Small Town

“I had the usual array of jobs, and the only one I might have kept was assisting this photographer, a really sweet boy, but he got too sick to work. And then I took a class at the Learning Annex, if you can believe it, and it was like I found my purpose in life. No time at all I had my Realtor’s license and a job to go with it, and this place was maybe the fourth rental I ever showed. I showed no end of co-ops, and I handled subletting some of them, but as far as straight rentals, this was the fourth, and I took one look at it and saw it was rent-stabilized and what the price was, and no way was I gonna let it go to some fucking client. So of course my first job was convincing this darling young couple that it was all wrong for them, and once I got rid of them I put in an application and rented it myself. I got fired for that, it’s a major no-no, but who gave a shit? I had my dream apartment, and how long was it going to take me to get another job? Five minutes?”

They’d stopped at a Starbucks after the meeting, and otherwise he might never have gotten to know her, because she never went back to ACOA. It was too humorless for her, she told him, and he could understand that, but suspected she also wanted to keep her distance from any program that might make her face up to her own relationship with alcohol, which he had to figure was at least somewhat problematical. She reined it in when she was with him — people often did in the presence of sober alcoholics — but one time she’d been a toke over the line, as it were, and he got to see the change in her eyes and in the cast of her features.

Well, it was his job to clean her apartment, not to take her inventory. Someday he might see her at an AA meeting, and maybe she’d get sober and maybe she wouldn’t, but for now her life seemed to work okay, or at least she thought it did.

Though you wouldn’t have guessed it from the state of her living room. Not this morning, anyway.

And that was where he came in, wasn’t it? He cleaned and straightened, washed glasses, emptied ashtrays, stuffed her dirty clothes in the bathroom hamper, put things where they belonged. He couldn’t seem to find the turquoise rabbit — maybe she’d taken it to bed with her, though animals carved from stone weren’t really ideal for cuddling — but he put fresh cornmeal in the little saucer and positioned the bear and the bison on either side of it. He bagged the garbage, carried it downstairs and stowed it in one of the trash cans in the rear courtyard. He cleaned the bathroom, scouring the sink and toilet and clawfooted old tub, getting the curious satisfaction this chore always brought him. The first time he cleaned someone’s toilet he wanted to retch, but you got over that, and nowadays he felt this great sense of accomplishment. Odd how it worked. Was it that way for everybody, or was it a gay thing?

When he’d finished in the living room and kitchen and bathroom, and the small second bedroom she used for an office, he got out the vacuum cleaner and hesitated. He went to the bedroom door, put an ear to it, then turned the knob and eased it open.

It was dark within, but enough light came through around the blackout shades for him to make out her form in the bed at the far end of the room. He said her name — “Marilyn?” — to get her attention if she was just lying there half-awake, but not loud enough to rouse her from a sound sleep. And she was evidently sleeping soundly, because she didn’t stir.

Should he vacuum? It was that or quit for the day, leaving her bedroom untouched and the whole apartment unvacuumed. The noise might wake her, but she’d probably want to be up by now anyway, might even have appointments scheduled. If she could leave her underwear in the living room and her Wild Turkey uncapped, wasting its fragrance on the desert air, she might well have neglected to set her clock. Even now some Wall Street hotshot could be cooling his heels in a lobby somewhere, waiting for Marilyn to show him the condo of his dreams.

He plugged in the old Hoover and had at it. If she slept through it, fine, it proved she really needed the sleep. If she woke up, even better.

He remembered how delighted she’d been to learn what he did for a living. “It’s a get-well job,” he’d explained. “Although it could be a career, if I want. All I have to do is let it grow itself into an agency, a cleaning service. But that’s too complicated for now. I like to keep it real simple. I make okay money and my rent’s low and I get paid in cash and I’m done for the day in plenty of time to make an afternoon meeting.”

“But a whorehouse,” she said. “How did that happen?”

“The way it always does. You clean for one person and he recommends you to somebody else.”

“So one of the bar owners was a customer at the whorehouse—”

“Actually, I think it was the other way around.”

“What are they like? The girls?”