Eight Million Ways To Die

"Does he have a feeling for the others?"

"He has a feeling for me," she said.

"And anybody else?"

"He likes Sunny. Everybody likes Sunny, she's fun to be with. I don't know if he cares for her. Or Donna, I'm sure he doesn't care for Donna, but I don't think she cares for him either. I think that's strictly business on both sides. Donna, I don't think Donna cares for anybody. I don't think she knows there are people in the world."

"How about Ruby?"

"Have you met her?" I hadn't. "Well, she's like, you know, exotic.

So he'd like that. And Mary Lou's very intelligent and they go to concerts and shit, like Lincoln Center, classical music, but that doesn't mean he has a feeling for her."

She started to giggle. I asked her what was so funny. "Oh, I just flashed that I'm the typical dumb hooker, thinks she's the only one the pimp loves. But you know what it is? I'm the only one he can relax with.

He can come up here and take his shoes off and let his mind roll out. Do you know what a karmic tie is?"

"No."

"Well, it has something to do with reincarnation. I don't know if you believe in that."

"I never thought about it much."

"Well, I don't know if I believe in it either, but sometimes I think Chance and I knew each other in another life. Not necessarily as lovers or man and wife or anything like that. Like we could have been brother and sister, or maybe he was my father or I was his mother. Or we could even have both been the same sex because that can change from one lifetime to another. I mean we could have been sisters or something.

Anything, really."

The telephone cut into her speculations. She crossed the room to answer it, standing with her back to me, one hand propped against her hip. I couldn't hear her conversation. She talked for a moment or two, then covered the mouthpiece and turned to me.

"Matt," she said, "I don't want to hassle you, but do you have any idea how long we're gonna be?"

"Not long."

"Like could I tell somebody it would be cool to come over in an hour?"

"No problem."

She turned again, finished the conversation quietly, hung up. "That was one of my regulars," she said.

"He's a real nice guy. I told him an hour."

She sat down again. I asked her if she'd had the apartment before she hooked up with Chance. She said she'd been with Chance for two years and eight months and no, before that she shared a bigger place in Chelsea with three other girls. Chance had had this apartment all ready for her. All she'd had to do was move into it.

"I just moved my furniture in," she said. "Except the waterbed.

That was already here. I had a single bed that I got rid of. And I bought the Magritte poster, and the masks were here." I hadn't noticed the masks and had to turn in my seat to see them, a grouping of three solemn ebony carvings on the wall behind me.

"He knows about them," she said. "What tribe made them and everything. He knows things like that."

I said that the apartment was an unlikely one for the use being made of it. She frowned, puzzled.

"Most girls in the game live in doorman buildings," I said. "With elevators and all."

"Oh, right. I didn't know what you meant. Yes, that's true." She grinned brightly. "This is something different," she said. "The johns who come here, they don't think they're johns."

"How do you mean?"

"They think they're friends of mine," she explained. "They think I'm this spacey Village chick, which I am, and that they're my friends, which they are. I mean, they come here to get laid, let's face it, but they could get laid quicker and easier in a massage parlor, no muss no fuss no bother, dig? But they can come up here and take off their shoes and smoke a joint, and it's a sort of a raunchy Village pad, I mean you have to climb three flights of stairs and then you roll around in a waterbed. I mean, I'm not a hooker. I'm a girlfriend. I don't get paid. They give me money because I got rent to pay and, you know, I'm a poor little Village chick who wants to make it as an actress and she's never going to.

Which I'm not, and I don't care much, but I still take dancing lessons a couple mornings a week and I have an acting class with Ed Kovens every Thursday night, and I was in a showcase last May for three weekends in Tribeca. We did Ibsen, When We Dead Awake, and do you believe that three of my johns came?"

She chatted about the play, then began telling me how her clients brought her presents in addition to the money they gave her. "I never have to buy any booze. In fact I have it to give away because I don't drink myself. And I haven't bought any grass in ages. You know who gets the best grass? Wall Street guys.

They'll buy an ounce and we'll smoke a little and they'll leave me the ounce." She batted her long lashes at me. "I kind of like to smoke,"

she said.

"I guessed that."

"Why? Do I seem stoned?"

"The smell."