THE PRIVATE PARTY

THE PRIVATE PARTY

by Mary Jane Ingebrecht

1.

            The Owner was not what you expected him to be. You expected, with his great wealth, a jowly sort of fellow sitting on a kind of throne, maybe stroking a white kitten. And the office – headquarters, really, a war room, a cross between a hotel suite and a dungeon -- was the kind of subterranean place where one might expect a throne, and perhaps a tank of sharks with a trap door before it.

            Just to get in, even, you had to press a button on the street beside a sheet-metal door, flush with a steel wall, and no sign or window, and then wait in the traffic, clutching your paper with the address in the October wind and the whining of mopeds and minibuses, hoping there was a buzzing being heard somewhere deep within, and then the door slid upwards, like a garage door, and then there was an art deco lobby with a mosaic floor and bevelled mirrors, and some potted ferns –very film noir, perhaps overdone -- and at the end of that there was a quaint caged elevator. The garage door slipped down, silently, behind you.

            So you walked to the only door, the elevator, pulled back the grate and stepped into that and it lurched and slid downwards, through two or three orange-lit floors – you couldn’t see through the patterned glass – and then stopped with a shudder, and a white gloved hand opened the glass and the cage and you stepped out into a space so dim and glowing it might have been candlelit, but it wasn’t. It was another lobby, like a boutique hotel lobby, with deep sofas and cushions and water trickling somewhere. There was no music. The guy with the white gloves was in a regular business suit, a young guy with slicked hair. He smiled and shook your hand and looked you up and down – your teetering shoes with the straps, the narrow skirt – and seemed to approve. He checked your name on a clipboard.

            And now you sit there on the tufted leather and think that this is high-end indeed, obviously for a luxury class of client, which is a relief after the club and its non-paying gropers. But the Owner will be like the rest of them --- some red-faced business guy who expects a bit of free action himself for giving you the privilege of working for a living.

            You do your deep breathing, listen to the fountain.

            You will decide -- have decided -- what your limits will be; you will not enter into any kind of relationshiop with the Owner, no matter how advantageous that would be to your working hours or conditions; you will not agree to any risky acts or extreme clients – not this time; just the kind of thing you did at the Manor, lap dances, cuddling, company. This time it’s your beauty and sophistication you are selling. You are not desperate. The gallery and the coffee shop provide a minimum income. If it comes to that. You could take on an extra shift. You could go back to bartending at Totem, now that James no longer seems to be a partner there. You could make three hundred bucks a night there, and as much as half of it could go to your sister.

            Of course, it would be easier not to.

            Clip-board guy calls your name, opens a heavy double-door, and you walk onto soft carpet and another deep room, a room that extends all around you in alcoves and corridors. There is a raised area, a couple of steps up to it, with a vast carved desk on it, and a young guy sitting behind the desk, writing, with a pen. And behind him is a wall-sized fishtank with glowing green and orange fish in it. The fishtank gives the whole thing a blue tinge. You almost laugh – it’s too much, really, too James Bond.

            But the young guy behind the desk – he can’t be more than 35, maybe even 30 – does not have a monocle or a scar or an evil laugh. He’s clean shaven, with black rumpled hair. He’s handsome in a conventional way, in a captain of the debating team way. He looks up and smiles at you, businesslike – smiles without seeing you, you think, and finishes what he is writing. You stand before the desk, waiting.