Friends

The next day Lupe paced back and forth in front of the little apartment building where Helena was living. She felt very conspicuous in the black dowdy maid's uniform, but, for the most part the denizens of Pauper's Drop paid her little attention. I'll look like a droopy pigeon compared to Helena, Lupe thought dourly, waiting for her friend to come down. Dorothy had sent Lupe out on errands and she was confident she could sneak in a quick visit with Helena and Dorothy would be none the wiser.

"Look at you, my friend!" cried Helena. "You have found honest work!"

Lupe smiled at her friend and embraced her. "I wish I had the fortitude to do what you do," she told Helena. She filled Helena in on her living situation.

"How are your employers? Are the decent?" Helena quizzed her.

"Dorothy is just mean, meaner than a bull strapped for the rodeo. But Richard, well," Lupe blushed. "He's very kind to me."

Helena picked up on her Lupe's blush. "Kind? Is that all?"

"He's terribly handsome," Lupe gushed. "He has the smartest suits and he looks like a, a prince or something, he's got the creamiest white skin and the fairest blond hair" she rushed out in girlish pleasure. "He was wounded in Germany and can't walk very well, so yesterday I brought him some hot bags to soothe the aches and I saw his body and-" Lupe bit her lip secretively.

"And what?" Helena prodded. "Did you sleep with him?"

Lupe shook her head in a negative. "No, but, last night I went to bed and I was thinking about him. He's still very much in shape, despite this nasty wound." Lupe flushed again.

"Lupe!" cried Helena in mock indignation. "Did you sin with yourself? Did you use your own hand?"

"Shush!" Lupe looked over her shoulder in embarrassment. She had never done such a thing before, she hadn't even known that she could do such a thing. But when she found herself thinking of Richard, and how pleasure his touches and kisses would be, she felt not just the familiar twinges of romantic pleasure, but instead a twisting cyclone of physical burning that she needed to sate. Her willowy fingers hand acted on their own, and Lupe's body had moaned and contorted of its own accord.

"Oh, Lupe, you've become a woman!" Helena congratulated her. "Here, have a cigarette."

Lupe inhaled. "Something happened though. You know how you sleep with a man, and he spurts and he's very pleased with himself when that happens? Well, I felt like that, like that I reached the end of bodily pleasure, and I felt like I had stuck my finger in an electrical outlet instead of my own honey pot. But it was like a nice electricity."

Helena smiled. "Oh, you Americans and your puritan ways. That's called a climax, just like in men, and it happens to women all the time. You never had one before?"

"No!" Lupe rolled her eyes. She couldn't believe how much there was that she didn't know, and that she had managed to have several lovers already and never experience once.

"Well, I daresay you had bad lovers then." Helena glanced around her to make sure no one was in ear shot, then leaned in towards Lupe. "You said it is Richard Stone, correct? One of those men who make the turrets?"

"Yes, he said so."

"Joanna is sleeping with his brother Roland. I don't know if Roland fully realizes that Joanna is a hooker, but, well, she's getting money out of him either way. Lots of money. Find a way to get money from Richard. You need twenty-thousand and you making what now?"

"Forty a week," Lupe replied. Her joy at the discovery of orgasms was greatly diminished by the reminder of the need to escape.

"Lupe, you must find a way to get money from him. Seduce him."

"Oh, I don't think I can, he seems busy with so many things, and I don't think he has an interest in me. And if his wife found out, well, things would be awful. I think she might try to kill me if I slept with Richard," Lupe answered.

"Nonsense. You are very pretty and thin and I bet he would just love to ride you. Just have a little more confidence in yourself, that's all. And," Helena continued, her tone turning more serious, "no matter how handsome you find him, or how many climaxes he pumps into you, do not tell him of our plan. Remember, you are his employee. You clean up after him and make him his tea. You change his sheets and iron his shirts. If he screws you it will be just the same thing for him. You're a tool for him. He would stop you from leaving because he needs you because he is bourgeois swine, just like the rest of them who pay women like us for sex. He needs you rot here, because if you rot here, you serve him."

Lupe blanched. She did not want to believe it, she wanted Richard to be different, but the part of her that had been defeated by the admission of her own failure in Rapture was inclined to agree with Helena. "I, I won't tell him anything," she answered. "I want to get out so badly."

"When we escape we shall tell the whole world of the suffering in Rapture. And if your government is not roused, well, then we shall tell them of all the tax money that they are missing out on, and they shall haul this damn place to the surface and we will be free Lupe, I swear, I am not going to die here!" Helena whispered fiercely. "I will fight to last breathe to get home, I will do anything, but I will feel the sun on my skin and the wind in my hair once more!"

Lupe nodded and set her hand on Helena's shoulder. "Yes, I do to. But Helena, don't hold back. Don't wait for me. If you can escape, go, and send the Americans or the Soviets or I don't care who, just send someone to free me and all the others. You are so brave, and you will have the money before I do."

Helena smiled sadly. "Do not give up, my dear friend, never give up. Even if it takes you forever on your maid's wages, never stop trying to swim to the surface." She sighed.

Lupe hugged her. "I must go. Dorothy wants me to wax the floors before her Ladies' Club starts."

Helena nodded and squeezed her back. "I understand. Come by again soon, I miss you."

Would you kindly imagine a page break here?

Dorothy never cared for bridge, but she played it for the same reason that she suspected that all the other women did, which was that because everyone else played bridge. It was a convenient excuse to drink copious amounts of gin and complain about their lives. Dorothy spent most of her life now with the women in her Ladies' Club.

Today it was her turn to host, which Dorothy found to be unsavory as it required that…Jezebel to serve them their coffee and snacks. At least the little Jezebel had had the foresight to purchase dainties elsewhere as her cooking was abysmal. Dorothy had instructed Lupe to remain out of sight in the kitchen until she was called for as she didn't relish the thought of her loathsome husband's little toy eyeballing her friends.

Muriel was the golden haired but now sullen-faced withering member of their circle. Her husband had divorced her last month for a woman who sold flowers in Arcadia. He had met when he was buying flowers for Muriel, and within three months he had moved in with the young lady in a posh flat near Fort Frolic. He had demanded a divorce from Muriel and she had agreed and was now living on an alimony of a paltry five hundred dollars a month, which was not nearly enough money to keep up with fashionable changes in wardrobe or luncheons with the Ladies' Club and the excursions to the casinos. Even as the Ladies' Club began to gradually ostracize Muriel, Dorothy felt a rare twinge of pity for her.

Dorothy took a sip of her martini. She did not dare voice her suspicions out loud, nor did she share with her Ladies' Club how bad her marriage truly had gotten. Sure, she joined in with the other women's good-natured swipes at their husbands, but she never mentioned the revulsion she felt for her husband. She had been brought up to believe certain things, and one of those things was that proper ladies did not enjoy copulation, and that the only correct way to administer the vile act that was necessary was in the traditional matrimonial position, which Richard was physically incapable of. And now he had insisted on bringing a foreign looking Latin…creature into the house, who's pagan upbringing undoubtedly made her willing to engage in whatever perverse acts Richard wanted to engage in. No matter how much or how sternly she explained to Richard that the act of procreation was not for pleasure and since he was incapable of the only correct method he would have to just deal with it, he insisted that she was being narrow-minded and willfully cruel.

She could not believe the nerve of her husband sometimes. When they married he had been everything she wanted in a man - rich and ambitious. But he returned from the war unable to walk without a cane and constantly jabbing needles into his veins and talking crazy. Richard would tell her the most horrible things, about walking skeletons of children with cavernous eyes, and cities that were nothing but smoking brick and twisted metal, of women weeping over piles of corpses, of seeing the man that lay in the bed next to him at the field hospital put a service pistol in his mouth and pull the trigger because he could not bear the fact that his legs had been blown clean off. When she said that these things were indecent, that she did not wish to know them, and that he should forget about them and be concerned with more important things, things like charity events and summering at the Hamptons, he told her that she was a callous bitch. She could hardly believe her ears. No one had ever said such a thing to her, and Dorothy was shocked, but not nearly as shocked when later that night he suggested that in lieu of proper intercourse to conceive a child that she commit sodomy with him by putting her mouth on his filthy and near-demonic organ.

"I bid six of spades," she said curtly when it was her turn.

"So, Muriel," said Annette, a redheaded Canadian woman who was wed to a wholesaler of nearly ninety percent of the tobacco products in Rapture. "How is the single life treating you?"

Muriel smiled weakly. "Just fine Annette, just fine."

Annette caught Dorothy's eye and grinned cruelly. Earlier she and Dorothy had been gossiping about Muriel's fall from grace and making suggestions that she would soon have to be selling herself to the dirty men who skimmed the barnacles from the sides of the tracks. Dorothy had taken great amusement in their catty escapade and grinned back at Annette. Muriel witnessed this exchanged and sighed sadly.

Muriel looked away and tried to change the subject. "Dearest Dorothy, I don't suppose you've got any of those lovely cream cheese mints you had last time? I'm nearly perishing from hunger and I've got to sink my teeth into a little something soon."

"I'm afraid not, our new maid is just the absolute pits unfortunately. Can't cook to save her life," Dorothy said loudly, confident that the little whore was spying on them from the kitchen. It was what Dorothy would be doing in her position. Of course, where Dorothy in Lupe's position, she'd have the good grace to not inject herself into another woman's marriage.

Annette chuckled. "Oh no, my condolences. Why on Earth did you hire such an incompetent maid?"

Dorothy smiled a deadly smile at her friend. Dorothy would rather eat glass than admit her suspicion that her husband carnally craved the harlot. "I felt bad for her. There's a lot of unfortunates in this city, you know. Mostly empty-headed little tramps who didn't plan ahead, but still." Dorothy glanced at the kitchen door. There was much, much more she'd like to say but it wouldn't do to say it in polite company.

"Certainly she can manage something," Muriel continued, no doubt wanting attention on Dorothy's new awful maid than her failed marriage.

The pathetic wreck that Muriel's life had become steeled Dorothy's resolve to not let her marriage end in the same scandalous way that Muriel's had. She would fight to her last breath before she agreed to divorce papers and granted Richard the freedom to cavort around the slut. "Certainly," Dorothy concurred and pushed herself away from the table. She took measured but sharp steps into the kitchen.

Lupe looked up from the fashion magazine she had been reading. "Yes ma'am?"

Lupe's seemingly reasonable acquiescence to Dorothy's demands was infuriating, even more so than if she was openly insubordinate. "Bring out the tea service and the petit fours," she barked at her, unwilling to even spare her more words than necessary.

"Right away." Lupe put the magazine away on top of a cabinet.

"I don't want you reading or otherwise having leisure activities on duty either," Dorothy harshly spat at her. "I need you to work, not indulge. Understood?"

"Yes ma'am. I'll have the tea and sweets out directly. Is there anything else you would like?"

"No." Dorothy turned and marched back out to the parlor. She could almost feel the shame radiating off her skin as she returned. It was all so unfair to her, to be thrust into this position.

"Now Muriel, you must take care to not have too many sweets, otherwise how to you except to hook a husband? Especially at your age," Annette mocked.

All the ladies except Muriel gave a chuckle at this. Muriel reddened and Dorothy was grateful to have the attention drawn away from her inner fuming.

After a few more bids at cards Lupe emerged from the kitchen, large silver tea service rather inelegantly lofted as high as she could carry it. It was painfully obvious she was not well trained, and the other ladies could see this as well. Dorothy supposed they could guess as to why Lupe was here.

"Why Dorothy, I didn't realize Richard's company was doing so poorly lately," Annette scoffed as she beheld Lupe in her ill-fitting dress.

This took Dorothy aback. If nothing else she could take comfort in their shared marital wealth. "Stone and Sons has been doing fantastic lately, they've just landed a huge contract with Ryan Security."

"Hmm, well, you could have fooled me. You've got your maid here wearing what amounts to a potato sack. It reflects badly upon you Dorothy. You should be running a tight ship here," Annette lectured her.

If Lupe took offense at being treated like a piece of scenery, she made no indication. She acted as if she heard nothing and poured the tea for each woman in turn, then returned to the kitchen to fetch the dainties. Her good behavior was exasperating, as if she was pretending that she was there to something else other than seduce her husband.

"Her uniform is not permanent, Annette darling, she's been here less than a week. Perhaps you could recommend a good tailor for the help? I mean, what am I supposed to do, send her to Bella Mia's?" Dorothy laughed at the idea.

"I believe last time one of our help needed a new uniform she went somewhere in Little Eden Plaza. Have you ever been there? It's a bit rough, some common types there, but I wouldn't be too worried about sending your help there. Her virtue won't be compromised there, at least not any more than it is here in Adranos Place." Annette gave a knowing smirk and the other women at the table, even Muriel, tittered at this.

Dorothy nearly lost her cool. She could take it out later though on Lupe, however. "Who's turn is it to bid, hm? I've forgotten our order," she firmly said, directing the groups attention back to the game at hand.