And When She Was Good (4 page)

1991

I
l Cielo was supposed to be the best Italian restaurant in town. Given the town, this was not saying much. It wasn't even true. There were small roadside taverns that did much better by the hearty, pasta-heavy dishes that people thought of as traditional Italian fare. Il Cielo was the most
pretentious
Italian restaurant in town, with gilt-frame chairs and white tablecloths and tiramisu, considered avant-garde at the time, in that place. The ceilings were painted to resemble a pale blue sky with wisps of clouds. The effect might have been pretty if the slipshod brushwork hadn't been so noticeable. Plus, the sky had been filled with chubby angels that floated across the ceiling, most with harps, one with a bow and arrow.

The owner's wife, noticing Helen's eyes drifting upward, mistook her gaze for admiration.

“Don't you love my cherubs?” she said.

Helen, who had written a paper on cherubim in her class on comparative religions, yearned to show off her knowledge, to explain to Angela Papadakis that she had made the common mistake of thinking that cherubs were little angels, when they really occupied a much more interesting and specific role within Judaism and Christianity. The figures on Il Cielo's ceiling were, more correctly, putti.

But she wanted a job, so all she said was “Yes.”

Although Angela's second husband, Gus, owned the restaurant, it was Angela's project, the kind of gift that a smitten widower bestows on a second wife. Gus was in his sixties, a dour-faced Greek man who ran two successful diners. But plump, pretty Angela, twenty years his junior, wanted something with
class,
and he had given her Il Cielo instead of a lavish wedding. She paid far more attention to the decor than to the menu. The result was that the food was mediocre but inoffensive, whereas the dining room was painful to contemplate.

Part of the problem was that Il Cielo was very dark for a place meant to evoke the sky. The pale blue paint, the light colors throughout, could not combat the inherent gloom in the squat, windowless building, a random piece of real estate that Gus owned. (He may have been enraptured with his new bride, but there were limits even to rapture.) Often Helen ended her weekend lunch shifts thinking she was going out into a dim, dark world, only to wind up blinking at the sun, which had been shining all along.

The weekend lunch shifts weren't the best, but she was the new girl and she needed to schedule work around school. She waited on Saturday shoppers, women who, true to stereotype, took forever to split the bill and almost always undertipped. She waited on men who tried to cup her behind. She found that if she started at their touch yet said nothing, they left larger tips. She even waited on a few rich kids from her school, the kind with cars and endless allowances, but they pretended not to recognize her. She was like a bad smell, a fart, and the only polite thing was to ignore her. She preferred the men who reached for her behind.

She was surprised that anyone wanted to touch the waitresses, given the drabness of their uniforms. They were brown velour, short sleeved and V-neck, perfectly straight, with fabric belts. The thinnest girls appeared shapeless in them, while the girls with shapes looked like bulging sacks of potatoes tied at the middle. Helen could not understand why Angela wanted the girls to be so drab and clunky, clashing with the dining room. It was rumored that Angela had landed her then-married husband-to-be while waitressing at his diner, where the girls wore short skirts and tight blouses. But could Angela really think that the young women here wanted gloomy Gus just because she had?

Then Helen met Angela's son, Billy.

“Watch out, new girl,” said Rhonda.

“I'm not interested,” Helen said. She wasn't. Oh, Billy was very good-looking. He had dark hair and eyes, a charming manner. But she didn't have time for a boyfriend. A job and school were all she could handle, and she was barely handling school. Her grades had dipped here and there, just as her father had hoped.

“Doesn't matter if you're interested, only if he's interested.”

“That's illegal.”

Rhonda laughed. “Yeah, well, enjoy taking it to the Supreme Court while you're out of a job. Look, the best way to handle it is to give him what he wants right away, and he'll leave you alone. If he gets
too
interested, his mom gets mad and you'll be history.”

“I'm not interested,” Helen repeated.

“Well, then you're really fucked.”

Rhonda's dire warnings seemed off base. Billy was kind to Helen, nothing more. He was being trained to manage the restaurant, at least according to Billy and his mother. His stepfather seemed less convinced of this plan. He had a point: Billy came and went as he pleased. For a day or two, he would appear in a nice suit. Then several days would go by when he wasn't seen at all. Or he would show up late in a shift “to go over the receipts.” This involved shoving a few twenties into the pocket of his very tight, acid-washed jeans. They were fashionable—at that time, in that town—and Helen wouldn't have minded having her own pair, but she couldn't afford them. She could pay for them, but she couldn't afford having her father notice them. She had realized early on that the advantage of being a waitress was that her father couldn't know how much she made in tips. She'd been squirreling money away ever since. But he would get suspicious if she showed up with anything new and expensive. So while she hid money in books and soap boxes and in the toes of her shoes—never all the money in one place, because then she couldn't be wiped out—she could never figure out what to spend it on that wouldn't catch her father's eye.

At any rate, she thought Rhonda was wrong. Billy had no use for her. There were other, prettier girls at the restaurant, closer to Billy's age and therefore with more freedom to date. He helped her at times, but that was in keeping with his need to learn the ropes. For example, the restaurant had a “signature” dessert, which was nothing more than Marshmallow Fluff with syrupy canned strawberries worked through it and then spooned on top of ice cream. The Marshmallow Fluff, purchased in bulk, often arrived frozen, and Helen found it impossible to stir the strawberries through it in order to achieve the even color and distribution that Angela required. Angela was always more interested in how things looked than in how things tasted.

“Let me show you,” Billy said when he found her struggling with the mix one day. He led her to the sink, instructed her to wash her hands up to the elbows, almost to the hems of the cap sleeves on her ugly uniform.

Billy then rolled up his sleeves. He had nicely muscled arms for a slender man. Olive skin, which was odd, given how fair his mother was. Big brown eyes. Helen still didn't have aspirations toward him. He was twenty-three, he drove a nice car, he wasn't looking for some silly high-school girl who was still forbidden to date despite being almost seventeen. Besides, Angela wouldn't like it, and Angela, not Billy, made the schedule. Helen wanted to get weekend evening shifts, which meant the best tips—and, better still, being out of the house on the long weekend evenings, when Hector was often at his surliest.

“Do what I do,” Billy said, then plunged his arms into the fluff, almost up to the elbows. “It's the only way,” he said, seeing how startled she looked. “That's why you wash up so thoroughly. You have to squeeze it through. It's a little like milking a cow. I bet you did that, right? On the field trip to Wentworth Dairy? Every kid in this town has milked a cow at Wentworth.”

This was true, and the acknowledgment of this insubstantial bit of shared history made her like him. It was unusual for people to include Helen in things, to point out what they shared. People always seemed more interested in cutting her out.

Timidly, she followed. It was cold; she suppressed a squeal. Billy, after all, hadn't squealed. But it didn't feel awful, and after a bit the sensation was oddly pleasant. “You can squeeze too hard,” Billy said, “and then you'll break up the berries. You have to massage it.”

Deep in the fluff, she felt his fingers brush hers. A mistake, she thought, but he twined his fingers in hers before moving on, looking deeply in her eyes. At that moment Rhonda came into the prep area, and her expression of disgust shamed Helen. Was this what Billy did with all the girls?

He swore it wasn't. He began driving her home. Of course, given her family situation, she didn't dare let him linger in front of the house. When she explained, leaving out the uglier details, why she couldn't sit in a car with him in front of her house, he began stopping a block away, two blocks away, and then, one afternoon, many miles away, at his mother and stepfather's house, which was grand and new by local standards.

“I just need to check on the dogs,” he said. “The folks are out of town.”

She had just turned seventeen, but she knew what was going to happen. She wanted it to happen, had already told the lies—she was working a double shift, she'd just stay at the restaurant between the lunch and dinner hours—to make it possible. She wanted Billy as she would never want another man as long as she lived, although she didn't know this at the time. But Billy turned out to be the only man she ever selected for herself, for her own pleasure. And she didn't really choose him, unless taking a job at Il Cielo was a way of choosing.

He undressed her in front of the fire in the living room, carried her into the bedroom that surely must be shared by Angela and Mr. Gus. If she were watching a movie, Helen would have found the scene cheesy. But she was living it, and she loved every minute.

For the rest of her life, Helen would hold on to this memory. The fact that it ended badly didn't corrupt how it began. Whatever his intentions—and, in his own way, Billy did care for her—
her
intentions were pure, she was honest, she was in love. Later, when she was older, she would even dare to ask herself if her mother might have felt the same way with her father, that first time, but she couldn't bear to believe that. Her mother knew that Hector Lewis was married, with kids.
She
had no reason to hope for a happy ending, because she had already chosen a story in which someone had to get hurt—herself or the other woman and her kids. Hector Lewis, overachiever, managed to hurt them all.

That first night with Billy, it was possible to believe in a world where no one ever got hurt. The pain was minimal, and he coaxed her through it, gentle and considerate, stopping as needed. He used his mouth on her. Later he would patiently instruct her on how to use her mouth on him, and that became his preference. He would do less and less for her. But that first night he took good care of her. It was natural to believe that she had found someone who might be able to take care of her in all sorts of ways. Was it so wrong to want that? No one had ever taken care of her. Not her father and not her mother, not really. Helen didn't doubt that her mother loved her, but where was the ferocious maternal love that should have prompted her to protect Helen against her father? So many stories in childhood center on this alleged fact, that a mother will do anything for her child. Having a mother who fell short of that standard made Helen wonder if there was something wrong with her, if she were at fault for not inspiring true maternal feelings. Billy was the first person who made her feel cared for.

“You're lucky he's asleep,” her mother said when Helen came home at 1:00
A.M.
, hours after the restaurant would have closed.

“I'm allowed to hang out with friends on weekend nights, I guess.”

“I hope you're using birth control,” her mother said, sighing.

She was. Condoms that first night; then Billy took her to Planned Parenthood, had her ask for an IUD while he waited in the parking lot. “Shouldn't we keep using condoms, too?”

“You don't need those if you're faithful,” Billy said. She thought that meant they were going to be faithful to each other, then later realized that Billy meant only that he was sure she would be faithful to him, that he was not at risk from anything she might do.

As it turned out, he was wrong about that.

T
HURSDAY,
O
CTOBER 6

W
hen Heloise began shopping for a house in Turner's Grove, she was amused by the standard feature known as “Mother's office,” a small built-in desk, usually in a corridor between the kitchen and pantry, where a woman could keep a laptop and—the realtors always showed this with a grand flourish, as if it were truly something wondrous—the household papers, in a drawer already set up for legal-size hanging files.

“Isn't the whole house Mother's office?” her half sister, Meghan, once observed.

Besides, Heloise's files could never be kept in a drawer next to the kitchen, where a child in search of scratch paper might end up pulling out the applications used by would-be customers of the Women's Full Employment Network.

The issue of paper was central to Heloise's life long before various companies began begging its customers to go paperless and save the environment—along with their overhead. (Heloise has always been amused by the good causes that capitalism will embrace in order to save money. Paperless billing! No daily laundry in hotels! Adjusting thermostats! But ask them to reduce their actual dependence on fossil fuel? Impossible.)

Heloise, like the best madams, keeps an enormous amount of information in her head, but she still has to maintain some financial records, and paper is actually the least vulnerable medium. When she had the basement office of the Turner's Grove house renovated, she ended up designing her own file cabinets, then searched for the least curious contractor she could find. The winning bidder was a Polish immigrant who never smiled, although she thought she saw the wisp of one when he studied the drawings for her file cabinets. They look like old-fashioned barrister cabinets, not at all Heloise's usual taste, but she sacrificed her sleek aesthetics for this project. The banks of stacked cabinets alternate—hanging files in drawers with false bottoms are placed above drawers fitted with shredders. The top drawer has two locks. One is a real lock, the other releases the files through the trapdoor of the false bottom into the always-on shredders. Last year Scott had worked on a project for school about reducing the family home's energy usage, and he was appalled to find out how much power dormant appliances required. He dutifully followed the instructions, hooking up everything he could find to surge protectors, then turning them off in the evening. He was disappointed how little their energy bill dropped. Heloise couldn't bear to tell him it was because of her office, where Audrey mans the phones until midnight and the shredders are never turned off.

Heloise is aware that there could be a raid in which neither she nor Audrey would be able to get to the files first, or that the cabinets could be carted away and opened in a different location. Still, it was the best system she could figure out, and most of the paper is benign, although a good forensic accountant might be able to piece together how her business works. If she could, she would conduct all business by carrier pigeon, throw the papers into a fire, then roast and eat the pigeon for good measure. After all, isn't that what squab is? But such a system is impossible, so she saves what she must save—payroll, the necessary tax records, the expenditures she files with the state to prove that she's within the lobbying regs—in her hanging files and hopes she never makes the mistake of using the wrong key.

She has pulled out her files today to go over the quarterly filing, due next week. Her accountant, Leo, is a young man, at least chronologically. He carries himself with an older man's stooped, defeated posture. He has large, unblinking eyes behind thick glasses, and he always wears a suit, even for an afternoon meeting such as this. He has worked for her for five years, and Heloise isn't sure if he's ever figured out the gigantic ruse that is the Women's Full Employment Network and its rather baffling subsidiary, The Store Unlimited. Whatever he's managed to glean about her business, it's more important that he be absolutely nonjudgmental, which he appears to be. The Leos of the world, single men with no social skills, are some of her best customers. If he ever tells her that he's figured out what she does, she'll happily have one of her girls service him. In lieu of fees, of course. But so far Leo cares only about receipts and documentation, all of which Heloise maintains scrupulously. He comments on nothing.

Once he did ask about her inventory costs, but that's because there were tax implications. Where was she stocking the items—the jewelry, the Hermès scarves, the Vuitton luggage—she sold through her Web site?

“I have no inventory costs,” she said, having anticipated the question. When Heloise can't sleep, which is often, she uses the time to try to think of any question she might be asked and how she might answer it. “I'm more of a personal shopper. People hire me to find exquisite things for them. I then charge a percentage of the full retail cost after procuring it at a discount, sort of like an interior decorator. The photographs are examples of what I might find, not actual items in stock.”

Leo didn't blink. Of course. She wishes he would, every now and then, because that unwavering stare makes him hard to read. He doesn't even slide his eyes to the right or left. She assumes this is possible because he never lies. That makes one of them.

Heloise runs four businesses—two of them essentially legitimate, or would be if they weren't used primarily in the service of an illegal one and a bogus one. The legitimate ones earn the least, barely breaking even, but they save her money and reduce risk.

There is the main company, the Women's Full Employment Network, and she is a registered lobbyist with the state of Maryland, in case anyone checks. Much of her paperwork is generated by the reports she has to file with the state. She also has to make sure she shows enough expenditures to look legitimate. She takes care of that by sending all the state pols food baskets the day after
sine die,
when the legislature adjourns, and making lunch dates when the legislature is out of session.

She also maintains a very discreet online store, one that cannot be found by any search engine. Cannot be entered, in fact, without an invitation and a password. There, customers who insist on using credit cards for WFEN's services can select various luxury items. These charges then appear on the monthly bills as “The Store Unlimited.” Heloise resisted taking credit cards for as long as she could, but it was costing her business, so she now allows Visa and MasterCard. She still tries to dissuade her clients from using them, saying it's for their own good to deal in cash. But some of her customers are single, with no wives peering at their credit cards, and others insist—
insist
—that their wives never see the bills. These are the men who get caught. When they do, Heloise procures the item for which they have been billed and it arrives in the distinctive black-striped box designed by a local graphic artist. She doesn't bill them again, which allows them to show their wives that the gift was always meant for them, not a mistress or a girlfriend. They then pay her back in cash.

And she records it, every cent. Tax evasion is the big risk for her, not sex. Tax evasion is what took down Al Capone. It is very hard to prove that someone has been paid for sex, the difference between an hourly rate and cab fare on the dresser, an appreciative gift. One clever call girl spells it out on her Web site:
“I don't take money, but you are free to give me gifts.”
She even has a registry of sorts. The other night Audrey was watching one of those god-awful reality shows about so-called housewives, and one of the women proudly proclaimed that she blew her husband for diamonds. A straight-up confession on national television about trading sex for items of value. If that's not prostitution, what is? But no one's going to arrest that woman, nor should anyone. Although someone might want to give her a few pointers about what class really is.

Heloise's other two businesses, the legitimate ones, were set up when she realized she required certain services and that she might save money—and protect herself from exposure—by providing them herself. There is a travel agency, which handles booking trips—relatively rare, but Heloise likes pocketing the percentage she gets back. And she also has a very small car service, with only two leased sedans and two drivers. The drivers, who are allowed to work as independent contractors when not being used by Heloise, provide an extra layer of security for her girls. Also, if the girls are going to drink or even do drugs with their clients—and all do the former and some do the latter, despite the fact that both are prohibited under WFEN's rules—it's better for them not to drive. A drunk girl crashing her car while on Heloise's payroll could end with her being sued.

Besides, Heloise also cares about the girls' personal safety. They all wear so-called slave bracelets, designed by her, with a GPS chip hidden inside. She hates the connotation of “slave,” but that's the proper term for a bracelet that can be removed only with a key, which the girls never carry. Of course, the bracelets won't save them if they meet someone sick enough to remove a girl's left arm. That's another one of the worries that leads to Heloise's insomnia, the nights of staring at the ceiling trying to think of questions she might have to answer.

The girls think the bracelets are funny, call them HoJacks. And when they leave her employ—and they all do, after they've graduated from college or solved their money problems—they can have the chip removed and keep the bangle as a souvenir, a badge.

Heloise also gives the girls a safe word, which changes weekly: At the end of each date, the girl must text that word to Heloise and Audrey. The text also serves as a time stamp on the appointment, confirming that the client has not gone overtime. Customers are screened by a private investigator that Heloise keeps on retainer. The PI, a pragmatic young woman from the city, probably has an inkling that Heloise's business is not exactly on the up-and-up, but there is nothing illegal about what she does for Heloise. She once told Heloise that the same results could be achieved for less money just by subscribing to one of the various Internet-based services, such as Intelius. But then those names, those histories, would be on Heloise's hard drive somewhere, a de facto black book. Again Heloise is paying in part for the privilege of paper. She takes the reports and she shreds them once read. Her arrangement with the PI was set up by Heloise's lawyer, so their transactions are confidential. No one can get to her clients—or to Heloise—through the PI.

So yes, she has gone to great lengths to do everything she can to protect the men who pay her and the girls who work for her. Everything she can think of, but it turns out that no one can think of everything. She has failed one of her girls, which is one reason her accountant is here tonight.

“Sophie's prescriptions now cost seventeen hundred dollars a month. Your health plan doesn't even have a prescription component, and you're paying that out of pocket. How long is she going to be on leave?”

“I'm not sure, but I said I would pay it, so I am.”

“But why are you paying her cash, under the table? It's the same as income, doesn't matter if she uses the money for prescription drugs. Does she understand that? Is she reporting it?”

“I think so.” Heloise doubts it.

“Look, you can afford this kind of outlay—for now—but it can't go on this way indefinitely.”

“Sophie's on a paid medical leave.”

“For how long?”

“For as long as she needs to be.” Forever. For fucking forever.

“So you're paying her base salary
and
you're buying her drugs. Fine, that's your choice. But as her medical bills start to rise, that will impact the group. You might see a big increase in premiums. If you don't expect her to return to work, it actually would be better to let her go, then use your money to cover her COBRA costs for eighteen months. Then she's guaranteed medical insurance through one of the big insurers and the group policy doesn't take the hit.”

“And what will she live on? How will she pay for those prescriptions?”

“She can work,” Leo says, but it's really more of a question. “I mean, I don't really know her, I don't know what her skills are or what kind of education she has, but she might be able to work again, right?”

“I promised to take care of her,” Heloise insists.

“Okay, but you're putting the cost of the plan at risk. Except for you and Scott, because you're on your own family plan. Which, by the way, now costs seven hundred fifty a month.”

“If that's what it costs, it's what it costs.”

“You and Scott have to have more comprehensive coverage, because kids see doctors a lot oftener. But that's all the more reason for you to find another way to help Sophie out.” Leo sighs. “All I can do is advise. I realize you feel sorry for the girl, but it's not your fault she has HIV.”

Except it is.

Sophie, like most of Heloise's employees, was recruited through an ad in a college newspaper. She was premed at Johns Hopkins, very beautiful, very brainy—and very bored. Like Leo, she'd been born old, but a different kind of old, the preternatural weariness of being desired from a very early age. Boys chased her. Girls chased her. Professors chased her. She had a wealth of sexual experience, but it had provided her no genuine pleasure.

“I feel,” she told Heloise at their first meeting, “as if I have this really valuable commodity—myself—and yet I'm not supposed to do anything with it.”

“Absolutely,” Heloise said. “Beauty is a commodity in our world.”

They were at One World Café, directly across from the Hopkins campus, eating vegetarian fare. Sophie had explained that she was very particular about what she put into her body. No meat, no soda, no alcohol. She said this with a young woman's earnestness, as if no one else in the world had ever thought of such a thing.