long as all of her parts functioned.
“So where’s the old guy tonight?”
“Don’t know. He doesn’t get around like as he used to.”
“He some kind of hypo? Was that the problem last time?”
“Something like that.”
“Yeah, that’s what I guessed. I was married to one for a while. After a while it’s fine with him if he can’t get it up, ’cause he doesn’t even want to. Why fuck when you could be fixing?”
“He doesn’t fix. The old man’s hooked on pills.”
“Heroin pills? I never heard of that.”
“Not heroin. Something like it.”
“Huh.” She downed her drink and rattled the ice cubes, swirling them around faster and faster at the bottom of the glass. “What do you feel like tonight?” she asked.
HALF AN HOUR later she was taking a shower while I lay there on the bed, thinking I should have brought that little 35 millimeter camera with me. The thought triggered a snicker; what the hell would I do with naked arty farty pictures of Irma? Jerk off to them? Sell them through Merle Tessler’s outfit in KC? No, it wasn’t my kind of thing. I was no Edward Weston, no Albert Stieglitz. I was born to sell pornography, not create it.
When Irma came out of the bathroom, though, still toweling her torso dry, skin still pink from the hot water, a curious natural grace to the sway of her hips as she crossed the room from bathroom to bed and hopped on, I had second thoughts. I’d pay for pictures of that.
“You’re paid up for another hour,” she said. “Just in case you might want another turn.”
“I will in a little bit.”
I lay there for a little while staring at the ceiling, thinking about nothing and content to do so. She startled me out of my trance by asking me if something was eating me.
“What makes you say that?”
“You look like something’s on your mind, that’s all. Sometimes guys’ll hire a gal just to talk about stuff they can’t tell wifey or their pals.”
This wasn’t news to me. In Italy, fully a quarter of our trade was guys who just wanted a sympathetic female ear, which was fine with me as long as the hour was paid up. On a whim I sketched out my difficulties with Huff, without naming any names, and she listened attentively.
“You ought to stake out one of the queer bars,” she said when I was finished.
“I didn’t know there were any.”
“Sure, they’re just like any other bars except full of homos.”
“I know what they are, I just meant I didn’t know there were any in Wichita.”
“Sure, where do you think they hang around?”
“You know a lot about queers,” I said.
“I know a few. I didn’t tell you this, but there’s two that work for Nester.”
“Nester’s pimping men?” I didn’t think I was easy to shock, but that one came clear out of left field.
“Keep that under your hat.” She propped up her right knee and picked at the bright red nail of her little toe.
“WHAT DO YOU think about baby names?” Sally asked me a couple of days hence over a breakfast of ruined grey eggs and carbonized bacon, washed down by coffee that was too strong, a welcome relief from her usual thin and transparent brew.
“I think they should all have one.”
“I’m perfectly serious.”
“All right, if it’s a boy we name it after my father or my grandfather. If it’s a girl I don’t care.”
“If it’s a girl I was thinking about either Linda or Loretta,” she said.
People were always telling Sally she looked like one movie star or another, and the two most frequently named were Linda Darnell and Loretta Young. I wasn’t kidding when I said I didn’t care what it was named, though. “Either one’s fine with me.”
I had a little break regarding that other pain in my ass at the moment, my pen pal, in the form of another envelope postmarked St. Louis. This letter consisted of only a single line:
The wages of sin is death and you are about big of one as I ever.
But this time he included a photograph of a certain Brunela, confirming my theory that he was a former GI client from Rome. I tried to remember her last name—Castelli? Cantelli?—but failed. It was a glum, head-on shot that might have been attached to an identification card. Maybe it was a mug shot, though that would have been trickier for my correspondent to get his hands on. Brunela was surly, chronically drunk, and she was one