swallows and looks down at the compact. “I’m going to have to report for you this. I don’t have a choice, you know. You’ve left me no choice, Moses.”
Moses looks down, ashamed. He watches her comfortable rubber shoes turn away from him. No, he thinks. Don’t leave me, please. Just don’t leave me, he murmurs. His ears fill with the wild sound of wind. It’s the ether that fills the space between worlds that he’s hearing. He is so terribly alone now. He is standing in the middle of the mailroom, but it feels as if he is a lone man on a lone planet. He lunges forward, ripping through the divide, crosses to where she is on the other side of the low wall, grabs her hair, knots his fingers in the back of it, and pulls her to his side of the room. He wrestles her close to him. Holds her tightly in place. Rests his cheek on her shoulder, noses her hair; hair caresses the tops of his closed eyelids.
It begins with Gina hidden. Behind the couch. Or under the bed. In the pantry. Or up against a shower wall. It is always dark, at first, until Arthur wants to catch her and wants an advantage, then he throws on the lights and there is really nowhere to hide. The apartment is enormous and mostly empty. A large loft with furniture that is organic in shape like mounds of earth, placed not in ordinary sitting circles but in random Easter Island or Stonehenge-type pop-up-out-of-nowhere patterns. The whole place is built for this. For them. They’ve been at this game for a long time. But it is only a matter of time now.
He’s been inviting others. Girls from the show who want to make it big. He brings the girls boxes of lacy things, makes them try them on, invites the girls over. There will be one tonight, Gina’s sure.
She uses her key. Follows their rules and installs herself under a table. It is a side table, not a large one. And being tall, it takes a lot of twisting and turning to get all of her in, leaving nothing jutting out for a streetlight to hit and make a shadow. Soon there will be a knock at the door. Some she will find it is already open. She’ll come inside. Arthur? Are you home? Why are the lights off? She’ll giggle because she is still a girl. Just out of college.
He’s been getting a bit blunt lately. He is losing his finesse. It used to be that the iron or the whip were accents. Small, quick punishments administered for not making him work hard enough. And it used to take him a while until he got there. Not anymore. He is hurting the girls first, scaring them into the game. He has resorted to this because not one of them is a natural, like Gina.
It has always been the challenge of the search and the fact that Gina is not easy to catch that makes this work. And for most of nearly seven years now, this has been exhilarating, exciting, perfection. But lately, when he catches her, he ties her up and comes in with a sandwich. Takes out the gag and feeds her, talks about work. Sometimes he switches on the TV. Lately, he’s been touching her wounds tenderly and she likes it all right, but she’s been left asking what is the point?
There. Someone. Running. Is she wearing the same uniform? The lace black, the garters tight, the breasts left to hang open? Gina looks hard into the dark trying to see who it is. Is she from the show? Did he deliver the uniform with the same ritual? Gina isn’t jealous, exactly.
There! The body again! Racing the floor. Frantic. Scared now.
Then silence.
Gina waits. To see if what comes next is the right kind of scream.
It isn’t.
This girl is terrified, not fortified. Gina exhales and goes a little limp under the table. Her foot kicks the leg and the table scrapes the floor just audibly.
“Not you, too!” Arthur yells from somewhere close by. “Won’t anyone just play the fuck along?”
Gina puts her head in her hands. Like a married couple, they’ve hit a wall. To Arthur, the answer is obviously a network girl, and the girls agree because look at Gina Padilla! They want her life. She is in charge. She won her first Emmy as soon as she graduated Brown. She is cutthroat. That good. So these girls, they want to be somebody, they want Executive in their titles, too. They’ll do “whatever it takes.” Those words. Those are always the words they use, and it always ends badly because they are wired for ambition; they are not wired for this. They are invited, coaxed, encouraged, flirted, massaged, gifted, flattered, eased into agreeing to come to Arthur’s place at ten p.m., and wear this, and just let yourself in, and then, he whispers in their diamond-studded, perfumed ears, hide and don’t let me find you.
Because they always think it is just sexy and cute, they come.
Really it is much more. The iron. The whip. The gags and whatever else is found that day, and something intangible, too. It is the part in Gina that is not ruined by this, or scared or abused or let down; it is the part that is found, opened, needed this all along, couldn’t live without it: reject, get caught, get punished. It scares the hell out of these women because they are not Gina.
Gina hears him jump out, imagines him lifting his whip to bring it down on the girl a second time, and she must have made eye contact—she must have thought it would make a difference—because she giggles. “Arthur!” she says, all coy. “Come on!” And of course he brings it down on her too hard and she falls to the floor, crawls off alarmed and gets quiet, finally.
Arthur is pleased. The rules finally established and understood. The game is now on.
Arthur knows she is under the table. He is pretending to look for the other girl, but he knows where she is, too—she’s lost her nerve and has fallen completely to pieces on the floor of the laundry. Before Arthur just gets flat out mad at the spoil-sport, Gina makes a break. She bolts out from under the table, and runs fast as she can right past him.
“You bitch,” Arthur mutters and takes off after her. She knows how to do this. To make him run her down. To make him work for her. For tonight she can satisfy his urges and hers. She’ll run until he conquers her. She’ll hang on the rack, crucified, while he makes a sandwich. She’ll act grateful when he takes out the gag and feeds her a little something. She’ll pretend, again, that this is still working. For the girl’s sake, sure. But more for her own.
“Your father was the only good one,” her mother sniffles on the line. It is the next morning and Gina, who is not hearing her, stands on the corner of Fifty-Seventh and Park in a slew of nine o’clock men with briefcases, a slew of men in suits. She looks at all their faces and knows them from O’Malley’s. They are lawyers. They are newspapermen. They are bondsmen and traders. They are in advertising or film. They all fuck like she isn’t in the room. This is the way she likes it. She is not her mother.
“Your father was the only one who would never leave me. ‘Til now, the rotten bastard,” Marie screams and Gina hears her throw her shoe at the wall. She knows it is her shoe because that’s what she does when her men leave, sits at the table and takes off her shoe and throws it. She could have done more damage with the ashtray, heavy ceramic, but then she’d have to give up her cigarette and would have nothing to hold onto. Gina thinks of this, not of what is being said.
“He couldn’t leave you, mom. He was locked up.” The light changes. She moves into the black cloud of light spring overcoats and aftershaves, mostly of a high quality, and she breathes them in, these men, exhales them out. Obstacles swarm her—carriages, ten dogs on linked leashes, cars that try to find the weak spot and push in—but Gina feels the men around her. There are women, naturally, but it is the men she feels, and even here on the phone with her mother—what is her mother trying to say to her?—she’s caught the eye of the man whose shoulder she shouldered up to and he, ever so lightly, leans in to her as they wait for a car to pull through. She pulls back. Asshole, she whispers.
Her mother locks her legs around anyone who turns his gaze, even if for a moment, to her, and tightens like a noose when anyone looks, even at the newspaper, away. Or goes to work. Or moves out screaming, You crazy bitch. Her mother would unzip a man’s pants right at the breakfast table with Gina eating corn flakes just to keep him, any him, from going to work. Don’t go to work, she’d say. Stay,