This Mickey Mouse Club reference was lost on him, so I cut the comedy and filled him in, in short, brutal strokes.
Finally, he said, “You did well.”
“Will you handle our client? And explain that I wasn’t trying to discover his identity, that it just fell in my lap?”
“Yes. Certainly.”
“Do it now. Tonight.”
“Well, of course.”
“I mean, we’ll stay the night, Annette and me, and tomorrow morning I will need to know the game plan. Does her father want to send somebody to collect her? Do I go back to Iowa City and let her return to her apartment? And do we finally pull the plug on this cluster-fuck of a job?”
The Broker shook his head. “I believe our client will want you to attempt to complete what you’ve started.”
“Getting a window to do that, where the stateroom isn’t jammed with coeds and wives and writing students, may not be a breeze.”
The Broker shrugged and stood. “You’ll do your best, I’m sure…We’ll talk tomorrow, first thing. I’ll let you know then.”
I stood. “Okay. There’s one other thing.”
“What?”
“Tell the desk clerk I need a couple of those little traveler’s kits-tiny toothpaste, toothbrushes, deodorant, and so on. Have a bellhop bring ‘em up right away.”
“All right. Why not just call down?”
“That’s where I am right now, getting that stuff. Got it?”
“Got it.”
When I returned to our room, Annette was still in my bed. The lights were off but for a reading light built into the headboard. Her face had a carved beauty, her Italian heritage giving her a Madonna look, despite our recent whore-worthy bed boogie.
She asked, “Do you mind if I sleep with you?”
“No.”
“May be a little crowded.”
“That’s okay.”
“I just…just don’t want to sleep alone right now. I need somebody strong beside me.”
“Well, I’ll have to do.”
She smiled. I was a card, wasn’t I?
“Jack, where’s our toothbrushes?”
“They had to go rummaging in a storeroom. They’re sending the stuff up.”
Right then came a knock- thank you, Broker — and I gave the kid a buck and took the two little plastic bags of sample-size toiletries and deposited them in the bathroom. Then she was right behind me, in the Concort Inn robe, and first she brushed her teeth and then I did and it was as cute and domestic as could be.
I got in bed, and she got in after me and switched off the reading light, but we didn’t close the drapes, liking the soft glow from the streetlamps and business signs and the river with Rock Island glimmering beyond. I had an arm around her and she was cuddled to my chest, like she was a tiny thing though she was almost as tall as I was.
There is something about being in a hotel room in bed with a woman with the lights out and nothing out there but the night that encourages a peculiar kind of intimacy. Like being at camp in a bunk bed in the dark and sharing with friends all sorts of hopes and dreams and secrets.
I said, “Can I ask you a few things?”
“Sure.”
“Remember how I wondered if you were collaborating with the professor on your book?”
“Yes.”
“And you said you weren’t.”
“Right.”
“He was just helping you.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t want to upset you. Maybe this can wait. This can wait.”
She sat up, leaned on an elbow, the big browns locked on me. “No. Tell me.”
“I found something out, shadowing the professor.”
“That he likes to fuck young women?”
“Well, I learned that, too. But…what kind of stuff are you dealing with in your book?”
“What…what do you mean, Jack?”
“I mean, there was something Byron said to you the other day, about you reporting every bad thing you ever saw or experienced with your father. What would that be, exactly?”
“Jack, I…that’s kind of personal.”
Not long ago, I’d been eating her out; not along ago, my dick had been halfway down her throat. And this was kind of personal?
“Honey,” I said, trying that out, “I have a good reason for asking.”
She sat all the way up. I did, too. But the sheets and covers were around her waist, so her small, pointy breasts were accusing me.
She said, “You know I have a rather…strained relationship with my father. Right?”
“I kind of gathered.”
“There are…reasons for that.”
“Reasons besides he’s a drug trafficker and murderer?”
She half-laughed, half-sighed. “Yes. Yes. Other reasons.”
“He beat you?”
“No.”
“Then he…oh.”
“Yes. ’Oh.‘ He fucked me, Jack. He fucked me from when I was twelve, around when my mother died, and until I was fourteen when he remarried and I got shipped off to boarding school. When I was older, later teens, when I was home for vacations or during the summer, there were no…advances, no sneaking into my room. He had a wife now and that was the past and it was never spoken of. Like it never happened. But it did.”
“Christ. I’m sorry. How does a thing like that…?”
“My mother died. Of cancer. It was lingering. In fact, the…abuse, the psychologists call it, began during Mother’s illness. I became the woman of the house at a very young age, her surrogate in many respects…”
Many respects was right.
She was saying, “I have terribly mixed feelings about it all, and-”
“Mixed feelings? What’s to be ‘mixed’ about?”
“That’s just the thing. The horrible, the most awful part to admit-I was his willing partner. Oh, I didn’t like it at first, it hurt me, I was too small, but I knew Daddy loved me and that I made him happy and I was taking over for Mother. Filling in for her, taking her place. And as the months passed, I came to like it. I liked having orgasms, and I liked having closeness with my father, and I became a kind of second wife to him.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Neither did I. Only, after he married, and our relationship stopped? At first, I know this is sick, this is crazy, but I was jealous. And I told a priest, and the priest secretly, taking a big chance, got me psychiatric help, and I came to know how wrong it was, how sad and sick and awful it was, and became very ashamed.”
Yeah, you got to hand it to psychiatry. Really put things right, that crowd.
“And the priest and the shrink, they didn’t report your father?”
“Daddy is a big contributor to the diocese. And as for my psychiatrist, well, you know who my father is. What would Daddy have done to that doctor?”
Hired somebody like me.
