She took a cab home that night; it was pissing down a cold early March rain that balanced on the edge of freezing. The tire spray in the wheel wells of the taxi created a seashell sound, pitch dictated by velocity. At lower speeds it reminded her of the resonance of blood pulsing through her eardrums, as she lay awake, alone at night. With the increase of rpm the sound took on the aura of radio static, background noise only made apparent by its absence, akin to the hum created by a fluorescent light’s faulty ballast. She calculated the fare, 45 minutes of time spent at her day job at the kosher food factory including the 5 minutes she had the hack idling outside the bakery. That’s how she justified her expenditures, the amount of time it took her to earn the scoots at one of her two engagements, three if you counted her gig with Mr. double-breasted tweed. She felt important in the back seat, she could tell the driver to take her anywhere, an unspoken ironclad contract, unconditional trust on his part that she would pay at the end of the ride. She gave him the address of the brownstone that her apartment was in, then she reached down undid the leather straps around her ankles and changed out of her heels, slipping her feet into something sensible.

The cab ride was recorded in red against the secretarial job’s ledger even though she was coming back from moonlighting at the burlesque house. She kept the money she earned separate in her head, until she could enter the transactions in the spiral binders that sat on a desk in her place. Once written down she could flush the numbers from her brain, wiping the slate clean. Einstein had said that he didn’t know his own phone number; that he never memorized anything he could look up. Sometimes, when she couldn’t get to her books, the digits filled her skull, calculations drowning out conversations and other exterior stimuli in a numeric mosaic, broken glass piled up distorting a photograph through refracted light. She was a year and a half into a ten-year plan.

The checks from Rabbi David’s Kosher Food House went for living expenses, rent, groceries, utilities, the occasional lunch with the girls and tonight a cab ride, all that bullshit that kept her pretty little head afloat in the ebbing gray sea of minute to minute day to day existence. That forty hours a week were a wash as far as she was concerned, a necessary inconvenience measured by the accumulation of keystroke clicks on the bared teeth of the Corona Selectric typewriter. Orders in, orders out people gotta eat. The dough from the strip joint was earmarked for sculpting supplies, chisels, hammers, clay, and chunks of stone. The fact that the money she earned baring her pastied tits on stage fed her creative habit laundered, folded, and pressed the under the table cash with a purifying irony. She saw no need to starve for her art but suffering a little ego checking indignity seemed fair enough. The money she got from Mr. Tweed and the one sculpture that she had sold was kept in a coffee can in the kitchen cupboard just in case she ever had anyone or anything she needed to go on the lam from.

The taxi pulled up to the curb in front of her apartment building. She paid the driver, overtipping him. Gathering up her stuff she unlatched the door and pushed it open with her foot. After rocking a few times to gain momentum she emerged from the Yellow Checker, her costume balled up in her arms, green faux alligator pumps hanging from the bindings clenched in her teeth, the neck of a bottle of Tawny Port throttled in her right hand. The long skinny loaf of French bread that was wedged under her arm looked like a sword piercing a three bit Shakespearean player preparing to die like no one had ever died before. Benny the doorman didn’t even look up from the racing form as she floundered with her keys at the front door. Once she managed to wedge her body in the threshold he called after her, “The elevator’s broke.”

“Yeah, well thanks for the help ya bastard,” she smiled.

“Ya get what ya pay for babydoll, get some sleep tonight and you won’t be so grouchy,” he replied.

She flipped him a left handed waist level bird and headed for the stairs, by the time she reached the third floor she was an expert at opening doors with her ass and elbows, stupid fire codes. A red glow pulsed from underneath the doorway of the apartment across from hers. The light syncopated with the blaring of an atonal saxophone solo that passed through the walls as if they weren’t there. She kicked at her neighbors’ door a couple of times.

“Hey you freaks, I’m home!” she shouted.

The music was turned down a couple of notches. God knew what the over caffeinated Blahonie brothers were up to tonight and she was too tired to stop in and find out.

She dropped her load on one of the two pieces of dropclothed furniture in her living room, an old couch that her boss had given her and which Benny had helped her cart in during one of his rare spasms of altruism. The rest of the room was filled with abstract sculptures in varying degrees of culmination and her desk. She took the baget and wine into the kitchenette, sliced herself a slab from the loaf with a serrated knife and popped the cork on the red. She drained the glass in one long swallow accompanied by a shudder as she returned to the couch with the bottle and piece of bread. The knot that held her hair up came undone when she lay down, her head hanging upside down off the edge of the sofa, ankles crossed and resting on the straight back. She occupied furniture in the same manner as an adolescent boy. A deep breathe in through the nose, then slowly out the mouth, a bite through the hard crust mixing with the soft interior while chewed. The tension from her legs drained downhill through her torso dissipating through the tip of her left hand’s middle finger as she absentmindedly drew tiny concentric circles in the granite dust on the hardwood floor.

The sharp knock at the door jerked her back into the here and now. She looked through the peephole and Benny was grinning in the hallway with a yellow Western Union envelope in one hand, his other already palm upward waiting for a tip. She opened up, grabbed the telegram dropped the piece of bread, butter side down, in Benny’s hand and closed the door before he had a chance to react. She knew who sent the message, and she knew a black Packard convertible would be waiting for her out front.

The burlesque house that she worked was called the Silver Minx. Outside of the joint neon tubes were snaked into the shape of a mink balanced atop green stiletto heels, right eye animated into a come hither wink. The building was a converted firehouse atop a crest of the river’s bank, perched above the gravel pits and steel mills that reclined along the waterway and provided the dive’s clientele. Tugboat whistles, diesel engines shifts and lift bridge bells coagulated amidst the sooty brick smokestacks providing a subliminal soundtrack to the scene. From a distance the illuminated sign looked as much like a skunk as anything due to the blackened limestone dust that covered it, and that’s what regulars had dubbed the place, “The Skunk”, they were a creative bunch. Bottom of the barrel all the way, these girls weren’t nude they were naked. This is where she had met Tweed.

The bar was a rosewood laminate in the shape of a giant ring with a diameter of about twenty feet and a couple foot wide, cigarette burns lent the illusion that it was infested with some sort of inflammable caterpillar. The firepole, which the girlies used to make their entrances, smack dab in the center. The stage was a smaller circle inside this configuration, theatre in the round. The space between the bar and stage patrolled by the bartender, a nappy haired illegal immigrant from Trinidad whose accent made the word fuck sound exotic, provided a liquor filled moat that safeguarded the dancers from the thigh pinches of the grimy fingered patrons. Musical accompaniment was provided by a solitary snare drum whose operator only knew a tango beat, more specifically Hernado’s Hideaway. Bump, bump, bump, bum, bah, da, da, da, da. If the ladies wanted to perform to anything else they had to climb down from the stage and pump their own cash into a jukebox that squatted near the door. This shaved the dramatic edge off the firepole entrance a bit but a tango can get on your nerves after a couple weeks.

It was on one of these trips to the jukebox that our gal literally bumped into the double-breasted Tweed, almost soda bottle cap popping his left eye out with her parasol, a prop from her Little Bo Peep ensemble. He used the opportunity to slide a napkin into her palm that he had jotted a note on, splotches from his fountain pen reminded her of a Dalmatian’s hide, or maybe ancient bloodspots on a white linoleum floor that no amount of bleach would ever remove. She wedged the message under her garter with the dollar bills that were mousetrapped like miniature oriental paper fans under the pink laced elastic and headed back to the stage to resume her set. After she finished looking for her sheep to the strains of Billy Holiday beseeching someone to make up their mind - this pursuit somehow requiring her to remove her clothing a single article at a time - she climbed the steps that led to the firemen’s dorm that had been converted into a dressing room for the gals.

Sitting at the vanity that she shared with the 300-pound platinum wigged Cuban Mae West impersonator - imagine this, Fred Mertz in drag with Ricki Riccardo’s voice chipmunked up two octaves - the girl counted out her singles. Thirty-three bucks, amongst the loot was the note from Tweed a little worse for wear due to perspiration. She looked down and saw the black splotch that the running ink had left on her thigh. She might have correlated the stain with her Scottish ancestry, lady McBeth and all, but she didn’t. The letters watercolor wash ran together but the communiqué was still legible. “Hundred dollars an hour, no touching,” and a phone number. This cat had a way with words that appealed to her, as far as she was concerned he was a literary genius. She crammed the note inside her heels and packed them with the rest of her stuff into a brown paper grocery bag.

Since she had made the initial call Tweed had sent for her two or three times a month for the last year or so. The day of the week and the times varied but the Method of Operation was always the same, a telegram that read, “working late tonight,” and the Packard out front. She wondered why he didn’t merely send the driver up with a note but then she just figured it was part of the no touching thing. Anyway, it was his dime, and you could spend your whole life psychoanalyzing other peoples’ motives. Some things you simply got to take on face value and she had grown accustomed to the face of Ben Franklin on the crisp C-notes she pocketed after each rendezvous. The driver would drop her off at a ritzy apartment building downtown with a key marked suite number three, on the return trip he always took the key back.

The place was as neat as the bourbon that she would hand the mystery man when he arrived, although the furnishings were dated by forty years. The whole scene was scrupulously scripted, typed out and left on the kitchen counter before she got there, only their minimal dialogue was ad lib, her only direction in this regard was to speak only when spoken to. Sometimes they would spend the whole hour without saying a thing, otherwise she was expected to pick up whatever thread that he was weaving without embellishment. During her second visit she made the mistake of asking him what he did for a living while they ate the tuna casserole she had prepared, the recipe having been attached to the refrigerator by a pineapple shaped magnet. Tweed dropped a hundred-dollar bill on the dining table and left without a word. The customer’s always right she reminded herself. She hadn’t repeated this faux pas in subsequent performances.

She let herself in and went to the kitchen to read the scenario that had been laid out for that evening. She was to cook a meal of meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and lima beans. The meatloaf was to contain no onions and heavy on the condensed tomato soup. Everything she needed for the recipe, nothing more, was laid out on the counter next to her directions, the ground beef was still cool to the touch while she kneaded in the breadcrumbs. She’d get the thing in the oven and the potatoes boiling before she showered and changed into her costume which scented padded hanger hung on the back of the front door in a clear dry cleaning bag. Basic housewife get up, it too forty years out of style. A peach colored A-line dress that came to mid calf, a pastel pink and white checkered apron, white flats, a pearl choker, a pair of wire rimmed eyeglasses with non-prescription lenses, and an ivory comb to hold her hair up. The outfit reminded her of the naughty librarian role that she used play back at the club before Tweed started showing up there, only in a more subdued and boring kinda way.

She washed with the rose scented soap that she found precisely where she had set it the last time she had been there. In fact, everything in the place was always exactly as she left it, except that her outfit would be laundered and a new batch of ingredients for a home cooked meal would be arranged on the counter. It was obvious that the place’s only use was for their get-togethers. The half a matchstick that she had balanced against the empty bedroom’s door had remained undisturbed for months. She could smell the meatloaf as she went through the feminine contortions of zipping the zipper on the back of her dress. Tying on the apron she headed for the kitchen, the pearl choker clasped in her teeth, yeah they were real even if the rest of this tableau was some twisted figment of Tweed’s fantasy at least the guy didn’t chintz on the jewels.

She was mashing a stick of butter into the potatoes when he showed up, a newspaper folded under his arm. He hung his gray overcoat on the rack near the door leaving his charcoal kid’s gloves on.

“Christ, what a day,” he said.

That’s how it started, when he did speak. Christ what a day, Christ pronounced Key-rist.

She handed him his drink, “Oh I’m so sorry baby, you sit down and relax, supper will be ready in a jiff.”

He sat in his big gentlemen’s club style leather chair his heels resting on the coffee table in front of him. The girl removed a Chesterfield non-filter from the silver case he had placed on the table, screwed one end of it into a long ivory holder and lit the other end with an over exaggerated puffing careful not to inhale. It wasn’t that she couldn’t inhale the smoke, it just seemed to upset him when she did, so she had developed this goldfish lip popping smoke ring producing style that she imagined he liked to watch. She handed him the cigarette. He disappeared behind his paper and she returned to the kitchen taking the last drag deep into her lungs once her back was turned to him.

The food was ready so she set the long table with the two place settings from the otherwise empty cupboard, one setting at either end. She lay the food out and hung her apron on a hook by the stove, then she stood by her chair waiting for him to pull it out for her, which he always did. She mimicked his silence as they ate; she’d never met anyone that ate so quietly before. His silverware never clinked, he never smacked his lips or chewed with his mouth open and he sat his bourbon glass down as if he were floating it on the surface tension of a liquid.

He looked her straight in the eyes across the expanse of the oak table and splintered the quiet.

“There’s another woman - I’m sorry,” he said.

He wiped the corners of his mouth with his napkin folded it neatly on the table, got up, put on his coat took an envelope from his inside breast pocket and placed it on the table then he left.

She cleared the table and washed the dishes, she always did. It was in the script.