Mark Fishman - No. 22 Pleasure City

He looked up but kept a cool and self-confident expression on his face. “Go on,” he said professionally.

“Have a heart,” she pleaded. “Don’t you feel anything like love for me?”

It was his turn to get upset because he didn’t like being on the wrong end of an interrogation which is exactly how he felt now that she’d asked him this question. Instead of arguing with her, he shut the notebook, lit a cigarette and took a long stiff drag at it and took his time letting the smoke out.

“Okay, you don’t want to talk about it. Maybe not now, but later. I can wait,” she said.

Fitch watched her try to find a comfortable position. He finished the cigarette, put it out under the running faucet, turned off the faucet, tossed the butt into the wastebasket and picked up the notebook but didn’t open it.

“This deal tonight isn’t something new for you,” he said. “For years and years you’ve been dragging yourself down into a kind of swamp thinking you’re in love or just fucking somebody because it took your mind off what you really wanted which was something you thought you couldn’t have and didn’t deserve and it was too painful knowing it, and believing it was true, so you kept on with what you’ve been doing all your adult life. And now you think you love me because I’m listening to everything you say without making a judgment, that love’s the answer when it isn’t the answer because when the answer comes it won’t come from the outside or somebody else.”

“How am I supposed to know when it’s really love?”

“You aren’t listening,” he said impatiently, tapping the pen on his knee.

“I’m trying to figure it out.”

“I’m no therapist.”

“Go on.”

“For you, here with me, it’s a shift of the emotions you had when you were a kid, the transfer of feelings about a parent to an analyst, me, and it happens in all kinds of nickel and dime therapies and maybe in a way between so-called normal couples or even close friends, but it isn’t love. And because that isn’t love, this isn’t love. Do you follow me?”

“So, what do you suggest?”

“You won’t know love until it’s really love.”

“That’s a load of shit!”

“Call it what you like,” Fitch said, opening the notebook. “I don’t give a damn whether you buy it or not. It’s just the way I see it.”

He was trying every possible way of manipulating her present state of mind to the point of making her more frustrated in the hope that she’d find her own way out of it. As far as Fitch was concerned therapists were crazy. Finally, he’d be glad to get out of it himself and he saw the advantage of having got caught by Shimura. Still there was more work to do and he thought of the twenty-four hours Aoyama had given him.

“Put the blindfold back on and leave me alone,” Angela said.

“We aren’t finished yet.”

“We are as far as I’m concerned.”

Fitch was trying not to look at her. But Angela’s sea-blue eyes were doing something now, operating like tiny fishhooks, and Fitch went on trying to turn his head and couldn’t turn his head. He sat there staring, waiting.

Angela was looking up at him, and she looked at him for a moment that had depth and weight, as if it were something she held in her hand.

He heard Angela saying: “Maybe you’re right, maybe there still are a lot of things to talk about and you were just trying to give me a healthy push in the right direction because my mind needs clearing and that’s what I’ve asked you to do for me and it’s why we’re here. Is that it?”

“Now that sounds like a load of shit.”

“Answer me.”

He didn’t want to explain anything to her, it wasn’t part of the setup, but he heard himself saying: “Yes, okay. Something like that.”

“I figured as much.” Angela smiled at him, content with herself.

Fitch excused himself for a minute, got up and went to the kitchen for a bottle of cold water from a small refrigerator he’d installed beneath the kitchen sink. He picked up a spare glass from the countertop.

Back in the bathroom, he poured out two glasses, held one to her lips, then set it on the floor beside her. He swallowed a couple of mouthfuls from his glass of water, sat down on the lowered toilet seat and took up his pen and notebook.

“Let’s begin,” he said.

She started talking, looking at the floor, ceiling and walls.

He thought of the arrangement they’d made and the money that was part of it although it counted less to him now than at the start, and he figured he might have to extend the twenty-four hours he was given by Aoyama because she had more progress to make and it would take as much time as it took for her to get where she had to go by the time the sessions came to an end.

Shimura was surprised when he’d learned that the plump young girl named Gracie was in fact Stanky’s daughter and that he’d wanted to fuck her and couldn’t get the picture out of his mind of her spread buttocks, and he didn’t feel any shame because of it. It wasn’t written on his face so Stanky could see it, and so he figured that what really bothered him was the lack of guilt he felt and how it made him close to and hardly different from the inhabitants of the city chasing pleasure without a conscience.

He scratched his chin, thinking. He was turning out to be just like them. He’d fought with himself and lost on the subject of fidelity while his girlfriend flew east and west, and even though he hadn’t followed through with it infidelity jumped around in his head like a nervous rat.

He unlocked the door of his apartment, went in. His mind was a bit foggy. He felt the unusually potent stimulation he’d got from looking at Gracie, but didn’t want to get rid of the feeling by masturbating a second time. This personal question of self-gratification was something he’d have to figure out without talking to Rand Hadley. The bigger question of how the same subject affected the city was something else. It was late enough to get into bed and read a book but that didn’t interest him either and so he went to the kitchen to make himself a cup of tea.

The phone rang as he poured boiling water into a cup with a teabag dangling in it. He picked up the receiver with one hand while he raised and lowered the teabag with the other. It was Tomiko calling him from the hotel flight attendants stayed in on their layover, and Shimura was immediately drawn away from the obsession with Gracie and his hard cock moved logically toward Tomiko even though she was far away.

Maybe there was something they could do about it since the phone was made for conversation and conversation could be whatever two people wanted to talk about and right now he wanted more than anything to talk about sex and it wasn’t the first time they’d done it over the phone on account of her traveling. Shimura’s mouth formed itself into a big grin that seemed to come from way back in his throat and it was made of pure satisfaction.

Violet found the bar without much trouble, remembering it was opposite the place she’d gone to with Burnett before he’d tried to burn her with a cigarette for a second time at the intersection of Winthrop and Front Street. She remembered it even though she’d had a lot to drink that night, first with him, then with Pohl after he’d settled her account with Burnett by beating him up.

She wanted Pohl to be there so that she could size him up under better circumstances than the first night she’d met him because tonight she hadn’t swallowed a drop of vodka.

She made her usual entrance with her narrow hips swinging just enough to draw attention from the customers who had the habit of watching the door open and close as drinkers came and went. The hem of her lightweight charcoal-gray skirt was well above her knees and she wore a matching jacket over a deep-blue silk shirt. The heels she wore accentuated her bare legs and the muscles of her calves.