She studies his face. “Did you really work with Joe McCarthy?”
He gives a self-conscious smile. “My father got me that job—it was my first. I thought there was a serious internal threat to the country and Joe seemed to be the only one who was doing anything about it.”
One of her hands is resting palm up in her lap and he reaches over with his, lays his hand lightly against hers, examines the contrast and adds, “Between working with Joe and bulldogging for my brother, I made a lot of enemies.”
“To say nothing of the Hoffa stuff.” She lets his fingers lace through hers.
“Hoffa deserved what he got. They stole millions and then you bring these fellows into court and every damn one of them takes the Fifth. And there was this constant chant, What’s wrong with taking the Fifth? It’s part of the Constitution. As if somebody were performing a major patriotic act in refusing to answer for his crimes.”
A tiny smile plays over her mouth. “Did you ever think it was wrong?” she asks. “I mean, did you ever agree to bugging someone …”
He sighs. “There were a couple things I did to keep Hoover off my brother.” He looks down at his sleeve. “This was my brother’s sweater.”
She touches the cashmere.
“A fellow I know once asked Johnson why he didn’t fire Hoover. He said, I’d rather have him inside the tent pissin’ out then outside the tent pissin’ in.”
She laughs.
“If I win this election, I’d like to nail that demented old queer to the wall.”
“You’ll win.”
“Or I’ll prove what everybody who doesn’t like me says: that I’m a selfish, ambitious little SOB who can’t wait to get his hands on the White House.”
“That’s not true. Lots of people love you.”
“I don’t know. Sometimes I get the idea that there are those around who don’t like me.” He grins and moves his hand from hers, up her arm, and brushes her cheek with one finger. The touch sends sparks through her.
That night, the two of them fall asleep on the couch, fully clothed.
In the morning, he checks the hall for bodies and eyes. Coast clear, she ducks out.
Eighteen
BRILLIANT RED, INCH-LONG AND BLUNT TIPPED, MY NEW talons made it pretty much impossible to write. I wanted to file them down a little but Frank loved them. He said they were perfect for the big show. I couldn’t type either so he bought me a headset to use, a mike that allowed me to answer verbally what the jerkflirt guys typed in. He’d also bought me a blonde wig and yet another sparkly G-string and bra.
“I thought you said you liked it dark.” I pulled the wig on in the mirror, finger-combing straw-coloured ends over the sequins on my new screaming-pink showgirl bra.
Standing behind me, Frank shrugged. “I said it made you look like a slutty librarian. But when you think about it, the wig helps to disguise you better. I mean, the mask works but the wig would kinda kill two birds.”
“The colour is shit.” I pulled wisps around my face. “You’re more freaked about someone recognizing me than I am.”
He arranged my bangs in the mirror, wiped a smudge of eyeliner off my cheek and picked up my lip brush. “Every guy wants his girl to be a virgin in public—” he glossed more red over my bottom lip “—and a whore in bed. Besides, if you ever get another acting agent, you don’t want anyone knowing you do porn.” He put the brush down and pulled a tiny brown envelope from his shirt pocket. “You wanna take one now or wait till she gets here?”
“May as well wait. Can you get me another glass of wine though?”
“You don’t wanna be drinking a lot before you take X, I told you that. It’s bad for business if you look too out of it.” He stuck the envelope back in his pocket, reached into my medicine cabinet and took out his Rogaine. Filling up the eyedropper, he held my makeup mirror behind his head. “Do you think this stuff is doing any good.”
I examined the back of his head for him. “To think they can grow hair on a rat’s ass … Here. Gimme.” I took the eyedropper and squirted some on, patted it into his thinning bit. “Okay, out of my way before I grow fur on my palms,” I said, rinsing in the sink. “Another glass of wine. I’m nervous, okay. Placate me.”
The intercom went. I buzzed her in, and went back into the bathroom to grab my robe.
“She’s he-e-ere,” Frank sang from the kitchen. I heard him clap his hands, rub his palms together. Finally realizing his dream. To observe anyway.
I opened the door to Sienna’s false eyelashes and swingin’ sixties hairpiece, her deer eyes crinkled with glee. She wore a pleated schoolgirl skirt in black and yellow plaid. “Vivian? You’re a blonde again?” she said with an uncertain face. I’d only seen her once since the night at Nevermind, a quick hello and goodbye when Frank and I stopped by their studio. She stepped into the hall.
“Frank bought it. He thinks it’d make a nice contrast with yours. I think he’s just pissed that I cut my own hair off.”
“Ohhh,” she answered after a pause, as though I’d said something that had taken her a great deal of juggling to comprehend.
I pulled the wig off. She brightened. “That’s better. Where is he?”
“He’s right here, my little beauties.” Frank walked merrily toward us as we came into the living room. He handed us each a glass of red. “You took it off?”
“They know Lucinda as a brunette,” I reminded him.
“Plus I want us to be twins,” Sienna said, two hands clutching her purse in front, swaying in little screw-turns back and forth, skirt swinging a beat behind her torso.
Frank took the envelope out of his pocket and shook it like a maraca. He dumped three tablets in his palm, one for himself, it seemed.
“Are we doing X?” Sienna asked.
“Oh yeah,” he said. “Feel the love, girls.”
“Frank, relax,” I said and patted his hand closed. “We don’t have to if you don’t want,” I told her. “I’ve just never done this before so I thought it might relax me, make me more lovey-dovey. Did you know they used to use it for couples counselling?”
“You’ve never been with a girl?” Sienna asked, wide-eyed. “You’re, like, a virgin?” she twittered. “So you need me to be gentle?” She giggled more deeply and hugged me.
I stiffened, gulped some wine. “Let’s sit down.”
“Yeah, sit, sit.” Frank looked from Sienna to me as if we were pie and ice cream.
“Brian told me you even outearned me last week?” She plopped down on the couch, skirt fanning out around her. “Boy, the two of us together? You know we’re doing $9.99 a minute for the duo right?”
“Yeah,” I nodded. The jerkflirt site had banners up advertising Lucinda and Sabrina’s hot girl-on-girl action, featuring Lucinda’s first lesbian experience. Available for private and private group-shows only. Groups were limited to four at a time with a fifteen-minute minimum. Our first two group-shows were already booked with regulars.
Sienna examined what appeared to be a cat scratch on her knee. She pulled off the first tiny scab of the dotted line; a prick of blood burbled up and she gasped. “Oh no, look what I did.” She sucked the drop off her finger.
Looking at the tablets Frank had left on the coffee table, I asked if she wanted a bandage.
“Umm.” Her swooping eyelashes fanned the scratch. She pressed her fingertip against it once more. “No. It’ll be all right. Thank you.” She smiled up as if I were her fairy godmother. Looking at the pills too, she reached for my hand and giddily said, “Okay, let’s do the ecstasy. I only like to do it with people I feel safe around. And you’re really nice.”
Frank held his breath. I suddenly felt like his old work mule next to Sienna’s new pony. The thing about ecstasy is that, generally speaking, it hadn’t ever made me feel idealistically adoring the way it does some people, but it often gave me a more understanding self, the ability to see these jerkflirt guys as just poor schmucks who needed attention, someone to answer their question
s, be compassionate. It gave me sympathy, coupled with a sort of stark realism: I was one of the highest-paid shrinks around. Sienna counted 1–2–3 and each of us popped a pill with a slug of wine.
Frank grinned as he bounced his knee and chomped his bottom lip. He seemed to be already grinding his teeth—another X effect. “Let me put some music on.” He bounded to the shelf, ran his finger up and down CD spines, looking for just the right thing. God only knows what possessed him, but he grabbed one of those old crooner compilations I’d bought. Louis Prima’s hoarse rasp suddenly filled the room with “That Old Black Magic” and Keely Smith smoothed in every other line clean and clear. The raspberry red of my mother’s dress rustled around me.
Frank danced with himself a little then looked to Sienna. “You should see what we did with the bedroom, it’s a regular Den of Iniquity … I draped cream-coloured satin down from the ceiling like, like, an Arabian Nights theme!”
“Cool!” Sienna squealed and I thought of my mother’s friend in San Francisco. Minnie Mouse on helium. Did I make that up? “This music is really cool too? Whereja get it?”
“Picked it up somewhere.” He offered his hand and she jumped up to join him. The two of them jived and wiggled and I watched them from forty years away. Dinah Washington slipped onstage behind them and started into “What a Difference a Day Makes” and the backs of my eyes ached. Vivian somersaulted into my ear from somewhere and I looked into my lap at Frank’s hand as it picked up mine and brought me to my feet. “Come dance with Sienna,” he said, placing my hand in hers.
Sienna’s mouth formed an eek as though she were heading up the first steep incline of a roller coaster. She put her head on my shoulder and let me lead, me in my bathrobe and her in her canary-yellow blouse and pleated skirt. Soon Ella Fitzgerald cut in with “Something’s Gotta Give” and Sienna gave a whoop and started a sort of half-jive half-waltz with me. The mood of the song perked me up but I was feeling more and more as if I were wearing someone else’s skin. By the time Rosemary Clooney sang, Kid you’re good lookin’ but you don’t know what’s cookin’, a hot rush zipped up my arms. The X was kicking in. I clenched my teeth.
“Five minutes, babies,” Frank yelled from the kitchen. “Five minutes till ring-a-ding time!” Ring-a-ding time? I could hear him rattling ice in the martini shaker.
“Why did you say that?” I asked and realized that my mouth hadn’t actually opened. Shots of cold alternated with the heat in my arms. My spine felt as though it had been dipped in Noxema. Frank slicked back into the room with two icy crantinis and suggested we head for the bedroom, get ready to show those jerk-flirts what their mothers couldn’t. I wished he hadn’t said mother.
Cream satin and cotton draped the bed and hung from the ceiling, throw cushions lay over bed pillows heaped around sheets. Frank had laid out a bouquet of vibrators and dildos. My laptop sat on the blanket trunk at the foot of the bed. “Wow,” Sienna grinned. “You guys got toys galore, hey?” She dumped her bag on the floor, started to take off her platforms then stopped. “I’m gonna leave my clothes on? and then we can, like, undress each other?”
I stood mute in my robe, my brain fritzing like shaken soda, my lungs cold and clammy. Beads of sweat had sprung up across my nose and cheeks. Neither Sienna nor Frank seemed to be reacting the same way. He picked up the remote keyboard and woke the computer. The jerkflirt site filled the screen and Harry Belafonte called, Mama, look a Boo-boo, from the living room.
“Two minutes, girls!” Frank clicked here and there and added, “Holy shit. The first three shows are booked solid and the first show already has three voyeurs signed on.” The voyeurs could watch but had no input, no ability to make requests. Peeping today would cost them $4.49 a minute. “You girls are some kinda hot commodities,” he whooped. There was altogether too much whooping going on. He reached over to the shelf and grabbed the feathery pink mask he’d bought to match my lingerie. Teasing it over the skin on my arms, his lips spread away from his teeth. I flinched. “Sensitive?” he laughed and slipped the mask over my head. Sienna reached into her bag for hers, set it over her eyes. He had my headset and another microphone set up near the bed so we could answer the men without typing.
I sat down and Sienna moved in close, took my hand and beamed at the webcam as Frank said, “Okay, we’ll start with the group chat for a minute so we can try and take on any of the stragglers as voyeurs. Man, we’re gonna cash in …” I gripped her hand as Frank counted down and pointed. “You’re on!”
“Hi boys,” Sienna said. Like some kind of shape-shifting lizard, her Sabrina voice drawled and dropped two octaves lower than her usual squeak.
Frank sniggered and, remembering the mikes, cupped a hand over his mouth. Instant messages flipped rapid-fire onto the screen. Our regulars: Lojo, SugarDaddy, Loverman, Gimme2, Diggler … U girls r hot; Kiss her; Take ur tops off; Touch her pussy; Do u do anal? U r angels. Then GuySmiley popped up, the first one to ever book me in a private. Lucinda, he typed. U ok? U look sad. The screen took on a plasmic warble, as if it were penetrable, a liquid door I could crawl through and find someone who would see the oily crows flapping in my chest and hold me. My mother’s thin cancerous fingers. My black birds.
Iggy typed: Sabrina, Lucinda looks fuckable.
“She’s definitely fuckable,” Sienna groaned. She turned my chin and kissed me. My hands floated up without command and took her face. It was soft as though I could pierce it with my thumbs. I wished I could climb all the way inside her mouth, like a cat in a cubbyhole. I needed to be wrapped in someone or something. She rolled the robe off my shoulders and batted her lashes at the webcam. “We’re late, boys,” she drawled. “There’s some big spenders waiting for a private sssex show. There’s still room for some peeping Toms …” And she waved goodbye. Frank poked at the keyboard and two still photos took the place of our moving selves. A message explained: These Models Are Currently in a Private Show. A second screen came up and four private members’ names and their comments flashed white against the black. Frank was suddenly on his feet, lighting the candle on the bookshelf and adjusting the helmet again. What was his obsession with that goddamn helmet? My eyes stuck to its raised visor. Sienna tsked and looked at me as if searching for some punchline.
You look sad.
Frank’s teeth glowed at me now as if they were black lit and Sienna pushed her tongue deep in my mouth. A dark cold sliced the heat in my arms, flapping up and through my neck, pulsing and feathering in behind my eyes.
Kiss Her, they typed and my brain bubbled. Tongue; lick; fuck; pussy; more; Baby It’s Cold Outside; lips; hot; dildo; lick; cunt; Something’s Gotta Give; These people are often called oblates; ChaChaCha D’amour, More obscene than all the dirty four-letter words poured into all the dirty books; suckling like a baby; I’m an old stupid woman; One-two-three, what are we fightin’ for; Why Not Take All of Me? Slap her ass; tongue, lick; Are you living in a vacuum, no purpose, no challenge, just existing?; harder; strap-on; bite; Tune in, turn on, drop out; finger; deeper; tongue; more more more.
And then our fifteen minutes of fame were up. Frank had swapped screens on the laptop and a sign reading These Models Are Currently on Break, filled the screen. Next Show in Ten Minutes. “Holy fuck, was that hot! I’ve never been so hard in my life,” he crowed, clutching at the crotch of his jeans.
Wayne Newton said Danke shoen.
“Are you okay?” Sienna asked me. “I never did dominant before! Was it okay?”
“It was fucking hot,” Frank hollered at the top of his lungs and then he was beside me. The touch of his fingertips shocked me and I flinched. He shoved his tongue in my mouth as he yanked his shirt off and I drifted, oozing and fritzing. Pink skin, all around, all gone, everything gone. Wings flapped slowly in my ears, giggles and moans laced through feathers, mouths inside thighs, fingers wrapped, someone inside, mouths lapping, One-two-three, what are we fightin’ for, don’t ask me I don’t give a damn, next stop is Vietnam. And then the oily black feat
hers came down all around, suffocating, a heavy black cancerous curtain, just pinpricks of light. I had to hold tight to the pinpricks. I screamed for light.
“What’s wrong?” Sienna squealed, jumping back.
Light through holes in the dark, gunshots through black felt.
“What’s wrong?” Frank repeated.
“No more,” I said. “I don’t like it. Just—no more.”
Sienna sat back now, her mask sagging off to one side. None of us was clothed.
Frank’s pupils were glistening black platters. “Are you freaking out? What’s wrong?”
I shook my head. “I don’t want to do this.”
“You feeling sick?” he asked. “You guys still got two shows to do.”
I shook my head hard; wings flapping as if a little girl had run through pigeons.
“Baby, you were totally into it two minutes ago. What happened?”
“No.” I shook my head again. “No. You don’t even know me.”
He looked at his watch. “Shit. Just calm down. It’s, like, two minutes till the next show. Just do this next one, okay. Come here, Sienna. Sienna’s gonna look after you.”
I shook my head. “Why do you keep touching my helmet?”
“Yeah, Frank.” Sienna giggled. “Are you going to use this for the download site too?” Frank must have made some motion that caused Sienna to say, “No way! You’re bad! Vivica! I mean, Vivian! You know Frank’s taping this too, right? … You can’t tape and not tell,” she squealed. “It’s in the helmet, it’s in the helmet!”
Frank barked a wooden ha-ha. “Big mouth.”
“You’ve been taping this? You’ve been taping us since I got home.”
“He’s got a camera there, right there underneath,” Sienna shrilled, pointing one long nail toward the face of the helmet.
“She knows,” Frank said, his erection sulking now as he worked the keyboard again. “We’ve got about a minute left. Just do this one, baby, and then we’ll get you something to eat or whatever. You had too much to drink, that’s all. Just fifteen minutes and I’ll give you a massage.”
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