A Better Goodbye (21 page)

“Yeah, I heard it was pretty expensive.” Was that relief in Sierra's voice? “Maybe I can help you—if you, like, still want to do massage.”

“I suppose,” Jenny said, trying to find the right tone, not too eager, not too distant.

She leafed through Bishop's
Complete Poems: 1927–1979
while Sierra laid out the situation: upscale apartment on the Westside, two shifts a day Monday through Friday, one on Saturday, two girls per shift, the girls keep everything they make in tips but the boss gets 50 percent of the donation.

“I told him all about you,” Sierra said, “but you've still got to meet him before you get hired.”

“Right,” Jenny said. “I can see if I like him then.”

“And if he likes you,” Sierra said.

Okay, she's still catty and she's definitely polishing the boss's knob,
Jenny thought. But she said, “Can I ask one other thing?”

“What?” Sierra said as if she were suddenly weary of this conversation.

“Is there security?” Jenny said.

“For sure,” Sierra said. “These days you'd have to be, like, totally insane not to have security, you know?”

Jenny knew.

She walked into the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf on Montana thinking that this Scott guy she was supposed to meet wouldn't win any points for originality. But everybody else came here—off-duty soccer moms, directors between movies, the idle rich down from Brentwood—so she guessed that a pimp could too. She just hoped she wouldn't run into someone from school or any old clients among the polished wood surfaces and the jars full of coffee beans. Not that old clients were much of a concern. For one thing, L.A. was so big that it seemed to swallow everybody. For another, at two on a Tuesday afternoon—okay, a quarter after—they were probably all at work, making money they could spend on girls they weren't married to or dating, girls like the one she would become again if this meeting went right.

She spotted a guy she thought was Scott at a corner table. Faded denim shirt outside his khakis, probably to cover his belly.
Yeah, definitely,
she thought once she got closer and saw his jowls. But he was still handsome in a scuffed-up way. She wondered what kind of problems he had that he would let himself go like that. She was sure he'd tell her. Guys always did, once they stopped wondering how she looked naked.

“Scott?” she said, stopping two steps away from the table.

“If you're Jenny,” he said, “you're late.”

“Sorry,” she said. “Parking was, like, impossible.” She was going to add that she was being extra careful because she was driving without a license, but then she thought better of it. Too much information.

When she sat down, she made a point of shaking his hand. It felt like a dead fish. There wasn't any light in his eyes either. He wasn't like the other guys who had interviewed her for massage jobs. They'd all tried to impress her, flirting and cracking jokes like they were on a first date or something. Maybe he was tired. No, that couldn't be it, not in a place where caffeine ruled. She decided that he'd just been shortchanged in the personality department. But she still said, “Nice to meet you,” and tried to sound like she meant it. She needed the job. Or she thought she did until Scott said he wanted 60 percent of what she got for every massage.

Sierra had told her fifty and Jenny didn't even want to settle for that. “Sixty?” she said. “No way.” And took a sip of green tea.

“That's what the other girls give me,” Scott said.

Okay,
Jenny thought,
he's a liar too.

“You know you'll make a fortune doing extras,” he said.

“I don't do extras.”

“Right.”

“I don't. Really.” Okay, now she was lying. But she didn't do extras for many clients, usually just one guy she decided was special, maybe even started seeing away from work. In the massage business, that practically made her a vestal virgin.

Scott resumed looking at her straight on. Maybe he was starting to believe her. “You must not have any regulars,” he said.

“Oh, I have lots of them.”

“And you don't do extras. What do you do, hypnotize them?”

“Trade secret.”

“I get it. Some Asian deal, right?”

“Maybe,” Jenny said. What was it about the mysteries of the Orient that made douchebags like this guy so easy? She had no idea if there were any mysteries of the Orient at all. “But I thought we were talking about your cut,” she told Scott. “I mean, like, sixty percent is pretty steep. Everywhere else I've worked, I was always able to make my own deal.”

“What did you have in mind?” he said.

“Sixty percent for me,” she said.

At last his eyes showed something: disbelief. “Now you're fucking with me,” he said.

“No, I'm straight up telling you I'll still make lots of money for you even if you only take forty percent.”

“And then you'll tell the other girls, and then they'll be bitching to me: ‘How come Jenny—'”

“I always call myself something else,” she said, wishing Sierra hadn't told him her real name.

“Whatever,” he said. “They'll be bitching about how come you get sixty and they only get fifty.”

“But you just told me they got forty.”

Jenny made a point of smiling when she said it, like she'd caught him checking her out in a department store.

Scott smiled back and said, “Whoops.”

“It's all right,” Jenny said. “I understand.”

“You do?”

“Sure. You're running a business and you want to make the best deal you possibly can. It's common sense.”

“Right,” Scott said, nodding, trying to look, wise although Jenny didn't think he had the face for it.

“So can you live with sixty-forty for me?” she said. “I don't think you'll be sorry.”

“Oh yeah?”

The question hung in the air while Scott sized up as much of her as he could see, the face, the long hair, the pink sweater. Jenny imagined that he probably remembered the tight jeans she had on too.

“Okay,” he said. “I guess I can live with that.”

But when he cranked up his smile, experience told her what was coming next.

“Just to be on the safe side, though, I'm going to need you to give me a massage. You know, so I'll be sure you can handle the job.”

It looked like he was trying not to leer. She had to give him credit for that. But she still said, “In your dreams.”

Coco or Koko? Jenny wrote both names on a legal pad in longhand and stared at them. She didn't like her penmanship, never had. Why couldn't it be elegant and graceful? Maybe because she wasn't elegant and graceful, she thought. Then, laughing, she printed both names in block letters.

There, that was closer to the way her next massage name, whatever it turned out to be, would look on the IrubLA website and in the back pages of
L.A. Weekly
. The Internet ad would feature a photo of her, one breast seductively bared but her face blurred so if anybody from her real life saw it, they'd say, “Hey, that looks like . . . but no, she'd never do massage.” That was all Jenny asked of the ad: plant the seed of doubt, give her plausible deniability, so she could move on unencumbered.

But with her face blurred, she needed to choose a massage name that would establish for even the densest horndog that she was Asian. Scott's first choice had been Asia, as though a million other girls, Asian and otherwise, hadn't already used it. The suggestion was, to Jenny's mind, further proof that the man was not a genius. Then again, he might have been trying to make nice with her after she had shot down his request for a freebie. It would have been a deal breaker if, after scowling, muttering, threatening, and pleading, he hadn't backed down. He would never tell anybody what happened, of course—he'd probably say just the opposite—but that would only put him in the same category as the other men she had worked for.

So Asia was out, and it had lots of company on Jenny's discard pile. Another girl had snapped up Suki in the short time since she'd abandoned the name, and she didn't want to go back to Kimmi, the only other name she liked. There were already two Jades working as well as a Mei, a Mai, and a Mai Tai. Kiannas and Briannas came and went with great frequency; Mikas and Mikos did too. The barrage of exotic pseudonyms had Jenny on the verge of a headache. Then
Ling, Ming, Ping, Pong
raced through her mind and she burst into laughter. Good thing she wasn't doing this at the library; people would have thought she was crazy. It would be hilarious to call herself Ping-Pong except she wasn't trying to scare clients away or, as would inevitably happen, inspire one of them to show up with two paddles and a ball in an attempt to charm her. Ming was too close to Ling, and there was already a Ling working for Scott, although he didn't seem to be overjoyed with her.

Back to Coco and Koko. Jenny knew that both names had wear and tear on them. But they hadn't been used in—she was guessing now—at least six months, and in the massage business, that was the equivalent of mummies in a tomb in Egypt. So it all came down to two letters, C and K, and when she made her decision, it was based purely on aesthetics. Koko with a K struck her as too harsh, and she wasn't that kind of a girl. She was Coco with a C because C looked softer.

It was almost quitting time when Sierra told Nick to stay put. He was surprised she was still around. She had seen her last client of the day half an hour before, and it wasn't like her to wait for Ling, who was polishing off a regular she would start bitching about the moment he was gone. Nick wondered what the poor son of a bitch's sin would be. An unwashed butt? Fingernails bitten until they were bloody? A flare-up of psoriasis?

Nick never found out. As soon as Ling rushed her client out the door and tottered back into the living room on red stilettos, Sierra pounced.

“Scott's hiring a new girl,” she said. “Asian.”

“Oh?” Ling said, unfazed. “Who is she?”

“I think I used to work with her,” Sierra said.

“You think?” Ling said. “Like, do you have amnesia or something?”

“No,” Sierra said, drawing the word out, annoyed.

“When does she start?”

“Tomorrow.”

Nick saw Ling's head snap back, like she'd been hit with a stiff jab.

“Tomorrow?” she said. “That's cool, I guess. I was going to take tomorrow off anyway.”

“You didn't tell me,” Sierra said.

“Well, I would have.”

“Right.”

Ling didn't seem to notice Sierra's sarcastic tone or the glare that accompanied it. “I'll bet I'm prettier than your friend, aren't I?” she said.

“She's not my friend,” Sierra said. “But no, you're not prettier.”

Nick watched Ling's eyes burn with the first signs of anger and frustration. He found himself wishing she'd shut up, but knew she couldn't.

“Then she's probably stupid,” Ling said.

“I don't think so,” Sierra said, relishing another chance to sink her claws into Ling. “She goes to college.”

“Like, beauty college?”

“UCLA.”

“Well, I go to college too.”

“You told me you dropped out.”

“Just for the semester. I'm going back in the fall.”

“Great. You guys will have lots in common.”

Sierra smiled triumphantly while Ling stood there searching for words with which she could fight back. When she couldn't find them, she dropped to her knees and burst into tears. “I hate her!” she wailed, pounding the floor with her tiny fists. “I hate her, I hate her, I hate her!”

A wave of sorrow swept over Nick, catching him by surprise. How could he possibly feel sorry for Ling? She was arrogant, unreliable, uninterested in getting along with anyone whether it was a client, another masseuse, or Nick. He knew this upscale jack shack would be better off without her, and yet seeing her humiliated, stripped of pride and dignity, went far beyond any payback he had imagined. It was like watching an execution. He wished he hadn't been a witness to it, just as he wished he hadn't watched Holmes beat Ali. When he glanced at Sierra, hoping she would show a little compassion, he saw her giving Ling the finger even though Ling wasn't looking at her. It was apparently the thought that counted.