The Homeless Millionaire

On Saturday morning, I returned home to find Roch sitting in the kitchen with a coffee and a cigarette. It was ironic: I'd missed him the last couple of mornings, and wished that he was there. After the run-in with Tracy, I wanted to be alone, and there he was. That's life; it refuses to give you what you want when you want it; once the d.e.s.i.r.e is gone, it's hey, presto! Here you are, kid. Why the sour face? Isn't this what you wanted?

He spotted that something was wrong instantly.

"Hey, Mike," he said. "What happened? You look - f.u.c.k! Cops? You got a tail?" I laughed weakly.

"No," I said. "No cops."

I opened the cupboard that had been acting as our wine cellar and got out a Beaujolais - there were only three bottles left, it was time to plan another visit to the supermarket: hopefully they'd have another discount on good booze. Roch watched me open it in silence: usually he was the one to start drinking in the morning, with me joining in after a few mild protests - sometimes hypocritical, sometimes not. I said:

"You want some of this?"

"I was planning to go to work."

"You mean you don't want any?"

"F.u.c.k! Okay, pour me a glass. Not full, half. Just to keep you company."

He requested another glass of wine before I had finished telling him about Tracy's unexpected reappearance in my life. It wasn't a long story, there really wasn't much to say, but by the time I'd finished it we had gone through two glasses of wine apiece. When I fell silent Roch shook his head, pulled on his cigarette, ran his fingers through his hair, then shook his head again a couple of times. He didn't look at me. He was looking at the table when he said:

"I didn't want to tell you, Mike, but... I thought she was a whore right from the start. Well okay, maybe not from the moment I saw her for the first time, but after you'd told me about her when we were driving back from the cottage - you know, that clinched it for me. You told me she was hot in bed, right?"

He looked at me and puffed on his cigarette and broke into a grin. He said:

"Time for a quiz, ladies and gentlemen: what do you call a woman that appears on a guy's doorstep in the middle of the night, f.u.c.ks like a professional, and disappears by the morning? A whore, ladies and gentlemen; a whore."

I shrugged.

"Yep," I said. "Sounds about right. Anyway, what's up with you? Yeah, let's talk about you for a change. It's the first time I've seen you in three days."

It was Roch's turn to shrug. Then he said:

""I've got myself a girlfriend. No, that's not right. I've got myself a new f.u.c.k. I spent the last couple of nights at her place. But I'm not enjoying it, it's not what I wanted. So my new f.u.c.k will change into an old f.u.c.k sometime in the very near future. Hard to say when. Maybe I'll try and drag it out until I've identified another new f.u.c.k."

"What's wrong?" I asked. I really enjoyed being able to ask what's wrong, instead of being asked.

Roch was silent for a while. I waited patiently, and worked on my cigarette and the wine. Roch scratched away at an eyebrow with the thumbnail of his cigarette hand, a maneuver that I knew was calculated to hide his eyes from mine. Eventually he said:

"I guess you want me to be honest."

"Yeah, I want you to be honest. But if that's too difficult, don't tell me. Keep it to yourself. It's better than lying, you can call it being discreet. That's definitely better than being a liar."

"Pour me some more wine, okay? This is going to be heavy work. Basically, Mike, my new f.u.c.k is a whore, too, only she doesn't f.u.c.k as well as your does. She's a different kind of whore. She plans for the long term. She gets her payoff a long way down the road, but man, it's one hell of a payoff. It's not just enough money to lead a nice life, it's everything, the whole package: a house, a husband, kids. Then, once she has that, she can start f.u.c.k.i.n.g people she just wants to f.u.c.k instead of guys she wants both to f.u.c.k and to exploit."

"What the hell are you talking about? And anyway, how did you meet her? What's her name, where did she pop up from?"

"Anne-Marie. Nice name. She's pretty, too. I've had the hots for her for a while, I met her nearly a year ago. I couldn't get anywhere with her, she wouldn't give me the time of day. The moment I'd become the owner of a house - boom! Magic transformation. She cooked me breakfast the last two days, can you believe that? Bad move, very bad move. She's a f.u.c.k.i.n.g rotten cook. And she talks all the time, you can't just eat the muck she's made in peace, and leave."

Roch refreshed himself with a big swig of wine, lit a fresh cigarette and added:

"When you come into a bit of money or property or both everyone suddenly wants to be your friend, Mike. Life, eh? I guess it's because everything's got to be balanced. You don't get choose between the carrot and the stick, you always get both at the same time, but maybe you've got a thick hide and can ignore the stick, or maybe you don't like carrots."

After a pause, I said:

"I think I know some people who don't get the stick. It's carrots all the way." Roch snorted, and said:

"Either you don't know those people well enough, or they're too stupid to see the stick. Many people are. And many more choose not to even look that way. They just don't want to go there. They know they won't like what they'll see or find. They don't want to be upset, they want to be happy." Roch broke off and scrunched his eyes and bared his teeth and screeched:

"I want to be happy!"

I started laughing.

Right after that we killed the bottle I'd opened and he left, taking another bottle with him in case, he said, he experienced a sudden crisis in motivation. I ate breakfast and before long I was in bed and asleep.

I slept for a long time, most likely because of the wine. I woke up around five in the afternoon; the sun had already begun to set. I had a coffee and a couple of cigarettes and a long bath. Then I dressed for work and went to the Chinese place for dinner and sat there over a pot of green tea for a long time after I'd finished my sweet-and-sour pork. My fortune cookie told me not to regret anything that had made me smile. I sat and smoked and came up with at least twenty occasions when I'd smiled only to regret it shortly afterwards, and for a good reason too.

I got to work twenty minutes early and Larry was so happy he offered me one of his cigarettes. I smoked his Craven A while he gave me the rundown on the situation. Things were busy, they had been busy throughout the afternoon, Larry had collected a couple of fat tips and he was a happy man. Five out of the six rooms upstairs had guests, and the sixth was taken even before Larry left, by a really young couple. The guy exchanged wisecracks with Larry about not having a place to f.u.c.k, they had a whole conversation about it while the girl looked more and more embarrassed. Eventually the guy stopped making an a.s.s of himself and went upstairs with his girl. Larry watched them go, then turned to me and said:

"Well, whaddya know! We're full up. You'll have to turn people away until someone checks out. Make sure you change those sheets fast, eh? By the way, there's a real looker in number four, make sure you check her out when she checks out, ha ha. Wouldn't mind jumping her bones myself if I weren't a family man."

I watched the family man leave, thinking about his wife. I wondered whether she really was as pretty as he'd claimed. I had real difficulty imagining that, but then he'd told me that she worked as a barmaid in an upscale bar. That meant she couldn't be ugly; a place like that wouldn't hire an ugly chick. I chewed on that mystery for quite a while. From time to time, the front door bell chimed and I opened the door to tell people that sorry, we were all full up. Each time I hoped it wouldn't be Tracy with some guy, and it wasn't. Then I stopped being afraid of it being Tracy because I thought I'd enjoy telling her she wouldn't be able to f.u.c.k in the Montrose Hotel, not that night. No one checked out, Sunday was coming up and people weren't in a hurry to get home.

By midnight I had turned away five couples of varying shapes, sizes, and in different stages of inebriation. I was polite and full of regret and only one guy, really drunk, started to get difficult. Luckily his girl dragged him away after he'd offered to poke me in the snoot. Things got really quiet after that; the bell rang only once in the next hour, and I opened the door to see an old woman in a quilted bathrobe and slippers. She was looking for her cat; I told her there weren't any cats present in the Montrose. She looked at me as if I were lying and instructed me to notify her at once if a cat showed up, no matter when, even if it was four in the morning. It was a very special cat and she was really worried about it. She lived in the house to the right, she'd be awake all night anyway. The cat's name was Tootsie, it was black on white, and didn't take kindly to strangers. She had prepared a lovely meal for her Tootsie, chopped cod fillet with milk and butter. Did I know cats were just as intelligent as people? I barely stopped myself from telling her Tootsie was probably busy composing a symphony or writing a novel in a secret hideaway where she wouldn't be disturbed by her owner's constant prattle. I told her repeatedly that I would notify her immediately if Tootsie showed up, requesting a room; after the fourth or fifth time, she finally shuffled away, mumbling something.

I didn't see Tootsie that night. Instead, I saw Tracy.

It was nearing two in the morning when I heard a door open upstairs: someone was finally ready to check out. I listened to steps coming down the stairs without looking up: Houghton-Briggs had laid in a fresh supply of magazines, and these included a month-old Playboy with a good short story. I was halfway through and loath to stop reading. I only looked up from the magazine when I heard the steps approach the reception counter.

She was standing by the front door already, wearing her black mac, and pretending to admire the umbrella stand by the door so that she wouldn't have to look at me. The guy she was with was a different guy than the previous night. He was middle-aged and wore a checked tweed jacket with jeans and an open-necked shirt. He had short curly blond hair and a silly mustache that looked like a smear of egg yolk he'd forgotten to wipe off, and small, beady blue eyes that were twinkling with joy. He'd probably just had a blowjob that had catapulted him into outer space. I knew from experience Tracy was capable of giving a blowjob like that.

He turned in the key and tipped me a full dollar and I showed them out; Tracy managed to avoid looking at me the entire time. I returned to my spot behind the reception counter and tried to continue reading the story, it was really good, Playboy was a good magazine for top-notch short stories. But I couldn't focus, I kept thinking about Tracy's behavior. It seemed that she liked the Montrose, I'd likely be seeing her again with a new client, then again and again.

Suddenly, I didn't feel like working at the Montrose any more.