The Party by Katya Apekina
Tillie was behind the cubicle wall partition getting tickled. The squat man had been tickling her for over half an hour. I’d walk past the makeshift room every ten minutes or so, and he would smile kindly at me and then glance down at his golden watch, which he’d placed on the chaise longue by Tillie’s head. The man had asked to tickle me first but I’m not ticklish. I offered to fake it, but Tillie was already taking his $20 and putting it in her change purse. It was nice to hear Tillie laugh.
I was sitting in the main room, next to an elderly woman, her bottom teeth brown and broken like the grasses of Nevada, where, she told me, she owned her first brothel. She was making a submissive by the name of Giorgio dance for us. The carpet was darker in the places where the desks and file cabinets used to be, rectangular islands of dark blue that Giorgio was using to guide his bobbing pelvis through a sort of square step. My gaze kept wandering from him to the walls, which were covered in phone jacks, probably also from the days when the space had been used by the Frasier Collections Agency. I knew that’s what it had been because Tillie had pointed out the Frasier Collections Agency sign by the elevator banks in the lobby. It shared a floor with a travel agency and an orthodontist.
Men were just beginning to trickle in, coming straight from work. They took off their coats, loosened their scarves and piled them on the couch next to the old woman, stepping around Giorgio to peer into the rows of cubicles and doorless corner offices.
Afternoon sunlight was entering through the cracks between the metal blinds, slicing up Giorgio and the carpet, igniting a fuzzy stripe on the old woman’s cheek. Tillie was probably tickled raw by now. Peals of laughter. Peeling laughter. Like layer after layer of psychic wallpaper was being stripped away and below it were chunks of crumbling plaster and below that nice, sturdy, shiny beams. Tillie’s laugh had evolved too, crescendoed, then plateaued, moving between choking, hiccups, murmurs, muffled grunts. But now, the sounds were gathering themselves into a definitive sounding climax, making the partitioned wall behind me shake.
I got up, stepped around Giorgio who was crawling back and forth to the Christmas music, and went to stand in the doorway to watch Tillie and the man finish. She looked like a sexy goose with her long neck, narrow shoulders, and big, dry hands flapping and tearing at the air in front of her as the squat man furrowed his brow and buried his squirming fingers into her sides with the facial intensity of someone playing the piano. When the golden watch let out a beep, he let go of her very suddenly and put the watch back on his wrist. Tillie looked dazed and happy as she sat up. Her blond hair was sticking up and out, and the seams on her short black dress had gotten twisted around her.
“That was fun,” she said, as though she’d just gotten off a spinning teacup or flying rooster swing. Just like the time we’d taken Andrew to FunTown, USA. Andrew was her son, or maybe her brother. She’d said both at different points and I don’t pry. She only watched him a few days a month, and on those days instead of sleeping in Tillie’s bed, I slept on the couch. I never got any sleep on the couch, which on top of being far from Tillie was also very uncomfortable. The old roommate, whose lease I’d taken over, had removed most of the springs for an oxidation sculpture. The art project stood, staining the corner of the living room orange, long after he had left town without paying rent and Tillie had found me on Craigslist. Eventually Andrew cut his arm open on one of the rusted coils and had to get shots and the sculpture was thrown out and Andrew did not come back the following month.
Tillie and I had lots of common interests, like Craigslist. We liked to get things on it – free stacks of magazines for collages or ransom notes, crates of frozen turkey dinners, clothes from dead people’s closets. We only responded to this party job post because neither of us had enough for rent this month. The ad had said: “$100/hr. No sex. Run by nice women.” If we worked four hours we’d have enough for rent and utilities. If we worked five, we could maybe go on a trip or get another couch or buy some more groceries or send some books to political prisoners. The woman on the phone said her name was Mistress Chloe and that she couldn’t guarantee $100/hr but that is what a lot of girls made. She also told us to wear open-toed shoes.
“Tell her we both have very high arches!” Tillie whispered loudly from across the kitchen table. Tillie had big feet as flat as Kansas, but I said it anyway. The woman didn’t seem impressed. She just gave us the address and told us to be there early with washed feet. After getting off the phone, Tillie drove us straight to the shoe outlet. We bought matching patent leather sandals with thin straps. The store was unheated and we stood in line, a heel in each hand. I was shivering and leaning into Tillie, and every few minutes, she’d grab my sleeve and say, with each word coming out as its own little, icy cloud: “If either of us doesn’t like it we’ll just leave. We’ll get up and leave. We’ll just go.” What she really meant was that if she didn’t like it. I liked everything we did together.
The pleasant squat man shook our hands and then edged past Tillie and me down the narrow hallway to find some other girls at the party to tickle. Tillie and I stood there under the fluorescent lights, teetering on our heels, waiting for someone to come talk to us. A very tall man’s head moved along the top of the cubicle partition like a shark fin. My heart sped up a little, but I pretended to inspect the art hanging on the soft cubicle walls. It took me a moment to realize that the drawings done in ballpoint pen were all interpretations of the same panda perched in a tree.
“They’re all the same,” I said, running my fingertips over their bumpy surfaces.
Tillie glanced at the pandas. “Institutional art,” she said.
“What?”
“It’s what they have you do in prisons, group homes, mental clinics.”
See, this is what I mean about Tillie. She knew so many things! A few feet away, a fat man in a leather jacket was lying face down on the floor. Eventually, he started to talk to us.
“You girls having a good time?” he said without moving his head.
We sure were, we told him.
“I’m Carpet,” he told us.
We told him it was a pleasure to meet him. We’d heard so much about him. We actually had, from one of the other girls while we were waiting in line for the bathroom. He was sort of a local celebrity in the city because he would find ways of hiding under the carpet at clubs so people would walk on him.
“You can come stand on me, if you want,” he offered.
We did just to be polite. It was hard to balance with my heels sliding into the soft leather over his shoulder blades. Tillie stood on his ass and looked blank. It was the same look she’d get when watching Andrew disappear into a taxicab. A chick hatching in reverse, the pieces of eggshell flying back into place and rescabbing.
“You girls ever been to Club Desires?”
Tillie wasn’t listening. I told him that I had just moved to the city, but had been meaning to go.
“I go every Thursday. Last week I must have had twenty people standing on me at once. Sneakers, heels, everything. None of them knew I was there.”
The Tall Man’s head briefly appeared above the partition and I almost lost my balance. Tillie noticed but didn’t say anything, instead she asked Carpet if he wanted “to play.” That’s what the hostess, Mistress Chloe, had told us to say. She had coached us in the kitchen before the party started. Her slight lisp gave everything that came out of her mouth a sheen of innocence: “Some men will lick and worthip your feet and that’s okay. And one of the men will touch himthelf when he does that, and that’s okay too. And one guy likes to tie girls up, totally harmleth. Also okay. These are all old friends.” She had a really smooth face, and there was something strange about her eyes, like they were crossed though they were not. She was very pretty.
Carpet hesitated. Maybe we should have asked him for the twenty dollars before standing on him, but he probably would have expected something more from us.
“Look, I’m surfing!” I said, letting go of the wall and spreading out my arms. Tillie bounced on the balls of her feet and laughed. Carpet laughed under us too. And then suddenly, Tillie was mid-air, jumping on Carpet’s back like he was a flaccid air mattress. The impact of her landing threw me forward onto the floor. Carpet shrieked, and it didn’t sound pleasurable. I skinned my knee, a raw patch on my pantyhose.
“A taste. Twenty could get you more,” Tillie murmured seductively in his ear. He had rolled over onto his side and was making a lowing noise. She gestured for me to go so I limped over to an empty corner office.
It did not seem nice, what Tillie did, and it made me nervous. I went over to the window and pulled the slats of the blinds apart. The sun was setting and the patches of snow on the road looked pink. There was a red-haired man sitting in the bed of a pickup truck throwing breadcrumbs at a flock of pigeons in the middle of the road. I could feel Tillie’s breath on my shoulder.
“Did you hurt him? Is he okay?” I asked.
“Sure,” she said, tucking a twenty-dollar bill into her change purse. So she’d given him what he wanted then. Tillie understood so much about the world that I did not. My upbringing had been a padded room. Comfortable. My parents quoted commercials to each other. This was their love language. What could I possibly know about anything?
I leaned into her a little bit as we both looked out the window, watching the guy in the pickup truck put his gloves back on. The pigeons fluttered around him, then settled back down.
“That’s not Buster, is it?” she asked me. “That’s exactly what I thought Buster looked like. Could he have followed us here?”
It was not what Buster looked like at all. Buster was not a redhead. Buster did not exist. When Tillie had asked me why I was moving to the city I’d said I was running away from a stalker. When she asked for his name I blanked and gave her the name of my childhood dog. I’d come to her apartment straight from the train station, my head wrapped in gauze. I must have cut quite a figure because she’d offered me the room on the spot, even though there were other girls scheduled to see the place after me. That first night she rocked me back and forth in her lap, fingering the gauze and promising that she would hide me from him, and I believed her.
“No, Buster has a big scar across his face,” I told her and let the slats in the blinds clink back into place.
“Like this?” she asked, running her index finger from my temple to the corner of my lips, where she pressed it lightly into my incisor. I shook my head “No” and her finger found its way deeper into my mouth.
I did not really understand our games, but they excited me. I showed her the location of the imaginary scar, bisecting her face with my thumb, down her forehead, squishing the tip of her nose towards her lips.
And then, I felt my center of gravity shift. The Tall Man was hunched in the doorway, watching us. Had I summoned him? I wondered. Tillie took her finger out of my mouth and wiped it on her dress. “Come in,” she said.
He stepped inside and straightened up. I grabbed on to the window frame to keep myself from drifting onto him. Does a planet when it orbits close to another sun ever switch its allegiances? Someone in the cubicle across the hall sneezed several times in a row.
“Gesundheit,” the Tall Man called out.
“Thank you,” Tillie said, even though she hadn’t been the one who sneezed.
I let go of the window frame and ended up knocking over a stack of unhinged doors leaning up against the wall. The Tall Man helped me restack them while Tillie watched us. I could feel his gaze settle shyly on my feet. I took a deep breath and suggested that he make himself comfortable on the loveseat, the room’s only piece of furniture.
“You want to pay both of us?” Tillie said. Nothing in her voice indicated this as a question. He nodded and passed her the bills, which she put in her purse.
The couch wasn’t really big enough for all three of us. Tillie squeezed herself onto the armrest and watched his shaking hands unbuckling the little straps on my sandals. When he finally got them off, he held my feet in his large hands and stared for a while into the middle distance, his back very straight.
“You in the military or something?” Tillie asked him.
The Tall Man sighed and slid down a little into the couch, eyes on the ceiling, his long legs out in front of him. “I’m not proud of what I did. But I did what I had to do.”
Tillie seemed satisfied by this answer. She got out a little bag of airplane peanuts from her change purse and began eating them. He talked about how he had rescued people after an earthquake by pulling them out of the rubble. She crunched her nuts and tried to hook her eyes in me, but I made myself into vapor. Everything but my feet because he was touching them and so they continued to exist.
“Tell me what you like,” she said, the salt from the peanuts all over her mouth. The Tall Man hemmed and hawed, because he thought she was saying that to him, but I knew she was saying it to me.
“You don’t like anything. You like whatever the other person likes,” Tillie said to me, interrupting him. Tillie had a way of saying things that had never occurred to me but were obvious in retrospect, whole sections of myself settling for a moment into focus.
I nodded. The Tall Man nodded too. Tillie opened her mouth and showed us the chewed up nuts, like that’s what she thought of us. And I understood then that the “us” was not me and Tillie anymore, it was me and the Tall Man. This would be the moment I’d tell our children about. “When did you know?” they might ask me, and I’d tell them the truth.
A girl who looked like a gourd with bangs leaned in through the doorway. I’d heard her bragging earlier about how men were always asking her for piggyback rides. “The Pervert needs one more,” she said into the room.
Tillie unfolded herself from the crease in the couch and stood up. She looked at me, expecting that I would stand up too, or that I would pull her back down, but I did neither of those things.
“Seriously?” Tillie said. “What’s wrong with you?”
That I could not and did not care to answer. When I was done I wanted the table cleared immediately. Who wants to sit and look at a plate of half eaten food? That’s what her face was to me then, a plate of congealing egg yolk.
“We each get $60. It’s really easy,” I heard the Gourd Girl tell Tillie as they disappeared down the hallway.
When they were gone, the Tall Man turned to look at me, then at my feet and smiled.
“They’re just so . . .” He finished the sentence by leaning over and kissing one of my toes. “As soon as I saw them, I knew,” he said and rubbed the arches with his thumbs.
I knew too, of course. Of course, I knew. He was so long and narrow. A walking snake. He lifted my foot slowly up to his mouth. I wiggled my toes against his lips and teeth. His face was kind and wise. He smiled at me, and it felt like the entwinement had begun. I felt so close to him. I moved my toes in past his lips and teeth. Then deeper and deeper down into the velvet clenching, until his eyes bulged and his head made sounds. “Unhinge your jaw,” I said.
I closed my eyes and concentrated on what we were doing, moving slowly, whisper by whisper until I was waist deep in his gullet, my feet standing on the couch, but inside his pelvis. It was difficult to maintain. I wasn’t in there very long.
The truth-truth is that sexually, I have never been able to achieve catharsis. There was always excitement, inflammation around something that had been only partially squeezed.
“Tell me about yourself,” the Tall Man said when he stopped coughing.
“I like you,” I said, because that’s all there was to say.
He grinned, a lock of hair falling over his eye.
The Gourd Girl was back. “The Pervert needs one more,” she said.
“You should go,” the Tall Man said. “You’re here to make money. You’re what, doing this to put yourself through college or something?”
I did not correct him about college. Maybe I was. Maybe I would now. I slid my soggy legs back in my sandals, threaded the straps but didn’t buckle them. It seemed for a moment like I was just stepping out to sign for a package or pay for our pizza.
In the main room a crowd of spectators had gathered. Men with sad, gentle faces. Several girls were already tied to office chairs as the Pervert paced back and forth, his right arm twitching with excitement, his glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose. He pulled a chair up for me to sit in.
Tillie was in the audience on the lap of a jowly man in corduroy pants. Giorgio the submissive was licking peanut salt off her fingers like a dog. The Tall Man joined the crowd. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, bend to say something to her. Mistress Chloe spun me around and tightened the rope around my wrists. “I learned this one in the Girl Scouts,” she announced to the room, “The Lark’s Head.”
The Pervert was going down the line, talking to each of us tied‑up girls individually. With the $60 dollars I was making I would buy the Tall Man a nice hat, or maybe a pretty step stool for his apartment.
“Would you please tell me to go to hell?” the Pervert asked the girl next to me. She tried, but she had a ball gag in her mouth so drool trickled down her chin. The Pervert nodded sagely. When he got to me he conferred with Mistress Chloe. I was to be tied to a railroad track. Mistress Chloe helped him tip my chair backwards, so I was looking up at the pockmarked ceiling tiles. The Pervert pressed himself against the wheels, towering over me for a minute, a big wet grin on his face. “The train is coming!” he said. I felt a moment of panic imagining a big metal train barreling towards me. Why wasn’t I on it with the Tall Man rushing out to our new life?
When The Pervert was done with me, he took a step back and looked at us all lined up, with an air of intense satisfaction, like for a moment the world was exactly as he wanted it. “Looks like you’re in a bind!” he exclaimed, no longer able to hold it in.
Mistress Chloe propped my chair back up, and sliced through my ropes with a penknife. The tingling in my arms and legs had turned to numbness. She rubbed my arms to get the blood flowing again, her touch sterile and tender. When I stood up, I saw the Tall Man was gone. Tillie was gone too.
“Have you seen the Tall Man?” I asked the man in corduroy.
He shrugged. His face was wet, but I couldn’t tell the source of the wetness.
Then Giorgio looked up at me from the ground and smiled like a hyena. “I know where they went, Mistress,” he said. “He and your friend.”
I followed Giorgio out of the party as he crawled to the elevator banks. “Where did they go?” I asked.
He reached up to press the Garage button. We descended in silence, and he crawled out after me.
I didn’t know the Tall Man’s name, so I yelled “Hey!” into the cavernous bowels of the garage. Hey! Hey! Hey! echoed back to me.
They left together, left me here. The life I’d imagined with the Tall Man – lake picnics, taller than average children, crawling into his mouth until I was slowly swallowed – it was hers now. What would Tillie do with all that? Take a few bites and throw it out, like everything else.
Giorgio’s grin was expanding like a waterfall past the edges of his face.
“I’ve been bad,” he confessed. “Punish me.”
I stared at him until his smile faded and he stood up, brushing off his pants.
“Jeesh,” he muttered and walked back to the elevators.
I followed the ramp out onto the street. My coat was at the party, but I wasn’t going back for it. As I turned the corner, a gust of icy wind surrounded me with feathers. It was like being inside a down comforter, except the feathers were gristly and sharp. I was standing where the man who wasn’t Buster had thrown breadcrumbs into the road. Now the intersection was filled with feathers and fragments of beaks and wings.
Up ahead, the pickup truck was idling, its taillights glowing red through the cold clouds of exhaust.
The story I told about having a stalker hadn’t been a lie. Not exactly. My stalker was always catching up to me. I could feel his breath inside me now filling the empty spaces left by the others. Tillie, then the Tall Man. Nobody was going to save me now, but if I moved quickly enough, maybe I could outrun him.
“Wait,” I called out as I ran towards the truck, my feet sliding through the slushy tire tracks – numb to the knee, numb to the ears, my body a stack of numb bags, numb sacks. “Wait for me.”
Katya Apekina is the author of the novel The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish (Two Dollar Radio, 2018). Her short stories have appeared in The Iowa Review, Electric Literature, Santa Monica Review, West Branch, and PANK.