has spent the last week inside. Unable to stand on the sidewalk, she has curled up in her bed in the room the color of raw liver, listening to the rain pattering on the metal box of the window air conditioner and placing personals on the Internet. She has left her invitations on Adultfriendfinder, LA-escorts, Classyhollywoodbabes, has given herself an anonymous e-mail address. She was proud of herself for negotiating the new territories, but remains nervous—she has spent a long time avoiding anything that might resemble a paper trail. She has never even taken a small ad in the back pages of the LA Weekly, preferring to pick out her own customers, to find by eye and smell and touch the ones who will worship her as she needs to be worshiped, the ones who will let her take them all the way…
And it occurs to her now, standing and shivering on the street corner (for the late February rains have left off, but the chill they brought with them remains), that she has a habit as bad as that of the smack whores and the crack whores, and this distresses her, and her lips begin to move again. If you were close enough to her ruby-red lips you would hear her say,
“I will rise now and go about the city in the streets, and in the broad ways I will seek the one I love.” She is whispering that, and she whispers, “I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine. He said, this stature of mine is like to a palm tree, and my breasts like clusters of grapes. He said he would come to me then. I am my beloved’s and his desire is only toward me.”
Bilquis hopes that the break in the rains will bring the johns back. Most of the year she walks the two or three blocks on Sunset, enjoying the cool L.A. nights. Once a month she pays off a man named Sabbah, an officer in the LAPD, who replaced another officer in the LAPD she used to pay off, who had vanished. That man’s name was Jerry LeBec, and his disappearance had been a mystery to the LAPD. He had become obsessed with Bilquis, had taken to following her on foot, and one afternoon she woke, startled by a noise, and opened the door to her apartment, and found Jerry LeBec in civilian clothes kneeling and swaying on the worn carpet, his head bowed, waiting for her to come out. The noise she had heard was the noise of his head, thumping against her door as he rocked back and forth on his knees.
She stroked his hair and told him to come inside, and later she put his clothes into a black plastic garbage bag and tossed them into a Dumpster behind a hotel several blocks away. His gun and his wallet she put into a grocery store bag. She poured used coffee grounds and food waste on top of them, folded the top of the bag and dropped it into a trashcan at a bus-stop.
She kept no souvenirs.
The orange night-sky glimmers to the west with distant lightning, somewhere out to sea, and Bilquis knows that the rain will be starting soon. She sighs. She does not want to be caught in the rain. She will return to her apartment, she decides, and take a bath, and shave her legs, it seems to her she is always shaving her legs, and sleep.
“By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loveth,” she whispers. “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth. My beloved is mine and I am his.”
She begins to walk up a side-street, walking up the hillside to where her car is parked.
Headlights come up behind her, slowing as they approach her, and she turns her face to the street and smiles. The smile freezes when she sees the car is a white stretch limo. Men in stretch limos want to fuck in stretch limos, not in the privacy of Bilquis’s shrine. Still, it might be an investment. Something for the future.
A tinted window hums down and Bilquis walks over to the limo, smiling. “Hey, honey,” she says. “You looking for something?”
“Sweet loving,” says a voice from the back of the stretch. She peers inside, as much as she can through the open window: she knows a girl who got into a stretch with five drunk football players and got hurt real bad, but there’s only