The next day he would send her flowers.
He let go of the wheel with one hand and patted her head. She gripped his shirt frantically.
He thought: This could work out fine.
Something Nice
WHAT’S YOUR NAME, sir?” The freckled woman wore green stretch pants, and had her red hair tucked under a neat pink scarf. “Fred?” She was making her naturally coarse voice go soft and moist as warm mayonnaise. “I’d like you to meet my girlfriends, Fred.” The four girls stared at him. Two sat up and smiled, holding their purses with tight fingers, their legs pinched together at the knees. A beautiful black-haired girl, with jutting cheekbones and a lush, full mouth, lolled in an orange beanbag chair, her long legs sprawled rudely on the floor, half open and tenting her tight silk dress so you could almost see between her legs. She gawked at him with open disgust.
“Sit up, Jasmine,” snapped the stretch-pants woman through her smile. She held out her freckled hands toward the last girl, who sat with one leg tucked underneath her, looking out the window. “And this is Lisette.” The girl wore a short red-and-black-checked dress, white ankle socks and black pumps. Her bobbed brown hair was curly. When she turned to face him, her expression was mildly friendly and normal; she could’ve been looking at anybody or anything.
The strangeness of it all delighted and fascinated him: the falsely gentle voice, the helpless contempt, the choosing of a bored, unknown girl sitting on her ankle, looking out the window.
“Do you see a lady who you’d like to visit with?”
“I’ll see Lisette.”
The girl stood up and walked toward him as if he were a dentist, except she was smiling.
The room was pale green. The air in it was bloated with sweat and canned air freshener. There was a bed table set with a plastic container sprouting damp Handi-Wipes, a radio, an ashtray, a Kleenex box and a slimy bottle of oil. The bed was covered by a designer sheet patterned with beige, brown and tan lions lazing happily on the branches of trees or swatting each other. There was an aluminum chair. There was a glass-covered poster for an art exhibit. There was a fish tank with a Day-Glo orange fish castle in it. He lay on the bed naked, waiting for her to join him. He turned on the radio. It was tuned to one of those awful disco stations. “I specialize in love,” sang a woman’s voice. “I’ll make you feel like new. I specialize in love — let me work on you.”
He smiled as he listened to the music. It evoked the swirling lights of dance floors he’d never been on, the tossing hair and sweat-drenched underwear of girls who danced and drank all night, girls he never saw except in commercials for jeans. He anticipated Lisette as he imagined her, the grip of her blunt-fingered hands, her curly head on his shoulder. Did she dance in places like that, in her white socks and pumps?
She came in with a white sheet under her arm. She clipped across the floor, sharp heels clacking. She turned off the radio. The silence was as disorienting as a sudden roomful of fluorescent light. “I hate that shit,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind. I have to put this sheet down.” She snapped the sheet open and floated it down over him. He scrambled out from under it, banging into the wastebasket as he stepped to the floor.
“Here,” he said. He took a corner of the sheet and awkwardly stretched it over the bed.
“No, it’s okay, that’s good enough.” She sat on the bed and stared at him, her small face gone suddenly grave. Her eyes were round and dark. Her muddy black makeup looked as if it had been finger-painted on. He sat down next to her and put his hand on her thigh. She ignored it. He felt as though he was bothering a girl sitting next to him on a bus. His hand sweated on her leg and he took it away. What was wrong? Why wasn’t she pulling her dress off over her head, the way they usually did?
“Do you come to places like this often?” she asked.
“Not too much. Every month or so. I’m married, so it’s hard to get away.”
She looked worried. She reached out with nervous quickness and picked up his hand. “What do people do now, mostly?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I’m new here. You’re only my second customer and I don’t know what I should do. Well, I know what to do, basically, but there’s all these little things, like when to take off the dress.”
He felt a foolish smile running over his face. Her second customer! “But you’ve worked before.”
“You mean done this before? No, I haven’t.”
He looked at her, beaming greedily.
“What do you do for a living?” she asked.
“I’m an attorney,” he said. “Corporate law.” He was lying. He felt cut loose from himself, unmarried, un-old, because of the lie.
“How old are you?”
“How old do you think I am?”
She smiled, and her black eye paint coiled like a snake in the corners of her eyes. “Fifty?”
“You’re exactly right.” He was fifty-nine. “How about you?”
“Twenty-two.”
She looked as though she could be that age, but he had a strong feeling that she was lying too.
“Why do you come to places like this?” She lay across the bed, her head on her hand, her legs folded restfully. “Do you not get along with your wife?”
He leaned against the headboard, his naked legs open. “Oh, I love my wife. It’s a very successful marriage. And we have sex, good sex. But it’s not everything I want. She’s willing to experiment, a little, but she’s really not all that interested. It can make you feel foolish to be doing something when you know your partner isn’t an equal participant. Besides, this is an adventure for me. Something nice.”
“Is it something nice?”
“With you it’s going to be very nice.”
“How do you know?”
“What a strange question.”
She crossed the bed to adjust her body against his, to put her head on his shoulder. She stroked his chest hair. “It’s not so strange.”
“Well, I just know, that’s all.”
They kissed. She had a harsh, stubborn kiss.
She took off her checked dress, button by button, very neatly. Her body was extremely pretty: white, curvy and plump. When she took off her high heels he saw that her legs were a little too short and her ankles a bit thick, but he liked them anyway. She folded her dress over the aluminum chair and turned to him with an uptilted chin, looking as if she might break into a trot, like a pony. She was proud of her body.
Her pride was pitiful in the stupid room. It made him feel superior and tender. He gushed a smile and held out his arms. She met him with a surprisingly strong hug, the pouncing grab of a playful animal.
“Goodness, you’re healthy.”
She grinned and squeezed him. “What do you want to do?”
“We’ll play it by ear. Don’t be nervous. It’s going to be lovely.”
The way she touched became unsure. She talked to him as they touched, and her crude, frank words were like pungent flowers against the gray of her shyness. When he touched her hips, he thought he could feel her innermost life on the sensitive surface of her body.
“It was like a honeymoon,” he said to her afterward. “Just like I knew it would be.”
“Oh, it was not.” Her face was in the mirror; she was swiping her mouth with lipstick. “Don’t be silly.”
“Have you ever been married?”
“Uh-uh.”
“Then you don’t know what a honeymoon is like.” She was right, though. It wasn’t like a honeymoon at all.
She walked him to the door and he kissed her in front of the other girls. The stretch-pants woman smiled. “Good night, Fred,” she said.