And When She Was Good (8 page)

Today she is poring over a new applicant's file. The guy looks fine to her, but Audrey has flagged his folder. Heloise sends her a text, asking her to come down from the den, where she is watching television with Scott. Yes, he probably would have enjoyed ice-skating with Lindsey, but Heloise didn't want Coranne to think she was taking advantage, parking her son with a stay-at-home mom while she caught up on her work.

And she'd rather plunge a knife into her chest than spend the afternoon drinking spiked hot chocolate with Coranne.

“Why are you suggesting we reject”—she peers at the name in the file—“Mr. Callender?”

Audrey looks nervous yet defiant. “I didn't like his tone.”

“His tone?”

“He sounded coarse.”

Heloise flips through the papers. “Financials check out. He has no court record.”

“He's single,” Audrey says.

“We have lots of single customers, Audrey. You'd prefer it if I had nothing but single customers, I thought.”

“He sounded as if he would be mean. You don't like the mean ones, because some of the girls can't handle them, so you don't have as much flexibility with scheduling. I just have a feeling.”

Feelings, intuition. Heloise has little patience for such silliness. The whole point of the vetting process is not to rely on feelings. There are two primary risks she is trying to avoid: cops and kinksters.

Kinksters are guys who get off on being cruel to her girls, physically or mentally. They're actually pretty rare. Sociopaths who prey on prostitutes choose easier targets, street-level workers.

Cops—they're the enemy. Heloise's insomnia is rooted in her fear of cops. Her girls are all instructed to leave any situation that hints at a sting. That's one instance where she has no problem honoring someone's feelings. Although it's not really intuition. There are things to look for. One key is the insistence on talking about the money up front. The average customer is not anxious to have a prolonged conversation about the transaction at hand; he's still pretending, on some level, that he's not paying for it. Or else he's done it a lot, he knows how it works. A guy who asks over and over again if they're going to have sex for money—better to lose the gig than risk an arrest. Heloise's girls know what to say:
We're going to have some fun, I hope. Whatever happens, happens.
Some girls think they're safe as long as they have sex first and accept the money afterward, but that's not the case based on the legal precedents that Heloise has studied.

Folklore also has it that a girl who asks if a man is a police officer is protected; if he lies, the charge won't hold up. But it's folklore, and it wouldn't protect Heloise in any event. One arrest, even if it ends with charges being dropped, will destroy her life. Although if Mr. Callender is a cop, why has he gone through with the paperwork, and how did he fake the financials? It's not impossible to obtain a fake Social Security number, but getting a credit report to match up with it—that's pretty labor-intensive. Her business is too small, by design, to attract that kind of sting. Heloise has thrived by being not quite top-tier, more BCBG than Prada. State pols who are happy to stay state pols, the occasional cabinet secretary, but always one of the positions that people forget exist, like Interior or Commerce. True, there's always a crusading state's attorney here or there who would love to bust one of her pols, yet it's a funny thing about the crusaders—they almost always have a kink or two of their own.

To placate Audrey, however, who is hypersensitive about her standing, Heloise calls the customer who made the referral. It is bad form to call on a Sunday, but she wants to lock the office door behind her this afternoon with the sense of accomplishment that comes from finishing everything on her to-do list.

She punches in the reference's cell-phone number. Her number will show up on his caller ID—Heloise assumes everyone has caller ID—as WFEN. That's less suspicious than a blocked call.

“Hi, Ellis, I hate to bother you on the weekend—”

“Yes, what's up?” His voice is pitched high, tight. Someone is nearby.

“I'm calling for a reference on Mr. Callender. He said you recommended him to us.”

“I don't think so.” Less nervous, but still in a hurry to get off the phone. “I don't know a Mr. Callender. And I haven't suggested that anyone”—long pause, as if he can't think what to say next, although it's fairly obvious—“call you.”

Good boy, Ellis.

“No one?”

“No one.” Barked. “I've gotta go. We're at the movies. Family time, okay?”

He seems so relieved. He shouldn't, Heloise thinks. Mr. Callender knows that Ellis uses the services of WFEN and what they're for, but Ellis doesn't know Mr. Callender. Private detective, she thinks. Divorce action. It won't be the first time. How did he slip past
her
private detective? How did he fake being so rich?

She reads the file again, trying to find something concrete. She can't see it. Ellis probably lied reflexively, unnerved by the phone call. There is no concrete reason to reject this application, but she's going to let Audrey have her way on this one. People vastly overrate their own capacity for making good decisions. They remember only those times that their hunches have played out, not all the other times they were wrong in their funny feelings. Heloise has never once had any sense of what was truly going to cause trouble in her life. Or the trouble was so obvious that it didn't count—Val, for example.

Overall, being born seems to have been the only thing she needed to find trouble. This isn't self-pity or melodrama on her part, merely acknowledgment of the hand she was dealt. She used to think about it all the time, the forces that brought her parents together. Later, when she began to read on her own, her would-be mentor gave her a poem by Sharon Olds that captured what it's like to owe one's existence to two willfully mismatched people. You hate knowing what they are going to do to each other and to you, but there is no you unless those things happen. In the poem the parents meet while in college and the poet is more generous to them than Heloise could ever be to her parents, noting their youth and their ignorance.
College,
she thought with contempt. Her parents didn't meet outside an arch of ocher sandstone, with black iron gates. (Heloise had to look up the word “ocher.”)

No, what she sees is: Wide-eyed Beth Harbison in her carhop outfit, the flared boots that showed her then-beautiful legs to such advantage. Hector Lewis, the car salesman across the street, making sure he always pulled into her slot—as it were, he would say with a snicker—taking her for “test drives” in the dealership's nicer vehicles when she finished her shift. Heloise realizes there was a moment, much like her first time with Billy, when her mother believed herself to be in love. But why didn't she walk out the first time he hit her? She had the job, she had the resources. She had more going for her than Heloise did when she found herself pregnant with Scott. Hector Lewis was a brute, but he wasn't the kind of man who would chase a woman down and kill her if she tried to leave him.

Scott, like Heloise, owes his existence to two people who should never have come together. But at least she got away from Scott's father—even if she still has to visit him every other week for as long as they both might live.

1994

V
al's
business, the part in which Helen was employed—he called it a subsidiary—was an
unusual combination of whorehouse, escort service, and street-level
prostitution. A van took the live-in girls to a not-as-sleazy-as-you-might-think
hotel, one whose legitimate trade was foreign tourists who thought the
neighborhood was more central than it was. The lucky girls, the ones in Val's
favor, were assigned regulars and callers, who arrived in three shifts—lunch,
after-work, and after-hours. The girls who were on the shit list had to walk,
which ranged from unpleasant to dangerous. Plus, there were quotas to meet.

Helen's goal was to stay off the street, which
meant staying in Val's good graces, something at which she excelled. The trick
was persuading him that his happiness was the only thing that mattered to her,
that she alone cared about him, but—and this was key—that she did not require
his reciprocal attention, she was fine when he ignored her. It was that little
core of coolness that kept her in good stead. This self-containment was, she
realized, the quality that had driven her father mad.
You
can hit me, but you can't touch me.

Remaining Val's favorite became trickier when she
decided that she was going to use her downtime at the hotel to go to the nearby
library and read. For one thing, the girls weren't supposed to leave their rooms
unless they were going out to hustle. After all, if a call came in, they had to
be available. Plus, if they left, they might try to generate business on their
own, which was strictly prohibited. The two Georges were charged with watching
them, making sure they were where they were supposed to be.

So Helen did the riskiest thing possible—she told
George I the truth, that she wanted to go to the library and read. It was only
two blocks away. She could be back at the hotel faster than any client if he
beeped her. George II was the kinder of the two, but George I was a sneak, the
sort of person who enjoyed having leverage over people just for the hell of it.
It amused him to know that Helen was going behind Val's back to read books at
the library. At first he extracted a few sexual favors from her to show he
could. She was too skinny for him, he would tell her, smacking her rear quite
hard as he rode her, mocking its size. But mainly he got off on knowing that he
had something on her, so he let it go. He also made it clear to her that when
Val found out—and he was adamant that Val would find out—he would throw her to
the dogs. He'd rather be dressed down for pretending that she had fooled him
than let Val know he had betrayed him in even this small way.

Despite having George I's protection secured, Helen
did not start going into the library, not right off. She was intimidated by its
scale. It was a large, imposing place, almost as grand as the cathedral on the
other side of the street. Once she managed to cross the threshold, she was
entranced by the soaring ceilings, the beautiful paintings that ringed the main
atrium. Her hometown library had been nice but modern, all glass and pale wood.
Yet the two places smelled the same. Standing in the center of the atrium,
inhaling the sweet odor of musty hardcovers, Helen remembered the girl she once
was, the straight-A student with hopes of a scholarship. She was embarrassed to
walk to the information desk in her work clothes, but it was her only chance.
Luckily, the librarian was a man, and men were always nice to her. At first.

He was cute, too, in a nerdy way. He wore a big,
lumpy sweater, and he had messy curls. And glasses, of course, which enhanced
his large amber eyes and the thicket of dark lashes.

“I want . . . I want . . .” she
began.

“As William Blake himself might say,” he said, a
finger holding his place in the book he was reading.

“What?”

“I'm sorry, a stupid joke. What do you want?”

“I want to read the Great Books.”

“According to whom?”

That stumped her. “Well—me, I guess. I mean, it's
my plan, not a school assignment or anything. It's just something I want to do.
For fun.”

“No, I mean, according to what source? There are a
lot of conflicting ideas about what the canon is, or should be. Some people want
to read the hundred best American novels, for example, while others want to
follow a course of study more like the St. John's College curriculum, in which
one reads chronologically through the great thinkers of our time—”

It was all she could do not to turn and run—well,
totter, given the shoes. She never got used to the shoes Val made them wear.

The librarian took pity on her and came from behind
the desk, grasping her elbow. “Let's go over to adult fiction, start there. I
had a text in college, written by Robert Penn Warren and two other professors.”
He paused, clearly expecting her to know the name, and it was dimly familiar,
something she might have studied back in Pennsylvania, but that part of her was
so distant now. “Anyway, we'll start with what they considered the essential
classics of American literature, into the mid-twentieth century. And yes, every
one is written by a dead white male, although maybe we'll mix in some Willa
Cather. Plus, you'll get to Jane Austen soon enough.”

But it was not Cather or Austen to whom she
responded most strongly. And it was not
The Scarlet
Letter,
the first book on the list, through which she trudged as so
many before her had trudged. The book that touched her was
Sister Carrie.
Yes,
she wanted to shout—except she was in the
library and couldn't—
this is life, this is how it
works.
You get on a train, intending nothing more than a visit to
your sister, and a man says nice things to you, and the world falls apart.

She had to read in the library on stolen bits of
time because she lacked the forms of ID required for a card. Jules—for that was
the librarian's name—was baffled.
No driver's license? Not
a local one. A gas bill?
No. Any utility bill? No.
Besides, she lived in the
county. At least she was pretty sure it was the county. That was okay, he said,
there was a reciprocity agreement. But she needed something to prove her
address. She didn't even know her address. No, she had no ID at all, except her
expired Pennsylvania driver's license. Oh, and her Social Security card. She
still had that, from back in her days at Il Cielo. But it didn't establish
residence.

So she ended up having sex with Jules. It was what
she did; it was the only currency at her disposal. And it turned out to be
pretty fun, at least for a while. But then he had to put a word to it, claim it
was love, and she had to explain to him that it couldn't be.

“Are you married?” he asked her one day. They were
in the library, in a seldom-used women's bathroom on the third floor. He would
sneak in and take the stall at the far end, and she would arrive five minutes
later. It was funny, being the one who had to remind the librarian to keep his
voice down. He was crazy for her, frenzied and incautious.

“In a way,” she said, then covered his mouth with
hers, to keep him from talking at all. Surfacing: “And you have a girlfriend. I
saw her photo on your desk.”

“I'll break up with her.”

“Don't,” she said, picking up the pace.

“Don't,” he said. “I don't want to—” He did
anyway.

“I'm trying to keep you safe,” she told him,
caressing the back of his neck.

“There's no safety in love,” he said.

“This isn't love. It's just really good sex. And
it's good because it's forbidden. If you break up with your girlfriend and I
leave my guy, it won't be the same. Trust me. I'm older than you. I know some
things.”

“I don't believe you're older than I am. I bet
we're the same age,” he said.

“We might have been born the same year, but it's
been a long time since we were the same age.”

She was actually younger than he was. She was only
twenty. It broke her heart a little, knowing how easily she could pass for
someone older now.

Still, it was a nice relationship. He gave her
books, shabby ones that were going to be tossed or sold. She smuggled them back
to Val's house in her purse and hid them on the property. There were books
concealed everywhere, and although she didn't dare read them in front of anyone,
it gave her a thrill to walk past one of the hiding places. She had a secret.
She realized she hadn't had any secrets for a long time, and there was power in
being able to keep something to herself, for herself. Her secrets were the only
things she really owned.

She read and she read and she read,
indiscriminately. The only thing she didn't really like was poetry. Jules gave
her a poem about some woman's parents meeting at college, and the woman just
seemed so sorry for herself it made Helen competitive in a weird way. Poets
seemed conceited to her, full of themselves. One wrote that the old
masters—Helen had to look that up before she understood that it wasn't about
slavery—were never wrong about suffering.
Bullshit.
How have you suffered?
she wanted to ask.
What do you know about it?
Helen liked facts. They
were useful. A well-dropped fact could charm a man, and a man who was charmed
might tip a girl.

Eventually Jules got crazy, melodramatic. He broke
up with his girlfriend despite Helen's advice, and, alas, the sex got better,
contrary to her sage wisdom, so now they had something of a problem. He lobbied
for her to spend the night at his apartment, and she could not begin to explain
to him how impossible that was, how dangerous, for both of them. He asked her
where she lived. She refused to tell him. He tried to follow her, but he was
inept. Still, she thought she was in control of things. And is there any greater
folly in human history than thinking that one is in control of something?

The universe, forever random and cruel, threw them
into the same Pulaski Highway diner at 2:00
A.M.
—Helen, Jules, and Val. Jules wasn't stupid enough to say anything,
but he was stupid enough to look at her long and hard. He looked at her with his
puppy eyes, he licked his lips, he bumped the counter as he paid his bill and
staggered out to the parking lot, where he sat in his car for a long time,
trying to pretend he wasn't watching the couple illuminated in the window.

She was no longer a nothing face. Men looked at
Helen all the time, but those were judging, appraising looks, the kind of looks
in which Val trafficked. Jules's gaze was different, longing informed by
knowledge.

“Tell me about college boy,” Val said the next
morning.

“Who?”

“The cocksucker in the sweater, drinking coffee and
pretending to read a book while looking at you.”

“Don't know him.”

“Don't lie to me, Helen.”

“Okay, I fucked him once to get a library
card.”

“Don't be clever.”

“That's the truth.” She was scared, cowed. She
hadn't been beaten for a while, and she began to see a connection. Jules had fed
some part of her, so she had been careful and compliant in the rest of her life,
never risking Val's wrath. She had never been a better partner to Val than while
she was having her fling with Jules.

Val worked his fingers into her hair as if to
stroke her head, then pulled her to him so sharply that it brought tears to her
eyes. “Why would you want a library card?”

“I get stir-crazy in that room. I have to get out.
And then sometimes it's cold, so I need a place to sit.”

“You don't need a card for that.”

“I had to start checking out books to keep them
from being onto me. They may be librarians, but they're not stupid. They know
what I am, in those shoes, those clothes. As long as I check out a book and
bring it back, they don't give me a hard time. But I don't have the ID necessary
to have a card, so I had to throw that guy a freebie. He didn't understand it
was a one-off, just, you know, business. He's inexperienced that way.”

“I bet he is. Show me your card.”

“What?”

“Show me your library card.”

She went to get it out of her purse, not knowing
whether it would be her salvation or damnation. Val studied it, and she
pretended not to know that he couldn't decode anything but the bright colors on
it.

“Hey, George II,” he called out. “Look at this.
Could it be a counterfeit?”

“Looks like the real thing to me, boss.”

The card was a flimsy plastic, yet more durable
than the old paper cards she had known in her girlhood. It couldn't be torn, not
even by George II's large, capable hands. Val took out a knife and sliced it
into slivers.

“Did you turn tricks on the side?”

“No,” she said. It was strange how the truth could
sound like a lie.

“I'm going to ask you again, Helen: Were you
freelancing?”

“No, I swear—I just wanted a place to sit.”

But it was too improbable, as the truth often is,
and Val fell on her, kicking her until George II finally pulled him off. George
I just smiled.

Helen saw Jules only one more time, when she was in
a man's car on Park Avenue several weeks later. She had been busted down to
street work for her disloyalty. Downtown emptied out pretty quickly after the
workday ended, so it was safe to do some jobs in parked cars. She lifted her
head from her customer's lap and saw Jules staring sorrowfully at her. He might
have been crying, but he turned and walked away so quickly that she couldn't
tell.