by Rae Meadows
“Hi there. I’m fine, thank you. Would you like to see a lady today?”
“You know who I want to see. I was wondering if you like to golf. We could shoot off to the driving range and hit a few balls. Then some dinner. What do you say?”
“That sounds lovely. Now I do have Jezebel today,” I say.
“I’m driving up from Provo right now. I could be there in forty minutes. Come on. A late-lunch-break date.”
I hope I sound cooler than I feel. I like this despite its eeriness.
“Thanks, baby, but you know I can’t,” I say. “Besides, I don’t know how to golf.” The other line rings. “Scott, hold for just a moment.”
I pick up and McCallister asks, “Did I ever tell you about the time when I went home to live with my mom after I came back from Aspen? I had no money, no job, nothing to do. It was really snowy upstate that winter. I wore this bright red one-piece pajama suit every day for four months. You know the kind with the butt flap? I slept in it, then got up and did a bong hit, layered on snow clothes and shoveled obsessively. I even shoveled out the neighbors’ cars. Then I’d go inside, transfer to the couch, my mom would make me nachos and hot chocolate, and we’d play Scrabble.”
I see that Scott has finally tired of waiting on hold and has hung up.
“Jesus, McCallister. You must have been in bad shape,” I say.
“Are you kidding? That was the best time of my life.”
I hear him exhale cigarette smoke.
“Feeling nostalgic?”
“I wish I understood why I was happy then.” “You had no worries and you had limitless timewasting activities.”
“Yeah,” he says, sounding flat and melancholy.
“So when’s she moving in?” I ask.
“Couple weeks.”
Sounds of calamitous New York City intrude through his cell phone.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“Going to my shrink.”
“Do you tell him you call me?” I ask.
“Maybe,” he says. “Sometimes.”
“Do you tell what’s-her-face?”
“No. She wouldn’t understand.”
“No, I bet she wouldn’t.”
“How are the whores?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say. “It’s a slow day.”
“How are you, Jane?”
“Fine.”
“Fine?” he asks.
“Fine,” I say.
“I think you’re being aggressively distant.”
“I think it might snow today,” I say.
I went to a therapist for a few months a couple years ago at McCallister’s urging, or more as a condition of our continued involvement. She was an older woman who worked out of her Upper East Side apartment, with soothing cream-colored carpeting, soft beige walls, and a Lithuanian doorman who used to give me a solemn smile and a slight bow because he knew who I was going to see.
I brought up my father’s drinking often because I knew she liked me to talk about it. My dad is all about control and his alcohol consumption is no exception. Scotch on the rocks, his glass perpetually filled. When my dad drinks, he becomes even more reserved.
“Absent while present,” the therapist said, nodding.
It’s not that I thought she didn’t know what she was talking about. I just dreaded going because I began to fear that all this overanalyzing of a comfortable life was a silly indulgence. Besides, I was always defending my involvement with McCallister, to the point that I conspired against her at all angles. So I quit. I told her I was moving to Seattle and then I stayed away from the Upper East Side as much as possible.
*
I meet Ember for the first time as she’s coming out of my bathroom in one of my towels. She has a slight, angular frame, wavy dark hair, and hazel eyes that are never still. When I compliment her on her coloring, she tells me she’s half Dutch, half Polynesian and pulls me over to the couch by my wrist.
“You’re not from Utah, I take it,” I say.
“Milwaukee,” she answers. “The ghetto. I was the only white girl in my junior high. My mom’s a drunk. I shared a room with my four brothers.”
Ember wears her scrappy childhood as an emblem of her exoticism and toughness. I know Ford must have been smitten as soon as she told him of her origins. Although he has talked up her beauty, I am still taken with how pretty she is. She seems an altogether different species than I am. When I talk to her, it’s as if she emits warmth that settles only on me.
Ford arrives just as Ember says, “Thanks for letting us stay with you. It’s so cool of you.”
I look at Ford but he just shrugs. I’m too tired to make it a thing and Ember’s enthusiasm makes a month seem not that long.
“You’re welcome,” I say.
Ember wraps her smooth arms around my neck. The towel falls to her waist but she doesn’t seem to care. Ford mouths “thank you” to me over her shoulder.
Ember disentangles herself from me and then sees Ford in the doorway. I leave them to their groping reunion.
chapter 5
Nikyla and Jezebel are in the lounge when I arrive at work. Nikyla is figuring out her week’s earnings on a calculator and Jezebel is curling her eyelashes while flipping through an old Cosmopolitan that has been on the coffee table since I first came in to apply.
“Men are like Slinkies,” Jezebel says. “It’s fun to watch them fall down.”
Nikyla smiles and shakes her head. “You’ll get tired of all the running around one day when you find the right one. Hey, Roxanne.”
“Hi, girls,” I say.
Kendra is talking to a client on the phone, purring with sex, surrounded by Doritos, Pepsi, and cotton candy, and she waves with one long French-manicured finger.
“Diamond is out at the airport Hilton,” Kendra says when she hangs up, gathering up her snacks. “You can call her out in ten.”
“Diamond? I thought she quit,” I say.
“She did. But she needs to get a root canal and her husband’s unemployed.”
I take Kendra’s warm seat, and when the phone rings, I quickly book Nikyla with an old-timer who lives out near the zoo. He may be her biggest fan. She says they catch up for a while, he tells her about his grandkids, then all she has to do is take off her bra and it gets him every time.
*
The late afternoon lull has left me sleepy. I’m making halfhearted progress on a crossword puzzle when the phone rings.
“I was thinking about a new idea for a script.” “Hi, McCallister,” I say.
“It’s a high school movie about a gay quarterback.” “What happened to the last one?”
“It sucks. I can’t finish it. Nothing’s working.” “I’ve heard this before.”
“Hey Jane?” he asks.
I hear the telltale Jaguar-door slam of Mohammed. “Got to go. The boss has arrived.”
Mohammed has a four-pack of toilet paper in one
hand and a bouquet of pink carnations in the other. “For me?” I ask. “You shouldn’t have.”
“We have to make things more nice around here. I was thinking about some classical music. Perhaps Chopin.” Mohammed rummages around in the back for something to put the flowers in. “We are a professional establishment,” he says, returning with a cloudy glass vase and handing it and the flowers to me.
“Next time,” I say, “maybe not pink and not carnations.” I fill the vase in the grungy bathroom sink.
“They were on special at Albertsons. A beggar cannot be a chooser.”
“Why don’t you bring over one of your rugs? That would spice things up in here,” I say.
“A rug here? Those are works of art,” he says, offended, rearranging the carnations. He opens the safe and separates the different credit card slips. “Send that new one out tonight.”
“Okay. I’ll send her to that guy who wants them to bark but doesn’t make them do much else.”
“I don’t want to hear about it,” he says, holding his hands to his ears.�
�I’m not interested in those things. Why don’t you make yourself useful and clean up the bathroom while the phone isn’t ringing? I pay you good money.”
“Now that is definitely not in my job description,” I say, going back to the crossword puzzle. “And you don’t pay me that much. The rest comes from the girls.”
Utah is cheap, but I’m still surprised at how easily I have adjusted to living on a fraction of what I used to make. My dad would be aghast that I no longer have a 401(k) or health insurance and that I actually have to punch in on an old-fashioned time clock.
Mohammed looks up to the ceiling and mutters an unintelligible plea. He straightens the old magazines on his way out the door without even a hello to Diamond, who brushes past him to the couch.
Diamond is twenty-one, petite but with D-cup breast implants, dark bobbed hair, and sullen brown eyes she lines in black. She got married a couple months ago and left escorting with a ceremonious salute. I was rooting for her. She got sporadic work as a fitness model, posing in a bikini next to exercise equipment in the back-page ads of muscle magazines, but the income hasn’t been much.
“Hey,” she says to me.
“Hey,” I say, trying to sound chipper, “nice to see you.”
She looks at me with an accusing glance then clicks on the TV. “Yeah, sure,” she says. She turns to Montel and lights a cigarette. “Is Nikyla on a date? I was supposed to meet her here.”
“Yeah. I sent her out again. She’s with ‘Randy Johnson’ at the Marriott.”
“That lucky bitch,” she says. “I wonder what he’ll buy her. Last time he took me to Victoria’s Secret and got me this sexy little nightie. I wore it on my wedding night.”
“How’s married life?” I ask, wanting to sound cheerful.
“It’s okay. It was good at first but we fight a lot.” Diamond dials one of the numbers etched on the lounge phone and orders a small pepperoni pizza. “How about you, Roxanne? Ever been married?”
“Not me.”
“Boyfriend?”
“No. Not since moving here.”
“I can’t believe you left New York for this,” she says, less wistful than disgusted.
“I needed a change,” I say.
Diamond gives a “whatever” shrug and turns back to the TV.
I don’t tell her that I left because I had started fantasizing about my own funeral. It was almost the same thing as imagining my wedding—all the people from different stages of my life in one place, all the focus on me. Old boyfriends thinking about what might have been. McCallister in the front row. It’s not that I actively wanted to kill myself but I did like that view from above.
I started with small things like giving up vitamins and vegetables, smoking alone, switching to nonlight cigarettes, not washing my hands after the subway, forgoing my seat belt and driving fast, making out with someone in a bar who had strep throat. But soon I had amassed a lethal dose of Valium. I found it calming that the option was there, that death was a possibility. I walked around late at night by myself downtown through the empty, fishy streets of Chinatown and across the Brooklyn Bridge. I avoided the dwindling, few friends who I hadn’t yet shaken loose. I felt invisible, on the periphery of existence, heading toward negligible. On my bathroom mirror I taped a fortune that read, “You can always find a way out.”
But when I heard that a friend from college had hung himself in an airport bathroom stall, the vertiginous wave I felt made me flush the drugs. I wanted to be free of the mess in which I found myself but not with such finality. I wanted to be someone who would notice the color of clouds or the tang of a Fuji apple—even if I never had before. I wanted to feel things differently.
Three days later, I drove west.
*
me from taking the job, he was glad I was sticking to the phones and I think he believed, when he was through with me, that I’d been enlisted as a conspirator. I keep his card in my wallet.
Though rattled by her session at the police station, Megan is resolved to do what she set out to do. She swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand, and it’s as if she’s won a victory for a cause, for the betterment of the little guy. Evil police. Good escorts. Mohammed would be proud.
“You made it,” I say to her.
“He’s such a jerk,” she says. “Logan acts like I could just go out and get another job or something, like I haven’t tried. It’s not that easy. I was a receptionist at a construction company down in Sandy but then I got laid off and then Eric left and took everything. Even my microwave.”
“So what do you think about tonight?” I ask. “In addition to the normal split, twenty of your take goes back to the house until the license is paid off. I assume you want to get started as soon as possible.”
Megan sits up tall to stretch out the flabby bulge of her stomach. Her eyes are glassy with alarm. Only now does it seem to hit her that she will have to get naked in front of men. There is nothing left to take care of, no more stalling. She looks to me for an answer to a question she hasn’t asked. Her tongue darts to her overlapping front teeth as if for reassurance.
“I think you’ll do just fine. It won’t be as big a deal as you think,” I say. “It’ll feel good to start making some money.” My pep talk sounds flat but it’s enough.
“Yeah. Okay,” she says.
“It will get easier,” I say. “Like with anything. I’ll start you off with a regular so you’ll know what to expect. What’s your name going to be?”
“I was thinking ‘Pamela.’ Like Pamela Anderson,” Megan laughs. “I’ll try to pretend I look like her.”
“That’s the spirit,” I say. “We’ll call you tonight if we can get you out. Seven-to-three shift. Make sure if you wear a skirt to wear pantyhose. Mohammed is pretty strict about it. Besides, it’s cold out there.”
“Okay,” she says. “I’m ready.”
Two phone lines ring at once. Megan, now Pamela, stands and hovers for a moment before turning to go. She already walks a little differently, I think, with her shoulders back, shaking her hair for effect.
When Ember calls, sounding out of breath and giddy, I immediately get caught up in the whirl of her energy.
“I heard about this place down on State Street where it hasn’t changed since the seventies,” she says. “The Tiki Lounge. It’s super old-school. You can get drinks in bright colors with umbrellas.”
“I’ve passed that place, I think,” I say.
“So? Do you want to go?”
“Tonight?”
“Yeah, with me. Come on, it’ll be fun.”
chapter 6
Driving south on State Street from downtown Salt Lake, seediness and sprawl take root as the LDS temple shrinks in the rearview mirror. There is a throwback quality to the used-car dealerships, the stand-alone Sears, and the fastfood restaurants—including the country’s first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise, with its script, light-bulbed sign. After Beehive Bail Bonds, South State Street turns into a no-man’s land of decay. In the gelid high desert twilight, it glows in dirty orange and yellow.
Ford, Ralf, Ember, and I are in the beat-up Saab Ember inherited from an old boyfriend, and as we take in the view of our adopted city, we manically chew gum, tap our feet, and chatter at each other. We blow our cigarette smoke out the car windows into the cold, late-fall darkness. Ember supplies the cocaine, which I took with remarkably little pause. I still feel let down that it isn’t just the two of us for the outing, but the drugs help.
“Hey, have any of you ever been arrested?” Ember asks as she gnaws her thumbnail. She pulls the car around a slow-moving pickup and speeds up.
“I got a minor in possession but I guess that doesn’t really count,” Ford says.
“I was caught shoplifting once,” I say to the car. “When I was fourteen.” Although I have always been deeply embarrassed by this, Ember makes me proud to offer it up.
That winter Saturday when I was fourteen, I took a bus to a local ski area and skied all day by mys
elf, working on my form, taking riskier hills, skiing better than I ever had. I was so proud of myself, so excited to tell my dad. When I got home, I found him in his den, Scotch in hand, watching the news. I ran in and announced that I hadn’t fallen all day.
“You must not have been trying that hard,” he said.
Without a word, I left. I was so angry I went to the mall and stole a lip gloss and a pack of gum. Then, emboldened, I walked into a department store and slipped a watch into my bag. Just as I stepped out the door, a security guard grabbed my arm. When my dad came to get me at the station—the police let me go with a warning about juvenile hall—I couldn’t look at him. He drove me home and to this day has never mentioned it.
“I wouldn’t tell the store people who I was,” I say, “so they had the police come and take me to the station. And then I cracked.”
Ember smiles at me in the rearview mirror.
“Jane. I never knew,” Ford says, turning around to look at me.
Next to me, Ralf is moving to the beat of a silent song. Ember reaches back and hits his knee, and he shakes his head “no” while he continues with the rhythm.
“I have a felony record,” Ember says. “In Wisconsin. I was pulled over and the cop made me stand outside in the snow on the side of the road and do those drunk-driving tests. It was so cold and he was pervy, so when he walked back to his cruiser, I packed a snowball and hurled it at him. It beaned him in the back of the head and knocked his hat off. He pulled his gun,” Ember says. She sniffs and zooms through the yellow light.
“Wow,” I say.
“That’s pretty impressive,” Ralf says to me.
Her defiance is dizzying. Now I know Ford is in love.
“Hey, you guys,” I say, with newfound gameness. “I have an idea. Let’s keep driving. There’s a strip club where I’m supposed to pass out some cards for work. It’ll be fun.”
Ember laughs and honks her horn in a short-longshort succession.
“A man goes into a doctor’s office,” Ralf says, apropos of nothing, “and the whole left side of his body is gone. He says, ‘What’s my prognosis, Doc?’ and the doctor answers, ‘You’re all right.’”
