What I Did for Love (16 page)

He could not resist a further question. “You
are
practicing safe sex, yes?”

“Of course,” I lied with amoral nonchalance. “And thank you, Ren.” His look softened, my gratitude and relief obvious to him. He gave me a quick hug and peck on the cheek, and then walked out with me. His waiting room was empty. He had scheduled me way off his regular hours.

How I wished there really was someone in town with whom I had a deep and good friendship. I wished Robin was already back, or that I could be with her as she dealt with difficult family issues. Her situation resonated with me. She might be seeing some much-loved relatives for the last time, and I pictured her, coping with mortality, coping with her parents who would try to put a positive face on the end of a life. I sighed, knowing she too wished I could have been with her. But to her parents, I would have been an intruder. Understandable, but I missed my friend.

Preoccupied with these thoughts I reached the lobby of Ren’s building, mirrored elevators, cool gleaming marble. The main elevators were programmed to skip the middle tier of floors which included Ren’s office. That middle tier held several luxury medical practices that were only accessible by referral. There were discreet patient entrances for them, a reserved private
corridor, and elevators that went straight to those floors.

Most of the practices were high-end plastic surgeons who treated not only rich private patients, but also media stars and public figures. They did not want their fans or constituencies to know how their faces maintained a kind of perpetual youth. But Ren’s office was for another high-priced clientele: those who concealed all illnesses because it might be interpreted as weakness, an opening to financial enemies or competitors. Foreign officials came here too, to hide their medical conditions from their countrymen and to avoid coups by younger, stronger, healthier aspirants to power.

To my proud pleasure, Ren also did much pro bono work in the city’s clinics for the poor; but his places of work were ever changing as the poor were chased to ever more marginal or remote areas of the city, as the price of living went up and up. Movie-star handsome, Ren had been married while in medical school, his young wife dying before she was thirty from an aggressive form of breast cancer. He watched helplessly, his medical arts useless to help the woman he had loved since college days. He and Bredon had double-dated with their future wives, another bond that cemented their friendship.

After a long period of mourning, there had been a succession of women, many of them kind and loving. Ren had introduced me to them over the years, but had never moved to remarry. I wondered if he would find happiness with a wife again, and hoped he would, such a good and fine man.

I was caught in these reveries as I walked along Fifth Avenue, passing St. Thomas Church, its great flags waving, visitors and tourists entering and leaving, some clustered on its steps. I was tempted to go in, but as I hesitated I saw Rand standing in front of me, watching me, his ever-present black car at the curb. I wondered what he was doing here, what he did that led him to so many places at so many different times of the day. He looked at me with a mixture of anger and desire, and I could feel my
heart thumping again, the intractable chemistry of him out of my conscious control. My body wanted him, there was no denying the slight pulse that I imagined I could feel against my panties.

I had been walking north, but decided to turn around. Would I always be heading downtown when he was in the picture, I wondered. Maybe I would go back toward the theater district, perhaps buy tickets for a show for tonight, anything to get away from him though I also did not want to. His body language had been one of waiting to see whether I would walk toward him, and when I turned away, he came quickly up beside me and matched my pace as I walked along the busy avenue.

I was frantic that my brother’s many acquaintances and social spies not see us, so I shook my head to shake him away, and he grinned, and fell back. I practically ran to the corner to cross as the light changed, taking a side street and heading west. Few people were on the street. The lunch crowd from the office buildings had not yet emerged, and it was too early for the vendors whose bicycle-driven carts would line the curb, with various ethnic foods to sell to the hungry workers.

My heart was feeling sad and tired from having seen Rand, from the futility of my feelings, and that he saw me as whoring myself to him for money. I was sure he thought my only motive was money, to protect my brother, yes, but also to protect my own fortune. He had no idea how my brother had insulated my assets against any possible claim from his dealings.

I reached the Times Square area, its great steps at 46
^th
Street, the wild billboards in their looping creativity. I did not want to call Bredon and interrupt his last hours with Ree, since his plane would be leaving in the late afternoon. Wanting simply to connect with him, I called the private line at his office that only he answered, knowing it would go straight to voice mail. I left an “I love you,” “Hello to Ree,” and “Be safe traveling” set of messages. It calmed me to have spoken aloud even to the digital ether.

I turned back east on 46
^th
Street to my refuge, St. Mary’s, and arrived in time for the beginning of the midday sung Mass. The clouds of incense and the music soothed my soul. I took my favorite place at a front pew where I could have full view of the altar. As the gorgeous liturgy started, my heart quieted. Losing myself in the rite, my eyes more closed than open, I let the old pattern of prayer and song and reading and prayer and consecration absorb me and replace the ache in my heart with calm and familiar consolations.

But when the people were summoned to the altar rail for Communion I almost said, “Oh!” out loud, for Rand was sitting at the end of the pew, watching me. I was angry, my heart feeling violated in a way so different from our sexual entanglings. The privacy of my religious life was a steadying foundation for me, and it had been breached by an interloper. I knew anyone was free to worship anywhere, but he had not come into church for the Mass. If he was so taken with me, why not help Bredon, and be my lover without the games and rules he had made?

He saw my eyes flash as I stood to leave the pew, and he got up and stood back as though to let me go first. But he did not come up to the altar with me, and when I returned to my seat he was gone. My heart, which had been pounding between indignation and desire, finally calmed. I decided to use the 47
^th
Street exit, but as I emerged I saw his black car parked across the street, his window rolled down enough for me to see him. How did he know I would exit this way, I wondered.

In that minute, an angel sent a cab right down the street, and I hailed it and was inside quick as a wink. The traffic down 47
^th
Street was, for a change, lighter than usual, and I had the cab take me uptown to my apartment, paying quickly with my card, and running inside to the welcoming doorman. I wished I could call Robin and tell her everything, but even if I could call her, I could not tell her much of anything, of this bargain, of the reasons for it. One slip, even by an innocent comment, and all
this intrigue and slinking about, the spankings and the raw sex, would have been for naught.

As I came into my study niche I found my message light on. The data read-out said it was Rand. The agreement was no contact except our weekends, and here he was violating all these rules he had made, while I had no recourse. He still was in control, he had the money to rescue my brother. So I pressed the button and his voice came over, quietly taunting.

“Are we into Magdalene mode?” he said, referring to the woman who was wrongly considered a prostitute. People think she was the woman caught in adultery, that she was a whore. But in the scriptures it said she was a friend of Herod’s steward’s wife. That’s like being the friend of the CFO’s wife in a corporation, and it is highly doubtful that a woman of such high standing in ancient Israel would consort with a prostitute.

I used the special text keyboard on my study phone and sent a text reply: “Do read the scriptures again.” The old bigotry, the old misreading, the old assumptions of whoredom. I no longer cared, and pressed “Erase” to send his message into oblivion.

Wednesday. Today was the day. I pressed my thighs together, trying not to imagine the pain of being waxed and thereby making it worse. I had done some quick research using Bredon’s data bases, and “Madame Aldiva’s” building was another family holding that Rand and one of his sisters controlled. It was a twin to the building Rand had shown me, where his apartment was, before we went to the restaurant and to the house where we made love… The thought made my breath start to come more quickly.

I forced myself to focus on the Park Avenue building. The floor plans and interior sketches showed rear apartments on the mezzanine that ringed the inner courtyard. I saw the back door traced in broken lines, the exit Rand had mentioned.

I decided to wear something that would, I hoped, cover up my identity. Going into the secret closet, I extracted a long black raincoat and voluminous headscarf, along with large wraparound dark glasses. I would be a modest Arab woman. Raincoats were their standard outdoor outfit these days, even in the heat. A white raincoat would be better for the season, but many women wore black in summer too. Such outfits were common enough in New York to be ignored, and that was my aim. I wore low, comfortable shoes and a long, loose tunic-and-skirt outfit. The spanking last weekend had left me sore enough when I pulled on my jeans. I could just imagine how I would feel after the waxing. No jeans this time.

I put my valuables in my under-the-shirt pouch, holding the raincoat and scarf, the dark glasses pushed up onto my head. My small phone was in my skirt pocket, and there was cash in the raincoat pocket for the cab I would take. Going out the rear entrance, one of the three janitors on duty waved to me. Bredon had hired them, and rewarded them well for their care and
silence. They were older, family men, two of them immigrants, all of them glad for jobs that had low status but high rewards for the way they helped tenants avoid notice, publicity, and on occasion, reporters. One of them had a special nose for private investigators. I wondered how many marriages he had saved, how many scandals he helped avert. The nuns at Robin’s Swiss convent school would have said he was headed straight to heaven when he died. Of course, the nuns would have assumed that he worked only to protect the sinless innocent. Robin and I had held a giggling and sometimes screamingly laughing discussion of the nuns’ own innocence about matters like this. In truth, we were both thankful that such women existed in the world. They had given Robin a safe, happy place, however stern and full of rules the school had seemed from the outside. No religious practice was imposed on her, nor upon any of the girls. They could opt to pray with the nuns, or keep their own private religious practices, if any at all. The girls had been treated like daughters, and their grateful charges and their families had endowed the school in hugely generous amounts in thanks for their goodness and for the fabulous education they had provided. I missed Robin. I missed everyone I loved, and felt very alone as I headed for a session that was sure to be filled with grimaces and pain.

Once I was out of sight of the janitors, in a nook where no cameras scanned, I slipped on the raincoat and scarf, pulling it forward, putting on the large dark glasses, and quickly exiting. I walked to the next avenue and hailed a cab, giving the address, paying in cash when we arrived.

The Park Avenue median was newly planted with flowers, and Madame Aldiva was in the old, beautifully preserved behemoth of a building on the northbound side of the street. No one was about as I entered the building, the doorman holding the door open for me but narrowing his eyes, the concierge coming forward.

“Ms. Kaye for Madame Aldiva,” I told him in a low voice. At that, the doorman relaxed and the concierge practically whisked me to a two-person elevator off behind a pillar next to his concierge storage room. Once I was inside the elevator, he reached in and pressed “M.” I nodded and he backed away since he had kept the door open by reaching in. I pressed “M” again, and was quickly lifted to the mezzanine level, which had a balcony on the small interior court. The first door on the balcony opened, and a woman as tall as I, but of older, womanly bulk, reached out to take my hand and guide me inside. The concierge must have signaled her because I could see the glowing amber light next to the wall phone near the door. She locked the door behind us, quickly pressing the button under the light so it went out.

“Come in, come in,” she said kindly, her heavy accent perhaps Russian and something else, her smile warm. She held my hand until we reached the sitting room, and then she helped me off with the raincoat, and I removed the scarf and glasses with relief.

“Madame Aldiva,” I started to say, but she said, “Call me Reza.”

“This is my first waxing…” and again she cut me off.

“Yes, I know.” Her large brown eyes held humor and sympathy. I was relieved to see no hint of sadistic pleasure. “Come into this room,” and she led me to a far door that opened into a room that looked like a surgical office, the table covered completely with white paper sheets. A counter on one wall, running almost the length of the room, held a variety of lotions and other liquids. A heating device glowed, and next to it, sealed boxes of strips, and bars of wax. At the end of the counter was a sink with hands-free dispensers for liquid soap and paper towels.

Ren would have been pleased at the cleanliness, I thought, though I was repelled at seeing all of this. Reza saw my look.

“We do this the very clean way,” she said, taking my hand again. “Please, take off your skirt and sit on the table.” She motioned me to a chair, also draped in white paper sheets, but my skirt was elastic-banded, so I slipped it down and laid it on the chair.

“Good,” she said, making no effort to cover me as a doctor would. I was simply naked from the waist down.