by Aimee Bender
He reached out his hand, warm from cupping the mug, and placed it on her collarbone, tracing the line with his finger.
“It’s good,” Janet said briskly, “I like it, I like how you touch me on my back, I like the pace and the kissing, and I like it.” Daniel moved his finger to the dip at the hollow of her throat, but her voice did not shift or relax. “But Daniel,” she continued, “let me make something clear. Maybe you did not know this, but nothing is its own reward for me.” She stared at his face as directly as she could. The words felt like fireballs in her mouth. “I want you to understand that. You don’t have to understand why, just that it’s true.”
“That nothing is its own reward? Really?”
She sat up straighter. “Now, we can of course reduce the fee to make it more financially feasible. Fifty?”
He took his hand off her body and placed it back on the table. “I mean, Janet,” he said, “do you have any idea how hard I am working my ass off to make—”
“Twenty?” she said. “I know you’re working so hard, honey, I know. But it would mean so much to me.” As soon as her voice softened, it began to break apart. “I can hardly explain how much it means to me.”
“Twenty?” he said. “Twenty?” He stuck out his lower lip, thinking. “Twenty? Jesus. I suppose I could do twenty for another week, but I don’t like it. I don’t want to. And is nothing its own reward, Janet? Really? Isn’t love its own reward?”
“Or thirty?” she asked, sorry now that she’d gone so low.
“Twenty, Janet,” said Daniel. “And then come on, now. How much money can you really make in a week off twenty dollars? Do you have something you need to buy and don’t want to tell me about? Do you think you should reconsider going back to work?”
“Twenty-five?” she murmured, tears in her eyes.
He sipped the last of his coffee very slowly, and when her eyes spilled he leaned in to kiss her forehead. “Twenty-five,” he said. “Fine. Until November 1, though, and then we’re back to regular. Okay?”
“November 8?” she asked, brushing dry her cheeks.
“Janet!”
She moved closer and pressed him desperately to her. “Our love is wonderful,” she said. “I know that. I know it’s true.”
His nose pushed into the smoothness of her hair. “We’re each other’s reward,” he offered, but she just dug her head deeper into his shoulder and whispered into the caves of his neck.
“November 8, then,” he said. “And that’s it-it-it.”
“Thank you, Daniel,” she breathed. “You have no idea.”
After they hugged, he went to watch TV. She wrote it all down carefully on the paper: November 8. 25 dollars. 770 currently. As if she would forget.
Starting the next morning, she initiated sex every day. If the week before had been largely his fantasy enacted, now it was all hers. In the shower, in the darkness under all the covers of the bed, at his warehouse among the shoeboxes in his work boots. It felt slightly pathetic to her that she had to do four now to each one before to make the same amount of cash, but she was ravenously hungry for contact all day long, and Daniel, who had grown accustomed—before the previous week—to a steady but slightly lackluster sex life, let her enthusiasm spark his own. He took a lunch with Edward as a break, and only begged fatigue a few times when Janet’s demand was kind of overwhelming, he said, since he’d just gotten home and just this morning in the shower and he needed some food and couldn’t they watch TV tonight?
She laughed with big red smudge-free lips and fed him and let him watch four sitcoms in a row, but before he fell asleep she was on him again and said he didn’t have to do anything at all but just be still and sleepy and she would complete all the movement.
At the end of the week, on Sunday afternoon, she presented him with a tidy bill, typewritten, accounting for each time, and labeling where/when it had happened, with a dotted line and a $25 at the end. The total for that first week was $250. A small amount compared with the easy near-thousand of the previous week, but a clear exchange nonetheless. Daniel paid it into her palm, in cash, counting backwards.
“Sunday’s my day off,” he said when she started to undo her bra. “Go do something else, honey, please.” He plopped in front of the TV with a bowl of rice cereal to watch some football, and Janet gathered herself into the pale-blue bathtub and attended to her body quietly in there, moaning softly under the whir of the bathroom fan; afterward, she paid herself fifty dollars by transferring funds from her savings to her checking account. That made three hundred dollars for the week.
November 8 shot around the corner in a blink; it was probably the quickest two weeks of her life. And it was not enough. That much was clear instantly. She had started, by now, to see the entire world in terms of currencies. She considered charging her few friends for their lunches based on who demanded more time and attention during the lunch itself, charging strangers a quarter in the supermarket aisle when they did not move their cart in time. Charging for each meal she cooked, including tip. One afternoon, when her father sailed off into one of his long monologues on the phone, she actually tape-recorded their conversation and then took four hours and typed it out as a script, with his endless speech on the right side of the page and her responses on the left: yes, uh-huh, of course. It was amazing, to see the contrast. How long were those pageful reports. How little she spoke. How wealthy she would be if she just charged him a dollar a word.
I am twenty-four-hour resentment, said Janet, in her bustier, to the glinting mirror. I am every-cell resentment. I am one hell of a big resentment, she said. The mirror and wall did not answer. They knew very well what she was like by now. But when had it shifted? In high school, she’d walked tall in her own deprivation and had volunteered at the homeless shelter in her free time. She bought her dad charming birthday gifts, and the homeless shelter made her a mobile saying she was wonderful, with each paper letter brightly colored, hanging from the stick. The “N” and “R” fell off in a week, so over her bed, for years, the stick slowly turned, announcing “WODEFUL.” I am grateful, she’d said every day in high school, grateful for the food on my plate and the roof over my head. Grateful for my dad. Grateful I live in a country where we have options. For our beautiful environment, she said on Saturdays, sorting through the sticky plastic bottles at the recycling center.
Now, years later, even washing a single dish irritated her. I do everything around here, she grumbled to herself while moving the sponge over the circle. Even though she knew it wasn’t true. She hadn’t done the dishes in weeks. Daniel changed all the lightbulbs and paid the bills. He rubbed her feet and listened to her complaints. The truth was, she just didn’t want to do anything at all. She did not want to have a job or have children or clean the bathroom or say hello. She only did a dish with happiness just after Daniel had done a dish. She only bought Daniel a present after he’d just bought a present for her, and even then she made sure her present wasn’t quite as good as his.
It disgusted her as she did it, but it was the truth. She certainly liked the image of herself as the benevolent wife with arms full of flowers, but if she bought the flowers she would spend part of the ride home feeling so righteous and pleased that she had bought flowers; what a good wife she was; wasn’t he a lucky man; until, by the time she arrived home with the flowers, she’d be angry he hadn’t bought her flowers.
She reached out a hand to touch the cool sweep of the wall.
“It seems,” she said to it, “that I have lost my generosity.”
Her whole body filled with a sparkling panic, painful and visceral as poison champagne, because she did not know how to get it back.
The grand total on November 8 was $1,245. Daniel paid her the remaining money and gave her a fake sad look that could not disguise his relief, and then trundled off to the bathroom to get ready for work. She ironed the new bills, and packed them all into her tiny pocketbook of black velvet with the glittery clasp. The cash poked out its green fingers
and her heels made pointed bites in the cement as she walked down the street, past the stores. She kept opening up the clasp of her purse and sticking her hand in there and stroking the money like it was a fur glove or a child’s hair. What with the angle at which she held her bag and that look on her face, to passersby it seemed vaguely like she was masturbating.
People looked away. It was either that, or stare. She was magnetically disturbing to watch.
She stopped when she reached the mall, big and curvy. She roamed the three floors and mingled with all the people milling about with their big paper shopping bags and worn, drawn faces.
Inside the biggest and fanciest department store, at one end of the mall shops, she walked around the various sections of women’s clothing, and observed all the different desks, and the different sets of salespeople. She watched for almost an hour, noting how each saleswoman interacted with customers, and how she looked, until she settled on the one she liked best. This was in the women’s impulse department. The saleslady was about Janet’s age, a little younger, and had a red velvet ribbon tied neatly around her neck, just like the horror story Janet had once heard about a woman who wears a velvet ribbon around her neck her whole life, every second of every day, until the one night when her curious husband removes it and her head falls off.
“Excuse me,” said Janet, resting her pocketbook on the counter. “I have a question for you.”
“Sure.” The saleslady reupholstered her salesface in seconds. “How can I help you?”
“Do you support yourself?” Janet asked. She smiled, as amiably as she could.
“Pardon me?”
“I know it’s an unusual question, but do you support yourself? Are you self-supported? Financially?”
The saleslady squinched up her nose. “Well,” she said. “As a matter of fact, I am. Why do you ask?”
“And do you have a boyfriend?” Janet took in the bare left ring finger. Then she refixed her eyes on that red ribbon. The more she looked at it, the more it did seem to be glued to the woman’s neck, and the red of the ribbon was the perfect shade to bring out the red in her lips and the brown of her eyes. It was the kind of glorious and simple fashion move you could stare at for hours in admiration.
The saleslady laughed, uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, are you looking for clothes, ma’am? These are fairly personal questions. There’s a sale on pencil skirts on the right.”
“But do you?”
“Why?”
“I’ll look for clothes in a second,” said Janet. “I need a cream turtleneck. Ribbed. Wool. Expensive. I’ll need two, maybe three. But I’m just curious. Do you?”
“Well, yes,” said the saleslady.
“Then, please, let me just ask you a little bit more,” Janet said, leaning on the counter. She hugged her pocketbook into her chest. “It’s for a study. Who talks more?” she asked.
The saleslady narrowed her eyes at Janet, and then relaxed against the cash register. Business was slow; only a few other customers rotated around the perimeter of the department.
“You mean when? Like during dinner?” asked the saleslady.
“Whenever. Sure.”
“Depends on who has more to say that day, I guess.”
“And who pays, if you’re out?”
“We usually split it,” said the saleslady. “We both make about the same salary. Or one will take the other. There’s no rule. What kind of turtleneck? You might want sportswear instead, that’s one floor down. Did you say wool?”
Now, in addition to the ribbon, Janet noticed how the delicate mole punctuating the tip of the saleslady’s eyebrow looked just like Venus at the tip of a crescent moon. Perfection.
“And do you regularly orgasm?” asked Janet.
“Excuse me?”
Janet held still. She could hear the cash registers erupt into sound around them. Printing out receipts over the sounds of pens signing shiny credit card paper that curls into itself.
“Please,” said Janet. “I know it’s very forward, but please. It would mean an enormous amount to me to know.”
The saleslady’s eyes dodged around the store.
“The turtlenecks are downstairs,” she said. “You’d better go down there. There’s a woman downstairs in that department who likes to talk about things like this. You should ask her. Molly. Look for Molly.”
Janet shook her head. “I want to ask you,” she said.
The saleslady was fidgeting all around the cash register now, pushing buttons, ripping tissue paper, as if she were trapped in there.
Janet took a breath. “Look,” she said. “I’m sure I seem crazy, but I’m not. I just don’t know what it’s like for other people. I live a sheltered life. Do you keep track? I don’t want to ask Molly, because I don’t want to be like Molly. This will be my last question, honestly.”
Janet fumbled in her purse and pulled out two hundred-dollar bills.
“I’ll pay you,” she said firmly.
The saleslady stared at the bills and balled the ripped tissue paper into hard pellets.
“Two hundred dollars?” She glanced over her shoulder. “For one question? Are you serious?”
Janet didn’t even blink.
The saleslady’s eyebrows crunched in, and the mole pulled closer to her temple.
“It’s for a study?”
A nod. “A self-study.”
“And then you’ll stop?”
Another nod.
“And are you a member of this store?”
Janet rummaged in her wallet and this time produced a bronze store credit card.
“Well,” the saleslady said, bobbing her head tightly, “if it’s worth that much to you. Fairly regularly, yes. What would you call regular?”
“Majority of the time,” Janet said.
“Fine, then,” said the saleslady. “Majority of the time. About seventy percent, through one method or another. Easier on some days than others. I don’t keep track, no. Better off the pill than on. Nicer for me at night than in the morning. Now. Done! The turtlenecks are that way.”
Her face was flushed. The red ribbon matched, in perfect harmony, the blush high on her cheeks.
Janet thrust the bills forward and held herself back from taking the woman’s hand and kissing it.
“Thank you.” She felt her eyes watering. “You are really very beautiful.” The yearning in her voice was so palpable it caught them both by surprise.
The saleslady stared at the money and broke into uncomfortable giggles before she grabbed it and strode off into the suit section. The older, blonder manager meandered over from across the room, sensing a need for managerial skills.
“Can I help you?” she asked Janet, now standing alone at the register.
“I need a turtleneck,” said Janet.
In the horror story, the woman tells the man that she loves him, and she will marry him, but he must never remove the red velvet ribbon around her neck. It is the one thing he can never ask of her. At first it’s the easiest trade; he complies for years and they are blissfully happy, but after a while it begins, in a slow broil, to burn him up inside. Why all the mystery? He unties the ribbon late at night, while she sleeps, and screams when her head rolls onto the floor.
Before, at summer camp, the story had always made Janet puff with righteousness. What a pushy spoiler of a husband. Wasn’t their happiness enough? Couldn’t he respect her one rule? One? But in the dressing room, her nose full of the clean smell of new turtleneck, she felt the story tugging at her. Something she couldn’t quite put a finger on. As she paid cash for the turtlenecks—three: cream, fuchsia, black—she told a quick version of the story to the blonde manager, a woman who clearly knew her way in the world. Strong shoulders, proud large hands, open smile. “What do you think it means?” Janet asked. Far off in the distance, she could see the saleslady of her choice rehanging blouses on a rack.
The manager flattened out the receipt to sign.
“I remember that story,” the ma
nager said, sighing. “I had the cutest camp boyfriend.”
“I mean, why not just be happy with the way things are, right?” said Janet.
The manager took the signed receipt and put it in the register’s pile. She folded the turtlenecks, separating them with sheets of tissue paper, and then slipped all three into a bag. “But can you blame him?” she said, handing the bag to Janet. “I mean, I’m all for clothes, but at a certain point, they’re supposed to go away, you know? How long were they married?”
“I don’t know,” said Janet, taking the bag. “Story doesn’t say.”
“Take it all off!” said the manager. She winked at Janet. “Turtlenecks are good that way too.”
Across the room, the woman with the red ribbon had finished lining up the blouses and moved on to the slacks. It was true, what the manager said. That ribbon was practically made to be removed. Even Janet herself wanted to slide over and undo the knot and unspool the choker from the woman’s throat.
So—the man didn’t know what was coming, Janet thought as she walked to the escalator. They’d been married for years, and he wanted her to give up the last thread of cover so she would stand before him nude and he could make love to her entire skin.
Well, of course that made her head fall off. Of course.
At home that night, wearing her new fuchsia turtleneck, Janet made a simple dinner of spaghetti and red sauce from a jar. She and Daniel ate together in silence. When they were both done, he cleared the dishes and put them in the sink.
“Thank you,” he said, at the counter. “That was very good.”
She watched him run water over the forks. His hair needed a cut—it was getting too long on the sides.
“It’s November 9,” he said.
“I know,” she said. “Thank you again.”
He dried the forks with a cloth. He seemed unusually quiet.
“You know, you were right,” she said, brushing crumbs off the table into her palm. “What you said a few weeks ago. About your wife.”
