“Oh. Well, they assign students randomly for the trials—”
“Randomly?” She said it deeply, enunciating it like I did, but with a question-mark tail.
“By chance. Luck. Not planned.” I wrote the hasty definition out for her. “You can choose another teacher if you want.”
“Yeah, okay. I think I will take the other teacher. You say he’s a good speaker?”
“Yeah.” Grace got up, picked up her combined purse/bookbag, and started to back out of the booth. She threw a small card onto the desk as she took the paper with the “random” definition from my hand, then went over to Bruce’s booth. The card had a phone number, presumably hers, on the back.
I found out for sure when I dialed it a couple of hours later. I’d just eaten a fish sandwich at a diner, trying not to be bothered by Grace’s abandonment. The boss had let me off early with a disappointed look, as though I’d let down the entire educational system by losing a student to Bruce. The waitress looked disgusted with me, too, but that was probably because I’d been ordering the same fish sandwich from her for six months. She’d been waitressing in a cheap diner for six months. We could take turns being disgusted.
“Hello?” The word was muffled and coy, the accent uncertain.
“Grace?”
“Oh, yes. You’re the teacher!”
“Not much of one, apparently.” I could tell that she was outside, walking around downtown, from the sounds of the automobile and sidewalk traffic.
“What?”
“Nothing, just a joke. Did you want to meet with me, or something? You certainly didn’t seem too interested in the school.”
She must have dodged into a building, because the noise on her end of the line receded suddenly. “I was interested, but wanted the other teacher. Sorry.”
“Yeah. Well. It’s a little mysterious. So are we going to meet up or what?”
“You like Starbucks?”
“No.”
She laughed. The friendliness of teaching was one of the first things that I liked to cast off on the street, although I did have to keep some of it around when I was with one of my recruited companion-students. I didn’t feel like being friendly with Grace.
“You pick,” she said. I named a bar. She said it was near her place. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I was ringing the buzzer at her apartment building a half-hour later.
Her place was near-palatial, in a building known to be infested by rich software developers, fathers of the boom that had come and faded in Seattle, just like the music scene that I’d loved. She met me at the door after my elevator ride. The door was a long walk away from the kitchen, which had delicious smells steaming out of it.
“That outfit is too nice to be cooking in.” It was. She was wearing a green linen dress that was supernaturally unwrinkled, with black stockings below.
“This dress is thin,” she replied. “Good for cooking.”
“Yeah. I just ate.”
“I wasn’t cooking for you, just me. I thought you just wanted to drink?”
“Yes, that would be good. What do you have?”
“Could you get some? I like Kronenbourg.” She separated the three syllables.
“Well, yeah, okay. Give me some keys so I don’t have to buzz up.” She tossed me a key with an electronic fob chained to it and I went on my way. There was a store at the corner, only a few minutes away, but it was raining hard enough by then for me to be soaked when I got back to the lobby. A few of the other residents looked at me, and I made a display of waggling my fob in front of the elevator’s scanner. I was wearing black jeans and a Meat Puppets T-shirt under my open windbreaker. At least I smelled okay.
She’d eaten and washed the dishes by the time I got back. The kitchen must have been well ventilated, because I couldn’t smell any spices. Grace’s clothes gave off fabric softener and perfume, which combined into a soft, synthetic blooming odor from her side of the room. The first six Kronenbourgs went down fast, and I asked the obvious question. We were both extended on separate parts of her red sectional couch, most of the light coming in from the city outside her massive glass walls.
“I told you there,” she said, “I only like older teachers. So much more to talk about.”
“But you should know that’s not true. Most of them are sad, broken men with very boring lives behind them. I guess if you asked them to list their disappointments you’d have an entertaining hour or six, but beyond that, what is there?”
“There is enough.”
“Why did you get me to call you?”
“I liked your hair.”
“Really? I guess it’s grown quite attached to me.” I grinned, knowing what I’d said would be beyond her English. But she laughed. She leaned back, shut her eyes, and laughed. Then she spoke again.
“That was bad. I hope you reserve those lines for people who won’t be able to understand them.” Her accent had disappeared. Actually, her voice had become Southern Californian, lacking any trace of overseas.
“What’s your deal?” I asked.
“My deal? No deal. I’m a student, just not an ESL student. Part-time theater at the university.”
“So what, you do this little act at downtown schools as a performance piece?” I was disturbed and would have gotten out of there if she didn’t look the way she did, and wasn’t looking at me the way she was. I opened another beer instead, using my thumb and her fob.
“No, it’s not that. I guess the acting practice is good, too. But no, I do it for money, really.”
I froze up and understood immediately. She got herself assigned to the worst sad sack in the office, convinced him somehow that she was his girlfriend, extracted what little cash he had on a day-to-day basis, and then maybe a little more. Grace confirmed all of it.
“And you’d be surprised at the kind of savings those guys have. What they’re willing to give up. Your pal Bruce has two properties, you know that? His dead mother’s house in Bellingham and his own apartment down here. Just works that talking job because he’s lonely.”
“How do you know that’s true? It makes perfect sense to me that Bruce would lie.”
“He carries around folded-up photocopies of the deeds in his wallet.”
This detail was too perfect to be fake. We both laughed and started to drink more. Her scheme was really perfect — she called it a “grift,” feeling that this term classed things up a bit. She did the same thing that I did — offered companionship, pretended to be shy about sex, complained of having money troubles from home, needing a loan to extend her stay in the city, and so on. She never let them come to her apartment, obviously. That would disrupt the whole game. After the rest of the twelve-pack, I felt comfortable telling Grace about my own game. She pretended to be disturbed for a moment, then folded over in giggles. She really was an excellent actress. Then we made our way toward the bedroom and I forgot all about her acting skills.
It was a lot like dating Eun Hee again, only better. We had more to share. Work was a delight, as I got to experience Bruce swaggering around smugly and dropping sledgehammer-subtle hints about the new girl in his life. He spent the early evenings with Grace, and I got all night with her. I managed to pick up a daytime girl for myself in the next week, a pasty unfortunate named Yu Na. Twenty-seven and never been kissed. I could do that much for her. She was out of the city in four days and I had enough spending cash to have an excellent month with Grace. We met at her place and spent lots of money at local bars and restaurants.
“Are you ever going to let me see your apartment?” she asked one night after we were walking home from an all-night Italian restaurant on Boren.
“Sure, tonight, if you want. We’ll need to cab it there. And it’s a rathole compared to your place.”