A Better Goodbye (17 page)

What Scott wanted, Scott got. Nick understood that. But it still bothered him more than he'd imagined it would. It must have showed, because he could see Kianna subtly shaking her head, reminding him to stay cool. “Scott always fucks her,” she said. “I mean, it's what you've got to do to work here. But, like, once is enough, you know?”

Nick nodded and let it go at that. Kianna was soon back on the phone, lying on the sofa, acting like he wasn't there when she rubbed and scratched and picked at the remnants of the Thai lunch she and Sierra had had delivered. They hadn't offered him any, and he wasn't going to ask, even though his stomach was growling and Kianna seemed like the type to share. Until he got some money in his pocket, he'd have to remember to bring something from home, a sandwich or at least an apple. Plus, a newspaper to read so he wouldn't go nuts from boredom.

Sierra emerged from her romp with the boss looking flushed and messy. Five minutes later, Nick heard Scott before he saw him: “Christ, only one clean towel in the fucking bathroom.” He finished his point when he stepped into view. “You damn well know I always use two. What the fuck is going on here, you want to tell me?”

The girls looked too frightened to speak. Once again Nick felt as though he'd been rendered invisible.

“This goddamn place costs me twenty-five hundred bucks a month and you've got it looking like a fucking pigsty.” Scott turned his glare toward the other bedroom. “I don't even want to go in there, do I? Probably some kind of toxic waste site.”

Nick fought back a smile.

“Get off your lazy asses and clean everything the fuck up. Jesus, how you going to make any goddamn money if it looks like a shithole in here?”

He slammed the door when he left. Nick couldn't help thinking the guy's performance was a rerun of something he'd done on TV. But it was too early in the game for Nick to be running his mouth about the boss, so he sat back and watched how the girls handled it.

“Get off your lazy fucking ass, Kianna,” Sierra said, turning anger to petulance by mimicking Scott.

Kianna wrinkled her nose and said, “It's a fucking what kind of waste thingy did he say?”

“Toxic.”

“It's a fucking toxic waste . . . ”

“Site.”

“Waste site. Yeah.”

When they finished bitching and laughing, they began to clean up. Kianna, carrying a load of sheets and towels to the laundry room, looked like she wanted to ask Nick for help. “Uh-uh,” Sierra told her, leaving unspoken the warning that he would rat them out to Scott.

The girls' shift was supposed to be over at three, but one of their replacements, a slender, waif-like Latina calling herself Riki, didn't show up until half past. Kianna seized the moment and split, saying she had to pick up a friend at LAX. With the phones ringing infrequently—Wednesdays were always slow, the girls said—Sierra devoted most of the next half-hour to muttering about how Ling always screwed her over like this. Ling was the AWOL masseuse, and the longer she was out there ignoring Sierra's messages and pages, the more interested Nick was in getting a look at her.

The big moment arrived at five-thirty, a good hour after Sierra had finally stormed off while Riki was telling her latest telephone suitor, “There's no full service but I do allow mutual touching.” As Nick tried to break the code, Ling swept through the door like royalty, carrying three bags from Bath & Body Works and not bothering to apologize for being late.

When she noticed Nick, she looked down her elegant nose at him and said, “Are you waiting for Riki?”

“No, I'm waiting for you,” he said. “Been here all day.”

“Is that a joke?”

“Afraid not.”

“Well, like, clients aren't allowed in until it's time for their appointment. Besides, I don't even know you.”

Riki hung up and filled in the blanks for Ling: “This is Nick. He's the security guy Scott got for us.”

“He thinks he's funny,” Ling said.

“I'm just trying to tell you I bumped into the guy across the hall this morning,” Nick said, blanking on the name and getting no help from Riki. “Probably be a good idea to stay away from his boyfriend. He was pretty upset.”

“That little faggot Neal,” Ling said, as if that explained everything. “Tell him he can go fuck himself.”

“I'm not sure I'll see him again,” Nick said.

“Whatever,” Ling said, and she began taking oils and lotions out of her bags, telling Riki how much they cost. Riki smiled a ninety-nine-cent-store smile, as if to say Ling didn't know the joke was on her, and Nick studied Riki's hair, which had been bleached blonde and enhanced with braided extensions that went to her waist. When she caught him looking—these girls were aces at doing that—she gave him a little smile.

Ling booked only one appointment, a regular she polished off in twenty minutes. Then she rushed to see Eddie, her lover with the shifting sexual preference.

“You're not worried about the other guy?” Nick said.

“Neal? He's at work by now,” Ling said. “Like a good little boy.”

When she was gone, Nick felt a weight descend on him. He was more than physically tired, he was sapped in a way that made him wonder how many more days of this he would have to endure. It must have shown on his face, because Riki tottered over on five-inch heels after buzzing up her seven o'clock and deposited herself beside him on the sofa, pushing her braids off her shoulders so he could see her tiny breasts under a sheer negligee. “Want to hide in the closet and peek when I do my next client?” she asked. “I'm a squirter.”

The warmth of her smile confused him at first. He wanted to think he had misunderstood this girl who must have been in high school only a year or two before, but he knew he hadn't. There was no other kindness she was equipped to offer. Just the same, he told her, “I better hang around out here.” Her smile collapsed, and the day weighed more than ever.

It had been sunny, but the temperature hadn't climbed out of the sixties, so like any self-respecting Cali girl, Jenny spent the day freezing and wishing April was over. Now, as night fell, she was bundled in an XL fleece hoodie she had borrowed from an old boyfriend and never returned. It made her hips look enormous, but she didn't care. Fresh from work, Maria and one of the girls from her Chinatown place, a blonde who called herself Twyla, were making sure there was plenty to look at. They both had on camisoles that showed off their boobs and low-rise Juicy sweatpants so every man in the grocery store could see the tops of their thongs and the tailbone tattoos they called tramp stamps without a trace of irony.

Jenny couldn't resist glancing at the men and categorizing them—
Client . . . Not a client . . . Client
—the way she and Rosie used to when they goofed on everyone who ogled them at the Sherman Oaks Galleria.
Ogled
. Jenny loved that word. But she wondered if it really applied here at the Ralphs on La Brea and Third Street, where some of the oglers had to be Orthodox Jews. The neighborhood was loaded with them, guys who spent their Sabbath walking around in black suits and hats, looking very somber and holy. She used to see them on her way to work at Maria's place downtown, and even then she had wondered how many of them got massages. She knew it wasn't like being religious meant you never got horny. One of the girls she had worked with even had a rabbi for a client. Jenny tried not to imagine what it was like to jerk him off. Too bizarre, you know?

But Maria wouldn't have thought twice about it if she had the pope in her hand. She was oblivious to everything except money and finding ways to spend it. Her primary luxury, it seemed, was useless boyfriends. The first one Jenny knew about was a fat black drug dealer named Mookie who lived in his mother's guesthouse in Leimert Park and wouldn't sleep with Maria if she hadn't seen enough clients. For the last year she'd been supporting a photographer whose work was so bad that everyone except Maria realized it. He wasn't even cute, just a skinny white guy about forty who acted like his chin stubble made up for the hair he was losing. Maria bragged that he was a great artist, and the photographer was always trying to get the girls to pose nude for him. Some actually did, the really stupid ones.

It was the easiest thing in the world for Jenny to tell Maria's picture-taking boyfriend to fuck off, but Maria was another story. She was acting like she'd never heard Jenny's horror story from the Valley or processed her need to do massage only in a place that had security. Maria, in her blissful, willful way, had decided she would make dinner for Jenny and convince her to work in Chinatown. Why Twyla was included, Jenny still hadn't figured out. But there the three of them were in Ralphs, bending over the poultry case and laughing as the chill tweaked Maria's and Twyla's nipples.

Not ten feet away, an elderly man stared until Twyla gave him a nasty look. Then she turned back to Jenny and Maria and said, “What are we doing here anyway?” Her words sounded fuzzy enough to make Jenny think she was stoned.

“I'm going to cook chicken,” Maria said.

Twyla looked down at the contents of the case. “Wow, is this chicken?” she said.

“Yeah, this is chicken,” Maria said. “See on the package? It says right there.”

Twyla stared at the words as if they were written in Sanskrit. Finally she said, “What if they're lying?”

“They can't do that,” Maria said. “It's against the law.”

“I don't know,” Twyla said. “I've never seen chicken when it looks like this. I mean not, like, cooked. How can you be sure this is chicken?”

“I just can, all right?” Maria said. “And I'm going to cook it, and then it will look more, you know, like chicken.”

Jenny listened to them for as long as she could stand it before wandering off in search of Top Ramen. Peeking down one aisle after another, she wondered just how weird her day was going to be after it had started so wonderfully. She had handed in a paper on Elizabeth Bishop's influence on Robert Lowell, hoping it would convince her teacher that Bishop was more important artistically and politically than the nutcase the class wasted so much time studying. Even if her plan didn't work, Jenny had learned more about Bishop—her twenty years in Brazil, her love affair with a female architect there, her dying too young at Harvard. Only now were Brazilians paying tribute to Bishop by reading her poetry and turning her life into a biography, a play, and a movie. It had taken so long because they had considered her scandalous for dressing in men's clothes and speaking in curses and just generally being Bishop.
Scandalous
was another word Jenny liked.

She wondered if it applied to the special on Top Ramen she found. Ten for a dollar—do the math and you were getting a whole dinner for ten cents. Definitely scandalous. But she wouldn't say so to Maria and Twyla. They weren't big on vocabulary, or anything else to do with words. Like reading, for instance.
Cosmo
was as deep as they got. And Jenny, finding them in the checkout line, could tell Twyla was a
Cosmo
girl just by the way she was ending a conversation on her cell, flirty and oblivious.

“It's black, very short, and very revealing,” Twyla was saying. She smiled at what she heard next. “Okay, nothing underneath. See you in an hour.”

She clicked off and turned to Maria, who was emptying her basket of chicken, frozen peas, white wine, and Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey. “Sor-reee,” she said. “My favorite client.”

“You've still got to eat,” Maria told her.

Twyla grabbed a bag of Skittles off the candy rack. “Dinner,” she said. Then she smiled as if struck by divine inspiration and grabbed a second bag.

Jenny, watching, saying nothing, decided that Twyla was one of those crack babies who are never hungry. All they crave is the energy to do more drugs. For them, Skittles was the perfect food, no fat, just sugar. Of course the sugar eventually turned to fat, but they never thought that far ahead. And if you suggested chocolate, which Jenny usually did to anyone who was hungry, they'd inevitably say, “My God, how can you eat chocolate?”
Right,
she thought,
like it's healthier for you to smoke a gram of ice every two days.

It turned out that the chicken was no healthier than crack or chocolate after Maria broiled it beyond recognition. Good thing they could open the kitchen window in her frayed Silver Lake apartment or the smoke would have forced them to evacuate. For a moment they debated moving straight to the Chunky Monkey, but Jenny insisted that they needed to eat something at least a little bit healthy first. “Like Top Ramen?” Maria asked tentatively. Jenny screamed with delight. Dinner was served ten minutes later.

She was washing away the salty aftertaste with some Two-Buck Chuck when Maria said, “You didn't like Twyla, did you?”

“Did it show?”

“Yes. You bitch.”

Maria laughed, and Jenny did too.

“I'm sorry. She just really annoyed me, you know? Who talks to a client about not wearing panties when they're in the checkout line at Ralphs? Plus she's a drug addict, right? Living on Skittles? Come on.”

“At least Twyla never noticed you passing judgment on her. She was too busy being—”

“A skank?”

“Whatever.”

“I'll probably never see her again anyway,” Jenny said.

Maria nodded. “I can make sure you guys work different shifts at least. Hey, don't look so surprised. You're coming to work for me, Jenny. No way you're not.”

Jenny's mother was the last woman to speak to her with such authority. Sometimes in dreams, sometimes when she was just stuck in traffic, Jenny could still hear her mother's voice scolding, nagging, pleading. It was a voice strained by the responsibility that came with not having a man around to share the load. Most of them split or were so brutish and unfaithful that pretty little Eun-Chu Yee did the splitting first, always certain the next one would be the right one. But when she finally found the right one, he died almost as soon as she wrapped her loving arms around him. She spent the next six years trying to kill her pain with drink, and then she died too, leaving Jenny, at sixteen, to either find another mother figure or fend for herself.