The Demand

Ordinarily, the stretch of road between British Columbia and Venice in California is just a dusty waiting period. There is movement, not all of it forward. Some of it was not in a direction, on a tilting of an axis, when William drove a little too close to a ditch and the car tipped into it. He cussed at gravity and took my phone to call a tow truck, then cussed some more and announced that they wouldn’t be here for a couple of hours.

I jokingly suggested we visit the pool, or the casino, and gestured at the dead, desert-like landscape. It was so calm and empty, I half-expected tumbleweed to blow across the road in front of the car. William didn’t laugh; I wasn’t good at making jokes, and while he usually at least laughed, just to acknowledge that I’d make one, not to encourage me or say that it was good, he was not good at taking jokes when he was bound to miss his favourite television show. He stared sullenly over the length of the BMW’s front, then got out, slamming the door, and kicked at the dirt. Exept the dirt was dust, so it rose about his knees and blew away. William has a talent for looking like a petulant child, still, and at 20 he could look like a petulant toddler.

I did not have the talent to express myself when I was upset. I was not versed in the language of unhappiness or anger. I knew it involved the scrunching of eyebrows, the drawing back of lips from teeth, gutteral noises from the back of one’s throat, but I could perform none of these without an impression or formality or discomfort that ruined the effect. I didn’t even twiddle my fingers. I made myself smaller, without occupying less space. I blinked rapidly. But my mouth, when I looked at my reflection in the side-mirror, didn’t even turn down at the corners. I didn’t look upset to myself, and if my throat didn’t feel constricted, because I hated to be stuck in the middle of nowhere when it was so hot and home was only two hours away (now four or five hours away), I wouldn’t even know that I was upset.

We’d been waiting an hour, and together William and I had finished five of the eight sodas from the backseat (now so warm they were beginning to make my stomach feel queasy), when the girl knocked on my window.

It was the least convenient way by which she could have presented herself. Mainly because I was startled into throwing my soda at William. I groaned because I didn’t want to clean up the car, which was sugary and sticky and now smelled like hot orange crush, and William cussed because one of his seven identical white t-shirts now had an identifying orange stain spreading across it.

The girl waited outside the door, bent so she could look through the window without shading her eyes. She had hair shorn at the shoulders, that stuck to her lips when the hot wind blew it across her face. She had sun burnt shoulders, and several freckles, and pleasantly tanned skin that made me aware of how pale I was. Her eyes were lined with so much eyeliner that they looked as though she’d actually smeared ashes in a streak across them both. When she blinked the mascara on her eyelashes quivered like dirt.

I knew she was a prostitute, in that judgmental way that you know someone is a cheerleader or a math geek or just an idiot. She wasn’t dressed in anything more revealing that what you’d see on a fifteen-year-old catholic girl in Los Angeles. And it wasn’t her expression, which wasn’t what I expected from a prostitute- too calm and wise and wary. Not condemned or pitiful. She didn’t even have the air of seductiveness that I imagined from a prostitute- though I’d also imagined prostitutes as either high-heel wearing fishnet stocking with red lips, or fur-stole wearing women with silk slips and the curly hair from a black and white movie. But I knew she was a prostitute before I rolled down the window.

“Hi,” she said. “I’m sort of stranded. Could I catch a ride with you?”

William was looking at her intensely. I was betting that he could also sense she was a prostitute. I knew my little brother. I knew he frequented brothels, or just clubs where someone would go to the backroom with him for the same price as some cocaine. I didn’t want to protect either this girl from my brother, or William from this girl. Something about her seemed unfazeable; William seemed more likely to get hurt by any interaction. Maybe this would be a lesson in rehabilitation for him.

“We’re stranded too,” William said. His voice was several degrees deeper than it usually was. “Tow truck won’t come for another hour or two. But we can drop you off somewhere after that.”

I had to interject. It was my car, after all. “As long as it’s on the way to Venice.”

William frowned. “Don’t be a bitch, Maggie. We can take her wherever she’s going.”

I had been driving for two days already, while William slept or listened to music or played angry birds in the passenger seat. I wasn’t inclined to go anywhere but home and a hot shower.

“I’m going to Venice,” said the girl.

William, smoothly, said, “So are we. We can take you all the way.”

I didn’t miss the innuendo in his voice. I doubted the girl did either. She didn’t smile, just tipped her head and waited for my decision. I was glad that at least she, if not William, recognized that I was calling the shots in this situation.

She climbed into the back seat, and William offered her a soda. She drank the warm soda and didn’t gag, and didn’t make any attempt to keep William from looking up her skirt. I avoided her eyes in the rear-view mirror. I touched the car keys and ran my fingers over the ridges. I picked my shirt away from my chest and blew out long breaths. William twisted in his seat to talk to the girl.

“My name’s William. You can call me Will. Unless you want to call me something else.”

“Like what?” she said. Her voice didn’t go up at the ends when she asked a question. Only the cocking of her head said that she’d asked a question instead of made a statement.

William smiled like a viper. “Well. Most of the girls I meet call me ‘God’. Pretty enthusiastically.”

I wanted to punch him in the mouth. I may not excel in expressing my anger, but in my mind I was as emotive as any girl, and William’s teeth were falling out of his mouth.

“I’m not sure you could afford me,” the girl said. I knew she meant it. She wasn’t making a joke. But here’s the thing: William and I are from a well-off family. We live in an apartment with our parents (who are mostly absent, because the thing about having money is that those with it tend to travel other places with it), and at the time neither of us had a job, yet we had hundreds of dollars of spending money over a few weeks. William’s eyes brightened.

“I’m sure I could arrange something,” he said.

“You don’t approve?” The girl was talking to me, but I didn’t notice because I’d been busy not watching her cock her head in the mirror.

I spoke to the mirror instead of her. “It’s not my business what you do with your body.”

“Damn right,” William said. Condescension dripped in his voice. “Prostitutes are people too.”

The girl didn’t say anything. Nor did I. My brother was the pot, the girl was the kettle, but the kettle had also brought it upon herself and was probably used to horny pots throwing themselves at her. I was as silent as I could be, and occupied my seat while still shrinking into it. When the tow truck arrived, the man driving it gave the prostitute a once-over before pulling the BMW out of the ditch and explaining to me- only me, because I had the wallet- just how much it would cost to not be in a ditch. Then, though I didn’t want to, I got back in the car with William and the prostitute and drove through California’s backwater towns, past the redwood forests and the valley, to Venice.

By the time we got the neighbourhood where our expensive apartment was, the girl had told us that she had nowhere to stay, and requested that we let her stay with us. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting. She had no luggage. Not even a knapsack or a purse. She had nothing in her pockets. Of course she had nowhere to go. But I recalled the time William had brought home a stray bird with a broken wing. We didn’t know how to nurse it, and the bird crapped on our hands and the rug, tipped over one of Mom’s vases, and chased our dog under the bed. William had found it delightful and hilarious. Mom and I had a silent conversation that went something like this: Why did we do this?

It will never happen again. No more birds in the house.

Do you want to get Rudy out from under the bed? He’s whimpering again.

I doubted she would crap on the rug or chase Rudy under the bed. Actually, she couldn’t chase Rudy, because he was dead. But there were several other things she could do.

“I’m not sure…” I said, which I hoped William would translate to: I’m not sure I can handle this, psychologically.

He didn’t. Or maybe he did, but his dick didn’t care. It did more of his thinking than his brain, and overruled any sense of sibling loyalty. “You totally can. You don’t even have to pay us. I mean, if you want to do me a favour…”

“I don’t generally offer favours,” the prostitute said.

“And we don’t generally take in strays. But people change their minds.”

“I need a big reason to change my mind.”

William laughed. “I’ve got a big reason, don’t worry.”

The conversation was becoming circular. After several days it was cyclical as the seasons, and too comfortable to abandon. If there was a lull in the conversation, it was filled and smoothed over with jeers about one another’s unrealistic dreams.

This was possible because she did stay with us. She stayed in Mom and Dad’s room, in the bed they’d vacated while they went to Peru or Petra or Pennsylvania (something with a ‘P’). She did not crap on the rug.

She spoke rarely other than those interactions with my brother. And never about herself. It wasn’t reticence, like me. It was as though nothing had happened in her life before she’d met us in the desert of California. As though she had emerged from the dust, more troublesome and conspicuous than tumbleweed.

She never mentioned my brother’s hypocrisy. It was clear he had no respect for her profession (which she didn’t actually seem to partake in, while she stayed with us). Everyday there were several pot-kettle interactions. He was several shades of black by the afternoon, and at night I wondered how she hadn’t come to punch him in the face.

“Why don’t you tell him that he has no right to say that?” I asked her in one of my more talkative moods. That was, perhaps, one of the only things I had in common with her. That I could go days without speaking and be more comfortable than the “no, thanks” I said when they asked if I wanted whipped cream at Starbucks. “He can’t criticize you. He’s the… demand to your supply.”

“It’s a condition of your upbringing,” she said.

I opened my mouth. All that came out was air. Words trotted onto my tongue, then retreated. I closed my mouth.

She stayed for several more weeks. I was too kind to turn her out. But my philanthropy had its limits. When she’d first stayed with us, she had had a little money and she’d smelled like an alleyway, or a sewer, or a sewer in an alleyway; I refused to let her borrow my clothing.

I didn’t say anything about her short skirts or the stilettos she wore when she went out. She said nothing about the books that piled around my room, or the table, when I worked at it. I’d been writing reports and, sometimes, speeches, for companies that needed formal presentations for… presentations. It isn’t a job that has a title, really. But it was providing a sum of money that my parents hadn’t given me, and I was grateful for that. I sometimes felt like it sucked away at pieces of my soul, when all I really wanted to do was write a book. Authors said you needed to put in the time to write a book, and that some of them wrote at the end of twelve-hour work shifts. I wrote enough to keep me afloat when my parents forgot to transfer money into my bank account, and lent my voice to companies whose voices were too muddled or informal to preach about their own glory.

One day the prostitute sat with a cup of coffee across from me at the table and watched me scribble. Today I was writing something about the combined efforts of a private hydro-electric power company’s workers. About the minimum-wage workers being the foundation, and the CEO being the crux, and more lies than I could count.

“You don’t really mean that,” the prostitute said.

I started. I didn’t thinks he’d been reading my writing upside down. When I looked up, her eyes weren’t on my paper.

“I don’t mean what?”

“What you’re writing?”

I became smaller, and not. “It’s just a job.”

The prostitute sipped her coffee. “Your brother William is not the only pot in this house.”

I wasn’t one who took insults and flung them back with several more ounces of venom. I couldn’t. I could only become smaller and feel my cheeks flush. She didn’t look judgmental at all, which somehow made it worse. “I don’t sell my body.”

“You sell your voice. You sell what you need to- or want to sell. I don’t blame you for your hypocrisy. William suffers the same condition. Perhaps it is a condition of your heritage. Are your parents hypocrites?”

My mouth fell open. The prostitute sipped more coffee. She made better coffee than anyone I knew, and drank more of it than I ever knew, but seemed no more awake for it. “Maggie. Magdeleine. You’re named after a whore in the bible.”

I’d always known that. But some people were named after conquerors or shared names with rapists. It didn’t sound like such a distant relationship when she said it. She said, “I’m going to leave tomorrow morning.”

“Just… just like that?”

She set her coffee down. There was a scarlet lipstick stain on the rim of the mug. “Just like that. I can’t avoid work forever. But consider what I’ve said. Pot,” she pointed at me, “Kettle,” she pointed at herself. “Black as coal.”

The prostitute rose from the table, didn’t look at the mess that was my life and the only commitment I could make at the moment, despite hating it, and carried her mug to the dishwasher.

In the morning, William filled the apartment with his sullenness when he discovered the prostitute had gone without providing her services to him. He had the money, he complained. We’d been kind. I was too judgmental; she’d left because of me. I did not mention that, between the two of us, he had had more interaction with her than I ever had. I also suspected that, maybe, that was part of what the prostitute had been talking about.

I never saw her around Venice. I did see other prostitutes, none of them as world-weary as the one we’d picked up in the middle of the desert. I didn’t look away from them. I didn’t know if that was a step in the right direction, but it felt better than turning away, as though they were a horrible event I wanted to forget.

I didn’t quit my job. I wrote papers and prostituted my voice, and my voice was worn away and carved into something sharper and smoother and more me than anything else in my life. I wrote and slept and ate and spent my parents’ money. Write. Eat. Sleep. Supply. Supply. Finally, I wrote.

Art by Anonymous

Text by Lucie MacAulay