It was nearly five in the morning and Luci was still awake. To her right (and half on top of her) was a snoring man, lying face down in the pillow. To an outsider it looked as though he was dead and encapsulated Luci with his limp arm. Luci pulled herself from under him carefully enough not to wake him. Not that he was wakeable, the miserable drunk. She tried to remember if he'd ejaculated or not, but her head felt a bit blurry. Better safe than sorry. Reaching for her nightgown, Luci left the bed in a hurry and entered the tiny adjacent room.
It looked like a bathroom really. Damp wooden panels were poorly secured on the walls. Centipedes were running amuck everywhere, and Luci wasn't wearing her slippers. In the middle of a room was a wooden pail, the kind a child squats to shit over. Lucy lifts up her gown and squats over it, pulls out the sponge and begins cleaning her insides dutifully. She winces at the uncomfortable pressure and the rough edges of the sponge, but proceeds with determined fervor. At least this was the only thing in her life that she did out of duty. She looks down at the soapy water and tries to determine if it looks clouded enough to be the accumulation of all the semen that could have been inside her, and decides it's the room is too dark to decide. Unsatisfied, she scrubs a little more, to the point where it really begins to sting, before tossing the sponge back into the bucket. She couldn't beat anyone in an arm wrestling, but from the practice she got from squatting, she'd put money on herself for quad wrestling.
There's nothing interesting about this except for the small fact that while Luci cleansed herself (ha!) with a dead-eyed stare, she was looking straight at a Faust poster—one that featured a wide-eyed, blonde prima donna praying towards an omnipresent Mephistopheles figure glowing red above her. Luci let her nightgown fall down her knees and stepped over the pail to get a better look at the poster. I forgot to mention: Luci reads. In fact, she was probably the smartest whore in Paris. Not only did she read when she was married, she still reads. It was something she hid from Madam Jacqui and (thank god) all men. In fact, Luci has read Faust, the play, but she's never seen Faust, the Opera. She wondered if it would be worth a week's work to purchase tickets for the show. The answer was ultimately no because she would have to go alone, and no one (not even patrons) went to the Opera Garnier alone. Still, she saw no harm in saving the date in case she changed her mind, so she took note of when it was playing, and went back to her sleeping lumberjack.
Luci crawled into the loungechair next to the big, canopy bed and propped her head against its arm. She could smell the cigars, booze, and sweat in her hair, but she didn't mind. She didn't pay any mind to her lumberjack or his hairy back. She looked down at her bony hands and remembered the other bony hands that belonged to Monsieur Gay-O-Lighty or something or another. Luci had seen hands with two fingers, covered in lesions, for just arms with no hands, but Mr. G's hands were downright special. His fingers were much too long for his palms. Spider-legs sprouting from his wrists, those hands were! It must have been terribly difficult jack off with hands like that. She almost felt pity.
She wondered what he wanted to "converse" about. Perhaps that he'd be shot in the face and is so ugly that no women would have him? But that was ridiculous. Any man with money (as he so obviously does), could have a woman. Even if it wasn't a whore. Especially if it wasn't a whore. There were plenty of respectable ladies out there who will marry for fortune. It was, after all, a part of the respectable game.
She began to wish she'd accepted the offer. She didn't need the money as much as she needed the intrigue, and by the sound of his voice, which Luci can only describe as different, he had some intriguing things to say. But she took the safer route, with her lumberjack (real name Will), three time comer and a two time drunk lard, face down in her bed. As if flattered she remembered his name, Mr. Will snorted into the pillow.
Luci looked out the window, across the street, and into the house of another early riser. A young man, strapping on his breeches and snapping his suspenders, gathers his coat, his hat, and his books. He couldn't be more than twenty-three. Brown hair, straight nose, distinguished and looking. He orders his tired maid to take care of his house while he is gone, and shoots out the door without a glance. Luci knows this man but her eyes do not show it. She merely keeps looking out the same window, into the same room, where the maid, whose fat ankles could barely hold her body up, treats herself to a piece of chocolate from the dresser and rapidly falls asleep in the master's bed.
Luci's ears perk at rapping noise at the door downstairs. She waits until she hears the creaking of the door, an exchange of words, a jingle, and Luci gets up and goes to work.