Songs of Innocence hcc-33

by Richard Aleas

  When someone dragged the door open, I didn’t even look up, just sat with my face in my hands, my head swathed in the towel. I heard steps, then the creak of a bench as someone sat, a pair of slippers being kicked off. The hiss of another dipperful of water landing on the stones. Then Grace’s voice, soft as before, but this time in an exaggeratedly seductive purr: “Mickey. I was hoping you’d come.”

  And a man’s voice replied, a voice I knew, a voice that brought the temperature of my overheated blood from a hundred-something to absolute zero.

  “It’s midnight,” Miklos said, in his heavy Hungarian accent. “Where else would I be?”

  Chapter 18

  I kept my head down, tried to angle my body away. I heard more footsteps, lighter ones, crossing the room.

  When Grace spoke again, she was next to me, apparently sitting on the ground, her voice at the level of my waist.

  “Mickey, Mickey. I didn’t mean I was hoping you’d be here. I knew you’d be here. I meant I was hoping you’d come.”

  She said this as though it were the height of wit, and Miklos rewarded her with a laugh.

  “So make me come,” he said. “If you’re so worried about it.”

  I heard the brush of fabric against fabric—a towel unwrapping—and then the oldest sound in the world, the stroking of flesh against flesh. “Oh, that’s nice, that’s good,” Grace murmured, as if she were talking to a pet, a well-behaved puppy perhaps. “That’s lovely.” The slow strokes quickened. And then she stopped talking, most likely because her mouth was full.

  “Boy,” Brian said, and it took me a second to realize he was talking to me, “you’ll want to watch this. You might learn something.”

  I didn’t turn, I didn’t look, and the three of them must have thought it was because I was embarrassed or a prude. Let them. Maybe Grace could’ve taught me something, you never know—but I didn’t need to learn it, not if it meant giving Miklos a chance to see my face.

  I stood up, walked to the door. Facing away, holding the ends of the towel in my fist, keeping my head covered. But I needed both hands to push the door open, and as I pushed I felt the towel go, sliding down around my shoulders.

  There was a bad moment when the rhythms of fellatio halted and I thought maybe Miklos had stopped her, had gotten up, that he’d recognized me from the back of my head and now was standing behind me, was reaching out for me with those enormous hands. The heat felt stifling suddenly, the darkness frightening, the dim orange glow hellish. And the door just wouldn’t open.

  But Grace had apparently only been taking a breath, because the sounds resumed, and with one more firm shove the door did open. I stepped outside into the cooler air, swung the door closed, and fought to slow my racing pulse. I was tempted to run, to grab my clothes and get the hell out—but I knew that for all the danger I was in here, it wasn’t clear that I’d be better off on the street. Some choice: Miklos or the cops. At least the cops wouldn’t shoot me on sight—probably. But the cops could and would put me in jail. And that might just be a deferred death sentence if anyone in there with me owed Miklos a favor. It would only take one.

  I put my glasses back on and walked to the front desk as calmly as I could. The woman looked up at me, smiled. “Have you changed your mind?”

  “Yes,” I said. I picked up a brochure from a stack on the desk, flipped through it looking for something that might keep me out of his sight. Hydrotherapy room? No way to be sure he wouldn’t walk in. Salt scrub? The scrub rooms all seemed to be communal here. Then I came to the page for facials. “How about this?”

  She looked where my finger was pointing. Cucumber Facial. The photo showed a woman with her entire face covered with a green paste. Each eye was covered with a cucumber slice and her hair was bound up in a towel.

  “That’s for women only. For men we do this one.” The woman traced her finger down the list till she came to an item labeled Mud Mask. A male model was getting it done to him in the photo and you sort of assumed he had chiseled features because what male model doesn’t, but you couldn’t tell with mud covering him from hairline to throat.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “When would you like it?”

  “Now,” I said.

  She held her palm out toward me again, and I started counting out twenties before she even named the price. One hundred twenty dollars. My money was going fast.

  She walked me around the short wall behind the desk to the front of the adobe meditation dome. She knocked once, opened the door and peeked in. It looked like a larger version of the sauna, only better lit and at room temperature. Over her shoulder I saw a woman catnapping against the wall. “One moment.” She stepped inside and closed the door behind her.

  I looked around. The spa was basically one large room with open lines of sight everywhere. I could see the front of the igloo from where I was standing and anyone coming out of it would be able to see me. I turned away. How long would it take for Grace to deliver on her promise? Would this be the start of an evening’s fun for the three of them or was it just a midnight quickie?

  I heard a scraping sound then and saw the sauna’s heavy wooden door begin to swing outward. I didn’t wait to see who was coming out. I opened the door to the meditation room and went in.

  “James,” the woman from the front desk said. “I was just going to get you.” The woman who had been catnapping was awake now and on her feet. She looked about seventeen years old. “This is Lisa. She’s going to be your therapist.”

  “Great,” I said. “Can we get started?”

  “You need to relax, James. Let your stress go.”

  I managed a weak smile, tried not to let my panic show.

  “This is going to feel wonderful, James. Take your time and enjoy it.” She said something in Korean to the other woman, who nodded.

  Lisa moved slowly, painfully slowly, getting things set up. I kept waiting for the door to burst open and for Miklos to come in, one arm around Grace’s waist, laughing. I pictured him taking a moment to recognize me, but only a moment—and then the violence would begin.

  “Lie down,” Lisa said. Her accent was thick.

  They’d laid out a sheet of plastic on the ground with a folded-up towel for a headrest. I lay down on it. Lisa took a plastic bowl out of a cabinet while the woman from the front desk finally left the room. I took my glasses off and slipped them in my pocket again.

  It took forever for Lisa to settle down beside me and stir the mixture in the bowl to the consistency she wanted. I kept glancing toward the door each time I heard a footstep outside. I didn’t feel safe until Lisa started painting the cool mud onto my cheeks and forehead. One wide swipe of the brush and my nose vanished, another and my chin was gone, a third erased my brow. Within a minute, I was covered completely. My own mother, rest her soul, wouldn’t have known me. My racing pulse finally began to slow.

  And the mud felt good, soothing where the pepper spray had burned.

  “How long?” I asked. A bit of the mud oozed into my mouth and I spat it out.

  “Half hour,” Lisa said. “You want shorter?”

  “Longer,” I said.

  “Hour?”

  “Two hours.”

  “No more than ninety minutes,” she said. “Bad for your skin.”

  “All right,” I said. “Ninety minutes.”

  I thought for a moment that she might have left the room, it was so silent. But then I felt her hand on me, first the pressure of her palm on my thigh, then her fingers snaking between the folds of my robe.

  I reached down, caught her wrist, gently extracted it.

  “You don’t want special massage...?”

  I probably couldn’t have gotten aroused anyway—fear and fatigue are better than saltpeter for killing the libido. But that wasn’t the main reason I didn’t let her proceed, nor was it a principled objection to paying for sex. If I hadn’t faulted Dorrie for selling it, I could hardly fault men for buying it. But if you were going to, you had to ha
ve the cash to pay for it—and unless it was included in the price of the mud mask, I didn’t.

  I patted her hand, said “Thank you, no” like the well-brought-up young man I was, and focused my attention on getting ninety minutes of desperately needed sleep.

  An hour and a half of unconsciousness doesn’t refresh you unless you were really running on fumes beforehand, but I had been. I woke to the sensation of a wet sponge delicately removing the mud from my face. Someone was kneeling behind me, Lisa presumably; my head was in her lap. She worked the corner of the sponge into the crease between my nose and my upper lip. She was very thorough.

  “Thank you,” I said, when my lips were clean. And then, because I needed to know: “Let me ask you something.” She bent forward and her face loomed over mine. Lisa. “Is Miklos still here? Big man. Big hands.” I gestured at my own hand, tried to illustrate the concept of ‘bigger.’ “He was here earlier—”

  “No,” she said. “Gone. Long time.”

  “You’re sure.”

  She nodded. “He never stay long.”

  “He comes every night?”

  “Yes. I think he pick up money. From Miriam.” Her voice was suddenly guarded. “Why? Friend of yours?”

  I knew from her tone where she stood.

  “No,” I said. “He’s not my friend.”

  “Good,” she said. She paused. “He’s not good person.”

  “Lady,” I said, “you’ve said a mouthful.”

  When Lisa finished cleaning me up, I cautiously stepped out into the main room. The lights were even lower than before; some of the candles had gone out and one or two were guttering. There was no one in sight. I looked in the sauna, and it was empty. A clock on the wall said it was almost two in the morning. I was sure there were a dozen beautiful girls on call somewhere, just like Julie had said, but for now I had the place to myself.

  That made the first priority taking a shower, my first in days. I hung my robe on a hook, turned the knobs under one of the showerheads, and ran my arms and legs under the spray, trying to keep the bandages around my torso as dry as possible. I wrapped a towel around the bandages and soaped myself down, felt relief as sweat and grime sloughed off me. They had a small table set up by the showers with various amenities—Q-Tips, cotton balls, mouthwash, toothpaste, disposable razors. I brushed my teeth, spat the residue on the tile floor, watched it swirl into the drain. I gargled, spat.

  I unwrapped a razor, shot a handful of foam into my palm and lathered up. The mud mask had softened my skin and the stubble came off easily. I shaved twice, once with the grain and once against it. Then I eyed myself in the mirror over the table, ran a finger through my hair. It wasn’t especially recognizable—it wasn’t like Steve Martin’s shock of white, or a mullet, or anything else you could easily describe in an APB report, but it was mine and I was sure they’d found a way to describe it. And unlike the rest of my appearance it was one thing I could easily change. I wondered briefly if they had any hair dye around here—but it was a spa, not a salon, and with a principally male clientele, I couldn’t imagine they’d have much demand for it. Then I remembered the man who’d exited the steam room when I’d been getting my tour, the one with the shaved head.

  Well, if I wanted to look different.

  I found Lisa, back in the meditation room. I asked her if they had any scissors, made scissor gestures with my hands. She returned a minute later with two pairs, one a miniature from a manicure set, the other a pair of barber’s shears, the sort with the extra curved bit that hooks onto your pinky. I took them both.

  Standing in front of the mirror, I lifted my hair in fist-fuls, cut it off as close to the scalp as I could. When I was done, I looked like a cancer survivor halfway through chemo. I hid the patchwork clumps of stubble under a thick layer of shaving cream, unwrapped a new razor, and went at it with slow, careful strokes.

  I’d never shaved my head before. You can say all you like about Michael Jordan making it sexy, and before him Yul Brynner and Telly Savalas, but on me it looked terrible, and not just because I kept nicking myself. Halfway through, I wished I’d never started. But it was a little late to back out then.

  I stuck my head under the shower, washed off, looked in the mirror and attacked the few spots I’d missed. When it was done, I toweled off, slapped on some lotion, and turned away from my reflection. This wasn’t about beauty. This was about survival.

  I looked at the clock again. Half past two. Still lots of time to kill.

  I went into the steam room. My lenses fogged up immediately and when I took my glasses off it was no better—I couldn’t see anything through the thick white mist. But that was good. It meant no one else who might happen to walk in at three or four or five in the morning could see me either.

  I settled in. I’d stay as long as they’d let me. I wasn’t bothering anyone, they had more than two hundred dollars of my money, the place was empty—they had no reason to kick me out anytime soon. And when they finally did, I thought, running my palm along my strange, naked scalp, when I showed my face on the street again, I wouldn’t be showing the same face the cops were looking for. It’d take two looks, not one, to recognize me.

  It wasn’t much. But it would have to do.

  Chapter 19

  The Food Emporium was where I’d been told to expect it. I looked around at all the buildings along Second Avenue as the cab pulled up to the corner. Lots of three-and four- and five-story holdovers from the turn of the century—the previous century—when this whole area, the east fifties near the river, had been an Irish slum. Back before the El came down, back before John D. Rockefeller bought up 17 acres of land that had once held slaughterhouses and, with no sense of irony whatsoever, donated it to the United Nations to use for their headquarters, certainly long before Stephen Sondheim and Katharine Hepburn and Kurt Vonnegut had decided the little buildings would make quaint and comfortable private residences, they’d been home to brawling generations of workingmen and their mates. Hints of this history still lingered—on this one block alone, a man with a taste for whiskey could bend an elbow at Jameson’s or Murphy’s or Clancy’s or the St. James Gate Publick House. Or he could buy microgreens and ten flavors of mustard at Food Emporium. You pick your poison.

  I was wearing a new shirt—two new shirts, actually, a button-down in white polyester over a cotton wifebeater, each only $4.99 at the import/export store closest to Vivacia. I’d dropped my old shirt in a cardboard vegetable box that was waiting for garbage pickup at the curb and stepped out into the street to flag down the first cab I’d seen. It was just past noon. I’d managed to stay at Vivacia till the lunch-hour crowd began showing up; by the time the staff had started hinting I’d overstayed my welcome it had been time for me to leave anyway. I’d snatched a bit more sleep in the meditation room in the early hours of the morning, and though I wasn’t well rested, exactly, I felt as though I ought to be able to face the day.

  But the first thing I saw when I stepped out of the cab shot that all to hell.

  It was a newspaper vending box, the front page of today’s New York Post staring at me through the glass. Me staring at me, I should say: They’d dug up my mug shot from when I’d been arrested on suspicion of murder three years back. The headline next to my face said “gay slay?”

  The Daily News, in the box immediately to the right, had gone with “killing on carmine street.” Their article began on the cover, and phrases from it jumped out at me: ...the victim, Jorge Garcia Ramos, 27, of Jackson Heights...found after an anonymous 911 call tipped police off...Blake, 31, has a record of two prior arrests...viciously slain...

  I dropped a quarter in the Post box, pulled out every copy in there, seven or eight of them, and then took the one clipped to the inside of the glass as well. I dumped them all in the garbage can at the corner, taking care to make sure they landed face down. Then I went back and did the same with the News. It was a futile gesture, even a dangerous one, because what if someone had noticed me doing it an
d wondered why, but I did it and it made me feel better. Stupidly. There were hundreds of these boxes around the city. I couldn’t empty them all.

  At least, I told myself, I’d had a full head of hair in the photos they’d run. And my old glasses, with the thicker, darker plastic frames. Now I wore sleek little wire rims and had a shaved head, and nobody could possibly tell I was the same person they’d read about over their corn flakes and toast. Jesus.

  The sidewalk was packed, swarming with office workers on lunchtime errands, and every face I looked in looked back at me with what I was suddenly sure was a knowing stare, as if they were all mentally comparing me to the mugshot they’d seen in the paper. I tried to keep my face averted; but how, in a crowd like this? A woman walked past, talking furtively into her cell phone, and I couldn’t help the paranoid impression that she was talking about me, telling an eager 911 operator where I could be found. I ducked into a payphone, grateful for the small degree of privacy its narrow metal walls afforded, and dialed the phone number I’d gotten from Rodeo the night before. It rang three times before a woman said, “Hello?”

  I struggled to remember the name I’d given last night. I couldn’t. “I have an appointment with Sharon at one,” I said.

  “Is this Douglas?” Douglas. That was it.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Where are you?”

  “Right here,” I said. “At the Food Emporium. Where the woman I spoke to said I should—”

  “On the payphone?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I need you to turn around, honey.”

  I turned, reluctantly. The building across the way had sixteen windows. No telling which one she was in. No telling who might be looking out the others.

  “All right,” she said after a pause that probably lasted less no more than a few seconds but felt endless. “You’ll go to 260 East 51st, ring the bell for 1FW.”

  “1FW,” I said.