She no longer cared what the neighbors thought.
“Was that from the guy?” the man said, puffing himself up and crushing a rose beneath his heel. She figured he probably thought he was making himself look strong, that it was a thing he’d done many times before, hoping to impress, and didn’t tell him he instead was only making himself look ridiculous.
“Maybe,” she said. “Probably. I really don’t care.”
She opened the door, stepped over the petals which had dropped off since it had been placed there. Or were those petals remaining from the previous night’s bouquet?
“Are you coming in?” she asked without turning or flipping on a light.
As he entered behind her, she realized she did not know his name, had not bothered to ask it on their way over from the bar. Would not ask it now that they were here.
Whoever he was, she was glad it was a stranger from the bar, rather than someone from the courthouse. Anyone from work would have already heard the whole story, however jumbled. Gossip travels. They’d have looked at the walls with the photos hung back neatly in place, looked at the glass in the window frame where once there’d been none, and not really seen them as they were. Overlaying all of it would have been the way things had been the night she’d been transformed. The way she had been before the night she’d been transformed. They’d have looked at her, and thought they knew more than they knew. They wouldn’t have been able to be present.
Better to bring home a stranger anyway. Only strangers can see you as you really are.
As she stood between the door through which she’d pushed Jim, and the window through which Jim had propelled himself, Amanda removed her clothes, and let the nameless stranger see, without explanation, what she had done in the hours after.
~
Amanda was aware, as she sat with Marco nursing drinks in the restaurant—Marco, the man whose name she eventually learned, not because she’d asked, but because he’d offered—that they were being watched. It wasn’t unusual during their brief time together, and though it thrilled her, Marco was, and always had been, oblivious to those who would, like this night, surreptitiously look in their direction. The tilted head which would quickly turn away. The flicker of a gaze which took but a moment to harden.
Sitting there, waiting for their appetizers to arrive, waiting for this to be the time their appetizer wouldn’t arrive, she undid yet another button on her blouse. She struggled not to smile as she did so, because those other customers were seeing what she wanted them to see, and if she smiled, they would see that no longer. Marco leaned across the table and pulled the cloth back together so less of the mottled color was revealed.
“Maybe it’s time you got yourself to a doctor, babe,” he said, his fingers rearranging her collar. “Your bruises should have started to fade by now.”
She wrapped the fingers of one hand around his wrist and lowered it to the tablecloth, using her other to open her collar again.
“This is who I am now,” she said. “I’m not hiding anymore.”
“You’re more than that, babe. Don’t let that guy—”
While he was speaking, a woman rose from a nearby table, rushed over, and before he could finish telling Amanda whatever it was she wasn’t supposed to let Jim do, took Marco’s wineglass, and tossed the contents in his lap. He leapt up, sputtering, slapping at his pants, looking as if he wanted to slap her.
“You should be ashamed of yourself,” said the woman, slamming the empty glass back down on the table. “And you, you deserve better.”
“What was that bitch talking about?” he said, looking down at Amanda as the woman returned to her table accompanied by the applause of the other customers.
“I have no idea,” said Amanda.
But did have an idea. She knew, she knew.
~
“I still don’t get it,” he said, waving his arms wildly, occasionally punctuating his rant by punching a fist into his palm. The restaurant was many blocks behind them, but their walk had done nothing to calm him down. “What was that all about?”
“I’m sure it was nothing,” she said, knowing it was something, knowing what she had done had finally done its job.
“But what could that woman have been thinking? What could they all have been thinking? They couldn’t possibly believe I’m the one who did that, could they?”
He gestured at her neck, pointing again, pointing like he had that first night, pointing at the bruises she would no longer cover up, pointing at the bruises that weren’t even visible then, not on the street.
“I have no idea what they were thinking,” she said, knowing what they were thinking, knowing what they were all thinking. “Calm down.”
“I can’t,” he said, in what was almost a shout. “That was what they were thinking! Of me! Who would never do such a thing! You know that babe, right?”
She didn’t answer, even though she’d learned, even though she’d been taught, there was only one answer to that question.
“I mean, come on, Amanda. You know I’m not that kind of guy!”
She stayed silent for the few remaining blocks to her building, which seemed to agitate Marco more. She remained silent all the way up the elevator, silent until the elevator doors opened, silent until she stepped out into the hallway to see another bouquet of roses by her front door.
She paused there as the elevator doors closed behind her, and only then did she speak.
“Do I?” she said, by which time he’d forgotten what he’d said to which that was a response. He looked at her dumbly.
Then he turned, saw where she’d been looking.
“Again?” he said. “When is this guy going to stop? What is this with him?”
He grabbed the bouquet, similar to the one she’d kicked down the hall on the night they’d first met, and on many nights thereafter, and threw it to the other end of the hall. It spiraled through the air to hit a neighbor’s door, which a moment later opened, then quickly closed.
“What would you tell him that would make him think you wanted this? No one would keep doing this without some kind of encouragement.”
“It wasn’t anything I said,” she said, even though something she’d said had led them right here, that time she was cleaning up in the kitchen and said … enough.
He raised an eyebrow, and raised himself, too, growing larger again, much as he had the night she’d first brought him home, when he attempted to telegraph that he’d protect her. Only this time, he seemed uncertain against what.
“You’re lying to me, Amanda,” he said, sensing her mixed meaning, struggling to decipher it. “You did say something. What did you say? How did you lead him on?”
His voice grew louder, which was when she chose to slide her key in the lock and open her front door.
She entered quickly, stretching the distance between them. He followed, giving the door behind him a shove to close it. Instead of resulting in a loud slam, his action produced only a dull clunk, and he turned, they both turned, to see that it had been prevented from closing by a crutch.
And then the door was slowly pushed back open, and there was Jim.
He was on two crutches, and wearing a neck brace, with his left leg in a cast. He lurched toward Marco before the man could react.
“You’d talk to my girlfriend like that?” Jim croaked.
Marco crouched to defend himself, but as he threw a punch, stumbled over one of the forward crutches and fell into Jim. As they toppled, Amanda rushed over to take advantage of their momentum and push them both back out her door.
“Enough,” she said.
They continued fighting in the hall, rolling one atop the other, Marco using his fists, Jim his crutches. Though Jim was the larger man, regardless of how Marco had liked to puff himself up to impress her, to impress himself, he was barely recovered from his fall. But he did
have those crutches, so the two men appeared equally matched as they pummeled each other. Both were bloodied. Neither managed to rise up off the floor.
Amanda could occasionally make out her name, but not, through their grunting, what they were saying about her.
“Enough,” she said again, this time in a whisper. But it wouldn’t have mattered if she’d shouted. They wouldn’t have heard her.
And she found she didn’t really care.
She closed the door on them. The click as she locked it was as satisfying as a slam. It dampened the noise of the fighting, though she could still make out an occasional curse, still hear a random punch connect, but when she went to the bathroom and closed that door as well, the sound of the flailing was barely audible.
She stood before the mirror and slowly unbuttoned her blouse, letting it slip from her shoulders, drop to the floor. She unbuttoned her skirt, let it slide down as well, and studied herself, considered her pale flesh, and the blues and purples and browns that wrapped around her neck, that curved against her ribcage, that stretched down the outside of her left leg, garish clouds of color that comforted her. Uplifted her. Protected her.
As the faint sounds of fighting outside stopped, to be replaced by a knocking at her door, by whom she did not know and did not care, followed by cursing she couldn’t decipher, ending with a welcome silence, she continued to trace her fingers along what had healed her, what would never heal, and knew she would never be troubled by sounds like that again.
Goodbye to all that, she thought. Only bruises are permanent.
Only bruises.
My Knowing Glance
Lucy A. Snyder
According to the textbook we’re using this term in Psychology 450 (The Future Therapist’s Guide: Theory and Practice by Garza-Fieldman), the most important thing you can do to ensure a solid working relationship with your clients—beyond, you know, staying current on research and therapeutic techniques and making sure you don’t stink when you go in the room—is to know yourself. And, at first blush, that sounds like a straight-up platitude like the LIVE LAUGH LOVE canvas on the greige living room wall of your cousin Becky’s suburban condo.
But knowing yourself matters. It matters if someone is pouring their black little heart out to you in a session, and something they say disgusts you, or irritates you, and that negative emotion catches you by surprise, and in your surprise, you let your true feelings show on your face. Because then they see your frown or narrowed eyes, and they withdraw or shut down. And congratulations, you’ve just undone weeks or possibly months of work. So you’re back to the Sisyphean task of building trust and rapport all over again, just because for one second you flinched when your client admitted that when he was thirteen he liked to fuck the goats on his mom’s Ann Arbor farm.
So while I am not a psychologist, nor a social worker, my clients still have a host of mental illnesses and neurodiversities. And so I have tried my level best to stare my own shames, bigotries, kinks and squicks square in their beady little eyes so I can maintain my professionalism and not inadvertently destroy the positive feelings my clients have about paying their hard-earned cash to see me.
And yeah—I get that people refuse to understand that I am, in fact, a professional. My parents would not understand it. Everyone eventually asks what my father thinks of what I do for a living. As if anyone’s father is supposed to have veto power over a grown woman’s life when her teens are a full decade past, a vanishing dark spot in her rearview mirror. When they ask—assuming they’re not clients—I just smile sweetly and say, “Aw, honey, does your daddy still run your life?” and that usually shuts them up right quick.
Some folks press on. They want to know how I can look my own family in the eye. How I can justify this lucrative, completely legal job to them.
And so I tell them the truth: My immediate family lost any care about what I do with my life when I was a junior in high school. I was away from home at regional band tryouts. My father decided to pick up a gun during a fight with my mother he’d started because he was sure she was cheating on him. (She wasn’t.) He shot her between the eyes, then went upstairs and murdered my little sister and little brother because he believed they weren’t really his biological children. (They were.) While their corpses cooled, he spent the next hour writing up an aggrieved, entitled, chest-thumping suicide note detailing why he had no possible choice but to slaughter his own family. And then, as is statistically typical of men like him, he blew his own brains out.
I tell the people who question my life choices that my father would have murdered me, too, had I been home. But I wasn’t, because I’d chosen to play saxophone in marching band to have a reason to be gone on Friday nights when Dad drank. All the neighbors and his coworkers said my father was so nice and considerate and they were just shocked at what happened … but I know my mother and my siblings did not die surprised because violence was always on the table behind closed doors. And I had worked hard and so I was safe a hundred miles away when Dad finally made good on the threats Mom had willfully ignored for years because, she always insisted, “Your father means well.” (He didn’t.)
That’s my story of why I survived: because of my individual choices and my hard work. And it’s fine to be skeptical about that. So let’s take a deep dive there: Maybe there’s no justice in this universe and my being alive today is just dumb shithouse luck. And if that’s the case, then there’s no point in moralizing over anyone’s life choices, is there?
My father’s choice to murder my family resulted in me having to spend the next two years in the home of my uncle Robert, who is a pastor at a Baptist church. And he loves Christian moralizing in exactly the same way my father loved Scotch. They were both narcissists cut from the same rotten wood. It surely comes as no shock that he disrespects women and women’s work in equal measure, nor that I got the hell out of there as fast as I could.
And if anyone asks, I tell them that my uncle’s opinion matters less to me than a skeet-soaked Kleenex dropped by a client.
Which leads back to this: most people insist what I do, despite it being the very oldest profession, is in no way professional. To them, my job is just lying on my back and taking a whole lot of cock.
First: It’s not that much cock. Many of my clients are bi women who need that itch scratched, either because they just don’t know how to seduce or be seduced by another woman—and hell yes I help them with that if they ask—or they tried and got shut down by local lesbians who get shitty with women who still sleep with men.
And second: What some of my clients want most is to have someone to talk to. They come in thinking it’s sex that they want, but it’s intimacy they’re starved for. Or they’ve got uncomfortable thoughts rattling around in their heads and they just need to get them out in front of a sympathetic ear.
A paid-for friend isn’t ideal, but it’s better than what a whole lot of people in this city have. And if you don’t have insurance, I’m way less expensive than a psychiatrist. It helps that our madam Em is a pretty damn cool boss and—shockingly, I know!—she values us for our individual interests, educations and skill sets. So the clients I get often skew toward women and people with special needs.
After the state blew up over the horrific human trafficking situation, voters finally decided to legalize sex work so women and children being held in slavery wouldn’t have to be afraid of getting locked up if they went to the police. And so The Pink Rose and the rest of the first legal brothels to go online have been extra careful to prove that their employees are 100% there of their own free will and are safe for customers. So, unlike my counterparts in Nevada, I do get full medical and dental. Considering how many people have come down with Polymorphic Viral Gastroencephalitis and how easily PVG can spread through body fluids, having us work as independent contractors without health coverage would have been criminal negligence. At least. People get charged with murder for spreading that sh
it. The moment the FDA approved the vaccine, Em brought in a nurse practitioner and lined us all up to get our shots.
Legalized prostitution is hot like Kilauea, so reporters are dying to get dirt on the brothels. Just one disgruntled courtesan could bring down one hell of a sticky load of bad press. So, it makes sense that Em puts effort into ensuring we’re happy with who and what we’re doing. We’re even allowed to keep guns and Tasers hidden in our playrooms in case a client decides to go all Jack the Ripper on one of us. I never wanted a gun for reasons that should be painfully obvious, but it’s good we were given that choice.
I fully agree this is a news honeymoon; the brothels will be passé back-page stuff soon enough. As boring as adult trafficking victims were ten years ago. As boring as my family’s murder was a month after they were buried. It’ll all be downhill from here.
I mean, this is still capitalism, right? Filthy lucre fucks up everyone’s best intentions. But for now, this is by far the best customer service job I’ve ever had. Even when I agreed to let an aging B movie star piss on me in the shower, it was still way better than phone tech support. (And I even got my Blu-Ray of Chainsaw Hobos from Mars autographed without having to wait in line at Comic Con!)
So, I’m always trying to use my education in my work, and always trying to know myself better. Most of the time, that’s been a rewarding journey.
But three weeks ago, I learned some things I wish I hadn’t. Everyone in this whole damn brothel would wish that, too, if they knew.
~
Gregory wasn’t a steady regular, but he’d seen me a few times before and had behaved himself perfectly well. He was shy, wrestling with gender dysphoria—he hated being male, but because his parents had been as shitty as my uncle Robert, the notion of identifying as someone other than a man made him straight-up panicky. He mostly wanted me to peg him. Mostly; I kept condoms handy just in case.
Because he seemed scared to death that someone might photograph him, I set things up so he could use the online system to schedule a session rather than having to arrive in person to negotiate scenes. And, more to the point, he could use the secret, biometrics-equipped side door that’s actually a block away and goes underground. Because of all the news vans camping in the parking lot across the street, the owners wanted to make sure that celebrities could come and go without harassment. But ordinary people stand to lose, too, if the flocking paparazzi stick cameras in their faces, so we offer back passage as a courtesy to good returning clients.
Miscreations Page 18
