Less than you ought to be, David thought, turning to look out the windows again, through the narrow streets around Wall, toward the towers that weren’t there anymore. He thought about Charlotte on the walk in front of the house, the back of her head gone, the grey-pink spatter of brains on the windows next to the front door. He thought about Tony with his face blown away. He should have known at the very beginning. All the signs were there. It simply hadn’t occurred to him.
Now that it had occurred to him, he had no idea what to do about it.
3
Lucinda Watkins finished doing the dishes at eleven. The house was still almost as quiet as it had been in the early morning, except for the thumps and giggles coming from the second-floor drawing room where there was an encounter therapy session in progress. The day outside was grey and getting greyer. The kitchen was cold. One of the things Lucinda wanted to do, as soon as they had the money to do it, was to completely overhaul the heating system. It didn’t make any sense to her to keep the house freezing cold when so many of the girls came here to get in out of the weather. If it was always warm and glowing and comfortable here, maybe more of them would come.
She went down the narrow hall to the front of the house where the living room was and looked out the front windows at the street. That was deserted. Even hookers didn’t walk here, no matter what the time of day or night. She wondered if it was ever possible to find a hooker in the morning, on a business basis. She’d never thought about it before. They were so concentrated on the night in this place. Annie went out at night. Those pictures she was always bringing back were always taken in the dark. The windows of the cars that cruised the strip were sometimes tinted black too, although that was only for the men who could afford that sort of thing, or had the foresight to rent it. She wondered how many men rented cars to go trawling for tail. Then she winced at the phrase, even though she hadn’t spoken it out loud. It was Annie’s phrase. It sounded all right when Annie said it, just as it sounded all right when Annie said fuck or cunt as if she meant them. Annie could get away with anything. Lucinda didn’t think even Grandma Watkins would have disapproved.
She was restless, and agitated, and tired. She knew she had to go out, but she hesitated to do it. She didn’t want to leave and not get back by the time Annie did. She didn’t want to wait until Annie got home, either. She wondered how many people out there, how many ordinary, everyday people, really knew what people like Annie were like. Before she’d come to Adelphos House, Lucinda had been like everybody else. She’d only been able to guess, and her guesses had been made up of too many viewings of The Philadelphia Story and a few desultory forays into the fiction of Dominick Dunne. She’d been convinced that people like Annie—that people like Tony and Charlotte—were “all prim and proper,” as the saying went in her childhood, and that they only listened to classical music and went to Shakespeare plays. The truth was, she’d never heard anybody swear the way Annie did on a regular basis. Even the greaser boys of her adolescence, who’d made a fetish of their motorcycles and their violence, had had mouths less foul than Mrs. Wyler’s over breakfast and the morning paper. She thought of Charlotte, dead on the walk in front of her house, but it was hard to get a clear picture of the woman. Lucinda hadn’t known her very well. The few times they’d met, they’d said very little to each other, although it had been easy for Lucinda to see what Charlotte was thinking: trailer trash, cheap flash, vulgar. It was all well and good for Annie to fret over how paranoid and ridiculous The Harridan Report was, but it had a point, all the same. Those people really were different from you and me, if not different in the way the movies portrayed them as being. They didn’t watch television. They didn’t go to malls. They didn’t play the lottery. Of course, Lucinda didn’t do any of those things either, but that was different. She didn’t do them because she was here, working, and it was too expensive to keep more than two televisions on the premises, with cable, so there always seemed to be somebody using the one she wanted to use to watch Friends or listen to the news. And she didn’t play the lottery because she had sense. Every time she went home, or anywhere near it, she found her family and all their friends knee-deep in lottery tickets, hundreds of dollars of lottery tickets, and all of them losers. Learn to count, she wanted to scream at them— and then another happy-happy television commercial would come on for the Pennsylvania lottery, and it was like watching an ad for angel dust. The girls all played the lottery too, of course. They bought their tickets at the convenience stores they passed on their way downtown to work. They hid them where they hoped their pimps wouldn’t find them. Well, Lucinda knew, if one of them won, her pimp would find her soon enough. There was something The Harridan Report got exactly right. If the lottery wasn’t a plot of the rich to drain the blood of the poor, Lucinda didn’t know what it was.