Jake & Mimi

by Frank Baldwin

  Jake looks away, then back at me.

  “Then she says, in English: ‘Ten francs.’”

  Jake is quiet.

  “She was a prostitute,” I say.

  “Yes. A whore.”

  “What did he do?”

  “He walked away.”

  We are both quiet.

  “He told me that story the day I left for college. And he said this: ‘God doesn’t show you what you’re made of—that’s the devil’s job.’” Jake leans forward, the sleeve of his shirt brushing my bare arm.

  “When is the wedding?”

  “In a month.”

  “You met in college?”

  “Yes.”

  He looks at the wall a second, his eyes on the pennants but not seeing them. He looks back at me.

  “Ask me, Mimi.”

  My nails press through my stocking, into my knee. I can’t say a word.

  “A month ago I saw the first crush of my adolescence through a Benetton window. She was still a beauty. A week later I went back to her store at closing time. I took her for a drink, and then I took her back to her empty store.” Jake holds my eyes until he sees I understand.

  “Diane Silio was one of many, Mimi. Tomorrow it will be someone else.”

  “You have sex with them,” I say finally, my voice far away.

  “More than that.”

  I feel the blood in my head. I’m dizzy.

  “You want in, Mimi — you have to ask in. Ask me.”

  My hand goes to the top of my blouse, and his eyes follow it. I look up at him.

  “What do you do to them?”

  Jake leans toward me, then puts down his pint. He looks at me, past me, then stands and smiles.

  “You must be Anne,” he says, and reaches like a gentleman for the hand of my maid of honor.

  • • •

  I’m all caught up, finally.

  Seven o’clock Saturday evening and I sit in my office at the firm, grateful for the mountain of returns and extension forms and client reports that have kept me at my desk all day. Grateful because they’ve kept my mind off of Thursday night and Jake Teller and the question I can’t quite believe I asked him. Anne rescued me from an answer, but two nights later, as I print out and now sign this last tax return, I think again of the electric moment in the small booth just before she walked up on us. The heat in my face, the look in Jake’s eyes. I think of it and I look at the phone on my desk. His extension is seven two six. He must have accounts to catch up on, too.

  Enough. Back to work, Mimi. I pull out the Brice account binder. One last pass through it, then I’ll stop for the night. I’ll call Mark and ask him if he knows anyone who can be at my place in an hour with a bottle of wine and a Caribbean movie. Mark booked our honeymoon today, and he called earlier to say that the travel agency had given him a video and that when I see it, I’ll forget about the ceremony — and the reception, too — and beg him to elope tonight. It’ll be just the evening I need. Maybe I can even forget Thursday night.

  I open the binder and start in. Mr. Stein’s lunch with Andrew Brice will be delicate. “Dragging him from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first,” as Jake said, “without pissing him off.” I scan the stock portfolio that Brice’s father left him so long ago. An investor’s dream, really, filled with first-tier stocks that would have risen like redwoods these past three decades if Brice hadn’t cashed them in as soon as he got his hands on them. He’ll have to start over now.

  I turn to the investment scenarios we prepared. Clipped to the top of the first one is a handwritten note, and reading it, I feel the breath go out of me.

  To answer your question, Mimi.

  Tax Statutes: Volume 47, Section 38.1.

  Jake

  I look up suddenly, as if he might be in the doorway. It is empty. I sit still and listen to the soft sounds of the office — the hum of the air conditioner, the faint clicking of a keyboard down the hall. Another associate, logging weekend hours. I look down again at the note.

  The firm keeps its tax statute books in the conference room. I take the Brice binder with me and walk down the hallway. I don’t see anyone, and when I reach the conference room I find the light on but the room itself empty and quiet. It is my favorite room in the firm, smelling of wood and made cozy despite its size by the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves that line the walls, each filled with leather-bound volumes so beautiful that it’s easy to forget they aren’t classics but tax tomes. They always remind me of the gold-embossed hardcovers by my bed at home, my graduation gift from Grandma just weeks before she died.

  I walk to the shelves and run my fingers along the black spines, down one row, up the next, until I reach volume 47. I pull it out and page through the statutes, the book heavy in my hands, its pages creamy and thin, like those in a Bible. Section 35, 36, 37. Here it is — 38.1. Tucked between the pages is a page torn from a magazine. It is folded in half, then in half again, so that all I can see is the back of it — a cigarette ad. I replace the book on the shelf and walk with the folded page to the window.

  I could throw it out and let the wind take it God knows where. Not even look at it. Put an end, right here, to this… game I’m playing against myself. You’re a month from the altar, Mimi. A month. I close my eyes. Mark wrote the check for the honeymoon today. Thirteen days and twelve nights in Jamaica. A stone hot tub on a balcony on the cliffs looking down on the sea. Long walks on the white-sand beach at sunset.

  I step from the window to the conference table and sit down. I switch on a green banker’s lamp and place the folded page in its light. I close my eyes, unfold it, and smooth it with trembling fingers against the hard oak table. I open my eyes.

  A woman lies on a bed, wearing only bra and panties. A black blindfold covers her eyes, and her wrists and ankles are tied to the bedposts with white silk. In the bottom corner, handwritten in blue ink:

  The bar at the Roosevelt Hotel — 10:00 Saturday night.

  I fold the picture in half, put it in my lap, and open the Brice binder again. I turn to the investment scenarios. Three separate ones we designed, each a careful mix of blue-chippers and high-upside stocks. I try to focus on our “governing principles” — reward him in a runaway market, protect him in a slack one. A cautious approach, as Mr. Stein advised, but not a weak one. I close the binder and look at the picture again. Her lips are parted in a gasp, and each of the ties is stretched taut — she can’t move.

  I walk to the window, feeling dizzy. I look for the Chrysler Building, and there it is, to the west, its jagged metal spires sparkling in the night. I’ve always loved them. Tonight they look dangerous. I walk back through the quiet halls to my office, where I put away the binder, tuck the picture into my purse, and call Mark. I’ll be later than I thought, I tell him. Tonight won’t work. Can we have brunch tomorrow and watch the video then?

  Yes, he says.

  In the reception area, waiting for the elevator, I pull my sweater close around my shoulders. I watch the silent floor indicators light up one after another, and think of something my mother told me years ago. Men see nice girls and want to ruin them. They can’t help themselves.

  In the lobby my low heels sound loud on the marble floor. The night guard, smelling of Old Spice, opens the logbook for me and turns down the baseball game playing on his tattered transistor. I sign out and he nods kindly, then follows me with his eyes until I’m through the glass doors and into the street, the cool night air a tonic on my face. I raise my hand for a cab, and one cuts across traffic and glides to a stop in front of me. I slide inside.

  “Where to, miss?”

  Jake Teller must have been in the office this morning. He knew I’d come in and go over the presentation again.

  “Miss?”

  “I’m sorry. Eighty-third and York, please.” I’ll go home first. I’ll change and run, and then we’ll see.

  The driver’s ID tag reads NABOUSSEM. Akrika Naboussem. I watch his gloved hands on the wheel. They are leather
and tight over his skin. Like Mark’s golf gloves.

  Last night I met Mark at Vine, the wine bar around the corner from my apartment. We drank a glass of wine and then cabbed to Anne’s high-rise building at Fortieth along the water, where her Irish doorman, as Anne had arranged, led us without a word to the elevator, took us to the top floor, and then unlocked the fire door that opens out onto the roof. There, by the railing, in a chilled bucket, were two glasses and a bottle of Jordan champagne.

  Mark was overwhelmed. Stunned at the champagne, at the city spread below and all around us. I hadn’t counted on the quiet, so far up — we could hear just the wind and each other, and it was as if we had the island to ourselves. We stood close together against the wind and raised our glasses to the lights of the city and the dark, beautiful East River.

  In the cab on the way home to my place, the driver’s eyes went to the rearview mirror as Mark kissed my neck and slipped a hand between my knees. At my building Mark fumbled for the fare in his excitement. I tried to guide him to the couch, then to the floor, but he took me by the hand to the bed. He was fast with our clothes and strong inside me, and afterward, lying on his chest, I thought, Yes, I can do this. Through the years. I thought of the wedding, so soon now, of the processional, the sun filtering through the church glass, glinting off the ring resting on the soft pillow his nephew will carry down the aisle. I kissed Mark’s chest, listened to his peaceful breathing, closed my eyes and saw, very clearly, the blue eyes of Jake Teller. And I realized what I’d seen in those blue eyes in the small booth in the bar Thursday night.

  Cruelty.

  “Which corner, miss?”

  “The near corner.”

  In my apartment I change into my running clothes and then walk down the five flights and out onto the street again. It is my first run in a week and I go hard, over to the water and then down the lit river walkway. I run all the way to Twenty-third Street, touch the railing, then turn and really push myself on the return, striding, as I learned in track, leaning into the pain, letting it cleanse me. Six miles in all, and then I shower and dress in a blouse and stirrups, sweeping the hair from my forehead with a hairband, my hand on the Chanel bottle, the cap off, before I catch myself and put it back.

  It is 9:30. I’ll take the subway.

  • • •

  At Forty-second Street I rise from my seat into the crowd of passengers and follow them out the subway doors. I move with them along the platform, up the stairs, through the turnstiles, and up into the swirl of Grand Central. I cross the main terminal, with its ballroom ceiling, and walk out into the city night. Food vendors are still working the sidewalk from their wheeled carts, and the smell of caramelized nuts scents the air as I walk past the bootblacks, looking away from the last one, whose eyes go to my blouse even as he keeps up his patter and shines away. I turn north onto Madison, the crowd thinning as I pass the scrubbed windows of the delis, the well-dressed mannequins in the fine boutiques.

  Two hundred people in a church wedding. The invitations already sent out. And I walk toward the Roosevelt Hotel to meet Jake Teller. And if I close my eyes and try to imagine my fiancé’s face, I see instead Diane Silio. I see her pausing at the door of the limo and then getting inside.

  We will talk — nothing more. And then I’ll be done with him.

  In front of me now is the Roosevelt. I pass through the revolving doors into its enormous lobby. The ceiling is beautifully high, the decor that of a 1950s gentleman’s club: dark reds, velour. Gracious porters weave their luggage racks among the foreign businessmen who sit reading newspapers in deep, well-spaced chairs, all under the sharp eye of the graying concierge. On the far side, not set off from the lobby at all but a part of it, is the elegant hotel bar, intimate, the lights kept low, a handsome bartender in a chiffon shirt working the circular brass bar alone. I see couples and a few men, but no Jake Teller. I take a seat at the bar, and the bartender walks over.

  “For the lady?” he says.

  “A glass of cabernet, please.”

  In one smooth motion he plucks a glass from an overhead rack, flips it upright in front of me, comes up with a bottle of Sterling from under the counter and deftly pours out two-thirds of a glass. The wine smells of oak, of leather. The bartender takes my money to the register and returns with my change.

  “Miss Lessing, yes?” he says.

  I look at him in surprise. “Yes.”

  “For you.”

  He pulls a small envelope from his shirt pocket and lays it on the bar in front of me. He nods discreetly and walks down the bar to another customer. I look quickly around to see if anyone has noticed, feeling the deep red rising in my cheeks, then slip the envelope into my purse. I take a deep sip of wine.

  It is five minutes before I open it, keeping it in my lap as I do. Inside is a hotel-room key, and wrapped around the key is another note. I look up to see the bartender glance over from down the bar. He looks down again at the snifter glass he is drying, and I read the note.

  She will arrive in Room 740 at 10:30. The closet is less than ten feet from the bed. You will hear everything.

  I put the note in my purse, and my hands on the bar. I’m surprised at how steady they are. My nails need a coat of polish. Did I bring any, I wonder? I take another sip of wine. It is 10:15.

  I’ve always thought the soul was the seat of sex. How else could it be? You love and trust someone, and your desire springs from that. I make love to Mark because I love Mark. He’s all I need. I look out across the busy lobby to the revolving doors. I’ll walk out them and into a taxi and take it straight to Mark’s apartment. I’ll surprise him. I open my purse, take out ten dollars, and leave it for the bartender, as though to keep our secret. He nods from down the bar, then watches me stand and walk to the elevators.

  I ride alone to the seventh floor and step out into the deserted hallway. My steps barely sound in the deep carpet. At room 740, I push the key into the lock and open the door a few inches. I listen, then open it the rest of the way and walk into the room. It is empty, the blinds drawn. I turn on the light. A modest hotel room like a thousand others. By the window is a desk without a chair. In front of the desk is a king-size bed. I close the door behind me and walk to it.

  Tied to each of the four posts are strips of white silk. They lie on the bedspread, their free ends looped into loose knots. One for each wrist and ankle. I feel weak and sit down on the bed. I touch one of the ties, careful not to disturb the knot. I’ve never felt anything so soft. I try to imagine it against my wrist. Tight against it, restraining. On the pillow is a black sleeping blindfold, the kind they give you on airplanes, and next to it is a folded note.

  This morning Mark and I argued about the wedding. He wants it on video, and I don’t. He never once raised his voice, and I remember thinking that he’d never slap me, ever. Even if I deserved it.

  The clock radio by the bed reads 10:25. I walk to the closet and open the slatted doors. Inside is the chair that belongs at the desk. I sit down on it and pull the doors closed. The slats are close on one another, heavy, and block out all light. I lay my coat and purse at my feet and run my fingers over the slats. I find a hook latch and secure it. There.

  From the hallway I can hear voices. Male voices, nearing. A short laugh, the word golf, more laughter. I can picture them: stout, in heavy suits. Their voices fade, and it is quiet again. Maybe she won’t come. Some of them must tell him no.

  From far away I hear the soft ting of the elevator bell. Twenty seconds pass and now, yes, the click of the key in the lock, and the sigh of the door as it opens. Is it Jake or is it her? The door closes. Through the wooden slats of the closet comes the scent of perfume. She has come. The scent seems familiar, somehow, but I can’t place it. Her steps take her to the bed, then stop. She is looking down at the ties. Seeing them for the first time — so pretty, so severe. Feeling the chill I felt, deep in the spine, but so much stronger. Looking down at her wrists, maybe, feeling the silk on them already. Wonderin
g if she can tie them loosely or if he will notice and pull them tight. I hear the rustle of paper. The note.

  I grew up in a house with rules, and I’m set to marry a man who won’t set any. Is that it? I hear the voice of Father Ryan again… in the full knowledge that we are sinning. At the edge of my memory is something else he used to say. Something about the path.

  I listen to the whisper of her clothing as she takes off her blouse, her skirt, her shoes. Yes, the note would tell her to strip to bra and panties. To slip her wrists and ankles through the knots. Like the girl in the picture. Jake Teller will have total control. She won’t be able to move. I hear the give of the bed as she lies down. She is still for thirty seconds. A minute. I wish I could have a sip of water. The air in the closet is close and hot. In the room, too, I realize. He’s turned on the heat. He wants her warm.

  I hear the sound of the bedside phone lifted from the cradle. She is making a call? Who could she call? She’s lost her nerve. She’s calling to tell Jake Teller she can’t go through with it. She will dress and leave, and I’ll be alone. Please don’t. I hear the sound of the buttons as she dials. Silence, and then a whispered voice. A voice I’ve known since I was six.

  “Mimi, pick up. Mimi? Mimi, it’s me, Anne.” A pause. “A girl makes her own luck these days, right? I called him — Jake Teller. I’m at the Roosevelt Hotel. And you will not believe what I’m about to do. I’ll call.”

  I sit stunned. Breathe slowly, Mimi. Slowly, or she will hear. I put my forehead to the wooden slats. Through them I hear her replace the phone in its cradle. Her breathing is quicker now. She tries to slow it, to calm herself. She whispers something I can’t make out. And now I can hear, barely, the soft pull of silk. Father Ryan’s words come back to me. We can regain the path, but only if we keep it in sight. And another sound now, from the hallway, faint but clear.