Mask Market

It was like a game of chicken—the loser would be the first person to say “prostitute” out loud. It wasn’t going to be me.

“I didn’t come to New York to be in movies,” Loyal said. “Nobody in their right mind does. I wanted to be on the stage. Not Shakespeare or Mamet, more like musical comedy. I can sing and dance, too. Not good enough to be the lead, and I’m way too short to be a Rockette, but I thought I could get chorus work.”

“That didn’t work out?”

She made a harsh sound in her throat, like a strangled laugh. “No. I did all the usual stuff girls like me do: went to a thousand auditions, waited on a thousand tables. I got little, little tiny parts. In off-off Broadway. Plays that ran a weekend, and didn’t cover my cab fare home.

“The first ‘agent’ I got didn’t want to get me jobs; he wanted to get me. But I was expecting that, and all it cost me was time. I didn’t get discouraged; I didn’t think I was going to set the town on fire or anything. But I was hustling like a crazy woman just to put together the cash for head shots and audition tapes.

“That’s when I started working as a B-girl. I told myself it was just like an acting job, sitting with men, listening to them go on and on. I threw down so many watered drinks, I spent half my time in the bathroom, I swear.

“After a couple of years, I’d had my fill. I’d been up here long enough so I could go home and tell folks I’d given it my best shot. I even had a couple of clippings I could show people, but…”

I stayed in my silence, waiting.

“Could you go in the living room?” she said.

I got up without a word. Walked over to the armchair, guided by the light spilling from the kitchen.

Time passed.

I heard sounds I couldn’t identify, coming from the bedroom area but deeper, as if there was another room behind it.

Loyal stalked into the living room like a woman on business. “Here,” she said, handing me a leather folder. The cover was soft, as if filled with foam. She walked behind me, turned on the lamp. My lap filled with frosted light.

“Go ahead,” she said, still standing behind me.

It was a photo album. The first shot was black and white, an eight-by-ten glossy. Loyal, in a straight chair, facing the camera head-on. She was wearing a short black skirt and a white blouse, black pumps on her feet, blonde hair pulled back into a bun. Each of her ankles was lashed to a leg of the chair. Her hands were behind her back. A white cloth was tied around her mouth, parting her lips.

“Keep going,” she said from behind me. “I did.”

The photographs were in some kind of sequence, telling Loyal’s story. They went from ropes to duct tape, from cloth to ball gags, from fully dressed to partially, then not. The last one had Loyal on her knees, facing a wall, naked. You couldn’t see her face. Her wrists were handcuffed behind her back, her ankles were bound together, and a single chain linked the two.

When I was finished, I closed the book.

Loyal turned off the light behind me.

“Say something,” she said.

“You’re a good actress.”

“What does that mean, Lew? What are you trying to say?”

“Just that. In the earlier pictures, when they came in close on your face, you looked like a damsel in distress.”

“What does that mean?” she said again, her voice tightening down to braided wire.

“You looked terrified,” I said. “Like the villain had tied you up, and your only hope was that Dudley Do-Right was going to ride in and rescue you.”

“That wasn’t acting,” she said, putting her hands on my shoulders.

“They really do it,” she said, standing by the window in the living room, this time facing me. “Tie you up, I mean. The first time I…modeled, I thought it was all fake. Like it would be Velcro or something. But it wasn’t.”

“So you were afraid of…what, exactly?”

“I don’t know,” she said, blowing a stream of smoke out the opened window. “Being…helpless, I guess. Not in control. They loved that. I had the ‘look.’ So I had all the work I wanted.”

“Why did you stop, then?”

“Did you ever look into a fireplace when it’s working? Well, that’s what it was like. If you start a fire, you either feed it, or you watch it go out. Do you have any idea of what I’m telling you, Lew?”

I flashed on a not-so-young-anymore girl I’d met in Los Angeles years ago. I’d been out there looking for a photographer who took crime-in-progress pictures for money. He knew I was looking, and he’d gone to ground. I’d gotten the girl’s name from someone who told me that she might have an address for him. And that she’d be stupid enough to give it up, if I worked her right.

That girl hadn’t been stupid. Just sad. All done, and she knew it.

When you’re fresh stuff out here, they may not treat you like a little princess, but they don’t… torture you, you know? But every video you shoot takes a little of the bloom off you. One year, you’re getting a thousand bucks for naughty schoolgirl—and I was never the lead, okay?—the next, they expect you to take some rough stuff for less money, and do it more often. And if you do that? Another year and you’re down to double anals and gang bangs. After that, it gets really disgusting.

“A real good idea,” I said to Loyal.

She took my tone for truth, shifted her own to one less challenging. “It’s like with my apartment,” she said. “I knew I had to get off the elevator before it started going down.”

“They asked you to—”

“I wasn’t looking at myself. Just sleepwalking through it. But I was sliding. It started with girl-girl. Not sex— they never even asked me to do that—but there’d be another girl in the pictures. Like she was the one who tied me up. Maybe I wasn’t raised on the fast track, but I could feel the heat when I got close enough to the fire.”

“You’re not the first actress to do that kind of modeling, early in her career.”

“If that was all I’d done, I could see what I want to see when I look in the mirror.”

“I don’t see that when I look, either,” I said. “I don’t know anybody who does, all the time.” That wasn’t the truth. I’d done time with glistening psychopaths whose self-worship was the sum total of their existence. But that was Burke, not the man she knew.

“Yes,” she said absently. She gutted her cigarette. I waited while she did her full-disposal routine in the bathroom.

“All the time I was…modeling, I had been trying out for parts. But I was getting used up there, too. Like I was disappearing. And the less of me there was, the less I felt I could go home.”

“So you stayed….”

“Until now. Yes. But I didn’t just quit modeling, I quit trying to work, too.”

“How could you do that and—?”

“—still afford a place like this? You know the answer to that, Lew. I’m a toy. A pet. A rich man’s life-size doll. I’ve had four of them since I left off working. You were going to be the fifth. That day we met? I wasn’t shopping for cars.”

I don’t know why I told you all that,” she said, as the green numbers on her alarm clock blinked 4:09. “I know how it makes me look. You know, I used to be able to lead boys around by the nose. All I had to do was take a deep breath, wiggle a little, and talk baby talk. I never had to…do what I told you to pay the rent, or keep food on the table.

“I wasn’t addicted to drugs, I wasn’t…I didn’t have any excuse, not really. I was just ashamed to go home. Not because of anything I did, but because I wouldn’t have anything to show for it. Can you understand that, Lew?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I can. And when you go now, after you sell your apartment, you’ll have been a hardworking actress who saved her money.”

“I sure will. I’ll be able to fix up the house so it’s one of the nicest ones around. Have a swell car. Maybe even…”