“It’s lovely.”
She smiled. “It’s not for nothing that it stays so popular. Do you want to try it on your hand? Your own body chemistry will alter the scent of any perfume, though I’ve never met anyone who couldn’t wear Chanel, not a single soul.”
“What on earth should I wear?”
She looked stunned, then perplexed. I wondered if I’d gone too fast.
“Oh, well, there are so many designers represented here. I’m sure someone upstairs could help you with that.”
“I’m terrified.”
Frances touched my arm, and this time she let her hand stay for just a moment longer. “I know,” she said. She looked around, then back at me. “It’s difficult.”
“It was very sudden. I mean, it was unexpected. There was no preparation, and I …”
She nodded.
“Do you have anyone to talk to? Anyone at all?”
I shook my head. “My friends, well, they mean well. But they don’t know what it’s like, so they don’t really know what to say. And it seems to me, they don’t want to hear anything, either. It just makes them frightened to realize that something so terrible could happen to anyone. One moment you’re a have, the next a have-not.”
“I lost my Patrick recently,” she said.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. Now look what I’ve gone and done. I shouldn’t have …” I looked down at my hands, both flat on the glass of the counter. “This is so inappropriate. I can’t apologize enough. I’m usually in better control, but you’re so easy to talk to that …”
“Well, and how were you to know that you’d found someone else who’d had the same misfortune? What are the chances?”
“Still, I’m so sorry I—”
Frances interrupted. “I go to this group, other women who have also …” She reached into her pocket and took out a white handkerchief with lace trim, but she didn’t use it. She only held it tightly in her hand. “Other women in the same boat, as we say,” sounding now as if she’d just gotten off one.
“And it helps?”
“That and the job. Without this, I don’t know where I’d be.” She looked around again and took out another perfume for me to try. “Are you working?”
I shook my head. “There was a little money, some insurance, but I absolutely need to find a job. I feel totally foolish for something else now.” I pointed to the bottle of Chanel. “I’m sure I can’t afford …”
Frances leaned forward. “Don’t you worry about the purchase.”
“But now I’ve wasted your time,” I said.
“And do you think that everyone who stops by this counter buys a bottle of Chanel? Don’t you give that a second thought. But the job, think about that, that’s essential. The worst thing you can do is stay at home. The very worst.”
“Might there be anything here?”
Frances nodded. She picked up a little pad and wrote down a woman’s name, and where the personnel office was, tearing off the page, folding it in half, and handing it to me.
“They’re hiring now for Christmas. It’s temporary, of course, and it might even be part-time, but if you do well, there’s always a chance for something permanent after the season. There’s always a lot of movement among the younger employees.”
“I don’t know how to thank you.”
“Never mind that. It’ll do you a world of good.”
I insisted on buying the smallest bottle of Chanel toilet water—an unfortunate description, but as Frances Ann said, it would give me confidence for my interview as well as my date. I promised I’d take her to lunch if I got a position at Saks, the only truthful thing I’d said to her so far. Her cheeks flushed a lovely pink. She told me she’d like that. Then she was all businesslike ringing up the sale, except for the part where she let her hand touch mine one last time when she handed me my change.
“I hope it all works out for you,” she whispered, picking up the sample I’d tried and returning it to the cabinet below. I thanked her again and headed for the elevators.
19
She Wants Those, and I Want These
I got to Jeffrey early and started browsing, wondering what LaDonna could have been thinking, asking me to meet her here so that she could outfit me for the stroll. I poked inside a red leather jacket, trying to find the price tag, doubling what I thought it would be and still being off by half. How would I possibly have any money left for drugs if I paid these prices?
I was in the shoe department, holding a little number made of two thin snakeskin straps, a feather, a thin sole, and a heel the height of the twin towers, when I heard LaDonna entering the store, her voice so loud that I wasn’t the only one who turned to stare. To make things worse, when she spotted me from the entranceway, she gave a center-stage wave and a loud yoo-hoo. Now everyone turned to stare at me. I couldn’t believe the number of people there to do it. With tiny leather skirts at eleven hundred dollars and shoes running five hundred and up, you’d think the place would be empty. Instead, it looked like Toys R Us two days before Christmas.
“Oh,” she said, hand on her fake chests, “those are divine. Have you tried them on yet?”
“Please.” I showed her the price tag.
“Never mind all that. I just need to know your size.”
I screwed up my mouth to ask why, but got yanked by the arm instead and shoved onto a backless padded leather bench so that I could slip on the little number now in her hand. LaDonna was feeling no pain.
“I can’t walk in shoes like that,” I complained.
LaDonna flapped her hand at me. “You learn.”
“Where are Chi Chi and Jasmine?”
“You just pay attention to what’s in front of your nose, Miss Thing. Now, which of those there could you walk in? And don’t go picking out your usual.” She used the snakeskin shoe as if it were a pointer, aiming it at me, and then over her shoulder at God knows what. “No one’s going to buy you’re real, girl, you wearing jeans and Reeboks, one of your boyfriend’s sweaters, and that long sheepskin coat covers all your ass-ets, no one can see what they’re about to purchase.”
I smiled and pointed to a pair of red platform ankle straps. I always wanted to try on a pair anyway. Suddenly, I felt walking wouldn’t be a problem after all. Hell, I had to, I could do a triathlon in them. Having just been employed by Saks Fifth Avenue to sell socks through the holiday season, part-time, was making me feel as high as LaDonna apparently was.
“Guess what?”
LaDonna, sitting next to me, her long legs crossed, leaned closer.
“I found Mulrooney’s wife. I made contact with her.”
LaDonna looked as if she were going to speak, then changed her mind, holding up her huge paw and curling her pointer at the young clerk, a cute young guy in a pristine white shirt, his dark hair gelled so that it looked wet.
“We needs our feets measured up,” she told him, her mind on the task at hand. “She wants those,” she said, pointing to the red ones, “and I want these.” She elevated the strappy one with the feather.
I turned out to be an eight. Still. And LaDonna was practically off the scale. The clerk apologized when he came back, handing me the platform number and saying he was so sorry, but he didn’t have the snakeskin number in LaDonna’s size. Would she like, perhaps, to see something else? He had, in fact, a box with him, one big enough you could bury a dwarf in it, assuming you had one you needed to bury. He said he’d found something for her, something in lizard. Lizard’s cutting edge, he told her. It’s very now. Could she use green? he wondered.
LaDonna feigned great disappointment, motioned for him to put the box down, said she’d “think on it,” then asked for the ladies’ room, and disappeared while I tried on the shoes of my choice, teetering toward the mirror, then back to my place.
When LaDonna returned, she tried on the green shoes, holding up one huge foot at a time, then walking over to the mirror to have another look. I looked at the side of the box. The green lizard shoes were g
oing for six-fifty. I tried to get LaDonna’s attention, tell her what the shoes cost, but she was studying her feet in the mirror, a very focused shopper.
She called the clerk with another hand gesture, palm in, four fingers vibrating. “They pinch my little toe,” she said, motioning for me to put my sneakers back on. Then she led me back to where I’d been earlier, the rear of the store, where all the clothes looked so tiny, they might have been for Barbie dolls.
LaDonna proceeded to take things off the racks, hold them up against me, cock her head, click her tongue, and put them back. After about fifteen minutes, she said it was time to go. Since I hadn’t argued with her before, I decided not to now and docilely followed her out the front door.
“So what’d she say?” she asked. “Mrs. Mulcahey.”
“Mulrooney.”
“Whatever.”
“Not much. It was just a first meeting.”
“You hoping for a second?”
“There’ll definitely be a second.”
She nodded thoughtfully, glad to see I was doing my job.
“So what was this all about?” I asked.
“You’ll see. We supposed to wait for the others across from the Gay and Lesbian Center. Come on.”
“What others? Were they in there?”
LaDonna shook her head. “You aks too many questions,” she said. “Always did. Probably always will. I guess it’s a good thing, too, considering your line of work. So, you going to ask this Mulrooney’s wife what she knows?”
I nodded.
“She won’t know nothin’.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Beg pardon?”
“What makes—”
“She a wife, right?”
I nodded. “Well, a widow now.”
“Same difference. They never know nothin’. They dependent on a man, makes them stupid. They invested in seeing nothin’, hearing nothin’, saying nothin’, like the monkeys.”
Was she talking about husbands and wives, or hookers and pimps?
“But you go aks your questions, it makes you happy. What about the johns? You’ll aks them questions, too?”
This time I didn’t nod. We were walking along Washington Street, too late for the meat markets, too early for the hookers. It was called a twenty-four-hour neighborhood, but it was actually only about a twenty-two-hour one, unless you counted Hogs and Heifers, the motorcycle bar. I didn’t ever remember seeing that closed, even though I was sure it did.
Did LaDonna, Chi Chi, and Jasmine really expect to tart me up and have me out here pretending to be a hooker? Working in the hosiery department at Saks was one thing. This was quite another.
LaDonna began to count on her fingers as we turned onto Thirteenth Street.
“One, to start out, you say, ‘Going out?’” She looked at me. “‘Going out?’ You got that?”
“Going out?”
“Right. Only more, what do you call it?”
“Sexy?”
“No. Your clothes take care of that. Your location takes care of that. That’s why they come here.”
“Blatant?”
“Wiseass.”
“Suggestive?”
“That’s the one. Some of them say, ‘Do you want a date?’”
I repeated that, too. LaDonna smiled.
“’Course, you could say, ‘Like a blow job or something?’ instead. More to the point. But you’re probably too delicate a person for that one.”
My mother rolled over in her grave. In fact, my whole family, all the way back to the Garden of Eden, did.
“Two, the prices. You gonna be aksed. You gotta know.”
I nodded.
“You say, ‘It’s forty for a blow job.’ Got it?”
“Look, you said I wouldn’t actually—”
“You gotta look real. You gotta sound real. You don’t gotta do real. I’ll take care of that part. Can I go on now?”
“Please do.”
“Forty for a blow job, but late in the night, you got to be willing to bargain. Too high’s no good. But don’t go too low. That’s no good either. Some of ’em, no matter what you aks, they’s going to drive away. They’s just looking. Or they gets scared. Or they don’t like your type, they want darker, bigger, hairier, whatever.”
I nodded.
“A straight fuck, aks fifty. Half-and-half, that’s seventy.”
“Whoa. A straight fuck? Half-and-half?”
“I figured, in case you change you mind.” She patted her hair. “Things we can’t do, you can. You can make hundreds in one night.”
“Yeah? And how much do I get to keep?”
“I didn’t say you wouldn’t incur no expenses, did I?”
“No. You certainly didn’t.”
“No need to get your tits in a knot. You got expenses being an investigator, don’ you, advertising, wardrobe, ve-hicles?”
“Yeah, right. So what expenses do I have here? Gotta know what to put down on my Schedule C.”
“You out there, we going to have to give a little something to Devon.”
“But I won’t be making anything.”
“You wanna tell Devon that?”
“Does everyone have a pimp?”
LaDonna shook her head. “You could come out on your own. Some do.”
“But you don’t?”
No answer.
“It’s just a temporary thing, you being out there. Jasmine, she told Devon you from San Francisco, you on the run, something to do with some john, find himself dead. She told him you probably won’t stay, you saving up now to go to Miami, you hate the cold, but you don’t want no trouble while you’re here, you’ll pay him to take care of you for the time being. That’s what she arranged.”
“And where is this money coming from?”
“Not your problem.”
“So why’d you even tell me?”
“Because he come, I want you to turn your back, like you don’t want to be seen. You promise money, he’ll respect that. You don’t, or you stare at his face, look him in the eye, he beat the shit out of you.”
“For taking up business on his turf?”
“For dissing him, girl. The way Chi Chi did, letting you take her dog without going and aksing him first could her dog be groomed by a professional.”
I looked at LaDonna, who was looking straight ahead, her chin slightly up, a trickle of sweat sliding down her cheek. When we got to Greenwich Street, she grabbed my hand and began to run across the street, dragging me along with her.
Jasmine was lighting a cigarette. Chi Chi had just put Clint down to let him pee. They each had a shopping bag, but not from Jeffrey. Chi Chi had one of those plain brown bags with a handle. Jasmine’s bag was from D’Agostino’s.
“You ready?” Jasmine asked me. She handed me the shopping bag. Chi Chi picked Clint up and motioned for me to take her bag, too. Her mouth was yellow now, and her eye was still very swollen.
“There’s makeup, shoes, everything,” Jasmine said. “We meet you here tomorrow night, nine o’clock, see what you can find out. I spoke to Devon. We cool.”
“Yeah. That’s what LaDonna told me.”
“Okay. We’ll watch out for you, but LaDonna, she’ll be right with you, like you’re going to do a two-fer. She might do the talking, but you might have to say something, too.”
“Might be better, her mouth, I say she don’t speak English,” LaDonna said. “At least the first night.”
“Whatever.” Jasmine drew in hard on her cigarette, blew the smoke down toward her plastic, see-through, high-heeled mules. “Word is, someone in the life knows something, so you talk to the other girls, too. But be careful. Some of them are real weird.”
“Weirder than us,” LaDonna said, punching me in the arm and nearly knocking me over. “She’d be something, wouldn’t she?” she said to Jasmine. “Good thing she’s not going blond, or one of the others kill her for sure.”
“I do okay,” Jasmine said, “she don’t s
care me.”
It went on like that for a while, the two of them talking about me as if I were across the street instead of inches away. I stayed, my mouth shut, watching and listening, thinking that if I did open my mouth, that’s what I should sound like, voice deep, pride deeper, and eyes sad as hell. I remembered something my t’ai chi teacher used to say when someone was puff-puffing, all ego and nothing real. The bigger the front, the bigger the back. He might as well have been talking about the stroll.
I opened the D’Agostino’s bag and looked in. There was a kelly green leather miniskirt, a feather boa that might have been white at one time, and what must have been a halter top, what there was of it.
“From Jeffrey?”
“From Rosalinda,” Chi Chi said, the first words she’d spoken since I got here. “She was about your size. Except for her feet.”
Everything got quiet for a moment, even the traffic. Or maybe it only seemed that way. I opened the other bag. Red platform shoes, the ones I’d tried on at Jeffrey. Then Chi Chi held out her hand and slipped something into mine. “Tape it to your hip,” she whispered, “because you never know, you might need it sometime.”
I could feel it through the tissue paper she’d wrapped it in.
“Look,” Jasmine said. “She’s so moved she’s going to cry. Do it now, you going to do it. You do it tomorrow, your mascara’s going to run, ruin that boa. She had three. That one was her favorite. She said it brought her luck.”
“We got to go to work now,” LaDonna said. Chi Chi looked up but said nothing. Jasmine wiggled her fingers at me.
“Okay, then I’ll see you here at nine,” I said, turning away from them, the razor blade still in my hand, suddenly aching to be with Dashiell. I missed him so desperately I thought my knees would buckle when I tried to walk. But I didn’t walk away, not just yet. “I’m bringing Dash,” I said, spinning back around. “That’s not up for discussion.”
Jasmine shrugged. “Whatever gets you through the night, honey. Same as for the rest of us.”
She took a last puff on her cigarette and flicked it far out into the street, the sparks flying up and out, bright in the dark night, then disappearing. When I turned away again, I saw Devon headed our way. Head down, I crossed the street, and as soon as I’d passed the building line, I began to run and didn’t stop until I was unlocking the gate, Dashiell’s barks coming at me from inside the cottage, making me feel human again.
The Long Good Boy Page 12