Madam Read online

  The rent had been raised on our townhouse in Charlestown yet again, and he was getting itchy about that. Somehow, in his mind, being settled and owning one’s own house go hand in hand, and he felt that we had waited long enough as it was. I wasn’t going to be able to get a mortgage in my name, obviously, though I could certainly provide the down payment. He’d been working long enough for what was becoming a terrific salary that we were going to do just fine.

  A woman who used to work for me, Caro, in deciding to “go legit,” had gone into real estate. By now she was a partner in a real estate company over on Beacon Street, and well-connected with mortgage lenders. Caro, we decided, would be able to make the forms work for us instead of against us.

  If I was paying less attention to work than usual, there were some very good reasons: I was pregnant, and we were spending all of our spare time looking at houses, talking about where we’d like to live, and exploring potential communities around Boston. Or maybe I’m just making excuses for not noticing that Muffy hadn’t been calling.

  Girls drop in and out of the life. They get boyfriends and stop working, then the relationship ends and they come back. They get a job and stop working, then come back from time to time when they need extra money. My concern is with the here and now: who can work tonight, who can work this weekend. I’m not supposed to be holding anybody’s hand. Or so I need to keep reminding myself.

  I got the call one dreary January day, when the afternoon shadows were lengthening toward twilight and the wind was making the windows rattle. The room was dark and I was feeling sick from the pregnancy and hadn’t gotten up to put on any lights. Benjamin would be home soon, and Siobhan would be leaving. When he got here he’d set all the rooms ablaze with light and we’d have an early dinner and some family time before I had to turn the phones on. That was all I was thinking about when the call came.

  It was a young man’s voice, a cultured voice. “Hello, may I please speak with Peach?”

  It was the phone line I give the girls to use. I frowned and pulled the shawl I was wearing tighter around me. Perhaps I already had a premonition, I don’t know. All that I remember feeling is suddenly, uncomfortably cold. “This is Peach.”

  “Ah, yes. Hello. This probably is sounding a little strange to you …” There was the slightest of pauses, and then he resumed, his voice a little louder, a little more assured. I had a mental picture of someone trying to get a grip on himself. “My name is Harrison Granville. I believe that you may know my sister, Melissa Granville, in some context?”

  That voice, that name … I thought of the summer afternoon captured in the photo that Muffy had shown me at Sonsie’s, of the emerald green lawn, the deep shadows, and the white mansion in the background. “Muffy?” I asked.

  “Yes, we called her Muffy.”

  Called? “What happened?” I asked, but I think I knew already, feeling my throat constrict, feeling that I was going to throw up.

  He cleared his throat. Yes, he was young enough to have been the Abercrombie and Fitch model standing next to her in the picture. “We found your name and number in her address book,” he said, carefully. “I’m sorry to tell you that Muffy … She died three days ago.”

  “What happened?” I repeated, belatedly adding, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

  “Thank you.” It was the proverbial stiff upper lip speaking, I was sure of that. “May I ask in what context you knew my sister?”

  I swallowed hard, twice, trying to keep the nausea at bay. “We were friends,” I whispered, wishing that it were true. “What happened, Harrison?”

  There was another pause. He wasn’t good at this yet. By the time the funeral was held in the proper Episcopal church in whatever wealthy Connecticut community they lived in, I imagined that he’d be better at it. “My sister took an overdose of sleeping pills,” Harrison said finally, carefully. “We are not going to release that information to the media, so I must ask for your discretion.”

  The room was starting to spin around me, and my stomach lurched. “I’m so sorry—” I blurted. Now I had a hand over my mouth.

  “If you would like to be notified about memorial arrangements,” he began, diffidently, but I couldn’t wait. “No, no thank you,” I managed to gasp. “I’m so sorry.” By the time I pressed the off button I was halfway to the bathroom. I almost made it.

  I dragged myself across the cold tile floor to the toilet, hugging it in the age-old position, feeling the cold against my forehead. I closed my eyes. I was back in Atlantic City, with the pills all neatly in a line, ready to be swallowed. Ready to take me where I thought I wanted to go. My father’s voice, echoing through the years: “I want to see my girl.” And the closed door, the denials, the stupid shrine that my mother had erected to his memory, the sheer inconsequence of it all. How many times does death seem preferable to life? To sleep, to dream, to drift off someplace where feelings don’t have to be felt, decisions don’t have to be made, nothing has to be done. To not only not be afraid of the darkness, but to welcome it. God, the temptation is always there, isn’t it?

  For all my own attempts at suicide, half-hearted and otherwise, I had never known anyone who killed themselves, much less someone who had worked for me.

  I sat on the cold tile floor and cried for Muffy.

  Later, lying in bed with a cold washcloth over my forehead and Benjamin gently stroking my arm, I tried to talk about it. “I wonder why.”

  His voice in the darkness was very close. “Who knows,” he said, softly. “Maybe it was all too much for her, the expectations her family had.”

  “I thought she had a pretty good handle on those expectations,” I said. “Oh, God, Benjy, it couldn’t be anything that happened on a call, could it?”

  “Of course not,” he said immediately, stoutly reassuring. “Girls work for you every day, none of them get upset enough to kill themselves.”

  “That we know of,” I said darkly.

  He wasn’t having any of it. “Abby, you have to let that go. You’re not in charge of the world. She hadn’t gone on a call in weeks, right?” I nodded numbly. We’d already started dissecting it at dinner, when Benjamin very wisely called Jane to take over the phones for me. I had managed about three bites of lasagna before I was back in the bathroom throwing up. “So it wasn’t a reaction to anything that happened here,” he said reasonably.

  “I’m trying to remember who she saw last.” It had been weeks ago, and I don’t keep records. Usually I pride myself on not keeping them. “I can’t remember. Maybe it was Carl Lianza—that guy at the Four Seasons. She used to see him a lot.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Benjamin said again. “It wasn’t about you, Abby.”

  “No, I know,” I said, irritably. “Even I am not so obtuse or self-centered that I can’t see that someone’s committing suicide may not be about me.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” he said, hurt.

  “I know.” But I was feeling bad and lashing out was a primeval response. It’s more than a truism that misery loves company. “But you didn’t know her.”

  “Neither did you,” he pointed out. “She worked for you, Abby. You met her, what? Once? And suddenly you’re all concerned that you might have contributed to her suicide? It’s never that easy.”

  Somewhere in the back of my mind a voice was cautioning me to go no further, and I remembered, belatedly, that someone in Benjamin’s past had killed himself. A cousin, was it? An uncle? A girl was dead, a family grieved, and all I could do was make my husband—who was doing nothing but trying to make me feel better—feel worse. Nice going, Abby.

  And then it was as though she were in the room with us, for I could hear her voice that clearly. Words I never thought I’d remember were echoing in my head: “I thought that none of it counted, because I’d lost him, because all I could think about was the loss. Not the fact that I once had had him and was happy then. And that’s what matters, in the end. We’re made up of what we’ve had, not what we’ve lost.�
�

  I started to cry. For what she had had, and not for what she had lost.

  After Muffy died, I noticed a change in my behavior, in my way of looking at things. I took people a lot less for granted, and I started being far more careful about keeping up with people.

  Jen hadn’t worked for me in over five years, and I had let our friendship lapse, so I called her. She seemed surprised to hear from me, and cautiously pleased; it turned out that she was getting married herself. “Didn’t think I ever would,” she said.

  “What made you change your mind?” I asked.

  “I met someone I couldn’t live without,” she said, and I smiled. Sometimes it could just be that simple.

  She had a novel coming out soon, she said, the same one she had first thought about in the days she used to read to me in my apartment in Bay Village. “It was really hard to write,” she sighed. “My fiancé –Tony—says the subtitle could be Jeannette Goes to Therapy. Can you come to a signing?”

  “You bet,” I assured her, thinking first of all that I already had to do, and then realizing that it was precisely at times like these that you make room for other people in your life. “I’ll come to your book signing if you come to my housewarming.”

  “You’ve got a deal,” she said.

  My friend Leo, who used to live near me in Bay Village, was someone else with whom I tried to catch up. We had been close before I moved in with Benjamin, and I had let that relationship lapse, too, without really meaning to. Leo worked as an attorney, but he had a flair for decorating that had always delighted me. “Come look at houses with us!”

  He seemed surprised and pleased. “I’m on my way.”

  Caro found us the perfect house in Watertown, a suburb of Boston that was still close enough to the city that one didn’t feel completely isolated but that gave us space to belong, space to move. A library with a terrific children’s section, long leafy paths to walk along the Charles River. People met your eyes and said hello coming out of the shops that lined its two main streets.

  The house itself was not wonderful but, as Benjamin said, it had wonderfulness potential. There was a decentsized yard, sure to win Sam’s heart; and it looked as though, for the first time since I had adopted them from the animal shelter, Sid and Court might be able to get outside and try for the occasional bird or squirrel. Neither of them was getting any younger, so I had my doubts about whether it could actually happen, but you know what they say about hope springing eternal in the feline breast. There was a basement in which Benjamin could finally have a venue for practicing with Mnemonic, his on-again, off-again rock band, a tremendously large kitchen, for me to work on my developing culinary skills, a good-sized office, four bedrooms, and a driveway with a detached garage. A driveway! All for us! It seemed too good to be true.

  Watertown Public Schools, we were informed, were quite good. There was a health club next door to the supermarket (as well as to the pizza place, but I won’t dwell too much on that little irony). And there was a place we could call home.

  We bid on the house and fretted ourselves to pieces until Caro finally called with a closing date. The words seemed foreign. I felt as though in some weird way I had come full circle—from outlaw to suburban mom. Benjamin was hugging me.

  “No,” I said darkly. “I’m warning you right here and now—we are not ever ever buying a minivan!”

  Never say never.

  Moving On

  Two months after we moved to Watertown, I miscarried.

  In the midst of joy, I was plunged back into sorrow. I stayed in, with the blinds drawn. I didn’t want to talk to Benjamin; I didn’t want to talk to anyone. Business suffered and I came close to closing the agency.

  I have no words to describe what I felt. Or what Benjy felt.

  It was Sam who brought us out of it. Sam was full of life, full of needs, claiming his own life, and in so doing he brought me back from the brink. I remembered the vase in the hallway, my father, Atlantic City, and I looked at Sam, the devotion in his face, and I finally smiled. I may have gone a little crazy, but at least I knew the way back.

  After we lost the baby, I became a philosopher. Actually, it was the juxtaposition of my loss with Mirra that started it all.

  Mirra had worked for me five or six years before this all happened, at about the same time that I was pregnant with Sam. She had come out of Montreal’s strip clubs and saw Boston as a quick stop on her way out to Los Angeles and the porn industry with its promises of fame and fortune. She did some dancing in Boston, but most of all worked for me while she figured out how to manage L.A., which in her case meant finding a man to take care of her as she climbed the rungs of the California ladder to success.

  Mirra’s plan had worked, too. She soon had a name and was in demand for the most pictures and the sleaziest parties. She stayed in touch with me, for reasons that I didn’t quite understand but went along with. Perhaps I was a sort of surrogate mother to her. I had gathered that her mom hadn’t exactly been nurturing.

  She’d call every couple of months or so, and I chatted with her, updating her on Boston’s gossip and listening to her stories about life on the West Coast. She was pretty, though not extraordinarily so. There was a French air about her, though, that the camera caught and magnified, so she seemed like an exotic creature, caught for a moment in an erotic pose before moving off into the shadows to reappear elsewhere, reinvented in yet another exotic persona against the drab milieu of standard-industry porn.

  That fall, I got a call from Mirra. She was back in Montreal, and living in a shelter.

  “What on earth happened, Mirra?”

  There was a silence. “There are lists,” she said at last, painfully. “Everything’s computerized, you know?”

  I had no idea what she was talking about. “What lists, honey?”

  I could hear her taking a deep drag on a cigarette and I wished I wasn’t trying to quit smoking. “The lists,” she said dully, “The ones that say who’s infected and who’s not.”

  Oh, God. A cold fist closed and twisted somewhere in my stomach. “Mirra—“

  Exhale of smoke. I could almost taste it over the phone line. “And I was careful, Peach. I really was. But they pay you so much more to do it without protection.”

  I closed my eyes in despair. Sam was trying to get my attention. “You’re HIV-positive?”

  There was something akin to a sob. “Yes, I just got tested. Then they all said there would be work.” She paused. “You know, there was nothing going on for the longest time, I mean, at the beginning. Everyone got it and then they started being safe again… .” Another ragged breath. “They figured out who Patient Zero was this time round. I only had sex with him twice …”

  Dear God. Only twice. “So what are you doing now?”

  “I’m back home. Well, not home, really—my mother and I, we don’t see things the same way. I don’t know, she just can’t cope. I don’t suppose I can blame her… .”

  No? I thought grimly, but I sure could. “Honey, do you want to come down and stay here? I can find a place for you.”

  “No—but thanks, Peach. No. I want … I want to do something here. I’m going to start a foundation, before I get too sick to do anything. It’s to help girls stay away from there, girls just starting the life. I just wanted you to hear it from me, before anyone else starts talking.”

  I’m not exactly hooked into either the West Coast or Canadian gossip circuits, but I took the remark as she had meant it, as underlining our connection to each other, and as a way of saying good-bye. “Mirra—” I whispered.

  “It’s at the bank,” she said briskly. “The foundation money, they have the fund at the bank. I’ll have them get in touch with you. I expect you’ll want to make a donation.”

  “I will,” I said, feeling empty and inadequate. After we hung up I sat there for a very long time, silently watching my son.

  We moved to Watertown, Sam started first grade, and life went on. Later that winter
I heard that Mirra had died, and yes, I did send some money to her foundation. Poor silly Mirra.

  The issue of safety is key in the sex industry. I consistently tell all the women who work for me to be safe, and if I hear that a client has tried to coerce anybody into doing anything she doesn’t want to—hell, even if what I hear is that a client has offered extra money for her to have sex without a condom—I cut him off. There are so few ethical stands I can take in my business. That’s one of the few I can.

  I’ve lost clients over the issue, and that’s fine with me. My girls stay safe.

  You’d think, sometimes, that the issue of AIDS had never come up. The arguments I get. The clients who are convinced that if they have the subject out with me just one more time, I’ll change my mind. The girls who, absurdly, want to have unsafe sex for more money, because they’re young and beautiful and they cannot imagine that anything ugly will ever touch them, defile them, kill them—like Mirra. No, not like Mirra. Not if I can help it.

  I remember sending someone on a call to a couple, a husband and wife—Julianna, it was, though the clients knew her as Cherie. The call was a disaster any way you looked at it. The couple had planned it poorly, the wife had obviously been talked into agreeing by her husband, and freaking out once Julianna/Cherie got there. A threesome with the man you love is a great deal more acceptable in the abstract than it is in the flesh, especially when the girl who comes to have sex with your husband is far more beautiful and far younger than you.

  Julianna was handling it all okay, though, reassuring the wife, being seductive to the husband, and balancing it all as best she could. She encouraged them to start without her, which of course they did sans condom. And then the husband pulled his cock out of his wife’s pussy and proposed to put it immediately into Julianna.