Songs of Innocence

Then there was the other half of the deal. She promised me she’d call me first—and in return I promised her that if I was ever unable to talk her out of it and she went ahead and did it, I’d...I’d...

Glazier, Lane. Harrison, Melanie. Katz, Maria.

If she ever went ahead and killed herself, I promised I’d come there and clean the place out, get rid of any trace of her professional life, so her mother would never have to know, and her father, too, for that matter; neither of them would have to read in the paper that their little girl had paid her rent by performing sexual services for a hundred eighty dollars an hour plus tips. No, not that. Just that she was dead. Which god knows would be so much easier to take.

I opened the grocery bag full of shredded paper, fingered the pieces. Someone had done that shredding. Not Dorrie, someone else. Someone who thought it set the scene for a suicide better and who maybe also had something to hide. Someone whose number appeared on those shredded phone bills, maybe, or whose face was in one of the photographs. Maybe. But someone, and not Dorrie. She wouldn’t have. That’s what she had me for.

If—just saying if, just imagining—if you speculated that she’d been so upset over something that she’d killed herself in a white-hot rage of self-obliteration, an impulse so powerful that she couldn’t take the time to call me first, well then she damn well wouldn’t have spent an hour patiently feeding pages one by one into a shredder either. If she’d had the presence of mind and the patience for that, she’d have had the presence of mind and patience to call me. You couldn’t have it both ways.

I finished with the address book and started on the calendar. There wasn’t much there, just her class schedule and, peppered around it, entries labeled “Appointment,” each showing a time and a set of initials, presumably of the person she was meeting. She had full days of appointments every Friday and Saturday, half-days on Sunday. Once in a while a nighttime appointment during the week. I wrote it all down.

I did this with one eye on the clock. It wouldn’t take the police very long to connect my name to Dorrie’s. It was widely known that we’d been more than just classmates; people had seen us together. And of course my prints were on file. They might not launch an investigation, but they’d certainly be coming to talk to me. Which was fine —but not if they found her papers and her laptop in my apartment when they arrived. That might not be for a day or two, but you never knew.

I had a suitcase in the bottom of my closet and I emptied it out, tossing the clothing it contained on the floor. Dorrie’s outfits and the dozen little bottles of lube and massage oil went in there, along with the phone and charger and the papers, both shredded and whole.

Leaving the suitcase open, I booted up Dorrie’s laptop and quickly sifted through her home directory. It was pretty sparse—Dorrie hadn’t been a power user of the machine. There were a few songs stored in her “My Music” folder and a batch of word processor documents in “My Documents.” One folder was labeled “Kennedy” and contained various drafts of the assignments she’d turned in that first semester when we’d been in his class together and of the longer project she’d been working on for him ever since. I opened a few files at random. Along with some pieces I remembered discussing in class, there was a fragment titled “First Time” that I didn’t. As I read it, I could see why she hadn’t turned it in.

The assignment had been for us to write a scene from the point of view of the opposite gender. As I recalled, Dorrie had submitted a piece about a young husband pacing in a hospital corridor while his wife was having a Caesarian in the next room—“Birth,” there it was in the folder, dated just two days later. She’d based it, she told us, on the experience of a cousin.

But “Birth,” it seemed, hadn’t been her first stab at the assignment.

FIRST TIME

“Undress anywhere you like,” she said, waving her hand in a little circle. It wasn’t clear what she meant by ‘anywhere.’ The whole apartment was one room, maybe nineteen feet one way and eleven the other, with a sectional sofa against one wall, a stereo and an incense burner against another, and a padded table covered in tan leather a few feet away from the third. There was also a short entrance hall and, off to one side, a lighted alcove that held a tiny kitchen. Maybe she meant it was okay to undress in the kitchen.

She carried my money to a table in the hallway, counting it as she went. I watched her shoulders, tight and angular under the straps of her blue tank top, and I watched her legs, which were shaking just enough that you had to be looking for it to notice. Her hands moved quickly, darting into the handbag she pulled from a drawer in the table and coming out empty. The rest of her moved quickly, too. She chewed up the distance between us in three strides and then was past me, replacing the New Age CD that had been playing with another, newer age one. She checked the incense: smoldering, just as she had left it. And the lights: dimmed. She dimmed them a little more. “You can lie down,” she said. “On the table.”

I finished unbuttoning my shirt and laid it on the sofa, rolled my pants up into a ball next to it. Dropped my wristwatch into one of my shoes. She looked away as I pulled down my underwear, busied herself with a row of plastic bottles by the CD player as I hoisted myself onto the table and lay down.

It was too dim to see whether she blushed when she turned around. “Face down,” she said. She passed me by and fiddled with the lights some more.

I rolled over. She crouched by the bottles again, uncapped one, and carried it back to the table.

She was wearing a peach-colored bra and a red bikini bottom now— she’d lost the tank top somewhere along the way. Once she was behind me, I heard her taking the bra off.

Harp strings played on the CD. So did flutes.

Her hands were cool and damp with lotion. They traveled down my back and up, down and up, down and up. Eventually they stayed down, and eventually she said I could turn over onto my back and I did.

The incense had a sweet-and-sour smell. It was probably supposed to be jasmine, but it smelled like Chinese food.

“Close your eyes,” she said. She’d been working her way up from the soles of my feet and by then had spent about as much time as she could get away with kneading my shins. She worked up to my thighs, and then hesitated. After a second, she squirted some more lotion into her palm and kept going.

I opened my eyes. Her legs weren’t shaking now. They were locked rigidly in place. Her shoulders were thrown back and her elbows were pinned by her sides. She was still wearing the bikini bottom and a thin gold necklace with a tiny cross on it, but nothing else. Tiny goosebumps stood out all over her breasts.

One of her hands was resting on my arm. The other wasn’t, either on my arm or resting. She was looking across the room at a poster for the 1988 season of the Metropolitan Opera, staring so hard at it that you’d have figured her for a real opera lover.

It didn’t go on much longer.

She’d told me the story, standing on the sidewalk at midnight; how one of her former classmates from Hunter had let her know about an open part-time position as a receptionist—just a receptionist—for a massage parlor, answering the phone, quoting prices, scheduling appointments. How after a few weeks the nine dollars per hour she was pocketing started looking paltry compared to the ninety the other women kept out of every hundred-eighty, not to mention the tips, and all for what? Fifty-five minutes of no more than you’d do if you worked at the finest spa in Manhattan and five of no more than you’d do after a so-so date with some guy who’d bought you two drinks and a plate of chicken marsala. No sex, not even oral, just a massage with a happy ending, a manual release, call it what you will; a full-body massage, and Jesus Christ, girl, what was wrong with that? You’re going to tell me, one of her co-workers said, that rubbing some guy’s thighs and shoulders and smelly feet for an hour is okay but rubbing his cock for ninety seconds is not? That’s bullshit. It’s just some more skin.

This from the woman who’d held the receptionist position immediately before Dorrie and who’d since moved up to become a masseuse herself. Later, Dorrie heard the joke that everyone in the business knew: What’s the difference between a phone girl and a masseuse? Thirty days.

There was a time when this would all have bothered me more than it did now—back before my high school girlfriend, who’d been headed for medical school to become an eye doctor, had ended up working as a stripper, and worse. Back before the years I spent, fresh out of NYU, doing legwork for Leo Hauser and getting to see every shitty thing one human being could do to another in the course of a day. Hell, if some men needed to pay to have a woman touch them and some women were willing to take the money, fine. If they both left feeling a little degraded