But Frank went for me. When he finally came to see me at Sigrid’s, he behaved like an ardent suitor, showering our humble digs with presents: an electric grill, a steam iron, a water pick, and a state-of-the-art clock radio. For this reason, Sigrid tolerated him, although she was pretty uncomfortable with the whole idea. According to her code, it was OK to jerk off anonymous strangers, but turning tricks with men who knew your name was another matter.
One more aspect of Evelyn’s business that worked in my favor was the unhurried nature of it. Often, I grew restless, and eventually, I came to resent the empty hours I spent waiting for the next call or the next appointment. But it gave me a chance to ease into the job.
Evelyn liked to smoke reefer; I preferred to duck into the bathroom and snort lines off my big hand mirror. Finally, toward the end of my first week, I told her about it. She did a line with me but regretted it immediately. Speed made her too hyper, she said.
“I don’t see how you can do that stuff and then just sit here, without even booze to take the edge off,” she said.
Liquor during working hours was forbidden by Evelyn, as it was at most of the smaller houses; not so the big ones, where drinking at the bar with clients went with the job. But usually if a house featured only one whore, that one had to be self-contained, almost demure. The long afternoons did not in any way resemble a party there in the garden apartment; rather, each john’s visit was meant to be a restful interlude, and I was offered up as the equivalent of a soothing tonic.
The time I spent at Evelyn’s was tranquil and easy once I got the hang of turning fast, efficient tricks in the darkened bedroom. A shaft of southern light trained itself against the vacant living room wall, and I would sit there for long stretches watching motes of dust and threads of smoke swim slowly inside its circumference, dreaming my drug-induced dreams of Michael McClaren and me living blissfully in a thatched-roof hut in the Irish countryside. Sometimes I wandered outside into the erstwhile garden, now reduced to two dirt plots divided by a path of stepping-stones. The remnants of bushes and other living things, the thin, bare cords formerly of ivy that climbed the brick wall, made me long for I could not then have said what.
Evelyn taught me how to play backgammon, but we didn’t gamble. Money was too serious to her. Nevertheless, we played ferociously, both of us hating to lose. My madam began to warm to me. She dropped her bravado as if it were a clunky burden to be discarded all of a piece. We talked about ourselves, or at least Evelyn did. She was more forthcoming than I was, because I was ashamed of my background. I don’t know why I was so reticent about having been brought up on Park Avenue. Perhaps I sensed that the details of my childhood were too much of an anomaly, too far-fetched. I alluded to my past, of course. I had to acknowledge it in a general way, or else Evelyn would have known I was lying or trying to hide something. She would have known because even though I continually censored myself, eliminating ten-cent words before they could spring from my mouth, my private-school diction gave me away.
Evelyn owned a big two-story house in a cul-de-sac by the water near the tip of City Island. There were two kids it turned out: a girl sixteen and a boy seventeen, almost eighteen, both born out of wedlock by different fathers. The first time Evelyn got pregnant, she was a junior in high school living with a taciturn mother who prayed most of the time, some brothers and sisters, and an Italian drunk of a father who beat up everyone occasionally. It did not occur to Evelyn to get an abortion. For one thing, she loved passionately the father of the baby, a petty hood, an honest-to-God Sicilian.
The girl’s father was Irish, and easier to forget, she told me. I didn’t argue with Evelyn about their comparative merits, because I had never been with a Sicilian, and I had never experienced the unassailable fidelity she described. Even after all these years, it was obvious he had been the love of her life. He had been true. The other one, the Irishman, was cuter maybe but disloyal. He screwed around. She made him sound trivial by comparison.
Sadly, Eddie’s father did disappear, first to Rikers Island, then to Sing Sing, and finally to the city of Albany, where he now ran the numbers or worked at some other low-profile job. She wasn’t sure. But as proof of the grandness of this first love, it had produced Eddie, her gray-eyed Sicilian, Eddie Carnivale, because she gave him his father’s surname, the hell with the birth certificate.
“Oh, but he’s trouble, big trouble,” Evelyn said, her fierce brown eyes lighting up whenever she mentioned her son. Her daughter, Ava, had just started to rebel. Up until sometime this year, she’d been tractable, an adult in miniature, shopping for food and sometimes even, unbidden, sweeping the kitchen floor. Eddie, on the other hand...“Oh, never mind,” she said. “He’s a JD, that kid, a little wise guy, a con man, just like his father, no good at all. But a charm boy, I swear, and not because I’m his mother, the boy could sweet-talk an old lady out of her Social Security check before she even makes it to the bank. He doesn’t have to steal; all he has to do is ask for it. I never knew anyone, even his father, like it.” She sat up straight while she spoke, bristling with pride.
“You’ll see for yourself,” she said at one point late in the week. “I want you to come out some Sunday and have dinner with us. You take the number one train, the local, to the last stop and then the bus to the last stop. It’s a drag, but I’ll get Eddie to drive you home. Nothing fancy, capiche? Oh, but a gorgeous sunset over the city, bright red on account of the smog. And it’s pretty where I live. So you’ll come. I want you to meet Eddie, and Ava, of course. Maybe a week from Sunday. OK?”
“Yes, sure, I’d love to,” I lied. I hated traveling anywhere except by cab, but I couldn’t think of a reason to say no.
By the time Friday rolled around, Evelyn had booked me again for the following week, the last week in August. Even though most of her clients went for the novelty of different whores, at least rotating whores, business at that time of year was as slow as it got; besides, I was new talent, so Evelyn figured I could carry two weeks. And she trusted me not to run off with her clients if any of them happened to get attached. Well, it wasn’t trust exactly. Instead, she didn’t entirely believe that I was in the Life, that I was committed to building a book of my own. But I was, and I gave out my number a half a dozen times at least while I was there.
I became good, too, at hustling the men in and out fast. The bedroom decor helped, it was so impersonal, so brown and laminated like the living room. Impossible to forget where you were in that atmosphere. But I loved it, free as it was of personality, the demands of domestic life, the awful reminders of a happier past, the worn-out, broken-down, sad and familiar things we surround ourselves with and then grow to hate, until the prospect of going home looms like the horror of last night’s ugly dream suddenly recalled. Evelyn’s whorehouse bedroom, by contrast, reminded me of life on the American road, of toilet seats wrapped in paper to prove how sanitary they are, of little individual bars of soap, enough so you could open a new one every time. This bedroom freed me from the burden of self, from the petty responsibilities of daily living. With the solemn reverence ritual inspires, tricks dropped their used condoms in the special metal wastepaper basket reserved for that purpose. I washed the men off again just as reverently before they put on their suits and knotted their ties in front of the cheap mirror attached to the low dresser.
And on it went, except for the hours when no one called and no one came, hours spent waiting on the sofa with Evelyn, waiting and waiting for the insurance salesmen, the Seventh Avenue wholesalers, the cheerfully settled family men with small retail stores in the neighborhood. I waited for the prosaic, but to me foreign, worlds they brought in with them, for the money, and, not least of all, for the chance to practice my profession, to seduce them.
I learned how to spike the simple acts we performed together with low-key drama, with a sultry voice and an artful stroke. I learned how effective it was to lower myself on him slowly, to strike