Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 136, No. 5. Whole No. 831, November 2010

Lesson Plan by Naben Ruthnum

Like a number of other EQMM writers, Canadian Naben Ruthnum has had another artistic career, as a rock musician. He spent the past ten years in Vancouver where he played in a rock band called Bend Sinister. He wrote “Lesson Plan” between tours with the band, then decided that the touring life wasn’t for him. He is now pursuing a master’s degree in English at McGill University, where, he tells us, he just finished a novel in the vein of Kingsley Amis.

I walked out of the school, past my overdressed and insultingly young boss, past the helpless secretary. I was clutching Grace’s narrow forearm through her sweater. It felt like two hot twigs wrapped in cashmere. I took her up the stairs so fast she had to hop. Outside, it happened to be as cold and rainy as people imagine Seattle is year-round. We stood under the canopy for a moment without talking, which is funny. She was the only person I’d had an honest conversation with since I arrived in this city.

With most people, I wouldn’t know how to begin talking about my work. And I certainly don’t want to, which again seems a little funny, as my day job involves talking and little else. I’ve managed to find the separation that self-helpers are always talking about: My job isn’t my work. But my work does come out of my job.

I moved to Seattle right after university, coming out West with hopes of finding a band, getting in on a music scene that I’d been picturing in my head. I soon found out it didn’t exist. My bass sat around unused. So did I. I grabbed the first job I could get, teaching ESL — that’s English as a Second Language — at one of the dozens of schools in town, this one not too far from the shimmering seafood-and-tourist reek of the fish market.

ESL had been my fallback job all through university, the work that kept my small gut full of beer and my nose entertained with whatever I felt like snuffing up there. After my first couple of years teaching, I did what I’d forbidden myself from doing — I slept with a student.

Eun Hee was, of course, my favorite student, a cute Korean girl who had a fair number of interesting things to say. It’s painful for me to recall most of the dialogues I had in the identical gray booths of the identical schools I taught at, but hers stood out.

“Yeah, I like baseball, okay, yeah, Koreans do,” she said the first day, impatient at being asked the same question twice. I’d lost concentration. Teaching conversation is harder than it seems — you’re being paid to extend small talk that you’d usually be screaming to get away from into hour-long dissertations on emptiness. The students bored me, and I bored them. Eun Hee could talk, though. Her English wasn’t perfect, but her interests were. Restaurants, getting drunk, gangster movies, noisy rock, and the inevitable end to that sequence. We spent time together outside of class, and even though we weren’t really dating, we were doing something. She quit the school and spent her time with me for the rest of her couple of months in town. On her last morning, she gave me an envelope.

“What’s this?” I was practically unconscious from our third bout between the sheets in as many hours. I don’t usually screw to impress but I didn’t know the next time I’d have such regular access to a pretty girl, so I was getting the most out of it.

“It’s for you. Present,” she said, getting up and picking a soft towel off the floor to wipe the sweat from her body. She unzipped her already-packed suitcase and picked out a few things to put on for her flight back to Seoul.

“What present? You don’t need to get me a present.” Especially a green present in an envelope that had this kind of weight. I told her I wasn’t a gigolo.

“What?”

“Gigolo. Like prostitute, but a man.”

She snapped on her bra. She always put her bra on before any other piece of clothing, and I liked that. “I learned more from you and had more fun with you than in the conversation school. That, in envelope, is my last two months’ tuition. I got a refund. And now you get it.”

“I’m not sure—”

“I learned from you. You keep the money.”

I kept the money. It lasted me the rest of the year — I was stunned to find out what kind of tuition students paid at that slipshod language school, which gave airhead college kids ten bucks an hour to blather and occasionally teach the students a new word. Most of the other teachers spelled like five-year-olds and talked like hasty text messages. I prided myself on being a bit above the pack, and felt even better about quitting.

My angle here in Seattle doesn’t have anything to do with what went on with Eun Hee, and I’m sure she’d disapprove. I disapprove. I work at various schools for about a month apiece, chatting my way through six-hour days. Surveillance sessions, I call them. The male students are the toughest, because there’s no possible benefit, but I find that schools tend to assign me more girls than guys to talk to, based on my one asset: my face. Being twenty-five, handsome, and functionally intelligent is a leg up in a business filled with nascent Dahmers and aging ex-cons with a yen for young Asians. They don’t do background checks at most schools. They usually don’t check your references, either. If the reprobates who teach around me aren’t worried, I certainly have nothing to fear.

I don’t scout for the Eun Hees anymore. She was more of a girlfriend than a source of income. The money was incidental, accidental. I seek out the slightly chubby girls, the ones with a Tommy-gun spray of acne and a stencil of loneliness on their faces. And I give them what they want — which isn’t sex, no, not at all — it’s a boyfriend, a nice American boyfriend with a hand to hold and time to spend. I pick up new students, girls who’ve only taken a couple of classes. Eventually I convince them that I’ll drop out of teaching if they’ll drop out of school and claim their refund. Then it’s simple. I live for free while we’re together, and gouge the tuition refund out of them by guilt or intimidation when they leave.

I felt pretty bad the first time, standing near the entryway of a bank while Yoon Jin withdrew the last of her spending cash — earned by her father and brother during fourteen-hour workdays in some hellish Pusan office — and brought it up to me. Three thousand, five hundred and sixty-nine dollars. Small earnings for an actual criminal, probably, but to me it was enough for a few months. I paid for our cab to the airport and saw her off. Yoon Jin left too fast to realize how much she should hate me, I think.

I moved from school to school, working a total of six months out of the two years I’d lived here. Eun Hee was a distant and guiltless memory that I conjured up once in a while to cover up the more recent ones. There’d been about five since her, none of whom I’d slept with and all of whom I’d taken money from.

Grace came into my booth on one of the slow days, in the lag time when the school semester is starting up in Korea. Most of the students who’d been piling up hours of conversation in the previous weeks left on the same day, leaving me with hour-long gaps to fill in my day. That meant trial lessons — free trial lessons that I didn’t get paid for. The other teachers, such as Bruce, a cowboy-boot-wearing fellow who dyed his goatee, hated these sessions.

“It’s a jack, straight ahead, a jack,” he said, leaning over the partition between our cubicles. His breath killed the oxygen around me, replacing it with the gaseous remains of what must have been a pickle-and-cheese lunch.

“I don’t mind the trials so much,” I said to Bruce. “Less pressure to drive the conversation. What do I care if the kid signs up or not?”

“Oh, you oughta care. Maybe the school gets ninety percent of the cash, but if we don’t net that ten percent from a sign-up, we’re dead in the water. Only made my rent last month after selling half my guitar collection. How do you get by?”

Half his collection must have been one whole guitar, I thought. Probably a cheap knockoff of some vintage model that he’d seen on a few album covers. Bruce had found out I played bass. Once he stopped trying to get me to join his nonexistent band, he concentrated on forming a bond between us as rebel artists caught in a thankless real-world racket. Meeting him made me glad that I’d given up on the rock-star ticket.

“I’ve got other income here and there, Bruce. Not a good idea to anchor your life to such an irregular paycheck — you oughta know that, string-slinger.” If I wasn’t already gagging on the stink of his breath, I did as those words came out of my mouth. I had to throw him off thinking of my other income stream, and the best way was to get him talking about himself. And he did, blabbing about some alt-country band he’d started with his buddy who’d just moved to Tacoma and was living next-door to an old A&R rep from Universal who’d gotten out of the game… that was all I heard before tuning him out.

At some point, Grace sat down across from me for the first time. Six months before I ended up dragging her out into the rainy street. She moved light. Bruce hadn’t shut up. He liked to make a show of how little the presence of a student affected his real personality, but when his peripherals caught a glimpse of her his jaws snapped shut and the pickle stink gradually receded. He sat down and left us to it.

Grace smiled. She looked older than most of my students — late twenties, maybe. She wasn’t Japanese, but didn’t quite look Korean, either. She had what I’d have to call raceless beauty, a kind of pretty that was almost alien. A thin face, with an extra curve of pale flesh just above the cheekbones and just below a pair of confectionary-brown eyes. We started to talk, and I could feel the unwanted pressure of Bruce listening to us.

“Who was that other teacher?” she asked. Every second word was accentless, as is typical with students who’ve been speaking the language for a while. They start to sound like they’re doing an inconsistent impression of themselves.

“He can still hear you,” I said. “Bruce. A hell of a speaker,” I said, risking a swear in order to be able to teach her an idiom.

“Oh,” she said. “I’m Grace.” I introduced myself and noticed her glance regretfully at the cubicle wall — as though she would have preferred to have Bruce as her teacher. It was too confusing to be insulting. So I started the conversation, preparing to pile it on, finding out quickly that her English was good and that her conversation was even better — she had things to say. I gave up on her entirely as a potential source of a payout. She’d have guys wanting her company all over any country. So I just sat back and enjoyed the talk, for once. Bruce’s inaudible jealousy richly enhanced our banter.

“This is my third trial lesson today,” she said after twenty minutes, being either candid or unaware that teachers didn’t like to spend time talking to students who had no intention of transforming into a paycheck at some point.

“Three different schools?” I asked. The answer was obvious, but mindless questions were the grease these conversations rolled on. I was enjoying staring at her face, in the way that mechanics enjoy having pinups in their garages. Her prettiness made the bleakness of the job feel remote.

“Yes, three different ones. I’m looking for the right one, with the right teachers. I am always getting very young teachers.”

“Yeah?”

She crinkled a tiny eyebrow.

“‘Yeah’ as a question, I meant. You can say ‘yeah’ in that way and it means ‘Please explain more, I don’t understand.’”

“I like older teachers, they have more interesting lives. Things to talk about.” Again, Grace looked at the divider. In the next booth, Bruce’s smile was probably in danger of splitting his face open.

“Oh. Well, they assign students randomly for the trials—”

“Randomly?” She said it deeply, enunciating it like I did, but with a question-mark tail.

“By chance. Luck. Not planned.” I wrote the hasty definition out for her. “You can choose another teacher if you want.”

“Yeah, okay. I think I will take the other teacher. You say he’s a good speaker?”

“Yeah.” Grace got up, picked up her combined purse/bookbag, and started to back out of the booth. She threw a small card onto the desk as she took the paper with the “random” definition from my hand, then went over to Bruce’s booth. The card had a phone number, presumably hers, on the back.

I found out for sure when I dialed it a couple of hours later. I’d just eaten a fish sandwich at a diner, trying not to be bothered by Grace’s abandonment. The boss had let me off early with a disappointed look, as though I’d let down the entire educational system by losing a student to Bruce. The waitress looked disgusted with me, too, but that was probably because I’d been ordering the same fish sandwich from her for six months. She’d been waitressing in a cheap diner for six months. We could take turns being disgusted.

“Hello?” The word was muffled and coy, the accent uncertain.

“Grace?”

“Oh, yes. You’re the teacher!”

“Not much of one, apparently.” I could tell that she was outside, walking around downtown, from the sounds of the automobile and sidewalk traffic.

“What?”

“Nothing, just a joke. Did you want to meet with me, or something? You certainly didn’t seem too interested in the school.”

She must have dodged into a building, because the noise on her end of the line receded suddenly. “I was interested, but wanted the other teacher. Sorry.”

“Yeah. Well. It’s a little mysterious. So are we going to meet up or what?”

“You like Starbucks?”

“No.”

She laughed. The friendliness of teaching was one of the first things that I liked to cast off on the street, although I did have to keep some of it around when I was with one of my recruited companion-students. I didn’t feel like being friendly with Grace.

“You pick,” she said. I named a bar. She said it was near her place. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I was ringing the buzzer at her apartment building a half-hour later.

Her place was near-palatial, in a building known to be infested by rich software developers, fathers of the boom that had come and faded in Seattle, just like the music scene that I’d loved. She met me at the door after my elevator ride. The door was a long walk away from the kitchen, which had delicious smells steaming out of it.

“That outfit is too nice to be cooking in.” It was. She was wearing a green linen dress that was supernaturally unwrinkled, with black stockings below.

“This dress is thin,” she replied. “Good for cooking.”

“Yeah. I just ate.”

“I wasn’t cooking for you, just me. I thought you just wanted to drink?”

“Yes, that would be good. What do you have?”

“Could you get some? I like Kronenbourg.” She separated the three syllables.

“Well, yeah, okay. Give me some keys so I don’t have to buzz up.” She tossed me a key with an electronic fob chained to it and I went on my way. There was a store at the corner, only a few minutes away, but it was raining hard enough by then for me to be soaked when I got back to the lobby. A few of the other residents looked at me, and I made a display of waggling my fob in front of the elevator’s scanner. I was wearing black jeans and a Meat Puppets T-shirt under my open windbreaker. At least I smelled okay.

She’d eaten and washed the dishes by the time I got back. The kitchen must have been well ventilated, because I couldn’t smell any spices. Grace’s clothes gave off fabric softener and perfume, which combined into a soft, synthetic blooming odor from her side of the room. The first six Kronenbourgs went down fast, and I asked the obvious question. We were both extended on separate parts of her red sectional couch, most of the light coming in from the city outside her massive glass walls.

“I told you there,” she said, “I only like older teachers. So much more to talk about.”

“But you should know that’s not true. Most of them are sad, broken men with very boring lives behind them. I guess if you asked them to list their disappointments you’d have an entertaining hour or six, but beyond that, what is there?”

“There is enough.”

“Why did you get me to call you?”

“I liked your hair.”

“Really? I guess it’s grown quite attached to me.” I grinned, knowing what I’d said would be beyond her English. But she laughed. She leaned back, shut her eyes, and laughed. Then she spoke again.

“That was bad. I hope you reserve those lines for people who won’t be able to understand them.” Her accent had disappeared. Actually, her voice had become Southern Californian, lacking any trace of overseas.

“What’s your deal?” I asked.

“My deal? No deal. I’m a student, just not an ESL student. Part-time theater at the university.”

“So what, you do this little act at downtown schools as a performance piece?” I was disturbed and would have gotten out of there if she didn’t look the way she did, and wasn’t looking at me the way she was. I opened another beer instead, using my thumb and her fob.

“No, it’s not that. I guess the acting practice is good, too. But no, I do it for money, really.”

I froze up and understood immediately. She got herself assigned to the worst sad sack in the office, convinced him somehow that she was his girlfriend, extracted what little cash he had on a day-to-day basis, and then maybe a little more. Grace confirmed all of it.

“And you’d be surprised at the kind of savings those guys have. What they’re willing to give up. Your pal Bruce has two properties, you know that? His dead mother’s house in Bellingham and his own apartment down here. Just works that talking job because he’s lonely.”

“How do you know that’s true? It makes perfect sense to me that Bruce would lie.”

“He carries around folded-up photocopies of the deeds in his wallet.”

This detail was too perfect to be fake. We both laughed and started to drink more. Her scheme was really perfect — she called it a “grift,” feeling that this term classed things up a bit. She did the same thing that I did — offered companionship, pretended to be shy about sex, complained of having money troubles from home, needing a loan to extend her stay in the city, and so on. She never let them come to her apartment, obviously. That would disrupt the whole game. After the rest of the twelve-pack, I felt comfortable telling Grace about my own game. She pretended to be disturbed for a moment, then folded over in giggles. She really was an excellent actress. Then we made our way toward the bedroom and I forgot all about her acting skills.

It was a lot like dating Eun Hee again, only better. We had more to share. Work was a delight, as I got to experience Bruce swaggering around smugly and dropping sledgehammer-subtle hints about the new girl in his life. He spent the early evenings with Grace, and I got all night with her. I managed to pick up a daytime girl for myself in the next week, a pasty unfortunate named Yu Na. Twenty-seven and never been kissed. I could do that much for her. She was out of the city in four days and I had enough spending cash to have an excellent month with Grace. We met at her place and spent lots of money at local bars and restaurants.

“Are you ever going to let me see your apartment?” she asked one night after we were walking home from an all-night Italian restaurant on Boren.

“Sure, tonight, if you want. We’ll need to cab it there. And it’s a rathole compared to your place.”

“You should get better at your job if you want a nicer apartment.”

“Oh, my grift, as you say? It’s part of my grift. I’m just a poor student on his way up, right? They’d get suspicious if their ten-buck-an-hour teacher was living in Silicon Heights or whatever.”

We got back to my place and Grace looked around. Half-full laundry basket on the floor, packs of guitar strings with dust-mouse colonies forming on them. Exactly what she’d expected.

“Sorry,” I said anyway.

“It’s no problem. We can do all the same things here.” We did.

I woke up alone. That was fine with me, and it fit our regular schedule. She had to be off every Wednesday, early, to have breakfast and a walk in the park with Bruce. She really did deserve a reward for tolerating that guy. According to tradition, my fridge was empty of everything except for half a glass of orange juice. I drank that and had waffles with maple walnut ice cream at the overpriced chain restaurant down the street. After my lean college years, it always felt good to be able to lay down a twenty without grimacing at the bill. I killed time at record stores and then got to work at about three.

Bruce was slumped in his booth in his customary nap-taking position. When I passed him he came to life, looking at me sadly.

“She cut me out, man,” Bruce said.

“Beg pardon?”

“That girl I was talking about. She said she needed to get back home to take care of some family trouble. She’ll e-mail me in a few days. I’m just broken up about it.”

“But she’ll get back to you.”

“Of course. Man, we really had something. I loaned her plane fare and everything. It was actually that girl who came in—”

“Grace.”

“How did you guess?”

“Prettiest girl in here in weeks, Bruce. I knew you’d be on that like I know you’re you.” This cheered him immensely and he forced me to high-five him. I taught with a grin for the rest of the day. Grace called when I was at dinner and told me that she’d come to my place after class.

She moved in a special way indoors, a type of walk that would look good on stage. It wasn’t theatrical, just very naked. Maybe that’s why she liked thin fabrics. She walked as though she was nude in her own place and no one was around. We joked about Bruce for a while and she showed me the manila envelope of bills in her purse. On the outside of it, he’d written “For trips there and back again. — Bruce.”

“That has real levels of pathos to it,” I said. Grace agreed. Soon, she was naked for real, and so was I. We spent most of the night that way, and the rest sleeping. I was woken by a sharp pain in my back at about four.

“Jesus! Did you bite me?” Grace didn’t answer. I assumed it was a spider and swept my hand around on the mattress. I didn’t find anything, and soon I fell asleep without realizing it.

I was alone again in the morning, but something was wrong. I felt bad. The sum of a dozen hangovers had added up in my skull and body, and I knew right away that I’d been drugged. Only drugs made you feel this bad the next day, and this was one I’d never tried. My fingers were working so poorly that the bedside lamp only came on after twelve tries. Another ten minutes got me to the bathroom, and what I saw made me glad that I still had some of those numbing narcotics in my system.

“Mlurn,” was the first sound to come out of me. My face was the color of polluted sea foam, and my eyes were nearly puffed shut. That explained why it still seemed so dark. I must have had an allergic reaction to whatever she’d injected me with.

I went to the kitchen and swallowed as many codeine pills as I could fit down, cupping handfuls of water from the tap to help their voyage down. Then I went back to sleep with a cold towel over my face. It was all I could manage.

In the afternoon, I was a little better. My face was still swollen but the rest of me felt okay. I took a closer look at my apartment and saw that it had been tossed in an organized, considerate way. She might have nearly killed me with whatever was in that needle, but she didn’t want to leave the place a mess. I went straight for the kitchen cupboard and found a half-full box of raisin bran, but no economy-sized corn flakes box. It was gone. Eight thousand and change in savings, the responsible put-aside part of what I’d taken off the girls. Grace had rightly assumed I was too lazy to get a safety-deposit box. With her plane fare from Bruce, she’d made a little more than ten thousand dollars yesterday.

I went to a dingy Chinese restaurant for some food, a place where the lighting was red and the service hasty. There was no point in looking for Grace at the school, or in asking to see her records there. They’d be fake. Mine always were. I checked my watch for the date: It was the first of the month. I didn’t have any doubt that Grace had moved house the day before when she was supposedly at acting class. She didn’t need classes.

I waited until my eyes looked almost normal and walked down to the school. I was an hour late, but I ignored the upset staff and went straight for Bruce’s booth.

“Do you own two properties, Bruce?”

The look on my face and the look of my face combined to make him talk plainly, for once.

“No, man. I rent a basement.”

“Your mother didn’t leave you a house in Bellingham?”

“I rent the basement from her.”

I quit the school and went home to rest and think. I’d been the target, not Bruce. That meant everything I’d said and thought about him in my month with Grace applied as much or more to me. My last check from the school came in the mail three days later. They’d deducted the price of the stamp. I lived off it for as long as I could before signing up at another downtown ESL factory.

It took me four months to find her. I knew there was a good chance that she’d left town, but I needed to keep working anyway. So I kept an eye open for her. I volunteered for all the trial lessons I could, knowing that she’d turn up if she was still around. And finally there she was, shivering a little in the rain, with her wrist clamped hard in my hand.

“That hurts,” she said.

“What did you drug me with? I hope you used a clean needle.”

“I’m not a junkie.”

“Just a plain bitch.”

“There’s a word for guys like you, too,” she said. I let go of her wrist. She didn’t run. I indicated a coffee shop and she nodded. I followed her in. She was wearing a turquoise capelike thing and she still walked the same way. She paid for the espresso.

“What was in the needle?” I asked. She told me. I couldn’t pronounce what she said when I repeated it back to her, and she laughed.

“Real funny. I just wanted to know what it was that almost killed me.” She stopped sipping and looked at me. I exaggerated my allergic symptoms in a description of that morning, adding in some shortness of breath and vomiting. “Could have died. Are you going to give me my money back?”

“Yes. And you know I didn’t mean that to happen.”

“Yeah, well, tell my lungs. You’re just going to give me the money, no trouble?”

“If I don’t I guess you’ll just try to make my life hell.”

“Good guess.”

She took a sip and undid the one large button on her cape. Underneath was a black silk top with a silly ruffled center. There was nothing ashamed about her.

“Why didn’t you get out of town?” I asked. “You had enough cash.”

“I was going to wait awhile, set up my business, then give you a call. I thought you’d be more interested once you’d seen what—”

I laughed, loudly enough to call attention from other people. They lost interest quickly, as people do. “Once you’d near-killed me and stolen my savings?”

She looked to the side, with the expression of someone who knows she won’t be understood, no matter what she says. It was a face I made at students to make them try harder.

“I’ve been saving seed money for a school. Teachers, students, a full ESL outfit. You said it yourself: Overcharging students and underpaying teachers is an easier way of stealing. Before you said that, I was just taking money from people and putting it away, for nothing. Retirement. It was empty stealing. But I took your money and your idea to make it into something. I was going to get in contact with you when you weren’t upset with me anymore. I thought you’d make fun of the idea if I just told you.” Her face was earnest, her voice caffeine- and adrenaline-infused. It took some effort to laugh in her face again, but I did.

We walked to her bank in silence and went to her deposit box in the company of a teller. The room was caged and marble. The teller left the room as Grace was opening the lid of the box. It wasn’t quite full.

“You can take your money now, or you can stay with me and be part of my school,” she said. I laughed, savoring the cold aluminum echo of the sound coming back from the walls at us.

“It’s a cute plan, I have to say. But I don’t really think we have the basis for a business relationship, do we? Trust and all that.”

“Aren’t you sick of doing all of this?” She made a circling motion around the deposit box. “It’s disgusting.”

“What you do is definitely disgusting, Grace. I’d like to think I’m a little more in the gray than you are.”

“You’re not.”

“Give me my eight thousand and you can win the argument.”

Grace angrily doled out the cash and popped a bonus thousand on top. “For medical expenses,” she said.

“Thanks,” I said, tossing her thousand back in her box. I started walking out, putting the wad of bills into my bag. She stopped me. There was a lilt and softness in her voice this time, even a trace of the accent that she put on in class.

“I just need things to end on a better note than this,” she said. “If they have to end at all.”

“Why would I want to spend another second with you?”

“I told you, because of the school. I need you for this. It was your idea, and I trust you, and I want you to forgive me, at least.” Her voice was getting louder, in danger of being overheard. “What do you need to trust me? What?”

“A lobotomy?”

Grace laughed even though she didn’t want to. That’s the best kind of laugh to get. “How about a key to this box?” she asked.

“For what?”

“So you know that I trust you, absolutely. That has to mean something.” Her eyes glossed up a little, like she wanted to believe that. Like she needed me to say yes so we could both believe it.

Grace signed a few papers upstairs at one of the tellers, and I did the same while she chatted on her cell phone by the bank doors. It was raining harder than before, so I took someone’s enormous umbrella from the steel cylinder by the door. It covered both of us as we walked back to her apartment. It certainly wasn’t the glass tower that she’d had when we’d been together. Although, I thought, we were technically together again, at least for the next few hours. Until I could go out for a beer run that would take me back to the bank before closing time.

“This is kinda small compared to my last place,” Grace said, apologetically. “That actually belonged to an old teacher.”

“Where is he now?”

“Japan. He’s back soon. Said I could use his place while he was off.”

“Oh,” I said, feeling jealous despite myself. I suspected that I wasn’t the only exception to her method of taking money and goods off guys without actually sleeping with them.

We walked through the lobby and up to her door. Instead of opening the door, though, Grace knocked.

“Who’s in there?” I asked her. She smiled and took a step to the side. The door opened to reveal Bruce, in all his paunchy glory. He slammed a fist into my face before I had a chance to laugh. It wasn’t much of a blow, but it was enough to knock me off balance and tilt me into the back wall of the hallway, where my head smacked into the fire alarm. It didn’t go off, but my legs gave out as I felt a hot stream start down my neck from the rip in my scalp.

“I know what you do, you bastard,” Bruce said, exultant that his punch had had such a dramatic effect. Grace was staring at the streak of blood on the wall, a little shocked, but not so shocked that she couldn’t shake it off in a couple of seconds and relieve me of the key and my cash, once again. Bruce pulled me up and dragged me outside before any neighbors could come into the hall. He slumped me against a potted plant just outside the front doors of the place, and both he and Grace stooped down to talk to me.

“Is he still conscious?” asked Grace, with sweetly alarmed concern.

“Don’t worry, he’s fine. Look, his eyes keep moving. Open them all the way, creep, you’re scaring Grace.” He sounded plenty scared himself, now that the rush of bringing down a younger man had faded a bit. I opened my eyes to oblige him and to take some final looks at Grace.

“She called me from the bank to tell me what you were up to. And I’ve known about your filthy life for a while, now. We’re going up to Bellingham for the weekend. And when we get back, I’m gonna call the cops on you.” Grace prodded his shoulder and shook her head.

“I mean, I’m gonna call them if you don’t stay away from my apartment and—” Bruce kept on babbling out qualifiers. I didn’t care. I’d had enough of this job, and it seemed that my sense of people was fading as quickly as my last wisps of consciousness. I kept my eyes on Grace while he babbled on, taking all the warning and all the reward I needed from her stare. I shut my eyes, knowing at least that I’d wake up again soon enough, and that she’d be gone.