David Handler: The Cold Blue Blood

He called himself Stan, although Torry was pretty sure that Stan wasn’t his real name. There was something about the way it seemed to catch in his throat the first time he said it. Plus he was real nervous. His eyes kept flicking around the bar as if he were afraid someone might recognize him.

Not that he seemed like the kind of guy who ever hung out with the kind of guys who hung out at the Purple Pup.

Stan wasn’t fat. Stan wasn’t loud. Stan didn’t reek of bad cologne. He was classy and soft-spoken. He said “thank you” when Torry brought him his draft beer-Beck’s, which was a dollar more than Miller. And pretty good-looking for an older guy, too. Tall and trimly built, with nice Ralph Lauren clothes. Torry, who was not good with ages, figured he was somewhere around fifty. And a real curiosity. Because she didn’t see his type around the Pup too often. Hardly at all, actually. Stan’s type belonged in a country club in Farmington.

The Purple Pup was a scruffy roadhouse next to Kwik Lube on Highway 66-just west of Middletown on the way to Meriden. Middletown was known for Wesleyan University and for the big mental hospital that was there, Connecticut Valley Hospital. Meriden wasn’t known for anything except the inadequacy of its storm drains. Residents of the neighboring towns knew to steer clear of Meriden whenever more than a quarter-inch of rain fell. As a consequence, Meriden was not considered a good place to own and operate a small business. Still, the Purple Pup managed to do well on the weekends when the weather was good. It was very popular with the bikers-the middle-aged firemen and postal workers who liked to toodle around in the sunshine on their vintage Harleys. It was a thing they all did, like playing golf or going bowling. They’d pull in by the dozens, drink and laugh and listen to oldies on the jukebox. It was fun when the bikers came, and Torry could make fifty bucks a shift in tips. She was a big, meaty woman, large through the breasts and hips. Not fashion magazine material-but she went over well with the Purple Pup crowd.

Torry had been slinging drinks there for almost two years. For the past year, she had been a blonde.

When it was cold and rainy, the Pup was deserted. Particularly on weeknights. A few young guys who worked odd jobs and still lived with their folks would hang there, nursing a couple of beers and watching the games on the dish. Lousy tippers, to a man. And their advances toward her were crude and smirky. Not to mention unsuccessful. Curt, who owned the place and tended bar, barely broke even on such nights.

That was the kind of night it was when Stan first came in. It had been raining, a cold March rain. The parking lot out front was under four inches of water.

He drank two Beck’s, seated there by himself in the shadows at a small corner table. When she asked him if he would like another one he asked her if she would like to go for a drive someplace after work. She said, “Where?” He said, “We’ll find someplace nice.” She said, “Why not?” Someplace nice turned out to be Wadsworth Falls, where they made out in the front seat of his mud-splattered Range Rover and listened to the rain beat down. Stan was a total gentleman. He even asked Torry for her permission before he unhooked her bra, marveling over the size and beauty of her breasts as he tongued them gently. He treated her like she was a prized figurine. She did not even have to ask him to use a condom. He was prepared. He was solicitous. He was as gentle as a lamb.

Afterward, he asked Torry how she made ends meet.

“I do what I have to do,” she replied matter-of-factly.

“And how does that work?”

“Not real well.” Not that she was complaining. Or had her hand out.

Still, when he dropped her off back at her car, Stan slipped her fifty dollars. And asked her when he could see her again.

“Whenever you’d like, Stan.”

Torry was not a hooker. She was simply someone who did what she had to do in order to get by in life. And there was no crime or shame in that. She was making it on her own. She wasn’t on welfare-even though she was a twenty-three-year-old single mother who had no high school diploma and got no child support from Stevie’s father, Tyrone, who was still in jail in North Carolina for armed robbery. She hadn’t seen Tyrone in four years and did not expect she ever would again. In spite of this, her parents had refused to have anything to do with her since she became pregnant with Stevie. They could not deal with Tyrone being black.

Torry worked thirty hours a week at an Ames discount store in Waterbury for not much more than minimum wage, although she did get a 20 percent discount on toys. Evenings and weekends she worked at the Pup. She and Stevie lived on Meriden Road in a twelve-unit apartment court with fake brick facing. Stevie got the bedroom. She slept on a convertible sofa in the living room. The walls were paper thin. She could hear everybody else’s toilets flushing and phones ringing. She could hear their love moans and their sneezes. She could hear the trucks rolling by at night as she lay there, her feet throbbing from so many hours on the job. It wasn’t much. But it was theirs.

Stevie was a sturdy, clear-eyed boy of five. Her true love, her best friend, her everything. She hated that she had to be away from him so much. Luckily, her next-door neighbor, a widow named Laura, was home watching TV virtually day and night and was happy to baby-sit for her. Laura would accept no payment for this. As thanks, Torry would bring her a bottle of good bourbon every week from the Pup’s back room. Curt would let Torry take this bourbon in the belief that he would one day soon be collecting a blow job from her in that same back room. Of which there was zero chance. But this was how much of Torry’s life worked. The invisible economy that kept her afloat. She had no health insurance. No retirement plan. A total beater of an Isuzu that needed new brakes. And no man to take care of her. Curt wanted a piece of her. So did Wade, her assistant manager at Ames. But she was not about to give herself up without getting something in return. Sex, in her opinion, was a transaction. Marriage was a transaction.

Life was a transaction.

So when a man like Stan came along, Torry went along. He was her third such steady gentleman. She never allowed herself to be involved with more than one of them at a time. And she never gave them more than two evenings a week. Al, who was a member of the state legislature from Waterbury, had been her first. He liked to come over to the apartment to watch adult movies on the VCR and frolic with her in the sofa bed. He was overweight and homely, but he filled her freezer with steaks, her closet with clothes and shoes. He even bought her a new sofa bed-her old one was giving him back trouble. Al had lasted for about six months. Right up until his wife found out and threatened to divorce him. After Al there was Dominick, who was an executive with Jolly Rubbish in Middletown. Dominick drove a flashy vintage Corvette and liked to drive her in it to the big Mohegan Sun Casino on the Indian reservation in Uncasville, where they would check into the hotel and order bottle upon bottle of champagne from room service. He would pour it over Torry’s bare feet and lick it off of her toes. Dominick had a thing for her toes. Afterward, he would give her a stack of chips to gamble with, most of which she would quietly cash in and pocket. The thing with Dominick lasted for three months. He just stopped calling her.

When Stan came along, there was no one. She started seeing him two evenings a week. He gave her fifty dollars in cash after every evening. He never asked to spend the night with her. Which was how she knew for certain that he, too, was married. Not that she’d ever doubted it. Or cared. Four hundred a month tax-free was damned good money for pleasant part-time employment. It meant she could think about getting health insurance for Stevie.