The prostitute was standing in front of the mirror, combing her hair, hair which passion had comically disarrayed. She had already re-dressed, and the man lying on the bed suddenly realized that her departure was imminent, perhaps but a comb-stroke away. The realization greatly depressed him.

He rose quickly to a sitting position, simultaneously blurting out, his words propelled by his knowledge of loneliness: ‘would you like another drink, or something to eat?’

‘No thanks, honey,’ the prostitute answered, laughing a bit {and uncharacteristically feeling a small amount of empathy} in recognition of the man’s mode of delivery. ‘I got to get going. It’s almost two o’clock; the bars will be emptying out soon.’

The man said nothing. He also felt nothing: the nothingness all men who pay for copulation feel when they’re hit with the icy reality of the professional lover’s emotional detachment.

The prostitute finished with her hair and placed the comb in her shoulder-bag. She studied herself briefly in the mirror, approved reluctantly {owing to the time-limitation} and then turned to the man. ‘Fifty dollars, honey,’ she said impatiently.

The man rose resignedly from the bed and moved to the chair over which his pants were draped. He removed his wallet from the pants and was about to remove the money when a thought delayed him. He re-seated himself on the bed.

‘Fifty dollars,’ the prostitute repeated, this time with a trace of anxiety. She had had some ugly experiences with men who had tried to escape payment. She had learned to take the money in advance. Why she hadn’t tonight now puzzled her.

‘Susie, how much do you figure to make tonight, after you leave here?’ the man asked, counting the money in his wallet as he spoke.

‘I don’t know, Joe,’ she answered. ‘Why?’

‘A hundred; a hundred and a half?’

‘I don’t know, Joe; it depends.’ she looked at her watch, her growing impatience manifested in the act, and in her accompanying foot-tap.

‘Two hundred?’ Joe asked with teasing incredulity.

Susie had to laugh. ‘Maybe a hundred, if I can get out of here quick enough to catch the guys coming out of the bars.’ she stressed the ‘if’.

‘You don’t like my place?’ Joe asked with exaggerated hurt.

‘Come on, Joe; I’ve got to run,’ said Susie. Her anxiety was gone now; she was certain that Joe would pay her. In its place was annoyance.

‘Listen,’ Joe said. ‘I’ll give you a hundred and fifty: fifty for services rendered and a hundred if you stay here till dawn.’ he held the money out to her.

The prostitute took it, counted it deftly and deposited it in her shoulder-bag. ‘Sure, good-looking; but are you sure you have two more rides in you? You’ve had a lot to drink.’

Joe laughed. ‘I’m sure I don’t,’ he said, returning the wallet to his pants. He then put the pants back on.

Susie watched him, perplexed. ‘What do you mean, you’re sure you don’t?’

‘I mean I just want some company is all,’ he answered, moving to a sideboard on which a bottle of vodka and its appurtenances sat.

‘You just want company?’ Susie asked incredulously.

‘Well, a little more than that,’ Joe said as he prepared two drinks. His words were accompanied by a slight, facial reddening of abashment.

‘What do you want, Joe? You don’t look like the kinky type, which, by the way, costs extra.’

Joe turned to her abruptly. ‘Hell no, nothing like that! What do you think I am, some kind of pervert?’ his face reddened even more, a coloration contributed to now by genuine indignation.

‘Calm down, honey,’ Susie said placatingly; ‘but if you won’t tell me what it is you want, I’m going to have to take some guesses.’ she was smiling, that smile that reminded him so of a woman he had once known, whom he had been planning to marry, who had run off with another guy all of a sudden. Joe had never been able to forget the jilting woman’s smile. It had had such a serene effect on him. Until tonight, he had never seen another one like it.

‘I’ll tell you,’ he said, in the curl of her mouth immediately mollified and mellow; ‘keep your blouse on.’ he turned back to the drinks. ‘Hey, that’s a rather appropriate expression, given our circumstances,’ he laughingly realized; ‘keep your blouse on, get it?’

‘Cute,’ said Susie, not apt to be overwhelmed by expressions apt.

He then told her what he wanted.

Susie suppressed laughter. Joe had spoken in such a sincere manner, with such a child-like sincerity {as often had that first guy in her life, whom she had given up everything for. He had dropped her for California and an air-headed blonde}, that she felt obliged to respond accordingly. ‘If that’s what you want, honey, sure.’ she then moved to him, turned his face to hers, kissed him gently on his mouth, lips closed. ‘I love you, Joe,’ she said. ‘I love you.’

Joe handed her a drink. ‘And one more thing,’ he said; ‘you’ve got to put up with my telling you that I love you too.’

‘I think I can handle that,’ said Susie.

‘I love you, Susie.’

‘I love you, Joe.’

‘Remember now, you’ve got to say it a lot, all the way till dawn, and say it as if you truly mean it,’ Joe inculcated. ‘All the way till dawn.’

******************************

The two were sitting on the sofa, drinking away. The clock above them was ticking slowly, slowly gaining on dawn. Outside, the streets were quiet; other residents in the apartment building were asleep. The sound of the clock was therefore unusually noticeable.

‘I love you, Joe,’ said Susie. In the length of time since their quid pro quo, the prostitute had made the statement quite a bit, but the words still felt awkward to her. She could not remember the last time she had used them and felt honest with the usage. It had no doubt been when she’d last seen her father, when he’d disowned her. Perhaps the awkwardness now related to the fact that Joe resembled her father somewhat, in the eyes.

‘I love you, Susie, and I guess you think I’m a head case,’ Joe said with laughter, laughter in no search of returned volley.

‘Why do you say that?’ asked Susie. She had become quite accustomed to abnormality; so accustomed, in fact, that she asked the question honestly.

‘Well, I mean this is a rather absurd situation, don’t you think?’ Joe smiled with a touch of embarrassment, again exhibiting a child-like quality, again reminding Susie of that first guy. The similarity tingled her between her heartbeats.

‘I love you, Joe,’ said Susie, turning her eyes from that smile. ‘I don’t think anything’s absurd. Everything simply is.’ there was unmistakable resignation in her philosophy.

‘That sounds like the statement of a person who has no future, no re-livable past.’

‘I love you, Joe, but, please, no analytical bull-shit.’ it was her turn to affix less than lung-filled laughter.

The street language, which she had used earlier to no disapproval from Joe, now displeased him. ‘Listen,’ he informed, ‘the woman I love, and who loves me, this charade we’re playing, doesn’t use gutter language, okay?’

‘Anything you say, Joe, cause I love you.’ for the first time, there was a trace of sarcasm in her voice.

Joe gave no face to the trace. ‘A beautiful woman appeals to all of the senses,’ he said in unsolicited elucidation. ‘If she isn’t appealing to a given one, that given one negatively affects the others. So don’t negatively affect my sense of sight or touch or whatever by disgusting my sense of hearing.’

Susie laughed, though she didn’t really know if he’d been joking or not. ‘What are you, some kind of writer?’ she asked, in case he’d been serious about that sense-crap.

‘No,’ answered Joe, dismissing but not convincing, as if maybe a dream slept somewhere.

Susie manually indicated a desk catty-cornering a meeting of two walls. A typewriter sat atop it. ‘What’s the typewriter for?’

‘Oh, I’ve always toyed around with writing, poems and short-stories; basically a killer of time.’ a dabbler, he was not; in his heart.

‘Ever have anything published?’ another guy in Susie’s life had been a writer. He’d even had a collection of poems published. He would write Susie a poem every day, and she had nearly fallen in love with him, probably would have; but the published poetry had been an abysmal failure, and the guy, already an abuser of drugs, had sunk with the collection through increased vein-perforation. She’d left him finally. He’d died of an overdose a short time later. Susie, who had used drugs recreationally, had ceased them altogether, having seen what lousy verses they wrote.

‘Actually, until just recently, I never sent anything in.’

‘What did you send?’

‘A short story. I don’t even know why I sent it in. I was drunk one night and did it on the spur of the moment.’

‘What is the story about?’

‘Nothing much,’ said Joe, referring more to the worth of his work, in his mind, than to a barren story-line.

‘Come on, tell me,’ said Susie with legitimate interest, an interest perhaps owing to her poetic past and the guilt that resided there: that she perhaps could have been a little more supportive and encouraging of the guy after his lack of success; support and encouragement that might have prevented his death.

On his own ladder of self-esteem, Joe had always had his foot on the lowest rung. Only once, years ago with an older woman he had been seeing regularly, had he climbed a little. She had praised him all the time, his writing efforts. Her panegyrics had never sounded phony or self-serving. Joe, who could smell any rat of insincerity, had accepted her praise much like a dehydrated man, seeing death of thirst in the not too distant future, accepts water; for, prior to meeting her, Joe’s life-long dream of being a word-weaver had gotten very close, through that lowest rung, to last writes. Alas, the older woman had split for New England, with someone more chronologically compatible. Joe had descended back down the ladder.

‘Come on, Joe, I’d really like to hear about it. I’ll bet it’s much better than you let on,’ Susie urged on; ‘and I love you.’

‘It’s about relationships, is all,’ began Joe reluctantly; but it was one of those hesitations that need but the slightest breeze.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s about how every ultimate relationship is composed of elements from each person’s previously failed relationships,’ he tip-toed ahead.

‘How do you mean?’

‘It’s like every relationship in a person’s life is a building block, leading to
the edifice of that ultimate coupling. A man might have a relationship from his past which he now considers a totally wasted period of time in his life. He hates her now maybe, doesn’t even want to think about her. She disillusioned him greatly. Yet, there was something about the woman which initially poked his heart. Whether he’ll admit it or not, that something he saved, to be sought as a component in another woman. The man goes on to have four or five such disappointing relationships, and thereby his savings account grows. Without knowing it, he is becoming certain of just what he wants in a woman. Eventually, he finds a woman who breaks his bank, has all the components. If she has followed his same tortuous path, their relationship will be permanent bliss. In short, my little story predicates that there is no such thing as a meaningless relationship, no wasted time spent in such pursuit of ultimate companion. Every turn, every bump in the road, can only lead to the road’s inevitable end, the end being love; or at worst, compatibility.’

‘Sounds rather optimistic,’ said Susie. She spoke and sat in a composed manner, but her heart was behaving strangely. She was in a state of confusion, and making the bewilderment worse was the fact that she didn’t know just what was puzzling her. Perhaps it was only the alcohol. Perhaps it had something to do with the grating sound of the clock, which was like some simple but disorienting torture-device.

**************************************

It was four-thirty.

‘What do you do for a living, Joe? I love you.’ the question Susie asked was an inquiry she usually made perfunctorily, to make conversation with strangers; but she found herself genuinely curious about this guy’s life.

‘There are three things that I never tell to a person I’ve just met: what I do for a living, my age and my education.’

‘Why not?’

‘People too quickly conclude too much about a person from those three items; and most of the time the conclusion’s wrong. I love you.’

‘Well, they are somewhat important.’

‘I disagree. A person who’s interested in those things so immediately into meeting me makes me feel like one of those boxes you see at a second-hand store, full of knick-knacks. Actually, I should say makes me feel like one of the knick-knacks. I’m being handled, studied, judged.’

‘I see.’

‘Would you like another drink?’

‘I love you, Joe; and yes, I would.’

As Joe moved to the sideboard, Susie excused herself to use the john. Night, of course, loses a lot of its charm if traveled strictly verbally. As a later condition of their agreement, Susie was stripped down to only her bra and panties. Joe watched her as she moved lazily down the narrow corridor to the
john. A couple of years ago, he had had a relationship with a woman that had been purely physical. It had ended amicably. The woman had been built beautifully; she had also had a perfectly fitting loose look to her eyes. She’d liked to play the field, which hadn’t bothered him at all in those days. He hadn’t been interested in her heart after all but in a lower part of her anatomy. However, the great acronymic threat had then reared its monkey-dick and Joe had jumped down from her populated tree. Susie was built like that girl. Tonight’s girl, however, had a much different face, an innocent face, with freckles gamboling across her nose, and eyes which came across as ingenuous, even though innocence and ingenuousness could not have possibly been rooted thereupon. With a full mouth not yet macerated by the street and long, uninhibited hair, Susie was, from head to toe, the most attractive woman Joe had ever seen, a visage capable of evoking in a man both lust and……..

As Susie returned from the toilet, she realized she was getting more intoxicated than usual. She could drink like a whale; yet, though far below her level of tolerance, her consumption tonight was most definitely getting to her.

‘I love you, Joe,’ she said, returning to the main room and accepting her drink.

‘I love you, too,’ Joe echoed. They reseated themselves.

Joe toasted her beauty, and she actually felt herself incarnadine. In a minute or two they were passionately mouth-to-mouth.

Kissing hadn’t been a proviso of their agreement, yet they had been doing so quite frequently, and at intervals that were getting closer as the night wore on, as dawn grew nearer. It was part of the charade, they told themselves: as the charade was passing by. In actuality, neither had ever been all that interested in such contact, had never overly enjoyed it. The kiss that originated in France {or so the labial reads} isn’t really recognized for the art form it is. There are intricacies involved, head-angles and such. Methodologies must mesh. Joe and Susie were artists together, had been almost from the first mouth-opening of proposition, which both were tinglingly aware of.

**************************************

‘What this is,’ said Joe, after forcing himself from her mouth and getting breathlessly back to something he’d touched on earlier, a return necessary to keep everything in its proper place, ‘this game we’re playing, is simply a case of a human being bereft of love. Such an entity can endure the deprivation for only so long. He needs to occasionally hear, even if he knows it’s a lie, someone express a love for him. He needs to use the word himself. It’s sort of an oiling of an unused yet essential part. I will fight however pathetically to keep my heart from rusting.’

‘Not everyone needs to hear or say those words, Joe; only a certain type of person, a loving person like yourself.’ Susie’s eyes were watering as she delivered the compliment, no doubt from the cigarettes they’d been smoking. Nicotine ghosts hovered about the room, taking their turbid time exiting through the recently opened windows. ‘I love you, Joe.’

‘I love you, Susie. Of course, you could never understand what I mean by that need.’

‘I understand,’ said Susie, words riding a small, whispering horse.

‘Come on,’ said Joe, laughing languidly, the night getting to him; ‘you hear it, or at least hear the carnal words, every time you turn a trick. On top of that, you get paid for it.’

‘Hear it! Come on yourself, Joe! I hear it from men for whom I’m some kind of an outlet; those aren’t the most melodious words, I assure you; and what I experience is simply penetration. To use the exact meaning of the words, I’m never made love to in this profession of mine; and I never make love. The money…….’ . She stopped abruptly, noticing Joe’s face. ‘What’s wrong, Joe? I love you.’

Joe seemed wounded. ‘Nothing,’ he said softly. ‘Go on.’

‘What is it?’ if she had not been so genuinely solicitous, she might have taken the time to contemplate her solicitude.

‘I love you, Susie,’ said Joe, becoming playful with obvious effort. The problem with Joe was the aforementioned emotional-detachment of the professional lover, though this time, her ‘I never make love’, hit him much harder than it had earlier.

‘I love you, Joe,’ Susie replied, playfully as well, as well with obvious effort. The charade was becoming, on both sides, an act of exertion.

*************************************

As dawn came nearer, now less than an hour away, Joe made his way to the kitchen to make breakfast for the two of them. Alcohol had suppressed their appetites to the best of its ability, ably assisted by the kisses and meandering conversation {much unrecorded here in this little story} which had touched frequently on similarities of non-comestible tastes; on differences which somehow balanced. At last, however, they had become aware of their supplicating stomachs; and when Joe had suggested that he make the meal, Susie had eagerly eaten the idea up.

The vodka and fatigue had made Joe physically shaky, yet him mind was incredibly clear; and as he prepared the food, he was deep in thought of the woman who was sitting in the other room. The charade that he had been playing was not a first for him. He had done it three or four times over the years, but he had never gotten so caught up in one as he had tonight. In fact, he had never even made it to dawn, having always tired of the woman or of the night itself. This woman, however, was drastically different from the others. This woman he could possibly have feelings for, had they met under more normal circumstances. She was vulnerable to that side of him that needed to protect, strong to that side of him that needed protection; childish to his paternal side, maternal to his childish side; as similar in enough ways to be a friend, as physically appealing to him as any woman could be; responsive to and seemingly appreciative of the man that heredity and milieu had made of him. In short, she was his perfect mate. He knew this beyond question. She had not been presenting herself falsely, save, alas, for the three words. Yet, tomorrow night, she would be with some other man; this too beyond question.

In the other room, Susie herself was in contemplation, though ostensibly looking through a magazine. There was something about this Joe which had begun to get to her. He was so different from any man she had ever met. He touched her in so many ways. He wanted love as badly as she had wanted it at one point in her life; and though she thought herself past that point, his sincere desire had had an infectious influence on her. Most of the men she had known in her life, and especially in her profession, had belittled such emotional longing. Joe spoke of it as if it were the only worthy pursuit in existence, and she had felt a beat of her heart that she had not felt in many a cold year.

Joe had his bad sides, of course, but they couldn’t take hold in Susie’s mind. He was a little too lonely, she thought, for a guy as attractive as he was; but maybe he was indeed looking for that one special woman and couldn’t settle for the proverbial less. He was a little too opinionated as well, but not unwaveringly so. He seemed a bit secretive on matters that, to Susie, were insignificant; yet, he would bare his soul to her in areas in which she would feel very uncomfortable without winter attire. He could be quite childish, but it appealed to a long hidden side of her; and anyway, the next moment, he could be seemingly years beyond her in understanding the pain that life inflicts upon those who live, through choice or with no other choice, questionably. His mind was an oscillating one; life would no doubt be interesting around it.

What had affected Susie most about Joe, however, was the gentleness with which he physically touched her, almost as if she were something delicate. The hands that she had become indurated to were lustful and uncaring, sometimes violent; Joe’s were antipodal to each, and more. His hands seemed to ask of her body permission to alight. Idolizing hands in an angel’s workshop, he had said, the jerk: the manual ways of the worshipper, he’d said another time.

Joe also talked to her as no man had in a long time, and more importantly, he listened to her. He recognized her as a human being with a brain; and although he was, as mentioned, somewhat opinionated, he never condescended, never said outright that she was wrong, only that their opinions were different. The one time that he had been insistent on a matter had been in regard to her use of gutter language once the charade had started. He had later said that the vulgarity was beneath her, thus elevating her. Yet, all of this was just part of the paid-for scenario, Susie figured, and soon dawn would be here hand-in-hand with her real world.

‘I love you, Susie,’ Joe called from the kitchen. ‘Breakfast is ready.’

‘I love you, Joe,’ said Susie as she entered the kitchen and sat down at the two-chaired dinette.

Joe had gone overboard in both the preparation of the meal and the setting of the table. It was a desperate extravagance, akin in its desperation to the tightly closed jalousie at the kitchen’s one window {the slats had been open all night; now they seemed determined to keep dawn out}.

Susie made light of his efforts, noticing as she did the efforts of light at the said jalousie. Her laughter seamlessly became crying. Joe comforted her with words and kisses as the juggernaut bulged the jalousie’s slats.

‘I love you, Susie,’ Joe said.

‘I love you, Joe,’ Susie said, drying her eyes with a napkin Joe had laid out.

The two then ate their meal slowly, stretching it, in defiance of their agreement, way beyond dawn.

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