Ruth began her story. “Suppose a man and a woman came to you and offered to pay you to allow them to watch you with a customer? Would you do that? Have you ever done that?”
“So that’s what you want,” Rooie said. “Why didn’t you say so? Sure I can do that—of course I’ve done that. Why didn’t you bring your boyfriend?”
“No, no—I’m not here with a boyfriend,” Ruth replied. “ I don’t want to watch you with a customer—I can imagine that. I just want to know how you arrange it, and how common or uncommon it is. I mean, how often are you asked by couples ? I would think that men, alone, would ask you more frequently than couples. And that women, alone, were . . . well, rare.”
“That’s true,” Rooie answered. “Mostly it’s men, alone. Some couples, maybe once or twice a year.”
“And women alone?”
“I can do that, if that’s what you want,” Rooie said. “I do that from time to time, but not often. Most men don’t mind if another woman watches. It’s the women who are watching who don’t want to be seen.”
It was so warm and airless in the room, Ruth longed to take her leather jacket off. But, in present company, it would be too brazen of her to be wearing just her black silk T-shirt. Therefore, she unzipped her jacket but kept it on.
Rooie walked over to the wardrobe closet. There was no door. A chintz curtain—in a pattern of fallen autumn leaves, mostly red— hung from a wooden dowel. When Rooie closed the curtain, it concealed the contents of the closet—except for the shoes, which she turned around so that their toes were pointed out. There were a halfdozen pairs of high-heeled shoes.
“You would just stand behind the curtain with the toes of your shoes pointed out, like the other shoes,” Rooie said. She stepped through the part in the curtain and concealed herself. When Ruth looked at Rooie’s feet, she could hardly tell the shoes that Rooie was wearing from the other shoes; Ruth needed to be looking for Rooie’s ankles in order to see them.
“I see,” Ruth said. She wanted to stand in the wardrobe closet to see what her view of the bed would be; through the narrow part in the curtain, it might be difficult to see the bed.
It was as if the prostitute had read her mind. Rooie stepped out from behind the curtain. “Here, you try it,” the redhead said.
Ruth could not avoid brushing against the prostitute when she slipped through the parted curtain. The entire room was so small that it was next to impossible for two people to move in it without touching.
Ruth fit her feet between two pairs of shoes. Through the narrow slit where the curtain was parted, she had a clear view of the pink towel centered on the prostitute’s bed. In an opposing mirror, Ruth could also see the wardrobe closet; she had to look closely to recognize her own shoes among the shoes below the bottom hem of the curtain. Ruth could not see herself through the curtain—not even her own eyes, peering through the slit. Not even a portion of her face, unless she moved, and even then she could detect only some undefined movement.
Without moving her head, just her eyes, Ruth could take in the sink and bidet; the dildo in the hospital tray (together with the lubricants and jellies) was clearly visible. But Ruth’s view of the blow-job chair was blocked by one armrest and the back of the chair itself.
“If the guy wants a blow job and someone’s watching, I can give him a blow job on the bed,” Rooie said. “If that’s what you’re thinking . . .”
Ruth hadn’t been in the wardrobe closet for more than a minute; she’d not yet noticed that her breathing was irregular, or that her contact with the gold-colored dress on the nearest hanger had made her neck begin to itch. She was aware of a slight discomfort in her throat when she swallowed—the last vestiges of her cough, she thought, or the coming of a cold. When a pearl-gray negligee slipped off a hanger, it was as if her heart had stopped and she had died where she always imagined she would: in a closet.
“If you’re comfortable in there,” Rooie said, “I’ll open the window curtains and sit in the window. But this time of day it might take a while to get a guy to come in—maybe half an hour, maybe as much as forty-five minutes. Of course, you’ll have to pay me another seventyfive guilders. This has already taken a lot of my time.”
Ruth stumbled on the shoes as she rushed out of the wardrobe closet. “No! I don’t want to watch!” the novelist cried. “I’m just writing a story ! It’s about a couple . The woman is my age. Her boyfriend talks her into it—she’s got a bad boyfriend.”
Ruth saw, with embarrassment, that she’d kicked one of the prostitute’s shoes halfway across the room. Rooie retrieved the shoe; then she knelt at her wardrobe closet, straightening up the other shoes. She returned them all to the usual, toes-in position—including the shoe that Ruth had kicked.
“You’re a weird one,” the prostitute said. They stood awkwardly beside the wardrobe closet, as if they were admiring the newly arranged shoes. “And your five minutes are up,” Rooie added, pointing to her pretty gold watch.
Ruth again unzipped her purse. She took three twenty-five-guilder bills out of her wallet, but Rooie was standing close enough to look inside Ruth’s billfold for herself. The prostitute deftly picked out a fifty-guilder bill. “Fifty is enough—for five more minutes,” the redhead said. “Save your small bills,” she advised Ruth. “You might want to come back . . . after you think about it.”
So quickly that Ruth didn’t anticipate it, Rooie pressed closer to Ruth and nuzzled Ruth’s neck; before Ruth could react, the prostitute lightly cupped one of Ruth’s breasts as she turned away and again seated herself dead-center on the towel protecting her bed. “Nice perfume, but I can hardly smell it,” Rooie remarked. “Nice breasts. Big ones.”
Blushing, Ruth tried to lower herself into the blow-job chair without letting the chair claim her. “In my story . . .” the novelist started to say.
“The trouble with your story is that nothing happens,” Rooie said. “So the couple pays me to watch me do it. So what? It wouldn’t be the first time. So what happens then ? Isn’t that the story?”
“I’m not sure what happens then, but that is the story,” Ruth answered. “The woman with the bad boyfriend is humiliated. She feels degraded by the experience—not because of what she sees, but because of the boyfriend. It’s the way he makes her feel that humiliates her.”
“That wouldn’t be the first time, either,” the prostitute told her.
“Maybe the man masturbates while he’s watching,” Ruth suggested. Rooie knew it was a question.
“It wouldn’t be the first time,” the prostitute repeated. “Why would the woman be surprised at that?”
Rooie was right. And there was another problem: Ruth didn’t know everything that could happen in the story because she didn’t know enough about who the characters were and what their relationship was. It wasn’t the first time that she’d made such a discovery about a novel she was beginning; it was just the first time that she’d made the discovery in front of another person—not to mention a stranger and a prostitute.
“Do you know what usually happens?” Rooie asked.