“Look at my eyes,” Jee snapped, grabbing him by the chin. “We don’t fuck around, Reg.”
Amanda and I adjusted our grip on his arms. Jee grabbed the lapels of his bomber jacket. Guessing what she was up to, I signalled Amanda with a look, and we braced our feet around his ankles.
Reg inhaled deeply—oh yeah, he was getting into this—and when he was full of air, Jee ripped the front of the jacket clean off. Shock filled his eyes. One-handed, she then ripped off his white Hollister tee shirt. The body of his jacket hung off him behind, his arms still in its sleeves. Jee stepped closer to him, rubbed herself up against his naked chest, and reached around behind him with both hands. Amanda and I exchanged glances and braced ourselves harder. Jee ripped the jacket-back free of the sleeves.
Reg was now shaking like a race horse at the post.
As she slid away from him, Jee whispered in his ear, “I told you I hate these fucking leather pants. Don’t ever let me see you in them again.”
Then she tore the pants off him, messily, in strips. I took a look at Mr. Johnson. Yes, this was definitely working. When Reg was hard as the Washington Monument, vibrating like the spin cycle, and naked down to his black, patent-leather, pretend biker boots, Jee examined him, walking around him slowly.
Behind him, she gasped. “You came back without your IID tattoo? Holy shit.”
“This is serious,” Amanda said in his ear in a deepened voice.
Reg was sweating. “I got arrested,” he whined.
“Oh, right. The guy in your cell disrespected you,” I sneered in his other ear.
Behind him Jee said, “I see, yes, he disrespected you pretty badly, didn’t he?” She sounded almost sympathetic. “Okay. You get a reprieve. Go tidy up the breakfast stuff in the kitchen, and when the dishes are in the dishwasher, you can clean yourself up in the sink. Don’t leave a mess. Then you can put on some of your nice clothes.”
“Hey—” Reg began.
Jee came around to face him, looking pissed. “What did you say?”
Amanda and I gave him a little shake. We’re just as strong as Jee is, although nothing like as mean.
“I’m your manager, you know,” he quavered.
After a moment, Jee smiled. “That’s right. Show him the manager’s door, ladies.”
We dragged him into the hall. When we were within five feet of that white door to the balcony, he started struggling.
The doorbell rang downstairs.
“Nuts,” Jee said. She gave Reg a scientifically correct thump on the back of the head. He slumped in our grasp. “Put him in the kitchen. I just hope he remembers what I told him to do. I’ll go let in the construction workers.”
“Calm down, okay?” I called after her, as Amanda and I dragged our manager toward the kitchen. “Carrot and stick for these guys.”
Amanda sighed and shook her head.
Even unconscious, Reg had a formidable erection. I had a good feeling about our new manager.
Beth
Pog came to her room while Beth was in there getting dressed and suggested that she stay there for a while, until they got the contractor settled.
“Why?” Beth brushed her hair, thinking it was time for a haircut. And how was she going to pay for that? She was living on these women’s generosity until she could “work.” “Is everyone having sex with him for the monthly report?”
Pog stood behind her, looking into the mirror with her. Pog looked so young, early twenties, her newscaster-perfect face and hair a reproach to every woman old enough to be her mother. Beth felt a stab of resentment at Pog’s perfection, remembering how she’d wasted her own youth. She plied the hairbrush viciously until her scalp protested.
“Earth to Beth,” Pog said.
“What?”
Pog took the brush out of her hand. “First of all, look at yourself.”
Beth looked, really looked in the mirror for the first time, not at her hair but at all of herself.
“Word of advice on maintaining this body. Don’t groom yourself without thinking. Always have in mind what you want to look like.”
Beth looked again. Would she ever get used to it? She was tall now, almost too tall to see her whole head in the full-length mirror on the back of Pog’s door. She was slim. She was young. This wasn’t even an idealized version of the self she had left behind. This was a version of herself that Beth had fantasized back in high school.
Pog came up behind Beth and put the hairbrush back in her hand. “Here. Now. Do you know what style you’d like to have?”
Beth eyed Pog’s near-shoulder-length pale blonde mane, tidy enough now, but capable of tousling into a movie star’s after-sex look, as Beth well knew. “Shorter than yours,” she said. She remembered gluing photos from magazines into a scrapbook, all the hairstyles and eyes and teeth and lips and cheekbones she’d wished she had. And I was a cheerleader. The envy of my school. What a fool I was. Is any woman ever satisfied with her looks?
“What do you want? Picture it,” Pog said patiently.
Beth remembered her favorite newscaster’s hair from high school. Slowly, she lifted her hairbrush.
Pog kept her hand on Beth’s brush hand, like a mom teaching her daughter how to use a hairbrush for the first time. “Pay attention to the picture in your head. Make every stroke count.”
Beth brushed. Miraculously, her hair began to style itself. “That’s weird. It’s even getting shorter.”
“Don’t think about anything except how you want to look.”
The newscaster’s sleek helmet began to take shape under Beth’s hairbrush. It got thicker. Beth bent and brushed the underside and felt the weight of it swing, newly heavy, around her head. “Wow.” Her hair, now shorter and thicker, developed darker-honey-colored streaks with every brush stroke, so much subtler and richer than her expensive hairdresser could achieve. It didn’t dare to curl. It curved.
Beth’s hand stilled. She stared. “I was going gray. It used to kink up in weird spots.”
“New hair. New body. New face. Are you looking at yourself, Beth?” Pog said. “This isn’t the you that’s sliding inevitably toward something you are permanently disappointed with. It’s all exactly the way you want it. And if it isn’t? Change it.”
Beth blinked, looking at her own tennis-pro-long limbs, her own ideal and totally unfamiliar young face, her actual hair. She turned toward Pog and threw her arms around her, hiding her face against Pog’s neck. “I’m scared.”
It was weirdly comforting to be hugged by Pog. Beth flashed back to high school again, the intensity of her friendships, the sense of merging into her peer group until her self was a comforting blur that could only be truly and clearly seen in the faces of her friends. Maybe it won’t be so bad being a filthy slut. A sob rose up in her throat. She whispered, “So scared.”
Pog patted her on the back. “I know, baby.”
“I’m twice your age,” Beth protested, muffled against her neck.
She felt Pog chuckle through her whole body. “Oh, kid.”
Jee banged on the bedroom door. “You ready? I am.”
“That’s a fucking miracle,” Pog muttered, and pushed Beth away. “Okay, what have we got?”
Beth held her arms out, showing herself, feeling childlike. “You had two of these tennis dresses.”
“What? Oh, the disguise, right. Hang on.” In less time than Beth would have thought possible, Pog yanked the other tennis dress out of her closet, threw off her PJs, and put herself together: tennis dress, a hairstyle much like Beth’s, strappy flat sandals. “Here.” She snatched a gold bracelet out of a drawer in the vanity and tossed it to Beth, buckling a matching bracelet on her own wrist at the same time. “Now hold still, this is gonna be fast.”
“What—” Beth began.
“Don’t talk or I’ll poke you in the eye.” Swiftly she brushed Beth’s cheekbones, then her own, with a dramatic plum color. Then she used two colors of eyebrow pencil on each of them. Then she drew faint lines dow
n Beth’s nose to the corner of her mouth, and copied the lines on her own face. Then she blended with her thumbs.
Beth watched their faces merge, match, age, and sharpen before her eyes.
“Voilà,” Pog said with satisfaction.
“Wow.”
“Now grow a bit taller to match me.”
Beth confessed, “I don’t know how to do that yet.”
“Well, you’ll find that a lot of nice clothes fit better when you’re taller. Why didn’t you pick a taller body to start with?”
“I don’t see the point in having legs like stilts,” Beth objected.
Pog sighed dramatically. “All right, I’ll shrink to fit you.” While Beth watched, blinking, she did just that. “There. We’re not quite twins, but enough to confuse anybody who looks casually.”
“Our sandals don’t match,” Beth said, looking down.
Pog took her elbow and hustled her toward the door. “If they’re looking at your feet, you’ve lost them. Now let’s get going, before Jee decides she has to change into something else.”
Beth ducked into the kitchen to grab a bottle of water and found Reg in there, naked except for his patent leather faux-biker boots, on his knees, scrubbing the inside of the oven. He pulled his head out and leered at her. “Nice legs.”
Pog
Three of us piled into my new black Beemer: me, Jee, and Beth the eternally clueless. We left Amanda at the Lair to go over the drawings with the contractor and keep an eye on Reg. The contractor, Carl, would be receiving his first installment of fringe benefits this morning, but only after they talked about the drawings. We wanted him clear-headed while he looked over the job, and foggy when he made his estimates.
“I’m sorry I’m such a dope,” Beth said from the back seat.
“You’re entertainment,” I said. “I’m bored.”
“And I love revenge, even when it’s on someone else’s behalf,” Jee said.
Beth was silent a moment. “But what can I do for Amanda?”
We were gonna have to get this girl on the payroll soon. Her work ethic exhausted me. “Play softball.”
“I can do that,” Beth said, sounding genuinely pleased.
“Did you bring the lockpicks?” I said. Jee pointed to her oversized YSL purse, on the floor. I looked in the mirror at Beth. “This life takes time to get used to.”
She was shaking her head. “I’m so dumb. I’m still getting used to the idea that Blake has been such a—”
“Weasel?” Jee offered.
Beth seemed to accept this. “Why don’t I get that? I realized I was destitute much sooner. I saw right away that my kids wouldn’t help,” she added bitterly. “Right away.”
“You probably see them more clearly than you see him,” I said.
“I was used to being broke,” she said. “We’ve been living on credit and my ingenuity, frankly, for more than six years. I wanted to sell the house in Glencoe and move to Evanston, but Blake wouldn’t hear of it. He had a position to keep up. So I kept it up. But it was hollow. I’m a fool.” Beth sniffled. “I still think of myself as fat and middle-aged and—” She stopped.
I glanced over at Jee. “Your turn,” I said.
“Revenge is at hand,” Jee said. “A very lifegiving emotion. Once you’ve burned out some of that anger with some sweet, sweet revenge, you’ll have a chance to really enjoy your new body.”
“I don’t know what I’d do with it,” Beth said, sounding bewildered.
Jee reached over the front seat and patted Beth. “Give yourself time. Contrary to what you see in the movies, mere rage is not enough to get a woman used to finding herself beautiful. She has to know what she wants to be. She has to know whether she really wants to be beautiful. It’s not for everybody. Look at Amanda. She’s just not interested in sex.”
“She s-screwed that busboy up against the wall in an alley!”
“Whoa, Beth said ‘screwed!’” Jee said.
I said, “She likes sex. She just isn’t interested. It’s like eating for her. Ever notice she goes for quantity, not quality?”
“Oh, not like you,” Jee said.
“I like both quantity and quality,” I said. “I didn’t hear you grabbing dibs on cook duty.”
“I’m a discerning consumer, not a producer,” Jee said.
“What does interest Amanda?” Beth said, sniffing and patting at her makeup with a tissue.
“Softball. Basketball. Athletics in general,” Jee said, ticking them off on her fingers. “Engineering problems. You should have heard her talking with the contractor about moving the plumbing stack. She gave me a keycard that ought to work on the doors at the Doral.”
“Amanda also likes magical theory,” I said. “Thank goodness. So there’s one magic expert on the team. I’ve played with it, but my needs are simple. You have to be a bit of a puzzle nut to get magical theory.”
“When we get ready to mess your ex over, she’ll be a tremendous help,” Jee said.
I waited for Beth to protest that she didn’t want to mess her ex over.
Silence.
“We’re here,” Jee said.
I pulled the Beemer into the garage of the building next door to the Doral. “Let’s go.”
Jee used the keycard Amanda had provided. It worked on the front door to the building and on the elevator. As we walked down the hall to “Blake Shanley’s” apartment I noted the dull black half-sphere of a security camera stuck to the ceiling at each end of the corridor. I nudged Jee.
“I see,” she muttered. “Fall back twenty paces.”
I stopped, watched them walk to the end, and turn the corner. Then I followed, copying Beth’s gangly, hesitant walk, clutching the hem of my tennis dress the way she clutched hers. As I turned the corner, I saw a door slowly swing shut. They’d left it ajar a crack. I pushed inside and shut it behind me.
Blake’s love shack was dismally predictable. Chrome, leather, too-deep carpet, floor-to-ceiling drapes kept closed, neon stick-lighting, full bar, fridge full of olives and vodka and champagne. We tiptoed through it, taking care not to touch anything at first. Monster jacuzzi tub, big round bed with satin sheets, sheesh, hadn’t this guy heard of the millennium? This was sixties. Fifties.
In a corner of the bedroom, Beth found a desk. She sat down and pulled a laptop out of the top drawer.
I drew Jee into the kitchen. “She’s getting the hang of it.”
“We have to kick it up a notch,” Jee said. “She’ll be no help.”
“She’s giving his financial records a nice going over,” I pointed out, working the cork off a champagne bottle.
“Sure. She’s pissed about the money.”
“I wonder if the money isn’t the biggest thing here for her,” I said. “She worries all the time about paying us back. She’s hardly said anything about his betraying her emotionally.”
“She feels it,” Jee said positively. “The money’s the part she can stand to talk about. The betrayal—” She showed her teeth in her un-smile.
A cry came from the bedroom. We rushed in.
“Look!” Beth had a file open on the laptop. “He bought our cabin in Tahoe from us! He bought the place in Tampa too! He bought them from us! He kept them!” She pawed in the bottom desk drawer and flung a wad of papers down on the keyboard. “Look! The deeds!”
“Slow down, honey,” Jee said. “What?”
“We sold them because the bank wouldn’t lend us any more on the Glencoe house to pay for Jeff’s last year of school. Blake said he couldn’t get a better price. He practically gave them away. I was so shocked. He’s an expert, you know. Real estate is what he does. He said the market was depressed, and it was the best we could do, that we had to accept the offers. I wonder if he even listed them!” Beth was red in the face and panting. “He bought them so he could take her there!”
Jee made a skeptical face. “Are you sure he still has them? This devotion-to-Farrah thing sounds weak to me.”
“Why?”
Beth’s mouth fell open.
“Sounds to me like he’s hoarding liquidatable assets. If he can flip those two properties quick?” Jee rubbed her fingers together.
Beth scowled. She turned back to the laptop, looking newly determined.
Meanwhile I borrowed Beth’s handbag and took the opportunity to port all Beth’s contacts from her old phone to her new phone. Then I copied the settings and synced the apps. When Jee found me in the living room, I had a plan.
“What do you think?” she said.
“I think we should take some naked pictures and leave them where Miss Thing can find them.”
“I like.”
“It’s doing it the easy way.”
“My favorite way,” Jee agreed. She stuck her head out the door. “Hey, Barbara Stanwyck, you ready to do some damage yet?”
Beth was so furious about the vacation homes that she was willing to take her clothes off and let me take pictures, using Jee’s phone, of her and Jee cavorting on the round bed. We cut paper masks out of the closing papers from Blake’s embezzlement on the Tahoe property and Scotch-taped them onto Beth and Jee. We drew naughty words and pictures on the walls using my lipstick, since Jee wouldn’t dream of using hers. We took baths in the round tub and left an oily, scented ring. We opened champagne and smashed a couple of rather nice crystal flutes on the bathroom floor.
It was when we were doing this, a bit tipsily maybe, that Beth cut her foot. She bled like a stuck pig.
“Messy,” Jee muttered.
“Here, let me,” I said. “You’re bleeding all over the place.” You could tell this was a man’s apartment. No paper towels in sight.
“So what?” Beth said, slurring. “The bastard. My heart’s been hemorrhaging for weeks.” She staggered out of the bathroom, leaving huge bloody footprints on the tile for me and Jee to clean up.
“Tell her to elevate it,” I said, “until it seals up again.”
“Clean up good,” Jee said. “We need to get out of here.” She bolted after Beth.
I did a really thorough job on the bathroom floor, using Blake Shanley’s fancy fluffy towels.
When I came out into the living room, Beth seemed to be coming down from the champagne. The sight of one’s own blood will do that.
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