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HarperImpulse

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2018

Copyright © 2018 Seven Acres, LLC

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018

Cover photograph © Nina Masic / Trevillion Images

Carrie Blake asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008279479

Ebook Edition © May 2018 ISBN: 9780008279462

Version: 2018–03–16

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Prologue

Isabel

Isabel

Matthew

Isabel

Matthew

Isabel

Matthew

Isabel

Matthew

Isabel

Matthew

Isabel

Matthew

Isabel

Matthew

Isabel

Matthew

Isabel

Matthew

Isabel

Matthew

Isabel

Matthew

Isabel

Isabel

About the Author

About HarperImpulse

About the Publisher

Prologue

On the day he finally asked me, I knew. This was where everything had been leading, all along. I didn’t ask: What happens now? I didn’t ask: Why me? I didn’t ask: What will I have to do? I didn’t ask: How bad will I have to be? How evil?

I waited for him to speak.

He smiled at me across the table in the restaurant where he’d just shown me something that had changed everything. Something that put the last part of my life—or maybe my whole life so far and my immediate future—in an entirely new and different light.

He didn’t have to explain. He didn’t have to tell me what I’d just seen. He took my hand in his and gently stroked my palm. His hands were smooth and icy cold. As cold as the devil’s, I thought.

‘You’re perfect,’ was all he said. ‘Perfect.’

Isabel

It’s always a nasty shock to learn that what you believed was your deepest self, your inner core, was, all along, only your surface. It’s even more shocking to discover how fast that clean, pure surface can crack—and reveal the darkness and dirt beneath.

On the surface I was a nice girl; the girl you want to have coffee with after yoga class, the girl whose shoulder you cry on after your break-up, the girl you call to watch your kids when the babysitter cancels at the last minute.

My senior year in high school, they actually tested us for compassion—to see how much sympathy we had. Our principal’s wife taught in the college psych department, and everyone said that the test was part of her research. We knew that this was probably not approved by the Iowa Board of Education, but no one objected. If you refused to take the test, it meant you had no compassion. You weren’t a nice person. You failed.

The school guidance counselor, Mr Chambers, took us one by one into a side room off the gym, a windowless cubicle that reeked of disinfectant and old sneakers. He asked a lot of questions. I aced the test without trying. Would I risk my life to save someone? Sure. If I won the lottery, how much would I give to charity? Fifty percent. Did I usually assume that a person was telling the truth or lying? Mostly, telling the truth. It depended on who the person was.

Mr Chambers put his hand on my knee. Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. He stared into my eyes. His eyes were liquid and brimmed with fat tears under his dark bushy eyebrows.

I ignored his hand inching up my leg. I pretended not to notice.

I answered his questions truthfully. I said what I thought. I didn’t have to think. I didn’t mention the fact that, all through the test, his hand kept edging further up my leg. Did he think he was being encouraging and supportive? Affectionate and kind?

Finally, I slapped his hand away, like a pesky mosquito. He raised his hand, and shook it from side to side, as if he were waving goodbye to me. After a few minutes, he put his hand on my leg again. I wanted to say something, to yell at him, to scream. But I didn’t. I just sat there, answering his questions.

To be fair, he never got further than my lower thigh. And maybe that was the real compassion test, underneath the fake one. Question: Did I think Mr Chambers was a disgusting perv who should be locked up for the rest of his life, or did I think he was a sick man who needed help? Answer: I thought he was a disgusting perv who needed help.

My friends and I never talked about what happened in that cubicle, and I think I learned something from that, though I couldn’t have said what it was. At least not then. Not yet.

Later, after everything had happened, I thought back to that day. And I thought I knew what the lesson was: Be careful. Trust no one. You never know the secret reason behind what seems to be happening. When (and if) you find out, it’s usually more sinister than whatever you could have imagined.

I’d always taken people at their word. Once, I ate a giant spoonful of cayenne pepper because a mean girl told me it was cinnamon candy. I dove into a slimy pond that a cute boy told me was clear. Everyone laughed when I came up for air, slicked with algae and mud.

For years the joke was on me. But what saved me was that I always somehow knew what people were thinking and feeling. It wasn’t anything weird, like telepathy or ESP or anything like that. But it was a little like that. I looked at the person and I knew. I could feel what they felt.

It was strange, I could almost see into their hearts and minds. It was like a new window opening up on an electronic device, a tablet or a phone. There was me, and there was that other person in a corner of my consciousness.

I sat with the kid at the party who needed someone to talk to. I stuck up for the bullied. I comforted the kids with problems at home. I wasn’t afraid to do the right thing, though I didn’t always know what it was. Even the cool kids came to like me for it. I was like their conscience, so they didn’t need to have one. Doing the right thing was a service they paid me for, with their friendship.

I never told my super-nice high school boyfriend that our hot romance bored me. Why would I hurt his feelings, telling him how often I was thinking of something else—a movie I’d seen, what Mom was cooking for dinner?—when we had sex in his bedroom after school while his parents were off at work? I was always relieved when he made that funny little snorting noise after he came. It meant that the sex part was over, and I could lie with my head on his chest and think my own thoughts, which I actually sort of liked. I was good at playing the girl in love for the time being.

After we graduated high school he went off to Oberlin. I could have gone to Oberlin, too. I got into all of the schools I applied to. And yet, despite the objections and fears of my mother, who thought that New York was a dangerous and scary place, I was going to New York to be an actress. Theater was the only place I felt at home. But this didn’t fit in with the kind of girl I was supposed to be—the one who went away to college to study hard, and then went to grad school to study harder, until I became a lawyer or a psychologist or a director of marketing at some startup company. Thankfully, my mother had raised me to be an independent person, to believe in myself, to be strong and not to let anyone make decisions for me. My dad had been killed in a car wreck when I was four, and she’d supported us since then, without a man to help her. She was an inspiring example of how a woman could be her own person and follow her own lights. And now she had to stick by her own principles, even though she worried about me.

My boyfriend and I pretended to be really sad about the fact that circumstances beyond our control were separating us. I could tell that what he was feeling was mostly relief … and happiness that he was leaving town to start over somewhere else. Maybe he’d meet a girl who honestly thought that he was interesting and sexy. We broke up with a long lingering kiss and hug. We were Midwesterners. We were nice.

On the day I met The Customer, that niceness began to crumble. That do-the-right-thing conscience started to peel away, like the papery skin that flakes off after a sunburn, and you can’t stop picking at it because it hurts so much and it feels so good. When that clean, pure surface was burned away by sex and need and desire, I was left with my true self: all body, all skin, all touch, no soul, lustful, depraved, and corrupt.

Isabel

I’d always wanted to be an actress. It was where I could use my ability to see what other people were feeling, what other people were thinking and make a crowd of strangers see it, too. I could even make them feel it. It was like a superpower. There was no limit to what I could do in these pretend worlds. That should have raised a red flag; pretending is never too far from reality. But I saw no flags. I loved the feeling of not being me, of being someone else. I loved the attention. I loved making my whole school cry when I did Emily’s ‘Goodbye, World’ speech in Our Town, at the end of senior year.

By the time I was in high school, my mom had finished school (she’d put herself through college working as a waitress) and had a job she really liked as an administrative secretary in the English department at the college in our town. I could have even gone there for free. But I needed to leave. I loved the small Iowa town where, it seemed, I knew everyone and everyone knew me. But that was another reason why it was time for me to get away.

When I moved to New York, I had about six hundred dollars of my own money—money I’d made when I’d worked every summer, babysitting and minding the neighborhood kids. And Mom had given me a fraction of the money she would have spent sending me to college—money that I knew she didn’t really have—in one lump sum. I dreamed of late-night rehearsals, smoke breaks on fire escapes, stacks of scripts piled high on dusty Turkish rugs in my bohemian penthouse. There’d be bottomless brunches and dinners till dawn with the crew. My name in lights. My glorious stage and film career.

I went to a few auditions. It took me a couple of weeks to realize this wasn’t high school anymore. I stopped going to auditions. I took a drama class at the New York School of Theater, which is where I met my two closest friends in New York, in fact my only friends in New York, Marcy and Luke.

I tried out at a few more auditions. I quit again. Everyone was better than me. I could hear them through the walls as I sat in the corridor, waiting for my name to be called. And when I got through the door, I could see the casting directors’ eyes glaze over. I was pretty, but not pretty enough. I wasn’t this enough, I wasn’t that enough. I looked like a million other girls who’d come to the city with the same hopes and ambitions. And boy, were they ever not interested in hearing me do the tragic monologue from Our Town.

Thanks. We’ll call you. Next!

I was running out of money way faster than I thought I would. If I wanted to stay in New York, I would have to make some changes. It wasn’t easy to give up on my dreams. And when I finally called my mom in Iowa to tell her that maybe I didn’t want to be an actress after all, it was as if I’d somehow made it official. Even though I knew my mom loved me and believed in me and wanted only the best for me, it made me furious when I heard, in her voice, that she’d always known how small—how ridiculous—my chances were.

She said, ‘Maybe you should consider something else, dear. Maybe you should think about becoming a psychologist. You’re so good with people, so sensitive. So intuitive. So caring.’

That was when I almost told her what the school guidance counselor had done in that dim cubicle off the gym. But I didn’t.

‘Thanks, Mom,’ I said. ‘I’ll think about it.’

That night, I cried myself to sleep. Could it really be this easy to give up on so much of myself?

Maybe that was part of what I saw in The Customer.

He gave me a chance to act, to pretend to be someone else—someone hotter and sexier than the nice girl I’d always been. But he knew I wasn’t pretending.

And he believed in me. He believed that I could become someone else, that I could do something else. And he let me show him how.

The week I got to New York, I found an apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a studio which was super cheap because it was tiny and had hardly any light and because everyone knew that it was directly over a giant toxic dump site that had never been properly cleaned up. I didn’t care. I wasn’t planning on staying there long enough for it to hurt me. I bought a plant—a cactus. I named it Alfred, I don’t know why.

The cactus shriveled up and died. Too little light, I guess.

I got jobs that paid almost nothing but that I was grateful to get. I helped people figure out how to use the copy machines at Staples until the flash of the machines started hurting my eyes and I got scared that it was going to damage them. I was a receptionist at a nail salon. The Korean girls were friendly and sweet and really brave in the midst of their terrible lives, but the only English they spoke was about nail shape and length and polish, and it made me feel even lonelier than I already did.

I guess that’s how I wound up selling mattresses at Doctor Sleep.

The place was named after Steve—my boss’s—favorite Stephen King novel. Steve lent me a tattered paperback copy of the novel and told me to read it. I got through the first two hundred pages, but it was too scary. It gave me insomnia—and when I finally fell asleep, I had nightmares. It seemed odd to me that a store designed to help its customers sleep better had taken its name from a book that would keep them awake. I thanked Steve for the book and told him that it was my new favorite novel, too.

Obviously, I’d never once in my life said: I want to be what Steve refers to as a ‘mattress professional.’ Believe me, I never thought: Oh, if only I could know everything in the world there is to know about memory foam and pillow tops and coils. If only I could work for a guy named Steve who looks like an aging groundhog, who has creepy, secretive habits and a pitiful business model, and who always stands way too close when he talks to me. Though in fact he never touched me, except once, to shake my hand when he hired me.

I could tell what Steve was thinking and feeling. I saw how he imagined himself: as the king of a vast mattress empire with branch stores all over the city and suburbs.

I decided that Steve was harmless, which didn’t mean that it wasn’t a little disturbing when, on my first day at work, he explained his theory: insomnia is not a psychological problem but an actual disease that only the right mattress can cure.

The showroom had touches—white tile walls, a weird little machine that blinked and beeped like a heart monitor, and to one side, a gurney on which there were stacks of fancy duvets no one ever bought—designed to look like Steve’s sick fantasy of a hospital or operating room. Steve even wore a white lab coat. At first he said that I should too, and he lent me one of his, which smelled of cologne and sweat and said ‘Steve’ on the pocket. But after a week he told me that it was a pity to hide my pretty legs under a uniform.

So he got me a short white medical jacket that came just down to my hips, the kind of jacket an outcall hooker would wear, a prostitute hired to play Naughty Nurse.

Maybe that’s why The Customer got the wrong idea. Except that it was the right idea. The right idea that went very, very wrong.

My name was stitched on the pocket of the medical jacket.

Isabel.

I felt like sobbing when I saw it. It was like a threat: I’d be working here forever, at least for a very long while. But I could tell that Steve was proud of the jacket. That little corner of my mind that had Steve’s feelings in it lit up like a Christmas tree. He was so happy when he gave it to me. I smiled and said, ‘Thanks, Steve.’

‘I can write it off as a business expense. It improves the look of the establishment,’ Steve said.

Was I supposed to say thank you for that?

My friend Marcy, from drama class, had worked at Doctor Sleep for a few weeks. She said it was easier than waitressing: better hours. But she preferred waitressing. I wondered if she’d left because of Steve, but I couldn’t ask a friend, even a friend I saw more rarely now that I’d quit drama class, if she’d set me up to work with a total creep. I didn’t like how Steve looked at me when I tried on the starchy white jacket.

On my second day at work Steve announced that he was in an open marriage, but that workplace romances were strictly forbidden for professional reasons. I was the only person he could have had an office romance with, so I assumed he was telling me something. That was a relief. As I said, he never once touched me, or did anything perverted. If I wanted to keep my job, it seemed like a stupid idea to ask my boss to stand back when we talked. I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if he took it the wrong way. So I didn’t say anything. I let him breathe his hot breath on me.

Whenever Steve left for his lunch break, he had a furtive, weaselly air. Through the window, I watched him scurry away. I always had the feeling that he was going to see a dominatrix. But weirdly, the part of my brain that told me what someone else was experiencing stayed empty—no picture, no sound—when Steve left for his lunch break. I’d always had an almost telepathic sense of empathy, but now I realized the foolishness of taking any gift for granted, of thinking you would have it forever.

I told myself that it wasn’t fair to blame Steve for being the person he was.

On the day Steve hired me, a Friday, he gave me a large binder full of papers from the International Mattress Retailers Association. He told me to study it over the weekend. On Monday he would give me a test.

I had a bad feeling about this ‘test,’ but I studied just in case it was real and not some euphemism for getting groped by Steve—like the ‘compassion test’ at my high school. I learned about the science of sleep and the fine points of mattress construction. There was even a section about feng shui—the ancient Chinese system that told you where and how to position your bed in your room for the soundest sleep and maximum good health.

The manual instructed me to look friendly, concerned, professional, like a doctor. I was dealing with one of the most intimate aspects of my customers’ lives. I should keep that in mind when I asked about slumber positions, back problems, sleeping difficulties, what they wanted in a mattress.

On Monday Steve handed me a multiple choice test and told me to fill it out at his desk. I scored one hundred.

‘Good girl, Marcy,’ Steve said.

‘I’m Isabel,’ I said.

‘Right,’ said Steve. ‘Marcy was the last girl.’

‘My friend Marcy,’ I said.

‘Right,’ said Steve. ‘The redhead. You’re the blond.’

I did what the mattress experts suggested. I acted concerned, sympathetic, professional. Like a kindly family doctor. I’d guide the customers to the most expensive mattress I thought they could afford, murmuring about why it was perfect for them. I even talked about feng shui, if I thought a client was the type to go for it. I never once tried to make clients buy something that I knew was beyond their budget.

Almost always, customers wanted to try out the mattress. Then my role would shift from that of the diagnostician to that of the tactful nurse who leaves the room or turns away when a patient undresses.

It was surprising how many people lay like corpses. On their backs, arms crossed. Even young couples, in love, lay there like statues on a tomb. Staring up at the ceiling, they discussed the mattress. Too hard? Too soft? You would never suspect that they might ever have sex on that mattress. Watching them, you couldn’t imagine the thought even crossing their minds.

The day I met The Customer was one of those weirdly warm, swampy September afternoons. An unusually quiet Saturday. Lately, business had been slow, even though Steve said it was usually his best season, when NYU students were moving into their dorms and convincing their rich parents that they needed a better mattress than the one the school provided. I could feel Steve’s gloom, his disappointment. He’d stopped talking about opening a second branch in the East Village.

Steve had gotten me a small cheap desk, at which I sat, looking out the window at people whose lives were more fun and exciting than mine. Everyone had somewhere to go, someone to be with, shopping to do. I wished them well. Someday I could be one of them. One of the lucky ones. I was determined not to feel sorry for myself—not to give up hope, no matter what.

A mom with a stroller came in and asked if we sold mattress covers for cribs. Steve sounded impatient when he told her to try Babies ‘R’ Us. When she passed me I flashed her a smile that I hoped said, what a cute baby, though I hadn’t actually seen her child under its milky plastic awning.

I tried to concentrate on my book, an anthology of poems based on Greek myths. I was obsessed with Orpheus, on how he could have gotten his beloved Eurydice out of hell if he hadn’t turned around to make sure she was there. What was that story about? Trust? Love? Fear? Stupid faithless men who would ruin everything in a heartbeat if something upset or scared them? Or women who think they can overpower fate and end up trapped forever?

I read the poems till I thought I understood them. Which I never did.

But I guess those poems prepared me for how I would feel about The Customer. For the sheer terror that I would turn around—and that he wouldn’t be there.

I pulled out my phone and scrolled through to a folder of apps I’d labeled ‘auditions.’ It hadn’t been easy to abandon acting. But the truth is I’d found a small workaround, for the time being at least. One drunken night, Marcy, Luke, and I all downloaded Tinder on our phones. It started out as a joke. We would each go on three dates and report back. ‘Come on, nice girl,’ Luke said. ‘Join the modern world. You’re not in Iowa anymore.’ We’d spent the rest of the night swiping left and swiping right, laughing out loud, screaming every time we had a match. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t feel good when a hot guy matched with me. We switched to beer and took a sip every time we landed on a picture of a guy with a puppy or a guy with a guitar. We were all hungover the next day.

I was surprised by how little effort it took to ‘match’ with somebody. But when I actually started texting with one of these so-called matches, I understood the old ‘plenty of fish in the sea metaphor’ on a whole different level; it was a big sea filled with a lot of creepy fish. The first guy made a joke about how cheesy dick pics were, told me he liked butt play, and then sent me a dick pic. Then there was the guy who sent me a picture of a paddle and asked me what I wanted to do with it. Or the guy who opened the conversation with ‘do u like to be choked?’ Finally, I matched with a guy who had just moved from Connecticut to work in marketing at some greeting card company in Midtown. He missed his mom and had a dog (the adopted, shelter variety—included in his Tinder profile) and lived just a few blocks away from me. Pretty vanilla. But after so many conversations with gross guys about the size of my chest and euphemisms for penises, I could do a first date with Mr Vanilla.

The date was pretty basic. We met at a bar around the corner from his apartment in Williamsburg that had just opened and he’d been meaning to check out. The bar was dog-friendly, so he could have brought his dog, he told me, but he didn’t want us to ‘move too fast.’ I wore a yellow knee-length dress and he wore a button-down shirt and khaki shorts. I could tell he’d gotten his hair cut for the occasion.

We talked about his hometown of West Orange; about what he studied in college, and his favorite TV shows. But when he started to ask me about my life a funny thing happened. I told him I grew up in Ohio, had two brothers, and two parents who were crazy in love. My dad was a historian and my mom was a lawyer. Dad was a total romantic and my mom was a real-life superhero. I had a grandmother I was really close to (actually my great-aunt, but I called her Nana—‘a long story,’ I told him), who passed away last year. The best Christmas present I ever got was my Labrador-mix named Juno, when I was nine. I met my best friend when we were in kindergarten, and I lived with her now.

I watched his eyes light up as I pulled out the props for my character. I could feel how excited he was to know me—this girl with so much potential who knew where she had come from and where she was going. I had written a different script for myself. I became the girl he would want to see again, someone who would meet his dog, his mom, his best friends from home.

After a chaste kiss at the corner, I walked home alone. I deleted our conversation from the app on my phone. I didn’t want a second date. I wanted to preserve that moment. The look on his face when he thought he recognized me, when I became the perfect girl. It was almost like acting except better. I wasn’t just memorizing lines, I was writing them, too. And in real time for an audience of one.

I wanted to feel that way again. To meet someone, figure out who they were and what they wanted, and become the person they needed, then watch them fall in love. Now I was the one not giving callbacks. I’ll admit, it felt good to finally have some power. When Tinder started to feel stale and flooded with perverts, I made profiles on Bumble, Thrinder (even more of a challenge), OkCupid, Coffee Meets Bagel—and each with a slightly different character. On Bumble, I was Riley from Portland, Maine. On Thrinder, I was Lorrie from the Bay Area. On OkCupid I was Amanda from Manhattan. All I had to do was make a new email, and a new Facebook profile (back when Facebook made it easy to do such a thing). I never went on more than a first date—and never took more than a sweet goodnight kiss on the cheek. I was still a good Midwestern girl, after all, and one date wasn’t enough time for anyone to get hurt. I thought of it as more of an ever-evolving character study game. I loved keeping all the scripts in my head at once, remembering which app I met so-and-so on, which backstory to pull out.

That day, I was going on a coffee date with a Mr Matthew from Bumble. I pulled up Bumble and scrolled through his pictures. From what I could see, he was tall with broad shoulders, and dark hair. There were no puppy pictures. There was Matthew on the beach in a tank top and American flag shorts, all square chest and tight, tan quads, Matthew sitting at the center of a group of guys, his thick shoulders wrapped around the two closest to him. But the one I kept swiping back to was a picture of Matthew standing on a pier, the sunset behind him framing his face. His head was thrown up to the sky and his eyes were closed, like he was in the middle of the greatest laugh. He had the best jawline I’d ever seen.

I grabbed my stuff and prepared to leave for my lunch break date. Steve told me to ‘have fun’ as I walked out the door. As I was walking to the coffee shop to meet Matthew, I kept thinking about that laugh, that jawline. I didn’t know why, but something about this date made me want to ride the line—maybe show him a little more of the ‘real’ Isabel. A new character challenge, or so I thought.

When I walked into the coffee shop, I spotted him immediately. Our eyes locked and we both grinned, mirroring each other’s delight as we moved closer to each other. When I got to his table, he stood up and gave me a kiss on the cheek. He smelled expensive—all sandalwood and vetiver—and my knees buckled as I tried to remember what he thought my name was.

‘Excited to meet you, Riley,’ he said, watching me as I sat down.

I laughed and said something about the pleasure being all mine. This was a new role for me—the fumbling girl who couldn’t get the words out of her mouth in the right order. I blushed every time I looked at his smile, and had to look away.

He glanced at his watch and said something about having to be back to the office for a meeting later in the afternoon, then asked me what I did. I opened my mouth to start talking about my uncle’s lobster boat on the coast, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I had this strange feeling that telling Matthew who I really was would make him like me even more.

‘Okay, so here’s the deal,’ I said. ‘My name isn’t Riley, and I’m not from Maine.’

He smiled but didn’t say anything. And so I did. I told him about growing up in Iowa and about moving to New York to be an actress and about failing at being an actress and about my ‘acting game’ with the dating apps and finally my sad life working for creepy Steve at Doctor Sleep, just down the street.

I laughed as I finished my confessional monologue, and leaned back in my chair, waiting for him to react.

He was quiet for a beat but his eyes were bright and working fast to take me in.

‘So that’s it? Any recent ex-boyfriend killing sprees? Any fetishes you want to confess?’

I laughed. ‘No. No. That can wait for our second date.’

‘Well then,’ he said, smiling as he leaned in closer to me. ‘I’m excited to meet you, Isabel.’

It was liberating to let someone in on my secret game. I had gotten the feeling that he would be okay with the story, but I was still surprised to realize that he was not only okay with it, he was thrilled by it. I was working hard to look cool and unfazed, but the way he said my name made it hard to stay composed.

‘Now your turn.’ I said. ‘Is your name really Matthew?’

‘No, no,’ he said. ‘That can wait for our second date.’

We both laughed.

He looked at his watch. I looked at my phone. My lunch hour was up and I had to be back at Doctor Sleep in a few minutes.

Before I had a chance to say anything, Matthew said, ‘Hey, I have a crazy question.’

‘Go for it,’ I said.

‘I’m sure you’re about to tell me you have to go back to work. But I feel like I’ve only just met you, Isabel-formerly-known-as-Riley. And the truth is, I don’t want to stop being with you just yet.’

I was floating. I definitely didn’t want to leave him either. ‘So what do you suggest we do?’

‘Well, I don’t feel it’s fair to deprive the poor mattress shoppers of their favorite Sleep Doctor, so what if I came back to the store with you and pretended to be your customer? I’ll wait for a minute to come in so your boss won’t suspect a thing.’

I smiled and shrugged. ‘Sure. Why not?’ I knew Steve would be going on break when I got back from mine, anyway. It was probably the first time I had ever been excited to race back to the store from lunch.

When I walked back my whole body was buzzing. I was kind of okay with the idea of slipping on my uniform today.

I walked into the store and Steve said, ‘I’m going on break.’ The timing was too perfect. I wondered what Steve did when he left. I didn’t ask and I didn’t complain even though his breaks were getting longer and more frequent.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Take your time.’ The truth was, I usually hated being alone in there in plain view of every passing maniac who might think, Hey! Look! A young woman all by herself with a cash register and a lot of mattresses! But today, I was excited to be alone. Today, I wanted him to take his time.

The doorbell rang its fake sleigh-bell chime. I looked up. Matthew—or should I say, The Customer—stood in the doorway, back lit. Tall, thin, broad-shouldered.

I walked toward him, slipping into character; welcoming and friendly, but not pushy, hungry, or aggressive. That was what the mattress professional instruction manual said to do.

Close up, he was so handsome I had to look away—but not before I noticed his glossy dark hair, dark eyes, eyelashes longer than mine. His features were chiseled. He looked a little like Gary Cooper, a little like Robert Mitchum—like old-school movie stars used to look before actors began to look like the guy next door who’s going to get fat and bald and jowly the minute he turns forty.

In other words: He was hot.

I said, ‘Can I help you?’

He said, ‘I hope so. I’m moving soon, and I don’t see any point in taking my old mattress with me.’

If I had ten dollars for every time I heard someone say those exact words, I could have quit and lived on the money for the six months it might take me to find a better job. But sex and beauty change the conversation. Things you’ve heard a million times sound interesting, fresh and new.

I wanted to know everything. Where did he live? Why was he moving? Who would be sleeping on the new mattress? I loved this adaptation of my game—for two players now instead of one.

‘What sort of mattress are you looking for?’

He smiled and shrugged. He had a beautiful smile, a charming shrug.

‘A comfortable one,’ he said.

I said, ‘Okay, let me ask you.’ This was on script. ‘Do you like your current mattress?’

‘My mattress is ten years old, what would like mean?’ He smiled again.

I smiled back. So there we were.

I asked him the standard questions. Side sleeper? Back sleeper? Skeletal problems? Sleep issues? He slept like a baby. He closed his eyes and fell out, slept straight through the night. I wanted to lie next to him, with my head nestled on his chest.

I had never felt quite like that before. Certainly not about any other mattress store customer. It threw me off script.

‘Lucky you,’ I said.

He didn’t respond. He was making me do all the work.

‘I think I know what you might like. We have one on the floor that I can show you. Please come this way.’

‘Thank you,’ he said.

I walked down the aisles lined with mattresses, looking back from time to time, as if to make sure that he was still behind me. I thought of Orpheus—don’t look back!—mostly to avoid thinking about how self-conscious I was, how aware that a man was following me, looking at me, at my back, my ass. Sometimes I wondered how a customer was responding to Steve’s weird medical decor, but now I wished The Customer would actually look at the gurney, at the bizarre medical stuff—at anything but me.

I stopped at the foot of the most expensive and luxurious mattress we had, twelve thousand dollars’ worth of organic German cotton, French wool layers, inner hand tufting. The celebrity movie star mattress, the Executive Deluxe Comfort Natural Pillowtop Set. As far as I knew, Steve had never sold a single one of them, but he insisted on having it on display. He said it improved the look of the ‘establishment,’ like my shorty jacket, I guess.

I could read The Customer’s mind well enough to know that this was the mattress he would want. But I also obviously knew he wasn’t going to buy it. I had no idea what he was thinking right that second. It was as if those circuits—my mind-reading window—were jammed by how sexy and handsome he was.

He asked, ‘Is this the best one you have?’

‘I think so,’ I said. ‘I mean yes. Would you like to try it?’

‘No. You. I want you to try it. I’d appreciate that very much. If you wouldn’t mind lying down for a moment.’

It wasn’t that this never happened—that people asked me to lie on the mattress. But mostly it happened with very old people, or people with some physical damage, who came in with their caretakers. They couldn’t, or didn’t want to, risk being a spectacle, struggling to lie down. Or they couldn’t lie down without help. In that case, they might want to see me lie on the mattress, to see if I looked comfy.

‘Comfortable?’ they’d ask.

‘Totally,’ I always replied, though nothing could have been less comfortable than I felt at those moments.

In the ten months I’d worked at Doctor Sleep, not one—not one!—young, handsome, hot guy had ever asked me to try out a mattress for him.

Actually, I did mind. I felt sort of queasy and flushed. I wanted to say that this wasn’t my job.

I could tell that he wouldn’t have insisted. He was too polite. But I was a nice Midwestern girl. I wouldn’t want to be rude to a customer…

And besides, I wanted to do it.

‘Lie down,’ he said. ‘Please. Let me see.’

That please did the trick. ‘All right.’ I couldn’t look at him.

I climbed onto the mattress. My white jacket rode up. I had to lift my ass to tuck the hem of my dress around me. All this time I was conscious of how intently he was watching me. I saw myself through his eyes. The mind-reading corner of my brain was glowing red.

When I saw myself through his eyes, I realized that I was already shaking.

I lay the way all the customers did, on my back, with my arms crossed, like a mummy.

I was so nervous that I started babbling. ‘Do you know anything about feng shui? It’s an ancient Asian … I don’t know … science, I guess you could say. What matters is not only which mattress you buy but also how and where you set it up in your room. It’s important for how you sleep and how healthy you’ll be. There are principles, guidelines…’

I stopped. I sounded like an idiot. He didn’t seem to be listening, and I didn’t blame him. Why was I blabbing on about all this to the last guy in the world who would be interested? I lay back and stared at the ceiling.

‘No one sleeps like that,’ he said. ‘Like you’re lying now. On your back with your arms crossed. Do you?’

‘No,’ I told the ceiling.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Show me how you really sleep.’ His voice was low, gentle but firm and insistent.

I rolled over on my side. I reached back and yanked down my skirt. He walked around to the other side of the bed so he was looking straight down at me.

Was I ashamed? I was ashamed to think that I would never have done this if The Customer hadn’t been drop-dead handsome. I thought: What a shallow person you are, Isabel.

‘How does it feel?’ The Customer asked.

‘Comfortable,’ I said, automatically.

‘I think not,’ he said. ‘I don’t think you look comfortable at all.’

‘Okay, not really.’

‘You don’t have to lie to me,’ he said. How did he know? I was the mind-reader here.

‘It feels weird,’ I said. ‘But good weird.’

‘That’s a step in the right direction.’

He just stood there, looking down at me. I heard my breath get slightly ragged. I willed it to stop, but it wouldn’t. My breath came faster.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Good. Now roll over on your back.’

I rolled onto my back.

‘Lift your jacket,’ he said.

I tried. It was awkward and clumsy.

‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘You’re very beautiful, do you know that?’

‘Thanks.’ How stupid I sounded.

‘Now spread your legs a little,’ he said. ‘Just a little.’ His voice was so calm, so even, considering what he was asking.

I moved my legs apart, just a few inches.

‘Okay. Now I want you to do you one more thing for me. I want you take your underwear off,’ he said.

I didn’t think: What? I didn’t think: Who is this sicko and what sick game is he playing?

Here’s what I thought: What underwear am I wearing?

I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t stop myself from reaching up my skirt. I felt an edge of lace. Thank heaven.

‘No, wait. Stop. Keep your hand there, where it is,’ he said. ‘Put your finger inside that lace edge, just underneath…’

‘I can’t,’ I said.

‘Why not?’ he said flatly. ‘I know you can. Please don’t tell me you can’t.’ We were almost whispering now. He leaned closer down over me, to hear.

‘Steve could be back any minute,’ I said. ‘My boss.’

I didn’t say: I don’t want to. I didn’t say: Are you crazy? How can you ask me to do this? I didn’t say: Go fuck yourself, pervert.

I said: ‘Steve could be back any minute.’

‘Just a little,’ he said, even more softly ‘Just raise your knees and spread them a little. And touch yourself.’

I closed my eyes. It was the only way I could do it. I couldn’t look at him. I could feel my face burning. I wanted to hear his voice with my eyes closed.

‘Please.’ His voice had a funny sound, not pleading exactly, but almost.

I pulled my knees halfway to my chest and let them slowly drift apart. My body felt hot and weirdly sleepy, as if I were dreaming, as if I’d lost my power to resist.

I didn’t care if Steve came back. I didn’t care what happened. It was the not caring that let me say, ‘Want to join me?’

I had never said anything like that in my life.

Even though most of my dating in New York had been of the online-dating game variety (with no sex, only chaste first-date goodnight kisses), I’d still managed to have my share of brief sexual affairs, and thought of myself as someone with a little experience—certainly I’d had experience taking my clothes off in front of a stranger, which, if you ask me, is a big part of what hangs people up about sex. I could count the number of guys I’d slept with: seven. But none of them had made me feel what I was feeling now in the middle of a public place, a mattress store, alone on a bed with all my clothes on.

Even then, right away I knew that I would do whatever The Customer told me. The pure electric pleasure flooding every nerve—I wanted to feel it forever. Exhibitionism, voyeurism, consensual, harassment. There were no words for what I was doing, for what was happening to me. It was just a feeling.

‘Sit up,’ he said, sharply, suddenly.

I sat up just in time to see Steve outside, slithering into the frame of the window. I was surprised to notice that I was on the edge of tears. What was that about?

I jumped up, slightly dizzy. The blood was taking its time, flowing back from between my legs to my brain. I stood beside the bed. The Customer stood beside me looking down at the mattress. We both looked at it. There we were, for anyone—including Steve—to see: a mattress professional and her customer engaged in a simple business transaction that might or might not occur.

I put my palm out toward Steve. Stay away. But Steve didn’t. He couldn’t. This customer, this mattress. It was like showing honey to a bear. This was the big fish Steve had dreamed of reeling in.

‘Have you made up your mind?’ I asked. I wanted to keep my job, so I included Steve in our conversation. ‘Do you think you might be interested in making a purchase today?’

‘No,’ said The Customer. ‘Not yet. For the moment I’m just looking. I need to think it over. Can I have your card?’

Steve was gloating, triumphant. He’d insisted on printing up business cards for me and making me carry them in the pocket of my little white jacket. I didn’t want strangers having my name and the phone number of the store. I’d fought against it, but he’d won.

Now I was glad I’d lost. I took a card from my pocket. It flipped out from between my fingers. Steve and The Customer watched me scramble to pick it up from the floor. I felt my short dress ride up, and I yanked it down. With Steve there, nothing was sexy, just pitiful and clumsy.

‘Thank you,’ The Customer told me and Steve, his gaze focused midway between us. ‘I’ll call when I’ve thought this through.’

‘Perhaps you’d be interested in something that was less of a … financial commitment,’ said Steve.

‘No,’ said The Customer. ‘I wouldn’t.’

And with that, Matthew left the store.

***

The weather turned drizzly, a chilly, watery taste of the winter ahead. I sat at my desk at Doctor Sleep and read a novel about zombies. Sometimes I stared out the window, past the fat cold drips blurring the world outside.

I wished I had never met Matthew.

Until that day he walked in, I’d made my peace with life. No boyfriend, no real job, no career track, a crappy walk-up apartment in Greenpoint next door to my landlord, who screamed at his wife all night. But still I had no major complaints. Hope for the best, my mom always said. Look on the bright side. Something will come along.

Now something had come along, and I’d let it slip through my fingers. I should have done any sex-maniac thing he wanted. I should have made him promise to call me. I should have humbled myself—right in front of Steve—and begged Matthew to stay.

The days dragged on. I could hardly fake the interested smile for the few customers who came in. Once I practically nodded off in the middle of a sale.

Steve hissed, ‘Isabel! Look sharp!’

Look sharp? How sharp did Steve think he looked?

I worked Saturday and got Sunday off. I slept till eleven, then sat in a café and read, like I did at work. Every so often I thought: I am the loneliest person in New York.

I was about to call my mom in Iowa when I got a text from her that said, ‘Faculty potluck. Yuk. Talk later.’ Even my mom had something better to do than talk to me.

At five I met my friend Luke, and we got mojitos at Cielito Lindo, the Mexican restaurant in the East Village where Marcy worked. If we got there early and left early, Marcy let us drink for half price. She’d sit with us for a few minutes, taking sips of our drinks when no one was watching. But around six-thirty she got busy, and after a while she gave us a look that said, ‘You guys better leave.’

Luke was still going to auditions. He’d gotten so thin and dyed his hair such a flashy platinum-blond color that it limited the parts he could get. But I couldn’t tell him that. It wasn’t my place.

We sat in Cielito Lindo, with the late afternoon leaking into the windows, a salsa beat thrumming, everything revving up for maximum deliciousness and fun. But just when things began to get good, Luke and I would have to make room for people who could pay actual money.

On his second mojito, Luke said, ‘Audrey got me an audition for the older brother in a cereal commercial. I didn’t get a callback. I guess they figured out that I’m twice Cereal Boy’s age.’

Three times Cereal Boy’s age, I thought, but didn’t say.

‘How old do I look?’ Luke asked.

‘Hard to tell,’ I white-lied. He was twenty-six, a year older than me. He looked fifteen. He looked thirty. He looked awful.

How old did Matthew think I was? I liked having a secret. Luke, can I tell you something? Promise not to tell. I played weird sex games with a stranger in the store when Steve was out to lunch.

‘Hey, are you in love or something’ Luke said. ‘You have this … glow. Promise me you’re not pregnant.’

‘I promise,’ I said. ‘I’m the same.’ I loved that Luke noticed something different about me. It made me feel almost hopeful. Maybe it was the mojitos kicking in, but suddenly I realised Matthew knew where I worked. He could stop by the store, maybe he would…

‘Are you hungry?’ Luke asked. ‘I know a pretty good Thai spot near here.’ Pretty good Thai spot was his not-so-secret code for even cheaper than Cielito Lindo.

‘That’s okay.’ My stomach heaved at the thought of chopsticking up the gummy, stuck-together, greasy Pad Thai that Luke would want to split. I wanted to go home and think about The Customer and what we’d done—and jerk off and fall asleep.

I said, ‘Next time, okay? I don’t know why I’m so tired. I think I’ll call out for Chinese and watch TV and pass out.’

Walking to the subway, I felt the mojitos wear off within minutes, and I got sad again. Why was I so stupid? Why couldn’t I just text Matthew? But I would never text Matthew first. Back in my apartment, I called my mom, who had gotten home from the faculty picnic.

‘Honey,’ she said. ‘Is something wrong? I can hear it in your voice.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘Really, I’m fine. I’ve been out with my friends. I had a couple of mojitos, maybe that’s what you’re hearing.’

‘As long as you’re having fun,’ Mom said.

‘Oh, I am.’

What a liar I was becoming. And the lies were only just starting…

On Tuesday, the store phone rang. Steve answered. There were no customers. He put the phone on speaker.

I heard Matthew’s voice from across the store. I would have known it anywhere. I closed my eyes for a moment. Then I went closer to the phone.

I heard him say, ‘I’m calling to order the mattress I looked at in your shop a few days ago. That nice young woman helped me … Isabel, is that right?’

He was taking this whole role-playing thing to a new level.

Steve gave me a thumbs up sign. He switched the phone off speaker, put on earphones and began typing into the computer. Numbers came up on screens that dissolved into other screens.

Steve said, ‘Sure thing. You’ll have it tomorrow. Thanks for doing business with Doctor Sleep. Yes, certainly, I’ll tell her. Goodbye.’

‘Tell her what?’ I said.

‘Nothing,’ said Steve. ‘I can’t remember.’

I could have tortured him to find out. Steve walked over to me, so close he was practically standing on my toes. I shrank away.

‘Good work, Isabel,’ he said. ‘That was your friend from last week. He went for the Super Deluxe. He said that the floor model would do, if that was all we had. I think the guy has the hots for you. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense. Guy like that should have an assistant ordering for him, he doesn’t do shit like that himself. You know what I think? I think the guy was hoping you’d answer the phone. I’ll bet you would have liked to talk to him, too.’

I wanted to smack him. But he was right. Why wouldn’t Matthew text me? Maybe he lost my number and this was the only way he could reach me? Maybe that was my last chance. I would never get another.

Steve said, ‘Am I right? Huh? Am I right about you and that guy? Something … funny? As in, funny business? I definitely got that vibe when I walked into the store that day he was here.’

That Steve noticed made me blush, and it made me strangely happy. It was all I could do not to ask what made him think that something funny was going on. I liked having evidence that whatever happened between me and Matthew wasn’t entirely in my imagination.

I said, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about, Steve. Maybe the guy just wanted to buy a mattress. Maybe he’s got more money than he knows what to do with.’

Who was I angry at? Steve? Matthew? What had Matthew done except play a fun little game and leave me more unhappy than I was before I met him? It’s not like I hadn’t done the same thing to countless guys before him.

‘Whatever,’ said Steve. ‘And FYI … No one has more money than he knows what to do with. People with that much money know what do with it.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ I said.

‘I don’t suppose you would,’ Steve said.

The next day the guys from the trucking company took away the mattress. They carried it away … bye bye.

It left a giant gap on the sales floor. Steve let the spot stay empty for a while, to remind himself of the amazing deal that he (already taking credit) had made. I couldn’t stand to look at the bare space, the only evidence of my hot, five-minute scene with The Handsome Customer. Now I would grow old and sell mattresses until I retired and died.

I looked up Matthew’s order on the store computer. There was no name, just an address in Brooklyn Heights, a charge to an Amex card listed to the Prairie Foundation and a note (in Steve’s writing) that said, Contact assistant.

The next day the phone rang. I knew it was for me before Steve said, ‘Isabel?’ He put his hand over the receiver. ‘It’s your rich boyfriend.’

Somehow, I’d known who it was. My friends never called on the store phone. None of them had that number. My mom would have called on my cell.

‘Isabel, it’s me.’

I didn’t have to ask who me was. I couldn’t speak. Or breathe.

He said, ‘The mattress is set up. I’m wondering if you would be willing to come over to check out the feng shui. I would hate for it to face in the wrong direction.’ He laughed, meaning it was a joke and not a joke. The feng shui line was a joke. But my going to his place wasn’t. After all, we had a history. We were more than friends.

‘I could do that,’ I said.

‘Isabel?’ he said. I loved the way he said my name. ‘Excuse me. I think we may have a bad connection.’

‘I could do that,’ I repeated. Maybe I’d been whispering, or maybe he wanted to make me say it again. Our connection was fine.

I felt something warm and moist and unpleasant on the back of my neck. Only then did I realize how close Steve was standing.

‘When?’ I said. ‘Where?’

‘Is tomorrow evening too soon?’

I should have said, yes, way too soon. I should have invented dates I couldn’t break. A boyfriend I was seeing. But what if this was my last chance? I wasn’t busy tomorrow evening. If I were, I would have cancelled, no matter what it was.

‘Tomorrow evening would be fine,’ I said.

‘What time do you get off work?’

‘Six?’ Why did it come out as a question? Why was I asking him? I could probably leave any time I wanted if I told Steve where I was going. But the following day, Steve might try to make me tell him everything we did.

‘Perfect. Come straight here,’ Matthew said. ‘We can watch the sunset.’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘Can you text me the address? On my cell.’

‘No need for that,’ he said. ‘It’s in the system at your store.’

Suddenly, it was as if I heard Mom’s voice. Put the phone down. Don’t talk to this man again. Don’t go there tomorrow night.

Sorry, Mom, I thought. I have no choice. After my dad’s death, my mom never remarried or even (as far as I knew) dated. So there was a lot my mother didn’t know about the modern world. Anyway, I wouldn’t have listened if she had been standing beside me. The desire made everyone else disappear.

When I hung up the phone, Steve said, ‘You’re not supposed to get personal calls on the store phone.’

I said, ‘This was business, Steve.’

I’d never felt that I had the power to make Steve step back. Yet now something—some new note—in my voice made him take a big step backward. Something in me had changed just from talking to Matthew.

I should have taken that as a warning, a hint of changes to come.

I couldn’t sleep all night. I obsessed over what to wear. Sexy but not so sexy that it would look weird in the store—and send the wrong message, first to Steve and then to Matthew. But what message was too sexy after what I did on the mattress?

I bought new underwear, black lace with a slim red ribbon threaded through the bra and panties. I wore a short denim skirt and a black T-shirt. I carried a jacket, just in case. The weather seemed changeable, low clouds, wind. Stormy weather. I went light on the make-up. At the end of the day, I could put on more in the broom closet that Steve called ‘the staff lounge.’

‘You look nice,’ said Steve, when I got to work. ‘Nicer than usual. Going somewhere?’

I didn’t answer. He knew.

Maybe I should have dressed up every day. Business was booming, for a change. There had been a bedbug scare in the NYU dorms, and the place was jammed with kids using their parents’ credit cards to (they hoped, ha ha) fix the problem. They bought the cheapest mattresses, but so what? In Steve’s words, we were ‘moving product.’ I liked the college kids, mostly. Their needs were simple. Their purchasing decisions were all about price. Not one of them wanted to act like a jerk trying out a mattress while a stranger (me) watched. Fine, they said. I’ll take it.

Steve felt good about the day, and when I asked if I could leave early, he said sure, if I was willing to come in early a couple of mornings next week and open up. That sounded fair to me. I would have agreed to anything.

I redid my makeup. And when Steve was in the toilet, I put on high heels and skittered out of the store.

I spent a big chunk of that week’s paycheck on the cab fare to Matthew’s apartment in Brooklyn Heights. Google Maps said that it was blocks from the station, and my heels were too high to walk that far. Besides, I was eager to get there.

I had four condoms in my purse, just in case. I was a nice Midwestern girl, but not that nice. Hey, this was New York, 2016.

From all the way down the block I knew which building was his: the luxury high-rise designed by a famous architect. There had been a battle between the Landmarks Commission vs. the architect and the developers. The outcome—who was going to win—was never in doubt. The structure was a twenty-four story middle finger raised to the city.

That was where Matthew lived. The house of the neighborhood destroyers. Though (to be honest) I knew that I would live there too if someone offered me an apartment.

The lobby reception desk was raised, like a throne. Seeing it from below added to the height and size and heft of the two enormous doormen, both in olive green uniforms. What if they asked me for Matthew’s last name? I didn’t even know it.

I gave them the apartment number. Could they ring Penthouse Three, please? I was asking them to ring someone whose name I didn’t know.

‘And you are?’

‘Isabel,’ I said. ‘Isabel Archer.’ I hardly recognized my own name. It sounded like two nonsense words. What did it even mean? Part of me had left my body. The nice Isabel, the cautious one, was trying to understand why this reckless new Isabel was here—doing this.

The doorman hung up the house phone. ‘Go on up,’ he said. ‘This elevator goes as far as the tenth floor, where there’s another desk for our premier floors. They’ll tell you what to do from there.’

A double layer of doormen.

The elevator whisked me through a column of air and let me off ten floors up, where a second pair of doormen directed me toward another elevator. I pressed PH3. This elevator was glass on all sides, so I could watch the rooftops of Brooklyn fall away beneath me.

There was only one apartment on the floor. I rang the bell.

A middle-aged housekeeper opened the door and took my jacket.

She said, ‘The Señor is out on the terrace.’ Did I want a cocktail? Absolutely. Bueno. Already poured. A young man, also Hispanic, also friendly, brought me a martini glass on a tray. Balancing the glass—filled to the brim with orange-golden liquid—I followed the maid through a huge living room that looked like a modern art museum, with white couches, white marble floors, walls whose perfect whiteness was defiled only by the violent splashy energy of the large abstract paintings. Was that a real de Kooning?

The glass wall to the terrace was open. The Customer stood with his back to us, looking out over the edge. I gulped down half my drink.

‘Thank you, Maria,’ he told the maid, without turning around.

The maid—Maria—asked me, ‘Are you all right, Señora?’ I wondered how many girls she’d watched stop dead in their tracks, barely able to move.

He didn’t turn around or acknowledge me in any way. I went and stood beside him. He was wearing jeans and a crisp white shirt, open at the neck. He looked even more handsome than he had at the store. I grasped the edge of the low brick wall and hung on. The view made me dizzy, or maybe it was being near him. Or just possibly it was the drink. It was all very confusing, but I loved it. I loved the last rays of daylight twinkling in the windows, the giant red ball that was the sun bouncing on the water.

Now I knew what it meant to feel like you owned the city. The Manhattan skyline spread out before us, lay at our feet, begging us, its rulers, to tell it what to do. Though maybe I was confused again. Maybe that was how I felt. Like a queen.

I took another sip of the cocktail. It was intensely delicious. Tequila, I thought. Edge of chili, edge of something fruity but tart.

‘Hibiscus flower,’ The Customer said.

The strong drink went straight to my head, especially since I’d skipped lunch. I’d been too nervous to eat. But now I kept drinking till it was done. I’d never tasted anything so amazing. I felt tipsy, terrified, and happy.

The sun dipped into the river. Matthew moved closer to me, and like a reflex or afterthought, as if he wasn’t paying attention, he rested one hand on my ass.

‘Lovely,’ he said. ‘No?’

‘Yes,’ was all I could say. But what was I agreeing to? The loveliness of the sunset, or the lovely warmth of his hand?

‘Come take a look at the bed.’

He smiled as he stepped back and let me precede him into the apartment. He took my arm and guided me down a long corridor lined with small vitrines, cut into the wall, displaying classical Greek and Egyptian statuettes. I paused in front of a figure of a human with a dog’s head.

‘Anubis,’ he said. ‘The lord of the dead and the underworld.’

I wanted to say I’d been reading poems about the underworld, but I was afraid of sounding pretentious. And I’d dated enough to know that too much anxious chit-chat could kill the sexual buzz. And there was plenty of buzz.

The bedroom was as stylish as the rest of the apartment. There were windows on three sides, so it seemed to be perched, like an eagle’s nest, above the city below. Could you have sex in a room like this without thinking about all the strangers who might be watching? Or maybe that would be part of the fun, the excitement.

Was it really me thinking that? I was shy about my body. I’d always preferred to have sex with the lights out. But now I was ready to do it any way, anywhere…

In the center of the room was the bed: the mattress from our store. Not that I would have recognized its organic cotton and hand-knotted tufts covered by a simple but beautiful midnight-blue silk bedspread and a half dozen matching throw pillows. Was he married? Would a single guy have a bed like that?

Maybe this was how rich men lived, men who never made their own beds. It shamed me to think of my bed at home, a tangle of rumpled sheets and blankets piled with books and, right now, with the entire contents of my closet, clothes I’d tried on for this evening.

Why had I bothered? I could read his mind, sort of. And I had the definite sense that he wasn’t getting ready to throw me down on the mattress. He wasn’t even going to ask me to repeat what I’d done in the store. We stood there in the doorway, looking into the room. He was still holding my arm.

He said, ‘Do I have to have it moved?’

‘What?’ I said.

‘The feng shui,’ he reminded me. ‘Does it work?’

Was he serious? I didn’t know him well enough to ask. I was ready to have sex with him, but I wasn’t comfortable enough to find out if he was joking.

From a strict feng shui point of view, the bed should have been diagonal to the door, which it wasn’t. But I wasn’t going to say that. There was really no place else in the room that the bed could go.

‘It’s fine,’ I said. ‘Perfect.’ If he had bad luck, or got sick, or developed insomnia, it would be my fault. Fine. Anyhow, I didn’t even believe in feng shui. It was just a way to sell mattresses.

He said, ‘That’s odd … I had the impression that the bed was supposed to be diagonal to the door and facing the other direction.’

My face burned with shame. ‘Probably,’ I said. ‘That’s probably right…’ Then why had he even asked me?

‘But I think I’m going to leave it where it is,’ he said. ‘Live dangerously, right?’

‘Right!’ I said. ‘That’s right.’

Standing beside me, he reached around and put his hand under my T-shirt, on my bare skin, on my back, just above my waist. My breathing quickened. It didn’t take much. He could feel it.

‘What now?’ I said. It was up to him. I would do whatever he wanted.

He took his hand out from under my shirt.

He said, ‘Thank you, that’s great. I can’t tell you how grateful I am.’

‘But…’ I couldn’t help myself. Something could still happen.

Or did I fail some sort of test when I’d lied about feng shui?

Only later I would learn that I’d passed the test when I lied.

He said, ‘I’m looking forward to getting to know you better, Isabel.’

Was he trying to make me beg? Maybe I would have, if I could have figured out how to beg a man for sex without humiliating myself. I was ready to humiliate myself, but I didn’t believe that it would work.

‘Could I ask you a question?’ I said.

‘Ask me anything,’ he replied. But I could feel him tense. What did he not want me to ask? What was he hiding?

‘Well. I suppose we might call this our second date. And you haven’t confessed to any other names. But what’s your last name?’ I said. ‘I was terrified one of the doormen would ask me for it on the way up tonight.’

He laughed. ‘I assumed you knew.’

‘I don’t,’ I said.

‘Well, I’m Matthew,’ he said. ‘Matthew Frazier.’

‘Pleased to meet you, Mr Frazier,’ I said, and stuck out my hand.

He looked down at my hand but didn’t take it. My arm dropped back to my side.

He guided me back down the hall and through the living room towards the front door. Halfway there, he handed me on to Maria, who gave me my jacket and opened the door.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Goodbye.’

I stood outside the door in the hall for a long time, though I was pretty sure that I was being watched on a security camera. Let them watch. I couldn’t move. Why had The Customer—Matthew—brought me there? What did he want from me? Why had he even called? He couldn’t have meant that he cared about the feng shui. And then when he caught me in a lie … I didn’t know him well enough to know if my tiny white lie had been a deal breaker.

Well, I told myself, I would be better off if the whole thing ended right here. I’m a truthful person. I don’t need a relationship with a man I’d started lying to, even before I had met him.

Over the next few days, even Steve could tell that something was making me miserable. He seemed weirdly pleased about it. Luke and Marcy treated me like a person who had a life-threatening disease but who didn’t want to discuss it.

When Marcy and Luke and I met at Cielito Lindo at our usual time on Sunday, Marcy made sure that my drinks from the bar were double strength and doubly delicious. But that only reminded me of the cocktail I’d drank at Matthew’s apartment. Nothing would ever taste that wonderful again. Nothing else would ever get me high in that same way. I’d been offered magic, and I’d lied and spoiled everything. I should have told him to move the bed. Maybe I’d be in that bed right now. Did he ever think of me when he lay on the mattress?

One night, after not having heard from him for days and not having thought of anything else, I dreamed I gave him a present. It wasn’t clear in the dream, what the present was, but I woke up remembering his smile, how in the dream he’d hugged me, how warm and happy I felt.

I thought: It’s a sign. I’ll send him something. A little thank you present. Thanks for the lovely drink. Thanks for buying the (I wouldn’t need to say ‘most expensive’) mattress. Businesses sent thank you gifts all the time. They showed their appreciation. That’s how you built customer loyalty, which was something Steve talked a lot about, though no one had ever bought anything from us twice. So what would customer loyalty have meant?

But what could I give The Customer? Matthew? What did a man like that need? How could I base my decision on a coffee shop exchange, a sex game in the store, and a chaste drink on the terrace? And a dream I only half remembered.

Every day, on the walk from the subway to Doctor Sleep, I looked in every window. I was shopping for The Customer. For Matthew. But nothing seemed right.

Then one warm afternoon—on my lunch break—I was going to meet Luke for a quick picnic in Tompkins Square Park. I passed this funny little store, part joke shop/part kids shop, the kind of place you hardly see anymore in New York except in the East Village. In the window was one of those Mexican card games, Loteria, like bingo but with pictures, beautiful old paintings of the world, the sun, the musician, the jug, the cactus, the tree, the heart—and words in Spanish on the card and the board.

The image that caught my eye was El Melon. A cantaloupe, sliced open, pinkish orange, juicy and full of seeds. A picture of a cantaloupe. A picture of sex.

I bought the set, and sent the card to Matthew’s penthouse, in an envelope addressed to Matthew Frazier. I hoped that he would open it himself, rather than the assistant he’d listed on his sales receipt—whom I’d never met—or the housekeeper.

Nothing happened. No reply. I imagined him throwing my card in the trash. What a stupid gift I’d chosen. Why would a hot rich guy who sipped cocktails on the terrace want a funky old picture of a cantaloupe?

A week later the package came back to me. The stamp on the slightly battered envelope said that no one by that name lived at that address. Why had he done that? Did he not want to hear from me? Why had he gone so far as to pretend he didn’t live there?

Meanwhile, I couldn’t stop thinking about Matthew. His hands, his body, the way he smiled at me from across the table at the coffee shop, the sound of his voice when I’d lay on the mattress at the store. I got interested in sex—obsessed, you could say— in a way I’d never been before.

Now, when Steve went out to do whatever he did at lunch, I watched porn on my computer. I’d found a little clip in which a guy who looks like Matthew is interviewing a girl for a job and he somehow persuades her (I watched it without sound) to have sex on his desk in many different positions. I’d come every time I thought about Matthew’s voice saying, ‘Lie down. Please. Let me see.’

Matthew

Sooner or later everyone wants a do-over. Sooner rather than later, everyone reaches a point when they say, Okay, guys, roll it back. Let’s try something else. Begin again. Give it another ending.

Especially if you are like me. If your life, like mine, took a turn for the worse early on, and nothing can get you back to that place you were before the bad thing happened.

I’d had money and comfort, high hopes. All the advantages, as they say. I’d grown up on the South shore, south of Boston. In a big house near the water—not right on the beach, but close enough so I could hear the ocean from my bedroom.

I’d made a mistake. I’d fallen. I wanted to climb back up. I longed for it like some people long for their childhood home.

My childhood home was comfortable. My dad was a bank executive and amateur photographer. He took lots of arty shots of my beautiful mother, who didn’t work, and who every so often had to be sent away for mysterious reasons. Only later (after both my parents died) did I figure out that Mother had a little problem with alcohol and pills and went, occasionally, into rehab.

The summer before I was supposed to go to college, my younger brother Ansel and I stole our neighbor’s car. Not just any car. A Mercedes convertible. Our neighbor didn’t deserve a car like that. Not just any neighbor. Doctor Graves. Graves was his actual name, I always said when I told this story. The Doc was a total dick. He’d called the cops on us, twice, when my brother and I accidentally drove over the edge of his lawn. What was his problem? We were kids, just learning to drive.

To get up the nerve, my brother and I got trashed on some candy-sweet alcohol drink concocted selectively from the back of our parents’ liquor cabinet. We cut holes in tube socks and put them over our heads and told Doctor Graves we had a gun. He knew we were the boys next door, but the papers were full of rich suburban psycho teens committing murders. He could see the headline about the killer prep school boys. How did he know we weren’t like that? He handed over the keys.

I won’t pretend it didn’t feel great, taking the car out on the highway. We knew the back roads better than the cops. We had a big head start. We parked near the beach. My brother leaned down and felt under the back of his seat and said, ‘Holy shit. Why does Doctor Graves have a gun? What does he need a hand gun for?’ Maybe the doctor thought he needed a hand gun to protect his Mercedes from punks like us.

Even drunk, I was the big brother. I grabbed the gun from Ansel. The gun went off. The bullet grazed my brother’s hand. A scratch. I freaked and called 911. Ambulances and cop cars came screaming up to where we were parked. It must have looked really bad, there was so much blood all over the front seat.

We both knew that it was an accident. Ansel made a complete recovery, with only some minor nerve damage in that hand.

But he hasn’t spoken to me in the fifteen years since the accident. Maybe he saw something in my eyes when the shooting happened. Maybe he knew that I always believed our parents loved him more.

Ansel has been the family success, the success I was supposed to be. Or maybe he was always the one who was supposed to be successful. Last I heard, he’s an architect, with an extremely profitable residential practice on Eastern Long Island. A cousin who gets in touch with me every couple of years (last time he was tracing some kind of genealogy thing) told me that Ansel had had a few serious relationships, but he’d never married. No wife, no kids. You had to wonder why what that was—maybe because Mom and Dad provided such an uninspiring example of marital bliss.

Anyhow, when we had our little … accident, I fell on my sword for my brother. My dad and mom had excellent lawyers who pleaded the grand larceny charge down to probation, a huge fine, and a class D felony on my permanent record. The college counselor at St. Andrews wasn’t thrilled about being bothered in the middle of summer vacation, just when he thought the whole college mess was sorted out. He called Dartmouth, where I was headed, to ask if a felony conviction would be a problem. Yes, in fact, it would be a problem. A gigantic problem.

That was the start of the slide. My friends went to college. Mom and Dad suggested community college, the only place that would take me, but I decided to move to New York and live on my own in the world’s most expensive city, which meant a counter job in a gourmet take-out fried chicken stand and a walk-up on a pre-gentrified block in Crown Heights. I would really have gone under if I hadn’t lucked into a series of brief affairs with generous older women.

A few years later, Ansel was the one who got to go to Dartmouth. Having a bad boy as an older brother wasn’t a stain on his permanent record.

My high school friends graduated from good schools, got jobs on Wall Street. Against all odds, we stayed friends.

One Friday night those same friends and I were drinking at a downtown dive bar we liked, despite the bar’s newly acquired hipster chic. Even though a few of the guys had girlfriends and were moving on in the direction of separate, grown-up lives, our partying had gotten more intense—more desperate, maybe—now that we sensed that our stay-out-all-night years might be drawing to a close.

That night we saw, at a table across the bar, Val Morton.

We looked and tried not to look, and we looked again. Was it or wasn’t it him? Those clean sharp features, that cool confidence, that authority, those looks—all pretty impressive in a man pushing sixty—were hard to mistake. But still… When we finally decided that it was him, and not someone else who looked like him, we felt that charge in the air, that fizzy vibe, the way that someone famous changes the atmosphere in a room.

It was Valentine Morton, the craggy movie star turned politician turned one-term Governor of New York, defeated in a run for re-election after the newspapers broke the story of how Val Morton and his wife were never in Albany. They stayed there at most four days a month.

At the table with Val and a few guys around my age was Val’s wife Heidi, a tall former supermodel who had spent her twenties watching her rock star boyfriends snort coke and destroy hotel rooms. Then she grew up, scaled back on the runway appearances, appeared in a couple of straight-to-video movies, married Val, and settled down. She’d traded the thrill of watching flat screens fly out of hotel windows for the comfort (and the thrill) of traveling the world in Val Morton’s private jet.

What did the Mortons do now? In the past few years, Val had become a high-profile Manhattan real estate developer. His name appeared quite often in the papers, mostly in connection with some battle that his real estate development company (named The Prairie Foundation, as if it were some public-interest group dedicated to helping Midwestern farmers) was waging with the city or the Landmarks Commission or the residents of the neighborhoods which his projects were about the destroy. For some time, he’d been fighting to develop a huge stretch of the waterfront in Long Island City, overlooking the Manhattan skyline. A lot of people hated Val Morton, a lot of people tried to stop him, but he always won. The Prairie Foundation had more than enough lawyers, time and money to beat the local block associations. And Val seemed to enjoy these fights; that is, he enjoyed winning.

When Val wasn’t too busy razing brownstones or throwing a block of mom and pop stores out of business, he and Heidi went to parties. They appeared in People and the other celebrity magazines. If you got your hair cut or went to the supermarket, you saw Val and Heidi hanging out with Hollywood stars and the Clintons. The Prairie Foundation did give to some worthy liberal causes: literacy, the public library, prisoners’ rights, rebuilding disaster sites. Val still acted in films every few years, mostly sequels to pictures he’d made when he was young. It didn’t matter if the films did well or not. He had lifetime celebrity status. Lifetime celebrity money.

The dive bar got warmer and brighter. Across the table from Val, who was playing to his entourage of young guys in suits, Heidi sat checking her phone and grabbing waiters who passed by, pulling them down to whisper drink orders in their ears.

Val was doing all the talking. His boys all laughed explosively at everything he said.

Meanwhile Val kept looking over at me, the way a girl would look at you in a bar. Was he gay? You heard that rumor about every actor, but I hadn’t heard it about him. I’d been cruised by guys before, but this didn’t feel like that.

My friend Simon said, ‘I think the governor likes you, Matthew.’

‘Ex-governor,’ I said.

One of our guys swung by Val’s table en route to the men’s room and came back and said, Yeah, definitely him.

Duh. No one else looked like him: the aging, handsome, slightly debauched Hollywood warrior. His eyes kept tracking to me.

Fine with me. I was straight. I’d had two serious girlfriends and lost count of the not-so-serious ones. I’d slept with all my female friends. They’d slept with each other’s boyfriends.

But hey, I’m a practical guy. Open-minded. Finding an aging sugar daddy before I got too old seemed better than taking orders at Fries and Thighs. I didn’t much want to get fucked in the ass, but we could work around that.

Val Morton was handsome and rich.

I went and stood by his table. He watched me walk across the room.

I said, ‘Mr Morton, I’m sorry to bother you, and I know how creepy it is to say I’m your number one fan, but…’ My voice trailed off.

I laughed. He didn’t. He’d heard it before. There was nothing to do but go on. He was listening.

‘I’m a huge fan. I’ve seen all your films. I voted for you for governor.’ That last part wasn’t true. I hadn’t voted in that election.

‘Guys, give us a minute.’ His posse rose obediently and left. He put one hand on Heidi’s arm, meaning stay. She was staying anyhow. She was poring over the cocktail menu. She didn’t even look at me.

He motioned for me to sit down but not get too comfortable.

He said, ‘Do you know that sorry was the fourth word out of your mouth? Don’t start off apologizing, okay? Not to me, not to anyone.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’ I laughed. He didn’t. He’d heard that before too.

‘Valentine Morton.’ He put out his hand.

‘Walker Frazier,’ I said.

‘What kind of parents name their kid Walker?’

‘A photography fan and his bullied wife,’ I said. He watched me deciding not to ask what kind of parents name their son Valentine.

‘Guess what lovers’ holiday in February I was born on,’ Val said, answering my unspoken question for me. ‘So what do your friends call you? Walk?’

‘Matthew. My middle name. My friends call me Matthew,’ I said.

‘Ah, right,’ said Val. ‘The friends. I can see them from here. So let me describe your evening to you … Matthew. You’re going to drink quite a bit more than your friends, and when someone pays, or when they split the bill, you’re not going to be putting your credit card in with the rest. Am I correct? In the ballpark, maybe?’

‘More or less in the ballpark.’ Fuck you, I thought.

‘More,’ he said. ‘More than less. But that’s not a problem. For me. From my point of view, it’s the opposite of a problem. It’s actually an advantage. I’m looking for someone like you.’

‘To do what?’ Somehow I could tell that this was about business, not sex. If it was a sex thing, Heidi would at least have checked me out.

‘What do you think I want you to do?’ he said. ‘Blow me? Christ. Don’t flatter yourself. You think you’re hotter than Heidi?’

At the sound of her name, Heidi looked up, then went back to the cocktail menu.

‘To work for me. To do stuff.’

‘Stuff?’

‘A range of stuff,’ he said. ‘For which you’ll get paid in cash, if I may. No boring tedious social security and tax deductions. No problem. And no record of your having worked for me. At the end of the day, should we decide to part company, no fulsome recommendation letter. No bright spot on your CV. How does that sound?’

It sounded great, but I kept waiting for more … for some sense of the weird ‘stuff’ he would be paying me to do.

He said, ‘What I mean is, how does a hundred and fifty grand a year sound?’

‘Amazing,’ I said, taken aback. ‘But … why me? You’ve never met me before. You know nothing about me.’

‘I saw you and your friends. You’re the hungriest guy at that table.’

He motioned for his entourage to come back. He told me to give my contact information to a tall, gym-buffed guy in a pale gray suit who typed it, lightning fast, into his phone.

‘My office will contact you,’ Morton said. ‘Have a fun evening.’

I went back to my table.

The guys said, ‘What was that about?’

I said, ‘I was just telling him how much I liked his films.’

My interview with Val Morton was two days away. I spent them on the internet. I read the puff pieces about the good works that the Prairie Foundation was doing, and some shorter pieces, mostly from political sites that weighed the fact that Val Morton was helping to ruin New York City against the fact that he’d built houses in the 9th ward after Hurricane Katrina.

I read about his fights with the Landmarks Commission and other city agencies regarding his plans to turn some of Manhattan’s oldest, most beautiful structures—the counting house off the Battery, a hall at Ellis Island—into condos. It was Val Morton’s position that he would preserve these places, which the cash-strapped city was letting decay.

Of course, I wondered why Val was hiring me. The way he’d said hungry scared me, partly because it was true. What had he meant by stuff? If the job wasn’t about sex, then what was it? To be his hired goon. To go to meetings and threaten the neighborhood associations. To make it clear that the sweet little old lady who said that her river view was being blocked by Val’s condo would come to wish she’d shut up and let Val do whatever he wanted.

I read the details of how his building on the waterfront in Brooklyn Heights had involved a battle. About how his co-op board was up in arms about Val’s plans to combine two Upper East Side apartments in order to double the size of the prewar Park Avenue palace in which he and Heidi lived. And about the ongoing war over his plans to take over Long Island City.

At the Prairie Foundation office, on the thirty-sixth floor of a high-rise in Tribeca, I had to run through a gauntlet of security guards, receptionists and secretaries before one of them finally gave me a form to fill out. There were several dozen questions, mostly having to do with my education, my health, my background, my previous employment.

It was just the kind of thing that made me conscious of how dismal my resume was. I worked in a fried chicken place! At the end, the form asked if I had a criminal record. I considered lying. Did one mistake I’d made as a teenager mean that I was supposed to spend my whole life asking, ‘Will that be light meat or dark?’ But something about my talk with Val Morton made me think this might be the rare case: a straight job for which a sketchy history would actually count in my favor.

Val didn’t bother seeing me. A secretary said, ‘Oh, Mr Walker, you’re hired.’

‘Matthew,’ I said. ‘Matthew Frazier.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You can start Monday.’

The job was never boring, though I didn’t always know what I was doing or why. I got paid enough to rent a nice one-bedroom apartment near Central Park, where I ran either before or after I went to work. I didn’t ask a lot of questions. I found out the answers later, if I found out at all. Sometimes I felt like a high level, well-paid errand boy. Once I hand-delivered a laptop to a lawyer’s office in Kansas City. It was assumed that I wouldn’t look at what was on it. I was sort of like Val’s personal assistant, though (at least I told myself) the work was a little more challenging and demanding than that. I never understood the black and white rules for being a ‘good guy.’ I liked working for Val because for Val—everything is grey.

I managed Val and Heidi’s apartments in Brooklyn Heights and on the Upper East Side, so he and Heidi could stay wherever was closer to where they were spending the evening. I worked with Val’s decorator, Charisse, to fix up the Brooklyn Heights condo.

Charisse and I trusted each other. When I told her that Val needed a new mattress, even though he already had one, she let me pick it out.

The real explanation was that I had found Isabel, and she was working in the mattress store.

But that was a secret between Val and me. Charisse didn’t have to know that.

One day, not long after I went to work for him, Val Morton called me up to his office. He always sat in front of a vast, explosion-proof picture window so that the Statue of Liberty seemed to float in the air behind him. He always gave everyone a moment to be wowed by the view. Then he got down to business.

‘I need you to do something that you may not understand, at least at first. But it has to be done. There’s something I need. You will need a partner. An accomplice, if you will. A woman. A young woman. Pretty but not too pretty. Sexy but not too sexy. Not ridiculous. A smart girl who isn’t crazy but who will do anything you say. The Bonnie to your Clyde. The Sissy Spacek character to the Charlie Sheen character. Dude, relax. I’m joking. I’m not asking you to rob banks or commit serial murders.’

I looked over his shoulder at a helicopter hovering over the Hudson.

‘Does this involve sex?’

‘Not with me,’ Val said. ‘I don’t even want to watch. I’ve got Heidi. Remember?’

As far as I knew, Val and Heidi were more or less happily married. A few days before, Val had taken me to lunch at Michael’s. He’d ordered the Cobb salad, as always.

He said, ‘I don’t know if you know this, Matthew, but I’ve been married three times. I must believe in the institution. I’ve got four kids, two from each previous marriage. Everybody gets along, loves everyone else. I’d say okay to one more kid, but that’s not on Heidi’s agenda. So at the moment we’re good.’ He knocked lightly on the table and gave me a version of the smile that had made him a movie star.

Now, in his office, Val said, ‘Don’t be an asshole, Matthew. This is not about the porn film of your dreams. Sex with this … accomplice would be your call. Sex, I need hardly point out, is one of the most reliable forms of mind control. Especially useful with young women.’

It was an odd thing for an older guy—my boss—-to say. Was he saying that Heidi was his personal mind control sex slave? I’d assumed their connection was about Morton’s money and power. If power was the greatest aphrodisiac, money and real estate were right up there along with it.

‘That’s not very feminist,’ I said. ‘Very retro.’

‘Mea culpa,’ said Morton ‘Please. Take it easy. This is supposed to be fun. You’re getting paid to seduce a pretty girl of your choice. Thank me. There’s no rush. Let’s give it to the end of the fall. Find the right girl. Get her ready. Maybe hold off on fucking her. Make her wait for it. Make her beg. Keep me posted. Let me know how it’s going. Tell me when she’s ready to do what we need. What I need. Then I’ll tell you what comes next.’

Actually, it was intriguing. What a cool assignment. All I had to do was find a girl who would do anything I said. I could have sex with her if I wanted to, but I didn’t have to. And it would be fun to make her wait. Val was right. I was getting paid for what most guys would pay to do. And somehow, in a funny way, that qualified me to do it. It was a job. Compared to the jobs that were out there, this was beyond sweet. I’d be nice to the girl, court her, tease her a little. She’d never have to be the wiser. And—at least as far as I knew—no one would get hurt.

I felt a little guilty, not telling a woman the truth, but, let’s face it, I’d done it before. It was something guys did all the time, even when they were married. Especially then.

I’d had several relationships. They always ended badly. Freud said, what do women want? I could have told him: Whatever they want, it’s more than you want to give.

Val Morton made it a challenge. An assignment. I began to look at women in a different way. A more … specialized way. More … practical.

Dating apps made it too easy. I went on Bumble—where sweet girls who want to feel empowered by doing all the work go to meet guys who supposedly want more than one fun night. Maybe for the first time ever, I knew what I was looking for. And now all I would have to do is swipe right and wait for her to make the first move. That was how I found her.

Isabel.

Later, too late, I asked myself: Why her? I never figured it out. I guess people just know things about each other. They pick things up on their radar. They know how far a person will go.

I don’t know how I knew about Isabel, but I did. Even when I thought her name was Riley.

That was an added twist—something that made her even more perfect, for some reason.

Right away I could feel it between us. The heat. When she walked into the coffee shop and told me about her little game. When she said yes to my own game. When I asked her to lie down on the overpriced mattress she was pretending to sell me. Well, good for her. It was pure inspiration. It was fun, and it was hot. By the time I left the mattress store, I knew I had found my accomplice, my partner in crime. My creature.

Who knows how far I would have gone if her creepy boss hadn’t shown up at the store? Or maybe we’d gone far enough. For the moment.

That night, alone in my bed, I thought about her and jerked off. I hoped she was doing the same. I would have liked to call her the very next day. But I knew better. I made her—and myself—wait.

Isabel

One slow morning at work, I looked up from my book and saw a white business envelope on the floor, just inside the door. I jumped up to get it before Steve did. I had a feeling about it.

The thick, expensive, cream-colored envelope was addressed to me. Inside was a printed invitation, the letters embossed in an elegant, old-fashioned cursive.

You are cordially invited for cocktails at the home of Valentine and Heidi Morton.

Val and Heidi Morton? Me? Why was my name on the envelope? Someone must have made a mistake.

There was something else in the envelope. I reached in and pulled out a Loteria card. El Mundo. The world. A picture of the world. On the back it said, in neat block letters, I’ll meet you there at seven. It couldn’t have been a coincidence. I knew it was from Matthew. But why had my own letter with the melon card come back to me? Had he opened the envelope and resealed it and returned it to the postman? Why would someone do something like that?

I would find out, or I wouldn’t. I was meeting Matthew at a party at the Upper East Side apartment of Val and Heidi Morton.

What did you wear to a fancy uptown Upper East Side cocktail party when you were a failed actress and mattress professional living over a toxic dump site in Greenpoint? I went to one of the last vintage clothing shops in the East Village and asked Melinda, who’d owned the store for years, what to wear to a cocktail party given by (I didn’t want to name drop) a famous older celebrity actor and politician on the Upper East Side.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Val Morton.’

‘How do you know?’

‘People have been coming in all week looking for something to wear to that party. You’d think the guests would be shopping at Bergdorf, but everyone seems to want vintage Balenciaga or Chanel. Okay. Let’s see. What can you afford?’

Nothing was the truth. But I’d gotten an advance from Steve.

I spent all my money on the perfect little black dress from the Sixties that made me look so pretty that even I relaxed. A little.

‘Fabulous,’ said Melinda. ‘Anyhow, it hardly matters. You’ll be a good ten years younger than anyone there. Fresh blood at the vampire party.’

I called in sick (Steve was definitely not happy about it) and spent the whole day getting ready. I watched the porn clip on my laptop, the one with the guy that looked like Matthew. I came when he was doing the interview and had the prospective secretary bent over the desk. I wanted to be satisfied before I went, at least sexually. It might help me act and react with more common sense and control than I’d had so far around Matthew.

I took Lyft from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side, though by this point I really couldn’t afford it. I’d figure something out before the credit card bill came and started accumulating massive amounts of interest. Well, maybe, just maybe, I wouldn’t have to pay for a car home. Maybe I would be going home with Matthew…

Three girls—around my age, dressed sort of like me, prettier than me, with better jobs than me—stood in the lobby with clipboards. It seemed impossible that my name could be on their list. But it was. One of them took my coat and gave me a coat claim ticket.

The door was open, and everything I could see inside the apartment shone—like gold, like glass, like perfect skin and hair and teeth. There were windows everywhere, and the starry lights of the city glittered in the dark sky. I hesitated in the doorway. Just walking into that room seemed like the hardest thing I would ever have to do.

The rooms were vast, the walls covered with brocade silk and gilt and mirrors. It looked more like the reception room of a French king’s palace than the living room of a former movie star and fashion model. I tried not to think about my apartment, how small it was, how dark. It hurt to picture what this place looked and felt like in the mornings when Val and Heidi Morton could hold their coffee cups and drift—slowly, leisurely—from room to sunny room.

Melinda was right; not counting the girls with the clipboards, I was the youngest woman at the party by ten or fifteen years. Many of the women were beautiful, and they looked as if they spent every spare minute and dollar on that beauty. But I had the skin, the bounce, and underneath my little black dress, pretty perfect breasts. No spending required. The men looked at me, even the ones trying not to look, even the gay ones. I felt as if I was struggling to keep my head above water, fighting for sheer survival with whatever weapons I had. The bloom of youth, good skin, good tits, whatever.

A strange man who excited and frightened me had arranged to meet me in this frightening and exciting place. And I had agreed.

There were mirrors everywhere, and they multiplied everything endless times. It was dizzying, disorienting. Even so, I saw Matthew clearly, from across the room. I fought off the weak-kneed feeling, followed by the adrenalin rush.

Matthew was leaning against a green and gold wall, sipping a glass of wine. He looked at me over the top of the glass and smiled his radiant smile. By the time I’d crossed the room, he—as if by magic—had gotten another glass of white wine, which he gave me. He kissed me lightly on the cheek. He smelled of that sandalwood and vetiver cologne he wore the first time I met him. Expensive. Delicious.

I could feel people watching us. It didn’t seem to matter that I was the poorest, least famous, least powerful person in the room. I didn’t know where Matthew ranked, in that group, in terms of power and money. But we had something they didn’t have. The aura of sex, the promise of sex. Even the oldest and most important guests sensed it.

Matthew cupped my elbow and leaned in close to my ear. ‘I’m glad you came, Isabel.’

Nothing seemed real. Not Matthew, not the wine, not the party, not the other guests trying not to watch us. I’d spent so much time imagining this. How could it be coming true?

I leaned back into him, ‘Who are these people? I recognize some of them, I mean from the news and magazines, but…’

‘I thought you knew. I assumed you would Google the foundation and figure out the rest. I work for Val Morton. This is a fundraiser for the Foundation. This is where Val and Heidi live.’

I couldn’t stop myself from saying, ‘The letter I sent you came back.’

‘What letter?’

‘A letter I sent to the place in Brooklyn Heights. Where we had drinks on the terrace. Let’s watch the sunset. The mattress … your apartment. Remember?’

‘Right. Well, you’re not the only one who can pretend to be somebody else for a minute or two. Truth is, that was Val’s apartment. Part of my job was to keep that fact out of the papers. Because when there was all that trouble, the PR was that he wasn’t building it for himself—but I assumed you would figure that out. That’s hilarious, really.’

‘I just assumed it was yours…’ I was trying to remember if he’d actually said anything to suggest that it was his apartment.

‘What made you think that?’

‘Didn’t you say that you were moving and didn’t want to take your old mattress with you?’ I was getting my stories mixed up—when was Matthew playing The Customer and when was Matthew just being the real Matthew?

‘I was,’ he said. ‘And I didn’t. But that wasn’t the same mattress. I bought that one for Val and Heidi. That was their apartment. Did I not make that clear?’

Something still didn’t add up. He must have gotten my card with the picture of the melon if he’d sent me back a card with a picture of the world. And yet he was refusing to answer, or choosing to ignore, my question about it. Was he just messing with my head? I didn’t want to think that was true, but I couldn’t help it. I didn’t like the slippage, the questions that suddenly rose in my mind about what was real and what wasn’t, what was true and what was a lie. For a moment everything seemed like a mind game in a thriller … and then I calmed down. After that it just seemed quirky and interesting. Funny.

No wonder he didn’t want to have sex on someone else’s mattress.

‘It’s crazy how two people can have a complete misunderstanding. Isn’t it, Isabel?’

I loved how he said my name. I hadn’t misunderstood what had happened on the mattress at the store, nor the feeling of his hand on my back beneath my T-shirt as we’d looked at someone else’s bed in someone else’s apartment.

‘Let me introduce you,’ he said, and steered me over to Val Morton, who was surrounded by a group of older men with good haircuts and much younger wives.

For some reason they shifted to make room for Matthew and me.

‘Val Morton,’ said Matthew, ‘I’d like you to meet my friend, Isabel Archer.’

Val Morton smiled his famous smile and looked me up and down.

‘Beautiful name,’ he said.’ Is that your real name? Wait a second. Don’t tell me. Portrait of a Lady. Early Nicole Kidman. Malkovich was amazing.’

‘My mom’s a big Henry James fan,’ I said.

‘See?’ he said. ‘Didn’t I call it? Let’s give me some credit.’

His friends made admiring gestures and noises.

‘You’re sure it’s not a stage name?’ he said. ‘You’re an actress, right?’

Failed actress, I thought. Shit. Was it that obvious?

‘I can always tell. I spent the best years of my life in the industry. There’s something about how you hold yourself, how you study the world, I can watch you figuring out what other people are feeling. Figuring out what you can steal. Or should I say borrow?’

‘That’s my real name. And thank you,’ I said.

‘She’s perfect,’ Val Morton told Matthew.

Then he turned to me and said, ‘Nice to meet you, Jessica.’

‘Isabel. Nice to meet you too.’

Morton’s attention drifted back to the men in his group. Matthew led me away.

‘Perfect for what?’ I said.

‘Huh?’

‘He told you I was perfect. As if he had something in mind. Perfect for what?’

‘Perfect,’ said Matthew. ‘You’re perfect. How many different things does perfect mean?’

A waiter put a full wine glass in each of our hands, and I drank mine in a few gulps.

It was happening. I was here with him. I would try to be what he wanted, if I could figure out what that was. He didn’t seem to expect me to say much as he took me around to groups of partygoers and introduced me mostly to young men, all of whom seemed to work for Val. I smiled. Nice to meet you. None of them was as handsome or as hot as Matthew. We navigated around the circles surrounding the actors and politicians and socialites whose faces were so famous that even I recognized them.

Glasses of wine kept appearing in Matthew’s hand. He kept passing them to me, and I kept drinking. It helped fuzz out the rest of the room, which was fuzzy to begin with, and it brought him—only him—into focus. After a while he was the only thing I could see.

‘Should we leave?’ he said. Together? He’d said we. I could hardly keep my voice steady as I said, ‘Sure!’ That high little squeak didn’t even sound like me.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Let’s blow this clam shack.’

‘I need to go to the bathroom,’ I said.

‘Brilliant. So do I. I’ll show you where it is. This place is a maze.’

There was a powder room downstairs off the living room. Matthew tried the doorknob.

‘Occupied,’ someone yelled.

‘Okay. Follow me.’

He knew his way around the maze, taking me through one of the closed doors at the end of the corridor and down another short hall where three steps led up to the private wing. How did he seem so comfortable in his boss’s private space?

He was holding my hand now, friendly but neutral, the way you’d hold a child’s hand, crossing the street.

‘Guess how many bathrooms this place has,’ he said.

‘Five?’ I said.

‘Double it,’ he said.

‘Why does anyone need ten bathrooms?’ The question didn’t interest him. I was sorry I asked.

‘I’ll show you the best one,’ he said. ‘The craziest one. As long as we’re here, what the hell?’

I should have known that in order to reach the ‘best’ bathroom, we would have to experience the full pageantry of Morton and Heidi’s bedroom. I don’t know what it was supposed to be. A Renaissance Venetian Vegas palace French bordello with all the modern conveniences. A billionaire’s sex cave. We paused in the doorway, just as we had in what had turned out to be the Mortons’ Brooklyn Heights apartment. We seemed to spend a lot of our time looking at other people’s bedrooms.

Again, I wondered how he knew so much about his boss’s bedroom and private bathroom? Had he come here with Heidi? Or with Morton? Did they give him orders from bed?

He said, ‘Managing both apartments, that is, managing the people who manage both apartments, is part of my job. Not the most exciting part, but the buck stops here. And the two of them can be monsters. If Morton runs out of toilet paper, he’s capable of firing every employee down the food chain starting with me.’

I didn’t want to imagine Morton and Heidi in that beautiful bed. But I wouldn’t have minded lying down. I felt tired and hot and drunk.

But first, right … the bathroom.

The bathroom was as large as my entire apartment, a gold-fauceted, marble-tiled, dazzlingly white Roman bath. The toilet, the bathtub, and the steam shower each had its own separate room.

Matthew showed me to the room with the toilet. I was startled when he followed me in and locked the door behind us. But I was so tipsy, it seemed to make a kind of sense.

I should have been alarmed, or maybe embarrassed. But it all seemed like fun. Matthew wasn’t going to rape me in Val Morton’s bathroom. If I asked him to open the door, he would. But I didn’t ask, I didn’t want to.

He stood with his back to the door. Across from the white marble toilet and the bidet was a white marble sink, and behind it, a mirrored wall. Did Morton like watching himself on the toilet? Matthew had said that people could get fired if Val ran out of toilet paper. I tried not to think about that.

Matthew said, ‘Go ahead. Pee. You first.’

‘Okay,’ I said. The wine made it easier, but I wasn’t so drunk that I didn’t know what I was doing. I lifted the hem of my little black dress, pulled down the black lace and red ribbon underpants that had cost half a week’s salary, and sat on the toilet. I closed my eyes and waited for what seemed like forever till I heard the trickle beneath me.

‘You next,’ I said.

I started to pull my underwear up.

‘I’m good,’ he said. ‘I can wait.’

I made a move to get up.

‘Don’t put your underwear back on. Take them off and give them to me.’

I did it. I wasn’t embarrassed. I’d never done anything like that. I was becoming someone else. Definitely not one of the characters I’d played on any of my online dating adventures. And definitely not me.

He folded my underwear with one hand and put it in his pocket.

He said, ‘Now lift your skirt over your waist. Lean over the sink.’

He came around behind me. He kissed the back of my neck. He took his time.

Finally he said, ‘You were really bad down there at that party. You liked the way those old men looked at you, didn’t you?’

Did I? I couldn’t think.

He ran his hand up my thigh and pulled his hand away. He gently slapped my ass.

I’d never done anything like this. I put my head down and moaned.

I was learning too slowly. I didn’t get it. If I showed him that something gave me pleasure, he would stop. He stopped.

He backed away, closed the lid of the toilet seat, and sat down.

‘Come here,’ he said. ‘Sit on my lap. No. Here. Pick your dress up more.’

I sat on his lap, both of us facing the mirror. The cloth of his suit felt great against my ass and my bare thighs. He held me by both hips, shifted me and held me just over the hard-on I could feel inside his pants. I reached down and touched it through his pants. It felt good, it felt like a triumph.

‘Spread your legs,’ he said.

I did. After all, I’d already spread my legs for him, at the store. At least we were in private here, behind a locked door.

‘Lean back,’ he said.

I arched my back and let my shoulders rock back against his chest.

‘Now touch yourself,’ he said.

We both watched me in the mirror. After a while I closed my eyes.

‘Keep your eyes open and don’t you dare come,’ he said.

‘I couldn’t if I wanted to,’ I said, though that was only half true.

‘Good,’ he said.

I played with myself for a while. It felt great. We were both breathing harder.

‘Want to see something cool?’ he whispered in my ear. I could hear him grinning.

‘Yes,’ I breathed.

‘What’d you say?’

‘Yes,’ I repeated.

He grabbed the remote that was on a low table beside the toilet. He hit a button, and the mirror in front of us dissolved and turned into a screen the size of the entire wall. On the screen was projected a film of people in a room. No, wait. It was a live camera.

It was the party downstairs. I saw the guests I’d met; even more people had come. I picked out Val and Heidi, and the famous faces. They didn’t know we were watching. They certainly didn’t know what we were doing as we watched.

I tried to shut my legs, but Matthew’s hand was there. My legs pressed tight against his hand, which felt so good I didn’t want to talk and spoil it.

I’d stopped toughing myself, but I still felt on the edge of coming, with Matthew’s hand inching its way up around my thigh. Finally I said, ‘So does Val Morton come up here and take a shit without leaving the party?’

Matthew laughed. ‘I don’t know what he does here. I don’t want to know. I don’t ask. When he showed me around his place, he showed me how the camera works. He thought it was funny. There was no one downstairs at the time.’

Matthew pulled me back against his chest.

‘Unzip my fly.’

I was shaking, but I did it. I helped him lower the zipper and get his dick out. He was so hard. The skin was soft as velvet. He put his finger inside me.

‘Touch me,’ he said. I did.

After a while he shifted so that his dick was between my thighs.

‘I’ve got a condom in my purse.’ I was shocked by my own boldness. I sat very still, awaiting his response.

He said, ‘What’s the rush? Let’s take it slow. Get to know each other. We’ve got all the time in the world.’ We sat like that for a few minutes, his dick between my legs, pressing up against me, his finger stroking gently inside me while the party guests sipped their drinks and chatted, never knowing we were watching them—or what we were doing.

I bit down on my lower lip to keep from coming. He felt so good. Slow, hypnotized by pleasure, we were still fondling each other when he said, ‘We should go. It’s probably okay that we’re here. Val would think it’s funny, too. But you never know what’s going to cause a major incident.’

I jumped up off his lap and pulled down my dress. The last thing I wanted was a major incident. And I didn’t know if I wanted a famous movie star thinking this was funny.

‘Please don’t tell anyone.’

‘Of course not,’ Matthew said.

As we were leaving, he said, ‘Wait a second.’

I leaned against the door and watched him piss in the toilet. Then we straightened ourselves up and did one last check in the mirror.

‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘Open the medicine cabinet. That one, on the wall.’

‘Really?’ I said.

He said, ‘That fat amber colored bottle of pink pills. Take it. Put it in your purse.’

‘I couldn’t.’

‘You could. Val and Heidi have more. They have plenty. They don’t leave the house without them. You’ll thank me.’

‘What are they? The pills?’

‘Happiness in a bottle,’ he said. ‘My gift to you. One a day. Don’t overdo it.’

We returned to the party, and we walked through the crowd, arm in arm.

I thought: I still hardly know anything about him. We haven’t had actual sex. But for the moment I felt comfortable, almost as if we’d been lovers for years. Anyone who saw us would have thought we were a couple.

I gave him my claim ticket, and he retrieved my coat from the clipboard girls. I didn’t make eye contact with any of them. The doorman opened the door. Matthew and I went outside. He let me go first, very gallant and cool for a guy who’d just fingered me in the host’s bathroom and made me steal his drugs.

The night was cold and clear. Matthew hailed a cab and put me in it and gave the driver what I could tell would be more than enough money for me to get back to Greenpoint, tip included.

‘I’m sorry. I can’t leave, after all. I have to stick around till the end. It’s my job.’ He kissed me on the forehead. ‘Weird job, huh?’

Only later would I learn just how weird Matthew’s job was.

I would have stayed to the end of the party with him. But he hadn’t asked. Had he kicked me out of Val Morton’s apartment? Or had he protected me from something I wasn’t ready to experience?

Matthew

Val Morton’s new superstar cardiologist talked him down to one cigar a week, and because Val Morton saw his cigar as a sociable thing, and because Heidi was involved with her charities and he didn’t like to drink alone, he’d text me to come see him, and he would ply me with brandy and light up a cigar and talk about his favorite subjects.

One of those subjects was how he’d always wanted to direct. He didn’t care where or how, film or TV or theater, a music video for fuck’s sake, he wanted to be the one deciding the narrative, making decisions that weren’t just about money. I always wanted to ask why, with his private fortune, he couldn’t just find a project he liked and finance it himself. But I didn’t say that, because I knew that what Val really meant was that he wanted someone, preferably someone important in Hollywood or on the New York stage, to ask him to direct. I thought: Everyone wants something—something they can’t and don’t have.

One night—clearly Val had started drinking some time before I arrived—he again got onto the subject of directing.

He said, ‘For now the best I can do is to stage little dramas involving real people. Call them performance pieces, reality TV without the TV, I don’t give a shit what you call them. That’s partly where you come in, dude, facilitating and so forth…’

Once again, I knew what he meant. He was directing the little real-life drama starring Isabel and me.

When Val Morton met Isabel at his party, he agreed that she would be perfect to do—and be—what we needed, though he still hadn’t told me exactly what that was.

It was my idea, not his, to play around with her in Val’s bathroom. Val had gotten more insistent about the fact that he wanted me to wait a while before I actually fucked her, and I was willing to go along. A little waiting never failed to heat things up. I felt bad for Isabel, but I was working for Val. Anyway, she wasn’t getting hurt. Neither of us were. We were having fun. I would have liked to fuck her, but I was being paid to act out whatever story my boss was spinning.

Whatever play he was directing.

By the end of that party at Val’s, I still had a hard-on from the stuff we’d done in the bathroom. But as we were leaving, Val signaled me to get rid of her and stick around. I was sorry to have to put her in a cab.

After all the guests had gone home, and Heidi had gone to bed, Val called me into his study, a kind of glass atrium built onto the roof, like a Victorian conservatory, again over the objections of the Landmarks Commission, and in this case of his own co-op board.

He sat at his desk, J. P. Morgan’s actual desk, and I stood before him.

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