The Things We Do to Our Friends(44)
August was busy. I followed a doctor who worked night shifts and turned out to be logistically difficult to pin down, whose movements we tracked obsessively until we found him. I ended up entwined in a drunken grope on a night bus. For him, it was just a few meetings, and a few quick photographs. Easy.
Then there was a man who should have made my skin crawl but, in fact, I thought he was fascinating. He kept spiders in tanks, so many of them in a room, and although at first I had to feign an interest in arachnids, I soon found that I wasn’t pretending at all. I liked their soft fuzzy claws pressed all over my hands. We gathered copious amounts of text messages where the conversation veered away from tank maintenance and into more X-rated matters. He sent me things to wear, and I sent pictures back, cutting my face off (I never let my face be photographed clearly for these purposes), just my body swathed in soft black mohair. Spiderlike—and was I the spider or was I being eaten by it? Limbs askew and sticking out at strange angles against the soft wool. It was hard to tell. Regardless, it was a particularly nice jumper and I kept it afterward.
What a joyous summer, to dip into these lives and try them on like fancy dress. And the reward of seeing the pure bliss in Tabitha’s face when we got pictures or text messages or anything.
When I tell the story, I’m aware of how it must come across. It suggests that we were irresistible to any man: ridiculously flirty, so seductive and incredibly attractive. That wasn’t quite the case. We had a set of refined procedures and expectations. A flawless setting where each element was calibrated for certain things to take place. The drink would be perfect, something from his past or simply his favorite, the one he always ordered, what chance! That was my favorite drink too! What I wore would be right, it would be what he liked. I sounded right—I was becoming better at changing my voice, not quite as good as Tabitha but I could sense improvement. I acted right, and it was all based on research. The research was always extensive without being intrusive.
There were other factors at play. An uneasy mix of art and science in motion. On the one hand, Tabitha had the intention to set it up as some kind of official-looking corporation. There were meetings and there was talk of appraisals and bonuses. She was keen we logged our hours and we pinned up ideas for marketing on a board—a PR event, discounts for referrals, more testimonials?! There was so much discussion at the beginning around the future. So much specificity to some discussions, certainly, but then a definite sense of deliberate ambiguity when it came to the detail of what each job should involve.
“As long as we’re managing expectations for the client,” Tabitha would say, and it was all so exciting and new that I never stopped to question further.
I was never fully sure what those expectations were. At the time, I just assumed she meant sleeping with them. That was naive of me. At the same time, it all just felt like one big game. We never thought about it too much. Samuel certainly didn’t, he stayed focused on the leads, on schmoozing rich women.
Sometimes, everything got a bit strange. Tabitha had an interest in the occult that, in Imogen’s opinion, jarred horribly with the concept of running a functioning, professional business. Despite eschewing our actual course texts, Tabitha devoured books about witchcraft and mentioned the supernatural frequently.
“Witches in Scotland were wealthy, you know,” she’d say to me pointedly, or, “A witch could make a man impotent.”
“Could she though?” Imogen replied to that one.
“Could she though,” Tabitha said, perfectly impersonating Imogen’s whine at first, then exaggerating it into something louder and squeakier. Imogen scowled, but Tabitha just smiled, and answered her own question. “Of course she could!” Back to her own exuberant shriek.
Tabitha laid out oysters for us and various types of chilies. Some were curled up and dried out like papery chrysalis, and some were fresh and smooth-skinned: crumpled, collapsing in on themselves, and waxy to the touch. She claimed such things were aphrodisiacs and that we should try them and assess our libido in a scientific way, and then we should find ways to integrate them.
Tabitha was also very interested in the possibility of a love potion (presumably Imogen would do the actual concocting of this), but we never moved past the storybook idea of some rose-scented mixture brewing on a stove, although she had asked me, casually, how I might feel about retrieving a lock of hair from the man with the spiders. That one had been a firm “no,” and she didn’t pursue it any further, just shrugged and tapped her nails up and down my arm so it felt like a swarm of ants.
“I don’t understand why you believe in this stuff,” Imogen whined, reaching to the edge of how much she’d openly contradict Tabitha.
“I’m open-minded about anything that helps us,” Tabitha replied. You couldn’t rile her up about the things she believed in—her own conviction in herself was sufficient. She froze Imogen out for a few days after that comment.
Secretly, I quite liked it—the idea of us as witches. Something to bind us, something wicked.
Everyone had been delighted after Tom Landore. They’d passed on the news to Mrs. Landore, along with some photographs.
They didn’t tell me how she’d responded, and it did make me a little worried. What if he came after me or tracked me down in some way? His wife was going to accuse him of having an affair, and surely his first thought would be how did she know? It was impossible not to dwell on the fact that he must have known. A young girl appears, interested in him, well versed in all his interests. But the more of the work we did, the more I realized that it was almost impossible for the men to conceive that their wives would do such a thing, that they’d be so manipulative or plan something so elaborate.