Some ladder-leg was simpering along at work the other day about some fictional

wench named "Bridget Jones" and the book and the movie and the action figure.

I have been around over-dressed (or under-dressed, as the tide of fashion flows)

office "girls" for most of my life. They don't pay much attention to me as I

am supposed to be "safe". I'm not, but that's none of their business.

I haven't seen or read any of this "Bridget" stuff, outside of a few clips or photos

of the actress involved (who hopefully will suffer gladder things), who seems a

pleasant sort when some idiot with a press badge isn't moaning about her

weight.

I have variously been associated with "working girls" of one brand or another

for almost all my life. I was delivered by a streetwalker when my mother was trying

trying to make it home from her job supervising floorwalkers. Yeah, I know.

Sex and lipsticks seem to permeate the otherwise shoe-worshipping tribe of

"adult" women who really should know better. Personally, I think they are all latent

lesbians who don't have enough guts to get the tattoo or visit the bars. Yet, they

will undergo liposuction and Brazil waxes and breast this and tummy that and

wear shoes that the Nazis would not have forced concentration camp victims

to undergo. Even fascists have consciences, unless they are in the "fashion" industry.

Couture is what PETA should be pestering. The formerly fur-bearing animals are

much better off than the women that Paris rapes with their schmattas.


The odd thing about most of the camouflaged-faced ladder-legs that I know

is that they have this odd ambiguity (not that they would use that word) about 'mistresses'.

They rarely discuss it whole-heartedly, the way they do wheat germ, yoghurt, and stretch marks,

but there is this kind of dark hole in their talking and thinking that highlights the concept

of the 'mistress', as opposed to the 'sleepover buddy' or the 'intermittent lover' or even

the 'alternate significant other' concepts. I mean, they are all talking about coitus without

reproduction, right? Not specifically as a life goal, as it is the getting there, the theatrical

and cultural bits of pretending to be almost but not quite 'available' and kissing or not

on the first 'date'... Food, theatre, music, non-prescription drugs and which wine will

make you uncomfortable in a tight dress... Yecch.

They have this grudging respect for 'prosties' and 'sex workers', like dancers and

you-know-what, but the mistress as 'other woman' or, to go even further afield from their

365 word (they have the calendar on their desks) vocabularies, 'concubines' or

'courtesans', is fascinating to them because it seems like a sort of half-winked at

respectable goal, a sort of entrepreneurship where the goods and services are the same

thing. I don't think I will mention the Geisha to them. The idea of going to a school to actually

learn a skill might blow their minds.

So, I go about my business, smile a bit, take a few notes on my PDA and then go home

and tell my father's mistress what went on. She has this odd view that the poor things have

regressed down a couple of evolutionary rungs and will never know it.

I'll take her word for it, although I don't understand.


I first met Hortencia when I was 13. It was an awkward age for both of us, as she was

25 and my father was 50. My mother was 46 and often seemed 1/4 of her age mentally.

She would have fit in wonderfully with the ladder legs 'round the office. That's why I never

seriously consider any of them attractive, except possibly as a paintball target, because

they remind me so much of my mother.

My father was doing one of his "things" that he did. Wandering off for the weekend to make friends

for friends of friends in the hope of getting a piece of a chunk of a commission some ways down the

road. He worked in wholesale office supplies and "reward" trinkets. My mother was occupied with

some sort of "drumming" weekend that was supposed to culminate on a march of concerned

women to a religious headquarters that promulgated the primacy of husbands and the "sinfulness"

of females of all species.

Somehow, I can't get the details out of her even now, although we've discussed almost everything

under the sun, I was shlepped to my father's mistress's lair for the weekend.

I really didn't have a clue. I didn't really care much where I was. I had had some odd moments of

almost getting beaten up that week, from my schoolmates and one of my cousins. I also had some

revising to do that I really couldn't get out of.

Now I know how the human mind works. You probably already have your easily-titillated little

libidos kicked into high gear just from the title of this piece. Well, kick it back into idle or go

away. This is about me, not you and certainly not about her.

I remember that day vividly. She was having domestic difficulties and the maid and cook were married

and babbling something about divorce proceedings and Hortencia, who was wearing Gucci running clothes,

and Ivan and Ivanna (I kid you not) were wearing an odd assortment of work clothes and ancient

evening wear. I remember the Chinese scarlet of their silk house shoes, with the non-squeak soles.

Hortencia was barefoot, with a couple of elegant Celtic-like toe rings and a turquoise lacquer

on her nails. Oddly, her fingernails were a lightly-buffed natural colour and her face was seemingly

free of the muck that most women apply to hide mother nature.

My underwear itched. I'd forgotten to change and my father had had the chaffeur slap together

some togs in a paper sack on our way out the door.

Her suite smelled of, well, good cigars and bad port. The furniture seemed borrowed from a rep theatre.

The bric-a-brac seemed to be waiting to be thrown in a bad scene from a silent movie.

It was 8AM on a Saturday morning and I really needed to be watching telly.

There didn't seem to be one. How disappointing.

The chauffeur (I've forgotten his name, if I ever knew it. He wore sour cologne, like Arpage) ranged

the doorbell, waited until Ivanna, still remonstrating with both her husband and her employer,

cracked the door, shoved me through, tossed the bag after and then vamoosed.

Ivanna scrutinized me like something that wouldn't go down the drain with alacrity, then pushed me

and my bumpf out of the way, toward an understuffed divan, and returned to the fray.

It was like a front row seat at an Orton play. Only with more spitting.

I sat there and fidgetted, then pulled off my schoolbag and dug out an old Tintin

and a pencil with a functional eraser and sat there removing the dialogue from the

balloons and writing in salacious (for a thirteen-year-old) replacements.


I don't remember exactly what was said. Who could? I remember some noises about

Hortencia's contract with the two being a single thing and that she absolutely refused

to deal with them as separate entities until the contract was up.

I do remember Ivanna saying something like, "Just like a whore, always tying other people up."

I remember Hortencia smiling slowly, like a cartoon snake surveying a mongoose. Then she

kicked Ivan in the crotch. Ivan screamed, "Why'd you do that?"

Ivanna just screamed.

Hortencia walked to the door and opened it and gestured them out with, "Because you have no

idea how to live like a man." When Ivanna had gently guided the limping Ivan out, Hortencia

gently shut the gigantic ivory-coloured door and turned to me and asked, "Do you know how

to do the washing up?"

I set aside my literary endeavor, "I went to swim camp one year and had to to KP."

"Good for you. Then you can show me."

I didn't know her, but as a thirteen year old, I had had a plethora of women of a mature sort

(well, more mature than I) putting their hand on my shoulder or my cheek and looking sincerely

into my eyes and making requests of me. Many more than have done so since I began to shave, mores

the pity. There's the little stroke for your libidos. Take it and run away. No more for you.

I was a very sense-oriented child. I smelled, tasted, felt, heard and saw everything with an intensity

that I wouldn't wish on anyone I truly liked. After so many years of experience with adults

and children and their panoply of smells, stinks, touches, and so on, Hortencia was a relevation.

She didn't smell bad, she didn't lean on me and her voice didn't grate. She just assumed something,

and it was so close to the mark that I just went along, assuming that since she was in the guise

of an adult, my father had left me to her care, and she hadn't asked me to do anything truly

repulsive, like take out the rubbish, then I was safe, entertained and likely to stay that way.

I trusted her. For some odd reason, it was an awkward and new feeling for me, she seemed to

trust me and feel safe with me, too. That was weird.


I ended up spending the rest of my life living with her or having her in residence. I don't know

when she severed her relationship with my father, but I do know that my mother seems to have

begun going to lunch with her sometime during when I was at Uni. Yeah, I know. Don't even go

there. That would be too easy. And I am not. Heh-heh.

I used to know her daughter, Crimea (don't ask), for a couple of years, until she got disgusted

with both of us for not helping her with a roman a clef. I don't think she had the guts to be

a courtesan or a lesbian. She married an accountant and tried to commit suicide on the lawn

of her three-year-old's day care facility. Now she's into Feng Shui as a religion. Yeah, I know.

It beats Conran.


It might occur to you to wonder when I learned that she was my father's mistress. I really don't

know. I do know that the first realization was that she was not a relative or a person in authority.

I learned later that she was relieved to have baby-sitting added to her duties because she knew

that my father was just moral enough to avoid fouling his own nest by fooling around with her

with me on the premises. In fact, I don't think he and I were ever on the site at the same time.

This fact alone probably didn't not bother her in the least and probably disposed her kindly

towards me and me to her from the start.

Oh, Ivan and Ivanna ended up staying together and they worked for Hortencia for the next

fifteen years. They got back at her by becoming progressively deaf and using sign language.

She and I had to learn it by default and I think Ivan and Ivanna kept making up new and spurious

signs to irritate us.

It did serve to make Hortencia and I's conversations at restaurants more interesting, though.

We would make snide little comments about people's clothes and food choices.

I don't remember when we started going out in public. I do remember some odd days when

the chauffeur picked me up from school and took me to a bistro or a restaurant where Hortencia

was. One time he even picked me up from a charity soiree where my mother was holding forth.

He had a whispered conversation with her, she nodded and then I was whisked away, not unwillingly.

I hated my mothers little co-conspirators in their little world of feminist fortitude. They would

have been better off helping people rather than finding new ways to irritate them.

Many of her co-conspirators had offspring that they ignored or shuttled about. I got to meet

many of them at odd events where the conspirators seemed to need children for some

photo ops. We were uncomfortably underdressed and arranged in strange groupings at little

tables or on playground equipment. We didn't have much in common except our loathing of

pretentious "adults" and we swore we would never join them once we reached that advanced

state of decrepitude.


Now, I know that in many of your tiny minds the idea of a teen associating with a woman who made

her living by dealing with the needs of needy and flush adults brings about vicarious associations

with SEX. We never talked about it, not specifically. Somehow she respected my intelligence

and I just assumed she had some and whatever I learned, I learned well, and whatever she taught me,

she did it it so skillfully that the syllabus was never printed and the grades were never posted,

but I got a better education from her than I ever had at school or Uni.

That's why I own the business I work at, but almost no one knows it. Especially the ladder-legs.


My mother died in a plane crash with her third husband, Drake Hind, whom

I hated, not because he was bedding my mother or ripping my father off, but because I simply thought

he was scum. I didn't like the way he looked at me or Hortencia. I once offered to kill him to put the

rest of the world out of his misery. He didn't talk to me after that. I think he thought I meant it.

I probably did at the time. Before she died, she went out to eat with Hortencia and I and it was not

as awkward as it would have been eating with my mother alone. I had always had to keep a distance

from her physically. She had this bad habit of trying to jug me just when she shouldn't, I had never

liked being just a table's width away from her because it brought me too close. That wasn't the case

when we were with Hortencia. The only one at risk of being hugged was my mother by Hortencia,

as a kind of preemptive strike. Heh heh. My mother had this odd habit of drinking sickeningly sweet

liqueurs without benefit of any other fluid. Hortencia would put some evil flavoured lip balm on her

mouth before she hugged my mother and make sure that the whole dose ended up on her blouse

or the collar (if there was one. My mother was a big believer in cleavage) and then my mother would

spend the rest of the afternoon trying to daub whatever it was off with a Kleenex and wrinkling her

nose in that cute way we all appreciated.


My father died after a strange bout with a stroke induced by exposure to burning poison oak in

a sweat lodge. He was drunk at the time. All the time. I liked him better drunk than sober.

It made it easier to steal from him. By the time his will was probated, I already had most of the

assets I was entitled to. I made sure Hortencia got her's, too.


While I was reasonably certain that my father hadn't been her first association with a married man

who thought he required outside assistance, I never bothered to find out the particulars. I did know

that my father was the last. Not bad for a thirty-year-old.


And, no, we never did anything. As far as I can remember, we rarely hugged. I did kiss her forehead before she died.

It was an easy death, I had the doctor's make sure of that. We watched cartoons and old Czech animated shorts

and I ate homemade waffles with Belgian jam while she lay there with a glucose drip and smiled

in a morphine haze. I was fairly drunk, myself, on Drambuie. I was mourning her while she still

breathed, because I was going to get on with things after the memorial service and the tossing

of the urn into the ocean from a chartered helicopter. It was in the middle of a Fleischer Bros.

Popeye cartoon that she passed. I didn't hear her final breath, but I saw it out of the corner

of my eye. It was a kind of sigh. I cried.