Authors: Beth Raymer
“If you ever want to cash in, just get a friend and bring her on over.”
I was open to a new line of work, but I was hoping to go into something that would allow me to travel. I often fantasized about working on a cruise ship or as an international stewardess. I wanted to have a lounge act. I wanted to bake cookies for passengers flying from Miami to Hong Kong. Of course, having a puppy at home made traveling too difficult. A girl-on-girl Web site seemed interesting, but if I was going to go out on a limb and pose naked on the World Wide Web, I certainly didn’t want to share the profits with anyone.
Unless …
The photo shoot took place on location in the barbeque area of Webmaster’s condo development. After spending several hours on the computer, erasing blemishes and the telephone lines in the background, we clipped and snipped pictures of myself until I fit snugly, and convincingly, beside pictures of myself, and
Voilà
! My vision was realized: a pair of twenty-three-year-old incestuous twin sisters. Graduates of Georgetown, I explained in their bio, daughters of a U.S. Supreme Court judge.
I enjoyed doing something artistic, and spent a lot of time developing the twins’ characters by writing little vignettes so the subscribers could learn about their individual personalities. The Web site was easy to market, profitable, and I didn’t have to share my earnings with anyone but Webmaster, who received 15 percent for his services. I quit my job and introduced the Nightmoves girls to Webmaster and they too launched Web sites. In return, I received
a finder’s fee and twenty percent of their monthly take. The local library offered a seminar on operating online businesses and, after completing the course, I applied for a business license. On June 30, 1999, Repenterprise Enterprises was born. As president, I promoted all of our Web sites, came up with ideas for future shoots, bought the props and outfits, responded to fan e-mail, kept track of tax-deductible items, and handled the online banking. I recruited more girls and bumped up my cut. Each morning, before my first cup of coffee, I scuttled to my computer to see how many people subscribed overnight. I discovered that there is no bigger thrill than making money while you sleep.
This joint venture with Webmaster lasted seven months and the ending was not amicable. Webmaster’s motivation wasn’t just to photograph young naked bodies and improve his Webmaster skills. He wanted a girlfriend, and any of us would do. We all started receiving gifts, though he acted as though his affections were exclusive. Pink roses appeared on my doorstep. Dallas received white ones. Jasmine, red. On the afternoon of our photo shoots, black velvet boxes awaited us on the bathroom counter where we did our makeup. Not intending to become Webmaster’s girlfriend—ever—we accepted the necklaces and earrings and promised to meet for dates that we canceled the morning of. It seemed easier than to say no and risk hurting his feelings or making him mad, especially since thousands of naked pictures of us, many unflattering, were saved on his hard drive. To make matters worse, nearly every single girl who worked for me had insurmountable problems stemming from drug addiction and poor taste in men. Often I was confronted by their unemployed boyfriends, husbands—fathers, even—who felt that I was taking too much of a cut. The men radiated aggression and most days I felt more like the headmistress of a woman’s shelter than the president of a successful business.
Tension peaked just after Webmaster’s fortieth birthday, when he purchased a yellow Mercedes Kompressor convertible. Webmaster preferred driving it sans shirt, as if to match his topless ride. The thick, black hair covering his shoulders, chest, and belly rolls gleamed in the sunlight. At red lights, he spritzed himself with
ice water and suggested to whoever was in the passenger seat that she too take her shirt off. In no time at all, we ran out of excuses as to why we couldn’t accompany him on his afternoon rides. Straws were drawn to decide who would steal his hard drive. We told him one last lie, got what we wanted, and faded from his life.
I was never able to find another Webmaster. Enthusiasm waned. One girl died of a drug overdose. I met a cute film student and over dinner one night he asked me to move out west with him. He was one of the few people to whom I showed my Web site, and he praised me. Not for how good my twin and I looked in sexy French maid outfits, but for the short stories I posted each week about what the girls were up to in their personal lives. He suggested we work at his parents’ Thai restaurant for a few months, save some money, and then move to L.A. We would write scripts together, he said, and turn them into movies. We arrived in Vegas, broke up, and when I needed the money, I took the solitaire diamond necklace that had been a present from Webmaster and, severing my last tie to that world, pawned it for ninety-five dollars.
There were two people in my life who knew that about me.
Now three.
I relaxed my shoulders and waited for Dink’s reaction.
“You’re a
gonif!”
Dink said. His voice boomed like a tribal chieftain announcing the name he had created specifically for its bearer. “You’re gonna do great in this business!”
Gonif
is Yiddish for a small-time, lovable thief, though at the time I didn’t know what it meant. Still, I sensed its complimentary connotation.
His response energized the room. Feeling relieved, I flipped on the lights and grabbed two Cokes from the fridge.
“But you don’t think it’s something I should be ashamed of?” I asked.
“No. You’re a kid. You’re gonna do kid things. It was dangerous, I don’t particularly like that …”
“If my parents ever found out, they would feel like they have no idea who I really am.”
“I freebased a few times,” Dink said. “I didn’t tell my mom.”
“If we went to confession, we would be forgiven.”
“You were making money without hurting anybody,” Dink consoled. “By doing the opposite of hurting anybody! It’s not like you were dealing drugs.”
“Is that worse?”
“What you did was legal. It’s important not to go to jail. Always remember that.”
I asked Dink to make me a promise: if, for some reason, the guys in the office came across pictures of me and my twin, he would tell them that I was once a triplet but that my sisters—the incestuous ones in the photo—died. In a car crash.
“Odds are you’ll be fine,” he said.
“Stranger things have happened.”
We sat there, smiling, over Cokes and
Daily Racing Form
s.
“You know what Amy said when she told me about you? She said, ‘Hire her, she’s one of us.’”
I was alone in the office, researching wind direction and humidity levels, when she walked through the door. “You’re here early,” she said, fiddling through her Neiman Marcus shopping bag. Her black Lycra exercise outfit accentuated her petite, toned physique. The enormous diamond on her ring finger was sunglow yellow and shaped like a cushion. Tulip Dershowitz had returned from yachting on the Rhine.
I set down my can of Coke, stood, and introduced myself. The jeans skirt I’d been wearing to work nearly every day for the last month now seemed excessively short. I tugged at its bottom.
Tulip gave the office the once-over. While she was gone, Dink had given me a four-hundred-dollar redecorating budget. The framed pictures of him posing beside racehorses in the winner’s circle were off the floor and hanging on the walls. A little wooden bookshelf held his sports schedules and handicapping books. A potted plant adorned the mini-refrigerator. Tulip’s glass-green eyes lingered on a doodle I had drawn and taped to the wall. It featured the little family that had sprouted while she was away: Dink sat at the head of the table eating a bagel and Robbie J, Otis, and I sat
around the table, making bets on telephones and watching games on heart-shaped televisions.
Tulip dropped her shopping bag on the floor and plunked her calfskin “hobo” handbag on top of the table. It smelled so strongly of leather it made me nauseous.
“Did you have a nice time?” I asked.
“Mmm hmm. Beautiful. Who have you called so far for rundowns?”
I glanced at the clock on the bottom of the computer screen: 7:55 a.m. Most of the bookmakers we bet with didn’t open until a quarter after.
“It’s the first thing you do when you get to the office,” she said, and turned away.
I gave my skirt one last tug, sat up straight, and picked up the phone.
Upon Tulip’s arrival I learned quickly that the best thing to do with my enthusiasm was suppress it. Like a too-cool teenager, Tulip had no patience for the overeager teacher’s pet in the front row. When I laughed at Dink’s jokes, she cringed. If I volunteered to do something for Dink, she rolled her eyes. Looking at the computer screen one afternoon, I announced, correctly, that the Virginia total was moving and we were on the wrong side. I was finally catching on, and Dink and Robbie J complimented me. If Tulip hadn’t been in the room, I would’ve screamed in excitement, demanding that pizza be ordered in my honor. But with Tulip sitting across from me, and her penchant for mimicking my high-pitched voice, I turned my attention back to the screen and bit the inside of my cheeks to keep myself from smiling.
With the good times seemingly over, I sat, dispirited, in my corner of the table, watching the numbers on the gambling software flash from white to black. Helping Dink update his hockey notebook, I’d divert my eyes from his terrible handwriting and see Tulip filing her glossy nails, the nail dust flying over the cover of her Isabel Allende novel. Sometimes I’d catch her in such a deep daydreaming state I wouldn’t bother to look away. Her tanned, narrow
shoulders relaxed; her thin lips parted. Her eyes fixated so intently on the item in front of her, a calculator, a pencil, it was as though she were practicing psychokinesis. The full-carat diamonds dropping like tears from her earlobes would send me into my own daydream. Shine, sparkle, haze, until, finally, the cute Cuban clerk from my neighborhood 7-Eleven appeared. In the stockroom, he pushed his body into mine. He kissed me, talked dirty, went up my shirt. A blink, and there I’d be, staring at Tulip, who was now staring at me. Between us, a balled-up piece of paper that Dink had thrown to get our attention. She bugged me, sure, but I couldn’t deny she possessed a certain mystique.
There was a time when Tulip found Dink’s gambling life exciting. The word she used was “edgy.” It was an edgy lifestyle, risky and unpredictable, and Tulip was always attracted to the edge. Growing up in San Diego, she was sent to juvie at the age of twelve for running away to Texas to see the Beatles. During the Summer of Love, Tulip moved to Northern California where she drank too much white wine, dropped too much acid, and forgot to go to college. Despite her morning hangovers, she managed to braid her long blond hair, zip the back of her nurse’s outfit, and hitchhike to her job at the convalescent home.
Around this time she met David, a handsome, successful jockey. When David made good on his promise to leave his wife to marry her, twenty-four-year-old Tulip found herself smiling beside her husband in the winner’s circle.
Pot brownies, embroidered miniskirts, and cross-country hitchhiking quickly gave way to Stoli martinis, St. John suits, and European holidays. The fourteen-year age gap was of little consequence to Tulip. She reveled in David’s adoration; being the wife of a jockey offered her the thrill she craved and the high-society lifestyle, which she took to like mint syrup to bourbon. David’s strict regimen impressed her as a sign of self-mastery and maturity. Every morning David trained, and then dehydrated in the sauna. He allowed
himself only one meal a day: a T-bone steak, medium rare, no sauce, no sides. The disciplined lifestyle of her older husband left Tulip with all the material comforts of success. The only problem was that there was no one to enjoy them with, no one to help her celebrate her newfound wealth. Not one to gain—or want—acceptance from the other jockeys’ wives, whose loyalty remained with David’s first wife, Tulip spent more and more time alone.
Loneliness bred boredom and Tulip resumed her partying ways. While David trained and dehydrated, Tulip snorted coke and downed martinis. When David traveled, she invited her brother and sister to come over and the three siblings did drugs and played board games. Though years later she would deny it, I could’ve sworn I heard her tell a story of one particular evening, when David was away and the three siblings were in need of a fourth person to play Pictionary. After an hour of snorting lines the length of curling irons and thinking of people to call, they decided there wasn’t anyone else’s company they really desired. Except Chancy. And with that they went into the backyard and retrieved from his stable Chancy, their favorite thoroughbred. For the next few hours the horse stood in the living room and acted as Tulip’s Pictionary teammate, chosen to do the guessing, not the drawing. David came home the next morning to find Chancy standing in the living room, dozing, and everyone else passed out on the floor.
But when the siblings weren’t around, and Chancy was back in his stable, Tulip was alone, waiting for the cocktail hour that never seemed to come early enough. Drinks at dinnertime seemed arbitrary. And unfair. What about lunch? What about breakfast? Wobbling slightly in her white Chanel pumps, Tulip stood over the kitchen sink piercing the pimiento heart of what must’ve been her millionth olive with a tiny plastic sword.
Enter Chipper, golf instructor to the lonely housewives of greater San Diego.
Tulip was never in love with Chipper but she did love his game. The way he kept his swing plane lateral, never sliding his hips on the takeaway, but storing up the energy in a tight coil for
that moment when his club reached its peak and his hips triggered a perfectly synchronized downturn—hips, shoulders, hands—generating a staggering amount of club head speed. God, he added excitement to her life. Perhaps too much. One day she came home and found Chipper sitting next to David on the living room couch. He had told David of their affair and Tulip was forced to choose between the two.