The waiter bowed, stuffed the credit card and the fifty into his pocket, bowed again, took the credit card out and dropped the fifty, picked them up, bowed, and finally scampered off.
By the time the drinks had come, Beth was definitely feeling hungrier. The four of them had finished off the breadsticks. The waiter, now a convert, set a giant platter of California rolls on the table. Jee had asked for the sangria to be served with her chowder and graciously poured a glass for Beth, whose pink sticky drink had run out faster than the others’.
For the next hour and forty-five minutes, they ate and drank. They didn’t talk much until the California roll was down, and when their dinners arrived, all conversation ceased.
Beth was shocked at how much she herself ate. When she looked up from her plate, there was nothing on it. The table was considerably less covered with dishes, thanks to the bus boy’s constant attentions. The empty bottles had been replenished. Empty, lipsticky cocktail glasses were taken away. Fresh, full, pretty glasses with fruity skewers and umbrellas replaced them.
They ordered the entire dessert tray, doubled, and coffee.
Pog groaned. “Thank goodness. It’s been hours since I ate.”
Amanda leaned back in her chair and stretched, giving a late diner at the next table an eyeful. “My waistband was getting tight.”
“If we don’t eat a lot, we get fat,” Jee explained to Beth, who actually didn’t feel very full after all. She nudged Beth. “Idiot ex-husband on skyline.”
Beth looked around, amazed at how alert she felt.
Blake stood behind her, his tie undone, his forelock falling in his eyes the way it had when they were youngsters. Her breath caught. Her heart began a slow thump-thump. Then she saw that he was fifty after all. He was at that stage where he had been drunk, but he’d come back from drunk, just enough to think he was in control of himself.
Where was Farrah? Beth scanned the room behind Blake, then surreptitiously checked her watch. It was ten-thirty. She peeked slant-eyed into the bar. No Farrah.
She remembered suddenly that she was a succubus now. She looked barely twenty, her makeup was flawless—such of it as hadn’t vanished during dinner—she wore Jee’s little black dress and pearls, and her hair was a calculated movie-star version of bed-head.
Blake looked down at the table loaded with desserts. “Fashion show’s over, let’s binge?” he suggested.
Pog checked her watch more obviously. “I do sleep with guys who insult me,” she said, “but first I get to punch them in the crotch.” She smiled up at Blake. One of her incisor teeth went ting! with a sparkle.
Blake backed up a pace. “No offense.”
“No problem,” Pog said, refocusing on death by chocolate. “Any time you’re ready for that punch in the crotch, let me know.”
Blake looked hungrily around the table. Beth waited while he took in Amanda’s breasts, then moved on to check Jee out: Jee with her lacquered dark looks and her air of self-possession. You melonhead, Beth thought. You just dumped your wife of twenty-eight years for a nineteen-year-old and you’re already scoping supermodels.
But when his eyes met hers finally, Beth could only swallow. He might be a melonhead, but he was my melonhead for a long time. She wondered if sex with him would be better, now that she had a hot young body. Then the thought of Blake screwing Farrah in her bed, on her sheets, sent a wave of nausea over her.
“Hi,” he said huskily. “I’m Blake. What’s your name?”
Melonhead. She tilted her chin up. “I’m Beth.”
He didn’t blink. “That’s a beautiful name.” He opened his mouth, glanced at the table, glanced at Pog, then said, “Can I buy you a drink—at the bar?”
Beth was speechless with indignation. She felt the blood draining out of her face. How stupid could she be? She had actually signed a contract with hell to get to this moment, and now she was choking! Mutely she glanced at Pog, who looked bored, then at Jee.
Jee raised her eyebrows.
“C’mon. Live a little,” Blake coaxed.
Fury rose so fast that her pulse roared in her ears for a moment. She bounced up out of her chair. “Don’t wait up for me,” she told her roommates.
The hot young women who had brought her here looked at each other.
Suddenly Beth was back in high school, and her cheerleading squad was scoping every guy in the place, rating him on four scales: clothes, money, charm, and sex appeal. Of course in those days, none of the guys had had any charm.
And in those days, her friends had never thrown a flaming asshole off a balcony.
She cocked her head and scoped Blake from his shoes up.
He smiled, clearly flattered by her attention and confident that she must like what she saw. Melonhead.
“Remember,” Jee said distinctly behind her, as the waiter was tenderly laying the bill beside Pog. “If you kill him, get rid of the body right away.”
Blake bent his elbow. Beth laid her hand on it, feeling surreal. Then she got a sudden wild rush of, good grief, tingling desire, a spasm that went all the way down to her underpants, or where her underpants would have been if she’d been wearing any.
What is wrong with me? This is my jerk of a husband!
“Your friends are pretty fierce,” he said, leading her to the bar.
“They meet a lot of men,” she said.
An hour later she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to be getting out of this. The understanding that she’d been married twenty-eight years to a lying jerk? How had she pretended not to know?
In the past hour he had told her he’d never married, assured her that the girl he had come in with had gone home to her regular boyfriend in a huff, and claimed to be forty-two. He’d said he was a broker (lie), that he lived in a high-rise condo downtown (lie), that he loved skiing (lie), that really he respected women who liked to eat (lie), that he was amazing in bed (lie), and that he had no kids and no interest in having kids but owned four dogs (lie). He had complimented Beth on every visible body part. He had speculated on the precise amount of money she made modeling. He had hinted that he could pay much more per hour than the fashion magazines paid.
When she’d fantasized this moment, she had worried that she couldn’t pull off the imposture. But it was shockingly easy. Blake didn’t actually see her. He saw his reflection in her increasingly glassy eyes.
He had just started on his outstanding high school and college athletic history (grossly exaggerated), when Beth realized that the Blakefest would continue until she got up and left, or until she agreed to go to bed with him. No wonder the succubi acted so cavalierly about men. When you looked like this, it was easy.
Worse, he kept touching her. And every time, she got a rush. It was sick. She wanted to slap him. And yet, these feelings.
She was going to have to have a plan. She’d never shake him off now. Plus, she didn’t have a cent on her and she had no car. And the bar was closing.
“Brent,” she said finally, “this has been fun, but I have to get out of here.”
“Sure, sure,” he said, pausing his monologue about his glory days at college basketball. He produced a card and, picking up her hand, masterfully folded her fingers around it and patted her, making the stupid parts of her swoon. “And it’s Blake.”
She looked at the card. It was one she’d never seen before, blocky white printing on a dark blue background.
“That’s my cell and my apartment on Michigan Avenue,” he said, holding her hand until she glanced up at him in annoyance. His voice dropped. “Beth.”
“I have to pee,” she said bluntly and pulled away.
He’d been pouring drinks down her for an hour, and goodness knew she’d helped with all the bottles and sticky cocktails at dinner, but she was able to stride stompingly to the ladies on her borrowed Ferregamos. She felt as if flames of fury must be setting fire to her supermodel hair. In the bathroom she looked closer at the card.
The address was at the Doral, a cushy skysc
raper which overlooked the lake and Millennium Park. Blake used to do business with the Doral when it was first built. He’d helped them find their anchor tenants. As far as she knew, he’d done no work for them for thirty years. Had they lent him a place for old times’ sake?
Beth doubted it. Commercial real estate developers were not long on gratitude.
Her teeth met with a click. She needed to get out of here, find a ride back to the Lair, and look into this. She tucked the card under her boob. It felt icky next to her skin, but Jee’s dress didn’t have pockets. From now on, a purse. On a long chain. So I can strangle my date when he bores and infuriates me.
Someone tapped on the bathroom door. “Miss? We’re closing.”
Blake would be out there, waiting for her. He was all too confident by now that she found him irresistible.
Feeling trapped, Beth looked around the one-holer bathroom. There was a window high on one wall. If she could get up to it, which she couldn’t, it probably wouldn’t open, since it looked painted shut, and if it wasn’t painted shut, she certainly couldn’t squeeze through it.
She got up on the commode and tested the window anyway. She felt surprisingly comfortable balancing on the balls of her feet. This over-tall succubus body was good for things.
The window was indeed stuck shut, but she gave it a bump with her fist, and the ancient paint cracked.
“Miss?” Tap tap tap.
“Coming!” she sang out.
She slid the window up. Commending her soul and Jee’s Ferregamos to luck, she bent her knees and jumped, hoping only to get up to the windowsill and glance out. She landed gracefully on her elbows, snatched at the sill, clonked her head on the open window, scrabbled against the wall with her feet, thrust her head and shoulders through in a desperate bid for balance, and hung there, draped over the sill on her stomach, panting with panic.
“She won’t come out,” said the voice outside the bathroom, now somewhat muffled.
The night air was fresh in this back alley at one in the morning. It cooled Beth’s head.
Pulling herself together, she calculated the distance to the alley below. This was never going to work. She would have to go back inside and face Blake.
Ugh.
She looked up. Wait, there was an electrical pipe or a cable TV wire or something running right past her window. She reached over and gave it a tug. It held. Wriggling, she worked herself up until she sat on the windowsill. Now she could grab the wire—this wasn’t going to do their cable service any good, she feared—hold on tight just long enough to wriggle her legs free—dammit, her new legs were too long to get through the window—she took a tighter grip on the wire and threw herself off the sill head-first, just as a key sounded in the lock of the bathroom, and her dress ripped.
The wire sagged but it held her.
Now she was dangling from the wire over the alley. It was ground floor, for goodness sake. Only a drop of six feet.
If she landed on the balls of her feet she might not destroy these shoes.
“That’s funny,” someone inside the bathroom said.
Beth let go and dropped. She landed squarely on her feet and felt her ankle twist.
“There you are,” Blake said, two feet away. He must have left by the front door and come around the back.
Beth panicked again.
“Here, you’ve hurt your ankle,” he said hopefully. He put his arm around her, making something burst like a dark pleasurable star in her belly, and she lashed out with the heel of her hand, more violently than she’d intended.
The blow caught Blake on the chin. He flew backward and thudded against the wall.
Panting wildly, she hobbled away, past the kitchen door, past the dumpsters, past a busboy busily humping some woman against the restaurant wall, and out into the more fragrant street.
There, sitting in the van, with all the doors open, and the air conditioning and motor running, were her new roommates.
“Is Amanda about done?” Pog said as Beth flopped into the rear bench seat and began belting herself in with trembling hands.
“You okay?” Jee said.
“What is the matter with me? Every time he touched me, I wanted to throw up! And I wanted to have sex with him!” Beth shook with confusion.
“It’s the body, honey,” Pog said from behind the wheel.
“You’re a sex demon now,” Jee said.
“I can’t believe I lived with that man for so long,” Beth grated. “Was he always such a liar? Only—wait,” she added, fishing the sweaty business card out of her dress with a shaking hand. “How can I find out if this is real?”
Jee read it and handed it up to Pog in the driver’s seat, just as Amanda sauntered out of the alley, pulling her dress down.
“She had sex with that busboy?” Beth blurted, loudly enough for Amanda to hear.
“I’m the only one here who will make her quota by Tuesday,” Amanda announced in a bland, superior voice. She climbed into the front passenger seat, closed the door, and smacked the van roof twice.
“What’s the question, Beth?” Pog said over her shoulder. “You want to know if he has an office here?”
Amanda took the card from her.
“It’s on too high a floor to be an office. Those are apartments,” Beth said. “I remember when they put that building up.”
“You didn’t mention that he had an apartment downtown,” Jee said, fixing her makeup in a purse-size mirror.
Beth couldn’t speak. The anger was coming back, the big stuff, volcanic and deadly, leaking red-hot out of her eyes, her ears, the palms of her hands. She wished she’d hit Blake harder. Her hands formed into fists and she pounded slowly on her thighs. “What can I do? What can I do?” she whispered.
Jee opened Beth’s left hand, tucked the card into it, and patted it, exactly the way Blake had done when he gave it to her. “My department.” She got her phone out. “What’s your old home number in Glenfiddich?”
“Glencoe.” Beth told her the number.
Jee nodded and tossed her hair back over her shoulder with a businesslike flick. “Mrs. Saunders? Oh, is your mother there? I need to speak to the owner of the house. This is Officer Canning from the Chicago Police Department. Ah, I see. Well, is Mr. Saunders there? Where else might he be right now, Miss?” Jee smiled maliciously at Beth. “No, we’ve tried his office. Does he have any other numbers? Thank you, let me write that down.” Jee sketched a number in the air.
“That’s his cell,” Beth whispered.
Jee turned back to the phone. “We have that number, too, Miss. We’re trying to find that out right now, Miss. Do you have a number for his next-of-kin? Just a moment, please.” Jee put her hand over the phone and laughed a silent hyena laugh. Then she said into the phone, “No other residences or places where he might be? I see. No, but I’ll get back to you a little later.” She hung up and doubled over, howling out loud. “She is gonna rip him such a fresh hot butt hole!”
Beth realized she was grinning, too. “Although if I had taken that call I’d be frantic with worry about him,” she said, sobering. “Won’t you get in trouble for impersonating a police officer?”
“Oh for Pete’s sake,” Amanda said, rolling her eyes.
Jee said briskly, “My phone blocks hers, so she can’t get the number. So the next question, I take it, is this. Does he borrow, rent, own, or just lie about the apartment at the Doral?”
“Want to go there, Beth?” Pog said, as she turned the van onto the Eisenhower Expressway headed into the city. “Or do you want to go home to bed?”
“Bed, I think,” Beth admitted. “My body feels fresh as a daisy, but my brain is tired.”
“Suits me,” Amanda said.
“We can chase this down easier in the morning anyway,” Jee said.
They brought her back to the Lair and settled into the row of La-Z-Boys in the kitchen. Beth roused herself to try to tidy up.
Pog said, “Hey! What are you doing? This is my kitchen.�
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Beth stopped cold, her hand on an empty beer bottle. “I’m sorry.” Horror at her faux pas made icky prickly ripples up and down her back. “Oh, I’m so sorry.” She felt grovelingly apologetic. She couldn’t afford to mess up with these women.
“Don’t fuck with the new girl’s head,” Jee said.
“Bring me a beer, someone?” Amanda said.
“Sheesh,” Pog said. She got up and pulled a couple of bottles out of the nearest refrigerator and tossed one to Amanda. “I’m just saying, Beth, leave that row of empties there. We’re saving one for each kind we like, so I can order more when these run out. What, did you get a badge in Brownie Scouts for manners?”
Beth put the bottle back down. “Yes.”
Pog chuckled. She took another beer out, popped the cap, and put it in Beth’s hand. “You feel up to discussing tonight?”
The beer went down cold and tart. Beth’s eyes closed by themselves. “I don’t know. I’m pretty wiped out.” She heaved a tired sigh. “Okay. What do we discuss?”
Pog patted the La-Z-Boy next to her and Beth flopped into it. “What did you hope to acomplish?” Pog said.
Beth thought. “I was stupid. I guess I thought I could ask him why he left me. I knew Farrah wasn’t the first,” she admitted, speaking aloud something she hadn’t ever said. She wished she could take it back. Maybe it wouldn’t be true. Her voice rose. “So why leave me now?” Four bumpy heartbeats later, she shook her head. “Never mind. Stupid.”
“What else might have happened?”
“I don’t know. I thought maybe if I met him like this—” She looked down at herself.
“Like what? Young, hot, and rich?” Pog said.
“Yes. I thought he would tell me things he wouldn’t tell his wife.”
“You already knew most of it,” Pog pointed out. “And he did tell you something new. He told you about his apartment downtown.”
“Yes, he did that.” Beth wasn’t the least bit consoled. She still felt stupid. “I’m sick to my stomach with fear. What else is going to happen? What else will he do to me? I have something again, kind of. Maybe.”
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