“You should get better at your job if you want a nicer apartment.”
“Oh, my grift, as you say? It’s part of my grift. I’m just a poor student on his way up, right? They’d get suspicious if their ten-buck-an-hour teacher was living in Silicon Heights or whatever.”
We got back to my place and Grace looked around. Half-full laundry basket on the floor, packs of guitar strings with dust-mouse colonies forming on them. Exactly what she’d expected.
“Sorry,” I said anyway.
“It’s no problem. We can do all the same things here.” We did.
I woke up alone. That was fine with me, and it fit our regular schedule. She had to be off every Wednesday, early, to have breakfast and a walk in the park with Bruce. She really did deserve a reward for tolerating that guy. According to tradition, my fridge was empty of everything except for half a glass of orange juice. I drank that and had waffles with maple walnut ice cream at the overpriced chain restaurant down the street. After my lean college years, it always felt good to be able to lay down a twenty without grimacing at the bill. I killed time at record stores and then got to work at about three.
Bruce was slumped in his booth in his customary nap-taking position. When I passed him he came to life, looking at me sadly.
“She cut me out, man,” Bruce said.
“Beg pardon?”
“That girl I was talking about. She said she needed to get back home to take care of some family trouble. She’ll e-mail me in a few days. I’m just broken up about it.”
“But she’ll get back to you.”
“Of course. Man, we really had something. I loaned her plane fare and everything. It was actually that girl who came in—”
“Grace.”
“How did you guess?”
“Prettiest girl in here in weeks, Bruce. I knew you’d be on that like I know you’re you.” This cheered him immensely and he forced me to high-five him. I taught with a grin for the rest of the day. Grace called when I was at dinner and told me that she’d come to my place after class.
She moved in a special way indoors, a type of walk that would look good on stage. It wasn’t theatrical, just very naked. Maybe that’s why she liked thin fabrics. She walked as though she was nude in her own place and no one was around. We joked about Bruce for a while and she showed me the manila envelope of bills in her purse. On the outside of it, he’d written “For trips there and back again. — Bruce.”
“That has real levels of pathos to it,” I said. Grace agreed. Soon, she was naked for real, and so was I. We spent most of the night that way, and the rest sleeping. I was woken by a sharp pain in my back at about four.
“Jesus! Did you bite me?” Grace didn’t answer. I assumed it was a spider and swept my hand around on the mattress. I didn’t find anything, and soon I fell asleep without realizing it.
I was alone again in the morning, but something was wrong. I felt bad. The sum of a dozen hangovers had added up in my skull and body, and I knew right away that I’d been drugged. Only drugs made you feel this bad the next day, and this was one I’d never tried. My fingers were working so poorly that the bedside lamp only came on after twelve tries. Another ten minutes got me to the bathroom, and what I saw made me glad that I still had some of those numbing narcotics in my system.
“Mlurn,” was the first sound to come out of me. My face was the color of polluted sea foam, and my eyes were nearly puffed shut. That explained why it still seemed so dark. I must have had an allergic reaction to whatever she’d injected me with.
I went to the kitchen and swallowed as many codeine pills as I could fit down, cupping handfuls of water from the tap to help their voyage down. Then I went back to sleep with a cold towel over my face. It was all I could manage.
In the afternoon, I was a little better. My face was still swollen but the rest of me felt okay. I took a closer look at my apartment and saw that it had been tossed in an organized, considerate way. She might have nearly killed me with whatever was in that needle, but she didn’t want to leave the place a mess. I went straight for the kitchen cupboard and found a half-full box of raisin bran, but no economy-sized corn flakes box. It was gone. Eight thousand and change in savings, the responsible put-aside part of what I’d taken off the girls. Grace had rightly assumed I was too lazy to get a safety-deposit box. With her plane fare from Bruce, she’d made a little more than ten thousand dollars yesterday.
I went to a dingy Chinese restaurant for some food, a place where the lighting was red and the service hasty. There was no point in looking for Grace at the school, or in asking to see her records there. They’d be fake. Mine always were. I checked my watch for the date: It was the first of the month. I didn’t have any doubt that Grace had moved house the day before when she was supposedly at acting class. She didn’t need classes.
I waited until my eyes looked almost normal and walked down to the school. I was an hour late, but I ignored the upset staff and went straight for Bruce’s booth.
“Do you own two properties, Bruce?”
The look on my face and the look of my face combined to make him talk plainly, for once.
“No, man. I rent a basement.”
“Your mother didn’t leave you a house in Bellingham?”
“I rent the basement from her.”
I quit the school and went home to rest and think. I’d been the target, not Bruce. That meant everything I’d said and thought about him in my month with Grace applied as much or more to me. My last check from the school came in the mail three days later. They’d deducted the price of the stamp. I lived off it for as long as I could before signing up at another downtown ESL factory.
It took me four months to find her. I knew there was a good chance that she’d left town, but I needed to keep working anyway. So I kept an eye open for her. I volunteered for all the trial lessons I could, knowing that she’d turn up if she was still around. And finally there she was, shivering a little in the rain, with her wrist clamped hard in my hand.
“That hurts,” she said.
“What did you drug me with? I hope you used a clean needle.”
“I’m not a junkie.”
“Just a plain bitch.”
“There’s a word for guys like you, too,” she said. I let go of her wrist. She didn’t run. I indicated a coffee shop and she nodded. I followed her in. She was wearing a turquoise capelike thing and she still walked the same way. She paid for the espresso.
“What was in the needle?” I asked. She told me. I couldn’t pronounce what she said when I repeated it back to her, and she laughed.
“Real funny. I just wanted to know what it was that almost killed me.” She stopped sipping and looked at me. I exaggerated my allergic symptoms in a description of that morning, adding in some shortness of breath and vomiting. “Could have died. Are you going to give me my money back?”
“Yes. And you know I didn’t mean that to happen.”
“Yeah, well, tell my lungs. You’re just going to give me the money, no trouble?”
“If I don’t I guess you’ll just try to make my life hell.”
“Good guess.”
She took a sip and undid the one large button on her cape. Underneath was a black silk top with a silly ruffled center. There was nothing ashamed about her.
“Why didn’t you get out of town?” I asked. “You had enough cash.”
“I was going to wait awhile, set up my business, then give you a call. I thought you’d be more interested once you’d seen what—”
I laughed, loudly enough to call attention from other people. They lost interest quickly, as people do. “Once you’d near-killed me and stolen my savings?”
She looked to the side, with the expression of someone who knows she won’t be understood, no matter what she says. It was a face I made at students to make them try harder.