“I can’t stop now.”
She just looked at me. Hurt. Betrayed. I knew my involvement with the police was bothering her more than anything else. I got up and sat beside her on the couch.
“Sam broke the law,” I said.
“He wasn’t hurting anyone.” Her voice was not that different from the way Dulcie’s had sounded at lunch. Small, powerless, hurt.
“But he was breaking the law, Nina.”
I reached for her and she pushed me away. “They…”
“They only did their job.”
“You saw what they did. They were underhanded and conniving. You agreed with me. You hated them as much as Sam did. As much as I did.”
“No. I thought I did. But that was just solidarity.”
“That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is. Why is it so hard for you to accept that I wanted to be there for you?”
“Because…” she started, then stopped.
I waited. I wanted her to absolve me. To tell me that we were as close as ever. That she could accept everything I’d told her. That she still loved me. That I could tell her a truth she didn’t want to hear, could force her to think about Sam in a way that would demand she face his travesty. But she couldn’t do it.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“About what?” Nina’s voice was closer to its usual cadence and objective tone.
“That we are arguing. That you see my helping the police as a personal affront.”
“And why is it you’re sorry we are arguing? Where does that come from, Morgan? Why can’t you argue and feel good about it? Excited by it. You are expressing your feelings. I am expressing mine. Why can’t we do that without you apologizing?”
“You are getting angry again.”
“Yes, but at myself now. I still haven’t helped you see it, have I?”
“What?”
“That people don’t disappear when they are mad at you. That fighting it out is healthy. That not everyone takes pills to fight feelings and that not everyone is going to disappoint you.”
“When did this turn into a therapy session?”
We looked at each other. Both angry for different reasons. Both confronting what we had not ever really learned to confront, no matter how hard we had worked at it.
“That’s what is so beautiful about human nature,” she said. “The vulnerable, the sad, the helpless, all protected by the wings of hope and determination that we still, in the face of everything, wrap around ourselves and around each other.”
I heard her words. But I was seeing Cleo. She had that determination, that hope, but I was sure she was helpless despite it now.
Things with Nina would be all right. We could get through the anger. We’d get to the other side of it. And I would do that with Dulcie, too. But Cleo had flown beyond my reach, out of sight.
49
Monday nights were not as busy as the rest of the week at the Diablo Cigar Bar. As I sat at the bar talking to Gil and waiting, I watched a willowy woman with very blond hair and large green eyes stroke the underside of a man’s wrist with such élan that I started to feel her fingerpads on my own skin. The lushness of the club was so seductive. The deep club chairs, soft lights and piano music, the exotic wood tables, lacquered to such a high gloss that they were like mirrors, and a rug so thick it would suffice as a bed. You didn’t so much go to the club as entered its world and were enveloped by it. It surrounded you, embraced you; it was the first thing that touched you when you walked in. Cleo and Gil had created an alternative universe where there was no sense of time or strife. In the middle of Manhattan, an oasis. The city was filled with spaces like this. Thousands of apartments high above street level, where you looked out of oversize windows down at a silent world that appeared so lovely. When you lived in this city, you didn’t see the trouble on the street. You didn’t hear screams in the night. You didn’t see the woman who sold sex for a living by getting into a man’s car and giving him a twenty-dollar blow job.
“He’s here,” Gil offered as he put down a fresh club soda in front of me.
I turned slowly and scanned the room. The Slave was a man in his late fifties, trim but short, with a thick shock of gray hair and strong features. He was an ex-Wall Street guy who got out of the market in the late nineties with his fortune intact and became the dean of one of the most prestigious Ivy League schools in the country. He had been one of Cleo’s clients for five years and according to her manuscript, was someone she knew a little too much about.
Gil came around from the other side of the bar and I got up. A little wobbly. Not because I’d had too much to drink-I’d only been drinking sparkling water for the past forty-five minutes-but because my entire body was balanced on the two thin spikes of my stilettos.
“Ed, this is Morgan,” Gil said, introducing us.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” I said, trying for the voice I had practiced and now was using for the fourth time.
He smiled, appraising me.
“Thank you,” he said to Gil. And then to me, “Sit down, please.”
For fifteen minutes we talked about a movie he’d seen the night before that I, too, had seen a few weeks ago. It might have been a conversation between any couple, and that was the point. Cleo’s girls were supposed to be able to handle conversation. But then he picked up one of my hands and held it in his. It was no surprise anymore to me that these moments of physical contact bypassed my brain and went straight to my senses. It was the excitement that confused me. I would have been more comfortable with disgust or fear. But instead, I was curious. Cautious, but wanting to know more. These men offered a look into a side of sex that till then I had only read about and talked about as a dispassionate observer.
“You have strong hands,” he said.
“Is that good?”
“Yes. I need you to have strong hands. You will need to hold me down. Stop me.”
“Stop you?”
“From getting up, from touching you, from reaching out.”
I nodded.
“Have you ever had a slave?” he asked.
I’d found out from my other interviews it was easier if I told mostly the truth. “No. This is a fairly new gig for me. I’ve only been working here for a couple of weeks.”
His eyes lit up. “You mean at this club or in this business?”
“In the business. I recently got divorced. My financial circumstances have changed. A friend introduced me to Cleo. She’s been working with me for a month. And last week… was my coming-out party.”
He smiled. “Then I’ll have to teach you.”
“Is that something you like? Teaching?”
“Yes. Teaching you how to accept a slave. You have to be strong. And willing to punish me.”
I nodded.
“Cleo was an excellent master.”
My heart skipped a beat. He had spoken about her in the past tense.
Not sure of what to say, I just nodded. Listening, watching and waiting for the right moment to ask him the questions I hoped would give me a glimpse into his darkness. So far he was comfortable, slightly nervous, but connected and not distracted.
“What made her so good at what she did?”
“She loved it. She reveled in it. Being a master came naturally to her. Sometimes, when I was on the floor, lying there naked, looking up at her, begging her to let me move, to let me touch her, to let me get close to her, she would touch herself and make herself come.”
He shut his eyes for a moment as if reliving the scene, and then he continued talking. “My waiting for her, my needing her, my willingness to do as she said turned her on. Do you have any idea how fucking hard that made me?”
I shook my head. “Did you ever want to reverse it and be her master?” I asked in a low voice.
He shook his head now in a slow, rhythmic way. He was still in his daydream and my voice was barely penetrating. But he heard me.
“No. Never. Never wanted to. It’s too easy. I can do that all day long. Have done it my whole life. Told people what to do, what to buy, what to sell, what to learn, what to take in. It’s being helpless and having someone tell me what to do that makes me excited. Do you think you could do that?”