Reparations

by Stephen Kimber

  Earlier tonight at Monique’s, a couple of fellow Cabinet ministers had again encouraged him to call the dispatcher. “Just fucking tell them to send a car over to Monique’s,” Whitey suggested helpfully when Ward announced he was leaving. “They know the fucking way.” The four men and one woman seated around the kitchen table playing cards guffawed loudly. Especially Monique.

  “Tell them to send Sergeant Fralick,” she said. “He’s a real gentleman.”

  The weekly card game at Monique’s had been an end-of-Cabinet-day ritual since the Liberals came to office in 1970. The Tories probably did it too. When Ward was first elected, the idea of being caught in the house of Halifax’s most notorious madam would have frightened Ward, but he quickly came to realize there was almost no danger. Whenever the cops did raid her place, which was no more than once a year, one of Monique’s good—and well-paid—friends on the vice squad would telephone a few hours in advance so she could shoo any clients out the door, relocate her girls to safer accommodations in one of the apartment buildings she owned and make sure all her carefully maintained business records were hidden in the secret storage room behind a living-room bookcase. The bookcase was filled with rare, first-edition books, many classics. Monique claimed to have read them all. Ward believed her.

  Monique had arrived in Halifax from Montreal shortly after the war began. She’d found work in a waterfront brothel that catered to the roughest of the rough merchant navy trade. By the end of the war, she had her own place, a half-dozen girls working for her and a more genteel and better-heeled clientele. She paid bellhops at the finer hotels and baggage handlers at the railway station to direct inquiring visitors her way, offered a commission to any taxi driver who brought her customers and, of course, made sure the higher ranks in the city police department and all the top politicians knew they were welcome to sample her wares. Many did. Her girls were all good looking. And clean. Doc Wilson examined them before they were allowed to start working and he made weekly house calls to check for venereal diseases and any other medical complaints.

  Why hadn’t he asked Monique to get him a girl? Ward wondered. And why had he said no to calling for a cop-cabbie? Why was he here, drunk and picking up a street hooker? Why wasn’t he home in bed with . . . well, he and Victoria were no longer sleeping in the same bed.

  They had had one of their “conversations” this afternoon.

  “Hello?” Hopeful. Her.

  “Hi.” Pretending she’d be happy to hear the sound of his voice.

  “Oh, hi.” Disappointed.

  “Looks like I’m going to be late again,” he said, trying to sound disappointed too. “Long day in Cabinet. Just got back to the office, and there’s this mountain of messages and files to deal with.”

  “That’s fine.” She sounded relieved. “Should I save you dinner?”

  “Don’t worry about me,” he said. “I’ll get Sue Anne to send out for sandwiches, or I’ll pick up something on the way home.”

  “Fine.” She let that hang.

  “Well, okay then.” He tried to find a way out. “Guess I’d better get to it. Listen, kiss the girls for me. Tell them I’ll see them in the morning.”

  “I will.”

  “Don’t wait up.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Okay. Bye.”

  “Bye.”

  They used to make a point of ending their conversations with exchanged love-you/ love-you-toos. They didn’t do that any more. Sometimes, he thought it was because she was no longer the free spirit he’d fallen in love with. But he wasn’t much fun either. When Ward told her he had a lot of work left to do, he’d been telling the truth. There was always more to do than hours in a day.

  Perhaps it was just Fisheries. If he wasn’t meeting with this inshore fishermen’s group or that offshore lobby, he was under siege from a fledging aquaculture association or an oil exploration consortium. And from Junior, of course. Junior called him two or three times a week. With this scheme or that problem. Everybody had a problem. The problem was they couldn’t agree on what the problem was, let alone the solution. They did agree Canada needed to declare a two-hundred-mile coastal management zone around its perimeter, but that wasn’t something Nova Scotia could do on its own. The fishery was one of the few areas where Ottawa and the provinces shared jurisdiction. Which meant even more meetings with his federal counterpart.

  “You work too hard,” Whitey would tell him. Whitey was Daniel James White, the Minister of Sport, who represented a Cape Breton riding. All the Cabinet ministers sported nicknames. “Makes you feel part of team,” Whitey explained when they met for the first time after the election. “What’ll we call you? Wardy? Justy? We could call you Ward Heeler, I guess . . . Great fucking nickname for a politician. But too long. Justy . . . that sounds just right. That’s what we’ll call you. Too bad our fucking Famous Seamus didn’t appoint you Justice minister. Oh well, next time.”

  Whitey lived his job. He kept a running tab at Chez Henri for wining and dining. It was supposed to be just for Sports Department business, but Whitey believed his pleasure was Sports Department business. He travelled a lot, too. Wining and dining as he went. In the first six months of the new administration, he’d visited every Canadian Football League city except Regina—“Who the hell goes to Saskatchewan?”—to lobby for a Canadian Football League franchise for Halifax. And spent a week in Las Vegas trying to decide if Nova Scotia should allow casinos. He’d covered his seven thousand dollars in gambling losses with a receipt for a lobster banquet he hadn’t staged for the Vegas Chamber of Commerce. And he’d journeyed to the Turks and Caicos for two weeks of sun, sand and an occasional meeting with government officials to discuss the province annexing the Caribbean islands. Which justified the trip as a business expense. Whitey was all business. “The Yanks got fucking Hawaii, so why the fuck not?”

  Fuck—in all its motherfucking permutations and combinations—was Whitey’s favourite word. Ward marvelled at how he managed to make “fuck” every second word in private conversation and then, effortlessly, switched to his Sunday-school manners the moment he found himself in a public forum or with someone shoving a microphone in his face.

  Whitey had been walking away from a post-Cabinet scrum with some reporters this afternoon when he’d spotted Ward walking back to his office. He caught up with him. “What say, Justy my lusty trusty, you handsome young fuck, you? Monique’s at nine?”

  Ward really did have too much work to do. He was meeting with the federal minister tomorrow to talk about next year’s fish quotas. And Junior was coming in the afternoon to ask for his support in some scheme to lease a factory freezer trawler. Ward shouldn’t spend tonight hanging out at Monique’s. He looked at his watch. Nine o’clock? Four hours from now. Surely, by then, he’d have accomplished everything he was going to get done? He could go home after that, of course, but what was there at home?

  “Sure, why not?”

  Monique’s was always fun. After a Cabinet meeting, half the government’s front bench would end up in Monique’s kitchen. Some came for the girls. One night a few months ago, Whitey had walked out of one of the girls’ bedrooms and into the kitchen, wearing nothing but his socks and shoes, his ubiquitous fedora and a satisfied grin. He was chewing on an unlit cigar. “What the fuck you lookin’ at?” he demanded, taking in the suddenly silent group sitting around the table. “This a fucking card game or what? Deal me in and stop your fucking gawking. What’s the matter. You never seen a big dick before?”

  “I never seen one yet,” Monique replied, to hoots and hollers from the men. “Sit down, Whitey, and take a load off.”

  He grinned back at her. “Already shot my load, thanks.”

  Ward had never been with one of Monique’s girls. Neither, he guessed, had most of the others in the room. Monique’s was a place you went to say you’d been there, and let people imagine whatever they wanted. It a
dded a certain macho mystique. The truth was that Ward hadn’t been with any woman, including Victoria, since before the election. Until tonight.

  “The works,” Ward answered finally. “I’ll have the works.”

  The girl opened the door, got in the car, glanced over at Ward, did a double take. So did Ward. She was coloured! He panicked? It seemed worse somehow. He’d never even imagined having sex with a—should he send her away, tell her he’d changed his mind?

  “Why don’t you just drive around that corner up there?” she instructed. “There’s a parking lot. We can have some privacy.” She wasn’t looking at him now. She was staring straight ahead out the front windshield and into the snow void swirling in the car’s headlights. She was younger than her world-weary voice seemed to suggest. Late teens or early twenties, he thought. And her face in profile was beautiful. He drank in the contours of her body as she shrugged off her jacket.

  “Nice car.” He didn’t tell her it was one of the perks of his position. “At least it’s warm in here,” she said. She waited. He didn’t move. “Are you okay?” she asked finally.

  “Yeah, yeah. Sorry,” he said. He put his foot on the gas, felt the tires spin, grab the pavement; the car lurched forward.

  “In here,” she said, pointing to what he assumed must be the entrance to the deserted parking lot. It wasn’t. The car bumped up over the curb. “Sorry about that,” she said. “It’s hard to tell in all this snow.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “You can stop anywhere. I don’t think we’re gonna be disturbed tonight.”

  He stopped the car, put it in park and left the engine running.

  “Let’s get the money out of the way first,” she said. “That way we won’t have to think about it later. It’s like I said. Twenty dollars. For everything. “

  Ward reached into his back pants pocket, pulled out his wallet. It was fat with cash. He’d been to the bank before the Cabinet meeting this morning to withdraw the four hundred dollars cash he allowed himself for spending money each month. He should have taken the twenty out of his wallet before he drove down here. What if she decided to rob him? There was no turning back. He pulled two tens out of his wallet, handed them to her and quickly shoved the wallet back into his pants.

  The girl took the money, slipped it into a pocket of her jacket. She turned around then and looked into the back seat. “If we move that briefcase, we’d probably be more comfortable in the back.”

  “Sure. Okay,” he said.

  The girl kneeled, then gracefully executed what looked to Ward like a swan dive over the top of the front seat and onto the plush back bench seat. As she did so, Ward got a tantalizing close-up glimpse of her white panties against chocolate skin. He could smell perfume. A hint of lavender.

  “Come on in,” she said, smiling, white teeth against dark skin, extending a slender hand his way. He noticed the lightness of the skin on her palms. “The water’s fine.”

  He wasn’t nearly as graceful, tumbling over the seat back, a tangle of arms and legs. He tried not to hit her as he landed. As soon as he’d adjusted himself on the seat, she reached over with her right hand and began to rub his stomach just above his belt. He put his arm around her shoulder, pulled her closer. Her hair was soft, shampoo-fresh. Perhaps that was the lavender. He ran his fingers through her hair, kissed her forehead. She unbuckled his belt, pulled down his pants’ zipper. Her hand slipped inside his boxers. He sucked in his breath.

  “Not yet.” He exhaled. “I just want to hold you first.” He was afraid that if she continued, he would explode and it would be over. He wanted to kiss her face and lips, explore the unfamiliar terrain of her darker nooks and crevices with his hands and tongue, feel the warmth of her skin against his, make it last.

  What was the right way for a man to be with a girl who did it for money? He’d never been with a prostitute so he couldn’t quite get his head around the etiquette. He had the sense he was supposed to let her lead, let her “do” him. But he didn’t want to be done. He wanted to hold her, be held, get and give pleasure.

  He kissed her face, her shoulder, the smooth bare skin above the top of her blouse. He reached around, unhooked her bra and watched as it fell away, exposing her breasts. His fingers lightly brushed across the dark nipples, felt them stiffen, took them, one by one, in his mouth and stroked them with his tongue. She moaned, a small, involuntary moan of pleasure. His eyes were closed. His right hand was down between her legs, inside her panties, his middle finger rubbing against the nub of her clitoris. Her legs opened and closed in a slow rhythm.

  “I want you inside me,” she said finally. Was that really what she meant, or was she just looking to get this over with quickly so she could . . . turn another trick? Go home? To her boyfriend? To her pimp?

  She was straddling him now, lowering herself down, taking him inside her. Her muscles tightened, relaxed, tightened, relaxed around him. He opened his eyes. He wanted to tell her to slow down, make the feeling last, but he couldn’t speak. The girl’s eyes were closed now, her head was tilted back and the beginnings of a smile tickled her lips. Was she thinking about him? Or reliving some other, better moment in her head?

  Suddenly, it was over in one stuttering concussive moment of ecstasy. His head fell back against the seat. He was utterly, completely, totally spent. It had been a long time.

  She kept him inside her as his erection slowly subsided, her body leaning into his, wanting, he thought, to be held too.

  “That felt good,” he said as his breathing slowly returned to normal.

  “Mmmm,” she said, letting his penis slip out of her and dismounting. “Good. Yes . . . good.” She reached behind her to reattach the clasps on her bra, found her panties on the floor and slipped them on over the high heels she was still wearing. With what seemed almost like modesty, she adjusted her skirt to cover herself.

  Ward hadn’t moved. He couldn’t.

  She looked at him. “I know who you are,” she said.

  Oh shit. Blackmail. He hadn’t thought of that. Threaten to go to the papers. He could see the headline: “Negro Prostitute Claims Minister Paid to Have Sex With Her.” Big type. Across the top of the front page—

  Rewind.

  What was that she’d said?

  “You were friends with Ray. You used to visit him in Africville.”

  “Rose?” He tried to put the pieces together, shape a woman out of the little girl who wouldn’t eat her corned beef and cabbage.

  “Rosa,” she corrected him. “It’s Rosa.”

  “Sorry. I just didn’t recognize you . . .”

  “That’s okay. Lots of times I don’t recognize me either. You look different too. Better, I mean. But I knew it was you from TV. You’re always on TV.”

  “How did . . . ?”

  “How did a nice girl like me end up working the streets?” she finished his sentence, laughing. “It’s a long story. Not worth telling. Not now.” She paused. “You ever see Ray?”

  “No, not for a long time.” Strange, though, he’d been thinking about Ray today. This morning, Cabinet had voted to cut off funding for Black Pride immediately so the furor in the black community would have time to dissipate before the next election. Ward couldn’t help but make the connection between Black Pride and Ray, Ray the Radical. It was hard to square the image of Ray on TV with the one that rolled through Ward’s mind. Ray of the playground. Ray of Africville. Ray of . . . He missed that Ray, the Ray he’d known before Black Pride, before . . . before Ray had tried to expose him to the world as a vote buyer! Christ, how could he have been feeling nostalgia for the man who’d almost ruined his political career before it began? And yet, tonight, with Rosa in the car with him, his thoughts tumbled back to that time when he and Ray had been inseparable. When life was simpler.

  Race hadn’t mattered then. Was that what pushed them apart? Was that his fau
lt? Or was it Ray who’d refused to open himself up to new friends, new experiences, white people? Whatever, they’d drifted apart. It was only now, ten years later, that Ward realized Ray had been his last best friend. There hadn’t been anyone since. Jack and he were mentor and protegé. He and Junior had become friends, but there was a history there that would never be overcome. He liked the camaraderie of his Cabinet colleagues, but they were all older too. That was the problem with being too successful too soon. You were always out of sync.

  What was Ray doing now? he wondered. Jack had said something one night about Ray enrolling in law school.

  “Well,” she said, hesitating, “I guess I’d better be going.” She reached for the door handle.

  “Let me drive you. This storm’s too nasty to be out.” Stay.

  She looked out. Snow blanketed the car’s windows. Beyond, she could hear the wind. There’d be no more customers tonight.

  “You sure it’s no trouble?”

  “No trouble. Where do you live?”

  “Uh, off Barrington. You can let me off by the bridge. That’d be great.”

  They drove in silence. There were so many questions he wanted to ask but his tongue couldn’t seem to form the words. He pulled up beside the base of the bridge tower. The navy base was just up the street.

  “You’re sure this is okay? Is it safe to be walking around?”

  She smiled. Her hand touched his sleeve. “You’re sweet. But I’ll be fine. I can take care of myself.” She opened the door.