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By Root 1127 0

devotion, and lots of them keep coming even after that, just to pine. She’s worked at Burberry’s since at least ’91, long after the end of her acting career. What she did in the meantime is a mystery, but according to Dean she lived for a while with Lyle Hobart, one of the owners. Lyle is married these days to a former Playmate of the Month who doesn’t let him set foot in Burberry’s without her, so terrified is she of Cherie’s lingering influence on her weak-willed husband. Her fears aren’t misplaced; it’s due only to Lyle’s protection that she’s still employed. I’ve been at Burberry’s since my divorce, a year ago, and she’s the most unreliable waitress I’ve worked with in ten years of on-and-off bartending: noshows, bad arithmetic, ignored customers, the whole roster of waitressing sins. Her looks, combined with a certain flirtatious affability, have kept me—have kept the entire male portion of the staff—from turning on her, but the other waitresses loathe her, and she wouldn’t last a week anywhere else.

The house is at the summit, the street curving downward in either direction away from it. The front door is locked, the windows all dark, so I double-check the address before ringing the bell. From the outside it looks modest, but in this neighborhood at this altitude facing seaward you’d be looking at a couple million dollars’ worth of bungalow. When the door finally opens it’s Cherie, and she greets me with a finger to her lips.

“Hey, Cherie,” I say.

“Shut the fuck up,” she hisses, beckoning me inside.

It’s completely dark, and she takes my hand and leads me down a staircase into what turns out to be an enormous living room with a panoramic view of the Pacific. There’s another staircase leading down, and outside I can see more house going down the hill, and I understand that this is one of those four-story houses that you enter through the insignificant-looking top floor. I try to revise my estimate of the house’s worth and fail. This is one of those places you read about on the front page of the Times’ real estate supplement, the part Harry Shearer reads aloud on the radio Sunday morning. For the first time I begin to feel uneasy about what Cherie might be doing here.

She’s in her uniform, and she sidles up to me and slops her mouth onto mine. Up close she smells like cigarettes and perfume and wine, and her mouth doesn’t taste half bad, considering.

I pull away, determined to find out while I still can exactly what I’m buying into. “So what’s the favor, Cherie?”

“The favor is I’m horny, stud, and I want to make it with you.” One of Cherie’s more endearing traits is a tendency toward ’70s slang that dates her in ways her face and body fail to.

“Just all of a sudden out of nowhere?”

“All of a sudden I got this great housesitting gig and I thought it was sad to be staying in a beautiful pad like this without a lover to share it with.”

This is the first I’ve heard about any such job, and just as I’m thinking, Who in God’s name would be fucked up enough to hire Cherie as a housesitter? I find myself distracted by how nice her tits feel pressing against my rib cage, and the sensation of her tongue in my mouth is having its own clouding effect on my wits.

“You’ve never shown any interest before.”

“Oh, but I’ve been thinking about it, big boy. I see the way you watch me. Parts of me. You want a glass of wine?”

“No thanks.”

“Meth?”

I shake my head no and she takes me by the hand down the other staircase and down a hallway to a magnificent bedroom, and for the first time since I got there she turns on a light, a bedside lamp. The bed is made, the walls covered with framed gold records and what looks like dark red velvet. In the light I give her a careful up-and-down appraisal and find that she looks very, very nice indeed, down to the one nonregulation item in her uniform: a pair of black high-heeled shoes, the kind that would kill her on an eight-hour shift.

“You want to get naked, or are you one of those guys who gets turned on by the uniform?” she asks, and by way of an answer I jump her.

* * *

In three and