something?”
He shrugged, like it was the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. “If the telephone rings, answer it.”
“And what do I say?”
“You ask who it is.”
“And then?”
“You say I’m not in. Take their name and number and tell them I’ll call back. Unless it’s me.”
He was serious. “What am I going to do all day?”
He opened the drawer in the desk and took out a copy of Life magazine. There was a picture of John and Jackie Kennedy on the cover, taken inside the White House. He tossed it on my desk. “Read that. But tidy up a bit first.”
He went out. One of his goons was standing outside waiting for him.
I looked around the office. Tidy up? There wasn’t even dust. I looked through the rest of the drawers in my desk; empty. So was the filing cabinet. I went into his office, checked the drawers in SS Desk. I found a packet of Chesterfields and a stick of gum.
I went to the door and peered out. There was a regular office out there, a typing pool, cubicles, people walking around with files and telexes, people doing actual work. A couple of the clerks looked up from their desks and stared at me. I shut the door.
I stared at the telephone. It didn’t ring.
During my first week on the job the telephone rang twice: once it was Angel checking up on me, the second time it was a wrong number.
After a week I was going out of my mind. I started walking around the office, talking to the office girls who were my age, just trying to be friendly. They treated me like I was the President’s wife. They were polite to me, but so nervous one of them spilled her coffee all over her desk. I realised they were frightened of me. They knew who I was and they wanted to keep their jobs, so for them it was all about being nice to Angel’s new mistress.
I soon realized there was no chance of any real friendship with any of them.
Every day Angel would come back around twelve and take me out to lunch somewhere on Collins, places with men in double breasted suits and silk shirts smoking big cigars, their pinkie rings clinking on their daiquiri glasses. It took us five minutes to cross a room sometimes, everyone wanted to shake his hand and say hello. I didn’t think it was because of his personality.
He was a regular at Capra's on Biscayne. Anyone who was anyone in Miami went there, from the mayor to movie stars.
I noticed we never went to lunch at the same place twice in a row and never ever went out at the same time. “Basic security,” Angel said. It was hard trying to remember that this was the same beautiful boy I’d fallen in love with in Havana. Perhaps he never existed anywhere except outside my own mind.
Sometimes we’d go to the Fontainebleau afterwards, other times he’d drop me back at the office if he had business. I guessed maybe he had a body to drop off in the river somewhere.
It was a surreal life. At three in the afternoon I could be sitting naked in the Presidential suite of the Fontainebleau sipping champagne, having busboys tip their hat to me in the lift, and that night I’d be chasing roaches in the kitchen with a broom.
But at the end of every week Angel gave me an envelope equivalent to the vice president’s salary plus a bonus. I was literally sitting on a fortune. I guess I was the only whore in Miami who had a street corner made out of Norwegian wood.
Chapter 9
Angel unbuttoned his shirt and hung it up in the closet. He did the same with his pants before he offered himself for inspection. His body was still lean and hard, as it was when we were teenagers. He was still very physically attractive.
It was his personality that repelled me.
“I have to leave by four,” he said, as if he wanted me to make a mental note. I guess I was his secretary now, I had to keep track of his appointments even while he was penetrating me.
But today he wanted me to use my mouth. Well, okay, I could do that, if that was what he wanted.
As soon
Marjorie Pinkerton Miller