Mona didn’t know what to do with herself while she waited for Malcolm’s return. She tried focusing on her work. Malcolm had left her a pen and ink drawing by German-American cartoonist Lyonel Feinenger as payment for the night with the crop, and she liked it so much she knew she wouldn’t sell it to pay off her debt unless she absolutely had to. The drawing was of two ghosts carrying their own urns while a tall and skinny black cat stared wide-eyed at the pair of silly spirits.
A handful of gallery events had generated a little income for The Red, but the debt still loomed, growing larger with interest every day. She treated it like she treated fantasies of Malcolm, chasing them from her mind whenever they reared their heads.
Still…she thought of him.
Mona wanted to believe Malcolm had some feelings for her. Feelings other than simple lust or desire. He never left until she fell asleep, and she often fell asleep with him inside of her, his ardor for her body far greater than her stamina. She’d asked him the night with the crop why he came to her so infrequently and he’d said their encounters were taxing, that it took him time to recover. She found that difficult to believe. A man with his libido worn out for a month or two from one night of sex? Impossible. No, he must have a wife waiting for him in England. She’d worked up the courage to ask him about his children, but she couldn’t stomach mentioning a wife. Though if his children were grown as he said, why wouldn’t he leave his wife? If he even had a wife? Was she the source of all his money? Is that why he stayed with her? Or was he divorced, and something else took him back to England for weeks on end? Grandchildren? She’d guessed his age at forty. If he were older—forty-five perhaps—it wouldn’t be unreasonable at all for him to have a grandchild or two if he had married in his early twenties and his children had too. She shouldn’t think about such things, about his home life, about what he did when he wasn’t with her. A girl could go crazy letting her mind run along that rabbit trail. Her brain felt like a horse on a carousel, always moving but going nowhere.
October turned to November, and the orange and red leaves turned brown and then fell to the sidewalk where they made their final transformation to sooty black. The crisp air turned cold. This would be her first holiday season without her mother. Mona had friends, but she’d seen little of them since Malcolm came into her life. She cried off dinners and movies, pleading poverty and exhaustion. She didn’t want her friends asking her what was going on. In a weak moment she might tell them, and since meeting Malcolm she’d had nothing but weak moments. She tried to put herself in her friends’ shoes. What would she say if her college roommate Natasha called and said she’d sold her body to a man—a man with no last name, a man who didn’t use condoms, a man who had no qualms about fucking other women in front of her or bringing other men to their sessions to fondle and finger her? No, Mona couldn’t tell anyone. They might try to talk her out of doing it, and that was the last thing she wanted. She could either see Malcolm or she could see reason, and Malcolm was a finer sight than anything as dull as reason.
November turned to December.
Mona’s body had healed completely, no marks left at all. It shamed her how much she missed them when they were gone. She’d started sleeping in the bed in the gallery’s back room. First she slept there only one night a week. Then two. Now she slept there almost every night, little Tou-Tou on the pillow that should have been Malcolm’s. She’d rise early, go home to shower and change clothes, and then return to the gallery. If she’d had a full bathroom at The Red, she would have lived there. In the brass bed, even alone, she felt closer to Malcolm. Even after washing and replacing the sheets, she could still smell the faint cedar and cigar smoke scent of him when she laid on the pillow at night. She hoped it would never fade. Any ideas she had about ever selling the bed disappeared. As long as she lived she would keep the bed she’d shared with Malcolm. She wanted to conceive a child in it, his child. It’s what her mother had done after all—gone to bed with a strange man she met at a party for the sole reason of having a child on her own. Maybe he would allow that as long as she promised never to trouble him for money or support. It was what her mother would have wanted Mona to do. Maybe Mona could have convinced herself to follow through on this plan and abandon her birth control except it was nearing Christmas. This was the time of year when she wished the hardest she knew who her father was and where he was. With her mother gone, she had no family at all with whom to spend the holiday. She wasn’t sure she could do that to her child. The dream would have to have to stay a dream. It wasn’t as if she had the money to raise a child on her own anyway. Admit it, she told herself, you want him to love you.
She admitted it, but only to herself.
The week before Christmas, the gallery phone rang after hours. She picked it up and was pleased to hear Sebastian’s voice on the line.
"How have you been?” he asked. "Do you have more Degas sketches to show me?”
"None, I’m afraid,” she said with a laugh. "You’d be my first phone call if I did.”
"There’s a Degas exhibit this month. Have you seen it?”
"I haven’t, no. Worth the trip?”
"How could you ask me such a thing? I’d walk across a desert with no water for a Degas exhibit and this one is only a cab ride uptown. Come with me. I’ll tell you all of the master’s secrets. You can see the final result of that sketch you have. It’s on exhibit. You won’t regret it.”
"Now where have I heard that before?”
Oh yes, from Malcolm.
Hungry for company, Mona agreed to meet him at the exhibit. But only to meet him. She didn’t want him thinking it was a date, even if it sort of was. She was too far gone in whatever this was with Malcolm to get romantically entangled with anyone else. But still, Sebastian was terribly handsome with his curling dark hair, warm brown skin, and vibrant eyes. And he knew everything there was to know about Degas—his art, his life. Sebastian’s enthusiasm was infectious. She would have to see about getting a whole display of Degas sketches at The Red. When it was time to part, she kissed Sebastian on the lips—a quick small kiss, but more than she’d intended. As he put her in a cab to send her home, she realized she’d gone two whole hours without thinking of Malcolm. A small victory, but one she’d desperately needed on a cold gray Saturday in a lonely December.
As usual, she went to the gallery instead of her apartment. She pretended she was there solely to check Tou-Tou’s food and water, but she knew what she wanted was to work so late she could justify, yet again, sleeping in the brass bed in the back room. When she walked into her office, she found a book and a glass of red wine waiting on her desk.
Malcolm was back.
Mona could hardly catch her breath as she walked to her desk and sat down in the ancient swivel chair that needed oiling. She looked at the wine first. A white card sat propped up on the glass stem. On it in bold male handwriting were two words.
Drink me.
If he left the wine for her to drink, that meant he intended to have her tonight. She wondered vaguely if he was watching her and knew she’d gone out with Sebastian. Is that why he wanted her tonight? Usually he gave her a day’s warning. If he wanted her to drink it now, though…
And why the wine? One glass wouldn’t intoxicate her. At most it would relax her. But for what purpose, what plan? He’d beaten her with a riding crop last time without this sort of preparation. She couldn’t begin to guess why he needed her to drink. Carte blanche, she reminded herself. She’d given him carte blanche. If she needed to drink a little before whatever it was he had planned for her, she would do it.
She sipped at it gingerly. It was unlike any red she’d had, but once she discovered its subtle sweetness, she drank deeper and faster. On her empty stomach, the wine went to her head quickly. However, although red wine had a depressive effect, it did nothing to settle the tempest in her heart or quiet the storm in her blood.
She turned her attention to the book. A slim volume of blue, with "Picasso” printed on the spine. So tonight was to be surreal in some way? Her vision was already beginning to blur thanks to the potent red wine. Potent and delicious. She couldn’t get enough of it. She drank every drop of the wine before setting the empty glass on the desk and opening the book to the page marked with her red velvet choker.