Maybe she accepted because at the time she was fond of him. Or because it seemed an exciting thing to try. Or because she thought it would bring on the catastrophe. Charles bought her a red dress and matching high heels, and he bought himself a gun, because, as he said to Anne, no one respects a pimp without a gun. Anne first saw the gun when they were driving from San Francisco to Berkeley and she opened the glove compartment to look for something, cigarettes maybe. She got a fright. Charles assured her there was no reason to be frightened; the gun was like an insurance policy, for her and for him. Then Charles showed her the hotel where she was to take the clients, drove around the neighborhood a couple of times and dropped her at the entrance to a bar where guys used to go looking for women. He went off, possibly to another bar, to hang out with his friends, although he told Anne he was going to be on the lookout the whole time.
Never in her life had she felt so ashamed, Anne remembers, as when she went in and sat down on a bar stool, knowing she was there to pick up her first client, knowing that everyone else in the bar could tell. She hated the red dress, the red shoes; she hated Charles's gun and the catastrophe that was always about to occur but never did. And yet she managed to collect herself, order a double martini and begin a conversation with the bartender. They talked about boredom. The bartender seemed to be an expert on the subject. Soon they were joined by a man of about fifty, who looked like her father, but shorter and fatter, whose name Anne has forgotten or maybe she never knew it; in any case I will call him Jack. Jack paid for Anne's drink and proposed they continue their conversation elsewhere. As Anne was about to get down from her stool, the bartender came over and said he had something important to tell her. Anne thought maybe it was another reflection on boredom, for her ears only. The bartender leaned across the bar and whispered in her ear, Don't you ever set foot in this bar again. When he had resumed his normal posture, he and Anne looked each other in the eye and Anne said, OK, and left. The man who looked like her father was waiting on the sidewalk. They got into his car and went to the hotel Charles had pointed out. For the duration of the short trip, Anne stared out at the streets as if she were a tourist. She vaguely hoped to catch a glimpse of Charles in a doorway or an alley, but there was no sign of him and she thought, I bet he's in some bar.
Anne's contact with the man who looked like her father was brief, though not devoid of tenderness, surprisingly for her. When he left, Anne took a taxi home. The next day she told Charles it was all over, she didn't want to see him again. Charles was very young, Anne remembers, and his fondest dream, apparently, was to have a whore, but he took it well, although he nearly burst into tears. Some time later, when Anne was working nights in another cafй in Berkeley, she saw him again. He was with friends and they laughed at her. This hurt Anne much more than all their fights. Charles was wearing cheap clothes, so perhaps he hadn't made his way in the world of prostitution, though Anne preferred not to think about that.
The following years, as Anne remembers them, were fairly restless. For a while she lived with some friends in a cabin near Lake Martis; she slept with Paul again; she took a course in creative writing at the university. Sometimes she would telephone her parents in Great Falls. Sometimes her parents would come to San Francisco and spend two or three days with her. Susan had married a pharmacist and was living in Seattle. Paul had become a computer salesman. Sometimes Anne asked why he didn't start painting again but Paul wouldn't answer that question. She traveled outside the United States. She went to Mexico a couple of times. With some friends, she drove a station wagon down to Guatemala, where she was held overnight by the police and one of her friends was beaten up. She went to Canada about five times to stay with a friend who wrote children's stories, like Linda, and had bought a house in the country near Vancouver to get away from it all. But she always came back to San Francisco and that was where she met Tony.
Tony was Korean, from South Korea, and he worked in a clothing factory where most of the employees were illegal aliens. He was friends with Paul, or Linda, or one of her workmates from the cafй at Berkeley, Anne can't remember; all she remembers is that it was love at first sight. Tony was very gentle and very sincere, the first truly sincere man Anne had ever met, so sincere that, the first time they went to the movies together (to see an Antonioni film), as they came out of the theater he confessed without the slightest embarrassment that he had found the film boring and that he was a virgin. When they slept together for the first time, however, Anne was surprised by Tony's sexual know-how; he was far better than any of her previous lovers.
Before long they got married. Anne had never really thought about marriage, but she did it so Tony could get a green card. Instead of getting married in California, they went all the way to Taiwan, where Tony had relatives, and held the wedding there. Then Tony went to Korea to see his family and Anne traveled to the Philippines to visit a friend from college who was married to a successful Filipino lawyer and had been living in Manila for two years. When they went back to the United States they settled down in Seattle (Tony had relatives there too) and with his savings, and Anne's, and money from his parents, Tony set up a fruit store.
Living with Tony, Anne remembers, was like living in a protective cocoon. Outside, storms raged every day, people lived in constant fear of a private earthquake, everyone was talking about collective catharsis, but she and Tony had found a refuge where they could be at peace. And we were, says Anne, though not for long.
A curious aside: Tony loved pornographic movies and he used to take Anne to watch them, something she would, of course, never have thought of doing on her own. She was shocked by the fact that in the films the men always ejaculated onto, rather than in, their partners: on their breasts, buttocks, or face. Going to those movies made her feel ashamed, unlike Tony, who couldn't see what there was to be ashamed of, given that the movies were legal. In the end she decided not to go with him, so Tony went on his own. Another aside: Tony was very hardworking; he worked harder (by far) than any of Anne's previous lovers. And another: Tony never got angry, never argued, as if he could see absolutely no point in trying to make someone else agree with him, as if, for him, everyone was lost, so how could one lost person presume to show another the way. Especially since the way, as well as being hidden from everyone, probably didn't even exist.
One day Anne's love for Tony ran out and she left Seattle. She went back to San Francisco, where she slept with Paul again and with other men. For a while she stayed in Linda's apartment. Tony was devastated. Night after night he called her, trying to find out why she had left him. Night after night Anne explained it to him: that was just the way things turn out, love comes to an end, maybe it hadn't even been love that had brought them together in the first place; she needed a change. For several months Tony kept calling her and asking what it was that had made her break off their marriage. One night, Anne remembers, one of Tony's sisters telephoned and begged her to give him a second chance. She told Anne she had called her parents in Great Falls and didn't know what else she could do. Anne was taken aback by this, yet it struck her as extraordinarily caring. In the end Tony's sister started crying, apologized for having phoned (it was after midnight) and hung up.
Tony traveled to San Francisco twice in the hope of convincing Anne to come back. They had countless phone conversations. In the end Tony seemed to accept the inevitable, but still he kept calling her. He liked talking about their trip to Taiwan, their marriage, the things they had seen; he asked Anne what it was like in the Philippines and he told her about South Korea. Sometimes he was sorry he hadn't gone to the Philippines with her and Anne had to remind him that she had wanted to go alone. When Anne asked about the fruit store, how the business was going, Tony replied in monosyllables and quickly changed the subject. One night Tony's sister phoned again. At first all Anne could hear was a murmur and she asked her to speak up. Tony's sister raised her voice, but only a little, and said that Tony had committed suicide that morning. Then, without a trace of bitterness in her voice, she asked if Anne would be attending the funeral. Anne said yes. But the next morning, instead of catching a plane to Seattle, she took one that landed a couple of hours later in Mexico City. Tony had died at the age of twenty-two.