“I’ll let you know how I feel at closing,” she said, and went back to her station. She wanted to go with him. He might be as old as her father, but he also seemed harmless, and he was attractive. Still, as soon as he’d asked her the question a strange chill had rippled over her skin, almost like a premonition. She’d had those her whole life, little flickers of knowing. Like the time she’d been talking with her grandmother on the phone, and she’d gotten so cold that she had to run for a sweater after they’d hung up. The next time she laid eyes on her grandmother was when she was in an open casket, looking as though someone had replaced her body with a terrible nonbreathing approximation. Her cold spells weren’t always about death, though. When she’d first met Mrs. Talbot, their new neighbor in Greenwich when Alison was thirteen years old, she’d actually begun to shiver. Within a year, her father had left the family in order to move with Marianne Talbot to a brownstone in Philadelphia. He’d always been a distant, unhappy father, but after abandoning his family, he’d become almost a stranger. Alison hadn’t spoken with him in a decade.
The way she thought about her premonitions was that they were mostly about change, but always change for the worse. And that’s what death was, of course: just a change for the worse.
But she went out with Jonathan Grant, despite the coldness she’d felt when he asked her. And they had a good time. He talked about his children and his work, asked her questions about her own life. He didn’t try to kiss her, even though she’d already decided that she’d probably let him. But on their third date, he offered her a proposition, starting off by saying, “I believe in straight talk. I think that’s how I’ve made all of my money. So I’d like to put an offer before you.”
She knew what the general idea of the proposition was going to be long before he got into the details, but it was the details that ultimately sold her. He owned an apartment near Gramercy Park and she could live there rent-free. In return he would like to see her once a week for a “physical engagement”—his unfortunate words—and he would also make sure that she received plenty of spending money and gifts.
“We haven’t even slept together,” Alison said. “How do you know you’d like it?”
“Because I like you. I’m not a fetishist, and don’t care what your breasts look like or what acts you’d be willing to do. I don’t care about any of that. I just want to be intimate with you, but I would entirely understand if you want to do that with me first before making a decision.”
So, they did, that night, in a room at the Greenwich Hotel. True to his word, there was nothing strange or kinky about Jonathan’s sexual behavior. He took a pill first, telling her it gave him his best chance of a successful erection, and then he took her to bed, gentle at first, a little boring, but before she knew it, he had taken control, changing their positions until he’d found the one that felt the best to both of them, and she had managed to easily have an orgasm. She lay on the comfortable bed, her body tired and relaxed, while he dialed down to room service for a cold bottle of white.
“So I’ll be your whore?” she said.
“I believe the preferred nomenclature is ‘mistress,’ but you can call yourself anything you want. I’ll understand if you don’t want to do this.”
“What if I meet someone else? What if I fall in love?”
“I’d be happy for you.”
This was fourteen months ago. Despite the premonition that night at the Lodge, she felt as though the change that Jonathan had brought her had been mostly good. Her life was full of pleasure. She no longer worried about money. But she did worry about the purpose of her life, and she worried that she’d entered a kind of trap in this relationship with an older, married man. It wouldn’t last forever, and what would she do after he was gone? How would she go back to a life without the steady income he provided?
The day loomed before her. She texted Doug to see if he was free for lunch, then remembered right after she texted that he had gone to upstate New York for the weekend with his boyfriend.
She paced her apartment, wondering why she was so shaky this morning, her limbs practically tingling. She’d felt strange for a couple of days now, and thinking back, she realized that it had started when she’d received that list in the mail with the names on it. It had been a while since one of her feelings had come over her, and that letter had done it. Which meant change was coming, and the bad kind.