High Life (18 page)

“Come and sit with me for a few minutes.”

We climbed in and the car moved out onto the road. Bella told the chauffeur to drive down the street a little way and park, then she slid up the partition. The cabin light threw gold across tan leather and the black glass windows held infinite concertina reflections of ourselves.

Bella took her jacket and skirt off. I held her tits for a while, and then she had me suck them. The seat made a soft crunching noise as she lay back and pulled off her briefs. The seam of her cunt glistened. She ran her hands over the insides of her thighs, then opened it up.

“Watch.”

She started slowly, drawing her fingers through her labia, making lazy circles over her clit. My dick was painful against my trousers and I undid my fly and took it out. Bella’s hand moved faster between her legs. After a while she arched her back and slid a finger into her asshole. She moaned and shuddered. Her hand went lazy again, over her belly and breasts. The muscles in her legs relaxed, she sat up and kissed me.

“Maybe I should kick you out of the car now.”

“You’re kidding.”

She laughed and put her head in my lap. And it was weird. Every woman sucks in a different way and a lover’s blow job is as distinctive as her voice or the smell of her hair. Bella hadn’t gone down on me before in either of our two previous connections, but somehow the movement and the feel of her mouth were familiar to me. It was a dim recognition, one I couldn’t link to any particular time or place, but it was there nevertheless. Right then, though, I had too much input coming from elsewhere to worry about memories, so I put it down to some sort of sexual déjà vu and concentrated on stuffing myself into her mouth. When I came she swallowed some of it and let the rest run down the outside of my cock. I had to wipe myself with the tail of my shirt.

While her back had been bent I’d seen more clearly the scarab at the base of her spine.

“I like your tattoo.”

“Oh, that … I had it done with a friend, one of those silly, spur of the moment things. Pull up your pants, I have to go.”

I stood on the sidewalk. As she pulled away, Bella wound down her window and called to me:

“What do you think about love, Jack? Do you think it can happen this quickly?”

Then she was just a pair of taillights getting smaller on a wide city road. I watched them fade until a gray sedan took the same line and obstructed my view.

Emmett Terrace. Home. A room hissing with late-night isolation. I ran gossip on the vid until the examination of better lives than mine became too much for me and I had to kill the screen. Darkness swallowed the room, followed a minute later, as my eyes adjusted, by the orange glow that seeped through the fabric of the blind. It caught the edges of things, made ochre cross-hatchings of pieces of furniture and the corners of walls. I drifted, exhausted. Thoughts chased themselves through my head.

Bella’s blow job … Bella’s blow job … The way she took the whole of my cock and pushed it all the way back so I’d ended up fucking the soft tissue at the top of her throat. Why was it familiar? As I slipped into semiconsciousness the feel of my cock in her neck haunted me. I floated with the sensation, trying to focus on it in the hope of finding some explanation, but I couldn’t stop other images creeping in—a car door shutting, flashes of Hollywood through a window, a head of silver hair, gravel against my cheek … When two tramps made an appearance I came awake with a start. I knew where the memory of her mouth came from—Bella’s blow job matched the inexplicable memory of oral sex I’d woken with in the alley after my abortive attempt to locate Doctor Kidney.

Bizarre, to say the least. So bizarre, in fact, it made a couple of other things seem odd. Her tattoo, for instance. Of course, tattooists work from patterns and in the city there might be hundreds of people sporting the same design. But it was strange that both my wife and the first nontrade fuck I’d had after her death should wear identical marks. Then there was the fact that she’d turned up at my apartment so soon after I’d been drugged and dumped in the alley …

I caught myself. A day spent hungover was obviously taking its toll. I was allowing coincidence to become paranoia. And, at what I hoped was the beginning of a relationship with a woman who could make my life very much better than it was, I didn’t need to be having that kind of brain function.

To channel my thoughts in a different direction I pictured how she’d looked fingering herself in the back of the limo. But that dredged up a wave of despondency. Maybe it was irrational after only two fuck sessions and a blow job, but I’d expected to be taken back to her house after the Bradbury thing. And she’d put me off with some shit about her father.

It didn’t take too many synaptic firings to realize that if I was ever going to get anything beyond money for a suit I needed to strengthen my connection with her. That meant I’d have to push myself into her world, instead of letting her just dip into mine.

I woke thinking about Daryl Hannah, about how her mornings must be. How she’d lie on a king-size bed in a pure white room the size of a tennis court with sunlight cutting swaths across the carpet. And just a short distance beyond the floor-to-ceiling windows, a matter of yards perhaps, the sea would roll under blue sky and fat white clouds. The maid would come in with a light breakfast of coffee and croissants and the aroma of the freshly roasted beans and the delicate pastry would mix with the clean salt air and just that, just those three simple smells and the ocean breeze against your skin would remind you that you were a god.

I got out of bed, drank a can of Pepsi, and found Ryan’s number in a dirty pair of jeans that lay with all my other clothes in a greasy pile on the floor. I hesitated. It wasn’t an easy thing to do, making deliberate contact with Mr. Frightening. But I wanted my mornings to be like Daryl Hannah’s and there was no other way to get Bella’s address.

I arranged a meet for that afternoon. I didn’t say what I wanted. Ryan sounded smug on the phone, thinking, no doubt, I was ready to spill some Karen-related info.

At night, darkness and neon dazzle threw a deceitful caul over the drag, hiding the patina of blood, semen, and shit that layered the sidewalks and the buildings and glued the whole place together. Daytime, though, it was a wound laid bare. Drifts of trash sloped against walls like dunes on a beach. Pools of drying vomit mixed their stink with the acrid burn of piss that drifted from every ground-level recess and alley entrance. What little glamour the place managed to disguise itself with through the prime-time hours was mercilessly stripped away the instant the sun rose.

The whores were thinner on the ground when it was light, but they were still there—the more determined or the more desperate—hanging out for the midday trade of office drones who prefered a fast fuck in a wardrobe-size cubicle to eating salad in the company lunch room.

I had souvlaki and coffee at a counter and watched them parade listlessly along the street, wondering what type I’d need to hook Ryan. A simple fuck wouldn’t cut it. He’d get freebies for the asking—flash the badge and any girl would spread herself open to avoid the hassle of a trip to the station and a night’s loss of earnings. No, to get Bella’s address out of a guy who watched girls do it with jackhammers I’d need something more toxic.

In the months I’d been hanging there I’d come to know things about a few of the girls—maybe you chat with them over a drink while they’re between tricks, maybe you overhear gossip, some info you pick up just by watching what goes down on the street. It isn’t anything self-improving but it helps pass a slow night.

And that was how I’d heard about Rosie. She was a brunette in her forties who worked more for pleasure than for business—she got off having guys shit in her mouth. Rumor was she had a husband and a couple of kids somewhere, but she spent so much time on the drag, day and night, I didn’t think it was true.

I found her in her usual spot, standing in the doorway of an abandoned corsetry store in a cross-street twenty yards back from the drag, like her noneconomic motivation segregated her from the rest of the whores. She wore a black latex minidress and her body looked soft and a little overweight. I’d pawned the suit Bella had paid for, and with the rest of my money I had about three hundred bucks. I knew it was going to take most of it to get her to trek over to Santa Monica with me, but that was the way it had to be. Her mouth had some sort of nervous tic that made her lips pull back from her teeth when she spoke.

“So who’s the john?”

“A guy.”

“Yeah, but he does what?”

“Does it matter? I’m paying.”

“Sure it matters. I’ll do it whatever, but it can make a difference. For instance, lifestyle is very important. A man who spends all day sitting on his behind eating refined foods, chances are his output will be less than spectacular. Believe me, I’ve learned the importance of fiber. Doughnuts for breakfast, burrito for lunch, fried chicken for dinner, you’re going to get a six-inch turd if you’re lucky. Skinny, too. Someone who eats muesli and exercises, well, that’s a different story. They’re going to lay eighteen inches of healthy shit, minimum.”

“Size is important?”

“It feels heavier. But it’s a trade-off too, because shit from an out-of-condition colon smells more powerfully. Given the choice, though, nine times out of ten I’ll go for size. Maybe seven times out of ten.”

“Don’t worry, this guy’s full of shit.”

“That’s a joke, right?”

We purred down Santa Monica Boulevard in the Prelude.

Ryan had parked in front of the Senior Citizens Center and was sitting on a bench under a palm. There wasn’t a homeless person within thirty yards. I guess one of them must have fucked with him and got burned. I left Rosie in the car and went and sat next to him.

“Jackie, how nice to see you. Tell me about the limo outside the Bradbury Building.”

“The Bradbury Building?”

“From where I was it looked like the same bim you had over at your place.”

I remembered the gray sedan that had blocked my view after Bella pulled away.

“I’ll trade you the limo story for an address.”

“Jackie, I don’t know if our relationship has reached the trading stage. What address?”

“The woman at my place, the woman at the Bradbury Building. She forgot to pay me.”

Ryan laughed.

“I saw she left you on the sidewalk. What happened? Couldn’t perform?”

“The address? You got it through DMV, remember?”

“Oh, I got it through more than that. Give with the story first.”

I didn’t want to give him anything without a guaranteed return, but Ryan had the upper hand and there wasn’t much else I could do.

“She called me up and invited me to a party.”

“Sounds like she’s getting serious.”

“She needed an escort, that’s all.”

“What about those fifteen minutes in the back of the limo?”

“You were counting?”

“I was imagining what kind of technique she was using on your meat.”

“Jesus …”

“For her address I want details, like it was one of those phone sex things.”

“You know what I was doing, you know I didn’t go home with her. That’s enough. See that woman in my car? She’s paid for, and she isn’t your usual hooker.”

“I can see that. How old is she?”

“She comes when you shit in her mouth.”

Ryan reached a heart pill out of his pocket.

“You’re quick, Jackie, but then I never figured you for dumb. Where are we supposed to do it?”

“I’ll spring for a room.”

“Get me in the mood. Tell me how it happened in the back of the limo.”

“Shit, Ryan, she’ll tell me where she lives pretty soon anyway.”

“But you can’t wait.”

“You’ll give me the address if I do?”

“Word of honor.”

So I told it like it was something out of a porn rag. Details like the trace of shit I noticed when Bella pulled her finger out of her ass, like the gulping sound she made when I came in her mouth. When I finished, Ryan stood up abruptly and started for his car.

“Let’s go. Don’t bother getting her out, just follow me. You know the Starway on Wilshire?”

“Give me Bella’s address and take her with you. I’ll give you the money for the room.”

“Oh, no, Jackie, you have to come too.”

The Starway Motel was a dump that stood across from a shoe retailer on the eastern boarder of Santa Monica. It was the kind of place where ten-year-old Trans Ams and Camaros pulled up late at night then disappeared before dawn without the owners ever being seen. The rooms invited invasion—the windows didn’t shut properly, the doors didn’t latch. Inside, the carpet was greasy and the sheets were stained. But it was cheap, and if the other guests weren’t actively trying to rip you off they pretty much minded their own business.

Rosie took an eight-foot square of plastic sheeting from her bag and spread it out in the middle of the room. I climbed onto the bed and sat with my back in a corner. I was pissed off. I wanted Bella’s address safe in my hand, I wanted to be out, heading toward it. Instead I was stuck here, hanging on Ryan’s string, not knowing if he intended to make good on his promise or not.