Dark Plums (13 page)

“Are you my woman?”

“Yes,” she whispered.

One of his hands moved down her body, and he began to rub her with a circular motion that aroused her. Then he stopped, looking anguished. “Not one fucking review!” he cried. “Those assholes.” His nails dug into her skin. “Not one sale. Not one review.”

She clenched his fingers, pulling them away. “Give it time. The
show just opened. Dominic said he's going to buy a painting.”

“
Mierda
!” he spit out. “That's just Dominic's way of thanking me. He'll make a lot of bread peddling your ass.”

“You sold me, Alfredo? Like a slave?”

“You
are
my slave.”

“What do you mean?”

He let go of her, leaned back against the toilet tank, and reflected. “Baby, you've never faced that slave core of yourself. Until you do, you'll never be free.”

“I don't understand.”

“Something inside you has always wanted to be a slave, because you
are
one. We have to live out who we are before we can change. Most people never face who they are. So they stay children all their lives, fucking up the world.”

“I still don't understand.”

“Someday you will. But first you need to be a slave completely. Then you'll become a magnificent woman. You'll grow beyond slavery, and you'll leave me. Someday you'll realize I was your teacher.”

“I don't want to leave you! I want to marry you and have your children.”

“You may just do that, sugar. That may be part of the whole trip.”

“I don't like Dominic.”

“Why?”

“I don't trust him.”

“You don't need to trust him. I'll deal with him.” He looked into her eyes. “Baby, tell me, ‘I'm your slave.”‘

“I'm your slave,” she murmured uneasily.

“If you leave me now, Adrianne, you lose your last chance of making it. You were on the verge of cracking when I met you.”

He stroked her pelvic bones. “You've gotten almost skinny,” he said. “Got a cashbox between those thighs.”

They both laughed uproariously, filled with a strange burst of energy.

“Let's see how you do a blow job with a trick.”

She stared at him.

“
Puta
!” he cried. ‘You're nothing without me!” He struck her across the face. “Go on. What are you waiting for?” He pushed her
down to the floor and thrust his erect cock into her mouth. “Blow me, baby.”

The linoleum floor was cold. Her face stung from the blow, and her neck was sore as she leaned her head backwards, then cupped his testicles in her hand. Tears streamed down her face as she began to suck him while she stroked his balls and thighs, licking and sucking. Her knees ached, and she wished he would come. He was taking such a long time. She tried every technique she knew, every titillation between anus and scrotum, until finally she heard him breathe faster, and then the semen came in thick spurts that she swallowed. While she licked him off, he pressed her head against his thighs.

She was carrying a tube of contraceptive jelly, along with black lace panties and an extra pair of nylons. Her large handbag also contained three bras to return to Saks, because Alfredo said they looked like nursing bras. At the bottom of her bag lay a thin book on the history of European music, which she had found the other day in Brentano's. The book stirred old memories. As a child she had loved to play the piano.

As she waited for a taxi, it began to drizzle, cold and icy, half-rain and half-sleet. Despite her fur coat, she shivered. Her slender heels dug into her feet; her toes were cramped, and the small of her back ached from the way the shoes pitched her forward so that her spine over-arched.

Three p.m.

A taxi stopped.

“Ninety-seventh and Park, please.”

“Good morning, miss,” said the doorman. She knew that Dominic and Cecily gave him generous gifts.

Adrianne went up in the elevator with a middle-aged woman swathed in mink who got off at the eleventh floor. At times she wondered if the other inhabitants of this building knew or cared what went on. She, as well as the prostitutes she worked with, appeared to be simply three or four fashionably dressed young women who shared an apartment on the fifteenth floor. When men in heavy overcoats visited them, this aroused no great stir as they were indistinguishable from other strangers who lived in the building.

Cecily nodded to Adrianne as she walked inside the luxurious apartment with its dark, polished furniture and thick carpets. Cecily had reddish mahogany hair, and today she wore a grey knit adorned with an elegant gold necklace. While she talked on the phone, she was paying bills which were stacked up on the desk in front of her.

Was there any essential difference, Adrianne wondered, between typing for Eureka Fabrics and acting as a human receptacle
for sperm and confessions? Either way, as Alfredo would point out, she was a slave, but here the pay was better.

A sweaty stranger pressed on top of her and pounded against her numb vagina walls. For a while, she used to fantasize about food when she lay with strangers, as she had been constantly hungry. But with the Dexedrine pills the hunger gradually lessened. Now her mind went blank, or else she soared far away from her body and thought of the ocean or a song she had heard on the radio. When the stranger climaxed, she gave a fake moan of pleasure, then drew her face away and buried her nostrils in the sheets, drifting off half-conscious into a world of pine forests.

Cocks in her cunt, her ass, her mouth. The varied tastes of semen, like seaweed or cheese or slightly sweet. A blow job was more personal than straight screwing. Far more offensive to take a stranger's cock into her mouth and swallow his semen than to take his fluid inside her vagina. After each encounter, she washed her mouth out with Listerine.

Semen ran down her legs. Strangers' fluids filled her. Where did she end, and where did they begin?

The smell of Sonya's nail polish filled the living room. A spike heel dangled from one of her feet, and she surveyed the fresh scarlet tint.

“Want a game of rummy, Adrianne, when my nails are dry?”

Irritated at the interruption, Adrianne looked up from the chapter on the harpsichord in the eighteenth century. “No, thanks. I'm reading.”

Cecily said, “You shouldn't do your nails here in the living room.”

“I forgot,” muttered Sonya. The expression on her broad-planed face was impenetrable. Why did she work here? Adrianne wondered. Although Sonya went places with Dominic and screwed him, she didn't seem to be in love with him. Did she do this just for the money?

Vanessa, a strikingly beautiful woman in her late twenties with chalk-white skin and glossy dark hair, wandered out into the living room. Her last client had just left.

“I've got some kind of infection,” she said.

“Vanessa, dear, I've got you scheduled all through this evening's shift. Wear your diaphragm, and make sure they use condoms. You'll have to wait until tomorrow morning to get a checkup. Girls, don't any of you forget your weekly medical checkups.”

While Cecily was talking on the phone, the buzzer rang. The elderly Puerto Rican maid, María, who was afflicted with arthritis, limped to the door. Then a man came in and chose Sonya.

While she waited, Adrianne read about Clementi. When her father was alive and they still had the piano, she had practiced Clementi exercises for hours. Now one of the melodies she used to play floated through her mind.

The next trick summoned her. He was a thin man with receding hair.

Fifty dollars a shot.

An expensive house.

“Hey, don't tell Alfredo, okay?” Dominic was feeling her all over. Then he took off her clothes, and he made love to her slowly, with surprising gentleness. She noted that he left his socks on, though, as many tricks did. Close up, with his acne-scarred face, his lips on her body, Dominic took on a different aspect.

Afterwards, he took out a small plastic bag of heroin from his vest pocket.

“This stuff relaxes you, doll, and you're very tense. Try some.”

“No, thanks.”

“Don't be scared of it.”

“I'm afraid of getting hooked.”

“You can't with one shot. It's here any time you want. Just ask me.”

“So tired,” Adrianne would moan at night in Alfredo's arms.

“Baby, you're doing fine.”

She wanted to tell him about Dominic, but she didn't dare as she did not know what Alfredo's reaction would be. She nestled more tightly against him, but he soon stirred, got up, and went into the kitchen, probably to get some beer. She heard him pace back and forth, and then she heard him moving canvases.

While Sonya, Vanessa, and a new girl named Eileen ate a pork-chop dinner which the maid had cooked, Adrianne sipped her broth and munched on celery. Then she lit a cigarette. She had lost thirty pounds. Her hip bones protruded, her waist was slender, and her large breasts hung pendulous. She felt as if her heart were seeping through her breasts, as if soon her heart's blood would drain out completely and she would vaporize into mist.