Inside, the fire had already gone out and the cabin was cold. I knelt to start it again but Lisa said, “I’m going to bed,” and I thought, Why bother? I knew she couldn’t sleep, not after the fight in the bar and the crank, but I couldn’t bear the idea of sitting up there with her on the bed in the silence and the dark. If we still didn’t have anything to say to each other, I mean. I sat in the living room, under the Navajo blanket that was across the back of the leather sofa, and drank a glass of water. There was no minibar in the cabin. Then I went to the car, opened the trunk, and found the Burgundy that I had brought for us to have with lunch tomorrow. I had planned for us to take the boat out and have a picnic on the lake.
In the morning we drove to the pancake place, but we weren’t hungry.
For weeks we had been building things. We drew designs and swapped them back and forth, we got out the stencils, the French curve set, and the Staedtler compass, we critiqued each other, we sent Sosa to the SMU art supply store for fresh 9000 pencils, we arranged tiny stones in black and purple sticky wax to evaluate sizes and patterns. We filled the holes in our inventory with pieces created by Jim and Bobby. The cocaine was helpful in this process — Jim was doing it with me now, too, or maybe he had never stopped and had just been hiding it from me — and we usually worked at Jim’s desk, and late into the night. We drew sketches and checked diamonds for size against the open-pronged holes in yellow gold blanks. Christmas was rearing its fierce, beautiful head, and there was no time to dawdle or sleep.
“So she’s a hooker now. Wonderful. Good for her. She’s really moving up in the world. And you are paying her? I know you’re not paying her. Why do you need a hooker for a girlfriend? In a way it’s not fair to her. It’s like you are making her into a liar. She’s a hooker, so let her be a hooker. That’s probably what she was meant to be all along.”
“I pay her by the month now. She’s not doing it for the money. I mean, she needs the money, of course. But that’s not why we do it that way.”
“Well, Lisa was always smart. Now she’s a smart hooker. I’ll give her that. What got her hooking anyway?” He paused for a minute. His eyes softened at the corners. “I guess it was the crystal. That’s what does it to all of them. I told her not to smoke it. I told her and told her.”
“She’s not really doing drugs anymore. She doesn’t do drugs at all, in fact.”
She had done drugs once or twice with me, now, but I didn’t know if she was doing them on her own. I didn’t think she was. Not that I wouldn’t have lied about it.
Except he might know better than I did what drugs she was doing. If they were doing them together.
“And I wouldn’t say she’s exactly a prostitute, Jim,” I continued. If they were seeing each other he wouldn’t say that. Unless he was paying her, too. “That’s not fair. Or even accurate. It’s more like a networking thing. That’s what I’m saying. I was thinking we should hire her as a gift wrapper.”
If I brought Lisa into the store I could understand whatever was going on between Jim and her. Then it would all be transparent, and my relationship would have the moral authority because I wasn’t hiding anything from either of them. Plus, that would force me to end it with the Polack, which I needed to do regardless. I doubted I had the strength to remove the Polack from my life without outside help.
“Good idea. Hire the hooker. Free blow jobs with every Rolex.”
“Like they don’t get them already.”
“Maybe I should call her.”
Here it is, I thought. He’s warming me up for it. The truth.
“You called her? She said something like that. I thought you had called her.”
“I didn’t call her. But maybe I should.”
“Sylvia said something. She said she had given you her number.”
“Don’t you think I would tell you if I called her? Why don’t you ask her? Do you think I would lie to you about a hooker?”
He had lied to me thousands of times. He lied to me almost as much as he lied to his customers. But that was beside the point. And if you told him he lied he would deny it with a sincere heart. He was extraordinarily healthy. Psychologically, I mean.
“She’s not your type. I mean, not now, not anymore. She said something about it.”
“I wasn’t talking about having sex with her, Bobby. Jesus. Lisa and I used to be pretty good friends, you know. But maybe I should call her for sex. She would do it. Maybe that would show you. The point is you don’t know anything about that girl. That hooker, I mean. I think she was fucking Popper, too. Did you know that? Did I ever tell you that? I bet she didn’t tell you, did she? She’s attracted to men like us. I bet she would like this new belly of mine.” He patted his stomach. “The king muscle. Smart hooker.”
I took the tweezers I had been playing with and put them back on his desk pad where I had found them. I folded the three carats back into their papers.
“The package looks fine to me,” I said. “I like your bracelet idea. I bet Fadeen will go for it. But you better get terms,” I said. “I have a few deals closing this week. But not enough to pay cash for these. You have anything working?”
I could not say anything directly about our numbers. But he had been behind me for months.
“Where are you going? I was kidding,” Jim said. “Are you going to get your feelings hurt over a hooker?”
“Call her,” I said. “It makes no difference to me.”
I almost wanted him to. Or rather, I almost wanted him to believe that I wanted him to. If he already had.
“I was joking. Ha ha, a joke. I’m not going to call her. Hell, let’s make her a gift wrapper if you want,” he said. “I don’t care. I remember she’s good with her hands. That’s a joke, too. Joking.”
“Here. Here’s her number.” I wrote it in big, awkward numbers on his desk pad. The number he already had.
Bobby, I said to myself. Stop this now. Control yourself. If you let them know that you know it’s real, then they can let you know it’s real. And then it will be real.
I felt sick to my stomach. Like I’d been climbing the rubber-matted walls of one of those centrifuges we used to ride at the Calgary Stampede when we were kids. Jim was the only one who could ever get all the way up on his knees, or who dared to go to the top of the wall. The rest of us stayed on our backs about three-quarters of the way up.
“I’m not going to call her. I should, though. Remember those hookers in Vegas?”
In Vegas one time, at the Jewelers Circular Keystone Vegas show, we had been robbed by three black hookers of four hundred and twenty thousand dollars’ worth of loose uncertified diamonds and thirty grand in cash. These women knew what they were doing. They demanded more money when we were in the middle of sex — I had two of them in bed with me, and Jim and the third one were already asleep, wrapped together in the next bed — and when I punched in the code to get a few extra hundreds, they must have watched me from behind. The next morning Jim woke me and said, “Did you move the diamonds? Because the safe is empty. Bobby, where are the diamonds?” I understood immediately what had happened, though it took a few hours before I could admit it to Jim. I remember rising from that bed, walking to the huge wall of glass that was one end of our enormous suite, and resting my forehead against it. There was Vegas, many floors beneath us, stretching out flat for brown and yellow miles, and farther out the line of the mountains.