Fallen Angel (Club Burlesque)

by Logan Belle

  “But since we started thinking about the possibility of owning a burlesque club, we haven’t been able to get off that track. And we realized over breakfast this morning—if we can’t buy the Blue Angel, why not just start our own?”

  Alec and Mallory exchanged a look.

  “I don’t have time to mastermind the whole thing. I’m about to launch Honeymoon Two in the market, and I think it’s going to really take off. I have to be there for my new baby. And, of course, Justin isn’t very business-minded. Don’t get me wrong—we all know he’s a genius when it comes to aesthetics, and that’s important in this game. But we would need someone to be on the ground every step of the way with this. And we thought of you two,” she said, looking at Alec and Mallory.

  “To … run the place?”

  “Yes. You’re a lawyer by training; you both went to Penn. Not Wharton, we know, but Penn is still Penn. You both know this world, you get what makes a club work, and you have the relationships to get girls on the stage—as do we—and people in the seats. I think we would make an unbeatable team.”

  “This is an amazing idea,” Alec said. “And I’m flattered. But there’s a lot to think about. It’s a huge commitment. And it might not earn back your investment for years.”

  “I don’t get the sense Agnes spent her life running that place because it was such a moneymaker. She did it because she loved it. And you know how Martha and I feel about art and beautiful women. And we are certainly in a better position to take the financial hits than Agnes is. There’s really no downside. We just need operational partners to get it going. Will you consider it?”

  “It’s incredibly tempting,” Mallory said. “But Alec is busy writing for the magazine, and I …” And she what? She had to quit yet another law job. She didn’t have a burlesque gig anymore. “Actually, I could do it. But I don’t know if it’s the right thing for Alec.”

  “Mallory and I don’t have the money to effectively not work for the year it will take to get this off the ground,” he said.

  “We didn’t imagine you did,” said Martha. “I propose we put you both on payroll until the club gains momentum. Then you have the option of staying on salary or buying in as partners to share in the profit of the club.”

  Mallory looked at Alec. She knew they should talk about it in private, but also that there was little doubt they would do it. If the way Martha and Justin paid their fish tank girl was any indication, the Baxters were generous with their employees.

  “It’s an incredible opportunity. We are flattered and thrilled that you guys thought of us. Let us talk about it and call you in the morning?” Alec said.

  “Of course. In the meantime, we’re having people over if you care to stay for a few hours. It should be an interesting group.”

  It was always an “interesting group” at the Baxter parties—movie moguls mingled with rap stars, politicians talked to porn stars, Academy Award-winning actors were entertained by street performers. The atmosphere was always sexually charged, and the sense that anything could—and often did—happen made the evenings “must” events. Mallory had made her performing debut at a Baxter party in LA, and so she had a soft spot for their festivities. But she didn’t have the energy for a party that night and only wanted to go back to the apartment she shared with Alec. They’d been apart for too long.

  “Another night,” Alec said.

  Mallory curled up against Alec in the dark and quiet of her own bedroom. It felt so good to be home.

  She rubbed her leg against his thigh.

  “You’re such a horndog,” he said. “You want to go again?”

  “Sort of,” she said.

  He nudged her over onto her back and slipped his hand into her underwear.

  “Jeez, you’re already wet. You really are the horniest girl I’ve ever known.”

  “Is that a problem?” she said, kissing him.

  “Only when I can’t keep up with you any longer. But I think I’ve still got a few good years left in me.”

  He stroked her softly, and she slipped her hand inside his boxers to find him already hard.

  “I guess I’m not the only horndog in the room.”

  She moved on top of him and pulled off her shirt. He looked up at her with great intensity, and she was moved by the expression in his blue-gray eyes.

  He ran his hands over her breasts and down her shoulders.

  “That night you got that painting on your arm … it looked so beautiful. You know, I came to that room looking for you so we could go home. I didn’t want to be out with Violet or at some crazy party. Were you taking me out with Violet to test me?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I’m sorry. And I loved the painting. You know I’ve been thinking about getting a tattoo, but I’m not sure what image I can really live with long-term.”

  “Yeah. I know. And I’ve thought about it since that night. I’m thinking about a new image you can play around with.”

  She looked down at him. “If you’ve got a new tattoo, it must be somewhere really interesting because I thought I saw every inch of you earlier today.”

  “I don’t—not yet. But I have an idea for one.”

  “It must be contagious. Bette just got a new one.”

  “I know. She told me you went with her and you said you could never go through with it, that it’s too permanent.”

  “That’s right,” she said.

  “I’m ready for something permanent,” he said. “Will you come with me?”

  “You’re seriously going to get a new tattoo?”

  “Yeah. I’m not afraid of commitment,” he teased.

  “What are you going to get?”

  “You’ll have to wait and see,” he said. “In the meantime, I’m going to keep looking for inspiration.” He pulled down her underwear.

  22

  Wendy the tattoo artist was waiting for them.

  “I recognize you,” she said to Mallory. “Moxie, right?”

  “Yes,” Mallory said, and she could feel herself blushing. Alec laughed.

  They sat on a black couch with Wendy, and she pulled out a sketch book.

  “I made the changes you asked for after I e-mailed you the preliminary sketch. You wanted her hair to be longer, right? And the feather fan to be bigger?”

  “Yeah,” he said, looking at the piece of paper she passed him. He smiled, then handed it to Mallory.

  “It’s my girl!” she said with delight, looking at an image very similar to the one that had been painted on her arm that night that seemed so long ago. Except … “But she looks just like me,” she said.

  “Yeah—it’s my girl,” Alec said. She looked more closely and smiled.

  “You’re getting a tattoo of me on your arm?” she said.

  “Yes. If it’s okay with you. I’d hate to get something permanent if you didn’t plan to be around for a while. It’s a big commitment, you know.”

  She kissed him. “It is.”

  “Alec e-mailed me a picture of you,” Wendy said. “I recognized you from the day you were here with Bette Noir. And Alec told me you’re a performer, too.”

  “Yeah. I’ve taken a break the past few weeks but … I’m going to get back into it.”

  “I really need to get to a show,” Wendy said, gesturing for them to follow her into the main part of the parlor. “I went to a late show one night at the Slit, but I was too drunk to remember anything about it.”

  “That’s not real burlesque, anyway,” Mallory said. She was already thinking of the Slit as her competition—not as a performer at the Blue Angel, but as a club owner herself.

  Of course, she and Alec had agreed they should do it. She would quit her job effective immediately, and Alec would finish his final article for Gruff and resign before announcing that he was going to be running a club to compete with Billy’s. Justin and Martha were thrilled.

  “Where should we throw the launch party?” Justin had asked.

  “Let’s find a space for the actual
club first,” Alec had told him.

  Wendy sat him in the chair at her station, and again Mallory marveled at the little tubes of color, the instruments, and the sketches all around the room.

  Wendy snapped on her blue rubber gloves, then shaved the area of Alec’s arm where the tattoo would go. She pressed the stenciled image against the spot, peeling it away, leaving an outline of the girl. Alec checked the placement in the mirror.

  “What do you think, Mal?”

  “It looks amazing,” she said. “Are you really doing this?”

  “Of course,” he said, winking at her.

  He sat in the chair. Across the room, another tattoo artist, a thin guy with a ZZ Top beard, cranked up the Metallica.

  “How long do you think this will take?” Mallory asked Wendy.

  “Maybe two hours.”

  She couldn’t imagine being in pain for two straight hours, but Alec seemed unfazed by this estimate.

  Wendy touched the needle to his arm, starting one of the girl’s legs.

  “I do the outline first, then the shading and colors,” she said. “What color do you want the corset?”

  “Blue,” Alec and Mallory said in unison.

  Mallory was surprised by the blood. Lots of it, beading through his skin like it would never stop. She hadn’t noticed it with Bette because she hadn’t stuck around long enough. But she was noticing it now.

  “Is that normal?” she asked Wendy.

  “Yes,” she said.

  The Blue Angel girl was almost complete. Wendy was just adding details to the long plumes of feathers in her fan.

  “Are you read to finish it off for me?” Wendy said to her suddenly.

  “What?”

  Alec squeezed her hand. “I asked Wendy if you could do the last mark of the tattoo.”

  “You guys are crazy,” Mallory said with a nervous laugh.

  “I really want you to do it—to know that you marked me outside as permanently as you marked me inside.”

  “You are such a romantic!” she said. “But I don’t know if I can.”

  “Here, I’ll show you the part that has to be filled in,” Wendy said. Mallory leaned down close to look over her shoulder. “Just this dot at the top of the plume. It’s a circle—you won’t mess it up.”

  “Am I allowed to do this?”

  “Not really,” Alec said.

  “No,” said Wendy. “Rihanna’s tattoo artist lost his license for letting her tattoo him. Paparazzi snapped a photo of it. So don’t tell anyone. But your boyfriend told me your whole story, and you’re right—he is a romantic. You’d be surprised how many people come in here and get tattoos with barely any thought about it. It means nothing but getting some perceived hipster cred. And it’s not often I get to design something from scratch like this. So I’m excited about it, and I’m happy to let you be a part of the process.”

  “Just think, Mal—how many times have you wanted to inflict pain on me? Now’s your chance.”

  If Wendy was willing to let her do it, and Alec trusted her to take a needle to his arm, who was she to say no?

  “Okay. What do I do?”

  Wendy gave her blue gloves, and Mallory pulled them on. She felt as serious as if she was about to perform surgery. Wendy stood up to give Mallory the stool. She put the tool in her hand, and it was surprisingly heavy.

  “Put your foot on this pedal—press it to start the needle.”

  “Oh, my God,” Mallory said. She looked at Alec. He winked at her. She pressed the pedal toward the floor, and it started a whirring sound. Slowly, she lowered the needle to the spot on the design that needed the final mark. She was afraid to press too hard and hurt him, and ink sprayed off the surface making it hard for her to tell if she was making contact with his skin or not. She released the petal and pulled the needle back and looked at her handiwork. Sure enough, there was a small dot. With a deep breath, she restarted the tool and pressed it to Alec’s arm again, this time making a conscious effort to move the needle in a circular motion. After a few seconds, she pulled back again. Wendy wiped the area of the mark, and, there was a small blue circle completing the design of the feather.

  “Is it done?” she asked, as amazed as if she had just witnessed a birth.

  “It’s done,” Wendy said.

  “Thanks,” Mallory said. “That was something I’ll never forget.”

  “Damn right,” Alec said. “You’ll be looking at it for the rest of your life.”

  “Oh, you think?” she said to him.

  “I can only hope.”

  She leaned over and kissed him.

  23

  Mallory stretched her leg up on the barre, bending into a deep plié. She wore a pair of black Hard Tail workout pants, a black tank top, and her pink ballet slippers. Black leg warmers stretched from her ankles to mid-thigh. She remembered how her childhood ballet academy had required them to wear black leotards, pink tights, and pink ballet slippers. No deviation from that, and hair always pulled into a low ponytail.

  She wondered what her old instructor would think of her now—rolling the dice and gambling everything on making her way as a performer. It wasn’t ballet, or even jazz, but burlesque performance was dancing—her former practice space partner, Nadia, had assured her of that. Now Nadia had a spot with the Pennsylvania Ballet, and Mallory was on her way to running the club she herself would perform in. If they ever found a location for the club—or thought of a name.

  They’d tossed around plenty of ideas and rejected them all. For a while, the front-runner was “Moxie,” but Mallory told them it would turn off some of the more ambitious girls who would want to imagine they could become headliners or the top girl there, an impossible goal when the club was named after another performer. They had thought about calling it Ivy’s, in homage to the university where Alec and Mallory had met; they considered the Pike, after Martha’s sensational Kegel aid. They considered random names like the Revue, Gloss, and Stilettos. But they still hadn’t found something worthy of the club they envisioned.

  She cued up the old CD player at the ballet studio, and the opening of Marilyn Manson’s “Heart-Shaped Glasses” filled the room. The night she had abruptly walked out of the Blue Angel before the start of a show three months ago was the night she had planned to perform to the song. In the days that followed, she thought she might never again be in front of an audience, and that meant the “Heart-Shaped Glasses” choreography, probably her best routine aside from the one Bette had taught her the first night she ever performed, would never be seen by anyone. It was a waste, but at the time, she’d felt it was what she had to do.

  She still wasn’t sure when she would get to unveil “Heart-Shaped Glasses”; once the Blue Angel closed for remodeling by its new owners, she had no place to perform. A few of the girls were picking up gigs at other clubs, but she knew that when she performed, it would be on the stage that she would help design, in a show she would conceptualize and direct—Martha and Justin had made it clear they wanted her and Alec to be as involved with the creative direction of the club as possible. The thought was thrilling.

  She sat in the center of the room as the song kicked in, languidly unfolding her body, seducing the “audience” with her slow, purposeful movements. She rolled onto her side, experimenting with changing her position on the “bed” to start out half propped up instead of on her back, when a rap on the rehearsal room window interrupted her. Alec waved. She jumped up off of the floor and let him in. He kissed her perspiring forehead.

  “Hey,” she said. “I still have twenty minutes left.”

  “I couldn’t wait to pick you up; I have to show you something.”

  “Okay, show me.”

  “You have to come somewhere with me.”

  “Alec! I have to practice. I can’t let myself get rusty. Bette said when she took four months off it was really hard to feel confident on stage afterward.”

  “I wouldn’t interrupt you if it wasn’t important,” he said. She trie
d to read from his expression if he was being serious or was just messing around with her, but she couldn’t tell. His eyes looked bright and excited and playful, but there was something focused and determined in the set of his jaw.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll meet you out front in five minutes. Just let me change.”

  “Don’t change. Just put your coat on over that.”

  “I’ll be quick.”

  “No—I’m serious. Don’t change.”

  “Fine. I’ll meet you out front.”

  She was learning not to waste time debating Alec when he was determined. Maybe that was the way relationships survive—constantly learning how to coexist with someone. Picking your battles. Only putting your foot down when it was a deal breaker. Fortunately, she hadn’t been confronted with any of those lately. She was starting to feel confident she wouldn’t ever again.

  Alec told the cab to let them off on the corner of Elizabeth Street and Houston. He took Mallory by the hand and led her to the center of the block. She wondered if he was taking her shopping for an early Valentine’s Day present. Two of her favorite stores were on Elizabeth, the jewelry store Me & Ro and the Tory Burch boutique. Even though Tory Burch clothes tended to be a bit on the conservative side, Mallory had a soft spot for the designer because she had grown up in the same town as Mallory. Alec was amused that Main Line Philadelphia was the birthplace of Princess Grace Kelly, designer Tory Burch, and burlesque dancer Moxie.

  “And one day you’ll be more famous than the other two,” Alec had said.

  “I don’t need to be famous,” Mallory had said.

  “Oh no? What do you need to be?”

  “Loved,” she had replied.

  Now he stopped her four storefronts before Tory Burch. It looked to be a former restaurant. She could have sworn she’d been there before, but she couldn’t remember exactly what used to occupy that space.

  Alec pulled a key from his wallet and began opening the door.

  “What is this?” she said.

  “It’s your club.”

  “No way.”

  “Yeah. Justin and I found it a few weeks ago.”