He answered the door himself. I was disappointed that it wasn’t his aide-de-camp; the term had always made me think of tents and marshmallows and songs around a fire and two weeks in the country, where I’d never been. “A woman,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “So?”
We looked at each other. I knew I couldn’t let him stare me down; I had experience on the streets, and I’d thought about this a lot before I’d come here, practiced looking tougher than I really am. You had to keep a balance. I’d always had to do that. Out on the streets it was important to look tougher than you were, and talk dumber than you were. If you talked too smart, then people got it into their heads that you were all head and weak everywhere else. But with him, I knew I just had to look tough, but I couldn’t let him think I was dumb. His eyes were green and he had really long white eyelashes. “A very young woman,” he said.
“Not as young as you think,” I shot back, but that wasn’t true. I was sixteen and pregnant, and I looked like a twelve-year-old who hadn’t lost her baby fat.
His thick white eyebrows rose a little, and he said, “Interesting.” During the next months I would hear that comment from him countless times. It was the only compliment he ever paid any of us, and it always surprised me how often he used it, how many things he still genuinely found interesting, after all the years he’d lived and all the years he knew he still had coming.
“I saw your ad,” I told him.
He nodded and stepped back, bowing slightly and making a welcoming gesture with one hand. I remember thinking that his hands were elegant, long and pale and thin, except that they were so hairy. “Come in, my dear.”
“‘My dear'?” I laughed. I’d figured he would talk like that, and I wanted him to know right away that it didn’t impress me.
Except, of course, that it did. Not so much his fancy accent or old-fashioned language, but the way he noticed me, the fact that he really did seem to think it was interesting that I was there. That was new for me, and as soon as I got a little of it I wanted more. I went in, noticing the gold dragon under the gold cross on the door.
Against the bright, trendy pastels of this penthouse office suite, he looked like something out of a black-and-white movie. The only colors on him were his green eyes and the red of his mouth, so red I thought he might be wearing lipstick. He was dressed in crisp, creased black, although he wasn’t wearing a cloak; I’d been expecting a cloak, and that threw me a little. His face and hands were so white that I wouldn’t have thought anything could be whiter, but then I saw the tips of his teeth pushing out over the edge of his lower lip. His curly hair went past his shoulders—black, when I’d imagined it would be white—and his moustache was as white as his eyebrows, so that I could hardly see them across his skin.
“Sit down, my dear.” When he soundlessly shut the door, it was as if we were the only two creatures in the world. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m answering your ad,” I repeated stubbornly. I didn’t like it when people made fun of me, and I heard mockery everywhere. I’d punched people out, scratched their green eyes, for less. “I’m applying for the school. The ad didn’t say you needed an appointment.”
I wished I could think of things to say that sounded more intelligent. People on the street were easy to impress; even Oliver didn’t take much. Though at first I’d thought he would. But this guy would be a real challenge; I’d known that before I came. He’d be like my grandmother, only more so—able to see who you really were and what you really wanted when even you didn’t know. I sat down on the gigantic couch that took up one whole wall of the room. The couch was that peculiar yellow-green color they call chartreuse, and the walls and carpet were mauve. Who’d have thought that mauve and chartreuse would go together? Who’d have expected this guy to be an interior decorator? But then, he’d already lived long enough to be anything he wanted.
The guy had power. Once you had power, nobody could hurt you. I’d learned that much on the streets. And before. Power might have kept my grandmother alive. It didn’t really matter how you got it, because once you had it nobody much cared about the how. I’d been around the powerful people in my life—my mother, a social worker or two, PD’s and DA’s and juvenile court judges, Oliver. But they were little fish. They had power only in relation to utterly powerless people like me. This guy had real power, and he could teach me how to have it, too. So I could pass it on to my baby.
I shivered in appreciation, then stiffened my body to still it and hoped he hadn’t noticed. He had, of course; I saw the amusement in his eyes.
My jeans were dirty and smelled of the streets. It pleased me to think I might be soiling the fancy upholstery. I squirmed on the couch, moved my butt around a lot, just to make sure.
“Pregnant,” he observed. He was standing too close to me, and he was really tall. I hated it when people, especially men, towered over me like that; too many times, at home and in juvie and in foster homes and on the street, some guy had stood too close to me like that and had ended up fucking me over.
I wasn’t about to let him know he was making me nervous; you didn’t dare let them know. I yawned, hoping my breath smelled as bad as it tasted, and put my filthy tennis shoes up on the arm of his elegant sofa. “So,” I demanded, looking up at him as insolently as I could, “what do I have to do?”
