Leopoldine Core: When Watched: Stories

Leopoldine Corewas born and raised in New York’s East Village and graduated from Hunter College. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Joyland, Open City, PEN America , and Apology magazine, among others. She is the recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for fiction, as well as fellowships from the Center for Fiction and the Fine Arts Work Center. Author of the poetry collection Veronica Bench , Core lives in New York.

Lucy and Kit sat waiting side by side on a black leather couch, before a long glass window that looked out over Tribeca, the winter sun in their laps. Kit stole sideward glances at Lucy, who hummed, twisting her hair around her fingers in a compulsive fashion. Her hair was long and lion-like with a slight wave to it, gold with yellowy shades around her face. Kit couldn’t look at her for very long. She cringed and recoiled, as if faced with a bright light. Lucy was too radiant.

A low glass table stood before them. Fake potted plants flanked the sofa, their waxy leaves coated with dust. Lucy crossed and uncrossed her legs. Her eyes were quick and green, flitting about the room like birds. She wore a blue mini-dress with a white collar and peep-toe black heels. On her lap sat a chestnut leather purse with a brassy curved handle. Lucy was both plump and long limbed. “A tall cherub,” she had once said of herself with a laugh of self-hate. She mocked herself constantly, but with a certain joy. Her joy had a tough edge to it and seemed wonderfully defiant considering the pleasureless nature of their business. Kit was captivated by her. It seemed magical and impossible that one could laugh so heartily while waiting to be handled by a perfect stranger.

At the far end of the room, Sheila sat at a steel desk, staring at the bright page of a catalog, poised with her red pen. She booked all of their appointments sulkily, sighing whenever the phone rang. Kit and Lucy considered her a bitch, though she rarely said a thing. “She does it all with her eyes,” Kit had quietly remarked. They spent much of their time on the black couch talking shit about Sheila, leaning near one another and giggling conspiratorially.

Lucy removed a gold-tone compact from her purse and clicked it open. She patted powder onto her chin and gave her mouth a glance. It was pale pink and without lipstick, open slightly, her teeth and tongue peeking through. When her client arrived, she ate a green Tic Tac, biting down on it. He was a short, swarthy guy with a newspaper under his arm.

Lucy rose and clacked across the room with the steady grin of an assassin. It was her third appointment that day but she was an enduring faker, tossing her hair and sucking in her stomach. The man twinkled as he handed Sheila a white envelope full of money, which she counted and placed in a small drawer, then led them to their room with a crabby smile, one hand extended.

Once she was alone, Kit raised her butt off the sofa and pulled her stockings up. Sheila returned to her desk and groaned. She circled something in her catalog and Kit’s client called to say he would be fifteen minutes late.

“But he’s already fifteen minutes late,” Kit said.

“Well,” Sheila said, without looking at her, “there was some sort of emergency. I told him you would wait.”

“Yeah, I remember that.”

Kit walked to the bathroom. The walls were gray with one frosted window and a big beige air freshener that hissed vanilla perfume every ten minutes. She yanked the window open and a great wind came into the room. Snow rushed onto the black tile floor. Kit lit a half-smoked joint from her purse. She kept several on hand at all times in a battered Altoid tin.

She took a squinty suck and held the smoke in, liking the long burn, then leaned her head into the wind and exhaled, snow pricking her face. She peered down at the neon white streets below, car tops mounting quietly with snow. Kit shivered. She took another long toke and thought of the miserable year she’d spent at Bennington, where she had barely attended class, watching snow fall from her dorm window. She had been bored there. All anyone wanted to do was get plastered and sleep around. It was a lot like being a prostitute, she thought, only she had never gotten paid.

Kit took another tug of smoke. She stubbed the joint lightly in the tin and licked her index finger, daubing the orange ember. With one hand, she pushed on the window until it clapped shut, then walked to the oval mirror. Kit stared at herself like a doctor who — right away — sees something very wrong. She wore a sleeveless black dress that she had bought in high school for her aunt’s funeral. Her body hadn’t changed much since then. She still had narrow legs and a lean, gloomy face, half-moon shadows under her eyes. There was a pubescent look about her, a Peter Pan shapelessness. She flickered between boy and girl.

Kit returned to the black couch, reeking of pot, and began eating a flattened corn muffin from her purse. Sheila shot her a look of amazement and Kit glared back at her. She took another bite of the greasy yellow muffin and a man walked in. He removed his collared black coat and looked pensively about the room, tugging off his leather gloves. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Ned.”

Kit smiled, her mouth packed.

He stared at her and she tensed with embarrassment, knowing that he was comparing her face to the one he had seen on the Internet, a photo in which she sat posed on the arm of a beige sofa with the stricken look of a woodland creature in captivity. Kit hated to have her photo taken. The fact of one moment being yanked from all the other moments scared her. It was the same fear when people stared at her, much as Ned was doing. Her fear looked fresh and clearly he found this attractive. She seemed unaccustomed to it — unable to hide it — which suggested that she had not been a prostitute for very long.

To Kit, Ned looked a little desperate. Like someone on Judge Judy , fighting for old furniture. She watched as he counted out ten twenties on Sheila’s desktop, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Sheila led them to a square bedroom with scuffed white walls and brown carpeting. Once she’d shut the door, Ned removed his suit jacket and the two sat on the edge of the bed.

“What was your name? Tammy?”

“It’s Tonya,” she said, crossing her legs. “So what are you into?”

“I’m not going to touch you.” Ned pressed his temples. “But I’d like you to get undressed.”

Kit nodded absently. Her eyes were bloodshot and her thoughts floated somewhere near the ceiling. Ned leaned his face toward her neck, as if about to plant a kiss there, but instead took a sniff.

“Your hair smells like pot,” he said. “And like that big piece of cake you were eating.”

Kit turned in alarm. “It was a corn muffin.”

He smiled oddly. “You should be careful, eating all the muffins you want. You’ll get fat.”

“No I won’t,” she frowned. “Not if I tried. No one in my family is fat.” It was absolutely true. They were a bunch of beanpoles with long feet and sunken faces. Ugly, Kit thought. But uglier was his smile and his warning. His wish for her not to eat. For her to remain locked in a single state of attractiveness, like a woman in a painting, with no body fat or smells, nothing to say.

Kit could smell Ned too. Strong cologne with the scent of his underarms screaming behind it, a bright, beer-like tang. She tried to imagine the women who loved his smell. A wife. Daughters. Possibly girlfriends. These women were lurking in the private lives of even the ugliest men she saw. Ned was neither ugly nor handsome. He had the sort of face that there had to be hundreds of. A pale white oval with a slight shine. Small eyes and a largish nose.