Daisy
I tell Marsha that I thought I was on my lunchbreak. I don’t think she believes me, but I agree to work an extra forty-five minutes to make up for it and that settles the matter. So for the rest of the afternoon and into the evening, I work with Hound’s body pressed against mine, the memory of it so real at times that I’m sure I’ll turn around and find him standing over me again. He fucked me, really fucked me, fucked me harder than any man has even gotten close to. Hell, he fucked me even harder than I thought I could take. There were times when I was bent over against that wall when I thought I’d just snap in half, and yet there were times when I couldn’t believe I’d ever had sex in any other way. And now he wants me to go to a strip club, because he isn’t done with me. What does that mean? I’m not so naïve to think that one back-alley tumble will get rid of all Dad’s debts, so I think I ought to go to see what he has to say.
And even when I leave the Shack in my sweatpants and hoodie, glad to be out of the body-crushing clothes, I know that I’m lying to myself. Or half-lying, at least. I am going to the strip club to see about Dad, but I’m also going because this Hound guy intrigues me, intrigues me a lot. It’s like some scientist put all the men who usually hit on me into a machine with the intention of producing someone as close to opposite as possible…but who still wants to hit on me. I’ve been hit on so many times, I didn’t think a man like that existed.
Yet, as I make my way down the street, the world finally cooling, I can’t pinpoint exactly what is so different about Hound. He’s just as sex-hungry, body-objectifying, horny and crazed as the rest of them. So what exactly is this difference? Is it just that I feel less fake around him, less like a mannequin there to please him, and more like a real, actual woman? Or maybe that’s just some highbrow bullshit and really I just like how big his dick is and how huge his muscles are, and I’m just justifying.
The strip club is a squat, brick building with huge neon red letters which read The Red Room. I’ve never been in a strip club, but this is not at all what I expect. The few times I have imagined what strip clubs are like, I always get an image from an old episode of some reality show I watched a few years back, when a group of housewives went to the strip club because it would be kooky. As I approach The Red Room, with its chewing gum stuck to the door and smell of stale beer and cigarettes, the looming, flat-faced bouncer watching me with stony eyes, I’m sure the reality wives went to a staged set; their strip club was like a spaceship from a sci-fi flick, all clean flat surfaces with super-hot women who all absolutely adored their job.
When I get inside, I’m met with a sticky floor, a room packed full of old, young, fat, skinny, and leering men. Red lights shine all over, giving the place its name. I look around for Hound and spot him in the corner, leaning on the bar. There’s a woman working the pole, climbing up it and sliding down, her legs wrapped around the metal and her breasts bouncing freely. Hound isn’t watching her. He’s looking down at his phone, maybe at the time.
As I make my way toward him somebody touches my arm. I turn, startled, in no mood for some creep to be grabbing me. Even as I think this, I reflect: And yet I was okay with Hound fucking me in an alleyway, Hound, a stranger, a man I met less than twelve hours ago. I turn on the man, ready to shout at him, but then I see a smiling face I recognize. His name is Jack Michaels—which the Shack girls joke is about the most boring, mundane name that’s ever existed—and he’s a regular at the Shack. He’s wearing a flashy suit, as he always is, with an old-timey handkerchief stuck in the front, and an old-timey bow-tie, and an old-timey receding hairline and several old-timey nose hairs.
“Daisy?” he says, his old-timey eyebrows rising in shock. “What are you doing here?”
“Meeting a friend,” I respond. The crowd surges around me and I don’t really have a choice but to follow him to the edge. When we’re no longer being pushed from all directions, I say, “I shouldn’t keep them waiting.”
“Oh, sure, sure.” He smooths a hand over his sparse grey hair. He’s like Dad from an alternate universe, Dad if he had grown stocky and strong in old age instead of skinny and weak. “It’s just…well, don’t let anybody tell you that I don’t mind my manners, Daisy, I’m a man made of manners. Well—” He smooths his head again. “I was just wondering—this is out there, you know, way out there—well, look, let me put it like this. You see her?” He points to the woman writhing on the pole.
“I see her.”
“She makes three-hundred a night, sometimes more.”
“Okay…”
He squints at me, maybe wanting me to click onto what he’s saying without having to be told. I think I know what he’s driving at, but I’m not about to risk it by just offering it up. If I’m wrong that’d be incredibly embarrassing.
“What if you auditioned sometime?” he finally says.
I let out a laugh. A gruff, sort of manly laugh, the kind of laugh I usually reserve for random barks of hilarity when watching my favorite sitcoms. An image enters my mind: Daisy Dunham, stripped bare of her Shack uniform, writhing on stage. But even as I laugh, the financial, survival part of my mind, the part of my mind which ticks overtime and never stops, even when I’m asleep, starts to consider it. What if I did audition? I could dance a few nights a week instead of waitressing and make twice as much money.
“You don’t have to answer right now,” Jack assures me. “Here. Let me give you this.”
He hands me his card. I take it. Then I’m moving through the crowd once again, toward Hound. He smiles when he sees me, but not the cheesy grin he offered me in the Shack earlier today. This is a genuine smile, which lights up his face, turning him from a resting, dangerous fighter to a friend in half a heartbeat. It’s amazing what a smile can do to a face.
“Hello, pretty lady,” he says. “I hired us a booth.”
The booth is lit with red lava lamps, dotted on a low table and lined along the wall, and the couch is bright red leather. “I had one of those when I was a kid,” I say, nodding at a lava lamp. Talking, I suppose, so I don’t have to contemplate what I’m doing. “It was before Mom died, but after she got cancer. A friend gave me one for my birthday but one day Mom rushed to the bathroom and knocked into it—I put it in the living room after asking them—and it shattered all over the floor. I didn’t even care that it broke. All I cared about was that Mom was crying and trying to put the pieces of glass back together with vomit still clinging to her night blouse.” I abruptly stop, face going red. I don’t usually let my words get away from me like that. Before Hound can reply, I blurt, “So, why am I here?”
We sit side by side. Hound presses a button on the wall and a bikini-clad black lady holding an empty silver tray pokes her red through the red falling curtains. Hound orders a beer and I order a lemonade. “Not much of a drinker?” he asks.
“Not when I’m sitting in a stripper’s booth with a stranger,” I reply.
He laughs. “Fair enough.”
We sit sipping our drinks for a while and then I repeat my question: “Why am I here, Hound? I thought I paid my dad’s debts off earlier today.” I don’t believe this, but it’s worth a try.
He just shakes his head at me, seeming to say, We both know that wasn’t enough.
“I don’t think earlier today was as one-sided as you’d like to believe, anyhow,” Hound says. “My opinion is—and I was there, you’ll remember—that you enjoyed it just as much as I did.”
“Maybe I was faking!” I exclaim wildly, in an effort to exclaim away the truth. “You might remember where we met, Mr. Hound. It was at a place where the waitresses are trained to be the best fakers in the world.”
The red light catches Hound’s ice-blue eyes. “And the come all over my prick. Was that fake, too?”
I blush, lowering my gaze. “So why am I here? That’s the third time I’ve asked you now.”
“Are you angry?”
“I don’t have time to be angry. I’ve just worked a nine-hour shift and I have to be up at five to get in for a six o’clock start.”
“That’s rough,” Hound says.
“Careful,” I warn him. “It sounded like there was real compassion in your voice there.”
“Maybe there was.” I look up to see him smiling at me openly. Then he offers me his hand. “My name is Henry Roscoe. I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced.”
I take his hand, constantly surprised by the words coming out of his mouth. You’d expect a man like him to grunt and swear and shout. Huh, maybe I’ve got a little prejudice in me. His hand against mine brings back memories. I withdraw it before they get out of control.
“But everybody calls me Hound,” he says.
“Why?” I ask.
He seems stumped by that question, squinting and looking through me into the past. “I don’t really know,” he answers. “Isn’t that odd?”
He leans back, taking a long swig from his beer. I find I like watching these calm motions of his body, like watching the calm motions of a huge machine, a derrick pump, each of its movements solid and infinitely strong. Not at all like the erratic, face-touching, hand-worrying of other men. Maybe I should stop thinking like that. Other men. As though this mysterious stranger is already a category of his own.
“Why you’re here.” Hound nods. “Alright. To business, then. Let me explain my situation. I’m a debt collector, as you’ve probably guessed. I work for a man named Mac who was a friend of my dad’s; my dad’s dead now.” I remember him telling Dad that his mother ran out on him, so he’s all alone. For the first time in months I find myself glad that I still have my father, at least. He seems to be about to go on, but then he shrugs, clears his throat, and says, “There’s no need to go into unnecessary detail. The point is this: I’ve saved up some cash and I’m looking for a place in the suburbs, the sort of place where real people live, where you wouldn’t look twice if there was a bookshelf on the wall and desk set up at the window overlooking the garden.”
“I’m sure there are many places where you can put shelves up,” I say, confused by the importance he seems to place on this. His eyes went sort of dreamy when he said bookshelf. What a conundrum this giant is.
“I want a wife with me when I go check out the houses.”
He watches me calmly.
It takes me a second to realize what he means. When I do, I say, “This isn’t a real proposal, is it?”
“Depends what you mean by real.” He reaches into his jeans pocket and takes out two rings: one plain silver band and one diamond-studded band. A wedding rind and an engagement ring. “These cost real money. Here’s my proposal: you’ll be my wife as I’m looking around the houses—the realtors respond to couples, you know—and I’ll let your dad’s debts slide. I won’t drill you in every alleyway we pass, but if you find you love your husband just too damn much to resist, then don’t expect me to be some kind of gentleman.”
The main thing I hear is dad’s debts slide. Those three words ring around my head like some kind of chant. As though my entire life has been a football game and this is the home team’s winning song, roared after touchdowns with beer swilling over the rim of red plastic cups. This is what I am, what I’ve become. Somebody working to pay off debts. When it comes down to it, I don’t really have a choice. It’s this or let Hound collect my father’s teeth in a cup for his employer. I look him up and down. He’s changed into a faded blue shirt, rolled up at the sleeves, showing a triangular scar on his forearm that looks like he was nicked by a blade.
My heart is thudding in my chest. I try and imagine what Other Daisy is doing right now. I think of her sometimes, even though it’s immature and I should’ve grown out of it by now. When I was a girl, I would wonder if Other Daisy—who existed in some far-off land much sweeter and easier than this one—was out with friends right now instead of indoors with her ear pressed against the wall listening to Mom being sick. Now when I think of Other Daisy, she’s wearing a suit in an office doing something businesslike. But I can’t sit here pondering Other Daisy forever. Hound is waiting for an answer. And in the end, there’s no doubt of what I’m going to say. I don’t have a choice, not if I want to protect my family.
“I’ll do it. I’ll be your fake wife.”
Hound smiles, and then leans across and slides the rings onto my finger. The metal is cool against my skin. But it is somehow reassuring, too, even if I know it’s all playacting.
“Now what?” I ask, expecting him to slide his hand up my leg or leap on me. I’m ready for it, hungry for it, even.
But he rises to his feet. “Now I take you home,” he says. “You look tired.”
“If you take me home,” I reply, standing up with him so we’re almost touching, “you’ll know where I live. I don’t know if—”
“—your beloved husband should be allowed to know where you live?”
He leans close to me. I close my eyes, expecting—wanting—him to kiss me. But then I hear the curtains rustle. I open my eyes to find him waiting outside the booth, holding the curtains aside.
His car is an army-green jeep with one of those big tires on the back, the windows tinted night-black. I climb into the passenger seat and instead of my bum finding soft cushion, I’m sitting on something hard and jagged. I pick it up and find it’s a copy of Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates. To find a book like this—one I was studying in my last year in high school, before I dropped out—in a car like this, which belongs to a man like this, is such a shock I drop the book into my lap.
“Something wrong?” Hound asks, as he starts the car, driving us smoothly through the streets, all of which are bathed in the light of the setting sun.
I pick up the book again. He grins. “Oh, that. Much prefer Yates to Dickens, I’ve gotta say. For one thing Yates doesn’t make me pick up a dictionary every two seconds—just every four.”
“You’re a conundrum,” I tell him, echoing my thoughts from earlier. A conundrum of a giant. That could be the title to a children’s book, I think: The Conundrum of Hound the Giant.
“I never finished it,” I say. “I started it, once…I never learned what happened to…what are their names? April and Hank?”
“Frank.” Hound gestures at the book. There’s something out-of-place in that: his giant paw gesturing at this sleek hardback. “Have that one. I’m done with it.”
“Are you sure?”
He shrugs. “Why not?”
I tuck it into my handbag. Then we’re walking up the steps to my apartment building, me fumbling in the bag for the keys, Hound waiting at my shoulder. When I finally get the keys into the lock, the door open, and I’m standing in the hallway and he’s standing just outside, I expect that now, finally, he’ll kiss me. My body is alive to the idea, aching memories of our animal fucking in the alleyway coming back to me. The book presses through my handbag into my thigh, and I find myself thankful that we’ll have a bed this time.
“I’ll be in touch,” he says, strolling back toward his jeep.
It’s probably for the best.
I lie on my bed and stare up at the darkening ceiling, where a patch of chipping paint perfectly catches the changing colors of the world outside. Yes, it’s probably for the best. But if my mind is relieved, my body isn’t, and by the time the ceiling has turned the color of a fading bruise my hand is snaking down between my legs.