“Water sports will cost you extra.”
“Oh, no, no, no. I’m, uh, rather traditional.”
“Okay, Mr. Traditional, what are you looking for?”
I’d slept with seventeen prostitutes, all of them blond and blue-eyed. Twelve of them had been busty while the other five had been small-breasted. Eight of them had claimed to be college students; one of them even had a chemistry textbook in her backpack.
“Do you employ any Indian women?” I asked.
“Indian? Like with the dot in the forehead?”
“No, no, that’s East Indian. From India. I’m looking for American Indian. You know, like Tonto.”
“We don’t have any boys.”
“Oh, no, I mean, I want an Indian woman.”
There was a long silence on the other end. Was she looking through some kind of catalogue? Searching her inventory for the perfect woman for me? Was she calling other escort companies, looking for a referral? I wanted to hang up the phone. I’d never had intercourse with an Indian woman.
“Yeah, we got somebody. She’s a pro.”
“What do you mean by pro?”
“She used to work pornos.”
“Pornos?”
“Dirty movies? X-rated? You got them right there on the pay-per-view in your room, buddy.”
“What’s her name?”
“She calls herself Tawny Feather.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I never kid.”
I wondered what kind of Indian woman would call herself Tawny Feather. Sexually speaking, Indian women and men are simultaneously promiscuous and modest. That’s a contradiction, but it also happens to be the truth. I just couldn’t imagine an Indian woman who would star in pornographic movies.
“Well, you want a date or not?” asked the husky-voiced woman.
“How much?”
“How much you got?”
“How much you want?”
“Two hundred.”
“Sold,” I said.
“What room?”
“1216.”
“Who should she ask for?”
“Geronimo.”
“Ha, ha,” she said and hung up the phone.
Less than an hour later, there was a knock on the door. I peered through the peephole and saw her.
Tawny Feather.
She wore a conservative tan suit and a string of fake pearls. Dream-catcher earrings, turquoise rings, a stainless-steel eagle pinned to her lapel. Good camouflage. Professional but eccentric. She looked like a woman on her way to or from a meeting. She looked like a woman with an Individualized Retirement Account.
She was also a white woman wearing a black wig over her short blond hair.
“You’re not Indian,” I said when I opened the door.
She looked me up and down.
“No, I’m not,” she said. “But you are.”
“Mostly.”
“Well,” she said as she stepped into the room and kissed my neck. “Then you can mostly pretend I’m Indian.”
She stayed all night, which cost me another five hundred dollars, and ordered eggs and toast for breakfast, which cost me another twenty.
“You’re the last one,” I said as she prepared to leave.
“The last what?”
“My last prostitute.”
“The last one today?” she asked. “Or the last one this month? What kind of time period are we talking about here?”
She swore she was an English major.
“The last one forever,” I said.
She smiled, convinced that I was lying and/or fooling myself, having heard these same words from any number of customers. She knew that she and her coworkers were drugs for men like me.
“Sure I am,” she said.
“No, really,” I said. “I promise.”
She laughed.
“Son,” she said, though she was ten years younger than me. “You don’t have to make me any damn promises.”
She took off her black wig and handed it to me.
“You keep it,” she said and gave me a free good-bye kiss.
Exactly three years after our wedding, Susan gave birth to our first child, a boy. He weighed eight pounds, seven ounces, and was twenty-two inches long. A big baby. His hair was black and his eyes were a strange gray. He died ten minutes after leaving Susan’s body.
After our child died, Susan and I quit having sex. Or rather, she stopped wanting to have sex. I just want to tell the whole story. For months I pressured, coerced, seduced, and emotionally blackmailed her into sleeping with me. At first, I assumed she’d been engaged in another affair with another architect named Harry, but my private detective found only evidence of her grief: crying jags in public rest rooms, aimless wandering in the children’s departments of Nordstrom’s and the Bon Marche, and visits to a therapist I’d never heard about.
She wasn’t touching anybody else but me. Our lives moved on.
After a year of reluctant sex, I believed her orgasms were mostly due to my refusal to quit touching her until she did come, the arduous culmination of my physical endeavors rather than the result of any emotional investment she might have had in fulfillment. And then, one night, while I was still inside her, moving my hips in rhythm with hers, I looked into her eyes, her blue eyes, and saw that her good eye held no more light in it than her dead eye. She wasn’t literally blind, of course. She’d just stopped seeing me. I was startled by the sudden epiphany that she’d been faking her orgasms all along, certainly since our child had died, and probably since the first time we’d made love.
“What?” she asked, a huge question to ask and answer at any time in our lives. Her hands never left their usual place at the small of my back.
“I’m sorry,” I told her, and I was sorry, and left her naked and alone in bed while I quickly dressed and went out for a drink.
I don’t drink alcohol, never have, mostly because I don’t want to maintain and confirm any of my ethnic stereotypes, let alone the most prevalent one, but also because my long-lost father, a half-breed, is still missing somewhere in the bottom of a tequila bottle. I had always wondered if he was a drunk because he was Indian or because he was white or because he was both.
Personally, I like bottled water, with gas, as the Europeans like to say. If I drink enough of that bubbly water in the right environment, I can get drunk. After a long night of Perrier or Pellegrino, I can still wake up with a vicious hangover. Obviously, I place entirely too much faith in the power of metaphor.
When I went out carousing with my fellow lawyers, I ended up in fancy hotel lounges, private clubs, and golf course cigar rooms, the places where the alcoholics adhere to a rigid dress code, but after leaving my marriage bed I wanted to drink in a place free from lawyers and their dress codes, from emotional obligations and beautiful white women, even the kind of white woman who might be the tenth most attractive in any room in the world.
I chose Chuck’s, a dive near the corner of Virginia and First.
I’d driven by the place any number of times, had seen the Indians who loitered outside. I assumed it was an Indian bar, one of those establishments where the clientele, through chance and design, is mostly indigenous. I’d heard about these kinds of places. They are supposed to exist in every city.
“What can I get you?” asked the bartender when I sat on the stool closest to the door. She was an Indian woman with scars on her face and knuckles. A fighter. She was a woman who had once been pretty but had grown up in a place where pretty was punished. Now, twenty pounds overweight, on her way to forty pounds more, she was most likely saving money for a complete move to a city yet to be determined.
“Hey, handsome,” she asked again as I stared blankly at her oft-broken nose. I decided that her face resembled most of the furniture in the bar: dark, stained by unknown insults, and in a continual state of repair. “What the fuck would you like to drink?”
“Water,” I said, surprised that the word “fuck” could sound so friendly.