Butterflies in Heat

by Darwin Porter

  "She really was big," Ralph answered.

  Numie's fingers ran along the smooth arm of a mannikin. "Who buys her stuff now?"

  Ralph sighed. "About eight old dowagers, one who has retired to Palm Beach and owns a string of newspapers." He sat down at his desk, as if he were reluctant to begin the day.

  "They were with her in the old days, but they never switched to Dior or any of the other post-war designers. They still like Leonora's distinctive look." His voice sounded burned out. "She's finished elsewhere."

  Numie's eyes slowly took in the salon. Though immaculate and fresh appearing, the room was unreal, as if it had never known people. "But she said they were selling her dresses in Paris and London."

  "Her old ones—that's true. They have a certain antique value today." He paused for a long moment, as if he found the silence profoundly comforting, then went on. "In these crazy times, anything is fashionable, including gowns Leonora designed in 1935. She's not really taken seriously, though."

  "She was probably through by the time you came into her life," Numie said.

  "That's right—and how it hurt her." A touch of rare sympathy entered Ralph's voice. "All her grand posturing today is to cover up that pain."

  "She sure made others feel a little bit of it, too."

  Ralph just looked at him, making no comment. He propped his feet up on his desk. He didn't seem to have much to do today. "We would go twice a year to Paris to see the collections. We went to every showing, then we'd dine at Maxim's or Tour d'Argent. In the old days, she'd been given the best tables in the house. But it was all different when I went with her. We were tucked away in some corner. Once on a crowded night we were turned down."

  "That must have been a bitter pill," Numie said. "I can't imagine anyone saying no to Leonora."

  "I think she returned to Tortuga because it gave her a chance to recapture a bit of that grandeur she'd lost in New York." He suddenly sat upright. "Let's face it. In Tortuga, Leonora is the grandest creation there is."

  "For sure." The stirring of the wind lasted only for a little while, and then it, too, succumbed to the inertia hanging over the island.

  In the late afternoon, two incidents were conspiring to taint Leonora's mood.

  Seated in a throne chair, she was clad in turquoise ostrich feathers. In her chalky hands, she held a letter with a newspaper clipping.

  It was addressed and delivered to her, even though its anonymous sender in Palm Beach used the name she was born with, not Leonora de la Mer. The old postman had remembered Leonora and had delivered it to the fashion house. Even now, she couldn't bear to repeat her real name. It was so hideous she'd never breathed it to a soul once she left Tortuga.

  Norton Huttnar, her late husband, had insisted on using that name. Norton and one other person, Ruthie Elvina.

  Leonora had to invent a name right for her. Why go around with an awful name if it's just as easy to be known as Leonora de la Mer? Too many people begin by accepting their names, then all the other dreary names things are called. The next step, she knew, was in accepting the world's standards of thinking and behaving. If she had ever done that, she realized she would be doomed for certain.

  The second thing this vile letter-sender had done was to enclose a newspaper clipping. In it, one of her clients was described as wearing a "preposterous creation by the one-time popular dress designer, Leonora de la Mer."

  Tears came to her eyes. It was amazing how approval flowed in and out of a life. The moment you allowed yourself to think you're saturated in it, that's the moment the tide goes out and leaves you stranded. She clenched her long fingers, crushing the letter even more. The tide had gone against her. She knew that. The strain of maintaining differently was weighing heavily upon her. At some point in life, each famous person—harlot or saint—becomes a public joke. There was a time in New York when just the mention of her name would invoke laughter. The laughter reserved for a has-been still trying to maintain an illusion of former glory.

  She regained her composure. Suddenly, she felt flippant. Momentarily she had conquered her depression. After all, life was one great big masquerade. You have to know who you are and what you want—and not be afraid of either. That's how she climbed so far. The letter fell from her hand. "And, dear heart," she said softly to herself, "that's why I've had so far to fall." Her voice seemed to drown in the well of its own despair.

  Nervously she pressed a buzzer, summoning Numie to her office. Instead of the letter, her hands held a marijuana cigarette, wrapped in red.

  "Are you stoned all the time?" Numie asked, realizing belatedly how impertinent that sounded.

  She didn't seem to notice. "If that's what you call it," she said, annoyed at herself for explaining any of her actions. "I've smoked marijuana since 1932. I don't plan to abandon it now that it's become a popular middle-class pastime."

  "That makes sense," he said. "May I have one?"

  "No, you cannot," she said harshly. "I don't like my employees smoking on the job."

  He frowned. "You're the boss lady. May I at least sit down?"

  "Of course," she said. "Ralph says I have to treat you more democratically—not so much like a servant—now that you're one of our little family." A wry smile crossed her lips. "How is married life?"

  His face reddened. "I'm not married to anybody," he said defensively. All this talk of marriage was really getting to him. "Ralph and I are together—that's all."

  "Call it what you like" Remembering her own name change, she said, "I've always believed in being inventive about names or labels people give to things." She stopped talking, and the cigarette fell from her hand.

  He quickly retrieved it, returning it to an ashtray on her desk.

  She didn't seem to notice his action.

  He shifted uneasily in his chair.

  She spun around and glared. Was she aware of his presence for the first time? He had the distinct impression she had forgotten he was in the room.

  "I think you've made a major improvement in your choice of partners," she said. "Lola La Mour, after all!" Her smile was sweet yet menacing. "Of course, both Ralph and Lola are cop-outs; a sign of weakness, of not being able to stand on your own feet."

  His throat was drying up by the second. "I think you're comparing me to yourself. You have the guts to make the world listen to you. But you're different from me. You have talent, something to sell to the world."

  "Never admit to your own weakness," she said, virtually shouting. "You have to be convinced of what you are so powerfully that others will feel it, too." She reached into the ashtray and handed him the marijuana cigarette. She was amused when other people finished cigarettes or drinks, even food, she had started. "Or else ... , you've got to run so hard that for a few years your weakness won't. expose you. But eventually it will. Rest assured of that." Her voice grew threatening. "It always does."

  He smiled gently, the comfort of the cigarette relieving him of the anxiety she'd aroused. For a long while, he didn't speak, enjoying the rest of her cigarette although he questioned the wisdom of smoking the red paper when blue was his color. She had touched a chord within him. Like her, he wanted to fly across the sky on the wings of a giant bird, feeling his power. But he was a loser already.

  "You've lost your innocence," she said, "and found nothing to replace it with."

  That statement shot the wings right off that bird he was flying across the sky.

  "The world saw to that innocence soon enough," she said. "One is not meant to keep it—no more than I was."

  "Were you ever innocent?" he asked.

  "God knows, I was the most innocent creature who had ever lived until I met my husband, Norton Huttnar."

  "You married him."

  "A mistake I'll live with forever," she said. "He was such a degenerate. But he taught me something. The whole world is degenerate and depraved."

  "That's some lesson," Numie said, uncomfortable with the conversation. "When was your innocence completely gone
?"

  "By the time I was seventeen," she said. "I was thoroughly jaded—like so many other seventeen-year-olds in the world. Degeneracy and depravity didn't matter any more."

  "What did?" he asked.

  "I realized then we all play the same sinful roles. The only thing that seemed important was how we chose to deceive the world."

  "That's a pretty tough forecast, but I guess you're right." The cigarette was finished now, and he wanted another one, but was afraid to ask.

  "I know I'm right." Her eyes opened wide. "At twenty, though, we realize who we're deceiving—ourselves." She was fighting back tears.

  He got up and reached for her hand. "Are you okay?"

  She jerked it back quickly. "I'm all right, " she said, concealing her face from him. "I'm a Virgo, a cursed sign. If born under that sign, your brain never lets you alone, but haunts and tortures you night and day. I worry too much, care too deeply."

  He felt powerless to help her in any way.

  "Now you must leave me alone to meditate." She glided like some wraith into the throne chair. "I will sit here until darkness comes. Just be here to pick me up in my car, but only when darkness comes."

  Later that night, Numie was sitting alone in the patio of Sacre-Coeur. Ralph and Leonora were getting ready for dinner.

  The world was slipping into darkness around him, and he felt in danger of going with it. Someone switched on the lights in the patio, and the effect was like the headlights of the attorney's car that picked him up on the mosquito-infested keys.

  Missing since this morning, Anne walked through the gate. She looked at him briefly, but comprehensively.

  A strange shiver moved up Numie's spine. It seemed impossible that he had ever touched the flesh of this cold stranger, much less had her touch him.

  "I knew I'd find you here," she said. The sound of her voice was a shock to him. It seemed totally detached from her body, lacking in any real feeling.

  He studied the cool remoteness of her eyes. "About this morning ... " He really didn't know where he was going with the explanation.

  She intervened in time to save him. "Here," she said harshly, thrusting some bills at him. "Thirty dollars. Isn't that the usual stud fee?"

  He smiled bitterly to himself, accepting his punishment and having no desire to retaliate. "Stop it," he said softly.

  She laughed a small laugh. "You performed very well. Ralph was right. You are good in your work."

  Hurt and humiliated, he handed the money back to her. "It wasn't like that at all. And you know it." He wasn't remembering their love-making that night, but their time in the pool, the liquid movements of her body.

  A flash of resentment crossed her face. "Take it, damn you. A male prostitute needs to get paid for his hard labor."

  "Don't rub it in,' he protested.

  "All these years," she said, "and I'm still naive about men." She gave him a long, level look. "I hope you and Ralph are going to be very happy together. He and I certainly weren't." She turned and walked quickly away.

  "Come back .. ." he called, but his voice echoed in the darkness. She was gone. The stillness of the garden moved in on him. Once beautifully landscaped, it was now overgrown, like the emotions in this household. Behind her high wall, Leonora had hoped to buy solitude. Maybe, Numie wondered, all of them were tainted with Leonora's original purpose.

  Leonora herself paused briefly in the garden, spying on Numie. She was surely mistaken, but she was receiving vibrations of having stumbled upon a lovers' quarrel. She had heard strange noises coming from Anne's room late at night, but had dismissed it as the wind. Was it possible for Anne to be in love with Numie? She'd have to caution the poor girl against male hustlers. She knew, but possibly Anne didn't, that male hustlers were too damaged to love ... ever.

  After an appropriate interlude, Leonora's voice resounded across the patio. "Dear heart," she said to Numie, "it's going to be a very special dinner tonight. Just Ralph, you, and me. Somehow it didn't seem right to invite Anne. Amy Vanderbilt never wrote anything about the etiquette of the situation." Her hand was a pearly shadow moving through the night air. She held it up, suggesting the promise of the evening. Yet it could also hold a dagger. "Furthermore,' Leonora said, "you'll be delighted to know: we're having champagne."

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Numie stood in front of Commodore Philip's bar. The doors were wide open. In back an old black man was mopping the floor. Flies buzzed around the sticky waxpaper hanging from the ceiling, waiting to capture them.

  Dreading this moment, he'd returned to reclaim his possessions. At first he considered abandoning them completely, but he wanted that duffel bag back. It'd been with him through worse situations than this; and he had to have it. It was his traveling office, and he felt lost without it.

  From the upstairs boudoir, Dinah was racing down the steps, clad only in a skimpy see-through robe. She made a sleepy face, eyeballed him, and let out a soulful sound: "Lookee who's here! Lola's so pissed at you, stud, she could rip your thing off. Has that black bitch been carrying on "bout you!"

  "I've come for my things," he said.

  Behind the bar, she said, "Let me scarf down some strong whiskey. Till I get some stuff swimming around in my gut, I can't think straight."

  He swallowed hard. "Is Lola up?"

  "Was just a minute ago—not only up, but bouncing around like some whore in heat ready to take on the whole navy."

  "Where's the commodore?" The question came out like an angry curse.

  "He's in the cottage out back. Went there groaning and bellyaching that we was gonna give him a stroke for sure." She jiggled the ice in her glass. "He didn't retire, though, till Ned and I earned our bread. No two cottonpickers ever worked harder for the man than we did last night." She smiled suggestively. "Heard you got all high class on "em and swished your tail right out of here."

  Numie glanced back at the street, as two effeminate-looking older men with dyed hair paraded by. "It wasn't my scene."

  "Mine either, but a gal's gotta live. That magic wand of the commodore has clean run out of tricks."

  "Is it okay for me to go up?" Numie's voice resounded across the bar. "To get my things?"

  "Sure," Dinah said, slurping the rest of her whiskey. "Lola ain't got no bodysnatcher up there waiting to sell you into white slavery."

  Numie stood tall in his khakis an and desert boots, preparing himself for battle. Up the steps two at a time, he was pounding on the door to Lola's apartment.

  Irked at the interruption, Lola yelled, "Come on in if your drawers are clean." She reckoned it was probably that annoying cousin, Castor Q. Combes, asking for another dollar.

  Bracing himself, Numie walked in.

  In her red silk panties, Lola was on the bed with Ned. He wore nothing. Blinking her eyes, not sure she was seeing right, she sat up. Anger flooded her system. "Lily-White, the prick-peddling bastard has returned to the scene of the crime."

  Numie stood there stunned. The only thing he could think of for a moment was that the room smelled of Campbell's chicken noodle soup. "I've come for my duffel bag and my clothes," he managed to say, avoiding looking directly at the bed again.

  Ned said nothing, just stared at Numie with a mocking grin.

  Before Lola spoke, her mouth began to shape itself for cannibalistic devouring, like that of a hungry lioness. "The wardrobe I bought for you, you mean." She kept trying to read Numie's thoughts. He felt she was trash, that was for sure. She was torn between two conflicting emotions: That of trying to act like a lady and that of creating the impression she was the type of gal men wanted to rape.

  "What wardrobe?" Numie asked, now confronting her eye to eye. "A pair of pants and sweater paid for with the commodore's money. You're welcome to keep them." Lola disgusted him. She was nothing but a bragging, jiving, exaggerating bitch!

  "Just a minute," Lola said, propping her elbows on her hips and jiggling her breasts a little to enhance her sexual allure. "What makes you think
you can barge in on a lady when she's entertaining a gentleman? A real man, I might add. Look at that thing. Isn't that the biggest salami you ever laid eyes on?" Leaning over, she said to Ned: "Numie whipped it out for my commodore last night. It was soooo tweensy-weensy we couldn't even see the thing. My commodore asked me to go get his bifocals!"

  Numie burned at the fact that it was said in front of Ned. "Aren't you talking about your own endowments?" Numie asked.

  "Honey," Lola said sarcastically, "of all the things I've pretended in life, hung ain't one of "em."

  The very presence of Lola seemed to be clouding his brain, like darkness moving in fast on a winter's afternoon. "I'm here just to get my things, that's all!"

  Whiskey glass in hand, Dinah was back in the room. She flipped on a television set, turning up the sound. "Look at all these goddam white mothers, advertising all these grand things just to tempt us. They know we can't afford them. Some of us are lucky to even have TV. That's the way they have of torturing us."

  "I'll get your things when I'm good and ready," Lola said irritably. "Don't want you messing up my gowns." She settled back on the bed, determined to prolong Numie's farewell as long as possible. She wasn't going to be dictated to by any white trick in her own apartment. The commodore had dumped on her all the white man's crap she planned to take in this lifetime. It was feeling mighty good to toss a little of that shit back. "God only knows what you white trash would steal if I wasn't looking. First, I've got some unfinished business to attend to." She turned over in bed, pulled down her red silk panties, then ordered Ned: "Ride the range, cowboy." Panting, Lola hawkeyed Numie with hatred in her dry eyes.

  He looked away. His eyes darted around the room, as if seeking some door of escape from this mad moment.

  Chewing gum and drinking liquor at the same time, Dinah called over to the bed, "He in there dirty and deep, Lola?"

  "If he was in any more, child," she yelled back, "he's be coming out like an oil derrick in China."

  "He can cum a ton," Dinah said, her eyes transfixed on the kiddies' cartoons on the tube.