Downbelow Domino, Chapter Five
March 28th, 20085.
“Oh yeah?” Castle said. He was slouched across the couch like a teenager, television on with the sound off, beer in one hand, cellphone in the other. “What party?”
“I don’t know, it was just this thing, somebody’s birthday or something. Jack was like, ‘Where the hell is Castle Finch? That guy owes me a thousand dollars and a blowjob.’”
“Eh.”
“It was really funny.”
“Okay.”
“He was totally coked out at the time. You had to hear him say it. Like ‘a thousand DOLLahs and a BLOWjob.’ Right? With that accent he has on television.”
“Yeah. Nick, he’s got the same accent in real life, too. I mean … that’s why it’s his accent.”
“Right, exactly! It’s so cute. He’s a doll, that kid. Oh my gah, his sister’s a bitch.”
“Well, she’s so young, give her time –”
“Older than him. And not that much younger than me, hello.”
“Yeah, but you know.”
“I know. So hey, what the fuck cocksucker, where’ve you been, anyway? You’ve missed like all the parties, and Martinique besides. I mean, I know things got fucked up, but Cassie –”
“God, don’t call me that, Nicks, you know I hate it.”
“Castle Castle Castle, then. Castle-fucking-mania, remember that game? It’s just, after she OD’ed, all of a sudden — you left. It’s like, when Tara went cold turkey for awhile? Only without still coming to the parties. Castlebabia, I haven’t even seen you out at dinner or anything, and from what I hear, nobody else has, either. I mean like, are you doing a show or something?”
A reality show, she meant. “No. Hey, but that reminds me, that’s something I wanted to ask you. You did that Celebrity Big Brother, right?”
“Big House. They called it The Big House. Not affiliated with Big Brother, etc. But yeah, why?”
“I was just thinking, how’d you deal with it? Being locked in that one house for, what was it, a summer?”
“Six weeks. And it wasn’t even that big a house, I mean, we had to have roommates. Oh, it sucked. That was the worst thing about it, worse than the cameras — after awhile, you forget you’re being watched. All those eyes just become invisible. But cabin fever … God.”
“I know, so that’s what I’m saying, how’d you deal with it?”
“Talked to the other people, flirted, masturbated a lot, drank a lot. Remember, we weren’t as alone as it looked, the crew was there.”
“Seriously? You masturbated? I can’t believe they didn’t show that.”
“I didn’t do it on the kitchen table, for God’s sake!”
“Yeah yeah, all right. So you kept busy, kept distracted, it sounds like.”
“Yeah. I couldn’t go shopping, you know, couldn’t go to the movies, go to clubs, all the things I was used to, so the quiet … the quiet would just get to me. I had to make sure there was noise.”
“Makes sense. Listen, Nicky, I saw on TV you’re in the area –”
“Where’re you at, are you in Boston?”
“Nearby. I was thinking, you could come by, we could hang out.”
“Maybe more than hang out, huh?” They’d flirted for a couple years, since she was dangerously young. Nothing’d come of it except some drunken groping he wasn’t sure she remembered and wasn’t entirely sure he remembered.
“Hey, you know.”
“Yeah, um.”
“Oh, come on, I’m kidding. Listen, we’ll watch some movies or something. I’ve been learning to cook, I’ll make dinner.”
“Wow, you cook.”
“Yeah.”
“That’s so Den Mother. That’s really, like, thirty of you.”
“Hon, I’m thirty-two, remember?”
“Yeah, but usually you’re thirty-two and on drugs.” She drew out the word, druuugs, the way so many girls her age did, like they were using the word as slang for itself.
“Anyway, what do you think? How long are you in town for?”
“Sweetie, I think I’m gonna be busy.”
“Uh-huh.”
“There’s a Maxim photoshoot, at Fenway? And the opening for Dad’s new hotel? And then there’s an afterparty, and there’s this thing I might go to at the Vineyard, right. And you know. Also, I’m pretty much seeing this guy, he gets real jealous.”
“Nicky, come on. What’s the brush off?”
“Oh, Castle.”
“What?”
“Listen. I just, I can’t. I can’t afford scandal right now. Right? Not even being near it. There have been so many close calls, and God, sweetie, you know what it’s like being famous. The more they love you, the more they want to hate you. The wrong thing, right, it could just. It would ruin me. I don’t want to be that T-shirt. I don’t want to be four minutes on VH-1’s Remember The … well, whatever they call this decade, the Zeros or whatever.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry. I suck. But that’s how it is. Say something?”
He took a long drink of the beer. “I love your sister’s latest video, Nicky. I forgot how hot she looks with a cock in her mouth.”
Her silence was like a popped bubble. “You fucking shit –”
He hung up on her, and tossed the phone onto the coffee table with a clatter. He should know better than to blame her. She was in a more tenuous position, and she was younger. So fucking young. Wasn’t that half the problem? Before he’d come to Domino. He was thirty-two. What was he doing partying with twenty year olds to begin with? How long did he think they’d let him be one of them?
It was like slumming, if class were age. Which maybe it was.
He fiddled with the TV remote for awhile — he really did have the sex tape on, and was going to make a joke out of it originally — flipping channels, switching discs between the ones he’d loaded into the DVD jukebox. He should return those Netflix movies. And the porn. He needed to schedule a grocery delivery, too. And basically kill a lot of time until the housing inspector showed up in a few days — “a week at the most.”
A housing inspector would be great. It would mean someone other than him delving into the downbelow — the basement; why did he keep calling it that? — and that was A-OK by him. John Cassavetes would cool his jets.
Drinking and jacking off, huh Nicky?
He grabbed the phone to call another friend, and stopped, thumb hovering over the number pad, because there was no one to call. Nicky was quite possibly his least flaky friend. Most of the people he hung out with, the people he knew, they were the sort who were there for you when you had money and fun to bring to the table. If they happened to be around, they’d go as far as to get you through a bad night of women or drinking, and they had your back whenever the paparazzi showed up. But that was it.
His real friends … he couldn’t remember the last time he’d had them, really. College, maybe, or the couple years after it. People who’d moved on now, knew him as a name in the papers or a face on E!, if any of them watched cheesy gossip television.
So he called a number he’d already programmed into the cellphone’s memory, knowing he’d call it eventually. “Yeah, hi,” he said, when an operator picked up. “I’d like a date tonight.”
#
She was maybe four inches shorter than him, and while he’d never given much thought to a woman’s ideal height — or was it “an ideal woman’s height”? — four inches shorter might just be it. He wouldn’t guess at her weight except to say that it was distributed into all the right places, without making her look like she’d walked out of a television or a factory: waist maybe thicker than she wanted it to be, arms thinner and breasts smaller than if he’d made her with a magic wish computer. Green eyes, and that right there was her Thing. The way some women had cleavage that was their Thing, or Jennifer Lopez had her ass, and so on. Actual green eyes — or these days, maybe contacts.
Either way, they looked great, and he was happy he’d called. Just like that, he was happy. Not the all-over blanket happiness you have when you’re a kid and keep trying for, blaming the other people in your life or hating yourself when you can’t achieve it, but the melts-in-your-mouth kind of happiness that’s maybe even better. She’d managed to let him see the car waiting for her outside in the cul-de-sac, and the implied protector within, without making a big thing out of it.
“So,” she said, after they’d moved to the living room and he’d poured them each a snifter of Islay single-malt, “what’d you have in mind? Are we going out? Or do you want to just get down to it?”
Underneath her coat — which, given the weather, she was probably only wearing so it wouldn’t be obvious to the neighbors that she was a hooker — she was wearing this sparkly, not-very-touchable-looking, blue thing, tight, only a little cleavage, as much leg as allowed by law. In an ideal world, she would’ve been in something simpler, less flashy, but he supposed it wasn’t an ideal world for either of them.
“We’re going to stay in,” he said, “but there’s no need to rush anything.” They’d gone over prices and hourly rates and whatnot already, so he hoped she wasn’t going to give him the it’ll-cost-you-to-take-it-slow speech. “I figured, dinner?”
“Sure,” she said, relaxing a little everywhere but her eyes and sipping at the Scotch. “This is — good. I don’t usually like whiskey straight.”
“There’s a little ice water in it, to bring out the flavor. Good Scotch is a whole different category from other stuff. Anyway — you hungry? Or we could put a movie on. Television. Whatever.” Just keep talking, he thought. Just give me that.
She gave him an eye like she’d heard him. “You can put something on if you want. I don’t mind waiting to eat. I’m still working on the Scotch. Come back and sit?”
He nodded, refilling their glasses, taking a seat next to her on the couch, and flipping through channels until he hit a recent movie on one of the HBOs. “So,” he said, as she slid in under his arm and against his side, the top of her head against his neck. “Your name’s Katrine, huh.”
“Hon,” she said, “is this your first time with an escort?”
“Jesus,” he murmured, and louder, “Hardly. My first time with a hoo — an escort — would have been almost eighteen years ago now. It’s just, maybe, my first time talking to one very much.”
She nodded against him, and slid a hand between his legs, unbuttoning his jeans with such finesse that her fingers didn’t even seem to touch the buttons so much as command them. “So don’t talk.” He closed his eyes, listening to the sound of her dress against the couch as she slid backwards a little, her cheek against his shirt as she moved down, and the almost imperceptible sound of her lips parting before the rhythmic wet noises as she took him in her mouth.
It washed over him like the most arousing, erotic nostalgia he’d ever felt, a mix of things he didn’t know could go together. It was like reliving his first wet dream, without suffering the confusion. Like being fifteen again without being nervous or uncertain. Just the feel of her hair on his jeans was novel, the smell of her perfume clinging to the air as her head bobbed up and down, and her lower lip was as soft as he imagined anything tangible could be.
The first instants of it were the sort of daze you get from walking out into bright light or landing on the ground when your boot slips off black ice, and when it passed, when his eyes cleared, she was moaning too much. Those fake porn movie moans. He stroked the back of her neck with his fingertips, not exactly shushing her — how fucking rude would that be? paying customer or not — but trying to bring her back to his tone, his groove.
She responded immediately, going slower, less theatrically, sometimes barely moving at all. The whole experience of it, rigid and liquid, was so engrossing he had to force himself to think of other things in order to keep from coming, had to shove his attention down like burying it in a whole, and he found his thoughts in the downbelow. Down there where the darkness had settled the way fog clings to blacktop after a storm and everything smelled like old, warm meat. Down there in the circus.
“Ah Christ,” he whispered, those panicky fight-or-flight juices screeching through his veins, his heart pumping as his cock started to soften in Katrine’s mouth. She murmured around him, and he used her the way he’d used the downbelow, to come back from there and from those thoughts, focusing on flesh and warmth instead.
As soon as he started to move his hips, pushing himself up into her mouth, she slid her hand over his and pushed it up, from the back of her neck to the crown of her head, tangling his fingers in her hair and then pushing his hand down. He groaned and leaned back, focused not so much on the feel of her as the sound, the muffled sound of her voice and the hitch in her breathing, as something in him surged forward stormflood-strong, and he came as strongly and completely as he’d ever done. It was one of those orgasms that seemed to hollow out his chest and head, and take him entirely away from himself for a long moment, until he fell back, as sprawled backwards as he could be with her resting against him, smiling.
“Do you want me to go now?” she asked, after a collaborative silence.
He shook his head. “No. No. Christ — Katrine, right? Look around. I have money. I’m not watching the clock.”
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just, you know. Most clients, no matter what they say up front, once they’ve come they’re done.”
“Well. I could use the company.”
She nodded, and grinned. “And you seem more relaxed now. All right. What’s for dinner?”
#
So she watched him cook, sitting on one of the counters while he chopped onions and peanuts, minced chives and garlic, sliced pork shoulder into marbled strips, and steamed handfuls of greens. “It’s an African stew,” he explained once he got things going. “Sort of. I’m going to throw some andouille in there — the sausage, you know, from New Orleans?”
“Oh yeah,” she said. “I’ve gotten it on pizza before.”
“Right. Well, I figure, this is sort of a New Orleans version of an African stew. Stewed pork and greens — you steam them first, then press the liquid out, to keep the bitterness from getting into everything — with peanuts. It’ll take a couple hours. I should’ve mentioned that before. We can have dessert first.”
She grinned. “We just had dessert, but whatever you like.”
He gestured at the freezer while tossing everything in the pot and topping it off with a mix of chicken and pork stocks. “There’s some ‘burnt sugar’ ice cream in there. Same thing as caramel as far as I know. Mind grabbing it?”
She brought it over to him with a spoon from the drawer, feeding them each a spoonful, him first, and smiled. “So why African?” she asked. “Or like, did you want a black chick? Because I can call –”
“No, no. I mean, I don’t have anything against — I’ve just been playing around with cooking. Getting groceries almost at random, just things I like, and then looking for recipes that use them. Ever do anything like that?”
“I don’t cook.”
“All right. Me either, until recently. And you know, it’s funny, every time I’ve gone to Africa, I’ve gotten French food or McDonald’s.”
She looked at him for a minute, and her eyes flitted around like she was glancing at the house again. “Every time you’ve gone to Africa,” she repeated. “Okay. Um. Do you go there often?”
He shook his head. “You know. I’ve done some traveling, is all. Not like all of Africa. Mostly Morocco and South Africa. Well, and Egypt, if that counts.”
“Yeah, I think it counts.” She gave him another look, a closer one, while feeding him a slow spoonful of ice cream. “You’re right, by the way. Burnt sugar is just caramel. My sister works for the company that makes this stuff.”
“See, you’re in good hands for dinner, then, aren’t you?”
Katrine backed up against the counter again and lifted herself up onto it, swinging back and forth on her hands a few times before sitting down. “You’re famous, right? I mean — I know you. Not know you know you. We haven’t met before. That happens though, you know. Some guy will call the service for me, make like we’ve never met before.”
“What, like a previous client, you mean?”
“Yeah. Sometimes a repeat client. There’s a few, it’s clearly their kink. First-time jitters. They want to relive it every time. Perpetual cherry. They could just tell me — so it goes. But others? I don’t know. Maybe they don’t remember me. Or maybe — maybe they just figure, I work so much, they’re just a face in the crowd. Welcome to Goodburger, home of the Goodburger, can I take your order.”
“That’s … really harsh.”
She smiled without her eyes. “You sound like maybe you’re wondering if you’re one of those men. Not with me, I mean, but with another working girl. I get the feeling you’ve been around your share.”
“Yeah, well. From time to time. To be honest, though?” He stopped, feeling all true confessional.
“What?”
“I think the women I’ve been likeliest to forget are the ones I got for free.”
“… ouch.”
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s all right.” She took another spoonful of ice cream for herself. “If you can’t tell your call girl the truth, who can you tell?”
He stirred the collard greens into the stew, which still looked very soupy. Hopefully the peanuts and time spent cooking down would thicken it up. Cook down … thicken up … cooking knew no physics. “Is that what you call it?”
She cocked her head at him. “What? Call girl? Instead of whore or hooker? Sure. I’m more Risky Business than Pretty Woman, and I’d like to think I’m not entirely in the same line of work as the hos in the Combat Zone. But the point is: you are famous, aren’t you? You’re not on television, though.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Not on television.”
“No.”
“You can always tell when you meet someone you know from television — they look strangely lit.” She pursed her lips. “I don’t think you want me to know who you are, though, do you?” He didn’t say anything. “David — think about my line of work. Think about my prices. You have to know I’m discreet as hell. But you should know, too, that it’s okay. Sure I’m curious, but I’m not going to bug you about it. Be whoever you are.”
“All right,” he said, “I’ll try.” And they left it at that.
#
After dinner — which was good, but the greens were stronger-tasting than he’d realized they’d be, and the meal was in need of a side dish — they got very drunk on the bottle of Scotch, and sprawled out first on the couch, then on the floor, then in a second-floor bedroom. They didn’t have sex, exactly, but they did enough to be cheating on people if they had anyone to cheat on. TKO fornication.
“Spend the night,” he told her through a slur that took three times to push through, and she nodded but would have to make a phone call. He thought about that, naked from the waist down and laying diagonally across a twisted-sheet bed, thought about needing to call someone. He went around it three or four times in his head, ambling, perambulating, before it actually struck him that her someone wasn’t a parent, a roommate, or a spouse: it was her pimp, or bodyguard, or whoever the hell the guy in the car outside was. She had to let him know that she was okay and to come get her in the morning, or she’d get a cab, or whatever.
It wasn’t house arrest. But it was something something.
When she came back, she’d tucked her phone carefully into her purse, and her purse on the table by the door, rote caution that sleepwalked through drunkenness. He had only enough time to admire it before she was on top of him, bridging the space between the door and the bed in motions the alcohol haze blinded him to — all he could think of was being a kid, and trying to leap across the room, catching the foot of the bed without touching any of the stuffed animals and toys on the way.
“That’s so fucked up,” he started to say, talking too loud not because he was nervous but because he was out of practice: at more than sex, at people, and contact, and touching. Then he forgot about talking altogether, as he slid her panties aside and pushed up into her. She was too drunk to put on a show; he was too drunk to watch it. They barely paid attention to each other as things that could be seen, responding only to sensation, to texture, to warmth and wet.
Later, when she was laying on her stomach with a hand on the wall to brace herself, his fingers bunching her dress up in the middle of her back while he fucked her ass, pumping as hard as he could without the Scotch taking over and knocking him off his knees, something — some twinge of muscle, some smell of sweat, some sheen on skin, maybe just the act of having his cock so fully and completely inside someone — reminded him palpably, vividly, freezingly of another woman, another time.
“Oh Jesus,” he breathed, and it was like that nightmare he’d heard someone describe — and of course he ended up having it himself, once it was told to him — of having sex with someone, and realizing just at the critical moment that she’s your mother, or your grandmother, or some other cringe-inducing woman … and being too close to the edge to stop from coming. And, since you’re going to come anyway, continuing on with what you were doing.
Only Katrine was still Katrine. It’s just — he didn’t want sex anymore. Not right then. Not with that in his head. Not in his heart he didn’t, not in his mind. But his cock, his hips, those were other matters — all they cared about was friction, pulse, blood, response, greedy little nerve endings entangling in each other like squids fucking.
So he pushed in one more time, and pulled back as he came, and there was no joy in it, only skin.
Either she was really drunk, or good at her job — the parts that weren’t just sex — and sensed that something had happened inside him, because she didn’t say a thing. They fell asleep, near each other but maybe not with each other, eyes leaded down with exhaustion and liquor: she seemed to sleep solid through the night; he kept waking up, what felt like every few minutes but must have been every couple hours.
It was that kind of waking up where you’re sure you’ve been tossing and turning, where you’re sure the person sleeping next to you must keep waking up too. You’re not awake enough for all your pistons to be firing, so the world you put together, it’s a little simpler, its logic is a little less beta-tested. He kept thinking, I keep waking her up with all this thrashing, and by thrashing he meant “the act of waking up,” because it was so sudden and sodden and pillow-crunching for him that it felt like it had to be cacophonous for her. He kept thinking, God, I’m so the asshole john, I may as well just fart a symphony and kick her out without letting her use the shower. He kept thinking, I should explain.
So somewhere south of dawn, he wiped the fuzz off his tongue and picked a pillow up off the floor to prevent his neck from feeling any more weird, and calmly explained to her why he’d acted funny when he came. He was sure she’d been thinking about it, the way you can be sure when you’re tripping that everyone around you can tell. “The last person I touched,” he said, “they’re dead now. No one’s touched me since.”
It wasn’t until the next day, during one of those “wait did I–” moments, that he’d realize that wasn’t even true, much less something that would make any sense without elaboration. Even aside from shaking hands and hugging, he’d had sex the morning before moving into Domino, and with four or five different women in the weeks before that.
But it was true in a way that didn’t need all the pistons, true in a way that had its own engine to get it places.
#
They didn’t say much the next morning, and he wondered if that meant it was bad between them now. They had breakfast — breakfast was something he had down fucking solid, locked iron solid, because he’d been making it for years: rashers of bacon, Swedish pancakes he’d learned from his mother’s Swedish cousin, spiced apples in light syrup, and a double-thick butterflied pork chop to split between the two of them, because they were hangover hungry, and protein was like a song from God.
They said things, but they were empty things to keep the silence from being its own conversation, and they both knew it. They touched, but it was all post-coital.
“You know, David,” she said as she was leaving, the car waiting on the street, “You can buy a lot of things. You can buy sex, and you can buy companionship, and that’s completely okay. But even if it were okay, and even if you had the money, you couldn’t buy a girlfriend.”
“Yeah,” he said, and he didn’t think that’s what he’d been trying to do. “Can you come back tomorrow night?”
She brushed a hair out of her face and looked at him like she was trying to find something. Trying to recognize him, most likely. “I can do that. What time?”
“Eight. Overnight again.”
“Primetime. Okay. I’ll have to cancel an appointment. Usually –”
“I’ll pay it. And whatever kicks to the guy who’d be pissed.”
“All right. Tomorrow night. Primetime. I’ll see you then.”
He leaned against the empty space of the doorway, hands on either side of it, letting the breeze come up on him from the tiny movements of her, and from the heat of the muffler exhaust a frontyard and driveway away, letting the day take him before he had to shut it away again, like a groundhog who’d seen his shadow. What killed him was that he didn’t have to: he could have stood there all day, smelling the air, seeing the sky, feeling the breath of the grass. But he couldn’t bring himself to, because it would only remind him that he’d be watching the world without setting foot on it.