No, William Prescott III had turned me into his cabana boy and I was helpless to fight it. What else could I do but sit back and take the money?
33
I WAS LYING ON THE COUCH in my apartment with the lights off, drinking a beer and occasionally banging the wall with my fist, when she called for me. I was banging in frustration at allowing myself to be bought, banging at whatever it was inside of me that kept me from fighting it. And I was banging at the way Prescott was playing me. It rankled. “Oh, cabana boy, bring me a drink. Oh, cabana boy, sit down and shut up and let me have my way with you. Oh, cabana boy…” I drank my beer and stared at the shadows of light that swept through my window from the street and bang, banged, waiting for the phone to ring. From the first trill I knew who it was.
“I’ll be right over,” I said into the handset and within thirty seconds I was out the door.
Even before my fall into outright whoredom I had been running to Veronica whenever she called. She was like a drug to me, an addiction, and even when I wasn’t with her, when I was sitting in the courtroom supposedly concentrating on the testimony I was not permitted to challenge or rebut, I couldn’t keep my mind from drifting back to the salty smell and soft soft skin and the electric tongue. Jimmy, preoccupied with the trial, still slipped out now and then for a quiet rendezvous with his mistress, though his nights of carousing through the city with his entourage were on hold pending the verdict. Whenever he was with Veronica I worked late on Valley Hunt Estates or whatever else I could find to suck up my time and on those nights, whenever the Bishops weren’t taking me out for dinner and filling me with wine, I would stop at the corner grill for my evening cheese steak and fall asleep to the brilliance of late-night television. But on the nights Veronica called I would hang up the phone and rush out the door and drive enthusiastically to Olde City.
For a while we had been meeting at bars for a drink or two before retiring to her apartment. There was something reassuring about that, a restaurant for a late dinner, a bar for a nightcap. On those evenings out we could pretend that we were dating, as if we were a normal couple in a normal relationship satisfying our normal desires. But after the rear window of that hatchback exploded in front of my face I grew cautious of public places. And then there was that night in Carolina’s.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said, turning her head quickly away from me. “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”
We were at the far end of the bar, drinking our martinis and Sea Breezes, sharing cigarettes. She had begun smoking on our nights out, Camel Lights, and a cigarette was between her fingers now when her eyes widened with a shot of terror and she said, “Oh, Jesus,” and she turned away from me.
I thought for an instant she was gasping at my face, which was a gasper, really, but that wasn’t it. Behind me was the entrance and when I swiveled to grab a look, whom I saw walking in that entrance was Chester Concannon. I spun around again before he could see me.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said. “We have to get out of here.”
“Would he tell Jimmy?” I asked to the back of her head.
“Of course he would,” she said. “And that’s not all he’d do. Jesus. He has a wild crush on me, didn’t you know?”
“No,” I said.
“He told me on one of our nights out when he was bearding me. We got drunk together and he made a pass and told me. Jimmy and me is one thing,” she said, sliding off her stool. “But if Chester knew about you he’d go nuts. Come on, follow me.”
Without turning toward the entrance she headed for the rear of the room and I followed, hunching down so I might not be recognized from the back. We entered a short hallway with two lavatories and, at the end, an unmarked door. Veronica went to that door and opened it. Inside were shelves filled with supplies, toilet paper, and towels. There was just enough room for two to stand inside the closet.
“Did you know this was there?” I asked.
“No,” she said, with a laugh. “But good thing it is.”
“And you want us to hide from Chet in there?”
“I’m not the type to stay in closets,” she said. “I want you to hide from Chester in there. Thirty minutes.”
She left me in that closet, telling me that she would get Chet out of there before he saw me with her. I stood tall in the darkness, surrounded by the sweet menthol smell of urinal cakes, wondering at how far I had fallen that I had to hide from my clients in closets. This Veronica thing was impossible, I had told myself before and repeated it to myself inside that dark mentholated cave, but even as I swore to end it I knew I wouldn’t. It was something obsessional and foolish and perverse, but it had evolved into something else too, it had evolved into something close to love. Twisted, yes, forged from depravity and desire, yes, but there it was, like a nugget in my chest. And no matter how impossible it might have been, no matter how doomed, I would stay in that closet to keep it alive as long as I had to. When by the green glowing hands of my watch I could tell a half-hour had passed, I straightened my jacket and opened the door.
A woman standing in the hallway waiting for the ladies room saw me emerge from the closet and screamed.
“Funny,” I said with a shrug. “I thought it was the men’s room.” And then, with all the dignity I could muster, I walked past her back into the bar.
So, for safety’s sake, we didn’t meet in bars or restaurants anymore. When she called for me I came running to her apartment, straight as if on a string, and the night I was bang banging on my walls in frustration was no different from any other night. She called, I ran, and we rolled around her bed like cats, sometimes playful, sometimes lupine, always carnal, and it was worth everything.
And when it was over it was always the same.
“You have to go,” she said.
“Why?” It came out in a half-moan, dragged from the recesses of my sleep, a sleep that was eluding me in my own apartment but that attacked me as I lay in the warm muskiness of her bed.
“Because you do,” she said.
“Let me stay. Let me sleep just a little bit more.”
She pushed me hard, rolling me over toward the end of the bed, and I jerked awake in a panic of falling. “What?”
“You have to go,” she said,
“Just one night,” I begged. “Let me spend just one night over.”
“Absolutely not.” She rose from the bed and put on a heavy terry cloth robe. She took a cigarette from the pack on her bedside table and lit it, inhaling deeply, and then leaned against a wall with her arms crossed. Smoke leaked out of her mouth, covering her face like a veil. “Your clothes are scattered here or there. Pick them up on your way out.”
Generally, I had always believed there was no greater luxury after sex than to be alone. It is something about men, about the way our bodies work, about the physiological effects of orgasms in our brains. The neurotransmitters that are released by sex trigger those neurons that say turn over, pretend to sleep, maybe she’ll just go away. Give us a beer afterwards and a remote control and an empty bedroom and we’re halfway to heaven. Which is why men have invented the great after-sex lies: “I have to be at work early,” or, “I’m allergic to your cat,” or “I have to pick up my laundry before the dry cleaner closes.” The problem had always been getting away. Now I was desperately disappointed that she wouldn’t let me stay.
The reason for the desperation was clear to me that night, and it was more than just that nugget of love in my chest. Nothing existed in my life that I could yet be proud of and nothing ever had. Who I was just then, Prescott’s cabana boy, was no one I ever thought I’d ever want to be. But in her touch, her warmth, in her wet embrace, with Veronica I could lose myself. Her apartment had become a magic wonderland of sensuality and vice, a place separate from the rest of the world, which had suddenly turned even uglier for me. With her I was not Victor Carl, the shady lawyer who had been passed over by the profession, first duped and then bought by those he would have had as peers, instead I was part of something wild and lost and satisfyingly perverse. With her I metamorphosed into a piece of a puzzle that promised so much and that only the two of us could possibly solve. With her I… let’s just say with her I was someone else and someone else was very much what I wanted then to be. To force me to leave was to force me to become myself again. She didn’t know how cruel she was being.