“Sure. But it makes him feel superior to her. The less worthy he feels to get her, the more intimidated he is by her, the more he needs to get his power back. So he puts her down. And then....” Pog grinned evilly.
“What?” Beth said, fascinated.
“She puts a little curse on him. Every time he says or thinks that word about a woman, his dick goes limp. Doesn’t last long. But it’s very instructive while it lasts.”
“Wow. I bet.”
“Okay, I’m going to leave you with one more question. You took this job why? I mean, suppose someone had offered you a job tending bar or selling cars or doing heart transplants, assuming for purposes of argument that you could sell cars or tend bar or transplant hearts. You took this job when it was offered you. Why?”
Beth drew air over her hot throat. Then she got up and went to the fridge for two more beers. Why did she talk to these people? It was always so painful.
She hardened her voice. “I agreed to become a succubus because I felt I’d been thrown in the trash. I had no skills. Nobody would hire me. Blake gave me a bad check and clearly expected me to accept that. My kids don’t want me,” she added bleakly. “That was the hardest of all. I felt like being a sex demon for hell would be a step up. Now I would be a bad woman. A bad woman deserves to be treated the way I was being treated. Plus, if I worked for hell, I would have power. I’d be paid.”
Her eyes opened at that. Good grief, was Pog right? Was it just about money? She remembered arguing with Reg, No, I didn’t do it for the money, I did it for love, and Reg saying, He insulted your love.
Okay, it was about more than money. But it was about something other than love. At least, not about love for another person.
“I hated myself,” she confessed.
Pog drank beer and then said, “Well, let me clue you in, sugar. It’s really, really hard to do this job if you hate yourself. Impossible to do it well. Yes, there are some guys out there who will fuck you if you hate yourself—in fact, they prefer it if you hate yourself.”
“What? Why?”
“That superior thing again. They feel worthless and they hate themselves, and if they find someone who feels just as bad, they feel good about themselves when they master you. Yeah. That’s how they think. I had a pimp like that once. Boy, did he pick the wrong harlot.” She showed her teeth in an almost Jee-like grin.
“What did you do to him?”
“Never mind. Getting back to the point, you’re no use to us if you hate yourself. Can we move on from that?”
Beth stared sightlessly at the streetlight leaking in through the dirty, chicken-wire-reinforced window. Was Blake one of those men? She’d always seen through his I-am-master thing, always seen the unhappy boy inside. But she’d never reached him. Not really. In the end she’d settled for letting him feel like master all the time.
Pog snapped her fingers. “Earth to Beth. Are you ready to move on from self-hatred? We need a full-strength team member here.”
Beth couldn’t answer.
Next day, feeling somewhat heartened, Beth put on a pair of loose-fitting gym shorts, sneakers, and a tank top borrowed from Reg. Today she was going to like herself. She would check off some more guys on the incentives list. She would score for the team and she would let herself feel good about it.
No one was in the kitchen. Secretly relieved that she wouldn’t have to eat twenty-five-hundred calories at a sitting, she ignored her tummy rumble, grabbed a bottle of water, and headed for the stairs. Last time she felt amazingly good about herself, she’d been playing basketball. So maybe some practice might bring back that feeling.
As she passed through the old locker room she noticed two of the contractors sitting in the far corner, apparently on break, sharing a joint and talking quietly. She recognized her plumber and her drywall guy. They seemed to want privacy, so she didn’t let on she’d spotted them. As she went through the door out to the factory floor she realized they were talking about the incentives program.
She couldn’t resist. She hid outside the door and stretched her ears.
Nando the drywall guy was saying, “Yeah, I got laid three times since I been here.”
“Fuckin’ insane job, man.”
“Insane.”
“Which one do you like?” her plumber said.
“I like the dark one.”
Beth flushed. Well, she didn’t expect to be able to compete with Jee.
“Me, I like the big blonde.”
Nando said, “I don’t like that little one, though. She gives off this, I dunno—”
“Creepy vibe?” the plumber said.
“Yeah.”
“I mean, she’s pretty.”
“Yeah.”
“Still.”
“Yeah.”
Little one? she wondered. Which one of them could possibly be called little? They were all—
No, not all. Beth was a head shorter than the other two blondes on the team.
Red rage burst in her head. After I gave them free sex! God dammit!
She turned and stomped out to the big open factory space.
Amanda was there, lying on the floor, banging on something with her head stuck under the old ice maker next to the gas grill.
Beth ignored her. She grabbed a ball out of the drum and began dribbling, running feverishly from one end of the court to the other. “They have a lot of nerve,” she muttered over and over.
She felt scorched with embarrassment and humiliation and outrage. Nobody ever told her it was hard to have sex for money. Nobody told her there were rules. Nobody said she needed skills. Her furious tears dropped onto the floor. She ran from one basket to the other, pausing to shoot at each end, chasing misses at the same frantic pace, never stopping to re-shoot.
She found herself muttering, “If they like it, fine. If they don’t, hey. I didn’t hear anybody yelling ‘stop.’ They didn’t run away. They had orgasms, didn’t they?” She nearly choked on her tears.
She’d had orgasms, too, with both of them. Okay, they were pretty low-key orgasms, compared say with the way she messed herself when the detective kissed her in the rain-slickers closet on the ship at Navy Pier. “I thought men didn’t care about the fancy stuff. I don’t even know what that would be!”
Amanda crawled out from under the ice maker and put down whatever power tool she was using to make that ungodly noise. “Sorry, did you say something?”
Beth considered ignoring her. She wanted to run and throw lay-ups until she was exhausted, and then drink herself stupid.
“Beth?”
She stopped, the ball sweaty between her palms.
There was a reasonable way to look at this. You just changed careers and now you say you don’t think you have anything to learn? She felt stupid for losing it. She should have asked for advice from day one. She glanced at Amanda, who stood patiently looking at her.
Amanda wouldn’t make mock. She wouldn’t even give her those pitying glances Pog dished out all the time.
Beth walked over to where Amanda stood. “I was wondering, um, how it’s going with your day job?”
“Great.” Amanda put her power tool into a plastic case, folding up the cord and tying it with a bit of plastic-coated wire. “I’m working part time at a big engineering firm through a contractor. I do some of it at home, and once every few days I go downtown for a meeting or something. I’m scoring like a maniac.”
Well, there was her opening. Beth cleared her throat. “How does that work, exactly?”
“The subcontracting? Perfect. I spend a few weeks there, fuck every available man, and move on.”
This wasn’t the line of questioning Beth had planned, but her nerve was failing. “Don’t you get, well, a reputation that way?”
“Yeah, it’s great. Makes it a lot easier to figure out who’s open to me and who isn’t.” To Beth’s blank look, Amanda said, “I don’t do men who are too much work. Maybe back in the seventeenth century when we still had infrastructure to
support buying souls, I’d have bothered with completism. You know, nailed every guy in the company. But that kind of old world craftsmanship has disappeared in the Regional Office. It just isn’t worth it any more. Volume, that’s the ticket.”
“So everybody at your company knows you put out.”
“Sure.” Apparently Amanda couldn’t think of anything better than being known far and wide as a slut.
Unable to put that thought into words, Beth said, “Do they pay you?” Dumb question. The Regional Office paid her.
“Some do.” Amanda twiddled a spigot on a length of new copper tubing. “What I tell them is, ‘Here’s the deal. When we’re done, if I want to charge you, you pay me. If I don’t want to charge you, it’s free. If it’s good enough—like if I learn something new—I’ll pay you.’”
“Wow, do you ever pay them?” That sounded crazy.
“Sometimes. If they show me something new.” The copper tube hissed. “Or if I just like them. Besides, it goes the rounds of gossip. Then the competition gets really fierce. Everybody wants to fuck me and they all want to get me to pay them for it.”
Repulsed, Beth shivered. “That’s—that’s sick.” Then she saw it from Amanda’s viewpoint, finally. “But it’s brilliant.”
“Thank you.” Amanda smiled an unusually sweet smile. “That means a lot, coming from you.”
Beth was startled. “From me? why?”
“You’re like the team conscience. If we want to know how mortals would think about something, you’re the one who knows. After a while in the life, we get out of touch. Oh, relax,” Amanda said, giving Beth a thump on the shoulder that half knocked her over. “You need reasons to like yourself.”
Her conversation with Pog came back to her, and Beth hung her head. Then she remembered Nando and the plumber complaining about her in the locker room.
Amanda pushed a switch on the front of the ice maker and it started to hum.
At least she isn’t making fun of me. Come on. Ask her. “I don’t have a lot of reasons to like myself today.”
No response from Amanda. She opened the ice maker’s front hood and stuck her head in.
Beth was offended. This is my worst high school nightmare. I’m having a meltdown and nobody cares. On the other hand, this was Amanda. Amanda dealt in facts.
She swallowed her hysteria and told her roomie exactly what she had overheard. “Now what do I do? I can’t help with the incentives program if they won’t hav-ave se-ex with me.”
Amanda got a wrench from her tool box and did something to the copper tube.
That offended Beth even more. This is not what girlfriends do when you’ve been wounded to the heart. Girlfriends tell you it’s all his fault. They comfort you. She raised her voice.
“I thought men weren’t fussy!” she wailed. “I thought they would take any kind of sex! Now it turns out I’m a failure in bed as well as a failed wife and mother! What am I doing wrong?” She burst into uncontrollable sobs and covered her face. “Maybe that’s why that detective wouldn’t do the main event with me! Because I’m b-bad at se-se-e-ex to-oo-oo!”
Even as her voice rose, her emotion began to settle. It was a little embarrassing. Twenty-eight years of marriage and motherhood had given her worse nightmares than this. Beth lowered her hands and looked reproachfully at her athletic roomie.
At last Amanda sent an apologetic glance over her shoulder. “Look, that stuff doesn’t fly with me. Maybe you can get Reg to make a fuss over you when you try on all that girlie shit, but—” She shook her head.
“What do you mean, that girlie sh-stuff?” Beth demanded, affronted anew.
“All that manipulative shit. ‘You ought to know what to say to me right now. Blah blah blah.’ Pog has patience with it sometimes,” she offered.
Beth peeled a paper towel off the roll on the floor beside Amanda and blew her nose. “What am I supposed to do? Talk like a man?” For a moment she saw Amanda as a man, a big curvy gay man maybe, with no sympathy for someone’s feelings.
“Just tell me what you want. Do you want to know how to do quickie sex so men like it?”
“Is that what a man would ask?” Beth said waspishly, although she direly wanted to ask just that.
“That’s what a smart person would ask.”
With a big sniffle, Beth said, “Okay. How?”
“I take it you got through twenty-eight years of bad marriage by doing whatever your ex-husband wanted?”
Blowing her nose again, Beth nodded.
“That strategy won’t work when you’re a succubus.” Amanda looked at her as if over an invisible pair of half-glasses.
Beth nodded.
“You want to be in control at all times. The last thing you want is some guy getting the idea he’s boss.”
“Can that happen?” Beth said. “In movies like—”
“The Witches of Eastwick, yeah, yeah, I know. That was a sex demon, all right. But you may remember he didn’t come or go when he was told. They just thought he did. He was also a big crybaby. Got involved with the women he was fucking. He started caring too much. If he didn’t care, he’d have shrugged and moved on when they rejected him. Think of them that way and it may help.”
“What way?” Beth frowned. “Men are big babies? This is news?”
“It may take some mental adjusting if you’re trying to fuck them at the same time,” Amanda reminded her.
Thinking of Blake as a big baby had only worked when Blake wanted to be babied. Her actual babies had walked all over her, too, come to think of it. “I don’t think that idea is going to work for me,” Beth said firmly.
“Well, okay,” Amanda said.
“What do you recommend?”
Amanda nodded and put her wrench down and turned to face her, as if satisfied that Beth had finally quit with the girly shit. “First of all, you pick somebody who won’t give you any trouble. Me, I don’t bother with alpha males. Jee’s into that whole battle-for-dominance thing. Screw that. I have a job to do, I don’t want drama on the side.”
“No drama.” Beth started a checklist in her head.
“The guy I fuck is probably shorter than me. He probably doesn’t have a girlfriend—”
“So you do have morals!” Beth blurted.
Amanda looked at her exactly the way a cat would look if she’d asked it to spell antidisestablishmentarianism. “If he has no girlfriend, then he probably hasn’t been laid in a while. He hasn’t exactly given up hope, but he has no expectation of scoring with someone who looks like me. And he’s horny enough to be looking at me when I send out my ‘Let’s go out the back door of this joint and do it up against a wall’ signals.”
Beth tried to picture signaling all that, maybe by semaphore. “And you say girly shit is complicated?”
“Really, they’re not complicated. You ever have a dog?”
In dread and fascination she admitted, “When the kids were little we had a black lab.” Blake had wanted the kind of dog they put on bumper stickers about Martha’s Vineyard.
“So you know how you tell it to get out of the kitchen and it goes and lies down with just its nose across the doorway? And you point and say, ‘No.’ And it watches you, because, who knows, you might change your mind.”
Beth smiled. “Oh. Yes.”
“Well, then.”
Suddenly Beth could exactly picture Amanda giving out those signals. Nice little man in the kitchen, his arms full of other people’s dirty dishes, catches her eye and can’t believe she’s saying, walkies? Amanda wouldn’t play head games with him. She would just send that kind, unemotional, unmistakable message, and he would come trotting after her.
Now we get to the hard part.
“So what about the sex? Apparently I’m flunking that,” Beth said, trying not to sound hoarse.
“Same thing, really. When you meet a dog on the street, first, you make friends. Then, if he hasn’t been trained to ignore strangers or snarl at them, he tells you what he wants. Scratch b
ehind the ear, maybe a scritch on the tailbone, maybe a tummy rub? No need for some long sensitive conversation with a glass of pink fucking zinfandel on the side. Just like a dog, he sends out signals. You don’t try to bellyrub an ear-scratcher.”
“I guess I’m not good at reading the signals,” Beth confessed.
“There’s only like four basic moves. BJ, hand job, front fuck, ass fuck.” Amanda shrugged. “You can ask them. I’m not into all the yakkity-yak myself.”
No, she wouldn’t be.
“What about the—the creepy vibe Nando was talking about?”
“That the cute little short guy with the tattoo behind his ear?”
Beth was amazed that Amanda knew them by name. “Yes. I mean I didn’t see his tattoo.”
“He’s picking up on you not being comfortable with the job.”
Another light bulb went on. Amanda knows them by name. She notices things about them. When Beth did the plumber, she’d been high on basketball and team endorphins. She’d barely seen him. When she did Nando, she didn’t have sex with Nando. She’d just had sex.
Suddenly she realized she’d been going at this job like a woman forced to remove a flattened skunk from her driveway—with a shovel, at arm’s length, holding her nose.
Yeah, she conceded, I suppose it’s possible a guy might notice that.
Men were people. They had feelings. Or, if you looked at it the way Amanda did, they were dogs.
That probably helped if you were a dog-lover.
“Can we talk about this again?” Beth said. “I promise I won’t cry all over you next time.”
“Anytime.” Amanda turned back to the ice maker without another word.
That evening, Pog made them log another report. Amanda and Jee complained bitterly, but Beth felt a fluttering excitement: her second quota report to the Regional Office! As she listed off the men she had tempted or downright incentivized since her last report, she began to feel more like a team member and less like a charity case. One of these days, she might even get paid.
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