of them complimented her. They said how she knew their houses better than their wives did. One said how she knew his body much better than his wife did. She knew their secrets. It wasn’t hard. On that soap opera, the mistress was scorned. That was not hard to do at all and it was also not smart to do. Now that man was scared. He was thinking: I can’t win. Ding, ding, ding—you are absolutely correct, Bob, you can’t fucking win. He won when his wife hired her. He won the first time he ever ripped her clothes off and threw her there on the master bedroom bed and fucked the living daylights out of her. Oh yes, does that feel good? He never had it so good. She was a tool—his favorite tool—right in there with his putter and Weed Eater and espresso maker, the high-tech blender for the margaritas she never got offered. So sure, go ahead, bring your scrawny white ass on and fuck me; it won’t mean one goddamned thing.
The perfect affair is kind of like the perfect murder. Unlikely. There are always telltale signs. There are always bread crumbs—even the most minuscule—leading to the main event. Sometimes she cleaned everything up and sometimes she didn’t. Or doesn’t. Sometimes she doesn’t.
Nothing is free. That’s what she likes to say and truth is she is a real good deal compared to what they’ve got and are paying for. She watched one woman coming and going, so curious as to how she could be so unaware, slinking about in leggings designed for a teenager—a woman way too old to be sporting camel toe—but there she was doing it and maybe that was what first hooked him, cheap pussy, though not cheap for long. Get that ring and slip of paper and then nothing is free, is it? It’ll cost later. It costs a big-ass house somebody else needs to clean and two snotty kids, an expensive car and a trip to wherever and that’s just the beginning. This was why C.J. wanted out of the business; she didn’t want the life of a trumped-up whore, call it whatever you please. She was never standing on street corners or in clubs over near the military base. She was in a motel waiting for some very well-respected white-collar big deal about town. She was known for her discretion and for a period of time, her trademark costumes. She could do a schoolgirl because she was young and she could do a dominatrix—in fact she liked that one because if their old clammy hands were tied, they couldn’t put them on her. She could look like a young boy, slick her hair back, no makeup, a thin cotton tank hanging loosely, small breasts bound in a tight tube top so they weren’t even noticeable. One man, the one people would rise up shocked to hear, brought her grapes from his garden in the summer and liked to watch her put them in a galvanized tub and step and mash them, just enough to fill a pewter goblet and raise it to his thin gray lips. He fancied himself a man of God, and in the eyes of the town he was a man of God—but he was also a man of kink, which she sometimes whispered just as he came, eyes rolled back in whatever part of the deal he found ecstatic. He had once read about a priest in Boston who had offered his hardened self as a sacrament, demanding the young man at his mercy to suck away his sins. Eat, drink, that kind of shit, and he said that kind of shit, too, his big beefy hands clutching the sides of her face. There, too, it was like she was invisible, a helpless tool. How foolish to think he might offer up his salty unleavened cock and get away with it, but he did, and she took his offering and paid her bills and enrolled herself in a course at the community college, and she wrote down everything that happened. Every night she ever performed—schoolgirl and bad girl and timid boy and black girl and Indian girl—such a repertoire; she recorded it all. The who, the when, and the where. It was her security. It was that simple. And if she ever needed to use it, she would. She would open Pandora’s Box and let loose the varmints and vile diseases. She will do whatever she has