Hop Alley (5 page)

My third sitter of the afternoon failed to show up on time, and after half an hour’s wait I elected to leave. “What’ll I tell him if he shows up wanting his photograph made?” the boy asked.

“Tell him to take the sitting fee and invest in a goddamned timepiece,” I grumbled, straightening my necktie and preparing to leave. The boy was unsure whether to take me literally or not, and I clapped a friendly hand on his shoulder. “Or tell him I was called away by an emergency.”

The only emergency lay in the fact that the lady in question lived in Golden, ten miles away, and refused on principle to receive any unannounced suitor after the hour of five in the afternoon.

My housekeeper was just returning from the Chinese laundryman’s with the day’s clean load when I met her on the stairs, and made no response when I told her I wouldn’t be home for dinner. A widow of fifty-five winters, hard ones by the look of her, she didn’t approve of my courting habits, though she knew no details. She was round as a medicine ball, and in the course of her daily labors she regularly worked herself up into wheezing fits the sound of which terrified me; she assured me that they were nothing extraordinary and continued to work harder than any woman or man I ever saw.

Immediately upon arriving in Denver I’d advertised for a housekeeper; it had been years since I lived alone, and I knew I would require daily help in the running of the household if I were to get any work done. I was specifically looking for a woman of the least enticing physical type, with the hope of avoiding temptations that might lead to distracting complications, and Ralph Banbury, the editor of the
Denver Bulletin
and the owner of my building, had recommended Mrs. Fenster. She had worked in his house for some months before Mrs. Banbury decided she would be happier without her scowling presence and replaced her with a young Bavarian girl, whom Banbury bedded within the week.

Much later, in his cups, he admitted that if Mrs. Fenster’s brother-in-law hadn’t been one of the
Bulletin
’s pressmen, he would have joined the chorus of the town’s other papers in calling for her arrest upon the death of Mr. Fenster, ten years
previous. Her story was that she had returned from a visit to her sister in Georgetown to find her husband shot to death in their bed, but the opinion of the U.S. Marshal was that she had come home and found him alive and well and
in flagrante delicto
with the lonely wife of the greengrocer downstairs. Her refusal to pantomime either shock or grief did little to help her case in the public’s mind, but neither the press nor the police ever succeeded in getting a word out of the other lady, who according to Banbury was so terrified of Mrs. Fenster that she left her husband and the state of Colorado six months later, never to return. Eventually the matter faded away without Mrs. Fenster ever having to spend a night away from her own blood-soaked bed, and a decade later the incident was largely forgotten.

Mrs. Fenster received three dollars a day from me six days a week (exactly twice what her sister’s boy collected), and on Saturdays she went off into the night with another sister who was even fatter and more dyspeptic than she was, returning Sunday evenings subdued and moodier than usual. I had no idea what they got up to apart from the suspicion that it involved church; every Saturday night before leaving she laid my good black suit out, and every Sunday she returned to find it still laid out, unworn.

I
MADE MY
way to the roof and then down via the ladder to the courtyard below, the quickest way to the livery stable
on the street behind mine. The studio and gallery were previously operated by a melancholy Prussian by the name of Ernst Nielander who, after three quarters of a decade of operation in Denver, documenting the layers of its social sediment from the opium fiends and harlots at the bottom to the silver tycoons at the top, had found himself yearning to practice his craft in his suddenly peaceable native land. His desire to return was so strong that I was able to purchase the business as a going concern for less than it was worth; when he returned a year later, disillusioned and disappointed, and wanted to buy it back for the same price, I laughed in his face. He left Denver again and, so far as I know, was never heard from thereafter.

Though the building was nearly perfect for the purpose it generally served, several eccentricities of design made it a less than ideal place to live. Among these was an outdoor johnny that could be accessed only by a ladder from the rooftop, for no access to the rear courtyard was provided from the interior of the building. The arrangement’s only advantage was that it allowed me to exit the property via a gate behind the outhouse into an alley that ran between my property and the livery stable, though reentry via the gate was impossible.

It was nearly three when I drove my carriage out the door of the stable, bearing a bottle of nerve tonic, in case milady was still mad at me from last time, and foolishly dressed for the warmth of a spring day. When I reached Golden at 4:20 I was sorry for that, as there was still snow on the ground at
that elevation, and the air on the drive up had chilled my face to what I imagined was a deep, salmon pink. I drove to a neat, two-story brick building among a row of similar structures, climbed down, and tied my animal to the post outside it, ignoring the clucking of a pair of passing women as they looked back and forth between me and the house with equal measures of disapproval. One of them muttered something that sounded like “harlot,” and I turned to face them directly. In my hand I held a garland of bluebonnets I’d stopped to collect on the way up; I separated two blooms and brazenly proffered them to the horrified ladies, treating them to my most disarming and ingenuous smile.

“
Bel après-midi, n’est-ce pas, mesdames?
” I said, and they hurried on their way, sputtering at the vile and dissolute ways of the heathen French. I strode to the door, lifted the upcurled trunk of its brass elephant knocker, and dropped it to our rhythmic signal: one, two, three, then half a rest before four and five. Priscilla opened the door and looked me up and down with mild contempt. Dressed and coiffed with her habitual demure elegance, she looked as fresh-scrubbed and wholesome as a minister’s wife on her way to teach a Sunday school class on chastity.

“I suppose you’ve come all the way from Denver looking for a piece of ass,” she said.

I had no answer to that question. The truth wouldn’t have been gallant and she would have seen through a lie, so I handed
her the bluebonnets. She raised an eyebrow and frowned, but when I showed her the bottle of laudanum she moved aside to let me in.

Fifteen minutes later we were in her squeaking iron bed, hammering away at it like we’d only just met. She heightened my arousal with throaty cries that crescendoed and decrescendoed slowly, though whether expressing either real passion or a simple desire to gratify my
amour propre
only she knew. After such a long period of chastity the physical sensation of intercourse was nearly overwhelming, and shortly I discharged with a slightly piquant sensation what felt like a pint and a half of spunk. I resolved before withdrawal never to go that length of time again without a proper ejaculation. After we’d lain there for a while she spoke.

“You know I’ve been going to church, Bill?”

I sat up and took pains not to laugh. “You’ve seen the light?”

“Don’t be smart. I just go to be sociable.”

I thought about the biddies on the street and wondered what churchgoing ladies in Golden would welcome her in their homes. “Which church is that? The Methodist or the Baptist?”

“I take my carriage into Denver and go to the Presbyterian services and let it be known that I’m a widow. Last week some of the ladies invited me over to a tea.”

“That’s nice,” I said.

“Well, for a bunch of ladies taking tea after church services the talk got pretty vile, I’ll tell you that.”

Now I did laugh. “How vile could it get?”

“I’m getting to that. One of the ladies was talking about a fellow from Denver who abandoned his wife for a banjo player.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Well, this fellow apparently traveled the country as a sort of saltimbanque, he’d go into saloons and do a little tumbling, then he’d play his banjo and pass the hat.”

“This is the fellow who left his wife?”

“No. The one who left his wife, left her for this banjo player here. Two gents, if you see what I’m getting at? So one of the ladies at tea manifested the same misunderstanding you did just now. But the more we explained it to her politely the more confused she got. And finally Mrs. Halliwell, the lady whose house it was, explained to her that the nature of the rapport between the two men was of . . . of love. Of a physical kind.”

I nodded again.

“And the poor thing just wouldn’t understand. I think there were several of them that didn’t, quite, either, but this one kept asking and asking until finally Mrs. Halliwell broke down and explained that the one stuck his pecker in the other one’s mouth.”

I was thinking right then that I’d have given a thousand dollars to hear that Mrs. Halliwell explaining to her poor demure friend about cocksucking. “She said ‘pecker’?” I asked.

“I think she said ‘manhood.’ Anyhow, having said it, Mrs. Halliwell brought up the fact that it’s illegal, putting your mouth on someone else’s reproductive parts.”

“No, it’s not,” I said, though I knew it was most places, and probably here as well.

“Yes, it is. The law went after these two fellows and not just because the one deserted his wife.” She took a deep breath and paused before expelling it. “Mrs. Halliwell, who was enjoying our ill ease, shocked the other ladies by saying there were women deviates who practice a form of the same vice. Pussy-licking. Well, if you don’t think that got them all indignant. Most of them thought she was having us on. So it got me thinking.”

“About me tonguing your pussy?”

She got red and looked off toward the doorway. “I don’t know of anybody else who does that. I’d never even heard of it until you did it to me that first night.”

“I thought you liked it,” said I, knowing perfectly well she did.

“I do.” She was quite flushed now. “But it’s not natural, is it?”

“Sure it is.”

“But it’s not. Where did you learn it, anyway?”

“A lady whose husband wouldn’t. He thought it was unnatural, too.”

“Well. It’s not that I don’t enjoy it. But I feel so ashamed, just lying there and feeling lips and a tongue on it. Think of what else goes on down there.”

I shrugged. “If you want me to quit it, I will.”

“No,” she said. “I’ve just been thinking, is all.” She sat up, as though just remembering something. “And where exactly have you been all these weeks without a word?”

“In Denver, taking pictures. You could stop by and see the studio sometime if you wanted.”

“I meant why’ve you not been by to see me?”

She sounded genuinely puzzled and a little wounded, and I wondered if she possibly could have forgotten the vicious tongue lashing she’d given me the last time I’d stopped by for a quick one. Among other things she’d expressed a wish never to see me again, a wish I’d promised to fulfill. I’d meant it, too, but I hadn’t counted on the effect of weeks of celibacy on my stability and resolve, or on the contents of my scrotum. I’d had no desire to patronize the whores on Market Street, and the sin of Onan, which practice had been my sole sexual release for so many weeks, never provokes a sufficient volume of ejaculate to properly evacuate the nuts. (I remain convinced that the inevitable putrefaction of that residual semen is the cause of what we used to call in the army “blue balls.”)

“You told me not to come back, ever,” I said.

She slapped her hand down on my chest, playfully, but hard enough to hurt. “I was mad at you, you stupid man. That doesn’t mean I truly didn’t want you to come back,” she said, in an absurdly coquettish tone for a naked woman speaking to a man who has recently had to extract one of her shortest and curliest poils from between his incisors.

I was about to dress and make my excuses, hoping to avoid another screaming fit, when a loud rapping came from the door downstairs: one, two, full rest, three four, full rest,
five, six, and seven. Priscilla went rigid and sat straight upright, eyes wide and nostrils flared.

“What’s the matter?” I asked her, and she hissed to quiet me down, then crept to the window on her knees. She lifted the corner of the curtain, then turned back to me in a panic.

“Isn’t this Wednesday?” she asked.

“It’s Thursday,” I said, and she covered her mouth up with her hand. She kept shaking her head and crawled back to the bed. From outside came a cry, a man’s voice. “Cilla!”

I went over to the window and peered through the edge of the lace curtain. Downstairs at the door stood my friend and landlord Banbury. He stood patiently and didn’t act as though her failure to answer promptly was anything unusual. He consulted a pocket watch and continued to stand, facing the street.

“Well, for Christ’s sakes, it’s just Ralph,” I said with some relief, tempered by a growing realization of the complexity of the situation facing me. “I thought he came over on Tuesdays and Fridays.”

She shook her head. “Thursdays and Mondays, now.”

“No use getting into a knot about it. I’ll go let him in.” I was already half dressed and buttoning my shirt.

“Are you crazy?” she said, trying to whisper but betrayed by her anger into half shouting.