Sparrow Nights (14 page)

Soon enough I was standing opposite the Village Health Spa. It glowed among the freshly budding trees like a sunken ship, its cabin still alight.

“Ah yes,” I said in tones of bemused statesmanship, for I was again addressing the same audience that a drunk sometimes imagines is tailing him about town (how odd they have so little else to do). I stepped lightly off the sidewalk and crossed over to the other side of the street. (This provoked a small gasp of disapproval from the gallery. I could hear them stirring in their seats.)

Now look here, I protested, not a trace of a stagger,
pas même un soupçon
. I thrust my hands into my pockets. Trust me, my posture said, just a bit of fun and I’m off.

I mounted the curb and paused for a second, amused, open-minded, even a bit mischievous, as if I had just stumbled upon a student prank. A good sport. I had the sensation of pouting my lips as a Frenchman might seconds before he disagrees, or as you might prepare to kiss a dog. Rocking ever so slightly on the balls of my feet, I again heard the warning rumble of the cheap theatrical, Julius Caesar waving away the too insistent petitioner, but they were one and the same now, the stuffy spectators, the grumbling aluminum siding; they were emissaries from a more tentative world.

Playfully now (how sober I felt, how
lucid)
, I peeked in the front window. A man in an appalling shirt sat behind the reception desk. With his salt-and-pepper hair he could have been a lawyer, but there was something of the gutter to him, something that implied a capacity for quick violence. And that shirt, green with red melons on it, the kind of thing a pimp might wear. I tapped at the window. He turned and, squinting in my direction, rose athletically and disappeared from view. A few seconds later I heard the front door open.

“Can I help you?” he asked.

“I wanted to see if you’re open.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what the front door is for.”

He went back inside and I followed him.

“I’m looking for someone,” I said.

He nodded. Not an especially friendly nod. He appeared to be feeling along the inside of his teeth for a gap in which to rest the tip of his tongue.

“Does Passion still work here?”

He nodded. “She’s busy.”

“Busy for the night or busy for now?”

“Don’t know.”

“Should I wait?”

“That’s up to you, sir.”

Sir
. There was something especially uninviting about the way he said it, as if an attack dog had been force-fed a few tricks of civilization, a ritual he was compelled to go through before being permitted his natural savagery. It struck me he’d learned it from the police, that tone of theirs when, looking about the inside of your car with a flashlight, they suddenly request you to step out. “Would you mind stepping out of the car, sir?” I wondered if he’d been in prison and looked down at his forearms for tattoos. But they were concealed by the sleeves of his dreadful shirt.

“Waiting will be fine,” I said.

“That’ll be thirty-five dollars then.”

“For how long?”

“Half-hour.”

“Do you want it now?”

“Yep.”

“Not after?”

“House rules. Customers pay up front.”

“I wonder why that is.”

No response. Then, “So, what do you want to do here?” he asked.

I reached for my wallet. “Would cash be all right?”

“No, I want it in fucking
cherries,”
he said.

I was taken aback by the sheer venom in his voice. But I was also just drunk enough to presume a certain customer impunity and said with some dignity, “One forgets sometimes that there are those people in the world who mistake politeness for weakness.”

He hadn’t the foggiest notion what I was talking about and it occurred to me that maybe he could smell the alcohol on me. In which case I could see very swiftly the portrait forming in his head, that of a rather sad-sack middle-aged man who, after a few bottles of wine, has screwed up the courage to buy what he could never have otherwise. Foolish as it sounds, it pricked my vanity that he might think that of me. Why would I care? I don’t know. Only the other day I found myself bragging to an undergraduate about a book I’d published in my early twenties, the aftermath of which left me scratching my head with consternation. A certain hot shame dogged my footsteps for the next few hours. Why had I bothered? Surely by this point in my life I should have, I don’t know,
outgrown
all that. Or at least the need for it. What was worse was that midway through my transparent crowing I had sensed that the undergraduate knew exactly what I was doing and his co-operative nods and little gasps of pretend surprise were entirely for my benefit, as if somehow he were looking after me.

Still, it annoyed me. I placed forty dollars on the counter. He put the bills thoughtfully in his shirt pocket.

“Casual accounting system you have here,” I said. “Tell me, what percentage do the girls get?”

He gave his head a small shake, as if he were clearing it, which gave me to understand that it wasn’t the question that confused him but rather the notion that it might be any of my business.

“Uh?” he said, widening his eyes, as if he had perhaps misheard me and was giving me the benefit of the doubt.

I repeated the question, my tone implying, I know you’re a moron, so I’ll go slowly. “How much do the girls get to keep of this?”

“All of it,” he said.

“Oh,” I said quite cheerfully, “that’s nice. Can I have my change, please?”

“Sorry?”

“Five dollars. You owe me five dollars.”

“Don’t have it right now. You’ll have to wait.”

“What for?”

“I’ll get it from another customer.”

I looked around the deserted room. “No, I think I’d like my change now, please.”

“I can’t give it to you.”

“Then I’ll have to cancel the transaction.”

He made no attempt to return the money, and in the tense silence I could see he was used to moments like this. And the thought crossed my mind, a man like this has punched people in the face before. And been punched. It’s no big deal. I could feel my heart starting to pound. He went into the back and returned a few moments later with a five-dollar bill.

“That’s very kind of you,” I said with the fake friendliness one feels toward someone who has unnerved you. “Didn’t mean to put you out.”

“No problem,” he said. It sounded as if he were warming up. Perhaps I’d misjudged him. Long hours, difficult clientele. Yes, I could see now how one might become a trifle brusque.

“And what’s
your
name?” I said.

He paused for a second and you could see him pick it out of the air. “Donny,” he said.

“A bit slow this time of year, isn’t it … Donny?” I remarked. “It must be the rain. Canadians don’t mind being cold, but they hate getting wet.”

I repeated this little morsel of drivel as if I were saying it for the first time. It was in fact the hundredth time I’d remounted it, this rain-or-shine device to thaw unpleasant taxi drivers. But it failed to charm tonight. Donny was one of those creatures who feel no compulsion to smile at the jokes of others, a quality of coldness that chills me to this day.

“That a fact?”

“That is indeed a fact.”

“So you want to go back or wait up here?” he asked, his interest in me at an end.

I thought for a second while his tongue again sought its niche.

“I’ll wait in the back, Donny.”

He led me down the hall, past a closed grey door where I heard muffled voices, a woman’s laugh. It was Passion. He stopped in front of the second room.

“Knock yourself out,” he said.

I wondered if I was supposed to tip him.

^{C H A P T E R}        
12

I
closed the door behind me and sat down on the massage table. You could touch the wall on either side. Not enough room to swing a cat, but then again, why would one? The walls were a rich olive colour, surprisingly tasteful. A pair of pale cloth slippers peeked from beneath the table. The usual small nightstand in the corner, with its usual accoutrements, a box of Kleenex, baby oil, a candle, a clock radio, a box of surgical gloves for those clients in need of proctology. I peered into the wastepaper basket. It was filled nearly to the brim with squashed-up balls of tissue and from it, wafting upwards, came that slightly salty whiff one gets sometimes from certain trees in early spring, the smell of semen. How disgusting, I thought, how truly repellent in their
details
are the sexual habits of others.

I heard a door close. A man’s chesty, self-assured laugh; the contentment of the freshly ejaculated. Cigar smoke, the voice retreating down the hall, then halting. Donny telling Passion she had a customer. The man’s voice started back in, the tone different now, a winding-it-up voice. Donny must have given him “the look,” let him know his time was up.
Sir
.

I was also aware that I had now come too far to turn back. There was no way out of the building except through the front foyer. No rear exit. A lapse in fire regulations perhaps; Donny would be on it first light for sure. I stood up quickly and faced the wall, my back to the door, pretending to examine a calendar for German chocolates. I stayed like that for I don’t know how long, a minute maybe. She must have been washing her hands. Then very faintly there came a tapping of small knuckles on the door, and it opened.

“Good evening,” Passion said brightly.

I turned around. The smile fell from her face.

“Hello, Passion.”

“Oh, it’s you,” she said. Only a quick downward glance revealed the slightest uneasiness. In an instant she returned her eyes to mine like matching gun barrels. “I haven’t seen you for a while.”

“That’s right,” I said with pleasant surprise, as if I’d just noticed. I wasn’t entirely sure how long to let these theatrics go on, but I was curiously aware that it required a certain effort on my part to remember that it was not
I
who had been in the wrong. It is a great skill of the psychopathic, I reflected, to make the offended party feel culpable.

“It
has
been a while,” I said. Here I frowned and looked off toward the top corner of the room, calculating, it seemed, the months since our last encounter. I sat back down on the table. “How’s school? You were studying to be a customs agent, as I recall.”

“Oh that,” she said. “I don’t do that any more. Couldn’t find the time.”

“You’re pretty busy now, are you?”

“Busy enough. And you? You still teaching?”

“Yes. Still teaching. Not much new to report there, I’m afraid.”

She changed gears. “Okay, I’ll give you a couple of minutes to get ready and then I’ll come back. You like the oil, right?” This in the tones of a busy travel agent.

“Come to think of it, I
do
have something to report, Passion.”

She stopped in the doorway.

“But you probably already know what that is,” I continued. She said nothing.

“What it is I have to report,” I prodded her gently.

“No. What would that be?”

“Why, that would be
you
, Passion.”

Careful pause. Always a chance one misunderstood. “Come again,” she said with a trace of amused confusion. Brow furrowed. “I’m going to report
you.”

“I’m not following.”

“I’m going to report you to the police.”

Like a sign on a roadside inn, which, after years of hanging by a single rivet, has picked that very second to crash to the ground, her bemused disguise fell the rest of the way off.

“Fuck off.”

“Okay. I’ll do that,” I said briskly. “So you just hang about here for, I don’t know, ten or fifteen minutes, and watch what happens.” I stood up.

“Just a minute. Just a minute,” she said. She stood in the doorway with her hands up. “What do you want?”

“I want my things returned.”

“I don’t have them.”

“Where are they?”

“At a friend’s. I don’t even know if he’s still got them.”

How banal. And how obvious. I felt a wash of shame roll over me. My vanity, my stupid, craven, naive vanity. Of course it wasn’t the first time she’d been to a client’s house. This was a well-lubricated scam.

“Well, you better get on the phone.” She seemed not to hear me. I raised my voice. “I
said
you better get on the phone—”

She shushed me.

“Is that your boyfriend out there?” I asked, referring to the thug in the blazing shirt.

“Don’t get him back here,” she said in a tone that alerted me.

“Okay then, we’ll leave
Donny
out of it. Let me put it this way: I want my things back by noon tomorrow or I’m calling the police and they’ll come here and they’ll haul you—and
Donny
—away. Do you understand?”

She didn’t answer.

“Do you understand?”

“Keep your voice down, I’m warning you.”

I had the sudden, alarming sensation that I was out of my depth.

“Do you have my address?” I said.

“I forget it.”

I pulled a pen from my jacket pocket and scratched out my number on the Kleenex box.

“By noon, Passion,” I said, somewhat less convincingly than before, and stepped around her.

Donny looked up at me as I passed through the foyer. “Good evening,” I said. He was watching me very closely, nodding his head almost imperceptibly. As I stepped outside I could hear him start down the hall.

It was half past three in the morning when the doorbell rang. I had been dreaming about a castle in Scotland, which I’d visited on my twelfth birthday. I was looking down from the top of the battlements. A row of damp flags drooped behind me. It was late afternoon; the sun hid behind a fog; the wet brown terrain ran straight down to the ocean; from somewhere out on the grey water came the sound of oars. I was bored. Holidays were always so boring near the end; how one hungered to get back to school. I felt in my blazer pocket for a cigarette, yes, there it was, and carefully, for its paper was wet, I extracted it. I tapped my trouser pockets: good, I had matches. I was striking the tiny colourless head against the cover when I caught sight of a woman in a window across the courtyard. She passed very quickly, like that. But that part of the castle was supposed to be empty. She must be a ghost! I must tell my mother that I saw Emma Carpenter in the window of a
castle!

And then I heard the doorbell ring again. I got up, wrapping a towel around my waist, and hurried to the door. Holding the towel with one hand and pulling in my stomach, I swung it open. For a second I drew a blank.

“Donny,” I said. “You’re early.”

He uttered something, a few words only, in a rather soft and not unpleasant voice, and I thought to myself, Ah, this is going to work out. I also realized I was still drunk.

“I’m sorry, what was that?” I asked, and leaned forward. But at that very second he grabbed my head between both hands and brought his forehead smack against mine. Red light exploded and I dropped to the floor, the towel fluttering to the side. He looked down at me with absolute calm. He’s done this before, I thought. After waiting what seemed like a determined amount of time, like a man counting to ten before allowing himself to say something, he reached over and, putting his fingers slowly into my hair, grasped a handful and yanked.

“Do you want some more?” he said.

My eyes watered.

“Have you got any money in the house?”

For a wild second I thought there had been a grotesque misunderstanding, that he had somehow, the way things happen in dreams, mistaken me for somebody else.

“What?”

He pulled harder. “Money, fuckweed.” His grip relaxed.

“I’m a
professor,”
I protested, and in the tone of my voice, its cowardly pitch, a moment from my childhood flared up like a match head, when a boy named Steven Love had backed me against the brick wall of my school and I had heard myself say, in precisely the voice I now heard, “I’m not
a’scared
of you.”

“No safe, nothing like that?” he said.

“No, of course not.”

He grabbed up the towel and pushed my head away, releasing my hair. “Wipe yourself.”

I clamped the towel to my head.

He stood observing me for a moment. “A bleeder, eh?” You could see him thinking, like a slow reader turning the page of a book, as he moved to the next thought. “Jewellery?”

I shook my head.

He looked around the room. “I’m confused,” he said. “Rich guy like you, buys his pussy, pays in cash. You got to have some money around here.”

I sat up, holding the towel to my head. “I got it out of the bank today. Check my wallet.”

He looked at me uncertainly. “Bank cards?”

I didn’t answer.

“That’s some split you got in your melon,” he said, and he reached over and took me by the hand and pulled me to my feet.

I stepped away from him.

“Don’t be scared,” he said. “I won’t hurt you.” He kicked me in the shins, a short, sharp kick. I think he was aiming for my kneecap. I hopped away from him, but I tripped over my own feet. There was something slightly effeminate about it, the way I fell backwards with my hands out behind me, like a fat woman protecting her rear end. He’s going to beat me to death, I thought.

“You sure you don’t have a safe in here?”

I lay on the floor, my arm up. He leaned over. I could smell him. But he didn’t strike another blow. He simply waited with this eerie patience.

Then, “You in there?” he asked. He smelt of cigarette smoke. “You listening?” He gave my ear a pull and smacked the top of my head. “You
list
ening?”

“Yes,” I said. “Yes, I’m listening.”

“I’ll be back tomorrow.” He stood up. “Look at me,” he said. I was sure a kick was coming.

“Look at me,” he repeated. He leaned over and yanked away my hand. It was shaking.

“Don’t,” I said. “Please don’t.”

“Get yourself to the doctor, I don’t care, but I want to find something worthwhile here tomorrow when I come back.” He toed me with his shoe. “You hear me?”

“Yes.”

“What did I say?”

“You said you’ll be back tomorrow.”

“And what else did I say?”

“You want something worthwhile.”

“Okay. Good. And Passion doesn’t want to see you again. That relationship is
over.”
He toed me again. “You got me?”

“Yes, yes, I got you.”

“That all right with you? Answer me.”

“Yes, fine, okay, I won’t go back there.”

He stood up straight, bending a little backwards as if he had a backache. “Well, I guess I’m finished here. What do
you
think? Am I finished here?” He took a deep breath and looked around. “Okay, we’ll see you tomorrow, Professor. Noon sound good? Answer me. Noon’s good?”

“All right,” I said.

I went to the emergency room at Women’s College Hospital, where an Asian intern put six stitches in my forehead. I told him I’d slipped on the bathroom floor, but he wouldn’t have any of it. Automatically, as if it were printed on a slip that a machine had dispensed, he said, “You are too old to be fighting.”

“I need some painkillers,” I said. “My head is positively roaring.”

He looked at me with appraising neutrality. “Have you been drinking recently?”

“How recently?”

“Were you drinking last night?”

“I had a glass of wine with dinner.”

Instead of guffawing, he merely regarded me with a breathtaking lack of self-consciousness. “I can’t prescribe painkillers if you’ve been drinking.”

“My head is throbbing.”

“I’m sorry.”

“For heaven’s sake.”

He shrugged. “The problem with mixing alcohol and pain—”

“Jesus God, I don’t need a lesson in pharmacology. I’ve just been whacked on the head.”