Haunted Page 4

  Getting into the back seat, Angelique hands you a business card. It's the phone number for a holistic-healing clinic. Under the number, handwritten, it says: “Ask for Lenny.”

  The soft leather glove of her hand, the roses of her perfume, the sound of her voice, it all says, “Call me.”

  People have a lot of reasons they get into giving foot jobs. The idea that you can give your family a better life. You can give your mom and dad a little comfort and security. A car, maybe. A condo on the beach in Florida.

  The day you gave your folks the keys to that condo, that was the happiest day of your life. That day they cried and admitted they never thought their baby would ever make a living just rubbing people's stinky feet. That's a day you'll pay for for the rest of your life.

  Don't laugh, but it's not illegal. You're doing a simple foot manipulation. Nothing sexual happens except your client has an orgasm that leaves them too weak to walk for the next couple days. Men or women, it doesn't matter. You work the right spot on their feet, and they come hard as a seizure. So hard there's a smell when they lose control of their bowels. So hard most clients can only look at you, drool running out one corner of their mouth, and motion with a trembling finger for you to take the stack of hundred-dollar bills on the dresser or the coffee table.

  Lenny calls from the clinic, and you get on a chartered jet to London. The clinic calls, and you fly to Hong Kong. The clinic is just Lenny, a guy with a Russian accent who lives in a suite in the Park Hampton Hotel, and who you give half your income to. It's Lenny's accent on the phone, telling you what flight to catch, what hotel room or private island where the next client's waiting.

  Don't laugh, but the downside is, you never have time to go shopping. The money just piles up. Your uniform is a fur coat. To fit into this new world, you get good gold and platinum jewelry. You keep a head of perfect, glossy hair. Sitting in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, you might see a few kids you went to reflexology college with, now wearing Armani suits, Chanel cocktail dresses. Kids who used to be vegan bicycle-commuters, now you see them climbing in and out of limousines. You see them eating alone at small tables in hotel dining rooms. Drinking cocktails at the bar in private airports, waiting for the next chartered jet.

  What used to be idealistic dreamers, now lured into professional footwork.

  These hippie dreadlocked earth mothers and goateed skaterpunks, you hear them on the telephone giving sell orders to their stockbrokers. Stashing money in offshore accounts and Swiss safety-deposit boxes. Haggling over uncut diamonds and Krugerrands.

  Boys named Trout and Pony, Lizard and Oyster, now they're all called Dirk. Girls named Buttercup are all called Dominique.

  This flood of people doing footwork, it brings the price down. Soon enough, instead of software billionaires and oil sheikhs, you're loitering in a hotel bar, wearing your last year's Prada and turning foot tricks for twenty bucks a pop. You're slipping under tables to manipulate the feet of conventioneers sitting at restaurant back booths. You're bursting out of big fake birthday cakes to do the feet of whole football teams, bachelor parties, just to keep up the payments on your parents' retirement home.

  It's just a matter of time before you contract some incurable toenail fungus under your silk-wrapped French manicure.

  You do all this just to pay the interest on money you borrowed from Lenny and his Russian Mafia. Money borrowed to buy stocks that tanked. Stocks recommended by Lenny. Or to buy the jewelry and shoes Lenny said you'd need to fit in.

  You're in the lobby bar at the Park Hampton Hotel, trying to talk a drunk businessman into a ten-dollar foot job in the men's room. That's when you see her, Angelique, walking across the lobby, headed for the elevators. Her hair shining. Her furs dragging on the carpet behind her high-heeled feet. Angelique still looking great. Your eyes catch her, and with one gloved hand, she waves you over.

  When the elevator comes, she says she's going up to Lenny's penthouse suite. The clinic.

  She looks at you in your scuffed high heels, your fingernails chipped and jagged, and she says, “Come see what the next growth industry will be . . .”

  The elevator stops on the fiftieth floor, the whole penthouse leased to Lenny, where two pin-striped suits full of muscle stand guarding a door. It's these goons you pay Lenny's cut to, half of everything you make. One guard says your names into a microphone pinned to his lapel, and the doors unlock with a loud buzz.

  Inside, it's just you and Angelique and Lenny.

  Don't laugh, but, lonely and isolated as your life is, doing footwork—Lenny's life looks worse. Locked up here on the penthouse floor, wearing a white terry-cloth bathrobe all day, counting his money, and talking on the telephone. The only furniture is a desk chair, the seat stained and dirty. A mattress is flopped near walls of glass that look out over the whole city. On a computer screen, stock prices scroll up without stopping.

  Lenny comes to the both of you, his bathrobe hanging open, wearing wrinkled striped boxer shorts inside, white socks turned yellow on his feet. Lenny reaches both hands toward Angelique's face and says, “My Angel, my favorite.” He cups her face in his hands and says, “How are you?”

  In her high heels, Angelique must be a head taller than him. She smiles, saying, “Lenny . . .”

  And Lenny smacks her, hard, one hand across her face, and he says, “You're cheating on me, that's how you are.” He holds one hand up, the palm open and ready to smack her, again, and Lenny says, “You're taking outside assignments, aren't you?”

  Holding one gloved hand to her cheek, hiding the red print of Lenny's hand, Angelique says, “Baby, no . . .”

  And Lenny drops his hand. He turns his back to her. Lenny goes to look out the windows, the city spread out right next to his mattress.

  “Baby,” Angelique says. “Let me show you something new.”

  Angelique looks at me.

  She goes to stand next to him, putting her gloved hands on his shoulders from behind, and Angelique says, “Let Mommy show you how much she still loves her baby . . .”

  She steers Lenny to sit on the mattress. Then to lie back. She slips the yellowed sock off each of his feet.

  “Come on, baby,” she says. Taking off her gloves, she says, “You know I give great foot . . .”

  Then Angelique does what you've never seen before. She gets down on her knees. She opens her mouth, her lips stretched wide and thin, and runs her tongue along the bottom of Lenny's sole. Angelique cups her lips around Lenny's heel, and Lenny starts to moan.

  Don't laugh, but there are jobs worse than the worst job you can imagine. A media mogul with no history of high blood pressure, he's found dead of a stroke in a room at the Four Seasons. A rock star in perfect health dies of kidney failure after a foot massage in the Chateau Marmot.

  We have access to the feet of presidents and sultans. CEOs and movie stars. Kings and queens. We know how to make a paid hit look like natural causes.

  This is what Angelique tells you on the way down in the elevator. After Lenny moaned and thrashed. After Angelique mouthed his foot until the one long moment Lenny sat up on the mattresses, clutching his chest in both hands and gaping his open mouth at her still sucking his heel. After his heart stopped, Angelique pulled the bedsheets up to his chin. She wiped the lipstick off his foot and smeared more around her mouth. She unplugged his phones and told the guards Lenny was taking a long nap.

  On the way down in the elevator, Angelique tells you this was her last foot job. This kind of foot hit paid a million bucks, cash. A rival agency had hired her to bump off Lenny, and now she was out of the business for good.

  In the lobby bar, the two of you have a cocktail to get the taste of Lenny's foot out of her mouth. Just one last, good-bye drink. Then Angelique says to look around the hotel lobby. The men in suits. The women in fur coats. They're all Rolfing killers, she says. Reiki killers. Colonic-irrigation assassins.

  Angelique says, in gem therapy, just by putting a quartz crystal on someone's heart, then
an amethyst on his liver and a turquoise on his forehead, you induce a coma that results in death. Just by sneaking into a room and rearranging someone's bedroom set, a feng-shui expert can trigger kidney disease.

  “Moxibustion,” she says, the science of burning cones of incense on someone's acupuncture points, “it can kill. So can shiatsu.”

  She drinks the last of her cocktail, and takes off the strand of pearls from around her neck.

  All those cures and remedies that claim to be 100-percent natural ingredients, therefore 100-percent safe, Angelique laughs. She says, Cyanide is natural. So is arsenic.

  She hands the pearls to you and says, “From now on, I'm back to being ‘Lentil.'”

  That's how you want to remember Angelique, not the way she looked in the newspaper the next day, fished out of the river in a soggy mink coat. Her earrings and diamond watch taken to make it look like a robbery. Not with her feet fondled to death, but dead the old-fashioned way, with a hollow-point bullet to the back of her perfect French braid. A warning to all the Dirks and Dominiques who might jump ship.

  The clinic calls, not Lenny, but some other Russian accent, trying to send you to clients, but you don't trust them. The guards saw you with Lentil. Up at the penthouse. They must have another hollow-point ready for the back of your head.

  Your folks call from Florida to say a black town car keeps following them, and somebody calls to ask if they know how to find you. By now, you're already running from flophouse to flophouse, giving back-alley foot jobs for enough cash to stay alive.

  You tell your folks: Be careful. You tell them not to get massaged by anybody they don't know. Calling them from a pay phone, you tell them to never mess with aromatherapy. Auras. Reiki. Don't laugh, but you're going to be traveling for a long time, maybe the rest of your life.

  You can't explain. By now, you've run out of quarters, so you tell your folks good-bye.

  3

  Our first week, we ate beef Wellington while Miss America knelt at every doorknob and tried to pick the lock with a palette knife borrowed from the Duke of Vandals.

  We ate striped sea bass while Miss Sneezy ate pills and capsules from the rattling jars in her suitcase. While she coughed into her fist, and wiped her nose on her sweater sleeve.

  We eat turkey Tetrazzini while Lady Baglady toys with her diamond ring. With the platinum band turned around, she talks to the big diamond that seems to sit cupped in her palm. “Packer?” she says. “This is nothing like I've been led to expect.” Lady Baglady says, “How can I write anything profound if my environment isn't . . . ideal?”

  Of course, Agent Tattletale's videotaping her. The Earl of Slander holds his tape recorder to catch every word.

  A cough-cough, here. A cough-cough, there. Here, a gripe. There, a bitch. Everywhere, a complaint. Miss Sneezy says the air is swimming with toxic mold spores.

  A rattle-rattle, here. A cough-cough, there. No one working. No writing getting done.

  Skinny Saint Gut-Free, his face was always looking up, his mouth baby-bird gaped open as he poured in chili or apple pie or shepherd's pie from a silver Mylar bag. His Adam's apple bobbed with each swallow, his tongue funneling the lukewarm mess past his teeth.

  Chewing his tobacco, the Matchmaker spit on the stained carpet and said this dank building, these dim-dripping rooms, had nothing in common with the writers' colony he'd pictured: people writing longhand, looking down rolled green lawns; writers eating box lunches, each in their own private cottage. Orchards of apricot trees in a blizzard of white flower petals. Afternoon naps under chestnut trees. Croquet.

  Even before she started to outline her screenplay, her life's masterpiece, Miss America said she couldn't. Her breasts were too sore to write. Her arms, too tired. She couldn't smell today's veal cutlets without vomiting a little of the crab cakes from the day before.

  Her period was almost a week late.

  “It's sick-building syndrome,” Miss Sneezy told her. Her raw-red nose, already staying sideways, wiped in profile against one cheek.

  Trailing her fingers along the railings and the carved backs of chairs, Lady Baglady showed us the dust. “Look,” she told the fat diamond in her hand, she said, “Packer? Packer, this is not acceptable.”

  In our first week locked away, Miss Sneezy was coughing, breathing in the slow, deep notes a pipe organ would make.

  Miss America was rattling locked doors. Yanking aside the green velvet drapes in the Italian Renaissance lounge to find windows bricked over. With the handle of her pink plastic exercise wheels, she broke a stained-glass window in the Gothic smoking room, only to find a cement wall wired with bulbs to fake daylight behind it.

  In the French Louis XV lobby, the chairs and sofas all cornflower-blue velvet, the walls crowded and busy with plaster curls and scrolls painted gold, there, Miss America stood in her pink spandex active wear and asked for the key. Her hair, an ocean wave of blond breaking in curls and flips against the back of her head, she needed the key so she could go out, just for a few days.

  “You're a novelist?” Mr. Whittier said. Even resting flat on the chrome arms of his wheelchair, his fingers tapped an invisible telegram. Veined and chased with wrinkles, the bones of his hands trembled in a constant blur.

  “A screenwriter,” Miss America said. A fist on each pink spandex hip.

  Looking at her, tall and willowy, “Of course,” Mr. Whittier said. “So write a movie script about being tired.”

  No, Miss America needed to see an obstetrician. She needed blood work done. She needed prenatal vitamins. “I need to see someone,” she said. Her boyfriend.

  And Mr. Whittier said, “This is why Moses led the tribes of Israel into the desert . . .” Because those people had lived for generations as slaves. They'd learned to be helpless.

  To create a race of masters from a race of slaves, Mr. Whittier said, to teach a controlled group of people how to create their own lives, Moses had to be an asshole.

  Sitting at the edge of a blue velvet chair, Miss America kept nodding her blond head. Her hair flip-flopping. She understood. She understood. Then she said, “The key?”

  And Mr. Whittier told her, “No.”

  He balanced a silver Mylar bag of chicken Marsala on his knees, all around him the blue carpet patched and sticky with dark mold. Each soggy patch, a shadow branched with arms and legs. A mildewed ghost. Spooning up chicken Marsala, Mr. Whittier says, “Until you can ignore your circumstances, and just do as you promise,” he says, “you'll always be controlled by the world.”

  “And what do you call this?” Miss America says, stirring the dusty air with her hands.

  And Mr. Whittier says, for the first of a million times, “I'm only holding you to your word.” And, “What stops you here is what stops your entire life.”

  The air will always be too filled with something. Your body too sore or tired. Your father too drunk. Your wife too cold. You will always have some excuse not to live your life.

  “But what if something happened? What if we ran out of food?” Miss America says. “You'd open the door then, wouldn't you?”

  “But we're not,” Mr. Whittier says, his mouth full of chewed chicken and capers. “We're not running out of food.”

  And, no, we weren't. Not yet.

  That first week inside, we ate vegetable curry over rice. We ate teriyaki salmon. All of it freeze-dried.

  For food, we had green beans sealed in Mylar bags you couldn't tear with your bare hands. “Vermin-proof” was stenciled in black paint on each silver bag. We had vermin-proof green beans and chicken pot pie and golden-sweet whole-kernel corn. Inside each bag, something rattled, loose twigs and rocks and sand. Each bag inflated to a silver pillow with a puff of nitrogen to keep the contents dead. The lasagna with meat sauce or cheese ravioli.

  Vermin-proof or not, our Missing Link could rip a bag open with his bare pubic-hairy hands.

  To cook dinner, most people cut the bag open with scissors or a knife. You reached in and dug around unt
il you found the little tea bag of iron oxide—added to absorb any trace of oxygen. You fished out the tea bag and dumped in so many cups of boiling water. We had a microwave. We had plastic forks and spoons. Paper plates. And running water.

  You read ten pages in a vampire novel, and dinner was served. Instead of sticks and hot water, the silver pillow was full of home-style meatloaf or beef Stroganoff.

  We'd sit on the blue carpet of the lobby stairs, a rippling blue waterfall, each step so wide we could all share the same one and our elbows not poke each other. This was the same beef Stroganoff the President and Congress would be eating deep underground during a nuclear war. It was from the same maker.

  Other silver bags were stenciled “Chocolate Devil's Food Cake” and “Bananas Foster.” Mashed potatoes. Macaroni and cheese. Freeze-dried French fries.

  All of it, comfort food.

  Every bag had a good until date that wouldn't come until we were dead. A shelf life until after most babies would be dead.

  Strawberry cupcakes with a hundred-year life span.

  We ate freeze-dried lamb with freeze-dried mint jelly while Lady Baglady discovered in her heart's own heart that she really did love her dead husband. She loved him, she cried into her hands. Her shoulders hunched and jerking with sobs inside her mink coat. Cradling the fat diamond in her palm, she needed to get out and bury her three-carat husband in their family plot.

  We ate Denver omelets while the Duke of Vandals snapped and popped his nicotine gum and said this was a terrible time to give up smoking. And Saint Gut-Free lost the feeling in his left hand, a repetitive-motion injury, trying to climax without a picture.

  The cat of Director Denial, the cat named Cora Reynolds, ate leftover striped sea bass while Countess Foresight and the Reverend Godless worried we weren't safe enough. We'd walked into a trap. They worried someone might find us and . . . They told Mr. Whittier they needed to keep moving, hiding, running to stay safe.

  Reverend Godless, clutching a Barbra Streisand album, his split, blood-sausage lips moving as he read the lyrics in the liner notes, he told the Earl of Slander's tape recorder, “I just assumed we'd have a stereo, here.”