You Have the Wrong Man (21 page)

“I’m not lying,” she said. “You think I don’t want to get a job? I want to work. I want to bring in money, but not if it gives me a rash—”

“Maybe you have an allergic reaction to anything that’s
nine-to-five
.” He might have been teasing her, but he walked away. With his back to her, she couldn’t tell if he was finding fault with her or not. He came back into the room and took her hand. He led her to the bedroom, where they lay down together. He wanted to enter her where her stitches tugged her sphincter together like a sausage casing. Venice told him, “I’m probably going to faint, you understand?”

“You’re not going to faint.” It wasn’t a reassurance, it was more in the nature of an order. He rested the heel of one hand on her tailbone as he fitted himself inside her, then he gripped her hips. She felt the first slicing motion, then the full progression of his disregard. He weighted her upon her own pain and placed her worth in it. She permitted it to happen and believed in its judgment.

The lounge at the Marriott had solid brass doors. Venice had to polish the tarnished metal with industrial-strength paste. The lounge had a slimy fountain. Two cherubs squirted a few gallons of stale water to which Venice had added a half-cup of bleach to cut down on the algae. It wasn’t a great place to work, but she was making tips along with the free stuff she crammed into her oversized shoulder bag. She was waiting tables in the lounge and pushing the carpet sweeper over the floors. A vacuum would have done a better job, but the carpet sweeper was more discreet.

The hotel was always busy with conventioneers since it was located only a couple of blocks from the Providence Civic Center. Washington Street whores had duplicate keys to the rooms, which caused the chambermaids trouble because the cleaning personnel were the first to be accused of any thefts. This was bad enough, but it was also the hotel where the New England Patriots stayed on the nights before home games. They showed up in their limousines and sports cars at the last minute before the curfew. They had to follow a pregame diet of some kind, but they often took racks of ribs into their rooms from House of Bar-B-Que and left a big mess. They came into the lounge for fruit juices
and Cokes; they weren’t allowed to spike their drinks when it was a pregame countdown. The lounge filled up with Pat fans and groupies leaving their fingerprints on the brass doors she had just finished buffing. These trashy women ordered drinks but tipped cheap in their search to glimpse a quarterback.

Venice had been doing well there for over a month. The hotel had a big carve-up of the city’s local ass peddling, and once or twice she was mistaken for a business girl. She sympathetically declined, pleased to see she was passing. Once or twice someone had her number. A man said to his pal, “Look at the grand duchess behind the bar.” Venice was peeling the rind from limes and lemons to make twists. Her fingers were long and delicate, but her hands were just too large, and despite her pretty face and all her toil and grooming, it was usually her hands that told the tale.

They had the Providence
Sunday Journal
and their pencils. They didn’t talk to each other as they read the tiny print and marked the descriptions of possible jobs. Venice looked over at Stephen and watched his eyes descend one column and then another.

“Here’s something,” Stephen said, and he brought the newspaper up close to his face.

“What?”

“This sounds good. It’s right down the street. We could walk to work,” he said.

“We can walk? Walk where?”

“It’s a management slot.”

“That same Walgreen’s ad? They still want assistant managers?”

“No, the Cheaters Club on North Main. It says here, ‘Couple wanted to manage club.’ ”

“That strip joint wants a couple?” she said. “Isn’t that the place with the runway right up the bar? It has a wrestling pit with hoses and a drain?” She watched his face.

“They probably need people to manage the bar. You know, ordering liquor. The back room has video games, pool tables I think. We would have to keep that up. It’s a small setup, really, it’d be okay. It would be mostly nights, don’t you think? You’d have to miss
Letterman
.”

“That place? Shit, that place is buzzing in the morning, for God’s sake. They’re loitering around in broad daylight. You ever been there?” she asked.

“A few times,” he told her.

“That’s a straight bar. I didn’t know you ever went in there. Is that a twenty-four-hour place?”

“Hey, I looked in from the sidewalk,” he said. “Tell me you haven’t looked in.”

“Never. I’m not interested in those ‘happy girls.’ Are you?”

They decided to go see the place before applying for the positions advertised.

Venice said, “I think I’m being pretty flexible, aren’t I? Speaking for myself, I’d say that’s an understatement. Shit, I’m burned out with sex clubs, aren’t you?”

“Say the word, we won’t pursue it.”

She didn’t say the word. She wasn’t going to be a prude about it. “I’d like to talk to the talent,” she said.

“Talent?” He laughed. “Shit, this isn’t your premium drag palace, honey. Lower your standards. This is just a flesh room. These are mostly college kids who flunked out of their pastry arts class at Johnson and Wales cooking
school. They’re going to get more cash from one lap dance than they would get in their food service careers. These are wised-up Kelly Girls.”

“And you want to be their boss?”

“They’re self-governed.”

“The ad says they want a couple?” she said.

“We’re a couple. Since when aren’t we a couple?” he asked her.

He knew what to say to her, but she was glad to hear him say it, just the same.

He told her, “Look, the mom-and-pop thing is just what these stripfests need to keep an even keel. We could do it. With your stage experience and my bartender’s certificate, we’re perfect. Like any bar, the money’s in the alcohol. Difference being, the girls are walking around in thongs. It’s just a public-awareness problem. We could improve that.”

Venice didn’t care about any girls wearing tired old thongs. She was curious about Stephen’s sudden mood shift. The managing opportunity had electrified him after weeks in the doldrums. In order to decide what she felt, she needed to
see him
seeing the strippers. She wasn’t ashamed of this.

The clientele was enough to make Venice turn right around. Pods of men wore orange hunting jackets and camouflage overalls as if they had just come in from the woods after blowing away a herd of deer. Venice sat down next to Stephen at a small table near the runway. She noticed her lover remove his jacket. He put the jacket in her lap. “Hold this,” he told her. This alarmed her. He was settling in to watch the girls. He looked as if he were giving in to something, to an old ache. Once or twice he lifted his
arms over his head to stretch, as if he was trying to curb his anticipation.

They drank some house bourbon. “This is like a razor,” he told her. “I’ll order something smooth for our regular stock.” Then he pointed to an imitation Tiffany lamp that hung over the bar. “It’s cracked, see? We’ll have to replace that.”

She put her arms in the sleeves of his jacket, but the lining was icy. Then the house lights dimmed and Stephen’s face deepened. A spotlight fell on the stage and washed over Stephen’s profile and farther into the crowd. The pale blue light reminded her of Atlantic City where she had performed at the Exchange Street Bar. She had been famous for her eclectic concentration of blondes: Carol Lynley, Jean Seberg, Tippi Hedren, Piper Laurie, Eva Marie Saint, even Peggy Lipton. She preferred the svelte examples and avoided cows like Monroe and Mansfield. Every night after her show, she went with Stephen as he shopped for boys on the boardwalk. Stephen trailed the local coin collectors who strutted their stuff until a juvenile curfew drove them inside. Venice watched their young faces change color under the purple bug lights—their skin looked unnaturally radiant and fuzzy like velvet pictures of Elvis. Stephen took his time with the kiddies, buying chances at arcades and shooting galleries, pinging a line of severely perforated targets to win jackknives and neck chains for the teens. He could pick and choose. Venice knew Stephen’s routine as he slipped another trinket deep into a boy’s pocket. Next came the cash, flashed open and closed like a dinner napkin, and the boy went home with them.

The show started. A girl executed a slow and delicate cartwheel onto the runway and into the circle of blue light. She was wearing a United States Olympic Team sweater. She danced to the right and to the left and then she did some somersaults. She made gestures like a swimmer and then she pretended she was throwing the shot put. She pulled the sweater over her head, and her breasts lifted higher and higher until the sweater was off and her breasts jiggled back to their appropriate level. The girl folded the sweater neatly and placed it to one side of the runway. She was naked except for a transparent g-string fashioned from ordinary panty hose.

“She’s cute,” Stephen said.

“Sort of,” Venice said.

“No, I like the idea.”

“What idea?” she asked.

“The Olympic theme.”

“That’s an old standard.”

“If it ain’t broke don’t fix it.”

Stephen was watching the stripper as if she was already in his stable. Her eyes seemed blank, like in archive photographs of sweatshop girls sitting at their sewing machines. She smiled haphazardly in one direction or another, into the dark. Soon the men started to give the stripper money. They inserted dollar bills in the girl’s elastic g-string. Wary of paper cuts, she assisted them when they tried to poke the crisp bills in her muff. She stood at the edge of the bar and turned her back on the men. She bent over, touched her toes and waited. A man rolled a twenty into a tight tube and tucked it in her crack, but she had a glittered cork in her ass and he couldn’t sink it.

Venice had expected to see just what she saw, but she
couldn’t help reminding Stephen that in all her months on stage, she had never stooped so low as to be a mere coin slot.

Stephen was making a business appraisal, but Venice thought he should still hand this girl some cash. Her months on a runway gave her a feeling of solidarity with the plain-faced coed on stage. She didn’t want the girl to think Stephen might be trying to get something for nothing. When the music stopped, the girl walked off the stage. There was scattered applause and a wave of lewd discussion about her. Stephen applauded the stripper. He said to Venice, “That girl is making a living.”

“No kidding.”

“I mean, she’s doing something.
You
could work this hard for your money.
You
could do what she has to do,” he told her.

“Hey, it was your idea for me to get out of it. I was happy at Exchange Street, but I don’t want this end of it. I don’t want to sightsee.”

“You’ll get used to it.”

“I don’t think so. I’m finished with these gropers and oglers.”

“Well, I could do it on my own,” he said.

“You want to work here every day for a living? It’s not my idea of a real life’s work.” She looked at him. He was trying to look back at her, at her face, but he followed the next act. Then he turned to look straight at her. He told her she didn’t have to be part of the plan, she might not be included in his decision making. He wasn’t forcing her into it.

Venice recognized a threat. Since her surgery, she had lost her resilience to his icy warnings, they were harder to brush off.

“I have to use the ladies’ room,” she said. He nodded his head at her. He fondled his chin and rubbed his shave as he watched a new girl on the stage. He smoothed his palm over his face in a new dreaminess she hadn’t seen before.

On her way to the lavatory she passed the dressing room, where the girls were arranging their scanty costumes. One of the girls looked up at her and smiled.

“Where’s the john?” Venice said.

The stripper told her how to get to the lavatory and she warned Venice that one of the toilets didn’t work. She told Venice which toilet she should use.

“We all use that one toilet,” another girl said.

Venice thanked the girls, wondering at her inclusion in such an odd, protective detail. One stripper helped another get dressed. She used a pliers to tug a zipper. “Getting it up is one thing, getting it down is a scream. Every guy has to give it a shot,” the girl said.

“Can they get it down?” Venice asked.

“Only after I’m stuffed with loot. Then I decide when.”

“Oh,” Venice was smiling, “it’s a trick?”

“A technological miracle,” the stripper said, “that’s what I’d call it.”

“There’s a lot of science in this,” one of the other girls said.

“It’s not just bump and grind. It has to do with centrifugal force. Centrifugal force is behind every move you make.”

Venice laughed, remembering that her basic high school science didn’t prepare her for what really lay ahead.

“I bet you’d like to try it,” one of girls told Venice. They all turned to watch her face.

“Maybe,” Venice said.

“There’s a cash advance if you decide.”

“An advance?”