And When She Was Good (9 page)

Hey,
she wanted to call
out to him from her stinging mouth,
you're alive, and
that's no small thing. You have no idea how close you came to dying. I saved
your life.

Jules lived on, though, in the lists of books he'd
made for her. She hid these in the pages of the fashion magazines that Val never
challenged and, of course, never read. Sometimes the other girls would come
across Helen's lists, but they didn't recognize them as contraband. Helen
couldn't go back to the library, so she shoplifted the books as she found them.
There were more bookstores in downtown Baltimore then. When possible, she took
the books back or left them in places where others might benefit from
them—public restrooms, the old Greyhound station while it was still there, even
Penn Station. She found fiction less and less interesting, reverting to her
teenage passion for history and politics, which led her to reading more about
economics. One of her regulars was getting what was known as a weekend M.B.A.,
which provided a nice cover for him to get out of the house to get laid once in
a while. (He told his wife he was going to the library. Was that irony?
Something close to it, Helen decided.) The program fascinated her, but she knew
that if Val wouldn't let her get a GED, he definitely wouldn't approve of an
M.B.A. Helen began to shrink, literally, losing too much weight, with bad
consequences for her breasts and her face. She was trapped. When Val
disappeared, which he did for as many as two weeks every month, on business he
would never discuss or detail, she crawled under her covers with a book and a
flashlight, but it seemed more and more futile. What was she reading for? What
was the point?

Then Val brought Martin into the house.

M
ONDAY,
O
CTOBER 10

I
liked January,” Paul says. “A lot.”

Heloise is having lunch with Paul at the Maryland Inn. Heloise never goes to committee hearings, is seldom seen in the State House hallways, yet everyone knows her as the redheaded lobbyist who has lunch with Paul Marriotti. That's all the credibility she needs, in both her real and her ersatz professions.

Paul was her first big customer, and many of her referrals in state legislative circles have come from him. She has even landed a few big Washington players through Paul. There was one Marylander, a cabinet member in a previous administration, who had waffled about leaving his longtime service in northern Virginia. “Buy Maryland,” Heloise told him, appealing to his civic pride. Dead now, five years, a real gentleman.

“I'm glad she worked out,” she says, spearing a stalk of out-of-season asparagus. When eating with a client, Heloise chooses her meals based on what can be eaten daintily. She is sensitive about her manners, despite the time she has put in trying to improve them, and lives in terror of doing something gauche in front of others. She's selling a classy image. Asparagus is one food she feels comfortable eating in public, although one has to watch for threads.

“She's a smart girl, very ambitious.”

“Yes, she's a graduate student. Public health.” Heloise thinks,
You'd never catch January allowing a client to go bareback.

“I believe she's more ambitious than you realize. She tried to set up a private date with me.”

This is serious, a firing offense. And stupid, which January never is.

“Tell me exactly what she said.”

“She asked if I wanted to meet with her ‘off the books.' I told her that I was loyal to you. And that I would report the conversation back to you.”

Heloise twists this around in her mind while she tries to find manageable bites in her salad. She thought she was ordering a chopped salad, which is easier to eat neatly. But this salad has enormous leaves that require judicious cutting. She takes a long time slicing her lettuce leaves.

“She knew that. Before she said a thing to you, she knew where it was headed. She
wanted
you to report back to me.”

Paul nods. “I thought so, too.”

“Why would she do that?”

Paul lowers his head, forcing her to make eye contact with him instead of her salad. “Why do you think, Heloise?”

“Because she wants me to fire her? That makes no sense. It's not as if she could get unemployment benefits.” Wait, she could. Heloise has always paid into the system.

“She wants to do what you do. She's a sophisticated girl, January. Who told me her real name, by the way, Anna Marie.”

“My, you got downright chummy in just one session.”

Now Paul averts his gaze, and Heloise realizes he is not telling her everything. He reported the improper overture and said he rejected it. But maybe Anna Marie threw him a freebie. Makes economic sense when trying to steal someone's loyal customer. Heloise will have to track the GPS records on the bracelet. The girls forget that the bracelets are never turned off, that Heloise can follow them even when they're not working.

“She believes that what you do should be legal. Feels it makes sense from a public-health position, but also in feminist terms. She admires you, Heloise. She could be a hell of a protégée if you would consider having a protégée.”

“Well, I won't,” Heloise says. “If I were to train anyone to take over, it would be my assistant, Audrey. She understands the ins and outs of the business, and I trust her. How can I trust January, knowing she's gone behind my back?”

“She didn't really. I admit she was clumsy, in how she did it. She's not as smooth at politics as you are. But then, you've known a lot more politicians, for a lot longer.”

She thinks about the younger Paul, the one who came to her seven years ago. Darker hair and more of it. Desperate in his deprivation. He was, perhaps, one of the few men entitled to say,
My wife doesn't understand me.
She didn't. She was cold, perhaps clinically frigid. They had five kids, good Catholics that they were. Paul claimed they'd had sex exactly ten times since the birth of their youngest.

Yet it wasn't even the infrequency of their sex life that had worn Paul down. His wife would not entertain the mildest variations in sex, which she treated as a workout, something she had to do. She didn't bother with excuses. She just didn't like it much. But she wanted to be married, at least as long as their children were at home. If Paul hadn't been a politician, he would have left her long ago.

But Paul is a politician, and an ambitious one. Not wildly ambitious—he doesn't want to be governor or a U.S. senator. His goal was to reach a powerful job where one could stay for years, and he has managed that trick. Paul seldom appears in the papers, nor is he a sound-bite guy. But he is a committee chair, well connected and well liked. He cannot afford a sex scandal. He also can't live without sex. This was what had brought him to Heloise for sex once a week, twice if he had a big floor vote coming up.

“How old are you, Heloise?”

Heloise resumes sawing her lettuce. She is suddenly very hungry and frustrated with her food. She's going to hit a drive-through on the way home, indulge in something greasy, gobbled behind the wheel while no one is watching.

“Don't be hurt. You look great. You'll probably look great for another ten years. But you're like a pro athlete, with a limited time to play your game. You need a five-year plan.”

“It always amuses me,” says Heloise, ever the history student, “that what started as Stalin's program to increase productivity among workers is now a cliché used by every job seeker.”

“Call it what you like. And of course you could go into management mode. Hey, for all I know, there are clients for postmenopausal women.” Paul makes a face. He clearly won't be one of them. “But you might make more money if you get out sooner rather than later. Your business is strong now. It may not always be. I think Anna Marie could put together backers, or come up with a way to buy you out over time.”

It's interesting how he uses her real name.

“And what would I do then? It's not like I invented Google. I'm not going to make so much money that I can retire forever.”

Paul shrugs. “I don't know. Maybe you can finally do what you've always claimed to do.”

“What?” Does he know she has failed to take care of one of her girls, which was supposed to be her point of pride, proof of the fact that she was a good person in a dirty business? Does Anna Marie know about Sophie?

“Be a lobbyist. You're registered, right? You have good relationships with several delegates and senators.” Paul allows himself a rakish smile.

“Who would pay me to do that?”

“I'll ask around if you want me to.”

“Would I make as much as I do now?”

“Probably not.”

It all happens in the briefest of moments. She allows herself to believe, for no more than a second, that she could reinvent herself as a legitimate citizen. It's amazing how much it hurts to surrender the fantasy. But her life—Scott's life—requires a certain income.

She shakes her head, stabs her salad. “I'm not ready, Paul. And now I have to let January go.”

“Aw, c'mon. Can't you see your way to giving her another chance? For me?”

“I don't do second chances, Paul. Not even for you.”

1995

I
t was hard to remember later, when everything went bad, but Martin began as Val's protégé. He was tall, taller than Val. Almost all men were taller than Val, but Martin was so absurdly tall that Val didn't take offense. Like the Georges, Martin was allowed his size. It helped that he was thin, and not in the ropy, muscular way of Val. He was floppy and weak.

Plus, he was young, worshipful. In a different business environment, he would have been Val's intern, running meaningless errands in order to be close to the man he admired, happy to take his abuse. Helen was never quite sure what Martin did for Val, but then she also was never quite clear on the scope of Val's business. He continued to disappear for days at a time. He tried to put Martin in charge when he did, but the girls walked all over him, and Val had to use the Georges. Although increasingly it was George I, with George II disappearing with his boss. When Val was away, Martin drifted around the house, as melancholy as a dog who missed his master.

Helen didn't like Martin, not at first. She should have been glad for Val to have someone on whom to focus, especially if that person wasn't a straight-up rival. As much as she disliked her life with Val, she wouldn't tolerate any threat to it. When a new girl seemed to be gaining favor, she found a way to charm him again. She was extra sweet, accommodating, thinking about him, offering back rubs and making him breakfast, asking for nothing, letting the new girl shoot her triumphant glances as she headed to Val's bedroom, thinking Helen was over. She was never over. The girls usually did themselves in. They were greedy, they pushed. They mistook Val's besottedness for something that gave them real power. They were new toys, cheap ones, and they all broke soon enough.

But a guy shouldn't have mattered to Helen, especially a guy as clueless as Martin. Helen should have been thrilled at the way he distracted Val for a time, which freed her up to escape to her secret reading places on the property. (George II had caught her once, reading beneath the dock, but he didn't seem to understand how profoundly she was betraying Val. At any rate, he didn't bust her, and she didn't think he would as long as he believed them to be on the same side. And they were on the same side. Protecting, placating Val was a side, after all.)

Yet she resented Martin. She disliked his obvious worship of Val, the endless sucking up, the ready laughter at Val's mildest jokes, which were never that good. She hated how he took Val's abuse, too. She saw herself in Martin, in a way she had never seen herself in the other girls. And she could not bear being reminded of what a fool she'd been to think that she could manipulate Val into saving her and then someday be free of him.

“You're the boss!” Martin sang out several times a day, cheerfully at first. He became less cheerful over time. What did he expect? Val was too vain, too paranoid, to groom a true protégé. He would require a successor only in the event of death or prison, and he had no intention of succumbing to either. None of us believe we're going to die, not really. It's an impossible concept, Helen decided. We can imagine ourselves not being before we were born—that's easy. We weren't there, once. We watch the home movies, if there are any, and tolerate the scenes of life before us—the older siblings and, if there are no older siblings, then our ridiculously childless parents, going through the motions of various celebrations as if anything could have been meaningful before we arrived. Helen had not grown up with home movies, but she had the first family of Hector Lewis to remind her there was a time when she did not exist.

But once we do exist—imagining that as not being true is impossible. It was especially true for Val, precisely because a bad outcome was so likely. Death or prison. There were no other options. He accepted that, never pretended that he was angling for retirement or a legitimate life. But acceptance is not true belief. The result was that Val was fearless. And therefore lethal.

Martin began to assert himself in small ways. He wasn't as quick to fill Val's hand with a drink. His laughter was less ready, less raucous. He began to win at cards.
Mistake,
Helen wanted to tell him. Eventually she did.

“Go back to letting him win,” she said in the kitchen one day as Martin prepared Val's half-and-half. The trick to Val's half-and-half was that it was really two-thirds and one-third (lemonade to iced tea) or sometimes, if he had a hangover, one-quarter to three-quarters, and a person just had to know what was required or risk having it flung in his face. Martin also was expected to bring Val a broiled grapefruit sprinkled with brown sugar, and the sugar must be very even. Helen sometimes thought that landing a jet on a carrier had more margin for error than fixing Val's breakfast.

“I never let him win,” Martin said, eyes darting around to see if anyone was listening.

“You mean you just always lost, always, and then you started winning? Well, I guess that's how it goes. In streaks. I'd say you're due for another unlucky streak. It would be healthier.”

He shook his head as if she knew nothing of the man with whom she had been living for three years, and then he scuttled out of the kitchen with Val's breakfast tray. In a few minutes, there was the sound of glass breaking. Whatever the proportions of the half-and-half, they were wrong. Martin returned to the kitchen, face dripping, a small cut near his hairline, and started over.

Several weeks later she found him crying, a disastrous thing to do. He might as well have tried to have sex with one of the Georges. Val didn't like his
women
to cry.

“Why is he so mean?” he said, trying to cover up the evidence of his tears with ineffectual backhanded swipes, so like a little boy's.

“Well, he's short. So he has that complex.”

“Yeah, Napoleon, whatever.”

“He wasn't, though.”

“What?”

“Napoleon wasn't that short.” Helen was reading
Désirée
about then. “It's a myth. He was five-six, which was average for his time.”

“But not for ours, and that's Val's height, give or take. Five-six.”

Closer to five-four,
Helen thought. Even in private, Martin was scared to say Val's true height out loud. But then, so was Helen.

“I don't think Val acts the way he does because of his height. I always thought it was his name.”

“His name?”

It was Helen's turn to be conspiratorial, to look around before speaking. “Valentine. Valentine Day Deluca. I think his mother hated him a little. Don't ever say it. He doesn't even know I know it, but I saw it once, on his birth certificate. When he's giving you shit, though, you can think it. That's what I do, and somehow it makes it easier.”

A gift, a coping tool, nothing more. She didn't have a lot of respect for Martin, but she didn't think he was stupid. Then again, he was apprenticing himself to a man who ran ugly, illegal enterprises, a man who didn't want an apprentice. So maybe Martin was stupid after all. Or simply very young. He might have grown out of it. If he had lived.

Instead, a few weeks later, he reached out his arms to gather up the chips in a particularly high-stakes game of poker, having ignored Helen's advice to rediscover his unluckiness in order to be luckier. “Sorry, Valentine Day.”

“What?” Val's voice was matter-of-fact, flat. Too flat. His eyes cut to Helen, but her face was prepared, which is to say it was blank. She had decided that if she looked surprised or aghast, Val would blame her for sharing the information. She should look puzzled, confused. No one knew Val's name, right?

“Nothing,” Martin said guiltily, knowing he had gone too far. Did that make it better or worse? If he had brazened it through, acted as if he didn't realize the affront, would that have saved him? Probably not.

“I gotta take a leak.”

Val left the room. It seemed as if everyone stopped breathing—Helen, the Georges, the other girls—but that couldn't be possible. How could everyone stop breathing for three, four minutes?

Val walked back in, placed a gun at the base of Martin's head, and pulled the trigger. Martin never saw it coming. That was the part that amazed Helen. Val didn't require Martin's fear or foreknowledge, any more than he would need to make eye contact with a cockroach before squashing it. Something had annoyed him. He eradicated it. End of story.

“Do what you have to do,” he told the Georges.

That night, for the first time in several weeks, Val asked her to come to his room. Helen assumed that her patience had once again regained her the place as the house favorite, that her longevity was desirable in the wake of the evening's strong emotions, the complications engendered by having to dispose of a dead body. He wanted to be with someone he really trusted.

Val tore into her with a silent violence that made clear he knew she was Martin's confidante. No beating ever hurt as much as he made sex hurt that night. She was in pain for days, and these were days in which Val insisted she up her quota, work longer hours, more jobs. He put her on the street. At one point she began bleeding during a job, and the john recoiled in horror. Quick-thinking, she blamed him, said he was too big, and he ended up giving her extra money and a ride to the ER.

At home that night, she watched Shelley, the current favorite, laugh and giggle from what she believed to be her privileged position in Val's lap. He whispered in her ear, stroked her neck, but he had eyes only for Helen. Later he came to her and held her all night long. Again no words, but the apology was as evident as the punishment had been. Toward dawn he said, “You'll always be my favorite. Forever and ever. You know why? Because we're so much alike. We do whatever we have to do.”

She wanted to disagree, but he wouldn't like that, he would hurt her again.

Besides, he had a point.