She returned to the table just as the waitress was bringing the coffee. “Thanks,” she said. “I was just starting to feel those drinks. I can use this.”
“So can I. I’ve got a long drive back.”
She took a cigarette. I picked up a pack of matches and lit it for her. I asked how she had found out that Wendy was taking money for her favors.
“She told me.”
“Why?”
“Hell,” she said. She blew out smoke in a long, thin column. “She just told me, okay? Let’s leave it at that.”
“It’s a lot easier if you just tell me everything, Marcia.”
“What makes you think there’s anything more to tell?”
“What did she do, pass on one of her dates to you?”
Her eyes flared. She closed them briefly, drew on her cigarette. “It was almost like that,” she said. “Not quite, but that’s pretty close. She told me a friend of hers had a business associate in from out of town and asked if I’d like to date the guy, to double with her and her friend. I said I didn’t think so, and she talked about how we would see a good show and have a good dinner and everything. And then she said, ‘Be sensible, Marcia. You’ll have a good time, and you’ll make a few dollars out of it.’ ”
“How did you react?”
“Well, I wasn’t shocked. So I must have suspected all along that she was getting money. I asked her what she meant, which was a pretty stupid question at that point, and she said that the men she dated all had plenty of money, and they realized it was tough for a young woman to earn a decent living, and at the end of the evening they would generally give you something. I said something about wasn’t that prostitution, and she said she never asked men for money, nothing like that, but they always gave her something. I wanted to ask how much but I didn’t and then she told me anyway. She said they always gave at least twenty dollars and sometimes a man would give her as much as a hundred. The man she was going to be seeing always gave her fifty dollars, she said, so if I went along it would mean that his friend would be almost certain to give me fifty dollars, and she asked if I didn’t think that was a good return on an evening that involved nothing but eating a great dinner and seeing a good show and then spending a half hour or so in bed with a nice, dignified gentleman. That was her phrase. ‘A nice, dignified gentleman.’ ”
“How did the date go?”
“What makes you so sure I went?”
“You did, didn’t you?”
“I was earning eighty dollars a week. Nobody was taking me to great dinners or Broadway shows. And I hadn’t even met anyone I wanted to sleep with.”
“Did you enjoy the evening?”
“No. All I could think about was that I was going to have to sleep with this man. And he was old.”
“How old?”
“I don’t know. Fifty-five, sixty. I’m never good at guessing how old people are. He was too old for me, that’s all I knew.”
“But you went along with it.”
“Yes. I had agreed to go, and I didn’t want to spoil the party. Dinner was good, and my date was charming enough. I didn’t pay much attention to the show. I couldn’t. I was too anxious about the rest of the evening.” She paused, focused her eyes over my shoulder. “Yes, I slept with him. And yes, he gave me fifty dollars. And yes, I took it.”
I drank some coffee.
“Aren’t you going to ask me why I took the money?”
“Should I?”
“I wanted the damned money. And I wanted to know how it felt. Being a whore.”
“Did you feel that you were a whore?”
“Well, that’s what I was, isn’t it? I let a man fuck me, and I took money for it.”
I didn’t say anything. After a few moments she said, “Oh, the hell with it. I took a few more dates. Maybe one a week on the average. I don’t know why. It wasn’t the money. Not exactly. It was, I don’t know. Call it an experiment. I wanted to know how I felt about it. I wanted to… learn certain things about myself.”
“What did you learn?”
“That I’m a little squarer than I thought. That I didn’t care for the things I kept finding hiding in corners of my mind. That I wanted, oh, a cleaner life. That I wanted to fall in love with somebody. Get married, make babies, that whole trip. It turned out to be what I wanted. When I realized that, I knew I had to move out on my own. I couldn’t go on rooming with Wendy.”
“How did she react?”
“She was very upset.” Her eyes widened at the recollection. “I hadn’t expected that. We weren’t terribly close. At least I never thought we were terribly close. I never showed her the inside of my head, and she never showed me what was going on inside hers. We were together a lot, especially once I started taking dates, and we talked a great deal, but it was always about superficial things. I didn’t think my presence was especially important to her. I told her I had to move out, and I told her why, and she was really shook. She actually begged me to stay.”
“That’s interesting.”
“She told me she’d pay a larger share of the rent. That was when I found out she’d actually been paying twice as much as I was all along. I think she would have let me stay there rent-free if I wanted. And of course she insisted I didn’t have to take any dates, that she wouldn’t want me to do it if it was putting me uptight. She even suggested that she would limit her activities to times when I was at work — actually a lot of her dates were during the afternoon, businessmen who couldn’t get away from their wives during the evening, which was one reason why it took me as long as it did to realize how she was making her living. She said evening dates would have to take her to a hotel or something, that the place would be just for us when I was around. But that wasn’t it, I had to get away from the life entirely. Because it was too much of a temptation for me, see. I was making eighty dollars a week and working hard for it, and there was an enormous temptation to quit work, which is something I never did, but I recognized the temptation for what it was. And it scared me.”
“So you moved out.”
“Yes. Wendy cried when I packed my stuff and left. She kept saying she didn’t know what she would do without me. I told her she could get another roommate without any trouble, someone who would fit in with her life better. She said she didn’t want anyone who fit in too well because she was more than one kind of person. I didn’t know what she meant at the time.”
“Do you know now?”
“I think so. I think she wanted someone who was a little straighter than she was, someone who was not a part of the sexual scene she was involved in. I think now that she was a little disappointed when I took that first double date with her. She did her best to talk me into it, but she was disappointed that she was successful. Do you know what I mean?”
“I think so. It fits in with some other things.” There was something she had said earlier that had been bothering me, and I poked around in my memory, looking for it. “You said you weren’t surprised that she was seeing older men.”
“No, that didn’t surprise me.”
“Why not?”
“Well, because of what happened at school.”
“What happened at school?”
She frowned. She didn’t say anything, and I repeated the question.
“I don’t want to get anybody in trouble.”
“She was involved with someone at school? An older man?”
“You have to remember I didn’t know her very well. I knew who she was to say hello to, and maybe I was in a class or two with her at one time or another, but I barely knew her.”
“Was it tied in with her leaving school just a few months shy of graduation?”
“I don’t really know that much about it.”
I said, “Marcia, look at me. Anything you tell me about what happened at college will be something I would otherwise find out, anyway. You’ll just save me a great deal of time and travel. I’d rather not have to make a trip out to Indiana to ask a lot of people some embarrassing questions. I—”