And she liked the other girls, her coworkers. The other three girls on the night-shift with her were the ones she knew best, of course: Dee and Terri and Joan. Dee was a little difficult to understand, sometimes, with that big vocabulary of hers, but she was really friendly, and gave Honour Mercy a lot of good advice. Dee was a real pro, a girl who’d been working here for almost five years and knew just about everything there was to know about the business. Madge didn’t know it, but Dee was saving up to start a house of her own. She talked with Madge a lot, finding out what it took to become a madam, who had to be paid off, the ins and outs of the trade. And Dee had promised that Honour Mercy could come with her when she set up her own place.
Joan was kind of strange, in a way. She never talked much, never seemed to care to go to the movies in the afternoon with the other girls or do anything, never seemed to care about anything but her eight hours a day at the Third Street Grill. She was friendly, but reserved, saving her smiles for her customers.
Terri was Honour Mercy’s best friend of the bunch. Terri and she enjoyed the same things, loved to go to the matinees at the movie down the block from the hotel, loved to go window-shopping. They could talk together for hours without getting bored. Terri had come from the same kind of town and family as Honour Mercy, and for pretty much the same reason, and that made a bond of understanding between them.
As for Madge, Honour Mercy didn’t see much difference between Madge and her parents back in Coldwater. They both had strict sets of rules and regulations, ironbound values, and absolutely insisted on complete obedience. Madge’s set of rules and values was, of course, quite different from Honour Mercy’s parents’, and a lot easier to conform to, but the similarity was still there.
This was now her second Monday night, and her last night shift for two weeks. Starting tomorrow, she’d be on the noon-to-eight shift, which meant a little less money, but that was all right, because her period of forced inaction would come during that time. It would be better than being inactive while on the night shift, which was what kept happening to Terri.
In the last two weeks, she had come to learn that every man is different, and every man is the same. Every man is different in the preliminaries, and every man is the same in thinking that he is different in the act itself. At least twice a night, someone would come in with a brand-new variation he’d just thought up, and these variations were never brand new at all. Of course, Honour Mercy wouldn’t tell the poor guy he wasn’t as original as he thought he was. After all, it was extra money for extra service, and special tricks rated as extra service.
She had been worried that the other girls would get all the business, because they knew more, but it turned out that she got all the business she could handle. There was something naturally fresh and unspoiled and virginal about her, and a lot of men were attracted to that, liked to have the impression that they were the very first, though of course they had to know better, since she was working here and all. But still, they liked the impression, and she was making darn good money at it.
Of all the men who had come to see her in the last two weeks, this pop-eyed boy with the suitcase was by far the most different and most same one of them all. The fear and indecision and doubt that were, she knew, hidden deep in every man that paid his way here, was right out in the open on this boy’s face. Sameness and difference. It was strange that a thing could be the same and different all at once.
She spoke to him, and he simply looked more pop-eyed than ever. Dee had told her, when a man got stage-fright in the parlor, bring him immediately upstairs. Seeing the bed will snap him out of it, one way or the other. Otherwise, you could waste half an hour with a man who might change his mind at the last minute and run off without paying a cent or doing a thing.
So Honour Mercy took the pop-eyed boy by the elbow, and gently led him upstairs. He followed obediently enough, but he didn’t look any less terrified, no matter how much she smiled at him, or how gently she talked to him.
She led him to her room, empty except for the sheet-covered bed and the stand and the chair and the enamel basin and the sink. And, upon seeing the bed, he froze solid.
“Come on, now, honey,” she said soothingly. “It isn’t as bad as all that. Why, some men even think it’s fun. Specially when I do it with them. You come on, now.”
He stayed frozen.
This was the first time a man had done this, but Honour Mercy was ready for it. Dee had warned her it might happen, and told her the antidote was nudity. She should take off her clothes, in front of him, as provocatively as possible.
She did. She crooned to him, telling him how much fun it would be, and she slipped out of her dress, wriggling her hips to make the dress slide down away from her body. Beneath the dress she wore only bra and panties. A slip was a waste of time, and a girdle would be a horror to remove.
She kicked off her shoes and walked over in front of the boy. “Unsnap me, will you?” she asked him, and turned her back.
She was afraid he’d stay frozen. If he didn’t unsnap her, she didn’t know exactly what she could do next. She waited, her back to him, holding her breath, and all at once she felt his fingers fumbling at the bra strap.
“That’s a good boy, honey,” she said. She turned to face him again, still smiling, and said, “Slip the old bra off me, will you, honey?”
His face was still frozen, but his arms seemed capable of movement. He reached up, gingerly, just barely touching her skin, and slid the bra straps down her arms, releasing the fullness of her breasts.
She cupped her hands under her breasts. “Do you like me?” she asked him. “Am I all right?”
He spoke for the first time, with something more like a frog-croak than a voice. “You’re beautiful,” he croaked, and his face turned red.
“Thank you,” she murmured, and leaned forward to kiss his cheek, rubbing her body against him as she did. He stiffened again, and she swirled away, afraid of rushing him. She slid out of her panties, and walked, hip-rolling, toward him, her arms out to him. “Come on now,” she crooned. “Come on now, honey, come on now.”
His head was shaking back and forth. “I didn’t know—” he started. “I thought — I didn’t know—”
“Come on now, honey,” she whispered, her outstretched arms almost reaching him.
“I can’t!” he cried suddenly, and collapsed at her feet, sitting on the floor and covering his face with his hands.
She stared at him, amazed, and suddenly realized he was crying. A man, and he was crying. It was the strangest thing that ever happened.
She knelt on the floor beside him and put a protective arm around his shoulders. “That’s all right, honey,” she whispered. “That’s all right.”
“I can’t,” he said again, his voice muffled by his hands. “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. I’ve never done it, I’ve never, never done it. I don’t know how, I can’t—”
It seemed as though he’d go on that way forever. Honour Mercy interrupted him, saying, “If you never did, honey, how do you know you can’t? There’s a first time for everybody, you know. There was a first time for me.”
Something — her voice, her words, her arm around his shoulder, she wasn’t sure what had done it — something managed to calm him, and he looked at her with the most pathetic and wistful expression she had ever seen. Like a lost puppy, he was.