Small Town

“I think it’s more PC to call them women. No, seriously, I never see anybody. I did go up there one time to pick up the key and arrange everything, and I caught glimpses of one or two women, and they just looked like, I don’t know, like women.”

“What were they wearing?”

“Oh, please. I didn’t notice. The woman I spoke to, and I gather she was the manager—”

“The madam.”

“I suppose. She was forty or forty-five, and if I’d met her on the street I’d have guessed she was a beautician.”

“Really.”

“Or possibly, you know, an executive secretary, or maybe a showroom manager. Not exactly brassy, but that kind of self-assurance.”

She’d had more questions, and at the end she asked if he cleaned for any ordinary people. “Like me,” she said.

He said, “Ordinary?” and raised an eyebrow. And went on to say that he did indeed have a couple of private clients, no more than one a day, whose apartments he cleaned once a week. By the time they left the coffee shop they’d arranged that she would be one of them.

Most of the time she was out when he cleaned, but not always, and sometimes she’d be at her desk, working, and they’d chat between phone calls. A couple of times they ran into each other on the street. She talked wryly about her love life, asked his advice about her hair (a rich auburn, shoulder-length when he’d met her, short and pixyish as of two months ago), and generally used him as her Gay Male Confidante, a sort of girlfriend with a Y chromosome, or perhaps a younger brother but without all that family baggage.

“I wonder,” she’d said. “Do you think I could ever take a turn at your whorehouse?”

“You mean like Belle du Jour?”

“Sort of, except I have a hunch it works better if you look like Catherine Deneuve. Anyway, I’m probably too old.”

“You’re what, thirty-eight?”

“ ‘You’re only thirty-eight, and could pass for twenty-nine’ is what you meant to say, isn’t it?”

“Word for word. Thirty-eight’s not old.”

“How old are the girls in your whorehouse?”

“It’s not my whorehouse, and I don’t have any idea how old they are. There’s nobody home when I do my thing.”

“Men want young girls, don’t they? In a place like that?”

“I have no idea what men want,” he said, archly. “In a place like that or anywhere else. What’s this all about? You wouldn’t really want to do it, would you?”

“Probably not, but it’s an awfully nice fantasy.”

“Well, enjoy yourself,” he said. “There’s no age limit in fantasies.”

The vacuuming didn’t wake her. Neither did the phone, which he couldn’t hear over the noise of the vacuum cleaner; he only realized it was ringing when the blinking light on the dial of the office extension caught his eye. He switched off the vacuum and listened, waiting for her to answer it, but she didn’t, and after two more rings her voice mail picked up.

He stood still for a moment, frowning. Then he went back to work. Using one of the long skinny attachments to slurp the dust off the top of a window molding, he visualized a giraffe doing a line of coke. That reminded him of the little mirror he’d found in the living room. It was in the strainer on the kitchen sinkboard now, any cocaine residue washed off and down the drain, and...

Maybe you should just go home.

The thought was just there, all at once. He stood still and looked at his own anxiety and wondered where the hell it had come from. Yes, there had almost certainly been cocaine on that mirror, but Marilyn and her friend had long since Hoovered it away. And yes, there had been an open bottle of bourbon in the living room, and he’d caught a whiff of it, and smelled it again in the glasses he’d washed. And yes, he was an alcoholic, sober now by the grace of whatever God you wanted to credit, and could be rendered anxious by anything that might pose a threat, real or imaginary, to his sobriety.

But the coke was gone and the bottle capped and put away, and didn’t he start every day in rooms that smelled of beer and hard booze, with dozens of bottles just standing there, waiting to be sampled? He was like a fox with the keys to the henhouse, all alone in Death Row and Cheek and Harrigan’s, just him and all that booze. And, while his mind could conjure up no end of harrowing scenarios — a mind, his sponsor had told him, was a terrible thing to have — in point of fact it never really bothered him at all.

He’d run across drugs in the bars he cleaned, too, because people who were drunk and stoned tended to be careless, and the odd Baggie would turn up on the floor, or in the john, or, more than once, right out there in plain sight on top of the bar. And the apartments he cleaned had their stashes, legal and otherwise — the few ounces of pot in the model’s undies drawer, the huge jar of Dexamil on the dot-com exec’s bedside table, and with all that speed wouldn’t you think the guy would do his own cleaning? Like four or five times a day?