A Better Goodbye Page 13

  She wondered if it applied to the special on Top Ramen she found. Ten for a dollar—do the math and you were getting a whole dinner for ten cents. Definitely scandalous. But she wouldn’t say so to Maria and Twyla. They weren’t big on vocabulary, or anything else to do with words. Like reading, for instance. Cosmo was as deep as they got. And Jenny, finding them in the checkout line, could tell Twyla was a Cosmo girl just by the way she was ending a conversation on her cell, flirty and oblivious.

  “It’s black, very short, and very revealing,” Twyla was saying. She smiled at what she heard next. “Okay, nothing underneath. See you in an hour.”

  She clicked off and turned to Maria, who was emptying her basket of chicken, frozen peas, white wine, and Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey. “Sor-reee,” she said. “My favorite client.”

  “You’ve still got to eat,” Maria told her.

  Twyla grabbed a bag of Skittles off the candy rack. “Dinner,” she said. Then she smiled as if struck by divine inspiration and grabbed a second bag.

  Jenny, watching, saying nothing, decided that Twyla was one of those crack babies who are never hungry. All they crave is the energy to do more drugs. For them, Skittles was the perfect food, no fat, just sugar. Of course the sugar eventually turned to fat, but they never thought that far ahead. And if you suggested chocolate, which Jenny usually did to anyone who was hungry, they’d inevitably say, “My God, how can you eat chocolate?” Right, she thought, like it’s healthier for you to smoke a gram of ice every two days.

  It turned out that the chicken was no healthier than crack or chocolate after Maria broiled it beyond recognition. Good thing they could open the kitchen window in her frayed Silver Lake apartment or the smoke would have forced them to evacuate. For a moment they debated moving straight to the Chunky Monkey, but Jenny insisted that they needed to eat something at least a little bit healthy first. “Like Top Ramen?” Maria asked tentatively. Jenny screamed with delight. Dinner was served ten minutes later.

  She was washing away the salty aftertaste with some Two-Buck Chuck when Maria said, “You didn’t like Twyla, did you?”

  “Did it show?”

  “Yes. You bitch.”

  Maria laughed, and Jenny did too.

  “I’m sorry. She just really annoyed me, you know? Who talks to a client about not wearing panties when they’re in the checkout line at Ralphs? Plus she’s a drug addict, right? Living on Skittles? Come on.”

  “At least Twyla never noticed you passing judgment on her. She was too busy being—”

  “A skank?”

  “Whatever.”

  “I’ll probably never see her again anyway,” Jenny said.

  Maria nodded. “I can make sure you guys work different shifts at least. Hey, don’t look so surprised. You’re coming to work for me, Jenny. No way you’re not.”

  Jenny’s mother was the last woman to speak to her with such authority. Sometimes in dreams, sometimes when she was just stuck in traffic, Jenny could still hear her mother’s voice scolding, nagging, pleading. It was a voice strained by the responsibility that came with not having a man around to share the load. Most of them split or were so brutish and unfaithful that pretty little Eun-Chu Yee did the splitting first, always certain the next one would be the right one. But when she finally found the right one, he died almost as soon as she wrapped her loving arms around him. She spent the next six years trying to kill her pain with drink, and then she died too, leaving Jenny, at sixteen, to either find another mother figure or fend for herself.

  Maybe it was the extended time alone, with no guidance beyond instinct, that made Jenny respond to Maria the way she had. More than simply being older, Maria possessed the kind of wisdom that wasn’t available in a classroom. As clueless as she was about romance, she was shrewd and clear-eyed when it came to separating clients from their money. Jenny didn’t always approve of her methods—too cruel, she decided—but she recognized a survivor when she saw one. And at the moment, with her finances drained by the DMV and her lawyer, surviving seemed like the most she could hope for. But she still found herself resisting Maria’s edict. She thought it must be a daughter thing.

  “You don’t have security,” Jenny told her.

  “You can work eleven to two, whatever days you want,” Maria said. “Nobody gets robbed then.”

  “Did you take a survey?”

  “I just know, okay? I’ve been in the business forever and . . . Look, two or three clients on whatever days you want, and then you go home. What could be safer?”

  “A place with security,” Jenny said. She wanted to add that she needed to see more than two or three clients a day, but she kept it to herself.

  “You keep sixty percent,” Maria said.

  Jenny smiled. “I was going to keep sixty anyway.”

  “So you’ll come?” Maria said. “Is that what you’re telling me?”

  “Is it me you want in particular,” Jenny said, “or are you just, like, really hard up for an Asian girl?”

  “I want a girl that’s totally responsible, all right?” Maria said. “Not a flake, shows up on time, doesn’t lie about how many clients she sees. And does her share of the laundry.”

  They both laughed. Jenny was compulsive about the laundry.

  “If she’s Asian too, that would be so cool,” Maria said. “And you’re, like, the only girl I know that’s all those things.”

  This, Jenny knew, was as close to begging as Maria was going to get. And she liked Maria, she honestly did. There wasn’t another girl in the business she trusted, respected, and enjoyed hanging around with as much. But Jenny still said, “I’m sorry, I can’t do it. Not if you don’t have security.”

  “You fucking hate security,” Maria said. “Ever since that guy at my old place jacked off in your towel.”

  “He saw me in the shower, I think,” Jenny said. “I guess he didn’t know how to handle it.”

  “He handled it too much if you ask me,” Maria said.

  More laughter and then Jenny said, “That was before what happened in Sherman Oaks. Maria, I saw how those girls looked. I don’t want to be like that, ever. And besides, that idiot who jerked off isn’t exactly what I’ve got in mind now. You know, for security. It’s got to be somebody, like, legitimately scary.”

  Maria responded with what Jenny thought of as her Mona Lisa smile, not that Maria knew what the Mona Lisa was, not that Jenny should have been thinking that way about a friend. “I’ve got something better,” Maria said.

  “Are you paying off the police?” Jenny asked, thinking for the first time that the job offer might work out after all. And wouldn’t that be cool, working with Maria again.

  “There’s two or three that are clients,” Maria said, “but no, that’s not it.”

  “So what is it?”

  “Can you keep a secret?”

  “Maria, how many times have you asked me that since we met each other?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Like hundreds, all right? Maybe millions. And have I ever told your secrets to anybody? Never. So quit playing games and either tell me or don’t tell me.”

  Jenny startled herself with her boldness, feeling the shifting of power in their curious relationship. She wondered if Maria felt it too. Probably not, because Maria was lowering her voice as though she were afraid the apartment was bugged.

  “I got a gun,” Maria said.

  Jenny’s new sense of empowerment vanished. She could barely make herself say, “A gun?” It sounded lame and predictable, stupid even, but with the bottom dropping out of her stomach, it was the best she could do.

  Maria said a lot more about what kind it was, and how many bullets it fired, and the damage it could do to a human being. She talked about taking lessons and going target shooting with her boyfriend and keeping it in her purse at work. She might even have mentioned how she could loan it to Jenny for protection if she was at the apartment by herself. But by that point, Maria’s sales pitch had turned into
a drone that threatened to drive Jenny out of her mind.

  “I don’t like guns,” she said.

  “You don’t have to,” Maria said. “Just pretend it’s, I don’t know, like your favorite blanket when you were a kid. Your security blanket. Come on, Jenny, you know you loved your blankie.”

  Maria manufactured a laugh, and Jenny wondered if she was overreacting. It wasn’t like Maria had shot somebody with the gun she was talking about. She was trying to get Jenny to come to work for her, and this was how she thought she could close the deal. But even sugarcoating the idea couldn’t settle Jenny’s stomach.

  “I’m not feeling very good,” she said. “I think I better go home.”

  “But we’ve still got ice cream to eat,” Maria said.

  14

  Coyle kept sniffing around like he could smell perfume on Nick the way you can smell cigarettes on a guy who hangs around smokers all day. Of course the girls didn’t wear perfume, or use scented lotion and oil for that matter—clients were paranoid about anything that might tip off their wives and girlfriends. But Coyle’s smile still made Nick uneasy every time the subject was the job he never talked about.

  The last thing Nick needed was to have Coyle bugging him for an address and, once he got it, angling for a discount. There was an element of embarrassment in Nick’s silence, too. What kind of job was guarding the girls in apartment 824? Hell, he wasn’t even the piano player in the whorehouse.

  He told Coyle he was doing a little maintenance work at an apartment complex. As vague as that was, there was an element of truth to it; he was always picking up after the girls who seemed to make a bigger mess than ever once they recognized how hung up he was on cleanliness. Typical Coyle, all he wanted to know was how the women in the complex looked. He even threatened to swing by some day and check them out. “Place got a pool?” he asked, as though he could wear down their resistance simply by slathering them with sun block. “No, no pool,” Nick said. It was a lie, but Scott didn’t allow the girls to go swimming in the rooftop pool, so the lie was close to true, and it turned out to serve a purpose. After Nick told it, Coyle didn’t seem as interested.

  It would have been a different story if Nick had talked about the slow stretches when the girls—except Sierra, of course—decided to have some fun with their bodyguard. They’d be tired of calling friends and chattering about everything from shoe sales to yeast infections, and there was Nick, the perfect cure for their boredom: a guy. They’d get wicked grins, the way Heather and Brandi did one drowsy Thursday when they tried to convince him to strip for them. “Come on,” Brandi said in her Spanglish purr, “you see us naked all the time.”

  She and Heather flashed their tits at him while they tried to guess how big he was and how long he could go for. “If I told you,” Nick said, “you’d never leave me alone.” Which got all of them laughing until the phone started ringing again. Every once in a while after that, he saw them looking at him as if they wouldn’t mind finding out how good he really was in bed.

  He would have needed his plumbing checked if he didn’t regularly get hard enough to cut diamonds. The girl he found himself thinking about most often was Kianna, who seemed available some days and as far away as the moon on others. Nick guessed she’d gone to the moon one afternoon when she came back from the bathroom sniffling and making a face. Cocaine drip, he thought. Riki had called in sick, so Kianna was the only one working. She seized the moment by perching on the arm of the sofa where Nick had parked himself and caressing his cheek as her breasts spilled out of a lace teddy.

  “I like your stubble,” she told him.

  “Forgot to shave,” he said.

  “Keep forgetting.”

  “Even if it makes me itch?”

  Kianna caressed his cheek again. “Mmmmm. Doesn’t feel so bad to me.”

  “Me either, as long as you’re doing that.”

  “Anything else you’d like me to do?”

  Damned right there was, but before he could let her know what he had in mind, Scott walked in, abusing his agent on the phone and acting like a bigger star than he’d ever been. Nick wondered later why he hadn’t just gone ahead and taken his best shot at Kianna because Scott was so wrapped up in himself that he never would have noticed. But Nick hadn’t, and after that, all he got from Kianna was an occasional wink or a finger wagged at him like he was a naughty boy. And that, he thought, was as far as his chances went for getting a piece of ass on the job.

  So he went back to being invisible and listened to the stories the girls told about the lawyer who came back to L.A. from a Supreme Court case wanting to be peed on and the late-night TV car salesman who dressed like a little girl and took a dildo up the ass. Sometimes all a client had to do to inspire ridicule was take his pants off.

  “Curlicue dick,” a pixie named Bambi announced one day after seeing a tiny, hatchet-faced movie producer. “It looked like a pig’s tail.”

  “Oh, I’ve had guys like that,” Sierra said.

  Trust her to turn any conversation into a competition, Nick thought.

  “No, worse than a pig’s tail actually,” Bambi said. “You could open a bottle of wine with it.”

  “Like a corkscrew, you mean?” Sierra asked.

  “Uh-huh, uh-huh.”

  “So did he corkscrew you?”

  The girls shrieked with laughter.

  The parade through the front door never ended, men with money and sex drive to burn, some barely out of their teens, some way past retirement, almost all of them as ordinary-looking as a speed bump. Once the door closed behind them, though, they had a license to get weird.

  One evening a bleached blonde named Tiffany emerged from the master bedroom wiping a gooey chocolate confection off the ample body she hadn’t bothered to cover with a robe. Her client, so meek-looking he seemed almost prim, had shown up with two chocolate cream pies from Marie Callender’s that she had automatically assumed were for the girls. But no, he carried them into the bedroom, removed them from their boxes, placed them on the floor at the foot of the bed and then took enough plastic wrap from his briefcase to cover the bed. He didn’t want a massage, he just wanted Tiffany to walk back and forth in the nude while he sat on the bed and masturbated. “When he came,” Tiffany said, “he stomped both his feet in the pies and—sploosh!—all over the place.”

  Nick shook his head in disbelief.

  “What?” Tiffany asked.

  “You girls are crazier than any fighters I ever met.”

  Tiffany stuck around long enough to tell her story three more times, and then she was gone to wherever massage girls went when they went poof. By Nick’s fifth week, that seemed to be happening a lot, the girls coming and going almost as fast as the clients. Kianna found out she was pregnant and headed north to San Jose to stay with her mother. Sweet little Riki loved the money, but the coke she bought with it rendered her so unstable that Scott fired her.

  Only Sierra acted as if she were in for the long haul. She was a schemer and an angle player, cut from the same cloth as some of the managers and trainers Nick remembered from the fight game. Scott hadn’t appointed her second in command, but that was the role she assumed when he wasn’t around. “Don’t fuck with me,” Sierra warned more than one girl. But Nick knew there would be one who wouldn’t take her at her word. It was a redhead named Tracy who was meeting clients away from the apartment and not kicking back 50 percent to Scott. When Sierra found out, the girl was gone before her shift was over.

  “Fucking thief,” Scott said.

  “Didn’t realize how good she had it here,” Sierra said.

  “Where’s the appreciation, you know? I hate people like that.”

  “Me too.”

  “Damn, I need to unwind.”

  As if on cue, Sierra began to massage Scott’s shoulders. “How’s that?” she asked.

  He turned to look at her. “Don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  “Yeah?”

  He responded by steeri
ng her to the master bedroom without another word. What a piece of work, Nick thought. Sierra was operating under the impression that she had something special with Scott, and Scott was enough of a businessman not to let her suspect otherwise.

  If Sierra was easy for Nick to figure, Ling was borderline impossible. She showed up just a couple of days a week and usually saw only one regular. Any other business she got was by accident. Sierra said the only reason Scott kept Ling around was because she was Asian. Sometimes just saying an Asian girl was working would attract clients. Once they were in the door, they would be given the bad news that Ling had been called away because of a family emergency. But Heather, a redhead, was available. Or how about Carmen, the new Latina? There were other new girls as well, their phony names blurring together until Nick decided not to worry about remembering them all. He’d be polite and let it go at that. It wasn’t like they noticed him anyway.

  The clients turned out to be less trouble than the girls. Nothing more than a couple of drunks, a deadbeat who tried to skip out on Carmen without paying, and a guy who somehow got past the security door in the lobby and came upstairs saying he had an appointment with Ling. She hadn’t worked in nearly a week at that point, so Nick hustled the guy to the elevator, telling him to stop the bullshit and squeezing his bicep just hard enough to let him know the pain could get worse.

  Nick didn’t mention it to Scott. Sierra did. But most of what she told him was intended to make Ling look bad, not compliment Nick for snuffing out a situation that could have brought the apartment manager down on them. “That bitch causes trouble even when she’s not here,” Sierra said.