Bad Behavior

Something Nice

WHAT’S YOUR NAME, sir?” The freckled woman wore green stretch pants, and had her red hair tucked under a neat pink scarf. “Fred?” She was making her naturally coarse voice go soft and moist as warm mayonnaise. “I’d like you to meet my girlfriends, Fred.” The four girls stared at him. Two sat up and smiled, holding their purses with tight fingers, their legs pinched together at the knees. A beautiful black-haired girl, with jutting cheekbones and a lush, full mouth, lolled in an orange beanbag chair, her long legs sprawled rudely on the floor, half open and tenting her tight silk dress so you could almost see between her legs. She gawked at him with open disgust.

“Sit up, Jasmine,” snapped the stretch-pants woman through her smile. She held out her freckled hands toward the last girl, who sat with one leg tucked underneath her, looking out the window. “And this is Lisette.” The girl wore a short red-and-black-checked dress, white ankle socks and black pumps. Her bobbed brown hair was curly. When she turned to face him, her expression was mildly friendly and normal; she could’ve been looking at anybody or anything.

The strangeness of it all delighted and fascinated him: the falsely gentle voice, the helpless contempt, the choosing of a bored, unknown girl sitting on her ankle, looking out the window.

“Do you see a lady who you’d like to visit with?”

“I’ll see Lisette.”

The girl stood up and walked toward him as if he were a dentist, except she was smiling.

The room was pale green. The air in it was bloated with sweat and canned air freshener. There was a bed table set with a plastic container sprouting damp Handi-Wipes, a radio, an ashtray, a Kleenex box and a slimy bottle of oil. The bed was covered by a designer sheet patterned with beige, brown and tan lions lazing happily on the branches of trees or swatting each other. There was an aluminum chair. There was a glass-covered poster for an art exhibit. There was a fish tank with a Day-Glo orange fish castle in it. He lay on the bed naked, waiting for her to join him. He turned on the radio. It was tuned to one of those awful disco stations. “I specialize in love,” sang a woman’s voice. “I’ll make you feel like new. I specialize in love — let me work on you.”

He smiled as he listened to the music. It evoked the swirling lights of dance floors he’d never been on, the tossing hair and sweat-drenched underwear of girls who danced and drank all night, girls he never saw except in commercials for jeans. He anticipated Lisette as he imagined her, the grip of her blunt-fingered hands, her curly head on his shoulder. Did she dance in places like that, in her white socks and pumps?

She came in with a white sheet under her arm. She clipped across the floor, sharp heels clacking. She turned off the radio. The silence was as disorienting as a sudden roomful of fluorescent light. “I hate that shit,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind. I have to put this sheet down.” She snapped the sheet open and floated it down over him. He scrambled out from under it, banging into the wastebasket as he stepped to the floor.

“Here,” he said. He took a corner of the sheet and awkwardly stretched it over the bed.

“No, it’s okay, that’s good enough.” She sat on the bed and stared at him, her small face gone suddenly grave. Her eyes were round and dark. Her muddy black makeup looked as if it had been finger-painted on. He sat down next to her and put his hand on her thigh. She ignored it. He felt as though he was bothering a girl sitting next to him on a bus. His hand sweated on her leg and he took it away. What was wrong? Why wasn’t she pulling her dress off over her head, the way they usually did?

“Do you come to places like this often?” she asked.

“Not too much. Every month or so. I’m married, so it’s hard to get away.”

She looked worried. She reached out with nervous quickness and picked up his hand. “What do people do now, mostly?” she asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean I’m new here. You’re only my second customer and I don’t know what I should do. Well, I know what to do, basically, but there’s all these little things, like when to take off the dress.”

He felt a foolish smile running over his face. Her second customer! “But you’ve worked before.”

“You mean done this before? No, I haven’t.”

He looked at her, beaming greedily.

“What do you do for a living?” she asked.

“I’m an attorney,” he said. “Corporate law.” He was lying. He felt cut loose from himself, unmarried, un-old, because of the lie.

“How old are you?”

“How old do you think I am?”

She smiled, and her black eye paint coiled like a snake in the corners of her eyes. “Fifty?”

“You’re exactly right.” He was fifty-nine. “How about you?”

“Twenty-two.”

She looked as though she could be that age, but he had a strong feeling that she was lying too.

“Why do you come to places like this?” She lay across the bed, her head on her hand, her legs folded restfully. “Do you not get along with your wife?”

He leaned against the headboard, his naked legs open. “Oh, I love my wife. It’s a very successful marriage. And we have sex, good sex. But it’s not everything I want. She’s willing to experiment, a little, but she’s really not all that interested. It can make you feel foolish to be doing something when you know your partner isn’t an equal participant. Besides, this is an adventure for me. Something nice.”

“Is it something nice?”

“With you it’s going to be very nice.”

“How do you know?”

“What a strange question.”

She crossed the bed to adjust her body against his, to put her head on his shoulder. She stroked his chest hair. “It’s not so strange.”

“Well, I just know, that’s all.”

They kissed. She had a harsh, stubborn kiss.

She took off her checked dress, button by button, very neatly. Her body was extremely pretty: white, curvy and plump. When she took off her high heels he saw that her legs were a little too short and her ankles a bit thick, but he liked them anyway. She folded her dress over the aluminum chair and turned to him with an uptilted chin, looking as if she might break into a trot, like a pony. She was proud of her body.

Her pride was pitiful in the stupid room. It made him feel superior and tender. He gushed a smile and held out his arms. She met him with a surprisingly strong hug, the pouncing grab of a playful animal.

“Goodness, you’re healthy.”

She grinned and squeezed him. “What do you want to do?”

“We’ll play it by ear. Don’t be nervous. It’s going to be lovely.”

The way she touched became unsure. She talked to him as they touched, and her crude, frank words were like pungent flowers against the gray of her shyness. When he touched her hips, he thought he could feel her innermost life on the sensitive surface of her body.

“It was like a honeymoon,” he said to her afterward. “Just like I knew it would be.”

“Oh, it was not.” Her face was in the mirror; she was swiping her mouth with lipstick. “Don’t be silly.”

“Have you ever been married?”

“Uh-uh.”

“Then you don’t know what a honeymoon is like.” She was right, though. It wasn’t like a honeymoon at all.

She walked him to the door and he kissed her in front of the other girls. The stretch-pants woman smiled. “Good night, Fred,” she said.

When he got on the highway to Westchester, he used his push-button device to roll down the windows and drove too fast. When he arrived home he walked through the entire first floor of his house, turning on all the lights. His wife really was out of town, and he didn’t like to be alone in a dimly lit house. The refrigerator was clean and neatly stacked with food his wife had prepared for him. He got into his pajamas and slippers and made himself a sandwich of cold cuts and mayonnaise. He stood at the kitchen counter and ate the sandwich from a paper plate with a smiling cat face on it. He thought of Lisette lying across the bed like an arrangement of fruit, her shoulder snuggled against her cheek, watching him clean himself in the bathroom with a cheap pink loofah. She had a curious, sober look on her round face. She’s an intelligent girl, he thought. You can see it in her eyes. Why hadn’t he told her that he was a veterinarian? He had never lied to a prostitute before. He made himself a piña colada, with lots of crushed ice and a tiny straw — his wife had left a Dixie cup of red-and-white straws next to the blender — and went to bed.

The next night, he drove into Manhattan to see her again.

“Boy, I’m glad to see you tonight,” she said as she clacked into the room with the sheet.

“Are you? Why?” He stood to let her crack the sheet above the bed.

“Oh, it’s been sort of a bad night. I couldn’t stand to deal with another idiot.”

“I’m sure you get some pretty undesirable people in here.”

“You said it.”

“Nobody violent or anything, I hope?”

“No, just stupid.” She floated the sheet down and turned to curl against him.

Later, they lay folded together, listening to the sad gurgle of the fish tank. “Look at those poor, dumb things swimming around in there,” she said. “They haven’t got any idea of the filth going on in here.”

“What did you mean about the men who come here? When you said they’re … just stupid.” He’d said “stupid” too loud.

“I don’t really mean they’re stupid. A lot of them are businessmen. They must have some kind of brain to do that. But they’re dumb about women and they’re dumb about sex.” She rocked him over on his back and lay on him, her fingers perched on his shoulders, her face right against his. “They actually think they can buy you for a hundred and fifty dollars. Like you’re going to become sexually excited because they give you money. I mean they can pay you to do certain things. But they can’t buy anyone for a hundred and fifty dollars.” She rolled off him and flopped on her back. “It’s so retarded. They don’t have any idea of what good sex is, so they wouldn’t know you can’t buy it.” She turned her head to him. “I hope I’m not insulting you. I’m not talking about you.”

He stuck his body up on one elbow so he could look at her. “No. No, I think it’s very interesting. I’m flattered that you choose to tell me these things.” Her stomach was sticking out like a little bread loaf. He tickled it lightly.

She scratched her stomach. “Why did you come back so soon?”

“Don’t you remember last night? I find our, uh, sex highly erotic. Not because I pay for it, but because it just is.” He paused to let her react. She stared at him and blinked. “Besides, I like you. I think there’s something between us. I think that if I were a few years younger and we met under slightly different circumstances, we might even have what’s now called a relationship.”

She smiled and looked at the happy lions snoozing on the designer sheets. He put his hand on hers. “The first night I came here, you were uncertain, kind of shy. You came out and admitted it, you asked me questions. You trusted me. Tonight when you were mad, you didn’t put on a phony smile. You let off steam, told me how you felt. You didn’t treat me like a customer. That’s nice. There’s hardly anybody that’ll be real with you like that anymore. Sometimes even my wife isn’t honest with me.”

She looked up from the smiling lions. “You shouldn’t come to prostitutes looking for honesty.”

“You’re not a prostitute. Don’t say that about yourself.”

“What do you think I am?”

“You just happen to be a pretty, sexy girl who, uh—”

“I have sex for money.”

“Well, all right.” He slapped her thigh nervously. “You’re right. You’re a prostitute.” It sounded so horrible. “But you’re still a wonderful girl.” He grabbed her and snuggled her.

“You don’t know me.”

“You’re wonderful.” He squeezed her like he wanted to break her ribs. She shoved her pelvis against him, threw her arms and one leg around him and squeezed with all her slippery might. She smiled with half-closed eyes, and bit her grinning lip. He squeezed harder. She jammed her elbows into his sides and he made a meek “whoof” noise.

He dropped his arms, panting. “God, you’re strong. How did such a small person get so strong?”

She grinned like a wolf. “I dunno.” She let go and rolled off, and padded into the bathroom.

He followed her. “Are you a gymnast? A dancer?”

“No. I used to work out with weights in school.” She dabbed between her legs with a nubbly white washcloth.

“University?”

“Yeah.” She grabbed a fat economy-size jar of mentholated mouthwash, threw her head back and dumped a big splash into her mouth. Her cheeks worked vigorously as she sloshed it to and fro.

“Do you show your strength in the way you deal with people? I mean, outside of this place?”

She spat a green burst of mouthwash into the sink and looked at him. “Yeah. I do.”

“How do you make them aware of it?”

She leaned against the sink, facing him with her arms behind her, her face thoughtful and soft. “I just … don’t let people sway my thinking. I don’t mold myself to fit what other people think I am.” She came forward and put her arms around him. “It’s interesting that you find strength in women attractive.”

“Why?”

“Don’t most older men like passive, dependent women?”

“Oh, that’s an awful stereotype. Don’t believe it.”

“Is your wife a strong woman?”

“Yes, she is.”

“Is she a lawyer too?”

“No. She’s an antiquarian. She’s got a small rare-book business.”

“Did you meet her in college?”

“Yes. She studied art history and Latin. I was very impressed by that.”

“Was she the first person you had sex with?”

“Almost.”

“I bet that’s why you see prostitutes.” She let go of him and hurried to get dressed. The outermost flesh of her backside jiggled as she balanced on one spike heel and stuck the other through a leg of her underpants.

“What do you mean?”

“You had so little chance to screw around when you were young. You’re trying to get it now.” Her fingers were flying over the tiny buttons of her checked dress.

“You know, I think you’re writing a book. That’s what you’re doing here. You’re one of those journalists doing undercover work on prostitution.”

She smiled miserably. “No.”

“What do you do, besides work here? I think you do something. Am I right?”

“Of course I do something.” She said “do” very sarcastically. She trotted to the mirror and got out her shiny silver lipstick case.

“What? What do you do?” He came toward her.

“I don’t like to talk about it here.” She opened her black leather bag to replace the lipstick. He glimpsed a roll of money and a packet of condoms in sky-blue tinfoil.

“Why don’t you like to talk about it?”

“It makes me unhappy.”

The telephone by the bed rasped, indicating the end of their hour.

He saw her again the following night, and the night after that. He relished the way she laughed and playfully squeezed him around the stomach with her hefty thighs, or impatiently squiggled out from under him so they could change position. Her nonchalant reaction to his efforts to impress her sexually made him believe that her excitement, when it did occur, was real, that she wanted him. But if he so much as put a hand where she didn’t want it, she’d fiercely slap it away and snap, “I don’t like that.”

“That’s why I like you so much,” he said. “You don’t let me get away with anything. You’re straightforward. Like my wife.”

During that time, she told him that her real name was Jane. She still wouldn’t talk to him about her life outside the pale green room. Instead, she asked him questions about himself. He was too embarrassed by now to tell her that he’d lied about his job. The lie turned out to be a mistake. Not only was she unimpressed by his false attorneyhood, she was an animal lover. The longest conversation they ever had on a single subject was about a cat that she’d had for fifteen years, until the fat, asthmatic thing finally keeled over. “He had all black fur except for his paws and his throat patch. He looked like he was wearing a tuxedo with a white cravat and gloves, and he was more of a gentleman than any human being I’ve ever known. I saw him protect a female cat from a dog once.”

The cute stories he could’ve told about all the kittens and puppies that came into his office, clinging to the shirts of their owners, the birds with broken wings in white-spattered boxes!

The fifth night he came to see her, she wasn’t sitting in the waiting room with the other girls. “Where’s Jane?” he asked the stretch-pants woman nervously.

“Jane? You must mean Lisette. She’s busy right now,” she answered in her placid, salad-oily voice. “Would you like to see another lady?”

A very young girl with burgundy hair smiled brightly at him. She was clutching a red patent-leather purse in purple-nailed hands.

“I’ll wait for Lisette.”

The stretch-pants woman widened her naked-lashed eyes in approval. “All right, Fred, just sit down and make yourself comfortable. Would you like something to drink?”

She brought him a horribly flat, watered-down Scotch in a plastic cup. He held it, smiling and sweating.

The burgundy-headed girl curled her legs up on the couch and turned back to her Monopoly game with the contemptuous black-haired girl, who lay across the couch like an eel on a market stand. The stretch-pants woman tried to talk to him.

“Do you work around here, Fred?”

“No.”

“What kind of business are you in?”

“Nothing. I mean, I’m retired.” The patches of shirt under his arms were glued with sweaty hair-lace. Jane was being mauled by a fat oaf who didn’t care that you could feel her innermost life on her skin.

The stretch-pants woman asked him to step into the kitchen. This house advertised its discretion and made sure men did not meet each other. He saw only the man’s dismal black-suited shape through the slats of the swinging kitchen door as he stood there holding his drink, the ice cubes melting into a depressing fizz. He heard the black shape’s blurred rumble and Jane’s indifferent voice. She sounded much nicer when she said good-bye to him. The pale-eyed hostess opened the swinging door and gave him a flat smile. “Okay, sir, would you like to step out?”

Jane stood smiling in her checked dress, her hands behind her back, one white-socked ankle crossing the other, her chin tilted up. He remembered how he had seen her first, how she could’ve been any girl, any bland, half-friendly face behind any counter. He felt a funny-bone twinge as he realized how her body, her voice, her every fussy gesture had become part of a Jane network, a world of smells, sounds and touches that found its most acute focus when she had her legs around his back.

The minute she came into the room, he went to her and put his arms around her hips. “Hello, Jane.”

“Hi.”

“It was strange not seeing you out there waiting for me.”

She looked puzzled.

“I guess I somehow got used to thinking of you as my own little girl. I didn’t like the idea that you were with some other guy. Silly, huh?”

“Yes.” She broke away and snapped the sheet out over the bed. “Do you say things like that because you think I like to hear them?”

“Maybe. Some of the girls do, you know.”

He could feel the sarcasm of her silence.

He watched her pull her dress off over her head and drop it on the aluminum chair. “I guess it’s only natural that you’ve begun to get jaded.”

She snorted. “I wouldn’t call it that.”

“What would you call it?”

She didn’t answer. She sat on the bed and bent to take off her heels, leaving her socks on. When she looked at him again she said, “Do you really think it’s a good idea for you to come to see me every night? It’s awfully expensive. I know lawyers make a lot of money, but still. Won’t your wife wonder where it’s going?”

He sat next to her and put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t you see how special you are? No other girl I’ve seen like this would ever have thought to say something like that. All they can think of is how to get more money out of me and here you are worrying about how much I’m spending. I’m not trying to flatter you, you are different.”

“Aren’t you worried about getting AIDS?”

“From a girl like you? C’mon, don’t put yourself down.”

She smiled, sad and strained, but sort of affectionate, and put her hands on his shoulders. She felt to him like one of his puppy patients embracing him as he carried it across the room for a shot.

“I’m sorry I’m being so shitty,” she said. “I just hate this job and this place.”

“Here,” he said. “I’m going to buy two hours, so we can just relax and unwind. You just lie down and get snuggled up in the sheet.” He got up and turned off the light. He found a romantic jazz station on the radio. He undressed and got under the sheet with her, wrapping them both in a ball. He held her neck and felt her forehead against his shoulder. Her limbs were nestled and docile, as if all her stiff, pony-trot energy had vanished. The dim light of the gurgling fish tank cast an orangy glow over the room. “This is so nice and glamorous,” he said.

“When is your wife coming back?” asked a voice from the nuzzling bundle on his arm.

“In three days.” He sighed and stared at the stupid, lovely slivers of fish darting around their ugly castle.

Of course he knew that concern for his financial situation wasn’t the only reason she’d suggested that he shouldn’t see her so often. She was probably sick of him. He remembered dating well enough to know that women didn’t like to be pursued too closely. It could seem sappy, he supposed, to come grinning in there after her every single night. The next night he would stay home, and read or watch television.

He enjoyed making dinner for himself. There were still a lot of good things left in the refrigerator — herring, a chunk of potato salad that was only slightly rancid, cream cheese, a jar of artichoke hearts, egg bread. It was too messy to eat in the kitchen — the counter was covered with encrusted plates and pans filled with silverware and water.

He arranged the slices and oily slabs on two different plates and carried the stuff into the living room to put on the coffee table. He clicked on the TV with his remote-control device, flicked the channels around a few times and then ignored it. He ate with his fingers and a plastic fork, mentally feeling over the events of the day, like a blind person groping through a drawer of personal effects. There had been the usual parade of cats and dogs, and one exotic bird with a mysterious illness. He had no idea what to do with the crested, vividly plumed thing, which was apparently worth a lot of money. He had pretended that he did, though, and the bird was sitting in his kennel now, gaping fiercely at the cats with its hooked beak.

Then there was the dog that he had had to put to sleep, a toothless, blind, smelly old monster with toenails like a dinosaur’s. He thought the dog was probably grateful for the injection, and he said so, but that didn’t console the homely adolescent girl who insisted on holding it right up until the end, tears running from under her glasses and down her pink, porous face. Poor lonely girl, he thought. He had wanted to say, “Don’t worry, dear, you’re going to grow up to be a beauty. You’re going to get married and have lots of wonderful children.” Except it probably wasn’t true.

He picked up his remote-control device and switched channels thoughtfully. What would Jane think when he didn’t show up? Would she think he’d gotten bored with her, that he was never coming back? Would she go home wondering what had happened? He tried to picture her in her apartment. She had told him it was very small, only one room with a tiny bathroom. She said the bathroom had big windows and a skylight, and that she had so many plants in there that you couldn’t use the toilet without arranging yourself around the plants. She said she didn’t have a chair or a couch, that she sat on the floor to eat. When she came home from work she often ordered Chinese food and ate it straight from the cardboard boxes set out on the floor between her spread legs.

“What do you have for breakfast?” he asked.

“Ice cream, sometimes. If it’s warm.”

“What do you find to do in that little room?”

“I read a lot.”

“What do you like to read?”

She named a few writers, one that he’d been forced to read in college and others he’d never heard of.

He picked up a tiny bit of herring and mashed it with the edges of his front teeth. Maybe he could start seeing Jane in her apartment. It would be more money for her certainly. He would like to spend time in that funny little place. He could buy her a chair. Maybe even a table.

He wouldn’t be able to see Jane much at all once Sylvia got back. He thought of his wife getting on the plane in her green-and-white dress, the handle of her wicker suitcase in hand, her gray hair wound into an elegant bun that displayed her graceful neck and gently erect shoulders. Her smile was beautiful when she turned to wave good-bye.

He pictured Sylvia sitting in her favorite armchair across from him. She would be relaxed but sitting up straight on the tautly stuffed, salmon-colored cushions. Her legs would be crossed at the ankle. She would have her pale beige glasses on her nose, she would be in a trance over her latest book catalogues. If he stood up and put his hand on her shoulder, he would feel how slender and strong she still was, how well defined her small bones were.

He thought of her collection of rare books, arranged and locked in the glass cabinet in a sunny corner of her study. They were beautiful to look at and extremely expensive; other book dealers had offered her thousands of dollars for some of them. Every time he looked at them, he felt depressed.

One Christmas, he bought Sylvia a book entitled Beautiful Sex. It made him unhappy to remember that night when, with Beautiful Sex lying open on their bed to reveal a series of glossy pink-and-white photos, she cooperatively arranged herself into one of the more conventional positions illustrated, sighing as she did so. “Now, honey,” she said, “tell the truth. Don’t you feel foolish doing this?”

He clicked off the TV and left the room, making a mental note to put the plates in the dishwasher before he went to bed.

The next day he drove to Manhattan right after work, without stopping at home for a shower. Perhaps Jane would notice the vague animal smell on him. She might ask him about it and he could tell her the truth about what he did.

It was already dark when he reached the city. He drove slowly through Times Square, fascinated by the night’s ugliness. He stopped for a red light and looked up at a movie marquee towering on the corner, its dead white face advertising The Spanking of Cindy. There was a short man in a black leather jacket standing by the box office, hunching his cadaverous shoulders in the wind. “Now there’s a queer,” thought Fred. “Wonder what he’s doing in front of that movie house?” He looked at the marquee again, and noticed that the billboard next to it was painted with a girl in jeans thrusting her bottom out, her blond hair swirling across her back, her mouth open in laughter. It was an ad for jeans, but it suited the movie; he vaguely wondered if it had been arranged that way. He turned his head to look at the other side of the street and saw a broken old woman lying unconscious in the middle of the sidewalk with her face against the concrete, her ragged dress spattered across her ugly thighs. He was disgusted to see a young man pissing against the wall not two feet away from her. People were stepping over her as if she were an object, vicious people, it seemed to him, swinging their arms and legs in every direction, working their mouths, yelling at each other, eating hot dogs or Italian ices. What would it be like to be among them? He watched a couple of hookers in miniskirts and leather boots kick their way through a pile of garbage, screaming with laughter.

As soon as he got to a different neighborhood, he stopped at a Chinese flower store and bought Jane a single long-stemmed rose.

“Just so you wouldn’t think I’d forgotten you,” he said when he handed it to her.

“Thanks.” She laid it on the night table, between the bottle of baby oil and the flowered Kleenex box. “Were you sick?”

“No. I just had some … things to do. Did you miss me?”

“Yeah.” She began undoing her buttons.

“Listen, Jane. Tomorrow night will be the last night I can see you for a while. I was thinking maybe we could do something special.”

“Like what?”

“Like you could call in sick and we could meet somewhere for dinner.”

She put her hands in her lap and stared at him with something like alarm in her wide, smudged eyes.

“We could have dinner, go to a movie or a concert — whatever you’d like. Then we could go to a hotel — or maybe your apartment — and spend the night together.”

She looked at her nails and picked them.

“Of course I realize that I can’t ask you to take a night off work without making it worth your while. You’d do all right.”

“How much?”

“Five hundred.”

She didn’t say anything.

“It could be very nice. We’d have time to really act like people in a relationship. What do you say?”

“I don’t know.”

“What are your reservations?”

“I don’t think people in these circumstances can act like people having a relationship.”

“Well, maybe you’re right about that. But still it might be fun. I’d love to talk to you about a movie we’d seen or …”

“I think you’d be surprised if you found out what I’m like outside of here.”

“I can’t believe I wouldn’t like you.”

“You’d think I was weird.”

“I’m not as closed-minded as you think.”

“It’s just that we might not have anything to talk about.”

She didn’t notice the animal smell.

He waited for half an hour at their appointed meeting place. He wasn’t surprised when she stood him up. He was somewhat surprised when he called the escort service to make an appointment and they told him she’d quit. She’d often told him she hated it and that she was going to quit soon, but girls talked like that all the time and stayed for months, even years.

Sylvia returned the next day, smiling and suntanned, happy to wash the dishes on the kitchen counter and pick up the damp, scrunched-up towels that were wadded up on every rack in the bathroom. She told him nice stories about the Arizona desert and the book fair she’d gone to there. He made love to her in a quiet, respectful way. She put her slender arms around his shoulders and held him tight. But when he tried to show her some of the things he’d done with Jane, he could feel her body become docile and patient.

He drove into Manhattan about once a month to pay for girls. He went to different establishments each time, hoping to find Jane. Every time he saw a new girl he suffered from nostalgia and the irritating nag of unfavorable comparison.

When he thought of her he didn’t feel love or anything like it. He felt a sort of painful fondness. He remembered having a similar feeling when he ran into a girl he’d been crazy about in college and saw that she’d gotten fat and was buying a box of Pampers. It was strange to be having that feeling now for someone he met in a brothel.

It was almost a year later when he went into Manhattan one afternoon to do Christmas shopping. The city had a different quality during the day. When he thought of daytime Manhattan, the first thing he imagined was a pretty young woman with dark, wavy hair and an unnatural burst of red on both cheeks, walking down the wide, crowded sidewalks more quickly and sharply than anyone had to, her worn, brightly colored shoes marching in close, narrow steps, her cheap, fashionable jacket open to show her belted waist, her handbag held tightly under her arm, her head turned away from anyone who might look at her, turned so she could skim the window displays as she clipped by, one hand jammed into a pocket of her jacket, nothing swinging loose. And then he thought of a lumbering, middle-aged man in a suit, his glasses on the tip of his nose, a lace of greasy crumbs on his lapels, his briefcase clutched at his side, rolling down the street as fast as his plump body would go, jacket flapping open, his bored eyes skimming quickly over the girl and every other girl like her as he rushed to the office.

There was something sad and poignant about this image, but that didn’t prevent him from spending as much time staring at girls as he spent shopping. At the end of the day he’d found only two gifts — a sweater-guard made of twin silver bunnies for a teenaged niece and, for Sylvia, an elegant old-fashioned wristwatch from a Village watch shop.

By the time he had found these gifts it was late afternoon and he was hungry. The watch shop was close to a particular café he liked because the food was good and because he enjoyed looking at the strangely dressed young people who often went there.

The hostess, a tall girl with a high, perspiring forehead and pleasantly freckled cheeks, smiled as she ran toward him with a long plastic menu, and immediately raced him to a corner table that had yellow flowers in a green bottle on it. “Enjoy,” she panted, and ran off. He shook off his heavy coat and looked over the crowd with relish. He picked up the menu and glanced at the table on his left. From then on the rest of the people in the room became a herd of anonymous colored shapes that could’ve been eating their fingers for all he cared. Jane was sitting next to him. She was with a boy. She glanced at him too quickly for him to see her expression. She immediately put her elbow on the table and her hand to her face.

He looked away. He squeezed the laminated menu between his fingers. He read the description of cold pasta three times. He turned his head and stared at her. She’d grown her hair out and was wearing it up in a ponytail that looked like a ball of brown wool. Even with her hand blocking her face, he could see that she wore almost no makeup, that her skin looked fresh and rosy in daylight. She was wearing an old cream-colored sweater with pink and blue tulips woven into it.

He stared at the boy who sat across the table from her. He was a homely kid in his early twenties with a thick thatch of badly cut sandy hair that roared up over his forehead in a hideous bush. His crooked tortoiseshell glasses had one arm held on by a piece of grayish masking tape, and he wore a brown sweater thick enough to be a coat. His complexion was ruddy and coarse, his expression horribly cheerful.

On a cruel impulse, he leaned forward and leered at the kid. The boy glanced at him affably and buried his spoon in the bowl of stew he had before him.

“Yeah,” he said. “Simone’s been experiencing a lot of rejection from her old friends.”

“I’m not really rejecting her,” said Jane. “I just want to put some distance between us emotionally. Enough so that she doesn’t feel compelled to call me every time her psychotic girlfriend starts slapping her around.”

She was going to sit there and continue her conversation.

“How many times has it been now?” asked the ugly kid through a mouthful of stew.

“Five, counting the last girlfriend, three times at six in the morning. I mean, my God, where does she find these women? I didn’t think lesbians were into beating each other up.”

A waitress in a short black leather skirt and leopard-skin tights charged his table. “Are you ready to order?”

“No, no, not yet.” She smiled and roared off. He lowered his head to the plastic menu. He was not sure why this experience was such an unpleasant one.

“I mean, her life is her life,” said Jane. “But the last time she called she actually got me over there to mediate between her and this crazed, muscle-bound black belt in God knows what, and they’re screaming at each other and Simone is threatening to cut her wrist, and oh, it was a mess.”

“It sounds very theatrical.”

“It’s like not only is she going to be a masochistic asshole, she wants an audience. I know I’m being cruel.”

“I don’t think you’re cruel. Most people wouldn’t have put up with it as long as you did.”

“It’s so tragic, though. She’s such a great person. And I know at least two really attractive, charming girls who’re dying to get into her pants, but she’s not interested. She likes bitches.”

“Look, Simone sets herself up for disaster. She always has. Then she tries to drag anyone within range into it.”

They gnawed their food righteously. Jane still had her elbow up and her hand blocking her face.

“How’s the job search going?” she asked.

“It looks good so far. Like I said, I think I did all right at Ardis films. And I know somebody who used to work there. The only thing about that place is that the people are so pretentious. Everybody there is a ‘close personal friend’ of Herzog or Beth B. or somebody. Everybody has this certain pompous accent, especially when they say ‘film.’”

“That’s professional New York,” said Jane. “People who work in the arts are always that way.”

“Maybe I’ll just come work in the museum with you.”

“If we’re not on strike. And it looks like we’re going to be.”

“Could you survive on free-lance work if that happened?”

“Maybe.” She dropped the hand at her chin, exposing her face to him. “I don’t know.”

He got up from the table, looking straight ahead, and slowly gathered his coat around his shoulders. He could sense no movement of her head turning to look at him as he left the restaurant. He wouldn’t realize that he’d left the bag containing the bunny sweater-guard and Sylvia’s watch under the table until he arrived home in Westchester.