Beauty Dies

by Melodie Johnson Howe

  “What kinda questions?” The slits widened and I could see blue emotionless eyes.

  I twisted in his grip. Think, Maggie.

  “Don’t mess with me, lady. What are you doing here?” His grip tightened and I could no longer move my arm.

  “This is degrading to women,” I blurted. “No woman should be treated like this.” Not bad, Maggie. Not bad.

  A heavy sigh ended in a belch and filled the cubicle with a smell that made me want to stop breathing. “Not another one. What do you females want?”

  “The question’s already been asked by somebody a little brighter than you and he couldn’t answer it, either.”

  I was yanked, as easily as a ribbon from a Christmas gift, out of the booth. “Well, I know what I want. I want you outta here.”

  “Women are not pawns of male sexual fantasy,” I shouted at the top of my voice.

  The men froze. All eyes on me. Finally.

  “Pornography is a tool to keep women second-class citizens,” I railed as Goldie jerked me toward the stairs. I had a hard time keeping my feet on the ground but I did manage to raise my fist in the air. “And to keep minority women slaves.” I was on a roll. I wished Claire could see me. Maybe not.

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  Some of the men tried to move and fade into the darker recesses of the room. The women watched me with knowing bored smiles. They’d heard these words before and they were still meaningless. Boulton stood by the entrance to the stairs looking at me with a strange grin.

  “Get her out of here and don’t come back.” Goldie shoved me at him. But I turned and faced the room for my grand finale. “Pornography is oppression. Pornography is male tyranny. Pornography is male sickness.” I raised both my fists in the air and gave the V for victory sign. Why did I feel more like Richard Nixon than Gloria Steinem? There was no applause.

  “Let’s not go over the top, Maggie,” Boulton said in a low voice, half-pushing, half-guiding me down the stairs where the guy the size of the cab waited.

  I was escorted out of Peep Thrills. Boulton followed, hands in his pockets, the smile still playing on his lips. The lights on the buildings blinked and beckoned in the cold night. A once-pretty woman swayed drunkenly on the arm of a man in a trenchcoat. Boulton looked at me. His smile grew broader and he began to laugh. I’d never heard his laughter; it had a nice warm genuine sound. I stood in the middle of the sidewalk, surrounded by usable women and men who looked like the walking dead, and watched Boulton laugh at me.

  Now, this is where men and women have a big problem. Women laugh about men all the time, but we do it behind their backs. We do it as a form of comradeship with other women. We do it so we won’t feel needy and dependent on men. We do it because we are also laughing at ourselves. We know how to laugh at men properly.

  Men don’t understand how to laugh at women. First of all, they do it right in your face, which means they don’t need another man to share it with. And it would never enter their minds that they might be laughing at themselves.

  While Boulton continued to laugh I hailed a cab and left him standing on the curb. Now he could laugh at me properly—behind my back.

  I stared in righteous anger out the window as the taxi plunged into potholes and swerved around corners. I hadn’t learned one thing at Peep Thrills, except that the women didn’t trust me and I don’t like to be laughed at. Especially by Boulton. Wonderful.

  The cab turned down Fifty-ninth Street. The park spread like a dark stain. A phalanx of hotels jutted up; hansom cabs lined the street. The horses, their big heavy heads hanging down in resignation, waited. The women at Peep Thrills, with their large heavy breasts, implanted breasts, small breasts, waited.

  Waited.

  I suddenly felt terribly depressed. Horses and women were very sad.

  Oh, hell, so were men.

  Eight

  CLAIRE WAS IN HER chair reading my notes on our first case together. A fire flickered in the fireplace, shadows of its flames dancing on the white sofas. The table lamps glowed warmly. She was wearing the black velvet robe that made her look like a flamboyant judge. Her initials were emblazoned in gold on her black velvet slippers. She took a sip of brandy and looked up, then peered around me.

  “You seemed to have misplaced Boulton, Miss Hill.”

  “We took separate cabs.”

  “Not very economical.”

  I walked over to the drinks table and poured myself a brandy.

  Did you find out anything?” she asked.

  “Almost.”

  “Almost?”

  “There was a girl who I thought might know something but she didn’t. Okay! So they didn’t identify with me.”

  “Did I say anything?”

  “I know what you’re thinking.”

  “I am a genius. It’s impossible for you to know what I’m thinking.”

  I swallowed some brandy. “I know. Did Nora Brown call?”

  “Yes. She and Sarah Grange will be here tomorrow at five.”

  “They should have their stories worked out by then.”

  “Probably.” She put the pages on a table, then poked at them with her walking stick as if they were a dead rodent.

  “You’re so desperately modern.”

  “What?”

  “It’s as if all the women your age were born with mirrors in their hands so they can walk around looking at themselves, not to see how pretty they are, but to see where they are, who they are, and how they are doing.”

  “They’re just notes, background, it’s not even a rough draft.”

  “I’m sure there was a time when poor muddled Watson couldn’t remember why he had sat down to write.”

  “Watson?”

  “But it’s difficult to imagine since the good doctor only wrote about Holmes, never his own personal life.”

  “But I was there.”

  “Reality is no excuse.”

  The front door closed. Boulton came into the living room with all the swiftness of a tackle coming off the line of scrimmage. He stopped short when he saw Claire.

  “Ah, Boulton,” she said. “We thought we had lost you.”

  “No, madam,” he replied. “Just left in Miss Hill’s dust, so to speak.”

  “That may be the fate of us all. Have a brandy and tell me what you’ve learned.”

  I moved away from the table and stood by the fireplace. Boulton shot me a look, then poured himself a drink.

  “I discovered, madam, that Jackie lived at the Duke Hotel. She also had two, maybe three, regular customers.”

  “Well done, Boulton.”

  I thought she was going to get up and pat him on the head as if he were a retriever with a bird hanging out of his mouth. He bowed slightly, acknowledging her compliment. I couldn’t stand it.

  “I would have found out more if Miss Hill had not come along.”

  I slammed my drink down on the mantel. “But I did, and I don’t like being laughed at. And your pride is wounded because I left you standing on the curb giggling like an idiot.”

  “My pride wounded?” He turned on me. “I think yours must feel a little bruised. You realize we won’t be able to go back to Peep Thrills because of your grand exit?”

  Claire stood. “I’m going to bed. As you both know, I do not like my meals or my sleep interrupted. Please, do not continue bickering as if we were some incestuous family on vacation. Miss Hill, tomorrow morning I want you to find out where the Duke Hotel is located. Good night.”

  “Good night, madam.”

  “Good night,” I said.

  As she strode out of the room, the hem of her robe lapped darkly around her feet. The gold initials glistened.

  Boulton started putting out the lights. I grabbed my notes and put them in my desk. I wasn’t exactly batting a hundred tonight. Or was it a thousand?

  I noticed the sharpness of Boulton’s profile as he leaned down against the silk shade of the lamp. “We’re going to have to figure out how to work togeth
er,” I finally said.

  He switched the lamp off and turned toward me. Now only firelight flickered over our faces.

  “No, Maggie, we’re going to have to figure out how to live together,” he said gently.

  We stood. Not speaking. Both of us keeping our distance for what seemed an eternity but was only a few moments. Then I placed my glass on the tray and picked up my purse. “Good night.”

  “Good night,” he said.

  Exhausted, I took a shower and crawled into bed. The sheets were as starched and as clean as a nun’s veil against my naked body. I closed my eyes. I opened my eyes. Like hope, sleep on its feathered feet was nowhere to be seen. I turned on the light by my bed. I stared at my room. Hotel furniture was like a dowdy woman struggling to look chic. No matter how much money she spent, her skirt wasn’t going to hang evenly. No matter how expensive the room, hotel furniture looked used.

  I could hear Boulton moving around next door. Grabbing the TV remote control off the nightstand, I aimlessly clicked from channel to channel. All I saw were women. We were everywhere, like locusts. Women selling cars, jeans, perfume, douches, Ajax, lipsticks.

  Click.

  Women on the porno channel selling themselves without the car, without the jeans, without the Ajax.

  Click.

  Women on the music channels shaking their tits to rock and roll. Who were all these women shaking their tits for? Did they know? Did it matter anymore? Was it only for the money and the camera? At least at Peep Thrills there was a connection between the act and the fantasy. I mean who were these women shaking themselves silly for? Twelve-year-old boys? Five-year-old girls? Circus performers? Waitresses? Lawyers? Crooks? Lonely old men? Lonely old women? Anybody. Anybody who tuned in. The universe. The black hole. The Bermuda triangle. Me.

  Click.

  More women acting pouty, carnal, officious, aloof, dopey. Sexy preadolescent girls looking like a child molester’s delight.

  Click.

  The image of a plump plain woman with short brown hair appeared. She had on a simple blue sleeveless blouse that tied at the neck and tucked into a plain white pleated skirt. She was writing a sentence on the blackboard: Hello, I would like you to meet my uncle Bob.

  Instead of her breasts, the flesh on her upper arm shook as she exuberantly diagrammed the sentence. Her eyes shone with an honest love for taking the English language apart. Her round face glowed as she drew arrows pointing at subject and predicate. Okay, so she was one of those women who made a simple declarative sentence look like a physics equation. At least she wasn’t depressed because she didn’t have a man, or because her hair was mousey brown, or because her waist pushed at the seams of her dated skirt. She didn’t care that the fat on her upper arm shook when she wrote on the blackboard, revealing her a vulnerable fleshy human being. The woman cared about something. She had a passion for understanding how to write and speak, Hello, I would like you to meet my uncle Bob. I’d never seen her kind on television. I found her comforting.

  I closed my eyes, listening to her breathless, teacher voice. There must be a sleepless Peruvian somewhere in a tiny room in the city repeating: “Hello, I would like …” Or maybe a Russian … Chinese … all the sleepless Americans watching some young woman shake her tits. Hello, my name—

  The phone rang. My body jerked awake. I grabbed for the receiver while checking the clock. It was 1:00 A.M. I’d been asleep fifteen minutes.

  “Miss Hill.” It was Desanto. “This is not acceptable.”

  “Don’t you ever sleep, Desanto? Or do you just hang suspended like a bat from the lobby ceiling?”

  “There is a woman in the bar who will not leave until she sees you.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “I don’t know her name. But I do know we don’t want her kind in our bar.”

  “What kind is that, Desanto?”

  “And we did not have her kind in this hotel until you started working for …”

  I hung up on him, threw on a pair of beige slacks and a beige sweater, put my key in my pocket, and made my way down to the bar.

  The city must have taken its well-publicized nightlife someplace else, because it wasn’t happening in the Parkfaire Bar. There was an older man, wearing a toupee that looked like a dead cat wrapped around his head, sitting in a corner booth. He was with a woman, probably my age, who was trying to look like she was in her twenties. She stared at her drink. He stared at her. At the bar, three men, ties pulled loose, tried to concentrate on their conversation and their beers, but their eyes kept searching out the lone woman sitting a few spaces away from them.

  Perched on the bar stool, smoking a cigarette and drinking an espresso, the young woman exuded easy sex just as she had at Peep Thrills. The candlelight glow softened but couldn’t hide her pockmarked cheeks. Her dark roots were still doing battle with the blond tips of her hair. A tight black dress defined every curve of her body. I took the stool next to her.

  “The hotel manager is a real pisser,” she said.

  The eyes of the men drifted toward me, then quickly back to her.

  “You made quite an exit from Peep Thrills.” She blew smoke and laughed. “Very entertaining.”

  “So I’ve been told. What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Linda Hansen.”

  She was only in her early twenties but every move was weighted with experience.

  The bartender sauntered over. “Brandy,” I told him.

  “Another espresso,” she said. “Why don’t we go to the table near the window?” Her smoke gray eyes came to rest on the three men. Her hard mouth carved out a smile. “I look at them and keep counting the money I could be earning. Very distracting.”

  She slid off the stool and swayed to a small table facing the street. Her long black-stockinged legs looked as if their only purpose in life were to wrap around a naked man. My legs suddenly felt short and utilitarian. They carried me along as if they’d never felt a man’s body. The group at the bar fell silent watching her. The Toup in the corner even took his eyes off his date. We settled at the table.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “No bullshit. Right to the point.”

  “I’ve had a bad day. Jackie had even a worse one.”

  She smiled again. Her face softened, and for a fleeting moment she was almost beautiful. “Hope Goldie didn’t hurt your arm. He doesn’t know his own strength.”

  The bartender brought us our drinks. I took a sip of the brandy. Linda fell silent. I waited, looking out the window. The drivers leaned against their limousines the way torch singers lean against their pianos. A black BMW convertible as small as a child’s coffin was parked between the limos. The churches’ genteel lighting was lost in the garish yellow glare of the street lamps and the endless streak of headlights. I turned back to the table. Five thousand dollars was spread in front of me.

  “What’s this for?”

  “Information.” She ran her long platinum-colored fingernail across the money. “The coin of the realm. Sexy, isn’t it?” Insinuation turned her voice low and husky.

  “I’m wondering how many male fantasies you have to act out to earn this kind of money,” I said.

  “I could make an easy two thousand right over there.” She gestured toward the men at the bar. “I’ve never understood how women could put out for nothing.”

  “I know it’s un-American, but some of us just lack the entrepreneurial spirit. Look, I work for Claire Conrad. Five thousand dollars won’t make a dent in her household expenses.” I began to stack the money neatly.

  “This is for you. Claire Conrad doesn’t have to know.”

  I fingered the money.

  “What’s the matter? Not enough? What if I offered you the money and me?” The professional seductive look was back, masking her face. She leaned toward me, secure in her money, secure in her sexiness. “Would you like that? You’re not afraid of sex with me, are you?”

  “I don’t like it when men try to intimi
date me sexually. And I don’t like it any better when a woman tries it.”

  I was tired. I was tired of women. I was tired of men. I was tired of sex. I took a chance and stood up.

  Startled, she looked up at me. “Where are you going?”

  “Back to bed.”

  She grabbed my wrist. Her long fingers were ice-cold. “You can’t.”

  I jerked my arm away and headed toward the lounge. She was right behind me. The men at the bar watched.

  “Please, don’t go,” she said. Something in her voice had changed. I turned. The hard lips trembled. Tears glistened in her eyes.

  “Please.” Her hand moved up to cover her now vulnerable mouth.

  “Please, don’t go,” one of the men mimicked. “Please, please.” His friends snickered.

  She turned on them. “Why don’t you shut the fuck up?”

  Eyes that had once desired her now shone with belligerence, even hatred. Defiantly, she stared back at them. One teardrop broke loose and ran down her pockmarked cheek. The man who had mimicked her moved threateningly toward us. She just stood there, almost welcoming the violence. I pulled my only weapon. I smiled. Sweetly. Warmly. Obsequiously.

  “It’s all right. She’s just upset. You know how it is with women: PMS. Ms. BS.” All the time smiling, I guided her back to the table.

  His buddies pulled the man back toward the bar. We sat down. Linda’s eyes were bright with tears and excitement. My smile disappeared. “Put your money away,” I said angrily.

  She stuffed it back into her purse. “Did you see how quickly they turned on me? Men do that, you know?” She stared out the window. The excitement drained from her voice, replaced by a deep melancholy. “We all hate what we desperately need.”

  I sensed that if I asked her what she needed, she’d turn street on me, defenses back in place. So I went for a more general tone. “Why do you think we do that?” I asked.

  “Because we need to be loved at face value.” Her fingers touched her scarred cheeks and discovered the tear. She quickly brushed it away. “Of course we never are. If I didn’t have this body nobody would love me.” Bitterness edged her voice.