A Widow for One Year (54 page)

In the open doorway stood a vivacious, red-haired whore. Her winered lipstick matched her claret-colored bra and panties, which were all she wore except for a gold wristwatch and a pair of jet-black sling-backs with three-inch heels. The prostitute was now taller than Ruth.

The window curtains were open, revealing an old-fashioned barstool with a polished brass base, but the prostitute was in the midst of a domestic pose: she stood in her doorway with a broom, with which she had just swept from her threshold a single yellow leaf. She held the broom at the ready, offering a challenge to more leaves, and she carefully looked Ruth over, from her hair to her shoes—as if Ruth were standing in the Bergstraat in her underwear and high heels and the prostitute were a conservatively dressed housewife dutifully attending to her chores. That was when Ruth realized that she’d stopped walking, and that the red-haired prostitute had nodded to her with an inviting smile, which—as Ruth had not yet found the courage to speak—was growing quizzical.

“Do you speak English?” Ruth blurted.

The prostitute seemed more amused than taken aback. “I don’t have a problem with English,” she said. “I don’t have a problem with lesbians, either.”

“I’m not a lesbian,” Ruth told her.

“That’s all right, too,” the prostitute replied. “Is it your first time with a woman? I know what to do about that.”

“I don’t want to
do
anything,” Ruth quickly stated. “I just want to talk with you.”

The prostitute became uncomfortable—as if “talk” were in a category of aberrant behavior, short of which she drew the line. “You have to pay more for that,” the redhead said. “Talk can go on for a long time.”

Ruth was nonplussed by the attitude that seemingly any sexual activity would be preferable to conversation. “Oh, of course I’ll pay you for your time,” Ruth told the redhead, who was scrutinizing Ruth meticulously. But it was not Ruth’s body that the prostitute was assessing; what interested her was how much money Ruth had paid for her clothes.

“It costs seventy-five guilders for five minutes,” the redhead said; she had correctly estimated that Ruth wore unimaginative but expensive clothes.

Ruth unzipped her purse and peered into her wallet at the unfamiliar bills. Was seventy-five guilders about fifty dollars? It struck Ruth as a lot of money for a five-minute conversation. (For what the prostitute
usually
provided—in the same amount of time, or less—it seemed insufficient compensation.)

“My name is Ruth,” Ruth said nervously. She extended her hand, but the redhead laughed; instead of shaking hands, she pulled Ruth into her small room by the sleeve of her leather jacket. When they were both inside, the prostitute locked the door and closed the window curtains; her strong perfume in such a confined area was nearly as overpowering as the redhead’s near-nakedness.

The room itself was all in red. The heavy curtains were a shade of maroon; the rug, a blood-red broadloom, gave off the faded odor of carpet cleaner; the bedspread, which neatly covered a twin-size bed, was of an old-fashioned, rose-petal pattern; the pillowcase for the solitary pillow was pink. And the towel, which was the size of a bath towel and a different shade of pink from the pillowcase, was folded perfectly in half and covered the center of the bed—no doubt to protect the bedspread. On a chair beside the tidy, serviceable bed stood a stack of these pink towels; they
looked
clean, if slightly shabby—just like the room.

The small red room was ringed with mirrors; there were almost as many mirrors, at as many unwelcome angles, as there were at the hotel’s health club. And the light in the room was so dim that, each time Ruth took a step, she saw a shadow of herself either retreating or advancing—or both. (The mirrors, of course, also reflected a multitude of prostitutes.)

The prostitute sat down on her bed in the exact center of the towel, without needing to look where she was sitting. She crossed her ankles, supporting her feet by the spikes of her heels, and leaned forward with her hands on her thighs; it was a pose of long experience, which pushed her pert, well-formed breasts forward, exaggerated her cleavage, and allowed Ruth a view of her small, purplish nipples through the claret-colored mesh of her demi-bra. Her bikini panties elongated the narrow V of her crotch and exposed the stretch marks on the prostitute’s pouting stomach; she’d clearly had children, or at least one child.

The redhead indicated a lumpy easy chair, where Ruth was supposed to sit. The chair was so soft that Ruth’s knees touched her breasts when she leaned forward; she needed to cling to the armrests with both hands in order to avoid the appearance of lolling on her back.

“The chair works better for blow jobs,” the prostitute told her. “My name is Dolores,” the redhead added, “but my friends call me Rooie.”

“Rooie?” Ruth repeated, trying not to think of the number of blow jobs that had been performed in the cracked-leather chair.

“It means ‘Red,’ ” said Rooie.

“I see,” Ruth said, edging herself forward in the blow-job chair. “As it turns out, I’m writing a story,” Ruth began, but the prostitute quickly stood up from her bed.

“You didn’t say you were a journalist,” Rooie Dolores said. “I don’t talk to journalists.”

“I’m
not
a journalist!” Ruth cried. (My, how that accusation stung!) “I’m a
novelist
. I write
books,
the kind one makes up. I just need to be sure the details are right.”

“
What
details?” Rooie asked. She wouldn’t sit down on the bed; she paced. Her movements allowed the novelist to see some additional aspects of the prostitute’s carefully appointed workplace. A small sink was mounted to an interior wall; beside it was a bidet. (There were several more bidets in the mirrors, of course.) On a table between the bidet and the bed was a box of tissues and a roll of paper towels. A white-enameled tray with a hospital aura held both the familiar and some
un
familiar lubricants and jellies, and a dildo of an uncomfortable size. Like the tray, of a similar hospital or doctor’s-office whiteness, was a wastebasket with a lid—the kind that was opened by stepping on a foot pedal. Through a partially open door, Ruth saw the darkened WC; the toilet, with a wooden seat, was flushed with a pull chain. And by the standing lamp with the scarlet stained-glass shade, a table next to the blow-job chair held a clean, empty ashtray and a wicker basket full of condoms.

These were among the details that Ruth needed, together with the shallowness of the room’s wardrobe closet. The few dresses and nightgowns, and a leather halter top, could not hang at right angles to the closet’s back wall; the clothes were twisted diagonally on their hangers, as if they were prostitutes attempting to show themselves at a more flattering angle.

The dresses and the nightgowns, not to mention the leather halter top, were entirely too youthful for a woman of Rooie’s age. But what did Ruth know about dresses or nightgowns? She rarely wore the former, and she preferred to sleep in a pair of panties and an oversize T-shirt. (As for a leather halter top, she’d never considered wearing one of those.)

Ruth began her story. “Suppose a man and a woman came to you and offered to pay you to allow them to watch you with a customer? Would you do that? Have you ever done that?”

“So
that’s
what you want,” Rooie said. “Why didn’t you say so? Sure I can do that—of course I’ve done that. Why didn’t you bring your boyfriend?”

“No, no—I’m not here with a boyfriend,” Ruth replied. “
I
don’t want to watch you with a customer—I can imagine that. I just want to know how you arrange it, and how common or uncommon it is. I mean, how often are you asked by
couples
? I would think that men, alone, would ask you more frequently than couples. And that women, alone, were . . . well, rare.”

“That’s true,” Rooie answered. “Mostly it’s men, alone.
Some
couples, maybe once or twice a year.”

“And women alone?”

“I can do that, if that’s what you want,” Rooie said. “I do that from time to time, but not often. Most men don’t mind if another woman watches. It’s the
women
who are watching who don’t want to be seen.”

It was so warm and airless in the room, Ruth longed to take her leather jacket off. But, in present company, it would be too brazen of her to be wearing just her black silk T-shirt. Therefore, she unzipped her jacket but kept it on.

Rooie walked over to the wardrobe closet. There was no door. A chintz curtain—in a pattern of fallen autumn leaves, mostly red— hung from a wooden dowel. When Rooie closed the curtain, it concealed the contents of the closet—except for the shoes, which she turned around so that their toes were pointed out. There were a halfdozen pairs of high-heeled shoes.

“You would just stand behind the curtain with the toes of your shoes pointed out, like the other shoes,” Rooie said. She stepped through the part in the curtain and concealed herself. When Ruth looked at Rooie’s feet, she could hardly tell the shoes that Rooie was wearing from the other shoes; Ruth needed to be
looking
for Rooie’s ankles in order to see them.

“I see,” Ruth said. She wanted to stand in the wardrobe closet to see what her view of the bed would be; through the narrow part in the curtain, it might be difficult to see the bed.

It was as if the prostitute had read her mind. Rooie stepped out from behind the curtain. “Here, you try it,” the redhead said.

Ruth could not avoid brushing against the prostitute when she slipped through the parted curtain. The entire room was so small that it was next to impossible for two people to move in it without touching.

Ruth fit her feet between two pairs of shoes. Through the narrow slit where the curtain was parted, she had a clear view of the pink towel centered on the prostitute’s bed. In an opposing mirror, Ruth could also see the wardrobe closet; she had to look closely to recognize her own shoes among the shoes below the bottom hem of the curtain. Ruth could not see herself through the curtain—not even her own eyes, peering through the slit. Not even a portion of her face, unless she moved, and even then she could detect only some undefined movement.

Without moving her head, just her eyes, Ruth could take in the sink and bidet; the dildo in the hospital tray (together with the lubricants and jellies) was clearly visible. But Ruth’s view of the blow-job chair was blocked by one armrest and the back of the chair itself.

“If the guy wants a blow job and someone’s watching, I can give him a blow job on the bed,” Rooie said. “If that’s what you’re thinking . . .”

Ruth hadn’t been in the wardrobe closet for more than a minute; she’d not yet noticed that her breathing was irregular, or that her contact with the gold-colored dress on the nearest hanger had made her neck begin to itch. She was aware of a slight discomfort in her throat when she swallowed—the last vestiges of her cough, she thought, or the coming of a cold. When a pearl-gray negligee slipped off a hanger, it was as if her heart had stopped and she had died where she always imagined she would: in a closet.

“If you’re comfortable in there,” Rooie said, “I’ll open the window curtains and sit in the window. But this time of day it might take a while to get a guy to come in—maybe half an hour, maybe as much as forty-five minutes. Of course, you’ll have to pay me another seventyfive guilders. This has already taken a lot of my time.”

Ruth stumbled on the shoes as she rushed out of the wardrobe closet. “No! I don’t
want
to watch!” the novelist cried. “I’m just writing a
story
! It’s about a
couple
. The woman is my age. Her boyfriend talks her into it—she’s got a bad boyfriend.”

Ruth saw, with embarrassment, that she’d kicked one of the prostitute’s shoes halfway across the room. Rooie retrieved the shoe; then she knelt at her wardrobe closet, straightening up the other shoes. She returned them all to the usual, toes-in position—including the shoe that Ruth had kicked.

“You’re a weird one,” the prostitute said. They stood awkwardly beside the wardrobe closet, as if they were admiring the newly arranged shoes. “And your five minutes are up,” Rooie added, pointing to her pretty gold watch.

Ruth again unzipped her purse. She took three twenty-five-guilder bills out of her wallet, but Rooie was standing close enough to look inside Ruth’s billfold for herself. The prostitute deftly picked out a fifty-guilder bill. “Fifty is enough—for five more minutes,” the redhead said. “Save your small bills,” she advised Ruth. “You might want to come back . . . after you think about it.”

So quickly that Ruth didn’t anticipate it, Rooie pressed closer to Ruth and nuzzled Ruth’s neck; before Ruth could react, the prostitute lightly cupped one of Ruth’s breasts as she turned away and again seated herself dead-center on the towel protecting her bed. “Nice perfume, but I can hardly smell it,” Rooie remarked. “Nice breasts.
Big
ones.”

Blushing, Ruth tried to lower herself into the blow-job chair without letting the chair claim her. “In my story . . .” the novelist started to say.

“The trouble with your story is that nothing happens,” Rooie said. “So the couple pays me to watch me do it. So what? It wouldn’t be the first time. So what happens
then
? Isn’t that the story?”

“I’m not sure what happens then, but that
is
the story,” Ruth answered. “The woman with the bad boyfriend is humiliated. She feels degraded by the experience—not because of what she sees, but because of the boyfriend. It’s the way
he
makes her feel that humiliates her.”

“That wouldn’t be the first time, either,” the prostitute told her.

“Maybe the man masturbates while he’s watching,” Ruth suggested. Rooie knew it was a question.

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” the prostitute repeated. “Why would the woman be surprised at that?”

Rooie was right. And there was another problem: Ruth didn’t know everything that could happen in the story because she didn’t know enough about who the characters were and what their relationship was. It wasn’t the first time that she’d made such a discovery about a novel she was beginning; it was just the first time that she’d made the discovery in front of another person—not to mention a stranger and a prostitute.