“Is it still available?” Jan asked.
“They’re hemming and hawing, so if you want to put down a deposit, you could lock it up.”
Marcus took in the room, a large black box with little warrens off to the sides and a bar at one end. The exorbitant rental fees were apparently a result of the club’s evanescent cachet. Now they would have to pay a significant amount of money for something of no particular value. But it was the venue of the moment, decreed so in Jan’s conversations with several of the other mothers whose boys’ bar mitzvahs were imminent, and she was intent on having Nathan’s party there. Marcus asked Alison how large a deposit was required. A deal was struck, a check written.
Anyone who saw Marcus and Jan in the parking lot outside Tool Box would have thought they looked like any other married couple. Marcus took out his car keys and pressed the clicker. There was the familiar chirp, followed by the unlocking of doors.
“Plum wants to work for us,” Jan said. Marcus stared at her, incredulous.
“You told her what we were doing?”
“She was lying in a hospital bed with a head injury.”
“I wish you hadn’t done that.”
“I told her I thought it was a bad idea.”
“We already have more girls than we need.” Word had gotten around about Smart Tarts, and there had been a spate of defections from other agencies. Women had heard about the health care and the retirement plans, so Marcus and Jan had their pick of the field. “And the idea is ridiculous anyway.”
“How many guys do you think she’s slept with?” Jan asked. It was a rhetorical question, so he just shrugged as he leaned against the car. “Almost thirty. Three since she got divorced.”
“It would be too bizarre.” The information had thrown him. The marrying of the personal and professional was discomfiting. “Look at how it was with the store. You didn’t want to be in business with her.”
“I’m not advocating it. I just told her I’d talk to you. I felt so sorry for her lying in that hospital bed all covered in therapeutic mud.”
“We could just lend her money.”
Jan told Marcus that Plum had refused her offer of a loan. He said he’d think about it.
It was April now, and Marcus had been in the business since autumn. But the ensuing months had not inured him to the unease he felt while having a frank sexual discussion with anyone other than his wife. So it was with no little discomfort that he asked Plum whether she minded being urinated on. They were seated in the Smart Tarts office, a week after the injury. She was dressed in jeans and a clingy blue V-neck sweater that showed off her newly trim figure. Legs crossed tightly left over right, arms folded in her lap, she looked him directly in the eye.
“Do I mind?”
“Are you willing?” Marcus went on to explain to her that clients paid more for increasingly colorful varieties of sexual experience, and golden showers were a lucrative sideline if a person could transcend the taboo. As he awaited her response, he recalled a birthday party of Nathan’s that Plum had attended in the Ripps backyard. Nathan had turned six and was dressed as a dinosaur for the occasion. Marcus had a picture of him, taken on that day, stuck in a drawer somewhere. Plum had stayed after the party to help clean up. She had looked radiant in a lime-green blouse and pale yellow pants. Marcus had found her easier to talk to back then.
“Are you?”
“To be honest, it’s not my thing. But I need to know, because there are clients who pay a premium for it.” Ordinarily, Marcus would never have engaged in this kind of revelatory badinage in an employment interview, but this meeting was a bizarre fusion of the personal and the professional, so he was doing what he could to make Plum comfortable. “So?”
“I don’t think I want to go there at this point.”
If it had been up to him, this get-together would not have been taking place, but Plum had been insistent. He was not unsympathetic to her recent run of bad luck, and if she was willing, of her own volition (this was supremely important to Marcus), to engage in this kind of work, he believed it would be hypocritical to deny her the opportunity. She had already agreed to various other fetishes including woman-on-woman shows, toe sucking, handcuffs, whips, dildos, and sex with people of differing political persuasions, so he was slightly surprised by her squeamishness at the prospect of being urinated on. However, he did not judge, and instead simply made a note on the legal pad in his lap. Then he said “You don’t have to do this.”
“I know.”
“You could get a job doing something else.”
Plum appeared uncertain how to respond for a moment. She uncrossed her legs, re-crossed them right over left, and leaned forward.
“Marcus, when you were unemployed and looking for work, were there a lot of jobs available? Ones you wanted, I mean. Ones you’d actually be happy to do?”
Marcus pretended to think about this for a moment, although he knew the answer immediately. “Plum…”
“I want to do this. It’s not like I’m enjoying dating.” She punctuated her words with a harsh laugh. “I have expenses … I need money, and at this point …” She didn’t complete the thought. “You’ll make sure nothing happens to me, right?” Marcus nodded in as reassuring a way as he could manage. “I mean, you screen the … what do you call them … clients?” Marcus nodded again. “I’ll do it once and if it doesn’t work out, I can always kill myself.” Plum affected a smile as she said this, and Marcus tried to laugh, although it sounded more like he was clearing his throat.
In a conversational turn that caught Marcus unawares, Plum asked him if Atlas knew what he was doing.
“No one knows.” This seemed to satisfy her. “Does he know what you’re doing?”
“You must be kidding.”
Plum’s howl-at-the-devil attitude reminded Marcus of his own when he had veered onto this road. So, too, did the cape of tight-lipped joviality she hung over it. The whole presentation was familiar, and it made Plum more simpatico than she’d been as Jan’s business partner.
“Anything else you want to ask me?” she said.
Marcus wondered how long Plum would maintain her composure. The circumstances that had led her to this juncture were not remotely amusing, but he knew she was not a woman devoid of humor, and this situation felt ridiculous. Marcus, after all, was someone she had known as a workaday householder in Van Nuys, a man whose most immoderate behavior involved occasionally driving solo in the carpool lane. He sensed that she was beset with worry. He observed her as she looked at him, trying to be officious and conduct a business meeting. A small laugh escaped her lips.
“All right. So, what about providing one?” Marcus asked, tapping his pen on the pad.
“One what?”
“What we were just discussing. You know …” He didn’t even like to use the jargon that went with this line of work, unless it was absolutely necessary. “The peeing thing…”
“I don’t think so,” she said. Marcus made another note on his pad. The two of them were doing their best to pretend that this conversation was not awkward.
“You’ve got to do what works,” he said. Marcus reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a piece of paper, which he handed to her. “Read this and sign it. It says that whatever you do of a sexual nature is voluntary.”
Plum signed the document. It was decided that she would begin work in the next few days.
“Did Jan tell you about the book club?”
“No.” Ripples of nervous tension floated up Plum’s neck to her jaw and cheeks. She bit her lip.
“Our philosophy is to create an environment that’s supportive and, you know, human … so she thought a book club would be a good idea. They’re reading Anna Karenina.”
“I’ll pick up a copy.”
“Oh, and one more thing,” he told her. “If you actually follow through, and you don’t have to, but if you do …”
“I’m going to.”
“Okay. If you’re going to mention me
in front of any of your coworkers, my name is Breeze.”
At this, the dam broke and Plum started to laugh. At first Marcus was disconcerted, but he quickly surmised that her laughter arose from her discomfort at the situation. He appreciated that she had kept it at bay for the nearly half hour she had been seated in the office, but the strain had become too much for her to bear. Talking in gray tones about the unimaginably diverse permutations of human sexuality as if they were companies on the stock exchagne had been stressful. Yet the two had negotiated the conversation with aplomb, despite his being the husband of her former business partner and someone with whom she had played Scrabble. But declaring he was to be referred to as “Breeze” apparently pushed her over the line, and the laughter was now pouring out of her in great, oxygen-depleting torrents, leaving her breathless and gasping.
Marcus watched her, his smile pallid. However effectively he was able to operate in this incarnation, a sense of its essential incongruity never left him. He could fully understand Plum’s reaction. He found it slightly excessive, and not a little patronizing, but he sat there and patiently waited for the laughter to subside, which, a full minute later, it did.
“I’m sorry,” she said, drawing breath before discharging a final ripple of anxious giggles. “It’s just…”
“I know.” He tried to reassure her, aligning his features into a pattern intended to suggest probity. Plum did not seem to be capable of eye contact. Marcus felt like an actor who had lost focus in a scene. He told her she would need to be photographed for the Smart Tarts Web site, so patrons would have some idea of what they were paying for. Hearing the nuts-and-bolts details calmed her nervous system, which had become hyperkinetic. She considered Internet images, a searchable, eternal, and compromising configuration of pixels and bytes. It felt at one moment abstract, then as lasting as a tattoo, something she could not take back. Plum was less than thrilled at this prospect, but Marcus was able to mollify her with the news that her face would not have to be visible. Many of the workers, he said, chose to highlight what they considered to be their best physical features in the pictures and leave the rest to the consumer’s imagination. She told him that would be fine with her.
“Plum … really …” Marcus said. “Are you sure…”
Holding up her hand, as if to stop traffic, she told him not to ask her that again. Her eyes narrowed like caskets closing. “I want to do this.”
Marcus gave her some money to purchase new lingerie and told her to choose an alias by which she’d like to be known. Kostya took some pictures of her later that afternoon. The images were on the Internet that night next to the name Verlaine, which Plum had selected in homage to the poet.
That night, while Marcus sat on the couch in the den watching a baseball game, Nathan wandered in after having taken a shower. He was wearing plaid pajama bottoms and a T-shirt from Sea World. He settled next to his father, and Marcus ran his fingers over Nathan’s still-wet hair, smoothing it down. He asked him if his homework was done, and the boy told him it was. Marcus looked at his watch. It was a little before nine. Nathan’s bedtime wasn’t until nine thirty, and he was pleased that they would be able to spend some time together.
They watched the game for a few moments, and then Nathan, who did not like silence unless he was concentrating on a video game, turned to his father. “So, how was your day?”
The day had consisted of arranging twenty-seven assignations for his workforce and hiring his wife’s former business partner to work as a prostitute.
“Terrific,” he said.
“Do you remember the speech you gave at your bar mitzvah?”
“I never had one. I’m not Jewish, remember?”
“Oh, yeah. I forgot.” Nathan already knew this information, but he was tired and his brain was in the place where the forces trying to shut it down for the night were tangling with the rowdier elements attempting to extend the day just a little longer. Marcus asked Nathan how his speech was coming and was told that he hadn’t started it yet. He didn’t want to write it quickly, because it was the one time he could tell a gathering of adults what he thought about an important subject. “You’re giving a speech, too, right?”
Marcus assured Nathan that he was, although it was something he had completely forgotten about. Both Jan and he were going to stand in front of the congregation with their son and download whatever parental wisdom they could articulate into Nathan’s hard drive. Whereas the child’s speech at this event was usually a commentary on a biblical passage, each parent’s was meant to be a benediction to a son or daughter, sage counsel to ignite the rockets of their young souls, launching them in a deistic direction, one presumed to lead them toward a happy, fulfilling existence. Marcus blanched at this aspect of the proceedings right now, as he looked at Nathan’s clear complexion, unmarked by the garden of acne currently blooming on the faces of several of his friends, and thought about the absurdity of his standing up there and telling his son how to live his life.
“I want to talk to you two about motivational dancers.”
They looked up and saw Lenore standing in the doorway in a pink sweatsuit, perspiring from a workout. She took a sip from a sports drink.
“What about them?” Marcus asked.
“Nathan needs them at the bar mitzvah, right, kiddo?”
“I dunno,” he said. “I guess. Dad, do I?”
“Who do you have in mind?” Marcus asked.
“Some girls from the studio. They could use the work, and if you’re going to hire dancers anyway…”
“Are they strippers?” Nathan wanted to know.
“I think two of them are,” Lenore said. “But they’re really nice girls.”
“Strippers at my bar mitzvah?” Nathan again looked at Marcus. His nearly thirteen-year-old mind did not quite know what to make of this opportunity.
“I’ll talk about it with Mom,” Marcus said.
“They won’t be stripping at the bar mitzvah,” Lenore assured the two of them. “And you of all people shouldn’t be worried about this,” she said to Marcus. Marcus picked up his son’s look, the one that said what did she mean by that?
“Thanks for the input, Lenore.” Marcus said this in an even tone, but one that he hoped would shut her up. Lenore smiled tightly. Marcus sensed that she realized she had gone too far. When she left the room, Marcus and Nathan returned their attention to the television. After several moments of silence, they began to talk about the ball game.
Chapter 18
Plum approached her initial foray into this new life as Verlaine like a performance artist preparing for a show. She chose a new lipstick and an eye shadow she would not ordinarily wear, and she tousled her hair in a way meant to subtly hint at abandon. Standing in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door in her bedroom, she examined various wardrobe choices. It took nearly an hour to select the costume.
Marcus had not wanted to send Plum to meet a client who was using the service for the first time, and had told her the man she would be seeing was an Italian businessman in town to sell huge quantities of dried fruits to an American supermarket chain. He liked to experiment, so a neophyte was fine with him. Marcus had told Plum that as far as he knew, the client had no unusual proclivities and so would ease her into this new phase as uneventfully as possible. Settling on a pair of designer jeans and a white silk blouse over a chemise, she stepped into a pair of heels and surveyed the result. Not bad. Then she took a Valium.
Marcus had recently hired several new drivers, and one of them, Jerry Cakes, a retired mailman with an avuncular manner, was on duty that night. The van was parked near Shining City, and three Smart Tarts were chatting amiably in the back when Plum eased into the passenger seat. Two others were reading Anna Karenina, and a third was reading the Cliff Notes. She introduced herself as Verlaine, and Cadee, Mariah, and Xiomara/Jenna said genial hellos before returning to their conversation, which was about the difficulty Xiomara/Jenna was having in keeping her boyfr
iend from discovering that she was not really a paramedic. Plum listened to the exchange, observing the women as Jerry Cakes piloted the minivan toward the freeway. She appreciated that he didn’t try to make conversation. It surprised her that none of the others was instantly identifiable as a prostitute. Instead, these women could have been on their way to work at an auto show. Their mode of presentation was sexy, but not overly so, and Plum observed that by current decline-of-the-West standards, her new colleagues were relatively tasteful in their presentation. They were all headed to various hotels on the west side of Los Angeles, where they would do their part to grease the wheels of the world economy.
The days had gotten longer and the early evening sky was the bluish purple of a black eye as the minivan rolled south through the Sepulveda pass toward LAX. Plum was nervous, which surprised her, given the Valium she had dosed herself with an hour earlier. She realized how difficult it would have been had she not taken anything at all. Her palms were perspiring, so she rubbed them on her jeans and hoped no one would notice. Her mouth was dry, but she’d had the foresight to pack a water bottle in her purse, along with the condoms Marcus had reminded her to bring (although clients would offer to pay more were they not required to use them, Marcus insisted that his workforce practice safe sex).
Plum’s mind wandered to other times she’d traveled toward the airport. There were the trips to visit her in-laws in Wisconsin, the times she and Atlas had flown down to Mexico. They’d been to Cabo, and Puerto Vallarta, and once to a Club Med in Ixtapa. It seemed to her as if she was recalling someone else’s life. There was a lot of traffic on the freeway at this hour, and for a change she didn’t mind. Plum was in no hurry to get to where she was going.
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