Slut Lullabies (11 page)

Remarkably, the answer comes back, “Nothing I can't change.”

The stage is set.

What she hopes: the window washer will imagine she's in trouble. He will think Brent is exploiting her—even heroes in movies fall in love with whores if they belong to powerful men. Her Tomas will be an honest, hard-working, blue collar laborer. He will be the kind of man she would have met in her old neighborhood—the kind of man her mother met—if she had not spent so much time chasing Nicky's drug-induced dreams of glamour and power and money. Nicky left her at the precipice between two worlds, where it was impossible anymore to be a normal neighborhood girl and get a job at the deli counter of Dominick's and marry the night manager and buy a characterless new construction home in the cultural wasteland of the far southwest suburbs. But she could never be
more
either—never move among wives who summer in South Haven, or Gold Coast career women with their law degrees and androgynously beige Todd flats. She is a mistress out on the ledge of wealth and privilege, constantly in danger of falling, and she needs someone—a working class hero without a fear of heights—to throw her a rope. They could marry. She is only twenty-seven. She would bear him strong sons. Daughters are just too hard to raise.

If this were a film, the past three weeks would end up on the cutting-room floor. Jump from Scene 1:
Annette sitting weeping on Brent's bathroom floor, cowering in his robe after having been seen naked by (certainly, if it were Hollywood) a roguishly handsome, young, foreign window washer
to Scene 2:
Annette and Brent at dining room table, a distance from but still visible to the picture window where said washer first made his appearance. Brent's back faces window, since that is the chair where Annette set his mimosa (and the view is commonplace to him); Annette, at his right, has eye on window. Washer appears—it is nearly 10:00 on the dot, like fucking clockwork; it is symbolism of some kind that the audience will be left to decipher later. Annette loosens Brent's robe.

The washer is not alone this time. (Did he have a partner last time, too, and Annette was just in too much of a tizzy to notice?) He and the other man, also young, probably Mexican, halt laughing, stare as Annette, who has been serving breakfast in the nude, undoes her lover's robe and sinks to her knees.

Head is a sure way to make certain a man has absolutely no desire to turn around and look out the window behind him.

This other guy, not at all good looking, with a shadow of pubescent acne, unnerves her, but she has come too far. He will be edited out for the movie's release. No, he definitely wasn't here last time; he couldn't have been.
Her
window washer will remember her, remember what he saw last time. Will know this is for him.

Between Brent's flapping robe and the fact that she must kneel directly in front of him if she means to keep his back fully to the window, Annette is unable to meet her window washer's eyes.

Annette had just turned twenty-one the summer Nicky saved that woman.

The crime bosses with whom he was loosely affiliated were also heavily into construction, so since bouncing only took a few hours in the evenings, Nicky was a laborer by day. His buddies on the site mocked him when he shouted them over, “Look at that dude, shit, he's gonna kill that woman!” “Yeah, it's fucking
Rear Window
,” one of the older men scoffed, but Nicky was already racing for the lift. They hummed bars of the
Superman
theme song as he rode down to the ground, sped up God-only-remembered how many flights of stairs in the building across the way. Nobody followed him. Sure, several told the police later, “everyone” had seen “that spade smacking around his old lady,” but it looked like she was getting in his face pretty good—it didn't look like anything serious. Nobody, Annette least of all, could guess how Nicky knew.

By the time he got there, the woman was unconscious. Though not yet showing, she was four months pregnant. Nicky ran right in through their unlocked door (“He wrestled the gun from that crazy sonofabitch's hand,” said one of the witnesses at the construction site who'd watched it all through the apartment's window), but the assault victim still miscarried. Nicky mourned the death of the child—the fetus. Publicly. On the news, over and over, while interviewed about his heroic rescue. On local talk shows, on NPR. On camera for Channel 7, he cried.

The baby-killer was strung out on crack, which he had not purchased from any of the numerous construction site dealers, having connections of his own. After that, Nicky wouldn't touch drugs. Mere weed was repellent to him. He put in his time at the site, but he wouldn't deal anymore. Even his ex-bosses approved. He was their resident hero, their local boy made good. They crowed when he joined the Army. His soldier's patriotism would atone for all their sins.

All at once it is clear: the first Friday of every month, Brent's building's window washers clean his windows. Though their staff of cleaners may be quite large,
her
window washer is most frequently assigned to Brent's windows—though not always. Once, two completely other men appeared outside, and Annette calmly walked into the bedroom, dressed, and went back to her own apartment to find her mailbox empty, then spent the day trying to find something clever to say to Nicky in a letter, but she suspected her grammar was faulty, her spelling childish, and that her life would depress him.

In
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
, the Communist official's wife opened her window and Tomas climbed right in, but the picture windows of Chicago high-rises do not open. In order to reach her, the washer would have to go past the doorman, through the lobby, up the elevator. She would have to mouth the apartment number through the glass—she imagines their hands meeting on opposite sides of the pane, like prisoners and their wives on visitation day.

Except that here, she is the prisoner, by choice, in a very expensive cage.

He probably thinks she is a prostitute. He must figure Brent for some kind of exhibitionist homosexual who pays a beautiful woman to come to his apartment and put on a show for the young hotties who do physical labor at his building. What
woman
, after all, would voluntarily spend the first Friday of every month performing sexual acts in front of a stranger outside the window—sometimes more than one stranger?

He probably thinks, on the mornings she has been unable to get Brent to stay put and put out (so she masturbates alone with her eyes clamped shut), that her john is lurking somewhere just out of eyesight, surveying his whore's performance from the other side of the wall.

Nicky stood on her parents' front porch waiting for her to come out and say good-bye. It was August then like now. She emerged with cotton stuffed between bare toes, nails glimmering with purple polish. He held out a can of MGD and Annette took a big swig, lipstick leaving a waxy lavender smudge. They stood swallowing hard like small town teens on a first date.

“They'll make you cut your hair,” Annette said. His hair was not inordinately long. He stared at her, his expression vague, grasping.

“You'll be cool, Netty. You've got a job, a diploma—shit, your dad's right inside that door eating dinner with your ma, not rotting in jail like my old man. You've got everything going for you, babe. You don't need me.”

She'd scraped her wet toenail against the tiny rocks embedded in the cement of her front steps, ruined all her hard work. “I never said I did.”

“Yeah, see.” He punched her in the arm. “You're tough.” Then, like he couldn't make up his mind: “Don't be that way.”

He was right. His control over her life had always been conceptual, not actual. Sweat drizzled the bones of her chest, bare above an old terrycloth tube top she'd had since eighth grade. He was right. No point in even bringing up the three abortions she'd had over the past seven years at his counsel, or the fact that only the first guy to knock her up even merited a punch, while the other two were in his inner circle, entitled to plant their seed even if they did not want to raise it. No point in asking why he'd never shed any tears for her dead children,
his
thick blood, even when Channel 7 panned in for a close-up of his dramatically rolling tear over the probably-brain-damaged product of junkie parents. Annette's nose membranes were so abused they both knew hers would have been brain damaged, too.

He leaned in to kiss her cheek, some kid sister too young to care that he was heading off to college. She turned abruptly so he got her lips instead. He jerked back and she glowed, triumphant, but then his hand reached out just as quick, so fast she feared he might belt her. Instead his fingers grazed lightly, almost lazily over her collarbones, downward, wiping away perspiration. She jumped, bumped her hip against the door frame. He grinned, and all at once it was a smile of everything, a smile of
I could've had you if I wanted to
, a smile of
See, I did the right thing there, too
. She sensed he wanted her to be grateful somehow, for leaving her intact. She felt abject, insignificant, naked. Nothing like gratitude.

But he was backing down the stairs, hands spread between a wave, an apology, an offering. Her lips parted to speak: nothing else. His eyes were over her already, busy doing his bad-boy-poet thing, dreaming of the stars.

This is how a hero is fashioned: like everyone else who knew him, the Army was impressed by Nicky. With the earnestness of a new convert, he set about devouring every education they could offer. In the span of four year's time, he finagled not only a GED, but a BA in computer science, then hurled with all his might toward the Peace Corps. To Ghana, where fellow aid workers muttered how he'd “gone native”—that he failed to exhibit the proper alarm when flies congregated on an open sore. He wrote these things in letters at first; he wanted to impress her, maybe. He preached of his determination to drag his corner of the third world into a technological age that, here in Chicago, still baffled Annette. Words like
archaic
rolled off his pen. He learned to see art in the dusty dirt powdering a young African girl's night-black skin. He forgot the audience of his letters home, then forgot to write letters home altogether. He was home.

“Are you leaving early this morning?” she asks Brent when he slings his suit jacket over his arm: another man with a mission.

“Early for what?” he asks. “I was supposed to be at the office five minutes ago.”

She has no answer. She has long suspected he is secretly aware of her games with the window washer—that he allows himself to be detained in order to play along. But no, Brent is a shy man really. He once told her a story about going to a nude beach with friends and pleading with his wife not to take her suit off so that he would not be the only one who refused to undress. His wife laughed at him and flung her bikini off. Annette has seen photos of her (clothed) and she is overweight, very Tipper Gore. Brent has a nice body, swimmer's shoulders and no spare tire to speak of. The story surprised her—made her wonder for the first time if his wife might have a lover, too. If she might not consider Brent any great loss.

She re-dresses in the lingerie she wore last night, it having spent only five minutes on her body before Brent peeled it off. Patiently, she reclines on the leather sofa—but it is only 8:15 and she will have a long wait. She stands and paces the room, restless in luxurious captivity, touching everything she passes, leaving her scent. Brent's bookshelves bear titles too divergent to reflect the mind of a man she has never seen reading anything but the
Wall Street Journal
: from self-help for golfers to volumes on the Ming Dynasty to Stephen King to
Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus
. Although the city apartment is mostly his, perhaps some of these belong to his nudist wife. That she is utterly uncertain which—cannot differentiate her lover's taste from that of a woman she has never met—saddens her only vaguely. Among the closely packed book spines, she recognizes the name of the same angry Czech who wrote
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
. Has this always been here? It is a short story collection:
Laughable Loves
. A less imposing title, surely. She extracts it carefully, memorizing the books on either side, brings it back to the couch.

Annette's course without Nicky was a smooth ascent among married men. From hostessing at
ristoranti
run by whichever of Nicky's friends she was currently banging, to affairs with coke-loving options traders who frequented these establishments, and finally to the fortysomething head of a prestigious, privately-owned trading firm. Once she met Brent, being a “restaurant girl” didn't fit anymore—didn't leave her evenings free enough to accommodate a busy lover, made her too visible, exposed her to the eyes of too many men. Her breakfast of coke, snacks of speed, and bedtime milk-and-cookies of Flexiril compromised her looks, her ability to say the right thing at all times, so she quit cold: her own choice. She learned never to wear eyeliner on the inside of her lower eyelid—to wear just enough makeup to look like she doesn't need makeup. To wear very high heels, but not too-tight clothes. She keeps her nails short and square.

Yet here she is. She cannot understand
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
. She does not even have a job. Her apartment is a shithole because she spends all her money on the maintenance of beauty, and Brent will
help
—as they all have—but not so much that she might feel she has enough and want to leave. Not so much that someone better might mistake her for being in his league. Her haircut is more flattering now; her life has been prolonged by getting off drugs; a rendezvous in Paris with a lover who speaks French beats those old weekends in Vegas hands down—obviously. Annette
knows
that Nicky saved his own life when he saved a stranger from a man just like him.