And When She Was Good (6 page)

Things didn't happen as fast as Billy thought they
would. But they happened as he said they would. She got a job dancing. She made
slightly more than she'd made on the good shifts at Il Cielo. She brought it all
home, and Billy, instead of paying the debts he owed, put it up his nose.

She started bringing home a little less, hiding
money as she had hidden it from her father. She started doing extras, to make a
little more. Lap dances. As Billy had promised, no one touched her. Nothing
touched her. He no longer touched her. She seldom seemed to catch him in the
right phase of his chemical arc for sex, and she didn't want it much either.

So this is it,
she
thought.
I fell in love with the wrong guy, an addict, and
this is the life I get.
Going home didn't seem to be an option. She
had called once, to say she was in Maryland and planning to get married, and her
father had called her a whore and slammed down the phone. Prophetic Hector.
How could I be such a dope?
She didn't think she
could feel anything, ever again.

She was eighteen years old.

F
RIDAY,
O
CTOBER 7

H
eloise is having dinner with Scott when the home phone rings. She lets it go to voice mail. Calls to the landline are almost always telemarketers, although girls have started calling Scott, who does not have his own cell phone and is not allowed to chat on Facebook. And even if tonight's call is something uncharacteristically urgent, it can wait. Almost everything can wait. It's funny how few people figure this out, how they allow their phones and their BlackBerrys and their computers to enslave them. Heloise can't completely leave work behind on the nights she doesn't have appointments—there are almost always girls out on call, although Fridays tend to be slow—but she leaves it to Audrey to monitor the office, checking the GPS program from time to time, making sure everyone is where she's supposed to be. The ritual of the meal with Scott is important to her, even if she has never learned to enjoy food. She blames her father, the way she had to rush through dinner in order to escape him.

Food has never mattered that much to Heloise. Her mother was too exhausted to rise above the cheap conveniences she could afford—frozen vegetables and waffles, Hamburger Helper, casseroles made with Campbell's chicken soup. Heloise's experience behind the scenes at Il Cielo, her memories of being up to her elbows in Marshmallow Fluff, left her skeptical of all restaurants. Even when she dines in celebrated places, she finds it hard to have much of an appetite. During the years with Val, that cocaine-addled household had huge quantities of food, but it tended toward junk food and doggie bags from high-end chains, Styrofoam containers of unfinished sandwiches. Val didn't believe in wasting food. He was thrifty about everything. Even human beings. He squeezed every ounce out of them. Val was the person who could always get one more dab of toothpaste out of a spent tube, one more trick from an almost-done hooker.

Yet Scott, completely on his own, has become a little foodie. He bakes, he knows what an emulsion is. Heloise thinks his fascination with food must have started when he began watching cooking shows with Audrey or a previous baby-sitter. The cooking shows were probably an accident, sandwiched between the hideous reality shows that Audrey loves. Heloise cannot understand this. Audrey, whom she introduces as her au pair—her odd speaking voice makes her sound as if she's from some unplaceable foreign land, although she grew up in Wilkes-Barre, then moved to Aberdeen, Maryland—has had more reality in her relatively short life than most women could stand. Married at eighteen, she was abused by her husband for several years. One of the beatings resulted in a partial hearing loss, which is what makes her speech sound odd. Then, after catching
The Burning Bed
in a rerun, she decided that the old television film was meant to be instructional, that God wanted her to watch it and learn from it. Audrey doused her husband's bed with lighter fluid and set him on fire. The thing that troubled prosecutors was that it had been months since she'd been beaten. “But it was only a matter of time before he hit me again,” Audrey told Heloise when they met. “And those were the worst times. The waiting. The best times were immediately after the beating, and not just because he was nicer. He wasn't, not always. He would apologize, but in that lame way where you say you're sorry but make it clear that the other person is at fault. Sort of like, ‘I'm sorry that you behaved so badly I felt I had to hit you. I'll try to do better, but you have to try, too.' Although at least I wasn't wondering when he was going to hit me again.”

Heloise understood. The prosecutor did not, nor did the police, and Audrey was convicted and imprisoned for manslaughter.

Five years later, pardoned by the governor, one of a group of women released for their violent crimes after the circumstances were shown to be connected to domestic violence, Audrey had somehow come across the Women's Full Employment Network and taken the firm at its word. She was a woman. She needed full employment, and no one would hire her.

Heloise was touched, but Audrey was not suitable for one of the six positions she kept on her roster, all of which were labeled “legislative liaison.” It grieved Heloise to judge another woman this way, but Audrey was unattractive, with thick glasses and hair worn in the most unflattering braids, crowning her head. In a film one would take off the glasses, release the hair, and a beauty would be revealed. In real life, Audrey without her glasses had the sleepy, unfocused eyes of a newborn kitten, and her hair, when loose, was a Medusa-like mass. There would be no transformation.

Not that it mattered. Audrey disapproved of adultery. She had been faithful to a very bad husband. Certainly, more fortunate men and women should be able to maintain their vows. So when Heloise softened and decided to give her a job, it was simply as the “au pair,” although Scott was in grade school and needed little supervision. The whole point of Heloise's job was to work a schedule that allowed her as much time with Scott as possible.

Audrey was sheltered. Audrey was a small-town girl. But she was not stupid. She sussed out Heloise's real job just as she sussed out everything else in life—by watching television. All it took was one Tori Spelling movie on Lifetime and Audrey had figured it out. A straight shooter, she came to Heloise the next day and said, “You're running an escort service, aren't you?”

“I am running a lobbying firm dedicated to women's issues, primarily pay equity.”

“Do the girls who work for you—do they have sex for money?”

“That's illegal, Audrey. My girls meet with men who have the power to change things and use their best persuasive skills to convince them to introduce legislation that could help us toward our goal.”

Audrey's eyes, behind her glasses, goggled. An old cartoon jingle flitted through Heloise's mind.
Barney Google with the goo-goo-googly eyes.
She flinched at the memory, then pinned down the reason: Hector Lewis used to sing it, tunelessly, when tending to some small chore. He did only small chores.

“Heloise, please don't lie to me,” Audrey said. “I owe you everything. You gave me a job when no one else wanted to hire me. You trust me with your son. Trust me with this.”

But Heloise couldn't, not right away. She told Audrey that WFEN was highly specialized, that it might seem to be similar to an escort service, but it was serious. Deadly serious. She said that Tori Spelling movies were not very realistic, in her experience. (She was right about that. Later she caught the film that had sparked Audrey's curiosity, and it had much more in common with the turn-of-the-century melodramas about virtuous young things who can't pay the rent and fall into bad company. She gave Audrey a copy of
Sister Carrie,
hoping to improve her mind.)

Still, Audrey had put her finger on something key: Heloise trusted her with the most precious person in her life. But that was part of the problem, too. Audrey had to be Scott's buffer. It was dangerous for anyone close to Scott to know everything about Heloise. Compartmentalize, compartmentalize, compartmentalize. Sometimes she felt that her entire life was about creating boxes and storing pieces of herself in each one. She never got the boxes mixed up, but it required ferocious concentration on her part, an eternal vigilance. How could she trust anyone else to keep it straight? No one else had as much to lose.

A few months after their conversation, Audrey was driving Scott home from school in Heloise's car, a nice SUV but not particularly extravagant or in demand. They were waiting at a light, making idle conversation, when a man opened Audrey's door and told her to get out. Scott was probably too small to be seen in the backseat, but perhaps the would-be carjacker didn't care. He jabbed something pointed at Audrey through his Windbreaker pocket.

He hadn't counted on dealing with someone who was
done
being bullied.

“No,” Audrey said. “Show me your gun. I don't believe you have one.”

The would-be carjacker reached across her and unfastened her seat belt, even as Audrey pulled hair from his scalp. Screaming in pain, he threw her to the ground and took her place behind the wheel. But before he could close the door, Audrey was up and on the running board, clawing at him with one hand, straining for the panic button on the keys, trying to stomp the emergency brake, yet somehow maintaining a completely calm tone with Scott all the while.

“It's okay, buddy, it's all okay. Don't worry about a thing.”

The man stopped the car, pushed Audrey out of the way, and took off on foot. He was arrested at the local ER several hours later, where he went for treatment for a scratched cornea. He also had scratches all over his face. But it was the bald patch that gave him away.

Such an incident would have attracted a lot of attention anywhere, but in a suburb such as Turner's Grove reporters slavered for the story. The world's bravest nanny! Television news crews converged on Audrey from both directions, Baltimore and D.C. The local papers dispatched their best reporters. The
Today
show sent her a fruit basket. Heloise declined to speak to anyone, using the credible excuse that additional exposure could endanger her son. But she knew she could not keep Audrey from enjoying the attention, the prospect of which was heady.

Yet Audrey also told the press, through Heloise's lawyer, that she had no desire to be interviewed or photographed. She said no over and over, for about three days, and then a new shiny toy of a story came along to distract the media types. Heloise understood that Audrey had done this to protect Scott and, by extension, Heloise.

The cliché was inevitable: “How can I ever repay you, Audrey?”

The reply was unexpected: “By trusting me.”

So she did. She let Audrey in. Into her confidences, her world, and, ultimately, her office. Audrey was the only person allowed to inhabit the two spheres of Heloise's life. After the years of strict compartmentalization, it was a relief to have someone who moved back and forth between the two worlds as Heloise did. A relief to have someone with whom she never had to be guarded. As Scott required less attention, Audrey asked for more responsibilities at WFEN. Over time she became Heloise's office manager. The euphemisms of Heloise's inventory list were helpful to Audrey, who still did not approve of what these men were doing, of what Heloise was facilitating. And her fierce maternal instincts were perfect for the task of ensuring the girls' safety.

So Heloise forgave and even indulged Audrey's terrible taste in television. Having Scott be a little foodie wasn't the worst thing in the world. Heloise even learned to cook, after a fashion. She was too impatient to be a truly good cook, and she had horrible knife skills, but she became good at simple sauces and began to glimpse why some people cared passionately about food, although she would never be one of them. Scott was the far better cook, if spectacularly messy and very hard on the cookware. Tonight, for example, he has made a shrimp stir-fry, and Heloise's heart sinks a little, looking at the splattered grease, the scorched pan, the odds and ends scattered along the counter, the dusting of cornstarch and five-spice powder across the floor. She will need an hour to restore the kitchen to order.

Then she looks at the cook, who is waiting expectantly for her verdict. Brown eyes. Red hair. Some would call his face foxy, but there is no guile there. Val—Val had the foxy look. But did he always? Was he born that way? Heloise knows very little about Val's past. She has seen no photos from his childhood. She knows nothing about Val's parents, Scott's grandparents. She lives in dread of the unknown genetic gifts passed down on that side of the family.

Not that her side is much better. She is, after all, Hector Lewis's daughter. She has done harm. Not intentionally, but by error and omission. A man died because of her. Maybe more than one. A woman has HIV because Heloise was willing to wink at her own rules. Another woman— She prefers not to think about that other woman.

“Mom?”

“It's delicious, Val.”

“What?”

“I said
pal.
It's delicious, pal.”

“You never called me that before.”

“I know.”

“You're
weird,
Mom.”

“That I am, Scott. That I am.”

She bolts her glass of wine.

1993

T
here were many things that Val Deluca didn't like to be called. Short. His full name. Most of all he hated to be called a pimp. He said he was a CEO, an entrepreneur, a self-made man. He told Helen that he was her savior—and maybe he was.

But he was, inarguably, short. Shorter than Helen, fine-boned, seemingly incapable of putting on weight although he tried just about everything to add mass to his frame. Protein shakes, heavy lifting. Not steroids, though, never steroids. He heard they gave you pimples on your back and shrank your testicles. A redhead, Val had found
freckles
difficult enough to surmount and had no inclination to see his testicles reduced.

He had bright red hair, the orangey kind, Bozo hair, the type of hair that people are teased about. Only no one teased Val, not in all the time that Helen knew him. Occasionally a new person moving in his circles made the mistake of underestimating him, but that didn't happen often. Most people were quick to figure out that a small man with that hair had not gotten where he was by being soft.

Yet he was soft, tender even, with Helen.
Of course,
people would say, if there had been people who actually spoke to Helen at that time in her life. The only people she knew were Billy and the other dancers and employees at the club, and while they exchanged desultory conversation, they didn't really talk. But she knew the conventional wisdom.
That's what pimps do. They lure you in, they treat you nicely at first, make you dependent on them, and then lower the boom.

In Helen's experience that was what
men
did. Her father had done it to her mother, or so she assumed. Billy had done it to her. Besides, she was already essentially tricking when she met Val. That's how she first encountered him, in a private room at the club. He liked her, something clicked. He came back to see her. When he came back a third time, Helen began to think that Val might be able to help her solve what she thought of as her Billy problem. Billy wasn't human to her anymore. He was just a huge hole, waiting for her back in the motel room every night. He swallowed up everything he could. She had no doubt that he would eventually swallow her.

Helen had to give Billy this much: He wasn't paranoid. People
were
out to get him at this point. His stepfather wanted to swear out a warrant on him, according to Billy's mother, whom he called—collect—every Friday, when he knew that his stepfather would be at one of his diners. His mother had kept Mr. Gus from making a formal criminal complaint, but Helen thought an arrest might be the best way to keep Billy safe. The other people who'd been ripped off by Billy weren't going to bother with warrants. They would find him, ask for the money they were owed, then kill him when he couldn't pay them back. And if Helen was there at the inopportune moment that the bill came due, they wouldn't hesitate to kill her as well. What was she? Some girl, a whore, a dancer on the Block. Collateral damage.

Helen was naïve enough to think that she could get Val to help her solve the Billy problem without being forever in his debt. When she realized he was drawn to her, that she had a brief window of being able to leverage him, she told him the details of her situation, how she feared for her life as long as she lived with Billy.

“Then don't live with him,” Val said. “Live with me.”

“It's not that easy,” she said. “He's out of his mind. If I try to leave, he'll try to stop me. He relies on me for money—I pay the rent, buy what little food he eats. He doesn't care about me at this point, but he won't want to lose his meal ticket.”

Val locked his eyes on her. He had brown eyes, unusual in such a fair, freckled redhead. There was a slight tilt to them, and she wondered if his mother, or perhaps grandmother, had been Asian. “Do you understand what you're asking me to do?”

“Oh, I'm not asking for anything,” she said. This was true: She couldn't ask for anything, because she didn't know what she wanted. She had hoped Val might present her a laundry list of choices, see the solution in the way that outsiders sometimes can. She didn't want Billy to come to harm. But she couldn't prevent it, and she didn't want to be there when that moment arrived. Besides, Billy would make a scene if she left. He needed her. She brought in the only money they had.

She changed the subject. “If I did live with you, it would just be until I got on my feet.”

Val stroked her arm. They were in a twenty-four-hour restaurant, of which there were surprisingly few in Baltimore, so the cops and the pimps and the whores and all the other night people ended up hanging out together at this one place, Burke's. It was an informal, neutral ground, a place where everyone coexisted in harmony as long as no one did anything stupid.

“You weren't meant to be on your feet. You're good, one of the best I've ever had. How many men have you been with?”

She blushed, which made him laugh.

“C'mon. You can tell me. You fuck like you started really early, before you even knew what it was. Someone help you out? You got a nasty daddy, a pervy uncle? Don't be ashamed. All the girls, it's the same story more or less.”

“Billy was my first boyfriend. Since we came down here—well, you know what I do. It was a way to make cash on the side. I keep it mainly to lap dances. Except for you.”

He laughed. “Bullshit.”

“It's true.” It wasn't. “I kept hoping I could put together a little bankroll, get away from him. But there's no place I can hide money that he doesn't find it. I've never seen anything like it.”

“He's an addict. I think you could take a dope fiend and turn him upside down and run him along a beach and he'd find more dough than any metal detector.” Val didn't use drugs, just a little weed. And although he liked to drink, his tolerance wasn't very good, probably because of his size, and he didn't like being drunk-drunk. He smoked and drank to take the edge off, although Val's edge was never really off.

“I feel like I'm in quicksand. The more I struggle to get out, the deeper I get.”

“You heard of these places called banks? You can put your money there.”

She shook her head, thinking of the crumpled and soiled bills she would carry to a bank. No matter what she wore or how she handled herself, they would know that it was truly dirty money. Besides, she would need proof of address, and a by-the-week motel near the bus station probably didn't count as an address. She had no utility bill, and the girl on her driver's license was so distant from who she was now that it might as well be a seventeenth-century Flemish painting in a museum.

“Look, I want you to be with me, exclusively. I'll be honest—I'll never be exclusive to you. That's not how I am. And I'd expect you to keep your job. I guess I'm liberated that way.” He smiled at his own joke.

“The dancing?”

“No.” He laughed. “Good as you fuck, you are shit as a dancer. What I'm saying is, I've got a big nut, everyone contributes. But it's a nice life. Basically I'm offering you what you have, but with more money, a nicer place to stay. I've got a house out in the east part of the county. It's almost countrylike, out on one of those little inlets, with a dock and everything. You'll have your own room for when I don't want you in mine. You'll work shifts at these motels I use. We screen the guys, bring them to you. It's very safe. No standing out in the cold, soliciting. Of course, that also means I know exactly how many tricks you work and how much you take in, so don't ever try to fool me.”

Those words sank in.
Don't ever try to fool me.

“And Billy?”

“He's a dope fiend. If I give him enough money, he'll leave you alone.”

She never knew how much money Val had paid Billy for her. He said it was a lot. He said it was a hundred thousand dollars, but she didn't believe him. Over time the amount would change with each telling of the story, but the bottom line was that it was more than she could ever repay.

She moved into his house. It was as he had promised. Val didn't lie very often. People with power don't have to lie. She had her own room—the one closest to Val's, which established her as his favorite—and the property was large enough to allow her to wander in her hours off. She liked sitting on the dock at sunset, discovering the plantings left behind by the previous owners. Val seemed indifferent to it all, preferring to spend his time in the big den, watching a large-screen television and keeping an eye on the video feeds from the various security cameras posted around his property.

About three months into Helen's stay at Val's house, Billy showed up one day at the foot of the driveway, pressing the buzzer, his face appearing on the grainy video monitor. It was like a horror movie, seeing this once-beautiful man reduced to a shambling skeleton, spittle flying as he screamed into the speaker. Helen, who had been nipping a little bit too much into the various drugs around the house, despite Val's obvious displeasure, decided at that moment that she would stop cold turkey, and she did.

“I can't have this,” Val said, watching the monitor, his arms crossed. “How did he find you? You been talking to him?”

She shook her head. “I would never, Val.”

“You've been talking to someone, though.”

Helen was pretty sure she hadn't. That was another thing about her life that hadn't changed. She didn't really have anyone to speak to. She was either here, drifting through the pretty house, or working. She didn't talk about herself with the clients. Come to think of it, she didn't talk much at all. Val had made it clear that he didn't have much interest in her outside his bed. The other girls were vapid and envious of her role as Val's favorite, but Helen didn't see that it was a big deal.

Val's security detail had arrived at the foot of the driveway now. When they parted the gates, Billy darted in, but they caught him by the arms. George I and George II, as Val called them, were as large and dark as Val was small and pale. Bald, they had extremely dark skin, skin so dark that it didn't seem to reflect any light at all. One was skinny and the other was fat, and both could move quickly when they had to. They seldom had to.

Billy had a junkie's wiry sidewinder moves, and he broke free, ran a few feet. He was out of the range of the camera now, and with no one pressing the button, there was nothing to hear.

That was the last Helen saw of Billy. Sometimes, when she was in town working and she came across a discarded newspaper, she would leaf through it, assuming there would be news of Billy's death. She never found anything. Maybe he wasn't dead. Or maybe George I and George II were very good at cleaning up after themselves.

She was not happy, but safe. She was Val's favorite, in his bed more often than not. He didn't let her keep the money she made, but if she wanted something, he saw that she got it. The refrigerator was stocked with food and beer and wine; Val had a horror of there being no food in the house. This was a clue to his childhood, although he never spoke of his early life. Deprivation was a big theme to Val. The other girls, while rivals of a sort, were respectful of her position. Helen was very, very good at what she did, and that pleased her work ethic, much as she had once delighted at being the best waitress at Il Cielo—not only a good earner but someone who looked for useful things to do during downtimes, even if it meant making that awful marshmallow topping.

The only serious argument she and Val had during those early months was when she asked if she could get a GED through a correspondence course. She had the time. But Val wouldn't hear of it. It turned into the first argument in which he hit her. It wasn't an angry or passionate hit, strange as that might sound. Val, as Helen would come to learn, hit girls the way some people hit dogs. He would actually announce it, very calmly. “I'm going to hit you now, so you don't do this again. Okay?” Which, of course, made it all the more horrible, that split second of knowing she was going to be hit.

Later, icing her eye—Val said he hit her in the face on purpose, so it would be harder for her to work; that was part of the lesson—she asked George II, who was slightly more approachable, why Val had gotten so angry with her about her desire to complete high school.

“Because he can't read, girl.”

“Of course he can read. I mean, I know he didn't finish school, but he made it through junior high. He has to be able to read.”

“Nope. Watch him. He's got tricks, things he's learned to do. He can't read ‘cat on the mat.' ”

“But he's smart.”

“That he is. Smarter than you or I.” Helen secretly disagreed with this part, at least as far as she was concerned. “But he didn't learn to read, he learned to fake it. By the time the school figured it out, it was easier just to keep passing him from grade to grade until he could drop out legally.”

“But what does that have to do with me?”

George II gave her a look as if he thought her stupid. Fair enough. She had just thought the same thing of him.

Helen gave up on the idea of a diploma, which meant giving up on the little fantasy beyond it, that she still might go to college. She was nineteen. Other girls her age, girls she had known in high school, were walking across campuses with heavy knapsacks filled with books, listening raptly to professors speak of amazing things. Did they know how lucky they were? Probably not. No one ever does, not really. Back in Pennsylvania, Helen had been lucky, and she couldn't see it.
Smarter to be lucky than it's lucky to be smart.
That was one of Hector Lewis's sayings, his way of explaining that it was lack of luck that held him down, not his own laziness. Well, she could still be smart. She would find a way to get educated somehow, without upsetting Val. She was a good liar when it came down to it. She had to be.