“Well, I felt it. I was humming with it until I turned around too soon to find her pretending that she was not shocked. You see, she had just then noticed the drag of my left leg and her face said, ‘Oh no, I’ve got another gimp.’ ”
“A ‘gimp’?”
“A cripple, a spastic, an aberration, something that was going to be abhorrent to her. It was the first time I had ever seen a woman direct that look at me, that mix of pity and revulsion.”
“I am sure you are exaggerating.”
“You mean I’m being self-indulgent.”
“Maybe that too, but that’s not what I meant.”
“Alex, I saw how she looked at me. She’s not a nurse. She’s not supposed to expect this . . . sort of thing.”
“Did she say something about it?”
“She didn’t have to. She’s a professional, and she had a job to do. She asked me to take her to the bedroom. I let her walk ahead of me on the stairs, not so much in order to be able to look at her but more to minimize the time she had to look at me. Especially me walking up the stairs. When we reached the bedroom, she suddenly needed the bathroom. It was very sudden. She rushed away, and it occurred to me that perhaps the prospect of imminent intimacy with me was actually going to make her sick. So I listened to the sounds she made, and it wasn’t that. She didn’t throw up, thank God.
“When she returned, she’d regained her composure and offered me a massage. She told me to undress and to lie facedown on the bed. I didn’t say anything. I just did as she instructed. I knew this was the whole idea, but I was still uneasy about her seeing me naked. I guess being facedown and not having to do anything to her was a good way to ease myself into it. She must have known that. When I buried my head as deeply into the pillow as I could, I felt the cool of her fingers tracing lines on my back. No one had touched me like that in years and, involuntarily, my eyes misted. I exhaled as though I’d been holding my breath for longer than I could remember.
“ ‘Why don’t you turn around?’ she said after a while, almost in a whisper. When I did I saw that she was naked. I must have stared like a teenage boy who had never seen a naked woman before because she smiled at whatever my face was doing. Alex, I did stare. I know I did. She was sitting on top of the bed leaning back on her arms with her feet just touching my legs. Though I could see everything my eyes were drawn to her inner thighs, to the gate of shaved hair, and to the folds of pink beneath that I thought I would never see on any woman again. And the truth is, Alex, I won’t ever see it again without paying.”
15. “I must have stared like a teenage boy and when she took one of my hands in hers and gently placed it on her inside leg and put her other hand on my inner thigh, I was gone, finished, spent, just like a teenage boy. I felt smaller than that, and I apologized. She smiled, grabbed a tissue from the bedside table, and cleaned up after me . . . like she was a nurse and I was a child.
“ ‘I’m so very sorry. I’m very embarrassed . . . to have called up and dragged you all the way out here and then . . .’ I stumbled.
“ ‘No, really. There’s nothing to be sorry about,’ she told me.
“ ‘This must be . . . I must be the most pathetic . . . This is probably the saddest thing you’ve ever seen.’
“ ‘No, of course it isn’t.’
“ ‘I mean, the saddest thing you’ve ever seen in your line of work.’
“ ‘No, you’re still wrong.’
“ ‘You’re very kind.’
“ ‘I’m not being kind, really. Dennis . . . It’s Dennis, right?’
“ ‘Yes. It’s Dennis,’ I said.
“ ‘I mean, I get the impression that you might be feeling sad, you know . . . inside . . . but really . . . from my point of view you’re a guy who has some leg and back problems and you came too fast for your own good. That’s just to look at you. You look like a nice guy who’s had some bad luck—which everyone has at times—but this is nothing on the sad I’ve seen, even on the job.’
“ ‘Really?’
“ ‘Absolutely. And while I’ve seen men who claimed to be the biggest, I have to admit I’ve never met one who claimed to be the saddest. Do you mind if I put some clothes on? I’m a little chilly. I can still give you a massage if you like.’
“ ‘No, you put . . . whatever you like.’
“Alex, I felt so ridiculous, and not just because I had come like that. Even to be naked on my bed with this naked lovely woman whom I’d just met seemed absurd. I felt stupid. It was not the sort of thing I did.”
“You’d done it before.”
“Once. I’d done it once before, and not in my own house, which is, which feels entirely different. Why do you keep bringing that up?”
“I’m sorry. It’s not important to me, but—”
“But what?”
“Well, it is important that you don’t kid yourself even about—”
“Even about sex?”
“About anything.”
“You don’t like hearing about us, do you, about me and her? Well, you’ve got nothing to worry about. She put her clothes on and I put on mine as she told me about the saddest booking she ever had.
“She said, ‘It should have been a dream booking. Probably a lot of girls would think it was. I was supposed to be flattered to be chosen. The guy calls the agency and says he wants the prettiest girl they’ve got, wants her young-looking, wants her to dress formally, wants her for six hours, the better she looks the bigger the tip. The agency chooses me. I dress up in a formal strapless thing and I drive to the address I was given. I was pleased to dress that way. I don’t normally have much cause to. When I get there a young man opens the door, a very overweight young man, but not entirely ugly, and he’s dressed formally too. He invites me in to this totally modern apartment—no expense spared, with a beautiful view overlooking Fawkner Park. The untidiness tells me I’m in the company of a spoiled rich kid, probably the product of a beautiful mother and a driven, possibly absent, rich, repulsive father.’
“ ‘I know them.’
“ ‘Sorry?’
“ ‘I know the parents.’
“ ‘Really?’
“ ‘No, I mean I know the type.’
“ ‘Yeah, right. A friend of mine, a good friend of mine, would call the son a living, breathing tribute to Charles Darwin. You know what I’m saying?’
“ ‘Sure.’
“ ‘Well, he was about twenty-one; in fact he was exactly twenty-one and really quite nice to talk to. He offers me a glass of champagne, real French, none of this “methode” shit, and he tells me the deal. He wants me to be his date, to go out with him in public and pretend to be his interstate girlfriend. Seems in his circle he is, for all his money, something of a joke, an object of ridicule. So we drink champagne alone together for about an hour in his apartment while he tells me enough about himself, his history, to enable him to pass me off as his Sydney girlfriend, the model.
“ ‘He calls a cab, really nervous, and on the way he tells me, as if it had slipped his mind, that the twenty-first birthday party we are going to is his. There were at least two hundred and fifty people there, two hundred and fifty twenty-one-year-olds, so to speak. And his parents. He can’t possibly have known them all. He says it is all right if I admit I am a little older than twenty-one. We settle on twenty-four, almost twenty-five. People keep coming up to me, mainly girls, to tell me that they really hope the two of us will last, that it is so good to finally meet me, that he talks about me all the time. His parents tell me that too.
“ ‘He didn’t seem such an object of ridicule that night. Perhaps it was the new role he was playing. We danced and drank. I think I did a pretty good job. I had to go back to his apartment with him and wait until the last of the “inner sanctum” had gone home. He kissed me on the cheek, paid me twice what I was owed, and asked if I’d be available when he turned thirty. A real gentleman. I didn’t have the heart to tell him how familiar his father looked.’
“ ?
??Was he gay?’
“ ‘No, I don’t think so. Why do you ask that?’
“ ‘I don’t know . . . rich guy, can’t get a date, doesn’t even try to—’
“ ‘Dennis, you’ve missed the whole point of the story.’
“And she was right. I had to laugh, Alex. Even after what had happened she could make me laugh, laugh at myself. All the while she was telling me the story she was holding me. Of course, after hearing it, I had to tip her too. So I guess I became another perfect booking. But it was worth it. You know what I mean? I liked having her there, just listening to her. So I started calling for her, booking her specifically. She would come to my house almost weekly. I found I needed it. I needed to see her.
“We didn’t do anything. We didn’t undress or anything. Sometimes she’d hold me while we watched television. I always paid her. This was an hour or two that she was supposed to be working, so I felt I had to pay her. I started confiding in her, telling her how I was feeling, about my son and Patricia, anything. It was in the context of all this that she would mention you. She’d quote you. I told her about my accident and gradually, perhaps reluctantly, she started telling me a little of her own story. I asked her why she did that kind of work. You see, I felt I could ask that because, although technically I was paying, I was really paying her just to come and see me. I wasn’t really a client like the others. Like you, perhaps.
“She told me she was doing it for her boyfriend. That was a shock. I have to admit that. Didn’t know she had a boyfriend, did you? Not so easy when you know that, is it? Her boyfriend was in some kind of trouble with the police and she needed money to pay for his defense. Apparently some cop had promised her he was going to fix everything up but—surprise, surprise—he double-crossed her and now her boyfriend was having trouble getting Legal Aid funding. She was reluctant to tell me the details. It all sounded very messy, but the nub of it was that her boyfriend’s trial was imminent and she needed a lot of money for his legal fees. She seemed pretty serious about him. I bet you didn’t know any of this? Unless you’re treating her. You wouldn’t know it from sleeping with her, would you?”
“Maybe we should stick to my asking the questions.”
“I’m telling you everything . . . no matter how bad it looks . . . how bad it makes me look.”
“Go on.”
“I told her I would like to help her, but I wasn’t in a position to. And I would’ve but I didn’t have any money, what with Patricia threatening to take James to Germany, threatening to hang me out to dry. But I did think about it. I wanted to help her. That’s good, isn’t it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You once said something to me about lower needs and higher needs. Lower needs were things like the need to eat, to sleep. Higher needs would include the need to help people. You said the urge to satisfy a higher need was a sign of health, that it was inconsistent with depression.”
“Yes, but—”
“That’s what you said.”
“Yes, but it’s not quite as simple as that.”
“No, I was thinking that even when you said it. But I really did want to help her. Is that selfish too, a way of making myself feel good?”
“That’s the kind of selfishness we call altruism. Subject to certain qualifications, it’s the best kind there is. It’s also one of the more mature methods of dealing with a difficult situation or emotional experience.”
“Well, there you are, then!”
“What you’re looking for now is absolution.”
“Fuck you! I really wanted to help her. I’m telling you the truth. I break down in front of you like a child but I keep going. I don’t care if you don’t believe me. I really did want to help her.”
“You keep saying that, but you don’t say how.”
“The next time she visited I told her I had an idea.”
“An idea?”
“An idea of how she could get the money she needed.”
“You don’t feel good about this idea, do you?”
“Alex, I don’t feel good about anything.”
“But you’re wrestling with yourself about this. You don’t really want to tell me about it.”
“Dr. Klima, you are full of shit! This is the reason I’m here, to tell you this.”
“So . . . tell me.”
“I offered to teach her to count cards in blackjack.”
“To play blackjack?”
“Not just to play it. To win at it.”
“By counting cards?”
“That was the idea. It was a skill I had, one she didn’t have, which I thought I could pass on to her. She’d never played it at all. Didn’t know the rules. I had to teach her from scratch.”
16. “ ‘There’s the standard way of playing and then there’s counting. We’ll just take it one step at a time,’ I tried to reassure her.
“ ‘Dennis, I don’t know anything about it,’ she protested. “The only times I’ve ever even been inside a casino I was there with clients and we never played blackjack.’
“ ‘A lot of men, wealthy men, treat call girls to a few hands of blackjack.’
“ ‘Yeah, I’ve heard of that happening, but not to me. I’ll never be able to get the hang of it. I don’t play cards. I’ll never be able to count them. You’re crazy. I don’t even know how many cards are in a deck.’
“ ‘Fifty-two, and they play with eight decks here.’
“ ‘Dennis, you’re out of your mind. Fifty-two times eight is—’
“ ‘Four hundred and sixteen.’
“ ‘How does anybody count four hundred and sixteen cards in their head?’
“ ‘You don’t, you don’t even try. Some people try, and they’re almost as stupid as the impulse gamblers sitting there—’
“ ‘What do you mean, “impulse gamblers”?’
“ ‘I mean the ones who make impulsive decisions without a plan, the ones who double-down or split because of a rush of blood to the head.’
“ ‘Dennis, I don’t even know what double-down means.’
“ ‘I’ll explain it all to you slowly. There’s the standard way of playing, and there’s counting. Insofar as counting is concerned, there is not that much to understand or even to remember. The secret to it is, sure, to know what to do. But the real trick to it is to have the discipline to put it into practice no matter how you’re feeling, confident or shy, bold or scared, you just have to stick to the rules I’m going to teach you and then it’s not gambling. You have to pay attention to what’s going on and divorce your emotions from your thinking.’ “ ‘I want to quit already.’
“ ‘Look, Angelique, you want to get the money to help him?’
“ ‘Of course I do.’
“ ‘Then it must be worth at least hearing me out.’
“ ‘Dennis, I appreciate it, but I’m not the kind of person who can—’
“ ‘Just hear me out. Your boyfriend deserves at least that much, doesn’t he?’
“ ‘I’m listening.’
“ ‘It all sounds very daunting, but it isn’t really anywhere near as complicated as people think. Fear sabotages people’s capacity to absorb a set of rules. That’s all counting is, a set of rules. And they’re really fairly simple. Let me explain them. There are only ever thirteen possible cards that are going to come out. Forget the four hundred and sixteen; just think of thirteen.’
“ ‘Okay, thirteen.’
“ ‘Three of those thirteen will be an ace, a two, and an eight.’
“ ‘Yeah.’
“ ‘I want you to forget about them. You’re not going to try to count them; they’re irrelevant. They don’t make it weaker or stronger whether they’re in or out of the pack. This leaves what we call the low cards and the high cards. The low cards are three, four, five, six, and seven. There are five of them. Treat all the low cards simply as low. Don’t try to distinguish among them. Now we’re left with the high cards—nine, ten, jack, queen, and king, these last three
cards each being worth ten. Similarly, they’re just high cards. Don’t distinguish among them.
“ ‘Now, when the cards are dealt, they might come out low, low, high, high. You see that, you take it in, and you can ignore it. They’ve just canceled each other out.’
“ ‘But they won’t always cancel each other out.’
“ ‘No, of course not, but that’s all you have to keep track of in your hand. You don’t need to know whether there are thirty eights left in the pack or whether fifteen threes have been played. Just watch the highs and lows. Like this. High, low, high, high, low. That’s one high card over. The way I do it, a high card is “minus one” and a low card is “plus one,” so if I’ve got one high card left over, all I have to remember is “minus one.” Now you do this one. Tell me what the count is. Remember, ignore aces, twos, and eights. Just track the high cards and the low cards. So . . . low, high, high, low, high, low, high, low, low, high, high, high.
“ ‘ “Minus two”?’
“ ‘Exactly, you’re counting cards. Faster or slower, that’s the principle. For greater speed and accuracy, you just have to do it for hours and hours.’
“ ‘That’s easy for you to say. I don’t know the rules and I don’t know what it means to count, to have a “minus two.” ’
“ ‘Okay. I can teach you. It’s not hard. If there were four more high cards than low cards, I call it “minus four.” ’
“ ‘I got that bit.’
“ ‘If there were four more low cards than high cards, I call it “plus four.” But it can be anything, “minus ten” or “plus fourteen,” whatever.’
“ ‘So?’
“ ‘So this is what I call the actual count. It varies with each hand, with each card, and you use the actual count to get the true count.’
“ ‘The true count?’
“ ‘The true count is the actual count divided by your estimate of the number of decks to come. If, for example, at the end of the first deck of cards, with seven decks to come, the actual count is “plus fourteen,” you divide “plus fourteen” by the seven decks to come and you get a true count of “plus two.” ’