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an excerpt from my novel, Sea of Favors.
to read more, drop me a line.
The money was lying on the corner of the table and that was always important. $150.00, mostly always cash and she threw it down onto the table like it wasn’t important just a formality, but it was more than that. A few feet away from the corner of the table, on the bed, a mechanic has undressed himself and now moves a hand down Kate’s hip and up again, a clean, raw hand, scrubbed out from under a weeks worth of grease until a fresh layer of skin has been made ready. That’s what she gets, that is her desserts. The hundred and fifty is just a formality, vulgar even to the mechanic who doesn’t want to see it now, he just wants to break in a new layer of skin.
She is long, sinewy, open next to him on the bed, and he knows she will let him do anything, and not just because of the hundred-fifty. So he takes his time, lying on the bed next to a beautiful woman for what he knows is the first time in his life; it’s dark, but he’s neither tired nor worried about the morning. No baby is crying in the next room and it is even quiet, seems quiet everywhere and he is allowed to create the noise if he wishes or turn on a light, he has paid. But that’s not important now and she prefers the dark just now, she has told him, like he was granting a whim leaving it off. The money is not visible in the dark, but it still smells like a transmission, maybe a leaky fuel pump, enough to remind her who is there, enough to remind him. But he does not need to forget or make excuses; he has paid, though that doesn’t seem to explain his luck as he touches the smooth skin, runs his hand along the form next to him with nothing stopping him or telling him to stop or what to do until, his hand stops at a breast. Is stopped. Oh, God. He curves his hand around it, circling, oh, but not too forcefully because it is not necessary. His own hand seems small and he presses into one breast then the other, the softest infinity, feels himself pull closer to her, naturally, the victim of a greater force than he though she doesn’t seem to move. But she participates, touches him, and the box springs creak as they move toward the center of a place he should not be admitted simply by the price he has paid, will not be able to equate to six oil changes or flushing out a radiator. The warmth he feels is greater and less permanent even than these things but the power to feel what he feels is so unlikely to be brought about by them that the smell of his money evaporates with the uneasy quiet and he murmurs into the small of her neck the secret of his one desire. Not in words, but she understands perfectly for the bed is old, creaky, and she holds him, pulls him to her with a perfection which would make tears roll from his eyes if not for the limitless potency she has passed to him, so strong and clear he hasn’t even the need to fear or mourn the harm she brings to his world. There is a stop. Then there is great movement under his power as she is able to allow herself to be seized by his wishes alone; ultimate, enduring commands without words or their need, for which he is grateful though in whose presence he has always felt inferior. Now he sees that they have never been necessary, realizes the self in his possession, hidden under the years and debts, wrongs and searches for the words to make them right again. But he has not labored in vain, he has reached this point at least and there is clarity, of uncertain origin from his height atop the smooth form that quivers just enough beneath his power, perfectly enough to make him believe it is because of him. Not the money, nor the witness of the bed that has become its own third person. It is all by him and he is finally a god from behind his own eyes, omnipotent inasmuch he wants to be for he is not bothered by the goals of the intellectual nor the problems of the priest; just a simple need for salvation, the real comfort of an open palm on his back, moving back and forth, telling him things about himself he had never imagined. As quickly as it had begun, it has ended and he feels no danger of losing his glory except being fallen with the moral dilemma that he should not pay her at all or cannot pay her enough.
“It’s juuust right,” she says, and giggles furtively, which reassures him. She sounds satisfied, but now it is hard for him to believe she is. His undeniable power has faded a little and he watches her roll over on the bed suspiciously. Now all of her movements are contemptible, suspect, even her utter stillness upon the sheets next to him. His mind runs through the traps of possession all men feel once they have dined on Kate Crane, have experienced the feeling of outlasting her only to see her roll over, stretch out. What does it take to move her? The metal clicks of the sharpened blades rattle against his heart as they have against the warm and the cold, the hardened and the sensitive others who have come to her. Whose money she has placed on the corner of the table a few steps from the bed, who have felt invited to enter, which had been important.
But he doesn’t like it now, and rolls her over forcibly with one of his big hands, trying to kiss her like he thought he would do at the beginning but had not. She pushes him away.
“Hey! Stop it! What are you doing?” she lowers her voice during the question and looks at him as though she was actually puzzled. She is not frightened, and he feels clownish, ogreish, and as a child in her presence. Beneath her eyes is a canyon of a man that she has just allowed free roam over her body for the price of seven of his wage hours yet nothing now, and he cannot fully comprehend the transaction. He is tripped up by the figures, not least the naked one next to him, but that she out earns him by such a tremendous ratio. She thinks; it comes to her.
“Richard. Do you know what a hundred and fifty bucks means between me and you?” He smiles. “Do you?” She is serious but not angry, though he tests her with his silence. “Well, right now, it means nothing. We’re even. You’re new, so I don’t mind explaining this to you once, though I don’t like to. I’d rather have a cigarette and some of that bourbon you brought. But no more grabbing, okay? You and I, we don’t need it.” He could still watch her though, get up and walk across the room to the chair where her clothes were draped. He thought she had thrown them off as he had his, which were strewn about the floor, but maybe he didn’t realize she had thrown them off many times, many times now, and had simply achieved a certain accuracy. Her clothes were beautiful, but they were more garments than clothes, fine fabrics respectful, completely mindful of the body simmering below their edgeless surfaces. A sheer, white silk blouse without buttons but gathered, not to conceal her breasts but to connote of them; then a shiny skirt she seemed to slip over her shoulders without effort and cover herself for good.
“You shouldn’t smoke, you now,” he said after entering the parlor off the kitchen and seating himself in the other of two chairs situated before an unlit fireplace. She blew smoke toward the darkened hearth and looked at his wristwatch as if consumed by a great thirst to know the time, to make it pass. They had talked for an hour upon his arrival about the larger nature of small things in his life; she explained that he had accomplished a formidable degree of self-sufficiency with his skill and listened as he explained his occupation in wonderful and magnanimous generalities that normally escaped him. But all that seemed far away now and he felt incapable again of the transcendental parlor talk that could rein in her attention a second time and perhaps replay the night. After fifteen minutes he excused himself, and as she listened for the screen door to slam after him, Kate took a little comfort in her night. Proscribed, she listened to the night outside the old house and relaxed with the last of her glass of bourbon. He had surprised her with a kindness and performance not common in working men, but his clumsiness and lack of conversation afterward had been more ordinary. He didn’t need them and she forgave him for that. He had arrived with a single-mindedness that she had calmed and stroked into a more easy to accept lover, had broken the stallion which had first conceived in him the idea of paying for love. If he left with his heart in a scramble and his mind in rebuke, well, that was okay; he could believe he’d gotten something for free.
But Kate was not concerned with these things, and worried not about the adult consequences of adult decisions. She did not accept the money of young lovers as a rule, but beyond that, she knew men were as inclined to hurt themselves as anyone, with or without her. No, after the screen door hit its wooden stop Kate could think of many things through the joy of being alone, but love was not one of them. That is, she chose not to be troubled by love. She had enjoyed a seduction, though it had been simple and easy, and without the dangers and ecstasies of love. But she had enjoyed it just the same. And she was not ashamed of enjoying it and in no danger of fooling herself into thinking it an accomplishment. Poor men in search of comfort are not a seduction or capable of it in and of themselves; they are too weary. But she had lured him into something outside his vulnerability upon arrival in fresh clothes and clean fingernails. It was easy, she was beautiful. But he had paid for these things knowingly.
Kate first met the candidate as the head of a pack of also-rans; eloquent, meticulous, and lonely. He was handsome for a man of almost sixty, though she didn’t care for attraction and had to avoid preferences at all costs. Her own beauty weeded out the ignoble, the unworthy, brought about the quick re-evaluations of desire and self-worth even where there was a price. But politicians are a breed convinced of their own grace and importance, of being perfectly suited to any opportunity, and when he saw her for the first time even at a distance, he was sure that he was up to challenge he had not even known to have existed.
“Sure, I remember that,” she said, blowing smoke across the gray hairs on his stomach and toward the darkness of the opened window next to him. “You were pretty brash to be out in the country, trying to rustle up votes. I pitied you, your vanity.”
“Why? These people are important; they need a voice and all that. That was all I was saying. By the way, your pity sure tasted funny that night, I remember,” he said, settling himself back into the pillow at the headboard, savoring the politician’s delicacy: the last word. She looked at his thin legs coming out of the barrel shaped torso and then at her own legs, sturdy, tanned even in the half darkness of the room, longer than his and bent with a sensuality on the bed he couldn’t win with a million votes. He didn’t seem to mind now, though he had been embarrassed after buying her dinner that first night they met six years before, during which he had spoken about his wife and children, cursed his opponents and their duplicity. He had thought she was a local campaign worker of his; Kate had allowed herself to be introduced vaguely, but had quickly balked at the idea of being any kind of volunteer. Now he knew better, went to great lengths to cover his tracks to Tarsus Lane during summertime when things were slow in the capitol, too hot for certain politics. He was proud of his surreptitiousness, though Kate warned him she would only keep secrets he told and that she was no secret in the rural county. After a while, he began to touch her again, and some concern, perhaps of a gentleman father, crept into his voice.
“How are things? Are you getting along okay?”
“No, actually. I am swamped by the necessity to get out of here for a while, that I should get away...”
“Why don’t you? You...”
“It’s impossible,” she sighed from the diaphragm. “There’s no way to leave, even for a little while. I don’t even know where I would go, anyway.” She looked at him, then beyond him, like it was worse than he could understand. He had a grasp of his ability to come and go, and was quick to transfer it onto others, to not understand the gestures of the trapped. His hand that had been caressing her arm stopped and went to his chin as he thought; he was a man who dealt with problems all the time, who was incapable of overestimating his reach. Kate got out of bed and walked toward a light in the hallway without dressing. Within a minute she had returned, but to a chair across from the bed where she crossed her legs beneath a magazine and began turning its pages slowly, yet short of reading. He didn’t like thinking of her as poor, of what she did and would do for money, that she didn’t seem to mind.
“I could get you a place at the beach for a week or two, over in Garden City,” he said less under his own influence than to win out over the magazine. Kate didn’t look up.
“I really don’t think I could get anything done there, I mean see anything, you know. It’d be the same as here.” The politician looked her over in profound dislocation. Perhaps he thought about where he was, and his humanity, his genuine concern for her began to twist itself out of the room and then the house before he could even get his clothes back on. He dressed in a hurry, tried to think of a way of surprising her with a kiss before he left, of her kissing him back, but it didn’t mix with the rash movements with which he pulled on his pants and put his shirt right side out. Kate touched him with her outstretched foot, put her toes between the buttons on his shirt, but it was obvious she wasn’t trying to stop him. She would never try to stop him. She wasn’t like other women, who might not try to stop him either but who he could at least leave when he got ready. She lingered too long and had that whore’s need of nowhere to be, would not put her clothes back on, dishonored even sex with her nonchalance, sex even with him. She robbed him of the joy he felt from thinking of ways to help her, of wanting to imagine keeping her. He was prepared to take the risk and she just wasn’t interested. Dressed, he felt more like himself, more willing to negotiate, and he leaned against a dresser holding his suit jacket.
“What do you do here? You don’t want to stay, but you easily spurn a chance to leave? I’m not angry, mind you, just puzzled.”
“Don’t be puzzled, Jack. You can’t give and take away like that, that’s all. Just like I really can’t leave here without going to some extreme. I would do the same things, and you know what goes on here.
“But how can you? I mean, for a lifetime, over a lifetime, what is it that is so enticing...?” he couldn’t bring himself to say whatever it was, and his voice trailed off with each vague syllable. The magazine was on the floor and she was drunk with recognition common to criminal celebrity. She smiled at him, as though it had been what she wanted all along. Not to think she was special because one man wanted to take her away, that an important man cared for her. Maybe if there had only been one. Yet it was simply the commonness with which he would leave her, and with its acknowledgement, a close moment had passed. He tried to be something else to her, something more than he could be when she had already explained herself as much as she was going to. The rest was pure indulgence and now she could properly take his money. From the very first night, though much of what he was as a man did not want to believe it, fought against it, held out for her despite her forthrightness, that was all she ever wanted. Kate still thought it simple.
To his chin went the hand, which had rested on the corner of the dresser, and the smell of motor oil inexplicably filled his nostrils momentarily before fading into his own scent as he looked at her and began to resign himself to the long drive back to Columbia. The cover of night would offer little solace; he would be forced once again to think of things he could not control, which on the drive down had seemed reasonably close to his power to change. But he was no closer to bringing her to him than the night they met. There would be an even grand left on the table which meant he wouldn’t be back until later in the year. The end of summer approached, and he looked upon with loathing the same trip he had offered her. As he pulled the envelope out of his jacket pocket, he tried to blame it all on age, why she wouldn’t go, why he was even there, and he felt the same way he would standing on the sand in his blue socks with his grandson the next week. It was torture, looking down at her still naked body, so young compared to his, so firm and complete, so rich without his wealth. The man in his conscience, standing guard over his passion, wanted so badly to help her, to destroy the very thing that feathered his fall into old age. But the years hadn’t completely passed him by; he knew his money could never stand for anything between them but an understanding.
“Send me a postcard from the beach,” she said as she stood and faced him. But then she took his hand in hers and began a long kiss that seemed designed to take away the mood which had engulfed him, and if it did, perhaps it was because Kate didn’t care so much for her powers, to understand and control them. Perhaps she hadn’t even chosen to stand. However she did, and for another moment before the short walk to his car for the long drive back into his life, he held her to him. His old lips seemed capably lithe against hers and he felt himself again, all the glory of years past instead of the dread of years to come. Able to conceal everything from herself about a man’s misery, all that was ever left behind which was actually his was the small stack of bills. She was told of ordinary tragedies, the Shakespearean misdeeds, the outright sacrileges that played themselves out in the vehicle of legal union between voluntary parties; the reasoning behind absolution was explained to her over and over through the window of relief she provided. Tears, like wriggles of the hip, can be quicker than the eye. They arrive under a greater than automatic influence as the soul surfaces for air in the form of water, or expels pure, unchanneled energy on the wings of an orgasm. But Kate was no therapist, and tried never to stand around the pretense of making anything better. And it was precisely by not attempting to take on any of these singular burdens that she could summon the strength to shoulder them all and why, with no need for seduction as a prize, she used it as a tool.
Her marriage to life, therefore, a union into which every human enters, lurked like her heart, her need to be, in the time she spent away from men. This had not come easily, for the life among them had its way of lingering in the conscience as debts were paid and necessities bought, and sometimes even supplies procured that ostensibly had little to do with earning money. As a woman who earned money by her divinity, everything had to do with earning money and so art could not. She sometimes drifted into sleep next to strangers, her taste on their tongues and, her sensation seared into their hearts, they are the newly branded heifer; this was difficult to escape. Therefore, the elimination of the desire for escape becomes fundamental. Without escape comes submission, and the fatal slide into worship is then only arrested by devotion to another that remains intact under the strain of concentration combined with the effortlessness of the gift. And here we find Kate at her easel.
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