Adios, Scheherazade

I can see why the word whore isn’t used very much around New York any more, why the word hooker has taken its place. These spade machines hitting the sidewalks up and down the West Side in the forties are too cold and deadly and well constructed to be whores. They’re hookers. They hook you, they turn it around, you don’t stick the hook in them they stick it in you. In the back, high up between the shoulder blades. The hook goes in and bends up through your neck and into your skull, and they hang you on a nail in the closet of their contempt. You spurt your little gray jism inside the felt-lined box they keep for the purpose, and you zip up your pants and go home, but at the same time you’re still back there in that closet, dangling from the hook, arms hanging, legs slightly bent, head drooping forward and sticking out that clown face with the dead white skin and the red circles on the cheeks and the big thick-lipped red smiling mouth that can’t quite hide the truth that the real lips are curved the other way.

So when it was settled that we wouldn’t haggle, she took me over to 8th Avenue, to a crummy tenement that called itself a hotel, where I paid seven-fifty for a room. Seven-fifty. In addition to the twenty. So the hooker already had the hook in, because although I knew I was being taken I didn’t argue the point, I paid and followed her up the green-walled stairs to a room on the third floor to which she already had a key. I paid for the room, and she already had a key to it. They didn’t even bother with any play-acting about the desk clerk handing me a key. I was just paying a thirty-seven and a half per cent tax, that’s all.

The room had a ceiling fixture with one bare twenty-five-watt bulb. Or maybe a fifteen-watt bulb. In any case, a very dim bulb. It also had a tall narrow dresser with a doily on top and some things on it like a plastic tray with bobby pins, things like that. It also had a rag rug on the floor, and a window with Venetian blinds shut over it, and a sink in the corner, and a white enamel basin — need I say chipped? — under the sink, and a kitchen chair that had long ago lost its paint and all but one of its back rungs, so that the back looked like a picture frame with a line running down the middle of it.

It also had a bed. Double. Hollywood. Covered with a very faded thin pink blanket, tucked in tight all the way around. Two pillows in yellowish pillow cases.

I stood in the room while she shut the door behind me and pushed home a bolt lock. I remembered the clown in the paper, the one who’d been beaten to death by a man let into his room by the whore he had with him. The hooker. I wondered if I was here to get myself beaten to death, and then, since in actual fact I did not lay my baby-sitter nor ever do anything at all to her but in truth made it all up, I wondered what the hell I should feel guilty about and want to be punished for. For telling the truth about my feelings about Betsy? For having those feelings? Or for something of which Betsy and that whole miserable farce were only a part?

The hooker waggled a finger at my belt. “Go ahead and drop ’em,” she said. Same soft seductive voice, same smile, same mocking eyes. Eyes like pieces of dark glass, colored glass. Like marbles, the marbles we had when I was a kid, the tiger-striped ones, black and brown and amber.

I took off my shoes and then my pants and then my shirt and then my underpants, while she went over to the sink and filled the basin with warm water, into which she put a cake of soap and a washcloth. Light blue washcloth. When I was standing there in T shirt and socks she came over and held the edge of the basin against my legs and washed my cock, which repelled me. I began to hate her then, for depersonalizing me before we ever got to bed, for turning my despairing lust into a simple exercise in slum hygiene, and when my cock, limp until then, began to rise at the touch of her hand and the feel of the warm water and the gentle abrasion of the blue washcloth I began to hate that, too. To hate my cock. As though I was like one of those old-time dinosaurs with two brains, only in my case one brain was in my head and the other in the head of my cock, and all the important decisions, all the decisions that changed my life or screwed up my life or complicated my life were made by that brain down there.

She was still dressed when she washed me. She’d taken off her coat and hung it on a hook on the door — the chair was now draped with my clothing — and under the coat she was wearing a bright pink sweater of very fuzzy material that zipped down the front. Inside there, her breasts were a trifle small, and high, and hard. They looked as hard and uninviting as knuckles, but for some reason I craved them. To see them, touch them, gnaw the dusty dry nipples. That was the thought that brought me up to a full erection and made me hasty.

“You, too,” I said, my voice uncertain, gesturing vaguely at her clothing.