The Red

  "I am very sorry for the loss of your mother. Ophelia St. James was much beloved in the art community.”

  "She was. And this gallery was her life. She told me to do anything to save it.”

  "I can be anything,” he said with the slightest smile.

  "Yes,” she said. "I imagine you could.”

  "Do we have an agreement then?” he asked.

  "I have to think about this some more,” she said. She turned in her chair to the side, rested her forehead on her hand and breathed.

  "Do you have a lover?” he asked. "I won’t tell you to stop seeing him if you do.”

  "We broke up,” she said. "After Mother died.”

  "My condolences.”

  "No need for that. We were never in love, only lovers. He was a boy.”

  "Scandalous.” Malcolm sounded far more pleased than scandalized.

  "Not quite. I was twenty-four. He was eighteen. He lived in the apartment across from my mother’s with his parents. In the last months I stayed with her every night, slept in the guest room. It was lonely sleeping there with my mother slowly dying in the next room.” She shouldn’t be telling Malcolm any of this and didn’t know why she was, only that he seemed interested and it had been a very long time since she’d had a conversation this intimate with anyone.

  "I certainly would have seduced the nearest available person as well,” Malcolm said. "Even if my mother hadn’t been dying.”

  "I can imagine that.”

  "You’re welcome to imagine me seducing someone. I recommend it.”

  "Sadly, it wasn’t much of a seduction,” she said. "He was young and pretty and, best of all, lived five feet away. We would talk in the hallway when we met there. One night a neighbor came out of their apartment and shushed us for laughing, so I invited him in to finish the conversation. Mother was already asleep. Her pills knocked her out around nine every night. I didn’t intend to go to bed with him, but the bed was the only place in the guest room to sit.” She smiled at the memory of taking Ryan’s virginity on the antique brass bed. She had to hold onto the headboard to keep it from rattling against the wall.

  "You had every reason to, every right to,” Malcolm said. "Anyone going through what you were would need the comfort of another body in your bed. Do you miss him?”

  She shrugged. "I miss that time. I still had Mother by day and a lover by night. It was a precious few months for me. After she died, I sold the apartment to pay off some of the medical bills. I kept the brass bed. Mother had bought it years ago at an estate sale. Mother said it had once belonged to a courtesan so she couldn’t resist buying it. Mother would buy anything if the origin story were good enough.”

  "It’s a lovely bed. I’m certain it misses you. You should spend more time in it, with me preferably.”

  She missed the bed as well. Although her affair with Ryan had been brief, only three months, it had been a delicious distraction. They were lovers for the summer and knew the end date of their affair when they started—September, when Ryan would start college. He’d been a virgin, a tabula rasa, and she’d taught him exactly how to please her…and please her he did, two and sometimes three times a night. He’d slip in around ten, joining her in the antique brass bed where she lay waiting for him, already naked. They’d make love for two hours or more before he returned to his apartment down the hall. They spoke of nothing to each other but the sex. It was all they’d had in common. Yet, she missed him, or more accurately missed it—the sex, falling asleep with damp thighs, waking up with tender lips, tender nipples, having a secret reason to smile when no one else was looking. Malcolm offered all that to her, plus the money to save the gallery. How could she refuse? And yet…

  "Condoms?” Mona asked. She hadn’t used them with Ryan, but Ryan had been eighteen and a virgin.

  "No,” he said simply.

  She had guessed as much. No one paid a million dollars to fuck someone and then put a layer of latex between their bodies.

  "But you needn’t worry,” he said. "I won’t give you any diseases.”

  "That’s a comfort. Only one night every month or two?”

  "That’s all,” he said. "But I assure you, they will be very long nights for both of us.”

  "Ten nights is a hundred thousand dollars a fuck. You do realize that you’re overpaying me, yes?”

  "I know it seems a bit, dear, but I will fuck you more than once a night. You’ll earn it, I promise. If you’re anything like the other Monas I’ve known, I have no doubt I’ll get my money’s worth and then some.”

  Twelve months. A handful of nights. Four or five times a night, if not more. And all for one million dollars.

  "If any of this art of yours is stolen—”

  "I’m a whoremonger, a rake, and a degenerate, my dear, but I am not a thief.”

  "Forgive me but I had to ask,” she said. "Art theft is the fourth largest international crime behind guns, drugs, and human trafficking.”

  "Only fourth?” He sounded disgusted. He sighed, as if disappointed with the world. "No accounting for taste.”

  It was that joke that did it. Until then she’d been sitting on the fence, torn between needing the money and wanting her dignity. But when he gave a little roll of his eyes as if affronted that anyone would consider drugs or guns more worth stealing and selling than art…she fell off the fence and right into Malcolm’s lap.

  "One million dollars,” she said. "You have carte blanche for one year. We’ll meet here. Is that the agreement?”

  "It is indeed. Are you saying yes?” he asked.

  "The deal is done after one year? You won’t expect anything else from me? Any favors, sexual or otherwise? A stake in the gallery? Counterfeit provenance?”

  "Nothing of the sort. After our final encounter you won’t even see me again. Ever.”

  Ever?

  "Well…you’ve certainly proven your bona fides with the Reynolds painting,” she said. "And I promised my mother I wouldn’t sell The Red.”

  "Deathbed promises are the most serious,” he said. "We must keep them at all costs.”

  "How did you know it was a deathbed promise?”

  "An assumption. You see, I made one myself.”

  "To your mother?”

  "No. If she said anything about me on her deathbed it was to curse my name. Luckily I was elsewhere at the time,” he said and smiled. She had never understood the phrase "devastatingly handsome” before meeting Malcolm, but when he left this room, she would feel devastated to be in his presence no longer. It all made sense.

  "My mother loved this gallery,” she said. "It was her life. Now that she’s gone, it may be the death of me.”

  "I won’t allow that, Mona.” He seemed to find her name amusing.

  "I have a feeling I’ll regret this…”

  "I have a feeling you won’t.”

  "You would say that.”

  "I would,” he readily admitted. "But you’ll say it too in a year. I assume you’ll accept the fifty-thousand-dollar finder’s fee from the Reynolds as a down payment?”

  "I think that’s reasonable,” she said.

  "Then we’re in agreement?”

  What did she have to lose? Other than her health, her sanity, her spotless criminal record, her business, and her life?

  "We’re in agreement,” she said.

  He clapped his hands, rubbed them together, and stood up.

  "Excellent. Just what I’ve been wanting to hear for a very long time. We’ll start tomorrow night.”

  "So soon?”

  "Does your cunt have a prior engagement?” he asked, his tone mocking.

  "Tomorrow night, then. Is there…” She paused, not sure what she was asking. "Are there rules? Expectations of me? Requests?”

  He held up one finger, telling her to sit and wait. She sat. She waited. He walked to her bookshelf and perused the titles, the hand on his chin again like the first night. At last he seemed to find what he was looking for. He pulled a large white book from the sh
elf and leafed through the pages. Then he returned to her desk, bringing the book with him.

  "That,” he said, laying the book open on the desk and pointing at a photograph of a painting. "I would like you to wait for me thusly.”

  The painting in the photograph was one she knew well—Manet’s Olympia, a portrait of a young girl, naked, lying on a bed with her head up and staring directly at the viewer. It was an infamous painting, Manet making mockery of the tired old Venus-reclining-on-her-bed trope. Olympia was a prostitute and a shameless one at that. When it was first displayed, the crowds found it so vulgar they wanted to tear it to shreds.

  "So I’m to be your Olympia.”

  "For what I’m paying you, you’ll be everything I want you to be.”

  She looked up at him, met his eyes. For the first time since they met, he touched her. He laid his hand on the side of her face, stroked the arch of her cheekbone with his thumb. Such a large warm hand. She truly believed she would regret making this agreement. But she didn’t regret it now.

  "You were meant to do this,” he said softly. "You’ll see.”

  "Why me?” she asked. "Millions of women in this country, millions in yours…why me?”

  "Millions of paintings in this world. Only one Mona Lisa. Billions of women in this world. Only one you, Mona Lisa St. James.”

  Then he left her in the office, blushing and shivering and undeniably aroused. She’d just agreed to become a prostitute to save her gallery.

  Something told Mona that somewhere out there, her mother was proud of her.

  Olympia

  Malcolm had picked a good day for a tryst. Sunday was the gallery’s shortest day—open only from one to five. After she closed The Red, Mona went shopping. She didn’t need much—a velvet choker, a flower for her hair, clean white sheets for the bed, all easy to find. At her apartment she showered and shaved and waxed until she was as smooth as a marble statue. Malcolm hadn’t told her to remove her hair, but Olympia had no visible body hair in Manet’s painting. Mona should have asked him what he preferred. She knew he would have told her had she asked. A shameless man, he’d made her feel rather shameless. In fact, the whole conversation with Malcolm had been rather dignified. She hadn’t felt embarrassed or ashamed. It felt like a business transaction, which she had appreciated.

  After all, she was a businesswoman.

  She was glad Malcolm had given her instructions for what to wear and how to wait for him. It made it easier. No second-guessing. Before dressing to leave her apartment, she stood in front of her full-length mirror and examined her naked body. She wasn’t thin exactly, certainly not skinny. She had breasts larger than her frame but no man had ever complained about that. Her legs were her best feature, if she did say so herself. The face? A straight nose, full lips, high cheekbones, high forehead, which is why she wore blunt bangs. The verdict? She’d make a passable Olympia and a very fine whore indeed. She was getting used to that word. In fact, she was starting to like it. It gave her a thrill to think of herself that way. A goldmine, that’s what Malcolm had called her body. A goldmine. Who wouldn’t go digging if one were sitting on a goldmine? Only a fool.

  She could only hope she wasn’t fooling herself.

  Mona dressed in a long breezy skirt, sandals, a white bra, white panties, and white cotton top. Her usual casual summer uniform. The streets were humid when she walked to the gallery four blocks away and by the time she unlocked the door, she was sweating. It was a relief to step into the air-conditioning. In her office, she caught Tou-Tou sleeping in the leather club chair Malcolm had sat in.

  "You know better than that,” she said to Tou-Tou, as she scooped him up and set him on the floor. "Company only. You have your own bed.”

  He looked at her, affronted, as if to say "How dare you judge me? I know what you’re doing here…”

  Or perhaps she was merely being paranoid. Tou-Tou followed at her heels as she went into the back storage room. She switched on the floor lamp, as the room was windowless but for the single skylight above the bed. This had always been her favorite part of the gallery. It was full of odd and gorgeous clutter. Here were the strange paintings her mother had loved but could never unload. Erotic paintings mostly. A woman in a red dress with one strap dangling off her shoulder, a bare breast exposed. A naked couple fornicating on a boat while the ship sank and sailors drowned. A lady in Victorian garb whipping the corpulent ass of a naked man with a branch of holly. All good company for such a liaison as Mona’s tonight.

  She wondered if the paintings would give Malcolm any ideas.

  In addition to the paintings, antique furniture was scattered here and there—a red velvet fainting couch, a cheval mirror with an ornately carved frame hidden under a white sheet, a Rococo-style chair with carved wood arms and red and gold striped fabric. They were for parties, special events. When she was a little girl, Mona would come here after school and nap on the fainting couch, dance in front of the mirror, sit in the Rococo chair and read her little school books, while her mother in the other room hobnobbed with artists, art critics, art lovers, and anyone else who wanted to come in from the rain.

  And, of course, there was the brass bed. It had been her bed as a girl growing up in her mother’s apartment. She’d lost her virginity in that bed and taken Ryan’s in it as well. Her memories of that bed, in that bed, were potent ones. After tonight it would hold even more memories.

  She prayed they would be good ones.

  Funny, the last night she’d slept in this bed was the night her mother died, the night her mother had made her promise to keep the gallery, no matter what. And now she’d keep her promise in that bed. She only hoped her mother would understand. Mona looked over her shoulder at the portrait of a handsome, randy old duke naked from the waist down with his penis poking inside the squirming girl on his lap.

  Oh yes, her mother would very likely understand.

  And approve.

  Mona had stripped the bed of sheets and blankets when it was brought to the storage room. They’d been old flannel sheets, pilling and faded. If she were going to whore herself, she would do it on high thread count Egyptian cotton. In Manet’s Olympia painting, the sheets on the bed were white, as was the coverlet. She’d found an old white quilt in her mother’s things and put that on the bed. When she finished, the bed looked lush and inviting. The temptation to lay in the bed was strong, lay in it and touch herself. Should she prime her body a little bit before Malcolm arrived? Would he want her to be wet when she greeted him?

  Well, it’s not likely he’d be displeased if she was.

  She stripped naked and put her clothes on the seat of the wooden chair she’d placed at the end of the bed. Olympia wore a flower in her hair, so Mona tucked one into her side bun. She tied the red velvet choker around her neck. Finally, she adjusted the lamp so that a gentle golden halo of light surrounded the bed and left the rest of the room in shadows. Then she lay down to wait.

  Though the sheets screamed luxury, decadence, and comfort, she could not relax. It was eleven now. Malcolm would likely arrive at midnight as he had the past two times he’d visited the gallery. She felt so awkward lying there naked. This wasn’t her. Not at all. No matter what Malcolm said, this wasn’t her. But for the sake of the gallery she would try anyway. She imagined herself lying stiff and unmoving underneath Malcolm as his cock jabbed at her tight, dry vagina. That wouldn’t do. It would be agony. He’d tear her and she’d bleed all over the white sheets. She wished she’d thought to bring wine and drink a glass or two. Instead she’d only brought a few bottles of water, a bowl of cut strawberries, and apples.

  Closing her eyes, Mona breathed deeply into her body, pulling the breaths into her lungs and belly. She imagined the real Olympia. She must have existed, or a girl much like her. The painting had shocked viewers for the forthright way Olympia held up her head. Shameless, she was. Unapologetic. Why should she apologize? It was the men who paid her for sex. She was merely doing what she’d been told to do all her
life: submit her body and will to men. How dare those men judge her? They’d created her. A woman can’t sell her body without clients to buy it. Olympia would laugh all the way to the bank and then likely spread her legs for the bank president in exchange for free checking.

  What a girl.

  Mona smiled. She wished she’d had Olympia’s courage. She wouldn’t be shaking on the bed while waiting for her next customer. No, she would bathe herself—a whore’s bath, washing the leavings of her previous client out of her. She’d repair her coiffure. It must be just right. She’d dab perfume between her thighs, behind her ears, between her breasts. She’d drink white wine to wash the taste of the last man from her mouth. She would recline on her bed and massage her breasts to bring her nipples to hardness so that when her next client came into the room, he would think she was aroused at the very sight of him.

  She heard the door opening.

  Mona lifted her head. Malcolm stood in the doorway in his