Fresh Girls & Other Stories (2 page)

It seems like days later that Carol emerges from the bedroom and I catch a rear view of the Chinese guy as he pads naked into the bathroom, but it can’t be that long because she’s only just coming down off the fix that Mark gave her.

“So, how’d it go?” I ask her, the way Jane asked me my first day at the massage parlor, when I came back from my first customer, holding a sealed envelope for the vault for Mario. “Was he okay?”

I don’t remember how I answered, that first time, but Carol says nothing. Her eyes are muddy and they glance off me like it hurts to look straight at me, and she crosses the hardwood floor and steps out on the balcony. The sun is starting to come out, I can see the lemon light mixed with pink and blue around the edges of the curtains, I hear Mark in the bedroom getting comfortable on the bed that’s just been vacated.

“Carol?” I say, but I can just make her out on the balcony, fumbling for a smoke, and I sink back into the cushions and pick up the needle she had left for me on the coffee table. And she stays out there like that for a long time, still and gray against the railings, and I know for a fact it’s not because she likes sunrises.

          A
fter she hung up the phone, Mary went to her closet humming. Later her boyfriend would be coming over, and for him she would wear lingerie and a floral perfume. She pushed the weighted hangers out of the way, reaching for the outfit pressed against the wall behind a row of sweaters and blazers. She drew it out shining, lay its slick black length across her bed as she began to undress. When her boyfriend arrived she would light the candles on her dresser, pour the wine into crystal glasses, she would undress him with the slow, savoring motions of someone unwrapping a beautifully packaged and long-awaited gift. She would kneel in front of him while he closed his eyes and stroked her hair.

When he sighed and opened his eyes again, pulling his body away from her and reaching for his clothes, she would understand and not ask him to stay this time.

She pulled in her stomach and zipped up the black leather outfit, the studs outlining her breasts glinting like bullets in the mirror across the room. She slid her feet into her highest pair of heels and, four inches taller, tottered into the living room, where she scanned her collection of CDs. Opera, classical — those tragic, ethereal voices and instruments would be for later. Wine was cooling in the fridge, there were fresh flowers on the kitchen table, and she had vacuumed and tidied the apartment earlier in hopes that she would see her boyfriend tonight. Everything would be ready by the time she returned; now she had to hurry to get in the right mood for the session across town, or she would be late.

Rock music thudded through the apartment as Mary leaned into the mirror above the bathroom sink, painting on the face that would make her ready.

A cockatiel flew into the dining room and stood on the curtain rod above the window facing out onto the alley. It had a round spot of color on each cheek, like a circle of rouge or the center of a Japanese flag. Mary, distracted by its noisy flight, got up from the couch to have a closer look.

“Sshh,” the man said from behind her as her heels clicked on the hardwood floor. She stopped obediently and lifted each leg with exaggerated care, glancing to her left at the locked bedroom door. The man’s mother, an invalid, was sleeping behind it.

In the dining area, the cockatiel stared away from Mary, one bright eye fixed on the opposite wall.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, charmed by its indifference towards her.

“When I turn the lamp on, sometimes it comes in here,” he said from the living room. Behind her a switch flicked and there was sudden brightness. She wanted to stay in the pink dining room, where halos of light were cast on the ceiling from upright lamps. The pink calmed her; it had the radiant, spreading effect of a sunset. She stood observing the cockatiel, which, without warning, flapped back into the kitchen and the further recesses of the house, shunning the light.

She returned to the living room, where the man was waiting. “You said you saw Mistress S. a few months ago. What was she like?”

“She’s — well, she’s good. There’s not much to say, really. She’s a grandmother, did you know that?”

“A grandmother?” Mary laughed in disbelief. “I knew she had kids, but …”

“A young grandmother, of course. She’s in her early forties.”

“I heard she’s very good, very highly trained. She sent me over last night to one of her clients, as a kind of thank-you gift for some favors he had done for her. I’ve never met her, but she sounds interesting.”

“Let’s not talk about her, let’s talk about you. You’re beautiful. Thank you for coming here, for making yourself so beautiful for me.” He looked at the glass in her hand. “How’s your wine?”

Mary finished it in a gulp. She took a breath, and when she next spoke her voice was harsh. “Get me some more. And bring it to me on your knees.”

“Yes, of course. I’ll do anything for you.” The man extracted the stem of the glass gently from her fingers. She stretched out on the couch with a half smile on her lips, reaching up to tighten the leather strings fastening a spiked collar to her neck. It occurred to her that her boyfriend might not recognize her if he saw her now. She took another deep breath and began pressing her fingertips against the sharpened points of the spikes, unaware of the increasing pain. The collar framed her face, which was white with makeup. Her fingers were flecked with blood by the time the man returned, dropping to his knees at the entrance to the living room and holding the glass of wine like a chalice as he shuffled towards her.

She could not thank him. He dropped his head and kissed her black stiletto shoes. She reached out with one hand to stroke his hair, but withdrew it quickly when she felt the grease on her palm.

“Lick my shoes,” she said. “Tell me how good they taste.”

He moaned. “Oh, yes, they taste wonderful.” He looked up at her with eyes as gray as mist, the depths turbulent and disturbed. They fixed on her face before he dropped them modestly and began to lap the bottoms of her shoes, taking a heel into his mouth and sucking. “Oh, thank you for letting me clean your shoes. You will let me do more, won’t you? You’ll treat me like … like white trash, won’t you? You’ll spit on me and treat me like garbage?”

She took this as a cue and gathered up the saliva into her mouth. He was staring at her with his churning eyes. She leaned forward and spat as hard as she could, flinging the spittle from her lips, but it landed somewhere below his neck. She tried again and again until it ran down his eyelids onto his cheeks, until he was licking it from the corners of his mouth.

“Oh, thank you,” he murmured.

“You’re garbage,” she said. “White trash. You’re scum!”

“Sshh,” he reminded her, with a nod at the bedroom. She dropped her voice: “Scum. Let me spank you.”

The man got up on his knees and pulled down his pants, which were stained at the crotch and sagged badly in the seat. “Do you want me to take my shorts off too?”

“No,” she said hurriedly, holding her breath as the air filled with his smell. He stretched himself across her lap and she gingerly took the waistband of his shorts between her fingers and peeled them back.

“Thank me for hurting you,” she said, as her hand cracked down.

“Thank you.”

“Say, ‘Thank you, Mistress, for hurting me.’”

“Oh, thank you, Mistress. Thank you for hurting me.”

“How does that feel?” Her hand stung.

“It feels great. It feels great, Mistress.”

She reached up to remove the spiked collar around her neck. Grasping it by the thongs, she smacked it across his buttocks, watching carefully. He made no sound of pain as beads of blood rose to the surface from the points of the spikes slapping into his flesh. He was patterned with red beads within seconds; she passed her hand over his rear in the semi-darkness of the living room, and his blood smeared across her palm. She laid her hand gently on him, smoothing the blood away, then drew the collar back around her neck.

He stood up, fastening his pants around his waist while another whiff of odor billowed out. His face was
expressionless but the pupils of his eyes seemed to tumble around randomly, darkly.

“How do you feel?”

“I feel great, Mistress. Thank you.” He dropped to his knees and pressed his lips to her feet, her calves, her knees. Impertinently, he reached up to kiss her cheek and she slapped him.

“Mmm, Mistress. You have such a beautiful face. I want to worship your body, I want to get wired on your body.” His hands felt her calves, her arms. “You have such a strong and beautiful body.” The back of his hand grazed her breast.

“You’ll be punished for that. Crawl into the kitchen, and bring back something I can put inside you. Remember, you’re my slave.” She reached out and tenderly stroked a finger down his cheek. He looked at her. She drew back her hand and slapped him again.

“Yes, I’m your slave.” He headed for the kitchen on his knees and she stood up from the couch, smoothing her skirt. In the mirror above the mantelpiece her face was flushed, her lips blood red above the spikes around her neck.

The carrot broke after a few thrusts, but the handle of the wooden spoon disappeared into him. She felt him clench around it, felt the grain of the wood grate against him. His eyes seemed to clench too. After a while he
became open and depthless, and she was able to slide most of the bowl of the spoon inside him as well. She slid it in and out rhythmically and he received it with the moans of a woman.

When he came it was with a shudder that made his fat thighs tremble. Instinctively she moved away from him, worried that he might forget himself and clasp her to him in gratitude or passion. But after a moment of stillness, during which he looked down at himself with something like puzzlement, he got up and padded to the bathroom.

Later they sat beside each other on the couch and he told her that he loved her. It meant nothing to her, coming from him, though for an instant she felt a stab of pain — her boyfriend had never said he loved her. “I will do anything for you, you know that. Anything at all.”

“I want to be the only dominatrix you see, the only woman you see. Do you understand that? If you say you’ll do anything for me, you’ll do that. You’ll take me shopping, buy me leather and lingerie, and you won’t see anyone else.”

“I won’t see anyone else, Mistress, just you. I’m so glad I found you.”

“Let’s dance,” she said. The songs on the radio were all good, and she watched their reflections in the mirror.

She could no longer smell him. She let his thick arms hold her close, and she teased him with the motions of her body. His face was a mask of pleasure and yearning. She kept glancing at the bedroom door, which hid the bedridden seventy-five-year-old woman from view. She wondered if the mother had heard the punishments inflicted on her son, and if these sounds would fill her dreams that night.

“Oh, Mistress,” he said, and she let him bury his face in her neck while they circled around and around between the mirror and the locked door. She had to point to the time on the clock by the couch, adding that he would have to give her more money if he wanted her to stay longer, before he would let her go.

When the cab arrived, Mary had to take off her shoes to make her way down the icy stairs. When she turned to wave he blew her a sloppy kiss and did not close the door until the driver rounded the corner. Then he whirled around and around by himself in the living room to the silence of the old lady behind the locked door. The cockatiel, motionless on the curtain rod, continued to stare at the opposite pink wall. Its crest stood up, bristling, like an exclamation of its dignity.

After she got home she ran to the bathroom eagerly, removed her makeup and put on a white lace teddy with
a pink ribbon tied between her breasts. An hour passed, and still her boyfriend did not appear to put his mouth over hers. She tried calling him, but could get nothing except his answering machine. After the twentieth or thirtieth attempt, someone picked up the phone but did not say hello. She listened to the fullness of the silence and was the first to put down the receiver. A moment later her phone rang, and when she picked it up it was her boyfriend’s wife.

“Fuck off,” she said. Then she hung up.

Mary stood there listening to the sound of the dial tone, absently wrapping the cord around and around her wrist like jewelry. After a while she unwrapped the cord and lay on her bed, cradling the receiver to her chest, pushing it down the lacy length of her body. Then her legs opened and she wept.

          T
he psychiatrist came into my life one month after my eighteenth birthday. He came into my life wearing a silk tie, his dark eyes half-obscured by lines and wrinkles. He brought with him a pronounced upper-class accent, a futile sense of humor, books to educate me.
Lolita. Story of O.
His lips were thin, but when I took them between my own they plumped out and filled my mouth with sweet foreign tastes.

He worshiped me at first because he could not touch me. And then he worshiped me because he could only touch me if he paid to do so. I understood that without the autumn leaves, the browns of the hundreds and the
fiery scarlets of the fifties, the marble pedestal beneath me would begin to erode.

The first two weeks were tender. He said he adored my childlike body, my unpainted face, my long straight hair. He promised to take care of me, love me unconditionally. He would be my father, friend, lover — and if one was ever absent, the other two were large enough on their own to fill up the space that was left behind.

He brought into my doorway the slippery clean smell of rain, and he possessed the necessary implements — samples of pills tiny as seeds, a gold shovel. My body yielded to the scrapings of his hands.

He gave me drugs because, he said, he loved me. He brought the tablets from his office, rattling in plastic bottles stuffed to the brim with cotton. I placed them under my tongue and sucked up their saccharine sweetness, learning that only the strong ones tasted like candy, the rest were chalky or bitter. He loved me beyond morality.

The plants that he brought each time he came to visit — baby’s breath, dieffenbachia, jade — began to die as soon as they crossed the threshold of my home. After twenty-four hours the leaves would crinkle into tight dark snarls stooping towards the soil. They could not be pried open, though I watered his plants, exposed them to sunlight, trimmed them. It was as if by contact with
him or with my environment, they had been poisoned. Watching them die, I was reminded of how he told me that when he first came to Canada he worked for two years in one of our worst mental institutions. I walked by the building once at night, creeping as far as I dared up the grassy slopes and between the evergreens. It was a sturdy beige structure, it didn’t look so bad from the outside. In my mind, though, I saw it as something else. In my mind it was a series of black-and-white film stills; a face staring out from behind a barred window. The face belonged to a woman with tangled hair, wearing a nightgown. I covered my ears from her screams. When he told me about this place I imagined him in the film, the woman clawing at him where the corridors were gray, and there was the clanking sound of tin and metal. I used to lie awake as a child on the nights my father visited my bed and imagine scenes in which he was terrorized, in pain, made helpless. This was the same. I could smell the bloodstains the janitors had not yet scrubbed from the floors. I could smell the human discharges and see the hands that groped at him as he walked past each cell, each room. The hands flapped disembodied in the air, white and supplicating and at the same time evil.

He told me that when he was married to his first wife, she had gone shopping one day and he had had to take
their baby with him on his hospital rounds. “I didn’t know where to put him when I arrived,” he said. “So I put him in the wastepaper basket.” When he returned the child had upended the basket and crawled out, crying, glaring at his father. “I had no other choice,” he said, and he reached into his trenchcoat and gave me a bottle of pills. “I love you,” he said, “that’s why I’m doing this.”

I believed that only someone with a limitless love would put his baby in a trash can, its face squinched and its mouth pursing open in a squawk of dismay. Only someone like that could leave it swaddled in crumpled scraps of paper so he could go and take care of his patients. I could not imagine the breadth of the love that lay behind his eyes, those eyes that became as clear as glass at the moment of orgasm.

He bought a mask yesterday from a Japanese import store. It had tangled human hair that he washed with an antidandruff shampoo, carefully brushing it afterwards so the strands would not snap off. It had no pupils; the corneas were circles of bone. He took it home with him and stared at it for half an hour during a thunderstorm, paralyzed with fear. It stared back at him. It was supposed to scare off his rage, he said.

After two weeks his tenderness went the way of his plants — crisp, shriveled, closed. He stopped touching
me in bed but grew as gluttonous as dry soil. I started to keep my eyes open when we kissed and to squeeze them shut all the other times, the many times he pulled my hand or my head down between his legs.

He continued to bring me magazines and books, but they were eclipsed by the part of him he expected me to touch. Some days, I found I could not. I thought it was enough that I listened to his stories. I fantasized about being his psychoanalyst and not letting him see my face, having that kind of control over him. I would lay him down on my couch and shine light into his eyes while I remained in shadow where he could not touch me.

His latest gift, a snake plant, looks like a cluster of green knives or spears. The soil is so parched that I keep watering it, but the water runs smartly through the pot without, it seems, having left anything of itself behind. The water runs all over the table and into my hands.

Tonight I did not think I could touch him. I asked him to hit me instead, thinking his slim white body would recoil from the thought. Instead he rubbed himself against my thigh, excited. I told him pain did not arouse me, but it was too late. I pulled the blankets around my naked body and tried to close up inside the way a flower wraps itself in the safety of its petals when night falls.

At first he stretched me across his knees and began to spank me. I wiggled obediently and raised my bottom
high into the air, the way my father used to like to see me do. Then he moved up to rain blows upon my back. One of them was so painful that I saw colors even with my eyes open; it showered through my body like fireworks. It was like watching a sunset and feeling a pain in your chest at its wrenching beauty, the kind of pain that makes you gasp.

How loud the slaps grew in the small space of my apartment — like the sound of thunder. I wondered if my face looked, in that moment, like his Japanese mask.

The pain cleansed my mind until it breathed like the streets of a city after a good and bright rain. It washed away the dirt inside me. I could see the gutters open up to swallow the candy wrappers, newspaper pages, cigarette butts borne along on its massive tide. I saw as I had not seen before every bump and indentation on the wall beside my bed.

And then he wanted more and I fought him, dimly surprised that he wasn’t stronger. I saw as though through the eye of a camera this tangle of white thighs and arms and the crook of a shoulder, the slope of a back. I scraped his skin with my fingernails. I felt no conscious fear because I was the girl behind the camera, zooming in for a close-up, a tight shot, an interesting angle. Limbs like marble on the tousled bed. His face contorted with strain. He was breathing heavily, but I, I
was not breathing at all. I knew that if I touched his hair my hand would come away wet, not with the pleasant sweat of sexual exertion, but with something different. Something that would smell like a hospital, a hospital without disinfectant to mask the smells underneath.

And when he pushed my face against his thigh, it was oddly comforting, though it was the same thigh that belonged to the body that was reaching out to hit me. I breathed in the soft, soapy smell of his skin as his hand stung my back — the same hand that comforted crying patients, that wrote notes on their therapeutic progress, that had shaken with shyness when it first touched me. The sound of the slaps was amplified in the candlelit room. Nothing had ever sounded so loud, so singular in its purpose. I had never felt so far away from myself, not even with his pills.

I am far away and his thigh is sandy as a beach against my cheek. The sounds melt like gold, like slow Sunday afternoons. I think of cats and the baby grand piano in the foyer of my father’s house. I think of the rain that gushes down the drainpipes outside my father’s bathroom late at night when things begin to happen. I think of the queerly elegant black notes on sheets of piano music. The light is flooding generously through the windows and I am a little girl with a pink ribbon in my hair and a ruffled dress.

I seat myself on the piano bench and begin to play, my fingertips softening to the long ivory, the shorter ebony keys. I look down at my feet and see them bound in pink ballerina slippers, pressing intermittently on the pedals. Always Daddy’s girl, I perform according to his instruction.

When it was over he stroked the fear that bathed my hands in cold sweat. He said that when we fought my face had filled with hatred and a dead coldness. He said that he had cured himself of his obsession with me during the beating, he had stripped me of my mystery. Slapped me human. He said my fear had turned him on. He was thirsty for the sweat that dampened my palms and willing to do anything to elicit more of that moisture so he could lick it and quench his tongue’s thirst.

I understood that when I did not bleed at the first blow, his love turned into hatred. I saw that if I was indeed precious and fragile I would have broken, I would have burst open like a thin shell and discharged the rich sweet stain of roses.

Before he left he pressed his lips to mine. His eyes were open when he said that if I told anyone, he would have no other choice but to kill me.

Now that he is gone, I look between my breasts and see another flower growing: a rash of raspberry dots, like seeds. I wonder if this is how fear discharges itself when we leave our bodies in moments of pain.

The psychiatrist, when he first came, promised me a rose garden and in the mirror tomorrow morning I will see the results for the first time on my own body. I will tend his bouquets before he comes again, his eyes misty with fear and lust. Then I will listen to the liquid notes that are pleasing in the sunlit foyer and smile because somewhere, off in the distance, my father is clapping.