The Homeless Millionaire

Next morning found me running around the house with a rag, a mop, and the vacuum cleaner. The bathroom was in really bad shape: I cleaned the shower cabin, and polished the mirror until it was spotless. I spent a lot of time in the bedroom that was used as a storage room for miscellaneous stuff.

I moved that stuff into the room Michel had slept in, and discovered that he'd left his bed unmade. It awakened all my earlier suspicions about him. In my experience, people who left their beds unmade were people who left a mess wherever they went in life.

I cursed Michel as I made his bed, then cursed that useless bicycle whose tires went flat within an hour of pumping them full of air. Most likely the inner tubes were old and cracked, and the rear wheel valve was fucked, too.

I put the bicycle in Roch's room, noting that Roch had made his bed. Then I spent almost an hour sprucing up the former storeroom. Motivated by the hope that it would become Tracy's bedroom in the nearest future, I cleaned and dusted and got out fresh sheets for the bed from the closet in the hallway, and even washed and polished the fucking window until it sparkled.

I had gotten dirty and sweaty doing all that, so I had to go take a shower and then wipe the shower cabin spotless again. I spent a long time in front of the mirror making miscellaneous adjustments to my appearance. But whatever I did, I couldn't get rid of the habitual, murderous scowl on my face.

When I didn't wear that scowl, when my face was relaxed and smiling, most people found me attractive. Some even found me very attractive. I had my mother's black hair and my father's blue-green eyes. I had a straight nose and a straight mouth, not too wide and not too narrow. I had standard-sized ears that didn't stick out too much, and when I smiled I actually seemed like a nice person. Yes, people found me attractive when I smiled, which was why I didn't smile often. I liked my scowl, it kept me out of trouble.

Most people think that being very attractive is just great. The people who don't think that way are the people who are very attractive. Being very attractive is hell. At least half of the people you meet hate you on sight because you're better-looking than them. The remaining half want something from you. If they don't get what they want, they begin to hate you too. And there's no fucking way you can give other people everything they want, because people always want more and more. Being very attractive is a fucking curse.

But there are exceptions to every rule, and that morning I wanted to be all smiles for Tracy. I just couldn't fucking do it. My face wouldn't cooperate. In the end I said fuck it and went out on the deck and stood there, smoking cigarettes and looking at the house across the bay. Overhead, small fluffy white clouds drifted lazily across a pale blue sky. It was quite warm in the sun, but when it hid behind one of those clouds, it immediately got chilly.

There was nothing happening across the water, no movement at all around that house. I got going with the glass cleaner and a rag on the doors to the deck, and it turned out to be a hell of a job. In the end I just focused on getting a strategic area spotlessly clean, then positioned myself behind the sofa and had a good long look through the binoculars.

There was absolutely nothing happening over there. I had the thought that maybe they'd both left. Maybe Tracy had told me she that she would come over just to get rid of me. I'd used that tactic frequently enough myself, after all. I had been flying high on hope all morning, and now I came crashing down, and it hurt. I could even feel myself getting weepy, and this made me so angry I could kill myself with my own fist.

There was some booze and pot left over from the guys' visit: Michel had been generous once again, he sure knew how to set about recruiting people into his enterprise. But I didn't want to get drunk or get stoned or both, even though it would have helped improve my mood. I wanted to stay straight for Tracy. Such was the power of my incipient love, or whatever it was that I felt for her.

For sure, lust was a very important component of what I felt. I hadn't gotten laid for quite a while. I hadn't gotten laid for quite a while because the last time I did, nearly three months earlier, it had been such a fucking disaster it had completely put me off sex.

It had been a disaster in every possible way but one. To begin with, the girl I had sex with wasn't even pretty. She had been hanging out in the bar where I worked evenings, and I guess she found me attractive, because my job forced me to smile at people. She always seemed to need a cigarette whenever I took a cigarette break. She had a nice voice and wasn't stupid, so we talked a bit now and then. Her name was Marlene, and I automatically associated that with Marlene Dietrich, the legendary actress, so that was another point in her favour.

That evening, I was feeling terribly horny. I don't know why, working at that bar usually made me the opposite of horny. If Brigitte Bardot or Claudia Cardinale or Raquel Welch had walked into that bar and bared their tits, I would have raised an eyebrow at best. But that evening I was going crazy with lust, maybe it was the moon or something.

Marlene hung on until everyone had left. It was closing time, so I was wiping down tables and stuff and she was still perched on a stool by the bar, leaning with an elbow on the counter and watching me with dopey eyes. She was wearing a miniskirt with high black plastic boots, the kind that go over the knee. She was probably hoping to attract someone that way, and she succeeded.

We didn't even talk, I just put my rag on the bar counter and put my hand on her thigh and kissed her. We were necking like mad within seconds. In a moment of sanity, we went to the can and locked ourselves in its single stall.

It was very cramped in there, we tried to fuck standing up and then switched to her sitting down on the toilet with the cover down and me kneeling on the floor in front of her, my ankles sticking outside under the door to the stall. Had my boss, the bar owner, come into the can there'd have been a hell of a shitstorm. He didn't, and that was the only thing that went right.

I didn't have any rubbers with me, if someone had told me I would need rubbers while working in that bar, I would've laughed them out of town. So I asked her if it was okay for us to fuck right before we got going; she went 'mhm', and I preferred to assume that meant everything was fine. A couple of minutes into our copulation in the can, she informed me dreamily that it actually wasn't fine, she was ovulating as a matter of fact, but what did it matter? At worst, we'd have a beautiful, bouncing baby.

It mattered a lot to me. I instantly went soft inside her. I pulled on my pants while she cursed me for stopping. When I was dressed I unlocked the stall and looked at her and said:

"We're closing up. It's time you went home."

She started to cry and I left her like that, crying on the toilet. I felt very bad about that for a long time, I felt bad about her, about myself, about the whole situation. It took me a real effort of will to go to work in that bar the next evening.

Fortunately Marlene didn't come. She never showed her face in that bar again. I was really grateful to her for that.

I didn't think once about initiating sex with a new girl for the next couple of months or so. I even stopped dreaming about beautiful women, which was a major downer. It contributed greatly to an all-time low in my relations with my parents. I talked back at them when they criticized me, and we had at least one fight every single day. Sometimes, I wished they were dead. Other times, I wished I was dead.

The day changed into afternoon, and Tracy still hadn't come, and there wasn't a single sign of life in the house across the lake. I tried to draw Tracy's portrait, with the vague idea of presenting it to her when she finally showed up. All I had left of the charcoal were short stubs that couldn't be gripped properly. I had to use a pencil, but drawing with a pencil required me to stay in a special frame of mind: cool, calm, and very precise.

I just couldn't do it. I almost completed each of three portraits and abandoned them all because the face I drew was wicked. There was a hint of evil in her eyes and mouth that kept appearing against my will. On my fourth attempt, I tried to cheat: I drew her looking sideways with the hood of her raincoat up, so that just one side of her face was visible. I wanted to make her look flirtatious, but she ended up leering at me from the page like a demented assassin about to stick a dagger into someone.

I thought that eating a lot of food would calm me down, so I boiled a ton of potatoes and barbecued one of the steaks that were left over. I bravely resisted having a beer with that meal, and maybe that was why the food didn't work. It made me feel dozy but I was still angry and tense. I took all four failed portraits outside and burned them as a sacrificial offering to the gods, but the gods didn't give a fuck about me that day.

Evening fell, and light came on in the house across the bay. I spent over an hour on the deck with the binoculars, alternately looking through them at the house and straining my ears for any sound from across the water. Nothing, nada, zip. It was getting cold so I went inside the house and walked around, smoking and looking at my morning’s handiwork. Everything was perfect, the rooms would have passed muster in a respectable hotel. There was just one thing missing: Tracy.

I smoked so many cigarettes I started feeling sleepy from all the poison that I had inhaled. So I went to bed, but of course I couldn't fall asleep. My mind got busy working on assorted doom scenarios. It got so bad I had to get up and smoke yet another cigarette. I even thought about going all the way to her house in the dark, that's how far gone I was.

To make things even worse I had an erection. In despair I even retired to the bathroom to attempt a wank, but that was hoping for a miracle. My dick shrank the moment I touched it, and I really felt like getting the big knife from the kitchen and cutting it off.

I didn't get to fall asleep until well after midnight, and the moment I did I was woken up by someone banging on the front door.