Hard Rain Falling - Don Carpenter [43]
“Turn off the lights,” she said. “Pull down the shades, too. It’s not dark enough in here. Don’t look. Unhook this for me, will you? Wait a minute. Okay.” She got on the bed with him, her thin, innocent body visible in the half-light, and they made love, Jack hungrily, Mona nervously, and when it was all over she pushed him away and turned facedown on the bed, her arms rigid at her sides. Jack got up and went into the bathroom, and then came out to get dressed. She was still in the same position.
“What’s the matter?” he asked her. He was used to variations of this reaction, and it irritated him. She was trying to make him pay for his fun by being distant, guilty, and then, inevitably, bitchy.
“Nothing,” she said. “Go away. I want to get dressed.”
“Why don’t I send that other girl over with your stuff from Denny’s room?”
“You do that little thing.” Her voice was muffled by the pillow, but it still crackled with dry bitterness.
“Are you pissed off? What’s the matter, didn’t you make it?”
“Shut up.”
“I’ll send what’s-her-name, Sue, down here with your stuff,” he said.
She sat up and looked at him. “Pay me ten dollars.”
Jack laughed. “What for?”
“You know.”
“Are you trying to turn yourself out? Are you kidding?”
“Pay me ten dollars,” she said stubbornly.
“The first rule is, get the money first.” He went out and down to Denny’s room. If the girl wanted to be a hustler, he thought, she was shit out of luck. A hustler has the larceny; she always thinks of the money first. He knocked on the door impatiently; he wanted a drink of whiskey.
Eight
The girls did not know what Denny did for a living, but it did not matter, as long as he had plenty of money and didn’t mind spending it. By little things he said, by his attitude of pretended boredom and suavity in front of the girls, Jack knew that Denny was having a high old time, that this life of girls, clubs, comic books, and whiskey was all Denny wanted out of life, and that the mystery of where and how he got his money enhanced his own sense of importance. This was not like the Denny Jack remembered from Portland; the old Denny had not done any faking at all. This was one of the things that time had done to him. This, and the thickening, and the wariness around his eyes. And there were hints that sometimes Denny got too drunk, blacked out, and went wild.
But nothing happened that night; actually, they had a pretty good time. They went to an Italian restaurant on the edges of the Tenderloin where the headwaiter wore a shiny tuxedo and called the girls “Madam” and showed them to a formica-topped table and pulled the table out so they could get into the leatherette booth, and their waiter wore a white jacket and music was piped in and a bottle of wine placed on their table. Mona put an ashtray into her purse before they left. After dinner they went to a nightclub on Jones Street that featured strippers and a pair of comedians and the girls drank whiskey sours and Denny and Jack straight whiskey, and during one of the strippers’ acts, the drumbeats sharp and explosive, the light on the stage brilliant purple, Mona leaned over close to Jack and pressed her fingers into his thigh and said, “Do you think I could make it as a dancer? I mean, as an exotic dancer?”
“You have a great little body,” Jack said to her, and he meant it, still feeling her body in remembrance, looking forward to the time when they would be back in his room alone; watching the stripper with erotic detachment, and glancing over at Mona to see her watching, too, a look of wolfish hunger in her eyes, made fantastic by the purple reflection.
But when they got outside in the sharp air the first thing Mona said was, “What a crummy hole. Jesus.”
“I wonder how those old hags keep their jobs,” Sue said.
“Call them old?” Denny laughed. “I seen a couple strippers in Seattle a while back that make these chicks look like high-school kids. Man, one of them old bags must of been fifty, her old boobies flopping