C4 antho - Chamber Four

The Next Thing on Benefit ~229~
when she asked Sharon to take her appointment with him.
Wanda had the flu.
“Duncan’s a trip,” said Wanda. “You don’t want to miss
out on Duncan. Do you know the St. John?”
“Is it near the Carlyle?” Sharon asked her. She was used
to working at the Carlyle. She had an arrangement with an
orthopedist at Mount Sinai who had arrangements with several
of the big hotels.
“Not really,” said Wanda. “It’s private.”
The Hotel St. John was in the eighties off Park. Sharon
had walked down that block a hundred times; she’d had a
client there, an older lady. She had never known there was a
hotel on the street. That was part of the thing of being the St.
John, she learned. The St. John had no awning, no doorman,
no sign. You climbed the marble steps to the door, toward
the warm yellow light coming from the front rooms, and
somebody swung the door open for you. You got into an elevator
the size of a phone booth, and up you went. The elevator
opened directly into a suite of rooms. There was no
hallway, there were no doors.
From what Wanda had said, Sharon expected Duncan
Munro to be what Sharon and Wanda and their friends
called a giant squid: ancient and hideous, raised from lightless
depths, having an array of long, slippery arms that
twisted and wriggled to turn up in unwelcome places. The
giant squids had to be handled. Wanda, a black Amazon, six
feet two, with the shoulders of a prizefighter and the stride of
a panther, handled them easily. Sharon, smaller, softer, not
so easily. In this case, however, it didn’t matter. Duncan
Munro, Sharon found, wasn’t a giant squid. He was a gentleman.
He was a little heavy, but not soft; not really fit, but in
decent shape. His age? Well, his hair was mostly there and
mostly dark, though his eyebrows had begun to look as if two