Each kiss is longer now.
The space between them is shorter. He pulls away to look at me. His face is flushed, his lips are wet and the Technicolor movie images are reflected in his eyes. Wide boy eyes. This is real. He is as lost in his dream as he can be. And now, watching me, holding my eyes with his, he moves his hand to my thigh and under my skirt and up the rest of my leg. He moves the elastic of my underpants with his fingers and feels around. Seeking heat, seeking warmth, he finds the space he has been heading for all along and his fingers slip into the wetness. He smiles. A satisfied smile. He loves the wetness. This is his proof. This is his hope. It is not an aborted attempt but an equal want.
He moves in for another kiss while he continues to stroke me. He knows how to do this. I benefit from what women before have demanded of him. A fortyseven-year-old man cannot be a groping sixteen-yearold boy no matter how much that is all he wants to be. He knows how to move his fingers in slow circles. He cannot unlearn this just to have his fantasy, and so I benefit.
I do not come often with my clients. It is my job to have sex. Not my desire. Just like an actress does not fall in love with every leading man she plays opposite.
But sometimes she does. And tonight in the theater, this fantasy is too sweet. And Peter Pan’s fingers are too expert.
He strokes harder, then softer; he kisses me in rhythm to the tension he is building. I almost forget. But I can’t. This is not my game.
I reach out. Oh, so slowly, scared, unknowing. I touch his knee, I hear him sigh. Encouragement. His fingers stop moving. Desperately I want to get them moving again. But this isn’t my game. I move my fingers up his thigh and find the bulge in his pants.
Still sixteen, I stop, react, then try again. My fingertips run up and down the length of his erection. Testing it. Learning it.
“Is this what you want?” I whisper.
“More, Jenny, more.” He is using her name; he has paid for the right to do that. I don’t mind. I am enjoying being Jenny, who is the teenager he was in love with thirty-one years before.
I get braver and unzip his fly and fumble in his pants to release him. I stroke him with my hand and he moves in his seat, thrusting out. And rather than this be the end, his fingers begin to circulate deep within me again. He mimics my movements so we are doing the same thing to each other now. My hand slides down and up, his fingers probe. We are in tandem.
Faster. He pushes forward. So do I. Faster yet. He pushes his lips at me, presses hard, I can feel his teeth and his fingers in me and my fingers on him and the sounds of a guitar in the background and the feel of mohair velvet on the back of my thighs and my breasts loose under my shirt.
The first wave hits me with a shock. It is very rare that this happens. But I don’t fight it. I give him the benefit of the feeling, I let him hear the pleasure, and it is what he needs to take him over the edge. The fortyseven-year-old man, who has never quite stopped wanting Jenny, whoever she was, throws his head back and lets me milk him to orgasm.
Not bad for a three-thousand-dollar-night’s work.
I’m sorry.
I know you don’t want to believe it. I know it hurts. You want to be his Jenny. You are his wife and his friend and the mother of his children. But you just can’t be her. At least not in real life. That’s for the movies and the make-believe. And that is what I’m in the biz of doing. Making make-believe real-for a few hours, at least.
25
Later, looking back on it with a level head, it would be hard to explain my decision. But at the time, it seemed inevitable.
Mitch came to pick up Dulcie that Saturday so she could, as per our custody agreement, spend the next ten days with him. The fact that Dulcie was out of the house and safely ensconced with her father left me untethered. As used to her being at Mitch’s as I was, I still didn’t sleep well when she was gone. I lived in a doorman-guarded building, but still I worried. Not that my twelve-year-old daughter kept me safe, but I felt secure when I knew where she was and could be certain she was fine.
So it was with this uneasy edge that I spent the weekend obsessing about a man who had so far killed two prostitutes and the fact that one of my patients, who was also a prostitute, was missing.
I rationalized my decision because there obviously was a chance that Cleo was missing because of that same man. Or that one of the men whom she had written about in the book had her.
Either way, chances were she was in danger.
And there weren’t many people who could help her.
I spent most of Saturday in a pair of old jeans and a T-shirt sitting in my living room with my copy of Cleo’s manuscript, the pages Elias had given me of the same manuscript with his notes in the margins, and a pad of yellow paper, making my own lists and notes.
From early in the morning to late that night, while the sun traveled in its westward arc, I pored over her pages, no longer reading for the overall meaning. I was mining the book. I made a detailed list of the men she referred to, and underneath each name that she’d given him I wrote any and all identifying information. The type of job he held, where he lived, whom he had introduced her to, what other clients he had brought into the fold, the kind of tips he gave, if any, and of course, what his sexual proclivity was.
In all, she mentioned more than twenty men. Fifteen in detail. And in enough detail in every case but one for me to figure out, along with the help of the Internet and a few phone calls to friends who knew people who knew people, who they probably were in real life and what their actual names were.
Cleo had a method to her rechristening of these men: they were either named for what they liked or for what they did. For instance, Lindbergh was a politician who was also an amateur pilot; Lord Byron was a bestselling author; the Marquis was an actor who had played the role of the Marquis de Sade in an Academy Award-winning film; Perry Mason was a public defender who had won a well-televised case and had gone on to become a TV commentator; Superman was a highranking and very charismatic ex-D.A. who was an NYC politician; and on and on. Each page of the manuscript would be cause for a lawsuit unless she did a much better job of disguising the men.
Surprising perhaps to someone who did not study human sexuality for a living, it would seem that most of what these men wanted was tame. Boring, even. It was the newness, the lack of commitment, the nonrelationship, nonresponsibility of the act, the desire for someone young and beautiful, the need for someone discreet who could be trusted, the lack of interest in the woman herself, the ego and the narcissistic needs of these men that sent them to Cleo or her girls time after time.
These were not the men who went with the street whores I worked with in prison. So, maybe, there was no connection between the Magdalene murders and Cleo. Maybe she had taken herself out of circulation for some other reason and just hadn’t even wanted to tell the two men she was closest to. Her business partner and her fiancé.
But I didn’t think so.
I worked on the lists and reread sections of the book for the whole day. Then I checked my list against Elias’s. We had both identified the same four men as those with the most to lose. But I had put a fifth man on my list that he hadn’t. I went on to make another list of second choices.
By the time I stopped to make dinner, my instincts were telling me that one of the men in this book, knowing that she had made a deal with a publisher, had taken matters into his own hands.
In the bowl, the tuna looked pathetic. I hadn’t remembered to dice the celery small enough and I used too much mayo and then too much pepper. I was embarrassed. The simplest meal. The most meager dinner. And I screwed it up.
I dumped the mess on some rye bread I had found in the refrigerator, added pickle slices and brought the sandwich over to the table. I nibbled on it and sipped a glass of cold white wine and read my notes over again.