The Craigslist Murders - Brenda Cullerton [39]
“This Guy’s Into Footsmelling” (“I enjoy stockings and socks”)
“Female Sasquatch with Bedsores” (“I just want washing and conversation”)
“Help! My Hair looks like crap!”
“Dentist Needed Desperately” (I noticed the hole in December. PLEASE—I can’t take it anymore.)”
“Tattoo Artist wants to drill you.”
“Wrestling Challenge” (“No real violence. Just wanna see who comes out on top. No sex involved.”) No sex, my ass! Charlotte thought, shutting down her computer and heading off towards the bathroom.
As the needles of hot water worked into the muscles of her back, Charlotte sloughed off the dead skin with a new body wash. It was made of meadow foam oil. Sniffing the bottle, she wondered how exactly one went about collecting meadow foam oil. The product had been a complimentary gift from Rapture, the new spa in Soho.
“You’re going to love it, Charlotte,” one of her clients had promised, after regifting her with a certificate for a morning of free treatments. “It’s like a spiritual rebirth.”
Greeted on her arrival with a hushed hello from her massage therapist, Charlotte had changed into a pair of fuzzy slippers and a soft linen robe and shuffled along behind her toward the spa’s inner sanctum. After four hours in a sepulchral room, breathing in the fragrance of pine-scented incense and trying to block out the sounds of wind chimes, chirping birds, and rolling waves, she still couldn’t fathom how this kind of self-indulgence translated into a spiritual “rebirth.” What did getting one’s skin rubbed, scrubbed, pummeled, exfoliated, detoxed, steamed, wrapped and buffed have to with God?
Toweling off her body, Charlotte applied a thin layer of moisturizer and brushed her wet hair. Pavel had called from Moscow and asked her to pick up a bottle of champagne. She was planning to open the Dom.
“I’m bringing over something very special,” he’d said. “Because I think it is an honor to be invited into your home.”
“An honor indeed,” Charlotte said out loud as she sauntered off naked toward her closet.
23
She was ten minutes late for her doctor’s appointment. The room was packed.
“I’m very sorry, Ms. Wolfe,” the nurse said when Charlotte checked in at reception. “But the doctor’s had an emergency.”
“How long is the wait?” Charlotte knew it was a dumb question.
The woman shrugged. “Why don’t you sit down, dear, and I’ll keep you posted,” she said, returning to the ringing phones.
Perched on the edge of a red upholstered chair, Charlotte drummed her fingers on the chrome armrests. As her eyes flickered over the row of vacant faces seated around the room, she realized that there was a bond she shared with these strangers. Like her, they had spent too many years waiting. Waiting for love, for dinner, for subways, for sleep. Waiting for bank loans and dentists, for sex, for success, even for dry cleaning.
Fidgeting restlessly in her chair, Charlotte sighed. Whoever had said that good things come to those who wait certainly didn’t live in New York, she thought. Age and death were the only two things that came to those who waited around in this town. She had been obsessed with death ever since those nights as a child when she’d tried to sing herself to sleep. That was why she’d chosen to block out the pain. To postpone the doctors. She didn’t want her fears confirmed. So why had she lied to Anna? Why wasn’t she here, making her laugh, quieting her fears? Casting her eyes down when she caught sight of the skeletal features of what had once been a staggeringly beautiful woman, Charlotte struggled against the urge to leave, to jump up and run for the door.
“Most of life is about loss and leaving,” Anna had said that night at the Temple Bar. It was