“Do you want to walk around?” he asks her. “Go shopping? See if we can get a table at Galatoire’s?”
“Could we”—she is blushing, furiously—“walk along Bourbon Street? When I was twelve, my church group came to New Orleans to compete in a chorale competition, but they kept us out near the airport, never let us get near the city proper.”
“Of course we can, baby. I’ll buy you a big ol’ drink, if you like, and we’ll walk along Bourbon Street.”
He’s no stranger to Bourbon Street. His life tricking began here, almost twenty-five years ago, and that’s how he always thought of it: tricking. Not hustling, but engaging in a fantasy with a consenting adult, and how was that any different from someone paying money to go see a magician? Almost too good-looking as a young man, he decided early on to find out what that commodity was really worth, to test how high the sky was, what one could procure with a pretty face and a great body. Back then he had sex with men and women alike, and while he found some good sugar daddies in his salad days, he also discovered that men were a little harder to control. He lived almost six months with an older man, Jacques, in a mansion Uptown. They had an argument one night, and it had been shocking how quickly it escalated. The old queen had beat him up pretty bad—and he had ended up being charged with assault somehow, not that he stayed around to face the music. He had decided then and there to stick to women for business.
Besides, with women, there is the possibility of marriage in all fifty states. And with marriage, there is so much more access to whatever wealth they have, and no one in the world can call it a con, what happens between husbands and wives. Sure, some of them made him sign prenups, but prenups didn’t matter when a man never bothered with the formality of divorce. He got whatever cash there was, he moved on. He’s lost count of how many times he’s been married by now. Twelve, thirteen? Yeah, he’s pretty sure that little Olive is going to be number thirteen. And she hasn’t breathed a word about wanting a prenup. She’s a pliable one, a sheltered girl whose parents, before they died, had spent most of their time telling her that she had to beware fortune hunters, that no one would ever love her just for her.
The Internet was both friend and foe in his business. A few ex-wives had set up blogs, tried to spread the word about him, but his name always changed just enough so that a Google search wouldn’t kick him out. A background check under his original name—that’s what he really lived in fear of, but no one knows his real name or Social Security number. He barely remembers his real name or Social Security number. Besides, the gals never run that kind of background check. They don’t want to. They buy into the fantasy willingly. They know themselves, what their prospects really are. They don’t want to question too closely why this handsome, rich man is on an Internet dating site, much less why he is interested in them, writing them flowery e-mails.
Relatives, however, can be skeptical. That’s why all-alone-in-the-world-Olive, as he thinks of her, is such a prize. A few years back, he dated a woman whose daughter was clearly skeptical of him, based on the e-mails he began to get. “Jordan wants to know—” “Jordan asked me to ask you—” “Jordan thinks I should see some kind of prospectus before I invest.” That was one of the ones he didn’t take to the end. He got some money from her but decided to skip before marriage, mainly because of that pesky daughter. He’s smarter now, makes sure his ladies are isolated. All alone in the world, as Olive described herself in her listing on the dating site. Although, come to think of it, who isn’t alone in this world? He’s been fending for himself all along, his father figuring that room and board to age eighteen were all he was owed, his mother barely lifting a hand to wave him goodbye. He was doing the best he could with what he had. People think it’s an advantage to be born handsome, but that’s just raw material. No, it’s the Olives of the world who have it easy, being born with money. The things she takes for granted. She thinks everyone knows how to eat escargot, for example. Certainly, he does, but that was part of his training. He had taught himself by watching Pretty Woman. Something else he should be able to deduct, buying his own copy of Pretty Woman, but it has paid off. He learned everything he needed to know from movies—the James Bond films, although only the early ones; The Philadelphia Story, Bringing Up Baby. He has better manners than most. Better than Olive, for example, who is openly gawking at the sights along Bourbon Street. She slips her sweaty little palm in his, and he can tell she is nervous, but exhilarated.
“How about one of those?” he says, pointing to a stand where the drinks are served in large plastic cups that resemble grenades.
“Oh, I couldn’t,” she says, pressing her face into his armpit, which can’t be that pleasant. He’s a little damp. Who wouldn’t be, wearing a suit on Bourbon Street in September? He forgot how long summer hangs on here, but Olive wouldn’t be dissuaded. She had never been to New Orleans, she told him, first in e-mails, then in their Skype conversations. Besides, Louisiana makes it very easy for out-of-towners to marry here. That reminds him: They should wander over to the clerk’s office in an hour or so, do the deed. Bless his laissez-faire hometown, where most of the rules can be waived by simple request—the waiting period, the requirement to show a birth certificate. Then on to the wedding night, but first a lovely meal, paid for with his new credit card. He would be needing some oysters, for sure.
But the drink has hit little Olive hard. Has she eaten anything today? Imagine how excited she was, how early she had to start to fly here from California. She starts to stagger, complains of feeling nauseous. The wedding will have to wait. He leads her back to the hotel, half carrying her the final blocks, puts her gently to bed, makes a cold compress for her head, runs his fingers gently across her arms and shoulder blades. “Giving chills,” his mother had called it. “Come here, Gus, give me chills.” She would stretch out across the sofa in the living room, the blinds drawn so the room was dark all the time, the television on but silent, two or three beer cans on the floor. Never more, because if you drank more than three beers in the afternoon, his mother explained, you were an alcoholic. But if you drank three between noon and five and then another three between five and bedtime, you were just honoring the packaging. “Why do you think they sell them six to a pack?” she would say. Did that mean one should eat a dozen eggs in two sittings? Once, he drank a six-pack of Coca-Cola in one sitting and she gave him a spanking for being greedy and wasteful. But he liked giving his mother chills, was happy to stand next to her and provide her a little pleasure. It was, he supposes, how he discovered his vocation.
He will marry Olive tomorrow. In fact, he will insist they spend the morning shopping, purchasing a new outfit for her to wear, as today’s suit is now a little worse for wear, crumpled and hanging on a chair. She’s sleeping in a full slip; he can’t remember the last time he saw one of those. The shopping trip will distract her and she will probably forget about him calling his bank in London until, once again, it is too late. Once they are married, he will tell her—he sifts through the stories he has used over the years. His London-based business manager is a con man, a scoundrel. He made up the story about the attempted fraud, the locked accounts, and used the time to clean him out. Oh, he has other money, but it’s so complicated, tied up in a trust, he won’t be able to get it right away. It might seem counterintuitive, telling a lie so close to the truth, allowing Olive to consider that there are people in the world who are not what they say, people who will pretend to be on your side but want nothing more than to fleece your pockets. But it works surprisingly well, he has found. Raise the specter of the very crime you are committing and no one suspects you of perpetrating the exact same fraud.
He is restless, though, a performer who had prepared himself to go, only to find out at the last minute that the show has been canceled. The adrenaline has to go somewhere. He thinks about the clerk, the one who eyed him at check-in. Sometimes he likes a little something on the side, something rough and anonymous and nasty. It’s tricky, though, finding someone
who won’t boomerang back, threaten one of his happy marriages. He can’t just sit here in this suite all night as Olive sleeps off her one-bomb drunk. He runs a finger along her jawbone. “I’m going to go out for a meal, let you sleep, okay, precious? And then I’ll sleep on the sofa when I get back, so you can have your rest. Big day tomorrow. Our wedding day.”
He really does consider each marriage a big deal, no matter how many times he does it. The women are so happy at that moment, and who can put a price tag on that? To date, his marriages have netted him as little as fifteen thousand dollars and as much as two hundred thousand, and he’s proud of the fact that each woman got the same quality job.
He’s disciplined. He doesn’t go too wild, stays out just late enough to find someone who wants to rid himself of energy as quickly and anonymously as he does. Then he creeps back in and, true to his word, stretches out along the sofa, doesn’t even bother to pull out the foldaway bed. Olive will appreciate the gallantry, he thinks.
Could she really be a virgin? She has been coy about her age, which leads him to suspect that she’s actually older than she looks. But even if she is ten years older than she looks, she’s still on the young side, no more than her late thirties. He hasn’t been with a woman that young since—well, ever. Even when he was young, the women tended to be over forty. It takes a woman a few years to amass a nest egg worth pursuing. But Olive is an heiress and an orphan. He has hit the exacta. He deserves it.
He awakens to a hard knock on the door—crap, he should have put the Do Not Disturb hanger on the knob—but before he can call out to warn the maid away, the door is thrown open and there is a sudden flurry that he can barely process in his sleep-dazed state. Voices, hard and emphatic, a trio of men circling him, calling him by his real name.
Calling him by his real name. The name that comes up on his rap sheet, from back in his hustler days in this very city. The name with a warrant or two, even a few of the earlier marriages. A name he hasn’t used for years for that very reason. How do they know his real name?
They cuff him, then begin examining the contents of his wallet, sitting out on the dining room table that so impressed Olive. Olive. Where is she, how has she slept through this? Maybe she went out for breakfast or a café au lait. He will find a way to explain this to Olive. She will bail him out. He just needs to get out of here before she returns, talk to her without any cops around.
“This your credit card?” one of the cops asks, extracting the platinum card that Olive added to her account.
“Yes, and that’s my real name, as you see from my ID. I have no idea who Gustave Meckelburg is.” God, what a name. No matter his line of work, he would have dropped that handle.
“Really?” says the cop, a detective, probably fraud or larceny. Whatever name he’s ever used, he’s never done anything violent, after all, and he can’t believe the New Orleans PD cares about his old adventures in vice. “Weird thing is, credit card company says you applied for this online a week ago, but the Social you gave belongs to Gustave Meckelburg. And everything else you provided—your address, your income—turns out to be a straight-up lie. That’s frowned upon, but it’s so minor compared to the other stuff we have on you, we’re not going to sweat it. Although you do owe for this hotel room now that the account has been closed.”
“That’s ridiculous. The primary account holder is my fiancée, and all she did was add me. When she returns, she’ll clear all this up.”
“Olive Dunne? The one whose name was on the reservation? She skipped, buddy. Doorman put her in a cab about six A.M. this morning. Told him her mother was ill.”
“She doesn’t even have a mother.”
“We’ve got a lot to sort out with you,” the cop says, putting his hand on his shoulder. “And we’d like to go over the various infractions in our jurisdiction before we hand you over to the feds.”
“The feds?”
“They’ve been advised that Gustave Meckelburg has never filed a tax return. They’d kinda like to talk to you about that.”
She has a long layover in the Nashville airport, almost three hours. She changes into jeans and a T-shirt, dumps the suit in a trash can. It smells like him to her, although the odors really belong to Bourbon Street. He smelled okay. Not a surprise, given his line of work. She parks herself in a Starbucks, uses the wireless feed to empty the checking account she set up only a month ago, calls the bank to tell them what’s she done. She bends the ATM card she extracted from his wallet early that morning, along with all the cash, and works it back and forth until it breaks in half. She kills out the photos of Olive Dunne’s house in the Pacific Palisades, silently thanking the woman for the loan of her name and her home for these last few months, not that the woman will ever know. Then she makes another quick call.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Jordan. Where are you?”
“Heading back to Providence. Ran down to New Orleans over the weekend just for the hell of it.”
“What prompted that impulse?”
“Feeling restless.”
Her mother is a sweet, trusting woman, despite all that has happened, but she knows her daughter well enough to be skeptical of this. Jordan doesn’t do much on impulse. “You’re still not on that tear about Frankie, are you?”
“Frankie?”
“Thinking he’s a con man, or whatever. He loved me, Jordan. You scared him off, making me ask all those questions. He thought I was too suspicious.”
“He did take almost twenty thousand from you.”
“For that hospital he’s building in Brazil, Jordan. I don’t mind that. It was a good cause.”
“You’re right, Mom.” She is right. Twenty thousand is nothing in the scheme of things, and it had served a good cause if it kept her mother from marrying that creep. If her mother had married Gustave Meckelburg—then known as Frank Mercer—he would have taken her for much more. But twenty thousand was still too much to Jordan’s way of thinking, and she had put a lot of time and effort into finding out who he was and getting him into a jurisdiction where that mattered. She had learned that bigamy may carry a social stigma, but it didn’t fetch much in the way of criminal punishment. But she knew how he had found her mother and she assumed he would find her that way, too, if she baited the hook just right. The hard part had been finding out everything she could about him. But she has always been a patient young woman, the inevitable consequence of her father dying young and leaving behind her sweet but silly mother, who never bothers to read the fine print or question anything too closely.
Jordan says goodbye to her mother and takes a much-folded letter out of her purse, a printout of an e-mail. “Dear Angel,” it begins. “How can machinery match two souls so perfectly? How can this thing of wires and circuits know what is in my heart?” It is the letter that George Middleberg sent her three months ago. It is also, word for word, the letter he sent to her mother eight years ago. If she ever harbored any doubts about what she was doing, they ended the day she received that e-mail.
“I can’t wait to take your name,” she told him at the hotel. And so she had. Taken his latest fake name, and returned his real one to him.
Toytown Assorted
PATRICK MCCABE
YURI GAGARIN WASN’T long in space when Golly decided to go up the town. For just the briefest of moments she thought that she’d forgotten her shop book—but then she remembered.
—Silly me, it was in my handbag all along.
Now as she proceeded across the square, she repeated the various items which it was her intention to purchase.
—I have Brasso to get and half a pound of butter, then there’s oranges and a tin of Mansion polish. After that it’ll be over to the butcher’s for a few tender chops. Thank you, Barney, she heard herself say.
Emerging onto the street, who did she encounter only Blossom Foster—a plump lady in a leopard-print coat and stole.
—This Russian fellow. What do you make of all this talk about space?
Golly’s response was that she didn’t really have any hard or fast views on the subject. But by now her interlocutor had already moved on and was inquiring of Golly as to what her considered opinion might be of Miami. Golly replied by saying that, regrettably, she’d never been.
There were lots of programs on television—Dragnet among them, The Lucy Show and Peyton Place—but for Patsy Murray and his son Boniface, Mr. Pastry was the best of them all. He sported round wire-framed spectacles and had a great big thick gray mustache. Such an amount of idiotic antics as he got up to! Always landing in one complicated situation after another. Even though he was Down syndrome, Boniface had no difficulty appreciating the TV funnyman’s idiosyncratic sense of humor. As the twelve-year-old boy fanned his fat fingers and pressed them to his face, rolling around the floor in hysterics—it got so bad that Golly had to go over to wipe the mucus and saliva off his nose.
—Mittur Pay-twee! he would squeal—repeating it, falsetto—Mitter Mitter Mitter Pay-twee!
Patsy had been watching the television too—but only halfheartedly. Being much too busy perusing his newspaper and thinking about the weekend’s football.
—Boo! he heard Golly squealing suddenly as he found himself jumping, instinctively placing his hand over his heart.
—Jesus Mary and Joseph, you put the fear of God in me, Golly!
The giddy peal of his wife’s laughter began to amuse him then, however, as she swung her bag gaily, tossing back her auburn curls. She had just come back from space, she told him, where she’d been tumbling about like Yuri Gagarin.
—No! she laughed, I’m only joking—I’ve just been shopping up the town. Would you like a sandwich? I’m just going in to wet a pot of tea. And what about you, Little Boniface Murray? Would you, perhaps, maybe like a nice little cup?
—Waaay! exclaimed Boniface, and Toytoon Torted!
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