The Earring

Now she was witness to Randall's destruction. School started and she plowed into it, taking some time off from the rest of her clients. She had dinner with Randall and he got plastered. Fortunately nothing could embarrass her. Outside they stood for a while and he cried quietly with his nose in her neck. People on the street passed by them without noticing because in Las Vegas it took more to turn heads than a man sobbing on a call girl's shoulder.

She felt bad for him, she really did. And her emotional labor was being well compensated. But it was more than she believed she was capable of doing. For a couple weeks she didn't hear from him, and she wondered if he had gone home, if the drama at his job had at last consumed him. During that time she thought about him quite a bit. One of her first clients had been a man very similar to Randall, successful in business and a partly-unbuttoned hedonist, who had never even had sex with her, they had only cuddled. At first that arrangement had been strange to her but eventually she comprehended how the desire between two bodies could never be transliterated. One of her clients was disabled. Another was bereaved. There were playboys, too, which had been her first impression of Randall. She was not a psychologist but the restaurants and rooms in which she inhabited were obscured by a different kind of subconsciousness. Veils were lifted and replaced with news ones, as though the truth was always going to be a mystery, a thing merely viewed from different angles.

It flickered in her mind that she was perhaps complicit by the very nature of her role in these proceedings. Then she said to herself that no, she might be losing a client, but it was not the client's downfall. It was the man's.

11/

He was losing time, the walls of his office were exhaling their oxygen and his own lungs were were losing their capacity to keep his head from spinning. One moment panic overtook him and he paced, he clenched his fists, he grit his teeth; the next, mental images of Mia injected in him a stupefied zen in which he rubbed his boner and let his tongue hang a little out of his mouth. At home under the shower he attempted to leave his body. In bed he allowed himself to send her a message, and then masturbate to her photos and the lingering perfume of her touch that he tricked himself was there. In the dark he could imagine himself as he wanted to be. But the next day he spent thirty minutes in the bathroom trying to move a T-bone, and he nicked himself shaving, and he had a toothache and a backache and his lips were parched for whiskey.

After a week of avoiding alcohol, he awoke as refreshened as he could ever remember. It was fall and the sky was blue and it was hot. He drove with the windows down. A struggle appeared to have resolved itself in his mind: it did not matter what he felt about Mia, or she about him, because it was an experience that he was paying good money for and as long as he kept his wallet open then in a sense it was all part of the purchase. Theoretically he could continue until she, as the supplier, cut him off. But in fact he wanted to pay for her indefinitely. At heart he was indeed a capitalist. A new struggle was emerging, however, that blurred the deepest edges of his vision. An epiphany was not yet solidified; it was as yet only a fragmentary terror. He knew that he was lying to himself but he believed it was love that might save him.

Reaching out to her, he made it clear that he was not coming to town for work. He needed time off, he said, and he wanted to at least buy her dinner. She put aside an evening and told him she'd be delighted to see him, and that she hoped he was okay. At her concern, his blood sped up and pondered that maybe, if he explained himself correctly, they could just run away together, pull a Bonnie and Clyde, accelerate towards the sunset. It was a card in his hand, anyway. In the airport waiting he texted her, "I hate to be sentimental but I would love to see you in the earrings I gave you, you look so beautiful when they're the only thing you're wearing."

12/

She matched the earrings with a red cocktail dress that had long sleeves but virtually no coverage of the space between her legs. They laughed about it as she made a faux-modest performance of tugging it down. It was new and shorter than expected. Sharp black stilettos balanced out the look. Randall said "I love it" as he pulled her chair out for her. His collar was open and he was wearing black pants and shoes. He wondered if she was tramping it up on purpose. When she ordered the salmon he smiled at the server and told him to make it two.

In his hotel room they folded over on the bed and did not take long to open each other up. They began their sex in a loose, easygoing way, just warming up. Mia took off everything except the earrings. Randall dabbed a finger in his glass of whiskey and rubbed it around her nipples, then sucked them clean. It made her giggle. While she gave him a blowjob he kept pouring himself more. For a long time he kissed her. He asked her if she thought he was just a dirty old man. Her answer was that all men were dirty. They both burst out laughing and couldn't stop, and for a while they just lounged, not even touching. He asked, "What do you really think of me?"

Mia's response came intermittently as they continued fucking. With her ankles at his ears she admitted that he was probably the most handsome of all her clients. When they had first met, she said, his confidence had been the quality that made her imagine what he might have been like outside of her job. But now she saw that he was more conflicted than his first impression had suggested. He flipped her over and she said, running out of breath, "I respect you a lot but I also don't know you that well."

Everything she said was true, but she had the feeling that it meant something different in his ears than what she'd intended. He shot his load on her tits and then they noticed how late it was. At the door he said, "I know I'm not supposed to love you, but I do."

In the hallway she smiled and told him, "That's okay."

13/

In a cab halfway home she pulled back her hair and discovered that one of the earrings was missing. Instinctively she checked her purse, but it was not there among the folded bills. Nor did she find it feeling the seat around her, or on the floor. When she got inside she was almost in a panic. It was impossible to know what his reaction might be but she was afraid it would present the tragic flaw, that to lose his gift was a breach of propriety. Her mistake would signal the shattering of the disguise. She cleaned the makeup off her face and promised herself that she would be fine.

14/

Randall woke up with a not unpleasant hangover, and stayed in bed looking at the ceiling for almost an hour. He got up to piss and stopped for a moment to look at himself in the full-length mirror on the door. Almost forty-seven and all the way naked. He still had all his hair. He still had the stamina to fuck a beautiful woman. Not often enough did he let himself be complimented by the muscles in his calves, the shape of his cock, the strength in his arms and chest. Yes, he was handsome, he knew it well. He regretted not having children, lots of them. It struck him that it was possible he would go to prison.

He decided to stay in bed a while longer. Crossing the room he stepped on something. The shades were drawn and the room was dark. He picked it up. It was the earring.

15/

When she returned in the late afternoon he was still naked. A thick slab of afternoon light bisected the dark room in a curtain of golden dust. It stank of whiskey and sweat and the same desperation that over the phone he had used to summon her. From the door he stumbled over to the chair, where he slouched unashamed of his state. She stood beside the mirror in civilian clothes, jeans and a blouse. It was between classes but she had felt compelled to follow his wishes. His eyes did look at her. In a thousand years she would not have confessed it but she was more attracted to him at that moment than the entire time she had known him.

At last he looked at her and said, in a rasping voice, "I don't even know your name."

She sank on the bed and he knelt on the floor and embraced her. He pressed his head against her stomach, muttering words and clutching her torso like he was a child. Her eyes rolled up and she steeled herself against seeing anything in the room at all. It was the last act. She rolled her tongue over a molar and counted the seconds.

"Save me," he gasped.

He loosened his arms and slumped over.

Said it again.

"Save me."