Russell Andrews - Icarus

He began exploring the apartment. Her books were books. No Danielle Steel or John Gray for this dancer. She had a lot of Freud and Jung and various writers' studies and analyses of both. He was amazed at what she had on her shelves and he wondered if she'd read it all. There were several rows filled with English novels: Swift and Defoe and Jane Austen and the Brontes. She had all of D. H. Lawrence and John Fowles, two copies of The Magus. There were a lot of contemporary novels Jack had never heard of and a lot of female writers he had heard of but had never read: Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, Eudora Welty, Kaye Gibbons. There was a well-worn paperback of Cold Mountain. Balancing those were a lot of thrillers, some by women, Patricia Cornwell and Sara Paretsky, but mostly by men: Parker and Connelly and Bloch. She seemed to be fairly compulsive. If she read someone, she read all of someone.

He peeked into her bedroom. It was totally different from the rest of the apartment. While the entryway and living room were impeccably decorated, fairly sparse and subdued, her room looked as if it belonged to a little girl. It was all fluff and lace and there were stuffed animals everywhere. The colors were bright – yellows and pinks – and didn't go at all with the colors in the other rooms. On her unmade bed he noticed that there was a rumpled pair of pajamas, lying there as if she'd kicked them off when she awoke and left them where they fell. They did not look like the sleep-wear of a hardened lap dancer. They looked like they were last worn by a twelve-year-old.

The second bedroom, quite small, space for just a twin bed and a desk and chair, was more like the rest of the apartment. Conservative. Adult. He noticed that there were stacks of books in this room, too.

The water was still running – she'd been in there for a long time now, close to fifteen minutes. He went into the kitchen, where there wasn't much to see. Her refrigerator had a few bottles of white wine, a jar of peanut butter, half a roasted chicken that she'd bought already cooked, and not much else. It did not look like she spent much time in the kitchen.

It was another five minutes before the shower stopped. And it was five minutes after that before she emerged. One long white towel was wrapped around her body, long enough to go from her chest to just above her knees. Another, smaller towel was wrapped, turban style, around the top of her head.

"I'm sorry I took so long," she said. "I just have to get that place off of me as soon as I get home. I'm compulsive about it and I'm sure there are fairly obvious psychological reasons for it, but I don't really care. I stay in there and just scald myself until the hot water starts to go. Sometimes if I take a bath, I can stay in there two or three hours. Now, I'll be with you in a minute. Really and truly a minute."

This time she was as good as her word. When she came out of her bedroom, she was wearing a black lightweight skirt and a black T-shirt. No shoes or socks. Her hair was brushed but still wet. He thought she looked exquisite. Very young and very fresh and very, very desirable.

"I know what you're thinking," she said as they sat in the living room sipping the white wine she'd brought out. And for a moment he felt guilty. But then she finished: "My apartment surprised you."

"A little."

"Well, most of the girls at the club really are what you think they are. Most of them are fairly shallow and not all that bright. They all tell you that they don't do drugs and that they don't sleep with the customers for money. But most of them do. Or if they don't yet, they will."

"But not you."

"For most of them, this is it. This is their career. They'll make a bunch of money and hopefully they'll meet a guy and then they'll quit. Or else they'll keep doing this until they're way too old. For me this is a means to an end."

"What's the end?"

"Money. Other than that I'm not so sure. I thought actress for a while. But I'm starting to think I don't have what it takes. But that's all right. I'm in school now. Hofstra. Psych major. I graduate in one year."

"So you're twenty-one?"

"Twenty."

"How old were you when you started dancing?"

"Sixteen. But I looked eighteen and they didn't check. Now I'm twenty and I look sixteen and everybody checks."

"Doesn't it worry you?" he asked, surprised that he wanted to talk about her personal life. "That you might start doing what the other girls do?"

"Sure," she said. "I'd be dumb not to worry about it. I can feel it happening, too. It's weird, but what can you do? I try to keep some perspective but it's hard."

"I can imagine."

"Can you?"

"No," he said. "Maybe not."

"You mind if I make myself a sandwich? I'm starving." She jumped up, disappeared back into the kitchen, and returned a minute later with a peanut butter and jelly sandwich on a small plate. "You want one?" she asked. "Sorry, I didn't mean to be rude."

"No. Go ahead."

He watched her eat and he could see his list, the list he'd made about Kid, in a vision right in front of his eyes. The Entertainer, it said. Eats with her mouth open. And there she was, chewing away, that lopsided mouth open just a crack too much while she ate.

"A few weeks ago, I was at a party," she said when she was two thirds of the way through her sandwich. "A real party. Kids. College friends. None of them has any idea what I do."

"None of them?"

"Nope," she said. "It's not the kind of thing you can just drop into a conversation. Anyway, it was very weird. I was having a perfectly good time. It was a little dull, you know, like they thought smoking dope and drinking was as cool as it gets, but it was fine. And a couple of the guys were really hitting on me. Talking to me, trying to get me to go out with them; one of them invited me to see Beck at the Meadowlands. And that night I got a little scared because the whole time they were talking to me I kept thinking, this isn't right, they should be paying me to talk to them. I get twenty bucks every five or ten minutes, minimum, just to talk. That's weird, huh, that I thought that?"

"Not so weird," he said. "But you're right. Scary."

"I'll tell you something else weird. Last year my mother had a stroke."

"I'm sorry."

"Well, it wasn't so terrible. I mean, it was a stroke but she was okay. She needed some rehab, though, really could have used a private nurse or something to help her, but she couldn't afford it. Well, I could afford it. Easy. Only I couldn't give her the money 'cause she doesn't know what I do, either. She thinks I'm a waitress, and how the hell would a college-girl waitress have an extra ten thousand dollars for a private nurse?"

"So what'd you do?"

"Nothing. I kept quiet. Let her fend for herself. And before you say, 'Oh, that's so sad,' and 'Why do you do it?' it really isn't so sad. My mom's a lunatic and a serious bitch, and I do it because I'm twenty years old and I can afford to rent this apartment and I've got over seventy-five thousand dollars in mutual funds and in five years I think I'll have ten times that." She finished the sandwich now, chomping down on the last sticky corner. "You can read the rest in my autobiography. Which I'm going to write one of these days. What do you want to know about Kid?"

She had brought him back around to the reason he was here and suddenly he wasn't all that sure what he wanted to know. It was distracting, listening to her chatter away. He was tired. And now one of her bare legs was curled up under the other and he could barely turn away from looking at it.

"Just tell me about him," he said, trying to focus. "I thought I knew him like he was my own son. Now I'm not so sure."

"He could be a real son of a bitch sometimes. Did you know that?"

"I never really experienced it. But I suppose I could see it in him."