Venus buzzes and waits for the click of the entry door, listens to footfalls across mid-century linoleum. Slow taking the stairs, a re-shuffle at the door of Apartment 4, the knock knock knock of a polite mouse. The last appointment of her shift has an apologetic touch, and it’s welcome. She spies him through the peephole, makes him wait like she’s his date for the prom. Silently, she counts down from ten, and then, her voice not so much penetrating the door as melting through it, says, “Yes? Who is it please?”
“It’s Ted?”
She is waiting for one of them to surprise her by not stooping to a fake diminutive. The male of the species did not rely much on creativity—were, in fact, fabulously devoid of it when looking for a good time—but one day she was going to get a phony Preston or a bogus Zachary, a counterfeit Nicholas. If only they’d just put some effort into it. It shouldn’t have to be so hard to get an adventurer from a children’s tale with cute, stockinged legs and gleaming white teeth. A Theodore, that would have sufficed, but it was another Ted she’d have to stomach.
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In the ads she goes by Venus. Her real name is Charlene, a name she’s always thought should be attached to a difficult and small-minded girl. Sometimes she went by Charlie, and her high school boyfriend used to call her Chuck. The stage name was apparently just to confuse people, sometimes even herself. Venus, not Venice, she reminded them. Who dubs themselves after a city famous for drugged-out drifters and litterbug tourists and barefoot last-ditchers humping surf boards across grimy hot asphalt? She had spent a night here on the boardwalk during the end of her elsewhere phase, not really living anywhere, not doing anything to make the time pass faster. Waking on a canker sore of a concrete bench, hiding from the rising ultraviolet like a roach, it made an impression on her. Her eyes opened to a sky fractured into elegant pieces. She could hear waves crashing like the tolling of some enormous warning bell. There were bodies scattered—friends she made the previous night—in similarly indelicate postures, shivering and snoring and muttering in their sleep, or threatening to hang the dog if it didn’t stop barking, or else with their unwashed, unloved feet sticking out from tents made of blue plastic tarps and pizza boxes while they lit the pipe. It was like they’d all gotten hit by the same bus at the same time. This was her place, these were her people. She didn’t know why, except someplace had to be for her, some people had to be hers, and Los Angeles seemed as close as she was going to get to either, and then she found Miss Suki. Or Miss Suki found her.
She was new at this not so long ago, she says to herself. Four years ago she was that barely-able-to-vote girl who did stupid things for crank and camaraderie. Most of the new ones Miss Suki brings in last a month and then leave town without a goodbye, mostly, she thought, because they didn’t really want to work for a living. None of them reminded her of her. She is clean, clear-eyed, right-minded, due north. She’s seen a lot of fucked up attitudes come and go; at some point they came to her—the senior practitioner in the office—to pick her brain. Or looking for a maternal enabler. What if it’s just too big? Venice tells them to mentally prepare for everything, but best practical advice for monster wood was slather on the lube.
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“I have an appointment?” Ted says.
“Just a min-ute,” she sings.
Toy with them, Miss Suki told her. Make them learn something about waiting. A trick, Venus knew, that could blow up a thousand different ways if you tried it a thousand times.
She’d written down her own set of rules, learned the hard way. Better cold and pushy than allow them to believe it was going to happen the way it does in their fantasies. The problem was that since they knew they were under observation, they had to be careful not to show her too much. It was cat-and-mouse to manipulate a strange man in heat.
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“Almost there,” she says.
At this juncture of a date, she routinely imagines tidying up after a gang of pugnacious children in pirate costumes. They are sucking the life out of her, but she doesn’t tell this to anyone; it is her private suffering. She has a perfectly functional marriage of convenience to a handsome and generous man with an executive SUV on call 24/7. Vast amounts of her time and worry are spent obsessively making sure spills and smears don’t linger too long and get sticky.
Again, she counts off ten. It’s a habit now, this slowing down of things. It’s almost the job itself. Miss Suki called it paperwork. The clairvoyant Philipina had her rules, and Venus found that putting limitations on herself gave her stations a peaceful glow, the magic of routine. Self-control was something Miss Suki preached not in the abstract, unknowable way, but as a way of living multiple lives within one. Charlene didn’t totally understand, but Venus did a little. The sheer size of her, even her eyes and her hands, seemed to crowd the room when she spoke in her rambling, musical gibberish. Downstairs there is a fortune-telling room where she flips cards and tells people how they’re going to die.
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Through the peephole, Venus sees a boy-blur that shows more crumpled than his age in an overlarge dark brown suit. Her first guess is that he is a missionary. She can see him in the hot city in his hand-me-downs pushing literature, a minute of your time to assist him in fulfilling God’s work. His hair is short and thinning, patches of bare, pale scalp show through. He wears glasses, round and old-fashioned. Since she started with Miss Suki, she knows the difference between what happens when they’re already in the fantasy and when they are simply on their guard, studying her the way she was studying them. Ted’s got a studiousness he can’t wash off—a man who spends a lot of time with his face in a book, not pussy.
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First impression, all the Teds are a variation on a variation. They are children disarmed by formality and warned to be on their best behavior—they will naturally skirt the rules and bang at their walls, the way water always finds a crack. Most of them are contextually harmless; all of them have their conceits. They come through her door spoiled or frustrated or entitled, bitter at the female of the species or darkly attuned to their private obsessions. To her, however, they could be morbidly obese and Martian green and wearing a lampshade over their head, as long as she didn’t get the demon who gets an operation shut down and workers rounded up like thieves, or ends a long time from now with her bones in a remote briar-patch, or a dumpster behind a third-rate casino.
Everything else is a question of personal threshold. She has a list of requests she would never honor, acts of kinky grievance she wouldn’t invite upon her body for all the money in the world. Miss Suki said a written record of taboos was the best way to keep a promise.
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“Hello? Is someone – are you there? I’m here to meet Venus,” Ted says, more aggressive in tone than before, but pronouncing her name correctly.
Reference points: disinterested in self-care, a low reserve of self-belief, well-read, perhaps poorly endowed. Something tells her he’s never paid a girl for sex; it’s not a stretch, she gets them all the time. They play against type, which usually made for uncomfortable revelations, but nothing yet that made her want to walk out on Miss Suki or worship some deadbeat stranger for drugs. She is a mystery to herself, and she prefers it that way, if that was something anyone would ever admit to. Maybe she would leave Miss Suki tomorrow, but probably she wouldn’t. She was good at keeping two sets of books and enjoyed the work of sex. She liked to feel and touch—wormy dirt, candle-wax, silk.
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She unbolts the door and opens it with the chain still in place, puts her face in the gap. “Yes?” she says, the tone of her voice still meant to unnerve. Run a little more interference, she thinks. Let him believe he might have buzzed the wrong apartment.
“Hello? Is there something I’m not doing right?” Ted says.
She puts a finger to her lips and surrenders the pretense as she unlatches the chain fob and lets him through. She flicks the lock and then re-fastens the chain.
Ted waits stoically to the side of the door for her command. Good boy, she thinks.
She takes him by the crook of his arm toward the bedroom, but it’s like he’s stuck to the floor. She softly kisses his cheek. Normally she doesn’t have to encourage them through the dark foyer; the glow of the lava lamp lights the way to the mattress and its colorless dressings, but now she has to uproot him and place him into the armchair, the only piece of furniture that isn’t the bed, the chest of drawers where the supplies are kept, or the Japanese screen. She feels like his care-giver.
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“I like to get your donation out of the way early so we can just relax and have a good time. Was it thirty or sixty you wanted, sweetie?”
He takes off his messenger bag. She hadn’t noticed it at first, but now it is suddenly occupying too much space in the room. She wonders what’s inside, guesses thick books with complex titles. Vaguely imagines a gun, something small but inelegant. Most likely it was filled with a ream of pamphlets on saving yourself before the end times.
“Sixty? Is that okay?”
“Of course,” she says, smiling her what-a-big-boy-you-are smile.
She knows that if he lasts five minutes, he’d be the king of the rodeo. Most of her Teds – with a few notable exceptions, like Seamus, for whose marathon sessions she was happily compensated—were finished before she had time to decide whether she might herself get off for good measure. It was, however, one of Miss Suki’s more solemn rules, to get them in and out as quickly as possible, no matter what they’d paid for.
Explosion then door, was the way Miss Suki put it.
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Venus had her own name for it: the bang zoom. Her approach to hustling them out was to engage in deathly platonic conversation about saving the polar bears or the signs of the Zodiac, until the message made itself clear: the physical part of the transaction had come to an end. Bang zoom, they dressed and departed.
“You can leave your donation on the dresser,” she says to Ted, weaving her small, animated fingers through his and tickling the underside of his wrist. “Back in a sec.”
Behind the divider she changes into a short black robe and dabs perfume under her arms and between her thighs. She gives the ends of her hair a single brush and blinks into the vanity to check that she is still herself, that she is twenty-seven (not forty-seven), that when she was small, she talked herself into believing that she was from Mars, that she has a tattoo on her shoulder blade of a Playboy bunny, a gift from Dirk, the boyfriend who called her Charlie. Dirk and Charlene was the name of the hallway item. He was back at the high school teaching history. And he had gotten married.
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The day has been long on her. Her body is hot and tired and over-stimulated. It’s not an altogether unpleasant sensation, it’s sort of dreary and grey-toned, but she has to get on with the bang zoom. She hears Ted stand to count out bills; she doesn’t need to see his lips moving as he adds the twenties together. For some reason, manhood prevents one from sitting and counting out cash. She figured out that no one wanted to come in short. It was a bona fide mood killer. She waits until he sits back down—no peeking necessary, the creak of the rattan armchair her starting gun—and then emerges from behind the divider to present herself to him.
The money is where she wanted it to be, and she knows it’s more than enough to cover her time, but he has put on a mask. Bad boy, she thinks. It’s a cheap Satan mask, pretty typical gaunt red face, furrowed brow, black horns, yellow eyes. Now she really wanted to know what else was in the bag.
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“Can you just go with it?” he says, ever the polite mouse.
She doesn’t answer, but then she is standing behind him, warming him with the heat baking inside of her for hours, tracing the nape of his neck with her fingertips, daring devil-boy to get hard. She is brushing her nipples lightly against the back of his head; she can feel the rubber band holding his mask in place. “Do you want to get more comfortable, Ted? Or should I call you…Satan? Or devil-boy?”
“Ted is fine,” he said.
“You want me to go first?”
“Please.”
“Okay, Ted,” she says and dances out a brief striptease, opening and closing her robe and slowly cupping a hand over her breast. She can see his eyes behind the mask, fixed perfectly into their crude slits, watching her in admiration. Then she closes the robe. Her tits, she has been aware for a long time now, are the only thing she’s ever really needed.
She circles the chair, confronting Satan-boy face to face and dragging her nails against his neck while straddling him. “Goose,” she says. She lets one side of her robe fall from her shoulder, thinking him dangerous enough to take it from here.
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“So where are you from?” he says.
Small-talk with the devil. Okay, she gets it. Curious about her in an anthropological sense. Or stalling because he’s got no place else to be, or because he hasn’t seen a naked female in too long and wants to soak in the view before sweet anticipation turns blurry and regrettable, and the banquet must begin in earnest.
“Philly,” she says.
Really, it was a blip of a municipality too close to Atlantic City to distinguish itself from the anonymity of strip-mall sprawl. Ages seven until eighteen. A down-market, casino-funded satellite community of zero marketability, a place named after a prosaic natural event; a hamlet, last she heard, where her high school best friend, Erin, still lived and dealt blackjack at the Golden Nugget. She’d always known that was going to happen to Erin, but what came out of nowhere was marrying Dirk, having kids, and turning into her mother—even inheriting the woman’s job—without putting up much of a fight. She wondered how much, if any, they still talked about her, the teacher and the blackjack dealer. She hoped they talked about her. At least they must have thought about her, dreamed about her. More than was probably normal for a disappeared high school friend. “I would’ve guessed the burbs,” Ted says.
“Why’s that?” she says.
“You have a very wholesome face.”
She looks at him and smiles; she can be susceptible to flattery. “You’re funny, Ted,” she says, and guides his hands to her bare shoulder, sets them free and leaves them. She tells him things with her eyes, things she wants to do to him.
“The ad said,” he says. “…is this supposed to be GFE?”
He pulls his hands back and watches the lava lamp send colorless shadow clouds oozing up and down the walls. “It is if you want it to be,” she says.
“I do,” he says to her.
“Okay, Satan, your wish is my command.”
“Will that help? Calling me Satan?”
“Wouldn’t hurt,” she says. “It doesn’t matter too much, I was good at being a girlfriend.” She puts the finger of her other hand between his belt and stomach, then adds another, and begins undoing the clasp, like a child digging through sand with a plastic shovel.
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“How did you end up doing this work?” he says as she pulls the belt from his pants. “I don’t mean to get too personal,” he says, “I just mean, would you have wanted to do something different?”
She didn’t look up from her task. What might have been offensive to some was genuinely understandable to her, and she had a catalogue of good backstories: “I liked to play with boys. I’m from a one-parent home, I was never abused or exploited as a child. I generally had good grades. My great uncle was a TV cowboy,” she says.
“Which one?”
“You know I can’t tell you,” she says.
If she wanted to make it even less comforting, she could tell him he was a walking penis that paid her dramatically more than she could make doing what she was otherwise qualified to do, all for a soft, warm place to land. Sometimes she even got off in the process. One time a guy said he was in love with her, and when she told him she didn’t believe in the concept of love, the guy said that he believed her, but that he’d already made up his mind it would never work anyway and he’d have to live without her. She could make it that kind of stark for Ted, too, but it seemed like he had feelings, and that was almost as bad as the polar opposite.
“Do people you’re close to know?” Ted says.
She wonders if she misjudged this Ted, whether he is better at pretending than the average other. She thinks maybe he is some kind of media working under-cover, but she doesn’t fear him; she cares less about him than getting the act completed, the joining and then the unjoining, the bang and the zoom. “My mother lives in Montana with her third husband. My father doesn’t think anything because he’s dead. You’re not wearing a secret hidden camera somewhere, are you, Ted?”
“No,” he said. “Why? Of course I’m not. Why?”
“No reason. I just wanted to ask.”
The thing she told him about her parents would have been true, too, if you swapped backstories. It was her mother who was dead, and her father who was in Montana (or Wyoming?) with his third wife. Talking about family with clients was another one of Miss Suki’s taboos. Always be lying.
Always be lying.
Miss Suki had taught her disaffection, to do her work like there isn’t a strange, pitiable man in a Satan mask stalling her with the third degree. Maybe he was there, but only if she wished him to be. Perhaps he wasn’t there at all, and he never existed and she had just conjured him from a pile of dust. They were already twenty-five minutes into the session and he hadn’t removed an article of clothing except for his shoes. She looked at the two ugly blocks placed side by side against the baseboard. Ted didn’t approve of her line of work, and that was okay. She supposed not too many did. There existed women in her business who might hope their clients all secretly hated themselves for indulging their vulgar lust, but she was not one of them. They could separate themselves from moral rectitude long enough to pay her upfront and get off. She could do the same. They—service provider and guest—were essentially the same thing. Free agents keeping two sets of books. Her satisfaction came knowing they had to pay a woman like her for permission to enter.
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“What about your parents? What would they think of you being here? With some girl like me? With that on?” she says, pointing at his face, covered by the mask. “And this?” She opened her legs and pushed a couple of fingers over her clit. Getting off always made her less self-conscious.
“They wouldn’t approve,” he says.
“Are they religious?”
“Yes,” he says. “But they would forgive me.”
“For what?” She grabs his hand and puts it between her legs. Under the mask she knows there is shock, there is fear. It is the most pleasant of all the positions she could find herself in.
“Here,” she says. He’s an obstinate child gone limp in anger; she doesn’t help so much as jaggedly dislodge him from his pants. It’s a new one for her. “Now, listen, Ted, we’re going to get you more comfortable.” She yanks the pants and underwear down to his ankles with official anger, annoyed he does not seem motivated while her inner thighs are sweating. “Sweetie?” He nods, but his arms are collapsed at his sides. She puts a knee on the pants clumped at his feet and pushes him onto the bed. “Are you ready?” she says, smiling, motherly-like, as though he were reckoning to negotiate the big yellow slide by himself for the first time. “This okay?” she says. She ducks and sweeps her eyelashes against his chest and tickles his balls. “There,” she says, as she takes one of his almost-dead arms and puts it around her waist. They look like they are going to roman wrestle. “Wait,” he says. He sits up and says, “Would you indulge me?” He takes another mask out of his bag. It is a witch with a nose-wart, crooked hat, sexless eyes. She allows him to place it over her head, and in a few minutes, it is over.