The three of us? But this time it is only about the two of us, I wanted to say.
I drank my vodka. Leave it alone, Bobby, I told myself. I tried to think of a joke to tell her. Something to get us on a new track.
“Let’s not talk about Jim,” I said. “I’m sorry I brought him up. That was one of your rules, right? No talking about Jim.”
I couldn’t help myself.
“Okay, that’s it,” she said. She started tickling me. “It sounds to me like you want to wrestle. You wanna wrestle?” she said. “I bet I can whip you. Let’s wrestle.” She took an ice cube out of her drink and put it in her teeth. She rubbed it on my chest. “You better watch out now,” she said, with the ice cube in her fingers. “I can do some real damage with this thing.”
When I woke up, in the morning, she was still there, where I didn’t know if she would be. Outside my window I could see the shadows from the sun, not quite risen yet. There were birds out there, too, waking up, bouncing the branches just past the window. I didn’t have a hangover. My first appointment wasn’t until one. What a good day, I thought.
That same morning, a few hours later, the Polack came into my office and said, “A girl will speak with you.”
The Polack was wearing one of my favorite thin silk shirts. The red one. She bought them for herself in one of those giant Chinese warehouses over on Harry Hines, where we sometimes bought cheap gold chain if we needed it in a hurry and didn’t want to pay for Italian. They were only ten or twenty bucks apiece but they looked like they came right off a mannequin at Barneys. She knew I always wanted to fuck her when she wore one of those shirts. You could see all of the details of her body beneath it. I had told her so many times, and we had even had sex in the bathroom at the store while she was wearing it. I asked her to keep it on.
I understood who the girl was by the way the Polack said the words. I looked up from my work on my desk in fear. I knew I would see Lisa on the showroom floor. There were three or four customers out there, wandering the showcases. My salesmen were sitting on their asses as usual. But no Lisa. Dear God, that’s one I owe you for, I thought. I knocked on the wood of my desk.
“She’s waiting,” the Polack said. “This girl. She is on the phone.”
“A girl? A woman or a girl?”
“Yes, as I explain. A girl. She is on that line.” She jabbed at the blinking light of the phone at my desk as though she were poking its eye out. I was afraid she was going to ask me to put her on speakerphone.
“Okay, Polack,” I said. “Thank you.” I shuffled the pink message notes on my desk until she left.
After I hung up, the Polack was back in my office. “She is who?” she said.
“She’s a customer, Polack,” I said.
“Okay. Customer. Fine. That’s what you say. Who? Who from? How does she know to ask your name? I do not know this customer. She sounds like someone I know.”
“She’s a referral,” I said.
“I said that. Whose?” the Polack said.
“Not now,” I said. “Polack. Please. It’s Jim’s business. Okay?”
“Good. I talk to him about it,” she said.
“No,” I said. I almost called her Emily, to try to get through to her. But that would be a giveaway. “It’s his personal business. Drop it.”
At lunch I told the Polack that the customer who had called was an old girlfriend of Jim’s, a girlfriend from the Lily days, who was now a hooker. I didn’t tell her it was Lisa. You know, the useful cliché, keep the lie as close to the truth as you can.
“He does that? He pays these women to have sex with him?” she said. “So she asks for you. This is the story?”
The Polack ate her mozzarella-and-tomato salad. She was also having a bucket of mussels. Unlike me, she preferred the large ones.
“I kind of knew her, too,” I said. “I mean, she left Jim just as I was coming in the business. That’s why she asked for me. She wanted to know what Jim’s romantic situation was. Like she had some kind of interest in him, I guess. Other than his money. I don’t really know. But I cleared it up. I told her, you know, that she should just ask Jim. I told her that we didn’t really get involved in one another’s personal lives.” I always had difficulty lying to the Polack. She was so suspicious that she made you feel like you were saying, Okay now I am going to lie to you, and then trying to tell the lie. It doesn’t work. It’s self-contradictory.
“I do not blame him. With this latest wife of his. Who would want to have sex with that? No. But, the hooker? For money? Do you ask, how many other cocks are in the hole? Now your cock is Mr. Lucky? We all fuck her at once! Shove in the cocks! More! Like a hotel. But we all sleep in the same bed!”
Lately the Polack wore her hair pulled back but today she had let it down and it made her look more human. She had angular cheekbones, long legs, and, when she wore short dresses or skirts, the kind of bony knees that made her look like a French or an Italian woman in a photo on a runway. But with the unjust and vulgar way she explained the motivations of other people, and more generally her outlook on life, she could seem almost ugly. For an unpleasant moment I wished a magical truck would leap the curb — we were eating outside, on the patio — and run her over right before my eyes. Stop dead with a huge rubber wheel crushing her belly and the crumpled chair beneath her. With that bit of white mozzarella squeezed from her lips. Then I thought, Bobby. You’re cheating on the Polack, too. She’s only trying to have a real relationship with you. She deserves your affection as much as anyone does. Or nearly as much. If you will just give her the benefit of the doubt.
“It’s not such a big deal, Polack,” I said.
“This is bad for a married man. You should be telling him yourself. You are the brother. A married man should not go fuck some hooker. He breaks a promise.”
“I’m married, Polack.” Why do you say things like that, Bobby? Are you so determined to make your own life worse?
“I understand. And I am not the hooker. Or you forget?”
“What I’m saying is leave it alone. Plus if you say something then he would know I told you. He’s my brother, Polack. He has to trust me. I should never have told you in the first place. But I knew, I mean, I thought you would show some discretion. This is important. I need to know I can tell you things, Polack. Without you running straight to repeat them to Jim. Anyway it’s none of our business.”
“Okay. No problem. I will tell it like a joke. We joke like that together. Jim and I, we have our friendship. I know him long before you.”
“But I told you.”
Her salad and her mussels were gone. She reached with her fork and started on my gnocchi. I didn’t mind because I wasn’t hungry. But it made me sick to watch her forking it up like that over the table.
“Go ahead and eat it,” I said, though she hadn’t asked.
I thought, Now I have to tell Jim the whole thing. He will want to call her, too. I did not think he would want to pay her for sex, like I was. But he would want to be friendly with her. He might even start dating her again. I didn’t know what his status was with his current girlfriend. Plus his latest wife, of course. I could ask him not to call her, I thought. But who knew what he would think about that. He might just laugh about it. “Like you said. She’s a hooker now,” he would say. But he would call her anyway. Then he would tell her the story about the Polack and the lie I told her about Jim. She might think it was a sweet story. But they might laugh about it together.
Unless he has already called her, I thought. Then I didn’t have to tell him anything. Or I could just say, Lisa called for you, earlier, and the Polack asked about it. I wondered if there was a way I could get the truth out of Sylvia. But she had been a hooker and a madam for years. She could keep a secret better than anyone.