by Solace Ames
He’d rather call Adriana and talk to her about the issue. They had a strange connection on a level separate and additional to sexual desire, like friendship without being friends, as if they saw each other reflected, and if he only reached out, he could grasp her hand through the mirror.
His mind was trained to find distinct forms and patterns, but what he felt for them was more like an Escher drawing, or a braid impossible to separate into single strands. Adriana evoked and satisfied his darker urges and gave him the comfort of similarity. He didn’t understand Jay nearly as well, he only loved him stupidly, like a child running off into the woods to carve hearts onto trees and rocks.
In Paul’s early life, he’d always waited to feel that touch of romance for a girl, and when it happened for a boy instead, he’d broken down...and eventually remade himself.
As he stared into the dull glow of the screen, the late night epiphany washed over him and left him no less miserable, but with some faint hope that he could remake himself again.
* * *
Graciela lived in an apartment building a lot like Adriana’s own, two stories tall and fronted with neat shrubs and cacti. But there were signs of more people here, denser living, and the outdoor corridor was grimy at the seams.
When she knocked and Graciela let her in, the smell was the first thing she noticed. It wasn’t awful, but it was powerful: rose perfume, cats, chorizo grease, that last unmistakable note wafting from the eat-in kitchen.
“You cook a lot in here?” Adriana asked. She’d brought a grocery bag packed full of bunches of spring onions which she started to unpack onto the kitchen counter.
“Not really,” Graciela said. “My abuela lives here with her friend. I’m staying till I save some money. I hope you’re not allergic to cats.” She slid the greasy frying pan into the sink and washed it. The sleeves of her purple tracksuit rode up to show spidery gothic letter tattoos. “Thanks for coming.”
“I grew up about ten blocks from here,” Adriana said, stacking the spring onion stalks into a loose triangular mound. Her family had lived in a ranch house, though, with plenty of room, and her mother was a snob who looked down on people like Graciela. If you get a tattoo, don’t came back home. I’ll change the locks. Try and see. “My parents got divorced when I was twelve, and I lived with my dad in Washington State for a while.”
They didn’t make eye contact as they spoke—it was all about the hands in the kitchen, any kitchen—but the conversation flowed naturally. The onions let off a crisp, fresh smell.
“We cut those?” Graciela asked. She was already laying out a cutting board.
“You got it. Watch me first, okay?”
Adriana set up the onions on the board, and with her second-best knife sliced off the pallid roots. Then she allowed her body to remember the pattern of motion. Hand and knife moved in a blur. Clack-clack-clack. A smooth spectrum of white to green grew apart and banded into separate colors, still in a perfect straight line, pearl to chartreuse to lime to malachite.
“Wow,” Graciela muttered.
“See how I stand? Look at my shoulders, first.”
They spent the next hour carefully deconstructing the spring onions. Adriana had brought potatoes and onions, too, and by the end of the hour, there were heaping bowls of chopped vegetables on the counter. Graciela had improved her posture and the placement of her guiding hand.
“It’s time for my shift,” Adriana said as she washed her hands. “You’re off today, got any plans?”
“My other job, that’s all. Sucks.” Graciela shrugged and made skittish eye contact. “I’ve got a baby girl in New Mexico. She’s with relatives. I’m trying to set things up so I can bring her to come live with me.”
“I’ll keep an eye out for extra shifts and run them by you first.” Adriana was happy to help. She surprised herself, even, by how happy—her mouth crooked up helplessly into a smile even though it really wasn’t appropriate. Maybe she was so used to squashing down her emotions in work mode that they sprang out all the more intensely now. An intense wave of sadness hit next, the undertow, as she imagined a little baby left behind.
“Thanks,” Graciela said. “You’re, uh, a great boss.” She busied herself at the sink quickly, not waiting for Adriana’s response.
“I try. See you tomorrow.” Adriana stepped over a rumbling tortoiseshell cat on the way out, and wished she hadn’t been so affected. She couldn’t afford to get this emotional.
She drove by her old house on the way to Sapore. There was a basketball hoop by the driveway and a flower garden by the mailbox, both new. She coasted to a halt on the opposite side of the street and stared at the house for a while, killing time, dreading work like she did too often nowadays.
Something was wrong with the future. Not that she was dying to go back to the past, back to the savage intensity of her teenage years, but the way forward kept getting murkier. She hated Jay’s insistence on job-hunting when he should be working on his master’s degree. And the thing with Paul was getting weird. She kept wanting to pick up the phone and call him, just call him and ask stupid questions.
We’ve got a strong connection.
I feel it just as much as you.
She owned a book about social skills for the workplace, and one of the chapters talked about how the surest way to create a connection was to act as if the connection were already there. Project your own reality. The advice had profoundly disturbed her, because when she looked back over her own life, all the people who’d impressed her with seemingly indefinable charisma—including some of the bad boys she’d fucked around with back in high school—had operated that way, consciously or not. It wasn’t magical. It was a technique. Psychological hacking.
Paul was probably a genius at it.
But that didn’t mean he was a bad person.
He and Jay had something strong, too. Jay, usually so articulate, couldn’t seem to find the words to talk about it. He’s hot. I liked the sex. And then shrugs and nervous grins, as if she was supposed to read all the rest in his body language, and sure, they knew each other well, but she wasn’t superhuman.
She reminded herself that the situation wasn’t going to last, anyway. Jay had said they could afford one more session, and then they had to save the rest of the money for the honeymoon they’d already postponed for two years. He’d shown her his accounting, even though it was really his money and she trusted him with it. He wasn’t as good with math as she was, but he wasn’t hopeless either.
An elderly woman with gray-shot cornrows walked out of the house and headed for the flower garden. Adriana felt a pang of guilt at spying, so she shook her head and drove off, squashing all of her vague worries back down.
No room for them on the line.
* * *
The first hint Jay had that something was wrong was a tinny thunking noise from his pocket. The other patients in the inner waiting room looked at him from the corner of their eyes until he fished out his phone and stared at it in confusion. It was playing New Order’s “Blue Monday,” but very murkily, as if someone had rerecorded the song from inside a washing machine.
Or the back of a car. Shit.
“I, um, lent my nephew my phone on the way here,” he said by way of explanation to the man sitting to his left. “Four-year-old evil genius.”
“Dang,” the man said, drawing out the word and pumping it full of sympathy.
Jay stabbed at the phone furiously, halting the music and trying to figure out the extent of Miguel’s damage. He’d jiggered with the alarm feature—
“Mr. Ramos?” A nurse called. “The doctor is ready to see you.”
He followed her down a narrow corridor. At the end of it, Dr. Patel was typing into a keyboard at a stand-up desk. “Your X-rays look good,” he told Jay without turning around.
Jay’s stomach was
tied up in knots, and every word only pulled the damn things tighter. He couldn’t trust doctors. He had to trust them, but he still didn’t. “Good? What does good mean? And hello, Dr. Patel,” he added, with belated good manners.
No greetings in return. “For a man diagnosed with Incomplete Cauda Equina Syndrome six months ago, it means amazing, astounding—” Dr. Patel whirled to face Jay, and threw his palms in the air, “—awesome!” Then he frowned, lips turning into an upside-down U. “For the average man your age, though, eh...let’s just say, if your spinal discs were Frisbees, I wouldn’t throw them to my dog. How’s the pain?”
Jay wondered how many times that joke had been delivered, ground his teeth and indulged in a brief fantasy of strangling Dr. Patel with his own stethoscope. “Since that day at the beach, zero through five. For the next refill you can give me a lower dose. I’m not taking them regularly.” He was proud of it, too.
“How about the anti-depressant?”
Jay barely kept from flinching. The phone picked that minute to go off again—Miguel must have entered mass random alarms somehow—but the only other person in the corridor was a nurse rearranging a mounted fake skeleton. At least Jay hoped it was fake. He’d heard somewhere that the Chinese government sold executed prisoners for spare parts.
He turned off the phone, which left the hallway uncomfortably silent. “I’ve got a refill left on it,” he answered in a low voice, as if the dead Chinese guy could hear him. “I’m fine.”
“Good, good, good. It’s very depressing, you know, not being able to urinate when—”
“I don’t have a problem with that anymore,” Jay said, and almost added My chart, you asshole, did you bother reading it? And what about my fucking patient privacy?
“I’ll see you next month at the MRI,” Dr. Patel said, turning back to his computer. Dismissed.
Jay stalked away, feeling as if his heart was pumping pure resentment instead of blood, saturating his muscles with it. Another patient was signing forms at the checkout counter, which gave Jay the chance to cool off. He leaned against the wall, took a deep breath, and turned his phone back on.
A call from the temp agency. Yes. He dialed back immediately. “Hi, it’s Jay Ramos returning your call,” he said in his best phone voice.
“Hi,” chimed the cheerful female tone on the other end of the line. “We noticed you hadn’t checked the lift fifty pounds box question on the intake form? Would that be a yes or no?”
Jay had been hoping he could get away with that, but his ability to screw with the system really only worked in person, when he could smile and fast talk. “Go ahead and mark the box no,” he said wearily.
“Thank you so much, Mr. Ramos.”
He hung up. The phone rang again. Wait, it wasn’t his ringtone; it was a different part of “Blue Monday.” Miguel had recorded himself singing over it. Multi-track recording. Jay didn’t even know the phone could do that. “I like to poop, I like to poop,” Miguel chanted.
Jay cut it off and deleted as many of the alarms as he could.
The nurse behind the counter looked at him strangely, but by this point, he didn’t care, he just wanted to settle up and get the fuck out. “Forty-dollar copay, right?” he asked, handing her his credit card and driver’s license.
“Actually, there’s been an issue with your insurance. The last claim came back as rejected, and it looks like your MRI isn’t going to be covered.”
He took back the cards, carefully put them back into the proper sleeves in his wallet, put his wallet in his pocket. Don’t panic. “Could you mail me the bill, please? I need to have a long talk with someone.”
She nodded. Not angry, not compassionate—she must have seen this all happen before.
He walked out into the waiting room, barely able to put one foot in front of the other. This is how you do it. One, two. I told Adriana I’d take her to Paris. Paul.
His mother and his sister and his nephew were waiting for him. He managed to navigate the outer waiting room floor. “Let me tell you what this little terror did,” he said to them, mussing Miguel’s hair.
As soon as he got home, he’d hit the phone and internet, call his lawyer, try to save something. Anything.
Chapter Eleven
The one social event Paul didn’t let architecture school swallow whole was Sex Worker Sunday Brunch. This week, it was at a café in Griffith Park. The place was a little hard to find, but it had fantastic outdoor seating.
He picked up his sandwich and cappuccino and headed to the table he was sharing with Maitresse Ebony and her friend. Light filtered down through pale green leaves and there were birds singing higher up, on the hill trails.
“Where’s Yolanda?” he asked, sitting down beside Ebony, who looked as casual as she ever got—tank top, designer jeans and low heels. “Was she really that pissed off finding out this place was vegetarian?”
Maitresse Ebony made a dismissive noise, the funny kind of hmmph she probably never used on her clients. “It ain’t easy being green,” she said. “And fuck Yolanda, she can take her ass to Outback. I like this place.”
Paul shrugged and took a sip of his coffee. “Evan’s not going to show up, either. By the way, I found a health shop on Ventura that sells cheap hemp protein powder.”
They talked heath and fitness for a while, and then Ebony gave him one of her new business cards. It had a photograph of her snarling face accompanied by her statistics: 36B/28/36, 8 inches fully functional. Transdomination by Maitresse Ebony. French twist.
“I don’t think the French twist part really works,” he said with a critical eye. “And if you decide to spring for professional photography, I can recommend someone.”
Ebony sighed. “I know. I’ve been putting that off for too long. Figured I got a steady business with my old photos. I need new stuff for my website, anyway.” She tugged her earlobe and frowned at the picture on the business card. It wasn’t awful, but the terrible beauty she was aiming for didn’t quite shine through.
“Your old ones are better.” He quickly felt the need to clarify. “I mean, your old photographer in France was better. Not that you’ve noticeably aged.” He thought about trying to recover with a black don’t crack joke, but only for half a second—their friendship probably didn’t extend to her suffering awkward racial humor from Caucasians. He changed the subject instead. “I thought about doing a website, but there’s the privacy issue. Right now, people who want to find me have to come looking, and I don’t have any full face shots. I’d rather stay at that level.”
They talked about long-term goals for a while. Finishing architecture school and moving into a career with a future, for Paul. Ebony had a surgical trip to Thailand and a new life under another name in her sights.
Like most other people who showed up to this event, they were part of the weird and sprawling middle range of sex work. Street-level people didn’t have the spare time, and the high-priced call girls who serviced movie stars had images to maintain. Paul had bonded with Ebony when he was new to the business; she’d given him a lot of tips about advertising and sexual domination. And it helped that their client bases didn’t really intersect. No competition, not even the friendly kind. Now that Evan was off in the porn world, Paul appreciated having at least one person in his life he could talk to about money and sex.
And maybe even love.
“Have you ever dated a client?” he asked.
She smiled wryly. “Oh, baby. Since I’ve been in the business, I’ve never dated anyone who wasn’t. You should know. Ain’t that how you started out?”
“But I was Evan’s client, then. And it was sort of a natural progression. We started meeting for drinks, he brought me in for a threesome...” Paul shrugged and licked some foam from his lips, remembering those hallucinatory nights in Las Vegas, the long bars with the neon colors that all s
eemed to bleed into each other. The sex was the least confusing part of that long-ago life. “I’ve been pretty good about boundaries since then.”
“I had a girlfriend when I started out. She thought she was okay with it. Turned out, she wasn’t. I never thought I’d date chasers, but I lowered my standards. Sometimes you just want to wake up next to someone all easy, you know?”
“I had a girlfriend, too. In a manner of speaking.”
“Little miss ‘call-me-slavecunt,’” Ebony said, and snorted. They’d only met once, and it hadn’t exactly gone well.
“She was a bit too gung-ho on some of the lifestyle stuff.” Paul raised an eyebrow and suppressed a smile. “I didn’t feel like going back in the pool afterwards. But things changed.”
“One of your regulars?”
“Not really. And they’re a couple.”
“Your forte.”
He started eating his sandwich while he waited for her advice.
“Do it,” she said, after a long pause. “But the boundary only opens one way. You can convert a client to a relationship, but if it goes down in flames...” She put her elbows on the table and spread her hands. Her nails were beautifully lacquered ruby, but very short. “Paul. Paul. I’m gonna take a picture and show you the dumb-ass smile on your face right now.”
“Mmm.” He put the sandwich down and looked up at the pale new leaves waving in the breeze. No more money. Whether it worked out or not. He imagined Jay and Adriana paying him, the dollar bills falling from their fingers and then losing their color, disappearing into nothingness. Nothing left between them. It felt so fucking right. “I love you.”
“I love you too, baby. I hope it lasts.” They lived in a floating world, her even more than him...and the way she looked at this moment would never sell her services. Angel-sweet, a little sad.
“You’d like them,” he said. “Maybe we’ll all meet soon.”
She whipped out her phone and took a picture.
* * *
Adriana spent most of her off day organizing the house. She wandered through the bedroom, bathroom, living room and kitchen, stacking and sorting and wiping and generally keeping herself busy so she didn’t have to concentrate on Jay falling apart over the phone, but still staying close to him.
