Authors: Beth Raymer
Madam S. blew her bangs from out of her eyes and shared her last piece of advice. “In the middle of a call, if the customer needs to order a pizza, he’s an undercover cop. They all use the same excuse to update their buddies in the motel room next door.”
The telephone rang. She jotted the customer’s address onto an index card and handed it to me. “Go get ’em, Angel.”
In time, I understood that this was a line of business based solely on trust. There was no playbook or legal system to fall back on. Instincts had to be listened to and trusted. Without them, we,
the women of Nightmoves
, were nothing but birds with clipped wings, stranded on a lofty perch. The job required me to be confident, direct, cunning, and comfortable with uncertainty. I can’t imagine any better preparation for a career in gambling.
Once I gained the skill most crucial to my new line of work—assertiveness—I enjoyed the job tremendously. I too developed a sultry phone voice and hung on every possible plot point on
Days
. I had business cards printed, the pink intense, the lettering engraved, and handed them out to ex-professors, bartenders, and lawyers and lobbyists I had worked with during my internship at the Department of Children and Families. In miniskirt and crocheted halter top, I put plenty of miles on my Ford F150, driving
to customers’ homes in the suburbs, cities, and farming towns along the Florida Panhandle. Having already forgotten the financial constraints that bogged me down just weeks before, I’d toss off my flip-flops, slip on my stilettos, and give Otis, my bodyguard puppy in the passenger seat, a kiss on the snout. Strutting up the driveway to my client’s door, I’d double-check the contents of my tote bag: R&B CDs, fishnets, leopard-print bikini, baby wipes, Mace, portable credit-card swiper. Check. One-fifty an hour began the moment my finger felt the heat from the doorbell.
And this was the best part: waiting for the door to open. It’s where the adrenaline kicked in. It mattered little whether it was an attractive pilot with a cool, confident swagger or a greasy-haired security guard with dirty fingernails. What I loved was being in strangers’ homes and listening to their secrets. Inside the maze of suburban split-levels, hunting cabins, summer homes, and doublewides, intricate, vulnerable human urges were revealed. There was no ordinary structure. Every encounter was unique. Life was in the here and now and I loved the feeling of being wildly alive to it all. Never turning down a call, I took every opportunity to dress up and playact. Some customers took me to shoot pool, some asked me to watch them masturbate. Many asked me to remove my shoes so I wouldn’t wake the kids.
There was only one customer with whom I felt uncomfortable. He was an English professor who preferred the lights on low as he instructed me to get naked but for my heels, straddle a bar stool, and read to him from
In Cold Blood
. Out of all the fantasies I was asked to fulfill, this one made me feel the most exposed. That it was a murder story never even crossed my mind. I just didn’t have the confidence to read aloud. I was so afraid I would mispronounce a word that I barely managed to enunciate anything. My posture caved. Red blotches the shape of crescent moons appeared on my neck and chest. Sweat trickled from the backs of my knees into the heels of my stilettos, making their plastic arches even more slippery. I scanned each page for words that might trip me up. The first one appeared on page ten:
abstemious
. There was a
long pause as I searched for an excuse as to why I couldn’t say the word. My damp palms turned the page’s edge transparent.
“I don’t like this word,” I said. “It makes me think of bad things.”
The professor seemed genuinely interested. “Bad things? Like what?”
Like it made me feel stupid, for one.
“Can’t we do something else?” I said. “Can’t I just dance for you?”
Ten months passed. Each afternoon, when I awoke, it became my habit to arrange my savings into piles of one thousand dollars and place them atop my bedspread, side by side. The rows of green stretched before me like a lifetime of summers, each one more promising than the last. There was nowhere I had to be, no outstanding bill I had to pay. I unplugged my alarm clock and forgot about it for a year. The moldy, metallic smell of money lingered in my sheets and before bed I’d pull the covers close to my nose and inhale, deeply, until I fell asleep.
My feelings about the job changed after an evening with Charlie. A friendly fifty-year-old southerner and Nightmoves regular, Charlie told animated stories about his two tours in Vietnam and his life after the war when he began working for the CIA, or so he claimed. It never mattered to me whether or not Charlie’s CIA stories were true. The only thing that bothered me about him was that he seemed to have something wrong with his memory. Sometimes I would spend two hours with him in the afternoon, go home, and later in the night he’d call again, forgetting that I had been to his house that very day. Still, I thought his stories were interesting, and I much preferred listening to him than to the downhearted, heavy-drinking cops and accountants I visited.
One evening, I sat on his couch and looked through his photo albums. I saw Charlie as a teenager, his long hair pulled into a ponytail, and Charlie with a buzz cut, grinning in front of a chopper. In one picture, a smiling Vietnamese boy handed Charlie a
sharp animal tooth, which Charlie still wore around his neck, attached by a hemp necklace. The albums’ last pages displayed more recent photographs: Charlie at fifty, in different exotic locales, his arm draped around girls in their twenties. Assuming the girls worked for places similar to Nightmoves, I asked Charlie why he never invited me to Cambodia or Panama. “Too dangerous,” he said. In the photos, the girls were wrapped in Budweiser beach towels and Charlie was sunburned and smoking a cigar. It didn’t look so dangerous. I looked up from the album. “Charlie,” I said. “Are you
really
in the CIA?”
“Lemme show you something, Angel,” he said, in a sarcastic tone I’d never before heard him use. He walked away from me. A closet door slammed, and Charlie returned, carrying a long black semiautomatic shotgun with two barrels. Peering through the scope, he pointed the sight at the bronze bald eagle, wings outstretched, on top of his television set.
From there, Charlie moved the gun swiftly through the air, as though the eagle had taken flight. He followed the bird as it flew from the La-Z-Boy to the ceiling fan to the pile of
TV Guides
, until it landed on the top of my head. Charlie squinted to narrow his aim and his eyeballs shook the way they always did when he had substituted speed for sleep for days on end.
The blood rushed from my limbs. I blinked and saw black. He was going to shoot me or torture me to prove he was no liar, to show this stupid little whore that he
was
in the CIA. I crossed the backs of my hands over my face and turned away from the gun. I found the courage to ask him to put the thing away.
“Miscreant shitheads out to fuck with me,” Charlie said in his boisterous Southern drawl. His blinking was outrageous.
I scooted forward to the edge of the couch. The front door was steps away and my bag, with my car keys in it, lay at my feet. Outside, there were neighbors, air, and sky. Otis would be waiting in the passenger seat. My truck was backed into the driveway, the only precaution I took in case I needed to leave quickly. Black dots danced like mosquitoes in front of my eyes. My instincts screamed,
Go. Now. Before you faint
. I managed to push myself up from the couch and grab my bag.
It wasn’t until I stood that I realized how light-headed I was. Charlie kept his gun focused on the couch as though I were still sitting there. Thinking that maybe I was overreacting, I second-guessed myself and lost momentum. I considered asking him, again, to put the gun away. Then I imagined the barrel of the gun twisting into my temple and I headed for the door. If he raped me, I’d never tell anyone. It was my fault for being there. The front door wasn’t as close as I thought. If he was going to shoot me, it was going to be now. Now. I told myself to scream.
Do it. Do it
. I couldn’t. I panicked, made a sharp left, ran into the bathroom, and locked myself inside.
“You’re scaring me!” I shouted. I felt frantically for the light switch.
“The CIA gives a shit,” Charlie shouted back. “The CIA
cares
about insane delusionoids.”
Shuffling through my bag, looking for anything that might help me, I imagined my parents at the morgue, collecting my belongings. My sister’s drug addiction had caused them years of worry and heartache. I was considered the good kid. Friends, boyfriends, lovers, and family were all under the impression that I worked for a pet-sitting service. One look through my bag—the pager, the panties, the credit-card swiper—and everyone close to me would feel as though they never even knew me. I stashed my business cards inside the fishing magazines stacked beside the toilet.
I heard him walk away from the door. A closet opened, closed. The refrigerator opened, closed. The couch squeaked and Dan Rather’s voice filled the room. I heard the sound of Charlie’s feet on the carpet, then on the kitchen linoleum. He returned to the door of the bathroom where, on the other side, I waited, back flat against the adjacent wall in case any bullets shot through.
“Listen,” he said. He popped open a can of beer loud enough for me to hear. “See? No more guns. Just me and my beer. You can come out whenever you’re ready. I’m gonna be here drinkin’ a beer.”
Certain that if I opened the door he’d point the gun at my head, mock me for being gullible, and steer me wherever he saw fit, I timidly asked if maybe he could call the cops.
“Angel, I’m not gonna bring the cops into this. If I wanted to get you, I would’ve gotten you already. I know how to pick a lock, for Christ’s sake. I
am
in the CIA.”
For the next ten minutes, Charlie talked me out of the bathroom the way someone talks a buddy off a ledge.
“Everything’s gonna be okay, Angel. I know what it’s like to be scared. Hell, I’ve spent most of my life bein’ scared.
Of ghosts!
If you can believe that.”
I splashed cold water onto my face and drank from the faucet.
“I’m gonna pay you for your time here. Throw in a lil’ extra for freakin’ ya out.”
From the crack beneath the door, two one-hundred-dollar bills inched their way toward my stilettos.
“I enjoy your company. You’re cheerful, I like that. I hope you’ll come back. I’m gonna watch TV. Maybe do some Tai Chi.”
If he was having an episode, it seemed to be over. Charlie didn’t seem like a rapist killer. He was a fan of Oprah and liked nothing more than a playful push-up contest. The imagined horrors left my head and my mind quieted. I cracked the door open to find Charlie just where he said he would be. On the couch, drinking a Coors, watching the news.
The next day was my twenty-third birthday. The weather outside was sunny and bright and I spent the day under a blanket watching a
Godfather
marathon on cable. My bones hurt. Every few hours I’d let out a deep sigh, pull the blanket to my nose, and weep. A young, suspendered Al Pacino offered only lukewarm comfort.
My roommate came home from her job at the health-food store. She opened the front door and the yellow afternoon shot through the dark living room, exposing the dust on the coffee table and the dark circles under my eyes. She eased over to me, bringing with her the stink of a vitamin aisle and a birthday cake. She knew that I was working at Nightmoves and she often worried about my
safety. I told her stories about my job, but only the funny ones. I certainly wasn’t going to tell her about Charlie.
“This is how you’re spending your birthday?” she said. Her latest vinegar cleanse was really working. Her skin was radiant. Peering up at her from beneath the blanket, I felt like a mole.
“Is something wrong?” She looked scared.
“No, no,” I said, laughing it off. “It’s just sad, you know. All the promises Michael Corleone made Kay.”
She prepared my cake and sang me “Happy Birthday.”
I continued to arrive at strangers’ doors with my belongings—the ones I was so embarrassed about my parents discovering at the morgue—tossed over my shoulder. The only change was my now-elevated sense of fear. Standing inside a customer’s home, surrounded by deep woods, I’d psych myself into thinking that there was another person in the house, waiting in the hall closet or behind the shower curtain. Every customer began to resemble Ted Bundy, the serial killer who had bludgeoned Florida State sorority girls to death. Dancing amid the dark walls and the family portraits inside master bedrooms, I couldn’t keep my thoughts from turning to the macabre. The wife in the photo wasn’t away on business. She was beneath the floorboards. I smiled and made small talk, vacillating as to whether or not I should make up an excuse and leave. A drink was offered and I accepted. Before I took a sip, I switched my glass with the customer’s just in case he had laced mine. The air smelled of moist soil as I walked back to my truck. The night mist cooled my face. And though my body shivered with fear, I felt the distinctive, enjoyable rush of having gotten away with something. Life, I guess.
My blossoming death drive came to a halt after I met a customer who worked as a Webmaster. He assumed I was a high school dropout and I never told him any different. From the frame of his front door, he smoked and lectured me on the poor choices I was making in my life. By this time, I had been working at Nightmoves for over a year and all the glamour and thrills that had accompanied the first months had faded. My fear had gradually dissipated
and all that was left was genuine boredom. Outcall dancing had become just another job. I no longer wore matching bra and panty sets, nor did I shave my legs or dab my neck with perfume. My dance style grew less seductive and more athletic. A two-minute headstand became the centerpiece of my routine.
“Girl-on-girl Web sites,” Webmaster said on the exhale. “That’s where the real money is.”
I let my legs come down to the floor.