Эйми Бендер - The Color Master

Daniel went to work at the shoe company in the morning, suit plus vest, and Janet slept in, as usual. Her afternoons were wide open. Today, after she had wrested all the hot water out of the shower, she went straight to a lingerie shop to buy a black bustier. She remained in the dressing room for over twenty minutes, staring at her torso shoveled into the satin.

“So, Janet,” called the saleslady, Tina, younger and suppler, “is it lovely? Does it fit?”

Janet pulled her sweater on and went up to the counter.

“It fit,” she said, “and I’m wearing it home. How much?”

Tina, now at the cash register, snapped a garter belt between her fingers. “I need the little tag,” she said. “This isn’t like a shoe store.”

Janet inhaled to full height, had some trouble breathing out because her ribs were smashed together, and said, sharply: “Give me the price, Tina. I will not remove this piece of clothing now that it’s on, so I either pay for it this way or walk out the door with it on for free.”

When she left the store, emboldened, receipt tucked into her purse, folded twice, Janet thought of all the chicken dishes she had not sent back even though they were either half-raw or not what she had ordered. Chicken Kiev instead of chicken Marsala, chicken with mushrooms instead of chicken à la king: her body was made up of the wrong chickens. She remembered Daniel’s first insistent kiss, by the bridge near the Greek café on that Saturday afternoon, and she hadn’t thought of it in years and she could almost smell the shawarma rotating on its pole outside. He had asked her out again, and again, and told her he loved her on the fourth date, and bought her fancy cards inside of which he wrote long messages about her smile.

By seven o’clock that night, all the shoes in Daniel’s shoe store were either sold or back in boxes, and clip-clop-clip came his own up the walkway. The sky was dimming from dark blue into black, and Janet sat in the warmly lit hallway, legs crossed, bustier pressing her breasts out like beach balls, the little hooks fastened one notch off in the back so that she seemed a bit crooked.

Daniel paused in the doorway with his briefcase. “Oh my,” he said, “what’s this?”

She felt her upper lip twitching. “Hello, Daniel,” she said. “Welcome home.”

She stood awkwardly and approached him. She tried to remember: Be slow. Don’t rush. When she had removed his coat and vest and laid them evenly on the floor, she reached into the back of his pants and pulled out his walnut-colored wallet. He watched, eyes huge, as she sifted through the bills until she found what she wanted. That smart Mr. Franklin.

He usually used the hundred-dollar bill to buy his best friend, Edward from business school, a lunch with fine wine on their sports day.

She waved it in his face.

“Okay?” she said.

He grabbed her waist as she tucked the bill inside the satin between her breasts.

“Janet?” he said.

She pushed him onto the carpet and began to take off the rest of his clothes. Halfway through the buttons on his shirt, right at his ribs, she was filled with an enormous terror and had to stop to catch her breath.

“For a week, Daniel,” she whispered, trembling. “Each time. Okay? Promise?”

His breathing was sharp and tight. “A week,” he said, adding figures fast in his head. “Of course, I would love a week, a week,” and his words floated into murmur as she drove her body into his.

They forgot about dinner. They stayed at that spot on the carpet for hours and then tumbled off to the bedroom, his coat and vest resting flat on the carpet. He stroked the curve of her neck with the light-brown mole. She fell asleep first.

On Wednesday, Janet heard Daniel call Edward and cancel their lunch date. “I’m just too busy this week,” he said. Janet smiled to herself in the bathtub. He brought her handfuls of daffodils. “My wife doesn’t love me,” he told her in bed, which made her laugh from the deep bottom of her throat. She put a flower between her teeth and danced for him, naked, singing too loud. He grabbed her and pushed her into chairs and she kept singing, as loud as she possibly could, straddling him, wiggling, until finally he clamped a hand over her mouth and she bit his palm and slapped his thighs until they flushed pink. When it was over she felt she’d shared something fearfully intimate with him and could barely look him in the eye, but he just handed her the hundred and went into the bathroom.

On their wedding day, Daniel had given her a card with a photograph of a beach on it. “You are my fantasy woman,” he’d written inside. “You come to me from my dreams.” It had annoyed her then, like a bug on her arm. I come to you from Michigan, she had told him. From 928 Washington Street. He’d laughed. “That’s what I love so much about you, Janet,” he’d said, whirling her onto the dance floor. “You’re no-nonsense,” he’d said. She’d spent the song trying furtively to imitate Edward’s wife, who danced like she had the instruments buzzing inside her hips.

By the end of the week, nine hundred dollars nestled in her underwear drawer. She put the bills on the ironing board and flattened them out, faces up, until they were so crisp they could be in a salad.

She’d thought about buying a dress. My whore dress! she’d thought. She considered sixty lipsticks. My hooker lips! she thought. Finally she just tucked the cash into her purse and took herself to lunch. Thirty dollars brought her to the best bistro in the area, where she had a hamburger and a glass of wine. The juice dripped down, red-brown, and left a stain on her wrist.

“Ah, fuck you,” she said to the homeless man on the street who asked for change. “You really think I can spare any of my NINE HUNDRED DOLLARS that I made by SELLING MY BODY?”

The man shook his head to the ground. “Sorry, ma’am,” he said. “I never would have guessed.”

“And don’t you God-bless me!” she yelled at the man from down the block.

“I will not,” he called back. “I have no interest in blessing you at all.”

Once she was home she couldn’t bear to sit down. She couldn’t move or answer the phone. Breathing felt like an enormous burden.

She took an hour getting dressed in a pressed slate-gray suit she’d never worn before but had bought because it was on sale and elegantly cut. The jacket had this slight flare. She swept her hair into a bun and clasped a pearl necklace from their fifth wedding anniversary around her throat. Daniel came home, and she served him rosemary lamb and chocolate-nut truffles, all bought at the gourmet food store with one hundred dollars of her money. Reinvest for greater profit later. She did not eat, but massaged his shoulders, and brought him coffee, and when he seemed calm and satisfied, she sat down with him at the table.

“You’re being so loving,” he said. “What a week we had, didn’t we?” He warmed his palms against the mug. “And you look great in that suit, Janet. Like one hot businesswoman.”

She set a piece of paper on the table. And then nodded, as if to signal herself to begin.

“I know it’s odd,” she said, with no introduction, “but for whatever reason, I can’t seem to summon up any desire right now to do it without payment.” Her voice was the same one from the lingerie store when she’d walked out with the bustier on. “I need a specific amount, each time,” she said, “or,” clearing her throat, “I feel I will melt into nothingness.” She adjusted the cuffs of her suit jacket so that the buttons lined up right with the gateway into her hand.

“What’s that paper?”

“Just for notes.”

“Are you going somewhere later?” he asked, sipping his coffee.