She was, this woman who in private did anything I said, arrogant in commercial matters and imperious in public. To the world we were broker and client. In restaurants together I would no more have held her hand or licked her fork as dipped my wick in flambé. Discretion ruled; intimacy naturally suffered. Never again did we speak as candidly as that first time in her car, except about money. Money was our bond, the giddy, mischievous referent that sex must be when lovers also are friends.
Beyond broker and client, there was a bit of the trainer and performing seal in our relationship. Regarding the building, she had all the answers and I had all the risk. In the days before we closed the sale, a pattern developed of my appearing at her office wretched with anxieties of all that could go wrong. I’d heard rumors of a tenant’s market, a surplus of office space; foreclosure haunted my dreams like a spider. On to other deals by now, Susan uttered bitchy asides to her colleagues of my intrusion in her workday.
It was almost scripted. I would show up mornings, her colleagues would trill, “He’s ba-ack,” and Susan, looking put upon, would ask, “What now?” I’d confess my latest fear—sleazy contractors, say—only to be put off: “Could you get me a decaf, Phil? And a Sweet’n Low light for Alison.” The trick performed, I’d get a treat: “Relax. When the bids come in, we’ll take the middle one. No crooks or fly-by-nights. For a Richie Rich, Phil, money really spooks you.”
“A Richie Rich?” Titters behind me—from Alison and the other brokers, and Lyle the secretary.
“Excuse me. A market speculator,” Susan amended, telling them winkingly, “He is a stockmarket whiz, you know.”
I said to her, “You could use help in that department. Your money’s where, a savings account?”
“In my car, in furniture, and investment clothes.”
“Spent, in other words.”
She laughed. “Isn’t he funny, Alison?”
Eventually I got so well trained I brought coffee to the office unasked. (Alison came to expect it, even phoned me one morning to ask what’s the holdup.) I feared disappointing Susan in any way. She’d found me a real estate attorney and attended our first meeting, interviewed contractors and took their bids while I sat by looking mysterious. My dependency made a queen of her, which I resented. She wanted me to resent it, wanted me, when alone with her, to claim punitive tributes of my own. Then I was king and she was subject—or trainer and seal if you like, me the trainer and she one the who tumbled and barked on command. Embarrassing stuff, these bedroom requitals. It made for sexy sex and doomed attachment, but we weren’t ones to quibble.
As a man in the middle I was sensitive to changes in the women flanking me. Carrie, for one, had become strikingly sharp-tongued, a shift that had its parallel in her developing sexual dominance. No longer limited to dirty talk, now we did the things she’d once only whispered in my ear, played them out with paddles and handcuffs and mail-order implements of ingenious utility and eye-opening anatomical realism. And just as Susan felt compelled to even out our sexual scorecard by insulting me in public, so did I with Carrie. Carrie’s job at a bakery, her vocabulary, her fair-weather Catholic faith, were all prey to my needling. Finally she ordered, “Just you fucking stop!” I obeyed at once.
Logic suggested that my relationship with Susan would follow a parallel dynamic, that her public treatment of me would begin to reflect the softer submissive side she’d revealed in private. But no. Her sexuality proved more grudging than Carrie’s joyous play-acting. Susan continued to seek redress for our intrusive intimacies through her sternly maintained distance and sarcasm. It never occurred to me to follow Carrie’s example and just tell her to quit it. Public belittlement gave me the satisfaction of receiving the comeuppance I deserved.
Susan had nicknamed my apartment The Cave, yet our games therein had grown not primitive but increasingly sophisticated as we progressed from beginner spanking to intermediate applications of discipline. I barely broke a sweat and often stayed clothed throughout the session, requiring only odd bits of laundry, a few kitchen items, lubricant, and a mildly sinister imagination to keep the action moving. Susan did the work, the sweating, the whimpery emoting. Let her boss me around in front of her colleagues, call me a Richie Rich. Such indignities balanced the scale in my mind and kept my conscience clean.
It was Carrie who first tipped the balance with feelings I didn’t anticipate. By no means with love, but with regard more than friendly that I couldn’t square with her antagonistic sexual tack. It was one of our afternoons. Carrie had just arrived. I was in the shower when she yelled through the bathroom door that two people were here to see me. I shut off the water. “It’s your neighbor and somebody else,” she said.
“It’s me, Philly.”
“Could she come back later?” I said to Carrie.
“They say they need to speak with you.”
“I have no clothes in here!” Just a bathrobe, beltless, and an expectant erection now holding in its quarter phase. I clamped the robe shut and stepped out of the bathroom. There was Mrs. Bakes in her widow’s black, a fortyish woman beside her, dressed neatly and cheaply as if for a nanny’s job interview.
“Forgive us,” the younger woman said. “Your wife said it was okay.”
“I’m not his wife,” Carrie snapped.
“Something wrong, dear?” I asked her.
“You never said you were throwing people out.” Evidently they’d been chatting.
“It hadn’t seemed relevant to our usual dialogues.”
“Cut the shit, Philip! This woman has a life.”
“But no lease.”
“She’s lived here twenty years, she says!”
“Was my hosband’s property,” Mrs. Bakes jumped in. “Now is my sons’.”
“And tomorrow it will be mine. I can’t change that now.”
“Mr. Big Shot,” Carrie said. She was wearing a summer-weight jumper with nothing, I knew, underneath. Her underpants were on my bed. To the headboard were knotted my bathrobe belt and my prep school varsity letter tie. Blood fled from my face and dick.
“I don’t need this from you, Carrie. Please.”
“You need a kick in the butt.”
“Later, I promise.”
The other woman spoke: “We haven’t come to beg, Mr. Halsey.”
“You are?”
“My name is Melina Bakes. I’m married to Mrs. Bakes’s son.”
“You’re Frank’s wife?”
“Yes.”
“The plot thickens.” I regretted my flippancy at once. I was predisposed to like this woman. She was why Frank was selling the building, the Helen of Troy in the Bakes brothers’ feud; as perpetrator of a family scandal, she was doubtless scorned by many, a predicament I understood. I remembered that her mother-in-law had called her a tramp. I guessed from their stances in front of me, stiff and apart, that the women were joined here uneasily, despair or guilt or dire need forcing today’s alliance. My dick, to keep you posted, subsided with the onset of such sympathetic thoughts.
Melina Bakes received my dig impassively. “My mother-in-law realizes you would expect bigger rent.”
“You deserve, Philly,” the old woman blurted. “Is fair to make money. I can say this.”
Melina continued patiently, “We understand rents must go up—”
“I pay you more, Philly! I pay six hundred, okay?”
“That’s three times what she’s paying now,” Melina said.
“I appreciate your situation, but the numbers don’t work for me. I’d be losing money on the property.”
“You’ve only got tons,” Carrie said.
“May I speak for myself, please.”
“Fuck you, Philip. You’re a greedy little snot.”
I was appalled and embarrassed. Melina only smiled at my discomfiture—then damn if I didn’t do likewise. “Look,” I said, a certain warm thickness filling my throat like the first effects of an oral hallucinogen. “Mrs. Bakes has been paying two hundred a month?
I’ll front her six months’ rent if she’ll vacate in peace.”
“She will not find an apartment for two hundred dollars, or even six hundred. This is the problem.”
“How much, then?”
The two women conferred in whirlwind Greek before Melina suggested, “Eight hundred a month. And six months, you will offer?” As I was doing my multiplication, Carrie pounced again:
“If you can find a place around here that rents for eight hundred a month, lemme know. I’d say a thousand at least.”
“Honeybunch, you’re spending my money.”
“I’ll owe you,” she winked. I had to laugh:
“All right. A thousand, times six—”
“Make it a year, Philip.”
“Twelve grand!”
“Even that’s not enough. Give her two.”
“Two years’ rent? She’s not young, Carrie.”
“A year-and-a-half, then.”
“Eighteen months? At a thousand per?”
Carrie spun toward Mrs. Bakes and Melina. “You heard him. Philip is offering eighteen thousand dollars in severance. Are we happy?”
The three women embraced.
I scrawled a check from my stock account. When the others had left, Carrie sat beside me on the bed and put her arm around me. “Feel noble?”
“I can’t even write it off.”
“So your bankbook takes a small hit. Big deal.”
“It’s a risky time for me.”
“You did a good deed today, kid. When the angels tabulate your life on a golden notebook with a crystal pencil, you may yet squeak into heaven.” She smiled, saying this; nine months ago she might have been serious. My gift to her in our relationship was the little bit of incredulity that is the holiest spirit I know. Her gift to me was the doubt of my own doubts.
Carrie stroked my hair. “You were so cute when you came out of the bathroom, all angry with your bathrobe and your hard-on.”
“You saw?”
“I always see. And I wanted it.”
“Really?”
She was kissing me—my ear and then my mouth. Then we were on our sides face to face and I kissed her with the sloppiness of a starving man slurping fruit, a seduction impropriety that Carrie seemed not to mind. When I nudged two fingers against her vagina they slipped inside so easily I thought for a moment I’d done something wrong. “Philly,” she said. “Put it in me, okay? Put it in me and come. For you.”
Later we resumed our old tricks. She got on top, her hips already moving, and with a beautiful leer instructed, “Do the boy.” Sometimes I think God gave us fantasy to keep our minds from wandering—during sex, I mean, for it’s a curious journey thoughts can take in the middle of intercourse. This time mine didn’t go far, however; just to an hour earlier when Melina Bakes was leaving. I’d asked her why she was helping her mother-in-law, since it probably wouldn’t dispel Mrs. Bakes’s anger toward her for rupturing the family. Melina had replied with the constraint that comes when your happiness has hurt others:
“It was something I could do.”
That’s the reason I surrendered $18,000 for no good reason. It was why, too, I could lie here letting Carrie possess me, saying mommy a lot and loving it; and why, on other days, I could theatrically degrade a nameless cunt named Susan and enjoy that just as much. I don’t know what it means. It was something I could do.
11
The next day we closed on the building, “we” being Frank and Nick Bakes, the original sellers, myself the final buyer, a couple of lawyers, brokers, Lyle the office secretary, and, as buyer and seller and general ringmaster, Neil Gray of Gray Realtors.
Neil was one of those self-made men whose false modesty appears as stylized buffoonery, as if his success were a cosmic mistake instead of something he’d killed for. But give me someone falsely modest over someone comfortably proud, so I liked him. My self-esteem was cracking. I was starting to like everyone.
Neil was both buyer and seller that day because he was buying the building from Bakes Partners and then selling it to me. The closing took place at Gray Realtors. I arrived with coffee for Susan and Alison. “What are you doing here?” Alison hissed. “You’re supposed to come at eleven!”
“I’m early, so what.” I didn’t see Susan anywhere.
“This is bad. This is so bad.” Alison was a redhead. When I imagined her sexually it was all freckles and pallor and insane moans; you should hear me on black girls. I gave her her coffee and asked where was Susan.
“With Neil, in his office. They’re calling the police.”
“I missed something.”
“There,” she whispered, pointing to the open door of the office conference room. Frank Bakes, the controlling member of Bakes Partners who was forcing today’s sale, was seated alone at the long table. “Neil saw he’s got a gun!”
“Alison …”
“Okay, a bulge,” she said. “Under his jacket. Look at him!”
Frank was wearing a dark suit, dark shirt, dark necktie—conceivably the uniform of a man on a mission, especially with the wraparound sunglasses. “Neil had it timed like clockwork,” Alison said. “Nick was supposed to arrive first, sign the papers and leave. Then Frank, you know? So they wouldn’t meet, because it’s total war between them. But Nick never showed and Frank’s here early—to like ambush him, we think. With the gun!”
“You takin’ orders, guy?” was asked me by a fellow just out of the lavatory. He indicated the two styrofoam cups in my hands. “Coffee black for me,” he said, zipping up. “And a honeybun.”
Alison said to me with a frozen smile, “This is the Bakeses’ attorney, Bill Kelly.” As she made introductions he surveyed her from head to toe; I saw his filthy redhead fantasies bubble up like sludge. Alison described me as “Buyer number two.”
“I heard Neil was pulling a quickie,” Kelly laughed.
“He’s taking a loss,” I explained.
“He tell you that?”
“Cool it, Bill,” she said. “You guys weren’t even supposed to meet.”
To counter his insinuation with one of my own, I said to Kelly uppishly, “Alison had a question about your client. She was concerned that he brought a handgun with him this morning. Could you check?”
“Hey, Frankie!” he bellowed across the office. “You carryin’ heat?” Brokers turned at their desks. Frank Bakes gazed at us. “A weapon, guy? You carryin’?”
Frank’s glasses reflected the overhead lights. “I wish,” he said softly. Alison wasn’t convinced:
“What about his bulge? Ask him.”
Bill Kelly looked at her, then back at Frank. “Girl says you gotta bulge, Frankie. Talk to her.” He headed for the conference room, me and Alison following.
Frank, in answer, took a pint bottle from his coat pocket, uncapped it and raised a toast. His smile crumpled suddenly and tears spilled from under his sunglasses. His lawyer went to him and massaged one shoulder, Alison the other, as Frank broke down and sobbed. I observed from the doorway, sipping Susan’s decaf. Awkward in these situations, I’ve learned from experience to find something to do, lest I break out laughing.
Neil Gray’s office door kicked open and out he came, short and bald in a custom suit. Through an iron grin he whispered to me, “The cops are coming. Act normal.” When I told him the cops wouldn’t be needed, he whirled on Susan behind him. “Call and cancel. Cops and lawyers together I cannot handle.”
“I phoned them for you. You phone them back.”
“Humor me, huh? Pretend I’m the boss.”
“The idiot, you mean.”
“Idiot!”
“That’s right. Idiot and … pifflehead!” Susan was giggling like a midwestern cheerleader, a side of her only Neil elicited.
He grabbed his chest. “Not pifflehead! Not that! And in front of the clients,” he added, meaning me.
“I’m hurt,” I said, playing along. “Surely we’re past such formality.”
He slapped me on the back. “
Absolutely! Me and Philip,” he waved a fist to the room like a cornered politician: “Like brothers!” I draped my arm around him. Who is this guy, I thought. We’d met a couple times before, and he was unlike any executive I’d ever known, loony and childlike, with an edge. I attributed my sense of Neil’s strangeness to my sheltered Boston upbringing; to his being Jewish, in other words, for in my youth I’d known Jews exactly never (not counting my father, which was his wish). It took college to teach me what a bagel was, and my Jewish first year roommate was WASPier than I in his quest for the perfect shiksa, his heritage, like mine, mentioned only in jokes and in adamant holy-day skepticism. Between freshman and sophomore year, however, he took a craving for history and joined a kibbutz in Israel. He sent me a photo of himself in a vegetable patch. He wrote that Israeli girls were beautiful and that he was quitting the kibbutz for the army because the army had more girls than the kibbutz. Lastly he said I was wasting my life, this from a kid off a commune. The following year Israel invaded Lebanon. I looked for him on the TV news among soldiers manning checkpoints or shepherding refugees. I never saw him; the odds against it were huge, and given the years and changes between us, I’m sure I wouldn’t have recognized him.
Through the front window of the realty office, I saw a black-and-white squad car pull up. Two cops strolled in. Neil shouted, “Hide the dope!”
They smiled. One said, “We got a call—”
“Where’s your bulletproof vests, men? What I donated for those things, I expect you guys to wear ‘em. It’s like my wife—I buy her clothes, she don’t wear ‘em! Says they make her look like a hooker. I say, Yeah, so?”
“False alarm, sir?”
Neil was contrite. “I hallucinated, that’s all I can figure. I’m old. Today I see guns, tomorrow the reaper.” He reached for his wallet. “A double-sawbuck for your trouble?”
“Another time,” the cop said. He and his partner left, swaggering as well they should, though I prefer it going away.
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