T felt her shrug under his fingertips. “I suppose it’s possible he took off,” she said. “But hell if I know where he’d go or what he’d do.”
“I thought he said Canada?”
“Yeah, with me,” she said. “I’m the moneymaker. I’m the cash flow.”
“And how is that again?” he said. “How is it that you’re the moneymaker?”
“Stripping,” she said. “There’s always a strip joint someplace. It’s not hard for me to find work.”
“And Lester?”
“Lester’s my manager.”
“Manager,” T said. He continued massaging her shoulders, pushing his fingers down a little deeper into the muscle. “So, he— What? Makes the arrangements? Negotiates a salary? And then he gets a percentage?”
“Mostly he does dick,” she said. “But I need him to deal with the owners; otherwise—” She stopped abruptly and sighed. “It makes me tired to talk about this.”
“I thought you said you weren’t ashamed—”
“I’m not ashamed,” she said. “But I’m not—” She sat up with her arms crossed over her breasts, still holding the quilt tightly. “Sometimes you just have to do things.” She paused a moment, her eyes locked on his as if she had just told him something very important and was waiting for a response. “I’m talking about to get money,” she added. “To pay for what you’ve got to pay for, from food to whatever. Sometimes you just have to do shit and that’s all there is.”
“I wasn’t born wealthy,” he said. “I understand about money.”
“I don’t think you do,” she said. “Not really.” She watched
him for a moment, as if trying to figure out whether or not he really did understand. Then she put her head in his lap and T returned to massaging her back. After a while she started talking slowly, as if intent on explaining things to him. “Lester’s family owns a bar in Chattanooga,” she said, “where my mom worked. So I practically grew up with him. He moved to Atlanta while I was still in high school, and then I didn’t see him again till he showed up to rent a room from me when he enrolled at UTC. He made it through, like, one and a half semesters before he quit, and then, at the end of that year, he took off for Atlanta again, where he had a gig managing dancers, which is what he’d been doing for years, before he decided he should be an actor. After that, when I had to leave school and I needed money, I started working for him. I did that for a few years, until I had what I needed. Then I quit. I bought my mom’s house. I was back in school. Then all this.”
“And your mom?” T asked. He ran his fingers along her back to the base of her spine, where he pushed down hard into the flesh.
“Oh, God,” she said. “That feels so good.”
“Did she move someplace else?” T asked. “Your mother?”
When she didn’t answer, he pushed her hair away from the side of her face so that he could see her eyes. She was looking past his thigh toward the wall as if there were something there to see. “My mother’s in prison,” she said. “She murdered my father. That’s why I quit school. The trial took all our money.”
T stroked her hair. He bent over awkwardly and kissed her back.
“I’m a murderer’s daughter,” she said. “Are you scared of me now?”
“Did you kill someone?” T asked.
Jenny shook her head. Her eyes remained fastened to the same empty spot on the wall. “What about you?” she said. “Do you have a secret, T?”
“Compared to you, my life’s been pretty dull.”
“Compared to me everyone’s life’s been dull. That doesn’t mean you don’t have a secret.”
“I’m afraid not,” T said. “No big secret.”
She sat up and wrapped the covers around her. “I just told you that my mother murdered my father. And you’re still— You’re not going to tell me anything?”
T heard a hint of that other Jenny in her voice, the other, older Jenny who had appeared for only a moment. He said, “I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”
“I want you tell me what’s going on with you,” she said. “I want you to trust me a little.”
T looked away from her, toward the window, where the unexpected appearance of sunlight lit up the blinds. He found it disorienting that she was asking him to trust her. He wasn’t entirely convinced yet that she and Lester might not be planning to rob him—and she was asking him to trust her. What was disorienting was that he almost felt he should, and thus he found himself looking at the rose-colored blinds wondering if
he would open up to her; then, to his surprise, he couldn’t think of what he might open up to her about. He felt oddly as if, for the moment at least, his whole history had disappeared. “I just,” he repeated himself, “I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Well, how about,” she said, her body tensing as she leaned toward him, “how about if you start with why you’ve got this look like you’re about ready to put a gun to your head?”
“What? What are you—”
“Oh, please, T— Why would you have picked up two characters like me and Lester?”
“I told you,” he said. “I’m not really sure—”
“Well, you should think about it.” She spun around out of the blankets and stomped away to the master bedroom.
T followed her. “You think I’m suicidal?” He was laughing, amused that she might think that about him. He entered the room just as she was getting into the sleigh bed.
“Oh my God!” she screamed. “These sheets are freezing!” She huddled up into a little ball.
T got into the bed behind her and wrapped his arms around her shoulders. “Jesus,” he said. “You’re beautiful.”
She turned around and pressed herself against him. She shuddered slightly, as if trying to shake off the cold. “Where’d that come from? You think I’m beautiful when I’m mad at you?”
“It came from watching you get out of bed and walk away from me naked.”
“You saw me naked last night. How come you didn’t tell me I was beautiful then?”
“Didn’t I?” he said. “I must have been in shock.”
“From seeing me naked?”
“Must have been.”
She put her arm around him and ran the palm of her hand over the silk pajamas from his shoulders to his waist and back up again, her fingers tracing a line along the middle of his body. “You must have seen it might be dangerous picking us up,” she said. “I mean, we knew we must’ve looked bad.”
“You didn’t look all that bad,” he said. “You looked like kids.”
“Please,” she said. “The way we looked, the only reason to pick us up was sex. We figured eventually some guy would come along horny enough to risk dealing with Lester.”
“So I wasn’t exactly what you figured. It’s a big leap from there to I must be suicidal.”
“That’s not the whole thing,” she said, and she rubbed her cheek against the silk fabric over his chest. “When I told you Lester had the pipe, you didn’t seem to care. And then, not wanting to have sex with me—” She undid the top button of his pajamas and kissed him on the chest. “Not wanting to have sex with me is a very bad sign.”
“What if,” T said, and he touched her hair again. “What if I never was into casual sex, sex with someone you don’t really know well?”
Jenny was quiet a moment, as if thinking about it. “Never met a guy like that,” she said. “Is that what you’re saying? It’s because you don’t know me well enough?”
“That,” T said, “and lots of other things.”
“Like what?” she asked, her manner turning coy as she undid more buttons.
“Like if I was trying not to take advantage of you.”
She stopped fiddling with his pajama top, which she had pushed off his chest and tucked behind him, out of the way of her touch. “Are you kidding?”
“I’m not kidding,” he answered, and he touched her shoulder, running his fingers along the curve of bone toward the center of her back. “There’s no reason for you to be interested in me except that I’m in a position to help you. And I’m trying to tell you— You don’t have to—”
“You don’t think much of yourself,” she said. “Why is that? It’s not what I would have expected.” When he didn’t answer, she asked, “Are you fishing for compliments? Do you want me to tell you all the good things about you?”
“Jenny, please. I could be your grandfather.”
“No you couldn’t,” she answered immediately. “My grandfather was a drunk who beat up on my father and my uncles, and wound up killing a couple of teenagers and himself driving drunk. I never heard anybody say one good word about my grandfather. That’s on my father’s side. On my mother’s side, no one knew who he was. Not even my grandmother for sure.”
T moved away from her and folded his hands under his head. “You know what I meant.”
“But are you listening to me?” she asked, lifting herself over him. Her face turned red slightly, as if with a mix of anger and defiance. “I come from trash,” she said. “I don’t
meet people like you. Ever. Or if I do, all they’ve got for me is a sneer.”
“You’re not trash,” T said, meeting her eyes—though the sight of her breasts as she leaned over him had produced a rush of heat that went from his groin to his face.
“I know I’m not,” she said. “But I sure am acting like it, aren’t I? I’m a stripper. I’m on the run from drug dealers with an idiot who thinks he’s a character in a daytime soap opera. And you don’t even know the half of it. You don’t know…” She turned away from him, a look of genuine and deep frustration in her eyes, and then collapsed onto the bed as if exhausted by the effort of trying to explain anything to him. “Forget it,” she said, and she pushed her face down into the pillow before pulling the covers over her back.
T waited alongside her in silence. He could tell that the clouds were breaking up outside by the way sunlight filled the bedroom for a while and then disappeared, leaving a different room behind, one where all the colors were darker and more somber. At the moment the room was dark. It still smelled richly of wood smoke, and though the air was chilled from the night, it was warm under the bed covers. In the distance, he thought for a moment that he might have heard a car engine, but then the sound faded and left him thinking about Lester, about whether or not he’d really be coming back, and what he would do if he didn’t. At worst, he figured, since his cell phone was in the console of the Rover, he’d have to walk to the nearest pay phone, where he’d call Brooke and have her wire money and arrange a rental car for him. If he couldn’t reach
Brooke, he’d have to fall back on Evan, who, it was possible, might simply hang up on him. Evan claimed that growing up the only times he had ever really seen T were on vacations, that T had otherwise ignored him to the point of emotional abuse— and the trial and divorce had left him free finally to express his anger. All of which had been news to T. Maura would have been the natural second choice, but she was in London. As a last resort, he could always call one of his lawyers, though that was a particularly depressing idea.
“When I was a kid,” he said, looking at the ceiling, “younger than you, I had an affair with an older woman.” When Jenny remained silent, he asked, “Don’t you want to know about it?”
“Not particularly,” she said, her words muffled by speaking into the pillow.
He was remembering a time fishing with Carolyn near Alexandria Bay. They’d been drifting through a maze of small islands, dragging fluorescent lines through muck while the sun beat down on them relentlessly. Carolyn had taken off her top and lain with her head resting on the gunwale while her hair trailed in the water. A fishing pole was propped between her legs as she held it loosely in the palm of her hand, her other hand over the side of the boat, her fingertips playing in the water. She lay quietly in the sunlight with her eyes closed as they floated along a narrow waterway. He was sitting in the bow with his line over the side, noticing, as he usually didn’t, the age lines around her eyes and across her forehead, the wrinkles along her neck and the flabby skin under her arms; and, in contrast, the youthfulness of her torso,
her breasts and belly, where the skin still looked fresh and firm. She had a little girl’s breasts, small and solid with puffy nipples. Her ordinarily pale chest had reddened in the sunlight. He hardly ever thought about her age. It wasn’t as if they had plans to marry or have children together. It was understood that he would graduate eventually and be on his way. But as he had watched her there, so peacefully trailing her hair and fingertips in the water, he had felt something real and unnameable stir within him and then expand so that he felt filled up with it, and though he hadn’t known for sure what to call it, it was a sublime feeling, a sense of timeless connection, as if they were bound to each other in some fashion that was in that instant permanent.
“What happens…?” he had asked Carolyn. They’d been quiet for a long time, the only sound the breeze through the thick cattails and weeds surrounding them. His voice little and insignificant. “What happens,” he repeated, louder, “if you’re my one, true love?” He waited a moment and then added, “Because, you know, it feels like that. Right now, it feels like that.”
“Tom,” she had said, without opening her eyes. “Sweetheart,” she said, her voice sleepy and listless, “you’re a child.”
He had gotten angry after that, and she had assured him that he needn’t worry, since most of the men she knew still behaved like children.
That notion, that most men behaved like children, had occurred to him again and again throughout his life, as it was occurring to him now, in bed with Jenny Cross.
Jenny was so still he thought it was possible she might be sleeping. “This older woman told me,” he said, “that men all behave like children.”
“Every woman knows that,” she said. “You don’t have to be old.”
“Why?” he asked. “What does that mean?”
She pulled herself up from the embrace of her pillow and kissed him, lightly, on the lips. “Most men are simple,” she said. “They just want what they want.” She thought a moment, then added, “But I don’t think you’re like that.” She touched his thigh with the flat of her hand and then slid her palm down to his sex, which she cradled for a moment before taking him gently between her thumb and forefinger and massaging him slowly, through the silk of his pajamas. “That’s what I’m kind of, piece by piece, figuring out about you,” she said. “You’re complicated.”
T felt himself physically responding to Jenny’s touch, and a part of him pulled back, wanting to resist, as another part of him acquiesced, wanting to feel and relax to her touch. “Jenny,” he said, surprised a little by the way the change in his breathing affected his voice, making him sound slightly breathless. “Jenny,” he repeated, “Lester told me that sex hurts you. He told me it was physically painful for you.”