The Whore

Mid thirties, scruffy, a rhapsody in blond, moth-eaten blond beard shadowing his sharp, narrow jaw—Justus Fawley bundled himself into a trench and took to the unusually cold streets of Hollywood at roughly two in the morning. At that time of night, when a city as sick and sacred as Los Angeles, opened its sewers, mangy kittens and rats in sequins crawled up into the neon light of faux-day, and the painter in Justus saw vices and demons acquire names the sun usually swept into raucous anonymity.

You could never know the loveliness of a whore if she'd already ceased to be a woman.

At Sunset and Gower, he spotted her near a busstop, a brew of smelly colors and incongruent fabrics, pushing a shoppingcart back and forth and walking in place.

Bag ladies weren't really homeless. They were human tortoises.

The truly homeless carried nothing.

You could always tell the ones who'd sold themselves, once upon a time, because despite the sudden accumulation of decaying property around them, they still carried themselves as if they had something to sell. Just the way you could tell which of the whores had once had bit-parts in movies, or even recurring roles on defunct shows, because they always made an attempt to speak very clearly, as if they'd never stopped auditioning. Whatever poison had blown up their noses or pierced their blood, the hope for better diction still rode palpably high in their sad eyes.

Justus had sold eleven Madonnas to date, going back twelve years. Men and women everywhere were still hungry for purity.

Every Madonna had a story and the most horrifying were the tales of those who'd tried to stay pure.

After he stopped near her, lingered for a few moments, as if with an unspeakable proposal, "Are you a priest," she finally asked, not really looking at him, nodding her head, walking in place, allegorizing about all she could of what the rest of her kind did standing perfectly still or lying in doorways. "Cause you look like a priest, clean and sacred. Remind me of when I used to be a nun—"

"You were a nun?"

Justus berated himself inwardly, almost at once, for the glee that leaked into his tone.

"Maria Assumpta—"

"That your name? Maria?"

"I'm nobody's fucking whore," she screamed at him, so people in cars turned to look.

He didn't care. You couldn't care and still paint.

"He hasn't yet forgiven me, you know."

"The priest?"

"Fuck the priests," her voice rose again, and some kids in their early twenties from a car going the other way cackled and craned their sorry necks. "You know about the church. You know what the church is all about." He was ashamed of how surprised he was that she spoke college English. It was easy to forget, viewing them as the verminous refuse of high civilization, that each one of them had begun somewhere, had known people, touched lives, moved on, fallen—possibly loved and been loved, if they were lucky. At thirtysix, he wasn't that lucky. Despite all his cool connexions, it was only the street, the whores and bag-ladies whose garrulous tragedies he could render into speechless color and line, that switched his oxygen back on again. "Oh yes, dearie, the church's one big goddamn industry, one edifice without holes. Imporous piety. You need a sponge to handle the tears. You better have a quicker picker-upper, Father—"

"—I told you I'm not—"

"—if you're going to pretend you know about suffering. You ever notice how the Bible gives no attention to a broken heart?"

Now that he'd got her going, it wouldn't be easy to get her to stop. They usually had to talk themselves out, at least temporarily, before he could make his proposition.

"No, dearie, the Bible's only about material poverty, about poor widows and orphans, makes absolute sense the rich people of this land thump it night and day. If you ask me, the Bible's all about the body, clothing and healing and feeding it, no wonder all the priests are obsessed with sex. Yes, dearie. No wonder. But if you look closely—do you believe in Christ?"

"Well," he flubbed it, not wanting her to stop, because their stories were what set the tone of each painting, "I'm more spiritual than religious—"

"In other words, you want to do what the fuck you want, to hell with God and community. Delude yourself into thinking you're so goddamn pious into the bargain, don't you, dearie? Sweet deal. Pick the vices first and then tailor the beliefs to fit them. Where's God, dearie? How far down the list of what you want and what works for you? Fucked up world. How're you different from some motherfucking corporate asshole who burns up villages to make a buck?"

"Well—for one thing—I don't burn up villages."

"They aren't your fucking villages in the first place, to burn or spare. But aren't we so pious, dearie?"

He was ashamed he couldn't grant her enough status and dignity to find her tirade offensive. She'd never once looked at him, so he found relief in believing, possibly, that she wasn't speaking to him but through him to the world that usually passed her mutely by. He was less a person to her than a representative ear. All speech is confession. Every verbal bridge to another mind is merely a subtextual bid for absolution. She needed Justus to believe in her God, the God who'd clearly done her wrong, so that she could ordain him, confess to him, and, in doing so, transgress her own moral indolence long enough to give her barriers meaning.

"—and so He had to die," she was nattering on, walking in place, from a habit she'd probably developed to keep warm or to give herself the illusion of motion in a stillborn world, "because I'm sure He loved Mary Magdalene, and John—yes romantically, in case you're wondering—and yes he had to've been bisexual—"

"Are we talking about—whom I think—?"

"Squeamish now? When'd you throw Him out of your life, anyway?"

"No. Not squeamish. Go on."

"What do you want?"

"Not sure I know what you mean—"

She turned her face to him, and the gleaming black eyes opened doors to him he never knew lingered in the city night, "Some of them tell you I used to do certain things for money, certain things some of the other girls didn't do?"

He shrugged, immobile in her gaze. Her irises were like gleaming black stones with a multitude of facets only the iridescent night allowed them to disclose. Despite the tattered pink-and-yellow woolen beanie—which must've been truly hideous even in its prime—the filthy black hair that was partly relaxed, waxy-yellow in the streetlights, partly all dull and frizzy, despite a faint scar above her left eye, she was a remarkably beautiful woman. She looked to be roughly his own age, but her filthy skin and the premature aging which life on the street had wrought could easily've conspired to deceive him. Her eyes were younger, but not by much. They bore their own reverberant cargo of unappeased experience. Most people would not've seen it. But Justus saw it, and he was already weaving around her the swift redemptions of color and callous shame.

"I don't get tied up," she said, "no matter what you pay me," turning her head away from him once more.

"How long's it been?"

"Just because I lost my bicycle," she said—

He laughed at that.

"You could walk a block that way and get some young thing who's about one clean dress and one final squirt of perfume away from where I'm at. But you wanna know something? My throat can handle just about any size as good as my—"

"That so? Well, I'm not worried. I'm nice and average."

"That is nice. I figure I had the biggest one there ever was, once upon a time, and average sounds like sunsets and ice-cream."

It struck him then, at the ripe old age of thirtysix, how deeply mendacious the world of courtship really was, how carefully designed to shoulder every load of bull and vanity.

"Tired of the mansion," he said, "you return to the gatehouse."

"Dearie," she said, "his wasn't a mansion, it was a whole goddamn island unto itself. You had to see it to believe Aphrodite would hand them out that large to emotional midgets."

Suddenly, because she'd likened him to sunsets and ice-cream, he wanted her to rhapsodize about him some day, to some other john, and he wanted this uniquely horse-hung monster from her past to be the villainous pivot of her downward spiral.

"Is he the reason you're on the street?"

"None of your goddamn business," she yelled into his face, her mouth making a full confession of its scattered rotting teeth and lethal reek. "You don't believe in God, so you can't believe in history, so what the fuck difference does it make how I got here? I'm here. And you're probably up there in the hills. And are we gonna to do the side-by-side or what?"

He stared at her. She turned her head and spat. She leaned into her shopping cart of decaying possessions and pushed on, as if his unbelief, his trite audacity, had propelled her out of stasis, and would probably someday, if the system finally worked, sweep her off the street.

"Five hundred," he said.

She stopped, about fifty feet away. She did not turn away from her cart to face him but turned it all the way about as if making some grandiose detour on her way to death.

She bellowed at him, "You kidding me?"

He shook his head.

When she was close again, she said, at times speaking barely above a whisper and now and then darting furtive looks up and down the sidewalk but mainly at a tree that grew on the edge of an empty parkinglot nearby, "There's a town called Sofia in the state of Pennsylvania which used to have a place in the mountains above it called Cytherea Grove. Cytherea is another name for Aphrodite and some of the locals still call it Aphrodite's Grove. It's a place where the goddess walks at night, except when there's no moon. I went to find it, but someone had hacked down all the trees and torched all the stumps and you could swear, standing there in the silent moonlight, with no wind to speak of, you could still hear the trees groaning, like phantom limbs, and feel the ground under you begin to smell like a stew of all the foul and nameless things heaven once unleashed on earth to keep humans on the right path and to give us freedom, because unless there're two absolutely opposing choices—heaven and hell—you can never be absolutely free. Dearie, I came back from Cytherea Grove and the only thing that seemed like home was the fucking street. You still got that five hundred?"

He nodded.

"I don't get tied up."

It seemed odd, a fallen whore, in itself an almost untenable proposition, fighting for her dignity against such a sum.

He offered to push her cart, but she refused to surrender it.

The miniature warehouse in which he lived suited his needs impeccably. Such friends as he had continually advised lodgings more appropriate for a man of his years and, in certain restricted circles of his field, his distinction—he had, after all, sold eleven paintings—but the large redbrick one-room structure standing in the middle of a garden that gave every reliable impression of the building's being derelict, held the same talismanic hold over Justus as Freddie Mercury's teeth had held over him. So he persisted in it, while zealously debunking all rumors of a possible Bukowski swerve.

There was the bed, a vast four-poster canopy affair, beshorn of all umbrageous fabrics, and provided in their stead with an intricate wealth of lights on long, boomlike necks, cranes, and pulleys; all looking in, like electric angels from above, with varying degrees of serene inarticulate curiosity.

Around the bed—

(She said, "You paint even when you're sleeping?"

"We all do," he said, "not just writers. What you do when you're awake is take dictation from works you've already finished in your dreams. The ones who can do it without a translator are the ones we call geniuses.")

—were various tables, strewn with palettes, a haphazard rainbow of pigments, scraps of paper from sketchbooks bearing the relics of charcoal prayers hurried into consciousness during the fitful watches of the night, lurid stanzas of virgins and wrythen saints, in whose nocturnal pudicity it was possible to perceive the soul of all their future technicolor incarnations, all ranged alongside the studied refuse of a man who was clearly taking a detour through the social dregs on a journey back to his own arcane purity, neither indulging a life of pretentious poverty nor weaving one of flamboyant accomplishment.

On the wall, like shrunken cyclops heads, hung seven cameras, six digital, one analog. Each strap by which the camera hung on its hook was a different color of the rainbow, all stretching left to right from violet to red, to remind him that photography made as much use of the spectrum as painting.

Justus had broken down the walls of the bathroom, so there were literally no interior divisions left inside the cube. Even the kitchen range stood against the wall to the far right with two ovens on a long counter alongside it, conventional and micro, edgy and speciously seductive against the ubiquitous red brick.

After some struggle, and his provision of a chain and lock which he kept for just such contingencies, in his line of business—she mayn't get tied up, but it was okay for her things—they secured her cart to a hook in the wall of the small garage out back in which he stabled his Harley. He could never stand the smell of their clothes and other stuff in his apartment, and the indoor heat—it being winter, and the middle of the night—only rendered the stench more pervasive, more difficult to exorcise the following day.

"You want that blow job now?"

Since there was always the possibility in Hollywood that people would come staggering by even at this hour, and be tempted to peer in, he'd hung huge canvas curtains over the large streetward windows, red over one and blue over the other, both pretty faded by now, but which he'd used over the years as a kind of abstract journal in paint, sometimes having recorded vibrantly on them no more than a few wild strokes here and there of ocherous frustration or viridian rage, so they now resembled a vital, salacious cauldron of Chagal, Modrian, and Pollack.

Struck by the way in which the particular haphazard colors of her tatterdemalion ensemble made her seem as if she'd stepped out of one or other of his curtains, the incarnation of some dryad that stood between him and the world, he studied her quietly, almost unaware of what he was doing, till it made her squirm.

Having allowed him his moment's examination, she wrenched him back to them from his silent separateness. "What the fuck you looking at? The merchandize won't look much better in this light than it did on the street, so if you want to pretend I'm a princess, Mister Photographer—under some trick of light—"

The inspiration abruptly dying, "There's one more ritual," he said, "I always do with my models."

"Models? You didn't say anything about modeling. That'll be extra."

"Don't be silly. Get undressed."

"What'd you just say?"

Gently smiling, "I asked you," he backed away, gesturing grandly to her with one arm, "to get undressed."

"Before that?"

With a small histrionic frown, "O, don't be silly," he chided her, turning away, taking off his coat, "I'd never repeat something like that," draping it over a battered Victorian armchair that stood between a good old-fashioned hearth and an ivory-inlaid oaken endtable on which lay a rare, green, leatherback edition of Thomas Hardy'sTwo on a Tower.

She cackled. He was grateful the windows behind his curtains sat snug in their frames.

He threw another log on the flames, lit two candles in their sconces on the wall, turned on a dim blue light, which dispensed its glow from a corner of the ceiling.

He walked over to the bathroom area—a vast ceramic clawfoot tub with sapphire trim under a an ornate gold shower rig in the wall—and began to run a bath.

Clumsily unlayering herself, an Aphroditic onion, "I get it," she said, "you want me to get in bed with you and you want to make sure I'm—"

"There's some mouthwash and toothpaste above the sink, also a new toothbrush. Start there."

For a few moments he heard nothing behind him and stood and turned at last to see her topless, with one wrist bent back and resting on her hip; wearing only a long, muddy-yellow woolen scarf and filthy sweatpants which he was sure were no longer the color they'd started out being. Her breasts were large, but not overly large, the size of each areola in proportion to each breast as ideal as anything can be which will always, in order to remain beautiful, elude mathematics. Her nipples, well warmed, were shy nubs that promised, even muffled, wonders of distension and flavor. Catching his eyes on her breasts, she pulled the scarf over them, each side, in a gesture that was odd, to say the least.

"Can I ask you something personal," she said, as if to deflect attention from her own quick modesty.

With vehement humility, "I already told you my dick's not very large," he said, as if, now that she knew that, she'd have to die, "how much more personal—"

"That's not personal. All you gotta do to tell me that is get naked and let the big-guy show me how much he wants me all on his own. Personal's when you talk. And men—well—men never talk, do they?"

As if in illustration of this, he shrugged, with a taut smile, becoming a little uncomfortable with her for the first time since he'd made contact; something, he suddenly realized, which was new, certainly, to these encounters, and more startling to him now, since she was partly naked and he was clothed, she the baglady and he the well-off guy with the skidsy-chic pad. Yet unwilling to let her have the last word on it, "Granted," he finally said, "but some of us at least paint," turning back to re-immerse his hand in the slow-warming water filling the tub. "Go wash out your mouth."

"Maybe I don't kiss," she said, speaking above the torpid susurrus of water.

"And maybe I'd just like to sample," he turned and spoke to her over his shoulder, eyes averted, "those sensational oral skills that other guy trained you for."

"That so, dearie?"

He first heard and then smelled her get totally naked, looking up from the water only when he saw her wide naked ass hovering by the sink, glowing like wet chocolate in the fierce baptismal steam he was stirring up. There were other elements of hygiene she'd have to take care of, at least preliminarily, on her own, for which he always kept one of those flowery bottles, freshly shorn of its box, by the sink, on a wooden pedestal, with a clean towel folded up near it.

They always came from somewhere. This wasn't India where girls were literally born on the streets. Maria, like all the others, had grown up with the amenities, had known the norm and fallen from it, either because of some heartless man, whose wondrous phallus was merely incidental to the tragedy, or, quite possibly, if you believed her charming tale, because of the sphingid mysteries of Cytherea Grove.

"Front and back," he called out to her.

"The backdoor's not open, either," she yelled.

"Don't worry," he said, surprised, again, for the first time, at how little the preambulary crudeness of this, while he didn't exactly get off on it, repulsed him. What, he wondered, did men and women do before the basics had involved such elaborate measures of hygiene for both sexes? Had men always been more idealistic that way and had their calamitous visions, in a kind of numbing and verbless despair too great for their lexicons, eventually precipitated rape; it being impossible, when faced with some ancient, savage female's unwashed and natural womanhood, to write her a sonnet?

No, he decided, feeling a twinge of that despair himself, there could be no linguistic system that effectively exceeded nature, and so the real men were the bums who fell in love with the unvarnished vaginas of the street.