The Lonely Hearts Hotel(62)

A man greeted her when she arrived at the door on the top floor. He brought her down a carpeted hallway. They passed a door through which she heard the sounds of people making love. There was a great bright light coming out from underneath it. Also, there were wires all over the floor leading into the room, so she assumed some sort of pornography was going on. One of the mistresses at the Roxy had gossiped to her about such a place.

Rose was directed into an office at the end of the hall. Another man was sitting behind a desk. He held a cigarette between his fingers and pointed it at her. “Will you pretend to look frightened, like the zookeeper accidentally left the cage door open and the lion got out?”

Rose made a funny look of horror with her mouth open and her eyebrows arched way up and her hands in front with all her fingers spread. Then he asked her to act as though a man had come up to her, unzipped his pants and let his erect penis out of it. She made the exact same expression and they gave her the job.

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ROSE WAS ASKED TO POSE for photos in the nude. The photographer was making postcards that would be circulated discreetly around the country. Maybe they would go to Europe. But Rose knew, no matter where they went, the photos were for men to look at and fantasize about. They were against the law. In her first photo, Rose was wearing a little black masquerade mask and riding a hobbyhorse, and holding a whip in her hand. There was another girl named Mimi who was dressed the same. Rose didn’t care. She got paid that evening.

She ate steak for dinner with a tumbler of whiskey. She’d had a taste of the type of life crime could bring you. After she was reminded of it, there was no going back.

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THEY TOOK HER PHOTOGRAPH sitting on a wooden moon that had a little seat on it and was attached by cables to the ceiling. Silver cardboard stars were glued onto a black backdrop behind her. In another photo, she was in a dress, sitting on a chair with her legs spread. You could see her underwear. She was reading a book. This was for a popular series of postcards. They all displayed the literate whore.

She and Mimi dressed up as maids. They took turns feather dusting each other’s fanny.

In another she was wearing lace underwear and a veil. There was a dog that wore a little tuxedo. She didn’t know what it was supposed to mean. Perhaps the dog was her master and not the other way around.

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SHE STARRED IN some movies too. She was usually naked in them, running away from priests and schoolteachers or men in black masks. In one movie a police officer made her sleep with him to get out of prison.

She pretended to be a girl working in an office. In the film she became so overheated that she could barely stand it. She tried to open the window but it was jammed shut. In frustration, she took off all her clothes. And the boss came out and started yelling at her as she happily typed away.

There was a dirty movie called Florence Nightingale. In it a patient was brought in, suffering from hypothermia. She took off all her clothes and climbed under the blankets with him. And they rolled around together until he was revived. Then she tried to get away, but he rolled on top of her and started having sex with her. The movie ended up with them wiping the sweat off their foreheads. In another film where she played the same character, in order to revive a man who was having a heart attack, she gave him a blow job.

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SHE DIDN’T THINK it was any different from the other make-believe games she had played. How different was it really from when she pretended that the great big bear was pawing her at the dinner table?

She liked performing. When she was young, she hadn’t realized how much she liked it. She didn’t realize that the feeling she had while performing was unique to performing. She thought it was just a regular feeling one went about having. But looking back on her life, she realized that she had not had that feeling since. It was a feeling of completion. It made her feel safe. It made her feel intelligent. It made her feel like herself.

She washed up in the bathroom at the end of the day and reapplied her makeup. She took the trolley home to the Valentine Hotel.

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THE DIRECTORS WERE AMAZED by how quickly Rose would catch on to instructions. She made them laugh out loud. They were wrapped up in the tale and the personas that she embodied. They almost wanted it not to end with her having sex or doing something dirty. They wondered about her character later in the day. They wondered about what would happen to her afterward. They wondered if she ended up happy.

They thought about the dear little perverted nurse and wondered if she would ever settle down. They wondered if she would be so enthusiastic about every patient. They hoped she would never become jaded. They hoped the hospital knew how lucky it was to have her. They wondered if they could meet their own little nurse someday and live happily ever after. And so they fell asleep without masturbating.

Sometimes her performance was too good and it took away from the sex.

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SHE HAD ON a black Napoleon hat. It was like the black part of a crescent moon. She was riding around on a hobbyhorse. There was a backdrop of the frozen Russian landscape stuck up behind her. How cold it was meant to be in this make-believe Russia! The white makeup on her face made her as pale as the snowflakes. She was wearing a long black coat, and she had on a pair of bloomers but no shirt. She made love to Mimi, who was also dressed up as a soldier.

“Did you know that Napoleon was afraid of cats? But that he liked women’s pussies?” Mimi asked Rose. “Did you know that he used to dress in the clothes of a poor person so he could walk through the streets of Paris to find out what people really thought of him?”