He didn’t like the housekeepers around when he was working, and he might not want the room made up until
Yvonne came on at three.
“I said, ‘I’ll come back later, Mr Jefferies.’
“‘Do it now,’ he said. ‘Just keep quiet while you do. I’ve got a bitch of a headache and a hell of a good idea.
The combination of the two is killing me.’
“Any other time he would have told me to come back, I swear it. It seemed like I could almost hear that old
black mama laughing.
“I went into the bathroom and started tidying that up, taking out the used towels and putting up fresh ones,
replacing the soap with a new bar, putting fresh matches out, and all the time I’m thinking, But you can’t
hypnotize someone who doesn’t want to be hypnotized, old woman. Whatever it was you put in the tea that
day, whatever it was YOU told me to do or how many times you told me to do it, I am wise to you. I am wise
to you and I am shut of you.
“I went into the bedroom and I looked at the bed. I expected it would look to me like a closet does to a kid
who’s scared of the boogeyman, but I saw it was just a bed. I knew I wasn’t going to do anything, and it was a
relief. So I stripped it and there was another of those sticky patches, still drying, as if he’d woke up maybe
around 9:30, an hour or so before, and just took care of himself.
“I seen it and waited to see if I was going to feel anything about it. I didn’t. It was just the leftovers of a man with a letter and no mailbox to put it in, like you and I have seen a hundred times before. And that old woman
was no more a bruja woman than I was. I might be pregnant or I might not be, but if I was, it was johnny’s
child. He was the only man I’d ever lain with, and I could eat this man’s spunk until it came out of my ears and
it wouldn’t change a thing.
“It was a cloudy day, but at the second I thought that, the sun came out like God had put his final amen on the
subject. I don’t recall ever feeling so relieved. I stood there thanking God everything was all right, and while
I did it I scraped all of his stuff off the sheet I could get and ate it.
“It was like I was standing outside myself and watching again. And a part of me was saying, You’re crazy to
be doing that, girl, but you’re even crazier to be doing it with him right there in the next room; 6 could get up
any second and come in here to use the bathroom and see you eating his spend off that sheet. Rugs as thick as
they are in this place, you’d never hear him coming. And that would be the end of your job at Le Palais – or
any other big hotel in New York, most likely. A girl caught doing a thing like that would never work in this
city again as a chambermaid, at least not in any half-decent hotel.
“But it didn’t make any difference; I went right on until I was done – or at least until some part of me was satisfied – and then I just stood there a minute, looking down at the sheet in my hands. I could see the wet
place, but now it was only wet because my tongue had been on it. That other was gone. I couldn’t hear nothing
at all from the other room, and it come to me that he was behind me, standing in the doorway, looking at me.
I knew how he would look. Used to be a travelling show that came to Babylon every August when I was a girl,
and they had a man with it – I guess he was a man – that geeked out back of the side show. He’d be down a hole