Nightlife: A Novel

19

Nancy Mills drove deeper into Arizona in the night. She had hoped to be better off than this by now. When she had seen Carl for the last time in Chicago, she had said she would have more money than he had within one year. It had been most of a year already, and what did she have so far? Forty thousand? No, less. She probably had thirty thousand left, and she was driving a dead woman’s car along a highway that had signs telling her to watch out for elk. Carl would have laughed at that if he could have known.

Carl had hated nature. He had told her that golf courses were about the wildest places he ever wanted to be. He said that people who went on hikes in the wilderness or liked animals were stupid. Now that she could look back, she knew he had thought that most of the people he knew were stupid. Compared to Carl, they probably were.

She had met Carl in a restaurant in Chicago. She had just finished her final exams for the fall semester, and she had taken herself out to dinner to celebrate.

The celebration felt due, because the semester had been a difficult time for her. Charlene had come to Chicago on the bus four days early. She had slept in the bus station the first night, then rented the only lodging she could afford, a room in a dirty motel not far from the campus. She had walked past her dormitory each day to see if it was open yet, and then sneaked in on the fourth day at seven A.M., when the last of the janitorial crews were cleaning up after the painters who had given the hive of cubical cinder-block rooms a fresh coat of bile green.

She had dreaded the way the first day at the dormitory would be. She had seen simulations of that day in movies and television shows—the happy, eager students, the resigned, tearful mothers, the proud, worried fathers all haunting the dormitories—and had known there was no place for her in that event. For her it could only be an unmasking. Everyone would see that nobody cared about her, and that she was nothing.

She put her clothes into one of the two dressers in her room, left a note to claim one of the beds, and went out until evening, after the other girls were settled and their families gone. She told the girls on her floor that her parents were living in Europe, and couldn’t come with her.

College began badly and became an ordeal. She had hoped college would change her life, but the girls snubbed her, the city was gray and filthy, and the work was demanding and monotonous. The world was pretty much the same everywhere, and her status in it was fixed at the lowest slot. Nothing Charlene Buckner ever did was going to make more than a minor change that would probably be temporary and might not even be an improvement.

Near the end of the semester, Charlene began to make her first visits to another life, one that existed because she chose it. She bought two good outfits at Marshall Field’s. One was a black cocktail dress that was on deep discount because there was a tiny tear in the hem that she could fix in a minute. The other was a sleek black skirt and three different tops to go with it.

She found a good pair of black shoes on sale because they had heels too high for most women to bear. Her mother had trained her from the age of four to dance in high heels for the beauty pageants, so she loved them. There was also a pair of black flats that she could wear in less formal places, and a small, elegant black purse. The coat she bought was intended as a raincoat, too light for a Chicago January, but she knew it looked right, so she tolerated the cold. She began to dress and go out alone at night.

Charlene would call for her reservations in various names that she made up while she was standing at the dormitory pay phone, like Nicole Davis or Kimberly De Jong. She would go into the bar after dinner, and when men asked her name, she would give them the latest one. During the long weeks of classes she was Charlene, but once or twice a week, there would be a night when she became Nicole or Kimberly or Tiffany.

She discovered that she could attract men. Occasionally she would go out on a Friday night, meet a man, and then not return to the dormitory until Saturday, or even Sunday. If anyone asked where she had been, she would say she had gone to visit an old school friend in Boston, or met her parents for dinner in New York. But the other girls had so little interest in her that they seldom asked.

She loved the nights when she was someone else. The only disappointment was the men. They excited her at first because they were a few years older than she was, but they were all so involved with their careers as stockbrokers or sales representatives or junior executives that they were unable to convey anything to her about their lives that she understood, except that they worked very long hours.

On one of those Friday evenings, at a restaurant called Luther’s, she met Carl. She’d walked in from the dining room and stepped toward the bar when she became aware that someone was close behind her. There was a tap on the shoulder, and she turned to see Carl. He smiled and said, “Please join me at my table.”

Carl was older than the men she had been meeting: he looked about forty-five. He wasn’t exactly handsome, but he was trim and had good posture, and his dark suit was beautiful. For a second when she had first turned around she’d thought he might be a hotel employee who was going to check the forged identification she’d bought outside the student union. But she looked at his expression and saw his eyebrows raised in an offer rather than knitted in anger, so she assumed a look of self-assurance she had been practicing, and went with him.

He introduced himself as Carl Nelson, and said he had noticed her at dinner and had not been able to let her leave without meeting her. He spoke without any embarrassment or uncertainty, a feat that she could not imagine any of the younger men performing. Everything he said seemed effortless. He told her she was a young woman who deserved to be congratulated on her beauty and told her that seeing her gave him pleasure.

She was so pleased that she invented a name for the occasion. She said she was Tanya Starling. It came to her because Tanya had always seemed to her to be foreign, and therefore frankly sensual. Starling was the corrective, a word that made her sound tiny and vulnerable, a way of protecting herself from the Tanya part.

Carl liked her name, and he liked her. When the waiter arrived, Carl didn’t ask her what she wanted. He simply ordered two vodka martinis, up, with an olive. When they arrived, cold and clear, she recognized them. As a child she had always imagined her mother in an elegant place like this with a man like Carl, drinking something from a stemmed glass that moved back and forth to throw off reflected light when she lifted it.

Carl was a lawyer. Unlike the younger men, he didn’t say much about his work, but it was clear he had made money. Tanya didn’t exactly lie about what she was doing, but she made getting a bachelor’s degree into “studying the arts at the university,” so it would sound like a whim of an older woman.

When she went back to the dormitory she had to tell her roommates that she would take any calls for her friend Tanya. Two days later, Carl called her and took her to another good restaurant. After that he took her out every couple of days, and called her whenever he happened to be thinking of her. He sent her flowers because they reminded him of her. He began to see other things—a set of sapphire earrings that would set off her blue eyes, a dress that would make her proud of her tiny waist.

He called one day at the end of February, when the ground was covered with dirty snow that had partially thawed and then frozen into ice, and the wind was punishing. He said, “Honey, I’m going to Florida for a few days on business. I thought you might like a little break, and I’d like some company.”

“Florida?” was all she could say.

“I’ve got to meet with a client in Palm Beach. That part won’t take long, but I’m staying until Friday. Can you spare the time for me?”

She packed her two suitcases with the few good clothes she owned, said good-bye to her roommates early in the morning, and told them she’d be back in a week for midterms.

That day she learned what life with Carl Nelson would be. When they arrived in Florida a limousine waited to take them to the hotel and then to the country club for lunch with the client. The client was about sixty years old with impossibly white capped teeth, a pair of red-tinted glasses, and a suntan of a depth that had not been stylish during Charlene’s lifetime.

Carl introduced them by saying, “Tanya, this is Richard Fellowes. Richard, this is the most beautiful girl in the state of Illinois, and her name is Tanya.”

After only a moment she realized that Carl had brought her there to be decorative, so she imitated the haughty, bored look of the fashion models of her childhood and kept all of her movements graceful, while showing no awareness that the men were having a conversation. She answered direct questions and smiled politely at Richard Fellowes when it seemed necessary, but smiled much more warmly at Carl.

The lunch told her a bit about Carl. Fellowes had owned a chain of dry-cleaning plants in the Midwest. Carl had helped him sell his controlling interest in the business at a large profit and move to Palm Beach a few years ago. Fellowes had remained on the board of directors, but now that the new owners were considering selling it, they wanted to buy his remaining shares.

Carl went over the papers with Fellowes while Tanya Starling gazed out over the shady veranda at the deep green lawns and the first hole of the golf course, a tree-bordered straight stretch of grass that looked to her about the length of an airport runway, with, at the end of it, a tiny flag. The only sight beyond the flag was the blue of the ocean she had never seen before.

Carl’s voice was deep and calm and reassuring. She could tell he was smart, that he had instantly seen what he had needed to in the contract and knew exactly how much of it to explain to his client. At the end, he handed Fellowes an onyx fountain pen and had him sign. When Fellowes said, “What’s this?” he answered, “You’re just initialing there to show that you know I’m also getting a fee from the company.” Tanya let her face reveal nothing. Carl was being paid by both sides.

On the way back to the hotel, Tanya wanted to say something to Carl about the opulence of the country club, but she didn’t. She wanted him to believe that she was sophisticated from birth, a creature of natural taste who belonged in luxury because she was unimpressed by it.

When the week in Florida was over, they flew back to Chicago at night. There was no discussion about Tanya going back to the dormitory. Carl simply had the driver go directly to his apartment in a high-rise building overlooking the lake. The driver carried their bags to the lobby, and the doorman put them into the elevator and transported them to the apartment on the top floor. Carl put her two suitcases in the guest bedroom and said, “You can have the closets and bathroom in here to yourself. When you’re undressed, come into our bedroom.”

After two weeks Tanya thought to make a telephone call to the office of the dean of students and let them know she wanted a leave of absence. The next day she went to the university in a taxi, found the boy outside the student union who had sold her the fake driver’s license she’d used to get served in bars, and ordered identification in the name Tanya Starling.

She wanted to be the perfect mistress, but it took her some time to realize what Carl expected her to be and to do. She went about it with the discipline she had been taught in the beauty pageant competitions when she was a child, and the determination that had gotten her to college. She used the pocket money Carl gave her to buy custom-mixed makeup, and had the store’s experts teach her the latest looks and application techniques. As soon as Carl left each morning, she entered the home gym he had installed in the apartment, and exercised. She studied the articles in women’s magazines about how she should look and what she should wear, and what men liked in female behavior but didn’t necessarily know they liked, and how to improve her skin, hair, nails, body, and small talk.

In the evenings when she went to parties and dinners with Carl, she closely observed the other women. Some were attorneys or clients, but most of them were wives or girlfriends of very successful men. They were all a few years older than Tanya, and very elegant and poised. She studied manners and personality traits that she envied, and took them for herself.

From the beginning, some of the men Carl knew would find ways to be alone with her for a moment and try to interest her in meeting them somewhere without Carl. She was extremely careful to be unremittingly loyal to Carl, but never derisive or threatening to the suitors. She understood instinctively that making enemies of Carl’s friends and colleagues could only lead to trouble for her. As she got better at her new vocation, she gained knowledge of what men were really thinking and feeling. She saw that they might have complex minds full of information she was not capable of understanding, but in their dealings with women, they were no more able to think beyond the mere prospect of sex than Tim had been.

Carl dressed her expensively, took her to wonderful places, and treated her as his protégée. His conversation taught her things—which paintings in a gallery were the best, which wines were the right ones to serve, which writers were the ones to read, which orchestras were the ones to hear.

Carl was a recreational talker, a man whose own voice enchanted him so much that for him speech was like singing. As soon as he was home each evening, drinking the martini she had mixed for him, he told her anecdotes about what he had done all day and what he had thought, and shrewdly analyzed the people he had seen. They were all minor players in his personal story, which was essentially comic, because he always triumphed.

He taught her how much to tip various people who provided services, and to remember that it was wise to tip the most when the service was still in doubt, not afterward, in gratitude for something she already had. Once, when Carl needed to leave her alone for a few days, he opened a drawer in the bedroom and showed her where the gun was.

He picked it up, then said, “It’s loaded, see?” He moved the cylinder to the side to show her the bullets in the holes, then flipped it back. “It’s smart to consider all of them loaded, but this one always is. If somebody knows I’m gone and thinks that makes it a good time to break in, you hold it like this, arms extended in front of you, and pull the trigger. Fire three or four times. It’s a .357 magnum, so I guarantee it will stop him. It’s got a bit of a kick, so hold on.”

“You mean it’s legal to kill someone because he’s trying to break in?”

“It’s not murder if he breaks into your apartment and tries to harm you. If he’s still outside in the hall when you shoot him, drag the body inside before you call the cops.” Then he added, “And if he’s not dead, shoot him again, in the head. If they live, they sue.”

For nearly nine years, she lived with Carl Nelson and learned from him. In return, she was even-tempered and companionable. She was aware that his attraction to her was sexual, so she cultivated the attraction. His manner in bed was much like his conversation. He was affable and he wanted to charm her and be the one directing the proceedings, teaching her things he thought she would like. All she really had to do to please him was to be available and submissive, willing to be impressed.

Just before Tanya’s twenty-eighth birthday, Carl Nelson came home from his office early. He didn’t sit where he usually did, on the couch where she had been waiting for him. He sat instead in the chair across from her. He said, “I’m finished with the Zoellner case. I’m going to Europe for a while.”

She said, “Wonderful. Should I call to make arrangements with the travel agent?”

“No, thank you. They’ve already handled that at the office.”

She understood then, from the way he said it. He was going. She was not. She controlled herself as well as she could. “You deserve a break. When will you be back?”

“In about a year. I’m taking a sabbatical. I’ll be doing some work while I’m over there, handling some things for regular clients.”

“You’re taking a secretary, aren’t you?”

He nodded. “Mia is going with me.”

She had seen Mia at his office. Mia was nineteen years old and already a failed model. She was taller than Tanya—taller even than Carl—and she had striking green eyes. She was Tanya Starling’s replacement.

Tanya stood up and said, “Excuse me, Carl. This is hard for me.” She went into their bedroom, crawled onto the bed, and cried. She stayed there for a long time. Then she heard noises. It was Carl in the big walk-in closet. There were sounds of hangers scraping sideways along the pole, and drawers opening and closing.

Tanya went into the bathroom, spent a few minutes fixing her hair and makeup, then stepped into Carl’s closet. She said, “Packing? You’re leaving that soon?”

“My flight is at ten tomorrow.”

She could feel herself beginning to lose control. Tears were coming, and her knees felt weak. She said, “I’ll have my stuff out of the apartment as soon as I can. I think the doorman will let me leave a few things with him while I find a place.”

“There’s no reason to do anything like that, Tanya. In fact, I’ve been counting on you to stay here while I’m gone.”

“For the whole year?” Maybe he was going to have the secretary for a while and then come back to her. Men loved variety. That was okay. Her mind was already accommodating itself to the idea. Maybe he would even send for her.

“Sure. It will give you the time to figure out what you would like to do with your life, and get a start on it. You’re smart, beautiful, and you should be doing something. Maybe real estate, or decorating. Take some time and think it over. And your staying here gives me somebody I know I can trust to care for the place and keep an eye on it. I’ll have the office pay the bills and send you an allowance.”

“Sure.” The word allowance was a deliberate reminder of her dependency, but he would have had to maintain the lease anyway, and pay someone to occupy the apartment and care for his tropical fish, his paintings and antiques.

She considered taking Carl’s pistol out of its drawer and shooting him. She considered simply slipping the loaded gun into his suitcase, so he would be arrested at Heathrow or De Gaulle or wherever he was flying to. But then she detected a contradictory impulse. She stopped being angry because she wanted him to stay. She began to be impatient for him to leave.

She spent some minutes exploring feelings she had not acknowledged before. She was humiliated, hurt, shocked, but now she realized that her situation was not so simple. She had been exploited, certainly, for her sexual attractiveness and her docility. In return, she had been educated, entertained, and pampered for nine years. The part that she was astounded and ashamed about was that she had not anticipated this moment or prepared herself for it.

Carl’s ability to appreciate women was limited to girls of about eighteen. He found them interesting only during this phase of their lives. His was an entirely sexual addiction, but it wasn’t because they were at their best. The exercised, massaged, and rested Tanya Starling looked much better, even younger, than the lonely, sad, frightened Charlene Buckner had, and she was more adventurous. And Tanya had seen Mia, who was going to take her place. Mia was pretty, but not prettier than Tanya. The attraction was that she was the right age: Tanya no longer was.

Tanya couldn’t be taught which clothes to wear or which wines to serve, how to behave at a cocktail party or how to please a man in bed, because by now she knew. She couldn’t be taken to a great hotel and stare in awe at the paintings on the domed ceiling, because she had already seen others as good. She had heard Carl’s stories, and he could never tell them to her for the first time again. She was no longer a protégée, just a sycophant massaging his ego, more desperate each day to keep him fooled, so she would not lose her increasingly unpleasant job.

He had betrayed her, certainly, but he had also set her free. He had supported her so lavishly that she would never have been able to translate her vague feelings of dissatisfaction into the irrevocable act of walking out the door. Now he was sending her away. It didn’t feel good, but it felt overdue, like a task she had been putting off.

Tanya went to bed in the spare bedroom, but when, a couple of hours later, Carl finished his preparations for his trip and climbed into the bed with her, she didn’t object to having sex with him. He seemed to believe he had one more night due him, and she didn’t feel like fighting. It gave her a chance to observe the extent to which she had only been going through the motions, and to try to think back to the time when sex with him had still been exciting. She realized that tonight, when she had no feeling except impatience for his departure, was not much different from the last fifty nights.

The next morning, Carl was up at five. He wrote her a big check and placed it on the antique table in the entry. “Cash this,” his note said. “It’s just in case you need anything. Call the office any time you need more.” At the door, he turned and noticed that she had stepped into the room to watch him. He set down his suitcases and embraced her. “I know you’re a little scared, but you’ll be fine. I know you’re going to be a very successful woman someday.”

She remembered her answer: “In a year, I’ll have more money than you do.” She had looked through the window to the street far below and watched the cab moving off, the tailpipe spewing steamy white exhaust into the cold morning air.

Tanya spent the next few months looking for work in the daytime and looking for a man in the evening. The evening hunting was better, but she didn’t find the sort of man she needed. Rich men were nearly all married, and they were all aware that the most expensive catastrophe likely to befall them was a divorce. They were willing to spend lots of money on her, but they weren’t willing to stay the night.

She went through a period in which she stopped looking for work and applied for readmission to the university, then spent her days trying to devise a course of study that would help prepare her for a career in law. Her observation of Carl had taught her that his clients paid him lots of money for very little work, as long as he kept them afraid.

She had begun to feel optimistic when she received a telephone call. She thought she recognized the voice on the other end as Arthur Hinman, one of the other partners in Carl Nelson’s firm. He said, “May I speak to Miss Starling, please?”

She wasn’t absolutely positive it was Arthur, so she said, “This is Miss Starling.”

“This is Arthur Hinman, one of Carl Nelson’s partners at Colefein, Park and Kayslander. I’m calling to let you know that Mr. Nelson has died.”

“Oh, my God. How? Where?”

“I believe he had a heart attack, but I’m not sure yet. He was in Spain.” He paused a full breath, which was his mourning period for Carl Nelson. Then he said, “We’re handling his estate, and the lease for his apartment is being terminated. We’ll be closing it up to inventory his effects. That means your services won’t be needed anymore.”

“Arthur,” she said. “Don’t act as though you don’t know me. You’ve been here dozens of times. You know I’m not the maid or something.”

“I’m sorry. I know it’s inconvenient. But please be out of there by noon tomorrow. You can leave the key with the doorman downstairs.”

She hung up the phone and went to work, taking everything from the apartment that she was sure Carl would have missed but the law firm would not. The art and antiques, the huge record collection, the old books were probably all insured. The cash Carl kept in the toe of a shoe on his upper closet shelf, and his cuff links, tie clasps, and tuxedo studs were all small enough to take. His watches were probably insured too, but nobody would be able to prove he hadn’t lost one in Europe, so she took his Rolex. Then, as an afterthought, while she was tossing things into her suitcase, she opened the drawer that contained Carl’s gun, and slipped it into her purse.