It always started with eye contact. Lucy would focus on one man until he felt the heat of her gaze, and if he looked back at her with a certain serious glint, she knew it had begun. He would ask the bartender to send her a drink, or else he would glide over and introduce himself before he ordered her an overpriced martini or glass of wine. It was best if he was over forty and not too handsome. The younger, better-looking men didn’t have to pay for it, unless this was specifically what they were trawling for.
It was also best if the man she set her sights on had come to the bar with a group. Solitary men were bigger risks. A few were there purposely to look for someone like her. If she scratched beneath their veneer of public politeness, a strong hint of suppressed anger or resentment greeted her; they had something to prove, although some of them did not want to be bothered at all because their intention that night was to obliterate their personalities with alcohol, and in these cases there was no time or energy for anything else.
She did not do threesomes. She had no pimp or protector. She had a regular job. Sex with strangers was something she did on the side when she needed money, or was lonely and restless, or, on occasion, both.
Her birthday was tomorrow, her thirty-fourth. It was just after nine o’clock and she was in the Swissotel bar on West Wacker Drive, drinking a gin and tonic, pretending to look at her phone as she surveyed the room. She was tall and slender; her breasts were real, her legs smooth and muscular from frequent runs. She was a natural blonde with hazel brown eyes. If asked her age, she told the men she was 27. Most of them believed her; some claimed she looked younger. She’d started sleeping with men for money the year after college when she earned a barely subsistence-level salary in the philosophy department’s administrative office at the same university where she accrued eighty thousand dollars in loans over the four years she was enrolled as an international studies major. Even with three roommates, her rent and loan payments were more than she could afford most months if she wanted to eat something other than beans and macaroni and rice and go out with her friends a few times a month. Her parents were divorced and both said they didn’t have any extra money to give her. She was, no surprise to her, on her own—as she had been, more or less, since high school graduation.
One of her roommates taught her how to work the men in the bars and soon she was doing it too. “Think of it as a second job,” her roommate said.
She had rules: no bondage, no rough play, no blindfolds. Most men only ordered off the regular menu anyway.
In her late twenties, she was married for a few years and had stopped meeting men who paid to use her body during that time. She was faithful throughout the marriage—the sex work really had only been for the money; it was not some self-loathing, psychological trick she was playing on herself—at least she didn’t think it was. Her ex-husband was married to someone else now and had a baby. She had never wanted kids.
A few months before her sixteenth birthday, she had sex with a friend of her father’s, a man she had been attracted to since she was fourteen. She was a virgin when it happened, boy crazy, witlessly impressed by the purported physical ecstasies and intimate negotiations of adults. Her father’s friend was somewhere in his forties, married, and drunk. His name was Carl Bonner and two years earlier, he had lent her father money to start a café that subsequently failed. At the time she hadn’t believed he’d behaved badly with her because she had wanted to kiss him, and when he finally did kiss her, she wanted to keep kissing him, but the idea of anything more filled her head with the fog of alarm and fear, but also, confusingly, desire.
She gave in to his drunken cajoling in spite of her fears. It was over in less than three minutes, and it had hurt too, which she’d known to expect but hadn’t realized it would hurt as much as it did.
Afterward, he told her they’d made a mistake, and that it wasn’t something he’d ever done before. He told her never to speak of it to anyone because he would deny it if she did. Within the year, he and his second wife and their newborn son moved to another state. She hadn’t seen or spoken to him since. His two children from his first marriage were closer to her age, but they went to a private school two towns over, and she wasn’t friends with them. For a while she made herself believe she felt flattered, even lucky, that Carl had chosen her—possibly it meant he had found her irresistible.
In college, she met other girls who had had similar experiences, and they decidedly did not feel flattered. They felt angry and shortchanged and pitied her for not realizing sooner that she had been used in the most personal way. It bothered them too that Lucy did not seem to understand that a woman had the right to defend herself against unwanted attention by any means possible because it was the only way to be taken seriously.
She didn’t know if this was true, because weren’t women who fought back often made to believe they’d asked for it? Weren’t they told that if they didn’t look and act the way they did…that if they really did mean no, what were they doing at that party, wearing that top, drinking all those beers with those guys who they knew were a little wild, in the first place?
Sometimes when she saw a man who reminded her of Carl, she stared at him until he smiled or else looked at her with growing bewilderment. If she ever were to see him again, she didn’t know what she would want other than his acknowledgment that what had happened was his fault. She wondered if he would still be attracted to her if he knew her now, or if he was plagued by remorse or a chronic, misplaced anger. Though of course he lived in some distant elsewhere, the past having swallowed him, and she had no intention of summoning him to the present. The past and its ghosts were best left undisturbed. If you brought them back, you could not hope to control how long they stayed.
This evening she was in good spirits and perfect health. She was so pretty that men and women both looked at her with curiosity and desire and envy. She knew that few people were as interested in the lives of the plain and the homely. To be plain or ugly was barely to exist, especially if you were a woman.
The man on whom she had set her sights for the night was in his mid- to late fifties, his dark hair turning silver. His suit was expensive, Savile Row or a convincing imitation. They exchanged steady, serious looks for twenty minutes before he raised his eyebrows, nodded, and came over to her side of the bar.
“I know you,” he murmured, settling onto the stool next to her. He wore a light, almost flowery cologne. His nails were manicured, his face cleanly shaven. He had a faint accent—Italian, she thought.
“You do?” she said. “I think I’d remember you if we’d met before now.”
“We’ve met,” he insisted. “You worked at the University of Chicago, yes? The philosophy department. You were the assistant there. Laura, right?”
So he did know her. She would have to leave and start over somewhere else, or go home, but she didn’t want to do either. “Lucy,” she said warily.
“Ah, yes. Lucy.” He took her hand and kissed it. “Nico Peretti. I know Mitchell Howard—Dr. Howard. I used to meet him for lunch sometimes, but now he is in California.” He paused. “Do you still work in that office?”
She shook her head. “No. Not for a while.”
“Are you—” He paused, his hand hovering above her knee. “Are you waiting for someone?” She looked down at his hand until he withdrew it and reached for the glass of wine he’d brought with him from the other side of the bar. He was fidgety, a little tense. His eyes darted around the room before they came to rest on her again. He was out of his depth, she sensed, but was trying to bluff his way through it.
“I have a friend who works here,” she lied.
“It is a very nice hotel.”
She gave him a small, cool smile. “Why are you here?”
“I like to look at the people. I come here sometimes when my wife is out of town.”
“Only to look?” she asked.
He laughed quietly. “Sometimes a little more.” He kept his eyes on her, neither of them glancing away. It was a peculiar thrill to look at a man this way, to be looked at in return with the same unequivocal challenge. Yes? Say yes.
Yes.
He moved closer, his mouth at her ear. His breath was warm, almost hot. His cologne filled her nose, the body beneath his clothes so easy to manipulate, so greedy to be touched. She took a long, surreptitious breath. She did like him, she supposed. A little. Enough. “Should we—” he murmured. “I’m divorced now, just so that’s clear.”
“Should we what?” she said.
His face fell but he blinked it away. “Why were you looking at me like that when I was on the other side of the bar?”
“I like to look at people too.” She reached for her bag, a small beaded purse that held her car key, a credit card, condoms, pepper spray.
He took her hand and squeezed it gently. “Can I come with you? Wherever you’re going?”
She didn’t take any of the men back to her apartment. They always went up to a hotel room and once it was over, she collected her money and left.
“Do you want to go to another bar?” he asked. “Should we take a walk? It’s a very nice night.”
Outside the air smelled of chocolate from the candy factory several blocks downriver. So many people were out for a Wednesday night, but it was early August and warm and there was a celebratory frisson in the air. The Cubs were in the midst of a winning season. The streets were filled with tourists, money in their pockets, each with appetites to surfeit. Some walked in pairs or small, animated groups, others alone, hurrying toward whatever or whoever tethered them to their lives.
“Come home with me,” whispered Nico before they’d finished crossing the bridge that delivered them to the south end of the Magnificent Mile, his lips close to her ear again. “If you won’t let me come with you.”
“Where do you live?” she asked. She hadn’t made up her mind about anything yet.
“Very close. McClurg Court. Please?” His smile was beseeching. “I have thought about you since those days when I used to visit Dr. Howard. I wanted to come see you after he left, but it would not have been proper. I was still married then, for one.”
“You can call him Mitch,” she said. “I didn’t call him Dr. Howard, not after the first week I worked there.” She didn’t remember Nico coming into the office, but it was probably ten years since she had last seen him, and perhaps he’d looked different then – fatter, bearded, less well dressed.
“I used to tease him about you,” he said. “He would get angry.”
She looked at him. “Why did you tease him?”
“Why do you think?” he asked. His throat and cheeks appeared flushed under the street lamps. Behind them two men laughed, loud and drunk, one crying out, “You wish, bro!”
“What did you say to him?” she asked.
Nico shook his head. “I’ll tell you another time. I want you to think well of me.”
They walked in silence for a moment, their hands brushing once. She pulled hers closer to her side, touched the cool, hard beads of her little bag. “What are you thinking will happen if I go to your apartment with you?” she asked.
He gazed at her, his red mouth twitching with a small, teasing smile. “That is all up to you, Lucy.”
She turned away, glancing down at the water as they passed over the Chicago River, the bridge trembling beneath their feet as a CTA bus rumbled past, several people standing in the aisle, holding the hand grips, faces turned toward the smeared windows.
“Tomorrow’s my birthday,” she said before she thought to stop herself.
“So you’re a Leo,” he said.
She blinked. “You know astrology?”
He expression was wry. “Only a little. My ex-wife is a Leo like you.”
“I’m divorced too,” she said.
“Ah.” His hand brushed hers again. “Did you break his heart?”
“No. At least I don’t think so. I didn’t want kids. He decided he did, and we were growing apart and so—” She shook her head.
“It isn’t easy to unmarry someone,” said Nico. “Even when there are no big battles.” He paused. “Tell me, would you like to come to my place tonight? It is a very nice place.”
She looked at him for a long moment before she nodded. She was curious about him and a little bored. She was also a little lonely—nothing, not even a dog or a tiny bird in a cage, awaiting her at her apartment. Her few good friends in the city were all but unreachable, lost to parenting duties and compliant monogamy.
He took her hand and kissed it again. “Very good,” he said. “Very good, Lucy.”
The pale, tall buildings on both sides of the street were lit up with commerce and blank promise, people flowing in a steady stream in and out of the stores, the hotel lobbies, the restaurants, their eyes giving nothing away other than their possession by the present moment.
Nico took her arm and led her on, his large hand warm at her elbow. She wondered if she could ask him for money. She wasn’t yet confident she could accurately predict how he would respond to such a request. She wasn’t going to ask, she decided then. With a stranger she would have been frank: Cash upfront, all right? All right. Or, Oh. No, no, I don’t—I didn’t realize—to which she would say, Sorry. A simple misunderstanding. But most of the time they understood and it went from there until they were done.
As soon as they entered his apartment, which smelled of some kind of vegetable matter going rotten, he reached for her and pressed himself against her. He was already hard, and she knew instantly that she’d made a miscalculation, assumed relative innocence where there was only subterfuge and cunning.
“Nico,” she said, pulling back. “I thought it was up to me to decide what we did tonight.”
His gaze was almost sorrowful. “Are you saying you don’t want this too?”
She shook her head and stepped away. The thought arrived that she should go back into the hall, walk straight to the elevator and flee. Later, reviewing the events in her mind, she knew she would definitely have fled if he hadn’t claimed they’d met before that night.
“We don’t have to do anything,” he said. “Or maybe just a little, if you agree? I want to see you without your clothes. I have imagined you naked so many times.”
“That’s creepy,” she blurted.
He looked surprised. “Why do you say that? Young women’s bodies are the most beautiful things on earth.”
He led her away from the door, down a short hall and past the kitchen where she spotted a large bowl of fruit—browning bananas, a cantaloupe, a pineapple with its jutting, spear-like leaves—on a countertop littered with mail and coffee cups and dirty water glasses. He said nothing about the fetid smell. He had to have noticed it too but wasn’t willing to apologize for it.
They entered a living room where a large, bare window looked westward over the city sprawl. The room also contained a plush, camel colored sofa and two matching armchairs. There was no TV, no stereo. Only the chairs, the sofa, identical tall lamps in two opposite corners, and a large glass coffee table. Nico turned to her with an eager smile. “The view is breathtaking, no?”
She nodded. “It is.”
“May I get you a glass of wine? Do you like zinfandel?”
“I do, but I’m OK,” she said.
He was disappointed. “Not even a little? I’d like to have some and it would make me happy if you did too.”
“All right,” she said. “But only a little.”
While he was in the kitchen, she stood at the window and looked out across the city, its spires and towers and rooftops filling her with melancholy—their remoteness was both attractive and terrible. She knew she had to stop going to bars and taking money from men. There had been almost fifty of them. That was enough, she told herself. She also knew she would give in to Nico if he kept insisting, but she would find something to take from him in return—she did not want to leave him unscathed.
When he appeared with the wine, the glass he gave her was more than half full. He clinked his glass with hers before they each took a drink. The wine was unpleasantly alcoholic—the bottle had likely been sitting out for some time. When he turned away, she surreptitiously spit most of the mouthful she’d taken back into the glass.
“Tell me what you and Mitch said about me,” she said after they’d settled onto the sofa.
Nico looked at her steadily. “Are you sure?” He put a hand on her knee and glided it up her thigh.
She took his hand and moved it back to her knee. “Yes. Tell me.”
“He said he’d had dreams about you. Sex dreams. He’d wake up with a mess in his sheets.” He was grinning hard as he spoke.
She glanced over at the window, at the constellation of lights, at the rooftops and chimneys in the near distance. She’d liked Mitch. He was the kind of man she would have picked up if he were in the habit of hiring a woman, but she doubted that he was. He’d flustered so easily and blushed sometimes when he’d talked to her. But perhaps he was different when he traveled. It would have surprised her, however, to learn that he was different in a different city, although it wasn’t beyond comprehension.
“When I told him once I wanted to bend you over your desk and fuck you, he got very angry with me.” Nico paused and took another sip from his wine glass. “I said he was acting like you were his daughter. I told him I knew he wanted to fuck you too. His sex dreams told me as much.”
She turned her gaze back to him. His face was flushed, his pupils dilated. “What did he say to that?” she asked, noncommittal. Heat rolled off of him, his body burning with pitiless energy. He was poised to strike. She either had to leave or submit; this time she doubted he would let her pull away. “Wet dreams,” she said. “That’s what they’re called.”
He laughed. “Call them whatever you want. You know what I meant.” He leaned in to kiss her and she let him, fear and lust rising in her chest. When he pushed her skirt up to her waist and pulled down her underwear, thrusting his face between her legs, his tongue immediately finding the right place, she was stunned. The sofa’s fabric was velvety against her bare arms, her nerves tingling from what he was doing to her with both skill and patience. He kept going, softly, inexorably insistent until she came, her cry making her ears ring.
She was still gasping, her vision not yet cleared, when he unzipped his pants and began working himself over with a hand he’d spit into with almost clinical precision. Within seconds he too was coming with an anguished groan, his head flung back, and then it was over, both of them wordless and panting, still mostly clothed.
She almost never had an orgasm with a man anymore. She wasn’t sure if she wanted to offer him something else, but he was already standing up and stepping away from her, the air around him appearing for a second to turn darker, almost fog-like. She struggled to put on her underwear and smooth down her skirt, unable to think of anything to say. He disappeared into the kitchen where she could hear him take a glass out of the cupboard and run the tap. She pictured the fruit moldering in the bowl and lay back on the sofa, her body still throbbing. She hadn’t come like that in a long time. He was unnerving and rude. She realized with a feeling of both confusion and resignation that she would see him again if he asked her to.
It seemed unlikely there would be a second time, however. At the door a few minutes later, he handed her a hundred dollar bill. “Is that enough?” he said. He looked more tired now than smug or cunning. He looked older and resigned, wearied by the series of choices that had led them both to this moment.
She stared at him, wondering how he had known. She almost didn’t take the money, but there it was. He pressed the bill brusquely into her hand, impatient to have her gone, and she put it in her bag and heard herself saying, “Yes. Thanks.”
He closed the door without a word. Her face was burning, heat creeping up from her neck. It took a second to remember which way the elevator was. No sounds emerged from behind the clean white doors of the other apartments she passed in the hall.
A bowl of red and brown potpourri, cinnamon scented, sat on a table in between the two elevators. She found herself touching the wood chips and cloves and bristly dried flowers as the elevator doors opened. Before she recognized what she was doing, she dumped the bowl’s contents onto the floor.
On the ride down to the street and during her flight across the city in a taxi where neither she nor the young, goateed driver bothered to speak, the stink of Nico’s apartment stayed on her. It wasn’t until she was home and had taken a shower that she let herself fully breathe again.
Christine Sneed is the author of two novels and two story collections—the most recent is The Virginity of Famous Men. Her short stories have appeared in The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, Ploughshares, New England Review and a number of other publications. She’s received the Grace Paley Prize, Chicago Public Library’s 21st Century Award, among other honors, and has been a finalist for the L.A. Times Book Prize. She lives in Pasadena, California.