Richmond Noir (13 page)
Mustafa kept his eyes on the Marylander, taking in the smirk on his face, rising abruptly as the man swiftly raked in the money on the table and headed for the door.
“Inshallah!” the General groaned. “Inshallah.”
The pressmen would report the scandal in the papers the next day. The General, a national hero and star witness in the Burr trial, had copulated with a woman in front of a crowd at a downtown tavern. The General would not know whether it was true or not. He would remember the white robes. And he would discover that his congressional medal had been taken from around his neck.
Rosie met Mustafa outside the back door. Shockoe Slip—a place stolen from the Powhatans and gilded by the slave trade—lay on a mosquito-ridden flood plain. The bloodsuckers swarmed at dusk. She led him across the alley into the brush near the johnnies on the bank, where the women met when they needed to discuss their private affairs. She showed him some bills and the glinting gold. He showed her what he had and lit a cheroot. Beneath the dappled stars and a crescent moon that lit both the Old and New Worlds, just above the river’s fall lines, the two talked briefly about getting out of town and danced in the Southern stink.
The whole infelicity speaks of a cause
that could never have been gained
.
—Henry James, on Richmond
T
hey’d finished having sex, Tacko and DaBlonde, but her husband Louis (you couldn’t call him Lou, she called him Daddy) was still taking pictures with a small silver Canon PowerShot. He’d circle the bed, crouch, loom, even push in between DaBlonde’s open chapped thighs. She’d threaten to trap him there, scissor him, and they’d laugh. Weird shit. Very weird shit, thought Tacko.
Louis was a big guy, obese, and whenever he’d kneel on the bed for another shot, it crunched and sank. He had on a tent-sized black T-shirt and gray Nike sweatpants. He always kept his clothes on. Well, both times so far. “That’s enough pictures, Daddy.” DaBlonde shook a foot at him, making short flicking motions with her toes.
She was at least fifteen years younger than Tacko, who was forty-eight. She might have been still in her late twenties—slight, almost skinny, a pretty face that looked dairy-maid wholesome when she took off her glasses. Just now, though, she’d kept them on through everything, fellatio included.
Louis was nearer Tacko’s age. A friendly, blunt-talking fat cuckold. Tacko didn’t use the word in mockery, merely as description. So the guy enjoyed watching his wife do strangers—so what? Other guys enjoyed tramping out in the dark and bitter cold to shoot at deer. And as far as Tacko could tell, DaBlonde loved the variety. She loved it, Louis loved it, therefore no problem. Weird shit, though. Tacko was in the presence of people the likes of whom he’d never come upon before. They were like TV Martians, human-looking but deeply different underneath. Being with them was exhilarating.
Till now Tacko had been a pretty standard guy, suburban youth in the ’70s, ever-rising, ultimately tiresome career straight out of college. He went to church. Episcopal, till he was thirty-five. All told, he’d had nine sex partners (including DaBlonde), considerably less than the national average for men, which he’d read was thirteen. With his first wife, but certainly not his second, he’d watched porn, but always the tame and corny stuff. Deep
Throat. Devil in Miss Jones
. He’d never been to an orgy, a strip club, a live sex show, or known any swingers or fetishists, that he was aware of. So yes, hooking up with the Amboys and balling her while the husband filmed it—that was extreme sport for Tacko.
“Really and truly, Daddy, no more pictures. Do you know if there’s still coffee to reheat?”
“Should I look?” Louis tapped the camera’s on/off button and the snouty lens retracted with a tootling whir. It amazed Tacko how agreeable the guy was, like a new boyfriend or a seasoned butler. “Mr. Tacko?” he said. “If there’s coffee, do you want a cup?” Louis only called him Mister. DaBlonde, come to think of it, never called him anything. “Or do you want another glass of wine?”
“Coffee sounds great.”
After Louis went out, Tacko turned on his back, pulled the sheet over him to mid-chest, and folded his hands behind his neck. He could hear it raining, a sleety, hard-ticking persistent March rain. He could also hear muffled sax, drums, and bass surging up from the art gallery below. Some kind of fund-raiser there tonight. Noticing a photograph in a pewter frame on the dresser, Tacko did a stomach crunch to have a better look. When he lay back down, DaBlonde loomed over his face. “What?”
“Just checking out the picture.”
“That’s our wedding.”
“Really?” He looked at it again, Louis in a dark-blue suit, DaBlonde in an Easter-pink cocktail dress. Outdoors on bright green grass, a flowering tree behind them. “How long ago?”
“Last spring.” Tacko watched her remembering, her mouth shifting into a private smile. “We’re still newlyweds. Year in May.”
A year in May, and practically from day one, they’d told Tacko, DaBlonde had been fucking strangers with Daddy’s blessing.
Hot Wife/Husband Watches But Doesn’t Join In
. That was their lifestyle niche. They’d started playing strictly for thrills, because they wanted to and could, but then Louis and DaBlonde wondered if they might earn some income from it as well. They recorded so many videos and took so many pictures, what were they supposed to do with it all? And frankly, they could use the extra money, what with their two divorces, which they hadn’t gone into in any detail about with Tacko. A website seemed worth a shot.
Louis, who was living on permanent disability (apparently he had twenty things wrong with him), was a seasoned entrepreneur. Before he’d hooked up with DaBlonde (they’d met online, each in a miserable marriage), he’d owned a small chain of video stores in the Petersburg area, and during the dot-com boom a website where he marketed things like patio misters and mosquito lures. He’d run that business out of the family garage in Chesterfield County while holding down a good job assessing and purchasing liability coverage for a residential building contractor. It wasn’t hard for Louis to do the research, stake out their domain, take care of all that technical stuff.
The site went hot six months ago. The original version was amateurish and skimpy, offering only a few dozen nude-slash-action pictures of DaBlonde and a handful of short clips. Over time it got better, easier to navigate, and grew to include thousands of photographs and more than eighty videos. About two thousand subscribers signed up, guys like Tacko paying $23.95 per month with automatic credit card renewal. Subscribers from all over the country, she’d proudly told him. Europe, Japan, Australia, Brazil, even the Middle East. “Arabs and blond women,” Louis said once, meaningfully clenching his jaw, and let it go at that.
Tacko had never intended to contact DaBlonde, even though as a member of her site he was encouraged to. But ten days ago—the same day that Dave Sandlin of the Eury Agency telephoned out of the blue and asked Tacko to fax over his resume—he’d impulsively written her an e-mail. Saying how much he enjoyed her newest video, adding that he’d been in the same bar dozens of times, the bar where she’d picked up that stringy Jamaican guy with the white teeth. It was the Tobacco Company, wasn’t it?
She’d e-mailed him back, using emoticons and
u
for
you
, which Tacko loathed. Would he like to meet? Tacko didn’t reply. Fantasy was okay, but actually
doing
something? Very damn unlikely. DaBlonde persisted. She wrote Tacko again, and included two cell numbers. When he didn’t call, she wrote a third time: they would be at Siné Irish Pub in Shockoe Slip on Wednesday evening at 8:30. It would be so great if he joined them.
By ten past 8 last Wednesday, Tacko still hadn’t made up his mind.
He’d been so nervous when they met that his lips kept sticking to his front teeth. He just nodded and smiled, sipped his beer, and let DaBlonde and Louis do most of the talking. This was their dog-and-pony show. Not that either of them had dressed to impress. Louis, in need of a beard trim and a haircut (his full beard was salt-and-pepper; the hair on his large head gray, thin, and wind-blown), had come to the pub wearing khaki pants and a plum-colored knit shirt stretched over his big stomach like a drumhead. He hadn’t worn a coat. Twenty degrees out and no coat. Louis was about five-eight, but his bulk made his presence overpowering; he took up so much room! They’d stood, all three of them, talking at the bar for more than an hour. Tacko wondered if they stayed there because the tables and booths were too confining for the guy.
DaBlonde introduced herself as “Ann-dray-ah but spelt like Andrea,” and Tacko thought she looked dowdy, a little drippy, in person. At any rate, in clothes. Charcoal slacks and a pale gray blouse, black vest hand-decorated with colored glass beads. A dobby four-button jacket. She’d dressed like a third-grade teacher out for a drink—a non-alcoholic margarita—on a Friday afternoon, even though it was a weeknight, and she drank a White Russian, then a second. This is what they liked to do, she said. She looked Tacko straight in the eye. He smiled back. There was their marriage, she said, and then there was this. She gave a happy shrug. This was just a hobby they shared.
But it was a business too, said Louis. Tacko would have to sign a consent form. They would try not to show his face in videos. Louis was careful about that. However, if Tacko were recognized, they could not be held accountable.
He had to think it over. What would happen if he
were
recognized? What
could?
Tacko wasn’t married, and his friends and professional acquaintances were universally unlikely to surf into DaBlonde’s “hot wife” site, although you could never know anything for certain. His parents were deceased, so was his brother, he didn’t plan on running for public office, and he’d been laid off from his job, so he couldn’t be fired.
Fuck it, he signed the waiver.
“That your real name?” said Louis Amboy.
Tacko blushed. Had he done something wrong? Was he supposed to make one up? “But nobody calls me Vincent,” he said. “Vin sometimes, but not so much. Never Vinnie. Usually either Tack or just Tacko.” Shut
up
.
DaBlonde had put her hand on his leg, right thigh, underneath the bar ledge. She moved it back to his crotch. At that moment her cell phone started playing Van Morrison’s “Have I Told You Lately?” and she withdrew the hand to root though her bag. “Excuse me.” She turned away and answered, frowning.
“Look, I’m in a restaurant. Because I am, that’s why.” She planted an elbow on the bar and slumped in dejection. “Nice.
Classy
. And I’m supposed to listen to this crap?
Scott
. I’m not listening to you. No, Scott, you may not speak to
my husband
, either. Because that’s who he is, Scott. And now I’m going to hang up. Same to you, asshole.” She listened a few more seconds, then snapped her phone closed. Flipped it back open and turned it off. Then she raised an eyebrow significantly at Louis. “That was Scott.”
“I gathered. And?”
“You heard me. I wouldn’t listen.” She looked testy, then didn’t. She widened her eyes, doing mock-waif, and smiled at Tacko. “Scott’s my ex-and-I-couldn’t-be-happier-about-it-husband. And I’m especially happy that he lives in Greensboro. He makes cheap furniture. And empty threats.” After a shrug, DaBlonde leaned forward and kissed Tacko on the mouth, with tongue.
“Well,” said Louis, recovering abruptly (he’d paled at Scott’s name) and paying for his and DaBlonde’s drinks with a twenty, “shall we continue this somewhere else?”
They’d gone to the Omni since they could walk to it from the pub, Louis explaining to Tacko on the way how it was standard practice for the single guy to pay for the room. Tacko thought,
Standard practice
. In the Amboys’ world it was standard practice for the single guy to pay for the room. In the Amboys’ world, and in Tacko’s world now too.
He’d felt a knot of fear when they arrived at their room and he unlocked the door with a magnetized card. (What if they robbed him? Tied him up and tortured him? What if—?) Then it was gone. DaBlonde threw off her clothes like it was nothing. White cotton underpants, white undershirt with spaghetti straps, no bra. Tacko was delighted by her smooth skin, her small breasts, impressed by her intensity. The more DaBlonde carried on, and the louder she got, the more Louis enjoyed it. That was demonstrably evident. All told, they were at the hotel for about an hour and a half.
Afterwards, Tacko felt conscience pangs. He’d wondered if he would, and he did. He felt like some kind of crazy amoral heathen, and as big a pervert as Louis Amboy. Well, maybe not quite as big.
He was surprised when the Amboys e-mailed him and suggested another get-together. He’d been flattered too by the follow-up invitation, but uncertain how to respond. He’d met them just to say (to himself) that he’d done it, to actually do something outrageous for a change. But what was the point of seeing them again? Sure,
that
. But did he really want any more of the Amboys? No. Yes. No.
Eventually, he decided to see them again, and then to his further surprise (and slight discomfort) they’d invited him to their condo on Decatur Street, just south of the Mayo Bridge. Tacko knew their pay site well, and all of the videos and pictures there had been shot in hotel rooms or in public or semi-public places, never their home. Till now they’d not so much as hinted at where in the city they lived. For all Tacko knew they actually lived somewhere else and just played in Richmond. No, it turned out they lived on Decatur and Third.
A few of the red-brick early-twentieth-century buildings in the old Manchester district still operated as factories (Alcoa had a plant, there were a couple of box companies), but most were either derelict or had been gutted and refurbished into work space for artists, art galleries, or luxury condos. Where the Amboys lived had once been the United States Cardboard Company and still bore the name chiseled above the entrance door.
They owned one of the few residential units that had been sold in the building. Two or three cooperative galleries, a banquet hall, a café, and about fifty artists’ studios comprised the ground level. Louis and DaBlonde lived on the third floor, a wide-open industrial space, exposed brick, timber columns and trusses, everything else chrome or glass or bleached canvas, Ultrasuede or black leather. The place was furnished, Tacko thought coming in earlier tonight, like a full-page design collection ad in the
New York Times Magazine
—except for all of the computers.
There were desktops and laptops, Macs and IBM PCs, and monitors either shining a dead blue light or playing explicit videos Tacko recognized from the pay site. DaBlonde with the Sports Bar Guy, the Sharp-Dressed Man, the Man in the Woods, the Cowboy Trucker. In the restroom at Chesterfield Towne Centre, on a farm, on a different farm, behind the Ashland Wal-Mart, at the Virginia State Fair. All of the monitors had the sound turned off. Even so, it was disorienting, porn everywhere you looked, and the actual woman, the “hot wife” herself, standing right there, dressed in herringbone slacks and a white fuzzy sweater, urging Tacko to sit down, then sliding onto the sectional beside him.
