A Better Goodbye Page 20

  “I don’t live there all the time.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Seriously. Right now I’m renting a house in the hills. Up by Appian Way.”

  “I kind of know where that is.”

  “Maybe you can visit sometime. It’s not a castle, but it’s got a pool and a nice view. I’ll be there a lot for the next year, while I’m taking care of some business down here.”

  “Cool. I’d like that.”

  It was as close to a formal acceptance speech as she could offer, and she assumed that Barry got the message. She was about to cease being the fantasy he knew as Coco and Suki and start being Jenny Yee and all the good and bad that entailed. She would make the transformation expecting answers to the questions she had from the last time they were together. Was he married? (He didn’t wear a ring and didn’t have the marks left by one he had taken off, but that didn’t mean anything.) If he was married, did he always go back to his wife when he was done fooling around? (Jenny was weary of guys like that.) Even if he was in a lousy marriage, were there kids involved? (Once was enough for that.) And what did he do for the business he was never specific about? (The answer had to be in his black leather briefcase.)

  Still, if everything she heard from him was wrong, even if he refused to say anything at all, Jenny knew she was going to sleep with him. It wouldn’t be during working hours, though, with people in the same apartment. It would be someplace she could enjoy the experience without embarrassment or the gossip it would generate. Someplace special. Okay, Barry’s place. She was already thinking about it when she put some oil in her hand and told him to lie back and relax.

  22

  A blind man would have known something was going on between Coco and Barry. She sounded different when she talked to him on the phone, relaxed and funny, not mechanical and cautious, the way she was with most callers. When she caught herself enjoying the calls from Barry too much, she pulled back. But every time he walked through the door for an appointment, her smile came from someplace genuine.

  The one time she noticed Nick looking at her, she shrugged helplessly. He took it as a good sign because it felt rooted in the moment they had shared. There was no such warmth when Sierra or Brianna or one of the ever-changing new girls was around. They’d been quick to tease her about Barry, calling him “your boyfriend,” asking her if she’d fucked him in the backseat of his Rolls yet. “You’ll have to wait until our sex tape comes out,” Coco told them. Some actually believed her.

  Sierra was the only one who didn’t say much when Coco was around, but as soon as she was out of the room, the jack shack’s queen bee let her venom flow. “Guess our little college girl doesn’t have to worry about tuition anymore,” she told an outrageously big-busted dunce named Melissa one day. “I wonder what she really has to do to keep him happy.” The two girls rolled around in the possibilities like a couple of mud wrestlers, guessing everything from heroin smuggling to blowjobs for all the Bloods and Crips.

  Nick had to leave before he called Sierra a cunt. He went out to the kitchen where all he could hear was the refrigerator humming, and stayed there until Coco came out of her session. She sensed the tension instantly.

  “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said.

  “Good,” Nick said, “because I’m not telling you.”

  There he went again, protecting her. He knew she didn’t always like it, but he couldn’t help himself. He just had to make sure he didn’t get stupid over her. His fantasies were one thing, reality far different. She was already hung up on another man, one who had a Rolls and what seemed to be truckloads of money and God knew what else. There was no sense in Nick beating his head against that wall.

  And yet he didn’t like Barry a damn bit. Barry was too much of a lounge lizard, one of those slick weasels who work the clubs every night and always seem to walk off with Cinderella. Douchebag, Nick told himself. And he wondered if someday he’d have to protect Jenny from Barry too, and if she would let him.

  He felt a twinge of jealousy. How could she care about Barry so much? How could Barry get her to care? Fuck it, that’s just the way it was. Nick was hired muscle, and for him to think he would ever be anything more was nuts.

  He was staring out the trick pad’s window at a city cleansed by spring rain. The haze that usually hung over L.A. had been washed away and replaced by a sky the color of blue you expect to see only in a movie. Out there somewhere, Coco was probably on her way over for another day of work, but Nick tried not to think about her. She wasn’t his responsibility until she showed up. A responsibility, that was all she was.

  Jenny didn’t mind that she hadn’t been to Barry’s house yet, or that they hadn’t gone to dinner at Campanile or one of those other fancy restaurants he said he loved so much. It made what was going on between them seem like a courtship, as if they’d met at a club or a Starbucks and were letting things take their normal course. Of course, normalcy between a masseuse and a client with feelings for each other did have its privileges. The second time Barry came over and saw her as Coco, he went down on her. The time after that, she returned the favor.

  Those intimacies kept intruding on her thoughts as she wrote her last poetry paper. The subject was Marianne Moore because the professor told her she’d devoted enough energy to Elizabeth Bishop. Like she knew anything about Marianne Moore. Like she cared. But now the paper had been handed in, and she was coming out of the final in her Vietnam War class. The whole time she’d been taking it, she kept hearing the voice of the last guest speaker the class had heard, a pretty middle-aged woman named Tan who had grown up as the daughter of the Vietcong chieftain in Cu Chi Province, where all the tunnels were. The woman recalled sneaking through the jungle with her father in the middle of the night when she was a child, and how they had stumbled into an American patrol. The woman laughed as she remembered fleeing in the darkness and the way she kept saying, “Run, Daddy, run!” That was the voice that stayed with Jenny, the one that called for daddy.

  It didn’t go away until she was driving to work, making the transition to Coco in her mind before she changed from her hoodie and jeans into something sheer and skimpy. She was thinking about the viable candidates for romance she had encountered through massage—not the guys who had made it all the way into her life, but the ones who had fallen short. The funniest had been the easiest to dismiss, a surfer named Todd who was so blond he looked like a snowflake. Somehow Todd had wound up making a living in sales, a good one judging by the red Saab convertible he drove. His paycheck was probably the result of the same charm that got him in her bed before she was sure he deserved to be there. Or maybe she’d just been horny, because Todd seemed a lot less charming the next time he called. He was in a car with a bunch of guys from his office, and she could tell he was trying to show them how hot she was for him. “Come on, you had a good time last time, didn’t you?” he’d asked. And she’d said, “Yeah, for a sport fuck.” She could hear the guys in Todd’s car laughing, but Todd didn’t join them. He never called back.

  Danny had been different, a sound editor from Warner Bros. who looked like he should have been an actor but was so shy that it was weeks before he even asked if he could kiss her breasts. He kept getting massages and telling her more and more about the wife who had walked out on him and his three-year-old daughter. The heartbreak in his life intensified Jenny’s feelings for him, to the point where she was going to ask him out if he didn’t hurry up and get around to it. And then—there always seemed to be an “and then” in her stories—Danny came to her one day and said he couldn’t see her anymore. Didn’t even take his clothes off for a final massage, just broke the news that he was getting married again, told her how much he was going to miss her, and left two hundred bucks on the table before he walked out the door. She didn’t find the money until later, and didn’t want it when she did. It only made her think of how bad she felt. The experience had been as painful as breaking up. She wished he had just stopped calling. That was what
the guys she didn’t give a damn about always did.

  She was trying to erase Danny from her mind when she turned off Wilshire and started looking for a parking place. There were two in the underground garage that came with the apartment, but one was permanently reserved for Scott and Sierra always used the other. Jenny was telling herself she’d have to sneak down and grab it as soon as Sierra left when she saw Mark parked out front. My very own stalker, she thought.

  It wasn’t that he was dangerous or anything, as far as she could tell. Every masseuse who was the least bit cute had a Mark in her life, sometimes two or three of them, and they were always so predictable. After the flowers and the pledges of love, he wanted to catch Jenny as she walked in and maybe get a spur-of-the-moment appointment. Or ask her if they could go for a cup of coffee before she started work. There were worse things that could happen, and right now she didn’t feel like dealing with any of them.

  Hoping Mark didn’t know what her car looked like, she drove past the apartment. As soon as she turned the corner, she grabbed her cell and called the apartment.

  Sierra answered and right away said, “You’re not calling in sick, are you?”

  “No,” Jenny said, thinking, What a bitch. “I just want to find out if I had any calls.”

  “Sorry, nothing from Barry,” Sierra said.

  Jenny hated her more than ever. “Okay. Anybody else?”

  “A couple guys said they’d call back, but didn’t leave their names.” Sierra dropped her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Cookie talked another guy that called for you into seeing her. She’s in with him now, in fact.”

  “That’s all right,” Jenny said. “Is that it?”

  “No, fuck, how could I forget?” Sierra said. “I’m so stupid.”

  Jenny wanted to tell her she already knew that. Instead, she waited for the insincerity to subside.

  “Mark called,” Sierra said. “Like four or five times. Cookie talked to him last, right before—”

  “He didn’t leave a number, did he?” Jenny asked.

  Once she had reassured Sierra that she really wasn’t calling in sick—“Honest,” she said—Sierra gave it to her. Jenny, making sure she stayed away from Mark’s stakeout position, tried not to run into anybody as she drove and dialed. He picked up on the first ring.

  “Hi, Mark,” she said.

  “Is this Coco?” he said.

  “You mean you don’t recognize my voice?”

  Now she was the bitch. She couldn’t help herself.

  “Well, yes, sure I do,” he said. “Of course.”

  “You’ve been calling, I hear,” she said.

  “Yeah, I’m, uh, I was hoping we could get together.”

  “Today?”

  “They said you were working.”

  “I start at four.”

  “So is it all right if I come over? Can you fit me in?”

  Okay, Jenny thought, time to spring the trap. “Are you close by?”

  “No,” Mark said, “I’m still at my office.”

  This was a first for Nick: the call from Coco before she showed up, the client lurking outside, the request to chase him away. Nick knew the guy she was talking about instantly. Coco didn’t make fun of many clients, but this one she did. Mark was the guy who wouldn’t go away. Of course Nick thought of Barry the same way. But Barry wasn’t the guy Nick was supposed to chase off. He would have enjoyed the hell out of that.

  Mark was parked where Coco said he’d be, next to the circular drive on the left. Nick wondered why he never got a space that close. He made his way out to the sidewalk and looked around like he was expecting somebody. Mark lowered his head and pretended to be reading something. He looked like just another blond L.A. guy. No tan, though. And clear glasses. Maybe that’s what happens to lawyers, Nick thought. You’re never out in the sun and your eyes go bad.

  Mark kept his head down as Nick stepped into the street and walked to the driver’s window. Peering inside, he could see that Mark was zeroed in on some legal documents. He still didn’t look up, even though Nick was sure he knew he had a visitor. There was nothing for Nick to do but rap on the window. Now Mark was looking. But he kept the window up, his last line of defense.

  Nick glanced around to make sure no one was watching. Then he said, “Roll it down.”

  “What?” Mark asked, acting like he hadn’t heard.

  “Your window,” Nick said. He made a rolling motion with his right hand, wondering if Mark would notice how big it was and the way the knuckles had been flattened.

  The window came down and Mark, trying to stay cool, said, “Can I help you?”

  “Yeah,” Nick said. “You can quit hanging around here.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mark said. “My office called about some paperwork—I’m a lawyer—so I pulled over and—”

  “Look, Mark . . . ”

  Mark blinked nervously.

  “That’s your name, right? Mark?” Nick didn’t wait for an answer. “You’re making a nuisance of yourself, and I’d like you to stop. Just start your car up and drive away.”

  “Did the manager send you out here?” Mark asked.

  Nick shook his head. “No, I’m not sure the manager knows anything about me. I’m from upstairs. You know the place I’m talking about.”

  Mark looked toward the sidewalk for help of some kind. When Nick checked to see what was there, he spotted two women who had to be in their seventies walking up from the corner. Maybe that explained why Mark seemed so defenseless when Nick turned back to him.

  “Does Coco know you’re doing this?” Mark asked.

  “She’s the one that asked me to come down,” Nick said.

  It was hard for him to look at the wounded expression that came over Mark’s face. Even if the guy was a pest and a creep and everything else Nick suspected he had it in him to be, he was devastated. It seemed like all he could do to drive away. Nick watched until he was out of sight, then headed back to the apartment, trying to forget the way the guy looked when his fantasy came undone.

  Nick wasn’t all the way through the door before Jenny asked, “Is everything okay?”

  “Well, he didn’t seem too happy.”

  Jenny felt her stomach do a flip. “You mean you beat him up?”

  “That was what you wanted, wasn’t it?”

  Nick looked so serious, Jenny thought she was going to have a heart attack.

  “No, I just wanted you to, you know, like scare him, make him quit bothering me. I never said anything about—”

  She stopped babbling when she saw Nick grin.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “I deserve it. But he is gone, right?”

  “Yeah. To tell you the truth, he didn’t seem like such a bad guy.”

  “He wasn’t. He just got a little carried away.”

  Nick nodded. “I hadn’t run into anyone like that before. Just a couple drunks or druggies, whatever they were, and a guy that didn’t have an appointment. Otherwise, you hardly need me except for cleaning up.”

  “You’ve got no idea,” Jenny told him. “The last place I worked, two girls got raped and robbed. I was the one who found them.”

  Nick let the silence settle around him and Jenny. “That’s not gonna happen here,” he said.

  The job had taught Jenny not to believe men, but when she looked into the dark eyes beneath Nick’s scarred brows, there was something besides sadness in them, and in that moment, she knew she could believe him.

  As soon as Scott arrived, he threw open the sliding doors to the terrace. The hell with how cold it was outside. Down in the fifties, he guessed. Like fucking Alaska. At ten at night, there wasn’t anybody around to bitch and moan as he let fresh air in and the smells of perfume and potpourri spray out. Jesus Christ! Somebody has been toking up. Probably Cookie. A couple times he’d dropped by when she was working the early shift and her eyes were already red at noon. He’d have to tell Nick to stay on her ass. The last thing he neede
d was a neighbor getting a whiff of weed and calling the cops.

  But the money was where it was supposed to be, in the security box, and Nick had left his accounting of the day’s action. The guy never fucked up plus you could read his writing. Scott didn’t understand how that could be, given all the times Nick had been hit in the head. Then he remembered it was Nick who had hit the other guy in the head too much. Now he was playing for Scott’s team, making sure nobody cheated Scott out of his money.

  Sierra was still raking it in, but Coco was the day’s big earner, the way she was almost every day she worked. And tomorrow was Friday, always the busiest day of the week, guys needing to get off before they went home for a long weekend with the wives they were sick of and the girlfriends they didn’t have the guts to dump. Scott shook his head, glad he hadn’t turned the little bitch down for denying him his God-given freebie but still determined to get himself a piece. Who was the fucking boss anyway?

  Then he resumed feeling sorry for himself. He’d been like this since Mercs blew up, assuming it was his privilege when he had to come up with the rent for two apartments, alimony for the ex he should have divorced before he knocked her up, and child support for kids he didn’t care if he ever saw again. Now there was talk that the makeup cunt was going to sue him for sexual harassment. His monthly nut was already the size of Dolly Parton’s knockers, and he had no idea how much longer he could handle it even without somebody new piling on.

  There was no counting on Hollywood coming to his rescue again, and the only other real job he’d ever had was moving furniture back in Missouri. For a moment, he wondered if the massage business might be his salvation after all. Maybe he could branch out into escorts, big-ticket whores, and become a twenty-first-century version of Ben Gazzara in Saint Jack. (Or was it John Cassavetes? He always got them confused.) But Saint Jack was set in Thailand or Burma, one of those places where nobody called you a sinner for peddling pussy. Over here, even in L.A., it got your ass thrown in jail sooner or later. Just thinking about it sent Scott back into his tailspin. He was wondering if Cookie had left any of her dope around when DuPree called and asked, “What up, dawg?”