“Really.”
“Or possibly, you know, an executive secretary, or maybe a showroom manager. Not exactly brassy, but that kind of self-assurance.”
She’d had more questions, and at the end she asked if he cleaned for any ordinary people. “Like me,” she said.
He said, “Ordinary?” and raised an eyebrow. And went on to say that he did indeed have a couple of private clients, no more than one a day, whose apartments he cleaned once a week. By the time they left the coffee shop they’d arranged that she would be one of them.
Most of the time she was out when he cleaned, but not always, and sometimes she’d be at her desk, working, and they’d chat between phone calls. A couple of times they ran into each other on the street. She talked wryly about her love life, asked his advice about her hair (a rich auburn, shoulder-length when he’d met her, short and pixyish as of two months ago), and generally used him as her Gay Male Confidante, a sort of girlfriend with a Y chromosome, or perhaps a younger brother but without all that family baggage.
“I wonder,” she’d said. “Do you think I could ever take a turn at your whorehouse?”
“You mean like Belle du Jour?”
“Sort of, except I have a hunch it works better if you look like Catherine Deneuve. Anyway, I’m probably too old.”
“You’re what, thirty-eight?”
“ ‘You’re only thirty-eight, and could pass for twenty-nine’ is what you meant to say, isn’t it?”
“Word for word. Thirty-eight’s not old.”
“How old are the girls in your whorehouse?”
“It’s not my whorehouse, and I don’t have any idea how old they are. There’s nobody home when I do my thing.”
“Men want young girls, don’t they? In a place like that?”
“I have no idea what men want,” he said, archly. “In a place like that or anywhere else. What’s this all about? You wouldn’t really want to do it, would you?”
“Probably not, but it’s an awfully nice fantasy.”
“Well, enjoy yourself,” he said. “There’s no age limit in fantasies.”
The vacuuming didn’t wake her. Neither did the phone, which he couldn’t hear over the noise of the vacuum cleaner; he only realized it was ringing when the blinking light on the dial of the office extension caught his eye. He switched off the vacuum and listened, waiting for her to answer it, but she didn’t, and after two more rings her voice mail picked up.
He stood still for a moment, frowning. Then he went back to work. Using one of the long skinny attachments to slurp the dust off the top of a window molding, he visualized a giraffe doing a line of coke. That reminded him of the little mirror he’d found in the living room. It was in the strainer on the kitchen sinkboard now, any cocaine residue washed off and down the drain, and...
Maybe you should just go home.
The thought was just there, all at once. He stood still and looked at his own anxiety and wondered where the hell it had come from. Yes, there had almost certainly been cocaine on that mirror, but Marilyn and her friend had long since Hoovered it away. And yes, there had been an open bottle of bourbon in the living room, and he’d caught a whiff of it, and smelled it again in the glasses he’d washed. And yes, he was an alcoholic, sober now by the grace of whatever God you wanted to credit, and could be rendered anxious by anything that might pose a threat, real or imaginary, to his sobriety.
But the coke was gone and the bottle capped and put away, and didn’t he start every day in rooms that smelled of beer and hard booze, with dozens of bottles just standing there, waiting to be sampled? He was like a fox with the keys to the henhouse, all alone in Death Row and Cheek and Harrigan’s, just him and all that booze. And, while his mind could conjure up no end of harrowing scenarios — a mind, his sponsor had told him, was a terrible thing to have — in point of fact it never really bothered him at all.
He’d run across drugs in the bars he cleaned, too, because people who were drunk and stoned tended to be careless, and the odd Baggie would turn up on the floor, or in the john, or, more than once, right out there in plain sight on top of the bar. And the apartments he cleaned had their stashes, legal and otherwise — the few ounces of pot in the model’s undies drawer, the huge jar of Dexamil on the dot-com exec’s bedside table, and with all that speed wouldn’t you think the guy would do his own cleaning? Like four or five times a day?
And every medicine cabinet held pills. Valium and all its cousins, and no end of ups and downs, many of which he recognized of old — a few years in the trenches were a veritable college of pharmacological knowledge — and some of which were new to him, because the drug trade didn’t go into freeze-frame the day he stopped using. It evolved, everything evolved, and he might spot something new on the shelf next to the shaving cream and wonder where it would take him if the lid happened to pop off the little vial and if two (oh might as well make it three) pills leapt up and out and into his open-in-astonishment mouth and down his throat before he quite knew what was happening. I mean, it wasn’t a real slip, was it, if it just sort of took you by surprise like that?
Thoughts like that just helped him remember who he was. They didn’t really upset him, and weren’t cause for alarm. And if they kept him going to meetings, well, then they served a purpose, didn’t they?
So he wasn’t afraid of what was in Marilyn’s liquor bottle or medicine cabinet. Or, God help us, her undies drawer.
But really, now, couldn’t he just pack up and go? He’d cleaned everything but the bedroom, cleaned really quite thoroughly, and he couldn’t do any more without disturbing her sleep, and for all he knew she really needed her sleep, for all he knew she’d been up past dawn. Why, she could have been partying while he cleaned the bars and the whorehouse, and he might have been tucking into his omelet right around the time her companion thoughtfully closed the bedroom door and let himself out of her apartment, leaving her sleeping...
Sleeping?
If she was asleep, he told himself, then he would indeed just slip out and allow her to awaken on her own, and in her own good time. He’d leave a note — “I was fresh out of kisses and couldn’t figure out how to wake Sleeping Beauty. I’ll stop by tomorrow and do the bedroom. Love, Jerry.”
If she was asleep...
He paused at her bedroom door, took a deep breath, let it out, took another. He opened the door, let his eyes accustom themselves to the dimness.
There she was, just as he’d seen her earlier. Sprawled out on her bed, obviously in deep slumber. It looked as though she hadn’t stirred since he’d first looked in on her.
Room had an odor. Nothing too rank, but even if he was going to let her sleep he ought to open a window. Hard to sort out the smells. Sex, booze, cigarette smoke...
He walked over to the side of the bed, looked down at her. She was on her back, her head to one side. The sheet covered her just past her waist. He looked at her full breasts, willing them to rise and fall with her breathing, but they didn’t move, and he knew he hadn’t expected them to move, hadn’t expected her to be breathing, had known what he’d find before he opened the door.
He took another breath — yes, there were other elements in the room’s odor besides sex and booze and smoke, there was a bathroom smell and a meat-market smell — and he reached out a hand and touched the tips of two fingers to her forehead.
Like a priest, he thought, anointing the dead.
And of course her flesh was cool to the touch. He couldn’t will it into warmth, any more than he could make her chest rise and fall.
“Oh, Mairsie,” he said aloud. “Oh, baby, what the hell did you do to yourself?”