“Is it bad luck to talk about?”
“I don’t believe in luck, bad or good.” He warms his smile one more time for her and says, “I’m glad you came today. I wouldn’t have ordered the tea.” He swings his legs to sit up. “And the sweater, well, it looks very nice. We’ll drive back when you’re ready.”
ON THE DRIVE NORTH Carol Ann Menager says one thing that stays with Eddie Zanduce after he drops her at her little blue Geo in the Hilton parking lot and after he has dressed and played three innings of baseball before a crowd of twenty-four thousand, the stadium a third full under low clouds this early in the season with the Orioles going ho-hum and school not out yet, and she says it like so much she has said in the six hours he has known her—right out of the blue as they cruise north from Annapolis on Route 2 in his thick silver Mercedes, a car he thinks nothing of and can afford not to think of, under the low sullen skies that bless and begrudge the very springtime hedgerows the car speeds past. It had all come to her as she’d assembled herself an hour before; and it is so different from what she’s imagined, in fact, she’d paused while drying herself with the lush towel in the Bayside Inn, her foot on the edge of the tub, and she’d looked at the ceiling where a heavy raft of clouds crossed the domed skylight, and one hand on the towel against herself, she’d seen Eddie Zanduce so differently than she had thought. For one thing he wasn’t married and playing the dark game that some men did, putting themselves closer and closer to the edge of their lives until something went over, and he wasn’t simply off, the men who tried to own her for the three hundred dollars and then didn’t touch her, and he wasn’t cruel in the other more overt ways, nor was he turned so tight that to enjoy a cup of tea over the marina with a hooker was anything sexual, nor was she young enough to be his daughter, just none of it, but she could see that he had made his pact with the random killings he initiated at the plate in baseball parks and the agreement left him nothing but the long series of empty afternoons.
“You want to know why I became a hooker?” she asks.
“Not really,” he says. He drives the way other men drive when there are things on their minds, but his mind, she knows, has but one thing in it—eleven times. “You have your reasons. I respect them. I think you should be careful and do what you choose.”
“You didn’t even see me,” she says. “You don’t even know who’s in the car with you.”
He doesn’t answer. He says. “I’ll have you back by five-thirty.”
“A lot of men want to know why I would do such a thing. They call me young and beautiful and talented and ready for the world and many other things that any person in any walk of life would take as a compliment. And I make it my challenge, the only one after survive, to answer them all differently. Are you listening?”
Eddie Zanduce drives.
“Some of them I tell that I hate the work but enjoy the money; they like that because—to a man—it’s true of them. Some I tell I love the work and would do it for free; and they like that because they’re all boys. Everybody else gets a complicated story with a mother and a father and a boyfriend or two, sometimes an ex-husband, sometimes a child who is sometimes a girl and sometimes a boy, and we end up nodding over our coffees or our brandies or whatever we’re talking over, and we smile at the wisdom of time, because there is nothing else to do but for them to agree with me or simply hear and nod and then smile, I do tell good stories, and that smile is the same smile you’ve been giving yourself all day. If you had your life figured out any better than I do, it would have been a different day back at your sailboat motel. Sorry to go on, because it doesn’t matter, but I’ll tell you the truth; what can it hurt, right? You’re a killer. I’m just a whore. I’m a whore because I don’t care, and because I don’t care it’s a perfect job. I don’t see anybody else doing any better. Show me somebody who’s got a grip, just one person. Survive. That’s my motto. And then tell stories. What should I do, trot out to the community college and prepare for my future as a medical doctor? I don’t think so.”
Eddie Zanduce looks at the young woman. Her eyes are deeper, darker, near tears. “You are beautiful,” he says. “I’m sorry if the day wasn’t to your liking.”
She has been treated one hundred ways, but not this way, not with this delicate diffidence, and she is surprised that it stings. She’s been hurt and neglected and ignored and made to feel invisible, but this is different, somehow this is personal. “The day was fine. I just wish you’d seen me.”