Liese moved to inspect the pattembooks stacked on the single bookshelf, while Lessing pulled a stool from under the cutting table and gingerly lowered his not-inconsiderable weight down upon it. Good living — and no ‘Raja’s Revenge’ — had plumped him out like a Christmas turkey! If commanding a Cadre unit did nothing else, at least it would give him a reason to exercise.
He had no idea how to begin. Neither, apparently, did she. They both spoke at once, then made polite motions.
“Us?” Liese was very direct. Lessing had liked this about her and once, long ago on Ponapc, had told her so. Now it unsettled him.
He tried to answer in the same fashion. “Yeah, us. Do we or don’t we?”
Tears welled up, astonishing him. “Don’t want “
“Hey… what? I thought…”
Her nostrils flared, and her lips worked soundlessly. Then she husked, “Fifty lira pog? Cairo special?”
He knew at once what the trouble was: her past was her millstone. He strove for a soothing, gentle tone. “Liese, why? Why drag it up? Why wallow in what happened to you… before? That’s history! It doesn’t matter! I heard some of it from Mrs. Delacroix… poor lady… and more from other people. It has nothing to do with us, with now.”
“Oh?” She moved, lifted her arms, shifted her stance, and licked her lower lip. Suddenly she was someone else: sleek, seductive, sensuous — every doggie’s centerfold, every pervert’s pom-queen! She leaned back so that her small, high breasts thrust out against the pearl-grey fabric of her blouse. She bent a knee so that the curve of her long thigh became as sinuous as the serpent in the Garden of Eden. She was lust; she was sex; she was what the Israeli and Arab heavy-breathers in Cairo had plunked down their coin for.
Was this Eighty-Five in another zany hologram disguise? One of Wrench’s silly jokes? This wasn’t the woman Lessing knew: Liese, the lady, the cool executive, the dedicated worker, the unflap-pable, twenty-first-century sophisticate.
He couldn’t help himself: lust swept up out of his loins to pound against his temples. His hand hurt, and he looked down to see that he had cut himself on Mrs. Mulder’s sewing scissors. Liese licked her lip again. Her hazel -and-gold cat’s eyes were as ancient and wise and knowing as Astarte and Lilith and Bast and the priestesses of the Dark Mysteries. The very air seemed to become turgid and hot. It pulsed.
“Hundred lira? Five hundred?” She was mocking him.
“Jesus…! Stop that! What the hell…?”
“What you see is what you get.” She ran slender Fingers down over her breasts, her belly, her hips, sliding her clinging charcoal-grey skirt aside to reveal tawny skin beneath. “Syphilis once. Gonorrhea four times. No herpes… lucky there. Never AIDS… really lucky! Can’t have children, though.” Her voice cracked on that last sentence, and her erotic pose began to crumple.
He stared. “Never forget. What I was.” She bit her words off a mouthful at a time. “All kinds. Men, women. White, Brown, Black, Yellow. Young, old. Kind, sad, timid, vicious, crazy. Sadists, masochists, fetishists. A necrophiliac Irishman once… white face-powder and a coffin.”
He wanted to slap her, kick her, beat her senseless. Instead, he balled his fists, bit his tongue, and listened in grim silence as she recited her litany of degradation.
Lessing was not shocked. He had seen things in Angola, in Syria, and elsewhere. Liese had been treated no worse than many other hookers, but humiliation stuck to this girl like cat fur to strawberry jam, as his mother used to say. Some women saw prostitution — in all its aberrant forms — as a business; some professed to enjoy it and the money it made; some shut their minds and did it because they had no talent, nowhere to go, and nothing else to sell. Some did it for drugs, while others were too weak and emotionally dependent to pull free. Liese was different from these: she had never given up hating. She hated those who brutalized her. She hated society foF caring so little about her plight. She hated herself for lacking the courage to fight, to run away, or to kill herself. She bore few physical scars — her pimps had been careful about that — but those she carried inside were gaping wounds that would never heal.
“How can you know? Care…?”
Lessing cared very much. He didn’t know what to say, how to comfort her, what would heal her. God damn his lack of words!
“Earn a lot, get your pick,” she continued tonelessly. “Money, clothes, jewels, perfume, special treatment. Earn too little, you’re the ‘M’ in the ‘S-and-M,’ center ring in the whips and chains circus. Don’t cooperate at all….”
“Shut the fuck up’.” He shook a fist at her.
Her features stayed expressionless, as stony as the Sphinx of Giza. “Want you to see. What you get.”
“I don’t give a pogging dink about that! I don’t care if you gubbed the whole world, men, women, and children… dogs and donkeys!” He slammed a fist down on the cutting table. “Oh, shit\ I am not getting some fifty-lira Cairo whore! I am not ‘getting’ anybody’. We are getting. You are getting, and I am getting. It’s mutual! We both get, or it doesn’t happen!”
Her lips were trembling. She was visibly on the edge of hysteria. “Not…! No…!”
“You’re afraid, aren’t you? Afraid of men? Afraid of me? Or maybe you hate men. God knows I can’t blame you. But I’m not ‘men M’mme! I’m Alan Lessing. A million rotten apples don’t spoil every one in the barrel!”
“No… yes Can’t help it.” She lifted her chin and looked straight at him. He admired her then. He loved her. When faced with the unendurable, she had escaped into aphasia and an inner landscape of her own. She had not surrendered. She had not broken. Anneliese Meisinger might bend, but she didn’t break.
“Oh, gub it!” he cried in frustration. “What am I supposed to do… to say? I can’t erase the hell you suffered! I don’t have a magic wand… I wish I did! I can’t make you trust me. I know you’ve seen psychiatrists and therapists… witch-doctors enough to pack a loony bin! If they couldn’t help you, then how in God’s name can I? How can I make you see me… not an abuser, not a violator, not a devil, not a man? Just me, Alan Lessing?”
She put her hands over her face and let her dark-blonde tresses swing down. He was reminded of someone else: a whiff of sandalwood, a flash of ice-blue. He shook his head angrily, like a horse bitten by a fly.
He didn’t dare take her in his arms. Patience!
“You… Alan… you…,” she moaned.
“Yeah, me. Alan Lessing. Mr. Potato Patch, as Wrench called me after I got home from Russia.” Desperately, he wanted her to smile.
“You: no bargain.” She did smile; between her fingers he could see the comers of her mouth quirk up. “Alan Lessing: nothing… nobody… wasted talent.”
“Right. Big and gawky. Waddles like a rhinoceros, sings like a duck.”
She giggled, low in her throat; her control was coming back. “Yes, you. Fixated in adolescence. Never grew up. Can’t relate to closeness. Bad childhood. Sex limited to groping in the movies, quickies in cars, banging in the bushes after the senior prom.” She must have picked those things up from one of his doctors. Or from Eighty-Five! Some bastard talked too much.