by Betsy Burke
He made it sound like a put-on, but I couldn’t help feeling that everyone was getting dressed up but me. That everyone was getting a little kinky in the corners and possibly having a good time. For all I knew my father was dressing up as the Mother Superior and my mother as Captain Von Trapp at that very moment.
“Drink?” Max held out the martini shaker.
“Yes, please.” He poured it out and minced masterfully over to hand me the glass.
“What are we going to do to her?” Sky asked Max.
“Oh well, something a little twenties bordello, I think. Or maybe we should try her in a zoot suit, the Janet Jackson pimp look. Don’t know.”
It didn’t matter. Whatever I wore was going to look conservative next to Max and Sky.
I threw back the martini and said, “Do your worst.”
After an hour of trying on and taking off, I ended up in an original Mary Quant minidress in black and white eye-popping geometrics. I had matching white patent leather go-go boots, a poor-boy cap and lime green fishnet stockings.
“You look truly groovy, Lucy,” said Max. “You should know that the girl who once wore this outfit bought it in Carnaby Street at the end of the sixties and, as she is no longer a girl but one fat mama of an over-the-hill housewife, only fit to cover her poundage in wash-’n’-wear leisure wear, I talked her into letting me take this treasure off her hands along with quite a few trunk loads of other fantastically hip, cool and groovy stuff.”
Sky and I stared at Max and then grimaced at each other.
He sighed. “Oh, I know. You’re just babies. You had to be there. Those were the years.”
The club was called Anastasia’s and was located downtown near the stadium.
Standing outside the old brick building, I imagined it was going to be yet another club just like all the other ones, with a lot of slick surfaces, flashing lights and plushy couches. How wrong I was.
Beyond the coat-check area was a maze of rooms decorated like the palace interiors of royal despots just before the start of the Bolshevik Revolution. The shooter bar and main dance floor areas were done in gold, teal blue and Chinese lacquer red, reflecting the colors of St. Basil’s in Red Square. Huge twisting gold columns topped with lions reached up to a lit mandala ceiling. It was like some Byzantine dream, or nightmare, depending on your point of view. In the background was a mix of Borodin’s Polovtsian Dances with a hip-hop beat. In one anteroom, tea was served from a samovar and a woman with a heavy accent read fortunes in the tea leaves. Another room was oriental rugs from ceiling to floor and huge cushions tossed everywhere, no tables or chairs. Still another room was like an oasis, a tiled fountain tinkling at its center and plants everywhere. In yet another room, men in costume were performing Cossack dances.
We pushed our way through the people with Max in the lead. He said, “Come on, I’ll introduce you to the owner.” We followed him into the most intimate room, which was made up of booths divided by carved wooden screens, like those in a harem. What a shock it was to see Max shake hands with Onassis, Nadine’s Greek friend. Except that I found out that night that he wasn’t Greek. And his name was Nikolai. Nadine always called him Nick.
He invited us to sit down and have a few peppered vodkas. It turned out Nick and Max had met when Nick went looking for pre-revolution Russian memorabilia. Nick’s maternal grandparents had been Russian nobility, on the run from the Bolsheviks. They’d fled first to Paris and then to London where Nick’s parents had met. His father had been part Turkish and part Russian, while his mother had been all Russian and intent on preserving what she could of a vague and useless nobility handed down to her by her parents. They both hated the cold and headed south to a remote Greek island where parts of Nick’s childhood had been spent. But his mother had done her best to fill Nick’s head with her dreams, and Anastasia’s was the realization of a child’s fantasy, a weird mix of his parents’ worlds. It made me think.
I got up to go to the bathroom. It was an orgy of imitation black and gold marble and bronze fixtures. I spent far longer than was necessary in there. On my way back, a familiar voice stopped me in my tracks. Paul Bleeker was holding court in the seraglio room. I stayed hidden behind the partition. I could feel my heart trying to pound its way out of my chest.
“…well, of course, the so-called vandalism in the show was intentional. Much like Yoko Ono’s piece in which the audience snip away with a pair of scissors at the dress she’s wearing until she’s virtually naked on-stage, my pieces were designed to tempt. It was inevitable that there would be someone who was unable to resist the temptation and it was precisely this weakness that I aimed to exploit. The pieces are being documented as they are gradually being eaten away. Analogous to woman, and her devastation through the ravages of time, is that all that remains of her original beauty is a collection of old photographs…the Chocolate Women really has been a fantastic success so far…”
Thanks to Lucy Madison and her weakness, I wanted to add.
Arrrghh.
Nadine, Felicity and the Mortician were there, too, hanging off his words. I could hear their snuffles and snorts. It was one big happy family. I suddenly had the urge to leave. I retreated back to the coat-check area where the pay phones were located and called Sky’s cell.
“Sky.”
“Who is this?”
“It’s me, Lucy.”
“Lucy?” She lowered her voice. “What are you doing? Where have you got to?”
“Paul Bleeker’s here in the club with Nadine and her henchmen. They’re in the room next to yours.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake, Lucy. You’re not ditching us, are you? I want you to stay.”
“So do I. But I just can’t face him and Nadine tonight. Create a diversion. How brave do you feel?”
“You know me. I’m a natural-born shit disturber. Max and I might just wander over and say a sloppy hello. Max will do anything when he’s dressed up.”
“Thanks. You’re a true friend.”
“I know,” said Sky, and hung up.
I left the club and waited in the shadows out on the street. Several minutes later, Paul and Nadine burst through the doorway, patting the wet spots on their clothes and complaining about how hard it was to get stains out of silk and suede. I slipped back inside and joined Sky and Max on the dance floor.
Everything went smoothly for another hour. We were all dancing and drinking and having a pretty good time when the ripple started. A wave of tension began to run through the club, a sense of something dangerous happening, moving through the crowd, like a shark streaking through a shallow bay full of swimmers.
Then I saw it.
Dressed in a sackcloth robe with a rope at the waist, sporting long greasy hair and a beard, my brother Dirk was doing a perfect impersonation of Rasputin. It was enough for him to just stand at the center of the room, expand his chest and leer to impress his audience.
I grabbed Sky’s arm and pulled her along with me into the bathrooms. I should have been keeping my eye on Dirk, to be sure he didn’t slip away, but I preferred to hide. His gaze had shifted my way. I knew it too well. The whites of his eyes were showing all round. He was capable of anything in that state. In that state, he had humiliated me publicly quite a number of times. It was smarter to stay out of his way.
I was practically under the bathroom sinks as I dialed Sam’s numbers. I knew them by heart now. No one was home at either of the numbers so I left a message. I gave him the address of the launderette and told him that I couldn’t be reached by phone at the moment.
Okay. I confess. It was a ploy. I wanted to see Sam in person. I wanted to see if he found our phone conversations interesting, too, and was tempted to check me out.
We were only in the bathrooms for a few minutes because Sky convinced me that we should go back and keep an eye on Dirk. Of course, when we came out again, he was gone. And then it occurred to me that Candace hadn’t shown up either.
The next day I went down to Boito’s Be
auties myself. I paused in the doorway and peeked in. Sure enough, Hard Candy had now become demure and boring Candace Miss Bun-too-tight. She was putting away bras. And these weren’t normal bras, but rigging that could have moved a sailboat in a high wind—we’re talking spinnakers here. She looked up from her folding and froze.
I came out of hiding. “Candy. How the hell are you?”
“Hi, Lucy.” Her voice was completely flat, devoid of emotion.
“Sky told me she bumped into you. Why didn’t you let us know you were back in town?”
“I haven’t been back that long.”
She was strange, shifty. She was definitely trying to avoid my eyes.
I started to babble, just to fill the unbearable silence. “When I stopped getting your postcards, I wondered if something had happened. I did Net searches trying to find news of you in New York. I tried to find addresses for you, phone numbers, but you just disappeared. I even phoned your parents but they hadn’t heard from you for a while. They were a little frantic. I figured you’d gone even farther, maybe you’d gone to Paris. You used to talk about Paris a lot, if I remember correctly.”
She looked away from me.
I babbled on. “So I even did some Net searches for Paris but my French really stinks so I didn’t get very far…we missed you…we missed getting your news…Candy, what’s up?”
She stared down at the counter and went on folding.
I persisted. “Remember me? Lucy Madison? We used to be able to talk about things. I was really looking forward to seeing you at the new club the other night. When you didn’t show, I wondered if something had happened to you.”
Candy seemed to have vacated the body that was wearing all those middle-aged clothes. Her voice seemed to come from a distance. “I shouldn’t have said I would go. I didn’t want to hurt Sky’s feelings.”
“Sky’s feelings are made of rubber most of the time. Besides, the truth works pretty well with her. So how was New York?”
“It was fine.” The dull emptiness of her tone frightened me.
“Where are you living now?”
“I’m…uh…living at my parents’ place.”
“Your parents’?”
Back in university days, Candy had always insisted that her mother was Lady Macbeth and her father was Benito Mussolini. They were the last people she would have stayed with. It had to be serious.
“Do they let you out of your cage for coffee in this place?” I asked. There was another woman working in the store, a bit of a Boito herself. I looked in her direction and whispered, “Can’t she hold the fort for a bit?”
Candy hesitated, sighed, then said, “Yeah, I guess so.” Then she added in a voice that sounded like the old Candy, “They can hardly fire me. It’s my mother’s store.”
We got our coffees and sat down in the Food Fair area. I couldn’t just come out and say, “What’s with the schoolmarm clothes and the Stepford Wives stare?” so I prattled about everything that had happened since Candy had been away. But it was my account of my adventures with Paul Bleeker that cracked her open. She’d been in my class, too, when he’d been a guest lecturer. She could appreciate the dynamic.
I continued to probe. “So what about you? Any interesting men in your life?”
Candy stared at me with an absolutely blank face. Then she started to talk in a flat, dead voice. “When I first got to New York, I met a lot of people. I went to a lot of parties. It was a pretty wild time. I was staying with some friends and I painted a lot but didn’t eat much. When I wasn’t painting, I was partying, trying to make connections. There were a lot of drugs around. Then I met this gallery owner, an important gallery, and we started seeing a lot of each other. He promised me a show. I kept pushing for it and he kept telling me it was going to happen but it never did. He kept telling me that I needed to push the envelope, that I had to keep working till the breakthrough came. He showed everybody else’s work but mine. I didn’t understand this at all. I thought I was a good enough painter to exhibit.”
“You’re a great painter,” I said.
“Well, I kept working, kept producing. I hardly ever slept. And then he dumped me. Just like that. He found another girl artist to sleep with. I lost it, Lucy. Not just a little. I really lost it. I did some weird things. I guess it was the drugs, too. My roommates had a dog. I put mascara on the dog’s eyelashes. I went for a swim in the ocean at Christmas. Somebody called my parents and they came and got me. I’ve been HERE, Lucy. I’ve been in Riverview for the last six months. When I came out I made a deal with my parents. No more artsy-fartsy stuff. Their words.”
“But Candy, you can’t. You’re the best painter I know.”
“I’m scared. I’m scared I’ll go crazy again.”
“But you said yourself, it was the drugs.”
“Maybe. I don’t know.”
“What about your work, your paintings? What about all the stuff you did while you were in New York?”
“As far as I know, it’s still there where I left it. Listen, Lucy. I want to forget about all that. It belongs to the past. I’m in neutral now. I’m doing okay with Prozac. I’m doing okay. Really I am.”
And I’m the Queen of England, I wanted to say.
Two days later, Sky came down to the launderette for a long visit. She wanted to hang out, to see the painting I’d done and talk about my idea. The mural had grown. A distinct Paradise, Inferno and Purgatory were emerging. There were starry skies populated with unlikely angels. There were oceans with murky floors along which crawled primeval slimy creatures. One of the creatures bore a surprising resemblance to Paul Bleeker. There was an earthly zone of fields and forests and oceans that hosted me and my friends. I left an empty space for a Sam figure but still had no idea what it would look like.
Sky paced back and forth in front of the painted walls. “This is definitely one of your finer works. I really think you should talk to Max about your plan.” I eased down off the scaffolding and sat on one of the benches. She came over and sat down beside me. A clutch of black-clad widows chattered and lamented in Italian in the other corner of the launderette.
“C’mon,” I said, “Let’s go into the back room.”
I’d made myself a kind of informal office-workshop-napping place in the utility room. I’d moved a table, chairs and a lamp into it as well as a mattress I’d found in Jeremy’s attic but I’d stopped sleeping there at night and moved into my father’s old room in Jeremy’s house.
Sky sank into the armchair and went on, “The sooner you put this plan into action, the sooner you’ll be able to get rid of the present clientele.” She rolled her eyeballs in the direction of the women on the other side of the mirror.
“Look out, Sky, they’ll put a curse on you. You should know better than I do that the customer is always right, bag ladies, Bagwans and scuzz-buckets included.”
“Yeah…unfortunately. Really, Lucy. Talk to Max. I know you don’t want men involved in this thing but sexist discrimination can backfire in your face.”
“Well, I suppose he is kind of a borderline case, having to temporarily explore his anima, empathize with people of other sexualities, if only for business purposes. Still, I’d like it better if he was a woman.”
“You could regard him as an honorary female. A sort of half-baked ambassador to the oasis of females,” said Sky.
“Implying that the land of males is a desert? That seems awfully grim,” I said. “I’ll think about it.”
We wasted time well into the afternoon, gossiping about everyone we knew. I filled her in on my meeting with Candace, and she agreed with me. We’d work on it. We wouldn’t leave Candy alone. We wouldn’t let her decline into a blob of Prozac jelly.
All our plotting made us very hungry. Sky phoned to order some Chinese food. When it came, we sat in the back room over egg rolls, mushroom chow mein, almond chicken and deep-fried prawns, and went on discussing my big project in detail.
Sky had her eye on the two-way mirror the
whole time, studying the “clientele.” It was around six-thirty in the evening when she abruptly stopped chewing and grabbed my arm. “Get a load of this clown.”
I followed her gaze. A man had just come in. His movements were painfully slow. He had propped the door open with a cardboard box full of laundry and was carting other similar cardboard boxes into the launderette. There must have been nearly a dozen of them. Once he had all his boxes lined up in front of the machines, he began to dig around in his pants pockets. And I have to say, they were the ugliest plaid pants I’d ever seen. The plaid was in vibrant orange, yellow and brown. There was a tear in one knee, a brown paint stain drooling across the other leg, a torn back pocket that flapped, and the pant legs were just short enough so that every so often, his mismatched gym socks showed. The top half of him wasn’t much better. He had one of those hooded sweatshirts with the kangaroo pouch and over that, a fluorescent green windbreaker. The hood was pulled up over hair that was either very wet or very greasy. I couldn’t tell. He had a scruffy reddish-blond week’s growth of beard and wore classic nerd glasses, black tortoiseshell with a bit of white surgical tape holding them together at the bridge of the nose and at one of the sides.
When he finally managed to dig all the coins out of his pockets, he held them for a second then fumbled them. They burst across the floor and rolled in all directions. He dropped down onto his knees and started to gather them up.
“This guy’s a real prize,” said Sky.
“Quite the classy dresser,” I said.
“What do you think he has in all those boxes?”
“I don’t know. Nobody has that many clothes.”
“Nobody. Not even Max.”
He’d managed to scoop up all his coins and was arranging them in little piles along the top of a washer. He began to pull things out of boxes and stuff them into the machines. We watched him, hypnotized by how slow and awkward he was. It was taking him forever to put his loads in. And the things were blotched and stained so badly, I figured this was a guy who regularly ate lasagna with his feet. I gave up and looked away, shaking my head.