are and some of us aren’t, so it doesn’t really work. But it may wind up the word of choice, because I’ve heard it said that you’re not really out of the life if you’re still taking drugs. Because it’s only a question of time before you need to convince a doctor to write a scrip, or you need money for a drug buy.”
“Is that how most slips happen? Or do you even call it a slip?”
“A slip, a relapse. Or it’s just, ‘Well, don’t hate me, but I did it again.’ But there’s less emphasis for us on clean time than there is on sobriety in AA.”
“Either way it’s a day at a time.”
“But numbers matter more in your program, don’t they? You have to be sober for ninety days to lead a meeting.”
“True.”
“Of course we’ve only been meeting for ten or eleven months. You have the Traditions in AA, don’t you? Alongside the Steps?”
“Twelve of each.”
“Well, it’s hard to develop much in the way of traditions in less than a year.” She fell silent for a moment. “I led the meeting last week.”
“Oh?”
She nodded. “Told my story.”
“All of it? Womb to tomb?”
“From the e-rection to the resurrection,” she said. “You were mentioned.”
“ ‘And now, all these years later, I’m married to the guy.’ ”
“Something like that.”
“Seriously,” I said, “what did you say?”
“No.”
“No?”
She shook her head. “You had to be there.”
Elevating the leg was easy enough. There’s a recliner in the living room, and I sat down and adjusted the setting appropriately. She brought me the ColdPak that had last seen service a few months ago, when she’d pulled a muscle at a yoga class.
“We should probably have two of these,” I said.
“One for each knee? I didn’t know they were both acting up. I could wrap ice cubes in a towel.”
“No, the other knee is fine. I was thinking one of these for each of us.”
“They’re not like toothbrushes, honey. It’s sanitary to share a ColdPak.”
“Well, you can use my toothbrush anytime you want.”
“And some people think chivalry is dead.”
“The fools they. But what I meant was sooner or later we’re both going to be aching at the same time.”
She thought it over. “At our age,” she said, “we’re a two-ColdPak family.”
“Sorry,” I said. “It was just a passing thought, but once it’s spelled out it’s kind of depressing, isn’t it?”
“Except I like the idea of the two of us growing old together.”
“Yes, so do I.”
“If I even got to have an old age,” she said, “I figured I’d be spending it alone. At some trailer park in Florida, making myself get to the shuffleboard court twice a week, because it doesn’t do to let yourself go.”