That’s when I noticed that the cards that should have been hers, the ones being dealt to the player to her left, were all losers. That the moment she’d left the table, in fact, all her cards went bad.
When she came back, we went to a deserted eating area and she ordered some wine and that was when – I can’t really call it anything else, she propositioned me.
She explained that she’d been born with this gift for winning at cards. Kiddingly, kind of, she asked if I’d ever read the “Queen of Spades”. I hadn’t, but thought I knew the story. Good, she said, and explained that – unlike the old lady in the story – she didn’t just win at a single game, she won at every game. From blackjack to gin to poker. It seemed that any card game Frannie played, she won. Because somehow, in a way she’d never understood, she knew every card that would fall. She’d always supposed, she said, that it was a kind of precociousness, like being a math genius, maybe, or Mozart.
It would sound crazy to most people, but I’d already seen her do it – twice – and I was a quarter of the way to believing everything until she mentioned this impossible thing. That in some sort of supernatural way, her gift depended on her being celibate.
That was bullshit, and that’s when I decided that either she was a nut case or that this was some really weird way of being hit on. So I got up to leave, but she grabbed my hand and begged me to stay “just a little longer” and then she began this blah-blah-blah about how it had taken her years to understand her “gift”: how she’d lost it when she got married once and had finally figured out that she needed to be single for the “charm” to work. And all this while she’s holding my hand and I’m thinking she’s out of her mind. And then she tells me she can pass her “gift” on to others. As some kind of a consolation prize, I suppose, for her not ever being able to have a husband and children and all that. So I’m beginning to feel a little sorry for her now, especially when she says that handing it on has been her only means of human connection, and how those select recipients of her “gift” became like her “children.” I thought it was the most incredible crap.
Until she mentioned that both times she’d been with me she’d felt my craving – that was her word – my craving for the cards.
I was shocked. How could she know that?
It was then that I began to think she might not be completely out of her mind, and I began to get excited. Because she understood my obsession. Maybe even shared it. And now that I knew I wasn’t being hit on by a seventy-year-old, I began to think that maybe it wouldn’t hurt to hear her out.
I’m compressing all this, Fernanda, although not as much as I thought, I guess, because my hand is starting to cramp.
Fernanda’s hand is at her throat.
We were on our third glass of wine, maybe, when she offered to me the “gift of the card.” That’s what she called it – “the gift of the card.” I would be one of the chosen, she said. But only – and here’s the stupid, incredible part – if I could stay single for the rest of my life.
Naturally, I thought of you, and I stood up again to go. Not a doubt in my mind. I would leave. But I had to sit down instead. I was sick, all of a sudden. Dizzy. Nauseous. My heart pounding, and chest pains. And Frannie seemed worried about me. So I guess to distract myself until the nausea passed, and to humor her, I asked if she’d show me a sample, and she said sure.
Of course she did.
You can guess what happened.
I played poker. I won. I played blackjack. I won. You’d think that winning every damn time would be boring, but that was the weird thing, it wasn’t, because I wasn’t winning every time. I’d lose three or four hands, maybe, but win big on the fifth. I wasn’t exactly unbeatable, like she was. I’d start to lose just enough to be sure she was bonkers, and then this “thing” would kick in. And all the while, this old woman (her full name was Frannie Andros, by the way – the name was Hebrew, she said, but she didn’t look Jewish), this weird old woman is standing right behind me and touching my hair, or my shoulder, and encouraging me under her breath and telling me I’ll get better at it. And I’m thinking, she must be the devil in disguise. If there is such a thing.
Well, that’s how it ended.
I took the deal. You know that by now, and there’s nothing else to say, except that I’m weak and shallow and easily manipulated, because how could anyone in his right mind choose this bizarre, sick thing over us? But even if it doesn’t work out – even if it’s a trick or something – what I learned is, that I’ll never get over this. At least now, though, it can’t hurt anyone but me ever again. Except for you, today.
It’s taken me hours to get this down on paper. It’s four in the morning now and I’m packed to leave for Vegas. Without you. Without anyone. Forever, I suppose.
There’s no “I’m sorry” for what I’m doing to you, Fernanda. I’m a shit.
But you’re brave. I told you that the other night. Braver than I am, for sure. And that’s why I know you’ll get through this. There’ll be someone who deserves you more than I do.
I did love you. More than I was able to say.
It’s unsigned.
Fernanda needs to vomit again.
She scrabbles at the door panel, yanks the handle hard and falls on her knees in the gutter. Crawling to the sidewalk through the soiled and dirty snow (when did it snow?) she retches feebly, and is just trying to stand when her arm is grabbed by something large and hot that drags her violently back to the limousine and throws her on the floor. Crumpled on the floor, Fernanda looks up and sees Elizabeth – still enveloped in her crimson gown, settling easily onto the seat, and lighting a cigarette with the end of one carmine-tipped index finger. A yolk-yellow rose is stuck in her considerable cleavage.
“So what do you think, Fran? Too hackneyed? This dress and those flames and all?” She smiles a poisonous smile, all doubled rows of shark-like teeth, and casually stretches her legs, crossing them at the ankle. A red satin pump dangles from one cloven hoof. “Frankly, I rather liked it. It’s so seldom I get to pull out all the stops anymore. Especially in a chapel. Even a non-denominational one.” She forces the shoe back on. Somehow, it fits. “Sorry about the hooves. The dog thing does that sometimes.’
She squints at Fernanda.
“So anyway, what now, Frannie, dear? Think you can get him back? Think he’ll be sorry?
“He wasn’t much of a challenge, you know. Between us.” She exhales a foul drift of smoke into Fernanda’s upturned face, but Fernanda doesn’t blink. She can’t. “I like them a little more tortured, usually: a little more of that wrestling-with-their-demons thing. Then it’s a contest. More religious, usually, too. Religious is so satisfying. Brings out my best.”
She considers the tip of her black cigarette.
“Although, that ‘Praise Jesus’ bunch is never much fun, you know. It’s television’s fault. And the movies, of course. Makes them all grab for their crucifixes. Like I’m some sort of vampire, for shit’s sake. Even garlic, would you believe? Garlic isn’t an argument I can relate to.”
Elizabeth hoists her strapless top, pats her poufy skirt, and smokes contemplatively. Slumped on the carpet at her feet, her back against the door, Fernanda, stunned, breathes shallowly,
Elizabeth Taylor. She’d never have guessed.
“So here we are now, you and me, and whaddya know, just a couple of days before you’re set to change back and be mine. Hey, you cut it so close I almost missed you. Must be getting old.”
She smiles venomously and leans towards her prey. “It’s rare that I lose one, you know. You must have known that, my dear.”
She actually has violet eyes, thinks Fernanda.
She must be losing it.
“But I’m a little let-down now it’s over,” Elizabeth goes on, exhaling coal-black smoke. “Or bored may be the better word. Because guess what, Fran? You’re boring and suburban and more than a little stupid, you know. Always have been. So why am I disappointed? Maybe because Randi’s offer
ings are generally so much more inventive. Asking for special clauses in the contract. Or pleading – I love pleading. And in third-world countries, would you believe, usually offering exchanges. Kidneys. Livers now and then. Spleens. Sometimes goats … as if I needed goats.” She waggles one hoof. “You know, almost everyone everywhere tries to enlist outside help.” She sends a black look up toward the moon roof.
“You, on the other hand, have been ditchwater. And until you bumped into – you know, what’s his name? – you’ve been a whole lot more interested in your precious job than in babies or men or our deadline. I was actually the tiniest bit pissed about that. Made me keep pulling your leg at the Frick.”
Elizabeth glances out the window at the iron pot.
“Anyway, what do you say we just wind this up? I have other appointments today, and to call this deal ‘unsatisfying’ doesn’t begin to describe its total pointlessness. So it’s over. We need to move on. Like what his name? – André – did.” She pulls the rose from her breast and eats it. “Our really-big-finish at this point is just going to have to be whatever small pleasure I can take from your body’s suffering in the little that’s left of your life. Because you will suffer, of course.’
Fernanda turns pale.
“You thought the baby thing was mean? Well, get ready, my dear. Frannie Turner’s biopic is going to have one hell of a final reel.”
The air inside the car begins to glow.
Fernanda can’t move, but at least she can speak.
“What does that mean?”
“Oh, didn’t I make that clear? Sorry. You’re going to grow old. You’re going to live a very long time. Yes, you’ll be old. Maybe ninety, maybe more. Maybe you’ll be the oldest woman in the world before you finally die – in agonizing pain, of course – and come to live with me.”
Elizabeth smirks, and a yellowish thread of saliva dribbles from the corner of her twisted mouth. She dabs it away.
“There’s no point in waiting till those few last grains of sand run out.”
Plucking at her skirt again and smoothing it flat, she leans over her knees and looks down. Her scathing glance travels over Fernanda’s soiled silk suit, her dead corsage, her shoeless, filthy feet.
Her face contorts.
“For fuck’s sake, go home and change.”
At which point, Elizabeth Taylor dissolves through the limousine’s door as, everywhere around, the air turns noxious with a stench that befouls this peaceful Saturday morning. Entirely engulfed in murk and babyshit brown, Satan evanesces.
EPILOGUE
“The tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young.”
Oscar Wilde
CHAPTER 26
It seemed as if eons had passed, but it was only 12:30 on that significant weekend morning when Fernanda went home to change.
Stumbling into the apartment, running for her bedroom and collapsing, fully dressed, on the bed she was never going to sleep in alone again, Fernanda could only cry: quietly at first, then in dreary, wrenching sobs, then in open-mouthed, heart-rending howls.
At length, exhausted and steeped in tears, she rolled heavily off the bed onto the indifferent floor and lay there. And when strength had returned somewhat, she crawled wretchedly to the bathroom and there, spilling some Ambien into her palm, she touched her tongue to two, swallowed hard, dragged herself back to the bed and found oblivion.
It was dark when she awoke. Her body felt hollow, her eyeballs crusted dry. And bizarrely, Stanley was filling her mind: his late-in-life limp, that incessant TV, the smell of burned toast. His voice. His ill humor. His well-worn chair. He hadn’t loved her. But what she hadn’t known about their marriage, but seemed so self-evident now, was simply this: in spite of all those decades of crisp shirts, healthful meals, easy forgiveness, wrenching concessions, and in spite of whatever physicality there’d been between them throughout those forty-some years … she hadn’t loved him either.
She’d never been a victim after all. She’d been a participant.
But dear God, she had loved André. He was the man she’d been willing to sell her soul for. And he had loved her back.
But not enough.
She crushed the still-damp pillow hard against her chest and rolled over. She felt blunted by the drug.
Satan had counted on André’s being weak, of course. Had probably engineered it from the start.
So how could she blame him? It was exactly what had happened to her. And André’s selfishness hadn’t killed anyone. Like hers had.
In the dark, Fernanda chewed on her lower lip and savored the mild tang of blood. She tossed her pillow to the floor, wrapped her arms around her body and held herself tight. Because something was being ripped from her just now and it would surely leave a wound. A bloody, infected wound.
Was it her soul?
Fernanda shut her eyes tight against the daylight smearing the windows now.
But people had defeated Satan in the past. She’d heard her say so.
She slept again.
When she awakened that second time, her room felt subtly different: larger, maybe? Distorted, just a bit? If she stayed still, she knew she could figure it out. But everything seemed to be in its place: the closet door ajar still; the dressing table disordered, her Bloody Mary glass – almost full – still sat on its top. She leaned on her elbow to turn on the light for a closer look, and then she knew right away what it was.
Her arm was shorter. She sat up.
The other arm was, too.
Her hands flew to her face.
Her earlobes felt longer.
She fumbled for her hair. It seemed to be chin-length now, and straight, and very, very thin. Her head against the headboard, Frannie ran numb fingers all over herself. She didn’t want to look, but she couldn’t help but feel. She touched her nostrils. They were longer, her nose as well. And where her eyebrows had been, there were fragile wisps of hair.
Satan had told her to go home and change.
It was just after Randi’s second betrayal, she was remembering now – just following her appointment with Dr. Korin – that Fernanda had thought about what it might mean to grow old again. It would probably feel more or less familiar, she’d decided, because she’d already been there once, of course. When she’d been Frannie, and sixty-six. What was happing to her now was inconceivable.
As she sat up and tried to lift this aged, shrunken body off the bed, her legs –these pitiable, scrawny sticks of things – slid APART and she felt herself going down. A strip of skin peeled off her forearm like Kleenex, and everything, everything hurt. With the help of a foot stool she crawled to her feet, and leaning on the furniture as she passed, she made her tortuous way to the bathroom once more. In front of the medicine cabinet, she paused to steady herself on the sink.
But she couldn’t quite see.
She switched on the lights and saw why.
Her eyes were filmy, their irises ringed with fog, the whites a sickly yellow. Her teeth were yellow too, but framed all around in the anus-like rictus of wrinkles encircling her lips. All that was left of Frannie Turner was a dry, decrepit husk.
What day was it?
Shuffling back into the bedroom for her bag, she retrieved her cell phone. It was dead. So she turned on the news.
She staggered then, and fell to her knees.
On the TV, just below the crawl, she saw the time and the date.
Fifteen years had passed, not one.
Oh, Elizabeth, beautiful, hateful, deceiver!
What had been only a year for Fernanda had been fifteen years for Frannie.
Which made her eighty-one.
And now, unable to get to her feet once again, she crawled on her hands and knees to the footboard of the bed and leaned her forehead hard against it, trying to catch her breath. With both enfeebled arms extended above her head, she clutched the duvet to try to pull herself up. It didn’t work.
Where had she dropped the phone? She could call for help. B
ut the phone was dead. She’d forgotten already.
Hunching and sliding along the side of the bed, she spotted her bag beneath the bedside table. With crabbed fingers, she caught the bag and inched it toward her. The phone was inside, of course, and still dead. But there were no sunglasses, no lip gloss, no tissues. Her pretty red wallet was there, but she no longer had a driver’s license. In a zippered side compartment, she found the letter from André and four one-hundred-dollar bills. Had she put them there? She didn’t remember. Still on her knees, Frannie threw the purse up onto the bed and painfully, every joint crying out, she hauled herself up to lie there beside it. She was panting, and her hip felt impaled on steel spikes. Just a foretaste of Hell, Frannie thought.
Leaning back against the headboard brought relief – the bed was her only friend now – she slid André’s letter out of her purse (her “purse” now, no longer her bag) and held it up before her eyes. He’d touched this paper. She watched those arthritic fingers stroke its surface. They were her own. And look – on that strange hand – his ring.
Frannie crushed the papers to her face and inhaled. No scent at all.
Vegas, he’d said.
She could go.
Pressing his letter to her chest, she felt it lodge where her soul used to be. Her impermanent soul.
Frannie mourned.
Hours or minutes later, she no longer knew which, she tried to dangle – first one leg, then the other – over the side of the bed. Her pale, knobby feet were amazing to her, as were those gleaming, hairless shins, the crepey flesh of her knees and her arms and her thighs. She’d have liked to stand, but dreading more pain, she stayed still.
Elizabeth. Damn her.
She felt around behind her for her robe. One arm, the other. Now the waist.
How could he have left her?
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