Slut Lullabies (10 page)

A window washer is looking right at her.

“Fuck!”

Annette staggers, half-falls back through the doorway separating Brent's bedroom and living room, then, in a panic that somehow the window washer can still see her (though she can no longer see him), scoots on her bare ass into the bathroom where there are no windows, and throws on Brent's robe. Cross-legged on the floor, heart pulsing in her ears, she listens as though the soundproof walls might give something away. Her watch is on the coffee table; she has no idea how long to wait, the duration of time it might take to clean such a gargantuan window and whether he was almost finished or had just begun. Her stomach growls impatiently. Brent has no food, though the mimosa would have calmed her hunger. She shouldn't have jumped, shouldn't have freaked out—should have strode right to the refrigerator and poured herself a drink, raised it toward him in a salute. Then she could have come back into the bedroom and gotten dressed and left like a woman entitled to be here, not like some perverted cat-burglar who takes to undressing in the homes of her victims and prancing about like a fool. Annette bursts into tears. It must be hypoglycemia. She has not eaten since half a tuna sandwich yesterday for lunch.

By the time she emerges, the tears have only made her feel silly. From the way she bolted, he probably guessed she'd run cowering to the bathroom to bawl like a baby. It doesn't matter now anyway. The window washer is gone.

Every afternoon, the butterflies in her stomach are the same. The turning of her key in the rusty mailbox, the flutter rising up her esophagus as she sorts through envelopes, scanning for a foreign stamp. Every afternoon, so that part of her always thinks
today
cannot be the day—good things have to catch you unaware, you cannot be caught waiting for them.
A watched pot never boils
. Once, Annette forced herself not to check the mail for four days, certain that her self-deprivation would magically produce a reward, but it produced only more bills Brent had to help her with, a jury summons, a letter from the INS addressed to her grandmother who has been dead for twenty years and never lived in this apartment. The way her hands perspired when she finally allowed herself to check the mail—key slipping from her grasp like a slimy bar of soap—embarrassed her sufficiently, so that she resigned herself to indulging her daily fix of nausea and disappointment. Since Nicky has been in Ghana, the progression has been from frequent long letters to sporadic postcards. He has been gone two years. Even his mother has more sense than to spend every day
expecting
.

Today is the day. Clutching what looks like an actual birthday card, Annette's heart surges violently forward, the rest of her taking a moment to catch up. She is almost angry: usually Nicky's holiday greetings arrive weeks late—now she will never know when to calm down. Unable to wait until she reaches the privacy of her own apartment, she rips open the envelope in the foyer, ankle-deep in discarded coupon pages, flyers, and advertisements.
Netty Baby
! But after that, she—Annette—disappears amid: . . .
we got them to donate some old computers and I've spent the better part of a month trying to sort them out, most were archaic
. Is relegated to the role of blind spectator:
I call our best student “Powder” because she's always covered in dust lighter than her skin, but her father won't let her come to school anymore since her mother had another baby and Powder has to take care of him while her parents work . . .

When Annette got dirty as a child, Nicky called her Pig Pen.
Her
dirt—Chicago dirt—was not imbued with the drama of Africa.
Her
absences from school were not because her working parents made her take care of the home, but because they were too busy to know or care where she went—and so she went with Nicky. Maybe she was never enough of a victim for him; all the time she was struggling to keep up, maybe she should have let herself fall so he could rescue her. Maybe then he would not have needed to go halfway around the world to feel important. Maybe then “archaic” would be written with irony—with an implicit wink,
Remember when we would've called that a ten-dollar-word
?—instead of carelessly, as though he had forgotten he was not addressing one of his Peace Corps buddies. Or maybe then they would just both be where they had always been: on drugs, in trouble, stagnant.

How can she explain to anyone—her mother, Brent, least of all Nicky in his campaign to save the world through the civilized means of computer training—that she wishes the brutal, crazy race toward death they once shared had never come to an end?

The window washer's jaw seemed vaguely Czech, she realizes. Square and animalistic, like the author of that novel she tried to read once—not at all like the actor who'd starred in the film version, ethereal Daniel Day-Lewis.
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
. She thinks it's still hidden under a mattress in her parents' home, like porn. Annette remembers a scene in the movie where Day-Lewis's character, Tomas, a doctor by trade, is forced out of his practice by oppressive Communists and has to become a window washer to make a living. Tomas systematically beds the housewives inside the homes whose windows he cleans—including the wife (played by a flat-chested, pug-looking actress) of a high-ranking Communist official. The scene intrigued Annette even before having a window washer of her own to think about, because it showed a man in a chick role—without money or power—using sex the way women had to: as revenge, as an equalizer. Though if she remembers right, Tomas-the-Powerful-Doctor was a player to begin with (easy since every woman wants to fuck a doctor), so maybe she doesn't get the point at all. Still, it makes her want to ask who ranks higher on the urban food chain: a financially dependent, poorly educated mistress of an influential married man, or a young, blue collar window washer, possibly of foreign descent, who has, regardless of other obvious social deficiencies, a dick?

She is not Brent's wife; it is not her apartment; fucking her would offer, in the sad, bottom-line truth of it, no revenge on the alpha males of the world.

But her square-jawed, secret Tomas knows none of this.

Once upon a time, Annette and her cousin Nicky were partners in crime. He introduced her to every illicit thing she did; she dated the Mafioso wannabes he traveled with, snorted the coke he sold, hung out at the club where he bounced. Before that, when he was nothing but another punk in the hood, fourteen to her ten, she worshipped him; trailed around behind his fellow gangbangers until the scummier among them, who could not get fourteen-year-old girls to make out with them, would settle for French kissing Annette behind the shelter court in the playground, groping up her shirt for breasts that wouldn't be there for three years.

She was prettier than other girls. It was her currency in the neighborhood, where being female or smart or ambitious didn't count for much, could even be a liability. Guys liked her, and since she was an only child, Nicky was her stand-in brother, protector and pimp in one. He guarded her virginity ruthlessly at first—threatened to smack her around if she drank or got high with anyone but him. But by the time she started high school it was as though his mission was accomplished, and like a hippie dad overeager to relive his own youth, he hastily drew her into his fold as a full initiate. Her school acquaintances amused her with their adolescent antics. By then she was going out with Nicky's best friend, a nineteen-year-old dealer; she got her coke for free. Even the sex didn't seem to bother Nicky anymore—when her first lover tired of her, there were a string of others, all stamped with Nicky's seal of approval, all in the club scene, all small-time aspiring gangsters in an era before
The Sopranos
made Guidos chic, all with a plethora of drugs and occasional free tickets to Vegas, all with hard, lean bodies and pissed-off pricks and a disgust for the female menstrual cycle that bordered on Hasidic.

In Nicky's world, her closest girlfriends were the rotating parade of girls his friends fucked. Women existed only on the fringes. She was really the
guys'
mascot; their team whore on a one-at-a-time basis. They trusted her, told her about the break-ins, the occasional shootings. She hid under the bed when somebody came trying to kill Nicky over a deal gone awry. It was a family.

“Blood is thicker than water,” Nicky always used to say. “You're the only one I can talk to.” He was that cinematic breed: the soulful gang-leader. His hair, in a sea of Brillo-pad Italian-boy heads, fell into his eyes in loose locks. They made such a beautiful pair that, hair wet, in skimpy swimsuits on Oak Street Beach, people gawked. But out in society, in clothes that grew progressively more expensive the more Nicky sold, a certain gaud easily distinguished them from the
righteous
affluent, those whose establishment she and Nicky gladly skirted. Women averted their eyes; men tightened their grips on their wallets. Nowadays, even though it has come back in fashion, Annette refuses to wear gold.

The facts: It was a Friday when the window washer first arrived (or rather, when she accidentally flashed him and noticed his existence—he had probably been at this job for some time). So, each Thursday night she makes certain to sleep at Brent's, which is easier now that his wife and their three children are in South Haven for the summer, and Brent drives up from Friday night to Sunday morning. Thursday evenings he is desperate to see her, desperate to fuck her brains out, even though he admits he and his wife
do
have sex. “It's easier than having to talk about why we never screw,” he says. Clearly no brains will be hitting the headboard in South Haven.

Annette sat, a tight coil beside Nicky's sprawled-wide legs. He was purposefully bored, having only come as a favor to her, one he wasn't intending to let her forget. Annette had read a review of
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
and
needed
to see it. She nursed a fantasy of herself as the kind of girl who liked foreign films, but the prospect of getting anyone she knew to sit through subtitles was nonexistent, and this movie—in English, but with its European stars and director—seemed a possible compromise. “You'll like it,” she'd begged Nicky. “It's supposed to be sexy.” To which he replied, “I don't need to go to the movies to get off.” He'd smuggled in more candy than they could eat, just to make a point.

This was the only cinema they'd ever visited together. Childhood movies they both loved—
Grease, Saturday Night Fever
—they'd seen separately, or on cable, getting high around the glow of somebody's mother's old TV. Yet he was here. It occurred to neither of them that she should go alone.

Nicky's every squirm and twitch jarred her. She imagined him berating her in his head for not reading the part about the movie being
three hours long
. When the credits finally rolled, she felt numb with relief.
The Unbearable Boredom of Being
, Nicky called it, filing out of the theater with his arm around her, periodically knuckling her head like when they were kids. “Those chicks weren't even hot,” he said. “One was old and the other had no tits. You put them to shame—why do you always wanna be somebody else?” It was the first time Annette ever felt embarrassed in front of Nicky, like he'd figured out something weak about her that she hadn't even known herself.

Afterward, though, clips from the film began playing in her sexual fantasies. She went out and bought the novel, by a strange Czech dissident whose jacket photo looked aggressive, angry, potentially violent. In the book, the Tomas character was supposed to be a much older man than scrumptious Daniel Day-Lewis—probably near fifty. The author used simple words, but his train of thought was confusing, preoccupied with classical music and philosophies with which Annette was unfamiliar. While she could sense the same erotic current of the film swimming just beneath so many inaccessible ideas, she ultimately tossed the novel aside and allowed Day-Lewis and his voluptuous on-screen lover, Lena Olin of the sultry bowler hat, to claim space in her head again, dismissing the book on which their roles had been based as part of a giant heap of things in life entitled OVER MY HEAD.

Whenever they were bored and trying to figure out what to do, Nicky would quip, “Hey Netty, why don't you pick out a movie for us to see,” and crack up. Sometimes she even scanned the paper for the dullest possible titles to throw his way deadpan—
Babette's Feast, The Belly of An Architect
—he got a real kick out of that.

Every week, she waits. The trick is enticing Brent into remaining with her past 8:00 Friday mornings. She calculates that it was 10:15 the first time she saw the window washer, and she isn't quite certain why Brent was running so late, or rather why he wanted to screw instead of walking out the door at his usual time. If only she hadn't been so abysmal in bed that morning—damn Nicky, distracting her on her birthday—now there is probably no hope of getting Brent to sleep in again on a Friday morning so the window washer can watch them fuck. The first Thursday after the flashing, Annette is so desperate that she just turns off Brent's alarm clock once he is asleep, although of course when he wakes, an hour late, he is frantic and rushing and would not touch her if he were off to spend a
month
in South Haven and his wife was the only woman in the town.

It turns out not to matter because the window washer does not show up anyway. The second week, Annette hits a grand slam by waking up and announcing she just had an orgasm in her sleep while dreaming about anal sex—that garners her so many points that she is even able to lure him out into the living room to do it on the floor only a foot away from the last window washer sighting. But again, the Czech-jawed boy does not arrive. The third week, Annette feels depressed and gives no effort at all; she refuses his advances at 7:00 since his timing is all wrong—no way can he last three hours. She claims she has to meet her mother at the hospital for an early morning colonoscopy Ma is afraid to have, and scurries out, then regrets not even being able to verify the window washer's absence. So the fourth week, hope renews: once a month, that would make sense. Thursday night she stretches in the crook of Brent's arm and says, “I never cook for you. I wish I could cook you breakfast tomorrow, before you leave for the weekend. Do you have any important meetings in the morning?”